back home now. never appreciated my lil' twin-sized loft bed as last night. so happy to sleep in a clean sheet. it's like going into a hotel (whenever i depart for a trip, i always changed sheets, etc. so that when i arrive, i'll have clean sheets to hit me with!).
europe was great. loved being in zurich. it's a doable city. possibly to live there too. but as i've written before, i really got sick of trying to speak german, listening to german, etc. german for 8 days. although at the end of the 8th day, i actually had no problem communicating with people at groceries, drug stores, etc. crazy right?
london was just too expensive. that's all i can come back with: $$$$. it's exactly double the american dollar now and it's just not the right time to travel to europe, period. dollar is falling falling and it's not even good to go to asia. perhaps travel to africa?
what i come back with is that i have newly found love for artist egon schiele. he died at age 28, was pretty amazing. i've seen his entire collection, being in zurich, basel and vienna. what an artist. saw all the works of klimt, including the kiss. unbelievable.
i am very fortunate to have seen all these precious art works (not to mention amazing works of old masters, filled with christ-themed works. just left me speechless.
i'm dying for some korean food right now. and yes, chinese food too. loved wiener schnitzel, but sick of being in smoke-filled places!!!
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
reporting from vienna:
finally have a moment of time to sit down and check emails and such.
i started off in zurich on the 15th and it's been non-stop since then. weather was perfect and i was once again the road runner from new york: zipping around zurich and then 3 days later, in basel, then a day later in vienna. tomorrow i'm heading out to london and in a way, i look forward to hearing english spoken again. i think i'm getting a bit tired of so many museum hoppings. i've visited at least 25 museums since the 15th and today's onlz the 20th!!!!
okay it's been beautiful until i got to vienna and then it's snowing, i'm freezing. more details on each cities later. i've written a quite a bit of journal.
off to more meat...
finally have a moment of time to sit down and check emails and such.
i started off in zurich on the 15th and it's been non-stop since then. weather was perfect and i was once again the road runner from new york: zipping around zurich and then 3 days later, in basel, then a day later in vienna. tomorrow i'm heading out to london and in a way, i look forward to hearing english spoken again. i think i'm getting a bit tired of so many museum hoppings. i've visited at least 25 museums since the 15th and today's onlz the 20th!!!!
okay it's been beautiful until i got to vienna and then it's snowing, i'm freezing. more details on each cities later. i've written a quite a bit of journal.
off to more meat...
Thursday, March 08, 2007
gotta get crackin'!
You know the Bible 82%!
Wow! You are truly a student of the Bible! Some of the questions were difficult, but they didn't slow you down! You know the books, the characters, the events . . . Very impressive!
Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes
Saturday, March 03, 2007
from today's NY Times:
March 3, 2007
Beliefs
Books on Atheism Are Raising Hackles in Unlikely Places
By PETER STEINFELS
Hey, guys, can’t you give atheism a chance?
Yes, it is true that “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins has been on The New York Times best-seller list for 22 weeks and that “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris can be found in virtually every airport bookstore, even in Texas.
So why is the new wave of books on atheism getting such a drubbing? The criticism is not primarily, it should be pointed out, from the pious, which would hardly be noteworthy, but from avowed atheists as well as scientists and philosophers writing in publications like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, not known as cells in the vast God-fearing conspiracy.
The mother of these reviews was published last October in The London Review of Books, when Terry Eagleton, better known as a Marxist literary scholar than as a defender of faith, took on “The God Delusion.”
“Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds,” Mr. Eagleton wrote, “and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.” That was only the first sentence.
James Wood’s review of “Letter to a Christian Nation” in the Dec. 18, 2006, issue of The New Republic began, “I have not believed in God since I was fifteen.” Mr. Wood, a formidable writer who keeps picking the scab of religion in his criticism and fiction, confessed that his “inner atheist” appreciated the “hygienic function” of Mr. Harris’s and Mr. Dawkins’s ridiculing of religion and enjoyed “the ‘naughtiness’ of this disrespect, even if a little of it goes a long way.”
But, he continued, “there is a limit to how many times one can stub one’s toe on the thick idiocy of some mullah or pastor” or be told that “Leviticus and Deuteronomy are full of really nasty things.”
H. Allen Orr is an evolutionary biologist who once called Mr. Dawkins a “professional atheist.” But now, Mr. Orr wrote in the Jan. 11 issue of The New York Review of Books, “I’m forced, after reading his new book, to conclude that he’s actually more of an amateur.”
