Welcome to the WordPress version of MandM. We are now open for business, there are a few navigational things still under construction and being tweaked so please bear with us as we sort these but you should be able to read and comment with no problem.
Tags: Blog Upgrades · Wordpress22 Comments
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
Today's New Atheists proclaim themselves our culture's party of reason. It is a claim they cannot sustain. Reason is the New Atheists' weakness, not their strength and in fact, the Christian faith is a far better place to look for True Reason. Making their case accessible to the first-time inquirer as well as the serious student, this top-flight team of writers presents a sound defense and a strong introduction to the true reason uniquely found in Christianity.
The book begins by examining foundational philosophical approaches to the Bible as well as the methodological challenges those philosophies create for interpreting the Bible. It then addresses textual and historical challenges and how to deal with them. Finally it looks at ethical, scientific, and theological challenges demonstrating the Bible's moral integrity in relationship to contemporary moral emphases.
Many philosophers have considered the strengths and weaknesses of a virtue-centered approach to moral theory. Much less attention has been given to how such an approach bears on issues in applied ethics. The essays in this volume apply a virtue-centered perspective to a variety of contemporary moral issues.
The challenge of a seemingly genocidal God who commands ruthless warfare has bewildered Bible readers for generations. A range of expert contributors engage in a multidisciplinary approach that considers this issue from a variety of perspectives: biblical, ethical, philosophical and theological.
The nineteen essays here raise classical philosophical questions in fresh ways, address contemporary challenges for the church, and will deepen the thinking of the next generation of apologists. Packed with dynamic topical discussions and informed by the latest scholarship.
While New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and others proclaim loudly their rationality, clear thinking, and incontrovertible scientific arguments, others are beginning to wonder how genuinely rational they are. Have they proved anything? Have they argued convincingly? Have they pinpointed any real challenges to the credibility of Christian faith?
Okey, but it doesn’t work with a www. on the front.
Also, mandm.wordpress.com appears to be Arabic or something!
.-= ´ latest blog-post ..The smell of prayers? =-.
mandm.wordpress.com is not our address so that will be why it is in arabic.
Give the servers 24 hours to get consistent.
It will work as both http://www.mandm.org.nz and mandm.org.nz
.-= ´ latest blog-post ..Moving to WordPress – Please Stand By =-.
ahhhh… wordpress! 🙂
.-= ´ latest blog-post ..explaining nature =-.
Feels good to be here and to be free of JS-Kit LOL!
.-= My last blog ..Video of Matthew Flannagan Speaking on Moral Relativism =-.
Our page rank has dropped to 4! What’s with that?
.-= My last blog-post ..Wet Paint: MandM Live at WordPress =-.
Yep, all good now.
.-= ´ latest blog-post ..If only they’d looked on google maps! =-.
thanks, looks kool
thanks, tht kool
My laptop likes this new blog system. It doesn’t freeze anymore.
I love WordPress 🙂
.-= My last blog-post ..“I believe because it is absurd” – Was Tertullian a fideist? =-.
There are things I like about it Glenn and things I cannot stand – like the way it mysteriously inserts gobbledegook and mucks up the formatting of blog posts and you remove it and it comes back. Aligning images and getting a single space between paragraphs are my two biggest headaches on every WordPress blog I write for – no matter what version or theme.
Also editing the theme is a much bigger headache than with Blogger and requires much more html and css skill.
Still its annoyances are outweighed by its functionality. Once you do battle with the theme you can get more from the platform – and you don’t have to be picky, you can just go with an out of the box theme… no way I was going to do that.
I’m sure I will learn the tricks necessary to prevent and fix the problems with editing blog posts – I just hate thinking of the 500 or so existing posts that need tidying now as they no longer display neatly now they are in WordPress and the fact that just doing the 10 on the front page to get the site ready took me, in some instance 5-6 goes for each as the things I removed mucking up the display would just straight back in.
We still have 1/3 of the blog posts to re-categorise and re-tag but now we are here I am overall happy.
Big thanks to Geoff whose help has been invaluable through this move.
.-= My last blog-post ..Darwinian Evolution, Chance and Design =-.
Yeah, if you’re going to really go the whole nine years and upload the wordpress package to your own server (which I think is easily the best way to go) then there can be a fair bit of css editing involved. What I did – and recommend – is hunt for a user made theme that’s very similar to what you want, and then tweak it. There is a huge number of wordpress themes out there.
.-= My last blog-post ..“I believe because it is absurd” – Was Tertullian a fideist? =-.
