sTILL wISHING sOMEONE wOUJLD aDDRESS tHESE pROBLEMS i kEEP hAVING wITH THE pRE tRIB rAPTURE sCENARIO

sOMEHOW THIS POST ENDED UP ON THE CREATIONISM BLOG.  i HOPE IT'S IN THE RIGHT PLACE NOW.

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Just heard MacArthur lay out the pre-tribulation rapture scenario and as usual I'm left with the same questions after all of it, qhich lever get answered or even addressed.  I get the logic of the basic scenario and it's very compelling, very persuasive, but nevertheless I have a problem with elements that seem to be left out,k or taken for granted.

How can there be two bodies of believers who have all the characteristics of the Church but only one of the greoups IS the Church and the other is the Tribulation Saints?  While "the Church" is in heaven, having been raptures before the start of the Tribulation period, others are being saved during the tribulation, some martyred, some managing to escape death to the end, all sharing exactly the same characteristics as the Church possesses and yet they are not the CHurch.  All I ever hear from the supporters of this scenario is that, well, that's just the way it is.  Those people are not th Church because the Church has been raptured and is in heaven.  Yet there is nothing about them that makes them different from the Church believers and I see nothing anywhere in scripture that suggests that there are to be these two separate groups of believers atg the end, all believers according to the same standards, all saved by fatih in Christ's death and so on, all the same and yet one group is the Church and the other is something else.  I don't get it and I don't see how nobody else sees this as a problem.

Specifically I have a problem with the different groups of martyrs.  The martyhres under the altar in Revelation Six after the opening of the fifth seal are waiting for another group of martyrs to join them so that they will aoll receive their rewards at the same time.  Presumably these are martyhrs made during the events of Revelation Six since the martyrs that were made during the church Age of the last two millennia have been raptured and are in heaven with the CDhurch.  Yet they are martyrs just likie those under the altar and like those yet expected to be martyred during the tribulation.  If Martyrs are being treated as a group unto themselves, how is it that those with the raptured Church are just blended in with the church and not separated out as are the other two tgroups?  Those in the raptured group would include all those martyred under the Caesars, especially Nero, in the early centuries, and all those mayrtyured under the Rom an Catholid Church of the Middle ages, millionsof them as memorialized in foxes' Book of Martyres.  It makes no sense to me that this group of martyrs would be treated as just part of the raptured church while other martyrs that come during the tribulation ate treated as a separate group, or two separate groups.  

I've said this many times beofre and here it is again.  I continue to see it as a question that needs an answeer, and I continue to susepct that it called the whole pre trib scenario into queisotn.  Not that I have an alternative in mind.  

I Wish Someone Could Answer These Questions About thew Problems I See in the Pre Trib Rapture ScwnaEIO

Just heard MacArthur lay out the pre-tribulation rapture scenario and as usual I'm left with the same questions after all of it, qhich lever get answered or even addressed.  I get the logic of the basic scenario and it's very compelling, very persuasive, but nevertheless I have a problem with elements that seem to be left out,k or taken for granted.

How can there be two bodies of believers who have all the characteristics of the Church but only one of the greoups IS the Church and the other is the Tribulation Saints?  While "the Church" is in heaven, having been raptures before the start of the Tribulation period, others are being saved during the tribulation, some martyred, some managing to escape death to the end, all sharing exactly the same characteristics as the Church possesses and yet they are not the CHurch.  All I ever hear from the supporters of this scenario is that, well, that's just the way it is.  Those people are not th Church because the Church has been raptured and is in heaven.  Yet there is nothing about them that makes them different from the Church believers and I see nothing anywhere in scripture that suggests that there are to be these two separate groups of believers atg the end, all believers according to the same standards, all saved by fatih in Christ's death and so on, all the same and yet one group is the Church and the other is something else.  I don't get it and I don't see how nobody else sees this as a problem.

Specifically I have a problem with the different groups of martyrs.  The martyhres under the altar in Revelation Six after the opening of the fifth seal are waiting for another group of martyrs to join them so that they will aoll receive their rewards at the same time.  Presumably these are martyhrs made during the events of Revelation Six since the martyrs that were made during the church Age of the last two millennia have been raptured and are in heaven with the CDhurch.  Yet they are martyrs just likie those under the altar and like those yet expected to be martyred during the tribulation.  If Martyrs are being treated as a group unto themselves, how is it that those with the raptured Church are just blended in with the church and not separated out as are the other two tgroups?  Those in the raptured group would include all those martyred under the Caesars, especially Nero, in the early centuries, and all those mayrtyured under the Rom an Catholid Church of the Middle ages, millionsof them as memorialized in foxes' Book of Martyres.  It makes no sense to me that this group of martyrs would be treated as just part of the raptured church while other martyrs that come during the tribulation ate treated as a separate group, or two separate groups.  

