These are my comments relating to some of the articles found at www.forerunner.com.
Check back for my random thoughts on eschatology, world missions, God's Law and Society, theonomy, Christian Reconstruction, pro-life activism, evangelism testimonies, Neo-Puritan theology and social theory, revival and spiritual awakening, church history, and so on.
Here's a video that has been on The Forerunner pro-life videos web page since 1999. Just this week I re-edited it from scratch and rendered it as a medium band-width streaming video.
It consists of 8mm video I made when I owned a house across the street from an abortion clinic in Melbourne, Florida. I was able to video-tape several emergency calls when abortion doctor William Egherman injured several women.
See video of the fire engines, police cars and ambulances and listen to the 911 calls responding to Aware Woman five times in a 17 month period. Also hear a heart breaking telephone message left on our answering machine from a sorrowful mother who has come face to face with what abortion really is -- the killing of her baby.
Some might wonder why this man has not been prosecuted and has not lost his medical license. Amazingly, the State of Florida says that "perforation of the uterus is a known and common complication of abortion" and not malpractice.
This video speaks for itself. If you want to read the transcript of the 911 calls, go to the pro-life videos web page. Since posting this on YouTube yesterday, I've had several people tell me that they plan to embed the video on their own web pages. You are invited to do that too. Let's get the word out.
This is already becoming my most viewed YouTube video due to the shocking revelation of how common are abortion related injuries -- a supposedly "safe and legal" procedure.
How should Christians use Google to preach the Gospel?
Have you seen Current TV yet? Although not on all cable and satellite networks just yet, Current TV represents a paradigm shift in how we will see television. Viewers upload their short less-than-ten-minute-long documentaries to the Current TV website. Viewers then vote on what "pods" should be broadcast on cable television.
You can see where this is headed when you realize that Google just bought YouTube.com and it soon vaulted to one of the top ten ranked websites. The way we will view television in a few years may be based on RSS "feeds" rather than a schedule of programs on certain channels. TiVo and other DVR cable and satellite services are part of this shift. In a short time, you will be able to view a channel that has both video on demand and scheduled programming.
A friend of mine recently responded to my gushing over the ability to create a Forerunner TV channel using YouTube as a host.
"How should Christians use Google to preach the Gospel?" he asked.
I first assumed he meant that Google is evil and I shouldn't publish my videos there. Later I found out it was a sincere question. Most likely I took a defensive posture because I know all too well that most media conglomerates don't promote anything like a Christian agenda. I've had similar comments about the recent monetization of the Forerunner.com website. Since 1996, I had just plain text on most pages. Now Google ads, DVD ads, and embedded YouTube videos abound. Some claim to be offended by the overt commercialization of the site. Google also pays me a few hundred dollars a month for the Google Ads you see on nearly every page on theForerunner.com website.
It does cost money to do all this and after all is said and done, I'd like to do much better than break even. My goal is to have a great impact for the Gospel through the media and to do that, I need to increase our budget.
Why should I use the Internet? Why should I use video at all? Should Christians not use the media? In my view, not using Google's new services would be like having a Christian TV station that doesn't broadcast. Podcasts and feeds are the direction in which all media is headed. I would be foolish not to go that way too.
Since 1993, I've had a dream to produce a weekly web-based television program. The technology to do this has been available for years. However, in the last year or so we have turned the corner. Already the number of people viewing video blogs and web based TV channels is in the tens of millions.
The reasons I decided to use YouTube to take advantage of this phenomenon:
1. YouTube is free. You can register and start podcasting your videos in just a few minutes. 2. It is one of the highest ranked websites on the Internet. 3. So many people are viewing videos on YouTube that it has created V-log stars overnight. 4. Some Podcasts are viewed by more people than most successful television shows. 5. Google is exploding right now and I intend to ride the Google bubble until it bursts. 6. It takes a lot of server space and extra money to stream large video files from my own site. 7. The traffic I get on YouTube is tremendous compared to the same videos posted on my own web pages.
If you decide to do your own Podcast in audio or video format, you will want to use a service that publishes and promotes your Podcast. You will get a larger, more immediate audience.
I began to realize the obvious only within the last few months. I was stuck in the 1996 Internet paradigm and I've just now begun to make the shift.
