Read more on the viaForensics website.

The iPhoneOS.platform folder now lives inside the Xcode application folder itself, rather than in /Developer. Its new path is:

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform

You can set this as your PLATFORM environment variable with the following command:

export PLATFORM=\
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform

You’ll also want to note that the SDK version has changed from 5.0 to 5.1 in this latest version of Xcode, and so to build, be sure to reference the new SDK. For example:

$PLATFORM/Developer/usr/bin/arm-apple-darwin10-llvm-gcc-4.2 \
-c -o injection.o injection.c \
-isysroot $PLATFORM/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS5.1.sdk -fPIC


Linking is done using the same new path layout. For example:

$PLATFORM/Developer/usr/bin/arm-apple-darwin10-llvm-gcc-4.2 \
-isysroot $PLATFORM/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS5.1.sdk \
-o SaySomething SaySomething.m -lobjc -framework Foundation


That’s it! Just a couple simple changes, and you’re ready to build using the new Xcode. Enjoy!

Hacking and Securing iOS Applications is geared toward software engineers, corporate and government security auditors, penetration testers, and any developer looking to write more secure applications. With the App Store reaching over a half-million applications, tools that work with personal or confidential data are becoming increasingly popular. Developers will greatly benefit from Jonathan’s book by learning about all of the weaknesses of iOS and the Objective-C environment. Whether you’re developing credit card payment processing applications, banking applications, applications for government use, or any other kind of software that works with confidential data, Hacking and Securing iOS Applications is a must-read for those who take secure programming seriously.

This year, I’m doing something different.

I’ve actually started doing this a while ago, as a matter of fact: I’m pushing reset. I’m taking back control of my identity and who I really am, and I’m just going to “be” it, rather than try to patch the old self up with more bandages. There’s no real reason, in fact, that you can’t do this too, and more often; daily, if need be. The reason people generally don’t is that they tie their identities up in their past, instead of assuming the identities of the people they were designed to be, and who their hearts tell them they should be in the future.

Each of us has two people living inside of us: the person we are, and the person we want to be. Over time, we come to accept the fact that we are whatever person we’ve been, and allow our past successes and failures to dictate our identity to us, rather than us being the ones to dictate our identity into our future actions. Some call it course correction, but I think that’s an understatement. Deciding to live in one’s true identity is to reject the notion that there’s a trail of waves behind us at all, and deciding to assume the personality of the person we know we already are deep down. The biggest lie you can believe is that you have to “arrive” somewhere: you already know who you want to be, so stop acting like someone else, and just start being who you we designed to be.

Sociology teaches us that we are products of the society around us, and ultimately products of our own past decisions. Most people blindly accept this, which is why sociology works: without purposeful living, everyone really is a machine, and makes the same types of decisions a computer does, based on historical input. It’s only when you reject the notion that you need to follow in suit of your environment (and your past reactions) that you can break free from simply being conditioned by those around you, and begin to define yourself.

Modern sociology rubs against many of my own personal beliefs. My take on it is this: we are empty vessels, like mason jars. What we choose to fill those vessels with ultimately defines what we are on the outside. An empty mason jar can be filled with a number of things. It’s only after you fill it up with pickles that it becomes “a jar of pickles”. Sure, you could make some New Year’s resolutions. you could scratch off the label that reads “pickles” and write something different, or even make it a jar of “diet pickles”. That won’t change much. You can also spend the next year being angry at the pickles in the jar, or the people who put them there. You can even withdraw and put a lid on the jar, so no one can smell the pickles… but it’s not going to change the fact that you are a jar of pickles.

The only way to reclaim your identity is to pour out whatever’s in your life, clean the jar, and start filling it with what you were designed to be. There are two things that stop most people from doing this. The first is that they’ve come to like the taste of the pickles; they like who they are, even though they know it’s not who they were destined to be. They simply accept the fact that, by continuing to compromise their true identity, they can continue having the things they want in life. In reality, you’re just cheating yourself though. While that true identity that’s deep down in you may not seem as appealing, there’s a reason it’s engrained on your heart: deep down, you’d be a lot happier if you were your true self. And even if you like the taste, you’re a lot better than that. You’re a better person than you realize you are, and there’s more depth in you than you care to acknowledge: so stop pretending you’re anything short of the incredible human being you were destined to be, and let your true identity start to come through. You’re better than pickles.

The second reason people don’t live who they were designed to be is the label on the jar. The people around you tend to stick labels on you and who you’ve been in the past. Whether it’s good or bad, if it’s not in tune with your true identity, those labels can cause a lot of trouble when you try and live a life more true to yourself. I’ve been given a lot of good labels and a lot of bad labels. I learned the real secret to getting past this from, of all things, a children’s book. The secret is this: the labels only stick if you believe them. The people we’ve been in our past don’t define the people we can be today. Life has consequences, and a good man will make things right where they need to be set right… but we don’t have to buy into the notion that our identity is defined by our labels, which really means our identity isn’t defined by others (or even our own critical opinion of ourselves). You can choose to lay down your demons and start living today as the man or woman you were designed to be, and if anyone tries to convince you that you are something different, find better company.

Society doesn’t believe people can change. I think deep down, this is true: our true identities were wired in us from birth, and they don’t change… but they also aren’t what needs to change. As a Christian, I believe in sin at work in the world; sin doesn’t change: it’s been around since the beginning of humanity. A great man once said that we aren’t defined by our sin, because it’s not our true identity: it’s just the sin working in us, pushing it’s way out to eventually manifest itself in our bodies. Sin doesn’t change, but the amount of sin we allow into our life can change, and that’s not beyond our control. To put things more simply: don’t let your past mistakes define who you are. Your identity isn’t wrapped up in the poor decisions you’ve allowed into your life. Your identity runs much deeper than your imperfections.

Similarly, the good labels are just as useless. I’ve accomplished a lot of great things in my life, and am considered a lot of good things by a lot of good people. These are all great, but again if they don’t line up with my true identity, then what value do they have? At the end of my life, I want people to remember me for who I really was – what my true identity was, and who I was called to be as a man. The labels people have assigned to me won’t matter: whether I lived up to my true potential, and lived as the real man that I am is what’s going to ultimately decide if I’ve had a good life, or if it’s been a waste.

You can’t live your true identity while you believe in the bad labels, or the good ones: because both will distract you from who you really are.

Realizing that we’re all shooting stars, and that we all burn out quickly is a great reason to stop putting up so many pretenses and to just live and be who you are. Because you will, some day, burn out. The illusion of “your past” is a waste of time. Use this new year to embrace your true identity, whoever that is, rather than try and patch the old person with resolutions.

Up until I came to an understanding of who He was, all I thought I needed Jesus for was finding the Goya section in the supermarket. Since 1993, I’ve been walking in the conviction that the God of the Bible is more than just a story, and have seen everything from the dead-church-dead-service group to the overzealous religious cornflake group.

The term born again Christian is one of those fanatical sounding terms that makes church sound like a religious ecstasy pill. There’s something that sounds a bit radical about the term which gives most people the picture of large women praising God to jazzed up organ music. The question most people ask when they indulge in this imagery is what in the world do they believe?.

This largely depends on who you ask.

Ironically, the many would-be tolerant people who would purport to respect an individual’s private religious beliefs seem to easily dismiss someone who would go beyond mere dogma in an attempt to quantify one’s own faith. In spite of such ignorant individuals, I’ve done just this and recorded some of the things that drive my faith beyond mere dogma and into more healthy rational terms.

There are cultural Christians, who comprise a large majority of the American church. Cultural Christians believe pretty much everything they’re told to, and are just as conditioned as students in public school. The stereotypical American Christian believes the Bible, but doesn’t necessarily have any real convictions about it, nor do they concern themselves with inconveniences like understanding their own faith. This is largely why many believe that Christians, in general, are stupid. It’s not really that cultural Christians are any dumber than the rest of society, it’s just that they claim to have the answers but don’t really know what the question is. Needless to say, this isn’t the ideal group to illustrate as an example of true Christianity. Those driven by dogma are more a novelty to most (including other Christians) than an example.

