A Day That Will Live in Blasphemy

On December 7, 1941, Imperial Japan launched a covert bombing raid on the US Navy's base at Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii. Over 2400 Americans were killed. On the next day, FDR took to the podium and asserted that it would be remembered as "A date that will live in infamy." It was seen as such an atrocity that public opinion swayed away from isolationism enough that America entered WWII, just as the Japanese had hoped to prevent them from doing, with a preemptive strike. But part of the fleet was out at sea, and had evaded the attack.

That was a day that would live in infamy, and which is now almost forgotten. I heard that Japan recently granted, or was trying to grant, itself the right to have a standing military, whereas the occupying US forces had written into Japan's constitution decades ago that Japan would “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.”

More memorable to Americans, June 23rd, 2015 will not be regarded by most as a cause for despair but a cause for celebration. However, the few Christians in this country regard it as something else entirely. It was on that day that 2 men and 3 women (Justices Breyer, Kennedy, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsberg) usurped the throne of God and professed to create law, let alone ethical truths, out of thin air as if empowered to decree what is good and evil without, and contrary to, the perfect will of God. The opinion, in full, with the dissents, is in a single file here: Obergefell v. Hodges (c. 500 KB)

It was on that day that the judgment America has been heading to was underwritten by its representatives in the abdicated cause of justice. A handful of people have consented to the doom of this country by setting themselves up as enemies of His, and daring Him to do something about it. This is the legacy of the Flower Children and their parents. What will ours be? Will there be anything left to leave?

Romans 1
²⁸ And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting...³²  knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.

"Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."
~ Rak Chazak

I've Been Here Before: The Manuscript Argument

This theme/series is something I first started in September of last year, with this introductory article. My idea is simply to transparently show what articles I distinctly remember having a powerful influence on me in my process of investigating truth claims beginning in 2010. Each of these articles will be presented in chronological fashion.

So far, I pointed out the "articles we should not use" link from AiG (at the above blog post) as the first epiphany I encountered, which immediately demonstrated the intellectual honesty of Answers in Genesis. Subsequent to that, I looked at their Statement of Faith. Keep in mind that I wasn't doctrinally reformed at this point. But I could tell they weren't complete crazies, so I decided to tentatively trust their claims, but be ready to question the more extreme assertions. And so I did.

For the next week or two, I spent dozens of hours poring over 'the creationist view' of nearly every secular scientific dogma I'd been exposed to since I was old enough to read. What impressed me most was that I wasn't, largely, told "new information." Instead, the articles used what I already knew, and appealed to my common sense to explain it better. The more I kept reading, the more persuasive it all became. But something began to nag me, and that was that though the point of view was internally consistent, one thing was totally taken for granted in every article: the inerrancy and authority of the Bible. Each article made copious reference to Scripture, but within-article, the interpretation and reliance on those Scriptures was never defended. The implicit argument seemed to be, "IF you believe the Bible is true, and the Word of God, THEN you will logically come to believe what we present in our articles." It was a challenge. I was prepared to believe the Bible is God's Word and inerrant, but now I had to go make sure, and find out for myself.

First, was there enough evidence that the Bible was written when it is said that it was written, and that the original texts say what the modern copies/translations say?

The answer to this comes by way of the Manuscript Argument

That link is dated later than I would have read it, but I recognize the content as something similar/identical to what I actually read in Marc/April 2010.
 Simply put, if we take seriously that other historical documents about other historical figures are truthful in that the events they describe really took place when they say they took place (Herodotus, Caesar, Pliny, Josephus, Aristotle and Plato, etc), then by the same standard of assessment, there is no logical reason to question whether the Bible was actually written at the time period which the Bible's writers indicate that their respective books were written.

And as to whether we can be sure that what the Bible we have now says what the Bible of 70 AD said, if we can believe that what is attributed to Aristotle was written by Aristotle, then we can believe that what is attributed to Paul was written by Paul -- since there are 100 times as many New Testament copies as there are copies of Aristotle's works.

