DISQUS

Wow I really really really hope for your sake you had full comp insurance, cos thats gonna hurt otherwise.

On the bright side... if you did, you get to start married life with a brand new car!?

Remind me if I ever get married and drive my car to take out full comp!

Not that either of those things seems likely or practical any time soon.

is that left as in UK left or American left, which is our right, making the leftists right and the rightists left.

When it comes to understanding political systems I feel like I've been left right out.

Amen to that Pauly. Geoff, you should take up my career I never pursued and do outdoor education... become a fearless outdoor leader. Hehe.

You have the 'child of teachers' bug I think.

Still... a dip-ed with teaching methods in theology and IT would be a feasabile thing for you.

What I like about the idea is that I'd be able to have serious conversations with you about educational outcomes and discipline strategies and you wouldn't look at me like I was some kind of freak. Now that would be an exciting day.

Oh I should have read the whole article first, it comes across a lot stronger!

Onya Tony Campolo!

The Rich Mullins quote was just funny to me, but I guess it was target at WASPy christians so it made sense in context.

I love the quote Geoff, but it amuses me as well...

It's a bit like the temptation to quote the verse that says Christ came to help the sick not the healthy... and in so doing imply that gays, blacks, metalheads, women, and other minority groups are 'sick' for being what they are.

To the mainstream, it feels like an expression of tolerance, but I think perhaps minority groups might feel a tad differently about it.

But I guess not excluding them from our lives and conversations is probably the first step towards letting their voices be heard so we can understand how much work will need to be done to make the journey from avoidance, through tolerance, to acceptance.

ah well its just nice to see some victorian teams up there.

My old little league socks are crying in the sock draw. They're brown and gold, and they thought they might have had a reason to come out and be worn (yes they still fit after many years of stretching and washing!).

Why oh why Hawthorn, did you have to take your eyes off the ball?

But apart from that, GO GEELONG!!! it is good to see one of the old great teams of the game in the running again!

Its something that victorian's know deep down. AFL is our game. We just let other people play it out of national spirit. But they shouldn't win.

Go Footesgray!!! ah the good old days.

lol wow

If introverts ran the world, we extroverts would go mad and start a revolution just for something to do to make up for the complete lack of mental stimulation.

Maybe introvers should all just plug into the matrix and eat imaginary steak while the rest of us go about the business of living! ;o)

There's evidence to suggest that the Myers Briggs and Big Five measurements of Introversion are not prescriptive personality Traits, but are in fact an external expression of the function of a persons intrinsic motivation. Some people's motivation functions in a way that means they always want to avoid social situations, but in others it is entirely context dependant. This is why some apparent introverts appear to go bipolar in midlife and suddenly turn into party animals.

Sometimes it is all about intrinsic motivation, and sometimes its about social/environmental paradigm.... so a person in the second category who suddenly experiences a paradigm shift, is subsequently empowered to live out their true inspiration and engage with people.

Strangely, some extroverts might actually be introverts who are so far out of their comfort zone they are pathologically driven to socialise as a survival mechanism.

As they like to say in scholarly circles... when people assume, they make a small grey beast of burden out of self and other.

Heya Geoff!

Didn't realise you hadn't heard these people in action in this way before. Don't know if I've bitched to you personally about it... but this is why the ACL get absolutely no support from me... in fact personally I think they have their hand in their pants.

I had the opportunity just before the last election to hear Jim Wallace speak, and he constantly used metaphor about Gays being "the enemy" in some kind of mortal battle. Because he's apparently some big important political figure, the church I was attending couldnt do enough to bend over for him. Do we want these people to be the face of christianity? Are any of us angry enough to start a different christian lobby group?

I rather enjoyed pointing out to him that while rhetoric about defeating an 'enemy' in battle might work for the baby boomer generation, if the ACL wanted to actually gain the support of my generation they were going to need to be a little more creative. I then questioned what the ACL was doin to show christ's love to the homosexual community. He responded like a politician who knows he's been outmanouvered. He started talking before he knew what he was going to say... he flushed... he looked embarassed... admitted they were doing very little and that it needed to change... and then tried to argue that any money given to support gay aids victims etc was getting used as ammunition in the war against family values.

The guy isn't stupid... he's very smart, but he's fighting for the fear and prejudice of the conservative bible belt baby boomers. His intellegence and advocacy would have been better used educating the same people about how UNCHRISTIAN their prejudice really is.

