Roundup

Just Brilliant! Three Things Only a PhD Can Believe – read it for the explanations.  It reminds of the quote by the philosopher J. Budziszewski: “Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that you must be highly intelligent and educated to commit. God keeps them in His arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all.”

Absurdity #1 There Are No Universal Standards

Absurdity #2 There Are No Essential Differences Between Men & Women

Absurdity #3  There Is No Clear Dividing Line Between Humans & Animals

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Study: Christians Who Tithe Have Healthier Finances

. . . researchers compared tithers to non-tithers using nine financial health indicators, and found that tithers were better off in every category. “The weird thing is, a tither looks at that and says to himself, ‘Well I’m better off because I give.’ A non-tither looks at that and says, ‘Oh, they give because they’re better off,’” said Brian Kluth, the founder of the study.

The Takeaways: Some of the more interesting findings from the study include:

• 77% of those who “tithe” give 11%-20% or more of their income, far more than the baseline of 10%.

• 97% make it a priority to give to their local church.

• 70% “tithe” based on their gross income, not their net.

• 63% started giving 10% or more between childhood and their twenties

• Tithers carry much less debt than most people and are financially better off than Christian non-tithers—80% of “tithers” have no unpaid credit card bills; 74% have no car payments; 48% own their home; and 28% are completely debt-free.

• What keeps non-tithing Christians from giving: 38% say they can’t afford it; 33% say they have too much debt; and 18% said their spouse does not agree about tithing.

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Has anyone tried the 7 minute workout?  Here’s an article about it and here’s an animation you can follow.  At a minimum it looks like a decent workout if you are short on time or traveling and don’t have equipment.  Potential buzzkill: The original article mentions repeating it 2-3 times.  Hat tip: The Christian Alert.

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Triage: Obama Summons Media Lapdogs to Secret White House Meeting – I’m not surprised, but you would think that at some point these “journalists” might have just a tiny bit of shame.  But Obama owns them.

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What Christians Do About Modern-Day Slavery

1. Pray for the victims.

Pray for the estimated 27 million slaves in our world today who are in bondage within affluent countries like America to Third-world countries like Haiti.

2. Raise awareness.

Raising awareness about this issue may not sound like an action point, but it is an extremely important component in tackling slavery. People need to know that this is happening, so it can be reported and prosecuted. . . .

3. Don’t look at porn.

As evil and degrading as pornography is, here’s another reason to never look at it. Porn is part of the problem. If you are looking at pornography, you are perpetuating the satanic industry of sex trafficking. . . .The authors show various connections between pornography and sexual exploitation. Many of the individuals who appear in pornography are slaves. They have been trafficked, drugged, manipulated in some way, and are forced to be part of this wicked business.

Then there are the forces of supply and demand, and the way that pornography creates more and more demand for the commercial sex industry. Pornography is like the gateway drug. People get addicted, and then they want something more. Pornography fuels prostitution (heightening the demand for prostitutes), and a higher demand for prostitutes means more lucrative opportunities for pimps, which means more women and children exploited by them for these purposes. So if you’re looking at porn, even if you’re not paying for it, you’re showing the advertisers and producers of pornography and all those involved in the sex business that demand is high, which then motivates them to shame and exploit even more people.

Think about that the next time you’re tempted to click on that website. Your momentary “pleasure” is contributing to the absolute devastation of women and girls and boys around the world.

4. Use your gifts.

What are your particular gifts and abilities that you could apply to the problem of human trafficking? There are many different sides to this, and many ways to address it. There’s the political aspect. We need stricter laws against these crimes. . . Lawyers need to vigorously prosecute these cases. Police officers need to know how to deal with these cases, so that a girl doesn’t go to jail because she’s assumed to be a voluntary prostitute, when in reality she’s a sex slave. Business professionals can address the issues of poverty that make many susceptible to being exploited. Doctors and nurses can help to care for victims of human trafficking.

. . .

5. Men, take a stand.

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Northwestern student govt nominee’s confirmation blocked because he is a ‘heterosexual white male’ – Gotta have diversity!  Which means none of you white heterosexual males!

The same thing happens in corporations. The “diversity” organizations at Compaq and HP were the least diverse groups in the company. They were all black females, except for one guy, who was a gay black. I know a Liberal who did a magazine cover photo for a diversity group and she sheepishly admitted the same thing: It was all black females. If I were in their position I would have been insulted. They didn’t have any prominent roles in the rest of the company.

Ironically enough, our Christian Employee Network Group (which Compaq officially approved and HP did not — even though they approved the gay groups) was the most diverse group in the company. At some lunch time Bible studies I led we would have great diversity in ages (literally 20′s through 60′s), races (black, white, Asian), disciplines (accounting, manufacturing, etc.), levels (administrative coordinators through directors), and even denominations. All the other groups were as homogeneous as could be.

Worse yet, how does this square with Christian organizations being forced to include non-Christians as members? Note that this guy isn’t asking to be in a gay group, just a “diversity” group.

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The shamelessness of pro-abortionists: Democrats in Congress Respond to Gosnell by Attacking Pregnancy Centers.  Then again, what would expect from people who support the legalized killing of babies?

Let’s see. Kermit Gosnell has just been sentenced on three counts of first degree murder in the deaths of three unborn babies aborted alive and involuntary manslaughter of a woman who died of a drug overdose during her abortion.  Another abortionist in Texas is reportedly under investigation for Gosnell-like behavior,” he says. “So what is the pro-abortion congressional response to this litany of horror stories. Well, according to The Hill Newspaper, “Dems look to crack down on anti-abortion ‘crisis pregnancy centers.’” Yes, that is their response, which is applauded by the likes of (surprise, surprise) NARAL Pro-Choice America and the National Abortion Federation (NAF).

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Roundup

Study Suggests That Wimpier Men Hold Liberal Views – Of course they do!

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Don’t Make it About Barack Obama – He isn’t running for office again and is very unlikely to be impeached.  Use his scandal-fest to attack big government and Liberalism, not Obama.  That will help in many elections.  One of their excuses (read: lies) is that government is too big for Obama to know enough about it.  So just agree with them and point out how we need to make it smaller and less intrusive in our lives.

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From the “What could possibly go wrong?” category: IRS official in charge during Tea Party targeting now runs agency’s Obamacare office

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BABY DIES AFTER MAN ALLEGEDLY TRICKS GIRLFRIEND INTO TAKING AN ABORTION PILL – Of course this is ghastly, but so are all abortions.  I wish the people quoted would have also noted whether they are anti-abortion if the mom wants to have the unwanted child killed.

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Friendly reminder: If someone uses the “tea bagger” pejorative against you, just ask them what it means. Then point out that they must be homophobic if they are using the slang for a gay sex act to demonize their ideological foes. Shouldn’t the gays be as offended as if they called you the “f” word?  Haters!!  Hate speech!!

Note that this is also an effective question to ask when someone is punished for using other slurs against homosexuals.  I’m not advocating the use of the slurs, of course, but it is worthwhile to point out their hypocrisy.  The people reflexively using “tea bagger” are the same ones who go into full pants-wetting mode if someone uses other slurs.  For some reason those are worthy of major fines and even the termination of employment, while the Liberals get a pass.  Also feel free to ask if those using the term “Santorum” in a derogatory way are “homophobes.”

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Socialism Leads to D.I.Y. Dentistry in Britain – Ouch.  The government can force you to  use their insurance plan, but they haven’t figured out how to force people to be dentists. This is the predictable and inevitable results of socialized medicine.

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Wow, Sojourners finally posted on the Gosnell case! I’m glad to see that. Until now, searching for his name returned zero hits. It is harder to imagine a case more opposed to the “common good.” Killing babies, storing their body parts in jars, unsanitary conditions, pure racism (white women got better treatment than blacks and the clinic mainly targeted blacks), government officials deliberately not enforcing laws, Planned Parenthood knowing of the conditions there yet saying nothing — and then pretending to be aghast at Gosnell, and more.

We should never stop reminding people that Gosnell’s main crimes were killing these babies 30 seconds too late. He did a bad job of killing them before they were completely delivered, so he just finished the job outside the womb. But all abortions are just as immoral.

