Us protestants ought to make our fundamental writings more accessible on-line for all to read. It can only be beneficial, right? The Roman Catholic Church has New Advent, which has a ton of Church fathers' writings in English, and even the whole Summa Theologicae. The whole thing! And the supplementary material that completes it, written after the death of Aquinas! I mean... that's awesome, and I take advantage of it all the time. But there's no website that I can find with a collection of all the early reformers' writings for free. There should be, we have enough money. We just need someone to organize it.

For example: Ulrich Zwingli. I did find the 67 Articles on-line in English, but that was only because I knew the first line and entered it into Google. This is the man who is responsible for beginning the revolution that resulted in the doctrine followed by mainstream Evangelicalism in America. Someone should be interested him!

Oh, that gif about Saturn reminds me of one of my new favorite sites. It's space.com, but more specifically the subsection titled NightSky. For example, did you know that there are going to be two comets visible to the naked eye this spring? That's the prediction, anyway. There are also 5 planets visible at one time in the same sky for a little while.

So you can check out either www.space.com or skip to the more practical information at spacewatch in the same site.

Something that sounds really interesting is the Venus transit of the sun April 8. Unfortunately it will happen before the sun rises here out West, but if you're on the east coast it might be worth getting up early to see. It only happens in 8 year intervals every 243 years.

Happy Monday night. Soon it will be Tuesday: a good thing, generally.

It's sad only having Torrey one night a week now-a-days, and doing it on Monday night is a bummer because it means that you don't have it to look forward to. Monday is just hard to look forward to during a nice restful weekend, no matter how much I know I ought to be looking forward to it.

Watch the winds on Saturn in this gif file.

I'm adding a link to my friend Sean's site. It's cool, so... that means you should look at it. Alright, so... go look at it now.

I added comments. That was sort of rediculously easy, using Haloscan. And here this whole time I thought that maybe it was hard and stuff... so yeah, this computer thing is nice when others do it for you.

Marsiglio of Padua, a fairly controversial thinker from the Rennaissance argued from an Aristotelian framework for a weighted democratic form of government. While it is a similar conception to the American experiment, he was not really all that influential in the formation of this country. And I'm going to hijack from him an argument that has implications on the gay marriage debate. Of course, he claims to hijack the argument form Aristotle, so I'm just following in his own footsteps.


The controversial presupposition would be that "every whole, or at least every corporeal whole, is greater in mass and in virtue than any part of it taken separately." I think this flies.

Historically the parts of the state may be seen as increasing degrees of community: that is: marriage -> family -> clan or village -> City-state -> State

In this way marriage can be seen as a microcosmic part of the state.
If marriage is a microcosmic part of the state it is an essential element to the state's correct function.
Marriage in its unique relationship to the state, as a microcosmic part, must be protected by the state in order for the state to operate successfully.

I think that the current marriage debate is actually an effor to un-define marriage into a meaningless social contract, bereft of all true meaning. In effect, destroying marriage is breaking a leg off of the state's stool. I'm afraid that it only has three legs.

Oh, yeah, as I just posted, Dr. Reynolds has a new blog. I'll put a link to it over in my link section so that you can read it. He posts a lot! I'm not really trying to keep up, but sometimes it's fun to read some of it.

Here's a neat article by Tom McClintock. He ran for governor here in California during the Recall Election as the conservative Republican Candidate. Dr. Reynolds posted some interesting thoughts that seem to apply to the conundrum California Republicans faced during that election on his new blog.

I think this is a neat argument, and the implications are pretty wide reaching. The natural question that arises for me is: what is the place of an atheist in the government? And the answer seems to be a pretty resounding "nowhere" because a government run by a consistent atheist would be dangerous.

This is a good website if you're interested in following the Palestinian Conflict. Seeing as it's heated up to such a fiery temperature in the last few days, this may be a good idea. I think everyone is waiting with bated breath for the other shoe to drop, and there to be a disasterous terrorist attack on Israel in response to the assassination of Yassin.

Haaretz

Have you heard of the wondrous Rev. Dale Owen? Here's an example of his beautiful thoughts:

"Today I heard a young man say, "You don't understand me" to his mother in the grocery line. This lad wanted some candy. The mother stood there over him with all the authority given to her by years of oppressive culture and said, "No." How I dread those words! I went forward in the line and put a gentle hand on the lad's shoulder, "Here, young person. Here is your candy. God wants you to have it." He looked at me with tears streaming down his face, "Thank you, mister." he said. "No thanks to me," I said. "God never says no to you."

The lady in line began to become upset. "You will spoil the boy!" she cried. "Yes," I said, "just as God spoils us with rainbows, roses, and kittens." She looked at me with incomprehension and took away the candy. "No." she said. The boy understood. He began to cry. How I wished I could have helped him, but the state protects abusive parents."

So beautiful that it brings a tear of joy to my eye. If only more people understood life like he does. Use this link and read his blog, as well. Good stuff.

http://www.revdaleowen.org/

This is amazing!

http://www.hugi.is/hahradi/bigboxes.php?box_id=51208&f_id=681

Just copy and paste it into your browser window and enjoy the fruits of high class French culture.

Ummm... so yummy!

Must read article! This contains critical information about the food making industry!

I totally just drew a robot on my computer. I am an artist. Our apartment may have to have a robot war, in order to settle the dispute between Phil and my robots.

Dan Peckham's posted his wedding pictures now on his site. You can access it in the links to the left. Hurrah for Bill and Becca!