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Natalie gave 4 stars to The Bible or the Axe: One Man's Dramatic Escape From Persecution in the Sudan (Paperback) by William O. Levi
bookshelves: christian-biography
I enjoyed this author's story. Levi's family are Messianic believers from an African Hebrew tribal group. Levi grew up as a refugee in Uganda. The earlier chapters are dedicated to his struggle to obtain an education due to the work requirements and need to provide for his family by working on their farm. Levi eventually left Uganda and headed to Sudan hoping to get his education there. However, he faced arrest, torture and persecution for his Christian faith.....

Levi finally leaves Sudan and seeks refuge in the West...He dedicates his life to highlighting the perils of his homeland and providing much needed aid and financial support through his charity Operation Nehemiah Missions International.

One of the things that made this account stand out was the author's perspective on Western churches and Christians. Coming from a poor conservative background and seeing his faith as priceless--being willing to die rather than deny Christ and having been forced to prove that. The author was not prepared for the apathy he faced in the West. He had been dreaming of countries where God was worshiped openly and joyfully......and was a priority.

This is a story also of God's provision for this young man who really took a huge leap of faith by attempting to travel to America in the first place. It reminded me that God does care about the details and will arrange things if we submit to His will and plan. There are also a number of stories where the author witnessed to others about his personal faith.

The story really made me think again about the case for pacifism. The title of the book was inspired by the author's grandfather asking him to choose the Bible or the axe due to the expected persecution. The author chose the Bible and suggests that all Christians should do the same. That our battle here is spiritual and we should not fight with worldly weapons. Something worth considering....

This book is fairly clean--there is no bad language, there is some violence that is not graphic and some discussion of prostitution. There is a torture scene which might upset some readers.

I recommend this book.

Felipe is on page 41 of 224 of <a href="/book/show/25183642-os-franceses-na-guanabara">Os Franceses na Guanabara</a>.

New comment on Natalie's review of Loving My (LGBT) Neighbor: Being Friends in Grace and Truth
by Glenn T. Stanton

Madelyn wrote: "Hello! Any particular reason you gave this one two stars? Should I be wary of the theology, or is it just personal preference/writing style?"

Hi Madelyn, I guess I felt that the author in trying to tread a careful line has lost the substance of his message. He uses politically correct terminology and although sincere ends up not really saying much apart from explaining the various details of the LGBTQQ community....at length. Will knowing that amount of detail help Christians to relate and witness to them? I don't honestly know...

It's a bit like the debate about how far Christians should delve into other religions in order to evangelise. Personally, I feel we need to know enough to avoid unnecessary offence and ignorance but not so much that it becomes a case study. Studying the truth of the Bible is better than focusing on the sin, in my view.

Having said that, I gave up on the book which is why I didn't review it. People hate it when I review books I haven't finished. I read another book on this subject that I feel would be more helpful for Christians, the title is What Some of you Were Hope this helps!

Felipe gave 5 stars to Apocalipse para leigos: você pode entender a profecia bíblica (Kindle Edition) by Kenneth L. Gentry Jr.
bookshelves: monergismo
Uma defesa breve, mas extremamente convincente da interpretação preterista do livro de Apocalipse. Altamente recomendado!

