For those of you who have read my article "The Real Inconvenient Truth," here, in its entirety, is the documentary that I referenced. It is entitled The Great Global Warming Swindle and features many prominent scientists who disagree with the "church of global warming" (the co-founder of Green Peace is even interviewed in the film). Only a day or two after I discovered that this documentary was on the web, I came across a NASA article that essentially backs up the main theory proposed by Swindle's director (interestingly enough, this documentary has a very sound scientific basis -- unlike the documentaries that some make about global warming for purely financial and political gain). I have not yet had time to watch the full video, but just by watching the first segment (approximately six minutes long) one's attitude towards the subject certainly is forced to go up against some new perspectives. Lastly, here is the article where I first heard about this documentary. It provides a more compact summary of the new theory as well as snippets of interviews with the director. All of this is well worth your time to check out.
~Tribal
Friday, March 23, 2007
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
A Take on the Truth of Love
I’m going to talk a little bit about love today…I’ve talked about it before, and I’ll talk about it again, for I am a hopeless romantic and am therefore dominated by love. This was brought on by Sunday’s sermon at church (March 11th). My pastor is doing a Lenten sermon series on loving one another, and in this entry I’m going to talk a little bit about what I got out of it.
Let’s agree on something straight out…our culture hard core overuses the word love. Raise your hand if you’re guilty of saying one of these…”I looove chocolate,” or “I love my job” (equally appropriate for our overuse of hate, but that’s another topic all together…and since I don’t really care for hate, I probably won’t talk about it anytime soon…sorry to all the hatemongers out there). I certainly am…guilty of the first at least….I dunno about the second….but there are people out there who are I’m sure. What’s this got to do with anything? Good question I just asked vicariously for you.
What about this one? “I feel like I love [insert significant person of said feelings here].” Hmm, tricky tricky. Let’s get to that later…I’m not really fully prepared to answer it now, but hopefully by the time I get to the end of the entry I’ll have figured out how to address it.
Let’s first take a look at what love is. Where shall we look? Why, to God for guidance silly billy, that’s where we should always look…although if any of you are like me, that’s easier said than done…why consult God first and then act when you can act first and than maybe when it’s convenient for you ask God, or just…um…well, just keep on acting? Something we all should be working on methinks, me included. (By the way, when I say we, I mean we Christians…if you’re not a follower of Christ, you should be…Jesus loves you and wants to be your friend, so you’d best wise up and make friends with the Creator of the Universe pronto, lest you are caught in a freak gasoline fight accident or something…but I’m way off topic now, and this parenthesis is way to long, so I’m going to stop it). It’s really tough giving stuff to God...and I don’t understand why. We’ll be quite quick to trust our lives to something made by man…I’ve flown on an airplane four times in as many weeks, and I’ll be on an airplane again in two more weeks….trusting my very life to the maintenance workers, the pilots, and the airplane….and I do so without thinking twice….so shouldn’t I trust God all the more, who certainly won’t ever fail me? I think so…but it is tough.
Now you ask a Christian, “What is love?” and the Sunday school answer is “Love is patient, love is kind, etc, etc, etc.” I Cor. 13 would have been my first answer too. And all that is very very true, and quite honestly beautiful…one of the most beautiful versus in all of the Bible, but I’m not entirely sure that that particular chapter addresses the question at hand. Let’s take another angle.
