5 views of translation

• All translation is a commentary on the original. The purpose of a translation is to help someone understand the original in line with how one would read a commentary (call this the Jewish / Muslim position).
• Translation is an attempt to capture the ideas of the original. Because ideas don't exist in a vacuum one needs to quite often make the translation less accurate so as to avoid "misunderstandings" which are a result of the new host language and / or come from lack of context (call this the Lutheran position).
• Translation is an attempt to capture the ideas and/or the wording of the original as understood by the church historically. Word level accuracy is to be considered preferable to phrasal accuracy but not at the expense of creating ambiguity regarding ancient heresies (call this the Conservative Protestant position).
• Translation should aim for the most accurate rendering possible at some predetermined unchanging level, be it word, phrase or paragraph. While church history can influence between otherwise equal choices the original should be held as superior to the understanding of the church (call this the Liberal Protestant position).
• Translation should aim to capture as best as possible the original intent of the writer as it would have been understood by contemporaneous readers. Word level accuracy should only give way to phrase level when absolutely needed to avoid problems in the new host language. Church history is likely to distort the original understanding and we need to deconstruct the translational tradition to find where "Orthodox corruption" in meaning has occurred. (call this the New school position).

Spam

I'm starting to get spam all the time on this blog. Sorry but I have to turn on comment moderation on for threads over 30 days. I hate doing this. It is infuriating that people are unable to follow basic rules of civility and instead feel it necessary to pollute the world with this garbage.

Fixing MacPorts for Snow Leopard

This is off topic so if you are one of my regular readers you probably don't care. This isn't anywhere else on the web though so I figured I'd add it to my blog so people can find the information.

OK so from here on out I'm assuming you were a Tiger or Leopard MacPorts user who has upgraded to Snow Leopard and is getting an error message that looks like:

dlopen(/opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib, 10): no suitable image found.  Did find:
/opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib: mach-o, but wrong architecture
while executing
"load /opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib"
("package ifneeded Pextlib 1.0" script)
invoked from within
"package require Pextlib 1.0"
(file "/opt/local/bin/port" line 40)

What's happening is you have a PowerPC version of this TCL library. You need an Intelx86 version to run port. Rather than reinstall you can just fix this. I've put a zip file of the correct version on the associated website.

Pextlib.dylib.zip

download and unzip this to /opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib

replacing the broken one then you can do your

sudo port -d selfupdate 

and everything will be fine.

Coolest intelligent design protest of the year

OK we have winner for 2009 (yes it is early and if someone else wins even better). The winner is.... The Raëlian movement(wikipedia article). The protest was for intelligent design. It was on Venice Beach in California, the women went topless the men wore bras. The religion teaches about the revelations received by a French journalist who covers the race car circuit over a period of 6 days by aliens who are the biblical Elohim.

Baptize young, before leaving the house

Mike Dever made an interesting point about Baptism:

Oh, a lot of things. I mean, spiritually, people’s affluence, people wanting to be served, consumers moving to urban areas where churches are close enough to where they compete for members, pastors not being taught this. I’m sure any real abuses that happen, and, of course, there were, anytime sinners like you and me are involved, any time abuses happen in church discipline, I’m sure those were repeated endlessly. And so I’m sure those stories would have been used against practicing it at all, because to practice it at all would have been in some way to have been involved in some kind of abuse of it. Now, I’m sure it’s just a combination of things like that. Also I think the theology changed and churches became more and more man-centered. I think people more and more misunderstood what it really meant to be converted. I think our evangelistic practices watered down the gospel. I think we started taking responses very quickly. We started baptizing people at a much younger age.


You know, I’ve been reading a lot of Baptist biographies in the last couple of years and noting baptismal ages. And if you look at all the Baptist leaders in the nineteenth century, they were all baptized at 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21. It’s when they get out of the home, or they have their first job, that’s when they’re baptized. Baptists these days baptize children at 12, or at even 8, or younger. It’s very hard. I mean, I’ve got kids. It’s hard to look at the kids who are pretty obedient, love their parents, and want to have the approval of their parents, it’s hard to know whether or not they’re really born again. I mean, of course they’re being sincere when they tell you something, but people can be sincere and be wrong, and I think we’ve just lost a lot of that subtlety of judgment. It’s not been encouraged among the pastors in our churches.

So what is your feeling. Is it a good idea to baptize before kids leave the house or not?

