God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

On Tuesday mornings, I join a Zoom Bible study called Text Talk, led by my former Citrus Heights ELCA Lutheran pastor. The topic this week was Jeremiah 36, where King Jehoiakim sliced and burned the prophetic scroll dictated by Jeremiah the prophet to his scribe Baruch. Sources:  2 kings; 2 Chronicles; Jeremiah 31-39; Lutheran Study Bible notes; biblegateway.com; Wikipedia. Backstory and timeline 721 BC, as prophesied by Isaiah and others, Northern Israel fell to Assyria. Her people were removed to Mesopotamia, and foreigners were imported into the region. This squelched national identity and made it impossible for captive rebels to stage an escape. Nor could Judah decide to ally with the north to strengthen resistance to invasion. It was genius, really. So, the towns and villages of Judah were the remnant of the people of Israel. 640 BC:  8-year-old Josiah became king of Judah in Jerusalem. Under the tutelage of faithful priests, he initiated reforms, trying to discou...

The Dark In the global quest to understand the occasional, mysterious lights or floating objects in the sky, we’ve come a long way. Public attention to the topic began in 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted what the press later called “flying saucers” skipping across the sky. That was followed up in June by the infamous Roswell incident. Additional public pressure and reports engendered a series of Air Force investigations—Projects Sign and Grudge, Project Blue Book, The Robertson and Condon Reports, and the establishment of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), all to sort out whether those events were swamp gas, weather balloons, or something otherworldly. The military and Pentagon tried hard to dismiss interest in the topic of UFOs, all the while allegedly squirreling away crashed vehicles. The public cried out for “disclosure,” the real truth about the lights in the sky and the odd poltergeist activity that followed close contact. Then there were books about alien abductions. The pu...