And he isn’t the “rogue” that this article makes him out to be. People who kill unwanted human beings for a living don’t seem to mind breaking the rules regarding how to legally kill unwanted human beings for a living.

Remember that Obama and Planned Parenthood are on record opposing the obligations of abortionists to save the lives of babies who survive abortion. And Planned Parenthood has been caught countless times hiding statutory rape and sex trafficking, yet they continue to get hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding and “social justice” groups not only give them a pass but they support the Democrats’ platform of taxpayer-funded abortions. The right to life should be the foundational principle of “social justice,” not an afterthought — or worse yet, something completely ignored or even opposed.

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Deuteronomy 18 and Moses/Jesus parallels (and why they don’t apply to Mohammad)

1. Born during the reign of an oppressive king (Moses with Pharoah in Exodus 1:8-14; Jesus with King Herod in Matthew 2:1)
2. The evil ruler decree the killing of children that threaten the newborn’s life (Exodus 1:15-16; Matthew 2:16-18)
3. The witnesses of the birth of the child obeyed God and therefore disobeyed the ruler (Midwives in Exodus 1:17-22; Magi in Matthew 2:12, 16)
4. God protects the witnesses (Midwives in Exodus 1:17-22; Magi in Matthew 2:12)
5. The newborn survived by hiding in Egypt (Exodus 2; Matthew 2:13-15)
6. When the child grew older, God leads them to depart from Egypt (Exodus 13-14; Matthew 2:19-23)
7. After leaving Egypt, water around them symbolizes a new era (the parting of the sea Exodus 14:13-31; Baptism, Matthew 3:13-17)
8. Both enter the Wilderness for a considerable time of testing (Forty years, Exodus 16:35; Forty days, Matthew 4:1-11)
9. Both expounds on God’s law to God’s people in a mountain (Mount Sinai, Exodus 19-20ff; Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7)

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Links to Barack Obama’s votes on Illinois’ Born Alive Infant Protection Act – Obama, Planned Parenthood and Kermit Gosnell all agree.

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Court upholds Obama Admin denial of asylum for German homeschool family – Millions of people can cross our border illegal and get lifetime welfare, but because this family probably wouldn’t vote for Democrats we won’t help them.  If only they’d claim to be gay they’d get a free pass.

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House of Horrors 2: graphic photos show Texas abortionist killed living babies, say nurses – Kermit Gosnell was not the lone exception.  People who kill babies for a living don’t mind breaking the rules regarding how to kill babies for a living.

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Canadian Supreme Court Rules Biblical Speech Opposing Homosexual Behavior is a ‘Hate Crime’ – This is inevitable with bogus “hate speech” laws.

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Flight: The Genius of Birds – Official Trailer — great examples of Intelligently Designed beings.

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His behavior is getting borderline comical.  He dramatically releases Benghazi emails in an attempt to appear cooperative, but the earliest is dates 9/14 when the incident happened on 9/11.  Uh, so, either no one sent any emails for 3 days (unbelievable, but very bad if true) or he has good reasons to hide those emails (believable, and a tacit admission of guilt).  And then he “fires” the IRS guy who was leaving next month anyway.  Great leadership, champ.

Technorati Tags: Religion,Christianity,politics,pro-life

Roundup

Study: Texting And Driving Kills More Teens Annually Than Drinking And Driving – yikes!  Obviously the volume of people texting is higher, but still it is sad they they aren’t getting the message.

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Fast and Furious. Benghazi. The IRS targeting conservatives. AP phone records. Yeah, this is just paranoid right-wingers making stuff up about tyranny.

Or maybe this administration is as corrupt and incompetent as we’ve been saying all along.

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Top CBS, ABC, CNN execs all have relatives working as advisors for White House – The title says it all.  Yet people continue to get their primary (and typically all of their) news from those sources.

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The Plastic Fruit of Online Living – Good reminders about the risks of online activity and how we interact with the world.

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Forgotten Arguments for Christianity: Undesigned Coincidences- The argument stated —  This is an interesting method of Christian apologetics that I just read about in J. Warner Wallace’s Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels.  It is a great refutation for false teachers and others who attack the authorship, age and veracity of the book of the Bible.

The argument from undesigned coincidences is one of the forgotten arguments for Christianity. It has seen a very recent resurgence through the work of some Christian apologists, such as the philosopher Timothy McGrew. The core of the argument is an investigation of the Bible. When one examines the Scriptures, one finds a number of historical, factual claims which either overlap and confirm others made independently or fill in gaps that authors familiar with current events at the time of the writings would have assumed their readers knew about. These coincidences are therefore undesigned–they are unintentional–but they show that the authors who wrote the books which contain them were telling historical truths.

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Alone, Alone, Alone: The Ultimate Social Meaning of Friedan’s Sovereign-Self Feminism – So, how’s the feminist extremism working out for you?  It is sad that so many people threw away their lives (figuratively) and their children (literally) based on Friedan’s false worldview.

For those trying to assess the half-century outcomes of the feminist revolution Friedan helped spark, the first reality demanding attention is indeed simply the epidemic of female unhappiness in recent years.Despite all the glowing assurances Friedan and her allies gave, their efforts to make women free to “search . . . for themselves” has not made those freely questing female selves happy. A 2009 study conducted by Wharton School researchers Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers has concluded,on the basis of a very large longitudinal data set, that during the last 35 years—a period of astonishing triumph for feminist activists—“women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men.” Indeed, the researchers report that although women reported higher levels of happiness than men three-and-a-half decades ago, “women no longer report being happier than men, and, in many instances, now report happiness that is below that of men.”

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Roundup

Those Pre-Christian Deities Aren’t Much Like Jesus After All – A popular atheist objection to Christianity is that it copied its believes from other religions.  The link thoroughly debunks the comparisons of Jesus to the mythical Mithras.  (Also see Copycats for more reasons why the atheists’ approach is riddled with errors).  The alleged comparisons are all false, meaningless or cases where the Mithras details post-date Jesus.

Claim: Mithras was born of a virgin on December 25th, in a cave, attended by shepherds
Truth: Mithras was actually born out of solid rock, leaving a cave. He was not born of a virgin (unless you consider the rock mountain to have been a virgin). His birth was celebrated on December 25th, but both Mithras worshippers and the earliest Christians borrowed this celebration from earlier winter solstice celebrations. The earliest version of the Mithras narrative that includes shepherds appears one hundred years after the appearance of the New Testament; it is far more likely Mithraism borrowed the shepherds from Christianity than the other way around.

. . .

Claim: Mithras had 12 companions or disciples

Truth: There is no evidence for any of this in the traditions of Iran or Rome. It is possible that the idea that Mithras had 12 disciples came from a mural in which Mithras is surrounded by twelve signs and personages of the Zodiac (two of whom are the moon and the sun), but even this imagery is post-Christian.

Claim: Mithras promised his followers immortality
Truth: While there is little evidence for this, it is certainly reasonable to think that Mithras did offer immortality, although this is not uncommon for any god of mythology.

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You Must Connect The Dots. Here, I’ll Help – a great explanation and critique of Liberalism by the Bumbling Genius.

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IRS apologizes for targeting conservative groups – Would they have apologized if they hadn’t been caught?  This is a great reminder that you can’t trust those in power to be fair.  This is just a sample of what they are capable of.  More here about how they’ve known about it since 2011.

Now, President Obama, tell me again why we are shouldn’t be concerned about tyranny?  Be prepared to remind people of this when they claim you are paranoid merely for questioning the goodness of our leaders and their plans.

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Idols of Awesome and Shibboleths of Community – A great read to help keep things in perspective.  If you really want to do something radically different because of your faith, that’s great.  But you can be an authentic believer anywhere.  Don’t let people guilt you into thinking you need to do something that is radical by their definition.  What is really radical today is a stay-at-home mom.

Every once in a while I stumble over something that opens my eyes wide to a lot of the silliness of secularism that pervades evangelicalism and, in turn, warps the whole of generations.Anthony Bradley points out that there is a crazy movement going on right now within young evangelical circles to shun the suburbs and engage in a “new legalism” of radical faith.

The best I can figure is that somehow suburbs are just bad. (Read Keith Miller on this point) I think there is something bigger than that and it goes beyond evangelicals to, particularly, millenials and those who close out the tail end of Gen X and Y. We’ve made idols of the awesome in our lives. All of us.

