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Thursday, August 25, 2016

Schools Receive Request for After School Satan Club


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Doug Mesner, who goes by the professional name Lucien Greaves, is co-founder and spokesman for the Satanic Temple, a group of political activists who are seeking to establish After School Satan Clubs as a counterpart to fundamentalist Christian Good News Clubs, which they see as an attempt to infiltrate public education and erode the constitutional separation of church and state. (Josh Reynolds/For The Washington Post)

The following article was written by AP correspondent, Heather Hollingsworth (August, 2016)

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — After-school religious clubs appear to be the next venture of a national group that sought to install a statue of Satan outside two state capitols to protest Christian monuments on public grounds. 
The Satanic Temple contacted nine public school districts across the country this week seeking to start after-school Satan programs. In all but one district, religious clubs are operated by the Child Evangelism Fellowship's Good News Clubs, in which students can study the Bible and pray, according to temple co-founder Lucien Greaves. 
Several districts contacted by The Associated Press said they were reviewing the group's request and noted their facilities were available to community groups. 
Mat Staver, founder of a Christian legal aid group that has represented the Child Evangelism Fellowship, said Greaves' organization was illegitimate and an "atheist group masquerading" as religious. Greaves described Satanism as an atheist philosophy whose believers "feel it provides everything a religion provides to be legitimized as such." 
The Satanic Temple, which is based in Salem, Massachusetts, and has chapters in several states, said it wants to counter well-funded fundamentalist Christian organizations that it believes are eroding the separation of church and state in public schools. Greaves said the after-school program would show "that people can be of different religious opinions and still be moral, upright people." 
"We think that when kids are being exposed to the idea that they will burn in hell and other supernatural ideas, that there is a positive upshot to being exposed to the presence of a satanic after school program," he said. 
Greaves said his group could pose tough legal fights if its requests are denied. 
In Utah, the Granite School District said that if the group meets set requirements, including paying rent, there's nothing the district can do to stop it. District spokesman Ben Horsley said the group won't be able to put up fliers in schools or talk to students during school hours, the same arrangement given to the Good News Club. 
Springfield Public Schools in Missouri also said it was reviewing the group's request. It noted that granting requests to use the district's taxpayer-funded facilities "does not constitute the district's endorsement." The school district in Prince George's County, Maryland, described a similar policy and noted parental permission was required for after-school activities. 
The other districts are in Georgia, California, Florida, Oregon, Washington state and Arizona. 
The Satanic Temple has taken up similar causes outside schools, including seeking to install an 8½-foot-tall bronze statue of Satan at the Oklahoma Capitol to stand in contrast to a Ten Commandments monument. Oklahoma's Supreme Court later banned all religious displays on Capitol grounds. The group is seeking to do the same outside Arkansas' statehouse, where a Ten Commandments monument has been proposed. 

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I Peter 5:8 ~ "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:" 


Related Articles: 

The Satanic Temple's Extracurricular Program For Public Schools   

An After School Satan Club could be coming to your kid’s elementary school

The "After School Satan Club" Wants to Show Kids Another Path to the Moral Life

After School Satan Club proposal spurs debate on religious activity in public school


Tuesday, August 16, 2016

The Prophet Nahum

Nahum, one of the twelve Minor Prophets in the Old Testament, wrote about the destruction of the Assyrian Empire and the ultimate downfall of its capital city, Nineveh. His early beginnings are somewhat obscure and the only clue to his heritage is mentioned in Nahum 1:1, which states that he was an Elkoshite.

Nahum's poetic predictions were mainly directed against the city of Nineveh and divided into two sections: the sins of the nation and the destruction of Nineveh. Little is known about this ancient prophet, but some scholars and theologians believe Nahum lived somewhere between 700-600 B.C.

The writings of Nahum could be taken as prophecy or literal history. There are at least two different accounts of such a theory... 1) some scholars believe this to be a prophecy written before the downfall of Assyria in 615 B.C.; 2) other theologians suggest it was a liturgy written after the downfall in 612 B.C. Then according to other sources, it is believed that Nahum prophesied during the reign of Ahaz or possibly during the reign of Hezekiah in the 8th century B.C. Yet most all scholars believe the Book of Nahum was written in Jerusalem, where he witnessed the invasion of Sennacherib and the destruction of his host (2 Kings 19:35).

As the destruction of Thebes, Egypt [in 663 B.C,] is mentioned in Nahum 3:8, the scholarly consensus is that his "book of vision" was written at the time of the fall of Nineveh at the hands of the Medes and Babylonians.

Regardless of his early beginnings or the correct date of the oracle's predictions, Nahum is considered the most enigmatic of all the Minor Prophets.

Simplified plan of ancient Nineveh,
showing city wall & location of gateways.
From an historical context, Nahum's prophecy proclaimed the complete destruction of Nineveh, which was the Assyrian Empire's greatest city, as well as its capital. At the height of its glory, it was the center of the civilization and commerce in the world. Yet, according to Nahum it was "a bloody city all full of lies and robbery" (Nahum 3:1), which was a reference to the Neo-Assyrian Empire's military campaigns.

