Saturday, May 19, 2018

Oh Noes! Two Sabbath's In A Row! What's A Church Member To Do?



Since tomorrow is Pentecost in most Christian churches and in most Church of God's around the world, except for those in blasphemer James Malm's cult who will be keeping it on May 27, it also presents a predicament for Church of God members who find their lives having to deal with two sabbaths in a row.  Two days without TV, or movies, or doing other fun things you might do on a regular Sunday.  For some, including children it is two days of taxing boredom.  First, being bored with sermons on Saturday by men who have recycled their sermons so many times they know them by heart, to now having to sit and listen to the same canned sermons on Pentecost.

Never fear though, God's ONLY end-time prophet and the only TRUE Church of God leader has the solution to all of that boredom:

So, you have two Sabbaths in a row and perhaps you wonder what you and/or your family should do?
Well, in addition to study, prayer, and church services, there are various quizzes and Bible games at the COGwriter website.
One is the Pentecost Quiz, developed by Michael Thiel.
A very popular one is the Who Wants to be a Biblical Millionaire? quiz, also developed by Michael Thiel.
It is an interesting game. It has over 1,000 different questions. Think of it as an entertaining way to assist your doctrinal memory.
Also, since it is the Pentecost season, perhaps you may wish to take Michael’s earlier (less sophisticated technically) Pentecost Quiz.
I believe that the quizzes and animations help reach a wider audience than just the doctrinal and news articles here.
We also have the Study the Bible Course available. 
I can solve that problem.  Read Banned! I can guarantee you will NEVER be bored like you are when listening to jazz hand's Bob!

Regrets...We've Had a Few

I regret 
"Coming into the Truth"

Every now and then, usually  in the middle of the night,  I wish I had never heard of Herbert W. Armstrong, Garner Ted , the Worldwide Church of God and the Wonderful World Tomorrow


We're taught to try to live life without regret. But why? Using her own tattoo as an example, Kathryn Schulz makes a powerful and moving case for embracing our regrets.





...and too



Friday, May 18, 2018

Dear Cartoon Bob: Call me. Sincerely-Lawrence M. Krauss




For better and for worse, these are heady times in cosmology. Over the past two decades, astronomers have pinned down the age of the universe quite precisely (13.72 billion years), confirmed its geometry as perfectly flat through exquisite maps of the Big Bang's faint afterglow, and found that its expansion is speeding up rather than slowing down. Three researchers shared the physics Nobel Prize for the latter discovery just last month.

Yet, embarrassingly, cosmologists have also come to realize that everything we see – the myriad celestial bodies that our telescopes reveal – constitutes a tiny sliver of what makes up the cosmic pie. Mysterious "dark matter," undetected except through its gravitational tug on galaxies, count for much more. The rest, a whopping 73 per cent, is in the even more bizarre form of "dark energy," the dominance of which dictates a dismal long-term future for the universe.

In A Universe From Nothing, Lawrence Krauss, celebrated physicist, speaker and author, tackles all that plus a whole lot else. In fewer than 200 pages, he delivers a spirited, fast-paced romp through modern cosmology and its strong underpinnings in astronomical observations and particle physics theory.

Other popular science books have covered many of the same topics, but Krauss's slim volume is bolder in its premise and more ambitious in its scope than most. He makes a persuasive case that the ultimate question of cosmic origin – how something, namely the universe, could arise from nothing – belongs in the realm of science rather than theology or philosophy. What's more, he goes on to argue, our current understanding makes it quite plausible that the universe indeed emerged from quantum nothingness, thus dispensing with any need for divine intervention. There is free lunch after all.

The book traces its own beginnings to a lecture that Krauss delivered in 2009. The video of the lecture has netted nearly a million views online, becoming something of a YouTube hit (though not compared to a clip of a piano playing cat, with 23 million views). So it is not surprising that the book at times has the tone of a lecture: You can almost hear the author's gleeful voice and picture a wry smile. Some sentences run long: I counted one at 107 words. Exclamation marks are sprinkled liberally. There are delightful historical anecdotes and humorous commentary. My favorite story is about the amateur astronomer who persuaded Einstein to publish "the results of a little calculation" on how gravity could act as a lens, the basis of techniques now used by researchers to weigh distant galaxy clusters and to find planets around other stars.

The author does not shy away from tackling complex physical concepts, and often finds clever ways to illustrate them. Even if you don't feel fully conversant with eternal inflation (of the cosmological, not economic, variety) or false vacuum energy by the end, you will almost certainly be rewarded with interesting insights, and a sense of awe, if you persist. Krauss explains how scientists know what they claim to know, for example, laying out the multiple, compelling lines of evidence for a hot Big Bang. He is careful to delineate what is well supported by experiments or observations and what is at the more speculative end of the scientific discussion.

A Universe From Nothing is not always an easy read – unless you are a science buff familiar with some of the lingo and the ideas – but it is surely a very rewarding one to plow through. The many fans of Krauss will devour it, and rejoice. Others, picking up a cosmology book for the first time, perhaps after watching Big Bang Theory or curious about what's new in astronomy, would find it demanding, but also mind-blowing. Those who feel the need to invoke a supernatural cause for the origin of the universe may – should? – find it disturbing.

"Changing by what we mean by things is called learning. It doesn't happen in theology but it does happen in scholarship."

Lawrence Krause-A Universe From Nothing