the tindog coffeehouse

From Jenny Simmons, the lead singer of Christian band Addison Road:

Perhaps we have misunderstood sin though. The overarching theme of scripture is that sin is a condition, not necessarily an action. Jesus seems to speak directly into this concept when he addresses the faithful Jews at the beginning of Matthew, “You have heard it said do not murder… but I say do not have anger in your heart for another man.” Essentially he spends an entire afternoon telling these people, “you have heard the law and followed it, but now listen to the heart of the law, it’s a new command I give you. Love me. Love others. That is the point.”

Sin is a condition that indicates our separation from God. Jesus focuses less on the sin action and more on the person and their separation from God. Sin is simply that. Our separation from God. Our less than holy nature. Our blemished existence. An incomplete way of being. That is sin.

Read the whole thing. It’s long but worth the time.

Previously:
Casualties of the American dream

An Apple employee supposedly loses a prototype of the upcoming 4th-generation iPhone after a night of heavy drinking to celebrate his birthday. A stranger then sells it to tech blog Gizmodo for $5000. Gizmodo makes millions from all the publicity. And now police have gotten involved, breaking in to Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house and confiscating several computers and other property that may have been “used as the means of convicting a felony”.

Not to defend Gizmodo’s actions, but I just have to state the obvious:

It was only an iPhone.

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There’s been a lot of talk this week about Facebook’s new Open Graph platform and its “connections” feature and what all that means to users’ privacy, and I even considered writing up a blog post about it. But I just couldn’t. I tried, though. Twice. But I realized that honestly I just don’t care.

Is Facebook really “positioning itself to become deeply embedded in almost every single website”? Will your privacy truly be “crushed with impunity”? Has Facebook “removed its users’ ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information”?

Or is everyone overreacting?

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Once again, my semi-random thoughts on last night’s Lost:

• First, the biggest moment of the episode: Sun and Jin finally reunited! And it feels so good! And Sun got her voice back! And look, exclamation points!
• Thank you, Sawyer, for confirming that Sayid is in fact a zombie. Although apparently he’s a zombie with a heart. What, you don’t really believe he killed Desmond, do you?
• Speaking of Desmond, wasn’t that well a lot deeper and darker last week?
• So Lapidus was in all those Burt Reynolds movies. Makes so much sense now.

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Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow was known for printing Bible verses on his eye black before each game, but now such messages have been banned by the NCAA. Philadelphia Daily News writer Tom Mahon puts the ridiculous new rule in perspective:

Guess there’s no place for religion in college football but plenty of room for those orange Gatorade containers, and all those jerseys featuring the Nike swoosh.

Previously:
We need more Tebows, McCoys, and Bradfords

On Wednesday I volunteered at my daughters’ elementary school. It wasn’t the first time I had done so, but for some reason I think I was more aware of what I was seeing, a lot of it good and a lot of it really frustrating.

First off, the third, fourth, and fifth grades are in the process of preparing for the TAKS test scheduled for the end of the month. They’ve already spent weeks taking various practice tests and benchmarking tests, and Wednesday my daughter’s third-grade class spent most of their time going back through a recent practice test and correcting their answers. And this pattern will continue for another two weeks. Because the TAKS scores are the very lifeblood of public schools in the state, every school district in Texas obsesses over the test to the point that it seems like they’re more interested in the test scores than in the actual quality of education that those scores are meant to reflect.

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