I first began using the Internet as a research tool for my work, but then along came 9/11/01. I began researching Islam, geopolitics and the current administration and its members. Might as well. our grant dried up fast. I also began messaging people from all over the world; India, China, Japan, Syria, Dubai, Turkey, Switzerland, the Netherlands, England, Germany, Israel, Belgium and Egypt, among others, including Vietnam and Thailand. I developed a close friendship with and Egyptian man and his family and in February, 2003, I went to Giza and spent a month with this Egyptian family. No tours or tour buses, with 4 star hotels for me. Though I visited the pyramids and Luxor with my hosts, as I knew my mother, a student of ancient civilizations, would haunt me if I did not at least hit the high spots, most of my time was spent visiting the villages out side the city of Cairo. Unfortunately, there was no time for Alexandria.

It was an amazing experience. Thankfully, two of the family members spoke fair English and a friend of the family spoke better English than this American. Egyptians are known for their friendliness and their hilarious sense of humor. Somehow, I’m not quite sure how, I became a member of the family and I will always consider that one of the greatest honors of my life. My Arabic was and still is pathetic, but I made an effort to learn all they tried to teach me, but sometimes you don’t need language. The eyes do not lie. Often, during my trip, I would listen to the CD by Elton John, “Love songs”…” Can you feel the love tonight?” as we would all be sitting around together in Papa’s living room. Everyone felt it. It was certainly a love beyond most reason and rationality, given what was happening in the world. I watched Colin Powell’s show-and-tell lies to the U.N. from Papa’s living room, surrounded by his two daughters and one of his sons, who sat protectively beside me, a beautiful young man old enough to have been my own son.

There were countless conversations with people in the city and out in the villages. They were sometimes hard conversations; difficult questions and even more difficult answers, both ways, but always there was humor, in spite of it all. What I learned from these people is priceless, as it certainly helps me understand more about what’s really going on than I knew before.

I visited my Egyptian family twice more, the next time when the bombs were falling on Baghdad and the third in the early spring of 2004, just before the Abu Ghraib revelations. I haven’t returned since, though I keep in touch with them as best I can. I guess there are many reasons why I haven’t been back, like lack of funds and being more politically active than I have been in years, but I suppose my main reason is shame. Now, I have been diagnosed with Cancer, squamous cell carcinoma, stage 3b. Radiation and chemo killed every cancer cell in what was a very large tumor, a bit of a miracle in itself, but this kind of cancer tends to come back and the statistics aren’t good, but I find myself not caring all that much about the statistical death sentence but, rather, the life I have left and what to do with it. (The tumor was inoperable because of where it was and surgery is the only cure. My oncologist calls what I am in now, remission.) I call it new life…a candle burning brighter than ever before.

The Internet has also given me a dear friend in New Zealand, where I have a standing invitation, anytime. I am seriously considering taking her up on it. I feel a push to leave the country I have loved; its mountains, high meadows, sea shores, deserts, waterfalls and the people, at least some of them, who really are the salt of the earth.

It seems obvious to me that absolutely nothing is going to happen to the men and women of this appalling administration for international and domestic crimes,so many in fact that, I have lost count. While I stopped supporting this government in 2002, when it finally hit me what was happening, I feel that even my presence, now, that I see no hope that these people will be held accountable for their actions, is tantamount to approval somehow. I can no longer bring myself to stay and try to fight for what I believe is right. My energy is not what it used to be.

Nevertheless, as I told my kiwi friend not long after we first began communicating, this is the first war during which we are not totally reliant on our own corporate controlled news media and others around the world aren’t reliant on their news media either, Furthermore, we can talk to each other, hopefully without hysteria and hatred.

One of the old indigenous tribes of America, it may be the Hopi, have a prophesy about a net, like a spiders web, that will one day cover the earth and protect it from the worst that could happen, if there is wisdom in its use.

Thanks for the great article and making me think again. I’m going to forward it to my kiwi friend.

When we asked how he became a Christian, he said:

Walter Vieth: ‘It’s a long story, but I was an evolutionist, and an atheist. I started to get interested in the subject of Biblical prophecy—for example, prophecies in the book of Daniel, chapter two. They were written long before the events portrayed there, and the kingdoms came in succession just as it says. And the Dead Sea Scrolls seemed to confirm the authenticity and antiquity of the Book of Daniel. So I started to get interested in the rest of Scripture, including Genesis.’