I stumbled upon a book this week, The Way of the Master by Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron. They run an organisation by the same name and another called Living Waters. They have produced a number of almost feature length films covering controversial topics, these can be watched on their website or on Youtube at no cost. The most recent is called The Atheist Delusion. Both organisations are committed to biblical evangelism.They state that the modern Western church has lost its way. That due to an over-emphasis on grace and the love of God our churches are full of false converts. These people have been told that God has a wonderful plan for their lives and that all they need to do is to pray a prayer, sign a card or make a decision to accept Jesus and be restored to God. The majority then continue their lives exactly as before but now with the “saved by Jesus” or "born again" label. There was no repentance and therefore there is no visible change in their behaviour. When trials and suffering come to these people they lose interest in their faith or become angry and disillusioned with God for their plight. They question the “wonderful plan” they were offered and blame God for their circumstances. They then either gradually fall into sin believing that God will forgive them later as life is just too hard and God is not delivering what He has promised. Or they harden their hearts and walk away from the faith, They are thus in a worse position than they were  in the first place. They have now rejected God completely and are resentful and bitter towards Him if they still acknowledge His existence.You may be thinking that these observations are not new and that other well-known preachers and authors (John MacArthur) have been highlighting “easy believism” and other mass conversion methods for years. Comfort, however, offers a solution. He suggests that the only way for someone to be soundly converted is to first confront them with the law and then outline God’s plan of salvation through Jesus. He believes that the only way to do this is by using the Ten Commandments to make a person realise that they are a wretched sinner before a Holy God.  A person needs to admit that they are a liar, thief and adulterer at heart amongst other things. Then they will understand that God’s wrath is upon them and will therefore desire to escape from the penalty of their sin which is ultimately eternity in hell.It is only once they have acknowledged their sin that Jesus’ death is offered as the solution. The point is that unless someone realises the danger they are in they are not going to take action to ensure their personal safety. Comfort uses the analogy of a blind man walking towards the edge of a cliff. Someone comes up to him and tweaks the MP3 player he is carrying to enhance the sound so he can enjoy his journey. He is thrilled and merrily continues towards the cliff edge, presumably falling to his death. This is what we are doing when we focus on people’s immediate physical needs, comfort and wellbeing rather than their eternal destination.At first I thought, wow what a great resource and method for evangelism. I watched all the movies on the website and looked at ordering tracts. But, I was curious and decided to research what others were saying about Comfort’s ministry—that was an eye opener! It seems Comfort is like Marmite, you either love him or you hate him. I expected that, to some degree, due to the controversial issues he tackles. I would’ve been more concerned if he didn’t have his critics. But, some of the comments were coming from Christian sources that I respected. The main two concerns were that the Ten Commandments were not designed to be used in this way for evangelism as we are now living under the New Covenant. Also, that a “one size fits all” or method approach for evangelism doesn’t allow sufficient room for the Spirit to lead and guide a believer when witnessing. That each person is an individual and should be ministered to as such. In relation to the first issue I can see the concern. In Comfort’s book, he goes to great lengths to explain the significance of the Ten Commandments themselves overlooking the fact that they were originally given to the Israelite nation and not to the gentiles. However, for those who think I am suggesting that the commandments don’t apply to us today--ALL, except one, of the Ten Commandments is actually repeated and confirmed in the New Testament and therefore does apply to NT believers. (The Sabbath Day command is the exception and has little relevance to this discussion about biblical evangelism.) The question that naturally arises is, why place so much emphasis on the Ten Commandments as given to Moses when we can use the NT with its wider scope and more relevant application for today? That would avoid the common argument that we are not living under the Old Covenant and that therefore the rules don’t apply.   Critics of Comfort’s approach argue that the use of the Ten Commandments is too narrow and excludes other effective methods. Also, that he is telling people that they will be judged according to their adherence to the Ten Commandments alone. They point out that the bigger offence is the rejection of God and of Jesus as their Saviour from their sin. The greatest commandment given by Jesus Himself is after all, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.” (Matthew 22 vs 37)Honestly, this is a tough one for me. There are people arguing that scaring or terrifying people about hell is not effective or loving. But personally, it was sufficient to convert me and cause me to give up my worldly life. I'm not sure whether the goodness of God alone would've had the same effect. Convincing people that hell is a real place and that their sins will take them there forever is important. I can see Comfort’s rationale in this respect. I can also see that he has a genuine love for the lost and desire for them to be truly saved.If there is a choice between the shallow and false conversions we are seeing everywhere today and Comfort’s approach, I would definitely side with Comfort. Actually, the videos that had the biggest impact on me were those of the large numbers of people who claimed they were born again/evangelical Christians cheerfully admitting lying, stealing, pre-marital sex, pornography, drunkenness, drug taking etc. The shocking thing was that these “Christians” felt no shame or guilt about their lifestyles and didn’t even acknowledge that these things were wrong. The main reason given was that everyone else was doing it. They weren’t giving into temptation and repenting and trying again. They were completely unconcerned and apathetic. They were false converts filling the churches on Sundays.Having said that, I don’t agree with a standardised or method approach that must always be used in evangelism. I have used lots of methods over the years and I think it’s important to really hear the heart of the other person. Sin must be confronted in every Gospel conversation and the Good News about Jesus offered. It is necessary for a person to understand what they are being saved from and how serious their sin is in God’s eyes. I like the way Comfort talks about a change of perspective reminding us that it is our own sin that takes us to hell. He speaks about how ridiculous it is for millions of tiny people (in comparison to God) walking around on the earth shaking their fists at their Creator as if that will change reality.I would highly recommend the resources on Comfort’s website, Way of the Master, as I believe they will make people think. I admire him for tackling controversial issues that others have avoided. There is no doubt that his work has done a lot of good in the American church. But, personally I would use New Testament texts where possible in evangelism and ensure that the biggest sin of all—rejection of God—is highlighted in any presentation.

le_fino gave 3 stars to The Life of Haydn (Hardcover) by David Wyn Jones
bookshelves: biography, musician-bio, classical-music, non-fiction
This was a disappointingly short biography of a rather disagreeable person - so in retrospect, perhaps it is better that it was short? Haydn was of course a musical genius - 104 symphonies, >100 string quartets - an incredible musical output and one of the great composers of his time. Someone Beethoven learned from and loved. But someone that spent most of his life under the thumb of the Esterhazy family (forced to write an absurd amount of music for a now all but extinct instrument his patron was obsessed with) and only late in his life was he granted the freedom to leave Hungary and he - like Handel hastened to England. But when the English wanted him to stay there - so much so that they invited his wife (that he hated beyond belief) to come live with him there, he fled back to Hungary and Vienna until the end of his days. Never one with a plethora of friends (yet nonetheless a collection of lovers), his biography is less interesting than those of Beethoven, Bach, Handel, or Schubert who all immediately preceded or followed him. I still enjoy his string quartets and his symphonies but did not seek to learn much more about his life (unlike all the other composers I mentioned).

A few days ago we published a blog post, “The conundrum of BI/aggregate queries on MongoDB”, where we analyzed and measured some performance issues that happen on MongoDB with aggregate/OLAP/DW type of queries. We also showed that if we would transform the JSON data into a relational form and query it with SQL on a PostgreSQL database, performance can be up to orders of magnitude better. Impressive!

However, this requires a significant effort. The DDL needs to be defined –and this may be non-trivial if the origin data is of high variety. Also the data needs to be migrated, and while there are many ETL tools for that, it is still an involved process. And won’t happen in real-time! What if I require real-time statistics? What if my origin data adds a new property that is not reflected in the DDL? Do I need to sacrifice the “schema-less“ness of MongoDB for being able to perform analytic queries?

Of course not! At least, starging today. I’m very pleased to announce ToroDB Stampede, the first member of ToroDB’s family and 8Kdata’s first commercial product.

