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Our Daily Thread 4-24-18

Good Morning!

Today’s pics are from Linda.

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Also, this past Sunday was Bob Buckles’ birthday. I missed it since I don’t post on Sundays.

So Happy Belated Birthday Bob!

Sorry I missed it.

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Anyone have a QoD?

 

67 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 4-24-18”

  1. It’s too late to be first!
    I answered NancyJIll about an hour ago in yesterday’s thread.
    And a good morning to everyone.

    The Waffle House hero says he’s not a hero.
    He says anyone would have done what he did.
    And he’s right.
    The thing that makes a hero is that he kept his cool and had the presence of mind to act. He’s the only one in the restaurant to think of doing what he did.
    Anyone could have done what he did. But he did it.

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  2. Morning! Progress Chas…and I cannot help but to believe your precious bride will be so much more comfortable at home with her beloved….continued prayers for you two!!
    I don’t know what is happening up there in that photo but I think it is safe to say it is not the remodel at Dj’s House….perhaps someone else is remodeling 😊

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  3. Our church is not ultra-modern, but it was built in the 1990s and it is relatively simple. Last year, when she was six, granddaughter, Emmy, asked me why we don’t have any stained glass windows. I kiddingly mentioned it to Pastor because I know he likes “old timey” churches. He said, yes, we need some. We jumped on it. We investigated the Center For Liturgical Arts, which is associated with our denomination, and their prices were very high.
    The man in the picture is one of our members. His wife, who isn’t a member (she’s Catholic) does stained glass and we engaged her to create them for us at a very reasonable price (we covered the cost). They were installed the Saturday after Good Friday so they first appeared on Easter morning. They were briefly mentioned during the service and dedicated in honor of Emmy. They are absolutely beautiful and really capture what we are and what we need. There is a second picture of them (that I assume AJ will also post).

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  7. THIS is what I have against “mega” churches and demigod ministers:
    “That meant a number of one-on-one meetings: often at his beach home in Michigan, on his yacht, on his jet, or at restaurants near Hybels’s summer home. During those meetings, the conversations often got personal, she said. And at times inappropriate”.

    HIS yacht. HIS summer home. HIS jet. Really?

    I have served on the Vestry of my church. I know what my clergy makes per month. They are both comfortable, but neither live and extravagant lifestyle. I also know how much my church donates to other ministries. We support and orphanage in Haiti and a school in Africa. We support a church plant in New Orleans and several other missions.

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  8. Good morning. It’s 33 rpm speed in the office today. I can not even remember what the other rpm numbers are. Did anyone here have a large collection of albums at any time in the past? I had only a few rock albums to play over and over until I joined a classical album club. Then I acquired maybe ten to fifteen more.

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  10. I had no idea of the scandal at Willowcreek and felt sick to my stomach after reading that article. On one hand thankful it was exposed on the other so sickened at the thought of it all.
    Janice at one time I had so many albums I cannot recall the number of them. I had every album ever made by James Taylor…they are all in a dump in South Carolina somewhere….

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  12. Kim makes an excellent point. A church leader who displays a love for filthy lucre is a disqualified church leader:

    This is a true saying, if a man desire the office of a bishop, he desires a good work. A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach; Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous; … (I Timothy 3:1-3)
    Likewise must the deacons be grave, not doubletongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of filthy lucre… (I Timothy 3:8)
    For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre… (Titus 1:7)
    Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind… (I Peter 5:2)

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  13. I love stained glass windows. In my childhood church, it had, like all Baptist church buildings, a baptistry behind the stage where the pulpit stood. Behind the baptistry, instead of a blank wall, there was a huge stained glass window. It was very Baptist in design, i.e. no people, but lovely to look at with the sun shining through. Eldest sibling was married from that church (the family church was too small for all our relatives) and her principle decoration was simply opening the baptistry curtains to let the sun shine in. Sadly, that church built another modern building, right beside the original building, and the stained glass window now stands in an empty building. I have fond memories of my childhood church, which rang the steeple bell as a call to worship every Sunday, and it always causes a bit of a pang to see the new building beside the old one whenever we drive through that particular village (we left because they brought in ‘contemporary’ music, and my father found that hearing carols played by electronic instruments with a rock beat reminded him of his barhopping days).