Dr Veith said that he had already been undergoing some ‘evolution’ himself—he started off as a classical Darwinian ‘gradualist’, believing that evolution happened by the slow accumulation of little changes. But because the fossil record does not show creatures gradually changing into others, he was drawn to the later idea that evolution must have happened ‘in spurts and bursts’. He noticed also that evolutionists were conceding that in the so-called Cambrian rocks, supposedly not long after the dawn of multi-celled life:

‘Even the chordates were there before they were supposed to be. Articles were appearing in the literature about “explosive evolution” in the Cambrian, in which there were already chordates, the phylum to which man belongs. So basically it was just one logical step to believing in Creation.’

Natural selection

There were other problems with evolutionary theory to which Walter Veith’s training and experience alerted him—for instance, natural selection. He said:
Professor Walter Veith
Dr Walter J. Veith

‘The very name “selection” implies that you’re choosing between two or more variants. So that means that the end result is extinction of one in favour of the other. Natural selection never increases the number of variants; it only decreases them. So my problem with it was, “how does a mechanism that makes less and less end up making more and more”?

‘The answer obviously is, it doesn’t. That leaves chance mutations as the only source of the new information. You have to have all these new genes coding for new features, all interacting precisely with one another, continually arising as animals get more complex, by chance. To believe that, you have to have a lot of faith. It’s certainly not something I see in my work as a zoologist.’

Some fascinating comments by Dr Veith concerned the tremendous built-in ability of some animals to adapt to changing conditions, much too rapidly to have anything to do with any proposed evolutionary mechanisms or millions of years. For example, island deer have been seen to respond to a scarcity of resources by decreasing their body size, by as much as two-thirds. He also pointed out:

‘Naked mole rats, if the ecological circumstances get tough, respond with a whole host of drastic rearrangements of their genetic material, so-called “jumping genes” doing their thing. This creates a far greater variety in the offspring, which of course has an effect on selection.

‘I think that organisms were endowed with a great capacity for variation, and that we haven’t begun to figure out all the mechanisms in the latent DNA. Evolutionists have tried to write this DNA off as leftover “junk”, but it is increasingly recognized as playing an important (though still largely unknown) role.’

After the Flood

We asked Prof. Veith whether such built-in mechanisms for rapid variation could be the remnants of mechanisms from the original kinds which, after the Flood, enabled populations such as the original ‘dog kind’ to rapidly diversify into wolves, coyotes, dingoes, etc? He replied:

‘Absolutely. A lot of the rearrangement can simply come about by playing different tunes on the same piano, as it were. There are organisms where there appears to have been a fusion of chromosomes, but basically the same information is there, just the order in which it is arranged is different, which has tremendous effects on the organisms themselves.’ 1

So what happened after he became a believer in creation?

‘When I started lecturing to my students (about creation evidences) at my previous university, it caused havoc, and I had to leave because of it.’

How about the present university?

‘It’s still very secular and evolutionistic, but it’s much more tolerant of other views. They’re a bit reticent to let me lecture on the question of evolution, but I get opportunities to put the counter view. The occasional creation/evolution lecture after hours is normally well attended and appreciated. The students here tend to have more religious roots, so they are not as evolutionarily inclined. We have a large number of the previously disadvantaged community, and when people have been through tough times like they have, there tend to be closer ties with God.’

Racism

Here was an obvious opportunity to raise the subject of apartheid, etc. Dr Veith agreed totally that if people had taken the Genesis history of mankind seriously, they would have realized that we were all closely related, anyway, so the differences between ‘races’ must be trivial (which is now confirmed by genetic and molecular studies). He said:

‘The paradigm of evolution (even in its pre-Darwinian manifestations) is one of the root causes of racism.’

We asked him about the way in which some in the former South African regime had actually tried to base their racism on the Bible. Dr Veith replied,

‘Yes, and that is a gross distortion of the Scriptures. My Bible tells me that God made all people from one man [Acts 17:26] and that the Gospel is for every nation, tribe, and people [Rev. 14:6].

‘Some even used the account in Genesis about the “curse on Ham” to justify discrimination. But it was not on Ham, but on Canaan [Genesis 9:25–26], and there is no evidence whatsoever of any discrimination on the basis of race—on the contrary, that is against the whole thrust of the Bible.’

Animals without death?

With his experience in ecological matters, we asked Dr Veith about a common argument raised against the clear Biblical teaching that death and bloodshed among animals2 only commenced after the Fall of Adam. I.e., that looking at today’s world, it appears that one needs death in order to have a finely balanced food chain.

‘But that’s looking at what we have today, not what we had in the beginning. We only have a fraction of the flora and fauna that were there at first—the fossil record bears that out. We don’t know what animals ate in the past. Tooth structure is not a good indicator. The panda bear is classified on the basis of its tooth structure as a carnivore, but it eats bamboo. An animal that has the tools for the original diet may also find them suitable for a more carnivorous diet if a need arose. There are many examples of that. With the destruction of northern hemisphere forests by acid rain, for instance, animals like chipmunks, normally seed-eaters, will now eat animals run over on the road.

