Trivia

• Tete is only 432 feet above sea level despite being 250 miles from the sea.
• Even though Mueda is lower than Nampula its climate is much cooler.
• The two cushiest assignments in Mozambique are Chimoio and Lichinga.
• Our current home in Vila Ulongue is as high as the summit of Mary’s Peak, Oregon.
• Maputo is awfully humid but it has a beach and shopping malls…

They can’t help it. It’s in their vowels.

According to work done by numerous researchers it has been shown that saying certain vowels can increase your facial temperature and worsen your mood. The happiest vowel is [i] as in “cheese!” and the unhappiest vowel is [ɯ], the close back unrounded vowel favored by Germans.

If you feel embarrassed to sit at your desk saying “Hee Haw” all day you can consider this more discreet alternative: hold a pencil between your teeth like this:

When I was a kid our family religiously watched Hee Haw. Little did I know at the time that I was practicing vowels that would set me up for a life of happiness. Recently, when I was in Nampula one of the Mozambican staff described me as “that white guy that laughs all the time.” Now that’s something that makes me smile.

Even better than carrying a pencil in your teeth is carrying a pencil in your teeth in an air conditioned room. The studies linked to above also mention the positive effects of cold temperatures for mood, productivity and creativity.

A final option is to listen to this:

http://lingamish.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sagetyrtle__laughter.mp3

Source: freesound

If this post made you smile, leave a comment (or smiley) in the comments below.

Intro and outline

For starters, I’m going to be using study guides from the Bible.org website (http://bible.org/passage) translated into Portuguese by Google translate. So far I’ve found that Google Translate does a decent job and we will then clean up the translation as we work through each study guide. Daniel Wallace has published an “Introduction, Argument, and Outline” for each book of the New Testament. We’ll be using those for Galatians through Philemon this semester and if it goes well we’ll do the same thing for General Epistles in the second semester.

On the surface, there are some problems with this approach. First, a machine-based translation is going to result in errors in meaning. Second, Wallace’s intros are pretty brief and necessarily ignore a lot of the complexity inherent in Biblical studies. Third, it would be preferable to have an authoritative resource specifically designed for the African, or in this case Mozambican, context.

Despite those problems, I feel this is a viable way to provide a sizable amount of quality information that has the following characteristics:

1. It’s from a recognized authority. (He also references the big names for study of each book)
2. It’s in recognizable Portuguese as opposed to incomprehensible English.
3. It’s freely shareable and reproducible as outlined in the Bible.org terms of use (http://bible.org/copyright)

Source text

For my class I will be using the freely shareable Portuguese translation produced by the World Bible Translation Center. I continue to be impressed by this translation and the big bonus is that they allow us to use it, print it and modify it as needed. No other Portuguese translation of the Bible has so much going for it. (Note: it’s only New Testament).

Electronic Tools

Currently I have a version of BPBible that has a Portuguese interface and several Portuguese translations. The versions I have are:

1. WBTC: A free and legitimate text
2. ACF: An unsourced electronic version of the Corrigida e Fiel (A Majority Text translation much used in Mozambique)
3. NTLH: An illegal version of the Nova Tradução Linguagem de Hoje which is an excellent translation of the Bible in contemporary Brazilian English.

Additionally, I have included the NET Bible in English and the Westcott Hort with NU changes in Greek. Unfortunately I haven’t found any proper dictionaries or commentaries that work with SWORD modules (which is the system used by BPBible).

BPBible has the additional advantage of working on a USB Drive so each student can have their own version to carry with them.

Summary

I’m really grateful to organizations like Bible.org and World Bible Translation Center who make it easy for others to use their materials in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, the bulk of Bible study information and Bible translations is locked behind copyright restrictions that don’t protect the resources but rather limit their impact and result in the proliferation of corrupt versions (see ACF) and illegal versions (see NTLH).

I welcome your feedback on this project. If you know of Free and Open Source resources that could help my students, please let me know.

     Soon.
And very soon.
     We are going to see.
The King.
     Hallelujah.
Hallelujah.

     Holy.
Holy.
    Holy.
Heaven is.
     A wonder.
Full place.

