I did hear of Pat Robertson’s comments. I know next to nothing about the supposed pact though. It apparently comes from a single book. Some say it is true, others say it is not. Either way, Robertson certainly wasn’t being intentionally hateful. The program he said the comment on was dedicated to raising relief money for the Haitian victims. Immediately after the comment he added something like, “so let’s reach out and help these people….” The comment was meant to move his viewers to compassion for a lost and struggling people.

Of course, there were Christian Haitians injured and killed in this incident, and that is regularly the case; the righteous and unrighteous suffer together so that the righteous can show the unrighteous how to suffer as trusting creatures of Almighty God.

There is good reason to see this situation as the doing of humans rather than demons, though. So many buildings collapsed because they were hazardous buildings. So many are now destitute because they were already in poverty. Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Why only now are the richer nations of the world rushing out their hands with commitments of long-term help? Perhaps this earthquake will be the turning point for Haiti. New resources. Better government. Stronger communities. If God did send the quake, he might have sent it to wake us up!

I think to start, if there were rumors of our own ancestors having made a pact with the devil, I would want to organize a ceremony dedicating us and our children forever to the Lord. Just in case. Just to be clear.

So Cheney has been busting Obama’s balls about national security. I’ve been thinking a little about that. Now – from the casual observer it can be noted that his criticism has been helping Obama by causing all the flaky and miss-matched Democrats to rally around him. And assuming that Cheney is indeed against the Obama agenda, it might seem illogical. It might seem that Cheney has some vindictive hair up his ass.

But let’s give this more than 1 and ½ second’s worth of thought. Cheney is a smart man. You can call him evil or crazy – but you have to admit he knows how to make things happen his way. Maybe he is seriously concerned about Obama’s approach – or lack of – to national security. Maybe he knows more about the situation we’re in and our ability to deal with it than we do – since it used to be his job.

Or maybe it is animosity. Maybe Cheney believes – as I believe – that a serious attack will be getting through –probably in less than a year. And if Cheney wants to totally cripple Obama’s agenda, his current criticism might be an effort in making every lax move Obama makes regarding national security starkly apparent so that when the attack does finally get through – when the next weaponized article of clothing operates as intended – everyone will know exactly who to blame.

Activity and Ontology.

Ontology (a static condition):

Something is to be labeled evil when it is in opposition to God’s desires.

Evil is a label, not a unit of measurement. There is no degree or scale to the label. Something is in conflict with God’s desires, or it is not.

Every human is born into a condition opposite of what God desires.

Every human is evil.

Activity (fluid decisions):

How often each human chooses to actively engage inclinations proceeding from their evil condition is a matter of personal decision.

Illustration: Jane is a sexual creature. That condition she did not choose and cannot unchoose (repress, yes, but not unchoose). How often and to what degrees she chooses to express that condition is a choice she constantly makes.

(  Excursus: This is why Paul taught that we are doubly guilty; (1) we were born into a condition we cannot change, and (2) all have at one time or another made choices in accordance with that condition.  )

The effect of these two realities:

Jane jaywalks and John eats babies. Both humans are evil. And one is choosing to participate in that condition to agreater degree than the other.

How will God handle these varying degrees of participation at the last judgment? He hasn’t told us. Dante in his Divine Comedy suggests that the degree of each person’s suffering in hell is related to their degree of participation in their evil condition through this life. That doesn’t seem likely to me as hell isn’t pitchforks but separation from God’s relational presence and the bearing of his image. Will there be degrees, then, of separation from bearing God’s image and experiencing his presence? I don’t think we’re going to know before it happens.

If you use the internet and haven’t screened your PC for malware, you have malware. Why is this bad?

Malware is a program that hides on your computer and does things. The things it does may be as simple and annoying as randomly bringing up new browser windows with ads in them. Or it might be a silent program that gathers information and sends it to an identity thief. But usually, if one malware program is making contact with other websites, you’re getting all kinds of other malware too.

These evil programs get on your system usually by loading themselves on while you visit a website. The website owner may not even know what the site is doing because malware creators can hack knto an unguarded site and upload a virus which then loads the malware onto visitors.

The first line of defense is good browsing habits: Don’t visit questionable websites. And by questionable I meanwebsites contained in spam of any kind and advertisements for nefarious or unbelievable things. Pornography, pirate, or any other type of back-alley website. It’s good to stay away from those sites anyway.

To see if you currently have any malware, and to remove it, you’ll need a good anti-malware program. One such program is Malwarebytes, which has a free version available that does all the basic stuff. Sometimes, all you have to do is go to the website, download Malwarebytes, and install and run the program. But – if you already have malware it may not be so easy.

Malware authors know about programs like Malwarebytes to they build protective measures into their malware programs. One such protective measure prevents your system from installing Malwarebytes. So if you don’t already have it installed you have to be tricky like the malware and rename the setup file (mbam-setup.exe) to something else, like browser.exe. Hopefuly the program will run properly then. If not, Malwarebytes has great support through a discussion forum.

And likewise, if you already have Malwarebytes installed, some maleware will prevent it from running a screen of your system or from updating its database. Usually this can be overcome by renaming the executable file in the Malwarebytes folder (mbam.exe I think) to something else, like explorer.exe.