Tales Of The Resistance

Tales Of The Resistance, by Mains is an excellent book. Though it's a children's book it is very deep, just like the Narnia series. I would say that it actually is deeper because it's set up as a children's book. It tells truths of Christianity, but it avoids the blatantly obvious paths of most Christian children's books. I would highly suggest finding and cherishing this book. You can buy it on Amazon on this link:

http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Resistance-David-R-Mains/dp/0891919384/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322709698&sr=1-1

By the end of it, I was actually brought to tears. At age 15. It was that good. One of the truths brought to light by this book is an amazing example of how the weakness of God is stronger then the strength of the world. In a certain scene the King, dressed as an ordinary man, has a face-off with the wizard. The wizard has robes and a crown and sends walls of flames at the King. The King doesn't react or counter attack at all. The main character wonders why the King doesn't strike back. But the fact that the King doesn't attack is the very thing that proves his strength. Even at his weakest moment, he is stronger then everything that the wizard can do. Even when Christ died, he was stronger then the Devil at the hight of his power. And the scene with Thespia is so amazing, and so true; .."because when one has found one's real love it is easy to leave what has only been pretend." Buy it. Shipping is cheap.

Just As I Was Beginning To Think That Greece Was Pretty Cool...

"Scholars apologize for attributing Western democracy to a make-believe civilization."

WASHINGTON—"A group of leading historians held a press conference Monday at the National Geographic Society to announce they had "entirely fabricated" ancient Greece, a culture long thought to be the intellectual basis of Western civilization.

The group acknowledged that the idea of a sophisticated, flourishing society existing in Greece more than two millennia ago was a complete fiction created by a team of some two dozen historians, anthropologists, and classicists who worked nonstop between 1971 and 1974 to forge "Greek" documents and artifacts.

"Honestly, we never meant for things to go this far," said Professor Gene Haddlebury, who has offered to resign his position as chair of Hellenic Studies at Georgetown University. "We were young and trying to advance our careers, so we just started making things up: Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, Hippocrates, the lever and fulcrum, rhetoric, ethics, all the different kinds of columns—everything."

According to Haddlebury, the idea of inventing a wholly fraudulent ancient culture came about when he and other scholars realized they had no idea what had actually happened in Europe during the 800-year period before the Christian era.

Frustrated by the gap in the record, and finding archaeologists to be "not much help at all," they took the problem to colleagues who were then scrambling to find a way to explain where things such as astronomy, cartography, and democracy had come from.

Within hours the greatest and most influential civilization of all time was born.

"One night someone made a joke about just taking all these ideas, lumping them together, and saying the Greeks had done it all 2,000 years ago," Haddlebury said. "One thing led to another, and before you know it, we're coming up with everything from the golden ratio to the Iliad."

"That was a heck to write, by the way," he continued, referring to the epic poem believed to have laid the foundation for the Western literary tradition. "But it seemed to catch on."

Around the same time, a curator at the Smithsonian reportedly asked for Haddlebury's help: The museum had received a sizeable donation to create an exhibit on the ancient world but "really didn't have a whole lot to put in there." The historians immediately set to work, hastily falsifying evidence of a civilization that— complete with its own poets and philosophers, gods and heroes—would eventually become the centerpiece of schoolbooks, college educations, and the entire field of the humanities.

Emily Nguyen-Whiteman, one of the young academics who "pulled a month's worth of all-nighters" working on the project, explained that the whole of ancient Greek architecture was based on buildings in Washington, D.C., including a bank across the street from the coffee shop where they met to "bat around ideas about mythology or whatever."

"We picked Greece because we figured nobody would ever go there to check it out," Nguyen-Whiteman said. "Have you ever seen the place? It's a dump. It's like an abandoned gravel pit infested with cats."

She added, "Inevitably, though, people started looking around for some of this 'ancient' stuff, and next thing I know I'm stuck in Athens all summer building a stupid Parthenon just to cover our tracks."

Nguyen-Whiteman acknowledged she was also tasked with altering documents ranging from early Bibles to the writings of Thomas Jefferson to reflect a "Classical Greek" influence—a task that also included the creation, from scratch, of a language based on modern Greek that could pass as its ancient precursor.

