The Threshing Floor

To me, deconstructing something means taking it apart to see what makes it tick, to see how it came to be what it is. Deconstruction of Christian  orthodoxy means looing at the socio-historicl development of the Christian church and Christian doctrine. It also means looking at the development of the doctrines, canon and underlying assumptions of orthodox doctrine. Orthodoxy did not spring full blown from the mind of Jesus, Augustine, Thoma Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin or even Pat Robertson. Christian orthodox has a long history.

The history of Christian ortodoxy is actually, for our purposes, two histories - a political,in the Aristolean sense, history; and an  ideological history - a history of ideas  there is a very vclose interaction between the political and ideological history of Christian orthodoxy For better or for worse, as we have already seen in my discussion of early Christian heresy, church politics has had a tremendous influence on church ideology. Read more…

The kerygma of Jesus often uses parables about ancient agriculture: the sower, the mustard seed,and separating the wheat from the chaff. The threshing flor is where ancient farmers used sticks to beat the stalks of grain to separate the wheat, the good stuff, from the chaff, which they threw into the fire because it was useless.

In reviewing my posts of the last year and a half, it dawned on me last night that what I have been doing all these months is beating Christian orthodoxy with a the stick of critical analysis to try and separate the wheat, the true kerygma of Jesus, from the chaff of the historical accretions and distortions we know as Christian orthodoxy. In otther words, this blog has served at times as a theological threshing floor. Read more…

As you can tell from my writing this, I am feeling much better today. So much better, in fact, that I ws able to deal with a major security issue with the Drupal script I had been using for this site . I have replaced Drupal with the Wordpress script and exported all the content from my Wordpress.com blog and imported that content here

Which, of coure, leads to the question of what am I gpng to do abpit the marketing content. At this point, I am not sure. I am really not all that enthusiastic about writing marketing articles. I thought I was, but it seems that enthusiasm was very short-lived. It has been realy hard to even think about the subject, let alone write anything positive about it. I could write reams of negative stuff, but what purpose would that serve? I have better things to do with my time and energy, like working on my doctorate, which I intend to start doing next week. Read more…

I guess my first order of business should be to explain my rather extended absence. To put it briefly and bluntly, my bing away was due to a pain in the ass, quite literally. I have sffered with hemorrhoids for years, but in the last year or so, they have become quite severe. I had a severe attack in May of 2007, so sever in fact that my wife and Ispent the early hours of Mother’s Day 2007 in the emergency room because doctors no longer are available on weekends. More on that subject below

I nearly had the surgery to remve my henorrhoids that sunner, but I chickened out after I found some herbal remedies that seemed to control the problem. Then, two weekends ago, after more than a year of repsite, my hemorrhoids struck again, worse than ever. My wife and I spent six hours in the emergency room on A Sunday. It seems that my little friends wait until the weekend to become a problem.

I have been in  a great deal of pain this past two weeks, and only have found any real relief the last couple of days. It’s very hard to concentrate and write when you cannot sit for more than five minutes without experiencing a great deal of pain in your rectum.

I have an appointment wih a surgeon on Tuesday to set things up for the surgery Although I a, approaching the idea of surgery with a great deal of apprehension, it is time for it to happen. The thought of repeating what I went through these last two weeks is enough incentive for me to overcome my apprehensions, I think. If all goes well, I wil only be in the hospital overnight. Read more…

The last week has been quite an experience, let me tell you. For someone who spends most of every day on the computer, having only limited computer cpabilities for a week is a nightmare. It is not an experience I want to go through again any time soon.

