I love having new experiences. Traveling to new places, tasting new foods, meeting new people. I love football (the kind where you use your feet and don't wear those pads and helmets) and my favorite football club is Tottenham Hotspur, and so I naturally hate Arsenal. I love cooking, particularly from scratch and not following a recipe. Ethnic food, especially asian is my favorite to cook/eat. I love music, as you'll see in the following section, and I play guitar, piano, bass, and occasionally write songs. I also love modern design- particularly modern furniture and architecture- I'm also a closet Mac computers nerd and have done nerdy things like hacking my iPhone and putting Zelda system sounds on it. I also like video games- specifically retro video games. We have a Wii which has been certainly fueling that addiction.
"Liberty once again must become more important to us than the desire for security and material comfort. Personal safety and economic prosperity can only come as the consequence of liberty. They cannot be provided by an authoritarian government... The foundation for a police state has been put in place, and it's urgent we mobilize resistance before it's too late... Central planning is intellectually bankrupt – and it has bankrupted our country and undermined our moral principles. Respect for individual liberty and dignity is the only answer to government force, force that serves the politically and economically powerful. Our planners and rulers are not geniuses, but rather demagogues and would-be dictators -- always performing their tasks with a cover of humanitarian rhetoric... The collapse of the Soviet system came swiftly and dramatically, without a bloody conflict... It came as no surprise, however, to the devotees of freedom who have understood for decades that socialism was doomed to fail... And so too will the welfare/warfare state fail... A free society is based on the key principle that the government, the president, the Congress, the courts, and the bureaucrats are incapable of knowing what is best for each and every one of us... A government as a referee is proper, but a government that uses arbitrary force to direct every aspect of society threatens freedom... The time has come for a modern approach to achieving those values that all civilized societies seek. Only in a free society do individuals have the best chance to seek virtue, strive for excellence, improve their economic well-being, and achieve personal happiness... The worthy goals of civilization can only be achieved by freedom loving individuals. When government uses force, liberty is sacrificed and the goals are lost. It is freedom that is the source of all creative energy. If I am to be your president, these are the goals I would seek. I reject the notion that we need a president to run our lives, plan the economy, or police the world... It is much more important to protect individual liberty and privacy than to make government even more secretive and powerful."
-Ron Paul
"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."
excerpt from "Mere Christianity"
-C.S. Lewis
"Why do you actually need a moral law giver if you have a moral law? The answer is because the questioner and the issue he or she questions always involve the essential value of a person. That is, you can never talk of morality in abstraction. Persons are implicit to the question and the object of the question. In a nutshell, positing a moral law without a moral law giver would be equivalent to raising the question of evil without a questioner. So you cannot have a moral law unless the moral law itself is intrinsically woven into personhood, which means it demands an intrinsically worthy person if the moral law itself is valued. And that person can only be God."
excerpt from "The Grand Weaver: How God Shapes Us Through the Events of Our Lives"
-Ravi Zacharias
long list here... i'll do it in chronological order of when i started listening to it. (i'm not proud of all of it, btw.)
80's
psalty the singing songbook, nathaniel the grublet, we are the world, michael jackson, john denver & the muppets' "a christmas together" (this is still my favorite christmas album, I listen to it every year), any disney record that came with a book and said "turn the page when the chimes ring like this", keith green, glad, petra, dynamic twins, P.I.D., S.F.C., freedom of soul, d-boy, apocalypse.
90's
public enemy, NWA, eric b & rakim, ice cube, tribe called quest, black sheep, de la soul, geto boys, XXX posse, digital underground, nirvana, pearl jam, led zeppelin, jimi hendrix, eric clapton & cream, david bowie, elton john, the doors, green day, stone temple pilots, the breeders, the beatles, yes, rolling stones, pink floyd, CSNY, john lennon, paul mccartney & wings, U2, R.E.M., smashing pumpkins, over the rhine, radiohead, larry norman, phil keaggy, gene eugene, superdrag, the verve, pulp, blur, supergrass, the bluetones, spiritualized, air, the cure, ocean colour scene, portishead, beck, paul weller, chemical brothers, bjork, embrace, rialto, the who, louis prima, weezer, 10 shekel shirt (i played with them for a while) the rentals, rufus wainwright, aimee mann, the features, the cars.
2000 and beyond
the cardigans, stereolab, belle and sebastian, ride, cornelius, starflyer59, grandaddy, doves, coldplay, broadcast, flaming lips, enon, boards of canada, brian eno, tortoise, philip glass, igor stravinsky, holst, thievery corporation, nick drake, kaiser chiefs, daft punk, ABBA, vince guaraldi, the concretes, cinematic orchestra, jonny greenwood, bloc party, the raveonettes, john davis, the clash, franz ferdinand, the futureheads, super furry animals, hot hot heat, stan getz, shostakovich, keane, british sea power, ennio morricone, the stills, arcade fire, mew, deerhoof, magnet, the hives, queen, stars, AC/DC, the bravery, the sounds, willie nelson, peter gabriel, starsailor, stevie wonder, wolfmother, aqualung, camera obscura, art brut, the small faces, the sheer, the feeling, midlake, editors, charlotte gainsbourg, mindy smith, dungen, feist, brandi carlile, dave brubeck, many more.
2001 a space odyssey, one flew over the cuckoo's nest, clockwork orange, dr. strangelove or: how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb..., children of men, the ocean's trilogy, spinal tap, waiting for guffman, best in show, a mighty wind, for your consideration, sunshine, just about any documentary, any bond movies, LOTR, the current and future narnia movies, crouching tiger hidden dragon, contact, the game, 12 monkeys, gattaca, swingers, eternal sunshine of a spotless mind, many more.
I don't watch much TV, but when I do, it's probably lost or SNL. I love the simpsons, but don't keep up anymore- I also love shows like arrested development or curb your enthusiasm. I'm also always up for a pint and a football match.
I honestly don't read much, but I love books on tape (or my iPod to be more exact). I especially love C.S. Lewis- not only for his Chronicles of Narnia series (which I've read 5 times or so each) but especially for his more in-depth books which focus on Christianity from an intellectual perspective, like Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, or The Screwtape Letters. I also love Ravi Zacharias, who speaks to secular universities, offering a strong, biblical, intellectual debate for not only the existence of God, but also the bankruptcy of naturalism, existentialism, pluralism, and other philosophies.