The End of Embryonic Cloning?

Although it definitely won't get as much press as Dolly the sheep received, one of the key figures in embryonic cloning (and creator of Dolly) appears to be abandoning the embryonic method of cloning. This is good news, because it means that perhaps the use of embryos for stem cell research will decrease in popularity...if other scientists follow his lead. It also points to the ridiculousness of the whole idea from the very beginning...even if it worked...and was morally unproblematic, where would all the eggs come from to create the embryos for the cloning?

Here's an article about Ian Wilmut's change in research:
Dolly Creator Prof Ian Wilmut Shuns Cloning

Dedication..."The Neon Bible"

I'd like to dedicate this song to Joel Osteen and his new best-seller. Also, don't forget to check out The Arcade Fire . They are Canadian...and quite good.

Neon Bible Lyrics
by The Arcade Fire

A vial of hope and a vial of pain,
In the light they both looked the same.
Poured them out on into the world,
On every boy and every girl.

It's in the Neon Bible, the Neon Bible
Not much chance for survival,
If the Neon Bible is right.

Take the poison of your age,
Don’t lick your fingers when you turn the page,
What I know is what you know is right,
In the city it's the only light.

It's the Neon Bible, the Neon Bible
Not much chance for survival,
If the Neon Bible is right.

Oh God! well look at you now!
Oh! you lost it, but you don’t know how!
In the light of a golden calf,
Oh God! I had to laugh!

Take the poison of your age,
Don’t lick your fingers when you turn the page,
It was wrong but you said it was right,
In the future I will read at night.

In the Neon Bible, the Neon Bible
Not much chance for survival,
If the Neon Bible is true

Emerging Info

I'm proud to say that my last post stirred up a little controversy...both here and at another page. I wish I had the time to interact with some of the discussions and debates before they become old news (Mike...don't argue with librarians...dictionaries don't lie). But, instead of attempting anything constructive, I thought I'd point out two resources that I think are helpful in understanding the emerging church. The first one (pdf) is emergent friendly, the second one (mp3) is not...I'm trying to be balanced.

Scot McKnight - What Is the Emerging Church?

Mark Driscoll - 2007 Convergent Conference (Driscoll's talk is Session 3)

"...often against people who are really onto something."

Read Tony Jones' post...in which (as in all emergent dialog) there a good vibe overpowered by an over-all sense of "something's not quite right here"...

http://tonyj.net/2007/11/06/daddy-whats-a-heretic

And, to quote Tony's blog...What is a heretic?
“It’s what someone says,” Mike told her, “when they’re trying to hurt and silence someone else. It’s been used a lot in history, and often against people who are really onto something.” (That’s a paraphrase. Mike said it better.)

Perhaps, "Mike" is on to something...maybe heretic isn't a bad word. Maybe gnosticism is a good thing, maybe Christ wasn't God...maybe the whole Trinity thing is a farce...perhaps Mary wasn't a virgin when she conceived Jesus. Or, maybe the word heretic is a sobering word...maybe a person should use the opportunity of being called a heretic to see if there's any chance that they've wandered into dangerous waters?

And, just to formalize my feelings...I think I'm officially tired of all things emergent. So what if they've given evangelicals some good questions that we've been missing over the years... I'm tired of them saying "I wonder what would happen if the Bible wasn't inspired" and then saying "I never said the Bible wasn't inspired". "I wonder...what if Mary wasn't a virgin?"..."Oh, I actually never said that Mary wasn't a virgin." This would potentially be tolerable if it wasn't followed up with "Why is everyone picking on me? I didn't do anything...look at these evangelicals...all they want to do is fight...join the emergent side...we're actually not a side, we're just the misunderstood folks who everyone is picking on."

I'm sure emergent-ism will pass soon...not soon enough for me, though.

Hebrews 5:11-14
About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

Jason Schwartzman's band "Coconut Records"

Jason Schwartzman has an album out...and, it's pretty good. Jason is famous in Wes Anderson circles for Rushmore...and, now The Darjeeling Limited. When you bought the album you used to get a Polaroid taken by Jason himself, but now you don't.