It seems that these critics hold several odd ideas, the first being that anyone attacking theology should actually know some.
“The most disappointing feature of ‘The God Delusion,’ ” Mr. Orr wrote, “is Dawkins’s failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology” and “no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions.”
Mr. Eagleton surmised that if “card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins” were asked “to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Africa, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could.” He continued, “When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.”
Naturally, critics so fussy as to imagine that serious thought about religion exists, making esoteric references to Aquinas and Wittgenstein, inevitably gripe about Mr. Harris’s and Mr. Dawkins’s equation of religion with fundamentalism and of all faith with unquestioning faith.
“Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that,” Mr. Eagleton wrote.
In The New Republic last October, Thomas Nagel, a philosopher who calls himself “as much an outsider to religion” as Mr. Dawkins, was much more patient. Extracting a theoretical kernel of argument from the thumb-your-nose-at-religion chaff, Mr. Nagel nonetheless had to point out that what was meant by God was not, as Mr. Dawkins’s argument seemed to assume, “a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world.” (Mr. Eagleton had less politely characterized the Dawkins understanding of God “as some kind of chap, however supersized.”)
Nor was belief in God, Mr. Wood explained two months later, analogous to belief in a Celestial Teapot, the comic example Mr. Dawkins borrowed from Bertrand Russell.
If this insistence on theology beyond the level of Pat Robertson and biblical literalism was not enough, several reviews went on to carp about double standards.
Mr. Orr, for example, noted the contrast between Mr. Dawkins’s skepticism toward traditional proofs for God’s existence and Mr. Dawkins’s confidence that his own “Ultimate Boeing 747” proof demonstrated scientifically that God’s existence was highly improbable.
Mr. Eagleton compared Mr. Dawkins’s volubility about religion’s vast wrongs with his silence “on the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity” and the good that religion has produced.
“In a book of almost 400 pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false,” Mr. Eagleton wrote. “The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history — and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.”
In Mr. Orr’s view, “No decent person can fail to be repulsed by the sins committed in the name of religion,” but atheism has to be held to the same standard: “Dawkins has a difficult time facing up to the dual fact that (1) the 20th century was an experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came before.”
Finally, these critics stubbornly rejected the idea that rational meant scientific. “The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism,” Mr. Nagel wrote.
“We have more than one form of understanding,” he continued. “The great achievements of physical science do not make it capable of encompassing everything, from mathematics to ethics to the experiences of a living animal. We have no reason to dismiss moral reasoning, introspection or conceptual analysis as ways of discovering the truth just because they are not physics.”
So what is the beleaguered atheist to do? One possibility: take pride in the fact that this astringent criticism comes from people and places that honor the honest skeptic’s commitment to full-throated questioning.
March 3, 2007
Beliefs
Books on Atheism Are Raising Hackles in Unlikely Places
By PETER STEINFELS
Hey, guys, can’t you give atheism a chance?
Yes, it is true that “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins has been on The New York Times best-seller list for 22 weeks and that “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris can be found in virtually every airport bookstore, even in Texas.
So why is the new wave of books on atheism getting such a drubbing? The criticism is not primarily, it should be pointed out, from the pious, which would hardly be noteworthy, but from avowed atheists as well as scientists and philosophers writing in publications like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, not known as cells in the vast God-fearing conspiracy.
The mother of these reviews was published last October in The London Review of Books, when Terry Eagleton, better known as a Marxist literary scholar than as a defender of faith, took on “The God Delusion.”
“Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds,” Mr. Eagleton wrote, “and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.” That was only the first sentence.
James Wood’s review of “Letter to a Christian Nation” in the Dec. 18, 2006, issue of The New Republic began, “I have not believed in God since I was fifteen.” Mr. Wood, a formidable writer who keeps picking the scab of religion in his criticism and fiction, confessed that his “inner atheist” appreciated the “hygienic function” of Mr. Harris’s and Mr. Dawkins’s ridiculing of religion and enjoyed “the ‘naughtiness’ of this disrespect, even if a little of it goes a long way.”
But, he continued, “there is a limit to how many times one can stub one’s toe on the thick idiocy of some mullah or pastor” or be told that “Leviticus and Deuteronomy are full of really nasty things.”
H. Allen Orr is an evolutionary biologist who once called Mr. Dawkins a “professional atheist.” But now, Mr. Orr wrote in the Jan. 11 issue of The New York Review of Books, “I’m forced, after reading his new book, to conclude that he’s actually more of an amateur.”
