The Illegitimates

It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage, so states a recent article in the New York Times.

It is a staggering statistic. At first glance it would appear that traditional marriage is collapsing. Perhaps it is. The fastest growth in children born to unmarried women in the last 20 years has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data. However, taking all age groups into account three years ago, 60 percent of children were born to married women.

In an age of abortion, it is of credit to unwed mothers that they have chosen to have their children. However, the new normal is unsettling.

According the NYT’s article, one group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. Reasons for that vary.

Not too many years ago, my wife and I gave a pre-marriage seminar to about a dozen couples who planned to have a traditional church wedding. Halfway through the day, I mentioned our faith’s teaching that cohabitation before marriage was a no-no. Come to find out, a number of couples were known to be living that lifestyle.

What are the reasons for the upswing in cohabiting unmarried heterosexual couples? What are the reasons for the new normal of children born to unwed mothers? What is happening to the institution of traditional marriage?

This new “marriage gap” in the United States is increasingly aligned with a growing income gap. Where people stand on the various changes in marriage and family life depends to some degree on who they are and how they live.

The decline of the influence of religious teaching factors in. Hollywood’s overt love affair with its own superstars’ lifestyles, plot-lines which embrace the sexual revolution, and the deeply influential “everyone’s doing it” mantra, all weaken traditional marriage. State and federal laws are passing more and more legislation, attempting to legitimize same-sex unions. This leads to a path of more blurring of the value of the traditional marriage.

However, the decline of marriage has not knocked family life off its pedestal.  According to a study done by the Pew Research Center, three-quarters of all adults say their family is the most important element of their life; three-quarters say they are “very satisfied” with their family life, and more than eight in 10 say the family they live in now is as close as (45%) or closer than (40%) the family in which they grew up. However, on all of these questions, married adults give more positive responses than do unmarried adults.

My YouTube Videos on the Bible

Many sincere Christians read the Bible with the conviction that the world’s most popular book is God’s Word revealed to mankind for the eternal salvation of the human race. Those of the Jewish tradition consider the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), along with other pre-Christian writings, as divinely inspired by Yahweh. 

Even the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, admits of divine intervention by Allah in the history of mankind, using names and stories, found in the Bible, familiar to Jews and Christians alike, as an historical basis for the early covenant with mankind by Allah.

Yet in our modern world, there are those who find the Bible a work filled with historical improbabilities. Others question the works included in the Bible as an incomplete list, referring to writings that were left out of the canon, or list, of both the Old and New Testaments.

Recent sensational stories about Jesus, taken from the Gospel of Thomas, or the hypothesis that Jesus was married and sired children, as suggested in Brown’s DaVinci Code and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene — even discoveries that purport to be ossuaries with the bones of Jesus and his family — have all made the New Testament story of the Christ’s bodily resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven appear to be an incredible tale that cannot stand up to archeological discoveries and scientific analysis.

Confronted with these non-traditional views about biblical works, many Christians retreat into a sort of shell, comforted by their faith in the inerrancy of the Bible, and dismiss any questioning of the Bible’s accuracy  as the poison of the age in which we live. Christian fundamentalism is on the rise, and many Christians prefer to view the Bible as what they have been taught to believe about it — the Bible is God’s Word, and that’s that.

Yet is there a scholarly method of understanding the Bible that makes sense of some of the improbabilities, historical contradictions, and imperfect morality found especially in the Old Testament? Yes, there is. Mainline Christian scholars call it the “Historical-Critical Method.”

Definitions draw limits around concepts. No definition is able to be all-inclusive in its few words, no matter how skillfully composed. However, without definitions, there would be indeterminate communication, and misunderstandings would be the rule.

To define the historical-critical method as it applies to understanding the Bible, one might say it is the analytical method biblical scholars use to shed light on the historical processes which resulted in biblical works. The method studies the biblical texts much the same as scholars who study ancient texts from pagan cultures. Without denying the divine revelation attributed to the Bible, scholars using the historical-critical method seek to go back in time and become familiar with the way in which biblical texts were written.

Obviously, God did not use high definition television with Dolby sound to reveal his word to mankind, but rather, by today’s standards of communication, a crude, often imperfect, system of revelation which relied on human beings in various times and places to translate that revelation to the written record of their times.
So, when confronted with the similarities of the birth of Moses, for example, with that of the Babylonian King Sargon thousands of years before, the scholar using the historical-critical method asks the question, “Did the human author, or authors, of Exodus draw upon a well-known story from pagan sources to fabricate an historical event which his readers would recognize?”

