Tuesday, January 27, 2009

I painted a picture. Yes, I am 23.



Josh Turner Song

Oh the longer the waiting, the sweeter the kiss
It's better my darlin, I promise you this.
Next time I hold you I'm not letting go.
Will you wait for it darlin? I need to know.

Well you know I'm a sailor and tomorrow we sail.
It's hard way of livin, but i know it well.
And if I surrender my life to the sea
You can marry another; it's alright with me.

Though we won't be together again till the spring,
Just imagine the treasures I'll bring.

Come lay with me, stay with me, soon I'll be gone.
I will remember you all winter long.
And when I return to the one that I miss
Oh the longer the waiting, the sweeter the kiss
The sweeter the kiss

When the mornings are warm and the valleys are green,
I'll come back from wherever I've been.
Oh the longer the waiting the sweeter the kiss
It's better my darlin, I promise you this
The next time I hold you I'm not letting go.
I will give up the ocean forever I know.
Forever I know

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Fruit of the Spirit

During the sermon last week, I was jotting a note about patience. I asked the Lord for more of it. Then I wondered, what is it? So I tried to define it, but really couldn't. Then I started thinking about the fruit of the spirit listed in Galatians 5:22 and what they are and aren't. Here's sorta what I came up with for some of them:



Love. If the primary person you care for and tend to and live for is yourself, then you have not love. Philippians 2

Joy. If your "joy" is in how happy you are dependent on your circumstances and how effectively you "love" loving yourself, then you have not joy. James 1:2

Peace. If you put your "peace" in your comfy pillow-seat of a life instead of in carrying your cross with stripes on your back toward death, then you have not peace. Matt Lantz

Patience. If you take comfort in certainty rather than in being uncertain about everything but the faithfulness of God, then you have not patience. Oswald Chambers p.120

Self-Control. If you continue to chase your desires and live self-servingly and are unconcerned with the choices that God wants you to make and do not painfully self-sacrificingly strive to tame your body, then you are not self-controlled. 1 Cor 9:24-27

Friday, January 2, 2009

Conversations on Creationism

Okay this is going to be a shuffled recollection of what I learned in the last few hours. I just got back from a 3 1/2 hour session intended to prove intelligent design. Three speakers (I am not going to spell all their names right)- all science scholars: Steven Myers from Cambridge and author of "Signature in the Cell", Ray Bellinsky from France and author of "The Devil's Delusion" (rebuttal to Richard Dawkin's "The God Delusion"), and Mike Behe, an American who faces issues like to those presented in "Expelled"- a documentary-movie made by Ben Stein about professors being fired over believing in intelligent design and author of "Darwin's Black Box." They talked about biology and the nanomachines inside our cells, about the anthropic fine-tuning of physics, about astronomy, and mouse trap analogies.... Wow. God was taken out of scientific arguments first by a french astronomer named Pierre la Place during Napoleon's reign and it went on from there through Darwin to Freud. With the help of the break down of the catholic churches dominion over Europe, it was easy for this theologyless scientific transition to take place. When Darwin wrote "the origin of the species, his purpose was not even to disprove God because he did not see that as necessary. And people these days think it is strange that he did not really address the "origin" of a species, but just the evolution of an existing one. At that time, they were not concerned with the "beginning" many scriptural texts had slipt out consideration and trust and the fact that many cultures had started their foundation texts with "in the beginning" statements was of little concern. It was not until the mid1940s that this "beginning" argument rearose and it threw many scientists, including Einstein for a loop. One day, while looking through his gigantic telescope in Southern California, Hubble discovered galaxies. This shocked and humbled mankind because we realized that we were smaller than we thought we were. ha. Anyway, as he looked at the numerous galaxies which we had previously known only as random burning balls of gas only, he noticed that many had a red colored light glow. I do not know much about light or how it travels, but apparently light that is receding or moving away from you is received as a red light. (I just decided to believe him- if it weren't true, it would not have concerned world renowned scientists)- The implication here is that the galaxies are slowly moving away from eachother/ our universe is gradually and constantly expanding. That, of course, implies that it, at some point, was closer together and even together which implies a beginning. Ah! Einstein flew all the way there to see it for himself and tried to fiddle with math to disprove it, but couldn't. Since then the argument on "how did life start?" has been a prominent one. One of the scholars wrote a book called "Darwin's black box" in it he claims that if Darwin knew the things that we know now about nanomechanics within cells (which he only knew as jelly blobs when he was writing), he probably would not have made some of the claims that he made. Watson and Crick discovered the double helix/DNA strand (btw Watson and Crick went to Gonville and Cauis which is the same school i attended at Cambridge- there was a giant double helix on one of our stained glass windows int he dining hall) post-darwin and our modern understanding of just what goes on with all the crazy mitochondrial whatnot and protein interaction would have affected his theories. The complexity of the cell just is not something that could arise by chance or necessity but demands a creator. I would try to describe a few of the micro pictures they showed us, but I don't remember any of the terminology- one that unzips a string of proteins has flagella that acts a propeller attached to a diallmagillyrotatingpollthing that attaches to a legit motor. Could this have realistically evolved from something simpler? The idea of cow going back into the ocean and becoming a whale is like converting a 1968 comaro into a nuclear submarine. There are too many technical changes that would need to take place and the likelihood that that would occur without a designer is well, unlikely. The adjustments simply could not have been made without an intelligent adjuster. It would take some crazy smart engineers to transform that camaro. In one protein strand alone, there are 10^105 possible combinations (whatever that means), but there have only been about 10^16 second since the universe began (according to geologists and Hubble-studying astronomers). That is not enough time for all those combinations to evolve by chance- that's more than one change a second- evolution supposedly went from ooze to eyeballs and reproductive systems over generations and generations. Darwinists, since the discovery of the DNA strand and inner workings of cells, write about to the "appearance of design" but not about "design" as a viable reason for it's complexity. As the prof said, "that is called denial" haha. He also said, "In the west, atheism is the default position for the uninformed/ those who have not informed themselves. It is not historical and it is not analytical and it is not even scientific because science is supposed to follow the evidence whereever it leads and when evidence leads to design, they still deny it." Darwinists lack of an answer for an origin of evolution is a "significant hole where there should be something substantial." Atheists authors like Richard Dawkins say that the argument is an "religiously motivated plot to kill evolution." Many compare theological views to old fables like "How the tiger got its stripes", "how the rhino got its horn", or "how the bacteria got it flagellum" haha (flagellum is the whiplike tail the propelles the bacteria). One more thing- the mouse trap- back to the evolution of the whale thing. Dr Behe wrote in his book as an analogy that a mousetraps could not function and in that case exist (if there were natural selection for mousetraps) in any form other than in which they are. If you took away one of its five parts (which would have to be done when backtracking through evolution) then it wouldn't work or survive. A man came back at him and made this whole website proving that he could infact make a mouse trap with 5, 4, 3, 2, and even 1 part and have it still function as a mousetrap! And he drew diagrams and explained how on the site. Well, Dr. Behe- said that's great, but did not that man's intelligence lend a hand to the changes of the mouse trap? In fact, for each recreation of the mousetrap that the man provided, there were multiple differences that would have to be in place and that came out the 10^[something big] combinations. All of which, since they were so great and so far between and since the mousetrap would have been unable to function and died out during any DNA transitional periods, could not possibly have been made without the intelligence of the diagram drawer/ designer. Int he case of living things, that woudl be God. I don't know if I explained that analogy very well, but it made sense when he told it. Well, that became a book didn't it. geeze.