Newt Gingrich is corrupt, petulant bully who has abandoned his wife for another woman twice! Meanwhile honest, steady-as-a-rock Ron Paul celebrated his 55th wedding anniversary with wife Carol yesterday. And who do you suppose most “Christians” say they support? The lying, adulterous, bought and paid for Newt Gingrich, of course!
You didn’t seriously think that Christians actually believe the things they say did you?
Until God showed his power, Moses doubted his own role in God’s plan. He continually asked the question that weighs on us all: “Who am I?”
Who am I to lead your people? Who am I to speak to Pharaoh? Who am I that anyone should listen to me? God replied by giving Moses a mission: to confront both the B’nai Israel and the Pharaoh and to bring the Israelites out of Egypt.
When Moses asked again, “Who am I that Pharaoh should listen to me?” God, secure in his own identity (“I am/will be who I am/will be”), responded to Moses’ doubt with ultimate authority: “You are who I say you are. ”
Exodus 7:1-2 And YHWH said to Moses, See, I have made you a god to Pharaoh. And Aaron your brother shall be your prophet. You shall speak all that I command you. And Aaron your brother shall speak to Pharaoh, he will send the sons of Israel out of his land.
You too have a mission, a task delegated to you by God. If you doubt your ability to be of service to God and his Kingdom, believe this: God knows who you are. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you believe in your own capabilities so long as you trust in him. You will not overcome through your own power. You are just a tool. Moses and Aaron may have spoken God’s words to Pharaoh, but it was by God’s might that Israel was delivered.
Exodus 7:4-6 But Pharaoh shall not listen to you, and I will lay My hand upon Egypt, and bring My armies, My people the sons of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments. And the Egyptians shall know that I am YHWH when I stretch forth My hand upon Egypt, and bring out the sons of Israel from among them. And Moses and Aaron did as YHWH commanded them; so they did.
God knows who you are and what you are capable of accomplishing, and he does not choose his tools arbitrarily. He always uses the right tool for the job.
If a captain twice abandons his ship and crew when the seas get rough, would you trust him at the helm of a much larger ship that is already listing and taking on water?
Exodus 1:10 Come on, let us deal wisely with them; lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies, and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land.
And we all know how that worked out.
There are four ways to preserve a relationship that has begun to deteriorate:
Each of these methods works to a greater or lesser extent and there is a time and place in which each would be appropriate. A healthy relationship, however, will be almost exclusively characterized by methods three and four. Pharaoh tried to keep the Hebrews in Egypt by physically and financially hobbling them. Although they wanted more than ever to leave Egypt, they had no ships, no weapons, no chariots, and no gold with which to obtain such things. They had no allies. They came to believe that they were too weak to face the Canaanites and that their God was too weak or too busy to rescue them. Pharaoh’s strategy might have worked if he had not dismissed Joseph’s God along with Joseph himself. God is the champion of the oppressed and does not allow his people to be abused, enslaved, and terrorized forever.
Nighttime images help track disease from the sky
According to this article, Nigeria used satellite images of city lights to correlate population movements to epidemic outbreaks. After the harvest season, there is a small population boom in the cities as migrant agricultural workers look for off-season employment. The close proximity of people combined with insufficient sanitation promotes the spread of diseases such as the measles. Interesting stuff.
It made me wonder about God’s three feasts of ascent where essentially the same thing happens. Three times each year, the entire nation (or at least representative men from each house) is supposed to gather in Jerusalem. Ancient Israel had superior hygienic practices than most of the rest of the ancient world, but that many people suddenly crammed into a much smaller space is sure to facilitate the sharing of germs.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The men pick up the viruses and whatnot in Jerusalem and bring them back home and spread it around at the farm. If the mitzvot concerning cleanliness were strictly observed the chances of a serious outbreak were minimized, yet the whole community could be exposed to and inoculated against new strains of disease.
The Feasts of Ascent might have served a secondary purpose as national pox parties.
Her corpse has begun to swell and stink.
The evidence:
Let’s face it: America is dead and there is no other people prepared to take her place. It is too late to save her. Don’t bother asking how we can restore our rights. Don’t bother spending all your savings on a good man’s election campaign. Who cares who’s running the train when it’s already derailed? Forget all that. It’s a waste of your breath and resources.
Ask yourself this question instead:
How should we now live given our current circumstances and the likely course of future events?
Vital lessons.
Israel and Palestine
Liberia
I started smelling smoke on Sunday. Texas is in the midst of its worst drought in recorded history, fires are raging all over the state, and the federal government has told the volunteer firefighters to go home: We have it all under control.
Thousands of scorched acres and hundreds of burned homes say otherwise.
What they say loud and clear is that Ron Paul is right about FEMA and the federal government’s mismanagement of, well, everything.
I realize that it wasn’t FEMA who sent those firefighters home. It was the U.S. Forestry Service, the same bunch who is letting firefighting planes sit idle on the ground. It’s all the same, though. Federal alphabet soup bureaucracies who invariably do more harm than good.
Poisonous giant rat makes for hairy predator
“What is quite clear in this animal is that it is hardwired to find the poison, it is hardwired to chew it and it is hardwired to apply it to the small area of hairs,” Kingdon said. The animals apply the poisonous spit only to the specialized hairs on a small strip along its back. When threatened, the rat arches its back and uses specially adapted muscles to slick back its hair and expose the strip of poison.
“Hardwired,” he said.
A distant ancestor of these rats happened to evolve an immunity to this tree’s poison. Then one of its descendants happened to evolve a compulsion to eat the bark of the arrow-poison plant. Then a later descendant happened to evolve special hairs on its back that can store the poison.
“There is no other hair that is known to science that is remotely structured like these hairs,” Kingdon said.
Well, that explains the “Evolutionary marvel” section heading. Evolution is bound to produce all kinds of fully formed, functional, and completely novel features with nothing remotely similar in other closely-related species. Isn’t evolution clever!?
What is quite clear in this story is that evolution by random mutation and natural selection (and genetic drift, gene flow, and whatever other supposedly purposeless processes one might choose to add) is the least likely mechanism for the development of remarkable features like this one.
Listen, kids. X-Men is fantasy. It is not even science fiction, let alone science. Even if a mutation might rarely allow an organism to survive longer than its peers in very specific and abnormal circumstances, mutations are almost always immediately debilitating and always make an organism generally less fit. Accumulated mutations kill.
The symbiotic relationship between the African crested rat and the arrow-poison plant was designed. Engineered. Hardwired. It exists because someone wanted it to exist, and not because it just “happened.”