thekurths.com

Merry Christmas!

We're having a great Christmas! So we thought it would be good to take a family photo in front of the tree. Then we downloaded the pictures from the camera and realized that we were completely obscuring the tree... oh, well.

Rejoice! A savior is born unto us this day. Have a blessed Christmas!

From That Day Forward

Yesterday we celebrated 4 wonderful years of blissful marriage. Feels like we've been married much longer, and it's almost impossible to remember what life was like before. Only that it was not nearly as good. God has blessed us in ways we could never imagine.

We went to the Stagecoach Inn in Salado for dinner last night. We weren't quite sure what to expect, but it was quite charming. They still recite the menu to you just like they did in the old days, and they bring you a delicious 4-course meal, including dessert! The ambiance is a little hard to describe. The food was fancy, but the atmosphere was relaxed. Thanks to our friends, the Bishops, who recommended it to us.

Kaeta, of course, stayed at Grandma's house, where she had the time of her life. When we got back to pick her up after 9:30, she was still wide awake, running in circles around the kitchen and living room, screaming in exuberant delight. She almost did not want to come home with us.

Christmas traditions

Here are a couple of interesting articles from Cranach, a blog I like.

Did you know that at the Council of Nicea, St. Nicholas slapped the heretic Arius in the face? Would Santa Claus do THAT? The True Meaning of Santa Claus

How did the evergreen become a symbol of Christ? That goes back to Boniface, a missionary to Germany, who cut down the Sacred Oak of Thor and (shockingly) was not immediately pummeled by heavenly hammers. He then used the evergreen tree "as an object lesson to teach about the everlasting life through Christ." The missionary and the first Christmas tree

We hope you're having a blessed Advent!

The Tuesday Night EP

Tonight, I decided to record an EP of some original songs. I just picked out three songs I've written recently and recorded them. They are called:

1. Wellington C. Mepham High School
2. Jeon Kyung-Joon
3. Can You Dig It?

I wrote the first two by clicking the "Random Article" button on Wikipedia and writing a song about whatever came up. The third one was written using other methods.

Since I recorded them all on a Tuesday night, it's called The Tuesday Night EP. The graphic is a scan of something I drew on a napkin.

Hope you like it! [Download the EP]

@ Uncle Colin's

Uncle Colin is cool, and he has a cat:

But he might be a bad influence!

He had us over for dinner Saturday, and we had a great time! We played tennis on his Wii, and it was extremely fun. Karianne got really into it, and she was pretty sore the next day from swinging the controller :-)

Video: Just being cute

Last night Kaeta was in manic-mode, and I got some great footage. She was just running around laughing, turning in circles, and sticking her tongue out a LOT.

[Download Video, 5.5Mb]

This is by far the scariest picture of her yet. I can imagine it as an album cover:

And here are a couple of cute ones:

New tricks this week: pointing at things, sticking her tongue out, and she can do the signs for "more" and "all finished" really well. One funny thing is that she will do the sign for "all finished" when we say goodbye to someone, as in, "I'm all finished with you!" And if you do something fun with her and she wants to do it again, she'll do the sign for "more!" She is learning to sign "please," and we made up a sign for "yummy."

And she has been very obedient, learning to put her toys away and to put things back when she's done playing with them. It means that we can let her play with more things, because she consistently puts them back (sometimes without us even asking).

Well, I could brag on her for a lot longer, but I just wanted to post an update :-)

Review of "The God Delusion"

In The God Delusion, arch-atheist Richard Dawkins argues that religion is a virus and the cause of all kinds of evil in the world. Dawkins never fails to make me mad, but that's not exactly a constructive response. Here is a fairly well-reasoned critique of The God Delusion by Shannon Love, who is also an atheist. It's helpful when someone else puts into words all of my jumbled thoughts!

Here's an excerpt:

"Atheists like to single out both the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition as examples of inhumanity that occurred because of religion. (The very fact that we atheists feel compelled to reach back 400-800 years for our kneejerk examples of bad religious behavior should set off warning bells.) Yet both events had significant materialistic or practical drivers that would have created much the same events without any religion being involved. The Crusades arose as a counterattack against the Muslim military expansion that had consumed half of the Christian world. Had the United Atheist League conquered half the lands of the League of United Atheists the same dynamic would have applied. Contrary to many people's view, no atrocities occurred during the Crusades that hadn't occurred when Christians fought Christians or Muslims fought Muslims. The massacres of the inhabitants of cities that so occupy the modern mind did not arise out of religious bigotry but from the established rules of medieval siege warfare. Cities taken by storm were put to the sack. The Crusaders established Christian kingdoms in the Middle East that lasted nearly two centuries. Those kingdoms were 98% Muslim with a Christian nobility. The Christians didn't try to exterminate those populations based on religion.