With ToroDB Stampede you will see how your MongoDB collections are transformed, in real time, to a relational structure in PostgreSQL. From there, you can run your native SQL queries on the data and use your favorite Business Intelligence tools, without requiring any ETL or change in your current database infrastructure.

So how does it work? It’s very simple:

• Stampede works as a secondary (hidden) node on a MongoDB replica set.
• Once started it will perform a full initial database sync and then will switch to streaming replication mode.
• All the incoming data is transformed on-the-fly from a document shape (strictly speaking, BSON) into a set of relational tables. Tables will have the names of your document properties, arrays and nested documents will be transformed into relations, and columns named after the corresponding keys.
• You don’t need to provide any DDL. All the DDL is automagically created by Stampede. Even if new keys or embedded documents appear, new columns and/or tables will be automatically and transparently created.

And this is where the fun begins. Now you have all your MongoDB data in perfectly shaped tables in a PostgreSQL database! Visualization and data exploration are greatly improved, and, more importantly, SQL querying, native SQL querying, is at your hand! Use it to connect to your favorite BI tools. Use it to migrate off of MongoDB to PostgreSQL. Use it to have a SQL replica. Unleash your unstructured data, into a relational database! See the example below to understand how ToroDB generates the tables and columns out of JSON documents, and check the documentation for more information.

Surely enough, performance matters. Does ToroDB Stampede deliver on the promise of 10-100x faster queries? There’s only one way to find it out. Benchmark time! The following benchmarks used one or more (when MongoDB was used in a sharded configuration) AWS i2.xlarge instances (4 vCPUs, 30GB RAM, 800Gb local SSD). We used a XFS filesystem and basic tunning was done on both MongoDB and PostgreSQL configuration. For each dataset, we manually created 6 different queries, that try to extract business value out of the information. MongoDB queries quere done via the Aggregation Framework and Stampede ones with regular (Postgres) SQL. All the tests were run 5 times, using the first two to warm up the caches and the numbers show the average of the last three runs.

Based on the Github Archive we performed an initial benchmark over a 500Gb dataset. We run 6 different queries (named A through F) which you may check here: MongoDB (A, B, C, D, E, F) and Stampede/PostgreSQL (A, B, C, D, E, F).

Up to 57x faster! All queries are significantly faster than MongoDB, and only one (A) is slightly slower compared to a 3-node MongoDB cluster. Trying with a smaller dataset reveals even bigger differences. This is likely due to a much better buffer management in PostgreSQL:

Woah! 267x faster! Query D takes 2,400 seconds on a single MongoDB node (about 20 minutes), 383 seconds on a three-node MongoDB shard (better, but still more than 6 minutes) and just 9 seconds on a single node PostgreSQL.

Here both MongoDB and Stampede had an index on both the _id and actor.login fields. Stampede will automatically replicate any index created in MongoDB (no action required on your side). We also wanted to try whether indexes were being used and what impact they had on the performance:

From the results we can conclude that: a) PostgreSQL results are almost the same, which is consistent with the assumption that indexes are usually not required for aggregate queries; b) MongoDB worsened the results for query A without indexes… but significantly improved query time for query D, when the index is removed! This may probably an issue with the query planner.

We also benchmarked another data set, based on the flights stats information from Transtats. Similar aggregate queries were written. Data size is smaller (50Gb) which leads to smaller differences:

Still, results are consistently faster even when pitched against the three-node MongoDB sharded cluster. And up to 11x faster queries, which is a very significant improvement! While developing Stampede we have performed benchmarks where we have observed more than 2000x faster queries. Of course, this may be a degraded case for MongoDB and surely Stampede does not perform always as well on every single circumstance.

So the recommendation is always the same: please don’t trust our numbers. Do your own. Benchmark Stampede, and please let us know the results.

ToroDB Stampede is fully open source, and it’s already available in our website for download and use. Check the user documentation to learn how to install, configure and run ToroDB Stampede.

If you need more information or you just simply would like to give us your opinion, please feel free to comment below or join the discussion on Hacker News! Thank you.

