I had a Muslim student in one of my classes recently and we had some interesting theological discussions. He is perfectly willing and happy to use thousands of years of critical scholarship applied to the Christian Bible (and the very fact that mutiple versions of the canon exist) to discredit and refute Christian belief. But there can be NO critical scholarship applied to the Qur'an, because it is a unified work by one author and clearly the revealed word of God/Allah. I think this young man may have been raised Christian (I didn't ask) but it strikes me that he is seeking absolutes. Things must be JUST SO. Christianity (and Judaism as well) are faiths chock-a-block with ambiguity, and some folks just don't want to have to deal with ambiguity. Heck, we have Christians who can't cope with it--that's why we have Biblical inerrants within Christianity, who believe the the King James Version of the Bible is the inspired word of God. But the fact remains that Christians and Jews must find their faith though thickets of ambiguity and many have difficulty doing so. Some may just make the choice to turn to faith of absolutes such as Islam. This is one of the things that makes dialogue between Christians and Jews on one side and Muslims on the other so difficult, even though we all believe in the same God expressed in different ways. Allah is a God of mercy, while the Triune God is a God of grace, and for some reason, I'll take grace over mercy anytime, even with all the ambiguity.

I have now made Firefox the default browser on every computer I use on a regular basis, and up to now I've been real happy with the decision. This is the first session editing my blog since the switch (I started blogging with Blogger but now use Movable Type), and I have discovered that the four handy little buttons for URL, Bold, Italics and Underscore don't appear in Movable Type under Firefox. First serious glitch of any kind that I've found. I'm planning to switch all the systems at work to Firefox after version 1.0 is released, and I'll also switch all of the staff email clients to Thunderbird when it reaches 1.0 as well. Except for the Movable Type problem, Firefox has worked flawlessly and with far fewer crashes, glitches and freezes than Internet Explorer. I switched; you should too.

OK, so I've decided to stop eating myself to death. Over the last couple of years I've developed some extremely bad eating habits, that (not surprisingly) have all manifested themselves right around my waist. Even back in my early Navy days I had a bit of a reputation as a trencherman, with new members of the wardroom being warned to keep their hands and feet well clear when my fork was in operation. But over the last few years I basically worked up to a policy more in line with the Weird Al Yankovic song, “Just Eat It”. I was eating two candy bars for an afternoon snack, and often a burger (just a small one!) on the way to work in the morning. Do I have an eating disorder? I don't know, but I know I was eating disorderly. I know there's probably some deep seated psychological reasons for this, but basically the reason to stop is simple: dying young is an idea that has become very unappealing to me. So everybody who knows me now has my permission: if you see me doing something stupid in the way of eating, stop me (politely if possible). I'd like to shed 40 pounds. I'll keep you up to date. (BTW, sorry I haven't posted in so long; I'm really glad summer school is over!)