Lutherans top place in Chistianity history

I coordinate with Lutheran Church Missiouri synod, a Lutheran synod. 

The Reformation was a political and religious movement in Europe that began in the 1500′s and lasted for roughly 150 years. It is difficult to pinpoint exact starting and ending dates for the Reformation, but we can point to two events that seem to begin and to culminate the Reformation era: 1517 (Martin Luther’s 95 Theses and his protest against the indulgence system of the Roman Catholic Church) and 1648 (The Peace of Westphalia, treaties that ended both the Thirty Years’ War and the Eighty Years’ War and thus put an end to most of the civil disruption caused by the religious movement).
1. Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses (October 31, 1517)
 It has been argued that the importance of Luther’s nailing of the 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg is often overestimated, since all public disputations were promoted in this manner. Furthermore, it is evident from the 95 Theses that Luther’s decisive break with Rome is not yet clear. He upholds the indulgence system, papal authority, and the existence of purgatory. Yet, this crucial event deserves to be at the forefront of any discussion on important Reformation events because it is the spark that led to the flames of revolution. Luther’s 95 Theses were published, printed, and disseminated into Europe, and the publication ignited a religious fervor that exploded across Germany and beyond.
2. The Marburg Colloquy (1529)
 Luther and Zwingli’s discussion of the theology of the Lord’s Supper may seem an odd choice for the 2nd most important Reformation event, but the political and religious consequences of their failure to come to agreement on the Eucharist set the course for a split which has lasted almost 500 years. Because the Reformers could not agree on the Lord’s Supper, the political alliance between Reform-minded countries was severely hindered. The religious implications forced the Lutherans and the Reformed to go separate ways, creating an animosity that precluded religious unity and led to even more splintering of Protestantism into differing groups.
3. Publication of Luther’s Translation of the New Testament (1522)
 Luther’s publication of the New Testament into common German was a watershed moment for the Reformation in Europe. He was followed by William Tyndale’s work on the New Testament in 1526 and by a host of other common-man translations in other countries. The translation of the Bible into the language of the people allowed the Reformers to base their criticism of the papacy on biblical grounds and led to the common man being able to search the Scriptures for himself without relying solely on the Church’s authority.

4. The Act of Supremacy (1534)
 Henry VIII’s institution of the Church of England and his positioning of himself as the head of the Church was the beginning of a long and checkered history of Reformation in England, in which the institution of Reformed theology from the top-down brought its own set of problems.
5. The Edict of Nantes (1598)
 This event was one of the most hopeful signs that the Reformation would eventually end with different religious groups coexisting peacefully. This innovative act of tolerance formed the basis for the modern-day secular society of freedom of religion.
6. The Council of Trent (1545-63)
 The Roman Catholic declarations following the Council of Trent eliminated virtually any hope for reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Protestant movement. The enormity of this council’s output served to codify Roman Catholic theology for the next four centuries, forming the Tridentine period of Roman Catholicism.
7. Calvin’s Institutes (1559)
 John Calvin’s systematic theology The Institutes of the Christian Religion formed the basis for the adoption of Reformed theology in Europe and America. His theology is important because it was a visionary exposition of theology, whereas the other Reformers’ theologies were reactionary in nature, being forged in the midst of conflict.
8. Martin Luther’s Three Treatises (1520)
 Martin Luther’s three treatises to the German people in 1520 (Appeal to the German Nobility, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of the Christian) served as a fervent call to reformation of the church, influencing the Protestant movement in Germany and beyond for years to come.
9. St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572)
 The Catholic mob violence against the Huguenots that lasted for several months claimed the lives of thousands of French Protestants. This event was a turning point in the French Wars of Religion, as it radicalized the Huguenot movement.
10. The Peace of Augsburg (1555)
 The first religious war of the century ended, as rulers allowed territories to choose their religion. This was the beginning of religious toleration in Europe, which formed the foundation for the Edict of Nantes and the Act of Toleration.

