Are you raising nice kids? A Harvard psychologist gives 5 ways to raise them to be kind

By Amy Joyce, Washington Post, July 18, 2014

Earlier this year, I wrote about teaching empathy, and whether you are a parent who does so. The idea behind it is from Richard Weissbourd, a Harvard psychologist with the graduate school of education, who runs the Making Caring Common project, aimed to help teach kids to be kind.

I know, you’d think they are or that parents are teaching that themselves, right? Not so, according to a new study released by the group.

About 80 percent of the youth in the study said their parents were more concerned with their achievement or happiness than whether they cared for others. The interviewees were also three times more likely to agree that “My parents are prouder if I get good grades in my classes than if I’m a caring community member in class and school.”

Weissbourd and his cohorts have come up with recommendations about how to raise children to become caring, respectful and responsible adults. Why is this important? Because if we want our children to be moral people, we have to, well, raise them that way.

“Children are not born simply good or bad and we should never give up on them. They need adults who will help them become caring, respectful, and responsible for their communities at every stage of their childhood,” the researchers write.

The five strategies to raise moral, caring children, according to Making Caring Common:

1. Make caring for others a priority. Why? Parents tend to prioritize their children’s happiness and achievements over their children’s concern for others. But children need to learn to balance their needs with the needs of others, whether it’s passing the ball to a teammate or deciding to stand up for friend who is being bullied.

How? Children need to hear from parents that caring for others is a top priority. A big part of that is holding children to high ethical expectations, such as honoring their commitments, even if it makes them unhappy. For example, before kids quit a sports team, band, or a friendship, we should ask them to consider their obligations to the group or the friend and encourage them to work out problems before quitting.

Try this
• Instead of saying to your kids: “The most important thing is that you’re happy,” say “The most important thing is that you’re kind.”

• Make sure that your older children always address others respectfully, even when they’re tired, distracted, or angry.

• Emphasize caring when you interact with other key adults in your children’s lives. For example, ask teachers whether your children are good community members at school.

2. Provide opportunities for children to practice caring and gratitude. Why? It’s never too late to become a good person, but it won’t happen on its own. Children need to practice caring for others and expressing gratitude for those who care for them and contribute to others’ lives. Studies show that people who are in the habit of expressing gratitude are more likely to be helpful, generous, compassionate, and forgiving—and they’re also more likely to be happy and healthy.

How? Learning to be caring is like learning to play a sport or an instrument. Daily repetition—whether it’s a helping a friend with homework, pitching in around the house, or having a classroom job—make caring second nature and develop and hone youth’s caregiving capacities. Learning gratitude similarly involves regularly practicing it.

Try this
• Don’t reward your child for every act of helpfulness, such as clearing the dinner table. We should expect our kids to help around the house, with siblings, and with neighbors and only reward uncommon acts of kindness.

• Talk to your child about caring and uncaring acts they see on television and about acts of justice and injustice they might witness or hear about in the news.

• Make gratitude a daily ritual at dinnertime, bedtime, in the car, or on the subway. Express thanks for those who contribute to us and others in large and small ways.

3. Expand your child’s circle of concern. Why? Almost all children care about a small circle of their families and friends. Our challenge is help our children learn to care about someone outside that circle, such as the new kid in class, someone who doesn’t speak their language, the school custodian, or someone who lives in a distant country.

How? Children need to learn to zoom in, by listening closely and attending to those in their immediate circle, and to zoom out, by taking in the big picture and considering the many perspectives of the people they interact with daily, including those who are vulnerable. They also need to consider how their decisions, such as quitting a sports team or a band, can ripple out and harm various members of their communities. Especially in our more global world, children need to develop concern for people who live in very different cultures and communities than their own.

Try this
• Make sure your children are friendly and grateful with all the people in their daily lives, such as a bus driver or a waitress.

• Encourage children to care for those who are vulnerable. Give children some simple ideas for stepping into the “caring and courage zone,” like comforting a classmate who was teased.

• Use a newspaper or TV story to encourage your child to think about hardships faced by children in another country.

4. Be a strong moral role model and mentor. Why? Children learn ethical values by watching the actions of adults they respect. They also learn values by thinking through ethical dilemmas with adults, e.g. “Should I invite a new neighbor to my birthday party when my best friend doesn’t like her?”

How? Being a moral role model and mentor means that we need to practice honesty, fairness, and caring ourselves. But it doesn’t mean being perfect all the time. For our children to respect and trust us, we need to acknowledge our mistakes and flaws. We also need to respect children’s thinking and listen to their perspectives, demonstrating to them how we want them to engage others.

Try this:
• Model caring for others by doing community service at least once a month. Even better, do this service with your child.

• Give your child an ethical dilemma at dinner or ask your child about dilemmas they’ve faced.

5. Guide children in managing destructive feelings. Why? Often the ability to care for others is overwhelmed by anger, shame, envy, or other negative feelings.

How? We need to teach children that all feelings are okay, but some ways of dealing with them are not helpful. Children need our help learning to cope with these feelings in productive ways.

Try this
Here’s a simple way to teach your kids to calm down: ask your child to stop, take a deep breath through the nose and exhale through the mouth, and count to five. Practice when your child is calm. Then, when you see her getting upset, remind her about the steps and do them with her. After a while she’ll start to do it on her own so that she can express her feelings in a helpful and appropriate way.

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How I made sure all 12 of my kids could pay for college themselves

By Francis L. Thompson, Quartz, January 12, 2014

My wife and I had 12 children over the course of 15 1/2 years. Today, our oldest is 37 and our youngest is 22. I have always had a very prosperous job and enough money to give my kids almost anything. But my wife and I decided not to.

I will share with you the things that we did, but first let me tell you the results: All 12 of my children have college degrees (or are in school), and we as parents did not pay for it. Most have graduate degrees. Those who are married have wonderful spouses with the same ethics and college degrees, too. We have 18 grandchildren who are learning the same things that our kids learned—self respect, gratitude, and a desire to give back to society.

We raised our family in Utah, Florida, and California; my wife and I now live in Colorado. In March, we will have been married 40 years. I attribute the love between us as a part of our success with the children. They see a stable home life with a commitment that does not have compromises.

Here’s what we did right (we got plenty wrong, too, but that’s another list):

Chores. Kids had to perform chores from age 3. A 3-year-old does not clean toilets very well but by the time he is 4, it’s a reasonably good job.

They got allowances based on how they did the chores for the week.

We had the children wash their own clothes by the time they turned 8. We assigned them a wash day.

When they started reading, they had to make dinner by reading a recipe. They also had to learn to double a recipe.

The boys and girls had to learn to sew.

Study time. Education was very important in our family.

We had study time from 6 to 8 pm every week day. No television, computer, games, or other activities until the two hours were up. If they had no homework, then they read books. For those too young to be in school, we had someone read books to them. After the two hours, they could do whatever they wanted as long as they were in by curfew.

All the kids were required to take every Advanced Placement class there was. We did not let entrance scores be an impediment. We went to the school and demanded our kids be let in. Then we, as parents, spent the time to ensure they had the understanding to pass the class. After the first child, the school learned that we kept our promise that the kids could handle the AP classes.

If children would come home and say that a teacher hated them or was not fair, our response was that you need to find a way to get along. You need find a way to learn the material because in real life, you may have a boss that does not like you. We would not enable children to “blame” the teacher for not learning, but place the responsibility for learning the material back on the child. Of course, we were alongside them for two hours of study a day, for them to ask for help anytime.

Picky eaters not allowed. We all ate dinner and breakfast together. Breakfast was at 5:15am and then the children had to do chores before school. Dinner was at 5:30pm.

More broadly, food was interesting. We wanted a balanced diet, but hated it when we were young and parents made us eat all our food. Sometimes we were full and just did not want to eat anymore. Our rule was to give the kids the food they hated most first (usually vegetables) and then they got the next type of food. They did not have to eat it and could leave the table. If later they complained they were hungry, we would get out that food they did not want to eat, warm it up in the microwave, and provide it to them. Again, they did not have to eat it. But they got no other food until the next meal unless they ate it.

We did not have snacks between meals. We always had the four food groups (meat, dairy, grain, fruits and vegetables) and nearly always had dessert of some kind. To this day, our kids are not afraid to try different foods, and have no allergies to foods. They try all kinds of new foods and eat only until they are full. Not one of our kids is even a little bit heavy. They are thin, athletic, and very healthy. With 12 kids, you would think that at least one would have some food allergies or food special needs. (I am not a doctor.)

Extracurriculars. All kids had to play some kind of sport. They got to choose, but choosing none was not an option. We started them in grade school. We did not care if it was swimming, football, baseball, fencing, tennis, etc. and did not care if they chose to change sports. But they had to play something.

All kids had to be in some kind of club: Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, history, drama, etc.

They were required to provide community service. We would volunteer within our community and at church. For Eagle Scout projects, we would have the entire family help. Once we collected old clothes and took them to Mexico and passed them out. The kids saw what life was like for many families and how their collections made them so happy and made a difference.

Independence. When the kids turned 16, we bought each a car. The first one learned what that meant. As the tow truck pulled a once “new” car into the driveway, my oldest proclaimed: “Dad, it is a wreck!” I said, “Yes, but a 1965 Mustang fastback wreck. Here are the repair manuals. Tools are in the garage. I will pay for every part, but will not pay for LABOR.” Eleven months later, the car had a rebuilt engine, rebuilt transmission, newly upholstered interior, a new suspension system, and a new coat of paint. My daughter (yes, it was my daughter) had one of the hottest cars at high school. And her pride that she built it was beyond imaginable. (As a side note, none of my kids ever got a ticket for speeding, even though no car had less than 450 horsepower.)