by Cameron Buettel & Jeremiah Johnson The heart of the human problem is the human heart. Therapy can’t change it. Self-help gurus can’t fix it. Positive confession can’t conceal it. And self-esteem can’t convert it. Sinners cannot be persuaded into the kingdom of God. Salvation is not achieved through mental assent or emotional responses. Unless God regenerates the heart (Ezekiel 36:25–27; John 3:3) it remains dead in sin (Ephesians 2:1), deceitfully wicked (Jeremiah 17:9), hostile to Him (Romans 8:7), and worthy of condemnation (Ephesians 2:3). That’s not a matter of opinion—it’s God’s own diagnosis of the unregenerate heart. And the only cure is His redeeming and transforming work. Everything else is woefully insufficient. If you get the doctrine of man wrong, you can’t help but get the gospel wrong, too. That’s why John MacArthur describes total depravity (or “total inability”) as the most distinctly Christian doctrine: No doctrine is more hated by unbelievers than this one, and even some Christians find it so offensive that they zealously attack it. Though the doctrine of total depravity is often the most attacked and minimized of the doctrines of grace, it is the most distinctly Christian doctrine because it is foundational to a right understanding of the gospel. . . . The neglect of this doctrine within American evangelicalism has resulted in all kinds of errors, including both the watered-down gospel and the seeker-driven pragmatism of the church growth movement. [1] John MacArthur, Slave (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 121–22 That was exactly what we experienced during our visits to Hillsong Los Angeles, where the biblical view of man has been discarded and replaced with something far more palatable to a therapeutic, self-centered culture. Man Is Central In Hillsong’s spiritual economy, man has tremendous inherent worth. The individual replaces Christ as the central figure in God’s redemptive plan. Their own doctrinal statement says that the purpose of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection was to “prove His victory and empower us for life.” The redemption of wretched sinners is not in view. That man-centered approach is a recurring theme throughout Hillsong’s global ministry empire. Their songs are often more about the ones singing than the One they’re singing to. Every passage they preach is a promise of God’s blessing and favor for you. And their altar calls emphasize an endless stream of temporal, personal benefits—breakthrough, healing, success, and prosperity. Effectively, Hillsong’s leaders seek to enable and empower a latent human condition. Their focus is primarily on the enormous potential we have to do great things and be great people. Hillsong’s official website contains a gospel presentation in which we are told that the main point of Christ’s incarnation was to “show us our full potential . . . the wonderful potential of perfected humanity.” The preaching is where Hillsong’s man-centeredness is most blatant, as all the sermons we heard adhered to a simple but consistent template. First, a narrative portion of Scripture would be isolated and severed from its larger biblical context. Next, the preacher would insert him or herself and the congregation into the story. Third, the text was routinely used as a bridge to introduce personal illustrations from the preacher’s own experiences. And finally, after those personal experiences had been fully exegeted, the passage is recast as a promise from God for the congregation. Sitting under that kind of teaching long enough would convince you that all of Scripture is merely an allegory for you and your life. God’s purpose in writing the biblical story, or its place in His wider redemptive plan, was never mentioned in any of the messages we heard. Man was always central. However, his culpability for sin was avoided at every turn. Man Is Never Prosecuted Human guilt barely registers on the Hillsong radar. While the word “sin” does get an occasional mention in Hillsong worship songs, it is never defined or described. The same goes for all the Hillsong preachers we heard—and even then, they prefer to describe sin as “dumb stuff” or “mistakes.” Their statement of faith attempts greater clarity on the subject, but still falls far short of the biblical definition: “We believe that sin has separated each of us from God and His purpose for our lives.” That’s not a false statement, but it drastically understates the reality of man’s fallen condition. The reticence regarding sin extends throughout the ministry. We spoke with some of the Hillsong volunteers responsible for integrating new attenders. They made it clear that they had been instructed to avoid challenging or confronting people about their sins—even open, unrepentant sin. Considering the way Hillsong operates, you can’t help but wonder where and when such a confrontation might happen? It’s certainly not coming from the pulpit. That reluctance to deal directly with sin is institutional at Hillsong. When Brian Houston—Hillsong’s founder and global pastor—was interviewed on Australian television, he was incapable of expressing any clear-cut biblical convictions on prominent moral issues: I think that the homosexual question and sexuality generally is one of the most challenging questions there is for the church in the 21st century. And it’s one where I feel conflict myself, as a believer in the Bible and specifically the New Testament, I think that marriage is God’s idea, and I think it’s for a man and a woman. But I also represent a God that’s merciful and gracious and kind, and having to connect those two things I think is one of the great challenges for me as a church leader. In the church we can point the finger so easily. On the subject of abortion, I’m pro-life. But in a way I’m pro-choice as well, because I believe in the sanctity of life and I believe that life begins at conception. But I also believe that ultimately human beings have to make their own choices, and I ultimately can’t tell you what you should do. I can only give you the parameters that I believe. Those