Take a listen to my latest podcast with Derek Hitchcock talking about how his envronmental work has been enhanced by forming relationshiops with the Native American tribes in Northern California.
You may remember Senator Larry Craig who’s famous “wide stance” got him into trouble in a public restroom or Senator David Vitter who was busted for having sex with prostitutes after running on a family values platform. In a comical irony, the two men, Republicans both, are co-sponsors of an proposed amendment to the United States Constitution which would ban gay marriage.
John Stewart and David Letterman must be doing back flips right now. . .
This was recently sent to me. . . I have not checked out all the claims, but I know most of the to be true for sure. Message. . . eat your veggies!
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• A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye…and YES science now shows that carrots greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes.
• A Tomato has four chambers and is red. The heart is red and has four chambers. All of the research shows tomatoes are indeed pure heart and blood food.
• Grapes hang in a cluster that has the shape of the heart. Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the research today shows that grapes are also profound heart and blood vitalizing food.
• A Walnut looks like a little brain, a left and right hemisphere, upper cerebrums and lower cerebellums. Even the wrinkles or folds are on the nut just like the neo-cortex.
We now know that walnuts help develop over 3 dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function.
• Kidney Beans actually heal and help maintain kidney function and yes, they look exactly like the human kidneys.
• Celery, Bok Choy, Rhubarb and more look just like bones. These foods specifically target bone strength. Bones are 23% sodium and these foods are 23% sodium.
If you don’t have enough sodium in your diet the body pulls it from the bones, making them weak. These foods replenish the skeletal needs of the body.
• Eggplant, Avocados and Pears target the health and function of the womb and cervix of the female - they look just like these organs.
Today’s research shows that when a woman eats 1 avocado a week, it balances hormones, sheds unwanted birth weight and prevents cervical cancers.
And how profound is this? …. It takes exactly 9 months to grow an avocado from blossom to ripened fruit.
There are over 14,000 photolytic chemical constituents of nutrition in each one of these foods (modern science has only studied and named about 141 of them).
• Sweet Potatoes look like the pancreas and actually balance the glycemic index of diabetics.
• Olives assist the health and function of the ovaries.
• Grapefruits, Oranges , and other Citrus fruits look just like the mammary glands of the female and actually assist the health of the
breasts and the movement of lymph in and out of the breasts.
• Onions look like body cells. Today’s research shows that onions help clear waste materials from all of the body cells.
They even produce tears which wash the epithelial layers of the eyes.
Cathy Lynn Grossman
USA TODAY
There are so many ways of seeing God, public policy expert Barry Kosmin says, that “the highest authority is now the lowest common denominator.”
And the wide-ranging ways people construct their spiritual lives could make the so-called religious vote unpredictable in the 2008 elections.
Such are the key findings in latest data from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey of 35,000 Americans. Pew released demographic data in February from the survey, conducted May through August 2007. This new installment focuses on 60 questions about participants’ religious beliefs and social and political views.
The survey finds U.S. adults believe overwhelmingly (92%) in God, and 58% say they pray at least once a day. But the study’s authors say there’s a “stunning” lack of alignment between people’s beliefs or practices and their professed faiths.
Likewise, the long-standing links between highly religious people, conservative ideology and the Republican Party are starting to fray, says a co-author of the study, John Green, a Pew Forum senior research fellow.
“There are votes to be had for both Democrat and Republican candidates,” Green says. “Evangelical Protestants’ votes may be more in flux than in 2004 … more open to persuasion.”
The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.6 percentage points for overall findings. The margin is a bit larger for subgroups such as “evangelicals” (26.3% of adults, who share strict ideas on salvation and common historic origins), mainline Protestants (18.1%, who share “a less exclusionary view of salvation and a strong emphasis on social reform”) and historically black churches (6.9%, “shaped by experiences of slavery and segregation”). Among the highlights:
• 78% overall say there are “absolute standards of right and wrong,” but only 29% rely on their religion to delineate these standards. The majority (52%) turn to “practical experience and common sense,” with 9% relying on philosophy and reason, and 5% on scientific information.
• 74% say “there is a heaven, where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded,” but far fewer (59%) say there’s a “hell, where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished.”
• 70%, including a majority of all major Christian and non-Christian religious groups except Mormons, say “many religions can lead to eternal life.”
• 68% say “there’s more than one true way to interpret the teachings of my religion.”
• 44% want to preserve their religion’s traditional beliefs and practices. But most Catholics (67%), Jews (65%), mainline Christians (56%) and Muslims (51%) say their religion should either “adjust to new circumstances” or “adopt modern beliefs and practices.”
Green observes, “Americans are deeply suspicious of institutional religion. … (Some see religion) as about money, rules and power. That’s not a positive connotation for everyone.”
