Here I raise my Ebenezer

Robert Robinson's Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing has a line, "Here I raise my Ebenezer, here by thy great help I come."  Thanks to Ken Ham and recent events that line has been in the back of my mind now for a while.  The Creation Museum has recently unveiled their Allosaurus fragilis,Ebenezer, and have invited scientists from around the world to come study her.  

Her name literally meaning, "stone of help", Ebenezer has a long complicated past in the evangelical world.  Though sources differ over when between 2000-2002, she was ultimately unearthed, in 2002 by the Vision Forum and a group of homeschoolers.  According to a creationist article at WorldNetDaily, Ebenezer was found with unfossilized or at least not completely fossilized plant debris.  

“We found a complete section of vertebrae more than 12 feet in length, which was fully articulated. The dinosaur appears to be in much the same position as he was at the time of his death and burial, which must have been virtually instantaneous, and caused by a catastrophic event. Not only was this fully articulated dinosaur found lying in a bed of leaves and plant debris, but there is wood from trees mixed in among the bones, some of which contains petrified and unpetrified elements in the same piece of wood. If this creature were millions of years old, the evidence would look quite different.”

According to Rachel Maddow, Dr. Andrew Snelling of Answers in Genesis will not vouch for the unfossilized plant debris.  He does however continue to date the fossil to the flood year by the position of the bones.

Dr. Snelling added that the intact skeleton of this allosaur is a testimony to an extremely rapid burial, which is confirmation of the global catastrophe of a Flood a few thousand years ago.

Dr. Mary Schweitzer has found soft tissues within dinosaur bones.  However Vision Forum's claims are even more profound.  Still the supposed discovery of unfossilized Mesozoic material that supposedly disproves an old earth is far from new.  I remember in High School attending a creationism conference in the late 90's.  One of the speakers said something so remarkable that I thought I knew that creationism was about to supplant the Theory of Evolution.  The speaker noted that during a 1994 expedition, Buddy Davis claimed to have found unfossilized dinosaur bones complete with unfossilized ligaments.  The man, who most of his sculptures reside in the Creation Museum, claimed to have discovered things that Schweitzer can only dream.   

Why is Ken Ham not inviting researchers to study unpetrified Mesozoic wood or dinosaur ligaments?  Surely if Ham had such things or if such things have been discovered, he would surely have invited Schweitzer herself to study them.  Twenty years later I think we can safely conclude that Ken and Buddy have no such thing.

I am more of a West Virginian...

In the 1861 Virginia secession debate, former governor Henry Wise put his pistol on the podium informing the conference that Virginian militias had taken up arms against the federal government. The Western Virginians demanded to know by what democratic authority did he bypass the legislature and even the governor of the state. Wise and his allies explained that this was war and democracy was too slow for the needs of the state.

The governor (Wise's allies had plans to kidnap him if he did not go along) ultimately retroactively sanctioned the attacks, but this breach of trust ultimately caused West Virginia to secede from Virginia.[1] Likewise, in Nevada and now Utah, Bundy and his allies have taken up arms against the federal government without any democratic authority from Nevadans or Utahns.

[1] Freehling, William W. and Craig M. Simpson, ed. Showdown in Virginia The 1861 Convention and the Fate of the Union (Charlottesville; University of Virginia Press, 2010) 193-195

Hashtags have done better than anything so far

I do not understand why we need to tell these parents that "hashtags will not bring back your girls". They tried everything they could and resorted to hashtags as a last resort to shame Nigeria into getting their daughters back. So far, this hashtag by a Nigerian lawyer has done more than anything else they tried. You are right, these fathers and this lawyer are not warriors, but they needed to shame the warriors into doing something.

Don't believe everything you read on the internet

Facebook

I am sure ACLJ knows and has googled this, but there is not a good source that Washington ever said this. This is probably a telephone game of a Washington quote from a 1835 history book which honestly sounds more like Washington.

"It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being.

It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being.

It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being. Religion is as necessary to reason, as reason is to religion. The one cannot exist without the other. A reasoning being would lose his reason in attempting to account for the great phenomena of nature, had he not a Supreme Being to refer to; and well has it been said, that if there had been no God, mankind would have been obliged to imagine one." [1]

Bundy, Fischer, Jeffress, Islam, Christianity

In the comment section on someone's fan page I made the following comment about this image.

Like Christianity, Islam is a spectrum. There are still Christians who argue that the 1st Amendment only applies to Christians, that women should stay home/submit to their husbands, and that homosexuality should be illegal. How few of these Christians condemned Cliven Bundy's call to arms.

There were two replies.

I have ministered to and have met many, many Christians from various denominations, and have never met one who said the 1st Amendment applies only to Christians. Do they teach that at Kent State or what? Cliven Bundy did not call anyone to arms. Quite the opposite. Hope you get an "A: in PolySci for that liberal whopper.

