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God Will Join Together What Man Has Put Asunder
In India people get placed into rigid hereditary social distinctions. And no amount of education or hard work could get a person out of their designated caste. A person born high caste enjoys all societal privileges without having to prove herself worthy of said caste, and a person born low caste gets sentenced to a lifetime of cleaning urine and feces no matter how much she tries to prove herself worthy of a better life. This may seem too ridiculous to believe. But we’d be surprised what people believe just because their relatives say it’s true. In my opinion, all social…
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Noah. Genocide. The Goodness of God.
This week Darren Aronofsky’s Noah will flood theaters (sorry, I couldn’t help it) with a story kind of like Genesis 6-9. It’s definitely a prodigal movie, taking the text and wandering off to a far country, but it does stick to the basic story line: The humans he made have become God-sickeningly corrupt. So he pours out his judgment in a flood, and all flesh “in whose nostrils was the breath of life…died.” In response the highly inflamatory (and proud of it) TV talk s how host Bill Maher says, "It's about a psychotic mass murderer who gets away with it, and his name is God…. Conservatives are always going…
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Create in Me a Green Heart
My pa-in-law is a meteorologist with the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the past he’s voted both Republican and Democrat. And he’s served as a deacon in a Bible Church. So he’s an interesting person to ask about environmental concerns. He used to say humans haven’t kept records for long enough to convince him that global warming is a manmade issue. Yet now he says we must do something. Immediately. He asks, “What can it hurt us to conserve, just in case?” In the interest of full disclosure, you should know I’m a fifth-generation Oregonian. So thirty years ago when I wrote for my school paper, I…
