Busting Myths About Abraham

Alice C. Linsley



Myth 1: Abraham was a Jew

According to the rabbis, Jewish identity depends on 2 conditions: whether one’s mother is Jewish or whether one has properly converted to Judaism. By this definition Abraham was not a Jew. He did not convert to Judaism since this religion emerged after Abraham’s time, and Abraham’s mother was not Jewish.

Abraham's mother is not mentioned in the Bible, but when we explore her identity we find the suggestion that she was a high-ranking woman whose father was called Karnevo, a name associated with the Horus temple at Karnak. In the Karnak birth chapel we find a series of scenes depicting the annunciation, miraculous conception, and birth of Pharaoh Amenhotep III (1390-1352 BC) as the embodiment of Horus. The virgin queen is embraced by Hat-Hor, the mother of Horus. (Hat-Hor is later called Isis.) There is a scene in which Amun, the supreme God, holds an ankh (Egyptian cross and symbol of life) to the queen's nostril. In the final scene the queen is sitting on a couch surrounded by five figures on the left and four on the right, and one in a group of three royal persons is holding the infant king.

Amenhotep III
His kingdom extended from Nubia to Syria

Some have noted the correspondence between Horus and Jesus and argue that Christianity is a conspiracy based on the Horus myth. However, Amenhotep III died and did not rise from the grave. Further, the burden of proof is on those who believe that the Christians selected the Horus myth to explain Jesus Christ. They must explain why this particular myth was chosen.

The true reason is that Abraham and his people were Horites, a caste of ruler-priests who were devotees of Horus. Horus is the archetype by which Abraham’s descendants would recognize Jesus as the Messiah and the fulfillment of the Edenic Promise of Genesis 3:15. Here God promised to Abraham's ancestors that a woman of their own bloodline would bring forth the Seed who would crush the serpent's head and restore Paradise.

Christianity emerges naturally out of the faith of Abraham.  Messianic expectation wasn't invented by the Jews, neither did Jesus found Christianity.  He is the fulfillment of both. This is why Jesus and his Apostles called the religious leaders in Jerusalem hypocrites. They claimed a special status as sons of Abraham but rejected the faith of Abraham.



Abraham’s Ethnicity

In Genesis we first meet Abraham living in the Tigris-Euphrates valley where his father Terah controlled a great portion of the commerce on the Tigris. Terah was as a ruler-priest with 2 wives living in separate households; one in Ur and the other in Haran. This was the practice of the Horite ruler-priests and explains why Abraham had 2 wives, as did Jacob.

Abraham’s people migrated to Mesopotsamia from the Nile region. Terah and Abraham were descendants of the great kingdom builder Nimrod who established a vast territory in Mesopotamia. According to Genesis 10:8, Nimrod was one of Kush’s sons, so Terah and Abraham are of Kushite ancestry.

This helps to identify when Abraham lived, since information is available about the Kushite migration into the Levant and Mesopotamia.To determine the approximate period when Abraham lived we must correlate the biblical information with findings in archaeology, anthropology, climate studies and migration studies.

The research of Dr. Catherine Acholonu of Nigeria bears on the question of when Abraham lived. Her work shows that a great Kushite ruler established a territory with Akkad as one of its center before the rise of Assyria. In Nigerian lore he was known as Sharru-Kin, which is interpreted “the righteous King.” In the eastern part of the Afro-Asiatic Dominion the word kin is khan. Sharru is related to the word sarki and in Egypt, the sarki were priests. Sarki can also mean one who takes life, as in sacrifice or hunting. The Hausa word for hunter is maharba. The Hebrew for hunter is nah shirkan (Targum).  Note the similarity to the Hausa word sarkin maharba, meaning lead hunter.

There is a large body of linguistic data to indicate that the Hebrew language emerged from the older Kushitic languages of Sudan, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania and the Horn of Africa.

The Hebrew word for soul is nefesh and is related to the Rendille words nefsi/nefso, to the Somali naf [soul] or neef [breath], and to the Oromo nef.  These languages of the Horn of Africa and Kenya are Kushitic. The connection of Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic to the Kushitic languages has been well established.

Sarki means ruler among the people of Kano (biblical Kain), who today are called Kanuri. They reside in west central Africa in the region of Orisha, which is where Noah lived according to African local legends. Sarki also live in the Orissa Province of India. Here we have a linguistic connection between India and Nigeria, further evidence that the Horite ruler-priests migrated north and east from the Nile valley. They went even beyond India into Nepal because Sarki live as ‘Haruwa’ in the Tarai region of Nepal. The word Haruwa is equivalent to the ancient Egyptian word ‘Harwa”, meaning priest. Horites spread also in Cambodia where they established a shrine at what is today Angkor Wat, which is actually Ankh Hor Wat, meaning shrine of the eternal Horus.

So there is considerable evidence for the migration of the great Kushite ruler to Mesopotamia and that he was what Genesis 10:9 calls a "mighty hunter before the Lord."
 
Another word for ruler is gon, although is may mean royal vassal. If so, both the name Sargon and the name Sharru-Kin mean ruler-priest. Assuming that Nimrod is Sargon I who died around 2215 BC, we can estimate the approximate dates of Abraham’s life. He would have lived between 2275-2205 B.C.

Using age 70 as the approximate lifespan for these rulers, and calculating the birth of the listed heir at about age 20, (though the age would be closer 40 for the heir of the cousin wife), we can estimate the following dates:


Noah  B.C. 2495-2425
Shem  B.C. 2475(55)-2405                          Ham B.C. 2325-2255
Arphachad  B.C. 2455-2385                         Kush B.C. 2305-2235
Selah  B.C. 2435-2365                                 Nimrod B.C. 2285-2215
Eber  B.C. 2415-2345
Peleg  B.C. 2395-2325
Reu  B.C. 2375-2305
Serug  B.C. 2355-2285
Na-Hor  B.C. 2335-2265
Terah  B.C. 2315-2245
Abraham  B.C. 2275-2205
Joktan  B.C. 2255-2185
Sheba  B.C. 2235-2165

Abraham and his Horite ancestors lived well before the time of Amenhotep III (1390-1352 BC)  Belief in Horus as the “son of God” who would be born by a virgin queen preceded Amenthotep's time. Horus was worshipped at the pre-dynastic shrine city of Nekhen (Heirakonpolis) in Sudan. Nekhen was already established in 4000 BC. By 3500 BC, it was a city of many neighborhoods, private homes and even palatial residences. There were commerical districts hosting busy industries, and Nekhen ran over 3 miles along the Nile.


Related reading: Jacob Leaves Beersheba; Hierakonpolis; Challenge to Shaye Cohen's Portrayal of Abraham; The Christ in Nilotic Mythology; The Saharan Origins of the Pharaohs

Trees in Genesis

Alice C. Linsley


Trees are significant in biblical symbolism. A study of trees in Genesis helps us to understand the ancient world of Abraham and his Kushite ancestors.

The trees known to have grown in the region of Abraham’s people include acacia, cedar, date nut palms, sycamore fig trees and baobab. These figure prominently in biblical symbolism, although not all are mentioned in Genesis. Acacia and cedar were used in the construction of the Ark and the Tabernacle. The baobab tree is likely the origin of the idea of waters flowing from a tree as in Revelation 22:1-2.

Six trees are especially important in the symbolism of Genesis: the Tree of Life; the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; fruit-bearing trees; the prophet's oak at Mamre, the "trees" used to built Noah's ark, and the date palm (tamar) which grew around water shrines.


The Tree of Life

The “tree of life” in the Garden of Eden (as in Revelation 2:7; 22:2, 14) is a symbol of communion with God at the metaphysical sacred center. The Church Fathers regarded this tree as representing the cross upon which the Son of God died. In fact, the cross is four times spoken of as a ‘tree’ (Acts 5:30; 10:39; 13:29; 1 Peter 2:24). Deuteronomy 21:23 says that “anyone who is hung on a pole [or tree] is under God’s curse.” Quoting this verse, the Apostle Paul explains that Christ bore that curse, “becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13).