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  14. What is it about a church bell pealing on a Sunday morning? We were visiting a small town once and heard the bells and it absolutely took my breath away. My Uncle lived in a small village in Ohio north from where we lived and we visited often. On Sunday mornings the church bells would ring out calling parishioners to Sunday School. We would walk across the back of the property, cross the bridge over the creek and walk into that little white clapboard church with stained glass windows and sit in the old wooden pews. The sweetness of that season of life fills the deep recesses of this old heart…. ❤️

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  16. Nancy Jill, in the downtown of the city, several old churches stand, and at least one plays the chimes every hour, the nearest town to where my parents live also has a church that does that. Whenever I hear the bells when I’m in the downtown, it makes me smile and relax a little. The is also a city clock here that rings the hourly chimes – I think I’ve told on here the story of being in an antique shop that stood across from the city clock when the hour struck noon and hearing all the different antique clocks strike along with the city clock. I remember, growing up, hearing the bells rung for both weddings and funerals. The mystery author and Christian thinker Dorothy L. Sayers, wrote a book around the bell ringing traditions of Anglican churches, called the Nine Tailors. If you like both mysteries and bells, it is well worth reading, as she used extensive research on the art of bell ringing and explained a lot of the traditions surrounding bell ringing.

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  17. The bells always rang on Sunday morning in Connecticut where I lived. At one time I was close enough to walk to the church, being careful to arrive before the bells stopped ringing, because if not, it meant I was late. And in one town I lived the bells tolled on Saturdays too. It does thrill the heart to hear it. I miss some of those old fashioned community rituals.

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  18. I live close (within just a few blocks in different directions) to a Presbyterian, Roman Catholic and Lutheran church and hear bells frequently (from the first two churches, I’m actually not sure about ‘Michelle’s’ Lutheran church?). Last night I was sitting on the patio just taking in the cool spring evening when the Presbyterian bells chimed at 7 p.m. That’s the closest church to me, an old mainline congregation (it was I think the first church to land in our port town, though that may have been the Episcopal church) where many of our community stalwarts have been (and are) members.

    I love bells. I’m thinking of putting an old California mission-style bell on the front of my house once it’s painted.

    Our area was soon settled by many coming from European countries of Croatia, Italy, Portugal, etc., who came for the commercial fishing so we quickly became (and remain) a largely Roman Catholic community.

    I love the older churches with wood pews and stained glass windows. Looking forward to seeing the next photos as the windows went up in Linda’s church.

    How can it be only Tuesday?

    I had the strangest dream last night, the Republican national convention was being held in our building (and there’s probably enough room with all the layoffs we’ve had). The party had nominated Richard Nixon (again). On the night of his acceptance speech I was there as were a couple photographers whom I didn’t know (because they laid off nearly all our photographers so now we’re working with staff from other papers and freelancers quite often). I kept thinking how odd it was that Nixon could be president again.

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  20. Debra, after reading The Nine Tailors, I had a better understanding of how bells served as communication devices and unifying factors for the community. The ‘tailors’ (tellers) for example were a specific set of rings for when a person died and communicated the sex and age of the person who died. The people in the village would know who was ailing, and be able to guess from the rings who had died. Wedding bells served as an announcement that two people were united for life in the marriage bonds. Every traditional culture has developed a way of communicating across distance – in West Africa, for example, they used the talking drum – and in Europe and Britain, it was steeple bells.

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  21. Someone on NextDoor posted this link to some fun historic pictures from our town the other day. I’ve seen most of them before, but still so fascinating to see the way it all used to look, familiar streets (then unpaved) with horse-drawn wagons, some buildings that still stand today but were then the only structures for miles.

    Wouldn’t it be a treat to go back in time for just a few days, to walk around your town and take in the flavor of the place 100, 200 years ago?

    http://waterandpower.org/museum/Early_Views_of_San_Pedro_and_Wilmington.html

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  22. In the article I linked earlier, I was struck by the yacht, jet, and so on . . . but also by the insistence of the writer that pastors simply never meet one-on-one with a parishioner in their home, that there needs to be some emotional distance between them. While it is indeed foolish for a pastor to have a woman in his hotel room or in his house without his own wife or that woman’s husband, the idea that a relationship between a pastor and his flock needs to be somehow “more distant” than between co-workers is absurd.

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  23. DJ, somehow I never realized how significant the harbor is to San Pedro.