I've said this many times beofre and here it is again.  I continue to see it as a question that needs an answeer, and I continue to susepct that it called the whole pre trib scenario into queisotn.  Not that I have an alternative in mind.  

Righjtig a Couple of Wrongs as usuusual

 Keep hearing how "our blessed hope" refers to the Rapture as understood in the Pre-Trib end timnes framework.  So distressing.  Our blessed hope is the hope of being with Christ forever and that has nothing to do with any partiular system of end times theiology, it's all Christians blessed hope.  Those millions who died in Christ before the raputre have the same blessed hope as those who will be raptured without dying.  

The Pre Trib people have this habit of being so certain of their ssyuystem of thought they seem to have no way of answering any objections to it that hap;ppen to arise.  And objections will always arise, there are always going to be questions.  All they seem to do with them is pronounce them wrong, I haven't heard anything I'd call a real answer.   Scripture for instance does here and there use the phrase "the wrath to come" as a description of what Christ died to save us all from.  While there is reason to ubnderstand that some will be saved from the speicfi wrath of the Great Tribulation of the Day of the Lord, as in Revelation 3:10, the idea of 3escaping the wrath to come is not always presented in those terms, it is soemetimes a definition of what Christ died for us.  But they don't seem to know this or they dobn't seem to want to address it from that point of vi3ew..

 Since I'm on one of my lissues or peeves, I might as well add another.  Another reference by a good teacher to that passage about the demon possessed boy the disciples weren't able to set free, which Jesus exp;lained as its being the sort of demon that required prayer and fasting to get it to leave.  That is, that's what the King James says.  the modern versions say only that it takes prayer and leave out the fasting.  Martyn Lloyd Jones commented on it that the Fasting does not osccur inte earliest manuscripts.  Mac Arethur doesn't mention the fasting at all, he just usess thje modern version that leaves it out.  

A case of the destrubctive work of Westcott and Hort's preferred manuscripts that Burgon identified as corrupt but which are now enshrined as the legitimate line of Greek manuscripts over the line on which the King James was based.  These older and supposedly better manuscripts are a trijan Horse in the Church, destroying foundations bit by bit because they are accepted as legitimate and superior to the Received Text on which the King James was based.

These bogus manuscripts which may be forgeries but are at least the wsork of early church heretics as Burgon understood it, destroy biblical inerrancy first and foremost although this isn't acknolweledged by many of the best exegetes.  It should be but they come up with ways of rationalizing it away.  

Who knjows why fasting was left out of the bogus line, but since it is left out we are to take it that it was added later and is therefore not what Jesus actually said.  this is a pernicious destructive way of thinking but it prevails because Westcott and Hort are taken to be legitimate scholars instead of the maniuplating corruptors they really were.  

So if youi want to get rid of a certain kind of demon you need to fast as well as pray but all we are allowed to think is that prayer is the onbly thing required.

What is Our Blessed Hope?

I keep hearing that "our blessed hope" is the Rapture, and specifically the rapture as understood in the Pre-Tribulation format.  This makes no sense.  Our blessed hope is shared by all Christians, not just those of the last generation who will be taken to heaven in the Rapture, but by all those who have died in Christ up until that time.   Most people who are the Lord's will not be raptured, but will die in the Lord and yet they too are heirs of the promise of the Blessed Hope, which is the blessed hope of being with the Lord forever.  Not the Rapture, not any particular understanding of the Ratpure.  All who are the Lord's have the Blessed Hopew.

Just had to say it again.

So supposedly we evolved this huge brain in order to employ it in such mind-shriveling inanities as evolutionism?

 (copied this from Faith's Corner)

Debate/discussion between evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Bret Weinstein I found on You Tube.  A political question came up among other things.  Dawkins called the election of 2016 a "disaster" and the audience applauded.  Weinstein had applied his evolutionary biological interpretation to the event as an expression of tribalism and implied dire consequences.  Huh?  Making America great again is just tribalism?  Too often people on the left confuse this objective with nationalism in the Nazi sense, which is insane to begin with, and then the evo biologists explain THAT in terms of the "selfish gene" that wants to populate the world with itself.  I feel all the cells in my brain cringeing in consternation.   Can brain cells cringe?  I think maybe they can shrivel up from sheer sorrow.  But I digress.  To make America great again is to restore the liberty and prosperity that underlies America's benevolence.  America is benevolent, as benevolent as is possible in a fallen world and it's done pretty well.  America is the opposite of a conquering empire, it is the antidote to Nazism and all other forms of fascism but there is nevertheless this concerted effort to paint her with the same brush.  And if you're restricted to the biological explanations for everthing you'll pack it all down into a tiny little box and soon be able only to grunt inanities with a severely restricted vocabulary.  Darwinism, Marxism both.  Killers of meaningful thought.

