Reading the Bible Every Morning

For several months now, I been trying to spend some quiet time every morning reading a chapter from the Bible and praying. (For the first few days, I might have read less than a chapter, but on the other hand there were a few mornings that I read more than a chapter.) I'm not a morning person, so when I started this routine, I thought it would be a lot harder than it's been. In all of these months, I've only neglected to spend this quiet time with God a few times. For me, it's mostly been a commitment to have a "quiet time" every morning.

I just wanted to blog about this to remind myself what I've been doing, and hopefully to encourage other people that might want to start spending a few minutes with God every day. It's been a good experience for me, and I'd recommend for others to give it a try, too.

I started this routine by reading the Gospel of John. When I finished John, I think I read Matthew (my memory gets fuzzy after a few months). After Matthew, I read Mark (which inspired me to post a blog entry about what I had read). Then I must have read all of Luke (which I had recently read part of due to the "One Year Bible" project in the evenings with my wife). Then I jumped to the end of the New Testament to read Revelations. After that, I went through Leviticus.

Since then, I've been reading through the Old Testament starting at Malachi going backwards (I start with the first chapter of each book, and then when I finish the book I go to the previous book). I've read Malachi, Zechariah, Haggai, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Nahum, Micah, Jonah, Obadiah, Amos, and Joel.

There's some method to my madness. I'm still reading through the "One Year Bible" every night with my wife. Before this year, I had already read the entire New Testament, but I had only read the Old Testament from Genesis to where I stopped in Isaiah (for no particular reason). So by reading from Malachi backwards, I'm trying to finish reading the Old Testament before the end of December. (If I stay on schedule, I think I'll be able to say that I've read the whole Bible by sometime in November.) The Bible's a big book, but I'm kind of embarrassed that it's taken me so long to finish reading it. (And then, I'll just put myself on a schedule of re-reading.)

Since I finished reading Joel this morning, I plan to start Hosea tomorrow. (By the way, I'm not trying to brag since most of these books that I've read in the morning aren't very long.)

By the way, I've been doing all of this recent Bible reading using the ESV translation (which has been my favorite translation for several months now). I still refer to other translations, but I've been using the ESV as my primary translation for reading and studying the Bible.

Correction: This probably means more to me than anyone else, but I think I started my morning readings by reading the Gospel of Mark. Then I read Matthew and Luke. (I have read John recently, too, but it was part of my "One Year Bible" readings in the evening.) I guess then point is that I've been reading in such a disorganized order that I've lost track of what I read when.

Mike Huckabee on Headline News Tonight

Glenn Beck has mentioned on his radio show that presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is going to be on his nightly Headline News show today (Friday, October 19). It's one of his hour-long interview episodes.

I think Glenn has pretty much interviewed all of the Republicans running for President on the radio (except perhaps Ron Paul) and apparently has offered all of them the chance to sit down with him for an hour, but Huckabee seems to be the first to actually end up doing it (in their defense, some of the others might have fuller schedules).

Cascading into a Crusade Against Dietary Fat

In the first hour of today's Rush Limbaugh show, he discussed a column by John Tierney called "Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus". It's a very interesting article about the main idea of Gary Taubes's new book Good Calories, Bad Calories: that eating fat isn't bad.

The article showed how scientific consensus can come to a faulty conclusion due to a phenomenon known to social scientists as a "cascade": a confident voice can lead others in the wrong direction like sheep that have gone astray. In 1953, Dr. Ancel Keys showed a correlation between how much fat people from a particular country ate vs. how much heart disease was in the population. ("But critics at the time noted that if Dr. Keys had analyzed all 22 countries for which data were available, he would not have found a correlation.") In 1957, the American Medical Association didn't find Dr. Keys' evidence convincing. But Dr. Keys didn't give up his efforts to get his theory support:

But three years later the association changed position — not because of new data, Mr. Taubes writes, but because Dr. Keys and an ally were on the committee issuing the new report. It asserted that “the best scientific evidence of the time” warranted a lower-fat diet for people at high risk of heart disease.

Years later, a Senate committee issued a report written by a non-scientist that relied "almost exclusively" on one particular nutritionist.

That report impressed another nonscientist, Carol Tucker Foreman, an assistant agriculture secretary, who hired Dr. Hegsted to draw up a set of national dietary guidelines. The Department of Agriculture’s advice against eating too much fat was issued in 1980 and would later be incorporated in its “food pyramid.”

Tierney also explained how as politicians became more convinced that the science was irrefutable, scientists began to risk their reputations if they questioned the "fat is bad" theory:

The scientists, despite their impressive credentials, were accused of bias because some of them had done research financed by the food industry. And so the informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom.

