Doing homework on Sunday?

“When I was in college and seminary, I made what was a bold decision at the time and committed, along with a friend, that we would not do homework on Sundays. No reading assignments. No papers.  No studying for tests. It meant rethinking my Saturdays, which meant being more thoughtful about my Friday evenings. I couldn’t sleep till noon on Saturday, watch football, hang out with my friends all day, and go out to a social event at night and then play catch-up on Sunday. I had to make pretty drastic changes.

“But I never regretted the commitment. Setting aside Sunday was a habit that served me well throughout all my studies. Sunday became my favorite day of the week. I was freed up to go to church more than once. I could go on a long walk or read a book or take a nap. The day became an island of get-to in an ocean of have-to.

“How many of us think, ‘You know what?  Life is a little underwhelming.  I’m not very busy.  I wish the days could be more crowded.  I wish life could be more hectic.’ Very few people think that way. So don’t you want a day where you can say no to many of the oughts in your head? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a day of freedom, one day in seven where the other six days have no claim on you?”

– Kevin DeYoung, in The 10 Commandments (h/t to Dr. Wes Bredenhof)

Gotta serve somebody

“So many political and theological liberals need a cause to substitute for their moral obtuseness on such issues as abortion and homosexual behavior. They’ve found it in the worship of animals and plants. “

– Cal Thomas

A better sort of straw

I’ve been pricing things out, and as near as I can figure:

• Plastic straws cost 4-5 cents each but they are becoming harder to find, and if you use one people think you are Hitler.
• Paper straws cost something similar or even cheaper…but they are paper straws. Enough said.
• Bamboo straws are 10-15 cents each and they still aren’t as good as plastic.

Meanwhile, you can buy a pack of Twizzlers for 2.99 at Wal-Mart with 60 pieces in it, which works out to 5 cents each. Nip off the top and bottom and you have not only a straw that works way better than paper, and is cheaper than bamboo, but it’s even better than plastic in that you can eat it afterward.

And it keeps getting better: turns out Twizzlers are even a “low fat” straw.

More consistent inconsistency

“Gender is constructed, but an individual who desires gender re-assignment surgery is to be unarguably considered a man trapped in a woman’s body (or vice versa). The fact that both of these cannot logically be true, simultaneously, is just ignored.”

– Jordan Peterson

Atheism doesn’t have answers

On his website ProofThatGodExists.org, apologist Sye Ten Bruggencate has a collection of more than 50 of his favorite quotes. If you like these four, be sure to check out his website for more.

• “The atheist can’t find God for the same reason that a thief can’t find a policeman.” – Author Unknown
• “The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words ‘true’ or ‘false’.” – C.S. Lewis
• “Someone once said that if you sat a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, one of them would eventually type out all of Hamlet by chance. But when we find the text of Hamlet, we don’t wonder whether it came from chance and monkeys. Why then does the atheist use that incredibly improbable explanation for the universe? Clearly, because it is his only chance of remaining an atheist. At this point we need a psychological explanation of the atheist rather than a logical explanation of the universe.” – Peter Kreeft
• “If there is no God, then all that exists is time and chance acting on matter. If this is true then the difference between your thoughts and mine correspond to the difference between shaking up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. You simply fizz atheistically and I fizz theistically. This means that you do not hold to atheism because it is true, but rather because of a series of chemical reactions…. If there is no God, then all abstractions are chemical epiphenomena, like swamp gas over fetid water. This means that we have no reason for assigning truth and falsity to the chemical fizz we call reasoning or right and wrong to the irrational reaction we call morality. If no God, mankind is a set of bi-pedal carbon units of mostly water. And nothing else.” – Douglas Wilson