The Tree of Life archetype is as old as the serpent archetype and the two are often shown together, as in the image (below) of Re's cat killing Apophis, the giant water serpent. The point of origin of both archetypes appears to be the Nile, the region from which Abraham's ancestors came.  Re's cat is perhaps the prototype of the Lion of Judah. Note in the image how the serpent's head is under the cat's paw.

The Church Fathers view the Tree of Life is a symbol of Jesus Christ and the serpent is the symbol of His adversary. We meet both in Genesis and in Revelation, at the beginning and at the end of the biblical story.

Both the Tree of Life and the serpent are associated with the first man and the first women. At the Horite shrine of Heliopolis, the first couple Isis and Osiris were said to have emerged from the tree of life.

The Gikuyu, a Nilotic people, place their first parents on a ridge north of Muranga, a town south of Nyeri in Kenya. One can visit the site. A sky-blue gate marks the entrance to Mukurwe Wa Nyagathanga—the Tree of Gathanga. Inside the gate are two mud huts, one for Gikuyu and one for Mumbi. The site looks toward the cloud-shrouded Mount Kenya (formerly called "Mount Kirinyaga"). To the Gikuyu, Mount Kenya is God's seat on earth and fig tress grow in abundance on the slopes of the mountain.

The Gikuyu call the creator Ngai and when Ngai created Gikuyu he told him: “Build your homestead where the fig trees grow." This is why many believe that the Tree of Life was a fig tree. The fig tree plays a significant role in revealing Jesus as the Son of God in the Gospels (Mark 11, Matthew 21 and Luke 13).

In the Gikuyu creation story we are told that at the beginning It was, our elders tell us, all dead except for the thunder, a violence that seemed to strangle life. It was this dark night whose depth you could not measure, not you nor I can conceive of its solid blackness, which would not let the sun pierce through it. But in the darkness, at the foot of Mount Kerinyaga, a tree rose. At first it was a small tree and it grew up, finding a way even through the darkness. It wanted to reach the light and the sun. This tree had Life. It went up, sending forth the rich warmth of a blossoming tree - you know, a holy tree in the dark night of thunder and moaning. This was Mukuyu, God's tree.

Now you know that at the beginning of things there was only one man (Gikuyu) and one woman (Mumbi). It was under this Mukuyu that He first put them. And immediately the sun rose and the dark night melted away. The sun shone with a warmth that gave life and activity to all things.


Tree of Knowledge

Cyrus Herzl Gordon suggested that the phrase “good and evil”( טוֹב וָרָע ) is a figure of speech whereby a pair of opposites refer to something greater than the constituents, as in the phrase, "they searched high and low", meaning that they searched everywhere. This figure of speech is called a “merism.” Merisms are a common feature of biblical language. For example, in Genesis 1 the phrase “the heavens and the earth” speaks of God’s creation of the whole universe. Such language isn’t merely a literary device. It also represents the binary worldview of the ancient Afro-Asiatics. Similarly, "male and female" constitute the whole of humanity. In the biblical worldview there is no gender continuum!

The tree of the Knowledge of good and evil can therefore represent all things, and all things pertain to God alone; thus the prohibition or boundary. This is a boundary that we continue to violate, attempting to make ourselves as God.

The Tree of Life is mentioned in Genesis 3:22 as distinct from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Both trees are mentioned in The Book of Enoch, a text sacred to Coptic Christians. In chapter 31 we read:

The tree of knowledge also was there, of which if any one eats, he becomes endowed with great wisdom. It was like a species of the tamarind tree, bearing fruit which resembled grapes extremely fine; and its fragrance extended to a considerable distance. I exclaimed, How beautiful is this tree, and how delightful is its appearance! Then holy Raphael, an angel who was with me, answered and said, This is the tree of knowledge, of which your ancient father and your aged mother ate, who were before you; and who, obtaining knowledge, their eyes being opened, and knowing themselves to be naked, were expelled from the garden.


Every Fruit-bearing Tree

In is on the third day that God said, “Let the earth put forth grass, herbs yielding seed and fruit trees bearing fruit.”

The third day signals the exercise of divine power, or in mystical terms, the arousal of God. Trees are the pillars that rise from the earth by God's command.  So Jesus who was lifted up on the cross also rose from  the ground; a sign of God's great power.

The Baobab is one of the trees that Abraham's ancestors likely had in mind when speaking of fruit-bearing trees. The bark is used for cloth and rope and the leaves for condiments and medicines. The baobab’s fruit is called "monkey bread."

1000 year old baobab

This legend surrounding the baobab describes what happens if you are never content with what you are:

The baobab was among the first trees to appear on the land. Next came the slender, graceful palm tree. When the baobab saw the palm tree, it cried out that it wanted to be taller. Then the beautiful flame tree appeared with its red flower and the baobab was envious for flower blossoms. When the baobab saw the magnificent fig tree, it prayed for fruit as well. The gods became angry with the tree and pulled it up by its roots, then replanted it upside down to keep it quiet.

In the wet months the baobab stores water in its thick, corky, fire-resistant trunk for the long dry period ahead. The water is tapped when drinking water becomes scarce and by this tree life is sustained in the arid months. Likely, this is the origin of the idea of a tree from which a river flows for the healing of the nations (Rev. 22:1-2), an image of the restoration of Paradise.


The Oak in Mamre

In Genesis 12:6 we read that upon his arrival in Canaan Abraham sought guidance from the Moreh (prophet) when he pitched his tent at the Oak of Moreh. The word "Torah" is usually rendered guidance or instruction, but Torah also is associated with a prophet sitting under a tree.

Males prophets sat under firm upright tress such as oaks whereas females prophets sat under soft flowing trees such as date nut palms, called "tamars." Judges 4:4-6 says, “Deborah, the wife of Lappidoth, was a prophet who was judging Israel at that time. She would sit under the Palm of Deborah, between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the Israelites would go to her for judgment."

Genesis 12 that tells us that the Oak of the Moreh was at the sacred center between Bethel and Ai (an east-west axis). Deborah's Palm was between Ramah and Bethel (a north-south axis). The Tree of Life was in the middle of the garden. If the sacred center is the place where the east-west axis and the north-south axis intersect, we have the image of the Cross.

Many Bibles render the oak of Genesis 12 as the terebinth (Pistacia terebinthus), also called turpentine tree. It is a small deciduous tree or shrub related to the pistachio and likely the earliest known source of turpentine. It is also possible that the word in the original telling was the "tree of the daughter of Terah."  Terah was the father of both Abraham and Sarah. This is a reasonable explanation and it suggests that when Abraham and Sarah left Haran they went first to a place where they had kin on their father's side. Arabic is older than Hebrew and the Arabic word bint (بنت) means "daughter of" and tera or Terah is a royal title that means priest. Also related to the name Terah is the word teraphim, which were ancestors figurines of Terah's ancient Horite family.


The Tree of Weeping

Rebecca's nurse, Deborah, was buried at Bethel under a tree known as the “Oak of Weeping" (Gen. 35:8).
The type of tree is not specified. It is named allon-bachuth, which means “tree of weeping.” Although allon is often translated oak the word can refer to a large tree of any species. Here it probably refers to an oak, a terebinth or a sycamore fig. The sycamore fig was associated with Hat-Hor, the virgin mother of Horus and there is some evidence that graves were placed beneath sycamore fig trees.

There is a natural association between the fig tree and the name Deborah which means bee or wasp.  The wasp lays its eggs inside the ripening figs.


Gopher Wood  (גפר gofer)

Noah's ark was made of this material according to Genesis 6:14. Since this word does not appear elsewhere in the Bible, it is uncertain what material is indicated. However, archaeology and anthropology provide adequate information about boat building in Noah's time in east Africa to safely say that the material used was reeds or sedge such as the boat shown in the masthead of Just Genesis.  This is supported by the fact that the word translated "ark" in Genesis 6:14 is found only one other place in the Bible: in the story of Moses' mother putting him in a reed basket (Exodus 2:3). The Schocken Bible reads: "Make yourself an Ark of gofer wood, with reeds make the Ark...", Vol. I, p. 35.