I publish my own RSS feeds, but I would have to do an incredible amount of advertising in order to equal what I get just by being on YouTube. In fact, my plan is to publish everything both at my website and through secondary RSS feed sites.
I use Google to publish my Blog at Blogger.com. The RSS feed is served from my website, but gets indexed faster and ranked higher if I publish it via Google.
I am looking at publishing my Podcasts to Apple ITunes as well -- for all the same reasons. The idea is to take advantage of all media that is available to reach the most people.
Here is the latest video podcast. The following is from the script.
A Response to Peter Jennings' The Search for Jesus
On June 26, 2000, ABC television aired The Search for Jesus, a two hour-long special hosted by Peter Jennings. The program took viewers to Israel and interviewed locals, Christian pastors, clergymen and laymen, but Jennings focused mainly on seven experts in the field of researching the historical Jesus.
Four out of seven experts interviewed by Jennings hailed from the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars who make it their life cause to disprove the divinity of Jesus. The other three "experts" interviewed in the program were also skeptics.
Jesus Seminar
There were a few voices of genuine faith in the Jesus of the Bible. But most of the so-called experts were liberal theologians, that is, those who do not believe the Bible to be the inspired and inerrant Word of God. Absent from the program were the great number of well-known and credible historians who have a deep, committed faith in the inerrancy of scripture and the deity of Jesus Christ.
Liberal Theology: The Higher Critical Method
The Search for Jesus relied almost solely on a school of thought called liberal theology or the Historical Critical Method. At the end of the 19th century, a school of liberal theologians arose in Germany. They were called the higher critics. Their proclaimed goal was to isolate the "historical Jesus" from the "God-man" who has been worshipped and adored by the Church for two millennia.
The divinity of Jesus Christ was presumed to be a myth. His many miraculous works were deemed to be legend. The circumstances of His life, His teachings and works were brought into doubt. The effect of these apostates has grown to the current day as they have stripped layer upon layer from the Jesus of the Bible, until they now have a common man.
The claims of the higher critics are nothing new. In the first and second centuries, early Christians had to deal with ridicule and abuse from Jewish rabbis and intellectual skepticism from Greek scholars and philosophers.
Throughout the early centuries, bold apologists for the Christian faith, such as Irenaeus, Tertullian and Justin Martyr, wrote volumes of practical wisdom defending the Gospel from the attacks of pagan critics. Succeeding centuries gave the Church many other brilliant experts in apologetics. But once Christianity had taken hold of the western world, a new breed of skeptics arose out of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
"Voltaire, the noted French infidel who died in 1778, said that in one hundred years from his time, Christianity would be swept from existence and passed into history. But what has happened? Voltaire has passed into history, while the circulation of the Bible continues to increase in almost all parts of the world, carrying blessing wherever it goes" (Sidney Collett, All About the Bible).
"Only 50 years after Voltaire's death, the Geneva Bible Society used his press and house to produce stacks of Bibles" (Geisler and Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible) a great irony of history!
The early American patriot, Thomas Paine, published Age of Reason, a popular book ridiculing Christianity. Although Paine was a Deist and not an atheist, he popularized the theory that the books of the Bible, especially the Gospels, were full of contradictions. This view continues to be popular among scholars even to this day.
In the 1800s, rationalists such as Hermann Samuel Reimarus and David Strauss published sensational works denying the supernatural miracles of the Bible. The philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who coined the phrase, "God is dead," is said to have lost his faith around the time he was reading Strauss's Life of Jesus Critically Examined.
The Jesus Seminar: Liberal Theology Repackaged
Most recently there was the Jesus Seminar, a council of liberal theologians who meet twice a year in an attempt to debunk the accuracy of the Gospels. Many of their "discoveries" are simply repeats of what the liberal theologians of the 19th century said. Strangely, these opinions are rigidly held even though 20th century archaeology and textual criticism has refuted many of their claims.
The Jesus Seminar's attempt to debunk the Gospels as invented history is not based on a thorough examination of the Bible's manuscripts. Unbiased examinations reveal ample evidence that the Gospel accounts are, in fact, historically accurate. But these "experts" are undaunted by facts. Even today, the skeptics continue to spread the error of a "historical Jesus."
