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Archives for January 2019

Resolution to Various Beliefs in the Bible as the “Word of God”

January 2, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

My friend attended Bible Study sessions of 18 different denominations, a variety of Book Club study groups, and listened to a diverse group of friends over cups of coffee, which led to different conclusions about the Bible:

The above YouTube music video expresses One Man’s Belief in God

My friend’s Conclusions:

  • The Bible is the “Word of God”
  • Thousands of different “Christian Denominations” interpret the Bible differently, but each believes that their interpretation is the ONLY CORRECT interpretation.
  • There are 7 Billion people on Earth, each with a different DNA Molecule, which makes each person distinctly different from each other.
  • Most people have experienced vastly different influences as they grew up, also shaping the way they process information.
  • As a result of their different genetic composition and environmental influences, each person processes information differently.
  • The EXACT SAME MESSAGE said to a thousand people will be interpreted differently, meaning a thousand different things, to different people.
  • That explains why the Bible means different things to different people.
  • Humanity is like blind men trying to define an elephant:

The 1st grabs the tail and says, “An elephant is like a snake.”

The 2nd grabs a leg and says, “An elephant is like a tree.

The 3rd touches the side and says, “An elephant is like a wall.”

  • Humans have Finite minds.
  • God’s wisdom is Infinite.
  • It is impossible for the “Finite” to understand the “Infinite”.
  • Again, by analogy, it’s like a gallon jug trying to contain the contents of a 55-gallon drum, only a trillion, trillion, trillion, etc. times more impossible.
  • That may explain the genius of the Bible’s construction:

The Bible’s primary message is for each person to have a loving relationship with God, and with each other, as God loves them.

The Above YouTube Music Video Applies to Our Relationship with One Another. Love also Applies to Our Relationship with God

  • The 40 authors, over 1,600 years, wrote that same message in different ways, to be understood by ALL different people.
  • ONE MESSAGE ABOUT LOVING GOD & EACH OTHER UNDERSTOOD BY 7 BILLION DIFFERENT PEOPLE,  DIFFERENTLY.
  • It’s God speaking in “Tongues” to His creation.
  • God created everyone to experience His companionship of Peace & Joy, now & forever.

Thus, everyone may have a different interpretation of the Bible, and it’s O K, if the result is loving God, and each other, as God loves us.

Hence, my friend’s “Creed” will be different from another’s “Creed”, but it’s O K. if each person genuinely loves God with his/her whole mind, heart, and soul, and loves one another as God loves him/her.

It’s a shame that each religion limits God to their finite understanding of an Infinite God. That statement is an absurd oxymoron. Yet, wars were fought defending that absurdity.

The Above YouTube Music Video Lyrics Provide  Glimpse Of the Futility of the Finite Mind to Grasp the Infinite

It obviously takes:

  • The humility of a creature to the Creator,
  • The gratitude of a sinner to his/her Savior,
  • The surrender of the finite mind to infinite wisdom,
  • The trust that God is sovereign over all things

To allow for the diversity of beliefs, all sharing the common denominator of love of God, and each other.

Anything else is arrogant folly.

Basis for Biblical Belief

January 1, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

My Friend’s Basis for His Beliefs

For over 20 years, my friend attended a Bible Study of 18 different denominations, a variety of Book Club study groups, and listened to diverse groups of Christian friends over cups of coffee, which led to the following conclusions about the Bible:

  • The Bible is the “Word of God”
  • Thousands of different “Christian Denominations” interpret the Bible differently, but each believes that their interpretation is the ONLY CORRECT interpretation.
  • There are 7 Billion people on Earth, each with a different DNA Molecule, which makes each person distinctly different from each other.
  • Most people have experienced vastly different influences as they grew up, also shaping the way they process information.
  • As a result of their different genetic composition and environmental influences, each person processes information differently: The EXACT SAME MESSAGE said to a thousand people will be interpreted differently, meaning different things, to different people.
  • That explains why the Bible means different things to different people.
  • Humanity is like blind men trying to define an elephant:
    • The 1st grabs the tail, and says, “An elephant is like a snake. “
    • The 2nd hugs a leg, and says, “An elephant is like a tree.”
    • The 3rd touches the side, and says, “An elephant is like a wall.”
  • Humans have Finite minds.
  • God’s wisdom is Infinite.
  • It is impossible for the “Finite” to understand the “Infinite”.
  • Again, by analogy, it’s like a gallon jug trying to contain the contents of a 55-gallon drum, only a trillion, trillion, trillion, etc. times more impossible.
  • That may explain the genius of the Bible’s construction:

The Bible’s primary message is for each person to have a loving relationship with God, and each other, as God loves them.

  • The 40 authors, over 1,600 years, wrote that same message in different ways, to be understood by ALL different people.
  • ONE MESSAGE UNDERSTOOD BY 7 BILLION DIFFERENT PEOPLE.
  • It’s God speaking in “Tongues” to His creation.
  • God created everyone to experience His companionship of Peace & Joy, now & forever.

Thus, everyone may have a different interpretation of the Bible, and it’s O K, if the result is loving God, and each other, as God loves us.

Hence, my friend’s “Creed” will be different from someone else’s  “Creed”, but it’s O K. if each person genuinely loves God with his/her whole mind, heart, and soul, and loves one another as God loves him/her.

It’s a shame that each religion limits God to their finite understanding of an Infinite God. That statement is an absurd oxymoron. Yet, wars were fought defending that absurdity.

It obviously takes

  • the humility of a creature to the Creator,
  • the gratitude of a sinner to his/her Savior,
  • the surrender of the finite mind to infinite wisdom, and
  • the trust that God is sovereign over all things

to allow for the diversity of beliefs, all sharing the common denominator of love of God, and each other.

Creating”White Space” in Our Lives

January 1, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

“White Space” – as a “New Year’s Resolution”

My friend was giving me a tip to improve my writing skills. He told me told me to create “White Space” in my blog posts. He suggested that after I finished my first draft, I go back and “delete” all common knowledge references that I use to support the blog post topic.

The blog post may be insightful, possibly inspiring. But a unique observation is diminished if it relies on common knowledge examples to support its unique observation. He told me that the great Greek writers understood that the reader’s mind would “fill-in-the-blanks” of the unsaid, common knowledge.

That reader participation in the essay creates an involvement devoutly to be wished. The confluence of reader involvement throughout the essay, culminates in reader investment in the topic. The reader now owns the writer’s idea. That’s every writer’s dream. Opening minds and softening hearts to accept & express a writer’s idea as their own. (Imitation is the highest form of praise.)

By analogy, my friend then then offered an extension of the “White Space” concept to my life. He suggested that I create “White Space” in my life by deleting my faults common to humanity. By eliminating the dross of pride, lust, greed that fester in the soft underbelly of my humanity, I create “White Space” for God’s grace. God’s grace will fill that vacuum with peace, joy, kindness, etc. – traits that are uncommon to our Culture.

The Above YouTube Music Video Expresses the Essence of God’s Grace

Others will see the reflection of those virtues, and some may want the same for themselves. Some may want to participate in a life that’s other-centric, as opposed to egocentric. A life of actually loving others, asking nothing in return.

The Above YouTube Music Video Expresses the Essence of this Blog Post’s Message

I bristled at his suggestion that my “Life” mantra was, “What’s in it for me.” My friend asked, “What do I worship? (from the Olde English – “Worth-ship”). The litmus test for “Worship” is “How do I spend my time?” Obviously, my career is important. I must support my family. There are mortgage & car payments to make, along with utility & insurance bills, and food & clothes to buy. I also listed a litany of all kinds a things and opportunities that a responsible husband & father must provide. All that stuff requires my time & attention.

Author, Rick Warren, provided another observation of the main focus of our lives: “Everyone eventually surrender to someone or something. If not to God, people surrender to money, to approval, to pride, lust, or fear. Surrendering your life to God requires: Gratitude, Humility, Obedience, and Trust.

