Found in the tubes

Facebook profile images

Some nerd ish for me for future reference…

Facebook profile images are scaled at 32% to create the small versions that end up in the stream. Or, from the other direction, scale your desired 50 x 50 image up by 312.5% to generate the full-size image.

A 58-pixel image is cropped to 50-pixels when shown in the stream. I.e., 86.2% of the image is “live.”

Dogma of all varieties is where we get into trouble.

Perhaps of interest to others who “feel God’s touch” but are uncomfortable calling it God. An interesting read.

“To attempt to determine whether the Bible is ‘true’ based only on its factual accuracy is therefore to make a profound category mistake, judging its contents by standards its authors were neither cognizant of nor interested in.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/is-the-bible-true_b_841949.html

Both sides, however, miss the literary nature and intent of the Bible as stated within its own pages. Take for example Luke, who in his introduction acknowledges that he is not an eye-witness to the events he recounts but depends on multiple other stories about Jesus. He writes what he calls ‘an orderly account’ so that his audience may believe and trust the teaching they have received (Luke 1:1-4). Or consider John, who near the end of his gospel comes clean about carefully arranging stories of Jesus so as to persuade his readers that Jesus is the messiah (John 20:30-31). The gospels – and, indeed, all of Scripture – do not seek to prove but to persuade. And so John, convinced that Jesus is “the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world” (1:29), portrays Jesus as clearing the Temple of money changers at the very outset of his ministry because he, himself, is God’s sacrifice. Similarly, Jesus dies on the Day of Preparation at the exact moment the Passover lambs are slaughtered. John’s aim is thoroughly theological, not historical.

For this reason, the Bible is filled with testimony, witness, confession and even propaganda. Does it contain some reliable historical information? Of that there is little doubt. Yet, whenever we stumble upon “verifiable facts” – a notion largely foreign to ancient writers – we should keep in mind that the biblical authors deployed them not to make a logical argument but rather to persuade their audiences of a larger ‘truth’ that cannot be proved in a laboratory but is finally accepted or not accepted based on its ability to offer a compelling story about the meaning and purpose of the world, God, humanity and everything in between. To attempt to determine whether the Bible is ‘true’ based only on its factual accuracy is therefore to make a profound category mistake, judging its contents by standards its authors were neither cognizant of nor interested in.