Reed Boat

Sedge is a grass-like plant which grows in wet areas, such as the Nile region. At the time of Noah much of the Sudan was wet. In ancient Kush sedge reeds were used to construct boats, baskets and sandals. Bas-reliefs of the Fourth Dynasty show men cutting reeds to build a boat; similar boats are still made in the southern Sudan. As Noah's sons and their descendants spread across the ancient Afro-Asiatic Dominion, they spread their ship building technologies so that reed boats exactly as those made along the Nile are also found in Pakistan and India.


The Tamar (Date Nut Palm)

The date nut palm is probably the most ancient cultivated tree in Africa. The Hebrew and Arabic word for the date palm is "tamar” and the tree was traditionally associated with females, probably because the nut has the appearance when opened of the vagina (below). In ancient Kush, as in Sudan today, fluidity and softness are associated with the female principle, so the soft movement of palm branches contrasts with the firm, pillar-like quality of the oak.

A. Zaid and P.F. de Wet report “that the date palm was cultivated as early as 4000 B.C. since it was used for the construction of the temple of the moon god near Ur in Southern Iraq - Mesopotamia (Popenoe, 1913; 1973).

More proof of the great antiquity of the date palm is in Egypt's Nile Valley where it was used as the symbol for a year in Egyptian hieroglyphics and its frond as a symbol for a month (Dowson, 1982). However, the culture of date palm did not become important in Egypt until somewhat later than that of Iraq (Danthine, 1937), about 3000 - 2000 B.C.

The above is confirmed by history, and corroborated by the archaeological research into ancient historical remains of the Sumerians, Akadians and Babylonians. Houses of these very ancient people were roofed with palm tree trunks and fronds. The uses of date for medicinal purposes, in addition to its food value, were also documented.”

The association of palm trees (tamars) with rulers and prophets is a common among many Africans and Arabians and is found in the Bible. Fresh palm tree fronds are used ceremonially at the installation of rulers and are used to decorate places of worship. The tamar as a sacred symbol is the complement of the oak tree. Male prophets sat under oaks while female prophets sat under date palms.

Jebu (Jebusite) rulers are installed with palm branches. Jude Adebo Adeleye Ogunade writes in his memoir about growing up Ijebu. He was warned not to touch the leaves of the Igi-Ose tree because, as his Mama Eleni explained, "That tree is the tree whose leaves are used to install Chiefs and Kings of Ijebu and as your grandfather was a custodian of the rites of chieftaincy and kingship you must not play with its leaves." This explains the greeting of Jesus with palm fronds as he entered Jerusalem.

Related reading:  The Fig Tree in Biblical Symbolism; The Tree of Life; The Chiastic Center of Ecclesiasticus; Wells and Brides; Circumcision and Binary Distinctions

17 Undiscovered Pyramids Seen from Space

The following article from The Star reports on the work of the American archeologist Sarah Parcak whose technology has helped Mary McDonald to make important discoveries in Egypt and Sudan.

A satellite perched hundreds of kilometres above the Earth has produced a fusion of modern technology and ancient wonder that some experts are hailing as one of the great archeological finds in a century.


“Seventeen lost pyramids!” exclaimed Kathlyn Cooney, an assistant professor of Egyptology at the University of California at Los Angeles. “That would be one of the most important discoveries in the last 100 years. That’s amazing.”


Cooney was referring to a series of infra-red images and high-resolution photographs taken from a satellite suspended 700 kilometres above Egypt, in a project directed by University of Alabama archeologist Sarah Parcak.


What those images have revealed nearly boggles the mind — 17 previously undiscovered pyramids, more than 1,000 antique tombs and at least 3,000 ancient settlements.


All of them are invisible to the human eye, all buried beneath the countless layers of sediment that have been deposited over the millennia by the annual flooding of the Nile River.

Read it all here.

____________________________________

Canadian archeologist Mary McDonald's work has provided conclusive evidence of Saharan/Kushite antecedents to Nilotic culture. McDonald has shown that the ancient Pharaonic civilization built upon the culture of Saharan peoples. Comparing ostrich eggshell excavated from the Bashendi circles with those found in Egypt, she found that nearly all of the shared artifacts showed up in Dakhleh, in the southwestern desert of Egypt, 500 to 2000 years before they appeared in the Nile Valley. Additionally, cattle domestication took place in the Sahara long before it appeared in the Nile Valley. No solid evidence has been found for cattle domestication in the Nile Valley before 6000 years ago.

Fekri Hassan, Petrie Professor of Archaeology at University College London, believes that “Mary’s work has been an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the origins of Egyptian civilization.” Hassan says, “Her work confirmed that one of the main strands in the early civilization of the Nile Valley was the contribution from the inhabitants of the Sahara."


Related reading:  Who Were the Kushites?; Kushite Kingdom Building; 3000 B.C. Rock Carvings in Sudan

Impressions of the New American Anglicanism

Fr. J. Scott Newman's insightful comments on this article which originally appeared on March 31, 2011, were deleted at Kendall Harmon's blog, as were mine. The neo-Anglicans like Matt Kennedy and Sarah Hey represent, in the words of Archbishop Haverland, "the slow lane to modernist mush." They refuse to entertain comments at Stand Firm that question the dangerous innovation of women priests. The Episcopal bishops are schismatic and the denomination remains unrepentant from its involvement in Spiritualism. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the confused Rowan Williams, is ineffectual in leading the worldwide Anglican Communion. Anglicans face a crisis of authority that will either burn them up or ignite a great renewal.

Female bishops in the Anglican circus

Impressions of the New American Anglicanism
By Alice C. Linsley


I hesitate to write on this subject because I’m no longer in the Anglican Communion. However, what I write has been on my mind and heart for some time and I hope that it will be received as helpful criticism. I recognize that these are critical days for Anglicans in North America and I don't wish either to offend or to stir trouble. I hope that this might encourage continued conversation about Anglican identity.

I worship each Sunday with other former Anglicans who have found their way to Orthodoxy and we discuss our impressions of what seems to be happening in Anglicanism in this country.


American Anglicanism: Another Form of Evangelicalism

One impression is that considerable sections of the new American Anglicanism constitute another form of evangelicalism, which typically tilts toward cultural norms such as contemporary music, streamlined liturgies, leniency toward divorce and remarriage, and interpretation of Scripture through a mainly Protestant lens.

It must seem so to most African Anglicans, who like the Nigerians, tend to be evangelical and far more sacramental than is often realized. The Nigerian bishops are orthodox on questions of human sexuality. They are serious about being “Lambeth Quadralateral Evangelicals” and they hold to the mainstream catholic understanding of Church, sacraments, and the male priesthood. Now there’s a godly balance!


The New ACNA Must Not Calcify

There is also an impression, supported anecdotally, that this movement might be calcifying. This can happen when a group wraps itself in a protective cloak and breathes its own stale air. Might this be happening with Anglicanism in America?

Here are some signs that it may be so:

Young clergy are not generally encouraged to pursue Truth for its own sake. The Truth is presented in the form of a realigned Anglicanism with an evangelical flavor, in which Church tradition on women priests is regarded as adiaphoron. Women were leaders in the early church, but none are recorded as presiding at the Agape meal. A church must screen candidates, but what happens to candidates who are opposed to the ordination of women and see this as an obstacle to the Church’s mission to proclaim Jesus Christ in Truth? Certainly, Truth must always be pursued by Christ’s followers if we are to avoid becoming a stagnant community.

There is lack of clarity about the priesthood in American Anglicanism. Do Anglicans have presbyters (elders) or do they have priests? Both elders and priests are mentioned in the Bible. Some of the elders were of priestly lines, others were not. What are we to make of this?

Does the Church’s priesthood come as an organic continuation of the priesthood that is traced back to Abraham’s ruler-priest ancestors or does it emerge as a new institution according to the doctrine of apostolic succession? Were the Apostles of the priestly lines? Very likely, but this is not verified. Anthropological study of the priesthood, using the Bible as my primarily source of information, reveals that not all priests actually sacrificed in the temple.  Men and women and sons and daughters in the priestly families served many functions and were traditionally leaders or rulers among their people.

