Is the UN preparing to attack Religion?

If you had to choose between Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech, which would you choose?

Now, you’re thinking, ‘I don’t have to choose, I already have both.’ Are you sure?

 

Do camel bones disprove the Bible?

 

The news just loves to jump on a story that seems to contradict the Bible.

Headlines all over the net, from USA Today to the New Zealand Herald are blithely repeating a story that biblical archaeologists have proven wrong the account in Genesis chapter 12, which says that a ruler in Egypt gave Abraham some domesticated camels.

The story goes like this:

Dr Erex Ben-Yosef and Dr Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures found camel bones in an archaeological site that was anciently a copper smelting community, a dig that has been positively dated to between the 11th century and the 9th century B.C.E. They found camel bones at the level of 1000 B.C.E. and later, but none earlier. They used radiocarbon dating to confirm that the bones were indeed 10th century - 1000 years before Christ.

Therefore, say they, domestic camels weren’t around Israel prior to 1000 BCE.

Leaving aside for the moment that they’re digging up a copper smelting site that dates to the exact time period when the Bible says Solomon was busy using thousands of tons of copper to build the Temple and its utensils – giving more credence to the biblical narrative, not less - there are holes in their assertion big enough to drive a camel caravan through.

Archaeologists – the real ones, not the kind who love to grab headlines claiming they’ve disproved the Bible – have established that camels were domesticated in Southern Arabia somewhere between 3000 and 2000 B.C.E., and were definitely in Egypt by 2000 B.C.E.

From Southern Arabia to Canaan is about 1200 miles, and to Egypt even less.

A camel can walk, fully loaded, about 30 miles a day for days on end.

It would therefore take a camel train about 40 days to make the trip from Southern Arabia to Abraham’s home in the Promised land, less than that to travel there from Egypt.

Honest archaeologists have found abundant evidence of a brisk trade between Judea and Southern Arabia as early as 2000 B.C.E. If that trade was not moving by camel, how was it moving?

So, they found bones of a camel they’ve dated to 1000 B.C.E. and they claim camel bones are absent in earlier excavations. However, the same articles also contain this intriguing sentence:

“Any bones found in earlier archaeological layers most likely belong to wild camels, which are believed to have been in the area from the Neolithic period or earlier.”

Well, that’s convenient: ‘We’ve decided there were no camels around when the Bible says Abraham had camels, so if any camel bones are found that could be dated back to that time, they must be wild camels.’ How’s that for circular reasoning?

According to real experts, camel domestication had to have happened in stages. Because wild camels thrived in a desert unfriendly to predators, they were likely easy for humans to prey on. Gradually, people would have figured out how to herd them, then how to gentle them for milking, then for draft work, and finally how to ride them. To this day, there are wild camels, camels slaughtered for meat, camels used for milking and plowing and hauling loads, and camels used for riding.

So what do the bones of a camel in a 10th century B.C.E. dig prove? What is proven by the absence of ‘domestic’ camel bones in older digs? Well, I suppose I could just as easily claim that the bones prove:

• That 10th century B.C.E. copper miners developed a taste for camel steak that they hadn’t had previously, or,
• I could claim that camels had been rare in the area prior to that time period because the mining industry was too small to justify their presence, whereas the industry got a colossal boost from Solomon’s Temple construction project, or
• I could as easily claim that camel ‘technology’ was hoarded by Arabians, and thus while camels may have come to the copper area frequently bringing trade goods and carrying away copper, the absence of camel bones only proves that the traders didn’t allow the valuable animals to be slaughtered in Judea.
• I could even claim that, perhaps camel bones disintegrate after a few thousand years, depending on what kind of soil they ended up in.

What about other texts besides the Bible that refer to camels?

“Hamilton cites an Alalakh text (18th century B.C.E.) with ration lists including that of "one (measure of) fodder - camel", the very fact of feeding it seems to imply its domestication or use as a pack animal. Camel bones were also excavated at Mari in an early house possibly dating back to c.2400 B.C.E. An 18th century B.C.E. Byblos relief depicts a kneeling camel further suggesting its domestication and use as a beast of burden.”

