Friday, 13 October 2017

Finding The Origin of Life


Finding The Origin of Life
origin of life
So where does life begin when considering a male and a female human, or animal for that matter, producing a new life form? To further pursue this discussion, we must see that “life comes from life
Professor Sherry Colb, in her article, “An Illinois Judge Declares that Frozen Embryos Are People: What Difference Does It Make?” brings up some very interesting points about where life of the human body begins.
The first conclusion that one must come to, when discussing either human life, animal life or plant life, is that there is always a “life-force” that makes the human, the animal, the plant a living organism. Some refer to it as the “soul”.
To further define “the soul” we must separate the “soul” from the “body”. If we do this we get a dead body. We can see that it is a dead body because it does not have any consciousness: it cant think, speak, hear, smell, touch, taste, or dream. To go even further we can say that the soul is actually the person and that the body is not. If I stand here and I say that this is my arm, this is my leg, this is my head, this is my hand, and so on and I will come to a point where I ask “who am I”? I am certainly not this hand or this head or this arm. The answer is “I am not this body, I am the spirit soul; the life force.”
So now we can say that the “soul” is the operator of the “body”. The body is a machine, the soul is making the body work, just like a machine does not work without an operator. The soul is the operator of the human body. The human body can not work without the soul.
So where does life begin when considering a male and a female human, or animal for that matter, producing a new life form? To further pursue this discussion, we must see that “life comes from life”. If life did not come from life, you could definitely make an argument saying that embryos can be disposed of as freely as your empty container of milk.
However, there is “no proof” at all that life comes from matter, and in fact it is a rather absurd notion. Take for instance the idea of “cloning”: a scientist creates an embryo with a sperm and an egg. Where does the sperm come from? Where does the egg come from? So did the scientist create the embryo? No, the scientist simply put the sperm and the egg together. The scientist can not make the sperm or the egg. In this scenario the scientist is facilitating the situation, to an extent. But he did not create life.

So when was the life created? Was life created at birth, at conception, or even before the male and female came together? If we take the first question: was life created at birth? The child is living inside the womb independently of the mother, otherwise how do you explain premature births? If you cut the umbilical cord, the baby is still alive and is able to live on its own. Through special high-tech devices you can see the baby’s heart beating on a television screen. It is beating separately from the mothers heart, even at a different rate. It’s body is only attached by a cord and this cords only function is to give food to the baby. The baby is living separately from the mother inside her womb.
As soon as the sperm penetrates the egg, the process that creates the embryo starts. The male and female are not together now. The mother is not the sole life support, somehow growing or creating the baby. The mother and the father simply brought the sperm and the egg together and then the growth process of the body begins. What begins the process? What is making the process continue? What makes the process work? That is the question. If you conclude that just by putting the sperm and egg together, process will start, you have missed the point. Something so advanced, such as the growth of a human body within the womb, must have an advanced intelligence behind it.
Take for instance, the electricity that runs your computer. The electricity is one part of all the parts that make the computer work, but still there is a higher intelligence that puts the electricity and all the other parts together. Electricity in itself does not make the computer do anything meaningful. That requires a person: the operator. It is the operator that really makes the computer run. Electricity is not operating the computer. That is done by the person who is operating it. Similarly, the presence of a higher intelligence must be instrumental in creating the growth process within the human body. The “soul”, the “life-force” is the real identity of the human being. We can see this is true just by knowing that if a doctor surgically amputates an arm, we will still live. We will have not lost any of our identity. We will have lost an arm, but we will still be the same person.
So the next question that will arise is; what is the origin of life; the sperm, egg, the human, the species that is able to have consciousness; to think, to understand a concept, to love, to have emotions? You can not avoid this question. To discuss the moral issue of “abortion” you have to address the issue of our origin, otherwise it is like trying to learn a language with out learning the alphabet first.
So where does life come from? We must conclude that there is a controller; a super intelligence, a supreme being, a supreme person. We can see that nothing works without an intelligence to initiate the cause, which makes the effect. Am I really addressing the notion of God? Is this really scientific? It is very scientific. The dictionary definition of Science is : “The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.” (Lexico Publishing Group, LLC: dictionary.com)
The science of God and how he works is a complete science. We can see that the universe is being maintained perfectly. The seasons change and repeat in the same cycle every year. We know that next year in New York City that in January it will be cold, in July it will be warmer. If we accept the idea of God, then we must accept that he is the controller and that he is the origin of everything including us humans. There is always a cause and effect to everything. God is the cause of all causes, the origin.
There must be some intelligence behind something that is so advanced and working effectively or working at all. Just as if a child sees an automatic door open at an airport, he thinks “oh, how is this working?” Because of his poor fund of knowledge he will think that it is by chance. But the older, more experienced person knows that there was a lot of thought and planning in the electrical design behind the automatic door operation. There has to be a higher intelligence.
How can an automatic door be working with out an intelligence behind it? How can the embryo grow into the stages of a baby without a life force of its own? How can a computer be developed without intelligence? The soul, the life force is part and also parcel of the highest intelligence. The supreme person is making the grass grow, the sun rotate the earth, the wind blow, the rain fall, human intelligence work, and making the computer work.
Abortion is not a right, it is murder. Whether the child is growing inside the mother or outside, murder is still murder. The growing of an embryo means that the “life force” is present. Life is forming the body and making it grow.