UBS process, ecumenicalism at its best

The United Bible Society publishes the most heavily used Greek text the Novum Testamentum Graece. Now like everyone else who gets involved in translation discussion I disagree with their choices, their are times I would have made gone the other way. But what I think is fantastic is how they have created a successful ecumenicalism, providing a model that is truly able to cross the divide and get a major complex religious issue resolved in a way that everyone can stand behind the final product. Roman Catholics participate in the UBS process the same as Protestants. Jehovah’s witnesses and Adventist translations are pulling from the same UBS text. And not only across denominations: from the ESV (conservative) to the NRSV (NCC) to the very liberal scholars version to even atheist translations like Price the UBS/NA is the standard. Asian and African churches are pulling from the same source. The Jewish Publication Society is a member of the UBS and the NJPS (1985) is pulling from the UBS Hebrew which means that even the Jews are part of this ecumenical unity. This is one of the great ecumenical triumphs of this century that doesn't get appreciated nearly enough.

This didn't have to happen. Had the IBS/Zondervan stuck with the MT or the TR for the NIV we could have had a very situation today where Christians wouldn't even have agreement on what the original texts say.

But more than this I’ve argued that this process is a model for ecumenicalism that actually worked and continues to work. I’m not sure why people who are interested in ecumenicalism don’t pay more attention to an area where the goals were achieved, full Christian unity. Think about that for a second, at least in one example humanity was are able to publish unified collection of books on an important topic which is authoritative to all Christiandom! We don’t have this breadth of consensus on the creeds.

What makes it work is the focus on consensus. Essentially the system looks like

1. A scholar makes a proposal about a verse based on manuscript evidence.
2. If that proposal gains wide acceptance as a variant in the academic community it will become a textnote in the UBS. For a new one that probably be around the NA29, but this is one going back a long time.
3. Some translators will start to incorporate it, generally as a possible variant which will draw larger debate and discussion.
4. If that proposal continues to draw a consensus it will become the default reading in the Greek.
5. At that point essentially all translations will attach a note similar to the one for 1John 5:7-8 that you see in Protestant bibles. This creates awareness of the issue and builds consensus among the whole community.
6. Some translations will start to move the older variant to an appendix which will again widen the debate. If there are strong objections the process may stop here.
7. Most translations will move the older variant to an appendix
8. Some translations will start to drop the appendix.
9. The older variant will be dropped entirely across the board.

Which is to say everyone is treating everyone respectfully and consensus emerges. At every step their is a check back. The system is very conservative but is open to discussion and reason inside the system.

Yale University Press cowardice

Yale University Press is releasing a book on Danish cartoons that caused riots in muslim countries (pictured to the left) (individual links). The book is called The Cartoons That Shook the World by Jytte Klausen. Yale University press removed the 12 cartoons plus several others from the book due to fear of violence. That's caving into censorship and cowardice of the worst sort. Their claim (see official statement) is that their publication would result in a violent response in which case that's all the more reason to publish them. Not publishing for fear of the response is giving into terrorism.

I don't have anything particularly insightful to say, this is just a crime without justification. I don't know if I would have bought the book anyway but I certainly won't now. I agree 100% with Sherry Jones (who published a similar book) self censorship changes the world for the worse.

In 2006 we saw a lot of fake bravery by newspapers arguing they should have the freedom to publish these cartoons while refusing to do so for fear of violence (see list of newspapers that did publish them). Yale continues the tradition wanting to get credit for writing a "brave" book on the topic while not having the guts to even print images that are widely distributed (including wikipedia) for 3 years. Shame on them. Thankfully the American Association of University Professors agrees:

We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.” That is effectively the new policy position at Yale University Press, which has eliminated all visual depictions of the Prophet Muhammad from Jytte Klausen’s new book The Cartoons That Shook the World.

See also:

• Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book (NYTimes)
• Yale Surrenders (Slate)
• Article in Telegraph
• Blog post on the Angry Arab (which also thinks Yale is being ridiculous)
• Investigation by Pajamas TV
• Martin Kramer editorial
• Everyone Draw Muhammad Day (added later)

Covenant Eyes and consent

Luke Gilkerson responded to my has been posting here to my porn addiction thread which got me interested in his Covenant Eyes product. This seems to be the best regarded "accountability" software on the market. The basic idea of Covenant Eyes is that "porn addiction" works based on 3 factors:

• Accessibility
• Affordability
• Anonymity

While CE works on removing "Anonymity". The idea being that people who want to kick a porn habit pick an accountability partner and Covenant Eyes sends creates an easy to read report of the internet web sites (and other internet applications). Now while I happen to think that porn addiction is a non existent disease I'm all for applications that help people empower themselves to accomplish their goals. And that is how Covenant Eyes is being primarily marketed. And that is one of the reasons the internet security groups with one exception seem to be not telling people how to bypass Covenant Eyes.

