🇬🇧🇮🇹 Vincenzo is a Christian, a husband, a dad, a theologian, an apologist, a scientist, a polyglot, and an anglicised Neapolitan. Not always in this order.
Despite incessant declarations that “there is no controversy” about evolution, ID is evidently on the mind of many biologists, to the point of obsession, reports Evolution News.
If one European researcher is correct, scientists in the United States spend one-fifth of their waking time thinking about how to “combat intelligent design.”
So, I was reading this, and towards the end of the page there is a section about “defamatory language” that should not be used when referring to or talking about a person who is a professing gay. Right at the bottom, one reads:
Associating gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people with pedophilia, child abuse, sexual abuse, bestiality, bigamy, polygamy, adultery and/or incest.
My goal here is simply to show the logical absurdity of a worldview that rejects the idea of an absolute moral standard whilst, in the same breath, making absolute moral judgments.
How so?
Well, the paragraph presupposes that the following things are objectively immoral: pedophilia, child abuse, sexual abuse, bestiality, bigamy, polygamy, adultery and/or incest. They say it’s offensive to associate LGBT people with any of these. Why is it offensive? Well, because those things are “bad”.
Ok, agreed, they are. But here’s the problem: who says they are bad? You? Society at large? Science? Science cannot say anything about morality, because you can’t derive “ought” from “is”. The other options confine you in the realm of relativism.
Therefore, LGBT people have no objective basis to claim that any of those things are inherently immoral (though I have no doubt they feel compelled to, since they too live in God’s world), and therefore no objective basis to be offended by being associated with those things.
There’s only one worldview that provides objective moral values, and that’s the biblical one.
And in the biblical worldview, sex is only moral if occurs within heterosexual wedlock.
But here’s the good news:
God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.
John 3:16
In “the world” and “whoever” are included all people. LGBT, too. Contrary to the claims of many, the reason why we preach the good news is out of love, not out of hatred. And the reason why we point out worldview-defining sin like in the case of LGBT is because when a particular sin becomes what you identify with at your core, then you have a massive stumbling block for believing the gospel. You would like that eternal life, perhaps, but at your conditions, not God’s.
But here’s the thing. God is perfectly good, and we are all flawed and inherently tending towards evil. So what God wants for us is better of what you want for ourselves.
The world has redefined love as always being in agreement with somebody about their preferences and what makes them happy. But that’s foolish. People are constantly drawing happiness and satisfaction from things that are harmful to them: drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, promiscuous sex, easy-yet-illegal money, etc.
Love is having the courage of telling them that they are harming themselves; and that there’s a better option.
Choose better. Choose Jesus.
these [things] have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name.
John 20:31
One thing I like a lot is to make the most out of old devices. I like that in an era where people keep throwing away, I manage to reuse. I like that whilst everyone else changes smartphone every 18-24 months, I manage to survive 5-6 years with the same one. I like that my 2010 MacBook Pro is still serving my wife well and my old PowerBook 12” G4 worked until 18 months ago. And still would if I could be bothered with changing the motherboard.
This week was time to put my old Minix Neo X7 onto a new job. It served me well from 2013, but recently became more and more neglected. I was only using it occasionally to watch RaiPlay (via VPN). Everything else was now available on the Smart TV (and more recently, on my Apple TV 4K).
Anyway, that’s no longer a problem, so the X7 kind of became obsolete. What to do with it? Sell it? It won’t sell. Let’s reuse it.
The Minix Forum was the right place to begin. Easily managed to get hold of a root patch for the version of the software my box was running.
With that, I was able to easily turn my X7 into a VPN router capable of 30Mbps, just needed to connect it to my router via ethernet, use my NordVPN app and subscription, turn on the WiFi HotSpot, and use this tiny app that takes care of the iptables rules for me.
And that’s how a 7-yo Android TV box still serves a purpose in 2020 😉