Check out this link for a sweet Jason Schwartzman interview...
http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/pmcc/view/jason_schwartzman_coconut_records_and_more

Also, his MySpace site has a good interview with Jimmy Kimmel...
http://www.myspace.com/coconutrecords

Need Help With "The Pianist"

Somebody's going to have to help me out with The Pianist. It's been on my need-to-watch list for a while, so I realize I'm having this discussion a little late in the game.

It conveyed that the Nazis were bad...but, I've seen that before. It was mostly about this guy locked up in apartments, being alone. But, it didn't have that I'm-alone sense that Castaway had. Maybe it was about how music can bring even enemies together? But, there was only really one scene that pointed to that. It seems with all the buzz that came along with the movie that there must be some underlying theme that passed me by.

Why I Pretty Much Hated "The Devil Wears Prada"

There was a moment at the end of The Devil Wears Prada when I felt as though the whole movie might have been redeemed. The movie is about the allure of power...success...and, I suppose fashion fits in as well. The young novice character (Anne Hathaway) gets a job working for a super-influential clothing designer. Guess what? Our novice knows nothing about clothes, nor does she give a rat's patootie for fashion. Guess what else? By the end of the movie her rags turn to riches (cliches seem appropriate here) and she becomes one of "them"... By "them", you know what I mean...those rich folks in the high rises, snooty, consumed with their jobs and absolutely nothing else. (To be fair at this point, I should point out that Meryl Streep does a good job with her character.) The good guys are Hathaway's friends at the bar, the bad guys are the ones making money. So, our rookie fashion character is slowly pulled to the dark side...and, there's this scene where Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway are in the car together and Meryl Streep tells her devoted protege that they are quite similar...they're made out of the same material, if you will. It's at this moment that I thought the movie was coming together. If the last 1.5 hours of light-hearted display of transformation into a snooty fashion figure were for a purpose...and, if this purpose was to show how easy it is to be sucked into a vice....then, we were on to something good. What if Meryl Streep had used her cunning to trap Anne Hathaway into a situation she really could not get out of? What if Anne Hathaway at this moment discovered that she did love her career and her power and her new wardrobe more than everything else in the world...and she decided to continue down this road?

Because it is easy to get trapped in a situation that is pretty horrible because a bunch of little slippery steps have caused you to slide into this spot you never thought you'd end up in. And, in a movie depicting this, I can see how this process could be displayed as it was in The Devil Wears Prada. So, at this moment of the movie, I was hoping for a little severity. I was hoping that she was stuck in the bed she had made...I was hoping that she discovered that she was just like Meryl Streep's character...I was hoping for a little of Al Pacino / Keanu Reeves in The Devil's Advocate and less of what I'd been fed up to this point.

Well, Anne Hathaway gets out of the car, tosses her cell phone in the fountain, and gets a regular job of her dreams. ...There are basically no repercussions to her actions over the course of the movie. She gets what she wants and all is good in the world. In my mind this ruins what was shaping up to be merely an average movie anyway. How bad is a situation that has no repercussions? I mean, really, are we concerned at all about realism if you can screw your friends and your family, work yourself to death and then pause and go back to normal. If the non-repercussion part of the movie is real, then, the rest of the movie that portrays Anne Hathaway as heading for trouble is a lie. I don't see how both can be true.

Like I said, it wasn't that great of a movie to begin with. And, as always, I'm reading too much into this little popcorn flick. But, as an easily annoyed person, this one bugged me with its basic lie and its flippant ending.

Vegetative States - Jesse Ramirez

This isn't exactly unbiased reporting...but, it makes you think.

Awakenings: The Schiavo case revisited
(...it's not really about the Schiavo case)

Sherwin Williams - Fix the Environment with...Paint

In this world of political correctness, where all things environmentally friendly, green, and organic are all the rage...it's quite amusing to see someone who just doesn't get it.

Romantica - America

If you want to hear some good music, you can hear Romantica's latest album here:

http://www.romanticamusic.com/music.html

I give it an A+.

"The wakeup call of my adult life"

Have you seen this Bill Hybels lecture on how Willow Creek's strategy for maturing Christians has been wrong all these years? It's a great discovery...but, the video disturbed me a little.

http://revealnow.com/story.asp?storyid=49

I'll start with the Greg Hawkins interview (the pastor who discovered this problem at Willow Creek). Here's a quote:

"And I sit there Sunday after Sunday and I wonder, are we spending those folks money in the right way? Really...would they feel great about how we're investing their resources?"

