Facts & Reason

From Greg Bahnsen’s “Van Til’s Apologetic”:

If the “facts” (external events or states of affairs) are completely a matter of “chance”- random and unconnected, having no rationale, no preestablished order, no intended pattern or preceding interpretation, no necessity- then they are indeed “brute” or untamed, no subject to reason. In that case, speaking of something (e.g., “the horse”) as an instance of a class wherein members are connected or part of a definable order, and speaking of its relations or properties (“is a gray mare”) in general terms that are applicable to other particular things, would be contrary to the isolated and brute character of chance facts. Brute facts would have to be mute – that is, not subject to predication or communication.

Here we see that you can not separate the facts from the interpretation of those same facts. For example if you say that the human beings came into existence by the a process of N number of random mutations, but cannot justify the predication of the those mutations since the presupposition is that they (“the mutations”) have no relationship between one mutation to another since they are all random, you have failed to demonstrate a rational conclusion to the premise that human beings came into being through evolution. Or to put it into more simplistic terms, you have assumed what you are trying to prove.

Growing in Grace

I’m a big Jonathan Edwards admirer and one of his most practical works for Christians is his Resolutions that he made a point of reading every week.  In Resolution #30 he states,

“Resolved, to strive to my utmost every week to be brought higher in religion, and to a higher exercise of grace, than I was the week before..”

So how does a 21st century grow in grace every week? There are some things that I have found to help with this. Here are a few suggestions:

Read Your Bible – I know this should not even need to be said, but the necessity to read the bible not once a week, but every day. Without this the whole deck of cards crumbles. Do not neglect so great a privledge.

Pray without Ceasing – This is another important means of grace that should never be neglected, but must be diligently pursued.

Devotional Reading – One of the great awakenings (No pun intended) is that there is a plethora of orthodox Christian books made available for free. Just do some searching for some solid reformers onGoogle Books.

Social Media – Social Media? Yes, but a great deal of discretion should be exercised. I have found most uplifting to engage fellow Christians and typically what happens are posts of uplifting messages and links to great Christian teachers and documents.

Podcasts – Even if you do not own a smartphone or an IPod-type device, you can use your PC to listen to Christian sermons and podcasts via digital audio. With great resources such as Sermonaudio, you could listen to more sermons than Calvin preached.

Finally, I highly recommend reading Edwards resolutions at least once a week. You can also either add to them or modify them to have a more contemporary context if that helps.

Top 5 Books for the UNIX Security Geek

Here is Justin’s top 5 UNIX security books.

Title	Author	ISBN
Practical UNIX and Internet Security	Garfinkel and Spafford	1-56592-148-8
UNIX System Security	David Curry	0-201-60640-2
The UNIX Programming Environment	Kernighan and Pike	0-13-937681-X
UNIX & Linux System Administration Handbook	Nemeth et al	0-13-151051-7
Building Internet Firewalls	O’Reilly and Assoc	1-56592-124-0

How Not to Present An Argument

I recently ran across a post browsing through my “Calvinism” sparks links in Google + and ran across this excerpt that was reply by a person, named David.

David, I am choosing to address your comment, not because I strive to change your mind, but for the sake of other readers who have ears to hear. If there is a set of doctrines that are not supported by Scripture, particularly in how to inherit eternal life, then such a belief system is a false gospel. Besides this, if this false gospel describes a god (the one we are supposed to be seeking and obeying) with attributes that are not the attributes that Scripture describes of Him, then the belief system is doubly false. Such a religious system would have to be deemed a cult. You are saying (at my comment page –8/18/11) that Calvinism matches “the historic views of the church at large the past two thousand years.” This is an unimpressive claim when it was Calvinism which, throughout much of Europe, merely got its way like Catholicism did, through the persecution of those who would not adhere to their enforced state religion. Augustine, whom Calvin quoted extensively, was a very influential Catholic who believed that Tradition and the Church were as authoritative as Scripture, yet Calvinists insist (dishonestly) that it is Scripture alone which they follow. No, Calvinists follow men’s interpretations of Scripture, which means you, as a Calvinist, are not following Christ, but following men’s doctrines –particularly, Augustine’s, Luther’s, and Calvin’s. By the very title “Calvinism”, your belief system is one that adheres to what John Calvin wrote in his “Institutes”. Please do not side-step this fact by talking about “hyper-calvinism” and a “straw man”. Those are typical phrases of evasion I’ve heard numerous times by those who don’t want to own up to what their system does indeed teach.