While the Apostles from priestly families haven't been definitively identified, the Bible tells us that there were ruler-priests among the early converts: Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. The Greek word for Arimathea has a rough breathing mark ( ῾ ) which indicates aspiration or an initial H sound. Consequently, Joseph was of "Harimathea." Here we see the Har that has ancient associations with the Horite priesthood of Abraham’s people. Harun is the Arabic equivalent of Aaron. (Arabic is much older than Hebrew.)  Hari-Mathea may indicate a priest of the line of Matthew, and therefore a kinsman of Joseph who married Mary. According to Mark 15:43, Joseph was an "honorable counselor” who was awaiting the kingdom of God. Joseph, who is mentioned in all four gospels (Matthew: 27:57-60; Mark 15:43-46; Luke 23:50-55; John 19:38-42), was a voting member of the Sanhedrin. He, like Nicodemus, was a ruler-priest.

If Joseph of Arimathea is the ruler-priest who brought Christianity to England, as Tradition holds, then Anglicans should regard the ruler-priest pattern as an essential aspect of Anglicanism.


Ignorance and Confusion about Church Tradition

Many of the new Anglican clergy are Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail and lack deep understanding of Anglicanism. Some have done all their formal training outside of the Anglican tradition. So it is that questions about the Virgin Mary as “the Woman” of Gen. 3:15 are sometimes dismissed as “Anglo-Catholic.” This actually happened at a conference! When did Anglican clergy become dismissive of the Incarnation and the Virgin Mary’s role in fulfilling God’s promise?

The new clergy of the Anglican realignment appear to have a shallow understanding of the relation of Scripture and Holy Tradition. This will pose an obstacle in conversation with Roman Catholics and Orthodox, Anglicanism two best friends in its continued struggle to uphold church discipline. A friend attended an 8-week seminar lead by a new Anglican priest who didn’t want to address questions. He only wanted to give the approved evangelical answers. My friend confided: “Holy Tradition and the Ancient Faith were summarily dismissed by an ad hominem. After years of listening to priests of varying quality, very few of them have as much to say as they think they do. I think they need to tread carefully and listen and learn, starting with the ancients, but they can't get their egos out of the way to recognize that.”

There is the problem of former Episcopalians who, like myself, never could find a high church orthodox parish. Here in Kentucky the choices are either the Episcopal churches (hopelessly revisionist) or “happy clappy” low church congregations. Bishop John Rodgers famously said "the real difference in the Church today isn't between those who are high-church and those who are low-church, but between those who believe Jesus' tomb is really empty and those who don't." That may be the most important difference, but it doesn’t mean the difference between high church Anglican worship and evangelical Anglican worship doesn’t matter. It matters because of the inextricable linkage of prayer and belief. It matters very much to me that there isn’t a single catholic Anglican parish in my state.

A friend expressed my sentiments well in these words: “What the Episcopal Church has become and what its replacement is just breaks my heart and challenges my soul.” He is a mature and intelligent person with a profound understanding of the nature of the priesthood. While exploring the priestly vocation, he looked into different divinity schools, but received a “severely negative reaction” when he expressed to his Anglican priest his preference for Harvard over Trinity School for Ministry. At Harvard the circle of discussion is wider, his career options less limited, and given the wide range of viewpoints, nobody thinks it strange that he should select Harvard over a seminary that trains women to be priests contrary to the tradition of the Church Fathers.

Another friend is helping her struggling AMIA parish through a clergy search process. She reports that the list of candidates is small and dismal. She wonders why her bishop won’t approve a retired ECUSA priest who already worships with them. He is theologically sound and experienced. Could it be that the ECUSA label is enough to block his approval? That happens when a church becomes so sensitive to past problems that it can’t embrace the newness of each day.

Anglicanism in America is at a critical place historically. It needs to find balance between Evangelicalism and Catholicism; and between Scripture and Holy Tradition. It needs to settle the issue of women’s ordination, which means struggling to understand the origins of the priesthood and to shape priestly ministry according to that divine ordinance. And it must restore the undivided Trinity as the central focus of worship.

Planting churches and inviting people to commit their lives to Jesus Christ is a very good thing, but a calcified church won’t hold people. They will want to move to a deeper understanding of the Son of God and the mystery of the Trinity. They will want to see Him in the sacraments and in the life of the Body. They will want clergy who aren’t afraid of Truth regardless of where it is found, and they will want to breathe fresh air.


Some Promising Signs

One promising sign is the cooperation between Trinity and Nashotah House. The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Munday in a VOL interview said: “One thing that gives our two schools a close affinity is that I was a faculty member and associate dean at Trinity for 15 years before coming to Nashotah House as Dean. Father Doug McGlynn, our Seminary Sub-Dean at Nashotah House, taught on Trinity's faculty as well. Fr. Arnold Klukas, our professor of Liturgy and Spirituality has taught at Trinity also. So we have lots of ties and friendships between the faculties of the two schools.

We have hosted Trinity's entire faculty for a visit at Nashotah House, and our faculty looks forward to reciprocating with a visit to Trinity in the future. There is a warm fellowship and collegiality between the members of both faculties, and we are often involved with the same mission agencies, speak at the same conferences, and cooperate in all sorts of ways.”

There are signs of sharing between evangelicals and the traditionally Anglo-Catholic dioceses of Fort Worth, San Joachin and Quincy, including a recent A.M.I.A. ordination by Bishop "Doc" Loomis in Peoria. When Bishop Alberto Morales of the Diocese of Quincy heard that AMIA wanted to start a church plant in his see city, he encouraged them. He recognizes that AMIA is culturally different to Anglo-Catholicism, and capable of reaching people for the Lord who might not be attracted to the more formal Anglican worship. Bishop Alberto generously offered St Andrew's Peoria, his largest Anglo-Catholic church for the ordination. Bishop "Doc" Loomis preached and presided at the ordination of his newest clergyman. Bishop Alberto celebrated a Pontifical Mass "the Quincy way" with smells and bells to delight the hearts of the high churched. Bishop Alberto had intended simply to sit in quire, but his participation with Bishop Loomis set the tone for the kind of cooperation that will enable Anglicanism in America to further the cause of the Kingdom of God.


Related reading:  Bishop Doc Loomis Responds; Consensus that Women Priests Must Be Addressed; Modernist-Traditionalist Divide in Anglicanism; God as Male Priest; What's Lost When Women Serve as Priests?; Why Women Were Never Priests; Ideologies Opposed to Holy Tradition

Luci Shaw's Genesis for Children

I knew Luci Shaw when I lived in Wheaton, Illinois.  At that time I attended Bethany Chapel, where she and Harold had been members for many years.  Luci's poetry and story telling is always expertly crafted and full of life.  That is the case with her book The Genesis of It All, illustrated by Sr. Huai-Kuang Miao and Sr. Mary Lane.

Here is a review of the book:

In her inimitable style, Luci Shaw presents the Genesis narrative in fresh and contemporary language that sparks the imagination. You will delight in “watching” as God creates, first in black and white, and then bursting into color.

Experience the exhilaration of the Creation and the Creator as work of art and great artist, developed in richness and diversity. Whether you are young or old, you will find yourself in the picture as you reflect on the Creator’s purpose in bringing human beings into the world.

"A luminous and rambunctious book. Shaw imbues the Old Testament account of the Creation with a joyful bounce that will be irresistible to children of all ages. Her God is kindly, imaginative, and mischievous—a father who loves his creation and wants nothing better than to delight his children. Shaw's poetic talents and spiritual wisdom combine to breathe new life into a familiar story." —Suzanne Wolfe, author of The Unveiling.
 
From here.
 
 

Astonishment, Part III

Kenneth W. Linsley's sermon on "The Doctrine of the Lord" (Part III)

(Do you want Christian maturity or respectability?)

Part I is here. Part II is here.

Astonishment, Part II

Part II of Kenneth W. Linsley's sermon on "The Doctrine of the Lord."  Part I is here.