Lutheran books (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod)

 Based on  "Forgotten book" edition with added Lutheran bias

 Lutheran Scriptures ( 95 theses )

 Layman terms

 Lutheran (ESV 2k7) biased Bible notes

 Holidays?

== ELCA ==

 

== Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod ==

 

1984 NIV Lutheran notes

Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS)

 Lutheran Synods Differences

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Playstation 4 tech specs revealed

PlayStation 4 development kits issued for January 2013
      AMD "Jaguar" 8-core
Storage capacity     Hard drive, size(s) unannounced
Memory     8 GB GDDR5 (unified)
Graphics     Custom AMD Radeon R10xx (based on Southern Islands GPU architechure)
, four USB 3.0 ports, two Ethernet connections, a Blu-ray drive, a 160GB HDD, as well as HDMI and optical audio outputs.

 Deep Down     Capcom    
Destiny     Bungie    
Diablo III     Blizzard Entertainment    
DriveClub     Evolution Studios    
Final Fantasy      Square Enix    
Infamous: Second Son     Sucker Punch Productions
Killzone: Shadow Fall]     Guerrilla Games     PlayStation 4 launch
Knack    SCE Japan Studio    
Rocketbirds 2: Evolution    Ratloop    
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt     CD Projekt RED     2014
The Witness    Jonathan Blow    
Watch Dogs    Ubisoft Montreal     PlayStation 4 launch
TBC    Media Molecule    

Dolph Lundgren's Kyokushin kaikan

One of the smartest hollywood actors (IQ: 160)  picked Kyokushin_kaikan for his second degree black belt so all you Tekken experts should check out Kyokushin kaikan at your local karate school.

24 years ago

1988-1989 1988-1989 1988-1989 1988-1989 1988-1989 This is me 24 years ago.

Non-denominationalism from the Frankfurt School

In an age that encourages nondenominationalism, using the name “Lutheran” may seem out of place. Some might even charge that it is wrong or sinful to use the name. But to my thinking, it is important to say clearly what you believe about God. The name “Lutheran” is shorthand for getting to those facts. It simply means, “I agree with Luther,” whose teaching has been well-known for nearly five hundred years. Calling yourself “nondenominational” became popular in the late twentieth century. But the idea stems from nineteenth-century movements that encouraged people to call themselves simply “Christians” in the hope of uniting all of Christendom. Those efforts failed and actually resulted in an increased number of denominations! When I hear nondenominationalism, I remember that particular hospital enforcing nondenominationalism (ie: corruption). Quite frankly, Obama is nondenominationalism and hospitals are still clearly corrupted by political correctness (ie: Critical Theory / Frankfurt school). As Lutherans interact with other Christians, they often find themselves struggling to explain their beliefs and practices. Although many Lutherans have learned the “what” of the doctrines of the Church, they do not always have a full scriptural foundation to share the “why.” When confronted with different doctrines or denominations, they sometimes cannot clearly state their faith


(Frankfurt School publication)
  Protestant Ethnic and Spirit of Capitalism PDF download A thumbnail version goes like this. There appears to be lots more Protestant capitalists than there are Catholic ones. Also, Protestant countries tend to be more economically developed than Catholic ones - so why? Marxism would say that people's ideas are a manifestation of the economic structure they find themselves in, but Weber believes this is only partly true, although he starts off strongly opposed to Marxism, in the end he is much less certain of the limits of the role of economics in providing the base for these ideas to flourish.. All the same, he believes that there is something in Protestantism that makes Capitalism more or less inevitable and that is not present in Catholicism. Now, given the countries picked - Italy and Spain on the Catholic side, Northern Europe and England on the Protestant side, you could possibly argue that living in a country with an incredibly bad cuisine is the problem. But Weber focuses on religion. In the last chapter he says that extreme Protestant views run something like this - God has a perfect plan which he worked out at the dawn of time. There is nothing you can do to change this plan. You don't deserve to be saved - no one does (we are all contemptible sinners and it is only God's grace which saves us in any sense). You cannot know you are saved. The only way you might 'guess' is if God rewards you. So, if you work hard and gain riches you are obviously in God's favour and therefore you might also be saved. Spending money is a sin. So, Calvinism and other extreme sects encouraged people to work hard and not to spend - prerequisites for the growth of Capitalism. Now, that bit is the bit this book is mostly known for. But what I found interesting was the idea at the very end that becoming increasingly wealthy - like Silus Marner - also leads one to become increasingly obsessed with secular interests, not least in increasing ones own wealth to the point of a fetish and to become obsessed with worldly goods, rather than heavenly ones. So, while Protestantism is seen as a kind of prerequisite for the early development of Capitalism, ironically enough, Capitalism does not return the favour and works to undermine the extreme forms of this faith that assisted its own development.

