10 New Year's Resolutions to Get Along Better with People

1. Keep skid chains on your tongue; always say less than you think. Cultivate a low, persuasive voice. How you say it counts more than what you say.

2. Make promises sparingly, and keep them faithfully, no matter what it costs.

3. Never let an opportunity pass to say a kind and encouraging word to or about somebody. Praise good work, regardless of who did it. If criticism is needed, criticize helpfully, never spitefully.

4. Be interested in others, their pursuits, their work, their homes and families. Make merry with those who rejoice; with those who weep, mourn. Let everyone you meet, however humble, feel that you regard him as a person of importance.

5. Be cheerful. Don’t burden or depress those around you by dwelling on your minor aches and pains and small disappointments. Remember, everyone is carrying some kind of a load.

6. Keep an open mind. Discuss but don’t argue. It is a mark of a superior mind to be able to disagree without being disagreeable.

7. Let your virtues, if you have any, speak for themselves. Refuse to talk of another’s vices. Discourage gossip. It is a waste of valuable time and can be extremely destructive.

8. Be careful of another’s feelings. Wit and humour at the other person’s expense are rarely worth it and may hurt when least expected.

9. Pay no attention to ill-natured remarks about you. Remember, the person who carried the message may not be the most accurate reporter in the world. Simply live so that nobody will believe them. Disordered nerves and bad digestion are a common cause of back-biting.

10. Don’t be too anxious about the credit due you. Do your best, and be patient. Forget about yourself, and let others “remember.” Success is much sweeter that way.

(Ann Landers, Ten Commandments of Getting Along with People)

'Homosexuality is a sin’ street preacher wins £7k from British police

A street preacher wrongly arrested for saying homosexuality is a sin has won substantial damages as U.K. police chiefs issue new guidelines telling officers to be more thick-skinned.

(reported by Jonathan Petre, Daily Mail)

Dale Mcalpine was held for seven hours and charged with a public-order offence in April after telling a gay police community support officer (PCSO) that he believed homosexuals were acting against the word of God. He was accused of uttering ‘threatening, abusive or insulting’ words ‘to cause harassment, alarm or distress’ contrary to Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986.

But the charges were dropped after the case was highlighted by The Mail on Sunday and now police in Cumbria have agreed to pay him £7,000 in compensation as well as his legal costs, potentially an extra £10,000.

The payout came as new national guidance was issued to police following growing criticism of their heavy-handed treatment of Christians expressing their religious views.

Keeping The Peace, published by the Association of Chief Police Officers, says officers must be aware that the right to free speech allows people to express unpopular views as long as ‘their conduct is reasonable or the actual or potential violence provoked in others is “wholly unreasonable” ’.

Pressure is mounting on the Government to reform the Public Order Act when it introduces its Freedom Bill in the New Year. Campaigners want the word ‘insulting’ removed from Section 5 of the Act because they believe it leaves street preachers and others vulnerable to arrest.

At a magistrates’ court hearing his trial date was set for September, but coverage of his treatment provoked a public outcry.

Mr Mcalpine said last night: ‘I am delighted the police are going to apologise. It is not about the money but about freedom of speech. I hope the police will in future do their duty defending freedom of speech.’

The Christian Institute, which backed his case, said: ‘We’re obviously pleased that Cumbria Police has seen common sense. But Mr Mcalpine should not have been arrested in the first place. Sadly, it’s not an isolated case. The Government needs to amend the Public Order Act as a matter of urgency.’

Earlier this month, street preacher Anthony Rollins, who was handcuffed and arrested for condemning homosexuality, was awarded £4,250 in damages following a court case against West Midlands Police. Even homosexual rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has called for reform of the law.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339843/Homosexuality-sin-street-preacher-wins-7k-police

Please pray for persecuted believers in Columbia.



FARC Colombia - a group of armed rebels
against the government. They have been
known to be involved in kidnapping
and drug trafficking.


"Will will serve in the church as long as God allows. ... But the fear doesn't leave; like all humans, sometimes we worry."