    Only once have I lived in a city with “a beach” (Lake Michigan in Chicago), and while “The Magnificent Mile” is a significant region in Chicago (it’s the shopping district) and photos of the skyline as seen from over Lake Michigan are iconic, Lake Michigan is really just one small portion of the city. And having rarely lived near water, I find it pretty but feel no “draw” to big bodies of water. (My husband does.) I find creeks and waterfalls compelling, and the summer that I rented a room in a house that sat on the edge of a creek, I found myself wandering down to the creek quite frequently. But oceans and lakes and ponds are just “That’s nice” unless there is some form of wildlife to observe.

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  24. Janice, I have a large collection of albums in the present. I’ve mentioned that my father has quite a few albums – the people he has the most albums of are Chet Atkins and Herp Albert’s Tijuana Brass – and a sound system still capable of playing them. When my piano teacher passed away, she left instructions that I be given her music. I have reason to know that she meant her piano sheet music, since she mentioned it to me one of the last times I saw her (she passed away when I was in West Africa). Her family, however, interpreted the instructions to mean her albums, so I now have an entire set of the ‘Greatest Works of…’ the great classical composers. I confess I would have preferred the sheet music, as it is quite easy to find ‘greatest works’ classical music on digital recordings, but much harder to find some of the sheet music she had. I was not, however, going to make a fuss about it, and I do value records over digital recordings. Digital recordings are certainly very convenient, but records are an actual physical impression of soundwaves. If ever computer technology is lost, which it could easily be (they already talk about digital rot as old files become unreadable to new programs) and future civilizations try to figure out this age’s artifacts, records should be one of the easiest to decipher – all you need is a needle and turntable.

    My piano teacher was a wonderful woman, and charged us very little for lessons, which was helpful in the days when my family struggled to make ends meet. She lived in the hamlet closest to us, so we walked to our lessons most of the time, as we only had one vehicle at the time which my father needed for work. When I became advanced in the piano, she advised me to go to my violin teacher (I started violin when I was twelve and we were more secure financially and had a second vehicle), who also taught piano, for lessons, since my piano teacher felt she could not give me the best advanced training. I think my piano teacher would have done a fine job, but the care and concern she showed for my musical future touched my heart. My last lessons I took with her were for organ, since she also played the organ, after the family church was donated an organ. I mentioned how I got my violin the other day, but Youngest got her violin from our piano teacher, who had been left it when a relative of hers died – it had been valued at four times the price she allowed Youngest to pay for it. It would have been lovely to have the sheet music that she used to lend us to remember her by, but I had no wish to offend her family over it.

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  25. The port remains central to our town built on the slope heading up from the water. Today, mammoth container ships and cruise ships glide in and out, prompting some to call it a “living theater” of sorts that makes developing the waterfront for more tourism a natural. If you’re dining in one of the restaurants overlooking it all, conversation actually ceases when one of those container ships glides by and everyone turns to watch. And we get huge crowds, especially from inland areas, for the tall ships festivals, which occur every few years giving us a glimpse into our sailing past and all the traditions of that era. (The local high school team name, of course, is the Pirates).

    The port is why we’re a part of the city of LA — the city, needing it, basically drew a narrow corridor that connects the downtown, 23 miles to the north, to our town so they could lay claim to the harbor which had become a center of much of the region’s commerce and trade. (The town then had 2 newspapers, one, the News, the other, the Pilot, which were on opposing sides of the debate to join with the bigger city — the papers eventually merged to become the News-Pilot, where I worked for a time and where Michelle was an intern.)

    Anyway, the community voted to join the city in 1909, a decision many today loudly lament. lol

    Speaking of beaches, though, I keep seeing TV ads lately promoting Michigan as the place to go. The state must have launched quite a publicity and tourist campaign to pay for all those slick TV ads showing beaches and forests and all kinds of nice things. Who knew?

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  26. I had quite a few albums back ‘in the day.’ Most are long gone but I did hang on to some I thought might be worth something “someday,” like the autographed Sonny & Cher album cover, some Beatles & Beach Boys records, too. They’re somewhere in the garage. Selling them will fit into part of my retirement plan — haha — along with all those antique family dishes I found in the big garage clean out (which actually took place, according to my journal, in the first week of May exactly one year ago — April and May-June last year were brutal, probably the toughest stretch of the house project I’ve been through as there were so many jobs ongoing that were completely disruptive of all living spaces; I didn’t really recover from any of that until this past Christmas).

