Nebraska Fetal Pain Law Hailed as Successful

Research clearly substantiates the concept of fetal pain in the 2nd trimester. This is the motivation behind Nebraska's new Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which prevents abortions after 20 weeks from fertilization, when substantial medical evidence indicates unborn children feel pain.

The genius behind the legislation was the thinking that it would be challenged in court and the pro-life movement could win a favorable decision from the high court on the heels of the ruling upholding the national partial-birth abortion ban.

This quote is from Mary Balch, Nebraska's legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.But, with the news that the late-term abortion practitioner LeRoy Carhart is possibly relocating to another state and him saying the fetal pain bill is responsible, Balch says the further genius of the bill is seen.

“This announcement illustrates the importance of having states pass protective laws such as the one passed in Nebraska,” Balch told LifeNews.com. “Now is the time for Right to Lifers to capitalize on the dramatic pro-life gains in state legislative and gubernatorial elections last week and to make it illegal to kill unborn children who are capable of feeling pain.”

For more, see Steven Ertelt's article at LifeNews.

“At twenty weeks into pregnancy, unborn children have pain receptors throughout their bodies connected by nerves to the brain’s thalamus, they recoil from painful stimuli, their stress hormones shoot up, and they are routinely anesthetized when undergoing fetal surgery. While we expect substantial resistance from abortion advocates, we believe most Americans agree in rejecting abortions that cause excruciating pain, and look forward to protective laws being given serious consideration in a significant number of states.”

The Trinity of North Korea

Juche Flame Tower,
Pyongyang, North Korea.

The North Korean communists tried to build a substitute for God for more than half a century - complete with a father, Kim Il-Sung; a son, Kim Jong-Il; and a Juche flame tower (holy spirit).

The "father" is dead, the "son" is dying, and Juche is a corrupt ideology.

(from Voice of the Martyrs, 2010 Year in Review)

Albania - God has always been at work

Enver Hoxha
First Secretary of the
Party of Labour of Albania.

In the 20th century, the communist country of  Albania was declared to be the first atheist state in the world by dictator Enver Hoxha. Hoxha killed all known Christan leaders and closed all churches.

Voice of the Martyrs still found ways to bring the gospel to the closed country. Despite Hoxha's efforts, we at VOM brought the gospel into Albania though the use of airplanes, boats, and "tourists". In addition, we dropped thousands of gospels sealed in plastic bags into the Adriatic Sea along the Adriatic coast.

We heard nothing at first, but when we were able to enter Albania at the fall of communism, we learned of the fruit of our labors. During the communist stranglehold, an Albanian soldier working on the beach looked up an prayed, "Dear God, if you exist, help me. Show me the way." He looked down to see a gospel book floating in the water at his feet. That soldier became a Christian.

(from Voice of the Martyrs, 2010 Year in Review)

Today many numbers of Albanians all around the world are turning to Christ. Many of them remember the darkest years of communism. Thank God that he has always been at work.

A series of anti-Christian riots in Nigeria...

in the spring of 2010 left more than 500 Christians dead, most of them women and children. In the past two decades, northern Nigeria has been the scene of horrific religious riots that have cost thousands of Christians their lives. Many states in northern Nigeria have instituted Islamic law and have vowed to keep northern Nigeria a Muslim region. This declaration has lead to many attacks on Christians.

(from Voice of the Martyrs, 2010 Year in Review)

Do you believe in Chicxulub?

Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago after an asteroid hit Chicxulub, Mexico, near Cancun. My 12-year old son said that's what they learned in their secular textbook at Christian school today.

Dr. Donald DeYoung, a Creationist Geologists, debunks the whole theory of the big bad asteroid that caused dinosaurs to die out.

Selections from Chicxulub and the Demise of the Dinosaurs, by Donald B. DeYoung, PhD.

(This excerpt by Marko is from the article published in Impact #334, Institute for Creation Research, April 2001, http://www.icr.org/article/453/).

There have been nearly one hundred different dinosaur extinction theories offered in recent decades. These range from poisonous plants to mass suicide by dinosaur herds. One particular extinction theory has gained wide acceptance since the 1980s. It involves a major earth impact by an asteroid or comet. This catastrophe is thought to have extinguished up to two-thirds of all animal and plant species living at the time.

Around 1990, a particular formation of faulted rocks received major attention, located at the northern end of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. The geologic formation is called Chicxulub (pronounced CHEEK-shoe-lube) after a nearby village. The roughly circular feature is 100-200 miles in diameter. It is buried a kilometer below ground, about half on land and half below the sea floor.

Scientific support for the dinosaur-collision hypothesis is not unanimous.
 
First, why did the alleged impact kill off the dinosaurs while many other forms of life remained healthy? Some of the least mobile creatures (tortoises, snakes, crocodiles) and also the most sensitive to climatic change (birds, fish) are still with us today. Some shallow marine bottom-dwelling invertebrates survived, while others became extinct. Plants also survived the cataclysm in great abundance.
 
Second, the fossil record does not show an instantaneous demise of the dinosaurs. Some dinosaurs died out within the Cretaceous period while others apparently survived well into the Tertiary period, millions of years later in evolutionary thinking (Rigby, et al., 1987; Sloan, et al., 1986).
 
Third, it is not certain that Chicxulub is an actual impact site. Practically all the data in support of a collision have alternative explanations. For example, the iridium concentration in the K-T layer could have resulted from volcanic processes. Igneous material includes traces of iridium, especially when derived from the deep mantle (Gunter, 1986). A large region in western India (called the Deccan Traps) experienced massive volcanism at a similar relative time in history. Some experts attribute dinosaur death to climatic events related to this massive outpouring of lava in India.
 
Several dramatic movies have portrayed deadly asteroids or comets pummeling the earth and endangering humanity itself in the years to come. The creation view is far more optimistic about the future, realizing that there is a definite future plan for mankind. We are not the result of chance, nor do we, or the earth's animal and plant life, face imminent extermination from a random space collision.
 
References (selected)
 
Gunter, F. 1986. Principles of Isotope Geology. John Wiley and Sons. New York.
 
Rigby, J. K., K. R. Newman, J. Smit, S. Vander Kaars, R. E. Sloan and J. K. Rigby. 1987. Dinosaurs from the Paleocene Part of the Hell Creek Formation, McCone County, Montana. Palaios 2: 296-302.
 
Sloan, R. E., J. K. Rigby, Jr., L. Van Valen and D. Gabriel. 1986. Gradual Dinosaur Extinction and Simultaneous Ungulate Radiation in the Hell Creek Formation. Science 232: 629-633.