The devils planted Pamela wearing her pretty pink petunias next to Billy with his baby blue blossoms in a flower bed.
That’ll teach um, one of the devils said.
Teach um what? the other asked.
Teach um . . . hmmm, yeah, teach um what? . . . ah! teach um that now they can weep and moan and gnash their teeth at each other for all eternity.The dumbest thing they ever did was to find their way down here.
Just then another truckload of flowering wretches arrived.
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Denise offers the prompt word “bed” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Luke 13:28-30 KJV – 28 There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out. 29 And they shall come from the east, and from the west, and from the north, and from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God. 30 And, behold, there are last which shall be first, and there are first which shall be last.
I don’t think this photo has anything to do with the story, but you are welcome to let your imagination run wild.
This morning I followed an email link from the Associates for Biblical Research to one of their Digging for Truth episodes on the tomb of Jesus.
The tour we took when in Israel scheduled us to see the Garden Tomb, but neglected the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This episode, however, convinces me that we should have gone to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre instead.
In the above video they mentioned the Shroud of Turin. I realized that I knew little to nothing about this shroud except that it was claimed to have covered the body of Jesus.
The following is a 8 minute summary of the evidence that favors the view that this was, indeed, the actual shroud that covered Jesus.
Although less than ten years old the boys were old enough to read a children’s weekly their parents purchased for them. One of the stories reported that chickens evolved from dinosaurs (or perhaps it was the other way around).
Regardless, the boys decided they would find a dinosaur and become famous like the guy who wrote that story. One of the boys thought that a slight rise in the normally flat Indiana farm land was enough of a warrant to proclaim that ground as the perfect burial ground for a dinosaur, but their father told them they could not dig there while the corn was growing.
So they shifted their plans and began a dig behind the chicken house going about a foot down before reaching the water table and finding – ! ! ! – BONES! – though admittedly only chicken bones, but bones nonetheless worth showing to their mother. After giving her the bones they went back outside imagining now that they were Flash Gordons saving Dale Ardens from Ming the Merciless and their mother put the bones in the garbage.
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Denise offers the prompt word “warrant” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
This is a true story. I was the boy who wanted to dig up the corn field. My brother liked digging up stuff as well. Only many, many decades later did I realize that this chicken-dinosaur nonsense was indeed nonsense.
Matthew 18:2-6 KJV – 2 And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, 3 And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. 6 But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
We are back in South Carolina. As I was putting mulch around some bushes I noticed the fossils in a bit of mudrock we brought back from a property we once owned on Green Bay in Wisconsin. That rock (along with the mulch) are shown in the photo above.
Ten years ago when I found the stone I tried to identify the fossils1 in it using a field guide. The field guide said that they were between 300 to 400 million years old (assuming I remember what it said correctly and matched what was in the book with what was in my hand).
I was impressed, but I was also disappointed that they weren’t 600 million years old, or older. I kept looking for more of those stones.
Over the past ten years I smartened up. I realized that given erosion rates all of the stuff I had in my hand would have eroded away2 long before it reached anywhere near 300 million years.
Today, I can tell you how old that stone is to within about 10 years, but you need to understand something about fossils first.
Fossils don’t form from dead stuff falling to the ground and being slowly buried over millennia. Dead stuff falling to the ground quickly decays. They have to die rapidly with a heavy weight pressing them down so they do not decompose. That occurs when heavy sediment carried by flooding waters provides the weight to press the plants and animals to the ground.
You would apply the same process to a leaf you wanted to preserve. You would pick it fresh and place it between paper with many books piled on top of it. When it dried out, you would have a nice, flat leaf, not a curled up piece of decaying leaf mold.
So, when in the history of humanity did such a flooding occur so that you could expect to find fossils all over the world? Think. The only time such flooding occurred on a global scale was the flood recorded in Genesis 6-9 and echoed through many legends.
That allows me to date the stone that I now have in my garden.
Given the biblical chronology that Henry B. Smith, Jr from Associates for Biblical Research provided3, the flood could be dated to 3298 BC. Now there is some wiggle-room here due to when in the year births occurred in the Genesis 5 and 11 chronologies, but I suspect that wiggle-room could be reduced to plus or minus 10 years.
You might object that what we read in Genesis are just stories. They are stories, but the important question is this: Are they TRUE stories? If you do not want to believe they are true, to the extent that archeologists can align those stories with historical events to that extent you might want to seriously reconsider any disbelief. This is why Christian archeologists try to align those dates with historical evidence so that the only ignorance that remains is willful ignorance.
So, how old is that stone?
It is, given today’s year of 2025 and subtracting one year since there is no 0 year in the Gregorian calendar, 3298 + 2025 – 1 = 5322 years old plus or minus those 10 years.
That is far less than the 300,000,000 years which the field guide wanted me to believe, but a far more reasonable number given erosion rates. That stone had already suffered much erosion damage when I found it.
And it is continuing to be eroded away every year I leave it unprotected in my garden, but it is not rare. Fossils like the one I have are all over the world because sedimentation layers are all over the world as one would expect given a catastrophic, global flooding less than 5,400 years ago.
The “ungodly men” are those who “willingly are ignorant”. They are not blindly ignorant, a class I would put myself in on many issues. They are liars.