The other class of Christians not only believe, but strive to truly answer the questions of not only what we believe, but also desire to know whom it is we believe in and why. The Bible teaches to know whom we believe, and in today’s world, there is an overwhelming amount of information available to accomplish this exhortation. I believe qualifying one’s own faith is critical to having real faith, and the basis of what I believe marks true believers – a strong desire to know their creator. We all start out as babies, but the ones who are really seeking to learn more and understand more about the center of their faith are really the only ones qualified to talk about their faith. After all, if God really is the most important thing to us, shouldn’t we be taking every opportunity to study Him?

A little background

I began with a simple faith, just like everyone, and was at an early point believing solely on the testimony of others. Over time, my experience and faith began to build as I watched God work in my life in new ways. As I grewn in the faith, I developed a strong and healthy curiosity in wanting to know just why my beliefs were qualified from a purely intellectual (as opposed to experiential) point of view. I spent several years studying two different areas: First, textual criticism, apologetics, creation science, and evolution more in-depth. Then, everything from basic Bible to ecclesiology, eschatology, apocryphal manuscripts, writings of early church fathers, and the writings of great historians such as Josephus. I taught myself the Greek language so that I could put my hands on copies of the manuscripts we base our canon on (such as the Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, and many smaller digital fragments), and observe firsthand what was written about God without all the messy English translation to get in the way. Unlike most students who study this in seminary and later abandon their faith, I found my studies (tempered with discernment) to only strengthen mine.

All of the scientific evidence eventually led me to put together a solid context to better understand what it was that I believed, and how it reconciled to science. All of the historical evidence eventually began to paint a context around this collection of books we call a Bible, and granted me a deeper understanding, reconciling what God has said with a deeper understanding.

Ironically, I received a rather significant amount of pushback from certain other Christians about studying history – something you’d think everyone should be doing. I don’t quite understand why most evangelical Christians fail to study anything beyond the store-bought Bible they have, which, in English, is quite possibly the most poorly translated version of scripture in existence. Many argue that because the Bible is inspired directly by God that it is the only relevant text to read. That statement makes a lot of dangerous assumptions though – namely that God’s inspired word depends largely upon what time period and geographical location you happen to live in. Even today, there are many different scriptural canons – they can’t all be right. The Ethiopic Canon, for example, includes the book of Enoch as well as many other books not present in the Bible we use, and the Catholic Bible also includes additional books (old testament apocrypha). Throughout history there have been councils, debates, criticisms, and crimes committed over the issue of what is God-inspired. To simply trust that everyone throughout history was directed by the hand of God in putting together a Biblical canon is simply naive and leaves truth as relative. Our canon is in better condition than I believe it ever has been, but it’s still imperfect. Even our Bibles go through periodic rewrites (such as the latest NIV translation, which was redone during the short time I have been a Christian).

But more importantly, without digging deeper and studying what was written in the annals of history, what was written by early church fathers, and the like, one can completely fail to establish a true context around what it is our Bible really is saying, and where many events originated from. For example, Flavius Josephus documented possibly the earliest use of the terminology behind “binding” and “loosing” as used to describe punishing and liberating people. Since most Christians decline to study history in this time period, however, many completely misappropriate that terminology when used in the Bible to imply some sort of “name it and claim it” scam (which, incidently, only works for rich, corrupt televangelists and Nigerian spammers).

Another fine example places emphasis on the political implications surrounding Jesus’ response when questioned about taxes. It wasn’t merely the fact that the Jews didn’t want to pay taxes, but the fact that they were paying taxes to a foreign government and at least one faction viewed this as the first step toward enslavement. This was documented in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, book 18, where a Pharisee by the name of Sadduc “said that this taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery, and exorted the nation to assert their liberty”. It’s explained briefly that “All sorts of misfortunes also sprang from these men, and the nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree”. Put that in light of Jesus’, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s” and you have a faction of zealous rebels interpreting Jesus as telling them to submit to enslavement (when all He was really saying is to think about what’s really important).

Reading the Bible today is much like reading through a series of foggy windows. The first window may be the translation from the original Greek language, or possibly even further back to the oratories in which many manuscripts were copied by ear. The next is the indoctrination of the translation, followed by the historical context. Each window further distorts what God actually said, bending the light just enough to miss important concepts. Other fogged up shards of glass might involve understanding the Gnostic and Separatist movements, and their attempts to redefine Christianity, or Apocryphal texts by early church fathers or forgeries from pseudonymous authors. The point is, the finished product in the store went through several processes to get there, and each process slightly bleached out a little of the meaning.

In my own quest to understand God, my beliefs have stemmed from the sum total of what I’ve processed and perceived to be God inspired scripture, on a personal conviction, in the context of historical and liturgical knowledge – as far separated from orthodoxy and indoctrination as this knowledge can get without losing its true meaning. My conclusions of the truth behind scripture is not very different from what our modern-day Bible teaches, but it is at the very least tempered with a bit of sobriety and discernment. With that said, I’ll start with a basic explanation of Christianity as it would appear to most, and then dig into some of the deeper details I’m sad to say most people never even think about, such as science and history.

You’re probably already starting to surmise that my beliefs are not merely rays of sunshine and ginger snaps, void of intellectual reflection. While it’s true that Christianity is ultimately based on faith, I’ve found that I didn’t need to commit intellectual suicide to accept the fact that Jesus was the Christ – the savior of the world. After a bit of introspection, I’ve arrived to some characteristics about Christianity that I have considered in the intellectual part of my faith.

Christianity Defined

Christianity is sometimes obscure to outsiders, and with the many different subcultures inside of Christianity, it can be difficult to get more than a looking-through-wet-glass resolution of what it really is. The focus of Christianity (and its root word) is obviously Christ. Christianity is focused around the man / God Jesus Christ and what Christians believe as a reconciliation between man and God through His resurrection from the dead.

Christians believe that God created the world for man.

No, we can’t agree on how He did it, and the truth is many of us don’t care.

Most of us believe that God had a direct hand in the design and manifestation of life on Earth. Some take Genesis to refer to literal days. Others use a scriptural loophole to change it into a thousand years per day. Yet others believe that the Biblical account of creation was an allegory, and even have a few reasonable claims from the Septuagint to back it up. One thing most everyone believes, at least, is that it makes perfect sense that, as the chief architect and scientist behind the universe, whatever design he used would be fantastic and ingenious. Do I believe God used science to create the world? He probably created the science we now study (which hinges on mere particles), and supernaturally created everything from the laws of physics to the natural elements we now use to dismiss His own existence. But more on that later.

What’s more important than how God created the world is why he did it. The Bible teaches that there were two reasons. First, God wanted a people to call His own; a family. The New Testament makes no mistake about our being grafted into the family of God upon our conversion. The second reason we were created is to thrive. Christians believe that we were put here with purpose, and science is beginning to reveal to us that we were put in an ideal place in the universe to discover, to learn, and to thrive. The key issue surrounding our origin on this planet isn’t so much as the how, as it is the purpose with which it came to be.

Shortly after man came about, we also blew it; we fell into sin very early on – during a time where it is written that God walked among His people. Sin could be defined as rebellion toward God; the first sin was quite literally disobeying a direct order (don’t mess with my tree). This left the rest of the human race being born into a sinful lineage, and led God to hide his face from us because He cannot be in the presence of sin. Even if we’re not committing murder or watching American Idol, Christians believe that we (mankind) fall short of the perfection and honor God originally created us for.