Was there anything known about Moses’ birth, or did the author of Exodus have a purpose in describing an event which no one can forget — a cleverly written story of the rescue of an infant who was about to be killed by a ruler, fearful of losing control?

I recently completed a six-part series on “Understanding the Bible Using the Historical-Critical Method.” It’s free and viewable on YouTube, with each session running under half an hour.

1) The Canons, or lists, of Biblical books
2) The Apochrypha
3) Literal vs. Historical-Critical Interpretation
4) The Abrahamic and Mosaic Stories
5) The “Writings” – Historical and Didactic
6) The Gospels, Revelation, and Numeric Symbolism

Ipadology

We Americans are proud of our innovative nature. After all, what country has sent men to the moon? American inventions include the teleprompter, the airbag, the barcode, the atomic bomb, the laser, the Internet, the CD and CCD, the PC, WiFi, the mobile phone, and Post-it note pads, among countless other innovations.

I own an iPad 2 and I think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.

However, in doing the research on my own word invention…“iPadology,”…or the study of the iPad, I found some disconcerting information on how and where the stellar iPad is made.

Do you think that the iPad is made in the USA? Yes and no. The technology comes from California at Apple headquarters. However, the assembly of most iPads is done in China, as is that of iPhones and iPods.
In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77.

Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chinese Chengdu plant.

“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”

“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.

“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.

According to a New York Times report, Apple has said it requires every discovered labor violation to be remedied, and suppliers that refuse are terminated. Privately, however, some former executives concede that finding new suppliers is time-consuming and costly. Foxconn is one of the few manufacturers in the world with the scale to build sufficient numbers of iPhones and iPads. So Apple is “not going to leave Foxconn and they’re not going to leave China,” said Heather White, a research fellow at Harvard and a former member of the Monitoring International Labor Standards committee at the National Academy of Sciences. “There’s a lot of rationalization.”

In a prior blog, I virtually canonized Steve Jobs. However, as the CEO of Apple he had to know that worker conditions in China were abysmal.

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

When asked how the more than 700,000 Apple jobs overseas could come back to the US, Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said. The questioner was the President.

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option.

A former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves.  Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.



A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation, and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

The Apple outsourcing story is the reason jobs are lost in the US. When I taught Global Issues a decade ago, I could see what globalization was already doing. Wages in the US, with decades of influence by unions, were way out of balance with wages in countries like China, Mexico, and India.

The other day I listened to Donald Trump claim that the US is rebuilding China. He’s right. That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day.

How can US companies afford to manufacture anything in the US?

I love my iPad. How it got into my hands stinks.

The Snowflake

With a winter waning away with weather that was wanting for wishers of a winning snowfall, let’s stop to wonder at the beauty of a snowflake. “No two snowflakes are alike” is a saying attributed to Wilson Bentley, Vermont’s most famous resident and pioneer photographer of individual snowflakes.

Of the billions and trillions of snowflakes that fall in NW lower Michigan in a normal winter season, there is often little notice given to the construct of this frozen speck of water.

Ski resorts rely on a goodly base of them. Those with pickup trucks and plows delight in daily snowfalls. Snowmobilers, with the abandon of the old West’s freegrazers, see no problem roaring their machines over others’ snow-laden property. (There is simply no policing possible of these violators of private property.)
On the other hand, snow deters traffic, causes fender-benders, and worse. Lots of money is spent by road commissions to keep roads free of snow. Mixtures of salt and snow create slush and rust deterioration of autos. Ten years of weekly commuting back and forth from near Ann Arbor left me with many moments of the sheer terror of black ice and memories of many vehicles in ditches or overturned. On one trip on I-96, I saw 15 vehicles in a row in the ditch because of slick roads.

However, the universe of the innocent snowflake is mind-boggling.

Enter Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht. In the mid-1990s his interest in the molecular dynamics of crystal growth resulted in detailed study of ice crystals and how they grow from water vapor. Using modern equipment and techniques, Libbrecht has surpassed the research of  Bentley. While he can produce artificial snow at any time of the year at Caltech, his field research has taken him to all parts of North America where snow may be found. At least six books on snowflakes are listed on Amazon by Libbrecht. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Kenneth+G.+Libbrecht%27s+Snowflake+Books&x=16&y=18

Just take a look at the many, many varieties of snowflakes identified by Libbrecht viewable at http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/class/class.htm.

