A Good Psychologist

Uncategorized

If more psychologists were like this (…or pastors…), I’d have far more respect for them!

Advertisements

“Tohu wa-Bohu”, Across the Stars

Uncategorized

From
How can lots of water worlds be “bad news for life”?

Many exoplanets discovered could be as much as 50% water but their size has an impact on what that means.
“This is water, but not as commonly found here on Earth,” said Dr. Zeng. “Their surface temperature is expected to be in the 200 to 500 degree Celsius range. Their surface may be shrouded in a water-vapor-dominated atmosphere, with a liquid water layer underneath.” …


[…]


The larger question is whether life can exist on so-called “water worlds” at all. As Scientific American explored earlier this year, the problem is what happens on a planet with enormous, deep oceans and very little land. At the bottom of the oceans, an ice layer forms due to the extreme pressure. This enormous ice layer would effectively seal off the bottom of the land from the actual water, cutting off the geological processes that are necessary for life to bloom in the deeps.On Earth, hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor provide the energy required to support thriving ocean ecosystems, even in the jet-black conditions of the deeps. Increase that depth by 20 times or more, and the ice layer that forms could simply choke off the possibilities. The weathering of land rocks provided an important source of minerals in Earth’s oceans, and that step would also be missing on a water planet.

Joel Hruska, “Water Worlds May Be Common in the Universe, and That’s Bad News for Life” at ExtremeTech

In other words, Earth doesn’t just “have water”; it is fine-tuned for life. We need to find exoplanets that are likewise fine-tuned.

Now, the Bible verse of the day:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

Genesis 1:1-3, English Standard Version

There looks to be a LOT of worlds out there, covered with water and hostile to life. Formless and void… and untouched by the Spirit of Life.

I suggest that where we come in.

Last in Line in Obedience? Last in Line for Blessings!

Uncategorized

A depressing — but needful — post from American Vision.

All quotes from
D. A. Carson: church must not be “kicking and screaming” against racial reconciliation

Love demands self-control

Carson’s concluding comments need to be emphasized here at the outset: “certainly we must not be perceived to be knee-jerk reactionaries who are dragged into racial reconciliation kicking and screaming, bringing up the end of the pack, the last to be persuaded” (p. 107). The sad truth is that for the majority of their existence, the conservative Protestant and Evangelical churches have only arisen to the level of being dragged kicking and screaming at their better moments. Much of the time was instead fierce opposition.

Reactionary attitudes — like all attitudes — must be grounded in Biblical truth: otherwise, they are simply worthless… then poisonous… then murderous… then suicidal.

The crippling racism of the American Christian Church has sapped and withered the power and authority of the American Christian in far to many ways. It will have to end, as it is in direct opposition to the will of God, and strikes at the root of the Kingdom of God.

American Christian racism must go, and it will go.

Regardless of the cost.

Because God demands it.

Carson’s elucidation of the problem answers those who would argue that “slavery ended 150 years ago!” and “Jim Crow ended 60 years ago!” so why should racial healing be any concern of ours today? Carson answers with good insight:

Because of the many legal sanctions now in place, some forget the bitter degradation of the Jim Crow culture. The attitudes wedded to the Jim Crow culture have not everywhere been expunged. I suspect that most European-Americans have very little understanding of the cumulative destructive power of the little degradations that almost all African-Americans, especially older African-Americans, have experienced—to say nothing of the less common but still too frequent threats, racial profiling, and frankly illegal (to say nothing of immoral) injustices they have suffered (p. 94).

Right now, I am thinking of all sorts of licensing laws that hurt the poor (typically Black) far more than other Americans.

Policies that, once again, demonstrate contempt for Divine Law.

[M]any a white church in a mixed-race community is full of people who honestly think they are above racism and yet who have people who have never once fully tried to understand what it would be like for a black family to come into their church. “Of course they’re welcome,” these fine folk might protest. “Anyone is welcome here.” But all it takes is for one member to say something really insensitive, and all of the courage it took to walk in the door dissolves in disgust and a sense of victimization. Would a white member who indulged in such condescending malice face church discipline? Would the black newcomers be invited to white homes and treated as peers? And if there are economic disparities as well, would there be any reflection on the fact that some white/black economic disparity is a function of years of discrimination that, morally speaking, ought to be vehemently opposed by concerned Christians? Moreover, if the black couple visiting the white church has a teenage boy who asks a white girl out on a date, what will be the response? (pp. 100–101).

Just let me highlight this bit:

But all it takes is for one member to say something really insensitive, and all of the courage it took to walk in the door dissolves in disgust and a sense of victimization.

God is waiting for serious repentance here, before endless Christian defeat can even begin to be replaced by some Christian victories.

Sure, pre-millennial “Rapture fever” needs to stop.
Of course, the Word of God needs to be taken as authoritative,

  • including the Six-days of Creation
  • and the Laws of God as given to Moses (and are substantially still in force).

