Thought ONE:
"Computers are like heroin."

Thought Two:
The birth rate in the Gaza strip is 5.91 children born/woman on average.

Thought Three:
Salah (also known as "salat", "solat", "solah" and several other spellings) (Arabic: صلاة, Qur'anic Arabic: صلوة) refers to the five daily ritual prayers that Muslims offer to Allah/God. The salah must be performed in the Arabic language even if the person neither speaks nor understands Arabic.

i actually have thoughts today! too many, actually. should i overdose today or save some for an unthoughtful day...?

thought one:
original thought is pretty much impossible. or close to it. seriously though... how vain to think that one could formulate something that nobody else has in the last 5 thousand (or so) years. it'd be pretty hard. unless you had (or "one had") a profound revelation about something like blogging or ipod, both relatively new inventions. but still, considering the sheer amount of persons acquainted with those things (ahhh! don't ever write "thing," rebekkah!), one would have to attain to a pretty intense level of knowledge about them to be "original." thus the reason i will never a) become a great theologian B) make a million on technology c) write terribly enlightening and moving blog thought entries.

thought two:
when interacting with a person whose outlook on life/ theology/ whatever is completely alien or contradictory to yours, is it a good idea to focus on the similarities in thought/ common ground? for instance: hno. andres and Muslims... he has attained a great degree of access to high officials in Hamas (the Islamic group within Palestine) and others because he focuses on shared ground AND DOES NOT ATTACK WHAT THEY BELIEVE. and this is bro. andrew... he's not going to be watering down the gospel. he preaches that Christ died on the cross and rose again, contrary to Islam. but he does not point out everything wrong with Islam, and thus conveys respect to his audience, who admire his audacity and Christ-like spirit. he builds upon their admiration of the prophet Isa to convey the truth of the SAVIOR, Jesus the Son of the Most High God. is this the "right way" to evangelize? or is it too tolerant? needs meditation.

thought three: (or thought two-and-a-half, as it's related:)
Is the Muslims' Allah, to whom they pray 5x a day, the same as our Lord God, as they claim (i'm pretty sure it's a pandemic assumption)? by the same token, is the Jews' Adonai, the one to whom they pray however and whenever, the same as our triune God? uh-huh... chew on that one for a while...

thought three:
Regarding: being...
existance... is WHAT? ideas: a thing can be said to exist if it can be perceived by another... "perceiving" entailing the sense and the mind... that part gets sketchy. because to think about something means nothing more than the fact that that idea exists. i'm considering the ramifications of existing "needing" another to define its existance... crazy stuff... i *think* i'm outta my league on this one...

other thoughts shall wait.

Ah, humanity.

I depress myself: i just viewed my blog, saw i had a comment, got excited and then found myself rather crushed as it was spam offering me the chance to invest in hardwood trees.

original thoughts, i promise.

thought one:
how much would it take for my existance to be justified?

thought two:
1 corinthians 13 love for God... man... to be patient with Him (His timing), spontaneously kind to Him, to be content with/ in Him and what He has given (Heb. 13:5), to boast ONLY in Him, to be humble before Him ("a meek and a quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God"), to have faith in Him... as a gift- of love. hmmmm.

thought three: (possible devo topic someday)
THE MEASURE OF A BELIEVER:
~what does it take to be a Christian? ... to "believe" in Jesus? truth, but that word's got to go or be redefined. let's reference james 2:19, shall we? "Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. " ...which is more than some of us do! so believe beyond intellectual consent, yeah, yeah, yeah...
assuredly, we're not to judge others, but we've got to have a working definition, if only for conceptual purposes.
how 'bout good ol' bro green:
*going to church doesn't make you a Christian anymore than going to McDonalds makes you a hamburger... praying doesn't make you a Christian; people of all religions pray... what's a Christian? i've got a really good definition for you: someone that's bananas for Jesus. SOMEONE WHO LOVES THE LORD THY GOD WITH ALL HIS HEART, WITH ALL HIS MIND, WITH ALL HIS STRENGTH. and don't forget the second part... AND LOVES HIS NEIGHBOR AS HIMSELF...*
with above definition of "love," that makes being a Christian pretty exclusive indeed...