Archaeological Evidence for the Validity of the Bible
Liberal scholars up until the time of the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls in 1947 assigned a later date to many books of the Old Testament. They rejected the early date of books that accurately predicted the coming of the Messiah, because so many of the prophecies were fulfilled to the letter.
Since liberals rejected the supernatural in scripture, they presumed there must have been a later date to the writings that accurately described the life of Jesus.
For instance, the second half of Isaiah was deemed to contain forgeries by second century Christians because it contains so many prophecies accurately fulfilled by Jesus' life and mission. Then one of the main pillars of liberal theology fell in 1947 with the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls including a complete Isaiah scroll.
In his prime time special, Peter Jennings does note that Qumran exists.
With the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, we now have an Old Testament in complete form that existed at least 150 years before Christ. All of the books of the Hebrew Bible except Esther are represented in the Dead Sea Scroll collection. Jennings fails to mention this in his documentary.
Jennings fails to mention that the Dead Sea scrolls give us evidence that the Hebrew Bible has been virtually unchanged over thousands of years, including the famous Isaiah scroll that contains many remarkable prophecies about Jesus the Messiah.
For many years, the Higher Critics held that the Bible both the Old Testament and the New Testament had been altered and changed over the years. Therefore, the critics tried to eliminate the myths and discover the historical Jesus.
"The Search for Jesus" rejects or ignores all of the archaeological evidence that supports the claims of the Bible. Throughout the special, Jennings ignores the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament that were fulfilled by Jesus. He also neglects to examine the overwhelming evidence that the New Testament has come down to us in virtually unaltered form.
A favorite slogan of pro-choice (read: pro-abortion) advocates is "Keep abortion safe and legal!" Having lived directly across the street from an abortion clinic for seven years, I disagree. Abortion is never safe even though it is now legal. A few years ago, I compiled some video footage of ambulance calls to the Aware Woman abortion clinic. As far as we know, there were at least five 911 calls to rescue/emergency concerning women who were the victims of botched abortions in a period of less than one year.
Over the weekend, I interviewed two pro-life counselors in Melbourne, Florida who have witnessed these emergency cases resulting from botched abortions. It's a lot more common than people think. I am in the process of creating a higher bandwidth version of the abortion clinic 911 calls video. This will be accompanied by interviews with Dr. Pat McEwen and Lydia Baker.
This streaming video was sensational a few years ago when I first compiled it. The video got thousands of downloads. However, with high speed internet access now so common, I want to offer this superior version. Pro-lifers will have access to the code in order to embed the video in their own websites. Look for the video in a few days at our pro-life videos website.
My prayer is that people's eyes will be open to the danger of abortion both on a physical and spiritual level and that abortion endangers the lives of many women, and it goes without saying, millions of unborn children.
I almost forgot I had these testimonies from people who have used God's Law and Society as curriculum. This is from when the video appeaered on VHS. It's now on DVD at a reduced price.
I used God's Law and Society for a Sunday School class I taught. The videos are very well focused on specific issues regarding a Biblical view of civil government. As one who lobbies on the Second Amendment, I am well aware of the need for Americans, and particularly Christians, to understand that if we are to remain free, we must stand on the unalterable word of God.
- Larry Pratt Gun Owners of America Springfield, Virginia
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Good Stuff! Profound theology packaged for the illiterate.
- Ryan Kidd North York, Ontario, Canada
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I have been viewing the videos for my own instruction, but also with a view to sharing it with my co-workers in China. It is very well done and the 20 minute sections are well suited to group instruction.
- William Moore Little Rock, Arkansas
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I have aired this video on local public access cable. I am starting a church with the Reformed Presbyterian Church in the United States (RPCUS) and love the study guide for teaching the video series.
- Val Finnell El Paso, Texas
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I thought the video was brilliant. I plan on using it for a small group setting. This is a very important subject matter. The application of the Law in a Christians' life must be understood and it shines throughout the video. I really think you have produced one of the most important videos on Christian living.
- Steve Thomasma Grand Rapids, Michigan
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I am also looking forward to showing them with people do not yet understand the importance of God in the totality of our lives, including our government, our workplace, the education of our children and the whole of society. I am in hopes that they will begin to understand. Again, thank you very much for your work.