Interestingly, according to that same author, “…the list of possessions [Abraham] gained in Egypt excludes horses…” As horses were not in use in Egypt before 1800 B.C.E., that’s not surprising.

But let’s reason on this: if Genesis was a fable written in the 10th century or later as Ben-Yosef and Sapir-Hen are claiming, at a time when Egypt was famous for horses, wouldn’t that unknown theoretical writer have claimed that Abraham was given horses instead of, or in addition to, camels?

The preponderance of the evidence, then, is that the account in Genesis 12 is true: Abraham was given camels while in Egypt. His successors Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph also used with them.

 

And a few camel bones unearthed in a 10th century B.C.E. dig do nothing to disprove that.

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com.

 

Is Jesus God?

Can you fill in the right side of this spreadsheet?

Image by Bill K. Underwood

This will be short.

A while back, a lady told me her Bible said unequivocally that Jesus is God. She showed me John 1:1. I showed her about five scriptures I felt showed Jesus to be God's son, not God. Yet, somehow, in her mind her one scripture outweighed my five.

Part 5: Blood, medical ethics, and the Bible

In a 2010 survey on ethics, 10,000 doctors were asked, ‘What was your biggest ethical dilemma?’

The top five were:

Blood Medicine, Part 4: Real advances in blood technology

The ABCs of emergency medicine are changing.

This is going to be a complex discussion. I'll make it as simple as I can, but anything having to do with emergency medical care will be. I'll make it as clear as I can. Before we’re done, you may find yourself making a list to carry in your wallet: TXA, FastClot, Centhaquine, Traumagel.

Blood Medicine, part three

 

 An operating room nurse responded to Part Two of this series:

“So you’re saying, if a woman in our birthing center is bleeding out, we should just let her die rather than give her blood?”

Are those really the only two options – blood transfusion or death?

Blood Medicine, Part Two

If the American Medical Association says blood transfusions do more harm than good, as we noted in Part One, why are so many doctors still doing them?

Advances in Blood Medicine, Part One

 

When a patient refuses chemo-therapy or radiation therapy, you may occasionally see it referred to as “life-saving” chemo or “life-saving” radiation, but often not.

Why not? Because most readers know that chemo or radiation may or may not be life-saving, and that rejecting one or the other doesn’t mean the patient has opted to end their life; it may simply mean they have chosen some other treatment.

GMOs, gluten, and the poisoning of a planet's food system

Fixing the food supply is not going to be easy. And it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.

The pro-labeling lobbies believe consumers have a right to know what they are putting in their mouths. The anti-labeling lobbies - funded in part by Monsanto - point out that:

• 70 percent of what we eat in this country is already tainted with GMOs;
• That, therefore, the ‘Warning: GMOs Inside’ label would be more ubiquitous than, and hence as useless as, the current label that warns ‘this product was made at a plant that also processes peanuts;’
• And that GMO-free foods are already labeled – with the word “organic.”

But GMO isn’t the whole problem, or even the biggest, and labeling is not the solution. The problem is greedy corporations putting profits ahead of the health of their customers.

Coca Cola sent ‘nutrition experts’ to the 37th Annual Conference & General Meeting of the Nigeria Institute of Food Science and Technology. Nigeria is seeing a rapid rise in obesity, heart disease, gluten intolerance and diabetes. The Coke experts – presumably with a straight face – told the assembled crowd that the increase in diabetes and other non-contagious diseases is a lifestyle issue and has nothing to do with the increased sales of Coke products.

Is the increase in gluten sensitivity a ‘lifestyle issue’? In our last column we pointed out that wheat consumption has gone down significantly in this country over the past century, yet gluten intolerance has gone up!