‘New Zealand’s kea parrots started to attack and eat sheep. They have the same talons and beak structure as a bird of prey but weren’t using them for this until their food source ran out. And most bears—even fish are only eaten by them at the time of the salmon run, because there are no berries around in that early season. Later, they become 70–80% herbivore, even though they have the “equipment” to be carnivorous.

‘Even the venom apparatus in snakes may have been used to inject an enzyme to soften food. So, many things may not necessarily have been designed for killing other animals. But it does indicate in the Bible that God restructured some organisms.

‘I think He used the existing genetic material and just reorganized the way it was expressed. For instance, a thorn is a modified leaf, just curled tightly upon itself. So the gene didn’t necessarily change; the way in which it was expressed changed. Or perhaps some latent genetic information switched on after the Fall.’

Playing God

Dr Veith’s current research appears to be showing that herbivorous animals fed with large amounts of animal protein are in danger of osteoporosis from excess calcium excretion.3 He said:

‘They lock up these animals and feed them anything from edible plastic to manure and ground-up animals. That’s one of the factors behind the spread of mad cow disease, 4 one of the things I am working on. People treat farm animals like commodities, because they think they are just chance accumulations of evolved genes. So if you think an animal doesn’t have everything it should have, why not just play God, and take a couple of genes from something else and add them? Animals were also created for man’s pleasure and companionship, not as mere food factories. Today, there is of course also the opposite side of the evolutionary coin, the animal rights movement, which elevates animals to the level of humans, since all are seen as just chance evolved entities.’

We asked him if, in the light of man’s dominion mandate over other creatures in Genesis, he would have problems with all forms of ‘genetic engineering’ in animals. He said:

‘No. But I would have a major problem transplanting genes that totally changed the physiology. For example transgenic pigs, where the gene for human growth hormone is engineered into pigs. You get very large pigs, but they are also incredibly diseased—because these are not “add-on” genes, they alter something integral to the normal developmental process of the animal.

‘You need proper research to be able to make the decisions as to where to draw the line.’

Dr Veith is also convinced about the evidence for a young world, and a global Flood. He said:

‘I gave a lecture at the University of Cape Town once, and presented the evidence from my slides that the famous Yellowstone petrified “forests” were not a succession of separate forests over vast ages, but were the result of a catastrophic event. 5

‘The geologists were so furious they exploded and called me a liar, that such research had never been done. Knowing where it had been published, I asked them, “What journal would you like it to be published in?” They said, “If it was in something like The Journal of Paleontology it would have been acceptable.” I said, “That’s exactly where it is, and you’ll have a copy on your desk.” 6 So I sent them a copy, with the article by a creationist scientist. And the next day they came back and said, “But it says nothing about a world-wide Flood.” I said, “Exactly. If it said it was a world Flood, nobody would ever publish it. But it’s clear that these logs were deposited by massive catastrophism.”’

We asked Dr Veith for a final comment to leave with readers. He said:

‘Read Genesis just as it stands. There’s a lot of evidence to favour the words written there. For evolution and long ages, there’s nothing but propped-up theories that have to be re-propped and re-propped every so often to be maintained. But God’s Word is timeless.’

Jane.

Secondly, according to Goedel’s Incompleteness theorem, there are always thing that are true about any given system which cannot be proven within that system. For example, God may very well be true for our universe, but within that universe we cannot prove it.

In short, I enjoyed the lucidity and moderation of this blog.

But those are the only differences, the differences to the background from which a person emerges. Differences in the lessons we think worthy to be taught, differences in the values we think worthy to be keep. But it is not us that chooses those differences, it is those who came before us, and those before them, and thus culture and tradition becomes not our differences, but our legacy left by people who were, outside of culture and tradition, the same as us.

We think ourselves superior to the past, we think ourselves more knowledgable, more morally aware and morally ‘correct’, we think ourselves more developed ‘people’, advanced not just in knowledge or society, but in every single way to our predecessors, but this is not true. All that advances is the legacy, and we are born afresh into it. We are the same people, capable of the same wrongs, same ills, but the same enlightenments and same advancements. We can live a squalid, mundane life of ‘ignominy’, or we can aspire to be a burning, illuminating star. Human life remains human life, atleast for the time being, but it our legacy, our culture and traditions that change and continue.

Ultimatly it will be our future that decides whether or not this current collection of generations is worthy of being viewed for good or ill in history, all we can do is aspire to the same goals that our predecessors did, aim for the highest gifts we can think of to give to our legacy and our future, just like our predecessors did.