Jesus told his disciples that they must love one another. Can you just up and love someone? I would argue yes, with Christ, you can. Love is not just an emotional response, but something you must want, you must will, and to which you must say yes! Love is not about what you prefer, or what I prefer, but about subordinating yourself to the will of the Savior Christ. Here’s where I think I’m comfortable addressing that ever hairy, “I feel like I love him/her!” I certainly believe, and know from experience (some wonderful, some painful) that love can grow from just plain pure feelings (I don’t want to sound like I’m saying feelings are stupid…feelings are awesome, and I’m very glad that God decided to invent them…what I am saying is that love transcends what feelings are…love is so much higher, so much bigger, so much stronger….it’s like comparing a musical on Broadway to a musical at a local theater…the local theater’s great fun, but can it really touch what’s possible on Broadway?) Romantic love more often than not grows out of attraction or admiration. It doesn’t have to be physical attraction either, though that is a leading starting point of love and indeed is also often a feeling mistaken for love. Let’s look at Robin Hood (I prefer the animated Disney version myself) where the pretender Prince John appears to be the lion in power, but the true king is Richard the Lionhearted. In this analogy, Prince John is physical attraction, and King Richard is love…one is pretending and indeed mistaken for holding the power of the other. Nothing wrong with physical attraction…God made it, and in the words of a pastor at a Christian youth festival I attended many man years ago, “It’s a great ride”…but it’s not love. Physical attraction is not the only culprit. Emotional attraction or even spiritual attraction can grow into love, just as they can be mistaken for love. We must be careful to choose love over lust, to make sure that our feelings of attraction form into love, and not into lust, for the former is the way of God, and the latter is the way of the world.
So I ask you, can you truly actually love without God? I say no. Perhaps I’m wrong, and I welcome discussion…for discussion = fantastic…but in my experience and from what I’ve learned from the Bible and the Holy Spirit, you can really only truly ever love someone, be it parent, child, brother, sister, friend, or significant other, if you love them through Christ. What do you think about it?
~AndyJams~
Heroes, Pirates and Talking Donkeys
The following is an excerpt entitled "Heroes, Pirates, and Talking Donkeys" from a recent Stand True E-News update written by founder Bryan Kemper. It's worth a read in my opinion and addresses some good points. For those of you who do not know about Stand True's Christ-centered pro-life ministry, you can check them out under our links section, but we highly encourage everyone to pay them a visit.
"I usually try and sleep when I fly, but this last week I could not sleep for the life me on the flight to the west coast. I picked up a newspaper and read about three movies coming out this May, all of which are the third movie in their respective series.
The article really intrigued me as it talked about the amount of money each of the movies' preceding installments had made, and how much they expected the new ones to make. All three are to be released over a three week period, and they are expected to make over a billion dollars combined in US box office totals alone.
I guess when you combine the exhilaration of a half-man, half-spider superhero flying around New York with pirates and zombies terrorizing the high seas, and a sarcastic animated talking donkey, it should be quite an exciting month.
So, millions of people will start lining up in May to spend about $20 a person on a night at the movies. They hope to be taken away in the story and thrilled by the action. Two hours later they will probably leave wishing that there really was a great hero that could always be counted on to save the day. Kids will be begging their parents to buy hundreds of dollars of toys, just so they can reenact the story, until their parents have a headache.
Just another average weekend in America. Of course, they could have gotten even more action, adventure, and drama, even a hero that saves the day, for free if they wanted too. They could have gone to church. That's right, church. Where we learn from the ultimate adventure book with the most amazing stories. Where we learn of a hero that truly does save the day, and offers us eternal salvation.
So why do we spend so much money on movies to take us away when we have such an amazing resource at our hands already? Maybe it is because so many churches have replaced the Bible with light, fun, fluffy stories. Maybe it is because, at so many churches, you end up hearing more about the pastor's weekend than the Gospel of Christ.
I have heard reports that teach us if we truly want church growth then we need to follow certain formulas for success. We need to keep the sermons under 30 minutes or we will lose everyone. We need to keep the sermons light and mellow so we don't offend anyone. We need to make church modern and relevant or no one will want to come.
Since when do we need to make the Word of God relevant? Maybe if people were offended by hearing the Gospel, they might see that they need repentance. Maybe we need to think about the things that we are willing to sit for hours to see before we complain about the length of church (football, concerts, movies).
I am not saying that we should not go to movies, although I will probably get a dozen e-mails telling me that there is nothing wrong with movies and I need to chill out. What I am trying to say is that maybe if we brought the Word of God and the Gospel of Christ back to church then we would not need gimmicks or special books and reports on how to keep churches relevant. The fact is the Word of God is just as relevant today as it was 2,000 years ago.
