Victim?

Maybe the obsession with blaming other people for our own feelings has gone as far as it can go.  

At Oklahoma Wesleyan University,  a talk was given to students about the importance of love based on the Bible. One of them later complained that he felt victimized. He resented the fact that he had guilt feelings for not living up to the teaching about love.

University president Everett Piper says, "I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience! 

"At OKWU, we teach you to be selfless rather than self-centered.

"If you want the chaplain to tell you you’re a victim rather than tell you that you need virtue, this may not be the university you’re looking for."

Cavern

A professional photographer camped for eight days inside one of the largest caves in the world. He used a GoPro camera mounted on a drone to get magnificent views of the huge caverns.

Watch the 6-minute video here at National Geographic's website. Look for people. He gets them in many of the shots so that you can grasp an idea of the size of this place.

US thanks

During his first year as the very first president of the United States, George Washington recommended "". . a DAY OF PUBLICK THANKSGIVING and PRAYER, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God . ."

British author Sally Lloyd Jones says, "As a Brit first coming to the United States, I couldn’t believe that a whole holiday could be centered around being grateful. It struck me as so beautiful. It still does.Thanksgiving is my absolute favorite holiday."

Rule of man

(cont'd)

If we want consumers and sellers to make their own choices freely (free markets), "rule of law" must prevail in contrast to "rule of man." Laws must be written to protect both consumers and sellers, and they must apply to everyone - even the government.

If a king or senator or president is not subject to law, he or she can favor his friends and sell political influence and punish his opposition - in short, do whatever he wants for his own benefit. That's corrupt.

Author and professor Rodney Stark tells a story that demonstrates how vulnerable we are to those in power when a king or ruler is above the law:

The Battle of Lepanto (1453) was fought in the Mediterranean Sea between Ottoman forces (Turks) and Europeans. Ali Pasha, a son-in-law of the ruling Ottoman Sultan, led the Turks with over 200 ships.

When they were defeated and Ali Pasha killed, it was discovered that he had carried his personal treasure into the battle in the hold of his ship. He had prestige and position in his own country and he was in the Sultan's family. But he still could not protect his wealth from government seizure unless he took it with him - into battle.

Nothing is safe under "rule of man."

Free markets

(cont'd)

All through human history, the natural state of the vast majority of people has been bare subsistence, or poverty. So our biggest concern, the most pressing question, should be: how did some cultures manage to raise their average material standard of living to a measure of comparative wealth?

A single feature correlates to cultures that rise out of poverty - it's economic freedom. This photo of the Korean peninsula shows visually the economic difference between the oppressed north and the south:

photo: nationalgeographic.com

South Korea has general economic freedom. But North Korea, a command economy, is controlled by a dictator. North Koreans as a people group are too poor to afford energy to light up their country at night.

The video of Jay Richards in yesterday's post is so good - go back to yesterday and watch it if you haven't yet! He uses a beautiful story to demonstrate freedom in the marketplace - it results in more satisfaction, more happiness, more wealth, for everyone.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Inasmuch

"Jay Richards argues that Christians who care about human well-being should support free markets." Because . . Jesus said that "inasmuch" as we care for the well-being of our brothers and sisters in need, it's as if we do it for Him. So let's think about well-being and ask good questions.

"Even if you live in the bottom quintile (20%) of the American economy, you are among the wealthiest people ever to have lived in the history of the human race." (Q) How did it happen that people even in the bottom income bracket in the United States are wealthier than most of the rest of the world? 

Poverty has been the state of humanity throughout history since the Garden of Eden. By far the majority have had a subsistence living, just enough (material wealth) to survive. So the most important question that can be asked is not "where does poverty come from?" but (Q) "where does prosperity come from?" 

The second most important economic question is, (Q) "what special conditions have enabled whole cultures to leave absolute poverty and enjoy more than subsistence?"

The key factor that answers that question is in tomorrow's post.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Why IS attacks

For obvious reasons, many of us in the West are baffled when it comes to comprehending the motives of Islamic State (IS). Their brutality is beyond repugnant, so attempts to figure it out go on.

There's the sympathetic, sort of Marxian theory:  terrorists can't get jobs, they're disadvantaged, so it's understandable that they'd resort to torture and murder. Fyi, I don't hold with this theory. It's often held by materialists who like economic explanations and don't like "values" explanations.

But there may be a move to start believing in beliefs. Last March, Atlantic's Graeme Wood said that IS "is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs" that include a mission to bring in the final war of the world, apocalypse.

And just yesterday a CNN article claimed the same thing. Author Frida Ghitis sited IS attacks on powers like Russia and France to demonstrate her theory that IS is actually trying to get that apocalypse going - to incite it.