quotes don’t represent Christian conviction. They are the chameleonic ramblings of a political pragmatist. Carl Lentz, pastor of Hillsong New York, goes even further than Houston. Instead of equivocating on morality, he simply chooses to avoid the subject altogether. During a television interview with Katie Couric, Lentz was asked for his views on gay marriage: “Do you feel you have a moral imperative to speak publically about some of these more controversial issues?” He responded: “No, because we try to be like Jesus. Very rarely did Jesus ever talk about morality or social issues.” That’s either a lack of integrity or biblical literacy. Either way, it’s indicative of just how far Hillsong is willing to go to avoid dealing with sin directly. Man Is a Victim Since Hillsong refuses to offer any exploration or explanation concerning our personal guilt, our condition is always couched in therapeutic language. Man is regularly designated as the victim rather than the perpetrator. Both Hillsong’s music and message label the primary problems of unbelievers with words like trapped, bound, enslaved, captive, hurting, wounded, disappointed, let down, and brokenhearted. Certainly some of those words reflect the biblical truth about the unregenerate heart. But the gospel of Hillsong is presented as the remedy to those problems—not reconciliation with God (2 Corinthians 5:19) and rescue from His wrath (John 3:36). During our visits, we regularly heard different Hillsong teachers point out that God loves us just as we are; that He understands how hard our lives are; that He has great desires and dreams for us; that He wants to fix all our financial, health, and relationship problems; and that He’s waiting on us to let Him unleash blessing and breakthrough in our lives. But none of that can happen until we have repented of our sin and surrendered our lives in faith to God. We’re not denying the existence of genuine victims. But in terms of eternity, even the greatest victim still needs to appreciate the depth of his own guilt in order to grasp his need for the Savior. The speakers we heard at Hillsong LA were only interested in salving our own grief—there was no thought whatsoever for how our sin grieves God. Man Doesn’t Need to Change The natural consequence of concealing human guilt is that it removes all need for repentance—another word we rarely heard in our time at Hillsong LA. It did fit the rhyme scheme of one or two songs, and it occasionally slipped out during the routine alter calls, but it was never explained or stressed as a necessary element of faith in Christ. Oddly enough, Hillsong’s statement of faith does talk about repentance: “We believe that in order to receive forgiveness and the ‘new birth’ we must repent of our sins, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and submit to His will for our lives.” However, that quote only highlights the danger of taking doctrinal statements at face value. Concerning Hillsong and the doctrine of repentance, there is zero correlation between what they claim in print and what they actually preach.   For the sake of honesty, Hillsong should either conform their preaching to their doctrinal statement or conform their doctrinal statement to their preaching. As it stands now, it’s hard to see it as anything less than a devious misrepresentation. Worse still, they have congregations full of people—many of them previously unchurched—who are being kept in the dark about the seriousness of their sin and their urgent need to turn from it. Man Is Validated That leaves Hillsong with an emaciated, man-centered gospel. A gospel where God is the supporting cast to man’s starring role. It is a gospel that fails to prosecute men for their sins against God, and instead portrays the criminal as a victim—a gospel that places no requirements on the sinner to turn from his wicked ways. Salvation is thus reduced to God’s revitalization of the victim rather than His justification of the sinner. Even during a discussion on the prayer acronym ACTS—adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication—we were specifically cautioned against confessing sins. The confession part of prayer was instead explained as reminding ourselves and God of His promises of blessing for us—a practice commonly referred to in charismatic circles as “positive confession.” With the doctrine of depravity already in ruins, it makes sense that Hillsong turns confession into another opportunity for self-aggrandizement. That example pretty much encapsulates the delusional anthropology Hillsong teaches to its attenders. They focus on building self-esteem rather than our need to esteem Christ. They spotlight our disappointments at the expense of our guilt. They emphasize our potential while ignoring our depravity. And all the while the Hillsong flock is left in the dark about their true need for Christ. A Final Word Please don’t misunderstand our purpose in this series—as though we take some perverse delight in chronicling such a theological disaster. Instead, we feel a responsibility to warn the church about what we’ve seen and heard during our time at Hillsong, and encourage God’s people to be discerning about the ministries they allow to influence their faith and spiritual growth. We also hope these posts will be lifelines to men and women who are unwittingly drowning in theological error. The people we encountered at Hillsong LA were some of the friendliest, kindest, and most welcoming people you could hope to meet. We are genuinely grieved for them and deeply troubled by their spiritual malnutrition. It’s our sincere hope that our words will help awaken them to the truth—that they are being denied the life-giving truth of God’s Word. Perhaps you know people likewise caught under the sway of Hillsong or another similarly weak ministry—sadly, there are many others. Pray for them, and do what you can to funnel quality, biblical teaching their way. They are not the enemy; they are a spiritually starving mission field that needs to hear about the greatness of their sin and an even greater Savior.              

