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"I like to think of myself as an open-minded person. I try to avoid being dogmatic when I talk to people. It seems very intolerant to impose my conception of reality on others. This may sound funny, but the one thing I can't tolerate is intolerance. People should lighten up. We can't really know what's true anyhow, so what's the point? Isn't it all relative, just a matter of perspective?" When one apprehends the Truth, it becomes a living force within his soul. He can no more conform that Truth to his own desires than he could wish the wind to blow contrary to its paths. By doing so he risks his own destruction. For when the Truth penetrates the heart, it changes a man to the innermost core of his being. He does not conform the truth to his desires; he is conformed to the Truth. |
A very boiled-down nuts-and-bolts page that gives basic biographical information, contact information, as well as the core components of my philosophy, theology, and political views.
On the college campus, it is not uncommon to hear people cry out for tolerance. Yet, despite their cries, our culture seems more intolerant than ever. How should Christians respond to the tide of intolerance, without becoming intolerant themselves?
Becoming the number one bestseller in record-breaking time, The Da Vinci Code making sweeping claims about the basis of the Christian faith. But are these claims of a hidden history all that they're cracked up to be?
In the post-Enlightenment world, many people find the intellectual life of post-Fundamentalist Christianity extremely unsatisfying. This page discusses Modern philosophical thought, providing critiques and resources for defending the Christian worldview.
The dream of success and finally "making it big" draw many people into the world of Multi-Level Marketing. Unfortunately, the dream rarely - if ever - lives up to reality.
The lure of "deeper spirituality" has drawn many people throughout time. But is it a deeper experience, or just a pretense for true spirituality?
With the threat of international terrorism looming large, the need for dialogue between believers in Jesus Christ and the followers of Muhammed has become clear. To accomplish this task, this page lists some of the best Christian resources available on Islam.
The task of worldview integration is one of the most exciting and most neglected challenges that Christians have the opportunity to engage. This page discusses the task and presents sources for vocational integration.
Does there exist an absolute Truth, or is it just a philosophical illusion? If Truth does exist, what does it mean for us? Does the existence of absolute Truth demand something of us? If there is an absolute Truth, does that necessarily imply an Absolute Mind to comprehend it? What does it mean to live in Truth?
Information on Wicca and Neopaganism from an Evangelical Christian perspective.
Homosexuality is perhaps one of the more controversial topics in culture today, however the need for open and honest dialogue between Evangelical Christians and Homosexuals has never been greater. This is a collection of resources on the topic, largely from an Evangelical Christian perspective.
Roman Catholicism, though bearing similar theology and history with the Evangelical Church, remains a difficult subject for Evangelicals and Roman Catholics alike. Collected here are some resources for working through relevant issues between Evangelicals and Roman Catholics.
The means of mate selection has changed quite radically since the early 20th century. The dating system has replaced courtship, however courtship, as a model, is not necessarily obsolete.
Resources on Christians on Campus and the Local Church from an Evangelical perspective.
While I have multiple copies of this website running from different
servers and URLs, michaelh.com is the primary address for
this website.
My brother's website, with significant plagarism from my website. Well, that's probably fair since I've copied from him too.
Be sure to visit and look around. He has been developing a number of thoughts, some of which developed out of our meandering philosophical conversations. Perhaps the single most impacting thought:
"These paintings, these poems, and these demonstrations... are the expression of men who are struggling with their appalling lostness. Dare we laugh at such things? Dare we feel superior when we view their tortured expressions in their art? Christians should stop laughing and take such men seriously. Then we shall have the right to speak again to our generation. These men are dying while they live, yet where is our compassion for them? There is nothing more ugly than an orthodoxy without understanding or without compassion."
Francis A. Schaeffer, God Who is There (as quoted in Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth)
Common Ground is the college ministry of Trinity Bible Church, and one of the most active Christian student organizations on the UT-Dallas campus. All students are welcome to attend our Friday night meetings, where we come together in pure worship, hear relevant Bible teaching, and fellowship until late in the night.
Website of Trinity Bible Church, my church home and church sponsor of Commmon Ground.
