#9 What Bill Gates Doesn't Know About GMOs

http://www.gmwatch.eu/latest-listing/1-news-items/13660-what-bill-gates-doesnt-know-about-gmos

This brief article is a highlight in and of itself!  Especially note:

      The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food has reported that ecological farming can double food production with in 10 years. This is the kind of agriculture we should be investing in.


     We have enough food to go around now. We must finally recognize that hunger is a problem of poverty and access to resources, especially land, not agricultural yield.

     Finally, here in the U.S., kick the farm lobby out of Congress and the pesticide industry out of our federal regulatory agencies (EPA & USDA). Together, these two special interests have a choke hold on U.S. farm, aid and trade policy, and dominate our agricultural research agenda in ways that make it possible for a smart man like Bill Gates to believe and proselytize on behalf of an approach to agriculture that A, the rest of the world knows is defunct; and B, has failed—after 14 years of commercialization and billions of dollars in public research funding—to deliver on a single one of its promises to the public.

#8 Redefine Marriage and History Will Not Be Kind to You

http://www.ruthblog.org/2012/01/30/prepared-remarks-for-the-washington-state-legislature-hearings-on-the-definition-of-marriage/

Speech given by  Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse at the Washington state legislature hearings on redefining marriage.  Excellent logic and insight. The chaotic effects of "No-Fault Divorce" and the "Sexual Revolution" continue to snowball out of control in our culture, and now another destabilizing factor enters.  Some highlights include:

     I am here today to address those of you who have already made up your minds to redefine marriage.  History will not be kind to you.  Previous generations of social experimenters have caused unimaginable misery for millions of people.  Particular people advocated the policies that led to today’s 50% divorce rate and 40% out of wedlock childbearing rate. None of these people has ever been held accountable.
     Mountains of data show that children do need their mothers and their fathers, and that children care deeply about biological connections.It is ludicrous to believe that we would feel the full impact of such a change in a few years.  It will take at least a generation, a full thirty years or more, before the full effects of redefining marriage work themselves out throughout the social system.

How many generations will it take to reverse the damage, assuming our culture survives?

#7 God at War pt.2

     Gregory A. Boyd (Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary) was a professor of theology, is senior pastor at Woodland Hills Church (which he founded) in St. Paul, Mn., and is a brilliant author.  His book, God at War, The Bible and Spiritual Conflict, recovers the original Christian worldview.  In a nutshell:

        The New Testament is thoroughly conditioned by a warfare worldview.  In this view the whole of the cosmos is understood to be caught up in a fierce battle between two rival kingdoms.  This view entails that the earth has, quite literally, become a fierce war zone and a desecrated battlefield.

        Jesus entered this war zone to set up the rightful rule of God over against the illegitimate rule of Satan.  Jesus’ healings, miracles, exorcisms, resurrection, as well as most of his teaching, make sense only as various aspects of a unified ministry within the context of this worldview.  The cross and the resurrection were, above all else, the act by which God vanquished his archenemy. 

     According to Boyd, Christ’s victory concerns the whole cosmos before it centers on us.  Our salvation and liberation is part of an ages-long, but not eternal, war.  Satan is fatally wounded, yet he and his army live so the war rages on.  There are still important battles to be fought.  Fighting them is what life is all about.

     Mainstream Christianity prefers the “blueprint view” of life, in which everything that happens is willed by God for his mysterious purposes.  As comforting as this view is, the logical end to it is that nothing we do makes any difference.  Prayer makes no difference.  Our position in such a world is truly hopeless.  But the New Testament writers presented a world in which God’s will is often thwarted by evil cosmic forces.

     Boyd uses an image of Nazis torturing an innocent child.  Incredibly, many modern Christians prefer to see some secret providential design being fulfilled by means of the Nazis!  Boyd prefers instead to discern in the eyes of the Nazis something of an evil “twisting serpent” seeking once again to undo God’s creation.  In the New Testament worldview, the only reason a child is tortured is because free beings, human and angelic, can will such atrocities.

     Precisely because our present suffering is NOT God’s will—however much he can now use it for our ultimate good—we can have assurance that the cosmos will not always be this way.

#6 God at War pt.1

Mainstream Christianity is dying.  It no longer has an answer to "the problem of evil"; therefore, it has no application to real life.

On January 19, 2010, we met indisputable evil when we rushed Della to the hospital for what we assumed was appendicitis.  The doctor found a tumor covering her appendix.  At age 14, she had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.


We got the typical answer for such an incident--that the pain and suffering of innocents somehow serves the mysterious "good" purposes of God.  Anyone who has been in a pediatric cancer ward knows how useless and repulsive that argument is!  The clueless, well-meaning people who offer it are baffled that you reject it.


The New Testament writers, on the other hand, were inclined to expect evil.  Instead of puzzling over why bad things happen to good people, they could address it and grapple with it.  The Eastern Orthodox churches still embrace this original Christian view, and at least one modern Western writer, Greg Boyd, has rediscovered it.  I am convinced that forces of Light and goodness led me to his work when I desperately needed it.  I'll state the nutshell version of this original Christian view in post #7.

#5 Why Does God Allow Cancer?

From Greg Boyd.  Obviously, the man can speak for himself here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7gXkCMROdU&list=PL5C7A8D414B657017&index=7&feature=plpp_video

#4 The Teacher: part performer, part dictator, part cajoler

from a letter to the editor of the Davis Enterprise:

January 25, 2012 - 9:43 pm

An article written by senior editor Kathleen K. Wiegner celebrated what technology would do to transform education. In the next issue, the magazine published a dissenting commentary written initially as an internal memo by its technology editor, Stephen Kindel. He wrote:
“What kind of transformation will computer generate in kids? It could well be a lot less than all the hype would indicate. Just as likely as producing far more intelligent kids is the possibility that you will create a group of kids fixated on screens – television, videogame, or computer. The notion of learning at your own speed is a hoary educational cliché beloved by computer ed folks. In theory it sounds wonderful. In fact, it eliminates the community of the classroom, turns the student into a lone figure engaged in a yearlong dialog with a disembodied voice. What would happen to class discussion – and, more important, the sense of rubbing against other minds?”
Kindel observed that “the computer is a tool, like a hammer or a wrench, not a philosophers’ stone” and that “education depends on the intimate contact between a good teacher – part performer, part dictator, part cajoler – and an inquiring student. The importance of the teacher is not necessarily as a conveyor of information but as a catalyst to interest students in learning for themselves.” He predicted that when this revolution came to pass, the poor would get computers, and the rich would get teachers. Of course, that isn’t quite right. The rich get both computers and teachers.
Diane Ravitch, 2011

#3 Diane Ravitch on NCLB

http://www.davisenterprise.com/local-news/schools-news/education-expert-diane-ravitch-blasts-no-child-left-behind/


http://www.davisenterprise.com/local-news/schools-news/ravitch-no-child-left-behind-has-been-a-disaster/

These articles are simply 'must reads'; the entire piece is a highlight!  Corporate/charter school reformers and proponents have no data to support their claims that competition produces excellence in young children.  Children need nurturing in a structured, supportive environment in order to learn and grow.  Market-place principles simply don't apply to every facet of human life, and Ravitch brilliantly demonstrates how they hurt our educational system.