by Cameron Buettel & Jeremiah Johnson Truth matters, especially when it comes to worship. That ought to be obvious; you can’t properly praise the Lord if you don’t know who He is. Christ Himself was unequivocal on that point—He said true worshippers “must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24, emphasis added). However, much of modern worship music seems to aim at taming the one true God. Some popular “worship songs” are nothing more than artificial praise offered to a different god altogether. In his book Worship, John MacArthur describes the fallout of the biblical illiteracy that permeates the church today. “Worship” aims to be as casual and as relaxed as possible, reflecting an easy familiarity with God unbefitting His transcendent majesty. This type of “worship” seems to aim chiefly at making sinners comfortable with the idea of God—purging from our thoughts anything like fear, trembling, reverence, or profound biblical truth. . . . The decline of true worship in evangelical churches is a troubling sign. It reflects a depreciation of God and a sinful apathy toward His truth among the people of God. Evangelicals have been playing a kind of pop-culture trivial pursuit for decades, and as a result, the evangelical movement has all but lost sight of the glory and grandeur of the One we worship. [1] John MacArthur, Worship (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2012), 10-12. During our recent visits to Hillsong Los Angeles, we’ve seen that trend played out in vivid detail. Worse still, we’ve identified some unbiblical characteristics that Hillsong routinely attribute to God. Hillsong’s God Is Passive In their Statement of Beliefs, Hillsong asserts—without any biblical support—the following: “We believe that God wants to heal and transform us so that we can live healthy and blessed lives in order to help others more effectively.” That statement raises some important questions: What is hindering God from making us all healthy and blessed? And why is the world full of sickness, poverty, and hardship if God doesn’t want it that way? The simple answer is that Hillsong worships a passive and impotent God. Over and over during our time at Hillsong LA, we were encouraged to “invite God in to lead and guide” and to “allow” Him to lead us. We were taught that our worship opens the door for God to work in our lives—that it offers Him the opportunity to bring breakthrough to our circumstances. One night we were bluntly assured that “our prayers can even change God’s mind.”  That’s a far cry from the God of the Bible, who “does whatever He pleases” (Psalm 115:3); whose purposes cannot be thwarted (Job 42:2); who predestines His people according to His purpose and will (Ephesians 1:11); and who sovereignly rules over all His creation (Psalm 103:19). While God’s sovereignty is occasionally paid lip service in songs and sermons, the concept of a truly sovereign Lord is utterly foreign to Hillsong’s theology. Hillsong’s God Is One-Dimensional But that comes as no surprise, given Hillsong’s general myopia when it comes to divine attributes. In the Hillsong doctrinal economy, one aspect of God’s character stands head and shoulders above all others: His love. On more than one occasion we were told that “God desperately loves every single person out there in Los Angeles.” We were repeatedly reminded that the gospel and the message of Jesus Christ are “inclusive”—that God is not interested in perfect people; that He loves you “just the way you are” (more on that next time). In one evening service, we heard from Christine Caine, an anti-trafficking activist and international speaker—herself a product of Hillsong. Her message concerned God’s faithfulness to keep His promises, and she used the story of Abraham and Sarah as her text. She closed by reassuring us that God still loves us after the “dumb stuff”—a term she applied to all sorts of sin, including Abraham’s fornication with Hagar. Her point was that there is nothing we can do—no matter how egregious and rebellious the sin—to make God love us any less. His great love for mankind will always win out, overcoming any and every obstacle. The problem with that view of God’s love is that it ignores so many of His other fundamental attributes. There is no thought given to His holiness, His justice, or His righteous wrath. In fact, as Romans 5:8-9 makes clear, God’s love and His wrath are best understood in tandem. “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him.” Hillsong is quick to apply the blessings and benefits of God’s great love. But apart from those other vital aspects of His character, it seems like little more than vague affection. Put simply, God’s love loses its luster in a vacuum. As John MacArthur explained in a video blog earlier this year, “You can’t take one attribute of God—any one attribute of God—and isolate that as if that defines God alone. God must be understood in all the complex of all His attributes.” In God’s divine nature, those attributes complement one another—they do not compete. And they cannot be fully or accurately understood in isolation. Hillsong’s God Is Familiar Perhaps one of the other hazards of over-emphasizing God’s love is that it turns Him into a kindly benefactor, robbing Him of due reverence and respect. Worship services do not need to be somber affairs, but there is a noticeable lack of sobriety that pervades Hillsong LA’s meetings. And it’s not just a matter of the club-like atmosphere or the rock show accouterments. There’s no discernable sense of reverence or awe for God—no notion that He is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:28-29). And while they spend significant time wooing people to enter into a relationship with Christ, there is no sense that “it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). Rather, Hillsong’s God is a cosmic butler, attentive to all our needs and eager to unleash breakthrough, heal relationships, and shower blessings into our lives. He waits at our beck and call. Gone is any sense of God’s transcendence or holiness. In fact, the reactions of men like Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Paul, and John—who humbly fell on their faces in the presence of the Lord, dumbstruck with awe—seem inappropriate for a deity as intimate and familiar as the one Hillsong describes. That attitude can lead to some disturbingly casual and careless discussion of God’s Person and work. For example, in the aforementioned message from Christine Caine, she brought the audience to hysterics with the following description of God’s creative work: “God woke up one day and burped and [gestures] earth, and [said] ‘Whoops, look what I did.’” Those simply aren’t the words of someone who takes God and His Word seriously. A Word About God’s Word That same giddy carelessness is on display in most of the preaching we heard at Hillsong LA. Speakers frequently play fast and loose with Scripture and its meaning. Context is rarely a concern. The general pattern is to isolate a portion of Scripture’s narrative and turn it into an analogy for the audience and a promise of God’s blessing and favor. Even the most familiar verses and passages are exceedingly pliable in the hands of Hillsong’s leadership. The first Sunday we attended, Hillsong LA’s lead pastor Ben Houston turned John 3:16 into an exhortation to give to the church, explaining how “God so loved that He gave,” and that our love for the church ought to prompt us to give our money. That sort of postmodern flexibility is brought to the text in every service, and it turns every lesson into a reminder of God’s aggressive love for you, His eager desire to bless you, and your integral part in unleashing that blessing in your own life. It’s not much more than a watered-down version of the prosperity gospel or the Word Faith movement. In his book, Worship, John MacArthur points to several Old Testament examples to illustrate how seriously God takes worship. Whether it’s the Israelites fashioning a golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai, the strange fire offered by Nadab and Abihu, or Uzzah simply reaching out to steady and secure the Ark of the Covenant, the message is clear: God will not accept deviant worship. Some would insist that any kind of sincere worship is acceptable to God, but that is simply not true. The Bible clearly teaches that those who offer self-styled worship are unacceptable to God, regardless of their good intentions. No matter how pure our motivation may seem or how sincere we are in our attempt, if we fail to worship God as He has commanded, He cannot bless us. [2] Worship, 20. At best, Hillsong’s God is a pale and incomplete shadow of the fullness described in Scripture. At worst, he’s a fraudulent idol, made in man’s image and incapable of providing the redemption and transformation that sinners so desperately need.              

