the singularity of being and nothingness
Archive for April, 2010
Quick JavaScript Goodness
Apr 10th
Ok, so this is nothing new nor is it something that hasn't been blogged about before. However, I thought I'd share in case it helps some other googler that can't find what they're looking for 🙂
So in JavaScript, most functions have a pretty standard form: you name the function and then define which arguments you wish to pass to the function. Depending on how you work out the logic in the remainder of the function, the arguments can all be required, all be optional, or whatever.
The one major drawback, however, is that the arguments must be passed in the proper order. For example, if I have a describeMovie() function that takes an actor, title, and year argument, the order I define these arguments in will be the order in which I have to pass them in my function call.
function describeMovie(actor,title,year) { // alert the movie’s lead actor alert(actor); …………}
would require
onclick="describeMovie('Bruce Willis','Surrogates','2009')"
in order to work properly.
(This won’t work:)
onclick="describeMovie('Bruce Willis','2009','Surrogates')"
Also, while I can easily pass the actor and title parameters without the year parameter (describeMovie('Bruce Willis','Surrogates')), I’ll run into issues if I try to pass just the actor and year parameters (describeMovie('Bruce Willis','2009')), for the order in which they are More >
The Truth About Easter: Conclusion
Apr 2nd
In my last post , I described in a fair amount of detail what I call the “truth about Easter.” In popular, Western Christianity, there is an unconscious, mostly unthinking prejudice toward understanding the cross as a picture of God’s wrath and punishment against sin unleashed upon Godself in Christ. As I argued in my post, however, if we presume that God were not to respond in such a way to human sinfulness (that is, to punish human sin with death, destruction and hell), we can still adequately describe the nature and reality of “hell” exclusively from the basis of considerations of the “natural” consequences of human sinfulness and violence toward God and self.
The truth about Easter, then, is not that God needs the cross in order to forgive humanity by punishing Christ, but rather that the cross is an expression of sinful humanity’s “gratitude” for God’s love: God in Christ comes with grace and mercy, and we respond in our hatred by nailing Christ to a cross, exulting in his brutal and violent end. Therefore, the cross is really a revelation of our true predicament apart from God, and casts a bright light on what our fundamental need is: to More >
The Truth About Easter
Apr 2nd
So if you didn’t realize it, Easter is only a few short days away. And yes, we are in the midst of Holy Week…go figure :).
Now with Easter comes some very regular and predictable things. We know that little girls all over the country will compel their parents to purchase new, spring-ish dresses for them to wear for one solitary Sunday (believe me, I know this all too well…). We know that many American children will go into certifiable sugar comas following the obligatory egg hunts on Saturday. We also know that their parents will achieve similar levels of pre-diabetic shock from eating the candy that their children “simply don’t need”… And, from most pulpits in America, you’re bound to hear something about the cross, Christ’s blood, and the drama of Atonement (and maybe even something about the resurrection, if you’re lucky).
If your church’s theology is typical of Western, Protestant thinking, the subject of this discussion will probably revolve around one particular pole: that of the cross as a picture of divine punishment. While it seems perhaps a bit harsh to the non-initiated, the often-rehearsed logic of God’s punishment of Christ on the cross seems reasonable enough. After all, humanity has More >