It seems that these critics hold several odd ideas, the first being that anyone attacking theology should actually know some.
“The most disappointing feature of ‘The God Delusion,’ ” Mr. Orr wrote, “is Dawkins’s failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology” and “no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions.”
Mr. Eagleton surmised that if “card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins” were asked “to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Africa, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could.” He continued, “When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.”
Naturally, critics so fussy as to imagine that serious thought about religion exists, making esoteric references to Aquinas and Wittgenstein, inevitably gripe about Mr. Harris’s and Mr. Dawkins’s equation of religion with fundamentalism and of all faith with unquestioning faith.
“Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that,” Mr. Eagleton wrote.
In The New Republic last October, Thomas Nagel, a philosopher who calls himself “as much an outsider to religion” as Mr. Dawkins, was much more patient. Extracting a theoretical kernel of argument from the thumb-your-nose-at-religion chaff, Mr. Nagel nonetheless had to point out that what was meant by God was not, as Mr. Dawkins’s argument seemed to assume, “a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world.” (Mr. Eagleton had less politely characterized the Dawkins understanding of God “as some kind of chap, however supersized.”)
Nor was belief in God, Mr. Wood explained two months later, analogous to belief in a Celestial Teapot, the comic example Mr. Dawkins borrowed from Bertrand Russell.
If this insistence on theology beyond the level of Pat Robertson and biblical literalism was not enough, several reviews went on to carp about double standards.
Mr. Orr, for example, noted the contrast between Mr. Dawkins’s skepticism toward traditional proofs for God’s existence and Mr. Dawkins’s confidence that his own “Ultimate Boeing 747” proof demonstrated scientifically that God’s existence was highly improbable.
Mr. Eagleton compared Mr. Dawkins’s volubility about religion’s vast wrongs with his silence “on the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity” and the good that religion has produced.
“In a book of almost 400 pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false,” Mr. Eagleton wrote. “The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history — and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.”
In Mr. Orr’s view, “No decent person can fail to be repulsed by the sins committed in the name of religion,” but atheism has to be held to the same standard: “Dawkins has a difficult time facing up to the dual fact that (1) the 20th century was an experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came before.”
Finally, these critics stubbornly rejected the idea that rational meant scientific. “The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism,” Mr. Nagel wrote.
“We have more than one form of understanding,” he continued. “The great achievements of physical science do not make it capable of encompassing everything, from mathematics to ethics to the experiences of a living animal. We have no reason to dismiss moral reasoning, introspection or conceptual analysis as ways of discovering the truth just because they are not physics.”
So what is the beleaguered atheist to do? One possibility: take pride in the fact that this astringent criticism comes from people and places that honor the honest skeptic’s commitment to full-throated questioning.
Friday, March 02, 2007
i've been reading francine rivers' books lately. finished redeeming love, the prince (about jonathan & david) and now on to unshaken, which is about ruth. i cannot put these books down!!!! so much fun to read and somehow, very overwhelming (i feel like crying every other page. what's wrong with me?!?!). i highly recommend them to you! i have 10 books to go, all waiting for me, courtesy of the new york public library :)
Thursday, March 01, 2007
this is very exciting:
'Star Trek' release date set
LOS ANGELES, California (Hollywood Reporter) -- Captain's log: December 25, 2008.
Paramount Pictures has set a Christmas Day 2008 release date for the 11th "Star Trek" feature, to be filmed by "Mission: Impossible III" director J.J. Abrams. Shooting will begin in the fall, Paramount said Tuesday.
The screenplay, from "M:I 3" scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, is said to follow James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock during their Starfleet Academy years and into their first space mission.
The previous film in the series, the 2002 box office bomb, "Star Trek: Nemesis," was directed by Stuart Baird, and starred Patrick Stewart.
'Star Trek' release date set
LOS ANGELES, California (Hollywood Reporter) -- Captain's log: December 25, 2008.
Paramount Pictures has set a Christmas Day 2008 release date for the 11th "Star Trek" feature, to be filmed by "Mission: Impossible III" director J.J. Abrams. Shooting will begin in the fall, Paramount said Tuesday.
The screenplay, from "M:I 3" scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, is said to follow James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock during their Starfleet Academy years and into their first space mission.
The previous film in the series, the 2002 box office bomb, "Star Trek: Nemesis," was directed by Stuart Baird, and starred Patrick Stewart.
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