There’s something just plain right about walking out of the house early in the morning feeling all groggy and waking up with a bica dupla at a sidewalk cafe. You can just sit there without feeling it necessary to do anything spiritual like read your Bible (something that I always try to do early in the morning but my eyes don’t cooperate). I like watching the shoeshine man, and the ladies walking by in impossible heels, and the little boys playing sidewalk football.

I could get used to living in Maputo.

A warning to all you who are considering starting your own self-hosted blog. It’s a lot of work. All that stuff that Blogger or WordPress does for you in the background is suddenly your job. The reason folks like myself do it is that we want more control, our own domain, our own design, and lots of bells and whistles. I enjoy it to an extent. But it can be a serious time sink. So consider whether you’re willing to invest several hours a week to manage a blog when you could be doing other stuff.

I use WordPress because it’s the best.

Here are the plugins I use and why:

1. AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button: It’s the little Share at the bottom of each post
2. Advanced Random Posts: This is my deceptively names “Featured Posts” widget. Keeps content churning.
3. Advanced Tagline: Since I have the attention span of a circus flea I like to have a constant rotation of taglines on my blog.
4. Akismet: SPAM
5. All in One SEO Pack: Everyone else uses it so I do to.
6. Audio player
7. Contact Form 7
8. Lightbox 2: Nice image handling
9. Organize Series: Allows me to group posts into meaningful series.
10. PollDaddy Polls
11. Quotes Collection: This is feeds the Lingaverse widget
12. Random Posts: lingamish.com/?random
13. Shashin: Manage my Picasa photo galleries
14. Subscribe To Comments
15. Theme Switcher Reloaded
16. Thumbnail For Excerpts 2
17. WordPress.com Stats
18. WordPress Database Backup
19. WP Easy Uploader
20. WP Security Scan
21. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

So there you have it. Sound like fun?

Sister Encarnación: Well, my favorite color is light tan. My favorite animal is puppies. I like serving the Lord. Hiking, play volleyball…
Nacho: You gotta be kidding me. Everything you just said, is MY favorite thing to do, every day!

From the movie Nacho Libre

I nodded off last night watching The Star of Bethlehem, a DVD proving conclusively the date of Jesus’ birth using a hodge-podge of astronomy, astrology, Biblical interpretation and wishful thinking. The author of the book and DVD is Frederick A. Larson, a lawyer from Texas. Interesting that another landmark of homebrew Biblical investigation Who Moved the Stone? was written by lawyer, Frank Morison. I suppose my tone is not quite right. I should be more balanced and allow Larson a fair hearing. But Christians get so excited about cockamamie pseudo-scientific explanations for Biblical miracles that it just makes us look really dumb. It’s not just that our science is bad, it’s that we’re leaning on science at all. Christianity in the last two centuries has never really escaped from its Napoleon Complex that started in the Enlightenment. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-intellectual. But the same Judeo-Christian worldview that allowed a flourishing rationalism sent many Christian thinkers on a snipe hunt for scientific proof of the Bible’s claims.

At this stage you might accuse me of disrespect for the divine Scripture because I am insisting that you can’t prove the miracles and events of the Bible through scientific enquiry. But the truth is that those who read the Bible in a way it was not intended by its author do more violence to the spirit and intent of the Scriptures.

Larson in his presentation explains the reality of God’s interaction with the stars by quoting texts like these:

He makes the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades,
and the constellations of the southern sky;

(Job 9:9, NET)

By the LORD’s decree the heavens were made;
by a mere word from his mouth all the stars in the sky were created.

(Psalm 33:6, NET)

He counts the number of the stars;
he names all of them.

(Psalm 147:4, NET)

If the intent of these passages were to give a scientific explanation of the creation of the universe we might conclude that it happened by words coming out of God’s mouth, perhaps the name of each star, and thus the universe was created. Does God sit around counting the stars? Does he really name all the stars? I suppose he might. But the intent of these poetic passages is to say something about the majesty of God and his relationship to the created order. He’s big. He’s all-knowing. He’s pre-existent. Wow! But these verses aren’t meant to tell us anything about the actual mechanics of the universe and its origins. (Consider isaiah 40:12 for a more obvious example of poetic description as opposed to scientific description)

In addition to mistaking Biblical genres, Larson and his ilk quite frequently resort to an argument from statistical improbability. The idea goes like this: “The chance of these events all occurring at the same time is so improbable as to be impossible unless God did it.” This is sometimes called Hoyle’s Boeing 747. Ironically, many of these theories are based on the movement of stars within constellations which are by nature subjective ordering of random dots in the sky. So we’re meant to accept that Jupiter, the king planet bonking into Regulus the king star is amazing evidence of God sending us a message about the veracity of the account of Jesus’ birth.

If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle. —Dave Barry

To take a spin on Dave Barry’s wise words, if God wants to get a message out to humanity about the birth of His son He will not use, as His messenger, astrological symbols and a lawyer with a laptop.

Proof of the “un-proof” of Larson’s claims is that truckloads of other star-gazers have looked into the stars and come to different results, using different stars, different dates, etc. Scientific claims should be predictable, testable and repeatable. But the star-gazing of Larson isn’t any of this. It is simply presuppositions and coincidence sprinkled with scientific jargon.

So, you might be wondering what I think about the star of Bethlehem? What was that thing described only in Matthew’s account of the nativity?

Here are some options which I feel are at least as plausible as Larson’s theory:

1. It was the choir of angels singing to the shepherds.
2. It was a big angel holding a torch.
3. It was a weird glowing orb.
4. It was a twinkle in God’s eye.
5. It was Tinkerbell.

Pardon my mockery but any of these explanations has just as much weight as the other. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what the “star” was. I’ve never doubted that the magi saw something which led them to the place where Jesus was born. See Clayboy O little town of … somewhere or other and Ox and ass and we three kings: Christmas harmonies and evangelical humbug for origins of the Bethlehem story.

My view is that there’s simply too much that we don’t know about the Bible to make dogmatic assertions about peripheral realities. As Martin Luther pithily stated, “Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.”

See here and here for some equally probable and completely different conclusions about the Bethlehem star.

Check out this post for a similar rant: Check your brain at the door | lingamish

All those past smashes
Are stale bread on today’s plate.

Forget about it, sister.
You screwed up?
Join our club.

Yesterday’s flub ups
Shouldn’t drag down your today.

Move ahead. Get over it.
You were a star.
Now you’re not.

In the reborn galaxy of your future
JC is the center of the universe.

Move ahead. Take a break.
You are a new creation.
Cause for elation.

Greater is the one in you
Than your past.

How appropriate that the taxi driver was jamming to Dire Straits while driving me through Nampula. This footage is ascending the FPLM road toward the SIL center.

I could make up a whole songlist for lonely guys like me on the road:

1. I’m a long long way from home
2. BethHilary, I hear you calling
3. I was born a rambling man
4. Find your way back
5. Please come to Boston…

Shoot, this is depressing. Well, thanks to the marvels of technology I got to Skype with my kids for half an hour. We really like smileys.

Only one more week to go and I’m back home surrounded by the kids and loving wife and faithful dog and favorite coffee cup and… decent weather!

Editor’s note: 148 is possibly the worst joke of all time. I list it here strictly for historical purposes.

1. A guy walks into a bar with a newt on his shoulder. “What do you call that?”, asks the bartender. “I call him Tiny, because he’s my newt!”
2. A magician walks down an alley and turns into a bar.
3. A man walks into a bar. [Bonk!]
4. Two men walk into a bar. [Bonk! Bonk!]
5. A dog with his leg wrapped in bandages hobbles into a saloon. He sidles up to the bar and announces: “I’m lookin’ fer the man that shot my paw.”
6. An amnesiac comes into a bar. He asks, “Do I come here often?”
7. A guy walks into a bar with jumper cables. The bartender says, “You can come in, but don’t start anything!”
8. A piece of rope walks into a bar and the bartender says, “We don’t serve your kind.” The rope goes outside, ties himself in a knot and frays one end of himself. He walks back into the bar and the bartender says, “Weren’t you just in here?” The rope replies, “No, I’m a frayed knot.”
9. A penguin walks into a bar, goes to the counter, and asks the bartender, “Have you seen my brother?” The bartender asks, “I don’t know, what does he look like?”
10. A termite walks into a bar and asks, “Is the bartender here?”