Awesome!

I never resist the urge, and when dining non-asian I often borrow my neighbors butter knife. A tall glass of ice water makes a nice bell.

I've had several linux based itunes impersonators throw fits with my mp3's that otherwise worked fine in winamp, itunes, and windows media player.

Perhaps there's more of an issue with some of the Ubuntu software?

The quadcore vista system I use at work ironically has no optical drive. I installed wubi a couple months ago and have been pretty pleased, though upgrading to 7.10 introduced a few bugs that made it see like a step backward from 7.4.

Hi CPT.TIM, actually the term "damnation" does not appear in Scripture, at least in the New Revised Standard Version. So I've got nothing to reconcile :)

If you're referring to the idea of "hell" then there is more to understand beyond the Medieval/Fundamentalist interpretation of eternal punishment, see Wikipedia's Hell in Christian Beliefs.

For instance, some New Testament references of hell are actually referring to a physical location known as "Gehenna."

If for no other reason, an understanding of Gehenna will make the Coen Brothers The Lady Killers far more entertaining.

To answer your question, like many other texts, Scripture can be read to argue for just about anything you want it to. Thus it's important to read Scripture as a whole within the context of Tradition as well as the present Christian community.

I believe the primary message of Scripture is "forgiveness" (and love too, but not really the way Americans understand it). And the concepts of Hell and judgement are only properly understood in relationship to this central theme of forgiveness.

Thanks for the post Cory.

The Aardvark plugin is a handy way to remove page content either for printing or to get rid of annoying ads - like the one's from sitepal.

*It's also a quick way to remove the transparent gif's that block the copyright images on Flickr from being copied to your clipboard (assuming you have a Fair Use argument and you don't view deleting a transparent gif as some kind of illegal DMCA circumvention.)

For this and similar issues I personally recommend the following organizations:

World Vision

International Justice Mission

Also, David Batstone's book Not For Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade—and How We Can Fight It provides a thorough overview of these incidents occurring in all 7 continents as well as a wealth of resources to get involved. You can also watch the author summarize the book on youtube

Whoa! a link from boingboing that portrays Christianity semi-positively… time to send Satan a winter coat.

In all seriousness, thanks Cory!

I have to admit that even I'm surprised (and pleased) to hear some of the dialogue taking place among mainstream evangelicals. As an example, check out the this Shane Claiborne clip from the aforementioned site.