The top one is the “before” picture; the bottom one is the “after.” I’m very grateful for Bill Nutt, whose sixty-some years experience in doing this sort of work certainly shows. He is a professional with an eye for detail, and a generous heart, too.

This was a first for me. I’m not real good with concrete – I suppose in my line of work I’m much more of an abstract thinker. I hauled about three-fourths of a yard of it in a wheelbarrow a week ago. I have a new appreciation for people who do this sort of thing all the time. It’s hard work! I went into teach class that afternoon still sweating. But it was worth all the effort. For years, we have had water drain right next to the foundation of the house, and now with the slope, the problem is solved.

It reminded me a little of the Old Testament story about the Israelites making “bricks without straw.” I actually had some junior high kids try that one summer at camp. Again, it’s not an easy job. Here’s what is amazing to me, though. When you read through the entire story of the Exodus, you discover one of the greatest contributions these people made to human civilization: A day off! Up until that time, you just worked all day, every day, until you died.

It wasn’t the Israelites, exactly, that came up with the idea. It was God. And the purpose was not simply to take a break for one day. It was a Sabbath intended to remind them that there were things much more important than making bricks. In fact, there was one thing more important than all things in this world put together, only it was not a thing. Taking a day to remember God is a way to keep everything else in proper perspective.

Thoughts worth pondering while hauling another load of concrete…

Back to School

It’s that time once again. Classes are starting up, and my calendar says I’ll be busier teaching this round than I’ve ever been: four classes and three different schools. I’m not complaining, though. I will admit, there are times I still dread grading papers. Maybe I just hate to be the bearer of bad news so much of the time! But what I always do look forward to are what I would call “windows of opportunity” for learning. And, as any teacher will probably tell you, the learning goes both ways. I’ve been engaged in some incredible online dialogues about some very heavy subjects, something that I was quite skeptical would ever happen before I started doing this. But happen it does, and I’m ready for more.

Childhood Chums

I did have real friends in school, of course. A few, anyway. One or two. But I always looked forward to a few pleasant moments together with Squiddly and Magilla. And, I still do. [Is that weird?] Two innocent simpletons, one who lived in Bubbleland and the other at Mr. Peeble's Pet Shop. Squiddly had a calm, come-what-may attitude. No matter what he encountered (instant stardom as a surfing rock star; threats from secret agents), he faced it all with a sort of serene cheerfulness. And Magilla was kind to others, above all else. Whether it was delivering dog food or telling stories to O-gee, he did at least one good turn daily. This 500-pound gorilla could sit anywhere he wanted, but he would be sure to ask first.

All good things must come to an end, I suppose. Summer's over. I go back to school next week (on the other side of the desk now). Every once in awhile, though, I turn on cartoons to check and see that my little chums are still there.

Foiled Again

Behold! Here are pictures of my directional discontinuity ring radiatior (DDRR, for short), AKA the "hula hoop" antenna for the 40 meter ham band. As you can probably tell, it is made from flexible dryer vent hose that has been formed into a 9' diameter loop raised up on cinder blocks. It actually looks rather nice, tucked away into an unused corner of my backyard. There's just one problem: it doesn't work. In fact, it tunes up a lot closer to the 80 meter band than it does 40, don't ask me why. It's not like I didn't give it the old college try, either. I spent several hours putting down chicken wire on the ground as a base, carefully measuring the loop, and then tying the hose to the blocks.

I'd like to say at least it "listens" well, and in a way, that's true. Loop antenna tend to be much quieter and they do help reduce static and noise. But the signals I've heard have also been a lot quieter and thus harder to read. There's no doubt in my mind now (after building a 10 meter version a few months ago) that the DDRR is indeed a "compromise" antenna. You can't expect a loop a foot or so off the ground to perform as well as a full-size dipole up in the air. Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.

On the Road Again

The clutch is in. The car runs, drives, and stops. Finally. It took over a month, but our '69 Volvo 145S has a brand new clutch and it is a huge improvement. Installing it, though, was an incredible ordeal. Seriously, that was probably the hardest automotive work I've ever done (and I even had both sons helping), unless you count the time the '53 Chevy wagon quit in a busy Seattle intersection and I had to push it up a slight incline while a friend steered. I thought I was going to have a heart attack that time. This wasn't much better. One day, I saw a thermometer that read 104 degrees, and I was crawling under the car once again, where it was hot and stuffy to say the least. Not to mention, I was getting a little claustrophobic in such confined quarters, like a bear in a great tightness, as Pooh might say. I'm starting to resemble Pooh, by the way - I need to lay off the honey or get taller jack stands.