More than a Dozen Mysterious Prehistoric Tunnels in Cornwall, England, Mystify Researchers

More than a Dozen Mysterious Prehistoric Tunnels in Cornwall, England, Mystify Researchers

More than a Dozen Mysterious Prehistoric Tunnels in Cornwall, England, Mystify Researchers(Read the article on one page)
More than a dozen tunnels have been found in Cornwall, England, that are unique in the British Isles. No one knows why Iron Age people created them. The fact that the ancients supported their tops and sides with stone, suggests that they wanted them to endure, and that they have, for about 2,400 years.
Many of the fogous, as they’re called in Cornish after their word for cave, ogo, were excavated by antiquarians who didn’t keep records, so their purpose is hard to fathom, says a BBC Travel story on the mysterious structures.
The landscape of Cornwall is covered with hundreds of ancient, stone, man-made features, including enclosures, cliff castles, roundhouses, ramparts and forts. In terms of stone monuments, the Cornwall countryside has barrows, menhirs, dolmens, cairns and of course stone circles. In addition, there are 13 inscribed stones.
The Cornish landscape is dotted with ancient megalithic structures like this Lanyon Quoit Megalith
The Cornish landscape is dotted with ancient megalithic structures like this Lanyon Quoit Megalith ( public domain )
“Obviously, all of this monument building did not take place at the same time. Man has been leaving his mark on the surface of the planet for thousands of years and each civilisation has had its own method of honouring their dead and/or their deities,” says the site Cornwall in Focus.
The site says Cornwall has 74 Bronze Age structures, 80 from the Iron Age, 55 from the Neolithic and one from the Mesolithic. In addition, there are nine Roman sites and 24 post-Roman. The Mesolithic dates from 8000 to 4500 BC, so people have been occupying this southwestern peninsula of Britain for a long, long time.
About 150 generations of people worked the land there. But it’s believed the fogous date to the Iron Age, which lasted from about 700 BC to 43 AD. Though they’re unique, the fogou tunnels of Cornwall are similar to souterrains in Scotland, Ireland, Normandy and Brittany, says the BBC.
Carn Euny fogou in Cornwall
Carn Euny fogou in Cornwall ( public domain )
The fogous required considerable investment of time and resources “and no one knows why they would have done so,” says the BBC. It’s interesting to note that all 14 of the fogous have been found within the confines of prehistoric settlements.
Because the society was preliterate, there are no written records that explain the enigmatic structures.
“There are only a couple that have been excavated in modern times – and they don’t seem to be structures that really easily give up their secrets,” Susan Greaney, head properties historian of English Heritage, told the BBC.
The mystery of their construction is amplified at Halliggye Fogou, the best-preserved such tunnel in Cornwall. It measures 1.8 meters (5.9 feet) high. The 8.4 -meter-long (27.6 feet) passage narrows at its end in a tunnel 4 meters (13.124 feet) long and .75 meter (2.46 feet) tall.
Main chamber of the Halliggye Fogou
Main chamber of the Halliggye Fogou ( public domain )
Another tunnel 27 meters (88.6 feet) long branches off to the left of the main chamber and gets darker the farther in one goes. There is what the BBC calls a “final creep” at the end of this passage that has stone lip upon which one could trip.
“In other words, none of it seemed designed for easy access – a characteristic that’s as emblematic of fogous as it is perplexing,” wrote the BBC’s Amanda Ruggeri.
Halliggye Fogou. One of the largest and best preserved of these fogou (curious underground passages) this one originally passed under the rampart of a defended Iron Age settlement.
Halliggye Fogou. One of the largest and best preserved of these fogou (curious underground passages) this one originally passed under the rampart of a defended Iron Age settlement. ( geograph.org.uk)
Some have speculated they were places to hide, though the lintels of many of them are visible on the surface and Ruggeri says they would be forbidding places to stay if one sought refuge.
Still others have speculated they were burial chambers. An antiquarian who entered Halliggye in 1803 wrote that it had funerary urns. But others entered by the hole he made in the roof, and all the urns are gone. No bones or ashes have been discovered in the six tunnels that modern archaeologists have examined. No remnants of grains have been found, perhaps because the soil is acidic. No ingots from mining have been discovered.
This elimination of storage, mining or burial purposes has led some to speculate that they were perhaps ceremonial or religious structures where people worshiped gods.
“These were lost religions,” said archaeologist James Gossip, who led Ruggeri on a tour of Halligye fogou. “We don’t know what people were worshiping. There’s no reason they couldn’t have had a ceremonial, spiritual purpose as well as, say, storage.”