Part III is here.

Astonishment at the Doctrine of the Lord

Kenneth W. Linsley's sermon on "The Doctrine of the Lord" - Part I

Part II is here.

3000 B.C. Rock Carvings in Sudan

Alice C. Linsley


Sudan was part of what the Bible calls ancient "Kush." Between 5000 and 10,000 years ago it was much wetter and there were sedentary populations, which means that there was fishing. The oldest known cemetery in the Sahara (about 7500 B.C.) reveals "The burial density, tool kit, ceramics, and midden fauna suggest a largely sedentary population with a subsistence economy based on fishing and on hunting of a range of savanna vertebrates." The discovery was made by National Geographic photographer Mike Hettwer in 2000.

Sudan, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger had rivers and lakes that connected to major water systems that are identifiable today, such as the Nile, the Niger, the Benue and Lake Chad.  The 8000 year old Dufuna boat, a fishing dugout, was found buried in the Sahara. This is the region in which Noah lived and experienced catastrophic flooding.

Fish was consumed in Kush in the Middle Paleolithic period. The Khormusan sites of ancient Nubia date to between 65,000 and 55,000 and "contain an abundance of fish remains as well as numerous bones of wild cattle, gazelle and hartebeest." The Khormusan industires have affinities with the Sangoan-Lupemban of central and west Africa. This entire region was biblical Kush.

Notice the discrepancy between what has already been established about fishing in this part of Africa and Karberg's theory. Here is part of a report from Live Science on the 3000 B.C. rock art, carved about 900 years before Abraham.


Another, even more mysterious, set of rock art appears to be at least 5,000 years old and shows a mix of geometric designs.

The "oldest rock art we found are the spiral motifs," said Karberg, which, as their name suggests, twist up in a way that is hard to interpret. Similar drawings have been found in the Sahara Desert.

They were created at a time when Africa was a wetter place, with grasslands and savannah dominating Sudan; people were moving to a lifestyle based on animal husbandry and, in some instances, farming.

Understanding what these drawings mean is difficult. Some researchers connect the "spiral motifs to some astronomical or astrological forms," Karberg said, but he thinks it might have more to do with math. "The regularity of the spiral might be one of the earliest mathematical ideas the people developed."

A second set of geometric drawings, probably a bit younger than the spirals, is "hard to describe," Karberg said. They consist of "amorphous patterns which are not circular. ... It looks like an irregular-shaped net," Karberg said.

There is no evidence that people were fishing in this area 5,000 years ago, ruling out fishing nets. One possibility is that these irregular "nets" may actually be animal hides. Similar drawings found in Uganda were identified as showing the hide of a crocodile or some other animal, Karberg said.

I wonder if the geometric patterns are similar to those found on these 60,000 year ostrich eggshells? Here is a sample of 270 engraved eggshells that were mostly excavated at Diepkloof Rock Shelter in South Africa.

Related reading:  Noah's Homeland; Africa in the Days of Noah

Alice Williams Linsley

May her memory be eternal.


My paternal grandmother, Alice Williams Linsley, was born in India in 1883, the daughter of pioneer missionaries. She was the only daughter and had 4 brilliant brothers. One was a Philosophy professor in New York City. Another was a successful businessman and finance consultant. Another was Dr. Roger J. Williams, the biochemist who discovered pantothenic acid and concentrated and named folic acid. The fourth brother, Robert R. Williams, published the chemical formula of vitamin B1 (thiamin) in the 1930s and set out to eradicate Beriberi in the Philippines.

My grandmother met her future husband at Redlands University. She married Paul Judson Linsley, a published poet and horticulturalist who cultivated hybrid roses with Luther Burbank of Santa Rosa, California. He also developed several strains of disease resistant avocado trees. His twin brother was Earle Garfield Linsley, a well known astronomer and former Director of the Chabot Observatory in Oakland.

My grandmother may have felt overshadowed by all this brilliance and productivity, but I doubt it. She too was an exceptional individual. She was ordained to the “Defense of the Gospel” in 1925 and she read the Bible in four languages, one of which was Telegu. The Telegu translation of the New Testament was largely the product of her father’s labors.

I was named after a woman of great faith and I am humbled and honored to uphold this godly heritage. What follows is my father’s testimony about his mother, Alice Williams Linsley.



An Extraordinary Witness
By Kenneth W. Linsley

My sheep hear my voice, and I knew them, and they follow me: And I give them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. --John 10:27,28

By anybody’s standards my mother was an extraordinary person. She was born in Ramapatnam, India, in 1883 the eldest child and only daughter of Baptist missionary parents. Until she came to the United States at age twelve, she had no experience in going to school in the customary sense and spoke only Telegu, a Hindu dialect. Even so, she did well in school and ultimately graduated from Ottawa University in Kansas and later went on to obtain a master’s degree and to become a teacher at the University of Redlands.

She was a master of the English language and read her Old Testament in Hebrew and her New Testament in Greek; and- what is perhaps more unusual – she was a minister, ordained by a church which was then part of the Northern Baptist Convention.

As a small boy, I probably heard my mother speak more times than did any other person, but you will have to excuse my fogginess with respect to sermon content. I just didn’t get it. I do remember that her approach was always positive, that she had a kind of Churchillian eloquence, and that she spoke easily and with great personal conviction.

For the first thirty-seven years of my life I did not know what it meant to be a Christina. But I could not have been an atheist, for in all of my years of floundering in darkness I never once doubted that my brilliant, praying mother knew what she was doing.

Near the end of her life she literally became as a little child. Her magnificent mind was damaged by a massive paralytic stroke that deprived her of her remarkable abilities to write and to speak. She required constant care and was unable to acknowledge that she understood anything that I said. She knew me, her only son, and at our last reunion she seemed to enjoy listening to my voice as I stood by her bed and read to her about the good shepherd from the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John. When I finished, she took the Bible in her one usable hand, raised it to her lips and kissed it, and smiled radiantly; and then suddenly, as if very tired, she dropped off to sleep. I never saw her again. Several months later she was liberated by death.

To have a funeral for Mother would have been a kind of blasphemy. So we simply had a reunion in the church to which she had given so much of her life. We asked her favorite young pastor to come and conduct a service of worship and praise. Long before that service started, my mother’s earthly remains had been buried in an unmarked grave in a public cemetery. There was no graveside ceremony. Her mortal clay was attended by a solitary grave digger. Mother simply was not there. She was “present with the lord.”

We began the service by singing one of Mother’s favorite hymns. Because it had been her father’s favorite, she especially liked “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” We also sang George Matheson’s great hymn, “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go.” Then Dr. Ivan Bell, my mother’s pastor, explained to the crowd what my mother believed. There was not a tear from any member of the family – husband, children, or grandchildren – just a kind of joyful sadness, as in our minds we placed her great faith alongside of the promises of God.

When Dr. Bell finished, a prominent judge, who, at sixteen, had accepted my mother’s invitation to give his life to Christ came to the platform; with marvelous love and a lawyer’s consummate skill, he pretended to talk to members of the church who had long since been in glory, calling each one by name and reminding us that my mother had brought them to Jesus. There is no possible doubt in my mind that seeing this parade of people in heaven would have been the grandest reward my mother could ever have contemplated.

Flowers were deliberately limited to one great bouquet sent by mother’s four distinguished brothers. But because Mother had been a Sunday school teacher for more than sixty years, members of her Sunday school class collected several hundred dollars to be used in Mother’s memory. This money was sent to the Christian in Ramapatnam, India, who read the New Testament in Telegu and worship in a beautiful sanctuary which I was able to visit in the 1950s. Both the Telegu New Testament and the church are products of my grandfather’s loving concern and personal efforts.

The persistent claim of Christians like my mother is that the man Jesus was God; He was not merely “divine” but God, declared to be God by His resurrection from the dead.

Those who accept Him have eternal life and those who reject Him are condemned already, He says, and will never see life. When one believes this, as I now do, it becomes clear that the ultimate tragedy of life is not death but rejection of Jesus, the Christ. The only real failure is not to give you r life to Him. Death simply marks the end of the time of testing and opportunity. For those who die having rejected Jesus the tragedy is irrevocable and complete.