- Marti Goodson Tonotosassa, Florida
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We have only just begun viewing and discussing your video God's Law and Society! Our adult cell group has for some time been studying the founding of our nation and what our forefathers, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights has had to say about our relationship and the nations when it comes to our worship and service to God. Your video addresses many of these same issues that we have been discussing and will help us to better identify what God's Law is and how we as Americans and individual citizens and Christian church members can better serve Him in our churches and community.
- Terry Jennings St. Augustine, Florida
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I enjoyed the video tapes. It's refreshing to see a work that takes the 10 Commandments (the heart of the moral Law of God) seriously. Those who believe that Old Testament law is invalid need to honestly answer this question. When we read the New Testament do we find the ethical standard changed from the Old Testament? Did Christ and the Apostles reveal a brand new, comprehensive, ethical system? The answer is, No, they assume one. They list sins which are merely asserted as being obviously evil. If we look for a brand new ethical system in the New Testament, we surely will be disappointed. The New Testament everywhere points us back to the Old Testament.
If you've never heard of this video, then please check out the above link. It is the only four-hour long treatment of Christian Reconstruction on DVD featuring many of the movement's leaders (including Rushdoony, DeMar, Sandlin, Gentry, Wilson) and others associated with Reformation of society from a biblionomic approach. The presentation attempts to answer the question, "What would a Christian nation look like?"
From a perpective of historical importance, the DVD has a rare and extensive interview with R.J. Rushdoony.
For a limited time, it will be available at 25 percent off the regular retail price.
I'll give a link in a later blog entry on how people can subscibe directly through an RSS feed. But I already know that out of the thousands of people who download this blog page, most are looking at the HTML web page and only a few dozen are accessing the RSS or XML code via a feedreader. Yes, it will be possible to directly access the videos as stand alone "Pods" to an IPod or a feedreader. You can see how to subscribe to The Forerunner video channel at the YouTube site. I'll write more on that later. I am new to all this myself!
There is some difference of opinion as to what constitutes a video podcast versus a video blog. Some use the terms interchangeably. But technically speaking a podcast is an RSS feed that may be accessed by a stand alone device such as an IPod, while a video blog -- or "vlog" -- is a website that may also be accessed directly through RSS or XML. We are told that eventually all people will subscribe to feeds and that RSS or XML will become the medium of all information and TV channels through high speed cable. We are seeing the beginning of that with Google's purchase of YouTube. Already, many television programs are publishing short excerpts from their programs through YouTube.
For now, I am going to begin by using the Forerunner.com website as the host from which to stream embedded videos. However, if you want to see The Real Jesus video blog, you can bookmark the following page.
Steyn says that in the face of the Islamic threat, the world will be divided between America and the rest and for our sake America had better win.
Although Europe now has more Muslims than ever before, this is mainly due to immigration from Europe's bordering Muslim nations. I think the greatest threat to the United States and Europe is from the radical left and western humanism, not Islam.
Islam will not have a significant influence in America. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists make up less than five percent of the total United States population. That is not likely to change.
Christianity is actually outpacing Islam worldwide:
In 1900, Africa had 10 million Christians or about 9 percent of its population. Today, there are roughly 360 million out of 784 million people or 46%.
Latin America has 480 million Christians.
Asia has another 300 million.
At this rate of growth, Christianity will be the dominant religion with 2.5 billion within the next 25 years.
There will be Muslims who will become radicalized as a result of Christ's victory, but then again, predictions about America becoming Islamic are exaggerated.
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Remember all the doomsday books in the 1970s and 1980s? The killer bees are coming tomorrow, nuclear holocaust is The Day After, followed in a few weeks by new uncurable strains of deadly disease, biological warfare and genetic mutants. If the 1980s were not the Decade of Shock, then we did we learn nothing from the false prophets of the Y2K scare?
By the way, you can get all these books really cheap now!
One of my favorite songs from the early 1970s is a comic ragtime novelty piece by Ray Davies called Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues. It describes the way that conspiracy theorists think.
I read in the news not long ago that it turns out we actually have killer bees in Florida now. But it's not the end of the world as we know it.
The greatest failure among the American pro-life movement is the squeamish attitude toward criminalizing abortion. When so-called "pro-life" Christians call for a restriction on some abortions, what they are really saying is that they want the federal government to regulate child killing much in the way that the FDA regulates the selling of meat and vegetables. There would be no penalties beyond the loss of a license and a stiff fine perhaps.
