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Saturday, April 30, 2016

And then...there's this...


From Hal Lindsey,.

There was a circus at the United Nations last week. There were no elephants or caged lions, no trapeze artists or sword swalowers, there was not even a bearded lady!

But there were sights to see that we’ll not see outside the circus.
Like, U.S. secretary of state John Kerry toting his 2 year old grand daughter to the front of the General Assembly hall to sign an international agreement.

And there were even brass bands playing inside the hall.
So, was this the annual visit of Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus to New York?
Not quite....but for some strange reason it did remind me of said circuses.

In reality it was the signing of the “Paris agreement” negotiated in Paris, last December.
The European Commission described it as “ the first ever universal legally binding climate deal”

The U.N. chose “earthday” is the appropriate setting for the historic signing of this ground breaking international climate accord.
Note that the EC described it as “legally binding” This is where it starts to get spooky, folks. What does this mean? A treaty can only be legally-binding
if all parties formally agree to it. And before the U.S. can formally agree to it, it has to be ratified by the U.S. senate.
The senate has not ratified this treaty.
And it takes an even scarier turn...Pope Francis, of all the world leaders, has been the most outspoken and bluntest.
He thinks that the “climate change hoax” is so threatening, that he has, at various times, suggested that every nation on earth, needs to be placed in subjection to the world’s “elites”
since it is obvious that only the “elites” know what is really going on and how to solve the problem. I imagine he considers himself one of the “elites”
He has recommended doing away with the sovereignty of individual nation-states...because some of those nations place their national interests above the global common good.
He proposes that nations be under the authority of a “higher agency”....and he is not referring to GOD in this case.

You can see where this is heading...right?
All these agreements and deals are about one thing: CONTROL!

more here
blessings
Yaddy

Friday, April 29, 2016

A testimony: ‘Joel Galvin’

Growing up in a Christian home, attending church regularly, and receiving Christian education my whole life served to make me an agnostic who was pretty knowledgeable of the Christian faith.

Christianity seemed to be a hoax of some nature. I couldn’t understand the motive for dreaming it up, but it certainly didn’t appear to carry much truth with it. Seeing that atheism is a strong belief in the non-existence of any gods at all, I knew that atheism required more faith than I had. I didn’t want to accept atheism out of laziness, and so, agnosticism would do for me until I found more answers.

I moved away from home, to be a car salesman. I was living on my own, and stopped attending church. Church seemed to be where one would go after accepting Christianity as truth, it just wasn’t the place you would go to find truth.

After two years of selling cars, I realized I wished to further my education. My choice as to which school I would attend was made for me when I acted on wishful thinking, and followed my ex-girlfriend to the Christian college she was to attend.

A couple of months after being at this private school, I realized that if anyone can defend Christianity with any supporting evidences or philosophical truths, it would be the well-educated people heading the institution. Christianity was then worth another chance, as perhaps these people could provide the answers I needed to hear and just couldn’t find before. Whether I received good answers or bad answers, I realized asking the questions would either lead me to truth, or totally eliminate what still remained a possibility in my mind.

What were my questions? The Bible clearly indicates that the earth is young, and that death and decay have been imposed on a once perfect world through the sin of man. How then does Christianity deal with the ‘fact’ of evolution? If death existed long before man ever came about, and this is required in evolution, then man cannot really be held accountable for it, and any ‘redemption plan’ offered to counter-attack such horror, is merely a joke. Evolution being true makes Jesus’ life, and more importantly His death, absolutely meaningless. This was my problem with Christianity, and this is what I was to bring to the educational leaders at this Christian institution.

Christian biology professor no help

I started out by asking my biology professor. Knowing he was a Christian, and that he was obviously well educated, I figured perhaps he could explain to me how he makes sense of this. He explained to me that there is an evolutionary community, and that there is an extremist group that calls themselves ‘Creation scientists’. He said that they were both extremes of the same spectrum, and that to remain at peace with both sides we need to compromise with both, and be ‘theistic evolutionists’. I asked him my questions concerning the Bible, thinking that if Scripture was truth it should be capable of presenting itself as such. He pretty much responded to that by telling me that I needed to have faith, believe in Jesus, and stop asking questions like that. Well, by doing this, he pretty much looked at my problem and told me that I didn’t have a problem. I had already figured on my own that ‘theistic-evolution’ is a total oxymoron, and so talking to him was certain to bring me no closer to any truth.

Campus pastor no help

I then went to the campus pastor. Perhaps he could make sense of my issues. I was pretty much presented with all the same rhetoric, and discouraged from asking such questions, as they only show me to be of weak faith. This wasn’t a joke to me, I admitted to not having any faith in a ‘truth’ which seemed so foundationless.