But the Bible says that Jesus came to “deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetimes subject to bondage” (Hebrews 2:15). For the “Christ-one,” death means eternal glory. In the words of our Savior, “I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he love: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (John 11:25,26)

My mother surely bore glorious witness to this truth, both in life and in death. And a few short years before her death, I too, had begun to bear witness to this truth.


Taken from Kenneth W. Linsley, Advocate for God, Judson Press, 1977, pp. 27-29

You Must be Born Again

What follows in my attorney father's testimony of his conversion. This was first published in Faith at Work magazine, vol. 80, no. 1 (Jan-Feb 1967), pp 3-5.


A Certain Lawyer
Kenneth W. Linsley

"Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." (John 3:3)



It was a beautiful January day. The bright morning sun gave an aura of exotic elegance to the lowly castor bean trees near the window.  The apartment was quiet. Betty Ruth had gone shopping, taking our three daughters with her. I was at home alone, intent on fixing the family washing machine that had long since failed to function.

Across the cluttered courtyard a huge, one-eyed Alaskan malemute lay motionless in the mud, as above him a kindly faucet dripped incessantly. The world as then seen from my kitchen window gave no cause to suspect that this was to be a very special day for me.  If I had any needs greater than a way to wash dirty clothes, I was unaware of them. I commenced dismantling the washing machine.

Lying on the kitchen floor amidst faint odors of rust, grease, stale detergents, and a growing accumulation of washing machine parts, I began to hum the tune of a hymn I had heard a few nights before on a telecast from Billy Graham's San Francisco Crusade. And then, unable to remember the words, I did what was, for me, a very odd thing.

I got up, went to the piano in the living room, found the words in a hymnbook, and then went back to my place on the kitchen floor, wondering why I had done such a foolish thing, but nonetheless singing.

Just as I am, without one plea,

But that Thy blood was shed for me,

And that Thou bid'st me come to Thee,

O Lamb of God, I come, I come!

I kept singing this over and over for no other reason, I suppose, than that my quite awful singing voice seemed to sound a little better coming off the floor.

A few moments later, I had a strange feeling that someone was praying for me; and immediately I suspected a slightly nutty Pentecostal woman named Joy, who had been coming to me for legal counsel.

I began to sing the hymn again, but something had changed. This time it was different. This time, I meant the words I was singing.

Suddenly, the room was flooded with a warmth and a great light. Overwhelmed, I stopped singing, knowing absolutely that I was in the presence of the Almighty.

This was my introduction to the love of God. It occurred to me that the only reason that God would ever come to my house was because He cared about me. I simply could not be in his presence and begin to see something of his love for me without also experiencing a staggering conviction of my unworthiness of such love. Some people have called this "conviction of sin."  I never knew what they were talking about before, but suddenly I did.

I pushed my face against the cold asphalt tiles of the kitchen floor and, in a torrent of tears of joy and shame intermixed, said over and over words somehow dredged up from my subconscious memory, "Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner."

That was all I could think of to say - not witty, not original - but I did mean it.

Then the Lord spoke to me. He said, "Come and put your fingers in the nail holes in my hands, and place your hand in the hole in my side."

As a young boy, I had read the Gospel of John, but with this absolutely astounding invitation came a wholly new consciousness of what our Lord had meant when he said to Thomas, "Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed."

Revealed to me for the first time was the terrible sense of rebuke that is in those words, and now that sense of rebuke was mine. I did not want to be a Thomas; so I kept my face hard against the floor and exclaimed in a halting voice, "Lord, that won't be necessary."

There are no words to describe what happened next. Gertrude Behanna says of her conversion that it was more like a spiritual shower bath than anything else. Someone else has described it as feeling as if somebody pulled out a plug and drained away the sin. I suppose it may depend upon how one is accustomed to being cleansed.

The room was shiny with love. I knew that I had been permanently forgiven, and along with this came a wonderful sense of peace; and I said to myself, “This is the peace that passes understanding.”

Incredible as it now seems to me, for the first sixteen years of our marriage my wife, Betty Ruth, and I never talked much about God. I was not sure how to tell her what had happened. I began saving up courage, and that night when we were in bed, I said, “Dear, a very strange and wonderful thing happened to me today.”

“That’s nice,” she replied disgustedly as she settled into her pillows. “When are you going to get my washing machine fixed?”

With that I abandoned any attempt to tell her in so many words; but in the weeks that followed, she began to get the message. Playfully Beth Ruth now says, “I knew something had happened to you when you suddenly began to insist that we give a tenth of our income to the Lord.”

Several days later, in a conversation with my slightly nutty client, I guardedly made some vague references to having had a spiritual experience on Saturday morning. Joy volunteered that on that same morning she had walked out on an ocean pier to pray. High on her prayer list was the concern that I, Ken Linsley, be born again. She also mentioned that she had at the same time received some kind of miraculous assurance. I never pressed her for details.

Two months earlier, on a Sunday afternoon, Joy and her husband, an air force captain, and their two young children had been enjoying a drive on a back country road when, with awful suddenness, a speeding oncoming car had veered wildly across the center line, causing a terrible head-on collision and bringing instant death to the captain and their eight-year-old daughter. Somehow Joy and their ten-year-old son had escaped serious injury.

The driver of the other car had been a drunken woman returning from a weekend party. Her companion had survived the crash but had been injured to the extent that he would never regain his senses.

Tried for manslaughter, the woman had been acquitted when she testified, contrary to the state’s evidence, that the now senseless companion had been the driver of the car.

A few days following the terrible bereavement, Joy, numb with grief, came to me for help. For several weeks I worked to try to bring order out of the sudden chaos of her affairs. I was touched by her grief and apparent helplessness and resolved to be of all possible assistance. It never entered my mind that it was I to whom she was about to minister.

When by appointment she came to my office, she was trim, smartly dressed, and seemed terribly alone. She wanted to talk and proceeded to tell me virtually her entire life history. She had been raised in poverty and had no education beyond high school. Her life had been marked over and over again by tragedy, and yet there were no signs of self-pity. Even now, her greatest sorrow seemed to be the bereavement of her son.

She prays a lot, I thought, as she went on to tell me how she thanked God that her husband and the daughter whom she had loved so dearly had “gone together to be with Jesus.” She also seemed to take great comfort in the fact that her husband and daughter were, as she said, “born again Christians.”

The phrase born again Christians” disturbed me. It purported to make distinctions which seemed judgmental. A Christian is a Christian, I thought, so what is a “born again Christian”? It was obvious, however, that the term meant a great deal to Joy; and even more annoying, there was no mistaking the fact that she considered herself to be one.

In the several meetings that followed, she further embarrassed me by insisting that God had sent me to help her in this time of need. Not once did she try to instruct me. She simply talked naturally and unashamedly about her living Lord Jesus.

Perhaps the thing that impressed me the most, however, was the fact that she had completely forgiven the wretched woman whom she knew had killed her jet pilot husband and beautiful young daughter. She not only had forgiven her, but, what is far more, she also prayed for her salvation.

I suppose that all of these things were part of the reason I suspected Joy might be praying for me that glorious day when, at age thirty-seven, I first came to know what it means to be a “born again Christian.”

A few months after my conversion, I was transferred to duty in the Philippines. It was several years before it occurred to me that I should write Joy and thank her for what she had done for me. When I did, I received a reply which read, in part, as follows:

It was thrilling to receive your letter. It gave me insight into things I had not known before. It also made me feel very humble that the Lord used me as a vessel for his work in such a way.

That day out on the ocean, as I watched the water swirl and tumble, I thought about how constant is our eternal God. I was praying for the Lord to shower you abundantly with his love and blessings.

At the same time, I was surrounded by a tremendous warmth and love and glow beyond all human comprehension. Although I came to the Lord when I was eighteen, this was beyond anything I had ever experienced before. It is really beyond description, isn’t it?


END



Climate Cycles Indicate a Dynamic Earth

The chart shows factors that influence climate change, glaciation and hemispheric reversals.