Pequeno exercício para o leitor:
A)
B)
C)

[ ] Itália
[ ] Costa do Marfim
[ ] Irlanda

P.S. A culpa é da França

Just like the Labour leader, the US President-elect is protectionist, isolationist and dead against globalisation

 

Russian Bill makes Free Software a Public Priority

Legislators have drafted a bill that will boost Free Software on multiple levels within the Russian Federation's public sector.

The draft, approved by the Russian Federation's Duma (lower chamber) in mid-October, requires the public sector to prioritise Free Software over proprietary alternatives, gives precedence to local IT businesses that offer Free Software for public tenders, and recognises the need to encourage collaboration with the global network of Free Software organisations and communities.

The text enforces prioritising Free Software over proprietary alternatives by requiring public administrations to formally justify any purchase of proprietary software. The purchase will be considered unjustified if a Free Software solution exists that satisfies the list of technical specifications and standards. In addition, all IT purchase agreements in the public sphere must be registered in a dedicated registrar and detail the overall quantity and price of both purchased proprietary and Free Software.

In order to encourage local businesses, IT companies that distribute and provide Free Software products and services will by default receive bonus points in public tenders. With this measure, legislators intend to reduce the administration's dependency on foreign IT providers of proprietary software.

Despite the above, the bill also recognises the universality of Free Software. As the legislators acknowledge in explanatory notes appended to the text, the concept of "Russian Free Software" is meaningless due to the global nature of Free Software. The text recognises the need to support Russian Free Software companies in order to better integrate into global Free Software communities.

"[...]законопроект предлагает тем самым уйти от понятия «российское СПО», поскольку наборы программных кодов, открытых по разного вида свободным лицензиям, представляют собой по сути единую мировую платформу[...]"

English translation:

[...]the draft bill suggests to withhold the concept of "Russian Free Software", because the source code available under different open licences represents in essence one global platform[...]

Another interesting aspect of the law is how the authors of the bill have made an extra effort to ensure the language used in the draft are correct. For one, only software carrying licenses that allow the four freedoms may be legally labelled as "Free Software":

"Свободное программное обеспечение (СПО) - программное обеспечение, имеющее открытый исходный код и распространяемое по открытым лицензиям на условиях специального лицензионного договора, на основании которого пользователь получает неограниченное право на его установку, запуск, а также свободное использование, изучение, распространение и изменение (модификацию) по своему усмотрению в любых, не запрещенных законом целях."

English translation:

"Free Software - software which is open source and distributed under open licences based on special licensing contract terms, allowing a user unrestricted right to install, run, use, study, distribute and modify it freely, according to one's needs and for purposes that are not restricted by law."

Secondly, every time the bill text refers to the most famous free operating system, it refers to it as "GNU/Linux", not simply "Linux". This indicates an awareness not commonly found amongst authors of national legislations.

"The bill is an example of public software procurement done right." says Polina Malaja, Policy Analyst and Legal Coordinator at the FSFE. "The FSFE has long advised having all public administrations prioritise Free Software and recommended that all software developed by and for the public sector be published under a Free Software licence. As the authors of the Russian bill have come to realise, without Free Software public administrations will never be able to claim they have real digital sovereignty. Other European administrations should take note."

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Clinton's supporters cling to a fictitious construct of world affairs.

This is the November 2016 issue of the monthly DB-Engines Ranking of database management systems.

You can find the complete and most up-to-date ranking at DB-Engines.com.

Rank	DBMS	Score	Changes
1.	Oracle	1413.01	-4.09
2.	MySQL	1373.56	+10.91
3.	Microsoft SQL Server	1213.80	-0.38
4.	PostgreSQL	325.82	+ 7.12
5.	MongoDB	325.48	+ 6.67
6.	DB2	181.46	+ 0.90
7.	Cassandra	133.97	-1.09
8.	Microsoft Access	125.97	+ 1.30
9.	Redis	115.54	+ 6.00
10.	SQLite	112.00	+ 3.43
Copyright © November 2016 DB-Engines.com

John finished reading The Word Became Fresh: How to Preach from Old Testament Narrative Texts by Dale Ralph Davis

Douglas gave 4 stars to Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith (Paperback) by Michael Reeves
bookshelves: theology
A winsome introduction to basic Christian thinking. Very enjoyable.

Douglas gave 4 stars to Things Not Seen: A Fresh Look at Old Stories of Trusting God's Promises (Paperback) by Jon Bloom
bookshelves: theology
Written on a very popular level, this book is nevertheless crammed with a number of insightful observations about the text of Scripture.

Felipe wants to read A Christian Theory of Social Institutions by Herman Dooyeweerd

Criar um "cadastro nacional de usuários de internet" não é uma boa ideia. Na verdade, pra chegar perto de ser péssima ainda precisaria melhorar muito.

Não é tecnicamente viável,
não é economicamente viável,
não resolve o problema que se propunha a resolver e ainda cria novos.

NOTA PÚBLICA em que expressa discordância sobre o Projeto de Lei que propõe criação de

NOTA PÚBLICA em que expressa discordância sobre o Projeto de Lei que propõe criação de

Fortune covers a ruling [PDF] by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that invalidates three patents asserted against anti-virus companies Symantec and Trend Micro. "The most important part of the decision, which has created a stir among the patent bar, is a concurrence by Circuit Judge Haldane Mayer. In striking down a key claim from U.S. Patent 5987610, which claims a monopoly on using anti-virus tools within a phone network, Mayer says it is time to acknowledge that a famous Supreme Court 2014 decision known as “Alice” basically ended software patents altogether."

Felipe gave 5 stars to Fé e obediência: uma introdução à lei bíblica (Kindle Edition) by Rousas John Rushdoony
bookshelves: monergismo
Um alerta muito necessário numa época de antinomismo mesmo no meio Reformado.

If you’re building a SaaS application, you probably already have the notion of tenancy built in your data model. Typically, most information relates to tenants/customers/accounts and your database tables capture this natural relation.

With smaller amounts of data (10s of GB), it’s easy to throw more hardware at the problem and scale up your database. As these tables grow however, you need to think about ways to scale your multi-tenant database across dozens or hundreds of machines.

After our blog post on sharding a multi-tenant app with Postgres, we received a number of questions on architectural patterns for multi-tenant databases and when to use which. At a high level, developers have three options:

1. Create one database per tenant
2. Create one schema per tenant
3. Have all tenants share the same table(s)

The option you pick has implications on scalability, how you handle data that varies across tenants, isolation, and ease-of-maintenance. And these implications have been discussed in detail across many StackOverflow questions and database articles. So, what is the best solution?