‘Reverend’ physics professor speaks drivel

My final attempt to find truth at this campus was a visit to the physical science professor. I was told that he held a degree from a top university, and that he was also a reverend. Of course it seemed that if anyone could bring the two together to make sense, it would be this man. I asked him if evolution had any negative effects on the Bible’s layout of the redemption plan through Christ. The response I received, as I remember it, was: ‘You are getting that from Romans 5:12, where it is said ‘as by one man sin entered the world, and death by sin’. It is important for you to understand that ‘death’ as mentioned in this passage, is not referring to man’s physical death, but rather it refers to the spherical death of man’s spiritual being.’ This was probably the most abstract piece of drivel anyone had given me yet in my search for truth! Why would he wish to defend a passage in Romans, when I actually had Gen. 3:17 in mind, where God says ‘cursed be the ground because of you …’? This Genesis passage does not mention man’s spiritual existence, but directly attributes the decay of the entire earth to Adam’s sin. Truth was not to be found in that professor’s office.

Creationists?

Atheism started looking like more of an educated conclusion to me now. I had felt as though I had given this all enough consideration and work to where I didn’t feel atheism would be an act of laziness anymore. While considering this, I looked back at the discussion I had had with my biology professor. He mentioned creationists, and this kind of tickled my mind a bit because I recalled hearing my father say something about them. What was there to this other ‘extreme’ on this spectrum the biology prof. spoke of? I had not heard any of these professors actually speak on behalf of creationism yet. My dad had recently been buying a great deal of literature and video tapes on the subject of ‘creationism’, and looking into it seemed like the last straw in my search for someone who could adequately defend Christianity’s crumbling position.

Creation video breakthrough!

I began by watching a set of tapes my father possessed [no longer available]. The first few tapes mainly pointed out the importance of creationism, which I didn’t really need to watch, as I was seemingly a poster child for the points he was making. Christian indoctrination without the apologetics of creationism and Bible literalism will only produce a confused agnostic, an atheist, or a Christian who is forced to rest on blind faith and a marred interpretation of Scripture. So where was I to find the answer to my question: How does Christianity deal with the fact of evolution? I learned that my problem was not with Christianity, or with science. My problem was at the tail end of my very question, where I wondered about ‘the fact of evolution’. I now was given different questions: what is factual about evolution in the first place? Where is the empirical evidence leading us to accept it as a fact? My true search for truth had now become a bit tilted from what it previously was. The creationists had figured out how to make the Bible stop contradicting itself, but could they hold up with observations in nature?

I looked into all of this, the Bible no longer was the source of my problem, now it was time to turn to nature for some answers. The Bible does indicate that we should be able to see the Creator in His Creation, and I knew that if this was true, I would find Him. I started out volleying back and forth, performing my own little case studies on various aspects of science to see how evolution and creationism stood up to each other. While doing this, I emailed Dr Sarfati then of [Creation Ministries International—Australia, now at CMI-USA] a creationist organization. He helped me when I first started volleying, and showed me that ‘Creationists often appeal to the facts of science to support their view. Evolutionists often appeal to philosophical assumptions from outside science.’ Knowing this helped to fine tune my ‘balogna detector’, which he also helped me to develop, so I could better know what to accept as truth, and what I should question right from the start.

To this day, when some aspect of science makes me wonder, [CMI] can usually help. Science does still get me to wonder at times, about certain little things, but whether or not God exists is something I haven’t questioned since I first realized Christianity was truth. My faith now is solid, and far from blind. I am able to say this thanks to Dr Sarfati’s efforts with me, and the creationist resources my father generously obtained for me.
See:creation.com

very interesting to read...blessings
Yaddy

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

beautiful song!

here


Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
Blessings
Yaddy

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Devil or angel...

Devil or Angel
Witnessing Tools
Tuesday, April 05, 2016
Wendy Wippel

Arber Tasimi was your basic carefree collegiate until targeted in two completely random attacks in just a few weeks. Then he didn’t leave his house for months. When he did, it was to study the basic nature of humankind using the “raw materials”. Meaning babies. Before societal morals were introduced. His findings? well…downright Biblical.

Tasimi went to work as a researcher at Yale University’s Infant Cognition Center, intent on discovering where, as humans, our ethical framework really comes from, his recent Series of Unfortunate Events causing him to wonder, in his own words, “are we a failed species?”

The experiments that ensued were ingenious. The lab produced animated videos that that featured three specific animated shapes with goggle eyes. The main character, let’s say a green square, is depicted as a man on a mission—specifically, to climb up a mountain. The second character, maybe a blue circle, plays a villain, who constantly knocks the protagonist back to his starting point, and the third, a helper (maybe a yellow triangle) comes to the main character’s assistance by knocking the villain out of commission.) The scenarios—with the same characters, readily identified by shape and color—were repeated six times, with very minor differences, so that the children got the chance to confirm that the blue circle was always mean, and the yellow triangle was always nice.

