Dreams & Visions Moving Muslims to Christ!

Dreams, Visions Moving Muslims to Christ


Chris Mitchell and Julie Stahl, CBN News Jerusalem, June 20, 2012

JERUSALEM, Israel—Several years ago, Ali took the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca known as Hajj.


But the trip became more of a spiritual journey than he could ever imagine.


“That night I saw Jesus in a dream. First, Jesus touched my forehead with his finger. And after touching me, He said, ‘You belong to me,’” Ali recalled.


“And then He touched me above my heart,” he continued. “‘You have been saved, follow me. You belong to me,’ he said.”


Ali’s story in Mecca was told and dramatized in a DVD called “More Than Dreams.”


“I decided I’m not going to finish the Hajj, the pilgrimage. Whatever it takes, I’m going to follow that voice,” he explained.


The film documents and dramatizes Ali’s story and several other Muslims who came to faith in Jesus through a dream or vision.


“We’re seeing that all around. We’re hearing about people that have never even thought about Jesus as savior,” Tom Doyle, with e3 Ministries, said. “They’re content Muslims and they’re having dreams over and over.”


“I think our God is a fair God, that He’s righteous and just, and people are seeking and they don’t know where to go,” Doyle said.


“Maybe they don’t have a Bible, maybe there’s no missionary in the village,” he said. “He’ll get the message to them somehow.”


The phenomenon of dreams and visions has surfaced throughout the Muslim world, from Indonesia to Morocco.


“In the church if you ask how many people came to Christ, 80 percent will say, ‘I saw Him in a dream,’” one woman in central Asia told CBN News.


A Christian friend challenged her to ask God to speak to her personally.


“So I decided to ask Him,” she said. “The next day … in my dream I saw Jesus … I decided to come to Him.”


Hazem Farraj hosts “Reflections,” a satellite program for Muslims. He said he often gets feedback about dreams and visions.


“I had one lady write me … she said, ‘I turned on the television and there you were … the words that were coming out of your mouth were so peaceful I fell asleep,’” Farraj recalled.


“She said, ‘When I fell asleep I ended up having a vision of Jesus and I saw the Lord,’” he continued. “She said, ‘As soon as I looked over I knew that Christ was the sacrifice, the son of the God.”


Doyle said the dream or vision is usually the start, not the end, of a Muslim’s conversion.


“Nobody goes to sleep a Muslim and wakes up a Christian, but it knocks down the false barriers that are inherent in Islam,” Doyle explained.


The Doyles said beneath the current revolution in the Middle East, there’s a spiritual earthquake.


“As things heat up politically and spiritually within Islam, man, the Holy Spirit is moving even more powerfully,” Joanna said.


“This is the time when hearts are open, people are desperate, governments are changing,” her husband added. “Everybody’s foundation has massive cracks in it and Jesus is the answer that can come in and fill that need.”


Many veteran missionaries to the Muslim world say dreams and visions, along with satellite television, are introducing Muslims to Jesus in unprecedented numbers.


They add that more Muslims are coming to Jesus than at any other time in the 1,400-year history of Islam.


The Doyles want believers in the West to join this spiritual revolution.


“Not everybody is going to go the Middle East. But they can pray,” Doyle said.

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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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What the Supreme Court Ruling Means to You!

What the Supreme Court's Ruling Means for Consumers


By Louise Radnofsky, The Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2012

The Supreme court said Congress was acting within its powers under the Constitution when it required most Americans to carry health insurance or pay a penalty. It upheld the mandate as a tax, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts.

But the justices found fault with part of the health-care law’s expansion of Medicaid, a joint federal-state insurance program for the poor. The justices made some changes to the Medicaid portion of the law.

Q: Does this mean the health overhaul law is in place for good?

A: The decision effectively upholds the law for now, but its future depends on which party controls the White House and Congress after elections in November. President Barack Obama and most Democrats consider the law a signature achievement and want to move forward implementing it. Republicans, including presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney, have pledged to overturn it. They say they would offer an alternative proposal but haven’t been specific about what it would include.

Q: What happens to any benefits I already get because of the law?

A: They will stay in place for now. Parents will still be able to keep their children on their insurance plans up to age 26, and Medicare recipients will keep getting discounts on prescription drugs to close a gap in coverage known as the “doughnut hole.”