The principle of applying an equal standard of historical scrutiny leads to the confident conclusion that what the Bible says is what the Bible has always said, and that the attributed writers really are the ones who wrote the book, meaning that they were indeed eyewitnesses to their claims.

After demonstrating the historical authenticity of the texts, the next logical question is: does what the texts say, logically contradict, or is it coherent? I dove in headfirst. I went looking for alleged contradictions, making sure to leave no stone unturned. There had to at least be a plausible explanation to resolve each one, in order for inerrancy to be a valid conclusion. And the careful scrutiny of these claims is what I will summarize in the next IBHB article. An address of the many alleged Biblical contradictions.

Stay tuned.

~ Rak Chazak

Text Treatise: Epicurus and the Problem of Error

The Problem of Evil is often easily explained by reference to the ancient Greek philosopher (mentioned by way of identification in the Bible, in Acts, where there were Epicureans and Stoics who wanted to debate with Paul) Epicurus, whose pithy presentation is presented below:

 

The problem with the Problem as stated is that it does not take into account time. Perhaps God does want to destroy evil, and will, but for the time being has a sound rationale for allowing it to persist. This is, in fact, justified by the Bible:

"The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance." 2 Peter 3:9

There is also the question of evil being a necessary side effect of the free moral agency of mankind -- Love is given freely by an act of will, so making perfectly functioning automatons which lack any aspect of generosity, grace, compassion, or desire is inferior to a creation that includes beings which have the capacity to love others -- and with it the requisite capacity to choose not to.

But moving on from that, here is "The Problem of Error." It is something worth considering for anyone who claims to be Christian but does not regard the Bible as the inerrant, word for word Word of God.

Did God author the Bible, or men?

If God is not the author, then there is no guarantee of its truth.

Moreover, can God lie?

If there are untruths in the Bible, either God lied, or God is not the author. In the first case, such a being is not to be worshiped or obeyed. In the second case, who knows whether the Bible accurately depicts God or His moral Law truthfully? There is no way of knowing, so there is no reason to give it any greater weight than any other human document.

In conclusion, either God is the author of all Scripture, or it has no authority over the activities of men. And if it has no authority, why heed it?

Either the Bible is inerrant, or you have ZERO justification for the authenticity and veracity of the Christian faith. Which is akin to saying that a Christian has no reason to believe Christianity if they don't also believe the Bible. They are like all the false religious adherents in that their "feet are firmly planted in mid-air." They may be saved, but they're still being foolish.

And in many cases, they're not saved. If you believe God exists, how hard is it to believe that God can make sure that His will is known with 100% accuracy and reliability? It really isn't. So non-belief in Biblical inerrancy, while it doesn't force the conclusion that a person is a false convert (i.e. they claim to be a Christian but they aren't saved), but it is certainly strong and worrisome evidence in favor of that conclusion.

'Which is why it's so important for people to think through this issue and get with the program.

~ Rak Chazak

Gonzalez case ironically provides an example in favor of a strong central government

Quick recap of the history of "States' Rights"

In 1777, the Articles of Confederation were adopted, and ratified by 1781 by the original 13 States. Because of the revolutionaries' distrust of an autocratic dictator (seeing as they just fought a war to free themselves from King George's rule), they intentionally made the central government far weaker than the States.

This presented obvious problems to the cohesiveness of the union, as a collection of papers by James Madison outlines. (this was from another link off of the first).

For example, there was no Executive to enforce the acts passed by Congress. Each State began printing its own money, raising its own military, and engaging in international agreements independently of one another.

The States sent representatives to rectify this in the Constitutional Convention. Convening first in 1787, the Constitution of the United States was ratified in 1789. They gave the central government of the federal system more power. As a pushback to this, there was clamor for a Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution, to guarantee protections for the People against a now much stronger central government, and this occurred later.

The point of a federal system where the central government is stronger than the states in certain regards, is to prevent chaos from arising out of the states passing contradictory laws, attempting to control other states, seceding from the union or going to war with each other.