Jonah was the first biblical prophet to utter warnings against the city of Nineveh, and Nahum was followed by Zephaniah, who also confounded the nation with the same prophecy of destruction against the capital city.

The Book of Nahum consists of two parts: 1) Chapter 1 - shows the majesty and might of God the Creator; and 2) Chapters 2-3 - describe the fall of Nineveh. In his book he epitomizes the siege and frenzied activity of Nineveh's troops as they try in vain to halt the invaders. From a poetic view Nahum becomes a participant in the battle, and with subtle irony, barks battle commands to the defenders. It is also believed that this ancient prophet used numerous similes and metaphors in his style of writing. One such example is that he compared Nineveh with a lion, in reference to the lion as an Assyrian symbol of power, who once was strong but ended weak [like a lion hiding in its den].

The great city of Nineveh was destroyed by fire somewhere between 625-612 B.C., bringing the Assyrian Empire to an end just as the prophet had predicted. Based on this event, some theologians enunciate that the siege of Nineveh came at the hands of the king of Akkad and the king of Media during the summer of 612 B.C., and not long after the death of the king of Assyria. The Assyrian Empire officially ended around 605 B.C. and the rise of the Babylonian Empire began. This prophetical event would go on to change the face of Asia.

Despite Nineveh's great power, the ancient city indeed was conquered and destroyed just as Nahum had forewarned. The ancient prophet proved to be correct when he said the city would be "hidden". (Nahum 3:11)

It would not be until the A.D. mid-1800s that archaeologists would begin excavating portions of the biblical city; by 2011 (A.D.) the ruins that were slowly unearthed over a century of hard labor are in dire threat of becoming "hidden" once more due to environmental effects, lack of funds and natural elements.

It is commonly purported the tomb of Nahum is inside the synagogue at Alqosh (present-day northern Iraq), although there are others that lay claim to him being buried in the original ancient town of Elkosh (present-day northern Israel) from which Nahum hailed. Even in death this Minor Prophet remains obscured in history. 


Thursday, August 4, 2016

Where is the Center of the Universe?

The following excerpt was written by John Michael Thompson, author of Scientific Theory Of God: Proof That God Exists

WHERE IS THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE?

This question is profoundly important, because if we humans are special beings created by God, then we are the center. For thousands of years people intuitively believed they were at the center of God’s universe. As civilization and mathematics advanced some people began to mathematically and scientifically analyze the physical world.

Before the beginning of our modern age Ptolemy was the authority on the system of the universe. He was a Greco-Egyptian scientist, mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer. He defined a system of the universe with a motionless Earth at the center. According to Ptolemy the Sun, Moon, planets, and the stars all revolved around the Earth. Ptolemy’s earth-centered model was necessarily very complicated, because he needed to geometrically show, among other things, how the planets sometimes make backwards loops as seen in the Earth’s sky. He came up with invisible mechanisms such as epicycles in order to explain how the system’s objects interacted. Ptolemy’s geocentric universe dominated scientific thinking for fourteen centuries.

Before the invention of the telescope Ptolemy’s earth-centered model made sense to anyone on the Earth looking up at the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars. The force of gravity was not yet understood. Ptolemy theorized that the Sun, Moon, planets and stars were supported in space by being attached to nesting crystalline spheres, which separately rotated around the Earth. The vast distances to the objects in space had not yet been realized, so scientists didn’t know to make adjustments in size for distance. Using the naked eye the Sun and Moon appear to be the same size but much smaller than the Earth. The Earth appeared to be by far the biggest and most massive object in the universe, so it made sense that all heavenly objects must revolve around it.

Five stars (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) could be observed wandering amongst the four thousand or so other visible stars. These wandering stars were called planets. The stars were attached to the outermost rotating sphere, which was called the celestial sphere. The universe was perceived as and so assumed to be a freestanding (existing by itself needing nothing else in order to exist) finite system of physical objects. The Earth was the inner most boundary and the celestial sphere was the outer most boundary, which was calculated to be at a distance of 20,000 earth radii.

Ptolemy’s scientific universe system supported the long held religious belief that we humans are special beings located at the center of everything that exists. But then in the fifteenth century a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer named Copernicus challenged the Ptolemaic model. He claimed that the retrograde motions of the planets could be explained much easier by understanding that the Earth was a planet, and all the planets revolved around the sun. For example: as the Earth and Mars orbit the sun, the Earth moves faster, so it catches up to and passes Mars, which causes Mars to appear to change its direction when viewed from the moving Earth. Copernicus showed that with the Sun in the center of the universe system there is no need for epicycles.

The Copernican heliocentric model positioned the Sun at the center of the entire universe. Gravity was still not understood, so the crystalline spheres were retained with the celestial sphere still being the universe’s outer most boundary. At first scientists and religious leaders rejected Copernicus’ theoretical sun-centered system, even though it scientifically worked much better than Ptolemy’s earth-centered system, because the new Copernican system went against long established scientific and religious beliefs and the common sense of the time.