1. That this software is voluntary, both in installation and continuing use.
2. They offer a simple uninstall process (it does notify the accountability partner)
3. They offer tech support in case the system causes trouble
4. The system doesn't capture information like passwords and bank accounts

Which is to say it doesn't seem to a noxious spyware but rather a self help program. And that's good their model does involve consent. I consider consent to be key in the morality of any of these products as in general I think it is with most things: consent is the difference between

• an employee and a thief
• boxing and assault
• sex and rape

So I love the fact that Covenant Eyes is targeted using a consensual model. The idea of Covenant Eyes is to stop people from being tempted. This plays into Covenant Eyes' mechanics, Covenant Eyes claims "Covenant Eyes is designed to be extremely difficult to disable or bypass." I've heard other people claim impossible, which felt to me like a dare. I'm really tempted to post 4 lines of "do this" instructions but I do approve of creating a solution for people who want to control a behavior. So I'm going to keep this discussion on a high level, which doesn't translate into instructions while hopefully making it clear enough for purposes of discussion that it really is about 4 fairly obvious steps. For those of you computer knowledgeable, Covenant Eyes works on windows by inserting itself into the Winsock LSP . LSP was created by Microsoft to allow administrations / applications to alter networking behavior without having to write their own networking stack; which is to say this is a fairly obvious place to do what Covenant Eyes is doing. Covenant Eyes is one of hundreds of programs that interfaces at the LSP level (though most are adware). There is a lot of documentation out there about how to alter LSP behavior; there are hundreds of thousands of people on the planet who understand the LSP subsystem and tens of millions that can read about it, so I don't see what is particular "difficult" about that. On a Mac it is daemon (/usr/libexec/CvntDaemon) that works in a somewhat similar way.

I've architected systems designed to be extremely difficult to bypass. With:

• No specialized hardware (example TPM chip)
• No hard drive encryption and a standard boot sequence
• An operating system that has to be able to run mainstream applications

nothing with an x86 processor is difficult to bypass. This thing runs purely in software (and in user not kernel space) it can't even tell whether it is running on a computer or a VM. So we have a software app running without a trusted environment on a completely vanilla box with an insecure and well documented OS. What this thing is at best is mildly annoying to bypass / uninstall / cripple. When I've written these sorts of systems I had all those hardware and operating system advantages, and I was just trying to stop people from doing things like rerouting checks or attacking telephone switches not stripping them of their sex lives. So at least on the surface I'd assume my targets were less motivated.

Luke might retort by saying my targets were 100% unwilling, they genuinely wanted to steal; while his customers were completely willing, in theory at least, to be porn free and just experiencing a moment of weakness, a craving. They will be ineffectual in their attack because deep down they don't want succeed. Having done things like quit smoking, I get that. You are never more than 10 minutes away from a pack of cigarettes but that ten minutes gives you time to change your mind that trying to quit with cigarettes in your pocket wouldn't. If someone genuinely wanted to smoke / didn't want to quit, a 3 hour drive wouldn't be enough to stop them.

And that brings us back to consent. Covenant Eye's system works on the assumption that people are low motivation attackers, for example they are unwilling to get help to bypass the system as I mentioned above. To give another example, which is on Covenant Eyes' website (so I figure harmless to mention), Covenant Eye's wouldn't catch a tunnel processing misidentifying itself, that is to say another of the sort of thing a person who is genuinely not consenting to Covenant Eye's being on their system who needs to generates reports full of innocuous websites would setup. And that's assuming you work within the OS and don't just reboot to a different OS and reconfigure externally. The web is full of the "boot with a Linux CD" suggestion which would work.

However, as I researched this product there seemed to be a lot of places where it wasn't really consensual.