Unfortunately the major churches continue to bend over and take it from organisations like the ACL because they are so giggly and excited about having a face in politics... and they think these people are God's annointed ones sent to deliver them. In our lust for power we have forgotten to reflect critically on our morals and on our stance, and the Australian church as it is voiced and seen in our community is now a Pariah and a mindless neo-conservative mass putting its weight behind something which is so insignificant to the key values of Christianity... it has some significants, but it's minescule compared to the massive, and frequently ignored issues that plague this country of Aboriginal rights and welfare, and the increasingly intellectual and business orientated economy that favours the elite, and makes it increasingly difficult for those in the poverty trap to break free.

Its another giant exercise in missing the point.

bugger... thats very very irritating and embarassing... it turns out they worked but my first one took about oooh 20 minutes to appear. Please please mr Editor can you delete something and make me look better!? I'm not so worried about your blog, as I am about my illustrious reputation. keh, who am I fooling.

Tim

ENFP

I seem to have a knack for loosing perfectly good comments and emails at the moment... and I have invented a new cuss word to describe my consternation at this fact... that I hope is not too offensive for your blog. It is this: "PEWFISH".

There now I said it. (and I sound like a complete idiot)

So in reference to the reference to an earlier reference to an earlier referee:

My personalDNA Report

I did actually put together a cute little comment that had links to yours and becs results also so that you could easily jiggy them up side by side and unleash your curiousity... but coding html stops being fun ooh about the second time around.

You may notice my authoritarian score, which I find amusing and quite like about myself, which has to be a bad thing. I blame Greenday. Now most of your other readers probably want to kill me... but such is life I guess.

I think you may also notice that I am higher in femininity than either you or Bec, which I think is fantastic, because I really like girls. Anyway I know what the test measures for that statistic and I think the traits 'traditionally assosciated with men' are a good measure of "stuck in the 1800'sness" which is now officially the century before last (has been for 7 years!), and that makes me feel even more progressive, even tho I only thought of it just then.

I'm NOT making excuses. Its just that (sniff) sometimes I just feel like men don't really understand me at all (sniff).... oh, I mean other men! Oops.

Its just a pity they didnt have a measure for opinionatedness... or writingtoomuchonotherpeoplesblogsness... I would be the king of those categories.
I'm gonna go do the test you quoted above, and if its nice to me, I promise you I'll make my next comment very very short. Four letters short.

Tim

Heya GeoffGeoff,

I'm gonna go check that one in a minute... and if I like it I'll tell you what I am... but if it says mean things about me then it was a bad test anway ;o)... in the mean time... here are my personal dna results as promised, and here, and here, because I know we all like to be lazy, are links to what I'm hoping (if my links work), are yours and Bec's results, as posted by each of you, for your, (and unfortunately everyone elses... but they could always have looked it up anyway) multi-tab browser comparisson and enjoyment ;)

You might especially enjoy noticing my authoritarian score. I'm still not sure whether to interpret it as good or bad. I like it a lot... and I'm pretty sure thats evidence on the side of why its... bad. In my defence: Greenday and the Living End. Yep... that's my defence.

(because I'm a brat, and I know everything and I talk back, and I'm not gonna be another prisoner of society, society, society... Oi, Oi, Oi).

I like me, but I'm pretty sure if we were all me, the world would be really really messy... or... serenely still and beautiful except for the smell of rotting me carcasess that all the other me's had killed because when it came down to it, me found me so irritating that me had to kill me.

There can be only one. (did I just hear a relieved sigh?)

(unfortunately most of your readers haven't seen highlander so none of them know why that was a funny quote and not (just) a stupid thing to say)

I have indulged myself enough for one comment. I'll try and keep my next comment as breif as... four letters.

haha :) argh! Its quite disconscerting trying to write a reply to this post with that sentance just ^^ there looking down at me, and all the implications of it echoing in my head while I try to think clinically and rationally about whatever it was I logged back on to your site to try and add to this conversation.

I think all I really wanted to do is point out how difficult it is to use any derivative, relative, or friend of the word 'liberal' to describe anything you might wish to believe about sexuality, without feeling as though people will immediately assume you've joined a swingers club, and are planning to run naked through the streets of jerusalem with a burning upsidedown crucafix painted on your right buttock.