I think some of those fossils are crinoids. Wikipedia says: “In 2012, three geologists reported they had isolated complex organic molecules from 340-million-year-old (Mississippian) fossils of multiple species of crinoids.” That there are complex organic molecules at all in there should raise a red flag that the millions of years are wrong. ↩︎
I’ve heard that a uniformitarian erosion rate would push all of the continents into the ocean in 50 million years. The problem with erosion is that it doesn’t all happen uniformly. If you have a house on a cliff near the water, you are likely very aware of the effects of erosion. ↩︎
One can find videos and other information about the controversy over the Genesis 5 and 11 chronologies at the Associates for Biblical Research site. There’s a controversy because the Septuagint and the Masoretic manuscripts have different, but not randomly different, dates. They are not unintentional scribal errors, but deliberate distortions of the original. I get the 3298 BC date for the flood (and 5554 BC date for creation) from Henry B. Smith, Jr’s article at the 2018 International Conference on Creationism. The 5554 BC date puts the ministry of Jesus in the 6th millennium when the Messiah was expected to come. ↩︎
The devil tempted George to curse the idiots around him, to just lay into them with full force. However, George couldn’t see what good that would do, so – since the devil reminded him of them – he blessed them instead.
Annoyed by George’s disobedience – not that George owed the devil any obedience whatsoever – the devil then reminded him that his silly blessings amounted to a hill of beans on the commodity market of prayers, because everyone knew those idiots weren’t going to change no matter how nice he was to them.
Don’t forget, George, that it is up to them to decide if they want to change, not you which was the only observation the devil made that George could agree with.
Regardless, those blessings were a win-win-win for George.
If nothing happened, as the devil predicted, those George blessed would remain good examples to point out of bad behavior, but if something unexpected happened – something admittedly miraculous in their cases – they would become an awesome fount of blessings for everyone around them and yet no matter what they did by blessing them George at least did what he was told to do: bless, and curse not.
Unable to naturally get there from here, Brian began mythologizing. He wasn’t sure if he should make it new-age spooky or stick to his usual pseudo-science.
Trying to make a good impression he began at the beginning with In the beginning the universe popped itself out of nothing and after an eternity it randomly evolved into what we see today.
He realized that no one in his right mind would buy that, but just how many people actually were in their right minds today nobody knew.
Just in case there were still a few around, Brian continued with Then the witch told the wizard that if you keep stirring the pot eventually no one will be in his right mind.
None of this is supposed to make any sense, so don’t worry except for the fact that Brian has been stirring the pot ever since.
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Denise offers the prompt word “impression” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Psalm 14:3 KJV – They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
“I know the Bible better than you do,” Brian taunted trying to rattle Mark’s brain.
“Even the devil knows the Bible better than I do,” Mark quickly countered unsure just how much the devil actually knew about anything.
“I am – NOT – the devil 😈 😈 😈!”
“How do you know the devil’s not running your month?” Mark wondered -unfortunately out-loud.
“How do – YOU – know 😠 😠 😠?”
Not having a good comeback for this, Mark wondered if perhaps the devil does know the Bible better than he does having heard it from every Tom, Dick and Harry he unsuccessfully tried to harass – not that such knowledge could ever, any more, do the devil any good.
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Denise offers the prompt word “rattle” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Matthew 4:5-6 KJV – 5 Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, 6 And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.
Yesterday John Hartnett provided a model based on historic measurements collected by George F. Dodwell of the change in the earth’s tilt1 confirming the biblical chronology that Henry B. Smith, Jr argued for in 20182.
The date Hartnett’s model estimated for the flood event was 3154 ± 191 BC. That range excludes Ussher’s flood date of 2348 BC3 but Smith, Jr’s date of 3298 BC still fits.
If we use Smith, Jr’s chronology, that would put creation at about 5500 BC, Noah’s flood at about 3300 BC, the Tower of Babel at about 2850 BC, the call of Abraham in 2091 BC, the Exodus from Egypt in 1446 BC, Solomon crowned in 971 BC and the birth of Jesus in 2 BC.4
The reason for the discrepancy between Ussher’s and Smith, Jr’s dates is due to conflicting dates provided in the chronologies of Genesis 5 and 11 coming from different manuscript traditions of the Bible. Smith, Jr argued that the Hebrew manuscript which became the Masoretic text was modified in the first or second century after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD to void prophecies that Jesus could have been the Messiah. The Septuagint, however, preserved the original text, but the Masoretic text became the preferred source for modern bible translations.
Hartnett’s model not only excluded Ussher’s date, but it also estimated a date for something which happened affecting the tilt of the earth at a time which aligned with the biblical chronology that Smith, Jr has promoted.
Simon leased a room above the cafe a block from the Charles Bridge. He told them he was a tourist and they told him how to get to Prague’s Old Town. Since they didn’t understand why he was alone nor why he tipped so well in the cafe, some speculated that something was going to happen.
However, while Simon was there nothing happened. Even after he left nothing much happened and nothing at all happened that could be linked back to him.
This story is a tale of what happens when nothing happens – or, look at it this way – from nothing you get nothing unless you have the ability to speak the words (which most of us unwittingly do) to curse or bless the unexpected into existence.
After hearing that Thomas’s lease was terminated the minister gave Thomas $1,000 in cash with no strings attached.
Thomas refused it.
Then the minister gave Thomas a check for $100,000 with no strings attached.
Again Thomas refused it.
Finally the minister came back with a cashier’s check for $10,000,000 which he personally placed into Thomas’s hand all with no strings attached.
Once again Thomas refused to give the devil any grounds to say that the devil made him rich knowing that there was no gift from the devil, the father of lies, without a string attached.
Genesis 14:21-23 KJV – 21 And the king of Sodom said unto Abram, Give me the persons, and take the goods to thyself. 22 And Abram said to the king of Sodom, I have lift up mine hand unto the LORD, the most high God, the possessor of heaven and earth, 23 That I will not take from a thread even to a shoelatchet, and that I will not take any thing that is thine, lest thou shouldest say, I have made Abram rich:
Poetry, Short Prose and Walking 