Links

Online shopping and blogger charity:
The Christmas shopping season is here, and many of you will buy gifts online. You can show your appreciation to your favorite bloggers by buying through their sites.

Almost every link to Amazon or any other seller on a blog is an affiliate link; the blogger would get a small commission from your purchase (probably a nickel a book). So if you like a blogger who has affiliate links to a site you like, consider buying through that blogger. (Generally, anything you buy once you click on the affiliate link counts; you don't have to buy the product that was displayed.)

If I am buying from Amazon, I go through ChristianThinker.net. For Westminster Books, I go through Challies. If you'd like to go through my Amazon links, feel free (see sidebar), but I'm not asking you to use mine; I'm suggesting you use someone's if you're going to shop online. It's a painless way you can show a blogger your appreciation.

Some apologetics links:
Jon has an interesting piece on the Flying Spaghetti Monster and summarizes the current state of the debate on intelligent design:

"1. Science, which (since around 1850) by definition only allows for completely natural causes in a closed system and therefore disregards the very idea of an Intelligent Designer a priori, finds no evidence for an Intelligent Designer.

2. Therefore, Intelligent Design is not science."

It's well worth reading the whole thing.

There's an interesting video briefly explaining the current theory of how the moon was formed. It's a neat video by itself. It's even better when you know how important the moon is to making the earth livable.

Suffice it to say that if there was no moon, hurricane force winds would be normal, the seasonal fluctuation would be devastating, and our atmosphere might be more like Venus' than we would find comfortable.

The formation of the moon via the method described above requires the collision to be very carefully balanced -- right size proto-earth, right size impactor, and very precise angle of impact. Some will not see design no matter what, but in this we are either ridiculously lucky or very blessed.

For more on this topic see Destiny or Chance: Our Solar System and its Place in the Cosmos or, if you can find it, a book called What If Earth Had No Moon?. (Both are written from a non-Christian perspective.)

Everybody have a happy Thanksgiving!