Only a very small segment of humanity wants to bring in the apocalypse by murder and torture. But it doesn't take many to make a terrible difference in the world.

EV question

Electric cars are cool. But are they the best choice if you want to reduce green house gases to cut global warming? Are battery electric vehicles (BEV) really much better for the environment than internal combustion engine (ICE) cars? 

A lot of people think so, but questions could be asked. When EV's are re-charged, what source provides the electricity? If the source is fossil fuel, is there any advantage over ICE cars?

"Battery electric vehicles are a rare case of a product which is both substantially more expensive with significantly worse performance than the technology it is supposed to replace."

I don't know if the energy trade-off is worthwhile; I'm still asking questions.

Self-control

My friend Sheryle writes powerfully for Christians in Recovery, out of personal experience with recovery and personal experience with God's help. Here she talks about hard choices. What if the way to recovery is difficult or painful? 

image: christians-in-recovery.org

"You either embrace the pain of discipline or you embrace the pain of regret." The "pain of regret" would be regretting that you didn't embrace the pain of discipline so you could be free.

"A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls," according to the Bible in Proverbs 25:28. He/she is so exposed to injury.

Work perks

According to the chart, millennials (age 18-34) place top value on being trained/developed in their work life. It makes sense. Information expands faster and faster, so they know they must keep learning. And . . continuing to get better at what they do will ensure being able to afford more of the rest of this list.

image: forbes.com

Good music

If you took piano lessons as a child, you may have a better appreciation for music today and a musical skill, all of which is good. But it seems there is more to the way you were benefited by those lessons.

Looks like you are better able to function today as a result of the way your brain was trained during that study of music. "Musical training doesn't just affect your musical ability — it provides tremendous benefits to children's emotional and behavioral maturation."

image: brainmadesimple.com

A professor of psychiatry at University of Vermont says that if a child took lessons on a musical instrument, "it accelerated cortical organization in attention skill, anxiety management and emotional control." We could all use more of that.

Carbon sink

(cont'd)

If you're not that excited about the soil, grass, animals or ranchers, well, the maker of yesterday's video isn't either. But his interest lies here:

 "I’m fascinated with [that new kind of] grazing because of its potential to help slow climate change . . .Via photosynthesis, plants suck CO2 out of the air, give us oxygen (O2) to breathe and send carbon down t[o] their roots . . " The dead roots lock up carbon for decades, where  it can bond with the soil and stay underground for centuries.

Biologist Allan Savory (whose TED talk went viral) claims that "holistic management" of livestock can regenerate soil and grasslands for the benefit of humanity - and can also stop climate change by capturing CO2:

"Ultimately, the only wealth that can sustain any community, economy or nation is derived from the photosynthetic process—green plants growing on regenerating soil.

Underground

You might remember Allan Savory's TED talk. He dedicated his life to finding a way to turn unproductive, dying grassland back into green and productive grassland.

Here are three farmer/ranchers who tried the new system and found that their dying grasslands became green, fertile, everything they could want it to be. They've regenerated dying soils "with cascading benefits: More water soaks into and stays in the soil; soil microbes thrive; plant nutrition and production levels take off; and wildlife — from bugs to birds to large mammals — flocks to the ranches."

If regenerated soil, flourishing grasslands, thriving livestock, happy ranchers don't ring your bell, then maybe this will:

Rancher Gabe says that in the few years they've managed grazing this new way, they have tripled the amount of carbon in the soil. Healthy soil with its lush plant life captures carbon from the air and stores it underground, where it should be, instead of in the atmosphere. Hugely significant for anyone worried about global warming.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Veterans Day

Thank you, U.S. veterans.

Alternative

NBC would call Harvard law student Josh Craddock's lifestyle "alternative" because he's married, 23 years old, and the father of a 10-month-old. Living in NYC, Josh and his family would have been typical decades ago, but today they are different.

These millennials don't think of marriage the same as most of their generation do. "We view marriage as a cornerstone institution that molds and shapes us, not as a capstone achievement to be added once we have everything else figured out."

Many would say Josh's point of view is mature: "If I could tell my generation one thing about marriage, it would be that marriage is not just a platform for self-realization or romantic love. It is a lifelong commitment to the good of another."

When an admissions counselor met his family, she said "Wow! You guys live an almost normal life!" But actually, they don't. It would have been normal any time up til, say, about  30 years ago. Now they're different.

Driverless 2

(cont'd)

So Google is not a car company but it's engaged in a "car project" to build a car that drives without a driver. How to do that?  It's complicated. The car will correctly handle a ridiculous number of variables, like a woman in a wheelchair chasing ducks across the road. 