I understand the need to be good steward of the money God trusts us with. But, really, the standard here seems a little fishy to me. I know I'm bordering on judgmentalness and over-analysing a single two and a half sentences...isn't there a bit of an overemphasis on the people in the pew? Should our motivation stem from the fact that we're misusing money...or, even better/worse...because people wouldn't "feel great" about how we're spending their money? Something seems awry here...shouldn't a church be wondering: How does God feel about how we're spending His money? What does the Bible indicate I should do with the money? These are oversimplistic questions...but, I don't get the vibe that Greg Hawkins started with anything except wondering how he could give people more bang for their buck.

Here's what I like, though. I like a big church admitting that they made a big mistake...I like the fact that they aren't trying to hide anything. I like the fact that the crowd applauds when he says: "...we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become self-feeders."

I'd like to be optimistic because I think Hybels hits the nail on the head with the problem...people are relying on the church too much and not learning how to grow on their own. But, the solution to the problem - a health club style discipleship program? - seems like more of the same to me.

Lee Strobel dot com

Here's a resourse worth spending a few minutes at:

http://www.leestrobel.com/

Think YouTube...apologetics...and evangelicalism.

Bioethics: A Primer for Christians by Gilbert Meilaender

Little Miss Sunshine Revisited

So, I got two comments and a taunting Email from my last post. Naturally, I’m thinking Little Miss Sunshine is really bringing in the hits to my blog, so I better give the fans more of what they want. So, here’s a snippet into my mind where I overanalyze the movie and life in general.

I’m pretty sure society is extremely wicked, screwed up, troubling, sinful…pick your adjective and/or verb. But, I have a hunch that in some sense it’s about a gazillion times worse than what we think it is. The reason it’s worse is because people show you what they think they want you to see. They pretty up their problems and misery so that they can keep up with the “prettiness” their neighbor has created in their own life. If the dressed up version is as bad as some of the dressed-up-versions are, I have a hunch that there’s a lot of crap going on behind people’s doors. Verbal abuse, physical abuse, internet porn of all shapes and sizes, prejudice, hatred…

But, what if people didn’t hide how depraved and flawed they really are? Think about it for a second.. Let’s imagine a church setting. What if the guy next to you in church told you that he looked at porn for two hours the night before? What if the lady next to told you that she beat up her husband with a frying pan the night before? …I think the cringe factor that I feel as I type those things is symbolic of the problem. We don’t want to know about it…probably for the same reason we don’t want to be part of a big brother program in the community or volunteer at the hospital or ask the family with the handicapped kid over for dinner. It’s inconvenient, it’s uncomfortable, it takes investment and follow up…etc.

…here Little Miss Sunshine enters into the equation. It’s a movie that shows a screwed up, “potty mouth” family coming to grips with who they are. Then, instead of prettying up who they are they celebrate their discovery. The reason I love the ending is that in about 5 minutes it tells the whole story of the movie in an allegory. I’m not going to argue that it doesn’t step over the line a little…but, I wouldn’t argue too much that it does, either. The reason why is that a naïve girl who has been taught an awful dance by her dirty grandfather is sort of what’s going on with us. It’s my belief that we’re made to be God-glorifiers…typically when we stumble into sinful actions in our life we do so naively…and, then we look as out of place as that girl did on stage. The comedy of the scene…the unusualness of seeing someone who isn’t pretending in that setting…the dark streak that goes through it all…there’s so many things going on all at once…this tension is what feels good and (for lack of a better word) “real” about the scene.

I think this brings us back to where I left off with my explaining-what’s-wrong-with-the-world paragraphs. Admitting the problem isn’t only part of the answer. Little Miss Sunshine ends with a celebration of the freedom of admitting your problems. If everyone went around admitting their problems all the time without doing anything about it, I think the digression may be exponential. But, I think part of the beauty of really expressing what’s wrong with you is that this release looks so ugly that we want to take care of it. Taking care of it appropriately is what Little Miss Sunshine is missing. Problems and ugliness appear too much like a yellow Volkswagen van that doesn’t run properly...if everyone pitches in together, then a community of people makes a bad situation not as bad and, in fact, the bonding experience of going down together is the beauty of it all.