• Parents installing it on college age children's computers
• Wives installing it on their husband's computers
• Employers installing it on employee's computers

Which bring us to controversy at Moore College (see note at bottom). In 2007 there was an announcement that Covenant Eyes was going to become a community standard and certain people felt that they were going to be compelled to use the product (newspaper article). This led to an interesting debate between Covenant Eyes and a Professor at Moore. The Covenant Eyes blog had 3 articles on this topic part1 part2 part3. The professor part1 part2 part3 through out some zingers I agreed with like:

I’ve also had pretty much all I can take of people reducing Christian morality to sexual abstinence, meanwhile ignoring the things that Jesus mentioned quite explicitly (sorry if that word causes anyone to stumble ;-) - judgementalism, bigotry, religious hypocrisy, materialism… why isn’t there the same market for some kind of software that can filter these out of our churches?

or another comment where he attacks accountability to spouses in general:

The problem is finding a way forward. Any pattern of thinking learned over time is not easily reshaped, particularly if deeply ingrained and etched with connotations of guilt and damnation – and even more so if it involves something as primal as sex. For those of us who want to define ourselves as “Christian” this poses a special challenge – what of our thinking about the subject is ours, as opposed to merely the manipulative accretions of both our churches, and those parts of society in opposition to the churches. Clearly much of the current dogma produces only hypocrisy, guilt and depression (among other problems) – the struggle is to find new and more empowering understandings.

I also have grave concerns about any relationship based upon one partner receiving a daily report of the other’s online activities. If it works for them….. ok (I guess), but to me it seems a less than optimal basis for and enduring and trusting relationship. As for having her watch it with him – I’m quite sure many men wished their partner shared their interest (and if she did I suspect the husband’s obsession would quite often fade as it ceased to be a captivating “secret” relationship) – but many women raised within conservative Christianity (and elsewhere) find the concept of porn as abhorrent as their partners find it fascinating. Forcing her to participate would be tantamount to abuse, and observing her partner’s interest in something she finds so distasteful would be extremely distressing. It’s this broader lack of communication that makes developing a response from within the religious context that many of us come from so difficult. As I think I said to you before – a lot of us from a religious background have very poor listening skills

Other than those objections, the professor's main concern was that it wouldn't be meaningfully consensual, people would be pressured into doing this. Certainly the professor writing these articles felt that he was essentially going to be forced to submit to this monitoring, I'd like to emphasize this never happened. Others in the thread expressed concerns that Covenant Eyes would be used to Moore primarily to catch seminary students looking at liberal theologians, that is not being used to track porn but rather for political control, and again there is no evidence this occurred. However it is the case that the software supports would support this usage . Jay Aguda mentioned he was evidentially fired from his church because of Covenant Eyes ( 28 July 2008 5:31 PM ).

There are hints of non consensual usage within families. here are discussions all over the internet of wives who put this on their husband's computers. In this thread Roark Janis talked about how he installed Covenant Eyes to send reports back from his college aid children's computers every three days, "However, as my children got older and went off to college and needed a little more independence and ability to make their own decisions, I found that http://www.covenanteyes.com is the perfect solution as it doesn’t block anything but logs all activity and sends me reports to review with them every three days."

So at least some of the usage is non consensual. And for me, if this were to expand that would changes things morally. If Covenant Eyes were primarily being used this non-consensual way, a social virus, I wouldn't be dancing so much in this thread, I'd have no problem typing those few lines of instructions -- do ABC to get this app to send out false reports, the same way you would for someone in China (they use a similar idea, but much harder to defeat and their accountability partner is a government official). But those non-consensual situations are not the primary usage, and this is one of the few situations where knowledge isn't power, but likely the opposite. But it does raise the issue for the people who are subjected to non consensual use, is it ethical for them to trick the system? For example lets say a missionary where a condition of funding is using this with the reports going back to the funding church? Or the college kid? What is the ethics in these situations?

For the consensual users a decrease in pornography consumption will lead to a decrease in masturbatory orgasm and this appears to be their objectives; Covenant Eyes is likely to help them achieve that. This IMHO will lead to an increase in lust, the same way that if you hold your breath you will start thinking about oxygen a lot more then if you don't. Which is to say, I think the objective in most cases will induce the opposite of the intended effect in a broader sense making the approach both stupid and sinful. To quote the old "the best way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it speech" (which while perhaps a bit over the top does address the problem with the addictions model):

I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream--I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal--to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. (Lord Henry from The Picture of Dorian Gray)

People are entitled to disagree with me and do what they want, I don't want to restrict anyone's freedom. In my mind compulsory usage of this sort of software is engaging in a form of sexual harassment. A secular workplace has no right to control its employee's sexual behaviors. It is no more the right of a boss to sleep with his secretary then to demand she remain chaste outside the workplace. A religious employer may be given more latitude in terms of profession. But the use of Covenant Eyes (or similar software) in this way seems to be directed at forced religious compliance, that is holding persons to standards they themselves never accepted; and moreover specifically aiming to force sexual behaviors on threat of punishment. The same morality seems case with the wives and also the case with the controlling parents of adult children.

