Timothy's Thoughts

F or a long time we’ve had this concept of a person duplicating himself. Often we see this on ads, a woman cleaning house divides into several copies of herself and the work gets down, of course that is to illustrate how much easier life would be with whatever product they’re selling. It’s an interesting concept because we wouldn’t mind letting someone else go to work so we can take time off, but it would never work. Can you imagine if you could just divide yourself in two? You would run into problems right away. Which person would do what? If you’re a naturally bossy person, both of you would be telling each other what to do and neither of you would do anything. If you’re a natural follower, both of you would wait for the other to decide what should be down and neither of you would take charge of the lead. (On a side note, I think that is why God designed marriage the way he did.) I’m somewhat fascinated with the concept of one person becoming two because both people would have equa...

T he good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one” the line says from Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan . The argument seems valid. If the death of one person can result in saving the lives of a hundred, it seems like a good trade, though none of us want to be that one or for that one to be a close friend. It’s the way wars are fought. A commander doesn’t want to lose men, but sometimes he has to send people into a battle they probably won’t win so that the rest of his men can position themselves for a battle that they will win. Soldiers choose to go to war because they know that even if they die it will make life better for their families back home. But it’s not easy to show an individual’s willingness to sacrifice for the group. With Spock it made sense because he was a very logical character. From seeing him in action before we knew that for him to do what he did he would have thought it out logically and had come to the conclusion that his sacrifice was the logical opti...

P eople like being scared. When we were children, we would hide ourselves away in a dark closest and tell ghost stories. I broke a window one time because of doing that. Some friends were over at the house one day. They, my sister and I had been sitting on the front porch telling ghost stories. We all went around to the back of the house to go inside. Us four had just gotten to the back door, with me leading the way, when the dog barked. I know I jumped, but I kind of think the other three pushed me forward. Whatever happened, my arm slammed into the glass and broke it. It takes more to scare most adults, be people still enjoy being scared. There’s an element of fear in every good story. We build a reader up to expect that certain things will happen, but we also introduce the possibility that it won’t . In suspense, the level of fear is pushed somewhat higher than what you might find in other genres, but every story has to have something to fear. The greatest fear comes from things w...

S in and our attitude toward it is an interesting thing. Not that long ago, divorce taboo. Fornication was also taboo. It’s interesting how different things are today. We’re much more accepting of divorce than we used to be. As for fornication, you can’t hardly watch a television show these days without someone at least implying that he is sleeping with his girlfriend. And for that matter, look at the Tyler Clementi case. I don’t condone what Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei are accused of, but the biggest concern people seem to have right now seems to be how to stop such bullying and no one seems to be concerned about what else was going on in the room at the time. Tyler Clementi is not innocent, but because he died people want to put all the blame on his roommate. First let’s consider the alleged crime of Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei. If I had someone using my dorm room for romantic encounters with a lover—either man or woman—I would be more than a little upset, so I can understand the tempta...

M ost people realize that I don’t agree with Rachel Held Evans. My take on her doctrine is that she believes a living god exists, but she also believes we came from monkeys. But I have no intention of discussing her doctrine. There’s plenty of evidence to prove her wrong that others have written about. What I do want to talk about is a marketing tactic she uses that might do us all well to examine. Writing for The Washington Post Rachel wrote the article When Atheists and Baptists Agree . In the article, she calls her critics by name and provides links, but she doesn’t pick on just any critic, she chooses Ken Ham of the Creation Museum, Hemant Mehta of the Friendly Atheist Blog and Dr. Albert Mohler, a prolithic blogger and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It is through his blog that I learned of the article she wrote. What we can learn from this is that if you want publicity from blogs you should pick a fight with bloggers who have a history of writing about...

O ne of the hard things in life is saying what’s right and knowing that people will be offended by it. As writers, I think that influences what we write. We don’t like people to be offended. We want everyone to like us, but that doesn’t happen. The easy thing is to try to please people, but it doesn’t make us much of a person if we tell them things that we know aren’t true. I believe the thing that makes writing hard isn’t the work but rather doing what is right.

T he other day, Brandon Cox of Saddleback Church wrote about repurposing sermons to get as much out of them as possible. The argument is that since sermons take so much effort to produce they should be used to the maximum. Having repurposed sermons on numerous occasions in the past, I get his point, however, as I considered the concept in that light I began to question the wisdom of that. My first problem with trying to squeeze everything we can out of a sermon is that the people who’ll be seeing the repurposed sermon may not be in the target audience of the original sermon. For example, suppose a pastor in a fishing village preaches a sermon, we package that sermon up and play it for Rick Warren’s usually audience at Saddleback Church. I’m guessing it wouldn’t go over well, and yet it may have been a very effective sermon in the other church. It is important that we realize that we can’t divorce the message from the audience. Another issue is that I don’t see why we should spend so ...