Hidden Fourth Circle at Mysterious 4,000-Year-Old Standing Stones in Cornwall to be Investigated

Archaeologists are set to undertake an investigation of a hidden fourth circle identified by geophysics at an ancient megalithic site in Cornwall known as ‘The Hurlers’.
The Plymouth Herald reports that the mystery circle was first identified in the early 1990s but only recently has funding been acquired to undertake an investigation in a project known as ‘Reading the Hurlers’.  Archaeologists from the Cornwall Archaeological Unit, geologists, and volunteers will join together to learn the secrets of the hidden circle.
The Hurlers stone circles
The Hurlers stone circles (public domain)
The Hurlers are one of Cornwall’s best known prehistoric monuments and are comprised of three stone circles and a pair of standing stones known as The Pipers. The name is derived from a legend that tells of a group of men who were turned to stone for playing the Cornish game of hurling on a Sunday instead of going to church. The two Pipers are said to be the figures of two men who played the pipes during the game and suffered the same fate.
The Hurlers - Stone Circle - Liskeard, Cornwall, UK (public domain)
In 1994, the possible fourth circle was discovered to the north of the Hurlers, apparently on the same alignment. The Reading the Hurlers project site reports that the buried fourth circle “measures approximately 21-23 m in diameter and lies 105m to the north of the northern circle within The Hurlers triple stone circle complex. If, it is found to exist, it may comprise potentially fallen (once standing) or even recumbent (lying) stones and while it has been surveyed.”
According to English Heritage, The Hurlers have a number of significant alignments, both astronomical and to other ceremonial and funerary monuments in the landscape. The axis through the centres of the two northern circles aligns with the massive Rillaton Barrow, a Bronze Age round barrow made famous for the exquisitely crafted gold cup found inside. The axis of the southern pair of circles aligns directly with a prehistoric round cairn to the south-west.
Main: Rillaton Barrow, an ancient burial mound on Bodmin Moor. Inset: The gold cup found inside.
Main: Rillaton Barrow, an ancient burial mound on Bodmin Moor. Inset: The gold cup found inside. (public domain)
With regards to the work about to be undertaken, Reading The Hurlers reports: “We will carefully hand dig the turf and topsoil around each of the stones which have been identified on the circumference of the site and excavate sections of the interior space. An area of approximately 23m² will be opened up. We will be looking to confirm the presence and/or absence of potential stones, any likely related features such as socket holes (the dug holes in which potential standing stones had once stood) and perhaps even levelled “artificial” (made-up) surfaces possibly laid around the stones.  We will look to see if there are large stones which form a possible fourth stone circle and examine each of the stones we uncover to see if, and how, they are placed in relation to one another, whether they make up a circular monument, and if so, whether they have been dressed (worked by hand).”
One theory suggests that the four circles were not all built at once by the same people, but were built by different communities over different time periods within the Early Bronze Age.

Hidden Fourth Circle at Mysterious 4,000-Year-Old Standing Stones in Cornwall to be Investigated

Wednesday, 11 October 2017

Can I Be Single, Christian and Sexual?

Can I Be Single, Christian and Sexual?
God gives us guidelines on how we should act as single Christians.
 
Shutterstock.com
Unfortunately the reality is that we live in a sexually charged world. Sex is plastered everywhere, and there isn’t a day that goes by where you don’t see ads, TV shows, news headlines or other media filled with sexual themes. As Christians, how do we handle living in such a sexually chaotic society?
Sexuality generates a lot of pain, confusion and heartache for many Christians. Some people may be carrying personal secrets they are afraid to share with others, while some don’t think of sex as a big deal at all. Most Christian’s sources haven’t been very helpful in answering the deep questions that women are asking about sex. In Dr. Juli Slattery’s book, “Sex and the Single Girl,” she dives into what the Bible has to really say about the topic. Based on her book, here are the truths that God wants us to understand about being single, Christian and sexual.
Connecting Your Sexuality to Your Spirituality
Dr. Slattery points out that one of the most important realities from God is that He doesn’t want you to separate your spirituality and sexuality. Whether you are single or married, having sex or choosing to stay abstinent, your sexuality is inseparable from your faith. Our culture encourages us to explore sexually as a way of finding and expressing who you are, but God wants you to think about it in terms of whose you are. Do you choose to belong to God?
Over and over again, society tells you that your sexual choices don’t matter. Most people have bought into the idea that what you do sexually is as trivial as what car you drive. But sex is never just about sex. Our sexual opinions and choices reveal something much deeper about us and our relationship to God.
If you are like many single Christian women, you have constructed a wall between your desires, shame and temptations because they seem like a total disconnect from your longing to know and please God. Your confusion and hidden pain related to sex are inseparable from your relationship with God and you can’t compartmentalize them into two separate groups. God cares about all of who you are, even the “sexual” you.
Instead of being discouraged and confused because you don’t have it all figured out, take it as an invitation to connect with God on a deeper level. God is inviting you to trust Him with your sexuality; no matter how broken this area of your life may feel. By accepting His call, you can begin to develop a more intimate relationship with the Lord. 