• 50% say “homosexuality is a way of life that should be accepted by society,” but the most consistently traditional religious groups say society should discourage it — 76% of Jehovah’s Witnesses, 68% of Mormons, 61% of Muslims and 64% of evangelicals.
• 51% have a certain belief in a personal God, but 27% are less certain of this, 14% call God “an impersonal force,” and 5% reject any kind of God. “People say ‘God,’ and no one knows who they mean,” says Kosmin, director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
• 14% of all surveyed, including 28% of evangelicals, say religion is the “main influence in their political thinking.”
Many who label themselves “conservative” also turn up in agreement with liberals and moderates on issues such as the environment, the economy and the role of government.
“Politics doesn’t occur in a vacuum,” says Green, pointing out a tendency by broadcast and print journalists to “focus on the most outspoken believers, who often tend to be the most conservative” and miss the tilt toward middle ground. Church attendance is the best predictor of political activity — whether people vote — but beliefs predict how they vote, he says.
Pew Forum director Luis Lugo attributes the decline of dogmatism to living in a pluralistic society, in which friends, co-workers, even family members come from myriad faiths. The survey found 37% of couples with children were married to or living with someone from another religion or faith tradition, bringing diversity “right down to the kitchen table,” Lugo says.
“Americans believe in everything. It’s a spiritual salad bar,” says Rice University sociologist Michael Lindsay. Rather than religious leaders setting the cultural agenda, today, it’s Oprah Winfrey, he says.
“After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the national memorial service was at Washington’s National Cathedral, conducted by Episcopal clergy. After the 9/11 attack, Oprah organized the official memorial service at Yankee Stadium, and while clergy participated, she was the master of ceremonies.
“The impact of Oprah is seen throughout this survey. She uses the language of Bible and Christian traditions and yet includes other traditions to create a hodgepodge personalized faith. Exclusivism (one religion has the absolute and exclusive truth) has gotten a bad name in America today,” he says.
Political science professor Alan Wolfe, director of the Boise Center for American and Public Life at Boston University, says many people, despite their religious claims, “have no command of theology, doctrine or history, so it’s an empty religiosity.” Still, he finds “a very forgiving quality” to this non-sectarian, no-mention-of-sin view. “No one wants to think their spouse, friends or co-workers are mad or bad.”
Duke University sociologist Mark Chaves, like Lugo, attributes the shifts to long-term changes in family with rising divorce, increased cohabitation, smaller families and steady increases in religiously mixed marriages. “Don’t look at the church, look at home,” he says.
Among couples (married or living together) with children, 63% say they read the Bible or pray with their children, and 60% say they send kids for religious education.
The numbers drop significantly for the 37% in religiously mixed marriages: 48% say they pray or read Scripture with their children, and 44% say they send their children for religious education, says Greg Smith, a Pew research fellow and co-author of the survey.
Adults under 30 are further from strict religious adherence than their parents. Although other studies show they cycle back to religion at key moments such as marriage or rearing children, those spirals are getting smaller and smaller, says Tom Smith, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Society at the University of Chicago, which has measured religion and society for decades through the General Social Survey.
“Every religious group has a major challenge on its hands from all directions,” says Lugo. When he factors in Pew’s February findings that 44% of adults say they’ve switched to another religion or none at all, Lugo says, “You have to wonder: How do you guarantee the integrity of a religious tradition when so many people are coming or going or following ideas that don’t match up?”
Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, sees in the numbers that Catholics, like everyone else, are shaped by an individualistic culture where “people are trained to trust only their own spiritual experience” rather than in the historic message of the church. “Religion is about conversion, self-surrender as opposed to self-righteousness,” he says. “That’s hard in any culture but particularly in our own.”
The Rev. Frank Page of Taylors, S.C., past president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, is not surprised by the Pew findings. “The number (of churches that) teach a clear doctrinal Christianity are a minority today. How would people know it when they never hear about how to be saved?”
Still, Page is undaunted. “Jesus predicted all this,” he says, quoting from the Bible (Matthew 15:8): “People honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me.”
“We still work as hard as we can to share the good news,” he says, “even though we know most will reject the way.”
Last week, my sister Jennifer gave birth to a beautiful little girl, Haley Joe Holdridge. It was a difficult pregnancy and she came to us a month ahead of schedule, but the doctors have given here a clean bill of health.
I get to fly out and see her in a few weeks!
Right-Haley on day one
Left- My brother-in-law and proud father Alden with my mother and doting grandmother, Kathy.
Scientists are examining how homosexuality may affect everything from penis sizes to how one navigates new cities, reports the Los Angeles Times. Innate differences between gays and straights rooted in biology could lead researchers to discover the biological origins of sexual orientation.
Recent studies on gay traits have found:
