Theodicy.

What the heck is theodicy? Well, it’s one of those theology vocabulary words that nobody but us theologians use. I used it on my podcast this week because I ranted about it. Theodicy is the debate about how a good, almighty God can co-exist with evil in our universe. If God can do something about evil, why doesn’t he? The usual answers are:

1. He doesn't exist; so that’s why.
2. He’s not almighty, so he can’t stop it.
3. He isn’t motivated to stop it. (Often because that particular evil is part of his grand scheme of things).

Except, when God talks to Job about the problem of the evil things that have been happening to Job, he made three things rather clear:

1. He certainly does exist.
2. He certainly is almighty.
3. He’s not too thrilled with anything Job’s so-called friends had to say about him. What did they say? Mainly that this particular evil is part of God’s grand scheme of things.

The next time you decide to try to comfort someone with a well-worn platitude, I think it might be a good idea to leaf through Job and see what God thinks of your words of comfort… when it came out of the mouths of Job’s buddies.

Don’t got mail.

I buy a lot of stuff through mail-order, as the Bethany University post office well knows. It seems I am always there to pick up one package or another. It’s because I hate shopping; if I want something, I poke around the internet, find the cheapest price possible (including tax and shipping; you always have to include extra expenses) and buy the thing. Why go to K-mart or Borders when you have eBay and Amazon?

I also use Blockbuster’s online service—again, why go to Blockbuster when you don’t have to?

The catch of mail-order is that Bethany’s post office takes an extra day to get me the mail. They get the stuff from the Postal Service, and then they gotta sort it and stick it in everyone’s mailbox, and that takes an extra day. Sometimes two. They don’t have a very big staff, but they have an awfully big job.

This is not a huge hassle, but it’s a little annoying when I want to watch my Blockbuster movies over the weekend (and Blockbuster emailed me to tell me they were coming on time), yet I can’t watch ’em because they arrived Friday and the post office won’t get it sorted until Monday or Tuesday.

Thus I’m in the habit of checking with the post office for packages. If I don’t, it’ll take ’em two days to put a notification in my mailbox, and in the meanwhile my packages are just taking up space in their office. (Plus, I want my stuff.)

The slowness, unfortunately, also means that I’m mentally blaming the post office for delaying my packages when it might actually be the person who’s supposed to send them.

Case in point: I bought the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD. (I’d been waiting a few months for the price to come down, and when it hit $25 I bought.) The person I bought it from had 1.5 stars out of 5, but I saw stars and a low price and bought the DVDs.

It’s now a month later, and I was wondering what happened to my DVDs, so I went onto Amazon’s site and checked out the status of the shipment. And while I was at it, I looked at the seller’s feedback page. And was horrified.

The guy had pissed off 98 percent of his customers. Either the stuff arrived late, or—in more than half the comments—not at all. Some of the comments were unrepeatable. The guy has also apparently ruined a wedding anniversary because the gift never arrived. Here, obviously, was a disreputable bastard, and I had stupidly sent him $25.

What was he doing with 1.5 stars? Well… Amazon doesn’t let you leave zero stars. You have to at least leave one. I never considered this because I am usually quite happy with my purchases and rate them 4 or 5. So I figured one star would mean you're not great, but at least you send the customers their stuff within a month. Guess not.

On the up side, Amazon will refund the $25, and the Star Wars DVDs are now available for $18. Score.

Charities and evangelism.

Unlike many ministries, the Salvation Army realizes that charity is evangelism.

Why do I plug the Salvation Army and not any of the other wonderful Christian charities out there?

It’s a fair question; one I got from someone recently because my school is donating to Convoy of Hope, an Assemblies of God charity that does much the same that the Salvation Army does. So why not contribute to Convoy of Hope?

Well, I never said don’t contribute to Convoy of Hope. They’re a good group; donate to them if you like. I tend to push the bigger charities because—and I said this before, after the 2004 tsunami—they’re more effective than the little ones, and you want to go with the ones that can help the most people the most effectively.

And they actually help people, instead of trying to disguise evangelism as a charity. This is a major peeve of mine: Some Christian charities forget that the purpose of a charity is to help people. Instead, they start evangelizing. Now, before you misunderstand me, the last thing I want to say is that there’s something wrong with evangelization. Christians are required to tell other people about Jesus. But Christian organizations are in the terrible habit of disguising their evangelization groups as charitable groups. As a result, they do neither well. They suck at charity, and they suck at evangelism.

Fr’instance.

Paying for stuff.

Getting my financial aid this week has been sorta annoying. Not that annoying; the people in the Financial Aid and Student Payments office are very nice people, so the annoyances have nothing to do with them at all. Mainly, it’s how one little thing on my application for financial aid managed to stretch out my application process until next Tuesday.