Q: When will I see the big changes from the law?

A: Most of the mandates don’t start until 2014. That is when most Americans will be required to carry insurance or pay the penalty at issue in the Supreme Court case. The penalty will start at $95 a year or up to 1% of a person’s income, whichever is greater.

Tens of millions of Americans are expected to get insurance coverage under the system that starts in 2014. Some of the poorest Americans will become newly qualified to enroll in the federal-state Medicaid program—although the court appeared to make some changes to how that program will work. Another batch of people who earn more but still have low incomes will get tax credits to offset their insurance costs. Consumers will be able to comparison shop for policies in newly created exchanges that will operate like popular online travel websites.

Insurance companies will have to sell coverage to everyone, regardless of their medical history, and will have to restrict how much they vary premiums based on age. Companies with 50 workers or more will be required to offer insurance to their workers or pay a penalty.

Q: What if I already have insurance?

A: You may see changes to your plan. Unless your employer has “grandfathered” your insurance benefits’ structure, your plan will have to meet new regulations under the law, such as covering more preventive services without out-of-pocket costs. There has been speculation that some employers will stop offering coverage and funnel workers toward exchanges once they open, but most companies say they have no immediate plans to do that.

Q: What will happen to my insurance premiums?

A: Most consumers can expect to keep seeing increases in premiums and co-payments because the underlying cost of health care is expected to rise. The law contains a few mechanisms to curb premiums, but it also requires that many insurance providers make their benefits more generous, which will raise their cost. Older people could see their premiums go down because of the new age rating rules insurers will face. People who buy policies without the help of an employer could get a better deal by being able to shop on the exchanges, where comparing plans will be easier than before.

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Spoiled Rotten! Why the Westerern Culture is in decline!

Spoiled Rotten


By Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, July 2, 2012

In 2004, Carolina Izquierdo, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, spent several months with the Matsigenka, a tribe of about twelve thousand people who live in the Peruvian Amazon. The Matsigenka hunt for monkeys and parrots, grow yucca and bananas, and build houses that they roof with the leaves of a particular kind of palm tree, known as a kapashi. At one point, Izquierdo decided to accompany a local family on a leaf-gathering expedition down the Urubamba River.

A member of another family, Yanira, asked if she could come along. Izquierdo and the others spent five days on the river. Although Yanira had no clear role in the group, she quickly found ways to make herself useful. Twice a day, she swept the sand off the sleeping mats, and she helped stack the kapashi leaves for transport back to the village. In the evening, she fished for crustaceans, which she cleaned, boiled, and served to the others. Calm and self-possessed, Yanira “asked for nothing,” Izquierdo later recalled. The girl’s behavior made a strong impression on the anthropologist because at the time of the trip Yanira was just six years old.

While Izquierdo was doing field work among the Matsigenka, she was also involved in an anthropological study closer to home. A colleague of hers, Elinor Ochs, had recruited thirty-two middle-class families for a study of life in twenty-first-century Los Angeles. Ochs had arranged to have the families filmed as they ate, fought, made up, and did the dishes.

Izquierdo and Ochs shared an interest in many ethnographic issues, including child rearing. How did parents in different cultures train young people to assume adult responsibilities? In the case of the Angelenos, they mostly didn’t. In the L.A. families observed, no child routinely performed household chores without being instructed to. Often, the kids had to be begged to attempt the simplest tasks; often, they still refused. In one fairly typical encounter, a father asked his eight-year-old son five times to please go take a bath or a shower. After the fifth plea went unheeded, the father picked the boy up and carried him into the bathroom. A few minutes later, the kid, still unwashed, wandered into another room to play a video game.

In another representative encounter, an eight-year-old girl sat down at the dining table. Finding that no silverware had been laid out for her, she demanded, “How am I supposed to eat?” Although the girl clearly knew where the silverware was kept, her father got up to get it for her.

In a third episode captured on tape, a boy named Ben was supposed to leave the house with his parents. But he couldn’t get his feet into his sneakers, because the laces were tied. He handed one of the shoes to his father: “Untie it!” His father suggested that he ask nicely.

“Can you untie it?” Ben replied. After more back-and-forth, his father untied Ben’s sneakers. Ben put them on, then asked his father to retie them. “You tie your shoes and let’s go,” his father finally exploded. Ben was unfazed. “I’m just asking,” he said.

