I’m sure I had loads to write about, but then I read sven’s post about having nothing to blog about and my mind went blank. Well, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Actually, that reminds me of a story I forgot to recount from a couple of weeks ago. My beloved and I were standing in the queue waiting for a cashpoint, nothing unusual – we were just getting some cash so we could go for a chinese. The guy in front of us put his card in, and stood there looking blankly at the cashpoint for a good thirty seconds. Eventually, he pressed cancel, took his card out and said “Damn, how embarassing, I’ve forgotten my PIN.” We laughed a bit as he rang his girlfriend to find out what his PIN was, and Naomi stepped up to the cashpoint and put her card in. She paused, looked at me, looked back at the cashpoint, and looked at me again.

“Er, I’ve forgotten my PIN.”

Very strange, and we never did find if we’d been set up by Derren Brown or anything. It’d be a neat trick if you could pull it off.

I saw Batman Begins last night. Good fun, stylish and has plot holes you can drive a Batmobile through, but that doesn’t stand in the way of it being a properly good superhero movie.

In other news, I got accused of evangelism the other night. Hm.

So, what’s the best way to build up a good relationship with your most dedicated customers? That is, those customers who, on hearing about your new product, are so excited about it that they go to the trouble of finding an importer who can get it to them before it’s released in their country, and who do a great PR job for you by showing all their friends how great this product is and encouraging them to buy it when it comes out.

Well, according to Sony, what you do is take the companies who were selling the PSPs to court, get a list of all the people they’ve sold them, and then impound all the PSPs they’ve sold. Yes, that’s right; if you’ve shown your dedication and loyalty to Sony by importing a PSP early, they’re going to turn up on your doorstep and take it back off you.

Sony says “FUCK YOU” to fans

Goddamn this is retarded.

EDIT: Updated

Okay, it seems all is not quite as bad as it seemed – you’re okay if you’ve actually got one, they’re not going to take it off you. But that’s not going to stop Sony trying to stop you buying one should you happen to live in a country they’re not yet for sale in. So much for free markets, eh? Of course, the official line is that it’s because they want to make sure all the bugs are ironed out. Which, if true, is a tacit admission that they are basically using all the other countries as beta testers. Of course, it’s got absolutely nothing to do with the fact you can buy a PSP Value Pack for £150 in the US, but it’s going to cost £190 here.

This is pretty impressive.

If Cardinal Sin is not the greatest name for a priest ever, I don’t know what is.

As I suspected, my post on evangelism ruffled a few feathers. Well, it was meant to, so that’s good. But there’s also been a small degree of point-missing going on, so I need to clear a few things up. First of all, it might help if you read this article, which is what prompted me to write mine in the first place. It says broadly the same things as I do, but less provocatively 🙂

Okay. Jeni said:

I was going to write a comment about how evangelism isn’t about beating people over the head with a bible, how it isn’t about telling somebody to believe all the bits and pieces of what you believe, of how it’s just introducing someone to Jesus and letting them start their own journey, but am wondering if you’ll be cynical about that as well.

Um. I thought that’s what I had said? My problem with evangelism, as taught in the modern church, is that it’s approached as a hit-them-with-the-gospel quick-fix salvation-focused thing – what does it matter if they don’t understand the issues, so long as they’re saved? The thing is, I have seen, time and again, people who have become Christians this way, and they all follow the same pattern. They’ve been told that God will fix everything and make it alright; that God is the ultimate answer and that He will never let them down. And of course, a couple of weeks down the line, something goes wrong in their life and they lash out and either blame God for being inadequate or letting them down, or they believe they’re not “good enough” to be a Christian. And worse, they continue to do this: a continual yo-yoing backwards and forwards in faith, re-dedicating their lives to Christ with the promise that this time, they’ll get it right. Somehow, they manage to believe that somehow, God’s grace doesn’t always extend to them, and they feel miserable about their faith.

And, therefore, I’m not willing to sell the quick-fix, pre-packaged, believe-and-be-saved-and-everything-will-be-better Jesus any more.

Would you answer questions if you were asked? Or would you consider that evangelism and not answer them?

This makes me sad, and makes me think you’ve missed my point. Not only would I absolutely answer questions if asked, but I’d absolutely encourage people to ask them. What I wouldn’t do, however, is fall back on the “All you’ve got to do is believe and be saved” line. My statement that I dislike evangelism was deliberately provocative; I said it because of the associations evangelism holds in people’s minds today, and I wanted to challenge that. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk about my faith; I just don’t want to turn it into a powerpoint multimedia presentation teaching five easy steps to salvation. Because it’s not; it’s far more complex, subtle, exciting, beautiful and profound than that.

Every now and again, you take a photo that makes it all worthwhile.

Also, just uploaded the remainder of the Chatsworth photos (not terribly exciting, it has to be said) and the pictures I took in Great Yarmouth whilst I was down there for my school reunion (photos of that are also in the gallery, but they won’t really mean much to anyone who wasn’t at Wymondham High School doing GCSEs in 1995).

Naomi is going out for dinner with another man, so I’m going to go to the pub with my many other women. I am such a hit with the lay-deeez, ohyes.

It is 28°C in our office today. That is somewhere slightly above the boiling point of lead. My brain has actually melted and taken all of my tuits, round or otherwise, away with it.

I’ve had this bumbling round in my head for a while, and iMonk‘s post on a broadly similar subject has prompted me to get my arse into gear and write about it. It’s kind of a tricky subject, and some people aren’t going to like it, but please, hear me out.