That last part is significant. The test of the federal system came with the Civil War, when pro-slavery states attempted to use "states' rights" to justify seceding from the union. Many legal pundits today still think that this is a constitutional right. However, whereas a state seceding from a state (West Virginia seceded from Virginia to join the Union during the Civil War) is not unconstitutional, a state seceding from the union is. And via might-makes-right, Abraham Lincoln cemented the role of the federal government through his executive actions leading up to and during the Civil War. Whereas the most obvious effect of the Civil War in our society was to end slavery, that was not the initial reason for it. Here is an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

The whole thing is worth reading. It's short but makes it clear that Abraham Lincoln did hope to end slavery, but that that was not his primary goal in his executive capacity, early on. The primary goal was to do what was his Constitutional obligation as the Executive -- to preserve the Union.

Why am I spending so much time talking about the Federal government? Well, it's because --

if the Central government is stronger than the states in matters of foreign policy and commerce and trade and international agreements and military etc etc etc,

then some states won't, for example, take it into their own hands to deport illegal immigrants (such as Arizona), while others take it into their own hands to refuse to cooperate with Federal immigration enforcement in turning over known criminals (such as the 'sanctuary cities' in California, one of which is San Francisco).

San Francisco has a law that requires officials to ignore Federal requests for cooperation on the subject of illegal immigrants. Rather than turning them over for processing and possible deportation, they are released into the general public.

That is how a man who has been deported 5 times has now ended up in a Sanctuary City, where officials arrested him, ignored a Federal ICE detainment request, and released him back onto the street, where he then murdered a young woman.

It's both the city's fault and the federal government's fault. For one, the city has an unconstitutional law on the books. For two, the Obama administration has had an inconsistent, at best, approach to immigration. They deport some immigrants, but release others from prison onto the streets. They refuse to send personnel to the Arizona-Mexico border, or to in any way secure it, and then sue Arizona for attempting to do what the Constitution requires Washington to do but which Washington won't do. They allow sanctuary cities to operate without any such lawsuits.

If laws regarding immigration were applied evenly across the board, and actually enforced evenly as well, then none of this would be an issue in the first place.

We have a dysfunctional system where the central government won't do its job, and the States are acting more and more like they did in the 1780s and 1850s-60s, as a confederacy where everyone gets to have their own opinion about what laws are important and which ones aren't.

And it gets the people that the government is sworn to protect, killed.

That is injustice. Deportation is not injustice, it is law. When someone who has been deported 5 times and shouldn't be in the country in the first place murders an innocent pedestrian, THAT is injustice.

I'm just glad I don't live near the border. All I can do is watch and opine. I abhor the feeling of helplessness. But feeling helpless when your family and friends are becoming victims of government corruption that encourages lawlessness in your city and state, that is a deplorable feeling.

~ Rak Chazak

Scientific Plot Twists in Images

Science News  (in the January 24, 2015 print publication) has a few things to correct you about. I'll summarize below and then put images of the articles below the jump, to back up my interpretation.

Speaking with a silly voice turns your babies into geniuses

Simple conclusion following from the premises. When you use "Baby Talk," you alert the child to that you're communicating with it, and its brain becomes receptive to vocabulary, grammar, object and concept associations, etc. Rather than confuse a child, speaking multiple languages to a developing infant is IDEAL, because it's at that age that we are able to learn multiple languages at once, because of the way the brain is behaving--I've heard it likened to a "sponge." So don't withhold knowledge from young children. Certainly they won't pick up on every thing you say, but the more you teach them, the more they pick up. And that's now being recognized in psychological circles.

Protein restrictions in diet may benefit longevity

This one was hard for me to take, because high protein levels is physiologically ideal before and after sustained anaerobic strength training exercise, because you're supplying your body's cells with enough nutrition and "building blocks" to repair and remodel its bone and muscle so that it won't break down already-existing musculature in response to the mechanical stresses. That's established science, so this doesn't negate that. But when sulfur-containing amino acids were cut to a low level in the diet of worms and mice, it affected their longevity and post-operation recovery significantly. However, as common sense would warn, you can't extrapolate this infinitely--some sulfur is necessary, as shown by the fact that when hydrogen sulfide was blocked, the animals had no measurable increase in survival or longevity. So when you're not caring about maintaining muscle, it would seem that having the lowest necessary levels of sulfurous amino acids in your diet, rather than a surplus, would benefit your health -- of course, humans have not been tested yet, only animals. We might be more complicated than mice. :)

Trying to keep carbon out of the atmosphere by piping it underground could cause earth quakes

"That'll teach those frackers to exploit Mother Earth!"

