Around the Horn – 2.25.10

Google’s Orwell Moment
From Newsweek:  Google recently introduced a new service that adds social-networking features to its popular Gmail system. The service is called Buzz, and within hours of its release, people were howling about privacy issues—because, in its original form, Buzz showed everyone the list of people you e-mail most frequently. Even people who weren’t cheating on their spouses or secretly applying for new jobs found this a little unnerving.  It’s hard to imagine Google could have been so clueless. Google’s coder kiddies may be many things, but stupid isn’t one of them.  Same goes for Facebook.

Postmodern Gnostics
Roger Lundin, from Mars Hill Audio: With the breaking of the bond between the self and truth in the late nineteenth century, however, the postromantic poet was left with no justifications for imaginative activity beyond those of preference and desire. With the loss of a belief in the spiritual and ethical significance of creation and the human body, the contemporary aesthetic temperament has found an easy justifi- cation for license. If nature and the human body are essentially amoral mechanisms to be used as means to whatever private ends we have, then the human will is free to do with them what it will, confident that any activity may be sanctified as a legitimate manifestation of desire.

Computers, Chess and “The Heart”
This from Richard Mouw: I took special note of the Kasparov piece because I included some thoughts on “thinking machines” in a lecture—“Confessions of an Evangelical Pietist”—that I gave at the Henry Center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School  on January 20. The whole lecture will probably be published by the folks at the Henry Center, or they may just put it online. For now, here is the relevant section…

How To Assess the Safety and Security of Your Place of Worship
We live in crazy times.  Questions that never would have occurred to ask in the past are now front-burner questions.  Not the least of which is the one addressed in this paper.

The Bible Was Written by Men and Men Make Mistakes
Ever hear that argument?  Over at Stand to Reason Blog they had this nice article: First, it doesn’t follow that because the Bible’s written by men, that it therefore must be in error. Human error is possible, not necessary.