Each of us forms in our head an ideal. Instead of enjoying our present where, as CS Lewis noted, we are closest to God, we either look to a future that may or may not be, or we hold on to a past that maybe was not as shiny as we think. Then we surround ourselves with others and, in a culture of Baby Boomer grandparents and their offspring, decide our life will not be fulfilled unless it is in some way awesome.

P.S. Shibboleth is a term from the Bible.  It is an interesting Old Testament story that all Christians should know about.

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9 things you should know about p*rnography and the brain – clear examples of how sin manifests itself and impacts us physically.  Too bad the “comprehensive sex ed” classes don’t teach this.  They are too busy pretending there are no consequences.

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Homosexual man complains to NZ Human Rights Tribunal for being barred from seminary — And he’ll probably win.  This is how “gay rights” advocacy is used by Satan to try and destroy the church.  The complaint should be dismissed simply for its absurdity.  Imagine a Christian complaining about not being able to be an LGBTQ leader, even if he wants the position just so he can undermine their organization with his opposite beliefs.

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A few important messages from Grumpy Cat.

Roundup

Jackie Robinson Had the Guts Not to Fight Back – I don’t watch many movies and probably won’t see this one, but was glad to read that the positive Christian themes were evident in the film — and, more importantly, in real life.

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Once again, more guns = less crime but media tells people the opposite.

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6 Ways Benghazi Proves Hillary Should Never Be President — And those are just the Benhazi reasons.  I think the fact that she lied to the faces of the victims’ parents is reason enough for her to go away for good.

It was sad that the Left actually cheered Hillary’s line, ignoring the obvious fact that every sin ever, starting with that of Adam & Eve, could be dismissed if that logic was legitimate.

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The little boy who started a sex change aged eight because he (and his lesbian parents) knew he always wanted to be a girl – This is child abuse (the sex change) upon child abuse (putting him with lesbian parents).

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Why do corporations ship jobs overseas? What causes outsourcing of jobs? – If you were starting a new company, all other things being equal, where would you go — a city with high tax rates or one with low tax rates?  If your headquarters was in a high tax city and you had to add production, would you consider doing it in a lower tax city?

Of course you would, or your competitors might put you out of business.  Now, replace “city” with “country.”

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Hope and Chains: #WarOnWomen Kidnapper Is Cuyahoga County Democrat – Anyone think the media wouldn’t have blared this 24×7 if the party affiliation had been different?

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Super freak: Guy leaves wife and 3 kids so he can dress up like a woman.  I really feel sorry for his wife and kids.  His utter selfishness, fueled by a perverse culture that will celebrate him being who he “really” is (a selfish freak), is at the root of this.

Top ABC News editor Don Ennis walked into his Manhattan office on Friday in a “little black dress” and a brunette bobbed wig and announced to colleagues that from now on, he would like to be known as Dawn.

The 49-year-old father of three said he’s splitting from his wife of 17 years to become a woman, or Dawn Stacey Ennis, as she is now known on her governmental records.

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Teacher posts gay sex poster in grade 7&8 classroom: school board says he had ‘good intentions’ – No, his intentions were evil.

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Roundup

Poll: 55% of Americans Don’t Know Planned Parenthood Does Abortions — That’s nuts — don’t these people read my blog?!

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When is it appropriate for Christians to start dating?  Some great advice:

The trouble with underage dating is that it presents an entirely faulty view of what interaction with the opposite gender should be about. Rather than placing emphasis on building one strong relationship with one person at a stage of life when a marital commitment is feasible, dating encourages young people to pour their energies into consistently seducing other young people at a time when neither of them are capable of making any long-term commitments. Their “relationships” are destined to fail from the get-go because they are founded on unhealthy perceptions of love and not backed by any real necessity to stick it out. . . .

Sadly, parents who should know better continue to display shocking naïveté regarding the absurd practices of driving their twelve year olds out on a “date,” or purchasing provocative clothing for their sixteen-year-olds, or sympathizing with their broken-hearted fourteen-year-olds by assuring them that they’ll “find someone better.” “They’re just having fun,” they’ll tell us, rolling their eyes at what they consider to be our tightly wound principles. I work a volunteer shift at Crisis Pregnancy Clinic where I witness every week the ruined lives and broken dreams that “fun” has left with our youth.

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Just one of many reasons you shouldn’t be stupid and listen to psychics: They are fake, demonic and deadly.

The cases of the missing Cleveland girls took heartbreaking turns over the years. In 2004, Amanda’s mother Louwana Miller went on a national TV show to discuss the case and was told by a psychic her daughter was dead:

Desperate for any clue as to Amanda Berry’s whereabouts, and tired of unanswered questions from authorities, Miller turned to a psychic on Montel Williams’ nationally syndicated television show.
The psychic said what the FBI, police and Miller hadn’t.
“She’s not alive, honey,” Sylvia Browne told her matter-of-factly. “Your daughter’s not the kind who wouldn’t call.”

Miller died in 2006 at age 44; family members blamed the agonizing loss of her daughter for Miller’s death.

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Did your media of choice tell you that gun crime has dropped dramatically in the last 20 years?

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Your tax dollars at work.  I wish I was making this up.

Obama is spending over $300,000.00 of taxpayers’ money to develop a so–called … “culturally relevant stigma-reducing intervention” program for the transgender population in India.

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Kermit Gosnell is not the inventor and sole practitioner of the “snipping” technique to kill babies who survive abortions.  Apparently it is a mainstream procedure.  Warning: As you would expect, it is gruesome.

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Social justice, simplified — Stealing apples yourself = bad.  Getting someone to steal them for you = social justice!

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From Pro-life is Pro-woman:

Lately I’ve been accused of being a hypocrite by the pro-abort trolls that can’t seem to keep their noses out of other people’s business.

I’m a hypocrite because I advocate for abstinence even though I myself have had a child out of wedlock.

My answer to that is: So what?

Good for her!  Her critics have no idea what words mean. Using their definitions, it would be hypocritical for anyone to ever caution against something they regret.

Recovering alcoholics would be hypocrites for encouraging people not to abuse alcohol.  Every person I’ve met in prison ministry would be a hypocrite for telling people not to commit crimes. And so on.

Sadly, I knew people with really high IQs who refused to caution their kids against pre-marital sex because they thought it would be hypocritical. Screwtape lives.

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Video: Michigan not much better at policing abortion mills than Pennsylvania – We should never be surprised at rule breaking by people who kill babies for a living or by the people who make a living supporting people who kill babies for a living.

Besides the actions of the defendants in the Kermit Gosnell house-of-horrors abortion clinic in Philadelphia, the original grand jury expressed outrage in their 2011 report over the lack of intervention by the city and state of Pennsylvania to stop Gosnell’s operation.  The refusal to address numerous reports and complaints over a years-long period was “by design,” the grand jury emphasized, as the political and regulatory establishments chose to protect abortionists rather than the women they maimed and the children they killed.

Pennsylvania isn’t the only state with designs to protect abortionists, either.  Earlier this week,Michigan Live and WOOD TV exposed the cronyism and official neglect that allowed a now-defunct abortion clinic to operate while owned by a convicted felon and piling up complaint after complaint . . .

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Benny Hinn Asks Followers for $2.5 Million to Get Out of Debt – Surprise!  Benny Hinn wants more money.  He is so flamingly false that I barely feel sorry for those taken in by him.  But with his “God told me ______” bit he’d fit right in with the false teachers in the “God is still speaking” United Church of Christ.  World-lovers like Hinn and the UCC can use phrases like that to rationalize all sorts of mischief.

Hopefully he and his “anonymous donor” will both fail.

“God has laid it on my heart to plant a seed of $2.5 million into your ministry, but God only wants me to make this gift if the ministry partners match the amount within 90 days! I feel so strongly that He wants them to be part of the supernatural wealth transfer that is coming to every believer who will obey God’s Word,” the man reportedly adds.

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Tyrants always deny being tyrants.  He warns against cynicism, while we warn against being naive and ignorant of history.

Roundup

Free PowerPoint slides on apologetics.