A few years ago, Izquierdo and Ochs wrote an article for Ethos, the journal of the Society of Psychological Anthropology, in which they described Yanira’s conduct during the trip down the river and Ben’s exchange with his dad. “Juxtaposition of these developmental stories begs for an account of responsibility in childhood,” they wrote. Why do Matsigenka children “help their families at home more than L.A. children?” And “Why do L.A. adult family members help their children at home more than do Matsigenka?” Though not phrased in exactly such terms, questions like these are being asked—silently, imploringly, despairingly—every single day by parents from Anchorage to Miami. Why, why, why?

With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world. It’s not just that they’ve been given unprecedented amounts of stuff—clothes, toys, cameras, skis, computers, televisions, cell phones, PlayStations, iPods. They’ve also been granted unprecedented authority. “Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval,” Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, both professors of psychology, have written. In many middle-class families, children have one, two, sometimes three adults at their beck and call. This is a social experiment on a grand scale, and a growing number of adults fear that it isn’t working out so well: according to one poll, commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents think that their children are spoiled.

The notion that we may be raising a generation of kids who can’t, or at least won’t, tie their own shoes has given rise to a new genre of parenting books. Their titles tend to be either dolorous (“The Price of Privilege”) or downright hostile (“The Narcissism Epidemic,” “Mean Moms Rule,” “A Nation of Wimps”). The books are less how-to guides than how-not-to’s: how not to give in to your toddler, how not to intervene whenever your teen-ager looks bored, how not to spend two hundred thousand dollars on tuition only to find your twenty-something graduate back at home, drinking all your beer.

Not long ago, Sally Koslow, a former editor-in-chief of McCall’s, discovered herself in this last situation. After four years in college and two on the West Coast, her son Jed moved back to Manhattan and settled into his old room in the family’s apartment, together with thirty-four boxes of vinyl LPs. Unemployed, Jed liked to stay out late, sleep until noon, and wander around in his boxers. Koslow set out to try to understand why he and so many of his peers seemed stuck in what she regarded as permanent “adultescence.” She concluded that one of the reasons is the lousy economy. Another is parents like her.

“Our offspring have simply leveraged our braggadocio, good intentions, and overinvestment,” Koslow writes in her new book, “Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-So-Empty Nest” (Viking). They inhabit “a broad savannah of entitlement that we’ve watered, landscaped, and hired gardeners to maintain.” She recommends letting the grasslands revert to forest: “The best way for a lot of us to show our love would be to learn to un-mother and un-father.”

Madeline Levine, a psychologist who lives outside San Francisco, specializes in treating young adults. In “Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success” (HarperCollins), she argues that we do too much for our kids because we overestimate our influence. “Never before have parents been so (mistakenly) convinced that their every move has a ripple effect into their child’s future success,” she writes. Paradoxically, Levine maintains, by working so hard to help our kids we end up holding them back.

“Most parents today were brought up in a culture that put a strong emphasis on being special,” she observes. “Being special takes hard work and can’t be trusted to children. Hence the exhausting cycle of constantly monitoring their work and performance, which in turn makes children feel less competent and confident, so that they need even more oversight.”

Pamela Druckerman, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, moved to Paris after losing her job. She married a British expatriate and not long after that gave birth to a daughter. Less out of conviction than inexperience, Druckerman began raising her daughter, nicknamed Bean, à l’Américaine. The result, as she recounts in “Bringing Up Bébé” (Penguin Press), was that Bean was invariably the most ill-behaved child in every Paris restaurant and park she visited. French children could sit calmly through a three-course meal; Bean was throwing food by the time the apéritifs arrived.

Druckerman talked to a lot of French mothers, all of them svelte and most apparently well rested. She learned that the French believe ignoring children is good for them. “French parents don’t worry that they’re going to damage their kids by frustrating them,” she writes. “To the contrary, they think their kids will be damaged if they can’t cope with frustration.” One mother, Martine, tells Druckerman that she always waited five minutes before picking up her infant daughter when she cried. While Druckerman and Martine are talking, in Martine’s suburban home, the daughter, now three, is baking cupcakes by herself. Bean is roughly the same age, “but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to let her do a complicated task like this all on her own,” Druckerman observes. “I’d be supervising, and she’d be resisting my supervision.”