And this one.

Hi, [my name]. An essential difference between Christianity and Islam is found in the two Basic Manuals; the Bible makes it clear that noone must be coerced into believing in Christ; the Koran makes it very clear that people must be coerced into believing in Islam. Examples of coercion in the history of Christianity were carried out by people who knew their position was not supported by the Bible. Note too that the greatest freedoms, starting with freedom of conscience, religion and expression, happened first in Christian countries. There too you find the greatest and longest sustainable development in culture, arts, sciences, philosophy, economy and government. As people uncritically accept secular humanism (atheism by another name), these things erode quickly, as noted by 20th Century atheistic movements of fascism, communism and nazism--not to mention Vorwoerd's most virulent Apartheid. I expect our American political leaders to know history, philosophy (especially ethics, moral philosophy) backwards and forwards. We unfortunately have not always elected the best in this regard. Best regards.

I made the following reply.

One, I am not a liberal. Two, Fischer, radio host for the AFA and Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas both argue that the word "religion" in the First Amendment only applies to Christianity. I doubt they teach it at Kent State, but it is taught on Christian radio and in a pulpit at Dallas. Bundy never condemned the idea of these militia preparing to kill police officers. Hundreds of armed people gathered to stop officers from enforcing the law. American Islam has never done such a thing.

[His name omitted], I said that Christianity is a spectrum. Yes there were deists arguing the Renaissance and Baptists arguing for separation of church and state. One of the reasons that we needed separation of church and state was forced conversion. Children were required to be baptized by law in many places. Fascism and Nazism were not necessarily Atheistic.

 I would like to also note that no one challenged that there are still Christians who argue "women should stay home/submit to their husbands, and that homosexuality should be illegal."  I am more worried about these Christians, because there are more of them in the states.

He looked just like us

This weekend, I was flipping through Ken and Mally Ham's A is for Adam: The Gospel from Genesis (Spiral Bound).  Now I make no bones on this blog about the fact that I am not a "biblical creationist", so you can imagine that I did not agree with a lot of the book.  Still one thing struck me.  I know that it is a children's book, but Adam is depicted as a white man with a beard and shoulder length hair.  Then the book tells the reader that, "He wasn't a monkey, he looked just like us."

I know that this is a children's book and I do not want to make the same mistake that some "biblical creationists" make when they take a children's book and try to make a mountain out of the author's attempt to simplify a subject (see Carl Kerby).  I do not wish to argue whether man is a Homo sapien, hominid, or primate.  What struck me was the phrase "he looked just like us".  I discussed this briefly in a post, Contradictory Messages.

Homo erectus

Like Ray, the Hams believe that both individuals in this picture are fully human and I suspect they believe that both could have been what Adam looked like.  It seems a little misleading for the authors to depict Adam as a Homo sapien who "looked just like us" when they also believe that he did not have to "look just like us."

Marital Rape Still Legal in Nigeria

Just researching a little extra context on the Nigerian girls abduction. While child marriage and unconsensual marriage have been illegal in Nigeria for years, it still happens for cultural reasons.[1] Marital rape however is still legal in Nigeria. Specifically in the Northern states, it is still legal to use pain and threats of death to obtain sex from your wife. Still the girls were ages 12-15 and it is always considered rape in the Northern States to have sex with a girl who is not your wife or is under the age of 14 unless she is your wife. Let us pray for their quick return. [2]

I have written quite a bit about marital rape and you can read more by clicking here.

What are you trusting God for?

My head has been a little twisted. I am reading Virginian secessionist/unionist Civil War arguments while paying attention to the mess out in Nevada.  This argument for Virginia's secession sticks out.

God means, through the instrumentality of African slavery, to accomplish His great purpose of Christianizing and civilizing that race. You may throw impediments in the way, and thereby bring down punishment on your own hands, but you cannot stop it…Every consideration of duty, of interest, of high Christian moral obligation, conspires to make us cause Virginia to secede at once, settle our difficulties peaceably afterwards, if we can – and if we cannot, forcibly.

If I find that you will not go with me, if you are determined to wait, wait, wait,…I will…go with you for the next plan which I think will best promote the great object I have in view…I mean to stand by my principles and doctrines to the bitter end. If that day shall come – which God in his mercy avert – when you and I will have to be exiled or yield to this horde of Northern Vandals,…I will not be exiled…I will stand on the shores of my own native Rappahannock, and there I will fall…I will die in Virginia, and trust to God and to posterity to vindicate what is just and what is right. ~ Robert Montague – April 1861 [1]

The phrase "Trust God" (or in this case "trust to God") means very little.  The question is the value and validity about what you are trusting God for.

[1] Freehling, William W. and Craig M. Simpson, ed. Showdown in Virginia The 1861 Convention and the Fate of the Union (Charlottesville; University of Virginia Press, 2010) 120-121