We as parents allowed kids to make mistakes. Five years before the 16th birthday and their “new” car gift, they had to help out with our family cars. Once I asked my son, Samuel, to change the oil and asked if he needed help or instruction. “No, Dad, I can do it.” An hour later, he came in and said, “Dad, does it take 18 quarts of oil to change the oil?” I asked where did he put 18 quarts of oil when normally only five were needed. His response: “That big screw on top at the front of the engine.” I said “You mean the radiator?” Well, he did not get into trouble for filling the radiator with oil. He had to drain it, we bought a radiator flush, put in new radiator fluid, and then he had to change the real oil. We did not ground him or give him any punishment for doing it “wrong.” We let the lesson be the teaching tool. Our children are not afraid to try something new. They were trained that if they do something wrong they will not get punished. It often cost us more money, but we were raising kids, not saving money.

The kids each got their own computer, but had to build it. I bought the processor, memory, power supply, case, keyboard, hard drive, motherboard, and mouse. They had to put it together and load the software on. This started when they were 12.

We let the children make their own choices, but limited. For example, do you want to go to bed now or clean your room? Rarely, did we give directives that were one way, unless it dealt with living the agreed-upon family rules. This let the child feel that she had some control over life.

In it together. We required the children to help each other. When a fifth grader is required to read 30 minutes a day, and a first grader is required to be read to 30 minutes a day, have one sit next to the other and read. Those in high school calculus tutored those in algebra or grade-school math.

We assigned an older child to a younger child to teach them and help them accomplish their weekly chores.

We let the children be a part of making the family rules. For example, the kids wanted the rule that no toys were allowed in the family room. The toys had to stay either in the bedroom or playroom. In addition to their chores, they had to all clean their bedroom every day (or just keep it clean in the first place). These were rules that the children wanted. We gave them a chance each month to amend or create new rules. Mom and Dad had veto power of course.

We tried to be always consistent. If they had to study two hours every night, we did not make an exception to it. Curfew was 10pm during school nights and midnight on non-school nights. There were no exceptions to the rules.

Vacation policy. We would take family vacations every summer for two or three weeks. We could afford a hotel, or cruise, but did not choose those options. We went camping and backpacking. If it rained, then we would figure out how to backpack in the rain and survive. We would set up a base camp at a site with five or six tents, and I would take all kids age 6 or older on a three- to five-day backpack trip. My wife would stay with the little ones. Remember, for 15 years, she was either pregnant or just had a baby. My kids and I hiked across the Grand Canyon, to the top of Mount Whitney, across the Continental Divide, across Yosemite.

We would send kids via airplane to relatives in Europe or across the US for two or three weeks at a time. We started this when they were in kindergarten. It would take special treatment for the airlines to take a 5-year-old alone on the plane and required people on the other end to have special documentation. We only sent the kids if they wanted to go. However, with the younger ones seeing the older ones travel, they wanted to go. The kids learned from an early age that we, as parents, were always there for them, but would let them grow their own wings and fly.

Money and materialism. Even though we have sufficient money, we have not helped the children buy homes, pay for education, pay for weddings (yes, we do not pay for weddings either). We have provided extensive information on how to do it or how to buy rental units and use equity to grow wealth. We do not “give” things to our children but we give them information and teach them “how” to do things. We have helped them with contacts in corporations, but they have to do the interviews and “earn” the jobs.

We give birthday and Christmas presents to the kids. We would play Santa Claus but as they got older, and would ask about it, we would not lie. We would say it is a game we play and it is fun. We did and do have lists for items that each child would like for presents. Then everyone can see what they want. With the internet, it is easy to send such lists around to the children and grandchildren. Still, homemade gifts are often the favorite of all.

The real world. We loved the children regardless of what they did. But would not prevent consequences of any of their actions. We let them suffer consequences and would not try to mitigate the consequences because we saw them suffering. We would cry and be sad, but would not do anything to reduce the consequences of their actions.

We were and are not our kids’ best friends. We were their parents.

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She’s Doing An Elite MBA For Under $1,000

John A. Byrne, LinkedIn, January 17, 2014

If everything goes according to plan, Laurie Pickard, 32, will earn her MBA in three years for less than $1,000. She’ll take classes from Stanford, Wharton, and Yale, among other top-tier schools. And she’ll tackle it with $0 opportunity cost by keeping her full-time job as a rural enterprise development and entrepreneurship specialist at USAID. She’ll accomplish all of this from Kigali, Rwanda.

It’s a premise that sounds too good to be true, writes Poets&Quants’ news & feature editor Lauren Everitt. But Pickard is determined to pull it off. If successful, she’ll be one of the first students in the world to cobble together an MBA program from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), free or low-cost classes accessible to anyone with Internet access.

Pickard didn’t plan to pave the way for earning a dirt-cheap business education. In fact, she initially had her sights set on a more conventional path–and she boasts the background to get into an elite program: a B.A. in politics from Oberlin College, an M.A. in geography and urban studies from Temple University, and stints with the Peace Corps and the International Finance Corporation in Nicaragua.

“I was looking at traditional, U.S.-based, high-end, expensive MBAs, and then I kind of dropped that idea in favor of shorter, European-based MBAs … that take half the time and cost a quarter as much,” she says. By her own admission, Pickard was “not an early adopter” of the MOOC movement. But after a friend enrolled in a finance course with MOOC provider Coursera, she reconsidered the traditional MBA. “I was thinking, ‘I could do that.’ And so I started looking into what was out there, and that’s when I got this idea that I should just do an MBA out of free courses,” she says.

Only a year ago, it would not have been possible to even consider getting the equivalent of an MBA via MOOCs. But in the space of just nine months in 2012, from February to November, the number of institutions offering free online business courses has doubled to 51 from 26, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International. The number of business faculty teaching MOOC courses has more than doubled in the same timeframe to 83 from 39.

Pickard developed her program by reviewing the B-school curriculums at top schools. She designed it to be flexible because MOOC courses are not guaranteed: “You have no idea when they’ll be offered and if they’ll ever be offered again,” she points out. Rather than setting a strict course list, she organized her degree path by themes.

Four months in, Pickard has completed five courses. Initially, she planned to complete 16 courses over two to three years, but she’s enjoying the process so much, she’ll likely keep going and exceed the credits required by most MBA programs. “There are so many course offerings out there, that it’s like a choose-your-own-adventure story,” she says. “I loved school, so it’s kind of like that excitement you get when you first get the course catalog for the semester, and you’re looking through it like, ‘Oh, I want to take that, I want to take that, I want to take that course,” she says. Although the courses vary in terms of quality and difficulty, Pickard points out that the same problem affects bricks-and-mortar programs.

Pickard also doesn’t seem to mind the virtual component. Given that her husband, a foreign service officer, is stationed in Rwanda for the next four years, the online aspect is actually a boon. “My mind is changing, and my thinking about business is really expanding and growing,” she says. “I feel the same way that I felt at other times in my life when I was really immersed in an education experience. So from that standpoint, there’s a true benefit to MOOCs.”

If you’re interested in taking MOOC business courses, check out PoetsandQuants.com.

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Study: Religious Schools Perform Better Than Public, Charter Schools

By Napp Nazworth, Christian Post, April 10, 2013
Private religious schools perform better than public schools, and public charter schools performed no better than regular public schools, according to a new study by William Jeynes, professor of education at California State University at Long Beach and senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton.

Jeynes spoke Monday with The Christian Post about the study. He found that religious, mostly Christian, school students were a full year ahead of students who attend public and charter schools.

The results of his research were recently published in vol. 87, issue 3 of the Peabody Journal of Education in an article titled, “A Meta-Analysis on the Effects and Contributions of Public, Public Charter, and Religious Schools on Student Outcomes,” and were presented last month in a speech for Notre Dame University faculty.

Jeynes used a research method called a “meta-analysis,” which utilizes very large data sets by combining the data from many different studies. Most of the studies used test scores to measure student performance, but there were some other measures, such as grade point average and teacher ratings, as well.

The research uses four different models to show how the outcomes might change using different control variables. Some might argue, for instance, that students at religious schools do better because their parents are more involved in their education, not because the schools are better. Jeynes, therefore, controlled for this “selection effect.” Religious schools still perform better, though, even when controlling for parental involvement.

When all the control variables are factored in, the study found that students at religious schools still have a seven to eight month advantage over students at public and charter schools.

Jeynes found that there were several reasons that religious schools do better. At religious schools, the students are encouraged to take difficult courses much more frequently and they have a “can do attitude,” Jeynes explained, epitomized by the saying, “God doesn’t make junk.” Religious schools place higher expectations upon their students and send the message that they have the ability to go to college.

Jeynes also found a greater reduction in the class and race based “achievement gaps.” Additionally, Jeynes found that the differences on behavioral measures were even greater than the academic differences. Students at religious schools were less likely, for instance, to get suspended, get into fights, do drugs, and get involved in bullying. These students also showed more respect for teachers.

Once difference that some, such as Jeynes, believe is an advantage for public schools is that public school teachers are more apt to demonstrate more flexibility with students expressing their own opinions.

Jeynes did not look at homeschooled students for this study, but has studied them in the past. His previous studies have shown that homeschooled students do even better than religious school students. Homeschooled students have several advantages over public and religious schools.

Students in general do better with high parental involvement and small class sizes. Homeschools, obviously, have the highest level of parental involvement and the smallest class sizes. Also, in a traditional school classroom, teachers may have to move on to a different topic before not all of their students have mastered the topic. In a homeschool, the parent/teacher can stick with a skill or topic until the student has mastered it, then move on. That is a “huge advantage,” Jeynes said.

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New Rules

By Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times, September 8, 2012
I just arrived in Shanghai, but I’m thinking about Estonia and wondering about something Presidents Clinton and Obama have been saying.

