Minor rant

Just a little one because I've had internal rants on this general topic for a while and I'm starting to wind down on it. But, just as I was winding down, along this comes!

Answers In Genesis is putting some of Charles Spurgeon's sermons on their website, but ... he was an Old Earth Christian!! If that were all, then kudos to AiG for providing a platform for some excellent sermons even though the author disagreed with them on some issues. But, since I'm ranting, it obviously wasn't left at that.

Nope. They edited things to take out Spurgeon's belief in an old earth. When they got some complaints about it, they didn't add it back in, but put in a footnote. A REALLY tiny footnote.

Here's how AiG "quotes" Spurgeon now:

In Ge 1:2, we read, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”^a Our planet has passed through various stages in creation, and different kinds of creatures have lived on its surface, all of which have been fashioned by God. But before that era came, when man should be its principal tenant and monarch, the Creator initially created the world as a chaotic mass on the first day of creation.

What is missing is a little detail where Spurgeon said "We do not know how remote the period of the creation of this globe may be—certainly many millions of years before the time of Adam."

It's one of those honesty things - editing someone's words to portray them as supporting something they did not is a cheap and dishonest tactic. The link is even less noticeable in the AiG webpage than it is in my bit of copying here. If they disagree with Spurgeon's sermon, then they need to either not put it up, or they need to put their disagreement in a footnote - not chop out the part they disagree with to create the impression that Spurgeon believed something he didn't.

Ok, Ok. So maybe you think it's just a minor referencing issue - I think they should have referenced it one way, but they did it another way.

Well, if that were all they did, then I would agree with you, but that's not all they did! They completely changed his words, and the meaning of the words, a couple sentences below that. They took his text and re-typed it to mean something else and in that case they certainly don't put in a reference.

Just a bit below the part I quoted, they continue Spurgeon's sermon to "say":

But before that era came, when man should be its principal tenant and monarch, the Creator initially created the world as a chaotic mass on the first day of creation.

Sounds like it fits in with a young-earth, doesn't it? Well, Spurgeon didn't say that. Here's what he actually said:

But before that era came, wherein man should be its principal tenant and monarch, the Creator gave up the world to confusion.

The weird part is that Spurgeon's original words weren't really even "old earth-ish" sounding after AiG edited out the first part. But, no, they went and completely dishonestly - no confusion about referencing preferences - changed Spurgeon's words.

It really does make me despair at times to see Christian organizations doing things like that. Out and out lies on top of sneaky editing.

Baby and housing

No, not our baby, but our neighbors! They went ahead and ruined the surprise and found out they are having ...

*drum roll*

A GIRL!!!

To celebrate, Bro graciously allowed A to beat him at Necromunda, Friday night. ;^)

Saturday was absolutely wonderful - it didn't get out of bed until 11:00. It won't be much longer before we'll have a baby that will put the nix on those lazy mornings.

Possibly because we got such a late start, we made up for it by sticking with our work and not getting distracted. I managed to get the main bathroom walls sanded, washed, and primed on Saturday! Sunday then saw the bathroom get painted with the final light blue color. I think I'm going to put on another coat of blue since there were a couple places the paint didn't turn out so well. I think I didn't scrub as well as I should have, and some grease or soap on the wall made the paint slide down at a couple spots. I'll re-sand those spots and give the entire bathroom another (thin) coating.

A couple weeks ago, C noticed that a nearby house which was being cleaned out was throwing out some very nice floor tiles the previous owner/renter apparently hadn't used. There were even matched tiles to go around the base of the wall! So she picked them up and we now have some very nice tiles with which to tile the main bathroom.

But before we re-tile the bathroom, I think we're going to be painting some bedrooms - J's and the baby's.

J wants lots of police colors for his room - blue, red, black, white, grey. A different color on each wall and ceiling! Hmmm, I'm sorry buddy, but I think we're going to keep it a bit simpler than that. Maybe white and blue with the possibility of some red or grey trim. CC has said she would like to paint a big police car on one of the walls! Maybe that will make up for the disappointment. :^)

Then comes the baby's room. At some point my mom is coming down for a visit and I think current plans are to use her extra hands to help paint the baby's room. Since we aren't finding out the gender of the baby ahead of time, I think we're planning on a light green room with some vining decorations.

