The main reason I’m not as engaged though is because almost every issue has been reduced to a false either/or and it’s nearly impossible to convince either side that it’s not a two-way argument. I’m seeing things like “no one should die because they cannot afford health care”. Can you spot the false choice?

Should someone die because they refuse health care willingly? Should someone die because they willingly made choices that precluded or restricted their access to health care? Examination of the terms used, the meanings and implications of the words, is difficult. People die every day because there aren’t sufficient organs for transplants, because there aren’t sufficient health care professionals to treat everyone who needs treatment, because they chose to live in a place where emergency medicine is nearly impossible. All of these can be bound up in the concept of  ”afford”, but it’s much more inflammatory when it just means “money”.

Even the miraculous healing of Jesus had a price, and in my opinion it was incredibly expensive by today’s standards. He healed people who had faith, sometimes almost unknowingly. Matthew 9:20-22 I’m not saying that human life should be weighed in gold, or that only the middle-class and above should have medicine and treatment. I am saying that this debate, like many others today, is too often reduced to either/or choices that make no sense and only serve to alienate and enrage. It’s hard to think about the details and intricacies though, it’s hard to consider what our words mean and how others might hear them. It’s easy to shout slogans and demonize the “other side”.

The ColdFusion 8 installer creates an alias on Linux systems from cfide to CFIDE so that either will work. Flash forms need to call the scripts folder in CFIDE in order to load their various components. On this server, Flash 10 on Safari would show the “Initializing” message and fill the loading bar, then stop. No error, nothing. Firefox on OS X would show the loading window, then throw an error “RSL Load Failed” and stop at 40%. Googling this problem led us to believe that it couldn’t find the .swf or even the scripts folder.

I suspected mod_speling fairly early on, and disabled it. No luck. Reinstall CF, build a completely new server, lots of time wasted. I never could get the debug version of Flash Player 10 on OS X to work and dump a trace, and there aren’t any instructions for this specific version that I found. None of the log files were any help, no error messages, nothing. The best we could do was look at the network activity on the client and see what the page was trying to load. It looked like it was finding all of the files.

Finally, I checked the SSL config that was included in the Apache config on the server. Spellcheck was turned on there as well, and we had missed it. Turned it off, and suddently Flash forms work again. We still don’t know exactly why they failed, but it obviously has something to do with redirects and aliases for the CFIDE and/or scripts folder.

ADDENDUM: Turns out the CheckSpelling directive works in .htaccess files. So we have case sensitivity and flash forms coexisting, for now. This fellow found a rather unique solution too, but I haven’t tested it.

• iWork
• iLife
• Microsoft Office 2008
• Adobe Acrobat
• TextWrangler
• Eclipse
• iStat Menus
• Firefox
• Flip4Mac
• iChm
• iTerm
• ManOpen
• OmniGraffle Pro
• OmniOutliner Pro
• Apple Xcode
• The Unarchiver
• VLC
• VMware Fusion
• Cisco VPN Client
• Cyberduck

There are many more applications that I use in specific circumstances, but they aren’t on my essentials list.

My wife said that she kept thinking about how unimpressed I would be. She even mentioned something about wearing a Pharisee hat.

I’m not opposed to emotion in worship. I just don’t believe that it should be about emotional reaction, that it should be crafted specifically to elicit emotion as if that were some measure of “spirit and truth”. I think the Pharisee remark was based on my assertion that there is a right way and a wrong way to worship God. I’m just becoming more and more cynical about the whole concept of “personal” religion and the American “roll your own” mentality. I object to the idea that it’s your intent that matters, not your actions or words or forms. Where’s that scriptural precedent? Intent does matter, but so does what we do. Christ did not abolish the law and prophets, nor did he say that any of the ancient forms were wrong. He said that the forms and actions are not enough.

I think it does matter what we do when we say we’re “worshipping”. For what it’s worth, the Pharisees weren’t necessarily wrong, their doctrine was simply insufficient. You can get to Heaven by following every rule and law, but no human being other than Christ was able to do it.

Worship is about pleasing God, not us. Sermons aren’t worship. Fellowship isn’t worship. I don’t think we get to tell God what worship should be. I’ll need to read more on this issue, too.