I just read this news article on the Toronto Star earlier today, and it makes me sick thinking about it. They keep saying that Islam is such a peaceful and beautiful religion, yet I simply cannot stomach that claim in light of the reality that Islam intimidates and oppresses religious minorities into defecting into their system? I’m just thankful that God is going to preserve His true children. May He have mercy on these defectors, that they may yet realize the error of their ways and return to the Truth.

LAHORE, PAKISTAN—Dog-eared and tattered, the blue book is an inch thick and sits on a dented metal table in the corner office of Jamia Naeemia, an Islamic school tucked in a scattering of cement-walled homes and roadside shops.

Many believe the book offers the promise of safety and perhaps even a better chance at prosperity.

The book is a registry used to document religious converts to Islam and officials at Jamia Naeemia say business is brisk nowadays.

At least 20 to 25 former Christians adopt Islam each week by pledging an oath and signing a green and white document in which they accept Islam as “the most beautiful religion” and promise to “remain in the religion of Islam for the rest of my life, acknowledging that blessings are only from God.”

Human rights advocates say it’s no surprise some of Pakistan’s 3 million Christians are adopting Islam. These are vexing and dangerous days for the country’s religious minorities.

Read the rest of it here:

• The Star – Some Christians in Pakistan convert fear into safety

According to the Associated Press and Elizabeth Prann from FoxNews.com, Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama took “more than two days … to apologize for controversial remarks he made during a Martin Luther King Day speech.” So what did the governor say during his speech that was so terrible he needed to apologize for it?

There may be some people here today who do not have living within them the Holy Spirit. But if you have been adopted in God’s family like I have and like you have if you’re a Christian and if you’re saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister.

1. Both the Associated Press and Prann said this comment “condemned the beliefs of non-Christians,” an indictment so irrational it staggers the mind. There is absolutely nothing in Bentley’s comment that condemns anyone of anything. It is a theological matter of fact in Christianity that those who reject Christ are not the brothers and sisters of those who are in Christ. There is an important and substantive distinction in the New Testament between someone who is your neighbor and someone who is your brother or sister, the latter being a matter of adoption into God’s family.

2. They also criticized Bentley for telling “the crowd he is color blind. But just minutes later he went on to say [that] if they don’t have the same ‘daddy’ then they are not brothers and sisters.” Indeed. But now I have a question for you remarkable examples of irrationality: what does the one have to do with the other? Are you so delusional as to also think Bentley’s statement had something to do with race? You do realize that the expression “color blind” is a racial point, right? And that being a brother or sister in Christ is not a racial point but a theological one? No, of course you don’t, because that would require rationality and accuracy, which is not as sensational.

3. Joey Kennedy with the Birmingham News, who followed the reaction to Bentley’s remarks, had this to say: “In the city and the state there are segments of the population who were offended, and others said it was good what he said.” Thank you for such an informative piece of reporting. Kennedy went on to say, “He is not a civilian anymore, he is not a private person anymore. He is the governor of Alabama every day, twenty-four hours a day.” I am sure Captain Obvious will have more to reveal in the coming days that is just as informative.

4. I especially enjoyed how Kennedy decided that context is irrelevant to content. The fact that Bentley was speaking at the King Memorial Baptist Church as a Christian (he is also a Sunday school teacher and deacon at First Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa) about his Christian convictions “doesn’t matter,” Kennedy tells us. It might occur to you to ask Kennedy if he was in attendance at King Memorial Baptist Church that day, as Bentley delivered his speech, to know what the point being made was, but you have to remember that Kennedy thinks context “doesn’t matter” with regard to what Bentley meant and whether or not it was appropriate. The legacy of Martin Luther King was anything but exclusionary, he said, ignoring the fact that Bentley described himself as governor of “all of Alabama—Democrat, Republican, and independent, young and old, black and white, rich and poor,” and Bentley’s director of communications Rebekah Mason who wrote to Fox News, “The governor had intended no offense by his remarks. He is the governor of all the people, Christians non-Christians alike.” Doesn’t matter.

5. William Nigut, a regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, thinks that an apology does not go far enough. “An apology is only meaningful if it is consistent with a sincere understanding of what a person has done wrong,” he said, which assumes that Bentley did something wrong. He wants to know Bentley realizes his error, “that we are all brothers and sisters.” Someone needs to explain to Nigut that Bentley must first do something wrong before he can realize it. And not to put too fine a point on it, but it is Nigut who is wrong; we are not all brothers and sisters, for we do not all have the same parent either genetically or theologically.