And yet surely a Christian theology of contraception, fitting as a part, into a Christian theology of sexuality should ultimately be a liberating thing!

Things it might be nice to be liberated from:
> Cultural Expectations
> Social (where they differ) Expectations
> Religious Traditions (cultural expectations that claim spiritual authority)
> Spiritual Obligations (well now there's a paradox... but things can be spiritual without necessarily being Godly...)

Its a juicy topic Geoff, and its certainly got a lot of people thinking and writing which is nice to see! You have a knack for drawing these things out which I really admire.

Fortunately, since you don't appear to be planning on being liberal in any of the non-endorsed senses of the word, you will have many happy years of marriage to play with all of these ideas (although I don't necessarily recommend trying the spirit lead birth control after visiting uncle chop-chop... the results might be predictable)((but then I almost definitely don't recommend it before visiting uncle chop-chop either... which renders my advice somewhat tortological and useless)).

And now I remind myself of the stupid clever guy from the princess bride... which might be the only thing I can say to justify the double perenthisis I indulged in above.

As a reader of your blog Geoff, I am really greatful to you, and to the others who have shared so openly, and in some cases really movingly, (is that even a word?) for giving my brain another good reason to clunk and whirr back into action, however briefly... regardless of the fact that I have no likely use for any of what I have learned here in the easily forseable future. (In otherwords I'm just an opinionated git :) )

Yarra valley vineyard = Ally rev arrive any day

On the hall of fame:

Evangelist = Evil's Agent

wow!

Hmm so yeah...

Another bible verse to think about "He that would be greatest amongst you, let him be the servant of all.

How many religious leaders do you know? How many of them come to you and ask how they can better serve you?

Is the church member the servant of the pastor, or the pastor the servant of the churches members?

Tim

Hmmm this topic intrigues me Geoff!

I think its a very very significantly misunderstood, and abused concept.

I'd like to hear someone analyse the historical and social construct that surrounds these two bible verses!

How do we explain this in relation to Jesus saying "I have come to turn the sons against the fathers" etc. (anyone pedantic enough to tell me i've misquoted is welcome to post the correct quote)?

What do we make of Bonhoffer? Evil criminal, or insightful servant of God?

Where does submission end? What sorts of things are we free not to submit to? What sort of things do we have a moral imperritive not to submit to?

So many more Q's but I have to go down to SES.

All I can say in closing, is that I'm a Hawthorn supporter :P HAR HAR HAR HAR

well anyway I'm paying attention to my team for the first time in 10 years, but right now you're pobably trying to forget yours exists ;)

Oh in case that all seems a little left field... one of the websites had a more in-depth critique of Rob and accused him of "rejecting the foundational doctrine of sola-scriptura."

Perhaps I am just a lunatic existentialist. I'm probably going to hell, since the writings of gay french atheist existstentialist, post-structuralist, communist (and then not-communist) friend of simone de Bouviour and other miscelaneous evils, Micheal Foucault, make a lot of sense to me. Or maybe I'm a feminist. It gets confusing.

Anyway there's a name for dogged dedication to a long departed way of knowing: naive-realism: the belief that the way "I" see the world IS the world. That's why God is frequently stuck speaking King James English. Clearly no English teachers have made it to heaven since the day they departed from teaching the Kings English. And its no wonder Jesus sweat drops of blood the night before his crucifiction... in order to understand the Father's will, he had to translate Olde Englishe into Aramaic without a dictionary.

Any dogged unbending dedication to the Reformation, or the Nicean council or any other post-ascention update on Christian Ideology, is a dead theology (although all of those theologies live on in dialogue). A century from now, if we dont scorch our own planet, Rob Bell and Brian McLaren will be remembered as the prolific writers, and voices of a changing era, and people will cling to their teaching doggedly, shunning the voices of whatever shake-up is renewing life in that century.

Today's trend will be tomorrows Tradition.

I'm pretty sure anyone who can be bothered will shoot 12 guage holes in everything I've just said... but hey... thats okay (if its okay with Geoff that is) hope I haven't lost the topic too much Geoff. Anyway a few holes are good... nice view of the sky and trees and so forth.

I have to admit, and to coin a mickism, I have been "delvaging" into the debate and reading my own slice of slice. There's some interesting and heated dialogue out there!

Its nice to see some diverse views even amongst the SBC, I've been reading a blog i found through a link to a link from your blog... http://mcelroycounseling.com/notes/ which got me reading slice, and some other stuff as well.

