This I believe, pt. 3 - Jesus Christ died and rose again

Sorry it's been so long since my part 2 post.  I really meant to do these in more rapid succession.

When I say that I believe Jesus Christ died and rose again, I think that belief is supported aside from any reliance on the Bible.  I think there is more than adequate historical evidence that a man who went by the name Jesus (although I think in his native Hebrew or Aramaic, it was probably something closer to "Yoshua") lived in Israel in the opening decades of the common era, and that he was executed as a criminal by crucifixion by the ruling Roman government.  I really doubt that there are many people who would seriously dispute that.

He had a small group of close followers that we today refer to as the disciples or apostles. And several members of this group proclaimed that he rose from the dead after the crucifixion, and spent many days walking, talking, even eating with them.  Now, I expect that there are many who would dispute that.

But there is one historical fact that convinces me that it is true.  Virtually everyone of those original apostles died a martyr's death before the end of the first century, solely because of their proclamation of that fact.

So, you might say, many people through history have died for what they believed in.  That doesn't prove anything.

Yes.  People die for what they believe in.  But they DON'T die for something they know to be a hoax or a lie.  These apostles had every reason to KNOW with certainty that what they were saying about Jesus having come back to life was true.  They claimed that they had seen him, that he had talked with them and taught them, that they had touched him, that he had asked for something to eat and consumed it in their presence, that he had cooked breakfast for them over an open campfire.

Either those things were true, or else they knew that they had all conspired together to make it up for some unknown reason.  And everyone of them clung to the proclamation of its truth, even to their own death.

No one dies for something they know to be a lie.

So I conclude that Jesus did, indeed, rise from the dead.

And if he did that, then I conclude that validates every claim that he made to being the Son of God.  And it gives untold authority to everything else he said and did through his life. And it means that there are a whole lot of things I can conclude and safely rely on based solely on the things that Jesus taught.

One is the nature of the God that, in part 2, I concluded exists.  Jesus proclaimed several things about God that were revolutionary in his time.  One was addressing him as "Father", in a close, personal relationship.  This was revolutionary in the Jewish thinking. God was holy, majestic, glorious, awesome, and basically unapproachable except through the priests. But Jesus addressed him as "Daddy" (the modern equivalent of the Aramaic word he used). And he said, "You want to know what God's like?  Look at me.  He who has seen me has seen the father."

So I conclude that not only is God a being of unimaginable power and intelligence, as we can see through nature, but that he is personal, with a relationship with his Son.

And according to what Jesus taught, God cares about each one of us just as much.  And I believe his resurrection validates his teaching.

Boycott Chase!

Chase Bank doesn't get it!

The whole point of the recent congressional hearings on credit card abuse, together with the subsequently enacted rules changes, is that consumers are sick and tired of being manipulated and abused by the banks who have all the power in the credit card game.

But Chase just doesn't get it.

Earlier this week, I got this "Important Notice Regarding Changes to Your Account".  It read, in part.

"Your minimum payment due will increase from 2% to 5% of the ending balance on your monthly statement..."

Whaaaattt?   I owe over $13, 000 on that card.  That means my minimum monthly payment is going to jump from somewhere around $260 a month to $650 a month!  For no reason at all! just because they can!

In the past, whenever there has been a change to account terms, it seems like there's been a paragraph that says something like "If you do not want to accept these terms..." and basically says you can close your account and continue to pay off your balance under the existing terms.  Not this time. Uh-uh.  We're going to do it to you, and you have no choice but to take it.

I even called customer service and told them that those terms were not acceptable and I wanted to close the account and continue to pay it off under the existing terms.  He said, "I'm sorry, you do not have that option."

I asked, "How can you unilaterally change my repayment terms?"  And he replied, basically, we can to any thing we want.  This is a direct quote: "We can demand payment of 100% of the balance in the next 30 days if we choose to." The arrogance!

I'm obviously not a lawyer, and I probably haven't kept the 15 pages of fine print "terms and conditions" that they sent me when I opened the account, so I can't really say whether they legally have that right or not.  I'm going to assume that, being a big corporation with lots of high-powered lawyers, if they say they do, then they probably do. (At least under current law. Maybe that needs change.)

But whether they legally have that right or not, to exercise it in the cavalier manner they have chosen to, with total disregard for their customers,  is absolutely unconscionable.

Understand, I'm not a deadbeat.  I've occasionally run up more debt than I should, but I have always paid it off. Aside from maybe 1 or 2 statements that have gotten lost on a messy desk, I don't think I've missed a payment on any of my credit cards in the 30 years I've been using them.