Anyway, I'm sure me and the boys would agree that it has been a learning experience. We've figured out, through trial and error, that it helps to have all the right tools within easy reach. One in particular was a clutch alignment tool. The first time we bolted everything up, there was no way the gearbox was going to slide into the clutch. I got this little plastic tool (maybe the best ten bucks I've ever spent - and free shipping, no less), and everything lined up perfectly. The other lesson learned is that there's nothing like the feeling of having done it yourself. I should add, having done it right. It's a terrible feeling to have spent countless hours on a repair only to discover that you have to tow it to a shop to undo the damage - I came close a couple of times. Strange as it may seem, though, now every time I shift gears on the Volvo, I get this little self-satisfied smile and I think, "I guess we really did fix our wagon ourselves this time."

Switchfoot

A week ago today we were driving back from Salt Lake City, after having seen Switchfoot once again in concert, this time at the Saltaire Pavilion. Was it worth driving five hours one way through triple-digit temperatures, only to get lost at one point and almost miss it? Absolutely, it was. There were only a few hundred people there at most, and it was great to get up (fairly) close to the stage. I was the old guy wearing the red "i like switchfoot" T-shirt, by the way. On the return trip, I got to thinking about why this particular band has meant so much to me (especially in light of the fact that I'm quickly approaching the half-century mark, as my youngest son constantly reminds me). It's not easy to explain.

When Switchfoot first released "Chem 6A," it just resonated with me like very few songs ever have. The music is incredible (if you've listened to any of their albums, you already know that), but there was something more. The lyrics portray this tension between the ideal and the real - in this case, someone who seems to be settling for the artificial world of entertainment as a substitute for a life that is more genuine but may be harder to attain. Or something like that. I was the student dean of a Bible college at the time, and some of us went to see them when they were part of a line-up that included All-Star United and a couple of other bands. The concert was at a church on the corner of Cloverdale and Fairview, as I recall. Afterwards, I remember writing an article in the student newspaper about the band just because they had made such a huge impression on me.

The other concerts we've been to were held at the Big Easy in downtown Boise (renamed the Knitting Factory, for some bizarre reason). Without a doubt, they have been among the best shows I've ever had the privilege to experience. Let me add, I've been to a lot of concerts over the years: The Stones, The Who, Clapton (multiple times), Dylan, The Police (when tickets cost five bucks), etc., etc. Out of all of them, the comparison I tend to make to Switchfoot is with Bruce Springsteen (believe it or not), right when he was getting big. I draw a parallel not because of musical styles, but because of the energy of his three-hour show back in the early eighties.

We were in the second row that time, and it was obvious that Springsteen was someone who genuinely loved not only making music, but also making a connection with everyone in the audience. That's what every Switchfoot concert I've been to has been like. At the Salt Lake show, Jon actually got off the stage and walked through the crowd in mid-song. The last time they were in Boise, they even brought some kid up on stage to sing along with them. It's like the band sort of makes the barrier between them and the audience disappear.

The other factor has to be the sincerity of their devotion. I remember a quote from an interview Jon gave in the Idaho Statesman. He said something along the lines of: "We're a Christian band by conviction, not merely by musical genre." That has always stuck with me. Again, I don't find it easy to explain why songs like "Meant to Live," "This is Your Life," and "Gone" have been such an inspiration to me, but they just have.

In the last ten years or so (you know you're long in the tooth when you start measuring your life in decades), alternative Christian music (although I'm not real into labels such as that one) has been a catalyst for spiritual transformation and renewal in my life (you might even call it an "awakening"). When I listen to the music that these guys put out, it strikes a chord with me - they're trying to live faithfully in a world that constantly challenges them to do otherwise.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to fill in for our minister and preach a sermon. My chosen text was Ephesians 2:10, my title was "An Unfinished Masterpiece," and I felt like the lyrics from "The Economy of Mercy" was one of the most effective ways I could have found to make the point that God continues to write more lines to the poems of our lives: These carbon shells/These fragile dusty frames/House canvasses of souls/We are bruised and broken masterpieces/But we did not paint ourselves.

I could cite all kinds of other examples to illustrate how these guys have made a huge difference to me, but maybe the best is from my current favorite song, "Burn Out Bright":

If we only got one try
If we only got one life
If time was never on our side
Before I die I want to burn out bright

That's what I'm trying to say.