I'm having some fantasies of putting up strings of LED lights around the room. Maybe I'll give it a try in J's room ahead of time. I suspect he'll think it's pretty cool!

I'm in the home project mood, I guess. (maybe "nesting"?) That's a good thing since we found out that the roof hadn't been patched. Either it hadn't been fixed on the roof, or the fix was really lousy. (I climbed up and couldn't see any evidence of patching work up there, so I suspect it wasn't fixed in the first place.) We thought it was to be fixed, but our realtor was conveying instructions to another realtor who was contracting for the work to be done. Somewhere in there was a breakdown of communication.

So, we had a leak inside the closet, and some wet clothes. Sigh. When I went up on the roof, it didn't look like there had been any work done, and where the work needed to be done looked pretty simple to take care of. Heck I can probably take care of it.

And just to add in some political and economic stuff: Frustrated Americans cheer Obama's tough auto moves. Not me. He has just fired off the president of a company. Since when is the executive branch of government supposed to be trying to run private companies? The FDIC does it to banks who have declared bankruptcy, but GM wasn't in bankruptcy yet and wasn't a bank.

Gah!!!!!

The Dreaming Void

On the off chance that someone, anyone, still reads this blog (or at least hasn't removed it from their Reader) -

Peter F Hamilton is an incredible writer! I flew through the first two books in his Commonwealth universe - Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. They're space opera - grand stories following dozens of characters in stories with the fate of the human race being affected. An absolute treat!

Following those, taking place about 1500 years later is his Void trilogy. I read the first one, The Dreaming Void, some time back and I've just discovered that the second one came out on the 24th, The Temporal Void.

I've got it on request from the library, but I'm 4th on the list and they only ordered three copies. I'll probably have to wait a week or two. So, I'm re-reading the first one to refresh the story.

The books get high, high recommendations to everyone.

Economics and Global Warming

Two of my favorite topics on which to wax nonsensical!

But first, let's talk really quickly about another's nonsense. Yesterday on the way to lunch, I'm flipping through the radio stations, and on one of the stations I heard a lady I had heard before but never paid much attention to. She's some Christian gal with an axe to grind on most political topics. Sounds like she's trying to be a female version of Rush Limbaugh or something.

She really needs to keep her mouth closed, at least on economic topics. Yesterday have a great big 380 point rise in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and similar percentage rises in the NASDAQ and S&P500 averages. This was kicked off by Citigroup, one of the big banking collapses, saying they've going to have some wonderful revenue numbers. She was all excited saying how this is what is really going to get the country out of its troubles - fixing the banking system and Citigroup showing a profit is this wonderful herald of things to come.

Sheesh. What does this lady do - read the headlines off CNN and nothing else? Citigroup posted a great revenue (not profit) and the statement specifically said this was before any writedowns and expenses. Most analysts are expecting a quarterly loss, still. Is this good news for Citigroup? Sure! They might eke out a small profit if all the stars align, or more likely post a smaller than expected loss - still relatively good news.

But what do headline-reading, sensationalist talk show hosts do? They make all sorts of ignorant and baseless statements. She said this is what she has been calling for to happen all along. I SERIOUSLY doubt that!

So why did the stock market jump yesterday? Easy - we've had a REALLY LONG period of downward moving stocks, and the market was ripe to jump on any good news. Citigroup's news was good (comparatively) and Citigroup is considered to be a bellweather for other financial institutions. If Citigroup is doing better than expected, then others probably will be too.

All in all - good news worthy of a nice jump. But ..... (yes, there is a BIG but coming) But, does that clueless lady have any idea how much money it took from the government to keep the bank solvent and how much of that potential profit is flim-flam accounting because they've borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars from the government that they'll need to pay back later??? Did she bother to read any of the dozens of market analysts who have said the exact same thing as what I've just said? Nope. She sees a market bump and whips out her ignorance for all to see. But, really, she's only one of a large crowd of people on the internet, radio, and TV who are much better at yelling out screeds which resound with a small market niche than they are at actually doing anything useful.

Here's a little graph of the last several months of DJIA to put this in perspective. See that itty-bitty little uptick at the far right? That was yesterday.

My little rant about anthropogenic global warming is much shorter. Or is it longer if a picture is worth a thousand words? Meh. Anyway. This is a comparison of two different global temperature measurements and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. See the correlation? Oh, you don't? Hmmm, neither do I.