Yeah, 'nuff said. Ideas can kill. Wrong ideas, like man-caused global warming, inevitably lead to people trying to implement solutions to problems that don't exist, thereby causing worse problems. If your solution to more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere involves putting us at risk of man-caused earthquakes, you just might be in desperate need of rethinking your misplaced concerns.

Homosexuality-obsessed Hollywood blatantly rewrites WWII history in The Imitation Game

"You mean Alan Turing didn't actually fail to report a Soviet spy in order to avoid being outed as gay?" 
Yes, that is what I am telling you. And not only that, but the pivotal moment in history that gave Turing the mechanism (electronic circuits) to realize his theory of computing (due to a switch-up in how the Germans were using their Enigma machines), was completely blotted out of the movie. So the origins of computers and the internet and everything electronic in modern society, which would have made for a great piece of history for Hollywood to portray, was glossed over in favor of overlaying a 21st century sociocultural narrative (that of the homosexual's reality consisting solely of fear of public humiliation) onto a context where the actual people involved would not have recognized it.

I'm not kidding. Alan Turing's story doesn't need modern polish. If you wanted to make him a martyr, why not note the fact that he married a female team member to hide his homosexuality? Or that he was forcibly given hormonal treatments by the British government, leading him to become chemically depressed and commit suicide? I'm not saying there wasn't legitimate oppression of homosexuals in history--and Alan Turing's story is a tragic one. But do you need to lie about the man's character and contributions to history in order to make your movie more dramatic? Shame on you.

Empiricism, while great in theory, apparently fails to be realized in actual scientific practice most of the time

This was a long article, so I'm not posting the whole thing. But take a look at all of the human elements that impact the reliability of published results. They are worth being aware of, and keeping in the back of your mind when you hear of sensationalized studies. I'm hardly bashing scientific research. The article addresses why some results are not perfectly replicable, with fair effect. But assertions made in papers are anything but monolithic presentations of absolute fact, and should not ever be uncritically received as such.

Ancient Egyptians and Scandinavians had trade contact. So their cultural religions, creation myths, cosmologies and pantheons were likely influenced by each other.

"These results demonstrate that the globalization of trade is not a modern invention." 

Ancient Egyptian cobalt-blue glass beads were found in graves in Denmark.


It should be noted that according to the historian Snorre Sturlason (c. 1200 A.D.), in his Ynglinga Saga, the namesakes of Odin, Thor, Balder, Frey/a, etc were all early founders of the Swedish empire at Uppsala, serving as warrior-priests. In other words, they were considered real living people who are placed at around 200-100 BC, and are described as having emigrated from Turkey to Sweden at that time. Their prominence would have later led them to be conflated with or exaggerated into god-beings. In other words, Snorre Sturlason was one of the first promoters of the critical view that cultural religious pantheons (such as the Greek, Egyptian, Roman, etc) begin as veneration and idolization of political leaders, and progress into ancestor worship and eventually an apotheosis, or deification of the distant human characters.

The date means that whereas the organization of the Egyptian and Norse pantheons may be influenced by each other, the namesakes of the Norse cannot derive earlier than the 100s AD, for historical reasons.

And here are the images:

"Earth is not the Center of the Universe" - Response to Common Bible Attack

Have you heard this comment? I've heard it many times. It's getting pretty tedious. You can almost predict with 100% certainty that if you're in a discussion about Christianity that touches on science, it's only a matter of time before a self-professed "intelligent atheist" tries to lecture the 'ignorant Christians' on how backward their beliefs are. This comment is one of their most favorite ones.