Wired magazine reported last week that public schools in Estonia are establishing a program for teaching first graders—and kids in all other grades—how to do computer programming. Wired said that the curriculum was created “because of the difficulty Estonian companies face in hiring programmers. Estonia has a burgeoning tech industry thanks in part to the success of Skype, which was developed in Estonia in 2003.”

The news from Estonia prompted The Guardian newspaper of London to publish an online poll asking its readers: “Children aged 7 to 16 are being given the opportunity to learn how to code in schools in Estonia, should U.K. school children be taught programming as part of their school day?” It’s fascinating to read about all this while visiting Shanghai, whose public school system in 2010 beat the rest of the world in math, science and reading in the global PISA exam of 15-year-olds. Will the Chinese respond by teaching programming to preschoolers?

All of this made me think Obama should stop using the phrase—first minted by Bill Clinton in 1992—that if you just “work hard and play by the rules” you should expect that the American system will deliver you a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one. That mantra really resonates with me and, I am sure, with many voters. There is just one problem: It’s out of date.

The truth is, if you want a decent job that will lead to a decent life today you have to work harder, regularly reinvent yourself, obtain at least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that you’re engaged in lifelong learning and play by the rules.

Why? Because when Clinton first employed his phrase in 1992, the Internet was just emerging, virtually no one had e-mail and the cold war was just ending. In other words, we were still living in a closed system, a world of walls, which were just starting to come down. It was a world before Nafta and the full merger of globalization and the information technology revolution, a world in which unions and blue-collar manufacturing were still relatively strong, and where America could still write a lot of the rules that people played by.

That world is gone. It is now a more open system. Technology and globalization are wiping out lower-skilled jobs faster, while steadily raising the skill level required for new jobs. More than ever now, lifelong learning is the key to getting into, and staying in, the middle class.

There is a quote attributed to the futurist Alvin Toffler that captures this new reality: In the future “illiteracy will not be defined by those who cannot read and write, but by those who cannot learn and relearn.” Any form of standing still is deadly.

I covered the Republican convention, and I was impressed in watching my Times colleagues at how much their jobs have changed. Here’s what a reporter does in a typical day: report, file for the Web edition, file for The International Herald Tribune, tweet, update for the Web edition, report more, track other people’s tweets, do a Web-video spot and then write the story for the print paper. You want to be a Times reporter today? That’s your day. You have to work harder and smarter and develop new skills faster.

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4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic

by Daniel Scocco

One of the most common complaints that I hear from bloggers is the fact that no matter how hard they try, they can’t grow their blogs past 100 or so daily page vies. Those early days are indeed the hardest, because you need to put hard work in without the certainty of achieving results.

If you are in that same situation, here is a simple strategy that will certainly increase your blog traffic and make you break the 1,000 daily page views mark. In fact, the strategy could be used even if your are already over that number but have reached a traffic plateau lately.

Just make sure to execute the 4 steps as planned and to spend the two hours and a half every day (obviously if you have more time available you can expand the time spent on each of the four steps proportionally).

First Step: Killer Articles (1 hour per day)

Spend one hour brainstorming, researching and writing killer articles (also called linkbaits, pillar articles and so on).

Notice that your goal is to release one killer article every week. If that is not possible aim for one every 15 days. So the one hour that you will spend every day will be dedicated to the same piece. In other words, expect killers articles to take from 5 up to 10 hours of work.

If you are not familiar with the term, a killer article is nothing more than a long and structured article that has the goal of delivering a huge amount of value to potential visitors. If you have a web design blog, for example, you could write an article with “100 Free Resources for Designers”. Here are some ideas for killer articles:

• create a giant list of resources,
• write a detailed tutorial teaching people how to do something,
• find a solution for a common problem in your niche and write about it, or
• write a deep analysis on a topic where people have only talked superficially

When visitors come across your killer article, you want them to have the following reaction: “Holy crap! This is awesome. I better bookmark it. Heck, I better even mention this on my site and on my Twitter account, to let my readers and friends know about it.”

Second Step: Networking (30 minutes per day)

Networking is essential, especially when you are just getting started. The 30 minutes that you will dedicate to it every day could be split among:

• commenting on other blogs in your niche,
• linking to the posts of bloggers in your niche, and
• interacting with the bloggers in your niche via email, IM or Twitter.

Remember that your goal is to build genuine relationships, so don’t approach people just because you think they can help to promote your blog. Approach them because you respect their work and because you think the two of you could grow together.

Third Step: Promotion (30 minutes per day)

The first activity here is the promotion of your killer articles. Whenever you publish one of them, you should push it in any way you can. Examples include:

• letting the people in your network know about it (don’t beg for a link though),
• letting bloggers and webmasters in relevant niches know about it,
• getting some friends to submit the article to social bookmarking sites,
• getting some friends to Twitter the article, and
• posting about the article in online forums and/or newsgroups.

If there is time left, spend it with search engine optimization, social media marketing and activities to promote your blog as whole. Those can range from keyword research to promoting your blog on Facebook and guest blogging.

Fourth Step: Normal Posts (30 minutes per day)

Just like a man does not live by bread alone, a blog does not live by killer articles alone. Normal posts are the ones that you will publish routinely in your blog, between the killer articles. For example, you could publish a killer article every Monday and normal posts from Tuesday through Friday. Here are some ideas for normal posts:

• a post linking to an article on another blog and containing your opinion about it
• a post informing your readers about a news in your niche
• a post asking a question to your readers and aiming to initiate a discussion
• a post highlighting a new resource or trick that you discovered and that would be useful to your readers

While killers articles are essential to promote your blog and bring new readers aboard, normal posts are the ones that will create diversity in your content and keep your readers engaged.

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Four Ways to Break Through Your Fear & Self-Doubt

Four Ways To Break Through Your Fear and Self-Doubt


By Fabienne Frederickson, Forbes, June 26, 2012

Just recently I read a post on a small business start-up blog by an entrepreneur who was selected to deliver a TED talk. Despite knowing what an amazing opportunity this was, she experienced intense fear leading up to the event and even considered some crazy excuses to get out of her commitment.

She’s certainly not alone. As a coach and mentor who works with thousands of entrepreneurs, I often witness how people stop themselves by allowing fear and self-doubt to hold them back. The thing is, they’re often not even aware of it. Here’s what I mean… People SAY they want something very badly, that they want a change, and theoretically, that they’d do anything to get it.

But when the rubber meets the road, it’s a totally different story. For many, when it’s time to take action, they’re just not willing to take the steps or do the work that creates the result. It’s that inner self-doubt that consistently has them questioning every single move they make in growing their business and their income.

Here are my four steps to break though that fear and self-doubt:

1. Take a No-Excuses Approach. Although, some may call them “reasons”, people stop themselves all the time by using excuses. The opportunity they want so badly finally shows up, and they make excuses so as not to go forward. The biggest excuses I hear are “I don’t have enough money,” “I don’t have enough time, “I’m too busy”, “I don’t want to travel,” and the list goes on.

They use these excuses as their trap door, their escape route.

Let me ask you this—when pressed in a life or death situation, would you find the time or money? If someone you loved was trapped in a building, would you stop trying to rescue them if the front door was locked? No, of course not. You’d try the back door, then the windows, and every other possible way, right?

To achieve success, you’ve got to be willing to take the same approach with your business. Successful people are those who take a No-Excuses Approach and are willing to do what others won’t.

So, how badly do you want it? You either have excuses or you have results. Which do you choose?

2. Feel the Fear—But Do It Anyway. The ego creates fear to keep you small. For example, fear of rejection, fear of overwhelm, fear of humiliation, fear of making mistakes, fear of losing it all, fear of the unknown, and on and on it goes. The list is huge.

All entrepreneurs I know experience fear. What separates those who are successful and those who allow fear to hold them back is the willingness to act in spite of the fear. The best way to get over fear is to walk directly into it. It takes courage but you know what? Walking into fear is never as bad as you think it’s going to be. Instead, you’ll find it liberating.

3. Be Willing to Stretch Beyond Your Comfort Zone. Most people avoid discomfort like the plague. If you want to get to the next level of your business, you’ve got to be comfortable being uncomfortable—just for a short time. Yes, it’s a little scary at first but let’s face it, it’s not going to kill you.

The question is—are you willing? Are you willing to trade short-term discomfort for long-term success? If so, are you willing to go where you have to go? Are you willing to talk to who you have to talk to? Are you willing to move for what you want? Are you willing to do what you haven’t done? Are you willing to stretch beyond your comfort zone?

4. Take Decisive Action. You can’t just wish for something. You’ve got to take action. Action is an issue of personal responsibility. It’s where you acknowledge that you are solely responsible for the choices in your life and you accept that you cannot blame others for the choices you have made. Time and time again our inner self-doubt makes us question everything and keeps us from taking action when the solution shows up. This all boils down to one thing and one thing only. In plain English it’s called self-sabotage.

Widening your perspective around success starts with a decision. Once you make a decision to succeed, it’s time to commit to doing whatever it takes to make it happen.

It comes down to taking bold and decisive action toward what you say you want in your business or your life. It’s about saying YES to what’s possible for you. Saying YES to the opportunities that are divinely given to you—and then taking action.

Back to entrepreneur, Rebekah who I mentioned in my introduction—her fear of failure and her desire to conquer that self doubt actually wound up being a driving force for success in her business. And it can for you, too.

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Six Reasons To Say No to Vaccination!

http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/six-reasons-to-say-no-to-vaccination/

by SARAH, THE HEALTHY HOME ECONOMIST on MAY 25, 2010

Vaccination is an extremely controversial topic these days. Whatever side of the aisle you may fall with regard to your opinion about vaccination, one thing is for certain. The choice to vaccinate or not to vaccinate is a decision that has the potential to greatly impact the health of you and most importantly, your children for the rest of their lives.