So have fun this summer and go see a movie, I know I will. But, when you are calling all of your friends to ask them if they want to see a guy in tights fly around the city and save the day, ask yourself if you have invited them all to church to learn about a man who died to save us for eternity."
~Tribal
"I usually try and sleep when I fly, but this last week I could not sleep for the life me on the flight to the west coast. I picked up a newspaper and read about three movies coming out this May, all of which are the third movie in their respective series.
The article really intrigued me as it talked about the amount of money each of the movies' preceding installments had made, and how much they expected the new ones to make. All three are to be released over a three week period, and they are expected to make over a billion dollars combined in US box office totals alone.
I guess when you combine the exhilaration of a half-man, half-spider superhero flying around New York with pirates and zombies terrorizing the high seas, and a sarcastic animated talking donkey, it should be quite an exciting month.
So, millions of people will start lining up in May to spend about $20 a person on a night at the movies. They hope to be taken away in the story and thrilled by the action. Two hours later they will probably leave wishing that there really was a great hero that could always be counted on to save the day. Kids will be begging their parents to buy hundreds of dollars of toys, just so they can reenact the story, until their parents have a headache.
Just another average weekend in America. Of course, they could have gotten even more action, adventure, and drama, even a hero that saves the day, for free if they wanted too. They could have gone to church. That's right, church. Where we learn from the ultimate adventure book with the most amazing stories. Where we learn of a hero that truly does save the day, and offers us eternal salvation.
So why do we spend so much money on movies to take us away when we have such an amazing resource at our hands already? Maybe it is because so many churches have replaced the Bible with light, fun, fluffy stories. Maybe it is because, at so many churches, you end up hearing more about the pastor's weekend than the Gospel of Christ.
I have heard reports that teach us if we truly want church growth then we need to follow certain formulas for success. We need to keep the sermons under 30 minutes or we will lose everyone. We need to keep the sermons light and mellow so we don't offend anyone. We need to make church modern and relevant or no one will want to come.
Since when do we need to make the Word of God relevant? Maybe if people were offended by hearing the Gospel, they might see that they need repentance. Maybe we need to think about the things that we are willing to sit for hours to see before we complain about the length of church (football, concerts, movies).
I am not saying that we should not go to movies, although I will probably get a dozen e-mails telling me that there is nothing wrong with movies and I need to chill out. What I am trying to say is that maybe if we brought the Word of God and the Gospel of Christ back to church then we would not need gimmicks or special books and reports on how to keep churches relevant. The fact is the Word of God is just as relevant today as it was 2,000 years ago.
So have fun this summer and go see a movie, I know I will. But, when you are calling all of your friends to ask them if they want to see a guy in tights fly around the city and save the day, ask yourself if you have invited them all to church to learn about a man who died to save us for eternity."
~Tribal
Friday, March 09, 2007
1 Kings 3
This has been featured in my aim profile for a while now....and I decided it was Insense worthy, so here it is.
I learned an interesting truth recently as I was reading in I Kings 3. In vs 5, God says to Solomon, "Ask! What shall I give you?" Solomon asks not for riches or fame, but for wisdom to judge as God is just. In vs 12, the LORD says, "behold, I have done according to your words; see, I have given you a wise and understanding heart, so that there has not been anyone like you before you, nor shall any like you arise after you." Why is this special? God gave Solomon a wise and understanding heart, not a wise an understanding brain...true wisdom, Godly wisdom, comes from the heart, the source of Love. In that way, I propose that Love is true widsom, and all else is folly.
"Love is a many splendid thing! Love lifts us up where we belong! All you need is Love!"
A high five goes to the first person who can tell me where I got that from.
~AndyJams~
I learned an interesting truth recently as I was reading in I Kings 3. In vs 5, God says to Solomon, "Ask! What shall I give you?" Solomon asks not for riches or fame, but for wisdom to judge as God is just. In vs 12, the LORD says, "behold, I have done according to your words; see, I have given you a wise and understanding heart, so that there has not been anyone like you before you, nor shall any like you arise after you." Why is this special? God gave Solomon a wise and understanding heart, not a wise an understanding brain...true wisdom, Godly wisdom, comes from the heart, the source of Love. In that way, I propose that Love is true widsom, and all else is folly.