Nicaragua, a country that was recently communist, has passed into law a six-year prison term for performing illegal abortions with stiffer sentences of up to 30 years for women who had abortions and for those who aided them. The Christians in Nicaragua understand that murdering one's own child is a far more unnatural crime than killing for money.
President-elect and former communist president Daniel Ortega, who once favored abortion rights, changed his stance and supported the law after strongly embracing Roman Catholicism and winning over voters in a country with a conservative religious tradition. Nicaragua is about 85 percent Catholic, with many of the remainder belonging to conservative evangelical churches.
What Ted Haggard's fall could REALLY teach Christians
I usually ignore scandals in the church and don't write about them mainly for two reasons.
1. Sin in the church is not news. 2. Unless it occurs within my own local church or denomination, I am not qualified to pronounce a public judgment -- only the elders of that particular church should do that.
However, I wanted to use this scandal as an illustration of why I left the so-called "evangelical" movement a few years ago. I joined an Reformed church that I consider to be truly evangelical. A truly evangelical church literally preaches the whole Gospel.
The Ted Haggard scandal and the response by "evangelicals" shows the major problem with evangelicalism. The Law of God is not considered to be part of the Gospel -- and is even considered to be an enemy of the Gospel.
The following linked article ("What Ted Haggard's fall could teach Christians") is typical of the reason why the evangelical church in America is in such a bad state. It totally ignores the fact that Ted Haggard was a pastor and leader of an international Christian ministry. It treats him as if he was "Joe Public" pew sitter in need of moral guidance from his peers.
It ignores the biblical law regarding qualifications for elders and deacons. Invariably I hear such pietistic drivel whenever a major Christian leader commits a sin that the Apostle Paul said "deserves death" and was punishable by stoning in the Old Testament.
I have to laugh at evangelicals who say that swift steps must be taken to ensure his restoration to ministry. And woe to us that we could not have fostered an atmosphere in which he could have been more open about his sin and received help!
We are also told by Haggard that all he did was buy some illegal drugs (that he never used) and receive a back rub. Here's the infamous "I didn't inhale" excuse once again. Yet most assume he was removed by his elders for hiding something that is more egregious than this. Otherwise, he would have simply denied that he did anything seriously wrong and voluntarily submitted to rehabilitation or counseling to deal with some personal problems. We are obviously not hearing the whole story and he is still covering something.
Now we are told by some pietists that God is judging him for his "judgment and anger" because he opposed "same-sex marriage." This wrongly assumes that we should forgive Haggard for a crime he has yet to confess and that he was "intolerant" of homosexuals in his own church.
The simple fact of the matter is that the interim pastor at Haggard's church admits that they allow openly homosexual members of their church to receive communion. These people are not subject to church sanctions and Haggard himself fostered an open and "loving" attitude toward sodomites.
It's similar to a pastor I knew in Melbourne, Florida who was never supportive of the pro-life activists in his church because he didn't want people to think of him as intolerant toward the "pro-choice community." It might hinder his ministry toward them. Later during the height of a so-called "revival" in his church in the 1990s that was chronicled by major Christian media, he was exposed in the sin of adultery with the daughter of his church's founder.
The simple fact is that if you are an adulterous pastor, you need abortion to cover your sin. If you are a homosexual pastor, you need male prostitutes in your church to service your sin. And so on.
But this is nothing new. The kings and patriarchs of Israel allowed temple prostitution to go on and rarely enforced the sanctions of God's Law. The kings of Israel multiplied their wives and committed open adultery. What is new is the pervasive pietism among conservative Christians that ignores the Law of God in favor of something they think is "more compassionate" than what God himself requires. It's not enough for us to ignore and violate God's Law, but we also must portray God's Law as harsh and judgmental and beneath our modern sensibility.
Can Haggard be forgiven? Yes of course, that is the heart of the Gospel. Ted Haggard can even be used of God again in some sort of service role in the church or in public life. And if he repents, he can be used soon. But there are temporal judgments for those who commit crimes against the Law of God. He should never again be allowed in an ordained ministry position. In a nation that loved God's law, he would receive some type of civil penalty as well.