Religulous

I’ll admit it; Bill Maher is a funny guy. And by taking aim at religion, he’s got more than enough easy targets to hit in his film Religulous. For more than just laughs, Maher attacks the very characters I am likewise outraged or embarrassed by, often because of their hypocrisy or stupidity or both. But the very ones I tend to dismiss as fringe elements (a very small minority out of the many for whom religion matters and ought to be taken seriously), Maher takes to be representative of the whole. My objections to Religulous, though, go far beyond who counts as “fringe” and who does not.

Let’s start at the end, rather than the beginning, because that’s when Maher puts all his cards on the table. After lambasting the major western religions, he concludes his film with a passionate appeal to reject religion entirely, because “religion must die for mankind to live.” We read verses from the Qur’an and the Bible superimposed on scenes of bombs exploding. The end is near, apparently, and our only hope is to stamp out faith in all of its forms, bizarre and otherwise. In stark contrast to religious gullibility, Maher claims, “doubt is humble.” And yet, not once in the film do we ever get the impression that Maher doubts his own assessment of the situation, not even for a moment.

Theism: bad; Atheism: good. This is to me a red flag, to put it mildly. I watched Religulous over the Fourth of July weekend. Just a day or so before, I had heard on the news that North Korean leader Kim Jung Il was threatening to conduct a nuclear test, and had missiles already pointed at Honolulu and San Francisco. As a Communist, Jung Il shares Maher’s atheistic viewpoint, but obviously I’m much more concerned about the damage he could do than any harm inflicted by televangelists. So, why does atheism get a pass?

Let’s not forget Joseph Stalin, whose “Great Purge” in the 1930s was responsible for the deaths of at least 3 million (some would estimate the number to be closer to 9 million). Likewise, Pol Pot’s reign of terror in the “killing fields” of Cambodia decimated roughly a third of the population of that country. Could it be that atheism is as dangerous as religion, if not more so? And yet, Maher makes no mention whatsoever of its recent horrors.

Religulous does have its undeniably funny moments, but if Maher want to be taken seriously, it seems odd to me that he devotes the shortest amount of time in his “documentary” to probably the most intelligent interviewee on the entire film: Dr. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project. In fact, Collins later said that most of the good footage from their discussion ended up on the cutting room floor.

Surprising as it may seem, there were definitely points with which I found myself agreeing with Maher. There are problems when the line between church and state becomes blurry, no argument there. History has demonstrated that time and time again. And I also object to people who use religion as a means to get rich, no less so than Maher does.

But Religulous oversteps its bounds, in my opinion, when it attempts to make its case that the Christian story is nothing more than the first-century variation of a Mediterranean myth that had already circulated for an entire millennium. This is when, in my mind, Maher loses any claims to credibility. That, and the way he insist on calling the last book of the Bible Revelations, instead of its proper title, Revelation, of course.

Are there parallels between the death and resurrection of Christ and similar “dying and rising” myths in the ancient world? Certainly. And the best analysis of them I have ever read comes from none other than C.S. Lewis, who is perhaps best remembered as a Christian apologist, but who was also a renowned expert in world mythology. Lewis basically reasons that the theme of rising from the dead is a universal longing within the human heart, and we would expect to see glimpses of it among the stories that various cultures have told to themselves. You can read more about it in a lecture I wrote for my mythology course:

http://www.commutercampus.com/mythology/powerofmythcritique.html

Maher contends that the Egyptian deity Horus was crucified and resurrected, and thus his story was identical to that of the Christian Gospels, only a thousand years earlier. What escapes the notice of the filmmakers is that these claims are easy to make but very difficult to prove. Let me suggest a starting place: crucifixion was unknown to the ancient Egyptians. In fact, it is this same historical fact that has led many to question the historicity of another religious text, the Qur’an, because the Muslim book makes reference to crucifixions in Egypt as well. There is no evidence that executions ever took place there in such a way at that time.

My favorite scene in Religulous was when Bill Maher stopped in at a “trucker’s chapel.” There he met a few truck drivers who weren’t quite sure what to make of his claims that the Bible was full of contradictions. I guess what I appreciated was how, even though they didn’t know the answers, they didn’t pretend that they did. They made a circle around Maher and prayed for him. Maher told them thanks for "being Christ-like, and not just Christian." There often can be a big difference between the two – unfortunately, it is too easy to wear the label “Christian” but to completely neglect “being Christ-like” at the same time.

In spite of all the many flaws of the film, if Religulous is a reminder not only that such hypocrisy exists, but that it has also been the very thing that has caused many (Maher included) to give up on religion entirely, then perhaps it has served a valuable service.

Please note: the image of the film above is included here only as part of a critical film review - if so requested by the copyright owner, it will be immediately removed.