via moony_blues
Aug. 5th, 2008 09:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tinpraComment on this post. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so others can play along.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moony_blues picked:
Apologetics
moony_blues: (Is it bad that Firefox's spell checker doesn't think that's a word?) lol...it's not a commonly used word, so no.
Apologetics is defined by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary as "1: systematic argumentative discourse in defense (as of a doctrine) 2 : a branch of theology devoted to the defense of the divine origin and authority of Christianity." It's from either the Greek or Latin apologia (which was the name of a novel-in-writing before I knew what it meant) which basically means to give a reasoned defense of something.
If you've perused my postings, you may have seen me call myself a lay Apologist, by which I mean a Christian Apologist since I think you can be an Apologist for just about anything. And I'm not sure whether it's a thing that's supposed to have caps or not, even though I keep using them. Apologetics of any sort is not related to giving an apology in the typical way that we mean it, or apologizing, but clearly they all have the same root. If you look up "apology" you will not find apologetics as a synonym or related word.
I became interested in Christian Apologetics, without quite knowing it, in college. The university system is not one that's really geared to being a Bible-believing Christian, generally speaking, although I didn't run into a lot of the head-on collisions with either profs or fellow students that you hear about. On the other hand I did feel and hear and understand the jabs at my faith--that it was something only children could believe, that it was illogical and unreasonable, that it was outdated. I even had a good acquaintance of mine once ask me "How can such a smart girl like you believe in Christianity [the way you do]?" At the time I don't think I had a good answer for him, but I knew that there had to be reasonable, logical, defensible reasons for being a Bible-believing Christian out there, even if I didn't know them and was defending my faith based on my own limited knowledge and logic. And it was worrisome that (a) I didn't know it, and that (b) maybe it wasn't out there in a formal, studiable way. Then I started paying attention while my mother listened to Ravi Zacharias' radio ministry. Ravi Zacharias who was, and is, a Christian Apologist. I've been formally interested ever since. And as the site quotes, the Bible calls on us to "...always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have." 1 Peter 3:15
Is that anywhere near the answer you were looking for?
Israel and New Breed: Israel Houghton is a Christian singer/songwriter and New Breed is his...mini-choir? I'm not sure how you'd call them since I don't think there are even 10 of them, including him. Anywho, a few years ago now he burst on the Christian music scene with several crossover praise & worship hits. He can as easily be classified as a Contemporary Christian musician as well as an Urban Gospel musician, or neither. For the most part he creates solid praise and worship music with a solid message, although every now and then some bubble gum crops up. But sometimes bubble gum's what you're looking for. I got into him when a family friend of ours came back from seeing his fam with a copy of the cd in tow. Mom's always looking for new praise and worship for the church, so when she heard it in the car she "borrowed" it for a few months. Been hooked ever since.
Pro-Life: Merriam-Webster Online simply describes this as someone who is opposed to abortion. Which I am. I wasn't always. I spent years and years and years as a pro-choicer. The feeling that it was my body, darnit, and no man was going to tell me what I could and could not do with it was the usual response to anti-abortion stuff floating around in the press. But in the back of my brain I thought about myself. I should have been an abortion. I'm not saying my mother tried and failed, but that the situation she was in when she was pregnant made her the perfect candidate for someone wanting to get an abortion. And in the back of my brain was that whole "Killing is wrong" thing. That was competing with "but it's not a baby" except I didn't really believe that. None of this was really conscious, up front thinking, mind you. At least it wasn't most of the time, but I had my doubts about this pro-choice thing even if I wasn't willing to admit them to myself.
Then came RU-486. It tipped the scales for me the very moment that I heard about it. The idea that you could just take a pill and it was over... That seemed so inherently wrong to me. Suddenly I had to deal with all the issues and concerns and morality that I had tried to sweep under my mental rug. Like why is it a fetus if you don't want it, but a baby if you do? And so after some heavy thinking I came to the (more reasoned) conclusion that I was most firmly a pro-lifer. It seemed to be a contradiction to say that I was a Bible-believing Christian who was willing to say that it's okay to kill babies because it's inconvenient/I made a mistake/things happened beyond my control/it doesn't even look like a person/there are enough people in the world. Or any of the myriad of reasons. Including rape (though that's the hardest one to come to grips with).
As many of us have said (or thought) to our parents, a baby doesn't ask to be conceived and it is not responsible for the situation in which I bring it into. If I feel like I can't handle the responsibility of the child my option is not to kill it but to deal with it, both the child and the situation. Once you've created an embryo it is neither its mother nor its father, but it is its own unique thing. An embryo is not the egg. An embryo is not the sperm. This is true from the moment those two things come in contact. It is unique. It is human, although not recognizably so at that moment. And if it is unique and human, it has its own intrinsic value...or at least it ought to. Just because my body is housing it, doesn't mean its mine. And if I'm going to get "rid" of the parasite then I should be honest and say that I'm killing a person, not aborting a thing.