The Bible teaches that we are all deserving of death and separation from God because of our sinful nature. God, in order to reconcile us, sent His son (Jesus) to Earth as a savior – the messiah, the Christ. In a nutshell, the core of Christianity is based on Jesus voluntarily giving His life to take our share of the death penalty we earned from our sin, freeing us from the slavery we were born into. This was fully qualified when Jesus rose from the dead three days after His death accompanied by a full verification by the brutal Roman military. The Bible (and other historical documents) teach that Jesus was mocked, beaten beyond recognition, and then crucified. History writes of His miracles and accounts of Roman guards initially ordered to remain silent. The death of Christ was for the purpose of absorbing the full penalty for our sins (on our behalf) so that we didn’t have to suffer the fate of a very real hell we all deserve.

All of this was prophesied in grammatically verifiable documents what were, at the time, Jewish manuscripts 400 years before His coming. These ended up forming much of our Old Testament today.

So what do Christians (including myself) believe Jesus does for us exactly? Well first and most importantly, He made a way for us to be reconciled to God so that mankind can receive eternal life. Jesus offered forgiveness for sins and a way to be re-born as adopted sons and heirs of God – this is available to anyone of any race, color, or gender. Secondly, Jesus liberated His believers from the slavery of sin. Being born into a sinful nature, the Bible teaches that all are given to sin. Part of being a Christian is identifying that sin is undesirable in God’s eyes, and has no practical benefits. When an individual asks God for His forgiveness, they are also asking to be set free from the power of sin. Finally, Jesus provided more abundant life through Him. Jesus didn’t come merely to save people and give them a way to avoid hell and death, but He provided a way to experience salvation while still on this Earth. Christians believe that Through having a relationship with God, quality of our lives improves on a spiritual level.

With that said, the looming question is why believe any of this. There are countless religions out there, and then of course there’s the religion of not having a religion. There are many observations which I have made about Christianity over my life as a Christian which I feel make compelling intellectual arguments for Christianity, or at least things I myself have strongly considered.

Historically: Christianity is Complete

The books of the Bible are, by far, the oldest and most reproduced documents in existence. Not only are they extremely old, but more importantly they claim to cover history (or at least explanations) from the beginning of human life. Having these qualities, the scriptures are most likely to be authoritative in explaining the logical progression of how we ended up where we are. If the Bible as we know it is indeed an accurate historical corpus, then the entire account of the creation of the world has been documented, with Jesus Christ as a significant completion of what began in Genesis when mankind fell into sin. If God is the one true God, then He would have been around when everything was made, and could adequately account for the first man ever created. The book of Genesis satisfies this requirement.

If Genesis is accurate, than the God known to Christianity was the first (and only) one true God. It’s much more difficult to give credit to a religion established centuries later. Take Islam for example. We didn’t see it rise until seven hundred years after Christ had already come; if Christ was a false God, then certainly any suboptimal religion to show up seven hundred yeras later is also false. If God is real, He has bragging rights that He was here first.

NOTE: It’s interesting to note that many Muslims claim that their qur’an is a pure text, and that the Bible is a corrupted text. As a point of fact, the qur’an is widely known to have had many different variants, just as our Biblical scriptures do, however they were believed to be later redacted into a final copy, the originals burned. This, in a post-constantine era where reproduction of manuscript had become much more reliable (in fact, block printing was starting to be introduced). In contrast, many variations of Biblical scripture still exist today, and are reconciled through a process called textual criticism, explained next.

Textually: The Scriptures are Reliable

At some point you’ve got to validate the credibility of the scriptures, and not just take it on someone’s word that “these are the words of God”. In fact, what we have today isn’t the word of God – it’s a critical text put together by scholars reconciling somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 variations of copies of the word of God (and this, just the New Testament) to reflect our best guess of what we think the real word of God is. On top of this, the English language is one of the least precise languages to translate into. Not only do we lack any meaningful grammar trees or even distinguishing words between singular and plural (with the exception of y’all), but our synonyms don’t frequently line up with Greek synonyms, leading to either gross misinterpretation of a passage, or the publisher being forced to compromise by substituting a more dumbed down word to prevent it from being misread. Bear in mind too that, over time, every translation from the original may have added further points of clarification. After this, you’ve got a team of scholars who apply various indoctrinations to translate words the way they believe they were meant to be translated based on current orthodoxy. If this didn’t seem bad enough, many publishers, such as Zondervan, have gone to great pains to make their version of the Bible easy to read at the expense of watering down (and in some cases, even castrating) what the original manuscript intended to say.

So in light of all this, the obvious question is: how reliable is scripture? Surprisingly, very few significant changes have been detected among the more trusted manuscripts we use, and much of this was confirmed with the discovery of the dead sea scrolls between 1947 and 1956. Although most of these scrolls were written in Hebrew, they provided samples of scripture written before AD100, and were surprisingly close to the manuscripts we already had in our posession. These, along with hundreds of other manuscripts, helped in building a critical text. The most widely accepted New Testament critical text is called the Nestle-Aland text, which is presently at release 27. This critical text incorporates hundreds of different manuscripts and papyrus fragments from all over the world from dozens of languages, and documents notable variations. From this is where a majority of translations stem, which is why I bought my own copy. The old testament masoretic text has also gone under heavy review and new research in this field is particularly promising in restoring the origins of a language which has become convoluted due to many mistakes and lack of vowels in the language’s infancy.

NOTE: The original King James was based on translations traced back to Erasmus’ Textus Receptus, which was later discredited as a corrupt translation, due to the fact that Erasmus was unable to find a high quality source copy to work from. Ironically, many “tweaks” originally made by King James remain in today’s translations; for example, the book of ‘James’ is really the book of ‘Jacob’ in the Greek, but many believe it was renamed to ‘James’ to make it sound more English in nature. For some reason, scholars are too afraid to fix the name in our English bibles for fear that it will cause a revolution.

The Nestle-Aland critical text of the New Testament is fairly solid, although errors have been found and some controversial decisions have been made. For example, the verse in Paul’s letter to Timothy about women remaining silent in the synagogue was suspiciously moved around in several different manuscripts, suggesting that it may have been added at some point by a scribe, and then moved around by other scribes to make it fit grammatically. Most Christians explain the logic away anyway, or pass it off as Jewish culture, but it’s entirely possible the verse might not have even been part of the original manuscript! Most larger issues have been resolved in the past decade. The newest release of the NIV has included additional warnings about passages which were not found to have strong witnesses, such as the story of the adultress being stoned. The mad rush towards Gnosticism spurned by literary works such as the Da Vinci Code seems to have made Bible scholars more honest and forthcoming in recent years. What’s nice is that you can read the critical text and see footnotes containing the many different variants from manuscript to manuscript. It’s very easy to see how things originally got out of whack by having all of the information right there to review.

What essentially decides whether a piece of manuscript is reliable is how many larger witnesses the text has, and where those texts originated from. Ideally, you want to have several different root sources all saying the same thing. I spent a considerable amount of time researching scriptures in the New Testament regarding wine (as many of the Christians in the South have adopted a modern-day version of ascetecism, rather than facing the fact that Christ drank it, enjoyed it, and had Paul tell people not to let anyone judge them for it either). I grabbed some electronic copies of the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus and studied the verses in their uncial character format (all caps, no spaces). I can’t begin to tell you how much confidence cross-referencing 4th century and 13th century uncial manuscript can be, when you find that the text is either perfect, or nearly perfect.

I continued to perform several different examinations of key verses in both the manuscripts and digital copies of fragments I had available, as well as my copy of Nestle-Aland/27 (which is much more thorough), and pleasantly found that not only were they consistent with the manuscripts we had, but that decisions made throughout the criticism process appeared to be quite sound, and almost noneventful. I’m fully convinced in my own mind that the critical text we have today is by far the best we’ve ever had.

To add some geek-worthiness to my endeavor, I’ve recently fed much of the Greek New Testament into a Markovian-based language classifier. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a technique used in a computer program I wrote that allows the computer to learn and weigh the presence of syntactic patterns across various texts. It can effectively compare different types of documents with precise accuracy. I used it for a different purpose here, which was to extract critical patterns of authorship. I found that, on a syntactic level, even a computer found a significant consistency between various manuscripts of the same author. In other words, even a computer is capable of seeing such a striking resemblance between various books, that it believes they are consistent with their purported authors. Cool stuff – I’ll write a paper about it some day. (Note to scholars: the first critical pattern that popped out was “the kingdom of God”, in Greek of course.)

