Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

I recently bought a Kindle from Amazon via my Amazon account. (It's Amazon's amazing new wireless e-book that uses electronic ink, really cool. And worth the 4 week delivery backlog when I got mine earlier this year.) I love the concept of potentially hundreds of books, blogs, daily newspapers, etc. just showing up (for a small fee to Amazon & partners) on my Kindle when I get up in the morning. I also love having nearly infinite degrees of freedom in directing the Kindle's wireless delivery service (initially free) to send me just the stuff I want. The Kindle'e product hardware is still rough dispite it's $500 price tag (e.g. the Kindle freezes up quite frequently and has to be rebooted manually) but by and large it's worth the price. But, the Kindle is also a little dangerous. It enables easy access to certain online media (books, DVDs, CDs, etc.) via the "Kindle Store" which is a subset of the real Amazon store. The Kindle store has been modifie...

I was born in Centertown, Kentucky. It's a small town (about 400 people, which is the same as the population in 1946 when I was born there). The town was incorporated in 1890 and the Centertown Baptist Church was established in 1907. I attended the 100th anniversery ceremony at the Church two weeks ago. It was a moving experience. One of the things that made it a moving experience is that I got to see so many people I've known all my life and hadn't seen in many years. It also brought back many great memories. My earliest recollection of the Church was nicely captured in the picture below of myself and my cousin Marilyn Morton at about the age of seven (1953) taken in the Centertown Church at my Aunt Junita Ross' wedding to Reed Renier. Afterward the Centertown celebration, I checked Wikipedia to see if anybody had posted an article about what I considered to be this significant historical event. Besides being 100 years old, the Centertown Baptist Church structure is al...

It's probably not statistically significant but it's still really sad that Francis Collins' beautiful little book "The Language of God" is only ranked #181 on Amazon and Richard Dawkins' anti-God rant "The God Delusion" is ranked in the top ten at #9. The other statistic that's interesting is that Collins' book has been "reviewed" by about three times as many Amazon readers as Dawkins' book, and many of those reviewers are critics. Seems like the anti-God crowd either reads more [which I doubt] or is less tolerant than the people of God whom they accuse of being intolerant.

I recently heard the presentation that Sam Harris made at PopTech in 2006. I haven't read his book "The End of Faith" but I think I got the gist of it from his speech. Basically religious belief is fantasy, those who practice it are stupid and ignorant, and worse yet religion is dangerous [to the point where Harris actually advocates making religon socially and morally wrong] because it's fantasies undermine logical scientific reasoning and ultimately lead to [are basically the cause of] war, poverty, environmental disaster, etc. On the other hand, the Christain Science Monitor pointed out that German philosopher and secularist Jürgen Habermas wrote this in 2004 in his essay "A Time of Transition" Christianity, and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [to Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Ever...

The United States Inequality and the American Dream Economist.com For a modest little British "newspaper" as they love to call themselves, The Economist has uncanny insight into the American psyche. They've hit the nail squarely on the head once again with their June 17th focus on "Inequality and the American Dream." As though The Economist was really the World's conscience [as perhaps it is] they set out three conditions that must be met in order for inequality to not be inherently wrong as many on the left have argued: "...first, society as a whole is getting richer; second, there is a safety net for the very poor; and third, everybody, regardless of class, race, creed or sex, has an opportunity to climb up through the system." To me they have omitted the most important condition that makes America unique. That is, the strong sense of right and wrong derived from our Judeo-Christian heritage, and the moral principles which guided the formation...

For those who are interested in the religion versus science debate, this wonderful book by Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett is a must read. The book offers a survey of the broad history of the subject from; Darwinism and the later day neo-Darwinian idological inferences of materialist philosophy, to diesim, creationism, intelligent design and finally to "Theistic Evolution." The authors come down firmly on the side of Theistic Evolution which is basically a realistic "reconciliation of Christian Faith and evolutionary biology." They place various points of view about Theistic Evolution on a continuium via an analysis of how each deals with five defining questions; Deep Time, Natural Selection, Common Descent, Divine Action and Theodicy. And they conclude with a bold and "constructive proposal" for a "future-oriented theology of creation and its concomitant understanding of the human being as God's created co-creator."

Couldn't have said it better myself Bishop Spong. Pat Robertson has said so many silly and ridiculous things that I wonder why anyone would pay much attention to him on any subject.