We are in such a bad state not because sin is rampant in the church, but because we have forsaken the only valid measure of righteousness and judgment that can bind our conscience -- and sadly I need I define that -- the Law of God.
Last Friday, I listened to a conference call between ministry leaders and Sylvester Stallone. He talked about his Christian faith and described himself as being "reborn" and dependent on church life for help in his spiritual walk.
Stallone also talked about the plot of the new Rocky Balboa movie as having a Christian theme. And, believe it or not, an upcoming Rambo 4 movie will have an even more overt Christian plot. Apparently, Rambo will also be reborn after encountering group of persecuted Christian missionaries in Burma.
If you find this fascinating, follow the link and you can hear the whole phone conversation.
Back in 1995, I owned a house across the street from an abortion clinic in Melbourne, Florida where a lot of pro-life activism was making the news -- sometimes even worldwide. Two Bible college students -- Joel and Ariel -- who were pro-life activists and members of my church had convinced MTV to feature them on their Unfiltered program. This was a series of reality-style shorts about young people with interesting real life stories.
Joel asked me if I would shoot some of the video since I lived across the street from the clinic. At that time, I was thinking that God was about to expand my media ministry into video productions, so I was encouraged by the open door. I was extremely pleased with the program when it came out. MTV was surprisingly unbiased. At the time I thought that Joel and Ariel had a gift for presenting on camera. That was over ten years ago. I still have a low-bandwidth RealPlayer streaming video posted at my pro-life videos site.
Last weekend, we spent several hours taping the stand-up narration for The Real Jesus DVD with Joel and Ariel discussing the segments. Some of it came out great. I plan to begin releasing all ten parts as a YouTube Podcast beginning next week.
One of the warm up exercises they did was to talk about the MTV Unfiltered program and what they think of it now over ten years later. I redid the MTV segment as a medium bandwidth streaming video with Joel and Ariel critiquing it at the end. I will upload the entire video to YouTube tonight. It will also appear at The Forerunner.com website. I'll post the urls here later tonight.
For the past year or so, I've been working on a video documentary called The Real Jesus. Part one is entitled: Debunking the Myths of the Jesus Seminar. It is almost an hour long. I also have a working script that would take several more hours if it were produced in its entirety.
You can read the scripts and see clips from the video here:
Part one of the DVD has been about 90 percent complete since August. I like the way it came out. However, my biggest frustration has been that I am not a professional narrator. I am also not a theologian. So I wanted to recruit a good narrator and get about ten Bible experts in front of a camera to record answers to questions in order to flesh out the remaining ten percent of the project. However, the time and expense required has delayed completing the DVD.
Believe it or not, I work as a teacher and The Forerunner International has been my "hobby" for the past five years. I used to work on Christian media projects full-time in the 1990s. This is the type of project that would have taken a month or two to complete on a full-time schedule. I was recently at the point where I felt terrible that this is still not finished and requires more work.
But here is the good news.
Last week, I had a revolutionary idea on what to do with this video.
But it occurred to me that I might eventually get a bigger audience on YouTube, which has become one of the most popular Internet sites since Google bought it a few months ago. My clip doesn't have a huge amount of traffic so far, but that will change once I advertise the following on my website.
I am going to produce the entire Real Jesus Seminar as a weekly Podcast!
Within the next few months, I expect that thousands of people will have watched The Real Jesus on YouTube (and as embedded video on other websites). In addition to offering one long seminar on DVD, I am going to offer 10 minute weekly or biweekly clips on the Internet. It will be just like having my own TV show. I will also create Podcasts of other videos I've produced.
People will still have the option of ordering the DVD, but I am going to do it differently at first. This way tens of thousands of people will be affected rather than hundreds.
THE PLAN
Let me explain how I came to this conclusion. As I explained, the main log jam I encountered in completing the DVD was in getting good narration and finding some "expert theologians" to do the interviews.
It's not as though theologians are hard to find in central Florida, the main problem is my time and money. I also talked to a video producer friend of mine about hosting the video. That is still an option, but the problem is his commitment to other projects.
Then it dawned on me that I don't need experts to make it appealing. I can just do it in the style of a Podcast -- since that is going to be the format in which most people would want to view it. Essentially, the "stand-ups" can take the form of a round table discussion with two or three friends.
