Dave Rosborough

I got reading a bit of Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life this afternoon. Seneca was a Stoic philosopher, meaning that he belonged to a camp that “preached freedom from passion by following reason” (Wikipedia).

Seneca’s main point is that it’s pointless to complain about how short life is. Life, he says, is plenty long enough; the main problem is that we waste most of it. It’s a valid point, from my way of thinking at least. Seneca’s suggestion, of course, is that we’d do a lot better with things if we just spent all our time studying philosophy. As much as I like philosophy, I don’t think that’s the example Jesus would have us follow, however.

A couple of my students recently came to ask me some questions regarding creation and the existence of God. It was clear from their discussions that they’d been reading up on their Richard Dawkins. Frankly, I hadn’t read any of Dawkins’ more recent work, although I’ve got copies of Climbing Mount Improbable and The Blind Watchmaker on my bookshelf and have read The Selfish Gene years back. I was aware that he had published The God Delusion, and had glanced over it a couple of times, getting a cursory idea about what he was trying to say.

So, I recently went to take a look at what he’s been up to lately.

A couple of years ago at my school, our chaplain asked me to create a Bible reading plan that our students could follow from September to June, reading through the whole Bible in slightly less than 10 months. A quick search of the internet revealed that virtually every reading plan out there starts January 1st and ends on December 31st. Never one to back down from a challenge, I wrote an algorithm that generates a (roughly) balanced reading plan of an arbitrary length.

I decided that this might prove useful to others, since we don’t always decide to start reading the Bible on January 1st. So, I created a site, yourBibleReading.com, that allows you to set up your own Bible reading plan.