To that end, author, John Eldridge added, “We want power over our experiences, and control over outcomes.” (Life lessons provide ample evidence of the futility of those wants.) Instead, John Eldridge suggests, “We need to trade the control we crave, for the companionship of God.” Sadly, so many eschew the wisdom of that counter-intuitive observation, and wake up so lost, in a place so dark, asking,  “Is that all there is?”

My friend then asked me if all those things in which I invested my time, were essential and functional, or did some reflect my achievements and status.  Did my life reflect the wise Latin phrase, “Esse quam videri” – “To be, rather than to appear.” ? A life full of a bigger house, better car, and designer clothes is more about, “What’s in it for me?” – than “making another life breathe easier.”

I recalled my friend saying, “The world with ONE EXCEPTION (me), is made up of others.” I recalled Emerson’s verse about “Success”: “To know that even one life breathed easier, because I lived.” I recalled Christ’s plea, “To love one another, as I (Christ) have loved you.” All those quotes were about creating “White Space” by eliminating the gratuitous, to make room for the essential.

Perhaps, then, “Old acquaintances are not forgotten”, and new friends are cherished, when I sing “Auld Lang Syne”, in 2020. Perhaps, then, 2020 will indeed be a… “Happy New Year”.

 

 

Irrefutable Scientific Evidence Debunking Darwinian Evolution

January 1, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

My friend provided an atheist with the following empirical scientific evidence as irrefutable rebuttal that Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution” is FALSE. “The Facts speak for themselves”.

Christians believe that they are made in the image and likeness of God. As such, C. S. Lewis stated, “We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. We have a body.” Consequently, there is almost a primal longing for the spirit within us to connect with the Creator Spirit outside of us.

The Christian also believes That God so loved the world, that He sent His Son to become man, and die on the Cross for the forgiveness of all sins, then rose from the dead, so that all who believe in Him, will have eternal life. As a result, Christians love God and others, as God has loved them.

The Above YouTube Music Video Expresses the Essence of the Blog Post Message

Atheists call that craving the “Opium of the Masses”, a kind of “Sour Grapes” for the downtrodden and great unwashed, somewhat similar to a child’s belief in the “Tooth Fairy.” The atheist labels the belief in God as the medieval faith of the ignorant. The atheist points to logic and science as the empirical justification of no god. He credits Darwinian Evolution for his existence, and “Survival of the Fittest” as his behavioral creed.

Unfortunately for the atheist, modern science debunks Darwinian Evolution, and in the process “Random Chance” and the “Survival of the Fittest”, as an acceptable behavioral norm. The following is a listing of Evolution’s Major Fallacies and Frauds:

Many people think that evolution simply means “change”. We see change everywhere in nature. However, Darwinian Evolution means very specific change:

  • A pool of non-organic chemical ooze somehow produced life-sustaining amino acids.
  • All life (fish/birds/animals/man) are descendants of common ancestry.
  • The common ancestry morphed into different species through many mutations, by random chance through time, guided by the natural selection of the survival of the fittest.

Haeckel’s Embryos are considered the “Best Evidence” of Darwinian evolution – that ALL living creatures are modified descendants of a common ancestor that lived a long time ago.

Darwinism claims that EVERY NEW species can be explained by descent of modification from a common ancestor, resulting from the natural selection of random genetic mutations. Haeckel’s renowned sketches depict the embryos of a fish, salamander, tortoise, chicken, hog, calf, rabbit, and human side-by-side at three stages of development. However, when actual photographs were compared to Haeckel’s drawings, they didn’t fit.

There were huge discrepancies between the actual early stage embryos and Haeckel’s illustrations: In some cases, he distorted his drawings to appear more similar than they are. In other cases, he used the SAME wood-cut to print embryos from different classes. (Haeckel’s drawings were done in the mid-1800’s.)

Darwin’s theory needs early embryo similarity to support the “common ancestry” required for decent of modification, by mutation. Actual early stage embryos confirm the opposite reality – early stage dissimilarity. Embryologists rebuked Haeckel’s fraudulent drawings in the late 1860’s, but they remain in our text books today.