"Love is a many splendid thing! Love lifts us up where we belong! All you need is Love!"
A high five goes to the first person who can tell me where I got that from.
~AndyJams~
Thursday, March 08, 2007
The Real Inconvenient Truth...
I was recently confronted by former Insense writer ice-t (who also happens to be the "Opinions" editor of our school newspaper, The Beacon) about doing an article to be published in The Beacon over the heated issue of global warming. It is slated to be featured side by side with an article of a more liberal persuasion in the forthcoming issue, but I find it worthwhile to post the piece here in the meantime. I will be sure to pass along my opposing colleague's work as well when the issue is actually released. Until then, enjoy my half of the special:
By now I’m sure that anybody who even remotely pays attention to the media is aware of Al Gore’s Oscar success with his recent documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Global warming seems to saturate political and scientific discussions everywhere, but is the theory that man is responsible for such climate changes scientifically sound? Is the earth really undergoing “global warming” as a result of human civilization’s increased industrialization?
While Al Gore and the environmentalist crowd in America are busy counting their political and monetary gains, a group of eminent scientists and climatologists are set to air a television special in the UK entitled The Great Global Warming Swindle. Proponents of global warming claim that increased atmospheric CO2 levels are responsible for the temperature increase, but Swindle’s director Martin Durkin argues, among other things, that temperature increase is actually responsible for increased CO2 levels. Studies of ice age temperatures show that increases in CO2 levels come, on average, 800 years after major increases in earth’s temperature.
No students here at Dallastown High School would remember this, but ask any teacher: the big scare of the sixties and seventies was global cooling. Between the 1940’s and the 1970’s, the average temperature of the earth actually decreased. Ironically enough, CO2 levels were consistently increasing. In 2003, NASA’s Global Hydrology and Climate Center released a graphic which shows the changes in the earth’s climates spanning back to 1979. While some areas are observed to have grown progressively warmer, other areas of the earth have actually grown cooler since 1979. Once again, however, CO2 levels were and are continuing to rise everywhere, meaning that temperature change should have uniformly risen all over the globe as well if that is the true cause for global warming.
So since some serious holes have now been punched in the classical interpretation of global warming as a result of man, what other theories exist to account for these undeniable changes in earth’s temperature? Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark claims in his book The Chilling Stars that cosmic rays cause clouds to form and thus block the sun’s most violent rays, reducing global temperature. Former New Scientist magazine editor Nigel Calder has recently released a book in which he argues that this theory is at the true core of the global warming controversy. He argues that since solar winds bat away many of the cosmic rays responsible for cloud cover, and since our sun is currently in the most active phase it has been in for a thousand years, this is the real reason behind the earth’s temperature increase. The change in climate is a direct result of a double knockout delivered by the natural life cycle of our sun: increased amounts of solar winds result in less cloud cover on earth, while at the same time the sun’s increased intensity means even more harmful rays penetrating the atmosphere. The undeniable result is an increase in global temperature.
What goes up must come down. The earth has undergone many temperature changes in its long history, and it is sure to undergo many more. It is the natural cycle of things. Leave it to man to think that he is powerful enough to be the cause of every single change in creation. While some may spend all of their time and effort trying to stop the earth’s temperature from rising another degree in the next one-hundred years, I think my focus is better placed elsewhere in a country where 1.6 million babies are annually slaughtered by abortion and where terrorist organizations can freely and illegally cross our borders.
Check back later to read the other side of this debate as carried out courtesy of The Beacon...
~Tribal
By now I’m sure that anybody who even remotely pays attention to the media is aware of Al Gore’s Oscar success with his recent documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Global warming seems to saturate political and scientific discussions everywhere, but is the theory that man is responsible for such climate changes scientifically sound? Is the earth really undergoing “global warming” as a result of human civilization’s increased industrialization?
