The Bible Bloke

  "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Eph 6:12 I spent some time last night scrolling through my Facebook feed. I paused to read a meme here, a snippet there. I stopped and read a comment by a long time and experienced author who was expressing fear caused by the push of AI into the world of writing and publishing. The advent of self publishing and the relative ease with which one can now published a book has muddied the waters, in that there is now a deluge of poor quality work being thrown up for a reader to pick through and either toss aside or give a go. I am thankful that most of the time I can use the feature "Read a Sample," so I can see how good, or sadly more often, how awful the writing is. Enter AI into this fray. Artificial Intelligence. Computers that are programmed to be intelligent, to think, to reason, ...

One of the things we do a lot of everyday, and we probably don't acknowledge it much, is thinking. Excuse my pun, but we don't think about the act or fact of thinking. Well, not very often, and usually only in passing. Most times it happens when someone asks "What do you think about that?" or "What are your thoughts on this?" But what is a thought? And for that matter what is thinking? A thought it seems is indeed one of those little pole vaulting zaps of electro-chemical energy, hopping from synapse to synapse.     Just as your heart beats and you lungs breath your brain thinks. That's what it's made to do. 100 billion nerve cells. All working towards the functioning of your body, and the 80,000 thoughts you have each and every day. I'm not sure I'm conscious of having that many, I mean, 80,000 is a lot (and who figures this stuff out? How on earth do you put a figure on that? Or is it one of those informed guestimates you are often given w...

 This will probably run along the lines of Worldview part 2, but that’s OK, let’s get it cranked up and see where we go. Let me start off by saying there are things I don’t know. To be honest with you there are things I don’t want to know, but that’s another story. There are books I haven’t read, movies I haven’t seen and there are books and movies I don’t want to see. My mother was a big influence on my early reading habits, and very much my early viewing habits. Mum loved murder mysteries, and she loved westerns. I enjoy a good who-dun-it, but I can take or leave westerns. Mum would hand me a book, and I would generally read it. There were some I just couldn’t get into, much as I tried. I remember having a copy of a booked called Swallows and Amazon’s, and for the life of me I couldn’t get past the first page. One day I might find a copy and read it and figure out why. But here we have one of life’s puzzles. I’m sure there are people who loved that book when they read it as kids....

I want to take a bit of time tackling a concept that looms large in the background or our now, and our every day.  This idea of worldview. If you've never thought about it, that's OK. Trust me on this, everyone has a worldview. You might not be aware of it, but you have one. In order to understand how the world works, and how other people work, then it's important to grapple with this concept. I have worn glasses for as long as I can remember, until recently that is, when I had my cataracts done. As a kid I was always put down the back of the class. I never worked out why. Because I was chronically short sighted I had to squint at the blackboard, yes, in those days they still used chalk, and often I wouldn't be able to make out what was written there. I think it's a bit of an indictment on the education system of the day that kids like me were considered a bit dim because we just didn't get it. Hey guys, I didn't get it because I couldn't see it! Eventua...

 If someone asked you what the best selling book in the world, in say the last 50 years, what would your answer be? I can tell you, you won't find it on the New York Times best seller list. You might think Harry Potter, but you'd be wrong. You might put The Lord of the Rings at the top of the list, but you'd be way off the mark. The Da Vinci code? Hey,  it sold well, made a lot of money for Dan Brown, but it's not even close. Time and again one book not only tops the sales charts it blows them away. The Da Vinci code has sold around 57 million copies. The Lord of the Rings slots in at 103 million. Good old Harry Potter is sitting on a very healthy 400 million, thank you very much. These guys face complete embarrassment. In the last 60 years, the book we know as The Holy Bible has sold 3,900 million copies. Wow. 3.9 billion. Let me throw some other statistics into the pot, to give it a bit of flavour. On a quick interweb search I discovered that the YouVersion Bible app ...

  Have you ever had one of those times when you just want to stand there and scream, not out of anger but out of sheer frustration? Sometimes when you have doubts that layer one on top of the other things start looking a lot like a Sara Lee pastry. What then? That old quip, “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” springs quickly to mind, but that isn’t really helpful is it? How can I make lemonade out of doubts? I can sit in the sun and sip that lemonade and still feel troubled by the things around me, by the grumps I have with my circumstances. So what do you do about doubt? The opening line to the hymn looms out of the shadows: “When my love to Christ grows weak, When for deeper faith I seek, Then in thought I go to thee, Garden of Gethsemane.” To think on this, I am reminded how small I am. How much tension, anxiety, even terror Our Lord must have felt while He prayed in the Garden. O, Father, take this cup from me, but only if it is Your will. He walked ahead, firm in His re...