I have two friends in Melbourne, Florida who produced a pro-life video for MTV's Unfiltered program in 1997. (Yes, I know that sounds strange, more on that later!) I helped my friends, Joel and Ariel, with the videotaping since I was around pro-life activism 24/7 back then. I thought at the time that one day we would do a TV show together.
The way all television is going to be done in the future will be Internet based. When I was growing up, there were less than 10 channels to choose from. When cable came around, suddenly we had a few dozen channels. Then came digital cable and satellite with hundreds of choices. Now within a few years, we will literally have millions of Podcast channels on the Internet. Everyone who wants a TV show will have one.
THE FORMAT
When I say that I want to produce a Podcast, really what I am talking about is one or two minutes of commentary within one of the videos that I have already produced. Each Podcast will start with a short introduction:
Introductions: “Hi! I’m Joel” and “I’m Ariel”
Ariel: “This is our program on The Real Jesus. This is a DVD produced by Jay Rogers of The Forerunner and we are going to look at the presentation in 10 parts.
Joel: "We are going to look at part one of The Real Jesus -- this is a presentation that examines the phenomenon of The Jesus Seminar and whether or not Christians ought to take their claims seriously."
Ariel: "What is the Jesus Seminar? First, let’s explain what we are talking about.
Joel: “Apparently, it's this group of liberal theologians who meet once a year and discuss what Jesus really said and did."
Ariel: "So these are people who claim to be Christian theologians but all they do is cast doubt the validity of the Bible.
Joel: “And whenever there is a popular program about the Bible on ABC, the History Channel or the Discovery Channel, these are the so-called "expert" theologians that get the most air time."
Ariel: "As Christians we want to be able to offer another view when we encounter someone who has seen one of these programs. I know I do because my friends always want t know what I think. So watch this and you'll understand more."
Then we will have the video for seven to nine minutes. It would be followed by a wrap-up of a short discussion and summary. "Wow! That's great Joel! How can people get this on DVD?"
Some of the Podcasts will have more discussion. Rather than interview the experts, we will research what the experts have written and quote them as part of a round table discussion. I will appear in some of these as the video producer.
That's it. We will produce the introductions and conclusions to ten programs at a time.
A few years ago people starting putting up streaming videos about their personal lives. It was a newsworthy phenomenon. But webcasting and podcasting have become even more popular now that more people have broadband. Streaming video will soon be up to broadcast quality and beyond. I read somewhere that by 2010, most people will get their television and entertainment this way.
So that's the plan for the weekend. By Monday, I'll write up a report on how it went.
What is the "preterist" view of the book of Revelation?
Are you a person who is concerned with getting to the heart of the truth on difficult biblical passages such as those concerning eschatology?
A few years ago, I produced a video (now on DVD) that explores the preterist view of the book of Revelation. This presentation continues to have a shelf life in that more and more people are turning to this view as they see false predictions related to the dispensationalist view of the End Times fall flat. The Beast of Revelation: Identified is the best primer on the preterist view available on DVD.
People who like to debate eschatology are those who have their minds made up and are passionate about a particular view. People who don't like these arguments are usually those with an untenable view or one they find impossible to articulate. Even so, no two "experts" have the same view on the Book of Revelation. That doesn't mean, however, that there is not a consistently correct view that may be understood. It just means that we need to work harder at it.
The heretical view of preterism can be distinguished from partial preterism in that the latter suggests that many of the prophecies of scripture are fulfilled, but obviously some have yet to come. When I speak off preterism, I am speaking of the "partial" preterist view. Futurism is the "end-times" view of prophecy, while preterism is literally the "before-times" view.
A quick web search will give you the basics. Beware though that some of the information is written by "full" or "consistent" preterists, a view that is seriously deficient in many respects, the main heresy being the denial of the Second Coming of Jesus. The partial preterist view is orthodox in terms of looking with a joyful hope in the bodily Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
John Calvin wrote a preterist commentary on Daniel. I post this at my Daniel website.
Most theologians until the rise of dispensationalism (1800s and 1900s) held a preterist view of Matthew 24 -- the so-called Olivet Discourse. R.C. Sproul in his book, The Last Days According to Jesus, outlines this viewpoint.