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Department of Defense states that it will punish Christians for evangelizing — And make no mistake, they will have incredibly loose definitions of “evangelizing.”  These radical changes to our freedoms of religion and speech are coming like a freight train.  If you are just a social Christian you should probably save yourself some trouble and get out now.

More ridiculous actions: Runner points to God in gratitude and team gets disqualified.

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Massive Use of Food Stamps by Illegal Aliens – Not surprising.  Just the mere talk of amnesty has a dramatic impact on the influx of illegal aliens.

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Good news! Liberty University offers scholarship to persecuted Eagle Scout – He is still being charged with a felony for the simple “mistake” of exercising his constitutional rights.

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I hope your kids and grandkids survived Beat Up A White Kid Day. What, the mainstream media didn’t tell you about that?

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How the LGBTQ leaders talk when they think no one is listening (Hat tip: Americans For Truth About Homosexuality):

1. Monogamy is only an illusion, there is no such thing, and it is good that monogamy does not exist.
2. There is no problem with having 3, 4, or 5 legal parents for a child.
3. Marriage is oppression
4. Marriage is not a life long relationship
5. Marriage is inadequate and needs to be redefined
6. Fidelity needs to be redefined
7. Sex is more interesting than marriage
8. There is a need to separate the ideas of sexuality and intimacy
9. Commitment should not be equated with monogamy
10. Marriage should not exist
11. The institution of marriage will change with the advent of homosexual “marriage”

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“Gun Control” Was Going On Long Before Gunpowder – Far too many people are ignorant of history and the concept of original sin, so they carelessly give up freedoms that people shed blood to obtain.

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Ew, gross! NY Times, Washington Post reject ad showing Planned Parenthood sex ed images (explicit) – Think about that.  PP shows images to 10 year olds that these newspapers won’t show.  These baby-killing perverts should not only be de-funded but in jail.

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Pew: 64% of Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan support death penalty for leaving Islam – And those weren’t even the countries with the highest percentages.

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Police say liberal student activist threatened herself with rape in Facebook hoax, framed conservatives – the title says it all.

Ms. Wanker-Simons can now join the long list of liberal hate hoaxers that includes among others:

• Olander Cuthrell
• Charlie Rogers
• Sharmeka Moffitt
• Joseph Baken
• Alexandra Pennell
• Aimee Whitchurch and Christel Conklin
• Quinn Matney
• Aubriana Banks
• Sarah Marshak
• Tawana Brawley
• Crystal Gail Mangum
• Kerri Dunn
• Leah Miller
• Ahmad Saad Nasim

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Obama: Huh, “I’m not familiar” with Benghazi whistleblowers being threatened – This already looked pretty fishy, but when he pretends at a press conference that he hadn’t even heard about it you know there is something there.  Even if whistleblowers weren’t threatened, the odds are zero that Obama would not have been prepped for that question before a press conference.

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Despite sequestration, Obama funds homosexual groups in other countries – Your tax dollars at work: Borrowing from China to spread a message of perversion.  Oh, and it is a higher priority than White House tours, air traffic employees, etc.

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Consistency: You’re doing’ it wrong.

Roundup

The Tragedy of the Dumb Church — anti-intellectualism is a huge problem in churches.  The author’s example of churches ignoring apologetics for adults and youth is the same thing I’ve seen at most churches.

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More great undercover videos from Lila Rose — She busted Planned Parenthood a few times.  Now she nails other abortionists for admitting what they’d do with babies who survived “botched abortions” (as someone on Facebook noted, is there a more bizarre term than that?  I mean, they are saying, “We tried to kill this defenseless baby and she survived.  What now?!”).

My only internal conflict is that abortions in the womb — whether early or not — are just as evil as infanticide.  These Gosnell et al ghouls seem worse but pro-choices will just dismiss them as being extreme.

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Five Tactics for Cheap, Healthy Eating – some good, simple advice.

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The Thing About Sex — great article on the biblical perspective.

From an evolutionary perspective sex is little more than a means of spreading genes, of ensuring survival from one generation to the next. From a pornographic perspective, the meaning of sex is physical gratification so that a person’s worth extends no farther than her (or his) ability to satisfy another person’s cravings. From a romantic comedy perspective, sex is a component of an exploratory phase of a relationship and one that precedes expressions of love and loyalty. These are ubiquitous, powerful messages that compete with truth.

A Christian perspective on sex could hardly stand in sharper contrast. There we see that sex belongs to marriage and that marriage has been created by God for a very specific purpose. Before it is anything else, marriage is a picture, a metaphor, of the relationship of Christ and his church. Within that picture, that representation of Christ and his church, we have sex. Sex is a necessary component of marriage so that a couple desiring to live in obedience to the Bible will regularly have sex together (see 1 Corinthians 7:1-5). And here is where we come to your concern. . . .

This is where a Christian understanding of sex is so much better and greater than the alternatives. It heightens the purpose and importance of sex by celebrating all that sex is and all that it is meant to be, for it is here that the physical, the emotional and the spiritual come together in the most powerful way. Literally: the most powerful way. There is nothing in the human experience that brings these three together in such dramatic fashion and this is exactly why sex is reserved for the marriage bed. God wants marriage to be a unique kind of relationship and nothing marks marriage’s uniqueness more than sex.

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You Say, This Is History’s Darkest Hour? G. Campbell Morgan Says, Oh, Be Quiet! – Good reminder by Randy Alcorn.  As bad as things seem, in light of history not much has changed.  We have the message of true hope for a world that desperately needs it — just like it always has.

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Kermit Gosnell is not an exception.  That’s one of the reasons why the media is suppressing his story.  Relatively speaking, he was more compassionate than this abortionist – Abortion Doctor: I Would Leave Babies to Die Born Alive After Abortion.  At least Gosnell killed them quickly.  

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Syrup of Ipecac substitute of the week: Barack Obama to largest abortion provider Planned Parenthood: God Bless You – We shouldn’t be surprised when drivers of unrestricted, taxpayer-funded baby killing blasphemously invoke God’s name to try and sanitize their beliefs. Oddly, he never mentioned Kermit Gosnell during his talk.

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Who would have guessed this?  Having female prison guards in male prisons leads to rape, pregnancies and abuse.  Sadly, because of political correctness the leaders must pretend the solution isn’t obvious.  Therefore, they’ll spend a lot of time and money trying to fix the problem with things they know won’t work.  The prison where I do some ministry has female guards.  It always struck me as a combustible situation, and here’ s proof that it is.

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Why is DHS stockpiling so much ammo? - Probably an unbelievably wasteful attempt to drive up prices.  Yeah, let’s borrow more money from China during the sequester to throw away like this, while we cancel White House tours and deliberately make air travel less bearable.

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Roundup

Mandatory background checks?  No problem — as long as it is for voting and not gun purchases (already in the Constitution!).

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Some great advice on raising Godly children (even if it is over 200 years old — or is it especially because it is over 200 years old?).  A few:

1. The best exercise in the world for children is to let them romp and jump about, as soon as they are able, according to their own fancy.

2. A parent that has once obtained and knows how to preserve authority will do more by a look of displeasure, than another by the most passionate words and even blows. It holds universally in families and schools, and even the greater bodies of men, the army and navy, that those who keep the strictest discipline give the fewest strokes.

3. There is not a more disgusting sight than the impotent rage of a parent who has no authority.

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My only complaint about Marshall is that he doesn’t post often enough.  But he’s back with a great take-down on a false teacher who insists that God is pleased with “committed, loving and monogamous” homosexual unions and that Bible-believers should change because we are on the “wrong side of history.”  My comment there:

Great post, Marshall. I could comment on each individually point but would basically be reiterating what you said. So I’ll just note how ridiculous it is for anyone — let alone an alleged follower of Christ — to appeal to a public majority as an authentic, God-approved victory. Using that logic, the early church was on the “losing side of history,” for they had no way of knowing that the persecution would ever end.

1 John 2:15-16 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world–the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does–comes not from the Father but from the world.

P.S. Re. “two committed, loving and monogamous homosexuals” — 3% of the population is homosexual, and probably 3% of those want to marry, and even less of those even want to be monogamous (another dirty little secret that the media won’t tell you). So as you noted, this is a fantastically small percentage of people to abandon free speech and freedom of religion over — not to mention the active destruction of the innocence of children via public school indoctrination.