Researchers then determined how the babies (initially 6-12 months old) felt about the characters by giving each child an opportunity to choose which character (offered now as plush dolls in the same outfits) they wished to interact with.

Even the head of the lab thought that chances of this experiment, in 6-12 month old children, had little chance of yielding meaningful information. Until the results came in. Pretty much every child tested chose the helper doll when given the chance.

Every one.

The researchers arrived at the obvious conclusion; human beings seemed to be hardwired with ethics.

Nice is good.

Mean is bad.

This was so contrary to their expectations (and, dare I say it, the “survival of the fittest” gospel of evolutionary theory” they no doubt all espoused—after all, it was Yale.) that they didn’t believe the results.

Until they repeated the experiment and got the exact same outcome.

But then they wondered if, even at this young age, ethics from parents, other caregivers, or even exposure to children’s programming like Sesame Street could have already helped form their ideas about what’s good and what’s bad. . And they wondered even if their judgments were hardwired, how early that programming may kick in.

So they repeated the experiment with babies three months old.

This time, however, since three month-old babies can’t necessarily choose their favorite character by reaching, the lab rigged it up so that the researchers could follow specifically what the babies' favorite character to look at, was.

And again, no question who won the Most Popular with the diaper crowd.

All the babies—overwhelmingly-- kept their eyes glued on the "helper" character on the screen.

Again, the researchers were kind of puzzled.

AS the head of the lab explained it, if our ethics stemmed from our experiences, there shouldn’t be strong natural feelings about ethical situations in kids this young, nor such astounding unanimity. She went on, with her conclusion: “Maybe we are built to identify … that some things are good and some things are not.”

For full disclosure I must confess that critics of this research (i.e other toddler ethics researchers who didn’t think this up first -I spent 15 years in basic research) accuse Yale’s results of being shaky science because the babies might have just liked the helper color better. When the experiment was rerun, however, with the colors switched, the results were the same.

My conclusion is that we can only conclude, from these experiments, that babies are, in fact, born with an innate sense of right and wrong. From birth.

Which shouldn’t surprise any of you, dear readers, since that’s exactly what the Bible says. God made Adam and Eve and blew his own spirit into their nostrils. They came preloaded with his righteousness, confirmed by Ecclesiastes 3:11: "He has made everything beautiful inits time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts.. . As well as Romans 2:15, which explains in a little more detail: “Even Gentiles, who do not have God’s written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it. They demonstrate that God’s law is written in their hearts, for their own conscience and thoughts either accuse them or tell them they are doing right. Romans 2:15 NLT.

God put His own spirit in us, and wrote His laws on human hearts.

But we are all surrounded with evidence of sin, and Tasimi would probably be the first one to ask us “So what gives?”

We have the answer. Man walked with God and knew good. Nothing but good, in fact, but then, chose evil. And we are living with the consequences. Scripture says (and it’s backed up every minute of human experience: that after the fall, every baby born was born with a sinful nature.

("Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, And in sin my mother conceived me.”)

And interestingly enough, the Yale Child Cognition Center pretty much made the same observation. Their research showed definitively that children knew that nice was good and mean was bad. but by the time the children were 2 years old, with pretty much full control of their body and awareness of their autonomy from their mother (i.e. they figured out that they can, in fact, say no!) the children are banished from the research center. The two year-olds are just too uncooperative and ornery to work with anymore.

And There we have it. The very beginning of the lifelong struggle with sin that besets all of us, as best expressed, probably, by the apostle Paul.

But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire. For apart from the law sin was dead. I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. And the commandment, which was to bring life, I found to bring death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me. Therefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good.

Has then what is good become death to me? Certainly not! But sin, that it might appear sin, was producing death in me through what is good, so that sin through the commandment might become exceedingly sinful. For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. Romans 7:8-19 All too true on this end.

Heavy Sigh.

Tasimi admitted to his interviewer that, after living through two violent attacks, “only his research gives him hope. “

Ostensibly the research showing that the awareness of good vs evil seems hardwired into our human psyche. But he’s seen the flipside up front and personal. Pray for Tasimi to find hope in the redeemer, the only one “takes away the sins of the whole world.”

Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, and all the rest of us too. not hardwired, bud downloaded at the fall.

But there is a balm in Gilead. Best expressed, in my opinion, in Jude:

“Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, And to present you faultless Before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.”

In His presence, with no sense of shame! Can you imagine?

Waiting for that one moment in time…. Aren’t we all!!

Blessings
Yaddy



About Wendy Wippel http://www.omegaletter.com/articles/articles.asp?ArticleID=8221