Preterism has always been a minority view of the church in interpreting the book of Revelation -- there are some ancient writers who refer to Nero as the "beast of Revelation 13" but it is only in a cursory manner. The fully developed preterist view did not come until after the Reformation when the Bible proliferated in the 1500s and afterward.
I find this strange because Revelation is the "capstone" of other biblical prophecies found in Daniel and Matthew 24. It is inconsistent to interpret Daniel and the Olivet Discourse as having taken place by the time of AD 70, but then place events that are described in Revelation in similar language at the end of human history. A correct view will interpret scripture with similar passages of scripture.
With regards to the book of Revelation, the modern primers on preterism are the writings of David Chilton and Ken Gentry. They draw most of their material from several authors of the late 1800s. You can get the PDF files of all their books for FREE at: http://freebooks.com/
Using “Ultra-Broadband” Wireless Internet to track criminals
Upon hearing this idea, some people will decry the federal invasion of privacy as a violation of first amendment rights. But such an argument is a double-edged sword. Individual citizens also have the first amendment right to publish information about convicted criminals living in their own neighborhoods. Since all criminal proceedings are public records, there is nothing to stop individuals from creating maps of where released and paroled and criminals are living. Individual initiative is going to be used to track criminal offenders on the Internet. In fact, a national database on convicted sex offenders is already available.
The availability and speed of wireless broadband is going to soon expand to a speed that will allow any individual to use real-time video rendering of 3-D maps depicting every square foot of the earth on all types of portable devices.
A simple background check is all that is needed to set up such a nation-wide network. It in fact, such a system already exists. Anyone can pay for a background check for any individual. Websites exist which compile information about individuals and will sell you a complete background check for as little as $9.95. However, the information is free. If you know where to look for each record, you can compile most of this information without any legal regulations.
As a public school teacher in the state of Florida, I am often surprised at how little privacy I have under the law. Some states have laws that prohibit employers from asking applicants to disclose their arrest records unless they were convicted of felonies. Only when hired, are employees subject to a background check. However, in my school district each applicant is asked to disclose not only their conviction record, both felonies and misdemeanors, but also all arrests and even non-criminal traffic tickets. I am also required by law to report any arrest – even a criminal traffic violation – to my school district within 48 hours of the event. I was somewhat shocked that this is allowable, but Florida’s laws don’t protect the so-called “right to privacy” to the same extent as other states.
People are tired of those who prey on young people, so the public’s desire to see criminal offenders ferreted out before any damage can be done overrides any “right to privacy.” I would be surprised if most churches won’t soon require this level of scrutiny for all ministers ordained within their denominations.
While I agree that there is not a “right to privacy” in the constitution (as pro-abortion advocates argued in Roe v. Wade) I am just as concerned as anyone about government intrusion into my private life. Even though I don’t have a God-given “right to privacy,” it is not the civil government’s role to monitor the lives of its citizens on a minute level.
But we live in a changing world. All information on criminal arrests, court proceedings and convictions has long been public record. Those with the time and money to research could always investigate and find out a lot of information about anyone. However, now the Internet makes this information available to anyone at a low cost and at a high rate of convenience.
Soon it will become obvious that having a national database of all criminal records is the way to help put a stop to crime. Currently, a person may hide his past record from friends and neighbors and is only required to divulge his criminal record to employers. But when each person is exposed to public scrutiny, the public embarrassment of being known as a criminal offender will be enough to deter many crimes from happening in the first place.
Let’s say you were robbed at gunpoint at an ATM machine (as I was in October of 2006). The robber escaped long before the police are able to arrive. But using a police dog, they were able to trace a fresh scent to a parking area by a dumpster where it suddenly ended. A police helicopter was called in. The infrared photography revealed a “hot spot” in that area of the parking lot where a vehicle had been. The trace unfortunately ended there, but I was left wondering how advances in technology could have brought it further.
Let’s say that the criminal had a GPS tracking device in his vehicle. The police would locate the exact spot where the vehicle was when the robbery occurred. They would quickly traced the path of the vehicle until the robber could have been arrested.
However, let’s say that the robber was techno-savvy and was able to disable his GPS device. Most public areas will have cameras that will record the make and model of all vehicles including license plate numbers. Even if that were not possible, satellite video would then be used. Even at night it will be possible to trace the headlights of a car from space and then use that tracking system to locate the vehicle of the fleeing suspect.