So I'm honestly torn. This LSP model seems hard enough that the average person is not going to be able to bypass it unassisted. Teaching people to lie to employers sexually harassing them would be disempowering for the vast majority that want this crutch, and would also be inducing people into sins of hypocrisy. Covenant Eye's itself doesn't seem to be trying to be unethical, they don't seem to desire that their product be used to force sexual behaviors and unlike the filter companies don't seem to be targeting control freaks with their advertising or User's Guides, except for parents where they fully embrace inappropriate levels of control. But Covenant Eyes doesn't have firm policies against this sort of usage.

What are people's thoughts?

• Do you think institutions forcing people to use monitoring software is acceptable? What about churches towards employees?
• What about the father towards children or wives towards husbands?
• Is there some suggestion about a workaround?

Note on Moore:

The original version of this article used Moore college as an example. My notification policy paid off this time. John Woodhouse (principle) of Moore college wrote me back informing me the administration is not tracking usage and that the uptake rate is moderate. Lots of people aren't using Covenant Eyes. The actually accountability partners seem genuinely freely chosen. The original controversy seems to have come from a not so charitable reading of some statements where buoyant expectations were being intermixed with policy.

What this appears to have been was an internet discussion about fears that didn't pan out which were never corrected once the policies went into effect. This is simply a service Moore provides to its students, consequently I've refocused the article and dropped the references to Moore. The other examples of compulsory usage I could find were workplace computers where the legal status of circumvention becomes more questionable.

The usage is described here: short proposal, full proposal,newspaper article. There was a bit of a debate between Covenant Eyes and a Professor at Moore when it wasn't clear if this would be consensual. The Covenant Eyes blog had 3 articles on this topic part1 part2 part3. The professor's articles are: part1 part2 part3.

See Also:

• How Kosher Was Khomeini?: The Case Against Religious Coercion
• Entry on McAfee
• A 411-spyware discussion on removal (still vague)
• No porn support community
• Net responsibility, an open source accountability package using a daemon approach written in Ruby, if you want to understand how one of these works.

Americans vs. Latins on why they changes churches

Very interesting results. For Americans here are the reasons that they dropped out of church (long term):

FACTORS	CATHOLIC RESPONSES	*PROTESTANT RESPONSES
I found other interests and activities that led me to spend less and less time on church-related activities.	39%	35%
I moved to a different community and never got involved in a new church.	25%	30%
I had specific problems with or objections to the church, its teachings, or its members.	35%	24%
My work schedule.	17%	21%
When I grew up and I started making decision on my own, I stopped going to church.	41%	19%
The church was no longer a help to me in finding the meaning and purpose of my life.	25%	15%
I felt my life-style was no longer compatible with participation in a church.	25%	12%
Because of poor health.	4%	11%
Another reason.	5%	10%
I don�t know or no answer.	4%	6%
I became divorced or separated.	7%	4%
TOTAL (multiple responses)	227%	187%

*Table ranked by Protestant Responses

On the other hand among Latin Americans (in Latin America, not in America but ethnically hispanic) the reasons were complete different:

� Deception (43%)

� Try something new (11.7%)

� To follow the Truth (11.2%)

� Because they experienced the Holy Spirit in their lives (8.9%)

� Learned to study the Bible (3.3%)

� Their previous religion was corrupt (3.3%)

� Attracted to a new form of worship (2.8%)

� For convenience (1.9%)

� The old religion was too strict (1.9%)

� The old religion was too materialistic (0.9%).

This data is from Prolades (acronym is in Spanish translated it is "he Latin American Socio-Religious Studies Program"). Original data.

So I'm a Quaker

Took a new denomination quiz:

(100%) 1: Anabaptist (Mennonite/Quaker etc.)

(86%) 2: Baptist (non-Calvinistic)/Plymouth Brethren/Fundamentalist

(81%) 3: Pentecostal/Charismatic/Assemblies of God

(66%) 4: Methodist/Wesleyan/Nazarene

(60%) 5: Seventh-Day Adventist

(56%) 6: Church of Christ/Campbellite

(45%) 7: Baptist (Reformed/Particular/Calvinistic)

(40%) 8: Lutheran

(33%) 9: Anglican/Episcopal/Church of England

(33%) 10: Congregational/United Church of Christ

(31%) 11: Eastern Orthodox

(20%) 12: Roman Catholic

(12%) 13: Presbyterian/Reformed

So tell me how you all scored:

See also:

• What is your theology