Also key, Druckerman discovered, is just saying non. In contrast to American parents, French parents, when they say it, actually mean it. They “view learning to cope with ‘no’ as a crucial step in a child’s evolution,” Druckerman writes. “It forces them to understand that there are other people in the world, with needs as powerful as their own.”

Not long ago, in the hope that our sons might become a little more Matsigenka, my husband and I gave them a new job: unloading the grocery bags from the car. One evening when I came home from the store, it was raining. Carrying two or three bags, the youngest, Aaron, who is thirteen, tried to jump over a puddle. There was a loud crash. After I’d retrieved what food could be salvaged from a Molotov cocktail of broken glass and mango juice, I decided that Aaron needed another, more vigorous lesson in responsibility. Now, in addition to unloading groceries, he would also have the task of taking out the garbage. On one of his first forays, he neglected to close the lid on the pail tightly enough, and it attracted a bear. The next morning, as I was gathering up the used tissues, ant-filled raisin boxes, and slimy Saran Wrap scattered across the yard, I decided that I didn’t have time to let my kids help out around the house. (My husband informed me that I’d just been “kiddie-whipped.”)

Ochs and Izquierdo noted, in their paper on the differences between the family lives of the Matsigenka and the Angelenos, how early the Matsigenka begin encouraging their children to be useful. Toddlers routinely heat their own food over an open fire, they observed, while “three-year-olds frequently practice cutting wood and grass with machetes and knives.” Boys, when they are six or seven, start to accompany their fathers on fishing and hunting trips, and girls learn to help their mothers with the cooking. As a consequence, by the time they reach puberty Matsigenka kids have mastered most of the skills necessary for survival. Their competence encourages autonomy, which fosters further competence—a virtuous cycle that continues to adulthood.

The cycle in American households seems mostly to run in the opposite direction. So little is expected of kids that even adolescents may not know how to operate the many labor-saving devices their homes are filled with. Their incompetence begets exasperation, which results in still less being asked of them (which leaves them more time for video games). Referring to the Los Angeles families, Ochs and Izquierdo wrote, “Many parents remarked that it takes more effort to get children to collaborate than to do the tasks themselves.”

One way to interpret these contrary cycles is to infer that Americans have a lower opinion of their kids’ capacities. And, in a certain sense, this is probably true: how many parents in Park Slope or Brentwood would trust their three-year-olds to cut the grass with a machete? But in another sense, of course, it’s ridiculous. Contemporary American parents—particularly the upscale sort that “unparenting” books are aimed at—tend to take a highly expansive view of their kids’ abilities. Little Ben may not be able to tie his shoes, but that shouldn’t preclude his going to Brown.

Today’s parents are not just “helicopter parents,” a former school principal complains to Marano. “They are a jet-powered turbo attack model.” Other educators gripe about “snowplow parents,” who try to clear every obstacle from their children’s paths. The products of all this hovering, meanwhile, worry that they may not be able to manage college in the absence of household help. According to research conducted by sociologists at Boston College, today’s incoming freshmen are less likely to be concerned about the rigors of higher education than “about how they will handle the logistics of everyday life.”

When anthropologists study cultures like the Matsigenkas’, they tend to see patterns. The Matsigenka prize hard work and self-sufficiency. Their daily rituals, their child-rearing practices, and even their folktales reinforce these values, which have an obvious utility for subsistence farmers. Matsigenka stories often feature characters undone by laziness; kids who still don’t get the message are rubbed with an itch-inducing plant.

In contemporary American culture, the patterns are more elusive. What values do we convey by turning our homes into warehouses for dolls? By assigning our kids chores and then rewarding them when they screw up? By untying and then retying their shoes for them? It almost seems as if we’re actively trying to raise a nation of “adultescents.” And, perhaps without realizing it, we are.

Letting things slide is always the easiest thing to do, in parenting no less than in banking, public education, and environmental protection. A lack of discipline is apparent these days in just about every aspect of American society. Why this should be is a much larger question, one to ponder as we take out the garbage and tie our kids’ shoes.

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Cyrstals of Light

Crystals of Light

A vision of light and darkness
By David Brandt Berg

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Crystals are very significant. Crystals are God’s own style of architecture in which He creates symmetry, and crystals are found throughout creation in all shapes. God appears to delight in creating order out of chaos.