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  27. Having grown up near the Great Lakes and a short walk’s distance from a smaller lake, and being raised by a man who grew up in a maritime province that was once noted for its ship building, I early on was aware of the importance of bodies of water and water courses. Most of the major communities the province were built next to water. The nearest town to where my parents live is built on a waterway that was built using natural water courses to connect Lake Ontario to Lake Huron. It is now used mostly for pleasure craft, but it was once used to transport goods, and features two sets of hydraulic lift locks:

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  28. Church bells ring in Charleston, SC.
    In fact. In Charleston you always know what time it is within fifteen minutes because one of the bells chimes the hour, then every 15 minutes a “gong”. According to the quarter it is ringing. I can’t duplicate the sound here, but you can figure what it is.

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  29. Every time I go home on the train, I travel along the shores of Lake Ontario. I have seen the Atlantic Ocean, from both her western and eastern shores, so I know how the ocean looks. Those who have looked out to sea will know that the most uncanny thing about it is only seeing water on the horizon. Well, one gets that same feeling when looking out on Lake Ontario, and it is the smallest of the Great Lakes in surface area. One of my relatives used to live in a house that looked out on Lake Ontario from a quite high elevation, and on a clear day, you could a faint line that was New York state, but running along the lakeshore on the train, you cannot usually see to the other side.

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  30. We have quite a few 33’s, a few 45’s and some 78’s. How well they still play I don’t know. We do have a turntable, but have not used it in years.

    God used stained glass to speak to my heart over a concern I had. I had a sister-in-law who made a piece for me. This was a great surprise, since we were not close and never had gifted each other (except our wedding gift to her and my brother). She brought one for me and an identical one for one of my daughters. I heard that still small voice as she handed it to me. Nobody could ever convince me otherwise. The stained glass became a great comfort to me as I waited for God to work, which he, indeed, did.

    I have an aunt who works in it and she did several pieces designed for my mother. Unfortunately, those are all in the hands of strangers after the estate sale. This aunt did a doll house out of stained glass, lamps and so many wonderful windows. One is a large piece at her son’s home, that features each of the homes he had lived in at that point in time. She is quite the artist.

    Stained glass is a wonderful medium to tell stories and bring beauty. I remember one of Jesus holding a sheep being used to comfort children at a funeral for their grandmother.

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  31. Roscuro, I took high school by correspondence, which meant just me and a book, and tests I would mail back to get graded by some unseen teacher. No video or tape lectures, no help from a parent or a teacher (though you could write a letter and wait for a reply by mail if you got really stumped on something–I might have done that once or twice). I had no teacher or fellow students with whom to interact.

    One of my textbooks, don’t remember the subject, was talking about the importance of water to industry, and it pointed out that you could look at the 15 largest cities in America and note that they are all built on major bodies of water (e.g., Chicago on Lake Michigan).

    The funny thing, though, was that I was living in Phoenix, which had moved up to #9 in population (well within those top 15) . . . and it wasn’t. I mean, technically there is the Salt River, but I lived in Phoenix for 20 years and I’m not sure whether I’ve ever seen the Salt River. It certainly is not a noteworthy body of water, from anything I’ve heard. Phoenix has nearly doubled in population since I left (and the metro area has more than doubled) and is now #6 and within a stone’s throw of #5 (Philadelphia), which means it will probably reach #5 in the next four or five years.

    But growing up in Phoenix and loving the desert, I never really learned to love oceans or rivers, except as occasional vacation spots.

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  32. I grew up in the port of Los Angeles with a smorgasbord of cultures. It was a great place to grow up.

    I’ve been to our pastor’s house lots of times. He and his wife host a lot of parties!

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  33. Cheryl, times have changed, and water is no longer so important a transportation system, since airplanes carry cargo between continents now. But, in the days before the large transport aircraft, water was the best means for carrying heavy loads, so the older cities were built along major water routes, since communities grow around trade routes. Four of the five largest cities in North America have harbours: New York (Atlantic Ocean), Los Angeles (Pacific Ocean), Toronto (Lake Ontario), and Chicago (Lake Huron). Mexico City, which is both the largest and the oldest city in North America, does not have a harbour now, but was originally built on an island in the centre of a system of lakes – It is that historical fact which is the reason for why the city’s air quality is so poor, as the low elevation of the lake beds, which are now built over, means that there is poor air circulation, allowing fumes to hover indefinitely. Numbers four and five of Canada’s largest cities, Calgary and Edmonton, do not have harbours, as they are cities near the oil industry, but the top three, Toronto, Montreal (St. Lawrence River) and Vancouver (Pacific Ocean) do have harbours.