Okay, I’ll begin at the beginning. I’m in the Teacher Education Program. I’ve been in it since last fall. I’m doing a sort-of package deal where I do the TEP, then take another semester and end up with a Master of Arts. Back when I applied to get into the program, I indicated that this was what I wanted to do: get an M.A. So, when they accepted me into the program, they didn’t actually accept me into the TEP; they accepted me into the M.A. program. But I’m in the TEP. Confusing? Sorta.

When I applied for financial aid last year, I indicated that I was going for an M.A. When I applied this year, I indicated that I was currently in the TEP. It’s a small difference, but it has obnoxious repercussions, the main one being that I have never formally been accepted into the TEP. I’ve been taking all the classes; I’ve been working on the paperwork; the head of the program is my faculty adviser… but I’m not actually in the program. I’m in another program.

So, in order to get financial aid, I needed a letter of acceptance from the TEP in my file, which I don’t have because I wasn’t actually accepted by them. (Even though, as I said, I’m doing the program.)

You’d think it would be an easy thing to get this letter, but apparently it isn’t, so I decided to do the simpler thing and change my application. Except that took five days to process. And since the end of the five days is Tuesday, and the last day to pay for classes (or they get dropped) was today, I decided to bite the bullet and pay for classes. With money I don’t have.

Fortunately, the school has a payment program. The first payment is due on Sep. 28. By the time I have to make the first payment (which, sadly, is the only payment I could actually afford) the financial aid will be approved, and I can joyfully take out another future-hobbling student loan, and pay it. (Which the state says it will pay back if I teach in the state, but that all depends on whether there will be any money left after our idiot governor and idiot legislature get over their fights and special elections.)

By the way: There is next to no scholarship money or grants for graduate-level work. There is some; you can scrape it together from private organizations who will fund you because they like you personally. I don’t happen to personally know too many billionaires so I’m kinda stuck paying for all this myself. It is, of course, my own bloody fault for goofing off in high school when I could have been getting Cal Grant-worthy grades.

So I’m sorta paid up, even though no money has actually been transferred yet. In the meanwhile I can post blogs over the college’s internet service, then go to bed because of that 8 a.m. Saturday class I just (sorta) paid for.

New nephew.

So, I’m an uncle again.

Gideon Joseph Chagnon was born last night, Sep. 1, 2005, weighing 3.46 kilos.

I’ll post photos when I get ’em.

Programming pages.

Because I have a Macintosh, I tend to use Safari as a web browser. It’s a handy little program, and locks up a lot less than Microsoft Internet Explorer. (I don’t know what it is with those Microsoft people and their lock-ups. Supposedly they’re interested in selling stuff to Apple’s consumers, and they own a nice batch of Apple stock, but sometimes I suspect they only want Apple around so they can have a convenient place to steal ideas from.)

The catch with using Safari all the time is that sometimes I forget that the rest of the planet uses Internet Explorer. (Except for the small batch of die-hards that use other browsers that don’t lock up so often.) So when I program a page to do neat things, I check to see if it works in Safari. If it does, I’m fine with it. Not that I’m deliberately trying to screw over Windows users or Internet Explorer users; I just wasn’t thinking about them.

So, after getting frustrated with my own pages on someone else’s computer, I apologize. I’ll do what I can to clean up the code.

Bear in mind that Microsoft has its own bastardized versions of the code I use. Everyone else sticks to the standards—Netscape’s version of JavaScript and the international conventions of HTML and stylesheets—yet Microsoft feels free to tweak these standards for their convenience because, after all, they have a near-monopoly on the world’s computers.

And Microsoft does make great software; but like I said before, I wish it wouldn’t lock up so often. I’ve been too spoiled by Macintosh OS X.

Human nature.

So when I finally got a chance to watch some TV news about Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, MSNBC was interviewing Harry Connick Jr. (I would hope this is because they ran out of officials, but considering America’s over-fascination with celebrities, it’s more likely because it was Harry Connick Jr.)

The newsreader was asking him what he thought of the looting. He replied that he was in no condition to judge. He stated that if he had been desperately poor, and had seen his opportunity, he’d be stealing plasma TVs along with them.

So I guess it's a good thing Harry has a career. Otherwise he'd be looting in New Orleans.

It’s pretty to figure out what the deal is: The respectable people left town in the disaster, and the only people who stayed behind are the gang members and hoodlums who figured this was a great opportunity to go Visigoth. So they’ll be looting, sacking, raping, pillaging, and murdering until the National Guard swarms in and shoots them.

The rest of the country will look on in horror because “civilized” people don’t do this—forgetting how the Romans, Germans, and every so-called civilization indulged in this sort of behavior at least once in their history. Those of us who know our history understand: This is human nature. Not the noble self-sacrifice that we've seen after other hurricanes or terrorist attacks. That’s how we’d prefer to see human nature, and that is what we must aspire to. We can be that way when we put effort into it. But when we don’t—well, if you want to see human nature at its most grasping, thieving, and self-centered—as history testifies to, time and again—there it is, in Louisiana, stealing plasma TVs.