Apology: The Lack of New Posts

Hello guys,

Thank you all for reading my blog. I haven't been able to post lately because of I've been busy. I'll try to post more often, now that I have been freed up a bit.

Greg

In Memoriam

Dad

The smell of your clothes, sweat and soil,
The feel of your hands, rough with toil,
The hair of your head, brushy and thin,
Few wrinkles line your sun-tanned skin.

Your teeth, not perfect, form a lovely smile,
And eyes of blue, that hold no whiles,
Average of height, with frame quite strong,
A belly that matches with eating too long.

Feet pale and freckled, in boots all day,
Moustache like a brush, spritzed with grey,
A face by turns: serious…humorous…joyous,
Arms full of strength, your joints weariness.

A hairy chest, with manly structure,
A broad back always strong, ever sure.
Your voice is deep but smooth with care,
Calves springy-stout, muscled thighs upstairs.

No one can see the love in your breast,
But everyone sees it, nonetheless,
Strength and compassion hidden from sight,
Invisible things, apparent as Light.

This is you Dad, on this day you died,
When manly vigor had not left your side,
The only part that failed you today,
Was your heart that broke and you flew away.

But you left me your smile, your eyes mine too,
My hands are not yet rough, but will be soon,
My garments as yours, smell of sweat and dirt,
And someday like yours did, my joints will hurt.

My voice not as deep as your manly tone,
But with it like you, I’m singing of Home,
Whiskers on my lip, not as greyed…coarse,
My hair’s still here, but we might get divorced.

My feet flat like yours, pale in boots too,
To carry me here, my long trip through.
To walk in the path you walked before,
To follow our Lord to distant shores.

You gave me your arms, and hairy chest,
Your muscles hard, to work with zest,
To use your strength for my family’s health,
To give them my all, for Heaven’s wealth…

This is Me, on this day you died,
When manly vigor has not left my side,
The only part that fails me today—
My heart has broke, you’ve flown away.

But with broken heart, I know as I live,
The gifts God gave you, He gave me to give,
To give them again to my son you loved,
That he too might pledge them to God above.

To travel his life, as you journeyed here,
As I followed you, he’ll follow me near,
I’ll show him the man we want him to be—
As he follows our way toward Eternity.

Of deepest prayers, that I pray below,
That he would come to Our Father and know,
How our Abba-Father, has led us with care,
And at our ways End, he’ll meet you There.

Elections: A War With Rhetoric as the Battlefield Smoke

Sadly, most people voting for the president(s) this year will have few issues presented in an easily understandable way to them by the media. I may be raising this issue as a personal problem, but I have a sneaking suspicion this is not the case, and that the cloudy speech of the media makes it hard for people to vote intelligently. For instance, how many average voters understand the Wall Street Bailout? Whom it benefits and whom it doesn't? What its impact will be for the future? And there are a whole host of other issues like it, from Green issues, to oil markets, health care, taxes, and foreign policy, just to name a few. Perhaps if the general public really knew the simplest explanations and implications of these issues, we would be finding things out that would cause us to demand more "change" in the US government than Barak Obama will ever bring!

Aside from the abortion issue, on which the candidates are clear, there are a whole pack of issues people want to understand and hear about from the media. People want to hear where the candidates stand, and they want (I think) to be able to grasp most of the major positions of the candidates. Maybe this is not possible, but I do know one thing--if it is possible, then the media makes it harder. Take for instance the vice-presidential debate. Depending on what media outlet one listens to, Biden or Palin could've "won." At least part of this is because the media engages in shaded questioning to benefit the political party and candidate they support. The following article is worth a read. It is not on Biden or Palin, but is instead on the moderator of the recent veep debate, Gwen Ifill. By reading this article, one discovers that her questions were often not designed to educate voters on the candidate's views, rather, her questions where rhetorical tools carefully designed to make Sarah Palin's answer's look bad.

Read it here: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/gwen_ifills_vp_debate_bias.html

Another interesting fact:

In college, my sociology prof plugged NPR News as reliable because a poll was taken to measure listener misconceptions about US motives for invading Iraq. He noted that NPR listeners had "fewer" misconceptions than those who listened to other news networks. Thus, he was saying NPR is more factual. The interesting fact is this: Gwen Ifill, the vice-presidential debate moderator works for NPR News.

Gods Wisdom to You,

Greg

"The Least of These"

Having no cable or satellite TV, I don't get to watch broadcasts of events like Rick Warren's "Saddleback Forum," his interview of the prospective presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. He asked them the same questions and let them talk on a nationally televised interview. However, I did watch quite a bit of this event, courtesy of YouTube.