And having read the Bible many times, I assure you that there is no passage even hinting that being fully committed to your rebellion-of-choice against God somehow sanitizes it.

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Atheist professor converts to Christianity.  I appreciated his concession that he would use his experience to “buffalo” his students.

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They are still hiding the truth: Big Three Networks Cover Internet Cats Pics, Lit Trivia, Canadian Clumsiness, But Not Gosnell Trial.  If you only get your news from the mainstream media you are hopelessly — and willfully? — uninformed.

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Harrison Ford has 7 airplanes and will fly to get a cheeseburger, but lectures you on the environment.  Check.

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This is why everyone should want limited government: Even though the need for helium regulations ended over 80 years ago AND there have been bi-partisan efforts to get rid of them, they still exist.

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Hey! Politicians Are People Too – Don’t let the title fool you.  It doesn’t mean, “. . . so don’t be so critical of them!”  It is a great reminder of why we should limit their power, not increase it.

Of all that the American founders understood when they set this grand experiment in motion, their keen grasp of man’s propensity for evil might have been their greatest asset.  And this asset led them to limited the power, not only of the government, but of the majority also.  While they realized that government must exist, ^* they did not envision government as a benevolent god-like entity.  No, they saw government as a dangerous collection of flawed individuals who suffer from the same afflictions of arrogance and selfishness that plague all mankind; especially those who seek, and then are lent, the reins of power.

Some see government as naturally benevolent because politicians are freed from the motivation of profit.  Such  is a naive and gullible view.  Politicians have plenty to profit politically by making popular promises today while strapping future generations with the bill.   Meanwhile, for the “benevolent” politician, power is a great source of wealth, luxury and ease.  One need only observe politicians, both the ones they love and hate, to see this.

Sadly, and much to even my own dismay, government is not a god-like entity that can usher in social justice, and this is especially true when it is elected by a constituency that rejects the very existence of moral absolutes.  No, the government is a collection of flawed politicians with their own aspirations and venal motivations, because, in the end, politicians are people too.

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Voddie Baucham has a great critique of the “sissified needy Jesus” preached by far too many.  His generic quote about what lots of pastors say (“people already know that they’re bad,” so I don’t need to preach about sin) is precisely what a bad pastor at a previous church (Disciples of Christ) used to say. No, we reflexively (rotten) cherry pick people to compare ourselves to based on our own un-Godly standards so we can feel better about ourselves.

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It shows their lack of character that they would deliberately make their “subjects” suffer to advance their ideology.

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Great take-off on the COEXIST bumper sticker.

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Roundup

In Honor Of Earthday, 13 Worst Earthday Predictions – Ever notice how those who celebrate Earth Day pretend its creator doesn’t exist?  And how their predictions tend to be hopelessly wrong and counterproductive?

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As one would expect, even half of the non-gun owning households would have wanted one had they lived in Boston last week.

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How to ruin your child’s chance of a happy love life: Have an affair – and the damage is WORSE the older they are when you stray – That can’t be right!  The needs and wants of adults outweigh any concerns about kids. They are resilient blah blah blah.

This culture pretends to care about kids but the actions don’t show it: Abortion, adultery, “same-sex marriage,” easy divorce and so much more.
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Here’s another Leftist outlet that returns literally zero hits when searching for “Gosnell” – Jim “the Gospel is all about wealth redistribution“ Wallis and his organization are doing a great job of advancing the Leftist cause of hiding these crimes.  Their title even references social justice, but they haven’t written a word about Kermit Gosnell and his mass infanticides.  They are too busy claiming to be prophets in trying to gut the 2nd Amendment and to disarm you.24

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Abductions of Christian Girls Increased in Egypt Since Regime Change – The real war on women.  And where is the Left?  [Crickets chirping]  Oh, right, busy hiding the Kermit Gosnell story.

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Supposedly there may be a movie version of the book, The Shack. A good analysis of the bad theology from that book is here. If you hear people talk about the movie please share those concerns with them.  (Hat tip: Erich from Facebook)

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The Liberal “safe sex” programs are a lie, because they ignore the spiritual and emotional aspects of sex and give a false sense of security (birth control often fails and even if used correctly it doesn’t prevent all diseases).  But even if they weren’t lying, they would be inconsistent for saying that sex ed won’t increase sexual behavior but gun education would increase the misuse of guns.

Roundup

Gun registries and background checks are either meaningless or malicious.

Meaningless: The criminals won’t participate, so all you have is an expensive, burdensome process to gather a list of law-abiding citizens.  And even if they worked on guns, they would do nothing about knives, clubs, pressure cookers, etc.

Malicious: The lists will ultimately be used to disarm law-abiding citizens.  Anyone denying that is part of the problem — either via evil intentions or via naiveté and/or ignorance of history.

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Mark Steyn nails it, as usual.

In America, all atrocities are not equal: Minutes after the Senate declined to support so-called gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacre, the president rushed ill-advisedly on air to give a whiny, petulant performance predicated on the proposition that one man’s mass infanticide should call into question the constitutional right to bear arms.

Simultaneously, the media remain terrified that another man’s mass infanticide might lead you gullible rubes to question the constitutional right to abortion, so the ongoing Kermit Gosnell trial in Philadelphia has barely made the papers — even though it involves large numbers of fully delivered babies who were decapitated and had their feet chopped off and kept in pickling jars. Which would normally be enough to guarantee a perpetrator front-page coverage for weeks on end.

In the most recent testimony, one of the “clinic”‘s “nurses” testified that she saw a baby delivered into the toilet, where his little arms and feet flapped around as if trying to swim to safety.

Then another “women’s health worker” reached in and, in the procedure’s preferred euphemism, “snipped” the baby’s neck — i.e., severed his spinal column.

“Doctor” Gosnell seems likely to prove America’s all-time champion mass murderer. But his victims are ideologically problematic for the media, and so the poor blood-soaked monster will never get his moment in the spotlight.

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Hey, don’t miss Fossil Freedom Day of Action this year!  I wonder how the participants will get there, because they would never be hypocritical and use fossil fuels to go to an event dedicated to not using fossil fuels.  Right?!

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20 Questions Liberals Can’t Answer

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Ben Carson Silenced, Bill Ayers Given Podium

Inspiring role model Ben Carson was forced to cancel a commencement speech at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, despite being director of the school’s Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery, because he does not endorse the grotesque blasphemy of homosexual “marriage.” In stark contrast, unrepentant communist terrorist Bill Ayers — best known for his involvement in bombing the Pentagon, the Capitol, and NYPD Police Headquarters; for encouraging his followers to “kill all the rich people” and “kill your parents”; and for still more damagingly launching the career of Barack Hussein Obama from his living room — was well received last spring at the University of Oregon, where he crowed that America is in decline . . .

The USA is declining, all right. What healthy country would silence Ben Carson, while tolerating an evil freak like Bill Ayers, even electing his protégé to the White House?

But the decline can be reversed, so long as people remember the principles that prevailed when America was great, and are willing to fight to restore them.

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Good commentary on original sin.  Or just funny.

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Planned Parenthood agrees with them as well, as do many false teachers.  Oh, and they all want them to be funded by taxpayers.

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This was floating around last week, which no Christian should ever use.  Real Christians know that praying to any other “god” is not only useless but blasphemous.

But it gets better: In a bit of morbid irony in the midst of this tragedy, the car hijacked by the terrorists had a COEXIST bumper sticker.  Talk about being mugged by reality!

More from Mark Steyn on the COEXIST bumper sticker from the car the terrorists hijacked:

I wonder, when the “CO-EXIST” car is returned to its owner, whether he or she will keep the bumper sticker in place. One would not expect him to conclude, as the gays of Amsterdam and the Jews of Toulouse and the Christians of Egypt have bleakly done, that if it weren’t for that Islamic crescent you wouldn’t need a bumper sticker at all. But he may perhaps have learned that life is all a bit more complicated than the smiley-face banalities of the multiculturalists.

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Did FDR help end the Depression or prolong it?  The pesky Law of Intended Consequences resulted in the latter.

