MyThesis

Here it is .... several months of work... three pages of bibliography ... over a hundred footnotes... and a generous helping of Hebrew and Greek. For those who asked for it. Remember, this is copyrighted or something like that. This might make more sense if you read Job 31 first.

BobBrown_Job31_MA07.pdf

Violence

I realized the other day, I am pretty sick of violence.

I was watching Smokin' Aces last weekend, I realized that I am no longer impressed by this "stylized violence." I fully realize that sex and violence are a part of life, and cannot be glazed over. But I am disturbed by the media trend that somehow if you have gorgeous cinematography and a thin plot line you are allowed to objectify women, and kill human beings in horrible ways that are inconsequential to the plot line.

I felt like this movie brought out the worst of every one involved in the production. The life and plight of prostitutes was trivialized. I lost respect for some artists in the movie - Alicia Keys in some of the bonus features said that she had respect for prostitutes after wearing thigh high boots. I know Alicia doesn't read my blog, but get real: Alicia, hookers can't afford your boots. I am also not clear why Common was in this movie, other than the "cool" factor that I talked about.

I know a few friends who struggle with pornography - and they have talked about how sometimes they will watch Ultimate Fighting instead. I think that violence and fighting fulfill a very base desire in men (and some women too), similar to pornography.

MacJanitor

So I was having some issues with my little 12" PowerBook G4 running slow. It is a four year old computer - so it is getting up in years. But I did a little research, and found out that most of the system upkeep that macs do happens at night - and I always close up my computer before I go to bed, so none of the clean up jobs happen.

So this little program runs the built in Mac OS clean up jobs when ever you want to run them. It took about 10 minutes the first time I ran it, but it deleted 1 Gig of log files, and sped my computer up a ton. Just some info for any other mac heads suffering from excess unix log files.

http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html

Wonderful Relaxing Beautiful Days

We are back from our 7 days in Mexcio. The time in Yelapa was wonderful. Very wonderful. It was a different world. We weren't in a complete tourist trap, and got to experience life in a remote fishing village of Mexico, and we still got to sit on the beach and have people bring us beer.

Here are a few pictures:

This is the water taxi that took us the 45 minutes from Peuto Vallarta to Yelapa. It has a few more cracks than it had patches - but it got us there.


This was the view from out bed on the first morning. We fell asleep to the waves - it was a little loud the first night, but we got over it pretty quickly.


I was the cook - wasn't such a bad view from the kitchen.


This was quite the panoramic view over the sink. Lauren didn't mind dishes so much.


Around noon every day the day trippers would roll in from Peuto Vallarta. The big boats would pull in and the little boats would go out and get people and bring them back to shore. They would all leave by 5.


Add in a nap for good measure.


Cap it all off with a beautiful sunset, repeat 6 times, and it all adds up to a lot of rest and relaxation.


It was perfect as I go into the final stretch of my Masters program, and Lauren struggles to put up with me.

It is finished...

Is it sacriligeous for me to use that phrase to talk about my thesis?

I have turned it in, last night - and I have my structured conversation on April 17th.

Then they will let me know that its good to go, and I will only have to finish the course work that I am involved in.

Next up, Mexico. Can't wait.

Yelapa here we come.

Sarah Silverman Sleeps with God.

So here is the video that has pissed off a few Christian folks.

I guess I just don't understand why. It seems that when people tell stories out of the Bible (i.e. Darling Nikki and Proverbs 23:26-28) and make them as vivid and alive as they were in their orignal times, we get upset. Many of us like our Bible stories to be far removed, and fully separated from out of our lives today. Here is the video of Sarah waking up after a one night stand with God.



This is a Biblical story, and a Biblical analogy. God is our husband, our lover. This is the same analogy that is used when Hosea is told to marry a prostitute, Hosea 1. We are indifferent to God, we sleep with God one night, and then with another the next. Look at Jeremiah 3:
13 Only acknowledge your guilt—
you have rebelled against the LORD your God,
you have scattered your favors to foreign gods
under every spreading tree,
and have not obeyed me,' "
declares the LORD.
14 "Return, faithless people," declares the LORD, "for I am your husband. I will choose you—one from a town and two from a clan—and bring you to Zion

This is the story that God has already told - it gets even better because Sarah is a Jew. Whether Sarah's intention was to tell the story that God has already told or not, she did. I for one have nothing against a non-believer who tells God's story. The people who tell these stories may or may not get the truth of them, but it is there-whether we see it or not.

This depiction is wonderfully true: our unfaithfulness hurts God, our lies and our unwillingness to accept God's love pains God. God is a jealous God, a scorned lover.

Kahlil Gibran

So a friend recommended Kahlil Gibran's poetry as a key to understanding struggle.

I wanted to share one that struck me from the Prophet:

And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.
And he said:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that enlcoses you understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And coud you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity thorugh the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:
For his hand though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen.
And the cup he brings, through it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

My Thesis has Begun

So on Wednesday night I got most of the first chapter of my Thesis completed. It was an amazing feeling to get 10 solid pages out, and work out the formatting of all that geeky stuff that goes into a Old Testament Masters thesis: Abbreviations Page, Table of Contents, Bibliography. It really gave me a good feelinging - like I will be able to actually write a 50-80 page paper by April 1st.

Well, incase you are wondering, my thesis is on the 31st chapter of Job:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=job%2031&version=47

So I am comparing the ethical issues that Job speaks about in this chapter with the way other Old Testament writers talk about ethics, and then looking at the Gospel of Matthew and what Jesus says about ethics there. 40 to 70 pages left.

Vacation

So Lauren and I are going on our first real vacation since our honey moon - one that lasts more than 2 nights.

Here is the view from our Pelapa:


There are some more pictures here:
http://www.palapainyelapa.com/pages/lbds.html

Any ways - it is a remote village near Puerta Vallarta - only accessible by boat. We are leaving right after my thesis is due. I can't wait. 7 nights in a tropical paradise. Ahhh is all I can say.

Scripture and Tradition

So what is the difference between scripture and tradition?

I am asking it, because it has come up in my own mind in my "Comparative Confessions" class.

The Bible wasn't the Bible until 324 AD, at the earliest. That is when the
canon was decided on by the early church fathers. Books were in, and books were out.

This group of books was unchanged until the 15th Century - when Luther said
that the Apocrypha was not part of the Bible. Calvin, and other reformers
accepted this move. So Calvin, and Luther demoted/threw out a few books of the Bible, after they had been part of the canon for almost 1200 years. How come they get to do that?

This article on Wikipedia on the Apocrypha is very interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocrypha
It talks about how Origen believed that Song of Songs should be tossed out of the canon.

My main question is, isn't it tradition (inspired by the Holy Spirit) that created the canon as we had it in 324? How can we throw out 14 books and fragments of books that have been part of our cannon for 1150 years and say that we are "Sola Scriptura"?

Seems that scripture came out of (Holy Spirit lead) tradition. We say that the early church fathers lead us, but we don't even read the same Bible. Any move to change the current scripture would be thrown out by fundamentalists who have in their hands the truncated Bible. Some might say that the "dubious origin" of the Apocryphal books justifies the removal, but many modern scholars would point to the dubious origin of many of Paul's letters (1&2 Timothy, Titus, etc.)

At the end of the day, I don't understand why people can throw out a good portion of the Bible and still say that they live by scripture alone - without tradion.