"People used to believe the earth was the center of the universe, but now we have science! and we know that those old Christian superstitions about a God who loves us and makes us the centerpiece of His creation are just old, unscientific stories from a long-lost age of backward ignorance" 

or something like it. Doesn't it sound familiar? Doesn't it sound dumb? Wait, it gets better:

Chronological Snobbery FAIL

The atheist snobbery goes like this:
1. Christians believe God made the universe for them (this is false, by the way)
2. Therefore, Christians used to believe the earth was in the center of the universe, because the center is obviously the most important (importing 21st century assumptions, here)
3. Those idiots thought we were in the center, but SCIENCE has shown that that's not true! har har!
4. Therefore, since SCIENCE leads to truth and Christianity does not, atheism is the rational belief system and Christianity is something to be ashamed of believing.

The problem is, the fundamental premises of the argument are false.

"A common thought in the Middle Ages was that the centre of the universe was the worst place to be. For example, Dante’s Divine Comedy(c. 1310) has nine circles of Hell inside the Earth, getting worse as they approach the center. Satan was right at the centre of a (spherical) earth, at the centre of the universe. In the opposite direction, the nine celestial spheres of heaven increased in virtue and closeness to God as they got further from the center. We certainly do not hold to Dante’s vision, but in this light moving the earth away from the center was a promotion in the eyes of people in the Middle Ages, not a demotion, as 21^st century anachronistic skeptics claim." Creation.com, "Refuting Absolute Geocentrism", bold emphasis added.

In other words, 

1. Christians never assumed that their relationship to God meant that they occupied a special 3-D location inside the universe
2. They therefore never assumed they were at the center.
3. Therefore, the fact that we are not "at the center" is not a scientific contradiction to Christian beliefs, whether theological or historical.
4. Therefore, any atheist or other person who makes this claim is blinded by presumptuous arrogance, and they are the ones who are truly ignorant.

Q.E.D.

~ Rak Chazak

PS God made the universe for the demonstration and maximization of His glory. If your reason for rejecting Christianity is that you think it's a belief that coddles people's desire to feel important by saying that everything God does is for your sake, then check yourself. You're even less important than you think you are.

Ferguson has something in common with 5th century BC Athens

And that is ostracism. It was a practice where unpopular people would be thrown out of a city if enough people wanted them gone. There's a theory mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the subject that suggests that the purpose of ostracism was to satisfy the anger of the populace while avoiding the troubling outcomes of vigilante murder or mob lynching, or political tyranny if the person was a public official. That's an interesting statement. The idea is essentially that ostracism appeases the anger of the mob. There were no rules for why someone should be ostracized, except that there had to be a sizeable vote by the citizenry to cast him out. It could be for no good reason at all, as you'll note at the end of the first link.

Officer Wilson is apparently leaving Ferguson "willingly." Yeah, right. I don't think he wanted any of this hullabaloo to happen for the simple fact that he did his job. Yes, the evidence is in. Here is the AP link hub to all of the Grand Jury documents.

Wilson wasn't likely forced out by an official act of the police department. Although facts may come out to the tune that he was pressured to leave, that's probably unlikely as well. No, it seems clear that he can't live a normal life in the city any more because of the public lynching-in-effigy that has occurred by people with no facts, but plenty of racial animosity toward him. He's a hated man. He's unsafe wherever he goes, because someone might think that they can make a name for themselves by taking him out.

"They got some intelligence that suggested there were going to be some targets at the Ferguson Police Department and the minute he said that, he also indicated that he thought his resignation might alleviate some of those threats," one of Wilson's attorneys Neil Bruntrager said. "They had some intel that suggested there was going to be some action of a violent nature." source

It's injustice, but it is reality. He'll have to go somewhere else because he's unwelcome. He's been ostracized.

And Ferguson's race rioters and the criminally biased news media have taken social progress back 2500 years.

