May 2022 – Page 2 – Poetry, Short Prose and Walking

In the Trees

Sunrise through palm trees — Sunrise in the Trees

Dale offers the prompt “in the trees” for this week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge.

Above the sunrise comes in and through the trees (Miami Beach, Florida), assuming palm trees, or whatever they are, qualify as trees. Below there is snow in, or on, the trees (Northbrook, Illinois). And below that there’s a park and mountains in the trees or perhaps it is the other way around (Garden of the Gods Park in Colorado Springs, Colorado).

Exploration 92 – The Creator’s Reckoning of Time

After adding Jewish and Messianic Jewish parashah readings, I began studying the ancient biblical calendar assuming such a calendar even existed. This calendar would be different from the Christian calendars (Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox) with holidays like Christmas, Ash Wednesday, Good Friday and Easter (Pascha). It would also be different from the rabbinical calendar at Chabad.org with a time since Creation of only 5782 years that follows a mathematical 19-year (Metonic) cycle for leap years.

The appointed times of YeHoVaH are Passover, Unleavened Bread, First Fruits, Shavuot, Trumpets, Yom Kippur and Succoth from Leviticus 23 along with the weekly Shabbat. The biblical calendar needs to determine when to observe them so we can rehearse them as prophecies while remembering their fulfillments. There are also historical events which need to be dated, a year assigned to the Creation (or some other starting point), and an estimate when to expect the Messianic Kingdom.

I thought this would be an easy study, but I am still trying to make sense out of it. Here are three attempts to describe that biblical calendar that differ from both the modern Christian and Jewish calendars.

Navah’s The Reckoning of Time. He presents the evidence so clearly and in such great detail that I use this account as my baseline when reading others, keeping in mind that he might be in error.
World’s Last Chance: Yah’s Calendar. This calendar maintains that the biblical day extends from sunrise to sunrise, not sunset to sunset, that the Sabbath always occurs on the 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th day of the month, and that the first of the month is a special day of rest.
Michael Rood’s Astr0nomically and Agriculturally Corrected Biblical Hebrew Calendar along with The Chronological Gospels: The Life and Seventy Week Ministry of the Messiah.
His calendar differs from the rabbinical calendar since it is based on crescent moon sightings and the observed ripeness of barley. For example, today, May 8th in the Gregorian calendar, on his calendar is the sixth day of the second month, day 15 of the Omer, year 6022 from Creation. The rabbinical calendar would call it 7 Iyar, day 22 of the Omer, year 5782 from Creation.

Below is the first of a series of videos on the Creator’s Calendar presenting Rood’s perspective created over a decade ago.

Weekly Parashah Readings
Parashah: Emor, 13 Iyar, 5782 – May 14, 2022
Torah: Leviticus 21:1 – 24:23
Haftarah: Ezekiel 44:15-31
Brit Chadashah: Luke 14:12-24; 1 Peter 2:4-10
Resources: Chabad, Hebrew4Christians, Weekly Torah Readings, Calendar

Mother’s Day – Friday Fictioneers

Miriam selected a white tulip for her mother. Later she wanted to treat her mother, father and younger brother to lunch at the botanic garden where many flowers were in bloom.

However, eighteen years ago her mother terminated that pregnancy and two years after that her younger brother would also be viewed as an inconvenience. None of the men in her mother’s life were good enough either.

Miriam and her brother still wait for their mother to find that narrow way even a thief on a cross could find and give her a white tulip to match her white robe.

____

Rochelle Wisoff-Fields offers the photo by Na’ama Yehuda below as a prompt for this week’s Friday Fictioneers.

Control – Six Sentence Story

Who controls the whirlwind? All one can hope when the debris settles is to find something left of value.

When Benjamin saw the twister head straight for the farmhouse he yelled to his wife to get the children. While they were driving away she noticed that the tornado had changed direction as if it were chasing them. With the sound of the wind ripping trees apart Benjamin braked, turned into the entrance of a field, backed out to face the opposite direction, shifted into first, accelerated, shifted into second, accelerated, and shifted into third to accelerate out of the reach of the advancing wind.

If that twister really did want to get them it miscalculated since it left chickens, cows, sheds, tractor, cellar and the farmhouse, all of it, intact and untouched, but glowing with Benjamin’s and his family’s praise rising heavenwards sweetened with gratitude.

Denise offers the word “control” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.

Proverbs 10:25, “As the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no more: but the righteous is an everlasting foundation.” (KJV)

Faces

Dale offers the prompt “faces” for this week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge. There’s a white bird looking at me above wondering what I’m doing and a grasshopper who let me take many photos of him.

Normally I don’t take recognizable photos of people. However, I do have a photo of myself which someone else took and that is below.

Exploration 91 – Mutation, Evolution and Natural Selection

Sometimes we use words that subtly undermine what we value without our realizing it. I am trying to identify these words so I can avoid using them.

For example, when we say parents are we undermining the differences between fathers and mothers by lumping them under one term? Is the word gender similarly undermining the differences between the sexes, men and women? According to Owen Strachan they do.

In this post I want to focus on (1) mutation, (2) evolution and (3) natural selection. With a biblical creationist worldview, should I be using or avoiding these words? If I choose to avoid them, what alternative words should I use to reinforce rather than undermine my values?

Mutation

Mutations in DNA is the only one of the three that has usefulness from an operational scientific perspective because it represents something that can be measured which could falsify an hypothesis. Random mutational changes in DNA allow us to look back into our past. Measured rates of mutations allow us to anticipate future mutational meltdown through genetic entropy.

Random mutations do not support evolutionary change from something simple to something more complicated. Like other mechanisms found to operate in the natural world it is a measure of decay or entropy. It can only reduce what is complicated to something simpler. Since this does not go against my values I have no need to look for an alternative.

Evolution

However, when I use the word evolution indiscriminately for any kind of observable change I reinforce the idea that alleged unobserved Darwinian evolution is possible when I would claim it is not. A safe alternative for observable changes is simply to say change.

There are no random mechanisms in the natural world that could account for the kinds of unobserved changes needed to go from non-life to life or from slime mold to mankind over any time period. We would not be here today without an act of creation if we relied only on random, natural processes.

Natural Selection

Is it safe to use natural selection to describe the changes that occur within kinds of creatures through random mutations? Charles Darwin created the term natural selection to try to project agency onto nature where no agency exists. The goal was to replace the Creator from Genesis with a mindless nature that somehow could make selections.

In the video below Lauren Pennington interviews Dr. Randy Guliuzza to first show the problem with the term natural selection and then to propose an alternate way of describing change in living creatures.