To continue with our bread story:

 

By the 1920s bread companies were using a flour that had had all the healthy bran and wheat germ stripped away. The remaining starch was bleached with a substance called Agene not only to make it whiter but – because large businesses are always in a hurry – to artificially ‘age’ it so that it worked better with mechanized dough-kneading machines.

The government stepped in midway through the century. Doctors in England had some pretty convincing proof that Agene would kill you, but not before making you crazy. Agene was banned, replaced with plain old chlorine bleach.

The government was also concerned (there’s an oxymoron for you) about the utter lack of nutritive value in the bleached, starchy powder, so it was “enriched”… small amounts of four B vitamins and iron were added. Of course they don’t come close to replacing the vitamins, fiber, magnesium, manganese, zinc, calcium, minerals, phytonutrients and lignans lost in processing. And the “iron” added has about as much nutrition as you’d get by chewing on a nail.

To offer customers ever lighter and fluffier bread the competing bread companies demanded higher gluten varieties from the wheat industry, eventually resulting in a bread that, if it was any less substantial, would have been impossible for the average housewife to cut with a breadknife. But a company called the Continental Baking Company pushed forward anyway, in 1928 purchasing another bread company that had a patent on an automated bread slicer and packager, and Wonder Bread was born.

And now you know where the expression, ‘The greatest thing since sliced bread’ came from.

Wheat farmers, like bread companies, work within what’s called the Free Market System. But they have an additional item to consider on their profit-and-loss statement. It’s called The Farm Bill.

 

The free market system determines what I will pay for:

• Regular bread flour, about 35 to 50 cents a pound,
• Red fife flour, $1.00 a pound,
• Kamut flour, $1.25 a pound,
• Spelt flour, $1.60 a pound, and
• Einkorn flour, about 2.00 a pound.

So why aren’t wheat farmers all jumping on the health-conscious, non-mainstream wheat bandwagon? The Farm Bill.

“What’s remarkable and extraordinary about the farm bill is that, at a time of record crop prices and federal deficits, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill to increase subsidies,” said Scott Faber, vice president for governmental affairs at the Environmental Working Group.

You’ve no doubt heard stories of farmers being paid by the government not to farm. Sadly, many of those stories are true. Also true is that farmers are paid higher-than-free-market prices for certain crops.

Thanks to government subsidies a farmer can, for example, get crop insurance for a 60% lower premium than the free market would dictate. But only if he stays in lock-step with the agro-industry: planting government-approved seed and using government-approved methods.

Currently, industrial agriculture uses 2 to 3 times more fertilizer, one and a half times more pesticides and 10 times more energy than a small or heritage crop grown organically.

So, if a farmer switched from his mainstream crop to a heritage organic crop, he would save money in those 3 areas, while earning a larger profit for his crop. But he’d lose his government aid, and have to learn a whole new set of skills, and probably have to purchase a lot of new equipment.

And there’s the likelihood his land is unable to grow anything other than the franken-wheat he’s used to. Is he going to be willing to work on soil improvement for years before his new healthier cash crop turns a profit? How many years (if ever) before his land could be certified as organic?

Farmers need to feed their families. It’s a rare farmer who will break ranks with his neighbors and start growing Einkorn, Kamut, Red Fife, Spelt, Emmer, Ethiopian purple, black, yellow, or blue wheat despite demand, and despite higher profits.

For large, conventional, industrial farmers the government provides incentives, below-market loans, below-market insurance and a guaranteed market for their crop.

 

For innovative, unconventional, risk-taking, organic farmers the government provides how-to booklets.

You and I can’t fix this. No government program will fix this.

The Bible was eerily accurate when it foretold a time when people would buy "Two pounds of wheat for a day's wages!”(Revelation 6:5, CJB)

According to the World Bank, there are still over 1.2 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day - about enough to buy a couple pounds of wheat. World Bank pats itself on the back because that number has shrunk slightly, but in the U.S. 15 million more people have been added to the ranks of those below the poverty line in the last dozen years.