Google's technical director of that project explains his approach in the TED talk below. It goes beyond just improving driver-assistance systems (like "collision mitigation braking") - which is the approach of the car makers. In Urmson's mind, that's like trying to fly by getting better and better at jumping.

Urmson thinks there's a "transformative opportunity" here to go beyond driver-assistance systems to fully driver-less. Why try something so challenging? Safety. He says that the rate at which cars crash today (with human drivers) would be, in the airline business, like a 737 crashing every work day. 

In 2013, they first tested it with "Googlers" who didn't work for the car project. "Something awesome happened. Every one of them told us they loved it!"

Driverless 1

Bloomberg Businessweek reported last week that "Driverless Cars Are Closer Than They Appear." All the big Detroit car manufacturers are now on board with the need to develop driverless capability. "If GM stays with its current car-selling model, it'll go out of business. "Yup, we're done," says an executive." What's pushed them into the new model? Free market competition.

Detroit considers Google's self-driving project a "very serious competitive threat." Tesla's Model S already offers an autopilot option. So (as can happen in any industry) the most "disruptive" innovation is coming from outsiders. It happened not in the entrenched car industry, but in the center of America's technology industry in Silicon Valley CA.

GM knows a lot about making traditional cars, but it's a very big stretch for them to catch up to Google and Tesla in this way. Their first market offering of a driverless feature won't come til 2017, when Cadillac will introduce what they call "Super Cruise." Even then, it will only operate on highways.

Tomorrow's post - Silicon Valley has a certain disdain for Detroit. Watch Google's car program technical director do a TED talk.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Bridge of Spies

A pretty ordinary guy who's good at his job (insurance lawyer) and loves his family and believes in the ideals of his country - this guy somehow gets put in a position to make a big difference in the world. The movie never tells us who chose him or why.



"Bridge of Spies" tells the story of this insurance lawyer who managed to use his head and his integrity to perform a tricky and sensitive service to America. We never find out why he was chosen, but he was the right choice.

Steven Spielberg directed it. It's good.

Universe

The beginning of the universe requires a "beginner,"that is, a "causative agent who works outside of matter, energy, space, and time. By definition, that is the God of the Bible" (in the words of Dr. Hugh Ross). "We're living in the one time of the universe where we can observe the entire history of the cosmic creation event."

It is our ability today to observe 100% of the history of the universe that gives us the most compelling evidence for the God beyond space and time who created everything, according to Dr. Ross.

The worldview of Scientism would say that all the unfolding discoveries of science reveal a simple material cause for everything. But just the opposite has happened in the last few decades, when science learned that the universe had a creation date.

Famous scientist Dr. Arno Penzias, a Nobel laureate in physics, said this about the universe:

"Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan. Thus, the observations of modern science seem to lead to the same conclusions as centuries-old intuition."

Yes, the intuition of human beings throughout history who have thought "this whole thing did not happen by accident."

Soli Deo gloria.

Scientism

Scientism is faith in science (and its methods) as the only source of true knowledge about everything. When it comes to spiritual truth, scientism would say "Spiritual truth can't exist because science can't find it. Science is the ultimate judge!"

It's sort of hard to keep faith in scientism because human experience simply goes beyond material data.  You'd have to kill your intuition to do it because humans overwhelmingly want their lives and relationships to mean something. We believe in genuine love and justice that are not reducible to physics and biology.

Scientists have opened the material universe and how it works to us, with incredible results that have blessed human life on earth (thank God). But some scientists have gone so far as to claim that science proves that God doesn't exist, and that's just not the case.

In fact, "The Scientific Evidence for God is Growing, Not Shrinking." One evidence for God is what we've found out about the universe, the subject of tomorrow's post.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Big Africa

The only way to get a good idea of the relative size of continents on earth is to look carefully at a globe. But we probably look at a flat map much more often, which gets more and more distorted moving away from the equator - so we have a skewed impression.

Did you know that Africa is as big as this (below)?

photo: economist.com

Few girls

(cont'd)

During the one-child rule which held for the last app. 30 years, Chinese couples were tempted to prefer boys to girls. So "gender selection abortions [have been] "extremely common". In some areas there could be up to 130 boys born for every 100 girls.

That kind of imbalance means that millions of young men will necessarily be unable to find wives. Social behavior is different in villages and schools.

"A shortage of brides is putting young women in neighboring countries at risk of being trafficked." 

At a shelter for victims of trafficking, all the girls say "they were tricked by relatives, friends or boyfriends and sold to Chinese men as brides." A Vietnamese girl said, "I had heard a lot about trafficking. But I couldn't imagine it would happen to me."