Fire and Knowledge

A man who makes his golf or his motor-bicycle the centre of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog, is being just as “in-temperate” as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it does not show on the outside so easily: bridge-mania or golf-mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road. But God is not deceived by externals.

—C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity, p. 79

I am now officially for sale. To celebrate, I have created a new “Services” section. If you are interested, please let me know!

Doug Groothuis has written a good, concise review of the current state of the Christian “Bookseller” industry. He is right on.

What is the remedy to all this? Consider these wise words:

What is the constructive curmudgeon to do? Keep buying and reading thoughtful books. Recommend them to others. Give them as gifts. Mention and quote them from the pulpit. Review them in newspapers, on Amazon.com, and in your blogs. Develop a substantial church library and put it in the front of the church. Turn off as many television sets as possible through TV-B-Gone or by any means necessary. Be an iconoclast by being a bibliophile.

Amen!

Temperance is, unfortunately, one of those words that has changed its meaning. It now usually means teetotalism… [In the past,] temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotalers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion.

Of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or of any Christian, at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking too much, or because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage them by drinking himself. But the whole point is that he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something which he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying. One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons—marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who use them, he has taken the wrong turning.

—C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity, p. 78-79

Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence begin sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.

—C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity, p. 78

Optimus keyboard

This is a geat idea for a keyboard–and a great way to make it 1000x more expensive.

Every key of the Optimus keyboard is a stand-alone display showing exactly what it is controlling at this very moment.

For those interested, Desiring God now has 183 mp3 sermons by John Piper on Romans 1-12 for $85.00! That’s an incredible deal for 183 God-centered, life-changing, exegetical sermons!

Arizona School Will Not Use Textbooks

A high school in Vail will become the state’s first all-wireless, all-laptop public school this fall. The 350 students at the school will not have traditional textbooks. Instead, they will use electronic and online articles as part of more traditional teacher lesson plans.

These people understand so little about education that they could only be educators. Throwing away textbooks are a great idea–but not for laptops. Throw them away for real books.

“I’m sure there are going to be some adjustments. But we visited other schools using laptops. And at the schools with laptops, students were just more engaged than at non-laptop schools,” he said.

I think he meant to say “more engaged at surfing the web” or “more engaged at staring at a glowing screen.”

If this catches on–and I have no doubt it will–expect the intelligence of students to drop even further at public schools. Lord help us.

[HT: WorldMagBlog]