It strikes me that the emergent movement is just a percentile thing... people have been saying similar things for many decades, but its only in recent times that communication and technology have allowed the dissillusioned minority to discover that they are more normal, perhaps even, dare I say it, more common, than they previously felt. What disturbs me, parrelel with the recent trend of punk outfits being sold in department stores, is the idea of counter-culture becoming pop-culture.

I had to read about sola-scriptura to make head or tail of the allegations being made against Rob Bell in some of those posts, and I came to the conclusion I dont believe in sola-scriptura either... and I don't think its a scandal. Whose intepretation is it that is so self evident? Which translation? Why do they always seem to tell me that its the old king james bible that the reformation belief (named in latin) of sola-scriptura defines as the self evident word of God?

Why did the Americans declare it to be self evident that all men are created equal, and have to be divided over unrelated politics before abolishing the slavery that, naked, and blissfuly ignored, mocked the foundation of their independance?

If it was self evident, why did so many of the founding fathers have slaves, and not think to free them when they penned and claimed beif in the statement "all men are created equal".

Which is a roundabout way of giving another example of how ideas change. Its irrisistable to ask why 'sola-scriptura', which as I understand it, was mostly about breaking the power of the interprative institution of the catholic church, rather than blocking the interpretaive freedom of the individual, came about during the reformation. How many hundreds of years after christ? You'd think if it was utterly foundational, He might have mentioned it Himself at some stage. No, it seems to be (if wiki can be trusted) traced back to Luther, who was in fact, an unpopular reformer (and probably called a liberal) in his day.

Liberalism and liberty tend to become nonsense words, and perhaps do begin to represent moral decline, when we stop remebering to ask the important questions "what are we being liberated from?" and "What are we being liberated for?"

Wow what a rant. Feel free to edit me or ditch it... just that you got my brain ticking over and it bubbled out. So thanks... :o)

Its an interesting question Geoff..

How dependant is google indexing on random database processes, and how much of it is deliberately priotised or interventionally ranked?

If its a databasing monster then effectively goolge can't be blamed for the fact that the s#!t floats to the top... whether they want to decide to have an ethics committee who look for and adress such bais is another question.

I was thinking about that in relation to a christian publishing company that published a book out of context that had some pretty damaging ramifications for australian young people as compared to what it meant in america where it was written.

Are they responsible?

They certainly have the opportunity to respond... but are they obliged to? I guess it depends on how you construct your ethics!

well geoff, it appears that that askimet gizmo is not everything its cracked up to be.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

:o)

Tim

Haha

I read this, and I thought of a few things I was hoping it related to. Geoff... can i fix you? pweeeeeeaaaaaaase?

not that i'm ever guilty of the same thing or anything.

Even Chris Martin has trouble with it... (and I will try-ei-ei to fix you)

I think the Taoists have a remarkable knack for figuring this stuff out... and if you are brave Geoff, and unaffraid that you may become an instant heretic, I recommend you look up their stuff. Actually they're a bunch of pretty wise chinese dudes who sat around and figured out some basic things about life and wrote it down.

What will be, will be.

God grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the grace to accept the things I can't,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
(the AA prayer)

Its tough when as christians we try to take responsibility for our influence over everything... and not just for the things we are specifically responsible for.

Often we get so focused on trying to MAKE things happen when we should only be saying "this is what I believe is best, and this is how I will support that" and then walking away. I'm really struggling with that with Young Adults at the moment. There are so many things we've set as goals that have fallen by the wayside, so many great ideas and things we could be, do, and acheive... and I want to MAKE that happen... but its neither my responsibility, nor my place to do that.

haha i thought this was going to be all about silence of the lambs...

Geoff with a rotating head...

Looks good mate

but... seriously can I question something...

" And it’s got to be a good thing to be out there and making a difference to the environment. Especially if it’s not just a jump-on-the-bandwagon thing."

How effective do you think we really were?

What were our aims, and how well did we fulfill them?

Hey Geoff!!

I'm not one to boast or anything buuuuuut.... (I'm going to anyway)

I pulled another two trollies out of the creek and filled them both with rubbish, after everyone else had gone home!

There... now I'm not storing up treasures in heaven, I'm just being a glib exhibitionist on earth. I'm proud of my trollies!

MMmmm Trollies.

Tim