The Fossil Record & The Cambrian Explosion:

Darwin’s 1859 “Origin of the Species” postulated that there would be millions of “Transitional Fossils” of many mutations from one “Kind” to another, in the fossil record. The fossil record would be the ultimate irrefutable proof of Evolution.  Without numerous transitional fossils, Darwin admitted that his theory would be false.

The vast majority of geologists and anthropologists now confirm that the dazzling display of thousands of fully formed fossils found in the “Cambrian Explosion” was created in a geological blink of an eye. This stunning variety of complex creatures has NO Transitional fossils, as required by Darwin. The Cambrian Explosion gave rise to the sudden appearance of most of the major animal Phyla that are alive today.

These findings are absolutely contrary to “Darwin’s Tree of Life”. These animals, which are fundamentally different in their body plans, appear fully developed, all of a sudden, in what paleontologists have called, “The single most spectacular phenomenon of the fossil record.”  It turns Darwin’s “Tree of Life” upside-down, because the major groups of animals come first, instead of last, on top of the tree.

Fraudulent “Ape-man” Fossils:

  • The “Nebraska Man”, used as evidence for evolution in the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial”, (and movie, “Inherit the Wind”) was a Fraud.  It was formed from a single tooth found in 1922, that later proved to come from a pig.
  • The “Piltdown Man” was shown to be a hoax in 1953, because its teeth were filed and stained to appear old.
  • The “Java Man” was the misrepresentation of an ape’s skullcap and a man’s leg-bone. 
  • “Lucy” was promoted to be the first creature to walk on 2 feet. “Lucy’s” skeleton is that of an extinct chimp.
  • The “Peking Man” supposedly consisted of 5 skulls, and about 150 jaw fragments & teeth, and 9 thigh bones, discovered in part by the man involved in the “Piltdown Man” hoax. ALL of the “Peking Man” bones “were lost” before they could be examined for authenticity. Not a single bone remains for examination for authenticity.  

Atheist and evolutionist, Richard Milton, sums up the fossil record of evolution: “In human anthropology, each new fragment of bone or tooth is enthusiastically greeted as further evidence of man’s decent by natural selection from an ancestral ape-like creature, when every single find of this sort has been definitively assigned to either human or apes, and not to any intermediate category.” NO transitional forms are found in the fossil record. The sequential pictures of bent over creatures gradually standing erect in our text books are merely cartoon drawings that exist only in the imagination of the artist. Those pictures are NOT photographs of actual fossil skeletons.

Irreducible Complexity:  The Human Eye & Ear, The Bird’s Wing, etc.

The book, “Darwin’s Black Box” by biologist, Michel Behe, refutes the evolutionary process of many small random steps by the irrefutable scientific confirmation of complex biological entities that can only function if ALL OF THEIR PARTS EXIST AT THE SAME TIME, i. e. the human eye, the human ear, a bird’s wing, etc.

Einstein said, “You cannot look at the human eye and not believe in God.” The eye requires an intricate combination of complex parts to perform its function. Furthermore, even a complete eye is useless unless it belongs to a creature with the mental and neural capacity to process the information provided.  Evolution allows ONLY for small mutations and not this complex capacity all at once.

The ear is capable of sensory response to sound whose pressure at the eardrum is no greater than two ten thousandths of a millionth of barometric pressure. This pressure moves the ear drum about one hundred millionth of an inch. That dimension is approximately one hundredth the width of a hydrogen molecule. Random chance cannot accommodate that precision, all at once.

The bird’s wing cannot function as an organ of flight until the hooks and barbules are co-adapted to fit together perfectly. These interlocking hooks and intricate features suitable for flight are quite distinct from other feathers that supply warmth. Darwin and his disciples have no credible answers for this irreducible complexity.

Gould, an atheist and evolutionist, recognizes that “irreducible complexity” exists and that it refutes the principle of “many mutations by chance though time”. Gould stated that these things just occur, without explanation. Gould calls it “Punctuated Equilibrium”. He might as well call it “Abracadabra” – poof, a complicated thing just appears.