6. The executive director of the First Amendment Center, Gene Policinski, said that Bentley needs to keep in mind that his office represents all faiths—which is complete hogwash. The governor’s office does not represent any faith whatsoever; it represents the executive branch of the state’s government, its powers and interests, which has nothing to do with any religious faith. His office governs the state in which people of diverse faiths reside; it does not represent any faith, much less all faiths. It is a little strange to think the executive director of the First Amendment Center, of all things, would need to brush up on his civics education.

7. Policinski also suggested “there is an implication when a particular faith receives favorable or disfavorable treatment.” That may be, but where did the Alabama state governor’s office give a particular faith favorable treatment? Nowhere.

Earlier this afternoon Bentley made a public apology:

If anyone from other religions felt disenfranchised by the language, I want to say I am sorry. I am sorry if I offended anyone in any way.

No, sir, do not apologize—for you have nothing to apologize for. If someone felt offended by your comment, then that is their problem, not yours. It is absolutely impossible to avoid offending someone somewhere of something. If offending people is not allowed, then speaking is not allowed. Consider for example the idea that your apology itself offends a lot people—like a great many Christians. Now what are you to do? Are you to apologize for the offending apology? Then what of those who were originally offended? Will they not be offended that you now apologized for the offending apology?

You know why it is okay to offend Christians? Because we are neither that retarded nor that insecure. Unlike so many others out there, we are rational grown-ups.

The other night I was watching a show on tv called Richard Hammonds Invisible Worlds (BBC). One of the topics he covered was gecko feet which was quite facinating. The following article goes into some detail of this amazing creature and his feet.

Great Gecko Glue

The best explanation seems to be that the geckos’ feet can exploit the weak short-range bonds between molecules. That is, they stick via van der Waals forces. But for such weak forces to work, there must be an enormous intimate contact area between foot and surface, so that enough individual weak forces can add up to a very strong force.

Under an electron microscope, researchers have found that the feet have very fine hairs (setae), about 1/10th of a millimetre long and packed 5,000 per square mm (three million per square inch). In turn, the end of each seta has about 400–1,000 branches ending in a spatula-like structure about 0.2–0.5 µm (microns—less than 1/50,000th inch) long. These spatulae can provide the necessary contact area.

This website has some good images of geckos’ feet.

With special instruments, a team of biologists and engineers from several American universities analysed a seta from the foot of a Tokay gecko (Gekko gecko). The foot pad has an area of about 100 mm2 (0.16 sq. inch) and can produce 10 newtons of adhesive force (enough to support two pounds). But they showed that an individual seta had an attractive force 10 times stronger than expected. In fact, one seta is strong enough to support an ant’s weight, while a million could support a small child—about 10 N/cm2, where 10 newtons is about the weight of 1 kg. So the gecko has plenty of attractive force to spare. This means it can handle the rough, irregular surfaces of its natural habitat.

Actually, the attractive force is far greater when the seta is gently pressed into the surface and then pulled along. The force also changes with the angle at which the hair is attached to the surface, so that the seta can detach at about 30°. These elaborate properties are exploited by the gecko’s ‘unusually complex behaviour’1 of uncurling its toes when attaching, and unpeeling while detaching. This all means that the gecko can not only stick properly with each step, but also avoid getting stuck, all without using much energy.

In his explanation of this marvelous feature of the gecko, Richard Hammond said that the gecko had to develop this toe curling ability in order to unstick its feet in order to be able to move. The use of the word develop makes it obvious that there are heavy evolutionary overtones that are assumed as the mechanism by which the gecko’s feet came to be.

Can anyone else see the disconnect here?

Evolutionary theory is a slow gradual process. Yet here we find three abilities associated with the geckos’ feet that have to present at the same time in order to work. If the hairs are present without the toe curling ability (which Richard is suggesting here), then the poor gecko will no be able to move and will quickly become a meal to the nearest predator. Without the self-cleaning ability, the geckos’ feet will quickly become non-functioning/useless. And why evolve toe curling as a precursor to hairy feet? To claim that this is the path taken, screams a designer at the helm realising that toe curling is needed to have occured before the hair. And when does the self-cleaning occur? These are not just singular variations in the DNA to change, say, regular toes to curling toes. According to evolutionary theory changes in anatomy like this would have to take many many mutations.

Even if it is reasonable to believe evolution started the ball rolling by giving the gecko a toe curling ability and the gecko was able to function/breed with this ability even though it serves no purpose, where are all the toe curling lizards that didn’t evolve further down the gecko path? There is no “Darwins tree” here whether alive or in the fossil record.