I had cancer a few years ago.  During that time, I was unable to work, and my (then) wife was taking care of me, so she couldn't work.  For some period of time, we lived on the generosity of friends and, mostly, credit card advances. We ran up a very substantial credit card debt.  But even when the payments were consuming well over half of my limited disability income, I never missed a payment.   And I have completely paid off 4 of the credit cards, with only 2 to go (both of them being Chase cards).  So they had no reason to single me out for this action.

Chase (well, actually Washington Mutual, which has been acquired by Chase) has been my preferred bank for quite some time.  But I refuse to do business with a company that shows such complete disdain for the rights of its customers.  I will be moving every account I have with Chase to another bank as soon as I conveniently can, and I would call on all my readers (both of you! LOL) to do the same.

I would also call on Congress to look into further curbs on the power of big banks.  It appears that arbitrarily raising minimum payments was not one of the powers that was limited in the recent reforms.  We were warned in the press that if Congress took away the powers that banks had to stick us with punitive interest rates and fees, the banks would find other ways to stick it to us, and it appears that they have.  Congress, we need to change that, too.

This I believe, pt 2 - There is a god

Note that I used a lower case 'g' on that title. At this stage of my apologetic, it can't be said that I'm necessarily talking about the Jehovah, the God of the Bible.

But, in my thinking, the fact that there is a supreme being of unimaginable power and intelligence is abundantly clear from the world around us. The only ones who can possibly deny that are those who have taken as a presupposition that there is no god.

Let me clarify what I mean by that. In any kind of logical reasoning, you start from some point, with some set of "givens", and construct your argument from the implications of those givens. They may be called axioms, or assumptions, or presuppositions. But within that sphere of logical reasoning, nothing can be permitted to contradict those givens.

One of the arguments heard in the evolution debate is that Christians accept God on "faith", the implication being that faith somehow contradicts reason. But the evolutionists have "faith", too - faith in their assumption that there is no god. And I conclude that it takes a great deal more "faith" in that assumption to reach the evolutionary world view than it does to accept the position that there is a god, and he created the world we live in.

I am NOT saying that one needs to start with the assumption that there is a god. One merely needs to eliminate the assumption that there is NOT a god. If you have that assumption, then you must bend and twist and look at the evidence from all manner of cock-eyed angles in order to avoid the conclusion that there is a god, because that contradicts your assumption. If you eliminate that assumption, than you are free to look at the evidence straight on, and my conclusion is that the evidence overwhelmingly points to the existence of a creator-god.

I remember some years ago hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park, and looking up in awe at the majestic rock formations towering hundreds of feet above me, and thinking, "And this was merely an afterthought of God's creative efforts." Okay, you can argue that that's merely the force of nature at work. But there are other arguments that suggest it is more than that.

I remember hearing one time (sorry, I can't remember the source) a man pick up a shoe, and saying "This shoe proves the existence of God."
And his listener replied "How?"
The man replied "Who made the shoe?"
"The cobbler."
"And who made the raw materials that the cobbler used to make the shoe."
"The cow."
"And what did the cow eat go grow?"
"Grass"
"And who made the grass?"

and so on, and so on. Eventually you get back to the "prime mover", the "first cause", something or someone made it all happen. Even if you subscribe to the "big bang" theory, where did this energy and matter that went into the "big bang" come from? Now the evolutionists at that point will say "Now you're getting out of the realm of science and into the realm of religion, and we can't answer that question." Well, duh, that's the point. You can't answer that question without violating your assumption that we there is no god, and that therefore we live in a closed universe free from anything that has to do with the supernatural.

But the thing that they miss is that the entire discussion is outside the realm of science. Evolution is not science. Science deals with the observable, the reproducible, the testable. You observe facts, you propound theories, you construct experiments to test your theories, and others can reproduce your work to verify it. Evolution does none of those. It cannot observe the origin of life, it cannot reproduce it, it cannot conduct experiments to test its theories. And just because 90%, or whatever the percentage is, of people accept a theory, does not mean that it is not still a theory.

So I believe that nature shows us that god exists, and that he is being of unimaginable power and grandeur.

But I believe nature also shows us that he is a being of supreme intelligence. I cannot understand the huge brouhaha over "Intelligent Design". It appears to me so obvious. If you're hiking in a desolate area, and you come upon, let's say, a watch, you don't pick it up and say, "My look at how these elements randomly assembled themselves into this watch." No, of course not. You conclude that someone was there before you and dropped the watch, because it's obvious that it was designed by an intelligence. [I know this is the age-old watchmaker analogy which has been "refuted", but all the "refutations" that I can find simply say, "no, natural selection can explain that design." Well, in my mind, it's a matter of which explanation makes more sense. Again, the natural selection argument is viable only if you start from a position that absolutely denies the possibility a god.] Nature in general, and the human body in particular, is of unimaginably complex design. To believe that it came about by mutations or other transformations happening randomly is beyond ludicrous. I remember someone once saying that's about as likely as an explosion in a type-setting factory producing the Encyclopedia Brittannica (obviously from a far earlier time when we still had encyclopedias!).