…and, I think that’s all I have to say for the moment on Little Miss Sunshine. Be careful in the comment section, 3 comments and an Email might point toward more needless ramblings and run on sentences.

Little Miss Sunshine

We watched Little Miss Sunshine last night. I love (for the most part) the message of this movie. My take...feel free to provide your take...is that the movie is saying that most people's lives are like a child beauty pageant. We take our lives and dress them up with our screwed-up, self-centered ideas of perfection...and, in essence, create some sort of a freak show. In reality, we ought to be real about our problem filled lives, because everybody's lives are full of problems. The movie's answer to this issue seems to be that we should celebrate our troubled lives, without any emphasis on fixing the trouble. I think they're on to something...our lives are filled with hypocrisy and fraud (I was reminded of this just a few hours ago as my wife and I had a mini-fight in the back yard and all I could think of is "be quiet, so the neighbors don't hear")...however, there are answers to our problems. And, while we shouldn't pretend that we're perfect we should continue to address the problems.

Also, the second half of this movie is hilarious...the last scene of the movie is one of the funniest endings I've seen in a very long time. And, for those interested, this one definately deserves its R rating.

Stephen Colbert - Bruce Springsteen

"Living in the Future"

This is disturbing...

"A UK couple has received approval from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to have their IVF embryos screened for early onset Alzheimer’s disease (EOAD). "

(...full article)

(Also see this article)

For some reason, I thought the world couldn't get any more screwed up... The sci-fi world you see in movies like Gattica is probably prophetic of what is to come.

Take Your Internship and...

I haven't taken the time to figure out whether I 100% agree with this quote or not...but, I'm sure I'm 100% agree with it's sentiments. It's why I think pretty much the whole NT was written to local churches...

"We acquire habits of conduct, not by constructing a way of living upon rules or precepts learned by heart and subsequently practised, but by living with people who habitually behave in a certain manner: we acquire habits of conduct in the same way as we acquire our native language. There is no point in a child's life at which he can be said to begin to learn the language which is habitually spoken in his hearing; and there is no point in his life at which he can be said to begin to learn habits of behaviour from the people constantly about him. No doubt, in both cases, what is learnt (or some of it) can be formulated in rules and precepts; but in neither case do we, in this kind of education, learn by learning rules and precepts...If we have acquired a knowledge of the rules, this sort of command of language and behaviour is impossible until we have forgotten them as rules and are no longer tempted to turn speech and action into the applications of rules to a situation." -Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 1962.

Rob Thomas' Best Lyric

"Everybody's trusting in their heart, like their heart don't lie."
- Rob Thomas' (Mr. Matchbox 20, himself)

Rob Thomas is pretty lame. But, I think that's a pretty good line. Almost as good as "...it's 3 AM...I must be lonely". ...I guess they can't all be winners. Some people bat around .250, though.
Here's a good quote by a guy named John Murray to refine Rob's thoughts:

"...we must not suppose that the measure of our understanding or experience is the measure of the Spirit's working." - John Murray

Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit

I can't get enough of Belle and Sebastian's latest album The Life Pursuit. It has a more polished sound than some of their earlier albums. The "Indy" sound for the sake of being indy doesn't do much for me (not that their preceding albums totally did that)....this album has a smooth sound which makes it very easy to listen to. It also has (for lack of a better word) a groove that keeps things optimistic and peppy as they flirt with several different styles of music while still keeping their album coherent.

Best of all the album has lyrics that use quirky stories to deliver their punch. Probably best suited to the previous musical themes I've posted here is Act of the Apostle I & II, which chronicle a person who is interested in believing in God, but not quite there yet.

My favorite has to be The Blues are Still Blue which (I think) is a love song about a lazy lover who doesn't quite put enough effort into life to keep the blues away. No matter what it's about, it's a toe-tapper...

Well, look at the kid from school

He's teaching mamas and papas how to be a little cool

He's changing fashion, the way he dress

The tracksuits are old, and the hoody's way too moody

For a kid with the will to funk

He dances in secret; he's a part-time punk