Roundup

9 Things You Should Know About Female Body Image Issues — hopefully this gets people to re-think their views.

9. The only complete way to overcome the problem is to have our beliefs about body image transformed by the Holy Spirit. As Heather Davis says in the Journal of Biblical Counseling:

In pursuing worldly beauty, we strive to become this elusive image in place of who we really are. You and I are created in the image of the living God. Our purpose is to reflect His image to the world. But since the fall, we let the world inscribe its image on us. It is the very picture of sin and ultimately death. Instead of being transformed to God’s image, we conform to the world’s image. We are hopelessly stuck in a lifeless cycle, exchanging God for the creature as our object of worship. But God in His mercy rescued us!

In love, God sent Jesus Christ to take on the consequences of our idolatrous affair. He became sin so that we might become righteous. In Christ, God gives us freedom from sin’s power now and hope for its eradication in heaven. God makes you beautiful with the beauty of His Son, Jesus. It is in gazing at God’s image in Jesus Christ that you are transformed. Romans 12:1-2 says, “Therefore, I urge you, (sisters) in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not be conformed any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

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The 2nd Amendment is safe — for now.  Mercifully a few Senators did the right thing.  Note how Obama was more upset at losing this bill than he was after Benghazi.  And how he has ghoulishly milked the Newtown tragedy but was nearly silent on Aurora.  Why?  Because the latter was before the election.

But kudos to Senators Cruz, Lee and Paul for being willing to provide leadership where there has been none.

Now – on to Immigration.

More good news: The most important thing about yesterday’s vote: national reciprocal concealed-carry is doable.

And still more good news:  Could Obama’s gun-control push cost Democrats the Senate?

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A good summary of the moral argument for God’s existence as well as responses to objections to it.

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“Day of Silence” — annual homosexual assault on children in schools — taking place this Friday, April 19. Parents can fight back! – Hey, how about a day of silence for the 1,000,000+ unwanted human beings who will be killed in the U.S. this year via abortion?

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Never forget the real issues with the Kermit Gosnell story.  It isn’t that he did some bad things.  What would you expect from an abortionist?!  Never be surprised that people who kill babies for a living will lie, have unsanitary clinics, kill babies 30 seconds after it is legal, hide statutory rape and sex trafficking, etc.

The real issues are:

1. The Liberal media, Planned Parenthood and false teachers knew that he was far too similar to other abortionists so they tried to hide the truth.  
2. Killing babies 30 seconds after being born is morally equivalent to killing them in the womb.
3. The political correctness of abortion meant that the safety regulations were not enforced for 17 years.

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Newtown shooting reaction = take the guns from law-abiding people.  Boston bombing reaction = take the guns from law-abiding people.

These scenarios are nearly guaranteed.  The media, Liberal politicians and false teachers will be very, very sad if it isn’t #2.

What we can expect once we know what the attack was about:

1. If it was an Islamist, Dems will immediately proclaim that the person(s) was a lone wolf and not representative or part of the Islamic world in the least, and if you try to link the even to Islamic terrorism, Sharia law, etc, well, you’re an Islamophobe. They’ll also say that we should have more spending and federal government because of this 1 off incident.

2. If it was a domestic plot, they will immediately look to portray the person(s) as far right, and will keep that narrative up despite any evidence to the contrary, and will make this about the Conservative movement/Republican Party as a whole, demonizing all, attempting to destroy all on the Right, despite Conservatives disowning these fringe groups. Oh, and call for more government and spending and liberty restrictions.

3. If the person is easily known as a liberal (Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Black Bloc, some environmentalist, etc, groups that Liberals rarely disown), the media will either completely downplay the link and still find a way to blame Republicans or let the story quietly die out while also mentioning that this was an aberration and means we need X (gun control, more spending, bigger government, higher taxes, etc).

   Also see: Left hopes bomber is a white dude.

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Speaking of the media not reporting important stories, see Top Ten Excuses for Black Mob Violence.  So is it racist to report on black-on-white racism? Apparently.  Try finding these in the national news.

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Roundup

If you have a Twitter account, post about #gosnell and ask why there is a media blackout.

Just how many infanticides would an abortionist have to commit before MSNBC and Politico would find it newsworthy?  (As noted below, searches for Kermit Gosnell return literally zero items.)  CBS had 5 stories on dogs this week and none on Gosnell.  How many would he have to commit before President Obama, the Democrats and the false teachers even acknowledged it, let alone spoke out against it?

Whenever these people bring up gun control, ask them about Gosnell and how much they spoke out against him.  [Crickets chirping]

Would the media have covered the Gosnell murder trial if the abortionist had killed the babies with guns?  They are milking the Newtown tragedy to destroy our freedoms yet completely ignore these murders.  They know it would destroy their “back alley abortion” meme if people knew what happened in front of the alley.

And remember that Planned Parenthood and Obama fought for these killings to be legal.

From Sifting Reality, this screen shot says it all.  Try it yourself at http://tv.msnbc.com/?s=kermit+gosnell .

This screen capture is not photoshopped.  I took it at 8:50 PM tonight

Not. One. Story.

Same thing for Politico.

Can you imagine the coverage if it were dogs being killed?

 Great quote about the media blackout on abortionist Kermit Gosnell:

“If Dr. Gosnell had walked into a nursery and shot seven infants with an AR-15, it would be national news and the subject of presidential hand-wringing.” That was the challenging observation made this morning by Rep. Chris Smith,  R-NJ, on the floor of the U.S. House.

Because Kermit Gosnell instead allegedly snipped the spinal cords of seven newborn babies in a building called an abortion clinic, the national media has almost uniformly ignored the case, said Smith, something that he charged amounted to a deliberate “cover-up.”

“Will the decades-long major national news media cover-up of the brutality—and violence—of abortion methods ever end?” asked Smith. “Will Americans ever be told the horrifying details as to how—and how often—abortionists dismember, decapitate, and chemically poison innocent babies?”

Kermit Gosnell is currently undergoing trial on charges of murdering seven newborn infants by slitting their spinal cords after failed abortions. Former employees of Gosnell have testified that hundreds of babies – many of them viable – were “aborted” in this way at Gosnell’s “House of Horrors” clinic.

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Background checks do not get the job done — they sound like a good idea until you actually think about them.  They wouldn’t have prevented any of the shootings that people are using to rob us of our Constitutional rights.  Criminals won’t obey them.  And so on.

As Ann Coulter says, to reduce gun violence you need to to deal with the crazy people (which Democrats aggressively fight) and advance concealed carry rights.  At least that’s what all the facts say.

All the actual evidence — mountains of it, in peer-reviewed studies by highly respected economists and criminologists and endlessly retested — shows that limits on magazine capacity, background checks and assault weapons bans will accomplish nothing. Only one policy has been shown to dramatically reduce multiple public shootings: concealed-carry laws.

. . .

For most of the 20th century, from 1900 to 1970, there was an average of four mass public shootings per decade. Throughout the ’70s, as the loony bins were being emptied, the average number of mass shootings suddenly shot up to 13. In the 3.3 decades since 1980, after all the mental institutions had been turned into condos, mass shootings skyrocketed to 36 on average per decade.

Mass shootings don’t correlate with gun ownership; they correlate with not locking up schizophrenics.

And never let the pro-abort gun-grabbers get away with pretending they just want to protect children.  These moral freaks think we aren’t killing enough of them in the womb, so they want taxpayer-funded abortions to kill some more.

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From the “How will ‘same-sex marriage hurt you’” files: State Sues Florist Who Refused to Decorate Gay Wedding – and this is before it becomes a Federal issue.

“Arlene’s Flowers has catered to all patrons, including homosexuals, for many years,” Bristol wrote in his reply to the Attorney General. “Arlene’s Flowers has had openly gay employees.”

He told The Seattle Times that he believes the state is trying to make an example of the flower shop.

“This is about gay marriage, it’s not about a person being gay,” he told the newspaper. “She has a conscientious objection to homosexual marriage, not homosexuality. It violates her conscience.”

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Anti-Anxiety Medication Used as Pretext to Confiscate Firearms - this is where this is headed, folks.

