My life summarized in three points aka Sarah's parody of my preaching style

• i got three things to say to all of you:
• pants - keep 'em tight
• Bible - keep it esv
• and doe - keep it real

First polaroid picture!

Entitled “fade to red.” ooooo

@_sryu @sa_mantou

Ways I have pissed off my coleader

1. Called her pale (though does not equate to ugly last I checked the dictionary)
2. Fooled her into thinking I was not reformed
3. Called her fat (okay yea, this is legitimately stupid of me)

I present to you JenJen, the ironfist of Humblebees >:O!

Five social catalysts that have undermined the American church

Dr. Tim Keller writes on Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics:

• First, the political polarization that has occurred between the Left and Right drew many churches into it (mainline Protestants toward the Left, evangelicals toward the Right). This has greatly weakened the church’s credibility in the broader culture, with many viewing churches as mere appendages and pawns of political parties.
  
• Second, the sexual revolution means that the Biblical sex ethic now looks unreasonable and perverse to millions of people, making Christianity appear implausible, unhealthy, and regressive.
  
• Third, the era of decolonization and Third World empowerment, together with the dawn of globalization, has given the impression that Christianity was imperialistically “western” and supportive of European civilization’s record of racism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism.
  
• The fourth factor has been the enormous growth in the kind of material prosperity and consumerism that always works against faith and undermines Christian community.
  
• The fifth factor is that all the other four factors had their greatest initial impact on the more educated and affluent classes, the gatekeepers of the main culture-shaping institutions such as the media, the academy, the arts, the main foundations, and much of the government and business world.

Of course, not exhaustive. I personally have beef with politics hijacking the church then damning its credibility. But for what it’s worth, the church in America definitely could be a lot worse.

The Great Debate: Does God Exist?

In 1985, a debate was set up between Dr. Greg Bahnsen and Dr. Gordan Stein. It was at this debate that the transcendental argument was unveiled to the general public (Van Tillian apologetic). The packed audience was largely convinced that the Christian Dr. Bahnsen had won, as Dr. Stein had no intelligible comeback to the claim that his idea of logic was completely borrowed from Christian presuppositions:

The transcendental argument for the existence of God, then, which Dr. Stein has yet to touch, and which I don’t believe he can surmount, is that without the existence of God, it is impossible to prove anything.

I am maintaining that the proof of the Christian worldview is that the denial of it leads to irrationality. An atheist universe cannot account for the laws of logic. However, we still hear [Dr. Stein] saying that laws of logic are a matter of consensus and are just this way.

That is to say, I don’t have to prove that the laws of logic exist, or that they are justified, it’s just this way. Now, how would you like it if I would have conducted the debate in that fashion this evening? God exists because it’s just that way. You just can’t avoid it.

You see, that’s not debate. That’s not argument. And it is not rational. And, therefore, we have interestingly an illustration in our very debate tonight that atheists cannot sustain a rational approach to this question. What are the laws of logic, Dr. Stein? And how are they justified? You still have to answer that question from a materialist standpoint. From a Christian standpoint, we have an answer, obviously, that they reflect the thinking of God. They argue, if you will, a reflection of the way God thinks and expects us to think.

But if you don’t take that approach and want to justify the laws of logic in some “a priori” fashion, that is, apart from experience, sometimes he suggests that when he says these things are self-verifying, then we can ask why the laws of logic are universal, unchanging, and invariant truths? Why they, in fact, apply repeatedly in the realm of contingent experience.

We have to ask, why is it that they apply repeatedly in a contingent realm of experience? Why, in a world that is random, not subject to a personal order, as I believe, Christian God, why is it that the laws of logic continue to have that success generating feature about them?

Once, again, we have to come back to this really unacceptable idea that they are conventional. If they are conventional, then, of course, there ought to be just numerous approaches to scholarship everywhere, different approaches to history, to science, and so forth, because people just adopt different laws of logic. The laws of logic are not treated as conventions. To say that they are merely conventions is to simply say that I haven’t got an answer.