Historians told reporters that some of the so-called Greek ideas were in fact borrowed from the Romans, stripped to their fundamentals, and then attributed to fictional Greek predecessors. But others they claimed as their own.

"Geometry? That was all Kevin," said Haddlebury, referring to former graduate student Kevin Davenport. "Man, that kid was on fire in those days. They teach Davenportian geometry in high schools now, though of course they call it Euclidean."

Sources confirmed that long hours and lack of sleep took their toll on Davenport, and after the lukewarm reception of his work on homoeroticism in Spartan military, he left the group.

In a statement expressing their "profound apologies" for misleading the world on the subject of antiquity for almost 40 years, the historians expressed hope that their work would survive on its own merits.

"It would be a shame to see humanity abandon achievements such as heliocentrism and the plays of Aeschylus just because of their origin," the statement read in part. "Moreover, we have some rather disappointing things to tell you about the pyramids, the works of Leonardo da Vinci, penicillin, the Internet, the scientific method, movies, and dogs."

-The Onion Newspaper

Funny stuff. XD XD But seriously-America is soooo influenced by Greece. We like to have our thoughts organized by all the rules the Greeks came up with, we use their Geometry, we are majorly influenced by their philosophy. We really think that their stories, and the stuff they did (Think 300) is so epic. We keep on making these movies about the Greeks and battles they fought, think  the Disney Hercules, 300,Troy, Clash Of The Titans and the latest; Immortals. Not even to mention the architecture. Haha, but apparently it was all made up. X)

In enemy territory

I am a Christian first and foremost. Anything that I come into contact with will first be examined by that standard. If it isn't in accordance with the Bible I will not examine it with the air of person coming to hear an argument, thinking about the idea of joining that side. I will examine it like a scientist examines a cancerous cell or a flu virus; hating it and being disgusted by it and only enough contact to understand how to destroy it.

Some Christians would say that if it doesn't fit with the Bible-"Don't handle it at all." "It's obviously sinful-It will tempt those who come close to it," they'll say. These are the ones who raise their children making sure that they never talk about pagan views. The ones who make sure that their children never read books that have "bad characters" in them. The ones who dictate who make sure that their children don't have any non-Christian friends. These are the ones who will be shocked to find their children leaving the Christian faith for some new religion. But it should come as no surprise: The people raised like this have no immune system.

But going to the other extreme isn't the right choice either. Having a 5-year-old totally exposed to the ideas of Buddhism with-out Christian protection is obviously a bad idea. Christians have to learn how sin will fight so that in battle they'll actually be prepared to destroy it. Consider the Bible. The Bible is full of references to sinful people doing sinful things, and yet it's all viewed through a lens of Christianity-namely that the evil people get punished for wicked actions.

The Unborn Paradox (And Comments)

I did not write this. This article was written by Ross Douthat, and published in the New York Times last January. It was to amazing not to share.

The Unborn Paradox

By ROSS DOUTHAT

Published: January 2, 2011 

The American entertainment industry has never been comfortable with the act of abortion. Film or television characters might consider the procedure, but even on the most libertine programs (a “Mad Men,” a “Sex and the City”), they’re more likely to have a change of heart than actually go through with it. Reality TV thrives on shocking scenes and subjects — extreme pregnancies and surgeries, suburban polygamists and the gay housewives of New York — but abortion remains a little too controversial, and a little bit too real.

This omission is often cited as a victory for the pro-life movement, and in some cases that’s plainly true. (Recent unplanned-pregnancy movies like “Juno” and “Knocked Up” made abortion seem not only unnecessary but repellent.) But it can also be a form of cultural denial: a way of reassuring the public that abortion in America is — in Bill Clinton’s famous phrase — safe and legal, but also rare.

Rare it isn’t: not when one in five pregnancies ends at the abortion clinic. So it was a victory for realism, at least, when MTV decided to supplement its hit reality shows “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” with last week’s special, “No Easy Decision,” which followed Markai Durham, a teen mother who got pregnant a second time and chose abortion.