A few years ago the U.S. came within hours of what Bloomberg News called, “an economic calamity like none the world has ever seen.” Next time it happens, we may all be paying ‘a day’s wage for two pounds of wheat.’ Since the Bible foretold the problem, maybe we should be looking to the Bible for the solution. We'll get to that in the next column.

Please Share this story with all your friends. Leave a comment.

 

Bill K. Underwood is a columnist and author of several books. You can help support this site by following this link to Amazon.com.

The great wheat crisis

Conspiracy theorists claim that some giant, secret organization is planning to kill off a third of the human race.

When they say it, most of us pretty easily write them off as a bunch of nut-jobs.

 

But it cannot be denied that, in the space of less than a century, the wheat industry took something that had been synonymous with “nourishment” throughout man’s entire existence and turned it into a commercial, rather than a nutritional, hero. Even more sinister is the fact that farmers have been incentivized to grow something that may be killing people.

Is gluten killing you?

50 years ago, you never heard about anyone having a problem with gluten. Now it seems like everybody does. What’s going on? Should you care? Does it affect you?

 

What’s gluten? It is a protein in wheat, barley, and some other grains. When your baker mixes yeast into dough, gluten is the elastic stuff that allows the dough to form bubbles and rise so the bread isn’t hard as a rock.

Lessons from a frog

You know the one about the frog in the pan of cold water?

The theory goes that if you drop a frog into a pan of hot water, he’ll immediately jump out. But if you drop him into a pan of cold water, then gradually turn up the heat, he’ll swim and swim, contentedly, until – well, until you’ve got frog-legs for supper.

Archaeologists find, argue about, evidence supporting The Bible

A story in Discovery News is reporting that an inscription on a 3,000 year old piece of pottery may be an early form of Hebrew.

If you're a Bible reader, that probably doesn't sound like news to you. However, "biblical" archaeologists - who mostly are anything but - generally go out of their way to prove they aren't being 'influenced' by their religious beliefs. It's sort of like a college science professor who sees the huge holes in evolution. If he mentions the holes, he must be a religious fanatic, not a "Serious Scientist". Or a medical doctor ignoring natural cures to make sure no one thinks he's a quack. 

 

So instead of showing how this or that find fits with the Bible, they often are more interested in showing how their findings disprove the Bible.

Red Cross admits it built only 6 houses in Haiti

Several readers have bashed me for bashing the American Red Cross. For example, one reader said,

‘What’s wrong with their having 1,359 employees above $100,000 per year? That’s just what it costs to get good people.’ 

 According to their own reports, Red Cross collected $490 million to help Haiti after the massive earthquake there in 2010 that killed over 220,000 people. Red Cross now admits they only built 6 houses with that money, but that was because their plans for housing were stymied because "clear land title couldn’t be established." They nevertheless claim they helped 132,000 Haitians with housing. 

 

Let's see: $490 million divided by 132,000 equals about $3,700 each. If that's true, those 132,000 Haitians each got double their yearly salary from the Red Cross. I can't help being skeptical of that claim.

 

Meanwhile, 2 years after the disaster Habitat for Humanity reported they had  "repaired or rehabbed more than 350 houses, and constructed 150 permanent core houses as part of its permanent housing community," despite the problems of 'establishing clear land title'... 

 

Donations to Habitat for Humanity in 2010 were about $20 million, none of which, as far as I can tell, went to Jimmy Carter.

 

Jehovah's Witnesses reported in their December, 2010 issue of Awake! that "In the first few months following the quake, 1,500 homes had already been built by the Witnesses for those who had lost theirs."

Apparently all those "good people" at Red Cross are getting paid high salaries for pushing paper around. 

Are you a good person? Tell me: if you really believed the American Red Cross were a noble endeavor, wouldn’t you be willing to work for them for less than $100,000 per year? I would. I think I’m a good person. I’ve been known to work for free for causes I believed in. I could certainly work for a below-market salary if I believed in the work they were doing. 