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  35. Roscuro, it was interesting to me partly because I wouldn’t have thought about most cities being on waterways and partly because reading it told me that even information in textbooks might be dated (and therefore inaccurate). Had I lived just about anywhere in the country other than Phoenix, I would probably have taken their word for it about the 15 largest cities.

    One day years ago a friend asked me what I did when I edited a book. I told her about a whole bunch of categories of things I look for: spelling, grammar, accurate quoting, factual accuracy, smooth flow, no unnecessary repetition, clarity. I might have told her that if a historical date is mentioned and I’m not sure that it is accurate, I look it up. (I don’t mean I look it up if it “looks wrong” but that I look it up unless I’m sure it’s right.) Likewise I will look up all Scripture quotations and any other quotes I can readily check. If everything I look up is found to be accurate, then I might not work hard to look up everything (though I always check all Scripture quotes), but if an author proves to be error prone, then I look up more. I double-check math, whether I’m editing or proofing–and have found enough math errors to tell me it’s a good idea. If an author tells a story about something I don’t know well (say the rules of football), I’m likely to run the passage by someone who knows more about the subject than I do, since those are the passages where error can easily creep in.

    When I finished the recitation of what all I check in a book, my friend said, “That gives me more confidence in the books I read.”

    I said, “It gives me less confidence. First because I know that most editors aren’t as detailed oriented as I am, and they’re less likely to double-check areas where they might not be very familiar. And second, because I know how many things could have slipped by me except that I happened to have some very specific knowledge. Through the years I’ve caught hundreds of random errors that many people would have missed, and I can’t help but think that many others have gotten by me. I am not going to let a text refer to the book of Revelations, for instance, or to a Canadian goose (it’s supposed to be a Canada goose), but I might well miss it if someone I’ve never heard of has a common first name but an unusual spelling of it, or if an author gets the rules of hockey wrong, or puts a South American city in the wrong part of the map, or any number of things that might look right but be wrong.

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  37. Oh, shoot! I thought I had caught up with the comments, and posted a couple of my own. Then I came back here after being gone for a while, only to find that I hadn’t clicked on the new day yet, so my comments were on the wrong day. Here’s the first one:

    I have a couple unrelated things to pass by you all today. First, a fellow believer on Facebook posted this (I don’t know if it really happened, but I have heard similar stories in the past):

    “The moment Barbara Bush died, there was a power outage in their neighborhood. The journalist retelling this story was on the phone with her parents in Houston who experienced it. Another reporter listening to what had happened said the story brought her chills.

    Yeah … I got em, too. They came with familiarity.

    When my roommate in L.A. died, I was already back in Ga.
    He passed away in the night from a long illness and was discovered in the morning by his roommate. She called 911, and while waiting for a responder, began to ritually clean the house. As the TV kept coming on and her vacuum cleaner kept shutting off, she tried unplugging the TV but that didn’t even work. Finally, she called out … “Terry, I’ve got to get this done!”

    Everything went back to normal.

    Meanwhile, 2,000 miles away:
    During Terry’s passage, I woke up that night … positioned in a spot where a small light was catching my eye. It was outside amongst the street lights and stars but it was an odd orange color. As the light began to grow I lumbered onto my porch like a scene from Close Encounters.

    But now I could tell what it was. The transformer on an unused telephone poll was combusting. As as I got “wow” out of my mouth, the tiny fire sparked majestically and began its flame-out until with a blink of an eye it just was gone.

    Now, what came out of my mouth was …. “somebody just died.”

    A while later the phone rang from one of my L.A. friends, and I knew what they were going to say. . .

    Maybe the greater the effect that one has in life, the harder it is to cross into eternity without leaving some sort of electrical residue. Or maybe it’s when one is so loved, that those who remain behind create a reaction upon the severance of our spiritual synapsis from the deceased.

    I hope this doesn’t offend anyone. I don’t think these stories fall into the category of new age or demonic. After all, someone else who was also very loved/respected had died in an even more dramatic way causing an earthquake some 2000 years ago.”

    So what do you think of stories like this? Have any of you ever experienced anything like that?

