35 minutes searching visual references, 15 minutes drawing w/o reference

Call it: the unveiling of the underwater diamond.
Lame, yes, but had Kirby on the mind. Trying out various layers on a Wacom Bamboo tablet.

Comic episode

Playing with Wacom tablet

My stackoverflow badge

Not that I have or ever will be able to make any contribution...

Letter to an Atheist

You may agree with me that the value system of, say, to pick three people, Al Franken, Michael Moore, and Rosie O'Donnell is completely different from that of what could be called "biblical literalism." You might also agree with me that the value system of Franken, Moore, and O'Donnell is incredibly more preferrable than, say, that of Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich. Where you and I would disagree, however, is whether the value system of Santorum, Perry, & Gingrich is a necessary requirement of biblical literalism. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you are either as uneducated as the boo-ers in the Republican debate audiences, or you are a disingenuous propagandist, if you insist that it's so. I would also say that even Penn Jillette agrees with me on this point, as evidenced by exactly how he condemned Michelle Bachmann in a recent interview. I'd also claim that you can do nothing nicer to the "debate boo-ers" than to tell them that they are following the literal dictates of the instruction book left by the Creator of the Universe.

Where Occupy Wall Street is failing.

A friend on Google Plus found this video to carry some great moral weight. I find it truly sad.



Some may look at this video and see how the cops are intimidating the peaceful protesters and how The Man is personally harassing them. I, and also probably most conservatives or non-OWS fans, probably see spoiled, over-privileged punks insulting police.

If you've read anything else in this blog, you can probably guess that I have extreme sympathy for anyone complaining about what Francis Schaeffer called "noncompassionate use of wealth." Read Martin Luther's Admonition to Peace to see what words I would say to "Wall Street."

But effective protest should involve an attempt to convince someone by appealing to their conscience. Not just pushing on the cultural divide, like someone hopping on an axe that is stuck in wood. That is what these guys are doing. Rather than reach out to the extremely socially conservative blue-collar guy who might feel oppressed by Wall Street, this video sends them running into the arms of the Tea Party.

They also are not wearing khakis and polo shirts.

Beautiful video on overfishing.

This video looks great full screen
, and has important message about overfishing.

Makehuman: if you're into that stuff

The development progress of the program makehuman is progressing nicely. They've got it to the point that it can export a fully rigged character to blender. Here is my first evening's attempt at such.

It's pretty cool, but right now it's a bit too much Uncanny Valley for me. I'll have to see if there are actually ways to reduce the realism and make more toonily-shaded characters with it.

A spiritually dangerous film from Focus on the Family

A Theological Review

of “Lesson 10 - The American Experiment: Stepping Stones”

by Focus on the Family’s “The Truth Project”

by Greg M. Johnson

The Christian view is that man lived in paradise until Adam upset relationship with God thousands of years ago. In the Christian view, the solution is Christ’s work on cross to restore humans’ relationship with God. Individuals remaining in unrepentant sin is dangerous because of Hell. What is necessary for humans is faith in Christ, or “a broken and contrite spirit.”

A view prevalent in certain Christian circles today, and in my opinion offered by the movie, sets up an entirely different narrative of the Fall. It is that USA enjoyed God’s blessings until secularists upset the relationship with God sometime in mid 1800’s. In this view, the solution is humans’ work to restore the country’s relationship with God. Country remaining in state of non-God-honoring is physically dangerous to the nation because God may remove the lampstand of Revelations 2 from the country. What very bad for humans is to “hate America.”

Problem: The speaker repeated a theme that “Without religion and morality, it is impossible to have liberty.” In the early days of the United States, we had a lot of religious fervor, but very little liberty. Thomas Jefferson put the word “God” on some public documents, but believed in a religion where it was okay to have sex with your slaves. George Washington put the word “God” on some public documents, but believed in a religion where it was okay to leave the babies of your slaves naked in winter. If religion were a requirement for liberty, then either: A) these men’s religion is apostate (in a far worse way than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s is), or B) the premise the “religion helps liberty” is false. I object to the films’ premise that the Founding Fathers were of my religion. They are not. I shake their religion from my shoes.

Problem: the speaker referred to the cycle of obedience, rebellion, punishment, repentance, and restoration for OT Israel and said that America was in the rebellion stage. His references to when things started to go wrong were in the mid-1800’s. I on the other hand cannot imagine a greater stage of rebellion than slaveholding. Is it okay for me to believe that the 1700’s were the worst part of rebellion rather than America’s “Eden?” God’s name was on the lips but our hearts were far from him. Undoing physical slavery was the principal work of God for his people in the OT. There is always sin, and I find his reference to 1700’s America as the “good old days” to be unbiblical.

Problem: the movie complained that “Jurisprudence” is now viewed as something that can evolve rather than being based on God’s word. Was our system of laws ever based on God’s word, per se, or one sect in one time’s understanding of it. I note that we went from Dred Scott (1857) to Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), which is a great thing. We went from saying it is okay for the government to keep different races in different schools to an “evolved’ (if you will) state where we don’t say that. As another example, in the year I was born, interracial marriage was illegal in the state I grew up in. The country’s understanding of interracial marriage has “evolved”: God be praised!

Problem: The movie set as a good thing from the old days, that there were Christian religious oaths as a test for holding office. I say, our country has aways been more like the towns of Paul’s epistles than OT Israel. Muslims, Jews, nonbelievers, and radically different flavors of Christianity exist. Is it workable in our society? Is it an outrage to God that the religious tests are gone? Luther said he’d rather be ruled by a wise pagan than a foolish Christian.

Problem: Revelations 2 is talking about a church. The speaker applied it to a country. This is very bad.

Problem: a boy at the beginning said that America was the “light of the world.” I confess someone Else to be. (One should neither teach children to say that, nor should one be a Unitarian Universalist preacher-- another speaker at the beginning of the film).

Agreements: Biblical Christianity is under attack. (First, I must add, it is under attack by this film). Secondly, it is under attack by an intelligentsia that is more dangerous than anything by the ACLU. If you listen to the broadcast media of scientific associations (Scientific American to IEEE Spectrum), you will hear educated people say that “religion mandates violence.” You will hear a cartoony distorted view of Christianity that is probably not actually taught or held to by many people: there is no Cross in this cartoon view, only a Hell, and a Hell that is arbitrarily dished out to basically good people. In one science podcast I used to subscribe to, a man claimed that someone shouldn’t be allowed a job in science if they believed in God.

Solutions:

1) Christ’s work on the Cross

2) Our repentance

3) A witnessing that has folks (or finds) folks in a state of “broken and contrite spirit” long before hell and the need to change where they are going is mentioned.

4) Apologetics work that points out to society that the moral and religious absurdities of 1700’s America and my own life are neither faithful to nor required by the bible, and only shows the need for Christ.

5) Good works, in proper context. (I like the way that Catholics call them “Works of Mercy”).

6) Honoring God in the public square, in a peaceable way that involves risk-taking with our own bodies, not in ways that involve fighting through the government over the right to put a symbol on a piece of land or “airtime” in a secular event.

Links to Original Material:

Outline of Lesson 10:

http://cccgreeley.org/files/PDFs/Adult%20Ministries%20Files/Truth%20Project%20Group%20Resources/Tour%2010%20Participant.pdf

Truth Project Lessons:

http://www.thetruthproject.org/events/A000000068.cfm/

Truth Project

http://www.thetruthproject.org/

Christina Aquilera!

I'm donating one post on this blog to the World Food Program's response to the Somali famine.

I don't know exactly what Christina Aquilera has to do with the famine, but it's probably nicer than seeing pic of starving baby, which was another option.