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A La Carte (1/17)
- 01/17/11
- 7
I woke up this morning and realized that the house seemed a little bit cold. I checked the weather and saw that it’s currently 19 degrees below freezing and, with wind chill, 26 degrees below. Tomorrow it’s supposed to be 3 degrees above with a bit of rain. Canada has weird weather.
Facebook Hype Will Fade - Here’s an interesting article on CNN forecasting the end of Facebook’s dominance. “This week’s news that Goldman Sachs has chosen to invest in Facebook while entreating others to do the same should inspire about as much confidence as their investment in mortgage securities did in 2008. For those who weren’t watching, that’s when Goldman got rich betting against the investments it was selling.”
What McNuggets Contain - You may have read one of the articles discussing what is inside a Chicken McNugget (saying, for example, that they are 56% corn, that they have an ingredient in common with Silly Putty, etc). This article suggests a surprising answer: chicken.
Who Pays for your Spouse’s Sin? - That’s the question Rick Thomas asks in this article. “Let's suppose my wife, Lucia, sins and I get angry with her as a response to her sin. In such a case, which sadly is how it goes in our home from time to time, I would be punishing her for her sin. I would be acting as ‘God’ by demanding justice, while completely missing the Gospel.”
Legal Christian Publishing in China - Desiring God has reprinted an article from a recent issue of The Banner of Truth Magazine. An “event has occurred that has gone almost completely unnoticed within the Christian community but has the potential of becoming a major milestone in the history of the church. About the year 2003 it became possible to legally publish some forms of Christian literature in the People's Republic of China.”
You Still Can’t Trust Wikipedia - An interesting article from PC World on why Wikipedia still stinks: “Wikipedia at 10 is really no more trustworthy than it was at two, five, or eight years old. However, the reality is that this is how the world prefers its information now: interpreted through the prism of belief and self interest. We get our news from web sites, blogs and television networks that, whether stated or not, have a point of view. It’s not ‘The Truth.’ It’s ‘His Truth. Her Truth. Your Truth.’ Why should we expect our new primary source to be any different?”
Getting to the Heart of Parenting - The deal on Paul David Tripp’s DVD is coming to an end. Buy it now if you want to get it on the cheap.
Old Bible Found - This would pretty much make my day:
That tiny hill in that tiny land is the centre of all history, not only of this world, but of all the countless galaxies and island universes of outer space from eternity to eternity. —Paul Billheimer
I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three young children. I worship and serve as a pastor at 
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This review of the bestselling
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Comments (7)
Regarding the McNuggets, to the lengths someone will go to defend eating junk. If something is 99% chicken and 1% poison, does that make it safe? Well, it’s mostly chicken, right?
The writer agrees that the chemical preservatives are toxic at a certain level, but then reasons that if they are diluted so much as to be “approved” for frying. So if you dilute Arsenic a bit, you are safe to drink it, but only if some regulating agencies approve it (because as we all know, the FDA never makes a mistake)? This type of logic does not make sense, but then again it appears this writer will go to great lengths to defend his consumption of what modern man has come to love: fast junk food.
Notice also the mention of “hydrogenated soybean oils”, a compound now (agreed upon without controversy) to cause coronary heart disease. Many U.S. cities have banned its use.
In the case of Wikipedia, I just got done responding to someone who wrote on my blog that Answers in Genesis (the folks behind the Creation Museum) uses junk science.
In truth, no factual information exists without worldview taint. As human beings, we bring our preconceptions to nearly every fact that exists. We even read our worldviews into the Bible and then come up with odd interpretations of the inerrant Scriptures.
Walter Cronkite may have ended his news broadcasts with “and that’s the way it is,” and he may have had the title of “The Most Trusted Man in America” but that Walter Cronkite’s worldview and that of the newspeople around him were colored by preconceptions.
No repository of facts is immune from this truth. Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, and on and on—all have an undercurrent of worldview bias supporting their “facts.” No person on the planet toady has pure knowledge. The gaps and worldview preconceptions lurk underneath everything we know. If we acknowledge this, we go a long way toward digging deeper toward the core of truth, but if we ignore that taint, our own taint only gets worse.
@ Michael: How do you define poison? Even too much water can be “toxic at a certain level.” It seems to me the bigger problem with fast food is people not using their brains (as the author points out).
Thanks for the McNuggets article link! I don’t eat them, but it was an interesting article, especially the point about eating food containing ingredients that I can’t pronounce.
On that basis, can we trust PC World?
DLE is right — there is only one written information source that is free from fallacious bias and perfectly reliable. God breathed that one. Everything else is susceptible to subjectivity, taint, and/or abuse.
That said, it’s entirely possible that Wikipedia is unreliable *to a degree* that makes it not worth using for anything debatable, and it would be nice to have enough information to make that judgment. But the problem is not that it’s perfectly reliable — nothing is — and framing it that way tells me nothing about whether Wikipedia is “good enough for everyday use.”
@Kate, poison is defined as “a substance that through its chemical action usually kills, injures, or impairs an organism.” Eating these chemicals injury the body, but at a level that does not show up for years.
The problem with people today is that if we don’t get sick and die immediately after eating these things, there’s nothing “bad” about these foods. But history tells a different story, as years later we discover the effects. Sure, the damage of one McNugget can be repaired by the body. But how many nuggest are kids today going to eat in their lifetime. There is a long history of this type of thing: cigarettes, trans fats, margarine, BHT, aspartame, etc.
The more chemically-altered ingredients we add to food, the more we damage the body. Of course this makes perfect sense if the same Creator created both the human body and it’s food source.
Hi, Tim. Just wanted to let you know that the article about Wikipedia is actually hosted at PC Magazine (not PC World).