 

As long as it wasn’t their blood business...

Before you give, what do you know about your charity?

 

 

Back in the 1600s, Sir Thomas Browne said “Charity begins at home.”

Have you noticed all the commercials for the American Red Cross? They crawl out of the woodwork whenever there’s a flood, tornado, or other disaster. The way disasters are increasing we’ll no doubt be seeing more of them. They raised hundreds of millions after the earthquake in Haiti and built a total of six houses there. Six...

 

When Trace Adkins endorsed them a few weeks ago, he explained it was because his house burned down while he was on tour in Alaska, and the Red Cross took care of his family while he was away.

Babylon part 2: How much 'Babylonish' activity is too much?

 

Years ago my friend Paul, a manager at a waste treatment plant, held up two glass laboratory beakers at a speaking engagement. The one in his right hand contained a clear liquid, the one in his left a thick, black liquid.

“This,” he said, jiggling his right hand, “is lab-certified 100 percent pure water.” Then he jiggled his left hand. “And this, well, this is the raw product I deal with all day long. Here’s the question: How much of this could I put in the water, and you still drink it?”

Ancient Babylon's Religious History

My day job once brought me in contact with a man who introduced himself to me as “Pastor Pete.” I managed – barely – to refrain from introducing myself to him as “Blogger Bill.”

Why do the clergy, like most doctors, feel the need to stick a title onto the front of their name? Jesus called religious leaders of his day 'snakes and hypocrites' for their practice of insisting on special titles, and one would think 'Pastor Pete' would be familiar with that passage (Matthew 23:8-10) if he was doing his job.

But why should I expect a clergyman to know or follow the Bible?

---

In a previous column we discussed whether the harlot called Babylon the Great in Revelation 17:16 could properly be identified as the papacy, as some claim, or whether it could symbolize all of Catholicism, or all of Christendom; or, perhaps be symbolic of Vatican city, or Rome, or New York, or Las Vegas. Or could it mean something else?

A look at the history of ancient Babylon makes identifying the symbolic Babylon the Great much easier.

The original city of Babylon was started by Nimrod, whom the Bible calls ‘a mighty hunter before the Lord.’ The word translated “before,” in this case, doesn’t mean he was basking in the Lord’s approval. It’s more closely related to the modern slang, ‘In your face!’

History records that his prowess with weapons made him feared. Says Bible commentator Matthew Poole,

“When men were few…and wild beasts abounded, by the hunting and destroying of those beasts he got much reputation and favour with men, who thereby were secured in their dwellings. In confidence hereof, and having this occasion to gather great companies of the youngest and strongest men together to himself, by their help he established a tyranny and absolute power over men in snaring, hunting after, and destroying like beasts all those men who opposed his dominion.”

Aggrandizing himself in this way made him one of the human race’s first kings. Some  claim that, after his death, his mother convinced people he lived on as a god.

Early on the Babylonians earned fame as astronomers and mathematicians, and they seem to have kept accurate records. Consequently, there is significant secular evidence that puts the start of the city somewhere between 2286 B.C.E. and 2231 B.C.E. (That may not seem very precise, but for such a long time ago, it's not bad.) This dovetails nicely with the Bible's chronology which places the Earth-wide flood at 2370, and Nimrod's birth only two generations thereafter.

The inhabitants of Babylon began building a tower whose top would ‘reach the heavens'.

(Mormons please note: The intent of the builders was not for them to reach heaven, as your Book of Mormon states on its first page. Smith failed to understand that the tower’s top 'reaching heaven’ was hyperbole for 'very tall'. Deuteronomy describes the fearful Israelites saying of the Canaanites, ‘The cities are great and walled up to heaven;’ (Deuteronomy 1:28) Reading the whole Tower of Babel account tells us the intent of the builders was actually ‘to make a name for ourselves, and to keep from spreading over the surface of the earth.’)