See, now, here’s the deal: I don’t like Evangelism. There, I’ve said it. Stone me now.

Now, if you’re a Christian from the same sort of background as me, you’re probably thinking something along the lines of: “Well, yes, it’s scary doing that whole sharing your faith thing, telling people about God and Jesus and how they need to be saved and that.” And yes, it is. I know, I’ve done a lot of it (and quite often made a fool of myself in the process). But that’s not what I mean. I mean that I am deeply uncomfortable with the whole idea of Evangelism; or at least, with the way we’re supposed to be going about it.

Now, part of this stems from the fact that yes, I am shy and no, I don’t like imposing myself on people (unless I’ve had a few beers, in which case I get all mouthy and ranting, but by that point I’m usually past my best for discussing theology anyway). And it also partially stems with that sort of gut postmodern fluffy moral relativist feeling I’ve got in my stomach that makes me wonder if I’ve really got any sort of right at all to go around telling people what to believe.

But the really serious thing is – I have doubts. It’s a dirty word, but every Christian does. Those who don’t are either lying or crazy. I have questions to which I don’t know the answers – important questions, too, not just little issues of dogma or liturgy. And these questions and doubts are important – they are not little issues to be swept under the rug and turned over to scriptural dogmatics or dismissed with a shrug and a “Well, we can’t know the mind of God”. They are things that need to be wrestled with, talked about openly and honestly and thought deeply about – and we also need to be open to the fact that many things will still continue to be without an answer; but, like an imponderable Zen Koan, it is more important that we think about these things that actually arrive at an answer.

My faith, therefore, is a journey; a dialogue, if you will. It’s been going on for a lot longer than that day, 10 years ago, when I gave my life to Christ (to use a deeply loaded and confusing phrase) – although that was clearly a hugely important milestone along the way – and it will continue on for a lot longer than where I am today. It is a fluid thing – as my dialogue with others (corporeal entities or otherwise) continues, my beliefs will continue to change, to be moulded by my experience. And it is that journey, far more than the final destination, that is the important thing.

I can’t, therefore, go out and tell someone that they’ve got to believe what I do otherwise they’re going to burn in hell/suffer the torment of eternal separation/be moody forever because they don’t like the afterlife, because I am not that dogmatically sure that I want people to believe the same as I do, and I really hope I never do reach the point where I am so sure I have all the right answers that I am willing to sit on my big fat theologcal arse and go no further. Therefore, to preach a definitive “recipe for salvation” – which I have done in the past – would be deceptive on my part.

There is an important caveat, though. And that is the fact that I do still have the beliefs I have and, if they are true, then some things do demand some kind of response, because they have profound implications for the way this world we live in works.

So. I am unwilling to beat people over the head with a Bible, to tell them that their soul is damned and that unless they turn to Christ they will suffer eternal separation from God. I am unwilling to sell the idea of a simple quick-fix Jesus to solve all your emotional, spiritual and physical needs. But I would encourage people to be open and honest, to be aware of their own journey, and, more specfically, to listen to the claims made in the Bible and to consider taking them seriously. I would hope that, as part of my journey, my everyday actions can become more of an ambassador for my beliefs than dogmatic preaching could ever be. And if that means I can stir a few hearts and minds and set a few people off in a new direction on their own journeys, then that must be a good thing, right?

The Christian blogging world has recently been going all fanboy over the ESV translation of the Bible. I’ll confess to not being entirely sure what all the fuss is about, but I’ll go along with things for the moment.

Anyway, Mr. Warnock, master self publicist and famous blogger, has got himself an exclusive blog-interview-thing with the ESV translation committee. The first question he asked was:

ESV Interview: Is translation effected by doctrine?
It is of note that the group of scholars who wrote the ESV include some great giants of evangelicalism. I wonder how important to the accurate translation of the Bible is an evangelical faith. How much does the doctrine one believes in influence the act of translation and the philosophy which lies behind it?

The response is, loosely, that yes, the Evangelical view that the Bible is the (literal) Word of God does inform on the way that they approach the translation. Adrian (and many others) seems very happy with that response, saying:

This inspires me with great confidence about this translation as I want the people translating the bible for me to believe that its every word is inspired by God and is profitable for us. It matters to me whether the original actually said what we are led to believe it does.

Well, in my role as fluffy liberal heretic, I feel I can’t let this one pass without pointing out the rather obvious hole in this argument: Basically, it seems to me, this is an utterly backwards way of approaching things. Rather than approaching the original texts in a neutral fashion, reading them critically and with an open mind and then letting the words speak for themselves and allowing them to inform matters of doctrine and belief, they instead choose to adhere to a doctrine and allow that to inform their translation.

In other words, if you’ve got a bunch of conservative Evangelicals doing the translating and reviewing the translation, then you are of course going to get a translation which is biassed towards the conservative Evangelical viewpoint – or at least one which doesn’t challenge this viewpoint – which will naturally make conservative Evangelicals who read the translation very happy. If, however, people from a wider variety of backgrounds are involved in the translation and review process, it is easier for these biases to be ironed out and therefore, to my mind, a more useful translation produced.

Of course, the obvious solution is for us all to learn ancient Hebrew and Greek and read the original texts for ourselves and make up our own minds. I strongly suspect, though, that this isn’t going to happen any time soon.

In the meantime, I await the publication of the Purpose Driven® Life Application ESV Study Bible, which surely can’t be far off now.