The UmBlog

I've written about Trump with his name in the blog title twice. Suddenly, I have more interest in my blog posts from Russia than I ever have. Here is a picture of my stats, courtesy of Google's Blogger platform, over the past week. I am a very little guppy in the big pond of blogs and social media and I have never had Russia more than the lightest green on the stats map. Why do Russians care about my blog? The CIA says they are so invested in Trump's victory that they leaked the DNC's emails but have kept the hacked RNC's, presumably for leverage. They filled comment fields with Trump trolls, making false assertions (blatantly lying) and overwhelming social media conversation with dis-information. Senator John McCain has called this digital meddling a form of war. I turned off comments on my blog ages ago because of spam and trolls. Russia has become America's troll in chief to support Trump. It's creepy that I am a repeat destination for Russia...

Did you know November is the month to write your novel? Check out National Novel Writing Month . I am inspired to write, but not a novel. But I do want to write on my blog daily in November. I have some ideas. Mostly, I want to process some thoughts on hell. I plan to do some theological deconstruction and reconstruction, continuing the process I've been in over the past two years. Arguing with myself and disagreeing with old posts I've written here. I started this blog 10 years ago. I am maturing. My view of the world is changing. My view of God is changing. I am evolving and sharing the journey here. I closed comments last year,so if there is something you all, my dear readers- all 35 of you including the bots and web crawlers, want me to cover, contact me through facebook or twitter or google+.

This blog turns 10 this year. Here is the first post . I turned 45 this month. Wow! The more I learn, the less I know. When I used to blog multiple times a day, in the beginning, Twitter didn't exist. My self-righteousness was so easily aroused. And I would write things and publish them. Now I just have to share a link to Twitter with a click or two. ;-) This year will be different. I made one resolution for 2015: read great literature. I started Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamozov at the beginning of the month. I'm only two thirds the way through. I like it, but it's not candy reading. It is not YA Lit. It is intense, deep, profound, challenging, almost life like. The most famous chapter in the book is "The Inquisitor",  a critique of organized Christianity in which Jesus Christ himself is executed by the Spanish priest. However, I find the life story of Elder Zossima more penetrating. If the book was on my Kindle, I would have filled up Twitter with so...

Here is what I wrote in my first post on March 24th, 2005, I've grown up in the church and still remain committed to staying with this ship of fools until we reach the sunset and the welcome reception of Jesus Christ. I hope to point out the pirates on our journey but also give a hand to my fellow fools who might be accused of piracy. I'm hoping to do this better than I have over the past eight years and 2200 posts. Jesus Christ Crucifix (Photo credit: Wikipedia )

This truly surprises me. an explanation of ferrocement house construction my book review of Terror by Night by Terry Caffey my book review of Rowling's newest book A Casual Vacancy building arched roofs without modern materials grain bin homes for Haitians a book review of the excellent Jesus: A Theography my hare-brained proposal about combining rammed earth with straw bales my excitement over a bike with a drive shaft , the Runabout my thoughts on this crazy article at Slate my proposal to drop the word "marriage" as a legal word Only one of these topics is directly involved with my stated purpose of this blog. I'm glad people are reading my book reviews, since I like reading books. I'm glad people are interested in crazy house ideas. They've also become popular on my Pinterest page . I found more houses than I can blog about and put them there. The same is true of bicycles. I have several of them pinned as well. I also don't link t...

Sometimes a poorly reasoned book written by an earnest believer can start a ball rolling on reading well reasoned books by other earnest believers, which can cause this earnest believer to earnestly believe a little differently. But it is hard to say, whilst on that journey to the land of "little differently", if one is merely moving to a different view on the same country, or really traveling farther afield. Two of the well reasoned books I've finished are Divine Presence amid Violence: Contextualizing the Book of Joshua by Walter Brueggemann and The Joshua Delusion?: Rethinking Genocide in the Bible by Douglas S. Earl. The  Israelite invasion of Canaan with it's incitement to genocide by "God" has always bothered me, as it has many others, and as it should. Taken literally, it's a behavior inconsistent with the command to not kill. I'm leaning toward the idea of hyperbolic language. Earl goes much further than that, but not out of orthodoxy. On...