I meant “whole nine yards.” One thing I immediately notice is that – just as on my blog – we can’t delete our posts if there’s a mistake. 🙂
.-= My last blog-post ..“I believe because it is absurd” – Was Tertullian a fideist? =-.
No you cannot delete but I have enabled self-editing for a short period.
.-= My last blog-post ..Wet Paint: MandM Live at WordPress =-.
I am seriously going to throw something at my computer. WordPress’ text editor is DRIVING ME NUTS.
With Blogger, Matt could write a post in word and I could copy and paste it over and click post. All formatting, links, everything would come over with one click.
Here, I edited Matt’s Sunday Study which he wrote in Word to have blockquote and a and i tags. Then I copied it, pasted it into notepad (cause I have already learned that no way can you paste from Word) deselected it, reselected it and copied and pasted it into the html editor. Visually it looked fine. I posted it and it looked like crap when it was live and the handcrafted link were gone.
When I went back to edit there was all this html rubbish code through it and all the paragraphs were morphed into one giant paragraph. I fixed that and reposted it and some paragraphs were fully justified and some were not. Now I am stripping all the div’s out that it scattered throughout (I sure did not put them in) and am trying again. ARGH!
WordPress need to seriously work on their editor. If you cannot copy and paste from notepad without it screwing up and if the visual editor and the preview function lie about what the actual thing is going to look like then you have a problem that needs fixing.
Equally frustrating as I go back through all the imported posts are the sheer number that are sitting poorly or that have mucked up spaces between paragraphs. Blogger at least has that over WordPress – even when it mysteriously added html rubbish to your posts they still displayed properly and you could take it out without it persistently putting them back in.
.-= My last blog-post ..Contra Mundum: What’s Wrong with Imposing your Beliefs onto Others? =-.
Yes, computer issues can be enough to split anyones personality! I have a fixer who does all that for me… he has just put StumbleUpon for me… and Twitter… what a guy!
I am a computer heretic, and my ignorance in such matters is never bliss, but when I am in the backend in my WordPress enabled site, feverishly typing away, one of the tab options, just above where one types, gives me the option to “Paste from Word”… I am thinking, or thinking I am, that such may be what you are after, as such should, theoretically, work to eliminate cross-pollination issues (it seems never to be that simple).
If you have that option, it may be messianic!
The loading of your site is much quicker on W-Press… blogger is a sluggard in this area, particularly.
Onward and upward!
I found the paste from word button Jonny and it was an improvement. It inserted lots of extra spaces and did not transfer over full justification but apart from that it was good.
I have not bothered with putting Stumble and Twitter buttons here yet as no one appeared to ever use the Stumble button – MandM only has 3 StumbleUpon reviews and I know that not one of them came from the Stumble buttons I had on the blogger version of MandM. If you have a Stumble account Jonny (anyone…) I’d really appreciate a review of MandM – I’ll give you one back!
I may install Tweetmeme here; I just wish it was not lime green.
The site definitely loads quicker here I am just really peeved after hearing all the hype about WP having superior SEO to Blogger to see our page rank dive to 4.
.-= My last blog-post ..Moving to WordPress – Please Stand By =-.
Your rank dived could be due to how you transitioned your blog. Give it time.
I wonder how WordPress.com SEO is compared to when hosting your own WordPress. When you host your own WordPress, you can tweak a lot of things. That includes ability to install some SEO plugins and sitemap plugin (which will make your post appear much quicker on Google index).
Nice youtube by Jason Ma: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73kZ6wBoqTk
Oh you do have sitemap, but it is not working? I got 404 error. And is this wordpress.com or are you hosting your own wordpress? Was under the impression you were moving to wordpress.com, but I just noticed there’s no wordpress.com bar on top.
We are hosted by Churchweb so I can tweak and fiddle.
This theme comes with the option to add a sitemap page but I have not enabled the sitemap – are you saying I should for SEO? I don’t really want to link to it from the Nav bar but I could always have it just sitting there I guess.
Which plugins should I have? Currently I am using All in one SEO Pack optimisation and Robot Meta.
.-= My last blog-post ..Moving to WordPress – Please Stand By =-.
Have your sitemap enabled, then register it at http://www.google.com/webmasters/
It makes your new posts get listed much quicker on Google Index. Not sure if it helps SEO, but who knows.
I use Google Sitemap plugin http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/ on my website. There are a few of such plugins out there, I happen to use that one for no specific reason.