the tindog coffeehouse

I’ve been angry and bitter all week. Disgusted, really. As the Supreme Court heard arguments in a couple of highly controversial cases involving same-sex marriage, people all over the country showed their support for gay marriage on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. But it wasn’t just non-Christians turning their profile pics red, it was many Christians as well. And that’s what pissed me off.

I know that we Christians aren’t always going to agree on everything, but the fact that so many Christians not only support same-sex marriage but endorse it just doesn’t make sense to me. How on earth can you read the Bible, claim that you believe what it says, and yet not find anything reprehensible about homosexuality, particularly when the Bible is extraordinarily clear in its opposition to it?

So I’ve spent the week fuming at my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, angry that they’ve chosen political correctness over biblical truth, and despondant over what that means for the future of the Church. If we choose to no longer identify sin as sin, then the gospel means nothing.

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Sunday is the premiere of The Bible on the History Channel, and it looks amazing. Described as a “10-hour docudrama”, the miniseries from Mark Burnett and Roma Downey recreates the biblical narrative from Genesis to Revelation in stunning high definition. Which sounds awesome. But here’s my question: What if it’s not historically accurate?

From the previews, it looks pretty accurate. I mean, Jesus doesn’t have blue eyes, so that’s a plus. But it’s the little things, like the Magi visiting Jesus in the manger when he was a baby (which didn’t actually happen until he was 2-3 years old) or Moses’ lack of a speech impediment. Do those things matter?

Or am I just being picky?

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I’ve been reading an excellent book about the 1860 presidential election, Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War by Douglas Egerton. In the book, Egerton explains the political forces that led to the birth of the Republican Party and the eventual secession of the South. Honestly, it’s one of the best explanations I’ve ever read for why the Civil War happened. Yes, it was about slavery. But it didn’t just happen overnight. It was a long process that had been building since the end of the American Revolution. What’s even more interesting, however, is how those same forces are at work in today’s political climate.

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With only a week to go before the 2012 election, the race is effectively a toss-up between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, with the deciding votes likely coming down to a handful of so-called “battleground states”: Ohio, Nevada, Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The winner, of course, will be whoever collects a majority of the 538 available electoral votes according to Article II of the Constitution.

The electoral college was devised by the framers of the Constitution as a way to prevent an unpredictable general population from directly voting for the president. Instead, their vote would count as a preference for how their state’s appointed electors should vote (although the electors are not legally bound to abide by those preferences). Such a system seems completely antiquated today, however. We have a much more organized electoral system and better technology, which should in theory reduce fraud. Besides, with many states strongly trending Republican or Democrat, many votes don’t seem to really matter. If you’re a Republican in California or a Democrat in Texas, for example, it seems pointless to vote since the outcome for your state is all but guaranteed. It’s no surprise, then, that in recent years there’s been a greater call to eliminate the electoral college, allowing the winner of the popular vote to be the winner of the election.

But I think you could actually make an argument for keeping the electoral college. Let me explain.

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As you probably know by now, I’ve been blogging my way through John Dyer’s From the Garden to the City, a book about the redeeming and corrupting powers of technology and how that impacts the Christian Church. Of course, when we talk about technology in that context, we tend to assume that means the Internet and social networking, but other than the physical mediums of our modern-day telecommunications, we tend to forget that none of that is really new. In fact, the social media of today bears a striking resemblance to the social networks of 16th century Europe, which allowed Martin Luther’s charges against the Catholic Church to spread like wildfire.

From the moment in October 1517 when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, his anti-Catholic protests began spreading at a rate that even took Luther by surprise. The Economist takes a look at why this happened and finds that just like with the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement of today, technology was at the heart of it:

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Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, probably the greatest holiday dedicated to the mass consumption of food ever. Except of course that it’s not really about the food, per se, but a time of, well, giving thanks. We all know that the holiday dates back to the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621, which celebrated the Pilgrims’ first successful growing season since arriving in America a year earlier. (And actually the tradition dates back to the Pilgrims’ days in Leiden, Holland, when the Dutch held a Thanksgiving feast every October.) But what’s cool — to me, at least — is that my ancestor was one of those early pilgrims.

From everything I’ve researched and read (and admittedly I’m not a genealogist, so I could be completely wrong), the first Spooners to arrive in America landed at Plymouth in 1637. Ann Spooner (born in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1598) arrived with her young sons William (my ancestor, age 16 at the time) and Thomas (age 14).

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