While Al Gore and the environmentalist crowd in America are busy counting their political and monetary gains, a group of eminent scientists and climatologists are set to air a television special in the UK entitled The Great Global Warming Swindle. Proponents of global warming claim that increased atmospheric CO2 levels are responsible for the temperature increase, but Swindle’s director Martin Durkin argues, among other things, that temperature increase is actually responsible for increased CO2 levels. Studies of ice age temperatures show that increases in CO2 levels come, on average, 800 years after major increases in earth’s temperature.
No students here at Dallastown High School would remember this, but ask any teacher: the big scare of the sixties and seventies was global cooling. Between the 1940’s and the 1970’s, the average temperature of the earth actually decreased. Ironically enough, CO2 levels were consistently increasing. In 2003, NASA’s Global Hydrology and Climate Center released a graphic which shows the changes in the earth’s climates spanning back to 1979. While some areas are observed to have grown progressively warmer, other areas of the earth have actually grown cooler since 1979. Once again, however, CO2 levels were and are continuing to rise everywhere, meaning that temperature change should have uniformly risen all over the globe as well if that is the true cause for global warming.
So since some serious holes have now been punched in the classical interpretation of global warming as a result of man, what other theories exist to account for these undeniable changes in earth’s temperature? Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark claims in his book The Chilling Stars that cosmic rays cause clouds to form and thus block the sun’s most violent rays, reducing global temperature. Former New Scientist magazine editor Nigel Calder has recently released a book in which he argues that this theory is at the true core of the global warming controversy. He argues that since solar winds bat away many of the cosmic rays responsible for cloud cover, and since our sun is currently in the most active phase it has been in for a thousand years, this is the real reason behind the earth’s temperature increase. The change in climate is a direct result of a double knockout delivered by the natural life cycle of our sun: increased amounts of solar winds result in less cloud cover on earth, while at the same time the sun’s increased intensity means even more harmful rays penetrating the atmosphere. The undeniable result is an increase in global temperature.
What goes up must come down. The earth has undergone many temperature changes in its long history, and it is sure to undergo many more. It is the natural cycle of things. Leave it to man to think that he is powerful enough to be the cause of every single change in creation. While some may spend all of their time and effort trying to stop the earth’s temperature from rising another degree in the next one-hundred years, I think my focus is better placed elsewhere in a country where 1.6 million babies are annually slaughtered by abortion and where terrorist organizations can freely and illegally cross our borders.
Check back later to read the other side of this debate as carried out courtesy of The Beacon...
~Tribal
Sunday, March 04, 2007
High Calling
Tis spring break, and for the first time in a very very long time I have some free time to rub together. I've got time to read again, and time to write somethin...which I haven't gotten to do for months. On the flight home from Florida I began reading a book I got for Christmas, High Calling, The Courageous Life and Faith of Space Shuttle Columbia Commander Rick Husband, written by his widow, Evelyn Husband. I'm halfway through, and I gotta say it's faaantastic. For those not in the know, Rick Husband was the commander of STS-107, the fateful space shuttle mission ended in flames and debris as the orbiter Columbia broke apart and burned up over Texas skies on the morning of February 1st, 2003 during re-entry.
Perhaps you don't, but I remember exactly where I was, what I was doing, and how I found out of the tragedy, and it effected me deeply. I'm a certified space nerd with aspirations of one day being an astronaut myself. For those of you who are not quite so interested in the manned space program as I am, I'll give you a little refresher on what went down that terrible winter day. During launch in late January, the extreme forces involved ripped off a small piece of TPS (thermal protection system) foam from the external fuel tank. This was a regular occurrence and even occasionally ripped off tiles from the shuttle, but it had been happening for over one hundred launches without any problem. This time however, the chunk of foam smashed a large hole in the leading edge of the left wing. During re-entry, the hot ionized plasma that surrounds the speeding orbiter flowed into the wing, vaporizing the superstructure and breaking the wing off. Columbia was reduced to a fireball breaking into pieces within the blink of an eye just minutes before it's scheduled touch-down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Anywho, so why am I talking about all this space mumbo jumbo? Well, the book is the biography of the commander of that incredibly successful mission that ended in such tragedy. But more than facts of his life, the biography is about the spiritual walk of Rick Husband. It is a wonderful book. I've been reading it for two and a half days and I'm half way through it...which for me, a slow reader, is pretty good, and shows how good a book it really is....I can't put it down.
