Blog Yellek

Gracie poses an interesting question over at .:unD0n3:. from her sociology course: Does Man make Religion or does Religion Make Man?The premise here seems to be that man makes religion as a social thing with the implication (by Karl Marx no less) that a truly enlightened person can dispense with religion because they have realized that they don’t need it.

My first reaction to this is that a system of rituals and conventions has no meaning in and of itself but rather needs to be imbued with a sense of greater truth in order to have relevance. The rituals without the truth still has an echo of it’s former meaning but increasingly it is succumbing to the trap of placing something else at the heart of life where God is supposed to be and nothing good can come of that. The worst of all people is the person who is deluded into thinking that the rituals and practices have eternal meaning when only a relationship with the person behind them can give you that. This is why “religion” is such a dirty word around PCC.

If man has to create religion in order for society to function then what are we lacking that we need to do so? Is it that we are just not enlightened enough to see that we can survive without it or is it that all of us are longing for a restored relationship with our creator? Why if humanity is the ultimate expression of the animal kingdom as some would have us believe do we need to create something above ourselves to believe in when no animal does so? Isn’t it that our nature is both physical and spiritual and that we need to come back into relationship with the almighty to fulfill the marvelous creation that each of us is?

Pity the person who denies God for they have an empty existence burying the pain of separation from the love of God all the time insisting that they are free of it when in actual fact deep down their spirit is in agony over their estrangement. It is not for nothing that Jesus says to us:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

There is an interesting comment discussion going on on a post I posted about a month ago : burnout leadership and vision the balance of attitude. I mention it because some of you might have an opinion and want to weigh in.

In my daytime income producing activity I get to edit a lot of documents. Most of those documents are based on templates of one form or another. Over time I have developed a list of the things that I hate about various templates and I thought I’d share them here for template designers everywhere.

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For a while now I have been lamenting the lack of a trackback feature for anyone using blogger.com as their blogging software. It was one of the primary reasons for me moving from blogger to Wordpress. Since I have moved over to Wordpress I am liking it very much, I don’t think I have begun to explore all the possibilities yet but I must say I love what I can do already.

For people still on blogger though there is a solution of sorts: the backlinks feature. Backlinks work by doing a blog search for the URL of the post and then appending the link of the person who has linked to you on the bottom of your post. The help page has more details and describes how to turn backlinks on (under the settings | comments tab), the template changes that might be required for older templates to incorporate backlinks and how backlinks can be turned off for individual posts.

I know some of my regular readers use Blogger.com so I thought I would point them to this little tip so that they can get notification when I comment on their blogs. Of course if you want full trackback and commenting support on blogger or other blogging software that doesn’t support trackbacks there is always Haloscan’s free trackback service.

Some time ago I attended a street corner meeting with my local federal member Kate Ellis and I raised with her the issue of DRM. I wanted to see if there was anything she could do on my behalf to try and avoid the train wreck I can see coming.

For those not familiar with DRM it is basically a way of preventing music from being played on different devices. For instance if I buy a song on the iTunes music store and I then want to use it on any other MP3 player than an iPod, I can’t. This means that I am locked in to buying only Apple iPod music players rather than deciding for myself what the best player is. It also means that at any time Apple can control what I can and can’t do with the music I have purchased from them.

This week I received a response via Kate Ellis from Phillip Ruddock the federal Attorney General regarding my query: (more…)

Having been tagged by both Ebenezer and Hecta for the one book meme that started here I will give this a go:

1. One book that changed your life:
   The Bible
2. One book that you’ve read more than once:
   Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold because I’m really a hopeless romantic at heart.
3. One book you’d want on a desert island:
   I’m tempted to say something like a survival book appropriate to the area but really if I’m going to be stuck there for a while the Bible is the only thing I’m not going to get tired of, it’s always fresh.
4. One book that made you laugh:
   Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold “It’s like swatting flies with a laser cannon, the aims a little tricky but it sure takes care of the flies”
5. One book that made you cry:
   The Happiest People by John and Elizabeth Sherrill, the bit where the patriarchs welcome his dad into heaven gets me every time.
6. One book that you wish had been written:
   Small group leadership for dummies
7. One book that you wish had never been written:
   The Night’s Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton, these are books that I had to get rid of, far too dark and away from God.
8. One book you’re currently reading:
   Getting Things Done by David Allen - This book has the possibility of going in category 1 also
9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:
   Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul by John Eldridge
10. Now tag five people:
    Bec, Conrad (time to update your blog Conrad ), Mike Cherry, Leslie Ey, Nic Bishop

Pastor Ashley has been talking lately about the laws of sowing and reaping, how the bible establishes the law that what you sow you shall reap. The bible is full of examples of people who sowed good things and reaped the rewards as well as people who sowed bad things which eventually found them out.

My question is: If there is a law of sowing and reaping then what hope is there for me, a sinner, to reap the things I do not deserve in life? Jesus died on the cross for my sins by grace and I can believe for that but what about other things? What if by failing to sow good things in my relationships with my family that I will now reap the consequences of a separate life lived away from them? If sowing and reaping is really a law then can I exp[ect any different? What if by somehow failing to invest in the right relationship skills there is no hope of finding a family of my own? What if by my past actions it is too late? Can I ever be a father?

It’s dark where I’m at tonight. I stood down the front of church tonight and poured my heart out to God in worship because there is no other place for me, He is all I have. Sometimes faith is doing what you know to be true. God has a plan but sometimes it gets dark on the way and you go through those places when you wonder if all is lost and the path you had expected isn’t the one you are on. Without specific promises to guide you how can you know that what you think you want is in God’s will for your life? I have to believe Him, there is nothing else that can save me. I have to believe that the one who created me knows the desires of my heart and will bring them to pass. I have to trust Him with everything.

Yes there is a law of sowing and reaping but isn’t there also a law of grace? Sometimes when you are in a low place you have to hang on for grace too.