Q4H: Unrestricted prayer power?

My wife Amy and I have had some interesting discussions as of late regarding certain beliefs held by some friends of ours about some of the more supernatural aspects of Christianity. I'll not go into all those things in this post, but one axiom, if you will, of those beliefs leaves me with some questions. The axiom is simply this: if you ask anything in Jesus' name, believing that you'll receive it, you'll get it. That's all there is to it.

The reading schedule that I and others are using to read through the Bible in its entirety this year employs the following pattern: weekdays take us sequentially through the Old Testament (minus Psalms) and with a sprinkle of Proverbs; Saturdays through the New Testament (with more Proverbs); and Sunday through Psalms. So today's reading had us in Matthew, and coincidentally covered two different instances of Jesus stating this very axiom. In Matthew 18:19-20, he says, "Again, I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three come together in my name, there I am with them." And then later in Matthew 21:22, Jesus tells his disciples (who are wondering how it was that he was able to cause a fig tree to instantly wither), "If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer." Presumably, it is on these promises that many stand when they seek to perform Jesus-like signs and wonders (faith healing, exorcism, etc.). And why not? As written, those are some serious promises! But as presented by our gospel authors, are they, in fact, complete and true? Shouldn't there be a clause in there that limits the promise to only those things that align with God's will? For some folks, no.

I recall a conversation I had about this with one of our friends who claimed this promise as-is without the "will of God" qualifier. And many folks do, believing that they can actually bend the will of God through prayer. I'm skeptical about such a seemingly wide open promise, though, and my skepticism actually began to turn into a bit of anger. I was compelled to ask why, if so many people believed exactly as she did — that anything asked for in Jesus' name would be granted to those that believe — no one had stepped up to organize a group prayer to end hunger and famine and war worldwide once and for all time. I mean, shame on anyone who lays claim to power of that magnitude and fails to use it to do good! Unfortunately I can't remember her response now. Perhaps her "out" was that the askers don't meet the faith requirement of the promise — that they don't really think these worldwide problems can end.

This actually runs right alongside some of the statements made recently by Michael Shermer — the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine — who was curious about the apparent limitations of miracles. In a recent debate with Dinesh D'Souza, and referring to soldiers returning from war today missing arms and legs, he asks (as you can see at about 5 minutes into this video clip), "Why does nobody pray for them to grow a new limb? Why can't God grow a new limb? A salamander can do it! Surely the creator of the universe can do it."

Again, maybe we just lack the faith to get it done. Or maybe God has decided that these days He'd prefer to do only the second class of miracles described by Dinesh later in the debate — using natural means, but driving them in ways they wouldn't naturally go themselves, to accomplish the supernatural. Or, given the staggering improbability that all the physical laws and forces and constants and such would turn out just right to support our Universe and our life in it, perhaps everything we know is just one giant miracle. Maybe those who need "to see it to believe it" are just out of luck, as the seeing requires belief.

Or maybe my friend has tunnel-vision, and is ignoring other Scriptures which indicate that there is a must-comply-with-God's-will clause. We read in I John 5:14-15 that "if we ask anything according to [God's] will, He hears us." The Lord's Prayer (or Model Prayer) even demonstrates humility to God's will with the phrase "[God's] will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10). Finally, we can examine Jesus' own prayer life. Could there be a more faith-filled, more believing, more humble, more likely-to-bend-God's-will person than Jesus Christ? And yet what was his prayer in his time of greatest need? Luke 22:42 records Jesus as praying just prior to his arrest and crucifixion, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done."

Q4H: Didn't Esau's mama tell him there'd be girls like that?

The Bible is so full of interesting little nuggets. Today's reading took me through Genesis 26:34-35, where we see only the very tip of what is surely a fascinating story.

When Esau was forty years old, he married Judith daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and also Basemath daughter of Elon the Hittite. They were a source of grief to Isaac and Rebekah.

A "source a grief" to the in-laws? Sounds like the beginnings of a television sitcom! This seems to be Judith's only appearance in the Bible; Basemath gets named elsewhere only in genealogy listings. Wouldn't you just love to know the rest of that story? I sure would. Why didn't Esau do the arranged marriage thing? It seemed to work out pretty well for his dad.

I don't know why I'm interested in this. Maybe it's because the situation is so foreign to me: my parents adore my wife, perhaps more so even than they adore me!

Q4H: Why all the confusion?

I've long been taught that way back in the day, a bunch of folks — who, at the time, all spoke the same language — got together at a place called Babel and decided to build themselves a huge tower that would reach to Heaven to show off how great they were. As the story goes, God is disgusted by this display of arrogance, and decides to frustrate their efforts by causing them all to speak different languages. Unable to effectively communicate, their building project fails and the people scatter.

Today's reading covered the section of the Bible that tells this tale (Genesis 11:1-9), but the details don't match the story told to me as a child. Yes, we have people trying to build a huge tower (using an apparently novel brick-making technique instead of stone-hewing, the text tells us). But the target altitude of this thing appears only to be "the heavens", not Heaven proper. The goal is a selfish one, but appears to be mere self-preservation instead of something sinister such as exalting oneself above God. But most importantly, the text never says that God's actions were intended as punishment for man's impure motives; it reads as though God simply didn't like the fact that man, absent communication barriers, was destined for success in all that he put his mind to.

Why cause the confusion? Man is certainly no threat to God, His will, or His work.

I have a theory, though admittedly one that I'm forming as I type this (and is probably a bit "out there"). We read early in Genesis that man is created vegetarian (Genesis 1:29). After Adam and Eve sin in the Garden, God curses them. Part of Adam's curse is that his farming job will no longer be easy (Genesis 3:17-18). Man must now depend on God, as the Designer and Ruler of Nature, to permit harvests. In fact, there are no shortage of cultures in times past and present that believed exactly this — that the gods must be begged for sufficiently productive harvests so that societies and civilizations don't die of starvation.

