These are my Confessions

Well, actually just one: I resent it when friends prevent me from exercising, or even when I fail to plan for exercise around my friends' social activities that involve me.

This is hardly fair; I should either plan ahead or draw some boundaries around my exercise time, rather than internalizing unexpressed (and often irrational) anger. So yeah.

Suffering from echo sickness tonight. Good thing for echo sickness is to sleep it off.

"God's Communication" Study: Genesis 1-3

I need to know more about how God communicates. So I'm going to be taking a closer look at the things he says in the Bible. Today I read Genesis 1-3.

In Genesis 1:28-30, God issues a command and makes a gift.

• God's command is life-affirming. It encourages humans to reproduce and make more of their kind.


• God's command also affirms the value of responsibility. Humans are to be good stewards of the creation, to exercise authority over it.


• God's gift provides for his creation: both the humans in charge and the animals to be ruled over. What does the gift communicate?

In Genesis 2:16 God gives another command.

• God's command creates boundaries for our protection. Some knowledge is healthy for man, and he should pursue that knowledge. God's boundaries are intended to protect us from the knowledge that will break us.


• I am reminded of John 16:12-13, in which Jesus says, "I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear." In time, Jesus explains, the Spirit will reveal what the disciples need to know, as they learn to trust God. Perhaps eating from the tree in the garden is a sin not because it is pursuing forbidden knowledge, but because it seeks to obtain that knowledge outside of a relationship with God, from a source other than God. It's just a hypothesis, but it could be the case.

In Genesis 3:8-13, God asks several questions.

• Human beings ask questions in order to gather knowledge. However, God is omniscient and already possesses knowledge of everything. Why does God ask questions?

Music to nap to

I've got this Winamp playlist of about 50 or so songs, all of them slow stuff, a lot of instrumental video game remixes. Lots of piano pieces. And I like to put on this playlist when I take a nap. It's good to have music that I can fall asleep to.

Joe Loves Crappy Movies

"I want to be funny at no one's expense": that attitude is the reason why I enjoy Joe Dunn's comics as much as I do. He really is a stand-up guy.

Article about standards in creativity

"On Editorialization And The Lack Thereof"

Wisdom for artists.

Article on Faith

I just wanted to share this. This short, informative essay is the most accessible, sensible, and fair discussion of religious belief that I have read online in a long time. I am so sick of the shrill atheistic insistence that religion is bad and terrible on the one hand, and the Christian refusal to even acknowledge the existence of doubt. This, on the other hand? This is good stuff. It's refreshing.