Now, if you want to justify logical truths along a “a posteriori” lines, that is, rather than arguing that they are self-evident, and arguing that there is evidence for them that we can find in experience or by observation — that approach was used, by the way, by John Stuart Mill— people will say we gain confidence in the laws of logic through repeated experience, and that experience is generalized. In some weaker moments, I think Dr. Stein was trying to say that.

Of course, some of the suggested logical truths, it turns out, are so complex or so unusual that it is difficult to believe anyone has perceived their instances in experience. But even if we restrict our attention to the other more simple laws of logic, it should be seen that if their truth cannot be decided independently of experience, then they actually become contingent. That is, if people cannot justify the laws of logic independent of experience, then you can only say they apply as far as I know in the past experience that I’ve had. They are contingent, they lose their necessity, universality and invariance. Why should a law of logic, which is verified in one domain of experience, by the way, be taken as true for unexperienced domains as well? Why should we universalize or generalize about the laws of logic, especially in a materialistic universe not subject to the control of a personal God?

Now, it turns out if the “a priori” and the “a posteriori” lines of justification for logical truths are unconvincing, as I’m suggesting briefly they both are, perhaps we could say they are linguistic conventions about certain symbols. Certain philosophers have suggested that. The laws of logic would not be taken as inexorably dictated, but rather we impose them— we impose their necessity on our language. They become, therefore, somewhat like rules of grammar. As John Dewey pointed out so persuasively earlier in the century, laws of grammar, you see, are just culturally relative. If the laws of logic are like grammar, then the laws of logic are culturally relative, too.

Why then are not contradictory systems deemed equally rational? If the laws of logic can be made culturally relative, then we can win the debate by simply stipulating a law of logic that says anybody who argues in this way has got a tautology on his hands, and, therefore, it is true. Why are arbitrary conventions like the logical truths so useful if they are only conventional? Why are they so useful in dealing with problems in the world of experience?

You see, we must ask whether the atheist has a rational basis for his claim.Atheists love to talk about laws of science, laws of logic, they speak as though there are certain moral absolutes for which Christians were just a few minutes ago being indicted because they didn’t live up to them. But who is the atheist to tell us about laws? In a materialist universe there are no laws. Much less, laws of morality that anybody has to live up to.

When we consider that the lectures and essays that are written by logicians and others are not likely filled with just uninterrupted series of tautologies, we can examine those propositions which logicians are most concerned to convey. For instance, logicians will say things like, “A proposition has the opposite truth value from its negation.” Now, when we look at those kind of propositions, we have to ask the general question, what type of evidence do people have for that kind of teaching? Is it the same sort of evidence that is utilized by the biologist, by the mathematician, the lawyer, the mechanic, by your beautician? What is it that justifies a law of logic, or even belief that there is such a thing? What is a law of logic, after all? There is no agreement on that question. If we had universal agreement, perhaps it would be silly to ask the question.

It isn’t absurd to ask the question that I’m asking about logic. You see, logicians are having a great deal of difficulty deciding on the nature of their claims. Anybody who reads the philosophy of logic must be impressed with that today.

Some say that the laws of logic are inferences comprised of judgments made up of concepts. Others say that they are arguments comprised of propositions made up of terms. Others say they are proof comprised of sentences made up of names. Others would simply say they are electrochemical processes in the brain. In the end, what you think the laws of logic are will determine the nature of evidence that you will suggest for them.

Now, in an atheist universe, what are the laws of logic? How can they be universal, abstract, invariant, and how does an atheist justify the use of them? Are they merely conventions imposed on our experience, or are they something that reflect absolute truth?

Dr. Stein tonight has wanted to use the laws of logic. I want to suggest to you one more time that Dr. Stein, in so doing, is borrowing my worldview. He is using the Christian approach to the world so that there can be such laws of logic, scientific inference, or what have you, but then he wants to deny the very foundation of it.

While doing laundry, recorded so I can laugh at myself two years from now (like I currently do for my old bboying clips). Wow acne.