There is far more within the sphere of "Intelligent Design" than I want to go into here that, to my mind, clearly demonstrates that, not only is the god I believe in a god of supreme power, but also one of incredible intelligence.

And thus, I believe that god exists.

This I believe, pt 1

A friend posted the video below to his facebook page a week or so ago, with the comment "PLEASE TAKE TIME TO WATCH THIS VIDEO! I HOPE IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE LIKE IT HAS CHANGED MINE RECENTLY!!!!" (thanks, Josh).

I found it compelling and yet disturbing. There is much that he says that I'm in full agreement with. And it's hard to say that there are things he says that I disagree with, because everything he says comes from scripture, and he's not misquoting it or misinterpreting it. And yet I find I strongly disagree with the overall message that seems to be coming through. Maybe it's what he doesn't say that I disagree with.

Watch these videos (it was posted a few days ago on YouTube in two parts, and that's the easiest for me to incorporate), and then read my thoughts below.

The Fire Part 01

The Fire Part 02

What he seems to be saying without saying it, is stop sinning so much and you won't go to hell. Nowhere does he ever talk about trusting in Christ for salvation, about being saved by God's grace, "not of works". And the monstrous problem with his message is, how do you ever know if you've stopped sinning "enough," if you've loved God "enough", if you've brought forth "enough" fruit? How can you be assured of salvation?

I heartily agree with his contention that we value the forgiveness of God far too cheaply. I agree that if we are truly saved, there will be fruit in our lives. But he seems to be saying that it's up to us to produce that fruit. He almost seems to be saying that anything less than sinless perfection means that you hate God and are going to hell.

I am a believer in Jesus Christ. I don't want to compare myself to others, but I think I take more seriously the claims of Christ and expend more effort in seeking to know him than most Christians I know. But I sin. I probably sin in areas I don't even recognize as sin. The Jews were commanded "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might". I know I don't do that perfectly, and not doing that perfectly is sin.

What this guy (Nate Pfeil, by the way) is saying strikes me as very much at odds with what I, as a lifelong "Evangelical" Christian, have been taught - that our salvation is dependent solely on our trust in the completed work of Christ, and, while it is our responsibility to surrender to God's work in our lives, it is the work of God through the Holy Spirit to bring forth the fruit in our lives.

And yet, as I said, his points are scriptural. So have I been led down the primrose path by, in his words "lying preachers, wolves in sheep's clothing?" As he says, his message is serious. The consequences of getting it wrong are too high. So it's prompting me to want to step back, re-examine and re-think what I believe and the basis for it. And I'm thinking, let's go ALL the way back, to "There is a god (and I'm not him!)". So I think that's what I'm going to do, and doing it in these pages will force me, I hope, to clarify my thoughts and the reasons behind them.

Stay tuned.

My website works on my machine, but it won't work on GoDaddy. How come?

Okay, as I said in my last post, I see a lot of posts in forums and newsgroups dealing with web development that are somewhere along the line of the title.  And it may be GoDaddy, or it may be some other shared hosting company.

I started writing this post about a week ago, and trying to recount my experiences chronologically became too long and rambling, so let me just list some of the problems that I have encountered.  I may expand on some of them in future posts.

1. You don't have control of your execution environment on a shared hosting service like you do when you're running on your own machine. You don't have control over what software has or hasn't been installed, or what the machine configuration settings are, etc. The first problem I encountered was that I had installed the MySql Connector that interfaces the .NET framework to a MySql database.  GoDaddy hadn't, or at least didn't have the same version that I had and that my program was expecting. (And they couldn't or wouldn't tell me what version, if any they did have.)  The work around is to make sure your program/website is completely self-contained, so that you're not relying on anything on their environment (in my case, by copying the MySqlData.dll into the "bin" directory of the website I was publishing to GoDaddy).

2. You're running in what is known as a "medium trust" environment in a shared hosting server.  Chances are, unless  you have deliberately configured it, your development and  test environment is a "high trust" environment.  What this basically means is that there are a whole  lot of perfectly legitimate things that your program might want to do that are simply not allowed in the medium trust environment.  This is worth a whole post of its own, but just let me say that, if you're going to be hosting your site on a shared hosting server, set up your development and test environment  for medium trust (I'll cover how in another post.  For now, if you need to know how, google it.)  You will save yourself a whole lot of headaches.

3. The database servers are probably different in some respects from what you're running on in development.  This will be particularly true in the case that you're using MySql (which I was), rather than Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL).  There are two noticable differences, even though I was running MySql in my development environment as well. 