Earth's elliptical orbit around the Sun and the degree of tilt of Earth's axis in its path around the Sun, are factors that must be considered when discussing climate change. In the cycle of Earth’s Great Year the line off the North Pole axis (extending toward Polaris) scribes a complete circle in the heavens about every 25,800 years. A complete cycle takes between 25,000 and 28,000 years, depending on the amount of Earth's wobble. One cycle is “Earth’s Great Year” (also called a "Platonic Year.") Climate and atmospheric changes appear to become more acute toward the end and beginning of a new year.

This is evident when considering the sea and air temperatures of the last decade.

Solar radiation is another factor in climate change and ice melt. Summer solar radiation varies in the two hemispheres due to cycles in the Earth's tilt and the elliptical orbit. The factors affecting the relationship between changes in the Earth's tilt and orbit and climate changes are very complex and not fully understood.

Alarmists and those profiting from the global warming “crisis” stress the melting of the Artic glacial ice but conveniently fail to point out that the snow caps on South America highest mountains and the glacial mass in Antarctic are growing. Here is the latest science report:

An International Polar Year aerogeophysical investigation of the high interior of East Antarctica reveals widespread freeze-on that drives significant mass redistribution at the bottom of the ice sheet. While surface accumulation of snow remains the primary mechanism for ice sheet growth, beneath Dome A 24% of the base by area is frozen-on ice. In some places, up to half the ice thickness has been added from below. These ice packages result from conductive cooling of water ponded near the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountain ridges and supercooling of water forced up steep valley walls. Persistent freeze-on thickens the ice column, alters basal ice rheology and fabric and upwarps the overlying ice sheet, including the oldest atmospheric climate archive, and drives flow behavior not captured in present models. (Source: Science Magazine)

The rise and fall of ice ages is caused by changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun due to the influence of the other planets. These changes are slight and can be triggered by events like the earthquake and tsunami recently experienced in Japan.

The earliest ice ages came about every 41,000. Later ones came every 100,000 years. Scientists do not know what caused the change from 40,000 to 100,000 years, but they have noticed that the 100,000 year cycle aligns with periods of Earth’s more-elliptical orbits. Earth's orbit around the sun changes shape every 100,000 years, becoming either more round or more elliptical. The shape of the orbit is known as its "eccentricity." The 41,000-year cycle of the tilt of Earth’s axis is related. The original research correlating climate, glaciation and orbit and was done by University of California (Santa Barbara) geologist Lorraine Lisiecki.

Lisiecki believes that climate change involves complicated interactions between different parts of the climate system and three orbital systems: 1) eccentricity of Earth’s orbit; 2) tilt of Earth’s axis; and 3) precession or change in the orientation of the rotation axis.


Earth's Precession

It appears that ancient astronomers were aware of axial precession. This is evident from the study of monuments in southern Africa and in Egypt. In his book The Great Pyramid Decoded, E. Raymond Capt says, “the most precise alignment of the Dragon Star and the Great Pyramid occurred on the Vernal Equinox of the year 2141 B.C.”

An imaginary line extending from the Earth’s North Pole axis into the heavens points to Polaris. In the cycle of Earth’s Great Year (also called the Platonic year) the line off the North Pole scribes a complete circle in the heavens over about 25,800 years.

They were also aware of lunisolar precession. Many of the ancient observatories, including Stonehenge, accurately record the 18.6-year cycle of the moon. In this cycle, every solar eclipse repeats itself at a different place on the earth every 18.6 years. It also creates an 18.6-year wave in the precession called “nutation.”

The term “general precession” applies to two gravitational factors: planetary precession and lunisolar precession. Planetary precession is due to the small angle between the gravitational force of the other planets on Earth and its orbital plane (the ecliptic), causing the plane of the ecliptic to shift slightly relative to inertial space. Lunisolar precession is about 500 times larger than planetary precession. Other planets also cause a slight movement of Earth's axis in inertial space.

Precession has an effect on hydrological cycles in the hemispheres. These cycles appear to reverse at times. Evapotranspiration, the movement of water from the land to the atmosphere, increased to about 1 inch/6.2 millimeters per year from 1982 to 1998. However, when the Earth completed its axial precession in the summer of 1998, evapotranspiration slowed dramatically and stopped in some parts of the world. Areas that began to dry include southeast Africa, much of Australia, central India, large areas of South America, and parts of Indonesia. At the same time, parts of Pakistan and Australia, and areas of the Sahal such as central Niger, experienced flooding from excessive seasonal rains. The same is true for parts of North America.

 
Related reading:  The Bi-polar Seesaw; South American Glaciers Growing; Genesis and Climate Change; Climate Cycles and Noah's Flood; Two Environmentalists Knock Heads; Lower Solar Irradiance, Higher Atmospheric Temps?

Sex against the "Order of Nature" challenged in Belize

BELIZE CITY, MAY 13 (C-FAM) A lawsuit backed by powerful international lawyers and pressure groups has placed the poor Central American country of Belize in the crosshairs of an international battle over homosexuality.

On one side of the battle stand three groups of international lawyers. On the other side is the government of Belize and a consortium of Christian Churches who have hired high- powered legal talent who are expected to file papers in court today.

The battle began last September when a homosexual advocacy group challenged Belize’s criminal code, which penalizes “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any person.”

The Solicitor General of Belize answered this challenge in February with an affidavit defending the sodomy laws, which drew a further response from a powerful group of lawyers including the International Commission of Jurists, the Commonwealth Lawyers Association, and Human Dignity Trust to join the case as interested parties. One of the attorneys representing these parties is Lord Peter Goldsmith, the former Attorney General for England and Wales.

In their affidavit, the three international organizations claim that the Belize sodomy law is “incompatible with the rule of law and with respect for international law and international obligations enshrined in the Belize Constitution.”

The group that started the fight is the United Belize Advocacy Movement (UBIBAM). Self-described as a “voluntary human rights association of men who have sex with men and gay, bisexual and transgendered people”, UNIBAM issued a report last year that suggested that “a mother and son watch porn together” in order to help reduce HIV/AIDS. The group’s partners in this report were UNICEF, and the UN Population Fund.

The International Commission of Jurists was founded during the Cold War to expose human rights violations of the Soviet Union. At some point the group also joined the sexual left. Not long ago the ICJ started a Sexual Orientation and Gender Project, which included their spearheading of the Yogyakarta Principles, a non-binding “expert” statement that reinterpreted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

The ICJ’s partner in the lawsuit is the Commonwealth Lawyers Association which recently adopted a resolution calling for the decriminalization of sexual orientation legislation in the Commonwealth, while admitting that 41 of the 53 Commonwealth jurisdictions still retained such legislation.

A lawyer close to the coalition of Belizean Christians who filed court papers today said, “the homosexual agenda insists upon the promotion of homosexual acts in the schools and society, undermining the rights of parents as primary educators of their children and targeting even grammar school children under the guise of “comprehensive” sexual education programs that promote sodomy and immoral behavior.”

The preamble of the Belize Constitution states that the nation is “founded upon principles which recognize the supremacy of God”. A recent court decision affirmed that the preamble is to be considered as a substantive part of the constitution.

From here.


Related reading:  Genesis on Homosex: Beyond Sodom

Has science buried God?

By William West


While “new atheists” Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have been grabbing headlines with their bold claims that modern science has killed off God, an Oxford professor has been quietly chipping away at the ground they stand on. John C Lennox, Professor of Mathematics and Fellow in the Philosophy of Science at Oxford’s Green Templeton College, has been popping up at debates around the globe to take issue with the most prominent new atheists.

Lennox’s arguments are outlined in his book, God’s Undertaker – Has Science Buried God? As The Spectator’s Melanie Phillips has written, Lennox’s book provides an “excoriating demolition of Dawkins’s overreach from biology into religion”.

The brilliance of Lennox’s approach is that it does not just concentrate on one academic discipline, like biology. It spans all of the most relevant fields, including cosmology, physics, philosophy, theology and mathematics, offering a compelling case for the view that scientific knowledge, rather than killing God off, actually makes a divine creator necessary.

