“Are you done?” Steve asked after listening to a lengthy complaint.
“No, I’m NOT!” Mark said as the cloud further darkened between them.
Not all that Mark said was true, but all of it was plausible, provided you thought the way Mark did. His thoughts must have echoed through his heart for quite some time for it to flow out so fluently.
Eventually Mark took a second breather and Steve once again asked him if he were done. When Mark nodded, accepting defeat that even he couldn’t run his mouth forever, Steve dismissed him without offering any defense eventually forgetting what Mark said, not that Mark had the peace of mind to do the same.
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Denise offers the prompt word “cloud” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
James 3:10 KJV – Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be.
If the universe began with an explosion, how did all of that exploded stuff come back together again to form even one star? If a star should explode, how would the mess it made clean itself up to become another star?
Not even gravity can put those explosions back together again.
There’s more truth in the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty than there is in the mythology of modern cosmology with its big bangs and stars forming from cosmic dust clouds.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.
One of the blessings of our universe is that things don’t naturally compress through gravity to the point that a thermonuclear reaction starts. If they did, the waters over the earth (along with all of the land) would have collapsed to the center of what once was the earth long ago.
The reason stuff like that doesn’t happen is because of hydrostatic equilibrium. Gravity draws things together. Sure, but an opposing outward pressure keeps stuff from collapsing beyond an equilibrium point. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.
Some claim that if there were a multiverse, an infinite number of universes all starting with explosions, then at least one of them would have to look like ours. Wrong. Blow things up an infinite number of times (or more) and none of those explosions, because of hydrostatic equilibrium, would turn into a universe with planets and stars.
Every one of those exploded verses in that multiverse would remain a mess forever.
At the end of the day in Tampa, Greg went to Clearwater Beach (latitude 27.9772, longitude -82.8279) to watch the sun set. Earlier that day he saw the sun rise on Miami Beach.
As the sun began its entry below the waters of the Gulf of America, Greg quickly phoned his brother on a boat in the Indian Ocean near the Cocos Islands (latitude -27.9772, longitude 97.1721) to ask him, “Where do you see the sun in the sky where you are right now?”
“Right now it’s rising in the east,” his brother said.
“How is it possible that I’m seeing the sun half-way below the horizon in the west while you’re watching it rise half-way above the horizon in the east?”
“That’s what you get when you talk to someone on the opposite side of a globe.”
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Denise offers the prompt word “entry” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
There’s not much to this story except that I have some friends who have been trying to convince me that the earth is flat. This is sort of a rebuttal to their argument.
I was also looking for an opportunity to use the new name, Gulf of America. It took a minute to make the AI tool in the Brave browser admit that the correct name is the Gulf of America considering my current location in Florida although it tried to convince me otherwise.
Two birds watching the sun rise over the Flood Waters of Noah
“When it comes to dragons I’m with Saint George,” Paul said.
“You’d wound or even kill them?”
“With a sword,” Paul affirmed.
“They’ll go extinct!” Paul’s opposition cried.
“Precisely,” Paul said resting on a bunch of obvious assumptions which, since they’re obvious, don’t need to be stated.
At this point I must confess that I don’t know where this story’s going so I’ll just end it by saying, I’m with Paul, or, if you prefer, being more with Paul’s opposition, just pretend I said, Look, squirrel!
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Denise offers the prompt word “wound” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Revelation 12:7-9 KJV – 7 And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, 8 And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. 9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
The following is a 25 minute video reenacting the journey on the road to Emmaus described in Luke 24.
Luke 24:13-35 KJV – 13 And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. 14 And they talked together of all these things which had happened. 15 And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. 16 But their eyes were holden that they should not know him. 17 And he said unto them, What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad? 18 And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering said unto him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days? 19 And he said unto them, What things? And they said unto him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people: 20 And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him. 21 But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel: and beside all this, to day is the third day since these things were done. 22 Yea, and certain women also of our company made us astonished, which were early at the sepulchre; 23 And when they found not his body, they came, saying, that they had also seen a vision of angels, which said that he was alive. 24 And certain of them which were with us went to the sepulchre, and found it even so as the women had said: but him they saw not. 25 Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: 26 Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? 27 And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. 28 And they drew nigh unto the village, whither they went: and he made as though he would have gone further. 29 But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to tarry with them. 30 And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. 31 And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight. 32 And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? 33 And they rose up the same hour, and returned to Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together, and them that were with them, 34 Saying, The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon. 35 And they told what things were done in the way, and how he was known of them in breaking of bread.
During the regular part of the Sunday service when Brian satirized critics of his ministry, he read, out-loud, a social media post which commanded that the eyes of everyone in his congregation start functioning with “20/20, cataract-less, floater-less, astigmatism-less, whatever-ails-you-less perfect vision”.
“Fat chance that’s going to happen,” Brian mocked just before his six-year old granddaughter sitting in the front row, nearly blind from birth, jumped up and down screaming, “Grandpops, Grandpops, I can SEE!!“
As others in the congregation admitted sudden vision improvement as well, Brian wondered if his own eyes had been healed (hoping not). Looking down at his Bible, a ministry-produced, three-ribboned, leather-bound, authorized version adulterated with his commentaries, he was surprised to clearly make out even the fine print of the footnotes without glasses.
For the next hour Brian read verse after verse. When he finally looked up, all that came out of his mouth was: “So that’s what it says.”
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Denise offers the prompt word “perfect” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
I posted the following as a comment on this video:
This is the clearest presentation of the distant starlight (non)problem that I have heard to date. We cannot use distant starlight to tell us how old the universe is given relativity physics. So, we will have to find other evidence to estimate the age of the universe. Radioactive decay might be one, but those rates aren’t reliable based on conflicting erosion rates, the discovery of soft tissue in fossils and the rates of dispersion of decay particles from zircon crystals. What we are left with is historical evidence, but that takes us back only about 5000 years which is surprisingly close to the time of the flood in the Septuagint chronology.
The video is almost two hours long, but John Hartnett does a good job of describing three rejected solutions to the distant starlight problem to arrive at the anisotropic synchrony convention proposed by Jason Lisle.
Jeffrey’s reactions were like those of a corpse in an open coffin. No matter how you insulted him, no matter how harshly the wind of cursing blew across his face, he didn’t respond.
And they did insult him accusing him of this and that while lying about that and this. They gave him as much hell as their trapped imaginations could come up with. However, the service Jeffrey and his team agreed to perform demanded that they focus exclusively on the assignment.
They only had a brief period of time to free those brainwashed hostages before the missiles arrived.
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Denise offers the prompt word “wind” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Romans 12:1 KJV – I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
While walking across the drawbridge connecting Normandy Isles and Treasure Island in the Miami area I noticed a door on the drawbridge mechanism right in the middle of the Intracoastal Waterway.
Waiting for the bridge to close so I can crossThe door where I would have least expected to find oneView heading back across the bridge from the other direction
Poetry, Short Prose and Walking 