The Text

There are thirteen letters written by Paul in the canon of Scripture. The introduction of each letter has the same basic structure.

1. Identification of Author(s)
2. Identification of Recipient(s)
3. Greeting
4. Thanksgiving
5. Prayer

There are letters that leave out the thanksgiving or prayer. In the letter to the Galatians, Paul moves quickly from the greeting to expressing his astonishment at the Galatians following the Judaizers. In his first letter to Timothy, Paul gets down to the business of discussing false teachers immediately after the greeting. Eight of the letters do have the thanksgiving section, including 1 Corinthians.

In the thanksgiving, Paul normally expresses his thanks to God for some quality of the recipients about which he has heard. The dominant theme in these thanksgivings is the demonstrated faith and love of the recipients. Now this observation could itself be a topic for discussion, but that is not the focus of this short essay. It does serve as a contrast to the thanksgiving for the Corinthians. Paul thanks God for them “because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus (NIV).” It makes one wonder whether the church was so wracked with divisions, sexual immorality and immaturity that Paul could not think of anything that they have done to offer thanks to God for. Paul continues this focus on God's hand in their lives through the rest of the introduction. God did the enriching. God will keep them strong to the end. God has called them. God is faithful. It is good to know that even when we are at our worst, God is still faithful.

Four weeks ago, I didn't know CSS. Four weeks ago, I didn't know PHP. Four weeks ago, I knew some basic HTML, but I certainly didn't know what a <div> tag was. Four weeks ago, I had a vague idea of what a content management system was. Four weeks ago, this website did not exist. A lot has happened in four weeks. Here is some of the what I learned in the past four weeks:

• People still use Internet Explorer.
  I knew that web surveys say around 80% of people use IE. I just didn't expect it to make up to such a large percentage of the browsers hitting this site. It is an old, broken browser in many ways. A modern, more secure browser can be downloaded from here or here.
• Designing and coding a site for many different browsers is a pain.
  A lot of time in the past few weeks was spent trying to find the combination of HTML and CSS that worked in IE, Firefox and Opera. I was surprised that even the default template for WordPress is broken under IE. I was more surprised at the number of Safari users coming to this site. In fact, the intro page to our site looked like a Picasso painting for the first few days under Safari as can be seen here.

I am considering writing up a comparison of my experiences configuring WordPress and Movable Type at a later date.

As I was backing my car down the driveway this morning, I saw a pair of cardinals sitting in a tree in the front yard. They have built a nest somewhere on our property, but we are not sure where. Shannon thinks it could be in a big bush next to the kitchen window, but I have seen a robin fly into it a few times. It doesn’t look big enough for the peaceful cohabitation of both a family of robins and cardinals. It could be in the overgrown forest of forsythia and lilac bushes on the other side of the house. I have tried to get a good photo of the cardinals to put in my work-in-progress photo gallery. No luck so far. They must have known that I didn’t have my camera with me, which is why they posed so nicely. I was tempted to run back into the house for the camera, but I knew it would end in failure.

There is another pair of cardinals at work. Well, I assume there is a pair because I have only seen the male. I was walking up the stairs to my office when I heard a “poink” sound on the ten-foot windows around the staircase. It sounded like the sound a pebble thrown at the glass would make. I heard it again and looked up to see a cardinal falling down to the ledge. It was a controlled fall. He sat for a while looking at the glass and then flew back to the neighboring magnolia tree. A second or two later I heard the same sound again accompanied by the cardinal falling/flying down to the ledge. This process repeated several times. In fact, it has now been a week of hearing “poink” coming from the staircase as the cardinal flies into the glass again and again. The tree is close to the windows so he doesn’t have time to build up much speed. Our theory is his mate has a nest in the tree and he views his reflection in the window as a threat. He may end up killing himself to protect his future offspring from his reflection.

Poink.

Poink.

Poink…

The Sunday School class that I attend and occasionally teach is beginning a study of First Corinthians. I thought it would be beneficial to me to record my thoughts on each section as we work through this book. If I use a commentary, I will be sure to cite sources. Otherwise, you can blame me for anything I write here.

I thought this joke fit well with the previous post.

Three guys from the CIA, Mossad, and the Iranian Secret Police have a competition. Each of them has a burlap sack, and must go into the jungle to capture a wild boar. The CIA goes first. 30 minutes later, he's back with a wild boar in the sack. Mossad goes next, and he comes back in just 15 minutes with a similar catch.

The Iranian Secret Police goes next. He's back in 2 minutes. The CIA and Mossad are shocked. "No, you can't have already caught a wild boar."

"Open the sack and see for yourself." The CIA and Mossad look in the bag and see a rabbit with cigarette burns, bruises, cuts, and possibly a few broken bones.

"That's not a boar, that's a rabbit. You lose."

On hearing this, the rabbit shrieks out, "No!!!!!! I'm a wild boar! I've been a wild boar for seven years. I can give you the names of other wild boars who are still loose in the jungle!"

One of the important points made in the 9/11 Commission Report is the problem caused by the current compartmentalization of intelligence information. This system made sense in the Cold War when the emphasis was on preventing a mole from accessing too much information. Trying to prevent terrorism has very different requirements for information sharing which is hindered by this type of security setup.

Another problem is the over-classification of information. Much of it stems from an attitude of superiority over those seeking to do us harm. If we do not tell them how to build a nuclear bomb, they will not be able to figure it out.

A less obvious reason for over-classifying information is the lack of incentive to release information. When a hard question is asked, it is a lot easier to say "I can't discuss that because it is classified" than to admit you do not know the answer. The same thing goes for covering up mistakes.

You can see this most clearly from the almost glacial speed at which information is downgraded in its classification. It is not uncommon for a piece of information that is classified to be commonly held knowledge in the world. Is that information downgraded? No, it becomes a running joke in the intelligence community.

Speaking of jokes, one of my favorite examples of the downgrade process can be found in a memo describing terrorist threats around the time of Christmas in 1974. This memo has been released twice in the last ten years. The second time it was released to the National Security Archive, and the memo can be found here. You will notice a large section of text is redacted on the last page under the heading Terrorist Threats and Plans: Worldwide. A reasonable question to ask is what sort of terrorist threat that occurred 30 years ago still needs to be classified today.

The answer to that question comes from another version of the same document released to the Gerald Ford Presidential Library two years earlier and can be found here. In that document we read that there was a threat to the prime minister of the North Pole by the Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge. Obviously, the second reviewer must have felt it necessary to protect the children from the devastating visual imagery of good ole Saint Nick and his reindeer being taken down by a surface-to-air missile. The CIA staffer two years earlier had no such qualms and released the information to the public.

If you are interested in reading more of this sort of stuff, head on over to the National Security Archive website.