Apologia Report is the premier apologetics research report for the field of Christian apologetics. Weekly reports scour the breadth of academic journals, drawing from far and wide to find information of the latest spirtual trends.
Apologia is also the host to the renowned AR-Talk mailing list, which is a heavily moderated forum for exchange of valuable and timely resources on any and all apologetics topics. Many of the top names in Christian apologetics are represented on the list, from web-based apologists, to academic Bible scholars, to academic philosophers, and more.
Many people have asked me what my secret is for being on top of so many different spiritual trends and versed in such a breadth of knowledge. The secret, of course, is Rich Poll's Apologia Report and the complementary AR-Talk mailing list. These resources are indispensible for the serious apologist.
"Grad Resources is a non-profit organization based in Dallas, Texas that serves the practical and emotional needs of graduate students on several university campuses across the United States.
"Grad Resources offers grad students free assistance and support via grad student orientation programs, seminars, support groups, online resources and several helpful articles. The organization is actively involved in co-sponsoring TA/RA appreciation events as well as Graduate and Professional Student Appreciation Week."
"The fact is that in the world in which we live, people do not like to be told what is right or wrong, but may be willing to see for themselves, as in a mirror, the inconsistencies of their own perspective. Through careful and genuine dialogue, we can help them to reconsider whether their spiritual perspective is adequate, and help them to take a step closer to Jesus Christ each day (1 Corinthians 3:6)."
"The Emerging Scholars Network is called to identify, encourage, and support the next generation of Christian scholars, at all stages of their academic careers, who will be a redeeming influence within higher education."
"We arrive at the great divide; science and grace going their own ways. Scientists and philosophers suspend faith in God while they reason about nature, just as Aquinas had suggested. They may independently give thanks and pray to God, just as anyone else but, in the execution of their professions, they behave as if God created a universe that is reasonable and can be studied without reference to God.
"Do the rigid disciplines of science and philosophy threaten our beliefs in a loving Creator God? Apparently not. Even when we accept the cautions of Hume, recognize our vulnerability to an amazing story, and realize that our belief requires us to accept the miraculous, we still believe. Are we weak and pathetic individuals who need the crutch of religion? I argue that many of us are not. The intellectual carefully studies the evidence before making a commitment. For the Christian, the evidence begins with the Bible and includes the literary and archaeological discoveries from the Holy Land, as well as the great wealth of scientific discovery. We look at the evidence that God created the universe and we look at the science that says that it came about without the hand of a loving Creator God, and we reject the greater miracle."
"It is time to recognize that the original goals of AI were not merely extremely difficult, they were goals that, although glamorous and motivating, sent the discipline off in the wrong direction."
This club is focused on developing the concept of Intelligent Design. Is it really a religious club in disguise whose true goal is hidden, namely to promote a creationist religion? Says the website in response:
"[T]he IDEA club leadership doesn't have a hidden agenda. Our statement of purpose can be viewed in our constitution. That being said, consider the following e-mail response from a faculty member of the University who was contacted in the hopes that he might serve as an adviser of this club: "I cannot in good conscience support your bid to form this club. The ID movement is a thinly veiled effort to introduce creationism. In its own right, the ID movement is simply not science. I am sorry, but the ID movement is doomed to defeat just as creationism has been torched and sent back its rightful home in theology. If you were looking to establish an evolution club that focused on an honest airing of science, that would be another matter." "
The belief that the Intelligent Design movement and this club in particular has some sort of "hidden agenda" is naïve in that it assumes that the goals of the organization are dishonest, and also does not take into adequate consideration the complex theological objections of a number of creationist camps to the use of certain ideas such as the "Anthropic Principle" and "Big Bang Cosmology." To put it simply, many of the concepts the movement purports work against many theological positions considered fundamental to various faiths.
Though I am interested in the discussion of Intelligent Design as an Old-Earth Creationist, I have had absolutely no involvement with the organization nor interaction with its leadership at this time (1/26/2004) and present this link as something that a critically-minded individual might find of value. For individuals interested in discussing these issues further, I would additionally recommend Reasons To Believe:
"The frontiers of science feed the front lines of Christian outreach. Every month's new discoveries about the cosmos, largest scale to smallest, add more evidence to the already weighty case for a transcendent, personal Creator, none other than the God of the Bible. Scientific research has provided us with more than sufficient reason to believe that His Word is true and, thus, every reason to trust Him, to receive the redemption He graciously offers through Jesus Christ."