(Vision:) I see a reflective crystal that glows with light. The darkness is all around and seems much larger than the light, and yet it can’t overcome the light. It can’t put out the light. It tries to surround the light and cover it, but it can’t put it out, because the darkness itself is destroyed by the light. Every time it comes close to the light, it is destroyed by this terrific power.

Thank You for the power, Lord. Thank You for the light. We couldn’t stand without Your light, without Thy power that surrounds us and lights us and causes us to glow.

It is impossible for the darkness to penetrate the light. But the light penetrates the darkness with its sharp lightning beams. And every time a lightning beam goes out, it brings back a jewel out of the darkness. The beam of light that comes from heaven is focused like a laser beam and refracts and spreads out and shows a vision like a picture on a screen.

All that darkness! Yet this piercing ray of brilliant light strikes this crystal with its beam or spurt of light and brings it to life, and then it glows with this light, not of itself, but from above, and it diffuses the light, spreads it out, refracts it into a colorful spectrum like a rainbow displayed against the darkness.

Each of these little crystals also has its own little force field, and anything that gets in its way, it destroys. Anything that tries to stop or hinder or come between the crystal and the light is destroyed by the light of each crystal. They are irresistibly drawn to the light and nothing can stop them. “My sheep hear My voice and they follow Me, and the stranger they will not follow” (John 10:27).

For we have come from the darkness into His glorious light, and that which was darkened has become enlightened and that which was in darkness has seen a great light (Isaiah 9:2)!

Jesus is the light of the world (John 8:12). “And this is the condemnation, that men love darkness rather than light” (John 3:19). They have to make a choice. They see the light in its beauty and brilliance, but they have to be willing to give up their darkness or they cannot enjoy the blessings of the light’s brilliance and radiance.

We are captivated, and in a sense imprisoned by the light, but we are also protected by the light. “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty” (Psalm 91:1). Abide under the shadow of the Almighty in the secret place. Abide under the brilliance, under the light underneath. God is overshadowing, but with light. No darkness in that shadow! It’s like an aura of light, an area of diffusion of light. This shadow is light. In other words, under this canopy it’s all light—God’s shadow of light.

While the crystal is out in the darkness, there is a terrific battle! The darkness cannot overcome it, but it batters it and it buffets it like the wind, which has no substance, yet blows and buffets and attempts to destroy it and blow it out. It is beaten about, yet is not destroyed.

As long as the crystals face the light, they seem to absorb the light and they have strength and they glow brightly and are drawn toward it, and the darkness has no power over them. But if they turn their facets or faces away from the light, it’s like a polarization.

If it turns toward the darkness rather than the light, the crystal loses its brilliance and it’s as though the darkness closes in and has greater power. And as the light diminishes in the crystal, the darkness has more power. The darker the crystal is, the more it is drawn by the darkness, as it faces the darkness. The moment it turns its face towards the light, it immediately begins to glow with the great brilliance of the light and power, and the darkness has no power over it.

You must face the light! You dare not turn away from the light or look backward, or you seem to lose the light. It seems like only your face is able to absorb the light. The crystal has to face the light in order to glow itself and to shine with such beauty, and especially the power in that light that drives off the darkness. The darkness flees in terror when the crystal glows. It’s afraid of the power!

But if the crystal turns away from the light, as though it were trying to turn itself and fight the darkness in its own strength, it loses the light, and it has no power unless it receives that beam of light. Every time it turns away, it grows darker and its strength fades and wanes, as the light is diminished in trying to face the darkness instead of facing the light.

As long as it faces the light, it doesn’t seem to have to exert any power itself at all, but the light gives it the power. So your only hope is facing and absorbing His light and glowing with His power, and this causes you to glow. It causes you to generate terrific power, which drives back the darkness and leaves you free to glide with such ease toward the light, until all are joined in one.

The light shines and shines through these crystals. There are thousands of little rays of light scattered everywhere in the darkness, and every beam from every little crystal is pulling in another crystal. And at the end of every beam of light is another crystal that’s being enlightened by it. And the other crystals start to move toward the light, as though each beam of light makes a path through the darkness that another crystal can follow, so all these little crystals can follow the path of light toward the light.

We are going to cover the earth with crystals of God’s light as it slowly turns and enlightens the whole universe with the light of the Lord, until it enlightens even the darkness.

Originally published March 1973. Updated and republished July 2012.

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