One thing that stuck out to me was Warren's question to Obama of how Obama's Christian worldview affected his life. Obama said that Christ inspired him to help the helpless, whom he used Jesus' words to describe as, "the least of these." I didn't think about the heinous nature of that statement for a day or two, but it is terrible. Think about this with me for a moment, because it is not at first obvious why Obama erred so in this statement.

"The least of these," is a statement used by Christ to refer to Christians...it is not referring to just anyone. However, in Obama's use of the term, it refers to economically downtrodden people or those in American society who traditionally have not had much. So Obama's use of Christ's principle is a misuse of Christ's words first of all--that is wrong in itself, but let's probe further: Did Christ promote helping the helpless? Yes, He did. He taught us to love our enemies (Matt. 5) and He taught us to give to the poor (Matt. 6), and he taught us not to tempt others to sin (Matt. 18), among many other things...in fact, we could say that Christ's principle given for Christians in their personal conduct with other Christians and unbelievers is an extension of "love your neighbor as yourself" (Matt. 22).

Now, lets compare this to one of Obama's views...his position on abortion. Who is more needy and helpless than an unborn infant? Who needs our support to make it more--a poor person or an unborn child facing the scissors and a vacuum tube? Who is more able to defend their life? Who is "the least of these" in this circumstance? An unborn child has 23 chromosomes. Under normal circumstances, much of the time, these 23 chromosomed-creatures (called human beings) make it out into the world where they will be unequivocally proclaimed to be people. Eventually, they would defend themselves if they could. For Obama to proclaim that he is unable to see if they are persons or not is hogwash. It is apparent that these are indeed "the least of these." Indeed, as I blogged on earlier, Obama attacked legislation that would have provided protection for unwanted pre-term down-syndrome babies that had been born. On this, even the liberals admitted that this is a child, born into the world--deserving protection, and they voted for it in Congress. But Obama didn't. He wouldn't even grant these children--undoubtedly "the least of these," the compassionate political stance that would have helped preserve or at least comfort their suffering little lives.

And so, for Obama, it may be "above his pay-grade" to determine when human life begins...but it is also above his pay-grade to determine what Jesus meant when He said "the least of these."

"Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven." (Matt. 19:14)

An Amazing Christian

This young man (30 years) is Mosab Hassan Yousef. He is the son of a Hamas leader and he has converted to Christianity. His interview can be found at the following link:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,402483,00.html#

...and it is absolutely amazing...I can't even do it justice with a summary, except that this young man has followed the Lord Jesus' words in the following scripture: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." (Matt. 16:24) This young man, in his short life, has studied the truth of Christianity--truth available world-wide now because of the internet and other media, and has renounced Islam and Hamas to follow Christ. He speaks intelligently of the ignorance of Muslims about their own religion, about searching for the truth about Christ, and about the state of the world today--including the State of Israel and the constant conflicts of the Middle East. I don't say this with every link, but please copy the above link or type it into your browser and read this interview--it is God-glorifying!

In this interview Mosab tells of the fact that Muslims and others are simply ignorant about Christianity because they have never been told the truth. I couldn't agree more. In my last 3 years of attending college, I had to defend my orthodox Christian beliefs numerous times against my professors, who would time and again try to lump conservative and fundamental Christianity together with fundamentalist Islam. My professors were very ignorant of my point-of-view, just as Mosab's teachers, friends, and family were ignorant of his. Fundamentalist Islam provides a false interpretation of a religion (Christianity) it does not really understand. Mosab sets the record straight.

Thanks to Jesus for saving this young man and bringing his testimony to the world!

Sudden Evolution and Petrified Trees (Stange Facts and Earth's Age Part 2)

Since I was in grade school, I have been instructed in a picture of life on this planet that started with simple life and moved on to the amazing diversity of life today. I remember watching a school film some years ago that followed this pattern. We were told, "Life started with only a few molecules, shocked into life in a fertile soup of millions of years ago (don't mind the rhetoric), which painstakingly preserved untold positive additions to the DNA blueprint over aeons that ultimately resulted in everything from jellyfish to man. Wow! What a story. Not only that, but some of each step in the "tree of life" have been buried and preserved in rocks corresponding to their age.

Not only this, but many people have seen something like the following geological scheme:



Tables like these list ages of the earth, based on organisms found in each layer of the earth, and draw conclusions about the age of rock layers based on them, as well as using radiometric dating to determine rock ages (the last being the subject of a future post). These have been powerful arguments to my mind, in favor of an old earth.

However, I later found out these tables are far from the whole picture. Often, older life is found on top of younger life (though scientists reject these as exceptions as the result of upheaval of old rocks).