The DNA molecule is an example of irreducible complexity and design beyond the Mathematical Possibility of “Chance”: “Signature in the Cell” by biologist Stephen C. Meyer is a 600-page comprehensive review and rebuttal of the evolution of random chance though time by many mutations, with recent scientific discoveries of the profoundly complex digital codes of the DNA molecule. (Darwin thought that the cell was a simple round blob with a brown center that split itself.) The actual machinations of the microscopic DNA molecule are mind-boggling:

  • “In a process known as Transcription, a molecular machine first unwinds a section of the DNA Helix, to expose the genetic instructions needed to assemble a specific protein molecule.
  • Another machine then copies those instructions to form a molecule known as messenger RNA. When that transcription is complete, the slender RNA strand carries that genetic information…out of the cell’s nucleus. The messenger RNA strand is directed to a 2-part molecular factory called a Ribosome.
  • Inside the Ribosome, a molecular assembly line builds a specifically sequenced chain of amino acids. These amino acids are transported from other parts of the cell, and then linked into chains often hundreds of units long. Their sequential arrangement determines the type of protein manufactured. (Actually, what makes you, you.)
  •  When the chain is finished, it is moved from the Ribosome to a barrel shaped machine that helps fold it into the precise shape critical to its function.
  • After the chain is folded into a protein, it is then released and shepherded by another molecular machine to the exact location where it is needed.”

That precise mind-boggling procedure caused the atheist biology professor, Dean Kenyon, to repudiate the conclusions of his own book on the chemical origin of life. The awesome display of Intelligence in the DNA molecule compelled other scientists to marvel at God’s “instruction book”. Or, as the title of Stephen Meyer’s book proclaims, (God’s) “Signature in the Cell.”

 “Darwin on Trial” by attorney Philip E. Johnson reviewed the “evidence” of peer-reviewed scientific findings and concluded that Darwin’s theory of evolution was guilty of fraud and misrepresentation.  Attorney Johnson has taught Law for over 20 years at the University of Berkeley – California, and found that:

“In fact, there is a great deal more to the creation/evolution controversy than meets the eye, or rather than meets the carefully cultivated media stereotype of “creationists” as Bible-quoting know-nothings who refuse to face up to the scientific evidence. The creationists have a very good point to argue. What science educators propose to teach as “evolution”, and label as fact, is not based upon incontrovertible empirical scientific facts, but upon highly controversial philosophical presuppositions.

The more people learn about the philosophical content of what scientists are calling” facts of evolution”, the less they are going to accept it.”              

There are many mutations WITHIN a species (but none BETWEEN species of a different kind). There are all sorts of cats, and all sorts of dogs, but NO DOG-CATS, NO APE-MEN. Darwinian disciples demonstrate many similarities AMONG species, but NO transitional fossils BETWEEN species of a different Kind.

Instead, all the current empirical scientific evidence proves that the “Facts” supporting “The Theory of Evolution” are wrong or fraudulent. Hence, it is the atheist who believes in a version of the “Tooth Fairy”, and will “Inherit the Wind”. Current empirical scientific facts point to the intelligent design of a Creator.

Physicist Patrick Glyne abandoned his atheism and said, “The concrete data points to God”:

  • Astronomers and Astrophysicists conclude that, “If the universe had not been made with the most exacting precision, we could never have come into existence.”
  • Earth’s location, size, composition, structure, atmosphere, temperature, internal dynamics, and many intricate cycles essential to life (i.e. the carbon cycle, etc.) testify that our planet is exquisitely balanced.
  • These highly choreographed geological processes are precisely tuned for life, and point to a Designer with a purpose for mankind.
  • A complete contradiction of Carl Sagan’s description of earth as “An unremarkable rock”.

The Above YouTube Music Video Expresses The Essence of this Blog Post Message Above

No wonder that the atheist walked away in silence, with his head bowed low. “The facts speak for themselves.” Darwin’s Evolution is the “Opium of the Arrogant”. Proving Mark Twain’s observation,” Worse than being ignorant, is being certain of something, that just ain’t so.”

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