Homosexuality In The News

This topic is getting a lot of airtime lately. From the election coverage pitted as pro-life and pro-choice, or even pro-abortion. Resulting in the honest question from a conservative perspective, whether or not signing the FOCA legislation is the correct way to lower the number of abortions, which is on Obama’s list of peragotives. From there, we can hop to the Newsweek article, and the Christianity Today response – which is as much about the method as it is the issue. And to go further, Tuesday’s “Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and Mike Huckabee in which Stewart focused the conversation quite a bit on the issue of homosexuality. I’m not sure Huckabee knew that was coming, and for a layperson, I think he held his own fine, he certainly didn’t gain any ground or put up any worthwhile arguments – but what can you honestly expect to do on a satirical news show.

I’m somewhat surprised how much traction this issue seems to be getting. It isn’t a new issue, and nothing very interesting has been said so far. Yet it seems to have captured the ear and mouth of more than a few people – no doubt, I’m posting on it.

This should wake us all up a bit. We need to realize “because the Bible says so” is not an acceptable answer in the public sphere. It might be a fine answer inside the walls of your church, though I’d argue that still isn’t good enough. It might be a fine answer inside your home, though I’d argue that still isn’t good enough. It might be a fine answer in your prayer closet (and I’m not going to argue there). But, as we’re coming to realize, Christianity is not defined only in your prayer closets, though that makes up part of it. And it is not defined only in your home, though that makes up part of it. It is certainly not defined only in your church. Christianity exists out in the world. God’s Kingdom is a public event. It is not shrouded behind a cloud. When God breaks out and acts in the world, it is not a secret. The influence of the Church in the world should not be secret.

When we interact with the world, in an attempt to show them God, the Kingdom, and ourselves – we have to do it in a manner that connects with people. This whole thing is about people. And for people who don’t believe in the Bible, “because the Bible said so” is no reason at all. You aren’t any closer to helping them understand you, Jesus, Christianity, the Church, God, or the Gospel. As a matter of fact – you’re probably hurting the chance.

As a kind of opening argument, I hope to go through some of the issues of sexuality, not only homosexuality.

Update

A new, very pointed response to Newsweek has surfaced on the general lack of true journalism.

The Way to Spin Your Wheels

Is to perform tasks that take up plenty of time and effort, while delivering the lowest impact to the goal.

Document Management

I must admit that I cannot imagine a way to move a culture from an oral-based one to a document-based one.

Somehow, over a thousand years, western civilization has moved from a largely oral-based culture, to a document-based one. How does one attempt that same change in a small business, in less than a year? I haven’t a clue.

The businesses that have put effort into document management usually buy fancy and expensive “enterprise solutions” that don’t solve very much at all. It amounts to basically a top-down indexing and categorization system for Word docs. The businesses that don’t put effort into document management just have a bunch of version-tracked Word documents with various version names and folders on a shared company drive. Neither of these solutions seem to work very well.

The upside of oral-based communication is that it is quick, and high bandwidth. You can have a conversation with a museum curator and understand the artwork much quicker than reading your art history books. However, there are several failings. Unless the curator is giving a tour, you’re the only one in the museum that knows this information. And sometimes, you’re having a conversation with the wrong person – therefore they can give you misleading information.

In a software organization, documentation is important. Often times developers will say the code is the documentation. If the code is refactored, clean, and straightforward – then it can be the documentation. Yet, that creates a “priestly class”, refusing to translate the sacred text (code) into the vernacular for consumption. Generally, programmers are poor writers, and you want them spending their keystrokes writing code, not documentation. I think there is a solution that works around this priestly class idea.

The functional requirements become the start of documentation. Then, a usability document outlines the interface that will accomplish the requirements. Perhaps these are mockups with sticky notes, or something more verbose. Now development starts. A test plan gets written. This test plan tells us what will and will not happen, what we are testing positively and negatively. It outlines data sets to perform these checks, and expected results. Putting these three documents together can create the standard two marketing deliverables: training guides and user manuals. The functional requirement becomes the goal of the training program. The mockups are the screen captures. And the test plan informs the behavior and some sample data to work with. It can alert to common problems and wrong paths that should be trained against. And this can all get written to be digested by a common person, the user, in a user manual.

Now, everyone, even the common user, should be able to know what the heck an interface does! And if the programmers want to really know, they can use their own “documentation”, the code