Drawing on his own discipline, mathematics, Lennox calculates the odds of life arising by chance and concludes that anyone who would bet on those odds must be either deluded or just plain mad. Of course, in the best academic traditions, Dawkins refrains from using such colourful language, but the force of his arguments leaves no room for any other conclusion.

Unlike biblical creationists, Lennox is not hampered by the need to take the Bible, or any other religious text, literally. He simply shows that the most recent advances in science make it plain that there must be a mind behind the genesis of life.


The big picture

Beginning with the big picture of the universe and planet earth’s place in it, he notes that the ruling view in science is that the universe is not eternal but began with the “big bang” – a view that had not always been accepted by the scientific community.

“The remarkable picture that is gradually emerging from modern physics and cosmology is one of a universe whose fundamental forces are amazingly, intricately, and delicately balanced or ‘fine tuned’ in order for the universe to be able to sustain life,” he writes. “Recent research has shown that many of the fundamental constants of nature, from the energy levels in the carbon atom to the rate at which the universe is expanding, have just the right values for life to exist. Change any of them just a little, and the universe would become hostile to life and incapable of supporting it.”

For a start, an abundant supply of carbon is needed on earth to support life and, as eminent mathematician and astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle discovered, “the nuclear ground state energy levels have to be fine-tuned with respect to each other… if the variation were more than 1 per cent either way, the universe could not sustain life.”

Lennox comments: “Hoyle later confessed that nothing had shaken his atheism as much as this discovery. Even this degree of fine-tuning was enough to persuade him that it looked as if ‘a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology’.”



Precision tuning

But, in terms of the tolerance permitted, Lennox believes that even this example “pales into insignificance” in comparison with the fine tuning of some of the other parameters in nature. They include:

* As theorectical physicist Paul Davies confirms, if the ratio of the nuclear strong force to the electromagnetic force had been different by one part in 1016 no stars could have formed.

* The ratio of the electromagnetic force-constant to the gravitational force-constant must be equally delicately balanced to produce the right size of star to sustain a planet with life. A variation here of only 1 part in 1040 and life becomes impossible. (Davies has commented that this feat is akin to a marksman hitting a coin at the far side of the observable universe, 20 billion light years away.)

* An alteration in the ratio of the expansion and contraction forces of the big bang by as little as one part in 1055 at the Planck time (just 10-43 seconds after the origin of the universe) would have led to either too rapid an expansion of the universe with no galaxies forming or to too slow an expansion with consequent rapid collapse.

Lennox goes on to list even more mind-boggling examples of precision-tuning in the universe. Such features of cosmic design were what led Sir Fred Hoyle to state that “there are no blind forces in nature worth talking about”, and Paul Davies to conclude, simply, “ the impression of design is overwhelming”.


Biology: the living cell

Moving on to biology, Lennox notes that there seems to be less certainty about the need for a “God” among today’s academics than there is in physics, but after reviewing the evidence he wonders why this is so. He says: “From the time of the great thinkers of the ancient world, such as Aristotle and Plato, to that of modern biologists, the living world has been a source of never-ending wonder. And the more that science uncovers, the more the wonder grows.”

Lennox says that one reason biologists are not so impressed by the design hypothesis is that according to neo-Darwinism the engine for evolution – the process of mutation, genetic drift and natural selection – is adequate to account for the growth and variation of all the species on earth. He distinguishes between microevolution within a species and macroevolution (allegedly between species) and notes problems with current evolutionary theory, including the shortage of examples of mutation bringing about biological advances, gaps in the fossil record and so on.

But he does not dwell on these problems, noting that any serious scientist who questions the dogma of neo-Darwinism is usually branded as either a heretic, a lunatic, or both. He accordingly directs most of his attention to the question of the origin of life, rather than its progress.

Quoting geneticist Michael Denton, he points out that the break between the non-living and the living world represents the most dramatic and fundamental of the “discontinuities in nature”: “Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological systems, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.”

Denton has said that even the simplest cell of all, a bacterial cell, is “a veritable micro-miniaturised factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of 100 thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.”

He also points out that there is little evidence of evolution among cells: “Molecular biology has also shown us that the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical. The meaning of the genetic code is also virtually identical in all cells.”

In summary, he says there is not “the slightest empirical hint” of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.

This view was echoed by Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jacques Monod: “The simplest cells available to us for study have nothing ‘primitive’ about them.”



The plot thickens: from proteins to DNA

Lennox adds that it is hard to get any kind of picture of the “seething, dizzyingly complex activity” in a living cell, which contains around 100 million proteins of 20,000 different types. The existence of proteins alone is a mystery, given that each one represents an intricate construction of amino-acids in a very specific order necessary for them to function. There is no way, he says, in which proteins could have formed simply from raw matter and energy.

As Paul Davies puts it: “Making a protein simply by injecting energy is rather like exploding a stick of dynamite under a pile of bricks and expecting it to form a house.”

The odds of getting a simple protein to form by chance has been put at 1 in 10130.

But this is only the probability of getting a single protein. The most basic forms of life require hundreds of thousands of proteins. Sir Fred Hoyle famously calculated the odds of this happening by chance at more than 1040,000. This is a very big number indeed. The number of grains of sand in the world has been calculated at 1020, the number of stars in the known universe at 1022, and the number of particles in the universe at 1080.. Sir Fred confessed that this fact alone had challenged his atheism. He said that the idea of the spontaneous formation of life was akin to a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and producing a Boeing 747 jet aircraft.

When you move on from proteins to an even more complex part of a cell, the DNA which acts as the blueprint for all living things, the picture becomes even more astonishing. The DNA of bacteria can be around four million characters long – enough to fill about 1000 pages. Human DNA is around 3.5 billion characters – enough to fill a whole library.

Lennox and other scientists compare DNA to a computer language and say that the cell’s information processing capacity far outstrips anything present-day computers can do. As Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, has pointed out, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”

It was this very fact which led atheist philosopher Antony Flew to change his mind about God: “What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together. It’s the enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together. The meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is simply minute. It is all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results were achieved, which looked to me like the work of intelligence.”

(There have been claims that Flew’s views on the need for a God were misrepresented, but Flew himself denied this.)



A mind behind it all

Lennox goes through all the theories put forward to give credence to the idea that all of this could have happened by chance and, as a mathematician, indicates that such scenarios are basically laughable. He says that the conclusion that a super intellect is at work in the creation of life may not be verified by scientific “induction” or experiment, but it is a valid inference to the best explanation (“abduction”).

He points out that the probability of a purely random origin for any sequence of even the most basic biological significance is “so small as to be negligible”: “It could therefore be argued that the molecular biology of the cell shows the same order of fine-tuning that we saw in connection with physics and cosmology.”

He also warns against any attempt to try to write off the clear implications of a mind behind the design of living things as an analogy from something like a watch. “We are not arguing from analogy, but we are making an inference to the best explanation,” he notes.

Lennox points out that the obvious conclusion that arises from reflecting on the reality that sciences like physics and biology have uncovered is that “information and intelligence are fundamental to the existence of the universe and life and, far from being the end products of an unguided natural process starting with energy and matter, they are involved from the very beginning”. In other words, the whole universe has the unmistakeable signature of monumental design about it.

So, what if you take all of the probabilities unearthed by science together? What are the chances of life developing without a super-mind to guide it? The answer, clearly, is as close to zero as anyone could imagine. In fact, the figures involved are so profound, so enormous, that no human mind could possibly imagine them in any real sense.

Despite all this, there still appears to be room for atheists to cling to their faith in a merely mechanistic universe that arose from nothing more than chance. In other words, there is room for the operation of free choice in the matter.

But the real riddle in it all is: how has it come about that so many people in the modern world still think that in the God v Chance debate, science has somehow proven that everything has happened according to a series of blind accidents? And why is it that the media are more than happy to allow that status quo to continue?

Go figure.


William West is a Sydney-based freelance journalist and Editor of Perspective magazine.  This article is published by William West, and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons licence.


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