Geneva has one.

It’s all there: Fundamentalism, Liberalism, Egalitarianism, Open Theism, Relativism, Rationalism and on and on.

It’s clear, written in plain language, and I love it.

You know a subject is taught and assessed well if you could do the following year’s exam and do as well or only slightly worse.

You know a subject is integrated into the college curriculum well if you could do the following year’s exam and do better.

I think I could smash the Ethics 3 exam this year, even without looking at any of my third year course notes, because my thinking has really come together this year through my project, Apologetics and Social Ethics.

Other subjects that will remain unnamed, not so much.

What do you think, students?

It’s worth remembering that millions of people are still affected by the spectacular failure of communism there, and the atheistic evil done in the name of the people.

This week’s Boston Big Picture displays photos from Kazakhstan, where the Soviet government test detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons. The effects of radioactivity in the area are still felt.

The series starts with a deformed boy, abandoned by his parents. The pictures that actually made me cry were the ones of parents who kept their children, and continue to look after them in very difficult circumstances.

Just think for a moment about whether you want to look at these photos.

If so, here.

See also Teak’s comeback at people who think the fall of the Berlin wall made things worse for East Germans.

Saturday morning instructions, easy to remember:

• 1 cup of flour

• 2 cups of milk
• 3 eggs

Whisk the eggs and milk together, sift flour in and whisk together.

Cook 10 thin crêpes over mid heat and serve them with strawberries and (real) Maple syrup (Camp is an easy brand to lay hold of).

Conclude by praising Jesus for good things like these.

Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving. (1 Tim 4:4)

It’s the same atheists-as-fundamentalists line we’ve been hearing for a while now, but there is some good succinct critique I hadn’t heard before.

Tina Beatie in her book The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War of Religion maintains that atheists are engaged in religious belief themselves because naturalists as authors such as Dawkins and Hitchens use their own beliefs to invest their life with meaning. Ironic, isn’t it?

What I want to know is whether Dawkins and Hitchens are good guys or… um, knobs.

If the latter, I’m tempted to think that does more damage to their case than all their ranting actual argument.

UPDATE: I just came across Hitchens’ ‘What I’ve learned from debating religious people around the world’ via kottke.org.

He includes this,

I haven’t yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a “script” that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe. I haven’t been asked to Bob Jones University yet, but I have been invited to Jerry Falwell’s old Liberty University campus in Virginia, even though we haven’t yet agreed on the terms.

Perhaps we can discover more about the personalities and morality of Hitchens (and evangelical Doug Wilson) by watching their buddy-and-road movie Collision, which is just opening in the US.

These guys generate some excellent resources for Anglican church members, and anyone else who wants them, as well as engaging with the government and other bodies on critical ethical issues like the nature of marriage in law, religious freedom and bioethics.

Kudos to Ben Beilharz for the design.

I’ve held off getting an iPhone until there’s some filtering or accountability software available.

That’s a comment from a user of Covenant Eyes, a cross-platform accountability app to protect Christians from the temptation to view pornography on the internet.

The person who said this obviously has a strong commitment to avoiding pornography. They’re eager to prevent that kind of sin-provoking material from entering their mind. That’s extremely counter-cultural.

Our culture is increasingly careful about consumption. Most people have some form of regulation on what they eat, in an attempt to live a long, healthy life. Many embrace a concern for the environment that means they consider the environmental impact of products and services that they buy. The Fair Trade movement has caught on as a way of enabling and encouraging the wealthy to consume in a way that ostensibly supports primary producers in developing countries.

But in the realm of what media content is consumed, there is no such reflection or restraint. Certainly most people are aware that children ought to be protected from accessing material that could harm them. But if an adult suggests that they need filtering software for themselves, that’s completely incomprehensible for most people in our culture. There is no available framework in which to place the idea that I might choose not to watch something I might enjoy, for the sake of my spiritual health.

I wonder when the tide will turn and people start to be reflective about what they allow to enter into their minds, and what Christians might have to contribute to that movement.

Any thoughts?

Classy.

No idea what I’m talking about. That’s okay. Try this.

He speaks to bioethics through the themes of creation, redemption and eschatology, and in doing so, he provides a sophisticated but very clear way of thinking about right and wrong in the world now.

The lectures aren’t long, they’re very easy to listen to, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

They’re free mp3 download from the New College website.

PS Did I mention Ethics 3. If you’re doing it, you need to listen to these. Do it.

On TV, it’s impressive.

I will point out, though, the best analysis of the situation thus far, from Miranda Devine. (NB It’s got some sexually explicit description in it). And I’ll add a short comment.

What Miranda doesn’t go so far as to say (probably because she doesn’t see things in quite this way), is that the uproar about Polanski’s arrest is evidence of a new direction in sexual norms. Or at least the broaching of a new horizon.

Over, say, the last 60 years, generally accepted norms governing sexual behaviour have changed. Western society has seen the gradual acceptance of pre- and extra-marital sex, homosexuality, and in the last ten years, pornography, with the rise of raunch culture. These things always existed, but the general public formerly viewed them as perversions.

A wise old preacher used to say that paedophilia was just about the only form of sexual expression still abhorrent to our society.

With the outcry over the arrest of Roman Polanski for a drug-assisted anal rape of a 13 year old, it looks like that’s changing.

Jesus? The Old Testament? Scripture?

Nope. The answer is, overwhelmingly: the good news about Jesus.

I didn’t pick it.

Run the search yourself in English here.

(Yes, the Bathgates are alive. We have had adventures.)