Given the current political climate, all new gun control measures must be resisted ferociously, because liberal authoritarians have made clear that they will disarm law-abiding citizens any way they can. Even ostensibly reasonable objectives like keeping firearms away from lunatics are providing cover for tyrannical abuse:

The New York State Police are suspending the handgun permits of people in the state who are prescribed anti-anxiety medication, according to Jim Tresmond of the Tresmond Law Firm in Hamburg, New York. …

“We were flummoxed by this whole matter,” the attorney said. “The HIPPA act is supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening. It’s a gross invasion of our privacy rights.”

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule establishes national standards to protect individuals’ medical records and other personal health information, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Does anyone really trust Big Government to keep information private? If your property belongs to bureaucrats to redistribute as they see fit, so does your medical data.

Make no mistake: You cannot trust the government not to abuse laws like this.  They will take your guns at will and the burden of proof will be on you to prove how sane you are.

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I’ve seen countless critics of Rick Warren be extremly respectful of him and silent in the wake of his son’s suicide, so I was suprised to see this: Rick Warren Uses Pastors.com to Attack Critics in Wake of Son’s Death.  Beth Moore was his attack dog here, hypocritically hating on the (alleged) haters and exploiting his son’s suicide to use against his critics.  She should know better than to support Warren’s theology, but then again, she’s part of the problem.  Just a few of the terms that “loving” Beth used during this period when Warren’s critics (at least the Christians) have been nearly universally silent.  Can’t you feel the love and compassion?

• Hateful

• Relentless

• Bullies

• Mud slingers

• Mean

• Careless

• Self seeking

• Haters

• Mockers

• Slanderers

• Snide

• Self serving

• Enemies

And Mark Driscoll played the same hypocritical game in attacking Warren’s “attackers.”  But is it wrong to point out when a Christian leader does things like endorsing books calling people back to Catholicism?

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“It jumped, the arm”; Update: Media score – Rutgers 41, Gosnell 0 – Media blackout continues.  They cover all sorts of lesser stories but ignore the abortionist who killed babies outside the womb, had an unbelievably filthy clinic and mistreated women.

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The government has no money for [fill in the blank], but they have plenty to spread homosexuality abroad.  Yes, those are your taxes, doing things that should never be done.

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Great and accurate send-up of gun control people.

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Roundup

The Atheist’s Dilemma — an encouraging story and a reminder of the importance of being a good ambassador, using apologetics and not using the “blind faith” arguments.

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Did You Know? 90% of Babies With Down Syndrome are Aborted – that’s the worldly (final) “solution” to medical problems.  It will happen with more and more people as other issues are discovered in utero.

We were out dancing the other night at an outdoor shopping area with a Latin Rock band.  There were lots of kids around, including several very happy Down Syndrome children dancing to the music.  It is so sad that the loving, tolerant, pro-abortion crowd thinks that society and the children would have been better off if they had been destroyed in the womb.

And even if it was acceptable to kill the unborn who “really” have Down Syndrome (it isn’t!!), people should be terrified at all the false positives that occur.

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Good news: I don’t follow my stats that much, but I had another record day fueled by Reddit linking to the Wendy Wright Schools Richard Dawkins post.

Bad news: Lots of the comments were just tired sound bites by people who didn’t read the post (leading to my adding a couple updates to the post).

Good news: It did lead to a lot of people reading the link on the minimal facts and the Atheist’s Dilemma post linked above.  I figured that if thousands of people were coming with a hostile attitude that I’d point them to some important truths, and it worked!

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More good news: I realized that when the song that just came on my playlist was over that my exercise bike workout would be complete.

Bad news: The song was Free Bird.  Live.

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Killing Sugar Subsidy Would Send a Sweet Message – basic economic principles aren’t that hard to understand, but our leaders are ignorant of them or do the opposite out of self interest.  We need more Junior Achievement classes in this country.

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Army Reserve training material: Evangelicals, Catholics are extremist groups – But of course!  People who support killing unwanted babies with taxpayer funding = not extremists.  People who oppose killing unwanted babies = extremists.  Check.

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The Danger of “Needing” a Job — good advice on living below your means.

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Tattoo regret — Think before you ink.  When my kids were younger I’d ask how they’d feel if they’d received tattoos of Barney the Dinosaur when they were toddlers.  Of course they were aghast at that.  I think the message got through: What seems great now may not later.  Deferred gratification = important life skill.

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More creepiness from MSNBC — reporter coaches her 5 yr. old daughter to say how crazy it is to oppose “same-sex marriage.”

Hey, why don’t you ask the 5 yr. old if it would have been fine to kill her in the womb if Mommy hadn’t wanted her at the time? Surely the Mom has coached her daughter on the importance of being able to kill her unwanted offspring.

How sad that she has perverted the mind of this young girl. To say it “seems strange” that a man would only marry a woman is a pure lie, even from a Leftist like her. Just look around the world, people.

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Roundup

Good news: Five reasons to believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead – it isn’t just that I love the “minimal facts” argument for explaining why Christianity is true and supportable by facts and logic, this article was actually in the Washington Post.  Hopefully it got lots of people to reconsider matters of eternal importance.

Professor Gary Habermas had the following piece in the Washington Post (of all places).  It’s not often that a politically-left leaning media outlet allows content which shines positive light onto Christianity.

(Washington Post) – I will assume nothing special about the New Testament writings whatsoever. I will use only the historical information that is accepted as historical by virtually all scholars who have studied this material today-no matter how skeptical or liberal they are. That means, for example, that I will only cite New Testament passages, ones that pass the customary skeptical standards and are recognized as such. Using only these “minimal facts,” I will still maintain that Jesus’ resurrection is the most likely explanation for what we know.

[...]

(1) Most scholars agree that Jesus’ tomb was discovered empty shortly afterwards. With almost two dozen reasons favoring this report alone, what best explains this? Other hypotheses do not account for all the data.

(2) Many eyewitnesses assert that they saw the risen Jesus, both individually and in groups. Even apart from the Gospels, we can establish this totally from just two passages in Paul’s “undisputed writings”:

–Paul told the Corinthians that he had received the Gospel resurrection report from others (1 Corinthians 15:1-8).

–The consensus critical view is that Paul probably obtained this material in Jerusalem, when he visited the eyewitness apostles Peter and James, the brother of Jesus (Galatians 1:18-24).

–Paul returned to Jerusalem 14 years later and specifically checked out the nature of the Gospel message, again with eyewitnesses Peter, James, and now John (Galatians 2:1-10).

–All the apostles agreed that Jesus appeared to them after his death (1 Corinthians 15:11).

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Ten Q&A on Same-Sex Marriage Canards and Evasions – this is a pithy yet thorough list.  You mainly need the first three.

1. What’s love got to do with it?

Nothing.  Romanticizing this debate by claiming that any two people in love should have a civil right to civil marriage is a foolish distraction.  Neither judges nor legislators have any business discussing “affection” as a factor in defining civil marriage.  Clergy who bless marriages have a legitimate and separate role in discerning the internal dynamics of couples.  But not the state.

2. What is the state’s interest in marriage?

First, to recognize the union that produces the state’s citizens.  Second, to encourage those who sire and bear the citizens to take responsibility for rearing them together.  That’s all, folks.  Proponents of genderless marriage often answer this question with non sequiturs such as property rights (irrelevant), civil rights (extraneous to the question), and “love and stability” (not a function of state involvement).

3.  Why should state interest in marriage be about children if not all marriages produce children?

It’s thoroughly irrelevant that many heterosexual couples lack children because of intent, infertility, age, or health.  Claiming that this is relevant to the case for genderless marriage suggests the “fallacy of composition“: inferring that something must be true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole.  Citizens of the state can exist only through the female-male union, no matter how the union occurs — whether traditionally, artificially, or in a petri dish.  That’s the only fact that provides any grounds for state interest in marriage.

And here’s a great summary:

It violates the rights of children by serving to deprive them deliberately of biological parents.  It violates everybody’s civil right to religious freedom by setting up a collision course in which conscience protections will be trumped by a nonsensical legal definition of marriage.  It violates our freedom of association by removing the buffer zone of family (and all mediating institutions) that insulate all individuals in society from abuses of state power.  It violates freedom of expression by requiring Orwellian Newspeak of everyone, especially those accused of hate for objecting to same-sex marriage.