Rather than believe a complex unsubstantiated evolutionary story, a designer at the helm seems a much more simple and likely explanation for such an amazing creature.

Launching his website in January 2010, B.J. Eduard writes:

Having observed the websites containing so-called ‘Bible Contradictions’, I am astonished at the anger of those who bring them forward. Also, not infrequently, the so-called Contradictions are supported in a way of which a schoolboy can see how trivial it is.

I am also astonished about the frequently inadequate replies of Christian writers. E.g. they often fail to see mistranslations in current Bibles, or they refer to copying errors where the textual tradition doesn’t give any support for such an assumption.

It is not my goal to discus all ‘Contradictions’ that have been brought forward in the course of time. It would take a lifetime. It is my goal to show that most solutions are much more natural than supposed usually. Let the texts speak for themselves.

Yet only one year on and the amount of information on the site addressing such contradictions is seemingly encyclopedic, and counting.

I discovered the site only last week while doing some private study to clear up a note I had made in the margin of my Bible in Acts (7:14), concerning an apparent mismatch with the figure cited in Genesis (46:27) and Exodus (1:5). Afterwards, I continued to search for other well known “contradictions” and found those addressed also. For example, the old ‘wear sandals, don’t wear sandals; take a staff, don’t take a staff’ conundrum is addressed in a post on January 4, 2010 – the inauguration date of the website; a conundrum considered by systematic theologian Wayne Grudem^[1] as among the most difficult of the supposed contradictions that one is ever likely to contend.

Since discovering Eduard’s site, I had in mind to simply point readers in that direction via a short blurb (as above). However, today I found a recent article by Paul Wilkinson, whose commentary on the approach to Biblical contradictions, compliments so well, the content of Eduard’s website, that I must also commend it to you as a quite sufficient detour prior to visiting and bookmarking Eduard’s Contradicting Bible Contradictions.

1. As cited in footnote 10 in a previous post, “Wayne Grudem addresses some of the strongest objections against variations in the biblical text that pose a challenge to inerrancy in his freely-downloadable Systematic Theology Class, in which he also maintains there has been no passage of Scripture he has ever found that could not be resolved in such a way that also preserves inerrancy.”

I just finished listening to this video of Bruce Ware laying out the problems with Arminianism’s view of libertarian free will and presenting a positive biblical case for Calvinistic Compatibilism. He argues his case with clarity and persuasion, and I think everybody should take a listen.

Without getting into tedious scientific details, God created the observable universe with ten (or eleven) dimensions. The four that we are familiar with and experience are three dimensions of space and one dimension of time; the other six dimensions ceased expanding abruptly after creation and remain tightly curled. And from the equations of Einstein to the theories of Hawking, we have learned that these four dimensions comprise a single manifold—spacetime. We know from careful observation that these four dimensions comprise an inseparable whole.

And the theological implications of this are difficult to ignore. That our spacetime manifold—three dimensions of space and one dimension of time—was created by God produces results in the following: that time as we know it has a point of origin just as space does, at the creation event; that God transcends time as we know it, just as he transcends space, because they are an inseparable whole; that in his nature God is transcendent, or exists independent of what he created, while in his operations God is omnipresent, or is aware of and at work throughout every point of space and time; and that this contributes substantially to why God is said to be omniscient, trustworthy in his prophecies and sovereign power.

Does this mean that God is timeless? Not necessarily. It means only that he transcends (exists independent of) time as we experience it in this spacetime manifold he created. For all we know, God could exist in another dimension of time perpendicular to ours, similar to how the dimension of length is perpendicular to that of width, such that for God time is a temporal plane rather than a line. In other words, it is not that God is ‘timeless’ so much as he is ‘timeful’ or omnipresent.

I have used the following thought experiment before to shed light the consequences of omnipresence with some success, so perhaps it might prove helpful again at present. Imagine that we observe a supernova in a galaxy two million light years away: (1) from the perspective of that galaxy, the event was two million years ago; (2) from the perspective of our galaxy, the event is just now occurring; (3) from the perspective of another galaxy millions of light years further still, that supernova will not be observed for a very long time to come. So the question presents itself: Is the event past, present, or future? Evidently that will depend entirely on your spatio-temporal location.

So then what if you are omnipresent across all spatio-temporal locations at once?

Quite simply, past and future are absorbed into an eternal now. In the words of Aiden W. Tozer, “In God there is no was or will be, but a continuous and unbroken is. In him, history and prophecy are one and the same.” And Charles Spurgeon, “With God there is no past, and can be no future … What we call past, present, and future, he wraps up in one eternal now.”