It started March 24th, 2005 with a post on the purposes of this blog . Now at 2111 posts later, I'm one of the endurance bloggers, where are my big paychecks?

I never remember this day of beginning until after the fact, but here is what I wrote on March 24th, 2005 . Purposes I've grown up in the church and still remain committed to staying with this ship of fools until we reach the sunset and the welcome reception of Jesus Christ. I hope to point out the pirates on our journey but also give a hand to my fellow fools who might be accused of piracy. I think I'm still doing that, after 2059 posts.

I'm disappointed that none of my posts in 2010 made the top 10 in popularity for this year's hits. I am surprised how many people come here to read about bicycles . Only a few posts in 2010 cracked the 100 hits ceiling. My cinema review of the Book of Eli got the most. My post on the Binishell , generated a cluster of hits recently, that pushed it over the century mark. None of my Haiti posts exceeded the 100 level, but collectively, the ones in February, generated many hits, including my trip report from February . Here are the top 10 hits overall for 2010. 10. Yummy Land Shrimp 9. Picture of the Electra Royal 8i and my bike crush on it 8. my personally positive experience at Family Life's marriage retreat, A Weekend to Remember 7. Someone else's negative review of the Cruzbike, which I pointed to (but I still want one) 6. the announcement of my new bike 5. a review of my Actionbent recumbent , which is still for sale, email me to buy it 4. a picture of the Gabion ...

2:1 So I made up my own mind not to pay you another painful visit. 2:2 For if I make you sad, who would be left to make me glad but the one I caused to be sad? 2:3 And I wrote this very thing to you, so that when I came I would not have sadness from those who ought to make me rejoice, since I am confident in you all that my joy would be yours. 2:4 For out of great distress and anguish of heart I wrote to you with many tears, not to make you sad, but to let you know the love that I have especially for you. 2 Corinthians As I read Paul's 2nd letter to the church in Corinth this morning, I was taken aback by his compassion for this church that needed so much correction. It stands in sharp contrast to so much Christian bickering on the internet, including what I have contributed. But then, I am a legalist, see previous post , and legalists aren't known for their compassion. Literally, compassion means "to suffer with." I think Paul exemplifies this in his letter. He spea...

In response to Ben's letter to Jesus . Dude You are whining. Stop it. Grow up. Man up. You made your bed, now you are laying in it. Sorry it sucks. You shouldn't be disappointed that your utopian view of the church didn't pan out. It's not the view in the Bible anyway. See James 3:1  Image via Wikipedia Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. ESV Is James being prescriptive or descriptive? I think the greater judgment is to be expected regardless. You betrayed the trust of dozens of people who gave you their money as a gift unto God. You aren't a chief sheep. You were their under-shepherd and took advantage of one of the sheep. You aren't safe to the flock bro. You turned wolfy. Your hunger was more important than your flock.  Jesus spoke about this in Matthew 7:15 Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. ESV The ESV s...

Faith Autopsy distinguishes between salvation and ethics. I replied, I don't have references in mind right now, but the Bible itself does not seem to separate salvation and ethics. There seem to be sins that, if one partakes in regularly, one should question their salvation. Arminians would consider this losing one's salvation and Calvinists would call it never truly having salvation. God is good jpu I'm frequently misunderstood, so I followed up with this. Image by Loci Lenar via Flickr I was thnking more along the lines of James 2. Faith without works is dead. I did not claim that every time I sin I lose my salvation, although that theology does exist. If you are a serial killer, you might not want to presume God has saved you and sealed you for salvation, if you can't stop killing. It's the ongoing bigger sins that are mentioned repeatedly in the sin lists throughout the epistles into revelation that we need to be concerned about, because God is concerned abou...

