Beliefs Have Consequences. Don't Freeze!. Update, I have a Critter!

For “Scripture Sunday”:  Better late than never!

Beliefs Have Consequences

“Evolution leaves mankind blind to our purpose, wandering and wondering in the dark.

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Did this cow put itself together? Apparently so, if Darwinian evolution is to be believed.

As a high school student decades ago I remember a radio personality ridiculing the theory of evolution with the catchphrase, “Did we come from scum, or did we climb from slime?”—parodying the idea that life emerged from some algae-laden pond. His phrasing had a clever ring to it, as evidenced by the fact that I still remember it years later.

At the time I was intensely interested in science. I won my school science fair’s highest award three years in a row, once for creating a set of three-dimensional, full-color cutaway models of various kinds of cells.

I still remember researching and working on that project and being amazed at the complexity of the microscopic marvels of blood cells, nerve cells, muscle cells, skin cells, plant cells and more. Electron microscopes were just beginning to reveal that cells were not merely simple blobs of matter, but were in fact highly refined structures beautifully designed for their purpose.

Except, we were told in our biology books, they weren’t really designed at all. And they didn’t have a purpose. In fact, they were nothing more than the product of chance and countless random accidents over an unfathomable period of time.

But what I saw sure had me fooled. I had never seen anything that worked so well put itself together out of nothing!

And then there were the cattle. Every year we raised a steer to provide meat for our family with three boys, and we consumed a lot of beef and beans. After my older brother left home, it fell to me as an eighth-grader to help my father kill and carve up that year’s steer.

To put it mildly, it was not a pleasant task. But the yuck factor was considerably compensated for by the opportunity to examine, up close and personal, how a large living creature was put together—the skeletal structure, the various internal organs, the protective outer hide, the digestive system, the blood veins and arteries, the intricate nerve system, and even a natural built-in fly swatter in the form of a highly efficient tail.

It sure looked like an intricately designed system to me. But again, I was fooled by my own eyes. The biology books assured me it had all put itself together out of nothing!

I speak facetiously, of course—but just barely. Only a few years earlier the U.S. Supreme Court had banned the Bible and prayer from public schools and much of public life. At my own school those rulings were pretty much ignored, and students continued to pray and meet for Bible studies every day before classes started. No one then ever worried about serious school violence, and school shootings were unheard of. This was even though some students in rural schools like mine had rifles in gun racks in their trucks or a pistol under the car seat, usually for shooting snakes.

What a different world we live in today. We are now well into a second or even third generation of schoolchildren who’ve been educated without the Bible, prayer or acknowledgment of God as part of their formal schooling. And sadly, it shows.

For decades now, in spite of its many flaws, Darwinian evolution has been taught to schoolchildren as fact. They’ve been educated to believe they’re simply highly developed animals. So why should we expect them to behave differently than animals?

With God removed from the picture and school kids taught they’re just another kind of animal, is it any wonder our schools today see so much bullying, violence, casual sex, teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease, along with an unprecedented epidemic of young male mass killers?

Is it any wonder human life is so degraded and devalued when abortion is so commonplace? After all, we’re told those tiny human beings are just lumps of tissue, of even less value than animals, to be discarded when it’s no longer wanted or convenient!

The sad fact is, beliefs have consequences. History is littered with the bloody debris of that reality.

Margaret Sanger was a firm believer in eugenics—ridding the human race of what she considered less-desirable specimens. You might say she wanted to streamline the evolutionary process, to make it more efficient. And she did. She founded Planned Parenthood a little more than a century ago. In the decades since, the organization has been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of babies through abortion and “emergency” contraception—making the organization one of history’s most prolific mass killers.

Adolf Hitler similarly believed in enforcing a kind of “evolution” as government policy. He ordered the extermination of millions of members of cultural or ethnic groups deemed undesirable in death camps so he could purify the earth for the superior Aryan master race to rule in a planned thousand-year Germanic empire known as the Third Reich.

Darwinian evolution has as its foundational premise “survival of the fittest.” And tragically, that mentality has taken root again and again in hateful ideologies all over the globe, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Isn’t it about time we woke up and acknowledged its evil fruit?