(from a persecuted pastor in Columbia, Voice of the Martyrs,  2010)

The Physics of the Resurrection?

My friend Michael Turley asks:

Do I understand from a previous post that you are a Physicist? If so, I want to ask you your professional opinion about Dr Francis Tipler's Omega Point theory (tried to read physics of immortality and could only grasp it in a very elementary fashion) and also what do you think of Dr Russell Humphreys' White Hole Cosmology and the plausibility of that....I understand it has problems, and if it does have problems are they as great as the problems facing naturalist's Big Bang cosmology. Thanks!!! :)

My answer:

Tipler is not Biblical. His Omega Point theory is not much better than Eric Van Daniken, who went to town in his Chariots of the Gods with the strange spacecraft of Ezekiel Chapter 1, which he interprets as a detailed description of a landing alien spacecraft.

How would Tipler use his Omega Point theory to explain Jesus' Resurrection from the dead? He can't, since what he's talking about has no real reference to the God of the Bible. But Bible believers know that "Surely the Lord does nothing without revealing his secrets to his servants the prophets" (Amos 3:7). And God tells us that "on the third day, He will raise us up, that we may live before him" (Hosea 6:2).

The best book on resurrection that I've read is John W. Cooper, Body, Soul & Life Everlasting, Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, 1989, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. 

Sorry, it does not try to deduce principles of the resurrection from fantastic models of physics.... Instead, Cooper goes to both the Old Testament and New and gives a very satisfying explanation of what awaits believers after death, in both the intermediate state before they receive their glorified bodies, and who they will be after judgment day.

Humphrey's White Hole Cosmology is really cool. I really like the way it starts with a huge ball of water. It also has a neat explanation of the uniformity of the background cosmic radiation field. Humphrey admits that his model is incomplete. It has been tweaked a little, but remains unfinished.

But the best physics explanation I've read so far of God's 6 day creation is Anisotropic Synchrony Convention—A Solution to the Distant Starlight Problem, by Jason Lisle. He demonstrates with some amazing relativistic equations that "starlight from the most distant galaxy can reach earth on the fourth day of the Creation Week when the correct relativistic synchrony convention is employed". I don't understand the math there yet, but I hope someday to write a blog entry on it.

~ Marko, M.S. Physics, M.Div Pastoral Ministry

Nerds searching for WIMPs

The search for dark matter is likely to go on for another 77 years, because without it the Big Bang would become the Bankrupt Bang. Bigger and better detectors will be begged for and built. Until then, it is probable that dark matter will only fill the minds of physicists!

"Nerds at work"

That's the logo on T-shirts sold at the visitor center in Lead, South Dakota. A team of physicists and former miners is converting the Homestake gold mine in Lead to become the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, or DUSEL. It will become the world's deepest underground laboratory, to be used in search for Dark Matter. The centerpiece is the LUX, or Large Underground Xenon detector, with 1.6 octillion (billion billion billion) xenon atoms. This according to the January 2011 issue of Popular Science.

"No one knows what dark matter is, or if it even really exists. For now, it is just a placeholder, an x that must be plugged into various calculations in order to square astronomical observations with the rules of Newtonian physics. The name comes from Fritz Zwicky, a Swiss astronomer who in 1933 used two well-established methods to calculate the mass of the Coma cluster, a group of more than 1,000 galaxies. The Coma galaxies were spinning much faster than would be predicted by the amount of overall light emitted. For the Newtonian equation to add up, there had to be more mass. Zwicky dubbed this missing bulk dark matter.

Searching for WIMPs

"Today, most (but by no means all) physicists agree that dark matter exists, and that it is probably made up of what they call WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. "Massive" doesn't mean that the particles are large, but that they have mass and therefore both respond to and cause gravitational pull. "Weakly interacting" means that the particles, despite having mass, nonetheless only rarely interact with matter. Scientists also assume that WIMPs are electromagnetically neutral, which is why we can't see them.

