From my Conflict blog:
We all agree that bad conflict is destructive. An apparent lack of conflict is also destructive, because there really is no lack of conflict. It’s either open and obvious, or it’s hidden; and hidden conflict is, in my opinion, far more destructive. How many people disappear from churches for no apparent reason? Truth is, there’s always a reason, and typically it’s an issue of unresolved conflict (although certainly that’s not always the case). As someone once said, “wherever two or more are gathered, there is conflict.” Conflict is a fact of life, as long as we are imperfect beings. Rather than ignore this fact, as many churches tend to do, the best case scenario would seem to be to put conflict front and center, but make it good conflict rather than bad.
Read the whole post here.
A few months ago, I had a weird experience at Starbucks – my cursor started moving to the right, all by itself. I first thought my wireless mouse was having issues, but unplugging it didn’t help. No matter what I tried, the cursor kept on it’s determined course. It seems like a little thing, but your laptop becomes essentially useless if you can’t keep the cursor still.
I suspected that my laptop had a stuck right arrow key, but when I got home, it worked normally. When I went back to Starbucks, it flaked out again. In a different Starbucks. So, I googled everything I could think of, but no one mentioned a problem like this, except to say that some kind of signal interference can do weird things.
After a few weeks, it seemed to stop. Except for today. Once again, my cursor began it’s march to the right, making it hard to do anything.
Then, it occurred to me that I was sitting in a spot I didn’t usually sit, in a little alcove by the huge Starbucks sign in the window. I picked up my stuff and moved to the other side of the room, and viola!, the cursor behaved itself.
So, apparently the huge green mermaid sign was somehow hijacking my laptop.
Mystery solved… I think.
Faithful readers of this blog will know that I occasionally post articles about why you can believe and rely on the Bible, as well as criticize people like Bart Ehrman for making really stupid arguments to the contrary. That being said, I also believe that there are serious issues with those who claim that the Bible is inerrant, or “without error in any way.”
Believers in inerrancy, I think, find themselves putting more faith in inerrancy than they do in the Gospel; however, the 1st Century Christians didn’t, for the most part, even have the Bible. Yet, it is clear from Paul’s epistles that they had “the Word of God.” I suspect that the real issue underlying inerrancy is that these Christians have become trapped in modernistic thinking, where propositions must meet certain criteria in order to be “true.” In this way, it seems that those requiring that the Bible be inerrant actually suffer from a lack of faith – one of the unfortunate consequences of modernism – rather than having a greater faith, as they would have us believe.
Yesterday Stephen at Undeception posted The Bible and the need for proof, makes some good points about why we don’t need to believe in “inerrancy” in order to believe the Gospel. He asks at the conclusion, “why is it logically necessary, rather than merely preferable for one reason or another, that the Bible be entirely true through and through?”
My question, just because I’m curious, is “What do you believe about the Bible, and why?”