In the end, the primary beneficiary of this social experiment is a tyrannical minority hell-bent on controlling every aspect of our lives and eventually dictating all of our personal relationships.

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From the “This is a piece from the Onion, right?” category, Hiring Lifeguards Who Can’t Swim in the Name of Diversity:

More than 90 percent of the students at Alhambra High are black, Latino or Asian. On a recruiting effort there over the winter, the city’s Melissa Boyle tells students she’s not looking for strong swimmers. Like many under-resourced schools, Alhambra doesn’t have a swim team.

“We will work with you in your swimming abilities,” Boyle says.

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Vandalism of pro-life display at The Ohio State University:

Pretty bizarre.  So she is apparently only for abortions by mothers who are poor or on drugs and she thinks middle class and above drug-free people shouldn’t be able to have abortions.  That’s an interesting branch of fiscal conservatism!  My guess is that she’s really pro-abortion all the way, including taxpayer-funded abortions without restriction, but she’s just posing as caring for the poor.

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‘Billions and Billions and Billions’: Biden Has No Comment on Fisker Failure – Just one more reason we need to let the free market pick the winners and losers.

“This is seed money that will return back to the American consumer in billions and billions and billions of dollars of good new jobs.”
– Joe Biden, Oct. 27, 2009

“With the help of UAW lobbying efforts for advanced vehicle manufacturing and federal dollars, the plant will become a production facility for Fisker Automotive, a new American car company that plans to produce 100,000 electric hybrid vehicles per year by 2014.
“GM’s former Wilmington [Delaware] assembly plant was selected for its primary global production facility based on its size, production capacity, access to shipping ports and rail lines, and skilled workforce.”
– United Auto Workers, February 2010

“Once again, the American public lost when the Obama administration attempted to pick ‘winners and losers’ in the free market. Today the electric car company Fisker Automotive, which received nearly $200 million in taxpayer money, is laying off three-fourths of its U.S. workers.”
– Sarah Palin, April 5, 2013

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I started to read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire based on the recommendation of the Bumbling Genius.  But after the most excellent summary on Winging It maybe I don’t need to . . .

In Volume 1, Chapter 9, Gibbon describes for us what he calls “barbarians”. What makes a “barbarian”? He starts with the premise that they are not masters of letters. Without a firm grasp on the written word, he argues, they cannot learn and pass that learning on to subsequent generations. Written communication is key. And I look at the texting and facebooking and Twitter stuff that today’s younger generation is using and ask myself, “Do they have a firm grasp on the written word?” The number of times I see their own generation ask, “What are you talking about?” suggests that they don’t. But he goes on with a very interesting next characteristic. He says that barbarians are lazy and yet energetic. Huh? Well, he says, they aren’t really interested in doing any industrious work, but they are inexhaustible in their efforts to find the next big sensation. They lived for big experiences. You know, like extreme sports. Oh, wait, no, that’s our time. Oh, wait … could it be that we are headed toward being barbarians in Gibbon’s view?

Gibbon argues that Rome fell for a few basic reasons. First, they were strong as long as they had wars to fight and places to conquer and enemies to subdue. They got soft when they got rich and comfortable. Gibbon argues that, just as humans live under a “no pain, no gain” sentence, so also do civilizations. Second, in their rich and comfortable decline, they experienced moral decline. They indulged every whim, outsourced their work to other places (yes, that’s one of his observations), surrendered any sense of civic virtue, and pursued pleasure as the ultimate good. Now if that doesn’t describe America, I don’t know what does.

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Ben Carson: White Liberals Are Pretty Darned Racist – Yep.  Get back on the plantation!  If you don’t agree with the White Liberals then you are obviously an Uncle Tom.  Haven’t you seen how well our policies have worked out in Detroit?

(Mediaite) On his radio show last night, Mark Levin had on newfound conservative “hero” Dr. Ben Carson to discuss all the lashings he’s received from the “left-wing media” over his views on gay marriage and religion. While discussing his being a black conservative, Carson told Levin that, in his experience, white liberals are the “most racist people there are.”

“They need to shut me up, they need to delegitimize me,” Carson told the radio host while explaining why he believes the media has scorned him for lumping homosexuality in with unsavory sexual acts like bestiality and pedophilia.

Levin added that the doctor has been attacked by “white liberals” because he is a black conservative, to which Carson replied: “They are the most racist people there are. Because they put you in a little category, a little box. You have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”

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They forgot to mention “racists.”

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I grew up thinking the entire world called the grass between the sidewalk and the street the “devilstrip.” Apparently this term was unique to the NE Ohio area and especially Akron.

Roundup

18 Reasons Why Doctors and Lawyers Homeschool Their Children

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8 points of encouragement for those who are doubting their faith — read the link for explanations to each one.

1. Focus only on the issues that make or break Christianity.

2. Doubt your doubts.

3. Make sure that you don’t lose fellowship with other believers.

4. Realize that the presence of other possibilities does necessarily not equate to the presence of other probabilities.

5. Don’t think you can ever be an expert in everything.

6. Be careful not to make individual emotional preference a decisive benchmark of truth.

I see so many people who set their own emotional or moral preference as the ultimate and decisive standard for truth. For example, some people say things like “I could not every believe in the God of the Old Testament. He is mean and cruel.” Fine as that may be, our personal opinions about God’s meanness or niceness do not have a vote in truth. If God is mean, so be it. That is an internal debate. Our attitude or emotional disposition has no bearing on God’s existence or authority.

I recently saw a respected Christian scholar say that if God were such and such way, I would not serve or worship him. In essence he was saying “If God does not satisfy my emotional disposition, possessing characteristics that I think he should have, he will not be my God.” As understanding as I am of this in one sense, in another sense I have to express complete bewilderment and sadness. We worship and serve God because he is God not because he is Godand we like him. If God is God, he is Lord and King. We don’t petition how we think he should be. Alternatives are not suddenly valid when we don’t like him. Truths about God are not a democracy.

The first question is not whether God is mean or a “moral monster”, but whether he is God. Then we can discuss the problems with God in the Old Testament or God’s decree of election. I certainly don’t believe that God is cruel in the OT or NT. I do believe that God loves mankind because he says he does (John 3:16). He is a better authority on himself than I am.

My point is that this is not an issue that should occupy your focus and it certainly should not cause you to have doubts about God’s existence. If Christ rose from the grave, whatever conclusion one comes to about any number of peripheral issues does not have the poison of death either way.

7. Don’t stop living out your devotion to Christ.

8. Realize that doubt is not a bad thing.

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84 Confirmed Facts in the Last 16 Chapters of the Book of Acts

Scholar and historian Colin Hemer has identified 84 facts in the last 16 chapters of the Book of Actsthat have been confirmed by historical and/or archaeological research.

They are as follows:

1. the natural crossing between correctly named ports [Acts 13:4-5]
2. the proper port [Perga] along the direct destination of a ship crossing from Cyprus [13:13]
3. the proper location of Lycaonia [14:6]

4. the unusual but correct declension of the name Lystra [14:6]

5. the correct language spoken in Lystra-Lycaonian [14:11]

6. two gods known to be so associated-Zeus and Hermes [14:12]

. . .

With these facts in mind, it seems reasonable to conclude that the author of Acts [who I believe was Luke] was an eyewitness of the events recorded or at the very least had access to reliable eyewitnesses.

It is also of interest that in the Book of Acts, the author records 35 miracles.

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Good line from Facebook:

A pro-abortion woman asked a mother who was holding up a graphic anti-abortion sign, “How can you allow children to see those horrible pictures?”

The mother responded, “How can you allow children to become those horrible pictures?”

Food for thought.

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Flashback: Remember when Democrats swore they opposed same-sex marriage? Oh, we totally agree with you that it is wrong, but you don’t need a Constitutional Amendment! So sad that people believed the lies. A good question for those Dems: What changed, other than public opinion? Nothing.

This was from Hillary. Oh noes!! Umbrage!!

So I take umbrage at anyone who might suggest that those of us who worry about amending the Constitution are less committed to the sanctity of marriage, or the fundamental bedrock principle that it exists between a man and a woman going back into the mists of history, as one of the founding foundational institutions of history and humanity and civilization, and that its primary, principle role during those millennia has been the raising and socializing of children for the society in which they are to become adults.

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