My original intention was to buy myslef a nice big, in terms of power, laptop - one that would be able to run all the productivity software I use as well as my favorite RPG games, World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2. I found exactly what I wanted at the local Staples and they even set it up for me as a Windows Vista computer. Iplanned on making it a double  boot system - it would boot in either Windows or Ubuntu Linux. Trouble with doing that is that all new PCs come with Windows Vista and there are some major hurdles for the average computer user in setting up a double boot system with Vista. But there is a new version of Ubuntu due out in November that will hoperfully resolve that issue

Qnyway, I bought this really awesome  HP laptop and tried it out for a few days. It handled all my games and software beautifully. There was only one problem. It uses a wide screen format and even at the smallest screen resolution, things were too hard for me to read on my gmes where Ihave no control over fonts. I beed a 1024 x 768 screen resolution to be able to read the fonrs on my games but that resolution distorts the graphics on a wide screen format. So, I kept the lap top for my daughter and bought myelf a new HPtower to run with my 19 imch flatscreen monitor. Read more…

Just a short note to let you know that I will be away till Monday. We bought a new lap top computer and we have some shuffling and reconfiguting to do that will make it hard for me to work online until Monday. I should have a new post ready by Monday or Tuesday. Until then, pace.

Back in the early 1970s when I was in my twenties, I got hooked on role-playing fantasy characters based in the Middle Earth universe created by J.R.R. Tolkien. I got hooked on Dungeons and Dragons. A group of six of us got together every weekend and had marathon sessions that lasted from Friday evening until Sunday evening. Back in those days we played using paper and pencil.

After about ten years, when I went back to college to get my BA, I started moving in a different circle of friends who did not play D & D, but the community college where I worked as a tutor had a computer lab and there was an online version that I got to play in my spare time.

Then in the mid 1980s I stopped playing all together until about a year ago, when my kids discovered Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights. My kids started playing World of Warcraft and have been badgering me to come play online with them but I resisted for reasons that are not relevant here. Two weeks ago I broke down and started playing a little on each of the two accounts we have with WoW. That way I can take turns playing with my daughter and my younger son, both of whom take role playing very seriously, as do I. [For an introduction to the WoW unverse, click here.] Read more…

Our dreams shape and direct the reality of our lives. We start out with lots of dreams and as we move toward maturity, we focus and refine those dreams into our life’s goals. As we grow older, we either achieve those dreams or discard them as impossible. But some dreams never die.

One dream I’ve had for many years has been to get my doctorate degree. I nearly achieved that dream twenty some years ago, but it ended up unfulfilled because rhe realities of my life at that time interfered and I ended up filing that dream in the drawer marked highly unlikely, along with several other dreams.

But my life’s reality has gone through some major changes in the years since then and all those dreams in the highly unlikely drawer have been fulfilled: a loving wife, three beautiful children whom I adore, and our own home in the country. The only one left in there is the dream of completing my education by earning a doctorate. Given my age (660), it would be fairly safe to say that that dream needs to be refiled in the not going to happen drawer. Read more…

American politics has, historically, had several ongoing major moral debates and perhaps the one that defines our moral dilemma best and most vividly exposes our hypocrisy is the death penalty. The recent Supreme Court decision, by a 5 to 4 vote, outlawing the execution of those who rape children, has brought the dilemma over the death penalty into the political spotlight again.

As a father, I find the rape of children, and the sexual abuse and exploitation of children, and that includes child pornography, extremely revolting. It is my considered opinion that these practices are symptomatic of a society with some very unhealthy attitudes about sex, nudity, and gender, but that is a topic for another post, not this one today. I do believe that child rapists deserve to be severely punished, but I agree with the Supreme Court that execution should not be an option for them or anyone else for that matter. As far as I am concerned, the death penalty violates the most basic principles of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious tradition - the Ten Commandments, and specifically, the sixth commandment: Thou shalt not kill. Read more…

All of the posts that I had on what is now the John Botscharow Marketing Journal site that were worth moving have been moved to the archives here. In a few instances, I left a copy on the Marketing Jornal site so they exist in both archives. One or two posts did not get moved and some got deleted altogether.

I started this blog back in January of 2007 at this location, so this is a homecoming of sorts. Because of the various changes in severs the last 18 months, not all the archives for this blog are available yet. I never did move asll of the archives from 2007 to my other servers. I think I still have them in a database file somewhere on a disk and will slowly add thoe best posts back into the archives here if I find the right file. There are some posts from 2007 that I would like to restore to this site. So keep your fingers corssed! Read more…