In practice, each of the three design options -with enough effort- can address questions around scale, data that varies across tenants, and isolation. The decision depends on the primary dimension you’re building/optimizing for. The tldr:

• If you’re building for scale: Have all tenants share the same table(s)
• If you’re building for isolation: Create one database per tenant

In this blog post, we’ll focus on the scaling dimension, as we found that more users who talked to us had questions in that area. (We also intend to describe considerations around isolation in a follow-up blog post.)

To expand on this further, if you’re planning to have 5 or 50 tenants in your B2B application, and your database is running into scalability issues, then you can create and maintain a separate database for each tenant. If however you plan to have thousands of tenants, then sharding your tables on a tenantid/accountid column will help you scale in a much better way.

Common benefits of having all tenants share the same database are:

Resource pooling (reduced cost): If you create a separate database for each tenant, then you need to allocate resources to that database. Further, databases usually make assumptions about resources available to them–for example, PostgreSQL has shared_buffers, makes good use of the operating system cache, comes with connection count settings, runs processes in the background, and writes logs and data to disk. If you’re running 50 of these databases on a few physical machines, then resource pooling becomes tricky even with today’s virtualization tech.

If you have a distributed database that manages all tenants, then you’re using your database for what it’s designed to do. You could shard your tables on tenant_id and easily support 1000s or tens of thousands of tenants.“”

Google’s F1 paper is a good example that demonstrates a multi-tenant database that scales this way. The paper talks about technical challenges associated with scaling out the Google AdWords platform; and at its core describes a multi-tenant database. The F1 paper also highlights how best to model data to support many tenants/customers in a distributed database.

The data model on the left-hand side follows the relational database model and uses foreign key constraints to ensure data integrity in the database. This strict relational model introduces certain drawbacks in a distributed environment however.

In particular, most transactions and joins you perform on your database, and constraints you’d like to enforce across your tables, have a customer/tenant dimension to them. If you shard your tables on their primary key column (in the relational model), then most distributed transactions, joins, and constraints become expensive. Network and machine failures further add to this cost.

The diagram on the right-hand side proposes the hierarchical database model. This model is the one used by F1 and resolves the previously mentioned issues. In its simplest form, you add a customerid/tenantid column to your tables and shard them on customer_id. This ensures that data from the same customer gets colocated together – co-location dramatically reduces the cost associated with distributed transactions, joins, and foreign key constraints.

Ease of maintenance: Another challenge associated with supporting 100-100K tenants is schema changes (Alter Table) and index creations (Create Index). As your application grows, you will iterate on your database model and make improvements.

If you’re following an architecture where each tenant lives in a separate database, then you need to implement an infrastructure that ensures that each schema change either succeeds across all tenants or gets eventually rolled back. For example, what happens when you changed the schema for 5,000 of 10K tenants and observed a failure? How do you handle that?

When you shard your tables for multi-tenancy, then you’re having your database do the work for you. The database will either ensure that an Alter Table goes through across all shards, or it will roll it back.

What about data that varies across tenants? Another challenge with scaling to thousands of tenants relates to handling data that varies across tenants. Your multi-tenant application will naturally include a standard database setup with default tables, fields, queries, and relationships that are appropriate to your solution. But different tenants/organizations may have their own unique needs that a rigid, inextensible default data model won’t be able to address. For example, one organization may need to track their stores in the US through their zip codes. Another customer in Europe might not care about US zip codes, but may be interested to keep tax ratios for each store.

This used to be an area where having a tenant per database offered the most flexibility, at the cost of extra maintenance work from the developer(s). You could create separate tables or columns per tenant in each database, and manage those differences across time.

If then you wanted to scale your infrastructure to thousands of tenants, you’d create a huge table with many string columns (Value0, Value1, … Value500). Probably, the best known example of this model is Salesforce’s multi-tenant architecture.

In this database model, your tables have a preset collection of custom columns, labeled in this image as V1, V2, and V3. Dates and Numbers are stored as strings in a format such that they can be converted to their native types. When you’re storing data associated with a particular tenant, you can then use these custom columns and tailor them to each tenant’s special needs.

Fortunately, designing your database to account for “flexible” columns significantly easier with the introduction of semi-structured data types. PostgreSQL has a rich set of semi-structured data types that include hstore, json, and jsonb. You can now represent the previous database schema by simply declaring a jsonb column and scale to thousands of tenants.

Of course, these aren’t the only design criteria and questions to be aware of. If you shard your database tables, how do you handle isolation or integrate with ORM libraries? What happens if you have a table that you can’t easily add a tenant_id column? In this blog post, we focused on building multi-tenant databases with scaling as the primary consideration in mind; and skipped over certain points. If you’re looking to learn more about designing multi-tenant databases, please sign up for our upcoming webinar on the topic!

The good news is, databases have advanced quite a bit in the past ten years in accommodating SaaS applications at scale. What was once only available to the likes of Google and Salesforce with significant engineering effort, is now becoming accessible to everyone with open-source technologies such as PostgreSQL and Citus. If you’re thinking of modernizing your multi-tenant architecture, drop us a line and we’d be happy to chat.

John gave 4 stars to Transgender (Talking Points) by Vaughan Roberts
This is a very helpful book on a very important topic. Christians must be equipped to discuss this issue from a biblical perspective and this book serves as a helpful introduction. It is a very easy read (you could probably finish it in hour). Because of its accessibility and the importance of the topic, every Christian should pick up a copy.