As a result, this decision should not be taken lightly and it should not be made in a vacuum. In other words, don’t just take your pediatrician’s word that shots are safe. It is possible for doctors to be wrong. They are human, after all. In reality, your doctor is simply parroting the standard line about vaccination from the American Medical Association (AMA) playbook. If you think you are getting their honest assessment, think again.

You should neither assume shots are dangerous just because your friend down the street doesn’t vaccinate her kids.

The key here is education; making an informed decision by investigating the facts with an open mind and knowing exactly what you are getting yourself into before you commit to do anything.

With that in mind, the list below will briefly detail to you the reasons why I did not vaccinate my own children and will never consider a shot for them for any reason even in the event of a so called “pandemic.” Please remember that I come from a medical family. My own Father (retired) is a MD as is my brother and my cousin (who was a pediatrician, now deceased). My husband’s mother is a nurse. There is no shortage of opinions on this subject in my family, I can assure you.

So, don’t use family pressure as an excuse to do what you need to do once you investigate the facts for yourself and make an informed decision. There is no more foolish choice than to do something because it is someone else’s wishes and not your own. It is your body, after all and these are your children. There is no one on earth who knows what is best for them except you and your spouse – not even and most especially not your doctor! Make your decisions feeling confident in this knowledge.

#1: Pharmaceutical Companies Can’t Be Trusted

Let’s just list a couple of the (many) times over the past 10 years where a drug or drug regimen has been deemed unsafe and downright dangerous and yet the pharmaceutical companies covered it up FOR YEARS in order to continue raking in the profits for as long as possible. This should be an easy task.

How about hormone replacement therapy for women? The standard of care for a menopausal woman for over 40 years was HRT. Even women with no complaints were advised that this treatment was helpful as it reduced chances for a heart attack and cancer and even helped them feel younger. Were any, I repeat ANY of these claims true? Not a whit. Breast cancer risk is doubled for women on HRT, 41% increased risk for stroke, 29% increased risk of heart attack, and the list goes on and on.

How about Vioxx? Before this dangerous drug that caused thousands of deaths from heart attack and stroke was finally removed from the market, evidence surfaced that Merck had withheld information and even doctored reports on its dangers years before. As of November 2007, Merck had agreed to pay $4.85 billion to settle approximately 27,000 cases from victims claiming injury or death of a family member using Vioxx. While this is a huge sum of money, in reality it represents less than one year’s profits for Merck. Does it pay for a drug company to lie about a drug’s safety and efficacy? You betcha. The risk of payouts to victims from getting sued is lower than the lure of huge and long lasting profits while a drug’s patent protection remains in effect.

I could cite other examples, but I’m trying to keep this post as pithy as possible. Please comment if you have other examples of pharmaceutical company deceit. It will help others reading this blog who might still be on the fence about this issue.

Remember the old proverb, “Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me”? These corporate behemoths have proven themselves to be completely untrustworthy based on past behavior. In a court of law, if such a company were an actual witness, an attorney would never put them on the stand due to a serious lack of credibility. Are you really going to take these companies at their word that these shots are safe when money and profits are impacted by their answer?

#2: ALL Vaccines are Loaded with Chemicals and other Poisons

Here is a list of some of the damaging ingredients in the vaccines on the market today:

MSG, antifreeze, phenol (used as a disinfectant), formaldehyde (cancer causing and used to embalm), aluminum (associated with alzheimer’s disease and seizures), glycerin (toxic to the kidney, liver, can cause lung damage, gastrointestinal damage and death), lead, cadmium, sulfates, yeast proteins, antibiotics, acetone (used in nail polish remover), neomycin and streptomycin. And the ingredient making the press is thimerosol (more toxic than mercury, a preservative still used in many vaccines, not easily eliminated, can cause severe neurological damage as well as other life threatening autoimmune disease). These vaccines are grown and strained through animal or human tissue, likemonkey and dog kidney tissue, chick embryo, calf serum, human diploid cells (the dissected organs of aborted fetuses), pig blood, horse blood and rabbit brain.

Can you imagine injecting this stuff directly into your child’s blood? At least if you ate these ingredients, your body would have a chance to detoxify and eliminate them before any permanent damage could be done. But, to inject them right into the blood is the most damaging and lethal approach imaginable. How could anyone possibly think injection of such a cocktail of poison could in any way help preserve and enhance your child’s health?

It sure didn’t make any sense to me. And, here I am 12 years later, still very happy with my decision NOT to vaccinate my children.

Sadly, I know many Moms with 20/20 hindsight who greatly regret their decision to vaccinate. I don’t know ANYONE who has not vaccinated and regrets their decision, however. Which group do you want to be a part of in 10 years?

#3: Fully Vaccinated Children are the Unhealthiest, Most Chronically Ill Children I Know

One thing that completely confounds me is that there are no studies comparing the health of unvaccinated children to the health of vaccinated children. This seems like such an obvious study and it should have been conducted decades ago. Why hasn’t it been done yet? My guess is because the health of the nonvaccinated children would so totally blow away the health of the vaccinated children that the discussion about the dangers of vaccines could finally be put to bed and the case would be closed emphatically in favor of those that accuse shots of causing chronic illness and auto immune disease.

Take an informal poll of the folks in your circle and see for yourself. Observation is a powerful tool, so put it to use. The kids with the most problems – allergies, asthma, ADHD, autism, coordination and other gross motor issues, etc sure seem to be the ones that are right on track with their vaccination schedule, don’t you think?

Even more powerful, ask Moms with several children, some of whom are vaccinated and some who are not. In my own circle, the Moms I know who have one or two older kids who are fully vaccinated and the younger kids who did not get any shots tell me that, hands down, that the unvaccinated children are healthier and have less problems.

Someday there will be a study that shows that unvaccinated children have many less health problems than their vaccinated peers. Don’t wait until this study is finally done because it will be too late for your child.

#4: Other Countries Are Waking Up to the Dangers of Vaccines

In 1975, Japan raised its minimum vaccination age to 2 years old, The country’s infant mortality subsequently plummeted to such low levels that Japan now enjoys one of the lowest level in the Western world (#3 at last look). In comparison, the United States’ infant mortality rate is #33.

In Australia, the flu vaccine was recently suspended (April 2010) for children under 5 because an alarming number of children were showing up in the emergency rooms with febrile convulsions or other vaccine reactions within hours of getting this shot.

Need I say more?

#5: A Number of Vaccines Have Already Had Problems/Been Removed from the Market

Here is a brief list of some of the vaccines that have caused serious injury in recent years. Please comment with others that you know of if they are not on this list:

- In Feb 2002, GlaxoSmithKline removed the Lyme Disease vaccine from the market citing poor sales when in fact a number of folks who received the vaccine reported symptoms worse than the disease itself such as incurable arthritis or neurological impairment.

- The Rotavirus vaccine (Rotashield) was removed from the market in 1999 due to an association between the vaccine and life threatening bowel obstruction or twisting of the bowl! Interestingly, my pediatrician at the time (who was a lifelong friend of our family) had highly recommended that this vaccine be given to my newborn baby at the time. I trusted my instincts and said no to the shot – am I glad I did! My pediatrician (remember, lifelong family friend) subsequently dropped me as a patient. Guess he wasn’t such a friend after all!

- A warning was issued concerning the second Rotavirus vaccine (Rotateq) in 2007 as it caused the same twisting of the bowel problem in 28 infants (16 of which required intestinal surgery). This second vaccine has not yet been removed from the market as far as I know.

- Another vaccine that has had a lot of problems but is not yet withdrawn is the Gardasil vaccine for adolescent girls. Fainting, paralysis, slurred speech are just a few of the reactions reported and yet this vaccine continues to stay on the market. At least 1600 adverse events have been reported since its approval in 2006, yet doctors are continuing to recommend this shot to their patients. Why this vaccine hasn’t already been removed from the market is astonishing.

If the vaccines above have had serious problems, the others probably do too as vaccine manufacturers follow the same basic formula when coming up with each new shot.

#6 You Can Always Get Vaccinated, But You Can Never Undo a Vaccination

Procrastination is usually considered a character flaw, but in the case of vaccination, delaying the decision for as long as possible plays to your advantage. The longer you wait to vaccinate your child, the better. A child’s immune system continues to develop for years after birth. The blood/brain barrier does not fully develop until adolescence. The longer you wait, the more likely your child’s immune system will be able to handle the onslaught with minimal damage.

If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything!

Conversely, you can never undo a vaccination. There are holistic therapies that can detox a child from the vaccine’s poison, but the damage that is done can never be 100% repaired. And, I have NEVER met a fully vaccinated child that is healthier and more robust than a well nourished, unvaccinated child. Period.

While I would like to convince you to never vaccinate your child, if I can simply convince you to delay it for a few years that is certainly better than vaccinating a baby. If you can simply commit to waiting until your child is school age to vaccinate, so much the better than if you vaccinate as a toddler and so on. Time is on your side and waiting is the best policy when it comes to shots.

By the time your child is older, more research will have been done, you will have an opportunity to learn more and become more comfortable with your decision to wait. Who knows? Your attitude of wait and see may turn out to be permanent.

Sarah, TheHealthyHomeEconomist.com

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Judge Not! What is the right moral stand?

http://lavistachurchofchrist.org/LVarticles/JudgingWithRighteousJudgment.html

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Borrowing characters from C. S. Lewis, imagine this dialogue between a junior demon named Wormwood and his wicked uncle Screwtape.

Wormwood: Believers have so many weapons at their disposal. It is difficult to neutralize them. It takes a huge effort just to slow the work of a single Christian.

Screwtape: Your one-on-one approach is inefficient. This is the age of Madison Avenue and mass marketing. If you can undermine their whole group at once, then you’ve accomplished something.

Wormwood: Unfortunately, I’m not highly productive. In the time it takes me to frustrate one believer, I could tempt a dozen heathens.

