God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

                          The link 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 It has to do with our understanding and application of Genesis 1-4. Hermeneutics is the branch of knowledge that defines how we interpret the Bible. Do we take those chapters literally and as genuine history? 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's worth a refresher. I didn't learn this in church. I read those 4 chapters from 1965 ...

“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, I had never read the Bible until I went away to college. 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 stable, 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...