~ Rak Chazak

PS I was initially misled (thanks to CBS-sponsored news-tickers at my workplace) to believe that there were reports that Wilson was leaving the city itself, not just the police force. I wanted to put this here to correct that, although I still think it's likely that he'll eventually leave anyway. How could you stay there when you have no hope of a living in your chosen career, and where everybody from the gutter to the ivory towers hates you and wants to turn your life into a failure in order to vent their private frustrations? But that's speculation. The point about being pressured out by public opinion still stands, as shown in the citation I added.

"Darren Wilson has a new wife and a child on the way. And while his wife works for the Ferguson police department, Wilson is now unemployed. People have been trying to keep their income afloat with vigorous online fundraising efforts."

Filed under, lives ruined by racism

4 Degrees of Separation from Meriam Ibrahim

These are the stories I stay alive for. Life on earth is an epic drama, and at this point in history in particular, we have a treasure trove of stories from history at our fingertips, waiting to be dug up and relished. The ability to know what happened in the past, let alone what's happening right now, is a blessing and privilege that can't be understated. I am quite confident that in eternity, God will show us flashbacks of what really happened, that we never knew about, simply so we can know what He did and give Him glory for it. And in the meantime, in my sense-limited experience of earth history as a participant, I take pleasure in getting just a little taste of seeing how His plan is unfolding. It's exciting. I can consider a day a good day if I learned something about men and women of today or men and women of history that makes me marvel at God's involvement.

Yesterday at the 'Life Group' (adult Sunday School) at the SBC church in my hometown I've been trying to be obedient in attending, the executive pastor dropped by to share a story having to do with the church's practice of "prayer walking."

Prayer walking is not something mystical. It is simply going out and walking around the community while praying for the people in the houses etc as you pass them by. The motivation is to connect the petitioner with the real world in a tangible way (praying from home is just as effective because God is the One who answers), so that as they go around, they get a sense of the needs of the community so that they have a better idea of what to pray for. Basically it's an immersive activity to help you target your prayers more specifically. It's not in any way suggestive of the idea that your prayers become more 'powerful' because you're doing a sort of ritual. Nope. Not at all. The whole goal is to make you more personally involved, and incite you to feel more compassion for the people you're praying for.

The executive pastor shared that he'd been at a retreat in New York (state) with his family some time ago, but recently. Also staying there was another family he's gotten to know, and the husband is an elder in Tim Keller's church. If I remember the details, this man suggested to him that someone he knew was conducting a prayer walk in the Bronx River Housing Projects in the early morning one day that week. The man's name was Demas, and was a former felon who'd become passionate about starting a church in the Bronx. 

My executive pastor showed up in the early morning, and walked with Demas and some other men as they prayed over the people there. He shared with us that he was affected by hearing how they were praying--one example was that they'd literally ask, "God, we ask that you put a spirit of preserving life in the pregnant women, today, that they will not choose to have an abortion today." Raw stuff. 

As they continued, a man came walking toward them. His name was Bill, a friend of Demas. Somewhat confused at first, but becoming more interested the more he heard, this was the conversation the executive pastor overheard:

Demas: How was your trip?
Bill: It was great. I got to hold the baby!

Bill's trip was to Khartoum, Sudan. He has been friends with the foreign minister of Sudan for some years, and he had been one of a group of high profile people who traveled there to contend for the release of Meriam Ibrahim. Her daughter had begun crying while he was there with her, and Bill asked to hold the baby. Apparently he has a way with kids. Final details about Bill from the story: he hadn't grown up in NYC (PA or NJ, I forget which), but if I recall, he had had a heart for the lost of that city and is an elder together with Demas in a church they started. I could be off on some of these last details; they're an attempt to piece together the stuff I heard that didn't fit into the linear storyline.

Bill offered Meriam a place to stay, and that's where her family is now headed. The exec. pastor pointed out that that's a dangerous thing to do. The entire world knows that he's harboring this woman, now, and it's a small thing for a cleric somewhere to issue a fatwa demanding his death and there will be tens of thousands of true believers hoping to secure their place in muslim-heaven by killing him. But this didn't even enter into his decision. It was an easy choice to make, because it was made on faith. It was the right thing to do.