John Tierney also has a follow-up article about this topic: How the Low-Fat, Low-Fact Cascade Just Keeps Rolling Along

Google Maps keeps on getting cooler.

I'm a map guy. For as long as I can remember, I've always liked maps. And my favorite kind of map is the free kind. So I'm a big fan of Google Maps (of course, Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps were around first, so they'll always hold a special place in my heart). One thing that I really like about Google Maps is that it keeps on getting better.

I don't know when they "made the magic happen", but I first noticed that they added exit number graphics to Interstates back in June (only a few days after "vafada" noticed). I like having the exit number when I'm looking at which restaurants are on a route that I'm planning on taking, so I really like that they've added the exit number to their maps (before I had to "get directions" to that location to discover the exit number).

Today, I noticed that I can type in a street name (or highway name) and get a map that shows where that street is. It used to be that a street and city wouldn't yield a location unless you provided a street number. (Sometimes, I would literally guess and/or make up street numbers just to get it to show where street is. And it had to be a realistic number.) Now, I can just search based on what I know, and Google will pick a place on that street to center the map. That's very helpful!

Mrs. Technocrat7's blog

My wife started a blog of her own called "Created in His Image". (I'm pretty sure the title is a reference to Genesis 1:27, but I could be wrong.)

Sometimes Secrets Are Necessary

I've been reading the Gospel of Mark in the mornings, and I've noticed a particular perplexing pattern. Why did Jesus ask people to keep so many secrets (such as Mark 5:43, Mark 8:30, Mark 9:9)? I came up with an idea. I wonder if it was because He can't lie. (Was Liar Liar actually based on a true story?)

Jesus didn't lie in His earthly ministry, and He doesn't lie now. (I believe that Jesus has always been unable to lie due to His Holy nature.) Lying would violate Commandment #9 (Exodus 20:16) in the Ten Commandments. Yet Jesus was and is "without sin" (Hebrews 4:15), so didn't ever lie. He could refuse to answer a question (which the Bible records Him doing in Mark 11:33).

I think the secrets were necessary because of timing. He knew that certain miracles (and the knowledge of certain facts about Him) would raise His profile so much among those who felt threatened by His power that He would lose His ability to move around freely. If He couldn't walk about freely, it would hurt His ministry's efforts to reach people.

Since I was sure that I wasn't the only one who was curious about Jesus's apparent need for secrecy, I looked into what my NIV Study Bible contains on the topic (I now prefer to read the ESV translation since I view the NIV as more of a paraphrase than a strict translation, but I still find the commentary and maps of the NIV Study Bible valuable). The note on Matthew 8:4 mentioned three possible reasons:

1. Jesus didn't want to be pigeonholed as "just a miracle worker".
2. He didn't want the publicity of His healing miracles to interfere with His teaching ministry.
3. He didn't want His death to come before He finished His ministry.

Those reasons make a lot of sense to me.

I guess the reason for the secrecy isn't that Jesus won't deny that He performed miracles, but that once everyone starts telling everyone about the miracles that might be all they want to talk about. If all of the witnesses came forward with their testimonies of His miracles, it doesn't even matter that Jesus isn't going to deny doing the miracles that He has done, since people wouldn't believe any such denials anyway.

"Earth 2" has been found ... maybe?

But don't pack your bags quite yet.

Astronomers have finally found a planet outside of our solar system that might be somewhat similar to Earth. As far as we can tell from 120 trillion miles away.

It's only about 20 light years away. And in galactic terms, that's close. But even if you traveled at the speed of light (which is supposed to be the physical speed limit of our universe), it'd take 20 years to get there. (Of course once you take into account the time dilation effect that occurs while traveling near the speed of light, you might barely age during the journey. But everyone back at home would be 40 years older if you decide to make a round trip to the new planet.)

Also, you're probably going to have to buy a whole new wardrobe since I'd suspect the dim red sun would mess up your fashion scheme.

By the way, Mars also qualifies as habitable according to the scientists' high standards (and I don't know of anyone seriously considering a move to Mars), so the climate of this new extra-solar planet may a bit too cool or a bit too warm.

Or the atmosphere (assuming there even is an atmosphere) may smell like dirty socks.

Reading the Bible in a Year

My wife and I have decided that we are going to try to read the whole Bible in a year. Today, we bought a One Year Bible (ESV translation).

We've already read today's passages. So far, so good. It's not the first time that I've started studying Joshua in the middle of the book (a few years ago, I started attending a church group while a study of Joshua was underway). Joshua might not be the easier book to start reading in the middle of, but this way we'll know right away if we start to fall behind.