Anyway, we move on in history to Noah and the famous flood. After the flood waters recede, Noah and his family are tasked with repopulating the earth. But there's a dietary change here — in Genesis 9:3 God tells Noah he gets to eat meat. (Yes, I say "gets to" — you'll find no vegetarian sympathies here, folks!) But what, then, does this mean for Adam's curse? The primary physical payload of the curse on Man is that the earth will no longer give up her fruits readily for us to eat. However, post-Noah man is given another food source to draw from anyway. Maybe, just maybe, God — having recognized that His goal with the original curse (to draw Man to a dependence on Himself) is being undermined by this meat-eating loophole — acts in what seems like a spiteful manner at Babel to amend the original curse and draw Man back into dependence.

Now that's how rumors — and entirely new false religions — get started.

Q4H: Does the Tree of Life still exist?

I'm going to try to read the Bible through this year, following the reading schedule published by a local radio station (New Life 91.9 WRCM). If the whole year goes like my first day did, I'm going to have a whooooole bunch of outstanding "questions for heaven" (Q4H). Some of them I'll toss up here for armchair Bible scholars to weigh in on. What follows is my first question.

In Genesis 1:8-9, God builds Himself a garden in Eden, and plants two trees in it: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (which bore one of the most famous fruits of all time), and the tree of life. Implied in Genesis 3:22-24, after the fall of man, is the fact that had Adam and Eve been able to outrun God to the tree of life and partake of its fruit, they would have gained immortality (though, presumably it would have been a life of eternal shame). Well, I suppose the reading also supports the alternative idea that perhaps the tree of life's fruit gave life for some period of time, renewable by further consumption — that's not really a key piece of my question, though.

My question is simple — does the tree of life still grow somewhere in the Middle East today? Do angels still guard the entrance to this garden?

"If I only had..."

My dear wife, Amy, loves board and card games. To her, "game time" is the sixth love language, and her primary one.

Last night she and I were playing a few rounds of In a Pickle, a game in which she typically tends to beat me. This was, however, just not her night. I was leading the game seven sets to none. After playing another card toward our eighth set, she drew from the deck (which contains all cards on which there is written a single noun, if you don't know the game). Glancing at the new noun in her hand, she suddenly exclaimed, "Yes! I have a brain! There's so much I can do with a brain!"

Her new body part served her well, but in the end, victory was mine.

Hacking on the LG CU400

I recently bought (via eBay) a USB data cable for my LG CU400 cellphone. Sadly, I did so before realizing that LG apparently doesn't provide software besides basic Windows drivers for this phone. (For those interested, I used the drivers from a package named LGUSBModemDriver_Eng_Ver_4.5.exe, found with a Google site search.) At any rate, my investment thus far (which was only about $7, truth be told) was looking like a poor one.

But tonight I tried BitPim even though my phone model is not listed as explicitly supported. To my great surprise, BitPim recognized my phone as an "Other CDMA phone". That meant I got filesystem-explorer-type access, but none of the other GUI goodies. That's okay, though -- it only took a little bit of poking around to figure out where the phone keeps my photos, videos, mp3s, and so on.

And best of all, I was able to pull off the hack described here. So now I can use the mobile versions of Google Maps and Gmail on my phone without answering a network usage permission prompt for what seemed before like every packet transmitted!

12/21/2007 Followup: I forgot to note that I was doing all this on a Windows 2000 machine. But I'm pretty sure the drivers I got were rated for Windows XP, too. No clue about Vista support for any of this stuff.

Irony combo, super-sized, to go

Dinner time — or, the hour just before dinner time — has for a long time been a period of heightened stress in my household. Every day Amy tentatively approaches me while I'm working to ask, "What do you want to do for dinner?" Every day I dread her coming.

It's not that I don't love to have my Sweetheart visit me. It's just that I almost never have a well-formed opinion about dinner. Do we cook or do we hit a restaurant? If we cook, what do we make? If we dine out, where do we go? In Amy's defense, it's the sort of decision I'm prone to micromanage anyway, so why not ask me? In mine ... well, I don't really have a defense. And so every day she comes, and every day I herald her arrival with a jovial, "Uh-oh, here comes the what-do-you-want-for-dinner question!" And so we sit. And think. And talk about what else needs to be accomplished that evening. And, on a good day, we have a decision made within an hour's time.

Last week, however, this daily exercise finally wore it out its welcome. In truth, I don't care what or where we eat. I'd prefer to eat more meals at home and stop hemorrhaging cash towards goods that only last as long our digestive tracts retain them. I'd prefer to eat earlier than later so that our kids aren't going straight to bed after eating. But most of all, I'd prefer not to be asked about dinner at all. So I told my dear wife these things. I dubbed her the Queen of the Kitchen, and said we would do for dinner whatever she wanted us to do. She knows my preferences, she knows her preferences, she knows what our boys do and don't like to eat, and she knows what's on our calendar and TODO list better than anyone else. It just makes sense for her to take full responsibility of dinner planning.

Wonderful woman that she is, I still have a place to live after this conversation. In fact, she seems to have embraced the responsibility. She quickly planned about a week's worth of meals, bought the ingredients, and we've already had two wonderful dinners in which I played no culinary role. The arrangement doesn't leave me without responsibility, of course — my job is to keep Gavin and Aidan out of the kitchen while she works. And frankly, I need to be investing a little more time with them, anyway. It's a win-win!

Or, it was a win-win. On Sunday afternoon, our oven died.