Likewise, the Spanish Inquisition sprang from the very secular needs for political control and money. The purpose of the Inquisition was to create legal and cultural justifications for the seizures of vast amounts of wealth from those accused. The religious aspects of the persecution were just a gloss, as in every other action taken during that time. In modern times, atheistic communists carried out nearly identical actions for nearly identical reasons. (The most strange thing about our view of the Spanish Inquisition is that we regard it with special horror even though the use of torture for both investigation and punishment was a universal standard at the time. What so shocked the contemporaries of the Inquisition was not the fact that it tortured people. Every police power of the time tortured people. What shocked the contemporaries was the class of people who got tortured. Mutilating peasants didn't raise anyone's eyebrows, mutilating the rich and noble did.)

Dawkins simply repeats the shallow and ahistorical version of history that any hip 19-year-old college freshman can regurgitate on cue. If Dawkins had approached the question from an empirical point of view, he would have readily determined that evidence for the degree to which religion does or does not promote inhumane decisions can only be found in the history of the last 300 years or so. Only during that time frame have atheistic ideologies gained any significant power to actually make good or bad decisions. Unfortunately for atheists, recent history shows that the more atheistic a political ideology, the more destruction it wreaks when it acquires power. The first true atheistic regime in history arose during the 1792 French revolution, which promptly consumed itself in the Great Terror. Atheistic communism next assumed power, and it killed 120 million people over 80 years, and brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation more than once. Mussolini was an atheist and the Nazis, who held a diverse mixture of atheistic, deistic and pagan beliefs, were united only by their antipathy towards traditional religion. National Socialism as an ideology was rigorously secular and justified its killings with appeals to a materialistic pseudo-science. Dawkins spends about 4 pages (what about Hitler and Stalin? weren't they atheists? -- p. 291) before concluding that atheism played no part in their crimes."

(Read the whole review here.)
(Hat tip: Cranach)

Someone I know did something! Look!

One of my friends from high school is a really great musician named David Harper. His music is like if Coldplay was wrecked on a deserted island with a bunch of acoustic guitars and Bibles, and maybe some David Harper CDs... and so they listened to the CDs a lot and learned to play the songs on the guitars, and they started to believe the Bible. Man, this is a terrible analogy.

David sent out an email today with this news:

Hello Everyone - It's my great pleasure to report that my Song "Everything" was selected as the Winner of the Song - Contemporary Christian category in the 6th Annual Independent Music Awards! My song was selected from the largest number of entries the program has received to date. So this was no small feat, to say the least.

Congrats, David! The rest of you, go to http://myspace.com/davidharperonline and check him out.

Also, his song "I Know You By Name" contains a flugelhorn solo! "Flugelhorn" is my new favorite word to say. Try it! Flugelhorn!

Happy New Year!

It's Advent, the beginning of a new church year, and the time of year when we risk our lives hanging Christmas lights! Seriously, this weekend I was hanging one-handed from the apex of our house in order to clip on these lights. But clearly, it was totally worth it.

The Hebrew people looked forward to a Messiah, and He has come! Advent is a time for repentance when we remember the wondrous way that God "became flesh and dwelt among us," and we look forward to His second coming.

For audio devotionals every day during Advent, click here.

The Jig is Up

Yesterday morning I sent this email to 36 people:

Dear friends of Colin Knox, I haven't talked to many of you in a long time -- howdy! A thought has been bouncing around my mind for a while, and TODAY IS THE DAY to try it out! As almost nobody knows, our friend Colin has a blog. Here's the address: http://knodi.blogspot.com/ Today (after a month of inactivity), he posted something about game shows that get their titles from lines from the movie Jerry Maguire. It's just a little observation he had, and I'm sure he does not expect more than about 3 people to ever read it. THAT'S WHERE HE'S WRONG! :-D Let's all go to his site and post a comment on that Jerry Maguire post. It does NOT have to be a long comment, and it doesn't have to make sense. Just tell him hi, and thanks for posting. Tell him the Jerry Maguire observation is a good point. Whatever you want. We should keep the comments simple (at least at first) and let him wonder why all these old friends he hasn't heard from in months or years are suddenly posting on his blog! Please do not let him know about this email -- I will tell him about it eventually, but I want him to wonder for a while :-) Thanks, and see you on Colin's blog! -Derek

Thanks to everyone who posted comments (20 so far)! Throughout the day Friday Colin and I chatted on instant messenger, and he was really excited to get so many comments. All day I alternated between feeling guilty (was this a mean prank?) and laughing uncontrollably.

Then, yesterday afternoon, Colin sent me this email, informing me that the jig was up... the subject of the email was "admit it, you wrote this":

To: everyone I know From: Derek Subject: Colin's blog Hey everybody, Derek here. Do me a favor, and all of you go post a comment on Colin's latest blog post. And don't tell him I put you up to this; I want him to think everybody he knows knows about his blog and checks it daily. C'mon, it'll really cheer him up, and it'll only take a minute. Check the imdb quotes page for good quip fodder if you need it. -- Derek

So I was forced to fess up... That Colin is a canny cat! Colin, thanks for being a good sport, and please don't hurt me. Everyone else, it's not too late to get in the action! You can still go here and post a comment! All the cool kids are doing it.

Baby Cam

Blogs only a mother could love:
Other bricks in the wall:

Christian stuff:

Software related:

Amazing Bible Software: