Year: 2004

More Good News: al-Qaeda Leadership 70% Degraded

Shortly after 9/11, I was talking to a Maronite priest friend who was helping me with Arabic pronunciation, and we got to talking about bin Laden. My priest friend was very worried about the danger posed by bin Laden–and, indeed, he was and is a very dangerous man who needs to be dealt with as swiftly as possible. But I pointed out that with the new U.S. War Against Terror, it would make it much, much harder for bin Laden to operate. He could no longer come out into the open without making himself a target, and it’s hard to raise support and coordinate major attacks if you’re deep in hiding. My priest friend saw the point and was somewhat relieved by this line of thinking.

Now we have reports that bin Laden has been forced so deep into hiding that he now is only a figurehead for al-Qaeda.

The same story goes on to report:

As many as 70 percent of al-Qaeda’s leadership have been captured or killed as a result of the US-led war on terror launched in the aftermath of September 11 in Afghanistan (news – web sites) and other parts of the world, according to US intelligence officials.

More than 3,400 of the group’s lower-ranking operatives and supporters have also been detained or otherwise neutralized, these officials insist.

But a report on worldwide terrorism patterns released by the State Department Thursday acknowledged that al-Qaeda probably still has several thousand members and associates it can rely on.

The Vacation From Hell

hellThis is a picture of a person suffering in hell. He (?) is swimming in a pond of blood. The surprising thing is, this is an exhibit that you can go see in a museum. A whole museum full of images of people suffering in hell. Children go to this museum with their parents.

You might be thinking, “What kind of sick-o Fundamentalist thing is this? This is like what Jack Chick would do if he decided to turn one of his comic tracts into a museum! Such a bizarre ‘educational effort’ could only contemplated by the most hardcore Fundamentalist!”

Wrong! It isn’t Fundamentalist at all.

It’s Buddhist.

Yes, that’s right. I know that the media loves to portray Buddhists as peaceful and calm and serene and enlightened, the kind of people whose faith would never believe in something as offensive as hell, but those media reports give you about as much of a sense of what Buddhism is actually like as Taco Bell gives you a sense of Mexican food is like.

In reality, Buddhists have all kinds of ideas about what hell is like, who goes there, what specific punishments are meted out for what sins, etc. To be fair, Buddhist hell is more like purgatory since you can get reincarnated and try again after suffering in hell. It’s still gruesome as anything, though.

What is fascinating is that Buddhists would build museums and theme parks with hell exhibits. If that were done here in America, it’s would be regarded as kitchy at best and offensively revolting in all likelihood. Yet it’s something apparently is an established trend over there. The photo above is from this hell museum in Singapore. There’s also an amusement park with a hell exhibit in Vietnam. And yet another hell museum in Japan. WARNING: Not for the faint of heart! Some material definitely offensive to Western sensibilities.

Welcome! New Blog Location

Howdy!

Finally decided to get the blog moved from its old location to a new one that offers more whizzbangniftyspiffyblog-o-matic tools. (There seems to be a demand for those things. I was getting e-mail from people asking about the site’s syndication, permalinks appearing before the item goes into the archives, etc.)

I decided to go with TypePad, powered by MovableType, as it seems to be one of the best. From my end there’s a downside in that the posting tool isn’t WYSIWYG, which makes it a bit harder to do what I want in a post, but not too bad. I also figure that the posting tools will eventually get better, and by making the jump now I’ll have my blog in a exportable/portable format, making it easier to “move it without losing it” in the future.

Since I wasn’t using blog software to do the previous site, I had to pull the entries over here by hand. I’ve got them all on the right days (I think), so the basic order is preserved, but the timestamps for the posts before this one are meaningless. Also, I still have a bit of cleanup to do on them (fixing links and images). I’m also trying to get the old comments imported, but this may be a complicated process, if it’s even possible. Worst case scenario, we have to start fresh with new comments on this site (which has a built-in commenting feature).

On the bright side, there’s now an easier way to access the blog. I’ve got it its own URL now. Henceforth, my blog will be www.JimmyAkin.org, while my web site will continue to be www.JimmyAkin.com. In other words, the blog is .org, while the site is .com. Got it?

Enjoy!

Scientists Find Moon Mineral!

How cool is this!

After years and years of hearing sci-fi shows and movies talk about substances “not found on this planet,” we’ve now discovered one!

Oh, sure, it’s not a strange nucleotide sequence that proves the existence of extraterrestial life. Nor is it some new element from the unexplored outer reaches of the periodic table. In fact, it’s made from two of the most common elements in the universe (iron and silicon), but–and this is the point–it isn’t made on earth.

The new substance is called Hapkeite, after the scientist who first theorized the extraterrestrial process that makes it, Bruce Hapke. As it happens, Hapke is still alive and got to say a big “I told you so!” (Actually, his words to the press were “I told them so.”)

Hapkeite is made by “space weathering” on the lunar surface, a chunk of which containing Hapkeite got blasted into space as a meteor, which fell to earth and became a meteorite.

Cool!

Now if we could just come up with some naquadah.

The Ancient Christian Commentary Series

A reader writes:

I have been thinking of getting the "Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture" Edited by Thomas C. Oden

I trust your feed back. This commentary as you know is about $560.00 and is published by a Protestant Press.

Is this Commentary worth the money? Do you know any of the down falls? Do you recommend any other Commentary set that focus on the Patristic writings on Scripture? I have the Navarre Bible set. I am looking for another Scripture Commentary set for my studying.
 

The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture is a good series, and I can recommend it, though there are a few things one ought to know about it:

  1. It is based on the 39 volume Protestant set of early Church writings that is commonly available (including on the web for free). The advantage of the commentary set is that it has the material sorted by Scripture order, so it gathers together passages where the Church Fathers and other early writers are talking about a particular passage. This pre-sorted aspect of the set makes it much easier to find relevant passages on the book or passage you are studying, and it is the chief reason one would want to buy the series.
  2. The set has an older translation that is somewhat clunky in places, and it occasionally suffers from Protestant translator bias. These, however, are minor problems.
  3. More significant is the fact that the set is limited by the 39-volume translation it is based on. This set did not include translations of some writings that would help round-out the picture of the early Church Fathers’ views (e.g., Jerome’s Commentary on Galatians was not translated, though it is key to getting a balanced picture of early Christian interpretation of Romans and Galatians). On occasion, the editors of the 39-volume set appear to have deliberately excluded certain works because they were too Catholic. Still, this is a sin of omission in the work, and the set is still useful.
  4. The upshot is that the set is a good one and I can recommend it, but it requires that you use some critical thinking skills when you read and that you keep in mind that there can be (and sometimes are) important things that you are not seeing because of the limitations of the original translation.

For those who are interested in sampling the series, I should also note that it is available in individual volumes, as at this link. Buying an individual volume or two will let you get a sense of the series as a whole before you decide to punk down the money for the whole thing.

Afraid that at the moment I don’t have another patristic-oriented series to recommend. (I have heard of others, but haven’t had the chance to examine their volumes.) If you’re looking for a good general commentary, I can recommend Word Biblical Commentary. It is much more in-depth than the Navarre Bible. Though it is by a Protestant publisher, is the best commentary of its kind out there at present (and available in individual volumes at the link provided). Fr. Pacwa and I recommend it.

Noah's Ark?

Every few years a story like this one appears in the press about Evangelicals who think they’ve found Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat in Turkey.

Believe me, I’d love for this one to pan out. I’d love to see the gents in question get together a competent expedition, get the necessary permissions, go to the site, and bring back solid proof of Noah’s Ark.

But I’m not holding my breath.

We don’t have, and never have had, any guarantee that Noah’s Ark or identifiable pieces of it have survived the ages. In fact, if I were Noah, one of the first things I would do after emerging from the Ark–before even planting a vineyard–would be to dismantle the Ark for building materials. In a world with four men, no chainsaws, and no lumberyards, the Ark could be too valuable for its raw materials to simply leave in one piece for future generations.

All the guys the article talks about really have (at best) is some satellite images showing some kind of wooden structures on the mountain (and there is even dispute about whether the location described by Genesis corresponds to the modern Mt. Ararat). Who is to say at this point that they won’t go up there and find the ruins of a few huts that are clearly post-diluvian. In fact, if they find anything, that’s probably what they’re going to find.

While I wish them well, the gents’ getting all this advance publicity worries me. If they fail (as they are likely to), it can embarrass the Christian cause. The worst of all worlds would be for them to go up, retrieve some wood that they loudly proclaim to be proof of Noah’s Ark, only to have the "proof" fall apart under laboratory examination.

Let’s pray that doesn’t happen.

Noah’s Ark?

Every few years a story like this one appears in the press about Evangelicals who think they’ve found Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat in Turkey.

Believe me, I’d love for this one to pan out. I’d love to see the gents in question get together a competent expedition, get the necessary permissions, go to the site, and bring back solid proof of Noah’s Ark.

But I’m not holding my breath.

We don’t have, and never have had, any guarantee that Noah’s Ark or identifiable pieces of it have survived the ages. In fact, if I were Noah, one of the first things I would do after emerging from the Ark–before even planting a vineyard–would be to dismantle the Ark for building materials. In a world with four men, no chainsaws, and no lumberyards, the Ark could be too valuable for its raw materials to simply leave in one piece for future generations.

All the guys the article talks about really have (at best) is some satellite images showing some kind of wooden structures on the mountain (and there is even dispute about whether the location described by Genesis corresponds to the modern Mt. Ararat). Who is to say at this point that they won’t go up there and find the ruins of a few huts that are clearly post-diluvian. In fact, if they find anything, that’s probably what they’re going to find.

While I wish them well, the gents’ getting all this advance publicity worries me. If they fail (as they are likely to), it can embarrass the Christian cause. The worst of all worlds would be for them to go up, retrieve some wood that they loudly proclaim to be proof of Noah’s Ark, only to have the "proof" fall apart under laboratory examination.

Let’s pray that doesn’t happen.

Petros vs. Petra

A correspondent writes:

"I”ve read the article [on catholic.com] on Peter the Rock and have a few questions.  You make a distinction between Attic and Koine Greek and state that the New Testament was written in Koine Greek and because of this there is no difference in the meaning of petros vs. petra.  Is this the only passage in the New Testament for which this applies?  I was speaking of this to a colleague of mine who has studied Greek, although not extensively, and she informed me that the explanation for the difference is due to the placement of the word within the sentence.  Since Greek is a reflexive language, the meaning stays the same even though the form is changed.  Is this correct?  Also, to which resource would one go to substantiate the claim regarding the Attic vs. Koine Greek as applied to the Bible?"

Greek is an inflected (not "reflexive") language, which means that the forms of nouns change based on the function a word is performing in a sentence. When this happens, the base meaning of the word remains the same. The inflection communicates information about how the word is being used grammatically but not what it means.

In the case of petros vs. petra, the change is not an inflection. Petros and petra are two different words in Greek. They are similar because they are cognates (just as "president" and "presider" are cognates in English but are nonetheless two different words with different, though related, meanings). Because they are two different words, the inflection (change of form) of petros and petra is not what is at issue here. The basic meanings of the terms is.

The point the article is making is that in Attic Greek there was a slight difference in meaning between the two, but in Koine Greek (the dialect of the New Testament) they were synonyms. A place to look this up is D. A. Carson’s commentary on Matthew 16 in the Expositors Bible Commentary. He makes this point very well, and he is a highly-respected Evangelical Bible scholar.