Then in the sixteenth century a physicist, engineer, philosopher, and astronomer named Galileo used his newly invented telescope to find evidence to support the sun-centered system. He saw among other things that Jupiter has its own moons, which proved that everything does not revolve around the Earth, and the Copernican model began to catch on. People had to absorb the perceived fact that humanity does not live at the center of the universe and therefore must not be special creations. People began to question humanity’s religious place in the grand scheme of things.

When Galileo looked up at the night sky through his telescope, he saw that the planets became larger but the stars did not. He realized that the stars were much too far away to show magnification. Galileo proved that the planets are located closer to and orbit the Sun, but the stars are located much further out into space beyond our planetary system. Our known size of the universe became vastly larger.

The telescope continued to lead to the discovery of a more and more vast, complex, and seemingly infinite universe. It became clear that our Sun is the center of our solar system, but it is not the center of the whole universe. Scientists discovered that the stars are actually suns like our own Sun. Our solar system is only one of a vast number of other solar systems. Our Milky Way galaxy is only one of billions of other galaxies. This caused a sea change in human thinking.

Technology continues to advance. Telescopes, microscopes, and particle smashers continue to become more powerful, and scientists keep discovering more objects further out in space and more objects further into sub-atomic space. Scientists can’t find any fixed boundaries to universe, so they can’t define a physical center. Science now teaches that we humans live in a minor solar system on an insignificant planet lost somewhere in infinite space.

Today we like to believe science has come a long way since Ptolemy, and we now understand the universe and humanity’s place in it. Over the past few centuries the modern system of the universe has removed the Earth from the center, replaced the crystalline spheres with the force of gravity, become vastly larger and more complex, and eliminated fixed boundaries. But despite these structural changes, the modern system is still fundamentally the same universe as the ancient system. Both are perceived by scientists as and assumed to be freestanding physical universes existing in independent in space and time.

When we look around and interact in our object world, it is common sense that the objects we see and interact with exist separate and independent from us. But, we have learned from the past that our common sense often deceives us, because the scientific evidence actually shows that the universe does not exist freestanding by itself in space and time.

The scientific evidence actually shows that both the ancient and modern systems of the universe are wrong.

It is a known scientific fact that we humans do not directly see our physical reality. We do not look out across volumetric space and actually see or otherwise sense objects. We receive information from objects in the form of electromagnetic signals (light), and then we each transform the information into a solid three-dimensional reality on our mind’s viewing screen. Our senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste are all electrical processes that provide input to generating our seemingly solid reality in our mind. A modern scientific analogy would be a virtual reality. When our minds are embedded in a virtual world, we think the virtual world is a solid freestanding universe, but it is not. We cannot distinguish a virtual world from our real physical world.

The universe based on human consciousness is not a new or radical idea. Religious people pray to God through their consciousness. All of the world’s major religions have always claimed the universe is based on human consciousness. During the nineteenth century, philosophers and scientists debated whether the universe exists freestanding by itself in space and time or whether it is exists based on human consciousness. Some scientists understood that we form the universe in our minds through our sensory apparatus. These scientists understood that we couldn’t actually know the universe outside our mind.

It is a scientific fact that space and time cannot be shown to exist outside the mind, and it is a scientific fact that physical objects cannot exist except in space and time, therefore the physical object universe cannot exist separate from the human mind. So some scientists thought it was a mistake to adopt a universe model separated from human consciousness, but never the less the larger scientific community assumed the universe is so vast and complex that it could not possibly be based on the supposedly insignificant human mind.

This has proved to be a wrong assumption. Scientists again mistakenly relied on the common sense of the time.

Science has now discovered that the human brain is the most complex thing in the universe. New measurements of a human brain’s memory capacity increase previous estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, which is in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web. This is equivalent to twenty million four-drawer filing cabinets, and this is just what we understand today. The brain’s capacity is very likely much higher still, because scientists are just starting to understand a small part of it. Total human memory capacity is based on the population of the earth, which is over seven billion human brains all working together to form human reality. Humanity’s memory capacity is at a minimum equivalent to seven billion World Wide Webs. This does not even consider the brain’s processing powers or the amazing power of the human mind, of which scientists admittedly know very little.

As telescopes continue to become more powerful astronomers are continuing to find more and more outer space with more and more objects. And as microscopes and particle colliders continue to become more powerful physicists are continuing to find smaller and smaller particles in inner space. This has proved to be a never-ending process. The ongoing process of scientific discovery has proved that the universe has no boundaries big or small. There is no outer boundary or smallest foundation particle, so the universe is not a standalone physical system. To the contrary modern science has shown that the universe operates just as we would expect a human connected physical reality would operate. A universe based on human consciousness would be an unlimited physical system without boundaries, big or small. Its known size and complexity would depend on human intelligence and imagination.

Both ancient scientists and modern scientists have misinterpreted the universe. The earth is not the center, and humanity is not lost in space and time. The universe is centered on our consciousness and not where we physically live, so it has never mattered where the earth is located.

We humans are the center of our universe, so anything is possible. We just have to believe.