Screwtape: Don’t lose heart, Wormwood. We are imple­menting a plan to impair the whole Church with a single ploy.

Wormwood: I don’t see how that will be possible. I see Christians dedicated to warning others about hell. It’s all I can do just to get one of them distracted for a short time.

Screwtape: We are going to use their Leader’s own words.

Wormwood: No! Please don’t. Don’t even joke about using His words. I can’t take it.

Screwtape: If you’re ever going to grow up to be an effec­tive demon, you’re going to have to learn to use the Enemy’s words against Him.

Wormwood: It just seems so dangerous. Which words are you going to use?

Screwtape: “Judge not!”

Wormwood: I don’t understand why He would tell them not to judge. That’s confusing. He commanded His followers to rebuke, admonish, and judge hundreds of times in His Book. And that’s what they’re out there
doing. And I might add, it’s causing me grief.

Screwtape: When their Leader said those words, He was speaking to hypocrites. “Judge not… you hypocrite,” as He said later in the same paragraph.

Wormwood: Yeah, but how are we going to use “Judge not” to neutralize the whole Church?

Screwtape: We’re going to get them to ignore the fact that He was talking to hypocrites. He said that hypocrites should not judge, at least not until they stop doing the wrong deed themselves. But we’re going to make them think none of them should judge, ever.

Wormwood: That’s bril­liant… if you can pull it off, that is. I mean, if we can get them to stop judging, then they won’t rebuke the wicked. And they won’t be able to admonish those who are sexually immoral.

Screwtape: It is even more brilliant than you realize. If we can seduce Christians into fol­lowing the instructions for hypo­crites, we will turn them into hypocrites. It’s like government workers who follow foolish rules so precisely they are transformed from human beings into bureau­crats; drones who mindlessly dis­pense red tape regardless of the misfortune they cause. The slave who willingly obeys his master, begins to conform to the master. If believers willingly submit to an instruction for hypocrites, they will conform to hypocrisy. Eventually, with a little evil luck, we might stop them from con­fronting unbelievers altogether because, as you know Worm­wood, to confront requires judg­ing. And if they don’t judge un­believers, they are hypocrites, professing the Gospel but deny­ing its power.

Wormwood: Ha, ha. I’m excited. When do we start?

Screwtape: Everything is underway already. Just do your part.

Wormwood: And that is…?

Screwtape: Make sure your targets read as little of the Book as possible. Don’t get too wor­ried if they stick to their favorite twenty cliché verses. But make sure they remain ignorant of most of the Word.

Wormwood: Master, you are brilliant.

Screwtape: You can call me Master if you want, but don’t let the boss hear you.

Hopefully the Church will see Judge Not headed for retirement replaced with Judge Rightly. For as Jesus said, “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment” (John 7:24).
http://kgov.com/should-christians-judge

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Fatoa Cientificos na Bíblia

Fatos científicos na Bíblia
100 razões para crer que a Bíblia tem uma origem sobrenatural
Autor: Ray Comfort - http://www.wayofthemaster.com/


Conteúdo

Prefácio................................................................5

Capítulo 1 A Ciência e a Bíblia ...............................11
Capítulo 2 O Incrível livro de Jô..............................17
Capítulo 3 A Ciência Médica e a Bíblia ..................20
Capítulo 4 A Ciência e o Gênesis.............................24
Capítulo 5 Os Cientistas e a Bíblia...........................29
Capítulo 6 A Biologia e a Bíblia...............................35
Capítulo 7 As Profecias Bíblicas 100% precisas.......39
Capítulo 8 A Astronomia e a Bíblia..........................46
Capítulo 9 Personagens Históricos e a Bíblia.............50
Capítulo 10 A Arqueologia e a Bíblia.........................59
Capítulo 11 A Precisão Histórica da Bíblia.................67
Capítulo 12 A Evolução e a Bíblia.............................70
Capítulo 13 A Ciência e a Evolução..........................85



Page 5 Prefácio

Eu espero que você seja um cético

“Suponha que eu acreditasse ser Deus e que eu cresse que todo o universo gira ao meu redor?” O jovem cheio de confiança esperava pela minha reação a sua pergunta. Eu simplesmente respondi: Eu acho que você seria um ser humano normal. Ele ficou um pouco surpreso de eu não ter me impressionado com o seu absurdo comentário, e me perguntou: “O que você quer dizer com isso?” Eu expliquei perguntando a ele o que ele achava que “aqui” era. Ele me disse que era onde ele estava.

Todo ser humano pensa dessa mesma forma. Nós definimos “aqui” como sendo onde nós estamos. Todos as outras pessoas e todas as outras coisas estão lá. Cada um de nós pensa que é o centro do universo. Semântica? Vamos mais adiante. Defina “agora” para mim. Diga-me quando é. Você não consegue. Na fração de segundo que você tenta localizar o “agora” ele se torna passado. Eu geralmente explico a natureza do “agora” depois que eu pergunto a uma pessoa se ela já roubou alguma coisa. Esta é a típica resposta à pergunta: “Sim, já. Mas isso foi no passado.” Eu explico a elas que tudo está no “passado”. Você tem que definir até mesmo a leitura dessa frase como algo que você fez no passado.

Esses pensamentos são um pouco estranhos, e você talvez esteja pensando que ainda há algumas coisas das quais nós (Page 6) podemos ter certeza – o sol ainda nasce, o céu ainda é azul, e “para cima” ainda é “para cima”. Não é verdade. O sol nunca nasce. A Terra gira, nos dando a impressão de que o sol está nascendo embora ele esteja parado (parece estar parado, mas na verdade está se movendo pelo universo). O céu não é azul. Pergunte a qualquer astronauta. Ele não tem cor. Nem “para cima” é para cima. Lembre-se que a Terra é redonda. Aquilo que é para cima para alguém no Pólo Norte não é a mesma coisa para alguém no Pólo Sul. Na verdade, se todo mundo na Terra apontasse para onde pensa que é para cima, nós todos apontaríamos em direções diferentes.

Muitas coisas que pensamos serem algo certo não o são. A História nos mostra que até aquilo que a ciência define como uma verdade hoje pode ser ridicularizado em cem anos.

Então do que nós podemos ter certeza? Existe algo que seja “absoluto” ou uma verdade imutável? Nós falaremos disso adiante nesse livro.

Em abril de 2001, por meio de uma série de circunstâncias estranhas, eu acabei falando na Associação Americana de Ateus, durante a Convenção Nacional em Orlando no estado da Flórida. A platéia de 250 pessoas foi razoavelmente educada ... até que eu afirmei que a Bíblia estava repleta de fatos científico e médicos, que foram escritos milhares de anos antes do homem descobri-los. A reação foi escárnio imediato.

A reação deles era compreensível. Se eu estivesse falando a verdade a Bíblia teria que ter uma origem sobrenatural. Um pensamento desagradável para um ateu convicto. Isso, no entanto, não é uma noticia de todo ruim para o incrédulo. Se a Bíblia provar ser a Palavra (Page 7) daquele que criou todas as coisas, faria sentido folhear suas páginas. Ao final das contas, o tempo levará a todos nós para o caixão. Se houver uma chance em um milhão de que a promessa bíblica de imortalidade e a ameaça de condenação forem verdade, nós mesmos devemos estudá-la.

A Bíblia não tenta defender sua inspiração. Gênesis simplesmente inicia com as palavras “Deus disse”. Essas palavras são repetidas nove vezes no primeiro capítulo. A frase “O Senhor falou” é usada 560 vezes nos primeiros cinco livros da Bíblia e pelo menos 3.800 vezes em todo o Antigo Testamento. Isaías alegou pelo menos 40 vezes que a sua mensagem vinha diretamente de Deus; Ezequiel, 60 vezes; e Jeremias, 100 vezes.

A maioria das pessoas não está ciente que a Bíblia foi escrita ao longo de um período de 1.600 anos, por mais de 40 autores, que escreveram em três continentes diferentes em três línguas diferentes. Eles falaram sobre centenas de assuntos controversos, e mesmo assim escreveram palavras que concordavam entre si.

Esses fatos tornam a informação contida nessa publicação ainda mais inacreditável.

Antes de olharmos esses fatos científicos na (Page 8) Bíblia, eu devo dizer algumas informações importantes. Para fazer isso, eu terei que citar trechos da Bíblia. Isso não significa que eu vou usar “raciocínio circular”. Eu simplesmente quero explicar algo que é relevante para o que eu vou apresentar.

Há muitos anos atrás, eu coordenei um clube de crianças. Ao final da reunião, eu disse para cerca de cem crianças que fizessem uma fila para ganhar doces. Logo houve um tumulto, e a fila foi arranjada de um jeito que eu percebi que era uma fila da ganância. Os garotos maiores e mais egoístas ficaram na frente, e os pequenos e tímidos ficaram na parte de trás. Então eu fiz algo que me deu grande satisfação. Eu disse para as crianças virarem para trás. Todos fizeram isso. Depois eu disse para ficarem onde elas estavam, e fiquei muito alegre em ir para a outra ponta da fila e em dar os doces primeiro para as crianças menores e mais tímidas.

Num mundo onde os ricos ficam mais ricos e os pobres são pisoteados, nós somos informados que Deus foi para a outra ponta da fila com a mensagem de vida eterna (eu sei que talvez você não acredite na existência de Deus, mas tenha um pouco de paciência). Isto é o que nos dizem:
Porque a palavra da cruz é loucura para os que perecem ...Porque está escrito: Destruirei a sabedoria dos sábios, E aniquilarei a inteligência dos inteligentes... Mas Deus escolheu as coisas loucas deste mundo para confundir as sábias; e Deus escolheu as coisas fracas deste mundo para confundir as fortes; e Deus escolheu as coisas vis deste mundo, e as desprezíveis, (Page 9) e as que não são, para aniquilar as que são; para que nenhuma carne se glorie perante ele. (1Coríntios 1:18,19,27-29) Como Deus foi para a outra ponta da fila? Simplesmente ao escolher aquilo que era louco, fraco, vil, e desprezível. Deixe-me ilustrar o que Ele fez.