Dark Matter supposedly makes up 90% of the universe, but for the last 77 years, it has only been detected in the minds of physicists. Physicists Tom Shutt and Dan Akerib of the LUX team theorize that about three or four dark matter particles per year will interact with the xenon in their detector.

More Nerds searching for WIMPs

"The LUX team's competitors, though in some cases further ahead in their projects, are also working through their own problems.  One project, the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search II, is located in an old iron mine in Minnesota. The physicists there made headlines in December 2009 when they thought they had detected two WIMP signals. Both turned out to be false alarms, but they intend to try again with a bigger detector called SuperCDMS. Another frontrunner, Xenon 100, hidden under the Gran Sasso mountain in central Italy, is already operational. It uses a technology similar to LUX, but its detector tank is much smaller. Thus far, it has detected nothing.

Nerds are stuck on the letter B

"The LAX lab is just the first stage in the larger DUSAL project, which is expected to receive more than $875 million from the federal government and has already pulled in another $47.3 from the state of South Dakota and $70 million from private donors. The project's annual operating budget is $23 million."

But it would be no surpirse if the search for dark matter went on for another 77 years, because without it the Big Bang would become the Bankrupt Bang. Bigger and better detectors will be begged for and built.  Until then, dark matter will continue to fill the mind of most physicists!

MOND is a cheaper alternative to Dark Matter

In their book Dismantling the Big Bang, Alex Williams and John Hartnett explain that some physicists with lighter minds do not believe in WIMPs or any sort of dark matter. Their alternative theory is called MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics).

"It proposes that the acceleration due to gravity in the inner reaches of a galaxy is above a threshold value, so gravity behaves normally and falls off with distance according to the inverse square law. But in the outer reaches of a galaxy it drops below the threshold value, and so the effect of gravity falls away as an inverse linear function of distance. As a result, the force of gravity remains unexpectedly strong in the outer arms of the galaxy and thus holds it all together. No one knows why the MOND theory works for spiral, elliptical, dwarf, and large galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, molecular clouds and globular star clusters. There is, as yet, no theoretical explanation for either the threshold or the change in gravitational behaviors.

"Light intensity also propagates according to the inverse square law. If gravity fails to obey the inverse square law at galactic distances, then perhaps light does also. This would have an enormous impact on cosmology and the Big Bang theory."

Mature Creation and Anisoptropic Synchrony

An even stronger alternative offered by some Creation Scientists is Mature Creation. Jason Lisle explains, that "It has been suggested that God supernaturally created the beams of light themselves. That is, the light beam from every star to earth is created “in transit” at the same time the stars are created."

In his article titled Anisotropic Synchrony Convention—A Solution to the Distant Starlight Problem, Lisle demostrates with some amazing relativistic equations that "starlight from the most distant galaxy can reach earth on the fourth day of the Creation Week when the correct relativistic synchrony convention is employed". 

If "any spiral galaxy were more than 1 billion years old, its spiral structure should be so tightly wound that it would no longer be discernable. Yet this is not what we find. Spiral structure is easily visible in most face-on galaxies, indicating the youth of these galaxies regardless of their distance from the solar system."

Further research needs to be done on Anisotropic synchrony as a replacement for Dark matter. I suspect that such research is likely to cost less than $875 million of taxpayer dollars.

Conclusion

The missing matter that remains missing is another evidence that Big Bang is not the mother of all matter and energy. Instead, we have a Father God, creator of heaven and earth, whose wonderful universe cannot be fathomed without signs of Him everywhere, even in the spinning of galaxies.

References

Borel, Brooke. 2011. Mining for Dark Matter. Popular Science, January 2011:42ff.

Lisle, Jason. 2010. Anisotropic Synchrony Convention—A Solution to the Distant Starlight Problem, Answers Research Journal 3 (2010): 191-207.Modified Newtonian dynamics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics, accessed 12/16/2010





Williams, Alex, John Hartnett. 2005. Dismantling the Big Bang. Master Books, Green Forest, Arizona, USA, 138-139.