Recommended Galileo's Mistake: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation Between Galileo and the Church by Wade Rowland

There is a famous story that Galileo, during his second year of university, was watching a lamp swinging in the glorious Romanesque cathedral in Pisa one morning. (He was, we are to presume, bored with the cant and ritual of the service.) It suddenly occurred to him that the lamp always required the same amount of time to complete an oscillation, no matter how wide the swing. This insight led him to suggest the pendulum as a regulating mechanism for clocks. Even today, guides at the cathedral make an ancient bronze lamp hanging in the nave a feature of their tours. The story as it is usually told is a thinly veiled allegory highlighting the superiority of the scientific mind. While the rest of the congregation wasted their time in the protocols of religion, Galileo's scientific mind was alert to the truth. He did in fact experiment with the pendulum later in life, and suggested its use in timekeeping (though he was not the first to do so). But unfortunately for the story, the lamp that he is supposed to have been watching as a youth was cast in 1587, by which time his student days had ended.

Christians are attempting to model an entirely seperate culture, (entertainment, media, school material, the works) for themselves, this is of course fine and acceptable but for two tiny little problems.

A: Christians actually do, more or less, reside on planet earth with several billion other people besides them who live in their neighborhoods, visit the same commercial establishments, sit on the same buses, own stock in the same companies, stare luridly at their daughters and even *gasp* use the same drinking fountains. Christians are of course trying to put a stop to all this as soon as possible, but my prediction is that this non-segregated and altogether ungodly environment will continue to exist for some years into the future.

B: Christians are attempting to model their brave new seperatist society after mainstream pop-culture...(only christian)...which is, how shall I say it?...a Collossally stupid idea.

Lets just look at “Christian”(TM) music and movies for an example.

Instead of submitting Christian Music for a decision on the quality of the work at the Grammy Awards, Christian artists came up with the “Dove” awards just for Christian Music, so that the “Christian Quality” of music could be determined, instead of having a bunch of unspeakable little secular people tear down something they obviously wouldn't be able to understand (like music). That would be unthinkable!

Millions of CD's are sold each year exclusively through Christian stores and the Christian sections of regular stores, no matter what Genre the music might be in, it is still sold in the Christian category. Why? Well, because it's christian music, and christian music belongs on the christian market since it obviously wouldn't do well with mainstream audiences, right?

It’s the year 1878! Sierra Samantha Victoria Hutchinson Dick Cheney O’Regan Begorrah Lancaster is a (select one: frontier doctor/lawyer/U.S. Marshal, daughter of Irish immigrants, abandoned orphan, child of stern Amish upbringing), who is (select one: trying to make her way in a career dominated by men, struggling to understand a new land and find true love, struggling with her own loneliness brought on by the man who left her behind, trying to reconcile her faith and childhood abuses).

Will her faith in God be put to the Ultimate Test?! Maybe!

These and other scintillating questions will be answered herein and also in the forthcoming next eight books in this series, available next month — same Bat-time, same Bat-channel! Same peril! . . .

We left [a well-known mega-church*]. Here is what transpired and pushed me over the edge (and out of that church).

I attended since 1982, but after a progressive creationist spoke at the church in 2005, I spent the next eight months confronting the elders and staff at the church. Sadness filled my heart to see them reject biblical truth.

There is so much to say about what happened. The bottom line was that I gave up believing there was any hope of the leadership holding a biblical view of the authority of the Word of God.

We withdrew our membership. They had the resident theologian call me to talk about it. The first 30 minutes went well but the last 15 made me angry.

(brackets in original)

[I]f all prophesy, and an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all, 25 the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you.

2 Corinthians 14:24 (ESV)

Recommended Star Trek - First Contact LeVar Burton, James Cromwell, Michael Dorn, Alice Krige

“I am the beginning. The end. The one who is many. I am the Borg.”

To us a human is primarily good; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

[. . .]

Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve.

-- from The Screwtape Letters

AiG’s website (answersingenesis.org) spiked to unbelievable numbers! This also shows that the Creation Museum is going to create the interest we have been predicting, with estimated hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

However, the FOX NEWS version of the article (even though as someone once said, “It doesn’t matter what you say about me, just spell my name right”) does fairly blatantly exhibit some of the usual anti-creationist agenda we’ve seen from some of the secular media.

The AP article appeared in many other news sources across the nation and other parts of the world! And we’ve already had a number of different Christian media call for interviews! We are going to have a busy few days fitting in interviews (as I already did today) and making sure other commitments are not neglected! But, it is thrilling to be that busy anyway—it is thrilling because it means we have opportunity to tell the public the truth about God’s Word and the gospel.

End-of-the-world prophecies have been around almost since the beginning. Ancient prophets, like Daniel in the Hebrew Bible and John the Apostle, who wrote Revelation, laid down visions of the destruction of the world and its replacement with a peaceful, heavenly kingdom.

Many complex mathematical formulas have been solved, but not “666,” which is the “mark of the beast” foretold in Revelation. Many have guessed at its meaning, but the answer has eluded them. For those interested in the history of false and phony end times prophecy, a partial list can be found at www.isitso.org/guide/endtime.html. It makes for entertaining reading. One of my favorites is the Anabaptist preacher in the early 1500s named Hoffman who declared the end of the world would begin in 1533 and that Strassburg would be transformed into the “New Jerusalem.”

The 1991 Persian Gulf War produced a spike in end-times books and sales. Some of them flatly predicted Armageddon was upon us. Authors noted that modern Iraq is ancient Babylon and they saw the Iraq war as a possible, even probable, fulfillment of end-times prophecies. Like those before them, they were wrong. To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, “we're still here.”

Authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have created an industry with their best-selling “Left Behind” book series about the Rapture and the disappearance of all Christians before the final battle of Armageddon takes place (15 titles and more than 63 million sold, which testifies to the intense interest in the subject). There is disagreement within Christian circles as to what comes first - Armageddon or the Rapture - but that can be left to those counting angels on pinheads and, for that matter, to pinheads. Whatever they decide isn't going to affect events, though it will sell books.

[. . .]

[T]he end isn't yet upon us, because too many expect it. But, as Tim LaHaye said on “Good Morning America” last week, it is still good to be prepared. Stop worrying about dates and times, though, unless you're writing a book, making a movie, or delivering a speech. In those circumstances, “prophets” can make big profits with their modern equivalent of sandwich boards that proclaim the end is near.