At various times you’ll see modern Judaizers. After two millennia they are still at it, trying to drag Christians back under the Talmud. They don’t like the academic label “Judaizers” and claim various other terms, but it changes nothing. The latest I’ve seen is a call to embrace the Talmudic calendar. Keep in mind that the Hebrew calendar did change a bit by custom over the centuries. Several celebrations are entirely extra-biblical and not binding even under the Law of Moses. However, the Judaizers miss the whole point of “rightly dividing” the Old Testament to see what applies to us under Christ. Most of the Hebrew calendar reflects agricultural habits for Palestine, and don’t fit well in other parts of the world. You shouldn’t follow that calendar in South America, for example, because it makes no sense at all. Rather, the single biggest take-away is that we should investigate the wisdom of moving away from the solar calendar and back to the lunar. It’s not black magic to notice the human body, as well as some of our brain chemistry, is more deeply affected by lunar cycles than by solar. God expects us to pay attention to such things. As always, do your own research and rightly divide the Word for your life.
Regular readers know that I make much of personal security and privacy online. One of my favorite tools is using multiple browsers, each one for a different use. I also use multiple profiles within a browser as a sort of firewall between the most egregious collaborators in spying and tracking. For example, I use one profile in Google Chrome for Facebook only. I don’t even chase links from there, but copy the links and paste into a different browser, and may even edit that link to get rid of references to FB referrals. After testing some rather lightweight browsers completely lacking in things like JScript (Dillo and D-Plus) versus Lynx and Elinks, I’ve just about settled on the most useful compromise available for now: Links2. I note that the download page has a Windows version I’ve never tried, but the one for Linux can be built with a semi-graphical rendering that is a fair compromise. I still get to see images and the text, but almost everything else is simply ignored. This one crashes far less than others (not once, so far) on sites that are coded funny. The menu allows for flushing the cache at will, and BleachBit knows how to clean it, as well.
Update: Installed and tested Links2 for Windows on my wife’s Win7 machine. It looks and acts like it does on Linux. If you click near the top border of the window, a menu appears. Explore the menus for various settings, but the whole point is to avoid bloat and vulnerabilities when all you need is information and maybe the images. Whether in graphical or text mode, simply hit “g” on your keyboard and tell it where to go.
Pain is a part of living. Learn to embrace it in its proper place. While it serves sometimes as a warning that things aren’t right, not all pain is bad news. Some of it simply signals that you are human in a fallen world. That includes the pain of certain memories. Be honest with your pain and you’ll discover things you never could know any other way.