this is how english 1302 ends/ not with a bang but a whimper

Thought One:
I'm trying to formulate it... something about how we (or youth) SHOULD NOT believe something because someone(s) we respect teaches us it... we should believe because it is the truth.

that's all for today. mr. graves said i should get a ph.d. i said if i was, i'd go to seminary. what what what about the future?!?

i'm going to name my car fredericka

"So feminism concluded that men, despite being idiots, were on-target about how we should live our lives. "

Thought One:
"...two bad ideas[:] One was the idea that women should be promiscuous. The other was that women should place career above childrearing.Both ideas were promoted by the feminist movement, yet there is a profound irony: both ideas are stubbornly contrary to the average woman’s deepest inclinations. Both ideas, in fact, were adopted unchanged from the worldview of the folks feminists claimed to hate -- male chauvinists. There is a pop-sociology concept called "imitating the oppressor," which means that when a group struggles for a new identity it tends to adopt the values of whoever it perceives to be holding power. Thus, anything that looked "feminine" made feminists uncomfortable, because in the opinion of men it was weak. Why we should think that men were smarter than our mothers and grandmothers was never clear. Most of the time, we acted as if men were made only a little higher than pond scum. Yet we accepted unquestioningly that a man's life was the ideal life. Everything about men seemed more serious, more important. We felt embarrassed at our soft arms, and betrayed by our soft emotions. Motherhood was a dangerous sidetrack, a self-indulgent hobby that could slow you down. That's the way men saw it, and who were we to argue? Whatever men treated with contempt was contemptuous; whatever men valued was valuable. And what men valued most was success."

i'm kind of embarassed i keep quoting from Gary's blog. original thought, carambas! or at least original sources... but it's just so good.

Thought Two:

"This is why the fight against legal abortion cannot stand alone. If we could padlock all the abortion clinics tomorrow, we’d see the next morning a line 3200 women long pounding on the doors. We wouldn’t have solved the problems that make their pregnancies seem unbearable. We wouldn’t have changed the context that normalizes promiscuity and undermines a woman's authority to say no. We wouldn’t have restored respect for the profession of mothering, or respect for fathering for that matter, so that men would be proud to love the moms and support the children whose lives they begin."

Thought Three:
there is no thought three! horrors!

"And should i then presume?/ And how should i begin?"

Thought one:
We (several of the girls in my class) just had a conversation about homosexuality. I use the term "conversation" loosely, as i did not comment. Their views were the typical, "I don't have a problem with it, as long as they don't try anything with me," but of course, being the terribly fascinating subject that it is, the conversation continued for quite some time. were i of the prophetic temperment, this would have been what some call "a golden opportunity." but, truly (not trying to let myself of the hook or anything), i want to be defined by what (Who) i believe, not what i condemn. and that's how it would have come out. that is, until i was walking to the library and i thought of what my response could have been:

"The issue is not really homosexuality; the deeper problem these people have is their rebellion against God."

Which would really have been a "platinum opportunity," if you will. ISSUES ARE IRRELEVENT; TURN IT TO CHRIST, REBEKKAH!!!!!!

Thought two: (courtesy Michael Pearl )
"The problem is that teenagers are not wise in discerning the difference between true joy and cheap laughter. But, they can easily discern when their parents don't have any joy at all. And then, they come across a person of the world who is light-hearted and full of fun. What do you expect them to do? They don't see the cynicism and rebellion behind the feigned joy. They just know that, for the first time in their lives, they have found a context for their passion. [...] They find unconditional acceptance with the people of darkness, and since they have never really experienced God's love, they think this is the love they have always missed."
Can't believe i think of teenagers as "they," but that article is incredibly insightful.

Thought three:
"I raised my children as if I would be dead and no longer an influence in their lives before they were grown. I raised them with the knowledge that they could be removed from my home by the state government at any time. I taught them self-reliance and independence from the very start."
How effective we would be if we would just apply the fact that we will soon be dead.