British theologian Robert Beckford investigates remarkable parallels to the Jesus story in other faiths; some that predate Christianity by thousands of years.

Depending on how strongly you understand the word investigate (and parallel) I suppose that this could be an accurate summary of The Hidden Story of Jesus which Compass (ABC) broadcast last Sunday night.

Unfortunately, Beckford’s argument was limited to the lines of ‘notice exhibit A from non-Christian religion, notice exhibit B from the life/teaching of Jesus. These two are extremely similar (really, in what way?) therefore Jesus is the same as Krishna/Buddha and Christianity is indisputably just a modification of the Egyptian God X’.

The evidence presented ranged from ’some Indians pronounce Krishna as Krista, which sounds a bit like Christ’ to ‘there is an Egyptian religious festival where a statue of Osiris “dies” and three days later “rises to life”‘.

From this investigation, Beckford arrives at two conclusions. Firstly that all religions are the same and secondly that Paul stole stories from Egypt and Rome to make the Christian religion.

Key to Beckford’s flawed argument is the mistake that similarity means sameness. Just because there may be a few points of similarity (and just how similar they were was impossible to tell in the documentary) in the events of Jesus and, say, Buddha’s lives, or the ‘vibe’ of their teaching, does not mean that they are the same. This line of reasoning is a bit like saying that since triangles and squares both are closed figures with edges and corners, that therefore a square is a triangle.

Because I can’t leave things undone, I’m going to watch the second (and fortunately final) part of this series on Sunday night, but I’m not expecting to see earth shattering evidence nor hear any profoundly convincing arguments.

Yesterday’s Courier Mail reprinted this article about the deep regret which the author felt for murdering her first born son (her description). This was a brave article for any paper to print, as although it attempts to carry a tone of ‘this was my experience’, rather than ‘this must be the case’, it will surely raise much ire in a community that wishes to believe that abortion has no consequences.

The article raises the question of the, what appears to be now common, practice of attempting to detect and destroy abnormal children before certain stages of their gestation.

Despite articles like this I wonder if into the future we will find only ‘religious’* people bearing and raising children with disabilities. Will this result with even further cuts in government support for people with disabilities and their carers (‘the are a drain on the economy’)? Will people with disabilities be vilified and pushed further into the periphery of society?

How will God’s people respond to face this challenge?

* I say ‘religious’ people, as I am sure that an ethic which values human life and wishes to care for the disabled and disadvantaged is not only a Christian concern.

PS – Philip Jensen also had an opinion piece on abortion published in yesterday’s SMH (h/t dougie).

PPS – And an edition of the Sydney Anglican newspaper, ‘Southern Cross’, last year raised this issue from a number of different angles. Really good read, but their website’s offline this weekend, so I can’t see if there’s anything online.

Da Vinci Studies - by .:: LINUZ ::.

ABC Breakfast News lead this morning with Barack Obama’s executive order to allow the US government to fund embryonic stem cell research. ABC News story here, the video will possibly be here later today.)

Disappointingly, the story was cast as an ’science v. ideology’ issue, rather than as the debate between those who oppose embryonic stem cell research for ethical/ideological reasons, and those who support embryonic stem cell research for ethical/ideological reasons.

Since the ABC are ‘embracing’ Media2.0, I sent them this email in response,

‘Pure Science’, ’separating Science and ideology’ – I was very disappointed by your reporting of the change in embryonic stem cell research legislation in the USA.

No knowledge, including scientific knowledge is free from ideology. It is an ideology to hold that somehow scientific knowledge is ‘more pure’ than other sources or forms of knowledge.

The ethical questions raised by this particular realm of scientific experimentation are much too significant to be brushed off by the rhetoric of ’science v. ideology’.

Do you agree that science is driven by ideology? (Political, ethical, …)

How would you have expressed your response to ABC News Breakfast?

I’ve been reflecting a little more on the Hillsong.com bus sign I photographed on Sunday.

It’s a message which, from best intentions is designed to inspire, encourage, empower… .
To succeed, to be the best you can, you need someone to believe in you – and what better ’somone’ than God.

But it’s an anti-gospel. This is a message that nullifies the gospel. A message that has no place for a cross. A slogan that offers no hope, solace, or comfort for those burdened by sin.

‘I believe in you’ might be good news to the successful, the rich, the beautiful. It’s a message that, whilst they keep being successful, could inspire them to be more so.

But for the sinner, the failure, the outcast, it offers no hope. If you’re down, stuck in the gutter of sin, ‘I believe in you’ is a kick in the guts. This God believes in you, yet you can do nothing but fall, and fall again. It’s a message of merit -that what really matters to God is that you are ‘empowered’ by His ‘belief’ and therefore should be able to get back up on your feet and do better.

The Gospel of Jesus, on the other hand, is Good News. To the person, burdened by their sin, Jesus doesn’t ask them to work harder, try harder, be a bigger success. Jesus calls for repentance and offers forgiveness. This forgiveness is offered only because of the cross, where Jesus died to bring you to God (1 Peter 3:18).

There is no need for the cross in the ‘I believe in you’ ‘gospel’. Why would Jesus need to die, when what you really need to know is that ‘I believe in you’ to solve all your problems, to move you up in the world? God can ‘believe in you’ without the cross.

But the cross shows us something far more significant than whether God believes in you. The cross shows us that God knows our sin, loves us, and has done what is needed to save us.

“God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

Edit: Jacko’s just put a great post up on what the gospel is. You should really read it.

this song came up on random on my MP3 player today.

It’s not brilliant, but it is appropriate.

h/t Tominthebox News Network

(How’s this for prolific. You can go back to your scheduled blog reading now.)

I believe in you

Originally uploaded by Saunderses.

(Snapped this in Waterloo after church this morning.)