Once you get out of the critical Greek text, things get to become a little dicey however. As I mentioned, the English language simply isn’t a very good one, and on top of that it seems that mainstream publishing has lost respect for God’s word to the point where they will improvise on it to make it more readable. Mind you, there are no significant doctrinal changes (unless you use a completely disrespectful text like the CEV, ESV, GW, etc.), but there’s a level of clarity that goes missing. For example, a verse in the Greek says, “bind up the loins of the thoughts of your minds”. In Greek, loins literally means “reproductive parts”; so the scripture is saying to bind up the reproductive parts of your mind – significant imagery there, and lots of power. One English translation replaced it with a mere, “be sound minded”. What was wrong with the Greek version? I find the scripture extremely accurate and reliable, and the English is an acceptable place to start, however if one desires to read the cloest thing we’ve got to the words of God, I would strongly advise picking up the Greek and using a lexicon that is not indoctrinated (such as Oxford’s Greek-English Lexicon – the big, heavy one) to get the full realm of meaning. (Note: Oxford’s lexicon also doubles as an assault weapon in the event of a break-in)

As for historical reliability, I myself am convinced that, in spite of minor scribal errors and variations, the integrity of the scripture is remarkable considering how long it has survived.

Theologically: Christianity is Logical

It seems odd to equate a God who became man, then died and was resurrected for the purpose of reconciling man to God, as logical. To most, logical is an amalgamation of science, mathematics, and reasoning – like the Matrix or a good quality toaster. After reading the Bible many times, I’ve come to find that the uttermost purest logic of God shines through scripture, making even the finest of human logic seem dull and uninteresting.

Regardless of what anyone may believe about the Bible, those who read it with an academic understanding of the point of view and purpose of each book cannot deny that it is a harmony of logical craftsmanship. Biblical wisdom is constructed with many converging layers, just as any great architecture is. If a single piece of the framework doesn’t fit, the entire structure falls. In reading through the Bible, I see many signs of what are supernatural logic:

• The complexity of how Christ’s death on the cross fulfills what is required in old testament law as a blood offering; blood was sprinkled by the priests in the temple for the forgiveness of sins of the people. In the same way, Christ’s death was a sprinkling of blood for sins, to fulfill the requirements of the law that there be a blood sacrifice.
• The complexity of Christ’s death as parallelling Adam, firstborn among the living. Through one man (Adam), sin entered the world, and death flowed through his entire bloodline; yet the Bible also teaches that we are literally adopted into Christ’s bloodline when we acknowledge Him as Lord – God literally hijacked Adam’s bloodline and cut us out of it to be replaced into a sinless bloodline through another firstborn that the scriptures refer to as the “firstborn among the dead”..
• The transferral of iniquity and explanations of generational curses as they apply to genetics and psychology. Iniquity is a “bentness” toward a particular sin that can be passed down the patriarchal line.
• Over 200 prophecies – 400-years and older – about Jesus: both fulfilled and historically dated authentic. Many such prophecies would have been uncontrollable by Jesus, such as his place of birth.
• Perfect human wisdom written through kings and prophets, which still apply today and result in prosperity
• Spiritual concepts and how they apply consistently, throughout an ever-evolving society, yet perfectly complement modern-day wisdom, medicine, depression, and personal well-being
• Undeniable accounts from many writings (including the Apocrypha – books not in the Bible) of Christ’s resurrection from a confirmed death, and historical accounts by external historians (such as Flavius Josephus) regarding Jesus’ miracles (who also believed He was the messiah).

There are countless examples of perfect logic in the Bible. Some of them have taken me years to understand, while I may never understand some (but I know they work). Now consider that the Bible was written through more than 40 different authors from all walks of life, over a period of about 2,000 years and through times of peace and war. It’s relatively easy to forget this when we see the polished leather-bound book sitting at the book store. In spite of the Bible’s unique and diverse background, some of the perfect logic to be found in the Bible transcend hundreds of years of writing, surpassing any philosophical wisdom of others most revere such as Aristotle, Socrates, or Paul Harvey. Someone once said, “If Jesus was made up by someone, I want to know who so I can worship him.”

If indeed God is real, and did create everything in the way outlined in this corpus of history, then He is obviously of superior intelligence with a firm grasp on true scientific concepts – something most don’t normally picture in God. If God really is God, then it certainly doesn’t make any sense that He’d be an all-powerful, but stupid God. He must surely have invented the atom, particles, matter, energy, and biology. It’s very non-traditional in our culture to view God as a really smart individual, but if He is real, then genius and scientist are a part of His makeup.

Philosophically: If Man Made God, He’d Be More Passive

I often hear individuals dismiss Christianity as a belief created by man. If this is true, then I wonder why we didn’t create a God that was more passive and catered to our emotional needs, who would tell us that everything was going to be alright and pass out candies. Sure, that’s what the cultural Christians believe, but that’s also why nobody takes them seriously – including other Christians. The Bible isn’t for the weak minded or the emotionally incomplete. It speaks of a powerful, perfect God and explains that if one is to follow Christ, they must deny themselves of their own wants and desires and take up their cross. It tells us that God hates sin and that we should deny our own personal pleasures if they are sinful. It guarantees trials, tribulation, and persecution – and that’s for the ones who are living right. The Bible paints a very different picture of what the real Church looks like than what most think it does. Real Christians are to help finance the church, live according to the standards Jesus set for Christian living, and share their faith with others (which will still get you arrested and tortured in many countries, including those we do business with).

God’s gift of salvation is free, but it costs everything to follow Christ – our entire life. If man created God, we certainly went to a lot of trouble to inconvenience ourselves. I don’t know anyone who, if given the option, would choose to share their money, live a moral lifestyle, and constantly deny their own desires – except, of course, those who have been changed by the power of God.

In America, it’s very easy to become a mediocre Christian, go to church once in a while and try not to swear too much. If anyone is guilty of creating a God, it seems that this dubious honor goes to the individuals who have taken the Bible and made themselves a pansy, self-serving God that serves their own desires. That’s not the God of the Bible, however. The American God of comfort is a God created by man, but the God of the Bible is most definitely not a work that would have been voluntarily created by any human, let alone 40.

Scientifically: Evidence Points to a Creator

I used to accept many theories blindly. Once I began researching them, I realized that the evidence we have today overwhelmingly contradicts Darwinism, and even naturalism all together. Now, I’ll be the first to admit, I have no idea how we got here – I just wish more people of science would admit the same thing. I do know, however, that the Darwin theory is lacking. In light of the evidence we’ve had for the past fifty years or so, scientists are beginning to realize that it takes much more faith to believe in Darwinian evolution than in intelligent design, or even in punctuated equilibrium. In fact, the last remaining remnants of by-the-book evolutionists have abandoned much of the recent scientific data and clung to a similar form of dogma as many other religions fall victim to. Ask such people what it would take to falsify evolution, and you’ll quickly find that their beliefs hold evolution to be practically un-falsible. In other words, in order to accept Darwinian evolution in its present form, some level of kool-aid is required.

The idea that, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Darwin evolution still teaches the much debunked copernican theory – that we are meaningless, without purpose, and innert – and that intelligent life is ubiquitous across our universe, is a betrayal of science.

Let me state that, if by some amazingly sound evidence and scientific method, Darwinian evolution were to be somehow established, that it would by no means trainwreck my faith. I’m not naive enough to suppose that there may be more to God’s way of getting things done than what is written. After all, Genesis gave us the end results and the purpose, it didn’t give us the specific method, and many scholars even argue that the rest was symbolic. As I said before, I believe that the science we study today was created by God. The natural processes that we observe, and many use to explain away God, could have just as easily been the scientific building blocks used by a master creator.