This is part of an ongoing conversation at Faith Autopsy. This in response to part 5 , where Ben elevates my comments to blog-postdom. Is HtS,LtS (hate the sin love the sinner) a distillation of Jude1:22-23 " 22 And have mercy on those who doubt; 23 save others by snatching them out of the fire; to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh. "? We are to show mercy (love) while ***hating*** the things stained by the sins of the flesh. I haven't been searching for answers to this topic, but I thought of this conversation when I came across these words this morning in my devotions. That's the ESV. Here is the Message, " Go after those who take the wrong way. Be tender with sinners, but not soft on sin. The sin itself stinks to high heaven." That's pretty good as well. I read it first in the New Century Version. '23 Take others out of the fire, and save them. Show mercy mixed with fear to others, hating even their...

I wrote... As the scientist in the family, my job is to teach math and science to the kids. When science experiments fail, i get excited because that's my reality at work. God is good jpu at When Experiments Fail on the Sonlight blog. We buy our home school curricula from them.

I wrote Abortion kills 1,000,000 babies a year, more than lack of insurance does. What kind of moral calculus can fund abortion to kill 1 million babies to save 50,000 adults with taxes on citizens of a country whose majority opposes abortion on demand? God is good jpu at Where do we go from here? on Urbanfaith.com See the varied voices in this post who are believers from all over the political spectrum.

I wrote, European constitutions are very different from America's. Obama has vowed to uphold our constitution, which really does not provide for a socialist system. If he doesn't like it, he can lobby for amendments, but he can't ignore it. Americans practice voluntary and even state socialism, but those are constitutionally viable options. Ignoring the constitution gave us Jim Crow laws and Roe v. Wade. It could also give us socialized medicine. Context and comment can be found at UrbanFaith, Confronting Health-Care hysteria part 3 .

I bought Snow Leopard for my computer today. I don't consider myself an early adopter, but I had the day off from work, and the Image via Wikipedia upgrade is only 30 bucks. It had several hiccups on installation. A few times it gave me a message saying it couldn't read the disc and that I needed to clean it. I did this a few times. Then when it got to the restart stage of the install, Skype and Adobe updater launched and seemed to interrupt the rest of the installation. So I had to begin the installation all over again. But now I'm online on the new OS. I'm using Safari to write this blog. One of my many griefs with Safari and Blogger is the inability to paste anything into the "Compose" window. Pasting only worked in the "Edit HTML" window. It works now. But I really like Zemanta in Firefox which fetches links and pictures for me. I'll be staying on Firefox for awhile. In fact, I will finish this post in Firefox, but, Snow Leopard is here, and...

It's nice to touch base with people you haven't seen or heard for 20 years. It's nice to see their kids. It's nice to hear what's going on in people's thoughts and lives. But I didn't want to update my "status." Things like "eating breakfast" or "IMing friends" or "enjoying peace and quiet" weren't cutting it for me. It's fine that others are telling their friends that, but it wasn't for me. This is also why I'm not on Twitter yet. But I am on a journey. And I decided to take snapshots of my journey and post them on Facebook. So on my Facebook page I share something that grabbed me from my morning reading in the Bible. As a family, we are reading, this year, through the New Testament together, one chapter at a time. We aren't reading it straight through. We meander. We'll read one gospel, then one short epistle, one middle epistle, and one long epistle. Eventually, we'll finish the year off...

Feel free to "friend" me at http://www.facebook.com/john.p.umland If I have never heard of you before, I will ignore your friend request unless you tell me you are a blog reader friend. I find that lately I've been doing more at FB than at the Umblog. Today's post, in fact, was an expansion of the verse of the day I've been using for my status updates.

Image via Wikipedia Busy. Busy. We escaped for a night to Block Island for our 15th anniversary. Then I crammed for the sermon . Now my brain is still decompressing. I should have a book report soon. I also hope to have a Block Island vacation review. It's good. In the meantime, I finally have time to catch up with the blogs. See the links I'm liking at the top of the page or directly here . Image via Wikipedia