PySol: Free Alternative to SolSuite

Download

I downloaded SolSuite 13.1, but this is the best freeware (Pysol). Pysol is as good as SolSuite 13.1, yet it is GPL licensed.  Its for Windows, Linux and MAC OS X.  PySol has all the Aisleriot selections.

Where's Republican Party

Republican Party is not on the ground for the entire year. Only election years. That's not how you win elections!

 

Headquarters 219 Second Street Hudson, Wisconsin 54016

How Generation Z will screw Generation Y: Episode II

As a history student in college (history of political thought, for all you fans of the Republic) and still an obsessive researcher of generational demographic trends (everyone should start with Strauss & Howe) I understand that to study history (contemporary or ancient), you must study generational shifts in thinking, because the way the generation thinks helps us to understand and explain historical action. And maybe predict future action.

So I think a lot about what Generation Z will be like. I have written before about what Generation Z will be like at work , but I've been thinking, recently, that the way Gen Z is educated will change the workplace when they enter it.

Baby boomers changed politics, Gen X changed family, Gen Y changed work, and Gen Z will change education. Here's how the education of Gen Z will affect us at work.

1. A huge wave of homeschooling will create a more self-directed workforce.
Homeschooling is going mainstream. We have known for a while that public education in the United States is largely terrible. Yes, there are pockets that are exceptional, but for the most part, we have an education crisis on our hands. But Baby Boomers were too scared to solve the crisis with homeschooling. If you homeschool your kids, you take them out of the typical ways to measure how well kids are doing in the competition. Baby Boomers couldn't handle that, and they also wanted to work full-time, so instead of homeschooling, Baby Boomers got kids tons of tutoring and extra help after school.

Gen X is more comfortable working outside the system than Baby Boomers. Gen X women are fine quitting their jobs to take care of their kids—they have no feminist ax to grind in the workplace. And Gen X parents don't feel a need to have their kid compete because Gen X is so noncompetitive. So homeschooling among Gen X parents is becoming mainstream. It's no longer just for religious radicals and problem children. Homeschooling is for parents who know public schools are broken and don't have $20,000 a year for private school.

This means we will have a generation of kids who grew up with largely a self-learning, self-directed model. They are more accustomed to figuring out what they like to do, and doing it on their own. The crisis to figure out what to do with one's life will not last so long because Gen X will raise more independent and self-directed kids.

2. Homeschooling as kids will become unschooling as adults.
We have established that school does not prepare people for work. In fact, Gen Y has been very vocal about this problem because a) they did everything they were told to do and it didn't help them get a job and b) we have a national crisis because gen y has huge debt from college and little ability to pay it back.

With alternative schooling and an emphasis on independent investigation, Generation Z will be the first group of knowledge workers who were trained to do their job before they started working. For example, Generation Z will be great at synthesizing information because they will have been doing that—rather than memorizing—the whole time they were in school.

The workplace ramification of this shift in learning is that Generation Z will have no problem directing their careers. They will know how to figure out what skill to learn next, and they will have more self-discipline to do it on their own.