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  38. And the second:

    The other thing I was thinking about was . . .Neanderthals.

    It is so interesting to me that they are considered a different species from us, not in our “evolutionary line”, to evolutionists, yet were so human-like. It makes me wonder what they indeed were, and if the information we seem to have on them is correct or not.

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  39. I get claustrophobic if I can’t see water or at least know it is there. I have never been so far from land that I didn’t know where it was, and I do think it is odd my “obsession” with being near water. A friend used to joke that what part of my life you don’t see me, I am in the bath tub.

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  40. Cheryl, city populations can shift wildly in quite short periods of time, just ask Detroit. The city I currently am staying in had, according to Wikipedia, a little over two thirds of a million people, just three years ago; it now has over three quarters of a million. Toronto and Chicago keep exchanged places for fourth and fifth largest cities only five years ago by a margin of about 84,000 people, and Toronto has only widened the lead since. Population statistics shift rapidly, so any textbook over a year old would not be accurate. As an active reader of published studies in healthcare, I know that certain information needs to be got from the most current source – when writing research papers on healthcare treatments, nothing published over ten years ago is acceptable to cite, while under five years is preferable. That means that papers published when I was studying my first nursing program are now out of date, that is how fast information changes.

    Kizzie, speaking of out of date information, I think you might like to be brought up to speed about Neanderthals and what is currently taught about them. My information is quite current, since I heard about this in my anthropology class I took last fall. Neanderthals are currently believed to be simply other branch of humanity which migrated out of our land of origin (Africa according the evolutionists) perhaps a little earlier than the other groups of humans. Neanderthal DNA has been retrieved and it has been discovered that modern humans, particularly those from European countries, share extensive DNA with Neanderthals – in other words, Neanderthals and ‘modern’ humans had children together. That is only possible if both groups were fully human. So, they seem, and evolutionists and creationists can agree on this, to have simply been a specific group of humans who were distinct, but not different from other humans.

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  41. Kizzie @1:27, There are three things I think in quick succession when reading stories such as the above about electrical occurrences and death. First, the person is attaching undue importance to minor events. Second, the person is relying on anecdotes as evidence. Third, they do not appear to be aware of the one of first principles of statistical analysis, which is that correlation (two events occurring together or in close succession) does not equal causation (that one event caused the other).

    Many of the disease processes I have been studying about result in death. This I can say, as the body breaks down, less electricity (we use electrical currents in our nerve impulses and muscle movement) is produced, not more – that is why the lines on a heart monitor go flat when a person dies. As the body goes into its death spiral during organ failure and shock, the cellular processes and structures which normally maintain the electrical gradient malfunction, and the charged ions of sodium, potassium, and calcium, which normally compose that electrical gradient spill out of their compartments, like battery acid leaking out of battery cells, helping to cause further destruction of cells and tissues.

    Furthermore, electricity has no connection with the soul. The soul is spiritual. Electricity is a purely physical process involving the exchange of electrons that happens due to the atomic structure, which is composed of a nucleus of non-charged neutrons and positively charged protons, around which the negatively charged electrons spin rapidly. In effect, every atom is a potential battery. So, electricity is very much a part of the physical world, not the spiritual realm.

    One final point, electricity is known to kill. If there really was a causation connection between electrical outages and death, which I doubt, it is far more likely that the electrical outages are contributing to the death in some way, whether by electrical surges, as in the case of a lightening strike, or by loss of power. I know of a real life example of the latter which happened in West Africa – a patient we sent to a hospital for oxygen died when the electricity went out. The patient was an asthmatic and I had helped to treat this patient before they had to be sent to the hospital. So, I am afraid, where I to speak to your friend, I would find such sentimental speculation about death as some beautiful nebulous thing that alters electrical currents to be very irritating.

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  46. Kizzie, current speculation is that there were several versions of “humanoids” and those with the strongest genes survived. It sort of makes sense to me. Some of the “fringe” scientists (not mainstream evolutionary scientists) are saying this and more.

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  47. Kim, as long as those “humanoids” (really human beings) are descendants of Adam and Eve, I don’t care how many lines they find. But generally the term “humanoid” means ancestors of modern-day humans, and I don’t think Scripture allows for any such thing. Adam was created directly, and did not have animal ancestors.