Because they were defying Jehovah's order to spread out and fill the earth, God stepped in and miraculously divided their common language into multiple languages, so that families woke up unable to speak to their neighbors. A person’s only recourse was to seek out who else in the city might have woken up speaking his language. Language groups banded together and physically separated themselves from the others with whom they could not communicate.

Note, however, that God changed only their language. He did not interfere with their thinking in any other way. People have free will; they can believe what they want. Folks who wanted to worship Nimrod could still worship Nimrod (although they may have now called him ‘Marduk’), people who worshiped bulls or the sun or sex could still worship bulls or the sun or sex. They just gave their false gods different names. As they reluctantly complied with God's mandate to spread out, they took all their Babylonish beliefs with them.

Seventeen centuries later the city of Babylon had a population of over 200,000 and covered an area several miles square, surrounded by a massive double wall - the largest city in the world. Yet it was conquered in one night by the army of Medo-Persia under Cyrus. While its hanging gardens were considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the conquerors could not have failed to notice that there were temples on nearly every corner, dedicated to over 50 different gods.

The Medes and the Persians may well have been Zoroastrians, who believed in a single supreme being called Ahura Mazda, 'Lord Wisdom', who was perhaps assisted by a few other lesser gods. They also believed there were evil spirits fighting Lord Wisdom, so they may have viewed these hundreds of temples as houses of those demons. Especially if they got a glimpse of the disgusting practices of the worshipers at those temples. 

Cyrus placed his subordinate, Darius, on the Babylonian throne and went on with part of his army to conquer the remainder of the Babylonian empire, before returning to take the Babylonian throne for himself.

During that first year of Darius' kingship, an event occurred which even non-bible students have heard of, called 'Daniel in the lion's den.' Daniel was one of Darius' highest officials. The other attendants were jealous and looked to get rid of him, so they went to Darius with a suggestion for a law to be passed prohibiting petitions to "any god or man except you, oh king." (Daniel 6:7) Perhaps the king passed it because it stroked his ego. On the other hand, he may have passed it, in part at least, hoping to reduce the worship of those gods on every corner for which Babylon was famous.

200 years later, when the Medo-Persian empire succumbed to the Greek empire, Babylon became much smaller. By Jesus' day, it was little more than a village in comparison to its former glory. 

But it still had a reputation for 1. religions of every possible belief system, 2. mathematics and other higher learning, and 3. people who studied the stars.

The '3 kings from the east who followed a star' that people sing about at Christmas time were not kings; according to the original Greek of the Bible, they were magoi from Babylon. According to Strong's Concordance magoi means: "Oriental scientist; by implication, a magician; sorcerer, wise man." 

Bible commentator Adam Clarke speculated that "these eastern magi, or philosophers, astrologers, or whatever else they were," might have been influenced by the Jewish community that had been in Babylon since Daniel's day. 

Scholar Albert Barnes says, "The persons here denoted were philosophers, priests, or astronomers. They dwelt chiefly in Persia and Arabia. They were the learned men of the eastern nations, devoted to astronomy, to religion, and to medicine."

According to Brethren NT Commentary, "These were supposed to be priests and wise men in Persia who practiced the interpretation of dreams."

I admit to taking these quotes out of context. Even knowing what the Bible says about these practices, some of the learned men I quoted don't want to upset their readers who know the fable of the 3 wise men. So they try to twist the passage to make it look like the visitors from the east were somehow doing God's work. But since the Bible condemns sorcery, pagan religion, astrology, and magical interpretation of dreams, those easterners were clearly not doing God's work when they informed jealous Herod about the birth of a rival to his kingship, Jesus. 

As had been happening for thousands of years, Babylon was still working against God. Babylon the Great in Revelation, then, must symbolize all of the false teachings carried to all corners of the globe by those early Babylonians and being practiced by all who aren't sincerely trying to worship God in the way He approves. 

To read another of my columns about Babylon's influence, click here. 

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com. You can help support this site by purchasing a book.