Você acredita que os seguintes relatos bíblicos aconteceram de verdade?

· Adão e Eva;
· Arca de Noé;
· Jonas e a baleia;
· Josué e as muralhas de Jericó;
· Sansão e o seu longo cabelo;
· Daniel e a cova dos leões;
· Moisés e o Mar Vermelho.

Se você é um ateu, é claro que não acredita. Para você, acreditar em histórias tão fantásticas seria o mesmo que desistir da sua dignidade intelectual. Quem em perfeito juízo faria uma loucura dessas? A resposta é somente aqueles que entendem que Deus escolheu as coisas fracas, loucas, vis, e desprezíveis deste mundo para confundir aqueles que pensam ser sábios.

Veja a ofensa intelectual no tom desta carta que eu recebi, em relação ao debate de Orlando sobre o tema “Deus existe?”:
Que triste você ter desistido do seu intelecto por causa de um livro pré-científico e ignorante. Eu sei do seu debate que vai ocorrer... (Page 10) eu não estarei lá, mas eu tenho certeza que a platéia vai ter umas boas risadas com a sua apresentação. Literalistas bíblicos talvez não sejam inteligentes, mas eles são extremamente engraçados. Eu espero que você tenha aberto esse livro com uma boa dose de ceticismo. Você deve fazer isso mesmo. O mundo está cheio de pessoas simplórias que fariam um templo para um nó de madeira em um tronco de árvore que se assemelha a um “santo” morto. Você é prudente ao verificar as evidências antes de decidir se algo é ou não é verdade.

Onde está a evidência?

Imagine que você está olhando um transatlântico luxuoso navegando em águas calmas. Para o seu espanto, cerca de uma dúzia de pessoas pulam do navio e se agarram a um bote salva-vidas. Você observa enquanto o resto dos passageiros no navio riem deles. Você consegue entender a reação deles. O que aquelas poucas pessoas fizeram era tolo. Não fazia sentido.

De repente, o navio colide com um iceberg não avistado e naufraga, levando consigo todos que permaneceram a bordo. Agora você entende que os passageiros que pareciam tolos eram sábios, mas os que permaneceram no navio e pareciam ser sábios, eram tolos.
Nós temos na Bíblia uma ordem para pular do transatlântico luxuoso deste mundo. Antes de você rir de cristãos bobocas, pergunte-se se há alguma prova de que suas afirmações são verdadeiras. As próximas páginas fornecem evidências convincentes de que a Bíblia não é um livro comum.

Page 11


Fatos científicos na Bíblia

Capítulo 1


A Bíblia e a posição da Terra no espaço

Em um tempo que se acreditava que a Terra estava situada em cima de um grande animal ou gigante (1.500 A.C.), a Bíblia falou da posição da Terra no espaço: “O norte estende sobre o vazio; e suspende a terra sobre o nada.” (Jó 26:7). A ciência não descobriu que a Terra não era sustentada por nada até 1650.


As Escrituras falam de uma estrutura invisível

Só há pouco tempo atrás, a ciência descobriu que tudo que nós vemos é composto de coisas que não conseguimos ver – átomos. Em Hebreus 11:3, escrito há 2000 anos atrás, a Escrituras nos dizem que “aquilo que se vê não foi feito do que é aparente”.


A Bíblia revela que a Terra é redonda

As Escrituras nos dizem que a Terra é redonda: “Ele é o que está assentado sobre o círculo da terra” (Isaías 40:22).

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A palavra traduzida como “círculo” aqui é a palavra em hebraico chuwg, que também pode ser traduzida como “circuito” ou “bússola” ( dependendo do contexto). Ou seja, ela indica algo esférico, arredondado ou arqueado – não algo que é plano ou quadrado. O livro de Isaías foi escrito aproximadamente entre 740 e 680 anos A.C. São pelo menos 300 anos antes de Aristóteles sugerir, em seu livro Sobre os Céus, que a Terra talvez fosse uma esfera. Dois mil anos depois (num tempo em que a ciência acreditava que a Terra fosse plana) as Escrituras inspiraram Cristóvão Colombo a navegar ao redor do mundo.


A Bíblia e a ciência da Oceanografia

Mathew Maury (1806 – 1873) é considerado o pai da oceanografia também chamada de oceanologia. Ele percebeu a expressão “veredas dos mares” em Salmos 8:8 ( escrito 2.800 anos antes) e disse, “Se Deus disse que há veredas no mar, eu vou encontrá-las”. Maury então acreditou literalmente no que Deus disse e foi procurar essas veredas, e nós devemos muito a sua descoberta das correntes continentais quente e fria. O seu livro sobre oceanografia permanece um texto básico sobre o assunto e ainda é usado em universidades.


A Bíblia e as ondas de rádio

Deus fez a Jó uma pergunta muito estranha em 1.500 a.C. Ele perguntou: “Ou mandarás aos raios para que saiam, (Page 13) e te digam: Eis-nos aqui?” (Jó 38:35). Isso parece ser uma afirmação cientificamente ridícula – que a luz pode ser enviada, e depois se manifestar em fala. Mas você sabia que toda radiação eletromagnética, de ondas de rádio ao raio-X, viaja na velocidade da luz? É por isso que você fazer uma comunicação instantânea sem fio com alguém do outro lado do mundo. O fato de que a luz podia ser enviada e depois se manifestar em fala não foi descoberto pela ciência até 1846 ( 3.300 anos depois) , quando “o cientista britânico James Clerk Maxwell sugeriu que a eletricidade e as ondas leves eram duas formas da mesma coisa” (Modern Century Illustrated Encyclopedia).


A Bíblia e Entropia

Três lugares diferentes na Bíblia (Isaías 51:6; Salmos 102:25,26; e Hebreus 1:11) indicam que a Terra está se deteriorando. Isso é o que a Segunda Lei da Termodinâmica (a lei da entropia crescente) afirma: que em todos os processos físicos, todo sistema ordenado ao longo do tempo tende a se tornar mais desordenado. Tudo está se desgastando e deteriorando à medida que a energia está se tornando cada vez mais escassa. Isso significa que o Universo irá se deteriorar ao ponto que (em tese) haverá uma “morte da energia térmica” e portanto não haverá mais energia disponível para o uso. Isso só foi descoberto pela ciência recentemente, mas a Bíblia afirma isso de forma concisa.


A Bíblia e o ciclo da água

As Escrituras nos informam “Todos os rios vão para o mar, e contudo o mar não se enche; ao lugar para onde os rios vão, para ali tornam eles a correr.” (Eclesiastes 1:7). Essa frase parece não ser profunda. Mas quando é considerada com outras passagens bíblicas, ela torna-se mais fantástica. Por exemplo, o rio Mississipi despeja aproximadamente 518 bilhões de galões de litros de água a cada 24 horas no Golfo do México. Para onde vai toda essa água? E esse é só um entre milhares de rios. A resposta está no ciclo hidrológico, tão bem explicado na Bíblia.

Eclesiastes 11:3 diz que “Estando as nuvens cheias, derramam a chuva sobre a terra”. Olhe para as palavras resumidas da Bíblia em Amós 9:6 Ele ... o que chama as águas do mar, e as derrama sobre a terra”. A idéia de um ciclo completo da água só foi compreendido pelos cientistas no século dezessete. Entretanto, dois mil anos antes das descobertas de Pierre Perrault, Edme Mariotte, Edmund Halley, e outros, as Escrituras mencionaram claramente um ciclo da água.


A Bíblia e a primeira Lei da Termodinâmica

As Escrituras dizem, “Assim os céus, a terra e todo o seu exército foram acabados.” (Gênesis 2:1). O original em hebraico usa o particípio para indicar que uma ação completada no passado nunca mais iria acontecer. A criação foi “acabada” de uma vez por todas. Isso é exatamente o que a primeira lei da termodinâmica diz. Essa lei (chamada geralmente de lei da conservação da energia ou massa) afirma que nem a massa nem a energia podem ser criadas ou destruídas.

Foi por causa dessa lei que a teoria do “Estado-imutável” ou “Criação contínua” foi desconsiderada. Hoyle dizia que em alguns pontos do universo chamados “irtrons”, a matéria ou a energia estava sendo criada constantemente. Mas, a primeira lei da termodinâmica afirma exatamente o contrário. Realmente não há “criação” ocorrendo hoje em dia. Tudo está “acabado” exatamente como a Bíblia diz.


A Bíblia e a dimensões de um navio

Em Gênesis 6, Deus revelou a Noé as dimensões da arca de 42 milhões de litros cúbicos que ele deveria construir. Em 1609 em Hoor na Holanda, um navio foi construído de acordo com essas medidas (30:5:3), revolucionando a construção de navios. Por volta do ano 1900 todos os grandes navios nos oceanos tinham aproximadamente a mesmas proporções da arca (confirmado pelo “Registro de Navio de Lloyd” no Almanaque Mundial).


A Bíblia e as leis meteorológicas

A Bíblia descreveu um “ciclo” de correntes de ar dois mil anos antes de os cientistas descobrirem: “O vento vai para o sul, e faz o seu giro para o norte; continuamente vai girando o vento, e volta fazendo os seus circuitos.” (Eclesiastes 1:6). Nós sabemos agora que o ar ao redor da Terra gira em gigantescos círculos, no sentido horário em um hemisfério e no sentido anti-horário no outro hemisfério.