When Gen Z enters the workforce, the older people, Gen X and Gen Y, will work to live, not live to work. This will be something Gen X and Gen Y fought hard for. To Gen Z it will be easy to do and self-learning will take center stage in their work day. So, as qualifications for the workplace will rapidly change and older people who don’t keep up will be outdated, it will be Generation Z that is best at keeping up. Not because they are young, but because they understand that unschooling is not a movement for kids, but a way to live a life, and it doesn't stop when you start getting a paycheck.

3. The college degree will return to its bourgeois roots; entrepreneurship will rule.
The homeschooling movement will prepare Generation Y to skip college, and Gen X is out-of-the-box enough in their parenting to support that.

One of the books that really changed the way I think is Zac Bissonnette’s book, Debt-Free U. He explains why no one should go into debt for college. It's just not worth it. He says, even if your parents have the money to pay for college, use it for something better—like buying yourself a franchise and learning something that'll really help you establish yourself in the adult world.

Baby Boomers are too competitive to risk pulling the college rug out from under their kids. And Gen Y are rule followers—if adults tell them to go to college, they will go. Gen X is very practical and is also the first generation in American history to have less money than their parents. So it makes sense that Gen X would be the generation to tell their kids to forget about college.

Ninety percent of Gen Y say they want to be entrepreneurs, but only a very small percent of them will ever launch a full-fledged business, because Generation Y are not really risk takers. However I am guessing (based on links like this one) that most members of Gen X have, at some point, worked for themselves. The entrepreneurship bug will be in full force when Gen Z comes along. They will feel they have no choice but to do that or weather an unstable workplace with huge college debt. People will trade in a college degree for on-the-job learning. The result will be a smarter workforce and the end of universities as a patronage system for philosophers.

How Generation Z screws Generation Y: Insider information

At this point, the oldest in Generation Z are just turning 13, and we have enough information about the two demographics to predict what will happen. Aside from my case of schadenfreude, I’m particularly interested in Generation Z because my sons are smack in the middle of it. But also I’m interested because if we understand the impact the next generation will have on the workforce, we’re better able to adapt our own careers for it. So get ready:

1. In generational conflict Generation Y will hide.
All generations have conflict between each other. But conflict is really bad for Generation Y because they hate conflict. They are the generation that moves home with their parents because they get along so well, and they apologize for quitting because they can’t cope with disappointing their boss. Generation Y is sunny, upbeat, and non-confrontational. Which means that Generation Z, raised by pragmatic, confrontational Gen X parents, will think Gen Y are lame. Weak. Delusional. (Which are the negative traits of kind and non-confrontational.)

2. Gen Z will lead Gen Y almost immediately.
Gen Y hates to stand out. Their idea of leadership is leading from the middle. Or pretending people don’t like leaders. This has not been a problem for them because Gen X doesn’t want to lead. Gen X just want to go home to their kids. So the only people providing top-down leadership at work right now are Baby Boomers who refuse to retire and exist miles and miles from the cutting edge of everything except the new retirement.

So there will be a power vacuum when Gen Z enters the workforce, and they will take it over very quickly. All they’ll need to do is say, “I want to lead.” No one will challenge them. And, conveniently, Strauss and Howe point out that generational tendencies are cyclical, and Generation Z is poised to lead. They grew up in a time of turmoil: economic demise, war, rampant, random shootings. Generation Z will take charge, create stability, keep everything in line.

3. The passion problem will be passe.
Gen Y is immobilized by their need to “do what they love”. Their Boomer parents instilled in them the fairy tale idea that passion should guide what they do. But Baby Boomers have never had this, except when they were unemployed at Woodstock, and their impractical, dreamer career advice has left their kids unable to make decisions. Gen Y has a passion problem. But this will end when Gen Z comes on board.