MTV being MTV, the special’s attitude was resolutely pro-choice. But it was a heartbreaking spectacle, whatever your perspective. Durham and her boyfriend are the kind of young people our culture sets adrift — working-class and undereducated, with weak support networks, few authority figures, and no script for sexual maturity beyond the easily neglected admonition to always use a condom. Their televised agony was a case study in how abortion can simultaneously seem like a moral wrong and the only possible solution — because it promised to keep them out of poverty, and to let them give their first daughter opportunities they never had.

The show was particularly wrenching, though, when juxtaposed with two recent dispatches from the world of midlife, upper-middle-class infertility. Last month there was Vanessa Grigoriadis’s provocative New York Magazine story “Waking Up From the Pill,” which suggested that a lifetime on chemical birth control has encouraged women “to forget about the biological realities of being female ... inadvertently, indirectly, infertility has become the Pill’s primary side effect.” Then on Sunday, The Times Magazine provided a more intimate look at the same issue, in which a midlife parent, the journalist Melanie Thernstrom, chronicled what it took to bring her children into the world: six failed in vitro cycles, an egg donor and two surrogate mothers, and an untold fortune in expenses.

In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.

Some of this shift reflects the growing acceptance of single parenting. But some of it reflects the impact of Roe v. Wade. Since 1973, countless lives that might have been welcomed into families like Thernstrom’s — which looked into adoption, and gave it up as hopeless — have been cut short in utero instead.

And lives are what they are. On the MTV special, the people around Durham swaddle abortion in euphemism. The being inside her is just “pregnancy tissue.” After the abortion, she recalls being warned not to humanize it: “If you think of it like [a person], you’re going to make yourself depressed.” Instead, “think of it as what it is: nothing but a little ball of cells.”

It’s left to Durham herself to cut through the evasion. Sitting with her boyfriend afterward, she begins to cry when he calls the embryo a “thing.” Gesturing to their infant daughter, she says, “A ‘thing’ can turn out like that. That’s what I remember ... ‘Nothing but a bunch of cells’ can be her.”

When we want to know this, we know this. Last week’s New Yorker carried a poem by Kevin Young about expectant parents, early in pregnancy, probing the mother’s womb for a heartbeat:

The doctor trying again to find you, fragile,

fern, snowflake. Nothing.

After, my wife will say, in fear,

impatient, she went beyond her body,

this tiny room, into the ether—

... And there

it is: faint, an echo, faster and further

away than mother’s, all beat box

and fuzzy feedback. ...

This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.

The web-page:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/opinion/03douthat.html

By D.C. Salmon: This is an amazing article. It's very appropriate for modern America because he doesn't actually call upon a higher standard (One that most relativistic Americans wouldn't accept.) He just bases his arguments on something that nobody can really deny-namely that there really are so many women who desperately want children. He begins generally; starting with something that would be familiar to many Americans, and continues on until he gets to a general thesis, ending with a lasting, resounding statement. The New York Times made a very good choice by publishing his article.

The day was wet and rainy.

The day was wet and rainy. The small huddle of soggy, vagrant children shivered under a porous brown tarp. Around them slumped the wreckage of English buildings. Piles of rubble and debris covered the street that they called home. Across the scene of destruction echoed the wails of sirens and grieving mothers. These children who scraped out a living in the graveyard of houses had none to protect them. With their fathers gone to the war and the mothers killed or having abandoned them they had none save themselves for security. These were the English orphans. These were the young frightened souls tormented by the Nazi planes and bombs. These were the tough survivors in a time and place when none looked to the skies with hope. Only dread of what may come. 


I wrote this for my Comp. class. We had to write a descriptive paragraph starting with the sentence,"The day was wet and rainy." So I did. :) Now I must admit-I have no actual evidence that there were these orphans scampering across the wreckage of London during WWII. Call it an "artist's impression". 

Women, Children, History and Christianity

I was listening to an NPR interview of a woman about her recently published book. She said that women were often not recognized in history, and specifically in the area of battle and war. I'm not surprised that she reached this conclusion, because usually in ancient times women were not valued as they should be. Men were the ones who went out and did the "important" things that end out in history books, namely fighting wars. This is an unfortunate failure among most pagan cultures. Women are to valued, and Christianity definitely does this.