Could you help me out please?

I’m still trying to work out what is being said by this bus-side signage, what part of the Bible or which doctrine is being alluded to here

The closest I can get to is Acts 16:31, but that seems to say the opposite.

After a good 5 month break, it’s about time for Part 2 in this series.
You know Firefox. It’s a web browser, and like all browsers it allows you to get around the Internet, search google, walldrop on facebook, do banking, and everything else you want to do on the net. There’s probably no reason to prefer one browser over another
except…

for the extension system that firefox uses. No longer is a browser a browser, but it can be a music player, an Internet Relay Chat client or enable you to interact with files on a server.

But this is useful for anyone. I want to draw your attention to two extensions that are particularly useful for bible college students, and finally an essential extension for anyone.

1.) Search the bible directly through your search bar using BibleGateway.com (this link shows you how). A quick way to look up a bible verse, or search for a particular word whilst online.

2.) A much more powerful extension for Firefox is Zotero. Zotero is a library/bibliography management system that makes putting together references and bibliographies in essays a breeze. Go ahead a give it a try, but it’s such a great piece of software for students that it’s worthy of its own post (probably also in 5 months, so don’t hold your breath).

Finally, there’s Adblock Plus. Ads on the internet are not only annoying (and often inappropriate) but you pay for the privilege of being advertised to, as these ads cut into your internet usage. Adblock Plus is a handy utility that blocks ads – mainly ones with lots of pictures. It doesn’t seem to be able to remove the ‘text only’ ads that Google runs (like on gmail), nor the ads on facebook, but any ads it blocks is a good thing (TM) on my account.

Do you use firefox? What’s your favourite extension?

Straight to Hell

Originally uploaded by Saunderses.

In the lead up to the execution of the ‘Bali Bombers’, this was the headline (and lead story) of the Daily Telegraph.

Hell still holds rhetorical power for the Telegraph, as the authors of this headline betray. Their sense that justice cannot be done, even trough execution, requires that there be further punishment after death.

Upon seeing this poster, I had two thoughts.

Firstly, I wonder if for the Telegraph editors (and readers) whether there is a corresponding heaven to this hell. A place, not for nice, white, Australian, ‘working families’, but for anyone who calls on the name of the Lord (Rom 10:13).

And secondly, do they mistakenly hope that Hell is only for the ‘really bad’ people (like Amrozi, paedophiles, and drunk drivers) and fail to realise that ‘people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment’ (Heb 9:27).

Hell is not a rhetorical device for expressing hatred, rather the judgment of God is something all will face.

Do you appreciate and agree with the Telegraph’s sentiments towards the ‘Bali Bombers’?
Do you think that the Bali Bombers were going to hell (it would appear that they thought themselves to be headed for paradise)?
Do you believe that Hell is more than a rhetorical device?

In my attempt to post helpful stuff on this blog, I’m planning to write a brief series on free software* that other Theological students might find helpful.  There is heaps of really good free software out ‘there’, on the internet.  Most of this software is pretty widely known, however from looking at the many laptop screens in lecture theatres, it seems to not be widely used in these circles.

So for starters, here’s OpenOffice (or more fully, OpenOffice.org – to keep the net-speak 2.0 generation happy).

OpenOffice is, like MS Office or iWork, a collection of different programs to do normal ‘office’ type tasks.  It includes software for creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings and databases.

Since writing essays and exegeting greek rarely requires spreadsheets or databases, it is the wordprocessor (creatively called ‘Writer‘) that is of most interest to theological students.  And when it comes to doing all the word processing tasks I need to do for college and church (writing essays and sermons, taking notes [which I generally use another program for - but more of that later]) it does it all superbly – and all for free.

For regular tasks its interface is quite easy to navigate – probably because it is similar to older versions of MS Word.

Writer is able to read and write to a whole lot of file formats, including (most importantly) the Microsoft Word formats (.doc and .docx) and for the most part it does so really well, displaying most of the files without a hitch.

The one place it has fallen down so far this year is with the ‘drawings/diagrams’ sometimes put inside documents (those diagrams with lots of lines and arrows) which it displays as a jumbled mess.  Writer also has a hard time displaying non-standard files (like a document where instead of using the ‘headers and footers’ in a document the page had a variety of lines and text boxes).

There are possibly situations where MS Word of Apple’s Pages will do a far better job of creating a document than Openoffice.org Writer, I’m just not sure what they are yet.

If you’ve already payed up for a commercial word processor there’s no reason why you wouldn’t keep using it, but if you haven’t, OpenOffice.org is well worth a look (oh, and it’s availabe for whatever operating system you use – Windows, OSX, Linux and others as well).

Download it here.

Food for comments:

• Have you tried OpenOffice?  What did you like, what didn’t you like?  Did you keep using it?
  
• Do you think there is any document that you need to create that you couldn’t make with OpenOffice?
  

*By ‘free’ I’m referring to both ‘free as in beer’ (no money) and ‘free as in speech‘.  For a nice bit of spin, the Mozilla foundation refers to this as ‘100% organic software‘.  I like.

A few* people have asked me when I am going to ‘blog’ again.

Well, here you go.

I’ve been doing a little bit of thinking about ‘blogging’ and I reckon the next the I’ll ‘blog’ is when I’ve got something to say that’s helpful to others.

In the past, I think I’ve considered blogging to be way to publish half-completed thoughts and questions.  I’m not sure if that’s the kind of thing that’s really helpful to anyone other than myself, and anyway, that’s what I can talk with my wife and people at college about.

However, if something crosses my mind that might be of help to others then there’s a small chance I might post it.

On that note, I’ll try and pull together a series of 3-4 posts this holidays that I hope will be of some value to people.

* Ok, there’s been 2.