First of all, Generation Z will be the education generation. They will have been homeschooled at a rate we have never seen before, so they will be great at identifying what they like. Generation Y, on the other hand, was schooled by teachers who told them what to study to ace the test, and parents hired tutors to help, which means Gen Y is particularly good at taking tests and bad at figuring out what they like. Generation Z will fill the gap and simply tell Generation Y what to do.

Generation Z will give meaning to work in a way that Gen Y has talked about but has been incapable of achieving. Work will be about creating a national sense of stability. Work will be about helping families to adjust to the new economic realities. Work will be about helping people build new paths through adulthood that do not focus on the corporation. Gen Z has been priming for this their whole lifes, with their counter-culture, Gen X parents.

4. Gen Z will out-communicate Gen Y.
Right now, Gen Y are the best communicators at work. They are the first generation to be taught social skills at work, and they are genuinely kind and concerned about people. Additionally Gen Y are the first generation who grew up writing for a massive audience, even as kids, and they are the generation with the best writing skills in history.

This will all seem old-fashioned, though, when Gen Z is on the scene. Gen Z communicates largely through video. They use YouTube like it’s Google. For example, when they want to know how to beat a video game, they search online for a video to tell them: no reading.

Teenaged boys are giving video game lectures to thousands of other kids. Teenaged girls are political activists who have their own video platform before they’re thirteen years old. The poise Gen Z has in front of the camera will translate to workplace confidence and charisma. This will be the age of verbal communication rather than written, and Gen Z will shine.

5. Gen Z will force Gen Y to live more in reality.
Gen Y’s obsession with travel is rooted in their acute need to feel special and different and document it in a way their friends approve of. Also, Gen Y has no money, so they are forced to say they value experience above possessions since they can’t afford possessions beyond their de rigeur Apple equipment and marked-down high-end purchases they self-define with.

Jan Chipchase is a great example of the travel-is-everything mentality; he does brag tweets about his job that is nearly 100% travel. Another example: Gen Y brides who forgo the wedding and just splurge on a big trip and a photographer to document the dress in an exotic location. Gen Y lives on Facebook and Instagram, and their reality is whatever is in the photo.

Generation Z is over the photography thing already. Every gadget they have has a camera. Their parents have documented their every move, and they are expecting to have no disposable income, so they won’t’ need to post photos justifying their existeence.

So Gen Z will shine a light on Gen Y and expose a lot that Gen Y hasn’t seen before. But the truth is that every generation keeps the generation before them more honest. In the end, I’m grateful for the Gen Yers who worked with me, and forced me to see myself differently. I am less cynical and more sunny becuase I was surrounded by Gen Yers.

And they will be better, too, once they get over the shock of someone younger than them in the mix.

Solution to Internet Explorer

Does your Internet Explorer always fail you?   Cannot open a tab, and  cannot download anything. If I do IE crashes and the tab switches to a message that says, "Internet Explorer has closed this webpage to help protect your computer."


Open up a command prompt and type ftp releases.mozilla.org and hit enter. It'll ask you for a user name, which is anonymous, and a password which you can just leave blank. You should now have an ftp prompt.

Now you'll need to change the directory to the one that contains the firefox installer we want. To do this, type cd pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/18.0/win32/en-US and hit enter (or if you want a different localisation change the en-US bit).

Now we tell the client we want to grab a binary file, simply by using the binary command. We then change the local directory the client will download the file to, which we do by entering lcd C:\ (or wherever you want to put the file). Oh, and we're also going to want to know that the file is downloading, so use the hash command to instruct the client to print a # for every 2048 bytes (which will fill your command prompt with 3600 or so hashes).

All we have to do now is grab the firefox installer, which we do by typing get "Firefox Setup 18.0.exe" and watch your screen slowly fill with # symbols.

It'll let you know once the file is complete, and once it is simply type quit to close the connection and exit the ftp client.

$200 DSLR

D70S
Nikons are more natural looking with less noise over Canon Rebel on same ISO.

Game Informer collection

collected this since 2003 - 2010.