Apparently joining the rest of the world in outsourcing everything to India, the Catholic church is transfering prayer requests and special masses (done for a certain donation amount) to the priests in India, that both have less work and income than their American counterparts.

I will resist the obvious commentary on this as I think most people should be about to see the several layers of mockery this makes of the relationship between man and God. I would like to point out the irony that I see when compared to many computer-related professions. I mean if your priest can charge you (much like a lawyer or accountant) for his time praying for you… shouldn’t it be reasonable for your techie friend to be compensated the next time he spends two hours fixing your computer?

• Prayer Outsourcing

Read more

ShipOfFools.com has created the first ever virtual church in 3D. This 3D church exists with the help of MacroMedia’s shockwave plugin - which you need to visit it. Once there, you are given control a 3D person that can move around, sit down, pray, cross themselves and of course do a hallelujah move. If too many people are there you are given a ghosted out character that can move around and listen but not talk or be seen by anyone else (due to bandwidth resrictions), otherwise you can talk and apparently (i’ve only been a ghost so far) select the avatar of your choice to represent you.

In their first week of being live, there were quite a few abuses of system and so further restrictions were put into place to keep one or two people from ruining it for (or at least distracting) everyone else. They have actual sermons on Sundays but it is open 24/7. When a sermon is not going on you can discuss things with fellow parishioners or practice doing the wave in the pews. While the stuff you can do is somewhat limited… it is still quite cool that they were able to pull off an interactive 3D environment in shockwave.
Read more

The Passion is a quite a controversial film so i thought i would weigh in with a few comments. As I mentioned before, I believe the Passion is a good movie, but a few things bothered me. First of all I was sad that when they came to arrest Jesus they negected the part where the guards were knocked to the ground out of fear.

He is risen!

He is risen, INDEED!

Easter is the holiday that sets Christianity apart from other religions. Many religions have had many prophets and holy men… but only one came back. In fact, Jesus offered this as his proof that he was the son of God.

Happy Good Friday everyone. If you haven’t yet seen Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, you should. While not 100% historically accurate, I believe it does a good job of transporting modern audiences back two thousand years to get a glimps of what Christ endured. Much like Tim O’Brian’s The Things They Carried the point is not a perfect retelling but conveying the human, emotional happenings of what it was LIKE to go through those events.

I promised a friend a long time ago to keep this up on the web for him. He probably doesn’t care anymore, but a promise is a promise… and since he has ghost written a popular christian book and is now working on his own book, I can say i knew him when ;)

This was originally put on the web around: 7-7-03

TRUE RIGHTEOUSNESS

IntroductionRighteousness is often misunderstood and incorrectly defined amongst Christians today. This extremely important characteristic of every Christian must of necessity be understood, or we face the consequences of living under a lie. Misconceptions of righteousness have caused many Christians to fall into legalism and others to misunderstand the gospel in its entirety. It is both vital and apparent that Christians need to stop overlooking this word and begin to grasp the truth about righteousness. To understand Biblical righteousness as it relates to the Christian, we must first know that righteousness has many different definitions. In this particular piece of literature, we will be discussing four specific types of righteousness:

Read more