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  50. Yeah, it’s that human-but-not-quite-human thing that gets me. I’ve known that scientists are saying that we have some Neanderthal DNA in us, but they also say that they were not as “human” (my word, not necessarily theirs) as homo sapiens. An article I saw recently said that it is now supposed that early cave art was done by Neanderthals.

    So I look at the biblical account of our creation, and wonder where they fit in there, if indeed they fit at all.

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  51. A belated bonne anniversaire to Bob.

    Kizzie, Cheryl, Kim, et al., I looked it up in my anthropology textbook. The Latin taxonomy for ‘modern’ humans is Homo sapiens sapiens, while the Latin taxonomy for Neanderthals is Homo sapiens neanderthalensis; in other words, modern humans and Neanderthals are so similar by biological standards that they are just two branches of the same species. Recent genome comparisons keep raising the amount of shared genes between the two. The textbook mentions one Neanderthal gravesite found in the Shanidar cave of Iraq. In their burials, they clearly used rites, and included medicinal herbs in the graves, as well as tools. One of the skeletons found in the Shanidar cave was of an approximately fifty year old Neanderthal male. The skeletal evidence showed that this male was blind and had deformities of the arms and legs, rendering him crippled, and that these deformities had existed since his childhood. The Neanderthals were capable of caring for a disabled person throughout life. They were human.

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  52. There was talk of church bells earlier. The bells from a church at the end of Main St., not far from me, strike the hours throughout each day. I love that sound! I also love that, when the windows are open, I can hear the trains whistling as they go through town. Our police station is located in the old train depot.

    And then there are the summer’s Friday night races at the Stafford Speedway, which can be heard – loudly – all over town. But I’m not complaining. The sound is oddly comforting. Here’s a little about it:

    “Stafford Motor Speedway is a semi-banked 1/2 mile paved oval located in Stafford Springs, Connecticut. Stafford Speedway is a NASCAR Whelen All-American Series sanctioned track with NASCAR weekly racing every Friday night May through September. This track is known as the home of the SK Modifieds and drivers such as Ryan Preece and Ted Christopher. The track hosts weekly events throughout the season including 3 NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour events. Notable events include the NAPA Auto Parts Spring Sizzler (April 29th & 30th), SK 5K (June 29th), and Fall Final (September 29th & 30th).”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Motor_Speedway

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  53. Kizzie, I’m not sure if you have ever read G. K. Chesterton. In one of his books (The Everlasting Man, I am pretty sure) he makes the case that we know very little about “cave people.” We don’t know, for example, whether they actually lived in caves or whether that was somewhere that they stayed for a while (a hunting camp, perhaps). We also know that they were good observers of animals and some were good artists. Nothing we actually “know” about them matches the wild speculation about them being primitive and stupid.

    Now, I have never studied cave men, and Chesterton was known to write off the cuff. Perhaps his own writing doesn’t match what we actually do know about them. But I found it a fascinating way of looking at it.

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  54. Roscuro – How do you think that fits into the biblical narrative, especially the part about their being another branch of the human species? Would it be like race or ethnicity?

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  55. Kizzie, the Neanderthals fit under some of the many descendants of Noah and his wife. The worldwide Flood would have destroyed Neanderthal gravesites if they were pre-flood burials. Yes, I am aware that dating methods date those burials to somewhere between 600,000 to 130,000 years ago, but I also know that Carbon 14 is the most common dating method for sites with biological material, and that, due to the half-life of Carbon 14, it theoretically becomes undetectable in tissue at about 50,000 years (both my secular high school biology and anthropology classes admitted to that fact). So when people go around claiming to have dated a burial site to something like 400,000 years ago, I get very skeptical.

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  56. Cheryl – No, I have not read that, but I have wondered about the truth about “cave men”, and have often thought that “early man” must have been as intelligent as we are.

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  58. I think of humans as being made as one intact species, so to speak, so talk of another branch is what I am trying to fit in. (Btw, my questions are not arguing with you, if they come across that way to you, just looking for clarification and input.)