Bill and the foreign minister do not affirm each other's beliefs; they are honest with each other and think the other is wrong, but they have been able to be respectful of each others' person, over the years. When Meriam was in jail, Bill went to the foreign minister and told him "what you are doing is wrong," and used his influence to help get Ibrahim released.

Who would imagine that God would forge a friendship between a NYC pastor and an official in Sudan, so that one day one innocent person could be freed from the injustice of the Shariah Law? No one. But the One orchestrating world events is the same One who lays the groundwork, years and decades in advance, to effect the exact result He desires, in His sovereign will. It's heady. I'm amazed to hear of it.

It should be noted that Ibrahim's case was high-profile but that there are dozens and hundreds of Christians wrongly imprisoned in various countries around the world, and they need prayer as well. We might not know what happens with them, as we can with a case like Meriam's, but I'm nearly totally confident that we'll find out one day. Meanwhile, God is still in control and has the power of life and death in His hands. Nothing comes to us or any other person that He did not do, or permit. So let us confidently trust in Him for all things, and not neglect to pray for the things which are outside of our control. Nothing's outside of His.

~ Rak Chazak

PS Out of curiosity, I searched to see if Bill was already a known man. Otherwise I would have changed his name to protect him. But when I found that there was a top-tier Google result telling about what I have just been reporting, I was left with no further concern that I would jeopardize his safety:
http://www.christianpost.com/news/ny-pastor-meets-meriam-ibrahim-in-sudan-offers-to-help-bring-and-take-care-of-her-family-in-us-123588/

I also misspelled Dimas' name at first (no time to correct it right now, gotta get to work)
http://www.christiannewstoday.com/Christian_News_Report_9005006.html

A Parable: History Channel Does a Reagan Documentary

Imagine that I'm a movie producer.

I really love president Ronald Reagan. I want to honor his contribution to American politics and to the world by filming a dramatic documentary featuring him. It's going to cover his personal life, his journey to the White House, the events of his presidency, and finally end with his death and funeral.

So I set about doing research so that I'll do my best job representing Reagan as who he was. First, I need to consult historical experts. I decide to ask the governments of Russia and Iran for their historical analysis of his contributions. Furthermore, I interview Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, for their insight into the presidency. I go to other famous documentary filmmakers such as Michael Moore and Oliver Stone to see what I can learn from them. Naturally, I consult with Matt Damon, Ricky Gervais and George Clooney, whom I might consider inviting to play a key acting role in the film.

Now that I'm ready to film, I decide that the best location would be Johannesburg, South Africa. I film exclusively there. While there, one of our crewmembers gets shot in the butt, since South Africa has the world's highest violent crime rate--2,000 per 100,000. We interpret this as a miraculous occasion, since Reagan was also shot by someone but survived.

While filming, we present Reagan as a transgendered Japanese orphan growing up in a cardboard-and-sheet-metal "house" in the slums outside the city. He was forced to become a member of an underground boxing ring to earn money to feed his family. One day he meets the King of France, Genghis Khan, who takes him back to Brazil in his rocket ship to be his personal servant. Reagan grows and learns to maneuver through Brazilian politics, and eventually becomes a successful leader of a drug cartel. This is how he eventually gets to America. Reagan then becomes elected to the White House, and while president, invades Russia and nukes Iran. Minor details, it's called artistic license. Get over it. Eventually Reagan leaves the white house and dies by getting shot by a Tea Party maniac wielding an AR-15 while he was attending a pro-Obama rally during the 2012 election campaign.

Wait, wait, wait, you say. You've got all the details wrong. This isn't the real Reagan. Sure, he was president of the US, but all the facts are wrong. Who he is, where he came from, what he did and why he did it. Everything is changed in your movie.

But my supporters respond by saying, well, shouldn't you be happy that at least someone had the nerve to do a documentary about Reagan in the first place? Think of all the people that could become Republicans as a result!


It's like that with History Channel's The Bible.  It's the Bible in name only, but all the details are wrong. Which Jesus do you follow? The one who came to "change the world," or the one who came to SAVE the world?

~ Rak Chazak