Along with women, children were often undervalued in pagan cultures. The Romans had an appalling tradition that dis-valued children. After a child was born he or she was laid at the fathers feet, and the father had the choice of whether or not to keep the baby. Often the child would be rejected if it had physical defects or simply if it was female (Again-not valuing a female because they weren't as "useful"). If the father chose not to keep the baby, he was brought to a designated place and left to die of exposure.

Christianity was (and presumably still is) different from other religions on both of these points because it openly values both women and children, even though they are physically weaker then men. Many of the Proverbs are about children and how to raise them. This obviously shows that children are worth the effort to train. Another example would be that one can specifically see love of children in the life of Jesus:

Matthew 19:13,"Some people brought children to Jesus so that he would place his hands on them and pray. But the disciples scolded them. “Allow the children to come to me,” Jesus said. “Don’t forbid them, because the kingdom of heaven belongs to people like these children.”  Then he blessed the children and went away from there."


In this passage the disciples didn't understand how precious children are, so they rebuked the people who brought the children. And Jesus rebukes the disciples because he knows that children really are precious. 


Next, Christianity openly values women. Mary Magdelin was commended for worshipping Jesus with the expensive perfume, while most of the disciples were slow to realize the worthiness of what she did. Also, who were the first people to witness Christ resurrected from the dead? Women, even though the testimony of women was not held of much account in the courts of that time. 


The Christian God is a God that values and protects the weak; 1 Corinthians 1:27;" ...God chose what the world considers weak to shame the strong." 


Solo Deo Gloria.

Evolutionary Hymn (Lewis) & Analysis

Lead us, Evolution,lead us
Up the future's endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.

Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow,
In the present what are they
while there's always jam-tomorrow,
While we tread the onward way?
Never knowing where we're going,
We can never go astray.

To whatever variation
Our posterity may turn
Hairy, squashy, or crustacean,
Bulbous-eyed or square of stern,
Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless,
Towards that unknown god we yearn.

Ask not if it's god or devil,
Brethren, lest your words imply
Static norms of good and evil
(As in Plato) throned on high;
Such scholastic, inelastic,
Abstract yardsticks we deny.

Far too long have sages vainly
Glossed great Nature's simple text;
He who runs can read it plainly,
'Goodness = what comes next.'
By evolving, Life is solving
All the questions we perplexed.

On then! Value means survival-
Value. If our progeny
Spreads and spawns and licks each rival,
That will prove its deity
(Far from pleasant, by our present,
Standards, though it may well be)




I love this poem because it makes fun of the blind "patriotism" that evolutionists sometimes give to the random changes of evolution. Also it shows how the evolutionary view doesn't have anywhere for morality. If you think about it, according to evolution: survival is the only thing that matters. Obviously. It says,"We're all just animals fighting tooth and claw to survive."  In the evolutionary world-veiw there is no room for morality-There's no place for it to come from. If we're all just animals nobody can come and impose a law of morality on anybody else because we're all on the same level. 


And that's why we get our standards of morality from a higher source: God. He clearly sets out standards for us in The Bible. Unfortunately, because we're fallen we don't have the ability to follow those standards anymore. And that's why we need Jesus Christ to restore our shattered relationship with God.

Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl Trailers

The link for the advertisement for the bookumentary on Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl:
http://vimeo.com/22625093


"A cinematic treatment of a worldview. A poet live in concert. A motion picture sermon. VH1 Storytellers meets Planet Earth. 60 Minutes meets Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. In this unusual but fascinating film sequence, best-selling author N.D. Wilson gives an emotional and intellectual tour of life in this world and the final chapter that is death. Everything before and after and in between is a series of miracles--some of which are encouraging, others disturbing and uncomfortable. Produced by Gorilla Poet Productions and Beloved Independent"-Gorilla Poet Website

This link for an advertisement for the actual book Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl:
http://vimeo.com/5600197


Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl is for Christians, Atheists, Agnostics, and people of all other religions. This is a mind opening book, and a beautiful bookumentary. This has personally helped my answer many questions that I've had about Christianity.