Probably everyone who's ever been to Sunday School is familiar with the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of his son, Isaac.

OK, I'll share my scores from Belief-O-Matic, the online test that asks you a bunch of questions and tries to guess your religion.

I'm going on a mission trip. It's been a couple of years since I've gone on a mission trip, and I found out a few Sundays ago that the absolute deadline to register was, well, the Tuesday after. I've been a little bit torn of late on mission trips; people spend lots of money to go spend a week far from home and yet, there's a mission field right around them. I know what my mission field is: It's 20somethings and 30somethings in South St. Louis County. And trust me: There are lots of them.

Strong religious content again. I make no apologies. People who are offended by this kind of stuff are probably long gone anyway.

I had someone ask me a few weeks ago, not terribly long after the 9/11 attack, why I believed in God. After all, most sysadmin types don't. Or they aren't Christian--they're pagan, or they dabble in Eastern religions. I understand the appeal. For one who's used to building PCs and even operating systems from best-of-breed components (or best-of-economy components, or some other selectable criteria), the idea of assembling your own religion from best-of-breed components is nearly irresistable.

When bad things happen to good people. A couple of weeks ago, I got e-mail from a friend I'll just call by her nickname, Hammer. Hammer moved to upstate New York this summer, after having lived in a small Illinois town outside of St. Louis her whole life. Hammer e-mails her friends a lot, and she's probably the wordiest and most vocal person I know, myself included. Hammer told me (and others) about a longime friend who'd been going to our church for the past six months, who wanted to join our small group, but didn't know any of us.

Country club churches. I had a conversation with my good friend Brad about country-club Christianity. We didn't come up with any great answers but I think we took a couple of good steps. What's not being in a country club look like? Talking to strangers, that's what. And I think I know what the last line of the conversation should be. Not, "Nice to meet you." Your mama taught you to say that, because it's polite. It's what everyone expects to hear. You shouldn't say that. You should be rude. I think those last words should be, "I'm glad you were here."

Mail the easy way. It figures that I would find this now, after blowing most of a Saturday trying to get a mailserver set up. This won't give you any nifty spam filtering, but if you want a fast, reliable, secure, mail server with every other nifty feature you could want, run to Qmail the Easy Way. There, you can download a script that goes and gets all the sources you need and compiles them for you. You get Qmail for SMTP (the fastest and most secure mail server available for Linux), Courier IMAP and POP for receiving, DJBDNS for name resolution, and a nifty Webmail interface. Combine that with your favorite Linux-from-sources distro, and you'll have a rock-solid, fast-as-possible mail server for a whole lot less money than an Exchange server. And the hardware requirements are far lower. Dan Bernstein, the author of Qmail and DJBDNS, claims Red Hat used a 486 to test Qmail and it performed so well they just threw it into production.

In the wake of Jerry Falwell's controversial statements on Pat Robertson's 700 Club, and after a conversation with a pastor who told me one of his congregants asked him whether "God still reaches down and zaps people," I think it's time for a voice of reason.

I was reading Generations, a book that tries to predict the future by looking at history's cycles, just last week, reading about how certain generations have reacted in the past to crises--because, like it or not, every generation faces one, if not several--and wondering.