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  59. Furthermore, Carbon 14 dating methods are actually dating estimates – they are a guess based on the theoretical half life of Carbon 14 (the half life is the time it takes for a substance to breakdown until there is half the amount there was before – Carbon 14’s is about 5700, making it theoretical, since people weren’t measuring Carbon 14 levels 5000 years ago). Carbon 14 is a radioactive isotope (form) of the element Carbon, that is created by atmospheric radiation. Live biological tissue (plants, animals, humans) take in the Carbon 14 along with regular Carbon, so there is a certain amount present when the biological tissue dies, and that amount theoretically decays the longer the tissue is dead. But we know that Carbon 14 levels fluctuate in the atmosphere – for example, apparently, due to burning of the fossil fuels, there is less Carbon 14 in the atmosphere in recent years than there was in the past. So, we do not really know how much Carbon 14 was in a dead biological tissue when it died, so we do not know for certain how large a percentage much is left. Essentially Carbon 14 dating methods are based on a lot of assumptions. By the way, this information comes from reading secular sources, not refutation articles from creationists. Having training in how to discern sound scientific research from unsound scientific research comes in handy sometimes.

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  60. Kizzie, early people might have invented different things than we have, but I have a hunch they were actually smarter. First of all, they lived longer, and so they had more time to learn. Second, we have had quite a few more generations, and thus quite a few thousand years more of mutation and health issues. Adam would almost certainly have been “smarter” than we are, but I think the early generations of his descendants probably were, too.

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  61. Kizzie, there were three main branches of Noah’s line – I love reading the Genesis account of the generations of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and the account is reiterated in I Chronicles. The genealogies of the Bible are there for a reason, and they are an excellent source of information. Shem, Ham, and Japheth all obtained their DNA from Noah and his wife. Shem, Ham, and Japheth’s wives, however, were descendants of Adam and Eve, but not of Noah and his wife. In effect, although all humans on earth are descendants of Noah, all the children of Shem, Ham, and Japheth had half their DNA from another source, meaning that there is more than just Noah and his wife’s DNA in the mix. The Neanderthals were very probably one tribe which split off from the others.
    Let me explain from what I know of history – meaning written history. Much of Western and Northern Europe is now a combination of the Celtic and Germanic tribes, but we know the Celtic and Germanic tribes were not the first settlers of Europe. There are traces still surviving of these earlier settlers – for example, the Basque of southern France and northern Spain, whose language bears no resemblance to the Latin based French and Spanish dialects, and indeed has no resemblance to any other European language (http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34175224). The Basque’s genetic makeup is also distinct from the Gallic (a branch of the Celtic) peoples that settled in France and Spain (France was called Gaul in Roman times).

    The Neanderthals were simply another branch like the Basque. Since modern humans bear Neanderthal DNA, it is pretty clear that the Neanderthal branch never actually died out, they were just assimilated into the ‘modern’ branch by intermarriage, as do all people groups over time. If I was to trace my ancestry back only 200 hundred years, I find Friesland, English, Scottish, Irish, Acadian (French Canadian), and quite possibly (as recent research on one of my great grandparents’ surnames indicates) Roma, which is also known as Gypsy. That is a lot of different branches of Noah’s descendants over only two centuries, and most estimates place the Flood about 6000 years ago. That gives plenty of time for many different tribes of humans to separate and recombine many times over.

    Too much is made about the distinctive characteristics of Neanderthals, and the fuss over them sprang out of the attempt to find the missing link between apes and humans – in other words, those who first spun the theories about Neanderthals being distinct from modern humans had an axe to grind. Their theories are proving more incorrect each year more information is gathered. In another decade, provided study is allowed to continue uninterrupted, there will probably be an announcement that the Neanderthals were in fact modern humans. After all, the evolutionary anthropologists now admit that humans never descended from any of the modern apes – instead, the honour of our ancestry is now extended to a theoretical cousin of the theoretical ancestors of the apes.*

    *I say theoretical, because when you see the few frail fragments of bone which they claim as being our ancestral relatives of ape ancestors, you tend to question their forensics – evolutionary anthropologists could give the technicians at CSI and NCIS a real run for their money, since they work from far less evidence.

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  63. Roscuro – Okay, so you mean ‘branch” as in a family or tribal branch, not as in another form of human. That’s where I was having trouble.

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  65. Well rk I looked that up to see what you had been training for today…and I still don’t get it!! I certainly am glad that you enjoyed whatever that was 😂 Are you all getting any of this moisture down there? We have about 3 inches of snow from this storm today…!

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  67. The thing I do love ❤️ about summer (and almost-summer) is the long daylight hours. Time to water, sit on the patio with the pet collection, and just generally enjoy a couple hours of remaining daylight after getting home from work.

    But I still yearn for Christmas …

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