God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

 Bible Tidbits are shorter than blogs. I send them to an email list.  Thelink below is from ASOR, American Society for Oriental Research, and their newsletter "Ancient Near East Today." The link talks about archaeological research into when Homo sapiens and the ancestor Homo erectus and other Homos began to control fire and cook their food. It's a good short presentation on the consensus of human development.  https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/when-did-humans-start-cooking-food Why am I sending this link under Bible Tidbits? Because it has to do with our interpretation and application of Genesis 1-4. Hermeneutics is the branch of knowledge that has to do with how we interpret the Bible and other literary subjects. Do we take those chapters literally? Are we falling away from Jesus or failing God if we take them metaphorically and plumb them for the theological message therein? Here's the thing. I think I've written about this before, but it

“As I lay on my back and prayed into the darkness, I saw a Scripture in light—Luke 3:16…” All Scripture passage are from biblegateway.com New International Version (NIV) Because I was raised Catholic, until I went away to college I had never read the Bible. I heard about the Baptism of the Holy Spirit for the first time as I read the book by David Wilkerson, The Crossand the Switchblade . He was an Assembly of God (Pentecostal) pastor loving his rural Pennsylvania congregation until the night that God spoke to him clearly to go to New York and help the street gangs there. He converted several gangs and gang members, including a leader named Nicky Cruz, and started an organization called Teen Challenge. It was 1965, and I was a flaky student at the University of Washington. While I was on lunch break at my summer job in the university district, a female colleague sashayed up to the table where I was talking with a fellow student worker. At that very moment, I was disparaging stupid