Unfortunately, not every student organization that claim to be "Christian" on the University campus are actually Christian. Some, in fact, are cults. An excellent resource to help is the website listed above.
A piece of humor that is excellent for one-liners and quotes.
"Unix is a lot more complicated of course - the typical Unix hacker never can remember what the PRINT command is called this week - but when it gets right down to it, Unix is a glorified video game. People don't do Serious Work on Unix systems: they send jokes around the world on UUCP-net and write Adventure games and research papers." (emphasis added)
"Abstract: The exponential dependence of resistivity on temperature in germanium is found to be a great big lie. My careful theoretical modeling and painstaking experimentation reveal 1) that my equipment is crap, as are all the available texts on the subject and 2) that this whole exercise was a complete waste of my time."
A cartoon satire of the day to day experience of your typical Campus Crusade for Christ student organization.
"It can be tough being a cult leader these days. The pressures of amassing a following, selecting a proper style for your appearance, purchasing property for your cult headquarters and coming up with a system of odd-ball beliefs, can get to you. That's why you need the forthcoming book The Purpose-Driven Cult: Growth and Stability Without Prosecution. Yes, The Purpose-Driven Cult is the perfect companion and guide for busy cult leaders."
The Qur'an 2:256
"Instead of making our theological seminaries merely centres of religious emotion, we shall make them battle-grounds of the faith, where, helped a little by the experience of Christian teachers, men are taught to fight their own battle, where they come to appreciate the real strength of the adversary and in the hard school of intellectual struggle learn to substitute for the unthinking faith of childhood the profound convictions of full-grown men."
J. Gresham Machen, 1913
"The point where living within the truth ceases to be mere negation of living with a lie and becomes articulate in a particular way is the point at which something is born that might be called the 'independent spiritual, social, and political life of society.'"
Václav Havel, in "Power of the Powerless"
"The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States ..."
George Orwell, in "Notes on Nationalism" (May 1945)
"Truth prevails for those who live in truth."
Motto of the Charter 77 Movement, rallying cry of the Velvet Revolution
"Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have."
President Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address (January 20, 1981)
"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak, as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers
"Grant, O Lord, that I may not break as I strike."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"If you're going through hell, keep going."
Sir Winston Churchill
"Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result."
Sir Winston Churchill
"An untransformed life is not worth living."
Abraham Heschel
"Kites rise highest against the wind - not with it."
Sir Winston Churchill
"We don't know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable."
G. K. Chesterton
"The truth consists not of knowing the truth but in being the truth."
Søren Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity
"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on."
Sir Winston Churchill
"Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests."
Epicurus
"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."
Charles A. Beard
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom
"He who wants to win the world for Christ must have the courage to come into conflict with it."
Titus Brandsma, martyr, who died at Dachau as a victim of Adolf Hitler in 1942
"A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
Cardinal Newman
"The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism."
Norman Vincent Peale
"A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail (April 1963)
"Courage is fear holding on a minute longer."
General George S. Patton
"I once more realised that the ways of the Lord are imponderable. That we ourselves never know what we really want. And how many times in life I passionately sought what I did not need and have been despondent over failures that were successes."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"Think Globally, Act Locally"
Lifelong motto of Jacques Ellul, author of The Technological Society
"There is no freedom without truth."
Karol Wojtyla, prior to being named Pope John Paul II
"Of that which one cannot speak, one must remain silent."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Conclusion of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
"Whereof one can speak, thereof one must not be silent."
John Warwick Montgomery, Conclusion of Tractatus Logico-Theologicus (emphasis in original)
"I'll always be younger than this society. What do you expect
me to do, keep silent all my life?"
Oleg Kostoglotov, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward
michaelh.com© Copyright 1997-2005, Michael Hamblin, All Rights Reserved. [ michaelh@ductape.net ] Last Modified: Friday, 05-May-2006 00:47:38 PDT |