I'm rambling, and I'm not really coming across as eloquently as I would like, so I'll get right down to it...read this book. If you are a Christian, read this book. If you love space flight, read this book. If you are a Christian who loves space flight, then you absolutely must read this book. If you are struggling in your faith, read the book. If you're struggling with love, read this book. It's amazing. One of the things that's so appealing to me is that Rick Husband was not a perfect Christian. I read the biography of Rich Mullins a few years back, and it was inspiring, but Rich Mullins was always a fantastically strong Christian, which for those of us who struggle and stumble, that's actually pretty discouraging. Rick Husband came through struggles and a weak relationship with God and through the prayer and help of friends and a great deal of study of the Word, he began to walk closer and closer until he started to really have a fantastic relationship with Christ. It's really inspiring and quite frankly, helpful. It's encouraging. It gives me hope in a good many areas. Again, I digress. The point of all this is to say that YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK!! Every now and then, when I read something especially cool, especially meaningful, or something that strikes me, I'll write it in. I'll start it off here with something on page 97, a transcript of an interview he gave shortly after his first flight to space in 1998 on STS-96.
Many people, reporters especially, have questioned Rick concerning the argument of science versus religion. When he came back from the Discovery [STS-96] mission, he was more than ready to answer their questions. In a taped interview Rick said,
"Even if you look at the universe and all the stars, our solar system--all the order that there is there, and the fact that the planets orbit around the sun, and the way that the different galaxies behave, all the different interactions that are there....I don't believe that's something that just happened by chance.
"Nobody can explain where everything came from and how it all got here. You just take a look around and you see the complexity in so many things and the detail in so many small things; how the simplest cell works, up to a tree, the human being; just the miracle of seeing our children born; and you say, 'This just didn't happen by chance.' If you even take a look at a system like the space shuttle--that is the most complicated and complex flying machine in the world and it didn't happen by chance and it doesn't approach the complexity of a human being. It took a lot of people a lot of time to sit down and think and put together that space shuttle and the entire system. Then to sit and think that the entire universe could have happened just by accident, it doesn't make sense to me.
"It'd almost seem you have to have more faith to accept that it happened by chance than to accept that God created the universe."
[page 97-98 of High Calling by Evelyn Husband, published by Thomas Nelson, Inc, 2003]
This is for you naysayers out there, those who say that only fools and the simple believe that God created the universe, that no thinking man can honestly believe in anything other than the Big Bang, that no person with an IQ greater than that of a pea could think that our world came about by anything but chance...well, Rick Husband did, and he was an astronaut. Perhaps it sounds trite, but he is among the best of the best that our great nation, the best of the best, has to offer. To become the commander of a space shuttle, Rick Husband must be among the very best humanity can offer. And if Rick Husband's strong faith in the Lord makes you think anything less of him and his memory, than you are the fool, and I pity you, and I pray that God have mercy on you.
Anywho, I say read the book, it's fantastic, but I'll put the cool stuff I see in every now and then.