Unfortunately, though, modern science isn’t about finding truth, or even discovery anymore, but it’s been married to a philosophical agenda to credit any events we consider natural towards discrediting God. After all, it’s not the scientific side of the theory of evolution that most Christians hate, but rather the philosophical conclusions drawn by its constituents. But even in spite of the fact that divine creation (or as some would call it, intelligent design) is open to some interpretation which could be nicely bundled in a theistic evolutionist package, I find it nearly impossible to choke down the rather large pill evolution tries to sell on, and quite frankly find it among the least credible theories (next to Stephen J. Gould’s punctuated equillibrium theory, which ironically uses the same evidence as we do for an intelligent designer but with an athetist’s spin on things).

The problem, I suppose, is that science is predisposed to philosophically discount the divine, and so therefore no matter how compelling the evidence of an intelligent designer is, the conclusions of any evidence are already tained by atheism. This philosophy got bundled with evolution, which has taken something that started out as mere bad science and turned it into unfalsible bad science.

The BBC said it best in this article, “Why one species branches into two is a question that has haunted evolutionary biologists since Darwin”. It’s not only the one haunting question, but it’s also the very foundation of Darwinism, yet cannot be answered, nor can it be falsified among devout believers of Darwinian evolution. It’s always seemed strange to me that a group of people would embrace a theory so openly, yet the very foundation of it remains a mystery to scientists. Now that’s having faith – pick a theory and stick to it for a hundred plus years until the right looking peg comes along to shove into that hole. I could probably rant about evolution for several pages, but this essay isn’t about evolution. Ultimately, the collapse of Darwinian evolution isn’t one of the reasons I believe today but it is one of the reasons I originally started searching. I’ve listed out just a few issues, however, that explain why evolution is one of the biggest misconceptions taught in public schools.

The Age and Origin of the Earth

In an interview with journalist Lee Strobel, scientist and author Stephen C. Meyer said, “The fundamental laws and parameters of physics have precise numerical values that could have been otherwise. That is, there’s no fundamental reason why these values have to be the way they are. Yet all of these laws and constants conspire in a mathematically incredible way to make life in the universe possible”. Meyers was referring to physics on a molecular level that could have mathematically been any other way so as not to support life. He was also referencing anthropic fine-tuning, which illustrates how the way our universe, gravity, and even physics itself appear to have been “monkeyed with by a superintelligence” in such a way that the statistical likelihood of life being possible anywhere in the universe would otherwise have been incalculable. This fine-tuning transcends down to the very fabric of how atoms hold together, the expansion rate of the unvierse, and all the way up physical characteristics of our planet and solar system. If the tiniest detail about physics or our world had not properly fine-tuned, even a small variation would have rendered life an impossibility.

The philosophical argument of the anthrophic principle basically says, “we are here to perceive this fine-tuning, because if it had been any other way we wouldn’t be here”. Yet this makes the dangerous (and incorrect) assumption that there are billions of other universes out there with different laws of physics, different expansion rates, and literally billions of differing variables. The fact is that we are here, and we observe this phenomenon only here.

To explain, many scientists have applied the time principle, which seems to magically make everything feasable, as if elements + time = life. Its essentially the scientific way of saying, “this is a bazillion times bigger than you can understand!” In spite of my public school programming (which began with “billions of years ago”), the Earth (or at least life) is actually a lot younger than old-school science once thought. The long-held beliefs of “stupid cavemen” has been discredited, suggesting that even the neanderthals were as intelligent as modern day homo-sapiens. Even constants we once thought were absolute, such as the speed of light, are now suddenly being called into question. In other words, as real science gets better, many of the assumptions in which Darwinism were based on have gotten softer.

There are many universal constants which, if not perfectly balanced, would immediately put an end to all life on the planet. We are the only planet with plate tectonics, which essentially is the only reason we are not underwater right now (as it is responsible for building of our mountains and continental drift). We know the rate of drift, yet we cannot reconcile this to a timeline of billions of years. Our moon, which stabilizes the Earth’s tilt (as discovered in 1993) and gives us most of our tides (further regulating surface temperature) is leaving its orbit at 3.82 cm per year. A billion years ago, it is unlikely the moon would have been in an orbit that could have sustained life on this planet. Our Sun, a G2 star giving us the full spectrum of red and blue light to maintain life on Earth, has a constant luminosity and burn rate of four billion kg of mass per second. This burn rate simply doesn’t reconcile to billions of years. Within only a fraction of that, gravity would be too strong and the Earth would be literally inside the Sun!

The list goes on, for anyone who cares to research this stuff.

In recent years, scientists were able to accelerate a beam of light through cesium atoms at 300x the speed of light in a lab, exiting the tube before fully entering it. This shattered the part of Einstein’s theory that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. Of course, you can’t prove a negative, but Einstein’s theory sounded good to most of us, so we accepted it as general fact. Oops. What if the big bang, or even our universe today, could have replicated a similar behavior of light acceleration? The light we’re looking at in the universe would be a lot closer to real time than we think. The age of our world is encountering similar scientific breakthroughs, which has been threatening the long-held beliefs of many darwinists.

If you consider the data of our universe, it directly contradicts the idea that life transcended millions or billions of years.

Radioactive dating you say! The radioactive isotopes we rely on to tell us the age of fossils is fuzzy at best, and based on what many believe is a fallible system. We know that Carbon-14 dating is typically inaccurate before 1600 B.C., as scientists have proven by cross-referencing it with Egyptian history (considered to be very respectable and accurate). Our problems with radioactive dating are due to the misconception that decay involves a calculation based on constants. Quite the contrary, it’s not only variable but the levels of Carbon-14 are very closely married to geography and elevation. Isotopes have a half-life, which is how we base most of our dating methods on. Not only the Bible, but many different religions, offer one potential account of a massive shift in both radioactivity and possibly geography during a great flood, which would have dramatically affected the levels of Carbon-14 (as well as other isotopes). They describe a historical event of a great flood, preceeded by what many believe was a massive atmospheric shift. If the Bible is indeed accurate, then the covenant of a rainbow, first recorded historically after this event, would certainly also support this theory. It could have been that such a massive change in atmosphere, in fact, originally put into place the atmospheric conditions we see today as it would have dramatically changed how the Earth regulated its albedo (reflection of sunlight). This would have dramatically affected not only the levels of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere, but even the levels of carbon-dioxide which are regulated, in part, by the albedo.

The heart of the problem with evolution isn’t necessarily its claims of species forking, but that people are still thinking life is a statistical possibility. The Copernican theory got scientists thinking, for a long time, that our planet was nothing special – that life could simply exist anywhere a set of random events came together. But scientists are beginning to abandon this theory, and in fact we’re just beginning to discover just how unique our planet really is. From understanding the earth’s engine, plate tectonics, statistically incalculable presence of iron-ore near the surface, and especially the unique relationship our planet has with our moon (to which we’re still making huge new discoveries as of the past 15 years), it takes much more faith to suppose that we got here by a statistical accident than it does to see just how finely tuned our planet really is for not only supporting life, but for supporting technology and discovery – being in the best seat in the house for observing the universe and having the materials to build the technology to do it. John O’Keefe, a renowned astronomer, once ran calculations to estimate the statistical probability of conditions for life existing elsewhere. He concluded that – mathematically – “only one planet in the universe is likely to bear intelligent life.”

The precision to which the world was created does support one conclusion – that it was no accident.

A Fossil Record that Contradicts Darwin

After a century and a half of digging, the fossil record appears to not only fail to vindicate Darwin’s tree of life, but in fact further deposes it. Unlike Darwin had expected the future fossil record would show, we’ve seen significant and immediate introduction of new Phyla instead of gradual change as his tree predicted. In fact, the “Cambrian explosion”, as scientists call it, seems to be directly contradictory to Darwin’s tree of life. Darwin himself admitted that the fossil record didn’t back his theory, but had expected that more digging would change this. Yet after endless searches, the scientific community still has not provided a definitive missing link between primate and human, but instead have reinforced the glorious lack of evidence of any such type of evolution in any creatures. Throughought the century, we’ve seen gross scientific forgeries, a manufactured-fossil black market out of China, and intentional “re-configuration” of evidence from less-than-ethical scientists who have begun giving archaeology a bad name. What we haven’t seen, however, are any real examples of transition creatures.