With due credit given to Libbrecht, below are five of my favorites he has imaged.

No. 1 – Split plates and stars

No. 2 – Another stellar dendrite

No. 3 – A double plate

No. 4 – A 12-sided flake

No. 5 – A rimed crystal


If anyone can say that such beauty and order are happenstance, look at the efforts of artificial snow. You can see from the picture below that artificial snow is made of frozen water droplets, with none of the elaborate structure found in real snow crystals.



According to Libbrecht, snow machines shoot a mixture of water and compressed air out of nozzles.  The water comes out as fine droplets, and the air cools as it decompresses, causing the droplets to freeze.  A fan blows the ice particles onto the slopes.

I view Libbrecht’s images and come away with a profound sense of awe. His work is opening not only new frontiers of science, but gives to me a reaffirmation of the magnificence of the hand of the divine Artist.

“Ice and snow, bless the Lord; praise and exalt him above all forever.” (NAB Daniel 3:70)

The Theology of Sports

Does God intervene in sports?  This is the question that has captivated the news recently.  Pundits, sports announcers, some of the clergy of various denominations, newspaper articles, etc., have all had their say about the recent remarkable feats of Denver Bronco’s quarterback Tim Tebow.

The Heisman trophy winner, who helped the Florida gators win two national championships, has amazed football fans of all ages this past season with seemingly impossible come-from-behind plays. The team was 1–4 before Tebow became the starter, but immediately began winning with him on the field, often by coming from behind late in the 4th quarter, until they won the AFC West title.

While pregnant, his mother suffered a life-threatening infection with a pathogenic amoeba.  Doctors recommended that his mother have an abortion.  She declined. Tebow is the youngest of five children, all of whom were home schooled in order that the parents’ Christian beliefs be instilled. Tebow’s father, Robert, is a Baptist minister.  Tebow’s mother and Tim appeared in a 30 second pro-life TV spot in the 2010 Super Bowl.

So did God intervene in the life and career of Tim Tebow?  I would suspect that his mother’s decision to carry him to birth was due to her trust in God, and that God rewarded her with an extraordinary son.

As to his exploits on the football field, there is no reason why God cannot do as He pleases in directing the universe.  Since football and other sports are often the result of human successes and failures, measured in inches or seconds, even the best teams or athletes have their natural ups and downs.  Is God involved? 

Theology says that without His permission, nothing would exist.  So, yes, God is involved in that way.

However, to say that God micromanages this or that detail in human life would go contrary to the concept of man’s free will. This is a gift He has given mankind. He doesn’t want puppets or marionettes that dangle with strings attached to a mechanical manipulator in the hand of the Creator.

There are those philosophers who contend, or grudgingly admit, that God created the universe and let it evolve according to laws of science.  These philosophers think of a “hands-off” Being who does not get involved with mankind’s ordinary pursuits.

In Christianity, we are taught to pray the Our Father.  In this prayer, “Thy will be done” is a powerful component.  Yet, if one looks at the first miracle that Christ performed, at the wedding feast at Cana, it appeared that He was reluctant to honor His Mother Mary’s request to do something about the lack of wine.  He even objected to his mother that it wasn’t his time yet to perform miracles.

Undaunted, Mary told the servants to do whatever Her Son told them.  We know the results.  I draw from this incident the fact that prayer is effective.  I also draw from this incident, that God can and does intervene in human events.

On a personal level, when I was principal of a parochial school, and it was faced with financial difficulties, the school board was about to vote to eliminate the high school portion of the school.  The boys basketball team played in a district elimination game the night before the school board meeting.  They won.  The next evening, the school board voted to continue the school in its entirety.  The boys went on to win the district finals.  Today, the school continues on K-12, over 40 years later.

Funny Religious Stories

Since I have never been able to retell a humorous story (I always screw up the punch line), I relied on Google for the following pieces — with adaptations so as not to be offensive!

• Preachers dying wish

An old preacher was dying. He sent a message for his banker and his lawyer, both church members, to come to his home.

When they arrived, they were ushered up to his bedroom. As they entered the room, the preacher held out his hands and motioned for them to sit on each side of the bed. The preacher grasped their hands, sighed contentedly, smiled, and stared at the ceiling.