People get up in arms about cats and dogs that are abused or given to shelters by callous owners. I even read a comment in the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
plants community where the commenter demanded that the poster apologize to the plant that she had chucked when she found out it was poisonous. Human life, however, doesn't seem to hold the same value with people though.
Science Fiction: Love, love, love, love, looooove scifi! Like whoa! And I'm pretty much a pan-scifi lover. You will not see me defending Star Trek over Star Wars by virtue of which came first, or unable to watch Babylon 5 because I know half the actors from other things or the show is derivative, etc. If I can catch it at a good time, I will give just about anything scifi-ish a chance. I mean it. I've watched Cleopatra 2525 for Pete's sake. I used to watch Earth: Final Conflict...um...geez louise...anything the WB was putting out during those couple of years when they dabbled in cheap scifi/fantasy. Ditto with fiction. Heck, ditto with my writing. One of the 3 or 4 plot ideas is more scifi than not. And then, of course, there's SciFi channel. siiiigh
Worship: It's weird seeing "worship" by itself instead of as part of "praise and worship". Be that as it may, in the Christian sense: worship is a deeper form of praise. In its most straightforward sense, worship is ascribing worth to God. You're not thanking or praising Him for what He's done or how He's helped you or any of His works, per se, but rather basking in who He is in and of Himself. I'm not sure that makes sense if you're not a Christian. The best analogy I can think of is being in a romantic relationship, perhaps when it's still new and gushy and all your friends are having to hold back their gag reactions when you say things like "I just like being with him." Or "We just go the park and lay on the grass and that's fine with us." It seems silly to any one who's not in the relationship, but to you and your beau you know that being in each other's presence is good enough. It's more than good enough. And so worship is something like that. It's honoring God's worth-ness just for who He is and basking in that, for lack of a better word. It's "just being with Him" and out of that comes worship.
And I apologize for the major opus. Sheesh.
moony_blues picked: Apologetics
moony_blues: (Is it bad that Firefox's spell checker doesn't think that's a word?) lol...it's not a commonly used word, so no.
Apologetics is defined by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary as "1: systematic argumentative discourse in defense (as of a doctrine) 2 : a branch of theology devoted to the defense of the divine origin and authority of Christianity." It's from either the Greek or Latin apologia (which was the name of a novel-in-writing before I knew what it meant) which basically means to give a reasoned defense of something.
If you've perused my postings, you may have seen me call myself a lay Apologist, by which I mean a Christian Apologist since I think you can be an Apologist for just about anything. And I'm not sure whether it's a thing that's supposed to have caps or not, even though I keep using them. Apologetics of any sort is not related to giving an apology in the typical way that we mean it, or apologizing, but clearly they all have the same root. If you look up "apology" you will not find apologetics as a synonym or related word.
I became interested in Christian Apologetics, without quite knowing it, in college. The university system is not one that's really geared to being a Bible-believing Christian, generally speaking, although I didn't run into a lot of the head-on collisions with either profs or fellow students that you hear about. On the other hand I did feel and hear and understand the jabs at my faith--that it was something only children could believe, that it was illogical and unreasonable, that it was outdated. I even had a good acquaintance of mine once ask me "How can such a smart girl like you believe in Christianity [the way you do]?" At the time I don't think I had a good answer for him, but I knew that there had to be reasonable, logical, defensible reasons for being a Bible-believing Christian out there, even if I didn't know them and was defending my faith based on my own limited knowledge and logic. And it was worrisome that (a) I didn't know it, and that (b) maybe it wasn't out there in a formal, studiable way. Then I started paying attention while my mother listened to Ravi Zacharias' radio ministry. Ravi Zacharias who was, and is, a Christian Apologist. I've been formally interested ever since. And as the site quotes, the Bible calls on us to "...always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have." 1 Peter 3:15
Is that anywhere near the answer you were looking for?
Israel and New Breed: Israel Houghton is a Christian singer/songwriter and New Breed is his...mini-choir? I'm not sure how you'd call them since I don't think there are even 10 of them, including him. Anywho, a few years ago now he burst on the Christian music scene with several crossover praise & worship hits. He can as easily be classified as a Contemporary Christian musician as well as an Urban Gospel musician, or neither. For the most part he creates solid praise and worship music with a solid message, although every now and then some bubble gum crops up. But sometimes bubble gum's what you're looking for. I got into him when a family friend of ours came back from seeing his fam with a copy of the cd in tow. Mom's always looking for new praise and worship for the church, so when she heard it in the car she "borrowed" it for a few months. Been hooked ever since.
