Terry said:

There is a follow up book to “How Wide The Divide” called “The New Mormon Challenge.”

Terry, that’s one of my favorite books. I saw it more as a follow-up to Mormon America, but maybe I’m wrong, or maybe it’s both. In literature aimed at Mormonism, there is definitely a movement within Christianity away from vitriol and invective toward more scholarly material.

I believe there is enough error in Mormonism that there’s no need to make stuff up or sensationalize things. I didn’t read any “anti-Mormon” literature when I was in transition, and I honestly don’t think that material is effective at all.

My conversion happened as I read the Bible and compared and contrasted its message with the claims of Mormonism. I read a few “pro-Christian” books in the process. The few anti-Mormon books I skimmed through always made me feel like I was being attacked. I never had any interest in reading that. Once I found the LDS church to be false, there were a number of issues I had to grapple with, and books like The New Mormon Challenge helped me do that without making me feel insulted for what I used to believe.

It’s my opinion that Evangelicals will move forward with Mormons only through honest dialogue and a focus on the good news of Christ—but I don’t think you need to be told that. You’ve already started an even-spirited dialogue with Steve in another thread. I hope you guys both learn something.

Just a quick post to announce that the “wedding pictures”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeyday/sets/149656/ are up. Enjoy!

Well, I’ve gone and joined the internet craze that is [Flickr]. Feel free to snoop through “my photos”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeyday/. So far I’ve uploaded the same ones that are available at “janeneday.com”:http://www.janeneday.com, but in time I’ll be uploading actual wedding pictures. I’ve had at least one request and I intend not to dissappoint.

I’ve also installed a WordPress extension called “Flickit”:http://chancecube.com/flickit/. It allows me to post my Flickr images to my blog, like the one to the left.

Anyone else using Flickr out there? I’d love to see your photos, too. Post a link in the comments below.

Can someone kindly explain to me what Netscape’s designers were thinking when they designed “this atrocious looking beast”:http://browser.netscape.com/nsb/?

If you followed that link, then you know this post is about the new Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta. I happen to be typing this entry from within the new browser, and I must say, it’s got some intriguing options. Unfortunately, it’s so ugly I’m not sure I can bear using it for much longer.

The browser itself is a rebuild of the excellent [Mozilla Firefox]. It’s light, fast, and has all the features you’ve come to expect in a good browser, e.g. tabbed browsing, popup blocking, etc.

It seems mostly customizable, but for some reason I can’t seem to remove the search box from the toolbar. I can remove the address box, but not the search box. How odd is that? As far as I can tell, every other toolbar feature can be customized.

I also noticed some quirkiness with shorcut keys the first time I used the program. At first I thought it didn’t have the standard Ctrl+N, Ctrl+T, and Ctrl+W keystrokes to open and close tabs and windows. Restarting the browser seems to have knocked the keystrokes into action, though.

Perhaps the most interesting “feature” is the ability to display sites using either the Netscape (Gecko) rendering engine or the Internet Explorer engine. The wacky thing is that, by default, it uses IE’s engine to display sites you designate as “trusted”, and the Gecko engine to display all other sites. Changing the defaults isn’t difficult — I’ve set mine so it never uses the IE engine — but why should I have to tell this browser to use its own engine? If I wanted to use IE’s engine, I would open IE, thank you.

The new browser comes a long way from the old Netscape dinosaur, but it’s just quirky enough that I’m certain I’ll stick with Firefox.

I have been privileged to study four different languages in my as yet short lifetime. In middle school I took a year of German; in High School it was Latin; at the University I was required to take a semester of Spanish; and recently I’ve been dabbling in Koine Greek with the help of some do-it-yourself books. How much of these languages has stuck remains to be seen.

I didn’t make it far enough in the first three languages to be anywhere near fluent. More than anything they helped me to understand universal principles of grammar and how to apply them better to my English. I’m hoping to go a little farther with the Greek, God willing.

One thing about learning languages struck me recently, though. In every language I’ve learned, “to be” was one of the first verbs I was required to study. In Greek, Latin, and Spanish, “to be” is an irregular verb. The tense, number, and person must be memorized—you can’t simply follow the rules to conjugate it like you can with other verbs. Consequently, it’s also a verb you spend a lot of time with.

When learning any verb, the first conjugation you learn is the first person singular present tense. Let that sink in for a second. Can you see where I’m going here?

When Moses asked God what to call him when he delivered his message to the Israelites, God told Moses to say that “I AM” sent him ((Exodus 3:14)). “I am” is, of course, the first person singular present tense of the verb “to be”. The personal name of God, Yahweh (or Jehovah), is closely related to the term “I am”. It means, loosely, “the one who is” ((For a fuller treatment of the meaning of “Yahweh”, see the Tetragrammaton article from Wikipedia.)).

So, one of the first words you learn when studying any given language is God’s name. I’m not sure if this holds any significance, but I find it very intriguing.