Traditions show you that greatness was aspired to. That [i]people lived[/i].

well, i agree, but MANY reliions dont do that.
i was raised catholic, but became buddhist years ago.
i also learned a good bit about deism
deism.org
too bad Americans forgot about this (NON-religion)
Deism believes in the “God of reason”
Jefferson was a Deist, so were many more of our founding fathers.
Most Deists now think that religion should be taxed, and i agree. instead of the president of the US giving my tax $ to faith based orgs, it should be the other way around.

As far as abortion, well, i certianly think its WRONG, but what is even MORE wrong, is the government telling me what to do.
Wait till George Bushes daughter is raped by someone on crack with aids, and lets see if Bush wants her to have an abortion?

You mentioned the POPE, well, last i heard, he said that the people in Iraq should be brought to justice.
sounds like just another bush backer to me.
instead of saying how the violence should stop,
it seems he wants more dead people.

“The worst thing about this whole ‘science v religion’ debate/fiasco, is that really most of the people are on the same damn side.”

unfortunatly i disagree.
there is a REAL problem here.
many of these people want us to turn back the hands of time, like galleleo and darwin never existed.
This is a turning point in our civilization to keep believing in the tooth fairy, or to wake up to reality as it is.
The real unfortunate thing is that the bible is a great book to learn how to live moraly, but was never meant to be taken literally.
The right wing christinas forget that many books never made it to the bible , they were not deemed to be needed by certian persons hunderes of years after it was written.
many books of the bible were written well after Christ died, and written by man.
its not the word of god, its the word of mans interpretation of another man that was dead for 100 years.
Then, edited, translated, and edited again.

A Buddhist can lok at the bible and see no problems with the lessons it tries to teach, actually, budhism teaches many of the same lessons.

In the end, we are not perfect, therefore can not see things perfectly, and our vision is skewed by this.
So everyone interpretation of “GOD” will be different.
the question is, will these differences change us for the better, or worse.
Brad
http://911review.org
911review

There is no argument. To disagree like most anything else is vanity, arguably the most deadly sin. Do I pit my wit against yours? I think not unless you disagree.

Faith is what we have to give back to Jesus(oops,I’ve said it now). It’s all we have to give and is all He seems to want. In comparison our faith in exchange for The Blood Of Christ doesn’t appear equal to me but for Christ Jesus(there I go again), giving His All in exchange for my filth is why It’s in my faith to believe Him worthy of my worship. Nothing else can compare.

We can have fun playing with words all we want but The Word Of God was written to be the last word. Prove me wrong, not that you should feel challenged.

I find myself wanting to say this more and more the older I get(the more I listen), coming to terms with that Deity is as personal as our most inner thoughts. Relax your keyboard Brendan, it’s because we’re not The Word Of God that what Jesus(oops, sorry) wants of us can’t even be spelled out not to mention argue the point. It’s all in two factors, (1)names written in The Book Of Life and (2)that gift Jesus(=/) sent us when we first believed, The Holy Spirit that comforts us and teaches/instructs us in ways indescribable.

I suddenly feel the need to focus on my prayers. I have you to thank for that Brendan this time. Our witness exists despite our vanity. Such is the power and mystery of God. cya

P.S. I wasn’t seriously apologizing for mentioning the name of Jesus, there is nothing I could be more proud of.

You’re already notorious and worthwhile for I have read you and that is something not everyone can say. Perhaps, tho not Irish, by virtue of being under heaven, we are brethren as well. This brings to mind how, at the age of 17(52 now), a lady called me on the phone, most randomly, with this message as I recall, “So you’re a Cast. That’s a proper German name. We Germans must stick together”, to which I replied, “so yea, uh…HUH???”. I do have some German ancestry and English and maybe Irish but what I’m most proud of is the wild Apache that runs through my veins.

I could never be a public speaker for vanity is relentless for reaching out to defeat me. If I could survive it, perhaps I would choose to validate the concept of resurrection if only for poor Mr. Wilde. I love being old. My mind weighs heavy with the keys to conflicts and controversy. The mystery of thoughtfulness I no longer find wrapped in the enigma of truth, it is my right of passage.

Keep in mind, supremacy can never be refuted if that’s what it is. Lucky for me, this is a tag I’ve relegated only to God Almighty (fodder for the atheistic/agnostic pipe to smoke). In this world, injustice will always reign supreme with the educated adding fuel to its raging scourge. Being that we all are sinners, the uneducated pose less a threat to humanity.

In closing(hate that phrase),

Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix loved their drugs. Too much? Who knows? I hate death, but thanks for a most delicious read Brendan.

All the best,
rdc