In this issue we examine some of the more recent discoveries highlighting the theory’s fatal flaws. Evolution leaves mankind blind to our purpose, wandering and wondering in the dark. We hope you’ll read these articles carefully—and realize that yes, beliefs have consequences.”  From: https://www.ucg.org/beyond-today/beyond-today-magazine/beliefs-have-consequences

Discern magazine: https://www.ucg.org/beyond-today/beyond-today-magazine/beyond-today-magazine-november-december-2019

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Don't Freeze!

“What spiritual lesson can we draw from the process of hypothermia?

Transcript of YouTube: https://youtu.be/iJVTCBG71Og

[Steve Myers] I was reading the story of a man who got lost in the blizzard and he was in trouble and as it got colder and colder, he was trying to figure out how to stay warm. And this article was kind of interesting in pointing out what happens when you are stranded in a blizzard and you’re trapped. And this man was literally beginning to freeze to death. Now you would think when that happens you would be cold. But in fact, this article went to point out that when you begin to freeze to death, you actually feel warm all over and you lose that sensation of being cold.

I found that really interesting that it is a medical fact that when you get to a certain point, you start to feel warm instead of feeling cold and it actually begins to feel good. And so what the medical journals say is that you actually begin to fall asleep and you can’t wake up because it feels good. It feels too good when you’re freezing to death. Isn’t that an oddity? But that’s really the medical facts. I got to thinking about that a little bit. You know, we are in this blizzard of a world and if we’re not careful, we can begin to freeze to death and not even notice it because it can feel good according to this world’s standards. But you know, God tells us, watch out.

The apostle Paul reminded the Ephesians in Ephesians 5:14. He said this, “Awake you who sleep arise from the dead.” You see, we have that tendency in this world to just be taken in by it all and we can go to sleep spiritually speaking, but he says, “Wake up and Christ will give you light. See, then you walk circumspectly not as fools, but wise redeeming the time because the days are evil.”

Now this has a connection to God’s Holy days as well. Awake, wake up. Don’t allow yourself to be frozen to death and feel good by fitting into the standards of this world, we’ve got to be different. And so he says, wake up, rise from the dead, turn to Christ and look how you live, watch how you live. So he says walk circumspectly. That’s one of the mistakes that people often do. If they end up in a blizzard and they’re lost, they’ll lay down and then they have that tendency to go to sleep. Well, we can’t lay down spiritually. We have to keep active, keep doing and keep growing more and more Christ-like in our behavior, in our character.

And so when you think of these types of things, wake up and keep walking that Christian walk. And as we do that, we recognize the world that we live in and we’re striving then to be more Christ-like. So don’t fall asleep.” From: https://www.ucg.org/beyond-today/beyond-today-daily/dont-freeze

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Update:

I didn’t get to the Bible study here at the apartments on Sunday afternoon, I was with my daughter Wendy on a road trip to Richmond, (TX that is!)  She went to get an American Eskimo dog.  She always wanted a fluffy white dog, like a white Pom, and here he was.  He was beautiful, outgoing, smiling and a happy twinkle in his eyes.  Then we saw another one cowering in a pen in their garage, and the man said it was Buy One Get One Free.  I scooped up the little shivering little white female Eskimo dog and she melted into my arms, so glad to get away from the four rowdy kids.  They said that they just kept her in their backyard.  Even though I didn’t want a dog, I just couldn’t leave her there. 

After I got to know her, I discovered that she had obviously been yelled at for soiling their million dollar house and thinks that going to the bathroom is a bad thing.  She is terrified to let anyone see her do that.  I don’t have a fenced yard and she wasn’t leash trained, but that just took a day.  Getting her to “go” when on a leash is still an ongoing thing.  She will only go when I am not looking at her.  Because of that, I am having to keep her in a big crate which fortunately I had in my storage. She is taking up a lot of my time tending to her, but I am used to rescuing abused animals and I am giving her all the love and understanding that I can. She looks like a little white Fox, so I call her Foxie.

That is one thing about a cat, you don’t have to house break it!  They go to a box as second nature.

As I had some dried cherries, I soaked them overnight and then made them into a Crustless Impossible Cherry Pie with some Bisquick, for the church potluck.  The sermon was “Here I am Lord”.

So here I am, getting a little scared doggie at ease around living with people, and hopefully she will be a really happy, well-adjusted little girl one day.