To add insult to injury, recent studies are showing that many species we once thought were direct descendants of humans, such as chimps and Cher, are actually even more distant from human than we had thought. If the scientific process is to be truly honest, it has to follow the evidence. Apologist Josh McDowell uses the term “Presupposition of Anti-Supernaturalism” in describing today’s flawed scientific process, which examines the evidence with the presupposition that God is not real, that supernatural events don’t occur, and the research as only a means of proving an existing theory. Scientific materialism is along the same lines of an argument suggesting that because you found my source code, it proves I didn’t actually write the software – and worse than this, our scientists today don’t even understand how God’s “source code” works yet. Not surprisingly, man’s “source code” (DNA) is remarkably similar to computer code. On a more technical level, DNA could be considered compiled machine-code; while we use binary consisting of two states (0s and 1s; off and on), DNA uses four. Genetic scientists have spent lifetimes attempting to disassemble DNA, and have mapped the human genome in much the same way that game hackers map game hacks. To compare DNA with machine-code would likely lead most software designers to the conclusion that the DNA is more intelligently designed than some of the applications they’ve written!

How can we claim that evolution is not falsible when the excuse is consistently, “just keep digging?” And that’s what followers of evolution break everything down to – finding evidence to squeeze into a theory that, as of yet, has none; a theory based on forgeries and bad science – from Miller’s misguided experiments, Haeckel’s faked embryos, and a fossil record contradicting it – but with a following so strong that the theory is used to prove the evidence, rather than vice-versa.

The Cambrian explosion does suggest one thing, in much the same way that Tim Berra’s corvette illustration supports the same: it is perfectly in-line with the evidence we would have expected to see in an event overseen by a master architect. All evidence, in fact, is pointing to the theory that the world was intelligently created using a series of design patterns rather than descent with modification.

Anyone who has written a piece of software understands that you use similar design techniques in different applications. Does this mean that a piece of tax software evolved out of a first person shooter? Of course not, but they were created using similar design patterns by a master designer. There’s a lot of flexibility there to fit theories about the exact scientific methods used in such an event, and following after Christianity doesn’t mean you have to necessarily buy the dogmatic view of a six-thousand year old planet. But at the same time, it’s important to follow the evidence, and all evidence suggests – at the very least – that the Earth and life within it was designed, rather than the product of chance.

Overall, the feeling I get is most people just simply don’t care about the origins of life anymore and are willing to accept whatever the mainstream line of thinking is for the day.

The Statistical Improbability of Life

The pillars of evolution inevidibly cave at the now-debunked theory that the very first cellular structures could have emerged by chance, as the result of some prebiotic soup mixed in the oceans. Yet evidence we have today refutes this. Amino acids being nitrogenous, such a prebiotic ocean would have required large deposits of nitrogen; yet sedimentary evidence shows us that the nitrogen content was a mere 0.015%, making this theory biologically impossibly. Statistically speaking, if the evidence were otherwise, then the random chances of life occuring would still be an impossibility. Less than the chance of sitting sixty monkeys down at a typewriter for 100 years and expecting that they would eventually hammer out a complete unabridged dictionary. This theory might have sounded good in primitive times where statistical probability and biochemistry were both in their infancy, but today it’s just another theory that has no scientific backing.

Some scientists have claimed to create cellular structures in a lab. The Miller experiment is still taught in textbooks as empirical evidence that life can be created, even though it’s been debunked for decades. In fact, had the experiment used an atmosphere similar to what scientists believe we really had, the product would have been Cyanide or Formaldehyde – two of the most toxic compounds to life. But even if we could somehow make a case for organic building blocks, such as amino acids, that still leaves us at a dead end – with no chance for putting them together as a cell. Dr. Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution, once gave a sobering illustration – to take a cell and punch it open into a sterile solution would give you all of the organic material you needed to build a cell, but science today still can’t account for any possible way to build a living cell out of even this rich and perfect mixture of organic material – never mind the billions of different combinations of amino acids it would have otherwise taken to make just one mere protein, or the improbability of multiple random proteins being generated that just happen to be compatible, just to get to this point.

I find it amusing, but somewhat detrimental to the reputation of science, how quick people are to dismiss any possibility of a creator (e.g. God) but will believe in a theory that could only be illustrated by a group of individuals acting as “the creator” by purposely and intelligently orchestrating life. Even if scientists could create a 100% “life” form (using plasma or what have you), the fact that it would require intelligence to come about and would be performed through procedure automatically discredits any findings which would ultimately suggest life was based on chaos and randomness, not intelligent architecture.

The bottom line is that life is so statistically incalculable that true scientists, even the atheists, have no explanation for it. Molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist Francis Crick, who shared the Nobel prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA, admitted as an atheist, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”

To summarize fifty years of science, all signs point to a master architect; true scientists don’t deny this, though the minority of false scientists seem to have the edge in forging their own evidence.

Socially: Jesus Elicits a Reaction

When people swear, do you ever hear the words Buddha Damn come out of their mouth? Or how about Allah Christ? Instead, all of the profanities we hear which involve deity revolve around Jesus Christ. Subsequently, the greatest love songs ever written involve Jesus or the Christian God and millions of people are martyred every year refusing to deny their faith in Jesus Christ.

Cassy Bernall was among those killed at Columbine, after (arguably) replying to the gunman’s question if she were a Christian. The gunman had such a hatred for Jesus that he wanted all Christians dead – and Cassy had such a love for God that she would rather die than deny her Savior.

There have certainly been many well-hated individuals in history and many well-loved individuals as well. Jesus, however, was both. He was (and still is today) loved and worshipped, and simultaneously disdained and hated by the masses. These strong emotions are so extreme that both love and hate teeter on the edge of giving life, or taking it. This tells me there’s something about Jesus that provokes people.

When was the last time you were provoked by Buddha or some other object of deity? A sacred cow never provoked a reaction in me, perhaps with the exception of wanting to eat one, with a slice of cheese and some bacon. The name Jesus provokes people. Christianity has been removed from public schools with fervor, and yet there is no problem teaching “world religion” or pseudo-sciences. Because people are provoked by Jesus, this tells me there is something powerful that should be investigated. People’s extreme emotions about Jesus cause Him to stand our from any other “religion”.

Monotheistically: God Became One of Us

Usually when we think about God, we think about an all-powerful king in richly colored clothing who would most likely want to be served on earth, and contribute to amazing social advances that would solve world problems – all from the comfort of his bathtub. It’s very difficult to imagine a God that became one of us and washed our feet. The climactic peak of the Gospel for me is not the resurrection (although that’s the most important aspect), but rather when Jesus spoke these words while on the cross:

Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?

Which translate to “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”. These words bring a rush of images in thinking about Jesus as the bearer of all sin. Jesus himself never sinned – He was the perfect human. He overcame sin. When He was on the cross, however, the weight of the sin of the entire world was upon him, which parallels the sin offering required in the old testament (where the sin of the camp would be transferred onto the sacrifice). The undeniable realization is that God (the father) had to turn His back on His son because of the sin that was on Him – our sin.

And so we get a brief glimpse into the relationship between God and His son and observe just how much of a stench the sins of the world are to God. The act of bearing the sins of the world illustrates the love Jesus had for His people, as He (God) was willing to be separated (for a time) from His father by bearing our sin. Never before has anyone else’s god shown such a love to the point where they would themselves become just as dirty and detestable as the world for the purpose of redeeming us. In fact, no other god written about has ever been interested in redeeming us at all, but rather more in controlling us. They hold our souls for ransom, where Jesus became a ransom for us. Other gods offered ascetecism while Jesus offered freedom. He knew we would never be worthy and for a time stooped to our level of filth so that we could be raised to His level of purity.