For a time, no one said anything. Both the banker and lawyer were touched and flattered that the preacher would ask them to be with him during his final moments. They were also puzzled; the preacher had never given them any indication that he particularly liked either of them. They both remembered his many long, uncomfortable sermons about greed, covetousness, and avaricious behavior that made them squirm in their seats.

Finally, the banker said, “Preacher, why did you ask us to come?”

The old preacher mustered up his strength and then said weakly, “Jesus died between two thieves, and that’s how I want to go.”

• Redneck Church

You Know You’re in a Redneck Church if … people ask, when they learn that Jesus fed the 5,000, whether the two fish were bass or catfish, and what bait was used to catch ‘em.

You Know You’re in a Redneck Church if … on the opening day of deer season the church is closed.

You Know You’re in a Redneck Church if … a member of the church requests to be buried in his 4-wheel-drive truck because “It ain’t never been in a hole it couldn’t get out of”

You Know You’re in a Redneck Church if … the choir is known as the “OK Chorale”.

You Know You’re in a Redneck Church if … in a congregation of 500 members, there are only seven last names in the church directory.

You Know You’re in a Redneck Church if … people think “rapture” is what you get when you lift something too heavy.

You Know You’re in a Redneck Church if … the choir robes were donated by (and embroidered with the logo from) Billy Bob’s Barbecue.

You Know You’re in a Redneck Church if … the collection plates are really hubcaps from a 1956 Chevy pick up truck.

• The two Brothers

There were two evil brothers. They were rich, and used their money to keep their evil ways from the public eye. They even attended the same church, and appeared to be perfect Christians.

Then, their pastor retired, and a new one was hired. Not only could the new pastor see right through the brothers’ deception, but he also spoke well and true, and the church membership grew in numbers. A fund-raising campaign was started to build a new assembly.

All of a sudden, one of the brothers died. The remaining brother sought out the new pastor the day before the funeral and handed him a check for the amount needed to finish paying for the new building. “I have only one condition,” he said. “At the funeral, you must say my brother was a saint.” The pastor gave his word, and deposited the check.

The next day, at the funeral, the pastor did not hold back. “He was an evil man,” he said. “He cheated on his wife and abused his family.” After going on like this, he finally concluded, “But, compared to his brother, he was a SAINT.”

• RESULTS

A minister dies and is waiting in line at the Pearly Gates.Ahead of him is a guy who’s dressed in sunglasses, a loud shirt, leather jacket, and jeans.

Saint Peter addresses this guy, ‘Who are you, so that I may know whether or not to admit you to the Kingdom of Heaven?’

The guy replies, ‘I’m Joe Cohen, taxi driver, of Noo Yawk City.’

St. Peter consults his list. He smiles and says to the taxi driver, ‘Take this silken robe and golden staff and enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’

The taxi driver goes into Heaven with his robe and staff, and it’s the minister’s turn. He stands erect and booms out, ‘I am Joseph Snow, pastor of Calvary Church for the last forty-three years.’

St.  Peter consults his list.

He says to the minister, ‘Take this cotton robe and wooden staff and enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’

‘Just a minute,’ says the minister. ‘That man was a taxi driver, and he gets a silken robe and golden staff. How can this be?’

‘Up here, we work by results,’ says Saint Peter. ‘While you preached, people slept, while he drove, people prayed.’

• Church sign

“How will you spend eternity?
Smoking or Non-smoking?”

• His first wedding

A little boy was attending his first wedding. After the service, his cousin asked him, “How many women can a man marry?” “Sixteen,” the boy responded. His cousin was amazed that he had an answer so quickly. “How do you know that?” “Easy,” the little boy said. “All you have to do is add it up, like the pastor said: 4 better, 4 worse, 4 richer, 4 poorer.”

• Morning people

“Somebody has well said that there are only two kinds of people in the world – there are those who wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, Lord,” and there are those who wake up in the morning and say, “Good Lord, it’s morning…

• Church Bulletin Announcements

Martha Belch, a missionary from Africa will be speaking tonight at Calvary Memorial Church in Racine. Come tonight and hear Martha Belch all the way from Africa.

Announcement in the church bulletin for a National PRAYER & FASTING Conference: “The cost for attending the Fasting and Prayer conference includes meals.”