A Bíblia e a Ciência

“Na antiguidade e no que foi chamado de Idade das Trevas, o homem não sabia o que ele sabe hoje sobre a humanidade e o cosmos. Eles não conheciam a fechadura, mas eles possuíam a chave, que é Deus. Agora muitos têm excelentes descrições da fechadura, mas eles perderam a chave. A solução ideal é a união entre ciência e religião. Nós devemos ser proprietários da fechadura e da chave. A verdade é que à medida que a ciência avança, ela descobre o que foi dito há milhares de anos na Bíblia” Richard Wurmbrand, Provas da Existência de Deus.

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Mad, Bad, Sad- What Has Really Happened to America´s Soldiers

Mad, Bad, Sad

What’s Really Happened to America’s Soldiers

By Nan Levinson, Antiwar.com, June 29, 2012


“PTSD is going to color everything you write,” came the warning from a stepmother of a Marine, a woman who keeps track of such things. That was in 2005, when post-traumatic stress disorder, a.k.a. PTSD, wasn’t getting much attention, but soon it was pretty much all anyone wrote about. Story upon story about the damage done to our guys in uniform—drinking, divorce, depression, destitution—a laundry list of miseries and victimhood. When it comes to veterans, it seems like the only response we can imagine is to feel sorry for them.

Victim is one of the two roles we allow our soldiers and veterans (the other is, of course, hero), but most don’t have PTSD, and this isn’t one of those stories.

Civilian to the core, I’ve escaped any firsthand experience of war, but I’ve spent the past seven years talking with current GIs and recent veterans, and among the many things they’ve taught me is that nobody gets out of war unmarked. That’s especially true when your war turns out to be a shadowy, relentless occupation of a distant land, which requires you to do things that you regret and that continue to haunt you.

Theoretically, whole countries go to war, not just their soldiers, but not this time. Civilian sympathy for “the troops” may be just one more way for us to avoid a real reckoning with our last decade-plus of war, when the hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown up on the average American’s radar only if somebody screws up or noticeable numbers of Americans get killed. The veterans at the heart of this story—victims, heroes, it doesn’t matter—struggle to reconcile what they did in those countries with the “service” we keep thanking them for. We can see them as sick, with all the stigma, neediness, and expense that entails, or we can recognize them as human beings, confronting the morality of what they’ve done in our name and what they’ve seen and come to know—even as they try to move on.

Former Army staff sergeant Andy Sapp spent a year at Forward Operating Base Speicher near Tikrit, Iraq, and has lived for the past six years with PTSD. Seven if you count the year he refused to admit that he had it because he never left the base or fired his weapon, and who was he to suffer when others had it so much worse? Nearly 50 when he deployed, he was much older than most of his National Guard unit. He had put in 17 years in various branches of the military, had a stable family, strong religious ties, a good education, and a satisfying career as a high-school English teacher. He expected all that to insulate him, so it took a while to realize that the whole time he was in Iraq, he was numb. In the end, he would be diagnosed with PTSD and given an 80% disability rating, which, among other benefits, entitles him to sessions with a Veterans Administration psychologist, whom he credits with saving his life.

Andy recalls a 1985 BBC series called “Soldiers” in which a Marine commander says, “It’s not that we can’t take a man who’s 45 years old and turn him into a good soldier. It’s that we can’t make him love it.” Like many soldiers, Andy had assumed that his role would be to protect his country when it was threatened. Instead, he now considers himself part of “something evil.” So at a point when his therapy stalled and his therapist suggested that his spiritual pain was exacerbating his psychological pain, it suddenly clicked. The spiritual part he now calls his sacred wound. Others call it “moral injury.”

It’s a concept in progress, defined as the result of taking part in or witnessing something of consequence that you find wrong, something which violates your deeply held beliefs about yourself and your role in the world. For a moment, at least, you become what you never wanted to be. While the symptoms and causes may overlap with PTSD, moral injury arises from what you did or failed to do, rather than from what was done to you. It’s a sickness of the heart more than the head. Or, possibly, moral injury is what comes first and, if left unattended, can congeal into PTSD.

What we now call PTSD goes way back. In Odysseus in America, psychiatrist (and MacArthur “genius” grantee) Jonathan Shay has traced similar symptoms to Homer’s account of Odysseus’s homecoming from the Trojan War. The idea that a soldier may continue to be haunted by his wartime life has had a name since at least the Civil War. It was called “soldier’s heart” then, a lovely name for a terrible affliction.

In World War I, it went by the names “shell shock” and “war neurosis” and was so widespread that Britain devoted 19 hospitals solely to treating soldiers who suffered from it. During WWII, it was called “battle fatigue,” “combat neurosis,” or “gross stress reaction,” and the problem was severe enough in the U.S. Army that, at one point, psychiatric discharges outpaced new recruits. The Vietnam War gave us the term “post-Vietnam syndrome,” which in time evolved into PTSD, and eventually the insight that, whatever its name, it is probably neurologically based.

PTSD’s status as an anxiety disorder—and as the only mental health condition officially defined as caused by a single, external event—was established in 1980, when it was enshrined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of psychiatry. The diagnostic criteria have expanded since then and will probably be altered again in next year’s version of the DSM. That troubles many therapists treating the ailment; some don’t think PTSD is a disease, others argue that the symptoms are just a natural response to being at war or that, in labeling it a disorder, political and cultural norms are being invoked to reinforce what is considered orderly. As Katherine Boone, writing in the Wilson Quarterly, put it, “If you react normally to trauma, you have a disorder; if you act abnormally, you don’t.”

Most PTSD is short term, but perhaps one-third of cases become chronic, and those are the ones we keep hearing about, in part because it costs a lot to treat them. For a variety of reasons, no one seems to have an exact number of recent combat veterans with PTSD. The Veterans Administration estimates that between 11% and 20% of the 2.3 million troops who have cycled through Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from it, and the Congressional Budget Office calculates a cost of $8,300 per patient for the first year of treatment. Do the math, and you could be talking about as much as $3.8 billion a year. (What we’re not talking about nearly enough is the best way to prevent PTSD and other war-caused psychic distress, which is not to put soldiers in such untenable situations in the first place.)

Our warriors today are all volunteers who signed up and are apparently supposed to put up with whatever comes their way. As professionals, they’re supposed to be ready to fight, but as counterinsurgents they’re supposed to be tender-hearted and understanding—at least to kids, those village elders they’re fated to drink endless cross-cultural cups of tea with, and their buddies. (Every veteran has a kid story, and mourning lost friends with tattoos, rituals, and drunken sorrow are among the few ways they’re allowed to grieve publicly.) They’re supposed to be anguished when they hear about the “bad apples” who gang-raped, then murdered and set fire to a 15-year-old girl near Mahmoudiya, Iraq, or the “kill team” that hunted Afghan civilians “for sport.”

A couple of decades ago, Dave Grossman, a professor of psychology and former Army Ranger, wrote an eye-opening, bone-chilling book called On Killing. It begins with the premise that people have an inherent resistance to killing other people and goes on to examine how the military overcomes that inhibition.

On Killing examines the concerted effort of the military to increase firing rates among frontline riflemen. Reportedly only about 15%-20% of them pulled the trigger during World War II. Grossman suggests that many who did fire “exercised the soldier’s right to miss.” Displeased, the U.S. Army set out to redesign its combat training to make firing your weapon a more reflexive action. The military (and most police forces) switched to realistic, human-shaped silhouettes, which pop up and fall down when hit, and later added video simulators for the most recent generation of soldiers raised on virtual reality.

This kind of Skinnerian conditioning—Grossman calls it “modern battleproofing”—upped the firing rate steadily to 55% in Korea, 90% in Vietnam, and somewhere near 100% in Iraq. Soldiers are trained to shoot first and evaluate later, but as Grossman observes, “Killing comes with a price, and societies must learn that their soldiers will have to spend the rest of their lives living with what they have done.”

That price could be called moral injury.

Of course, to have a moral injury, you have to have a moral code, and to have a moral code, you have to believe, on some level, that the world is a place where justice will ultimately prevail. Faith in a rightly ordered world must be hard for anyone who has been through war; it’s particularly elusive for soldiers mired in a war that makes little sense to them, one they’ve come, actively or passively, to resent and oppose.

When your job requires you to pull sleeping families from their beds at midnight thousands of miles from your home, or to shoot at oncoming cars without knowing who’s driving them, or to refuse medical care to decrepit old men, you begin to question what doing your job means. When the reasons keep shifting for what you’re supposed to be doing in a country where most of the population wants you to go home even more than you want to, it’s hard to maintain any sense of innocence. When someone going about his daily life is regularly mistaken for someone who means to kill you—as has repetitively been the case in our occupations of both Iraq and Afghanistan—everyone becomes the enemy. And when you try—and fail—to do the right thing in a chaotic and threatening situation, which nothing could have trained you for, the enemy can move inside you and stay there for a very long time.

In trying to heal from a moral injury, people struggle to restore a sense of themselves as decent human beings, but the stumbling block for many veterans of recent U.S. wars is that their judgment about the immorality of their actions may well be correct. Obviously, suffering which can be avoided should be, but it’s not clear what’s gained by robbing soldiers of a moral compass, save a salve to civilian conscience. And despite all the gauzy glory we swath soldiers in when we wave them off to battle, nations need their veterans to remember how horrible war is, if only to remind us not to launch them as heedlessly as the U.S. has done over these last years.

When you’ve done irreparable harm, feeling bad about your acts—haunted, sorrowful, distraught, diminished, unhinged by them—is human. Taking responsibility for them, however, is a step toward maturity. Maybe that’s the way the Army makes a man of you, after all.