Pro-Life: Merriam-Webster Online simply describes this as someone who is opposed to abortion. Which I am. I wasn't always. I spent years and years and years as a pro-choicer. The feeling that it was my body, darnit, and no man was going to tell me what I could and could not do with it was the usual response to anti-abortion stuff floating around in the press. But in the back of my brain I thought about myself. I should have been an abortion. I'm not saying my mother tried and failed, but that the situation she was in when she was pregnant made her the perfect candidate for someone wanting to get an abortion. And in the back of my brain was that whole "Killing is wrong" thing. That was competing with "but it's not a baby" except I didn't really believe that. None of this was really conscious, up front thinking, mind you. At least it wasn't most of the time, but I had my doubts about this pro-choice thing even if I wasn't willing to admit them to myself.
Then came RU-486. It tipped the scales for me the very moment that I heard about it. The idea that you could just take a pill and it was over... That seemed so inherently wrong to me. Suddenly I had to deal with all the issues and concerns and morality that I had tried to sweep under my mental rug. Like why is it a fetus if you don't want it, but a baby if you do? And so after some heavy thinking I came to the (more reasoned) conclusion that I was most firmly a pro-lifer. It seemed to be a contradiction to say that I was a Bible-believing Christian who was willing to say that it's okay to kill babies because it's inconvenient/I made a mistake/things happened beyond my control/it doesn't even look like a person/there are enough people in the world. Or any of the myriad of reasons. Including rape (though that's the hardest one to come to grips with).
As many of us have said (or thought) to our parents, a baby doesn't ask to be conceived and it is not responsible for the situation in which I bring it into. If I feel like I can't handle the responsibility of the child my option is not to kill it but to deal with it, both the child and the situation. Once you've created an embryo it is neither its mother nor its father, but it is its own unique thing. An embryo is not the egg. An embryo is not the sperm. This is true from the moment those two things come in contact. It is unique. It is human, although not recognizably so at that moment. And if it is unique and human, it has its own intrinsic value...or at least it ought to. Just because my body is housing it, doesn't mean its mine. And if I'm going to get "rid" of the parasite then I should be honest and say that I'm killing a person, not aborting a thing.
People get up in arms about cats and dogs that are abused or given to shelters by callous owners. I even read a comment in the
plants community where the commenter demanded that the poster apologize to the plant that she had chucked when she found out it was poisonous. Human life, however, doesn't seem to hold the same value with people though. Science Fiction: Love, love, love, love, looooove scifi! Like whoa! And I'm pretty much a pan-scifi lover. You will not see me defending Star Trek over Star Wars by virtue of which came first, or unable to watch Babylon 5 because I know half the actors from other things or the show is derivative, etc. If I can catch it at a good time, I will give just about anything scifi-ish a chance. I mean it. I've watched Cleopatra 2525 for Pete's sake. I used to watch Earth: Final Conflict...um...geez louise...anything the WB was putting out during those couple of years when they dabbled in cheap scifi/fantasy. Ditto with fiction. Heck, ditto with my writing. One of the 3 or 4 plot ideas is more scifi than not. And then, of course, there's SciFi channel. siiiigh
Worship: It's weird seeing "worship" by itself instead of as part of "praise and worship". Be that as it may, in the Christian sense: worship is a deeper form of praise. In its most straightforward sense, worship is ascribing worth to God. You're not thanking or praising Him for what He's done or how He's helped you or any of His works, per se, but rather basking in who He is in and of Himself. I'm not sure that makes sense if you're not a Christian. The best analogy I can think of is being in a romantic relationship, perhaps when it's still new and gushy and all your friends are having to hold back their gag reactions when you say things like "I just like being with him." Or "We just go the park and lay on the grass and that's fine with us." It seems silly to any one who's not in the relationship, but to you and your beau you know that being in each other's presence is good enough. It's more than good enough. And so worship is something like that. It's honoring God's worth-ness just for who He is and basking in that, for lack of a better word. It's "just being with Him" and out of that comes worship.
And I apologize for the major opus. Sheesh.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-06 02:18 am (UTC)*facepalm*
As a musician trained at an Assemblies of God univerisity, I really should have known that already, especially since our choir
butcheredperformed many pieces written by Houghton.no subject
Date: 2008-08-06 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-06 02:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-06 03:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-08 12:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-08 02:49 am (UTC)green party
barbara boxer
pro-choice (just seems fitting)
timothy busfield
music