But this wicked and unlawful contempt and malice against people of colour must also end. Hatred must be reserved for the wicked, and earned by their evil acts, and not tied to some irrelevancy such as genetics.

I am glad that several (but still too few!) Christian Reconstructionists are taking the lead here. But repentance and restoration can’t stop here: it must grow to fill the whole movement, and then the entire church, and then the world.

As it is, the Pentecostals and Charismatics are well ahead of us!

We had better get moving, to get the heavenly price of obedience to God…
and avoid the hellish wages of sin.

The Catholic Church, Perversity, and Repaganization

Uncategorized

It is disgusting, that the repaganization of the West (esp Europe) is led by the Catholic Church. I have considered them Christian, as they back the Nicene Creed: but frankly, that’s just not good enough.

Thank God for Martin Luther, despite his failings!

And double praise for John Calvin!

Quoted from the article:
From a Moral-Historical Perspective, This Crisis is Worse Than You Realize

There is only one reason why pedophilia is even a moral issue today: historically, the Catholic Church made it one. Sex with boys and girls, but especially boys, was an accepted part of ancient Greek and Roman culture, the culture into which Christ Himself, and hence the Church, was born. Christianity rejected this common pagan sexual practice as a distortion of sexuality, and evangelized accordingly. If it were not for the success of Christianity’s evangelical efforts, the laws against pedophilia still on the books today would never have been there at all.

[…]

Moreover, pedophilia with boys was not confined to a few perverted individuals with exclusively homosexual orientation. The great majority of men engaged in it as an accepted part of Greco-Roman culture, whether they were (as we would designate them) homosexual or heterosexual. Thus, pedophilia was not a moral issue, but a cultural practice engaged in by most men. (This is an important point that I’ll take up in a future article, because it means that our current attempt to fix a definite homosexual “percentage” in the population, say 2 percent or 10 percent, doesn’t take into account that homosexuality and pedophilia can spread to the majority through a deformed culture.)

[…]

The sole reason that there are still secular laws on the books that prohibit and punish pedophilia is that Christianity came to dominate culture in the West through evangelization. The only reason that we have accepted homosexuality in culture and in law is the increasing de-Christianization of the culture in the West. As we become even more secularized (i.e., repaganized), pedophilia will soon be accepted, just as homosexuality, abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia have already been embraced.

This is a massive, massive crisis in and for the Church because a deeply-embedded worldwide homosexual network among our priests, bishops, and cardinals is actively engaged in bringing about the full de-Christianization of the world by preying on boys between 12-18, literally recreating Greco-Roman sexual culture in our seminaries and dioceses. If you want to know what it was like in the sordid sexual days of ancient Greece and Rome, just read the Pennsylvania Report.

That’s a rather horrible irony, isn’t it? The very men most authoritatively charged with the evangelization of all the nations are full-steam ahead bringing about the devangelization of the nations. In doing so, these priests, bishops, and cardinals at the very heart of the Catholic Church are acting as willing agents of repaganization, undoing 2,000 years of Church History.

To be even more pointed, these priests, bishops, and cardinals are the chief agents of devangelization, de-Christianization, repaganization. There is nothing, nothing, that undermines the moral and theological authority of the magisterium more quickly and thoroughly than the devilish marriage of scandal and hypocrisy. It destroys the ability to evangelize.

And note that I say both moral and theological. Why should anyone now take anything the magisterium has to say seriously, whether it’s the Church’s teachings about pedophilia and homosexuality, or its teachings on the Most Holy Trinity?

I will only add that the repaganization of the West will mainly impoverish and kill the West. The rest of the world does not have the wealth of the West, and so can’t indulge in the self-destruction that the West is inflicting on itself.

This will change: as the world gets wealthier, evil becomes more affordable.

But there isn’t any single authority – like the Secular State or the Catholic Church – that can prop up evil in the rest of the world. And as decentralization progresses, the power of such top-down institutions (such as they exist) will fade with time.

Even the Secular State will be delegitimized in time, especially with the bankruptcy of the welfare system.

The fact that the Catholic Church (behaving like The Whore of Revelation) choose to destroy its own credibility before the destruction of the Secular (read: anti-Christian) State (a.k.a. The Beast of Revelation) is there choice. A bad choice, with disinheritance as the impending result.

Biblical Christians should not merely avoid repeating the decisions of the Catholic hierarchy: they should aim to do even better than their fore bearers in Roman times.

Evil within and outside the camp are destined for humiliation and destruction: on earth and in our lifetime, and again before the White Throne.

It is the Christian duty to expand the Kingdom of God – on earth and in our lifetime – and so receive praise and rewards before the White Throne.

The meek before God: they will inherit the earth we walk on.
And they will receive great blessing at the end of history, as well.