Now what I find interesting is that the writer seems to define a cult as any religious system that persecutes a group of people like Roman Catholisim did. The other problem is the author is not even addressing the “system” of Calvinism, which is actually what it is. The other problem is the author throws a statement saying that Calvin quoted Augustine saying that since Augustine believed that the Church and the Bible were on equal authoritative grounds that is what Calvin believed.

So what can we learn from this when presenting an argument? A number of things, namely:

• Context is Everything – Our author, despite her strong convictions really gave no context to her argument nor the context around the quote from Calvin quoting Augustine.
• Define your Terms – She throws out the term, “Calvinism” without ever defining it.
• Genetic Fallacy – She attributes what Augustine believed about the weight of Scripture and Church to Calvin, simply because he quoted him.

So it is important to think your presuppositions to their logical conclusions with chains of reasoning that can be used to defend your position and what you are actually trying to prove.

Emacs Cursor Movements

In this weeks segment on Emacs wizardry let’s learn some of the basic cursor movements so you can move around your Emacs buffer faster than the speed of light.

Keystrokes	Command Name	Action
C-f	forward-char	Move forward one character(right).
C-b	backward-char	Move backward one character(left).
C-p	previous-line	Move to previous line(up).
C-n	next-line	Move to next line(down)
ESC-f	forward-word	Move forward one word.
ESC-b	backward-word	Move one word backward.
C-a	beginning-of-line	Move to beginning of line.
C-e	end-of-line	Move to end of line
ESC-e	forward-sentence	Move forward one sentence.
ESC-a	backward-sentence	Move backward one sentence.

Exporting Your Kindle Library

As much as I love the Kindle that I received this past Christmas, there are certain things that I have found wanting. Recently one of my Facebook friends asked me what books I had on my Kindle. I thought, “This should be a no brainer,  I’ll just export the list from the http://kindle.amazon.com as a CSV and send it off to her.” That would be great, except that the current “Manager Your Kindle” portal does not have an export feature of any kind. Then I had an epiphany; I used to use a cool e-reader app for Linux…What was it called…Oh yes, Calibre! So as any committed Ubuntu user would do I fired up the Ubuntu Software Center and found it and a couple of clicks later I had it installed on my desktop. Then I noticed there was not an export option in the GUI. Oh no! But wait, Google is my friend and I have a lot of confidence in my friend. I then ran across this handy little guide
that documents how you can access the Calibre database from the command line. Oh yes, geek heaven! Then all I had to do was to run the list command and I just had it return title and author in a nice fixed-column width format and piped it to a text file and sent to my Facebook friend.

So what is the moral of this story? You will inevitably run into obstacles when your are attempting to solve a problem. The point is to continue to divide and conquer and never give up until achieve your objective.

P.S. I’m still curious as to why as something so basic as an export function is lacking in the Amazon Kindle portal.

Installing Nmap from SVN on Ubuntu 10.10

If you are an Ubuntu user and simply cannot wait to get the latest nmap features, follow the procedure below. Throw this into a file and call it, ‘build_nmap’ and copy it to the /etc/cron.daily directory and you will have a daily build of the latest and greatest version of nmap.

P.S. The same procedure will also work for you Backtrack geeks.

1. Open a shell terminal. 2. svn co –username guest –password “” svn://svn.insecure.org/nmap/. 3. cd nmap 4. ./configure 5. make 6. sudo make install