One can’t even begin to imagine the sorrow that must have been on Jesus as He felt our dirt on Him. A righteous and holy God picked up our filth and wore it as clothing. Such a concept is so far beyond even modern literary imagination that most are considerably certain it must have been a historical event rather than a work of fiction. At the very least, Jesus did what no other gods worshipped by the people ever did: dwelled among the people, became common among the people, and sacrificed himself for the people.

Ideologically: He’s Nothing We Would Have Expected God to be

Jesus was a different savior than anyone had expected, as evidenced by many people’s hatred of Him during that time and the pharisees’ plots to kill Him. The Jews were expecting a savior who would deliver them from the Roman government, who would validate all of their religious traditions, and who would reward those who had kept the law – much like the other gods written about and worshipped that required obedience over faith. If Jesus had a publicist, they probably would have told Him this is the god He needed to become. He could have lived a very rich and worshipped life, but he decided to take the road He was destined for.

Jesus came without political motivation. He did not destroy the government, and He did not set Himself up as an idol to worship. Jesus’ mission was completely incomprehensible to even His own disciples until the opportune time, yet was completely logical. What may have seemed like the important issues of the time were really not very important in the grand scheme of eternal salvation. Jesus came with a single purpose: to offer himself up as a sacrifice to God for our reconciliation. He stuck to the plan without marketing it, without asking for recognition, and without even taking his rightful place as a king on the earth.

Before Jesus came, keeping God’s law was the way to get closest to God. Many zealots such as the apostle Paul had been schooled in Judaism and could recite the scripture from memory. Great pride was taken by the pharisees who kept the letter of the law and performed their due service to God.

Nobody thought we needed someone like Jesus.

When Jesus came and fulfilled prophesy, it was only apparent after the fact that He was doing something even more important than putting a social band-aid on the political issues of the day. The sacrifice Jesus made would end up setting generations of the world free and provide for the eternal needs of people rather than their immediate comfort needs while temporarily on the earth.

Prophetically: He’s Everything We Expected God to be

At the same time that Jesus was fulfilling a mission that nobody understood, He fulfilled over 300 prophesies that were written about the Messiah. This started with the time and place of his birth, which involved a massive astronomical event, came from the lineage of King David, came out of Egypt, was praised on a colt on the way to Jerusalem, crucified between two thieves, and eventually rose from the dead, as prophesied. He had no control over many of these. Others, He fulfilled intentionally. I found one (somewhat tacky) site with many of these references documented: here.

Along with over 300 prophecies being fulfilled, this amazing man was like no other. He spent his days healing people of disease and ministering to the needs of everyone He came in contact with. He illustrated the kind of wisdom and temperance only God would have, and the supernatural knowledge and ability that could only be expected from God.

At the same time, Jesus was filled with love and compassion for people. Thousands followed Him around and Jesus made sure they were all fed. The all powerful God of the universe established physical contact with diseased, rotting lepers and healed them. People came to Him and out of His compassion, He healed their sick children and even raised loved ones from the dead. Even though He was on Earth with a much more important purpose, Jesus cared enough to take the time to make people’s lives better on a personal level.

Jesus was everything we would expect in a perfect human being, and a perfect God. He had human emotion enough to weep when His friend Lazarus died, even though He knew that He would later raise Him from the dead. He washed His disciples feet and served the people He cared for. Never once did He do anything out of personal gain, but continued to give from the day He was born – as is the sign of a true Christian this same love for humanity.

Supernaturally: He Overcame Death

If someone can overcome death, I’m inclined to listen to whatever they have to say. The most important characteristic of Jesus, and what gives power and authority to the Gospel, isn’t Jesus’ death on the cross, but His resurrection from death 3 days later. In spite of Jesus’ amazing life, the Gospel just wouldn’t be very compelling if it had ended with Jesus dying on a cross, and his disciples going back to tend sheep.

Jesus was crucified until dead and then speared through the side by a Roman soldier to make certain (there was much pressure by the Jewish pharisees to make sure of this). In spite of this, historical accounts (including non-biblical sources) tell us that 3 days later (as Jesus prophesied), He moved away the stone and gloriously appeared to His disciples (after scaring a few Roman soldiers half to death). Before departing into heaven, Jesus had eaten with His disciples, allowed them to touch the wounds in His hands and feet, and appeared to more than 500 people.

Neosporin couldn’t even heal spikes through the hands and feet in 3 days. Not to mention the spear through the heart would normally be a real bummer.

Jesus proved his deity in allowing us (humans) to kill Him, make sure He was dead, and lock Him in a tomb. By rising from the dead, Jesus has proven that He is surely God, and has authority even over death.

Excitedly: God is Still Working

What has made the truth of the Bible the most evident to me is that God isn’t dead. The story doesn’t end 2,000 years ago with some abstract performance, but rather God is alive and working in His people today. God is still speaking to His people through prayer and He is still in the miracle business. The Bible teaches that Jesus will come a second time to claim His followers before a giant tribulation.

You don’t usually hear much about God moving in the secular media these days, but walk into any spirit-filled church and you’ll find God moving in all sorts of ways. The prophets are not dead. God still anoints people today to speak words of knowledge from the throne of God, and I’ve heard (and experienced) this first-hand. I’ve seen many genuine supernatural healings, and most importantly I’ve received revelation from God myself. Most notably, I’ve seen a completely selfless love on people who have experienced God, which I have yet to ever see anywhere else.

Revelation is far better than philosophy. Philosophy changes in this country every few years. Whether it’s the latest medical or psychological theory, theology, or ideas about how the universe was created, the popular beliefs all shift with time. Many believe people like Martin Luther were great philosophers, but in reality they had revelation – not theory; revelation that came directly from God. I for one would rather be certain about something and not have to go back and wonder if I’ve made a mistake in my thinking. The revelation of God has withstood thousands of years of criticism and has emerged without scars. It is revelation that opens the eyes of many individuals to see just how perfect the word of God is. It’s revelation that saved many lives during 9/11 when God told many Christians not to go to work that day. If philosophy is seeking answers, revelation is the God-given solution. He gives it out willingly, and He’s still giving it out today.

If a huge cosmic mistake has been made, and there really was no God, then I haven’t missed much. I’ve benefited greatly from the wisdom of the Bible and have lived a good life because of it. I’ve prospered both spiritually and financially from trusting God and applying His principles to my life, which has allowed me in turn to support my church financially and raise normal children. The quality of my life is much higher than its ever been, and I will some day die a very fulfilled individual. I have no doubt, however, that the God in me is real, and He is doing some amazing things in this world.

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If OnStar is only modifying this portion of their updated terms and conditions, then a major problem still exists: namely, the updated T&C, scheduled to go into effect in December 2011, would still grant OnStar broad new rights to collect the GPS positioning information about active customers, “for any purpose, at any time” and would still reserve OnStar the rights to sell access to this data to third parties.

The offending portion of the new terms and conditions adds a new clause which formerly restricted OnStar to only collect this information when providing specific services, such as emergency response. The new clause dramatically alters when OnStar can collect your GPS data:

“for any purpose, at any time, provided that following collection of such location and speed information identifiable to your Vehicle, it is shared only on an anonymized basis.”

This provides carte blanche authority for OnStar to now track and collect information about your current GPS position and speed any time and anywhere, instead of only in the rare, limited circumstances the old contract outlined. You can read my previous blog post to gain an understanding of why there is no real such thing as anonymized GPS data.

I’m glad to see OnStar responding to its customers, however simply amending their terms and conditions to stop monitoring a vehicle after the user cancels is not enough to satisfy the level of privacy OnStar customers received prior to these updates. To win back the respect of the many customers who must have canceled over the new terms, OnStar will need to make a full 180 and agree not to collect customer GPS information “for any purpose, at any time”, but only when the customer would expect it to be collected, as the old contract enforced.

The complete update can be found here. Not surprisingly, I even had to scrub the link as it included my vehicle’s VIN number, to tell OnStar just what customers were actually reading the new terms and conditions.