Our youth basketball team is back in action Wednesday at 8 p.m. in the recreation hall. Come out and watch us kill Christ the King.

Miss Charlene Mason sang “I will not pass this way again” giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.
“Ladies, don’t forget the rummage sale. It’s a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Don’t forget your husbands.”

The peacemaking meeting scheduled for today has been canceled due to a conflict.

Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir. They need all the help they can get.

Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community.

Don’t let worry kill you off – let the Church help.

At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be “What is Hell?” Come early and listen to our choir practice. Eight new choir robes are currently needed, due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.

For those of you who have children and don’t know it, we have a nursery downstairs.

Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person(s) you want remembered.
Attend and you will hear an excellent speaker and heave a healthy lunch.

The church will host an evening of fine dining, superb entertainment, and gracious hostility.

Potluck supper Sunday at 5:00 pm.-prayer and medication to follow.

Ladies Bible Study will be held Thursday morning at 10. All ladies are invited to lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the B.S. is done.

Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 PM. Please use the back door.

The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The Congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.

Weight Watchers will meet at 7 p.m. at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance.

A Lesson From Zimbawe

Alright, I confess. Santa brought me an iPad 2. I’m guilty of high-techery and my punishment is that I have become the reincarnation of Sisyphus. The more this gadget opens me up to the newspapers of the world, the more I go up the hill of learning, only to find that the crushing boulder of so much global information pushes me back down to re-open that iTunes app called Newseum the next day to selectively scan the front pages of 800 newspapers from almost 80 countries.

Google News is another resource that one can get lost in. I happened across an article from Zimbawe, in lower Africa.  That’s right…Zimbawe…whose president is the infamous Robert Mugabe who has held power since the country’s independence from the British crown colony, the former Southern Rhodesia, in 1980.

The country is predominately Christian, belonging to Anglican, Methodist, and Catholic Churches.

The newspaper is The Standard, the country’s leading Sunday paper. The article which got my attention was “Time for a ’Christian Spring’ to revamp religion”. Author: “Rational Believer.” http://www.thestandard.co.zw/opinion/33307-sunday-view-time-for-a-christian-spring-to-revamp-religion.html.

The lead paragraphs say it so well.

As a Christian, it hurts me to see how ignorant and gullible many fellow-Christians can be. Many Christians believe virtually anything that merely sounds spiritual. In the process: They throw away the credibility of Christianity.

They give many non-Christians, some of whom DO think rationally about things, all the necessary ammunition to blast holes in Christianity.More specifically, ignorant and gullible fellow-Christians are the ones who contribute to Christianity as a religion having a bad name among Atheists and Agnostics.

I continuously search for the harmony between the Bible and science. I cannot understand how any person is able to live a dualistic life where he or she believes one thing in the tried-and-proven world of science and maths, but has to switch off part of his/her mind in order to believe in the Bible and God, and vice versa.

God is not the proper object of contemporary empirical science, i.e. God cannot be perceived with instrumentation. Nonetheless, that does not mean that empirical scientists should deny realities which are not directly perceivable. There is nothing intrinsic to contemporary empirical science which closes it off from another science which is beyond physics, i.e. metaphysics.

I might interject here what I remember about Rhodesia…the country practiced apartheid…separation of the races, with overt implications of racial inequality. This observation segues into to following from The Standard’s article:

For example, it was not long ago when apartheid was being preached from the pulpit. But that “gospel truth” has since been found to be wrong — and we changed our mind about it (or I hope all did!). Similarly, only a few centuries ago, it was believed that the earth was the centre of the universe — based on Bible scriptures. Now it is common knowledge that the earth is a planet in a solar system filled with more, in a galaxy with billions of stars, in a universe with billions of galaxies. It was found that the scripture was interpreted too narrowly.

The one thing we Christians have to learn is to not become fundamentalist in our mindset about what we think we know about the Bible; about how we understand God, and what we believe. Instead, we have to grow.

Oh, and how we need to grow as Christians. We need to understand how the Bible was written, when it was assembled, the midrashic elements in it, the poetry and parables that it contains. We need to learn both about science and its changing frontiers as well as the evolution of thought away from a fundamentalist approach to understanding the Bible.

New Year’s resolution for Christians: Get thee to a bible study group that explores the historical-critical method of interpreting the Bible and toss away the fundamentalist approach which can only cause severe rifts with science…