One is that the MySql server that was in my development environment was running on a Windows machine.  There's is running on a  Linux server.  Yes, the web server is hosted on a  Windows machine, but the database that it connects to is running on a  separate machine which is Linux.   The  key difference is that MySql on Windows is not case sensitive, while on Linux it is.  So a command like "SELECT productID FROM Products WHERE Sku=@Sku"  will work fine on a Windows base MySql Server, even if the columnname is actually productid and the table name is products.  But it will fail if that same database is hosted  on a  Linux server.

The second area of concern is that the security is much tighter on GoDaddy's database servers. Specifically, you cannot access anything outside of the database you're connected to, even if you have permissions for it (I'm  not sure how you would specify permissions for it.)  As a result, you are not even permitted to specify the database property of a table.  If you're not  aware of it, this can be a problem, because the MySql Connector that  interfaces with Visual Studio, by default, generates insert, update and delete commands that reference the tables as <databasename>.<tablename>  (E.g., INSERT INTO MyDB.Customer (CustomerName, ...) ) Even though the databasename is, in fact, the database that you are connected to and working with, simply specifying the database name will  kick the statement out on a permissions violation.  (The first time I saw this error, it said something like my Insert statement failed because I didn't have proper permissions, and I was on the phone complaining irately to GoDaddy Support that they had set up my database without giving me write access into my own tables!  It took  me a while to understand exactly how it worked.)

Another area where this comes into play is that, when you're dumping and restoring a database, you may have to edit the SQL that's generated to remove certain parameters.  When you define a View, the MySqldump will dump the CREATE VIEW statement with a "DEFINER" attribute.  Even  though the DEFINER is you, that will cause the statement to fail if you try tor use it to  restore the database on GoDaddy's servers.

Also, GoDaddy, allegedly for "security reasons" will not permit you to define your own stored procedures in your database (and don't tell you that until you try it and it fails with some obscure error!).  I'm not that good with databases, and so far, I've only had one instance where I was trying to use a stored procedure.  Fortunately, I was able to program around that one fairly easily.


So,  those are the three main areas.  There's probably some small incidents here and there that fall outside those bounds.  But that covers most of it.  And there are ways to work around all  of them. It's just a question of  how much work   you have to go through to do it.

I will try to expand on the "medium trust" issue in  another post.

Hosting a Website on GoDaddy

I'm going to make this short right now, and post more in future days, hopefully.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to share what I had learned about hosting a website that I've developed on a shared hosting service, specifically, GoDaddy.com. 

In reading various ASP.NET forums, I am constantly seeing posts that say something like "I developed this website, and it works great on my development server, but it won't come up at all (or misbehaves in some particular way) when I port it to my hosting service."  Which was exactly my experience when I brought up my first site nearly a year ago.  And I solved a lot of problems, one at a time, and learned a lot, before I got it running. (BTW, it's broke right now, and I'm working on finding time to get it fixed.  Soon.)

But before I do post any of those lessons, I wanted to share a post made earlier this week by Joe Stagner of Microsoft. It's a 45-minute video on
Creating, Updating, and Publishing Web applications with Visual Web Developed Shared Hosting.

In it, he goes through the mechanics of loading your site to your hosting service, establishing your database, administering your site etc.  The particulars vary depending on your hosting company (and, unfortunately, none of them are remotely close for GoDaddy) but the basic idea is there.

I was disappointed that he did not go into some of the development issues to keep in mind - things you are allowed to do on your own machine that are guaranteed to break spectacularly when you put your application in a shared hosting environment.  But maybe he will in subsequent installments.  He did say this was the first of a series.

And, if not, all the more reason for me to write my posts...

Facebook

I have a confession!  Until recently, I was not on facebook!

It really was more that I just couldn't be bothered than that I was actively resisting.  But I kept getting more and more invitations from friends, and discovered that you really couldn't nose around and see anything about what your friends were doing unless you had an account there.  (Fair enough, I suppose.)

So, a few weeks ago, I relented and created an account.  And since then, I have been amazed at the number of people that I really do know that are there.   Some that I haven't seen in 40 years!  But I'm even more amazed at the number of times it (facebook) will suggest that I might know someone, and way more often than not,  they're right.  And I scratch my head and say, how on earth does it know that?

Be that  as it may, it appears that facebook is becoming (or has become) something of a phenomenon.  My friend George Hillman posted an entry on his blog the other day which caught my eye: Why aren't you on Facebook? In it, columnist Farhad Manjoo says that facebook has followed a similar evolution to that  of the cellphone - from an elitist gadget to something that is simply expected.  Facebook recently announced reaching a milestone of 150 million user accounts.

Anyway, I'm enjoying catching up with a lot of people that I wouldn't have otherwise.  There are certainly some objectionable possibilities, Mark Davis points out, you have complete control over what you do  with it and what you make of it.