The first section explains the information that’s collected from the vehicle. No big deal. Sounds rather innocuous and boring. I imagine most people probably drool out and close the window by the time they get this far. Your contact information, billing information, etc. is collected. Nobody cares about tire pressure and crash information being collected – after all, that’s what OnStar is there for. Toward the end, you’ll read about how GPS data is collected, including vehicle speed and seat belt status. Again, in an emergency, this is very useful and most customers want an emergency services business to collect this information - when necessary. And the old 2010 terms and conditions only allowed OnStar to collect this information for legitimate purposes, such as recovering a stolen vehicle, or when needed to provide other OnStar services to customers on demand. As you scroll down the list of information collected, you see that once you get past important emergency services (what we pay OnStar for), OnStar now has given themselves the right to also use this information for seemingly profitable purposes. OnStar has granted themselves the right to collect this information “for any purpose, at any time, provided that following collection of such location and speed information identifiable to your Vehicle, it is shared only on an anonymized basis.” – This provides carte blanche authority for OnStar to now track and collect information about your current GPS position and speed any time and anywhere, instead of only in the rare, limited circumstances the old contract outlined.

Anonymized GPS data? There’s no such thing! We’ve all seen this before – anonymized searches, for example, that were not-so-quite anonymized. But in this case, it’s impossible to anonymize GPS data! If your vehicle is consistently parked at your home, driving down your driveway, or taking a left or right turn onto your street every single day, its pretty obvious that this is where you live! It’s like trying to say that someone’s Google Map lookup from their home is “anonymized” because it doesn’t have their name on it. It still shows where they live! That can sometimes be even more telling about your identity than your full name. What’s unique even more-so to OnStar is that the data they claim they sell as part of their business model is useless unless it’s specific; that is, not diluted to the nearest 10 mile radius, for example. This combination of analytics, and their prospective customers (law enforcement, marketers, etc) requires the data be disturbingly precise. Anyone armed with Google can easily do a phone book or public records search to find the name and address that resides at any given GPS coordinate.

So the GPS location of your vehicle and your vehicle’s speed are likely going to be collected by OnStar and sold to third parties. What kind of companies are interested in this data? OnStar would have you believe that respectable agencies, like departments of transportation and  various law enforcement agencies (for purposes of “public safety or traffic services“). TomTom recently had a run-in with so-called “public safety” and “traffic services” use when their data was used by the police to create a number of speed traps. I can imagine this data COULD be used for good, to create traffic based analytics to improve future road construction or even emergency response. But given that those types of decisions are only made once a decade in most cities, OnStar isn’t likely to benefit much financially from “respectable” companies.

What is more profitable to OnStar that your personal GPS data could be used for? Hmm, well how about the obvious – tracking you and your vehicle. It would be extremely profitable to be able to identify all vehicles within OnStar’s network that frequently speed, and provide law enforcement “traffic services” the ability to trace them back to their homes or businesses, as well as tell them where to set up speed traps. Or perhaps insurance companies who want to check and make sure you’re wearing your seat belt, or automatically give you rate increases if you speed, even if you’re never in an accident? How about identifying all individuals who shop at certain stores, and using that to determine whose back yard to put the next God-awful Wal-Mart store? How about employers who purchase these records from these third parties to see where their employees (or prospective employees) travel to (and how fast), sleaze bag lawyers who want to subpoena these records to use against you if you’re ever sued, government agencies who want to monitor you, marketing firms who want to spam you, and a long list of other not-so-squeaky-clean people who use (and abuse) existing online, credit card, financial, credit, and other analytics to destroy our privacy?

Add to this OnStar’s use policy of your personal information – the stuff that does identify who you are and ties it to your GPS records. While I have no problem using my personal information in events of an emergency, OnStar also uses my information to “allow us, and our affiliates, your Vehicle Maker, and Vehicle dealers, to offer you new or additional products or services; and for other purposes“. So not only is OnStar now able to sell my vehicle’s GPS location data to a number of third parties, but they’re also able to use it and my personal information for marketing purposes. Imagine your personal data being sold to any number of their “affiliates”, and a few months later, you start to receive targeted, location-specific advertising based on where you’ve traveled. Go to Weight Watchers every week? Expect an increase in the amount of weight loss advertising phone calls. Go to the bar frequently? Anticipate a number of sleazy liquor ads to show up in your mailbox. Sneak out to Victoria Secret for something special for your lover? You might soon be inundated with adult advertising in your mailbox.

OnStar’s new T&C continues, explaining that part of the company may at some point be sold, and all of your information with it. It sounds as though OnStar is poising part of their analytics department to be purchased by a large data warehousing or analytics company. Or at least, perhaps they’re throwing the hook out there for anyone interested. Do you trust such companies with unfettered access to the entire GPS history of your vehicle?

This is too shady, especially for a company that you’re supposed to trust your family to. My vehicle’s location is my life, it’s where I go on a daily basis. It’s private. It’s mine. I shouldn’t have to have a company like OnStar steal my personal and private life just to purchase an emergency response service. Taking my private life and selling it to third party advertisers, law enforcement, and God knows who else is morally inept. Shame on you, OnStar, for even giving yourselves the right to do this.

To make matters even more insulting, it was difficult to ensure the data connection was shut down after canceling. I still have no guarantee OnStar did what they were supposed to. I had to request the data connection be shut down repeatedly, after the OnStar rep attempted to leave it on and ignore my requests.

When will our congress pass legislation that stops the American people’s privacy from being raped by large data warehousing interests? Companies like OnStar, Google, Apple, and the other large abusive data warehousing companies desperately need to be investigated.

These terms don’t go into effect until December 2011, and it takes up to 10 days to have the account fully cancel, and another 14 days for the data connection to be shut down… so if you want to get out of these new terms and conditions, you’ll need to do it soon.

Update:

Since writing this article, OnStar has reportedly told a few individuals that the contract requires them to obtain the customer’s consent in order to provide this information to anyone. Not true. In fact, the only mention of the word consent in their updated T&C is below:

We will comply with all laws regarding notifying you and obtaining your consent before we collect, use or share information about you or your Vehicle in any other way than has been described in this privacy statement. 

Two points to make: first, this clause only applies to collecting and sharing information in any way that is not described in the privacy statement. All of the nefarious uses for your personal data are, quite clearly, described in the privacy statement, and so no consent would be required. Secondly, this paragraph makes it clear that they will only comply with all laws requiring consent, not that they will actually obtain your consent. I’m not a lawyer, but as far as I know, there are no such laws on the books in most (if not all) states that protect the consumer from having their private information shared or sold to third parties, especially when such sharing is disclosed in a contract. In other words, the above paragraph seems to do nothing to require OnStar to obtain your consent to do any of this – and it’s my firm belief that OnStar’s only real interest is in OnStar. If you doubt this, the older version of the terms and conditions had two more consent clauses that are no longer part of the new terms and conditions.

Old Consent Clauses – Now Removed:

In General, we do not share your personal information with third-party marketers, unless we have asked for and obtained your explicit consent.

Of course, we will notify you, and where required, ask for your prior consent if our collection, use, or disclosure of your personal information materially changes.

While I am in no way suggesting OnStar is evil, or would be evil, with this information, lawyers were paid to develop the verbiage that comprised significant enough changes to their privacy statement to issue a new one. As one poster said in a discussion, you don’t create a weapon you don’t intend to use. If OnStar’s verbal claims to the contrary are true, the best thing the company can do for themselves is to reflect these verbal intentions in a less empowering version of their T&C.

I’ve also made some updates to my keychain decrypter, which now uses a cleaner file format when obtaining keys from the iOS device.

The EMF tools are available in a separate directory named Crypto and are relatively easy to use. They are supported in both Linux and OSX. See the end of Chapter 3 for step by step instructions.

These and all forensic tools on the website are FREE for full time, active sworn law enforcement. See the website for more details or to register.