Two final observations from veterans who went to war, then committed themselves to waging peace, apparently a much harder task: Dave Cline began his lifetime of antiwar work as a G.I. in the Vietnam War. A few years into the Iraq War, when he was president of Veterans For Peace, he told me, “Returning soldiers always try to make it not a waste.” The second observation comes from Drew Cameron in a preface to a book of poems by a fellow veteran, published by his Combat Paper Press: “To know war, to understand conflict, to respond to it is not an individual act, nor one of courage. It is rather a very fair and necessary thing.”

Recognizing moral injury isn’t a panacea, but it opens up multiple possibilities. It offers veterans a way to understand themselves, not as mad or bad, but as justifiably sad, and it allows the rest of us a way to avoid reducing their wartime experiences to a sickness or a smiley face. Most important, moral repair is linked to moral restitution. In an effort to waste neither their past nor their future, many veterans work to help heal their fellow veterans or the civilians in the countries they once occupied. Others work for peace so the next generations of soldiers won’t have to know the heartache of moral injury.

Nan Levinson, a Boston-based journalist, reports on civil liberties, politics, and culture. Her next book, War Is Not a Game, is about the recent G.I. antiwar movement. She is the author of Outspoken: Free Speech Stories, was the U.S. correspondent for Index on Censorship, and teaches journalism and fiction writing at Tufts University.

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The Sahara Desert´s Forgotten Refugees!

The Sahara Desert's Forgotten Refugees

By Horand Knaup in Tamanrasset, Der Spiegel, June 28, 2012

Johnson Varny is back after four months away, spent somewhere in the no man’s land between Mali and Algeria. He’d been caught by the police here, who loaded him and 80 others onto the back of a truck, carting them back to Tin Sawatin. They spent two days and 700 miserable kilometers (400 miles) traveling southwest through nothing but sand and rocks. When they reached their destination—a small collection of tin huts—the police simply unloaded their human cargo and left them to fend for themselves.

“They treated us like animals,” says Varny, 32. “One loaf of bread a day and water from a trough. They would never drink that themselves.”

Yet here Varny is, back in Tamanrasset, southern Algeria, in the middle of the Sahara. He’s a bit gaunter, perhaps, than he was before struggling through the 700-kilometer journey back here. He started out together with another man in Tin Sawatin, but only Varny has arrived. He says he buried his friend 40 kilometers (25 miles) short of the city, after the other man died of a burst appendix. “He didn’t make it,” he says simply.

Few refugees know the desert city of Tamanrasset as well as Johnson Varny does. He arrived here the first time in 1995, when he was 16 and had fled war-torn Liberia three years before. He’s lost count of how many times he’s been here since, both willingly and unwillingly. In 2000, he says, he made it on as far as Oran, an Algerian city on the Mediterranean coast. But before he could find a boat to take him to Europe, police caught him and deported him.

Surrounded by nothing but sand and rocks, Tamanrasset, with its population of 100,000, has been a way station for emigrants from sub-Saharan Africa for two decades. At first a few dozen people passed through the city each year, then suddenly it was hundreds, and now tens of thousands. Are they refugees, migrant workers, immigrants? Definitions are fluid here. They stay for weeks or months, often even years.

But then they move on, because ultimately, they all have the same goal: Europe, the continent that draws them north like iron filings pulled toward a magnet. Estimates say only around 15 to 20 percent actually arrive there. But these refugees don’t let anything stop them from trying, not barbed wire or border guards, not bandits or the reports of the many hundreds of people who drown each year trying to cross the sea. They want to escape the hardship back home, so they chase after the dreams that satellite TV has planted in their minds.

In these 20 years, Tamanrasset has undergone an astonishing degree of development. There are paved streets now, sidewalks and electricity, entire new neighborhoods and even a university. These things were built with revenue from oil and smuggling, but also with the labor and the millions in cash left here by the city’s short-term guests.

The last residential neighborhoods at the western edge of the city give way directly to the desert. Another kilometer further out, slightly uphill from the city, is where the undocumented immigrants live. They have a few blankets, which get rolled up and stored under rocks during the day. There’s some firewood and a couple of cooking pots, water bottles and a great deal of garbage. Other than that, they have no possessions beyond their own miserable living conditions.

No governments or aid organizations provide help. Algeria doesn’t want to support migrant workers. A few good-hearted nuns occasionally bring blankets, an Italian organization donates money for medications and two or three doctors at the hospital will treat patients for free. There’s no aid beyond that.

Varny coughs. He has tuberculosis and needs medication to treat it, but how is he supposed to pay for that? He, too, is living out here by the rocks. His entire group sleeps out here. In the mornings, they slip into the city, where they carry stones, paint walls or bake bricks. Or they simply wait. Even when they find work, it doesn’t always go well. “You work for an Arab, for days, for weeks, and in the end, instead of giving you the money, he calls the police,” Varny says.

Once they’ve saved enough money for their onward journey, these refugees could choose to board a bus for a comfortable ride to Algiers. Instead, armed with a bit of bread, a few cans of food and a water canister, they climb aboard a truck in the back courtyard of a building, setting out at night to avoid patrols. Once outside the city limits, the driver leaves the paved road and trundles northward on dirt tracks.

The journey to Morocco costs €4,000 ($5,000), Varny says, or €6,000 including the crossing to Spain, and Nigerians have a firm hold on this line of business. Women have it easier, he says, though there’s the not insignificant drawback that they have to work off their debts in Spanish brothels.

Hundreds of thousands of people come northward hoping to scale the battlements of Europe, the old continent that’s intent on building its walls ever higher, even considering using drones, offshore sensors and satellite-driven search systems to fend off this onslaught. The EU plans to spend up to €2 billion on new security systems at its external borders.

But that won’t stop the immigrants, who start their journeys on the Ghanaian coast, in the villages of Côte d’Ivoire or in capital cities such as Kinshasa. In many cases, an entire family pools its resources, or even an entire village. Often it’s the first-born in a family who sets out, sensing an inner obligation to seek out adventure. More than anything, though, they want to escape the miserable conditions they’re leaving behind.

Parfait, 36, is also a refugee. His health is poor and his breathing shallow—he too has tuberculosis. Like most undocumented immigrants in Tamanrasset, he’s reluctant to talk. The city is a great gathering point for broken, mistrustful people. “You have everything you need, I have nothing and I need medicine,” he wheezes. Eventually, for a couple of dinar, he provides information, offered discreetly at the home of an acquaintance.

Ten years ago, he says, he left Cameroon with about €200 in his pocket. He’d saved up €30, and his family contributed the other €170. Just the difficult journey through Chad took a year and a half, before he finally arrived in Benghazi, Libya. He’s seen everything, from trucks that got stuck in the Saharan sand to police checkpoints where anyone who couldn’t pay was beaten, and he’s survived attacks by bandits.

These days, Parfait takes a sober view of things. “There are always some people who die,” he says.

Still, he managed to find work in Benghazi, thanks to his training as an electrician. He earned the money he needed for the crossing to Lampedusa, which would take 16 or 18 hours by boat, at least by optimistic estimates. But suddenly Parfait didn’t want to go anymore. “I got scared,” he says. He’d heard too many stories of unreliable people smugglers, capsized boats and friends gone missing.

Parfait turned back. After a few months at home in Cameroon, he made a second attempt, through Mali this time, paying €65 to cover the 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) of desert from Gao to Tamanrasset in a pick-up truck. Halfway there, the truck was held up by robbers. Parfait lost his mobile phone and €300.

Twice he made it as far as Algiers, and twice the police caught him and transported him the 2,000 kilometers back to the border. He’s been in Tamanrasset now for three months, where he hopes to recover from his illness and earn some money. Or perhaps those two things, but in the reverse order, because how is he supposed to get the medication he needs without money?

Tamanrasset is one of the few stopovers for refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, because there aren’t many options when it comes to crossing the Sahara. And since the civil war in Libya closed off that route to the Mediterranean, only two other possibilities remain. One way is to follow the western coast of Africa through Senegal and Mauritania to Morocco, then cross the sea to Spain. The other way is to try crossing the Sahara through the middle, a route that passes through Tamanrasset.

A two-tiered society has developed here. On the one hand, there are migrant workers from neighboring Mali and Niger. These are the visible immigrants, the ones who don’t need a visa and are here in Algeria legally. Hundreds of these men hang around the city’s benches and walls, waiting today, waiting tomorrow, always waiting for work.

Then there are the others, the invisible immigrants, the ones from the Congo or Ghana, Nigeria or Sierra Leone, who have come here without documents and live in fear of the police. They do the best they can to hide, and they don’t want to talk about their experiences.

Parfait wants to go to Spain, he says, because his daughter is in Bilbao. She’s six years old, and he only knows her from pictures and phone calls. He’s never seen her or held her in his arms. Her mother managed the crossing several years ago. Parfait says he sent them money twice, but then stopped—it’s a difficult relationship.

Yet despite all of these dramas, the refugees don’t want to go back. Or they can’t go back: The dishonor would be too great, their failure too obvious. After starting out full of expectations, both their families’ and their own, how can they show up again empty-handed, never even having set eyes on Europe?

So they find themselves blown about like drifting Saharan sand, partly because they know so little about Europe. In the best cases, they have a friend or a relative there, or at least a telephone number they can call when they arrive. But in most cases, they have and know nothing at all.

For these refugees, Europe is a secret cipher that stands for their dreams of a better life, for work and education and wealth. Europe is the promised continent they know from TV, where African soccer players can make it big, where supposedly there are jobs for everyone and always enough food, hospitals and good schools.

Hardly anyone in Tamanrasset has heard of Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island that lies close to Africa, but belongs to Italy, and has been struggling to handle an increasing number of refugees. They have even less of an idea of what to expect in Europe. And few of them has ever studied a map.

“I hope I can find job training, and work,” Parfait says. He pauses, then adds, “I’m hoping for a lot of things.” He isn’t allowing himself any doubts. “I’m sure you have difficulties too,” he says. “But they’re different difficulties from the ones we have.”

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