So illustrated (with higher numbers equal to younger life the traditional picture of rock layers and life looks like this:

10
9
8
etc.

....while the newer pictures look like this

10
9
8
etc.

or

10
6
8

or

7
10
6


Not only the disorder, but sometimes, layers are missing completely, and in hardly any place does anything resembling what should be a sequence from 10 down to 1 occur neatly.These days, the old story of orderly deposition of old life to new is not what science is finding.

Also, and against the steady re-telling of the old story, there has emerged a large scientific consensus that life has been an explosive affair--not only involving those first Frankenstein bacteria. The following link leads to an article detailing at least one of these explosions:

http://www.thedesignoflife.net/blog/The-Avalon-explosion-The-dawn-of-life-reveals-another-intricate-puzzle/View/Default.aspx

So Darwin, though worshiped by Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins as the fountain of all knowledge on biological life has undergone some revision. The new scheme shows multiple bursts of complex life appearing in earth's history, and amazingly, disappearing in many cases just as suddenly.

So the timetable of life is fraught with conflict in the scientific community. Now we ask, what does all this have to do with the age of the earth?

Well, a great mystery, in addition to that just mentioned, is the phenomenon of petrified trees. These trees were buried and replaced by minerals over time, but here's the kicker--they where buried standing up! They go through multiple rock layers and multiple ages of rock.



Scientists say they might have been completely buried, the surrounding rock worn away, and then reburied, layer by layer, but this seems to beg the question a bit. Why should that be the case? Could it be, that layers don't equal times in earth's history? And if so...how do we know how old everything is with certainty?

T-Rex flesh? (Strange facts and Earth's Age part 1)

I have long loved dinosaurs (I wanted to be a palientologist growing up), and also have had many questions about how the dinos related to my inherited Christian beliefs derived from the Bible (a possibly young earth, the Flood, etc). As a child, I often heard my father say: "A thousand years is like a day to the LORD" (a la 2 Peter 3:8) and "I don't believe we came from monkeys." All I knew for the longest time (from 5 or so to 21) was that I could come to no conclusion on this matter, having no desire to read the literature related to earth-age debate from theologians and apologists, or the scientific community.

After coming to know Christ...my desire to answer some of those old questions returned. Since then, I have read scientists like Stephen J. Gould, young-earth creationists like Henry Morris, IE theorists like William Dembski, and others in search of more information on what the Bible says about the age of the earth and what science says about its age. I have surveyed the strengths of both sets of arguments (the secular and the biblical) and also their weaknesses. What is strange is that both sides can be convincing enough to make you declare at times: "I can see truth here." However, this post is not about my conclusions on the earth's age, it is simply a demonstration of this conflict of ideas as I have encountered them.



First, there was the trip to Ripley's Aquarium at Myrtle Beach in 2003 (I realize the picture is the one in Gatlinburg, which I went to this year). That year on my honeymoon in June, walking through that fascinating display of fish, I encountered the following info on the Nurse Shark:

"Nurse Sharks carry their young and bare them live. While in the womb, the faster developing of the two babies will eventually devour the other en utero."

Horrifying? Yeah, a tad. What immediately shot through my mind was: "Life is a struggle...evolution is a struggle of selection (fittest surviving)...these sharks are already struggling in the womb...the fittest is surviving! Yikes! That's strong evidence for evolution."

I left the aquarium pondering whether evolution might be true after all from that little sign by the shark tank.

Second, there was the day I read on a science website (National Geographic no less) that palientologists had recovered (get this) intact dino flesh...and not just any dino--T REX! They found soft-tissue remains. You can read the article here:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/03/0324_050324_trexsofttissue.html

The day I read this, the pendulum took a hard swing toward the no-evolution, younger earth perspective. Soft tissue from an animal not thousands, but many millions of years old? Seems a little suspect. In fact, in that article, the scientist states:

"Finding these tissues in dinosaurs changes the way we think about fossilization, because our theories of how fossils are preserved don't allow for this [soft-tissue preservation]," Schweitzer said."

I am no scientist, but it don't take a genius to say it is utterly strange that meat didn't decay after 40 million years...hmmm...what could this mean? Possibly that dinos aren't as old as we thought?

Do you see the power of the examples? Course there are other examples of this play of ideas in my mind, but I won't go there, seeing this blog is getting too long already. My point would be that there is still so much we don't know scientifically, and that what side in this debate we are inclined to can be overturned quickly by a T-Rex burger or a ravenous baby shark...unless we just believe that "day" equals one solar day in Genesis.