My Journal

1/17/2025 3 uses of the law. Learned from this Reformed Forum Live (1/17/2025) Youtube recording:

3 uses of the law is not to be confused (The Tree Uses of the Law by Keith A. Mathison) with the threefold division of the law: Moral, Civil and the ceremonial. The 3 uses are: political [lowest - civil harmony], pedagogical [to know we are sinners and points to the Gospel] and normative [highest - right relationship with God].

1/12/2025 Finally looking into this: Garage sales bought 50 cent. The tactile switch must have fallen out after purchase of a bendable reading LED light with possibly USB recharge capability, requiring 3x AAA batteries, because it was working fine when we bought it around last year from a yard sale. When i noticed the cover was loose that's when i also realized that must be a switch fallen off. This video demonstrates that this is still repairable if i found the right switch. So I'll need to somehow fashion/purchase a simple tactile switch/mechanism that can behave as the video below:

Interesting Group Texting with Eleni on church music again:
Eleni: Hi dear Nadia! It would have been so good to see you there! We missed our GCC family this today. sermon was excellent. I think you both would have gotten a lot out of it. Large congregation! Not sure you and Tim would have liked the music though although we thought it was great. They use music from sovereign Grace also but theirs is quite a bit louder than ours with more electronic equipment. Lord willing, we’ll see you at our church next Sunday.
Me: If they can stand for our broken English I'm sure i can also tolerate their low-quality pentecostal music.
Eleni: Quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Me: Namaste
Eleni: Love you both! Have a blessed day!

This is the typical start of the promotion of Post-Modernism, that everything is relative. Relativism. When Eleni equate Quality with Beauty, that shows her ignorance to be taught, but rather subscribe to something someone like her should well know to stay away from, relativism.

Here's why I used these terms:

Pentecostal music: Many contemporary Christian music are based on Charismatic church music theology: Ya gotta find a music that appeal to the pop culture! That's how you get numbers! These churches don't usually last long if they were to maintain faithfulness to God, usually they die off a generation or two, because of qualitative mutation.

low quality: I purposely used a objective word. So this is a gotcha for Eleni, as she basically said: Quality to be a subjective thing. A clear exhibition of relativism. Even Nadia said that Quality is not like beauty. Not only so, the pop culture quote: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder is unbiblical, against verses such as Proverbs 15:3. Of course, with people like Eleni, I should dumb it down to using "good vs. bad" instead of low vs. high quality. So "bad music" instead of "low quality" music. Then she would really have to say "good and bad is in the eye of the beholder" if she was to stay consistent in her belief. That good can be bad, bad can be good. This would certainly be unlike her, of all people, to hold this woke belief, but because of her ignorance to be corrected, she fell to her own folly, and the ignorance opens the gateway for her to relativism, as much as she would deny it. But that is precisely the making of such heresy and foolishness/low IQ-ness.

Broken English comparison: Nadia loved this example. It was a spontaneous response on my part. This aptly analogized low quality music. Eleni should know better because she does correct my English from time to time and I am always grateful for that, not sure if she's aware of it, perhaps I should encourage her to continue. Broken English is a bad quality and it's not in the eye of the beholder that it can be a good, beautiful, high quality thing. One should not want to remain using broken English. But can bad English be used for art? I don't doubt that, but we would certainly call for precaution when using double negatives, imitating village grammars such as "We was here", etc. After all, that's how we sometimes get slangs. But proper English is still needed, just like proper music is required for worship, such that objective beauty exists, without discounting the subjectivity of arts. Objective beauty can be in proportion, balance, tonality, motive, etc. One key problem with CCM is that it cannot tell apart entertainment from giving praise. It conflates glorifying God with getting high on ecstasy trance. Eleni agreed with me that we must give God the best, the best quality. Which Christian wouldn't? However, now I can see that she confused and not able to see the difference of Giving God the Best from Giving God one's all. This also is unbiblical: Loving God with just heart and soul, but not mind (because they redefined mind to be just heart and soul).

Namaste: This is originally of Hindu culture/religion. Thus it carries pantheistic origin. It means bowing to your divinity. However, because of relativism, it can just simply mean "respecting the divine beauty in you" and thus, it can be stretched to become a Christian value from common grace. I'm not sure how much Eleni know of this word, but since she refused to be confronted by it, I think I have accomplished my point, in agreeing to disagree as there is no need to continue as she has clearly reached the capacity of her mentality on this issue. At least she didn't or was prevented by the logic I presented to rebut it like many Christian fundamentalists who would never allow such word to be passed around by Christians simply because it's Hinduism, it's relativism. But Eleni could not do so without jeopardizing her own "relativism" ideology which she used to defend herself. So would I use Namaste in public? Only against Christians who know better but contradict themselves with relativism because they don't wish to lose to an argument. It's a way to end it with nice sarcasm because they would never yield and admit their fault in this case, the more you push it, the worse they will become, and it's not right to cause them to deteriorate further.

Last but not least, is that not all CCM are bad. Just like not always my English is broken/bad. So the challenge I presented to Eleni is one on humility and she failed it. At least I admit my English is broken. If Eleni had wanted to say that Beauty is not always subjective, then she certainly had tried very hard in speaking against it.