Living With Sexual Integrity
Dr. Slattery gives a guideline on how we as Christians can live with sexual integrity the way God intended. First, we have to begin with the truth that humans are sexual beings. Even if you have never had sex, you are still a sexual person and are so by God’s design. He intentionally created you a female with the physical and biochemical properties of sexuality. This means that you have a longing for intimacy, relationships and physical pleasure. God didn’t give us the need for intimacy so it could be isolated or shamed. No, instead God made it so we have a desire to share our hearts, soul and body with another person. Underneath your sexuality is the drive and desire to be known and loved. God created you as a sexual being so that you might understand what it means to long, to desire and to crave intimate oneness. Ultimately, your greatest need for intimacy is to know the God who created you.
Your sexuality is tied into who you are as a rational and spiritual women, as God designed. However going a step further, God’s design was for you to live with sexual integrity. Integrity means “the state of being whole and undivided.” Dr. Slattery then states that to live with sexual integrity means that your sexuality is representative of who you are as a Christian woman. When you live with sexual integrity, your sexual choices are a consistent expression of your relational and spiritual commitments.
You make choices about your sexuality everyday – what to look at, what to think about, how much of your heart and body to give away, and how to deal with your sexual past. Broken sexuality is expressed by single and married women when their sexual choices don’t match up to their commitment to follow the Lord. If Jesus is your Savior, your body (including your sexuality) no longer belongs to you but should be used for God’s glory. As a follower of Christ, you cannot pick and choose which areas to surrender to God. Either He is the Lord of your life, or He is not. This is so crucial to understand.
Women often ask what they should do if they’ve already messed up in the area of sexuality. Even though we cannot erase the past, Jesus offers us a way forward. Jesus came to redeem us in our sin and heal our brokenness. You might know firsthand the tangled mess of sexual sin and how devastating it can be when it is outside of God’s design. However, God invites you to healing and redemption though Jesus.
Understanding Temptation
In Genesis God tells Cain, “sin is [always] crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.” Temptation is going to come to you and it’s important to prepare for it. We fight a daily battle to pursue holiness because Satan is always trying to bring us down. Your desire to express your sexuality isn’t a bad thing, but Satan twists that desire and presents you with shortcuts. These counterfeits may appear to meet the longings of your heart, but you will only end up feeling hurt, rejected and shamed. Every women is vulnerable to counterfeit intimacy. Sex before marriage, fantasies, and pornography are just a few of the ways that we can fall into the trap.
There are a few strategies to help you fight temptation, Dr. Slattery points out. First, you must stop flirting with sin. For example, you may not get naked with a man, but you let him put his hands on you. While you think you might have things under control, you are getting closer to the edge of your morals and values. At any time the temptation can be overwhelming and break you. Secondly, you can put on the armor of God. This means preparing for spiritual battle by building a strong foundation with God, having open lines of communication with Him, and fully understanding His teachings. Then, when confronted with temptation, you will feel powerful in your ability to stand your ground. Lastly, you don’t want to leave yourself spiritually isolated. Fighting off temptation is easier when you have other Christians to help you along. Find other single women who you can trust, and have open discussions about how you want to live with sexual integrity in the face of sin.
Building a Relationship With God
Choosing to live with sexual integrity can draw you into a deeper relationship with God. Yet, there are still barriers to making that a reality. Every woman has had barriers between herself and God, and the main message of the Bible is God’s plan and desire to break down those walls that stand between Him and His children. He wants an intimate relationship with you no matter what past sins you have committed. Demolish these strongholds! Know that God made you to be a sexual person, and as a single Christian you can embrace that by having an intimate relationship with Him until you have found the soulmate God has created for you.
For more answers about sexuality and faith, Dr. Juli Slattery’s book “Sex and the Single Girl” can be found on Amazon for purchase.