~AndyJams~
Perhaps you don't, but I remember exactly where I was, what I was doing, and how I found out of the tragedy, and it effected me deeply. I'm a certified space nerd with aspirations of one day being an astronaut myself. For those of you who are not quite so interested in the manned space program as I am, I'll give you a little refresher on what went down that terrible winter day. During launch in late January, the extreme forces involved ripped off a small piece of TPS (thermal protection system) foam from the external fuel tank. This was a regular occurrence and even occasionally ripped off tiles from the shuttle, but it had been happening for over one hundred launches without any problem. This time however, the chunk of foam smashed a large hole in the leading edge of the left wing. During re-entry, the hot ionized plasma that surrounds the speeding orbiter flowed into the wing, vaporizing the superstructure and breaking the wing off. Columbia was reduced to a fireball breaking into pieces within the blink of an eye just minutes before it's scheduled touch-down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Anywho, so why am I talking about all this space mumbo jumbo? Well, the book is the biography of the commander of that incredibly successful mission that ended in such tragedy. But more than facts of his life, the biography is about the spiritual walk of Rick Husband. It is a wonderful book. I've been reading it for two and a half days and I'm half way through it...which for me, a slow reader, is pretty good, and shows how good a book it really is....I can't put it down.
I'm rambling, and I'm not really coming across as eloquently as I would like, so I'll get right down to it...read this book. If you are a Christian, read this book. If you love space flight, read this book. If you are a Christian who loves space flight, then you absolutely must read this book. If you are struggling in your faith, read the book. If you're struggling with love, read this book. It's amazing. One of the things that's so appealing to me is that Rick Husband was not a perfect Christian. I read the biography of Rich Mullins a few years back, and it was inspiring, but Rich Mullins was always a fantastically strong Christian, which for those of us who struggle and stumble, that's actually pretty discouraging. Rick Husband came through struggles and a weak relationship with God and through the prayer and help of friends and a great deal of study of the Word, he began to walk closer and closer until he started to really have a fantastic relationship with Christ. It's really inspiring and quite frankly, helpful. It's encouraging. It gives me hope in a good many areas. Again, I digress. The point of all this is to say that YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK!! Every now and then, when I read something especially cool, especially meaningful, or something that strikes me, I'll write it in. I'll start it off here with something on page 97, a transcript of an interview he gave shortly after his first flight to space in 1998 on STS-96.
Many people, reporters especially, have questioned Rick concerning the argument of science versus religion. When he came back from the Discovery [STS-96] mission, he was more than ready to answer their questions. In a taped interview Rick said,
"Even if you look at the universe and all the stars, our solar system--all the order that there is there, and the fact that the planets orbit around the sun, and the way that the different galaxies behave, all the different interactions that are there....I don't believe that's something that just happened by chance.
"Nobody can explain where everything came from and how it all got here. You just take a look around and you see the complexity in so many things and the detail in so many small things; how the simplest cell works, up to a tree, the human being; just the miracle of seeing our children born; and you say, 'This just didn't happen by chance.' If you even take a look at a system like the space shuttle--that is the most complicated and complex flying machine in the world and it didn't happen by chance and it doesn't approach the complexity of a human being. It took a lot of people a lot of time to sit down and think and put together that space shuttle and the entire system. Then to sit and think that the entire universe could have happened just by accident, it doesn't make sense to me.
"It'd almost seem you have to have more faith to accept that it happened by chance than to accept that God created the universe."
[page 97-98 of High Calling by Evelyn Husband, published by Thomas Nelson, Inc, 2003]
This is for you naysayers out there, those who say that only fools and the simple believe that God created the universe, that no thinking man can honestly believe in anything other than the Big Bang, that no person with an IQ greater than that of a pea could think that our world came about by anything but chance...well, Rick Husband did, and he was an astronaut. Perhaps it sounds trite, but he is among the best of the best that our great nation, the best of the best, has to offer. To become the commander of a space shuttle, Rick Husband must be among the very best humanity can offer. And if Rick Husband's strong faith in the Lord makes you think anything less of him and his memory, than you are the fool, and I pity you, and I pray that God have mercy on you.
Anywho, I say read the book, it's fantastic, but I'll put the cool stuff I see in every now and then.
~AndyJams~
Thursday, March 01, 2007
100th Post
In honor of our 100th post, I would like to pass along to you this hilarious bit of political comedy that my AP Government teacher shared with us in class today. It is good to see that our president can laugh at himself, even in spite of the viciousness with which he is often attacked on a daily basis by the news media. We thank all of our readers out there and all of those who help support and promote us. God bless.
~Tribal
~Tribal
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