It was Dawkins who said more than once that he doesn't think it helpful to try to explain everything in terms of biology, and Weinstein who kept finding ways to do it anyway.  I'm certainly no fan of Dawkins but he's the one with the sane position in this case.

I don't understand how evolutionary explanations hold the attention of an intelligent person.  It's such a cramped way of thinking, reductionistic, procrustean -- hard to find a word apt enough to convey its claustrophobic effect.   Survival:  what a mindnumbing straitjacket of a concept to make the explanation of all life.   No wonder if its aficionados must flee to art and poetry to escape the crawlspace from time to time.   Some of them have that much good sense.  But then they have to explain the art and poetry from within the same  airless little box.

Sometimes they ask questions that really should collapse it in on itself, but don't because of the tenacity of the theory and its basic unfalsifiability.  Why do the females of some   species require beautiful and dramatic displays from the males to qualify them as mates?  Why does all life grow senescent and ultimately die?.  All these questions must be answered in terms of biological survival advantage.   That's the mental exercise demanded of each.  Suffocating.

So they put their imagination to work to answer such questions.  Funny how they think this is science.  Well it is a part of science for sure but with evolutionary biology it never gets past this stage and yet whatever conclusions become popular get reified into "fact."    Answering any question is just a matter of imagining it in terms of survival value.  Same sort of thinking describes the Marxist "analysis" of everything as class conflict, but the class conflict is a total mental fabrication used as a battering ram to destroy everything good in civilization.  Marxism never comes down to earth, never touches actual reality.  Neither does evolutionary biology.  The theory is an unprovable imaginative construct and every issue is answered with an imaginative construct.   The actual realities of biology are better explained by creationism.

 The tribalism shrinking mechanism got pursued through a few examples.  Hutus and Tutsis.  Must be something primordial built into the genes that caused that genocide.  Nope, it was a Catholic priest who got on the radio and called one of the tribes cockroaches and stirred up hatred toward them in the other tribe.  Before that they'd got along together just fine.  Both tribes were Catholic too.  And then Catholic celibacy was discussed in the same procrustean terminology.  Gosh, it must somehow promote the survival of the "lineage," not that I have any idea what the lineage is.  But that's what evo biology decrees is the explanation of everything in existence.  But priestly celibacy is nothing but an incubator of all kinds of sexual sins and it's completely contrary to biblical teaching, in fact "forbidding to marry" is specifically denounced in the Bible as a fruit of the false teachers prophesied to infiltrate the Church and undermine the truth.  But such real historical facts must give way to the shriveling idea that it *really* serves Survival somehow.

How liberating is the revelation of Creation, Fall and the Flood, death and disease as the consequence of violations of the Moral Law of God, biological systems retaining much beauty though crippled by the Fall.  Too much to say about all that.  Mostly the deathly death brought about by evolutionism is what this post had to be about.  

Amazing insect with meshing gears, and other evidence of I.D.

A thread has been started at EvC forum on a remarkable insect that has actual meshing gears as part of its body design, used to synchronize the movements of its hind legs as it makes a high leap.  Of course this will be treated as a remarkable instance of what evolution can do, although of course it is really much better evidence for design than for evolution, design in this case by God, a really good instance of Intelligent Design.

Here's the source information

But they are so convinced of evolution all that thread is going to get is one rationalization after another for how evolution coulda brought it about:  the time-honored Coulda Argument.  They've convinced themselves that the complex human eye evolved simply because they can point to eye designs all over the range of living things that they are able to mentally arrange into a sequence of steps or stages of complexity, although most of them don't even occur in the same Linnaean lineage.  No matter, if you can mentally assemble utterly separate designs into some semblance of a sequence that's all they need to justify belief that the eye evolved and convince them no Designer is implied. 

There is another instance of a remarkable creature, the one used by Michael Behe in his argument for Intelligent Design, the bacterium with a rotating flagellum.  The way they argued that one was to find other creatures that could plausibly be said to have one or another of the parts of the complex rotating apparatus as part of their design, so that they could say that if any of those parts exist as a functioning unit in any other bacteria, then all of them could have been part of an evolutionary sequence to the final rotating mechanism.  But of course there isn't an iota of evidence that this occurred, again it's just a mental arranging of features of completely unrelated creatures into a sequence, a purely mental sequence:  the Coulda argument again, though in fact it really couldn't. 

So we can expect that for this amazing jumping bug with its amazing gear mechanism they'll try to put together some kind of sequence out of just as much fluff as in the other cases and declare it evidence for evolution.  If they can't find anything that resembles a stage on the way to the gear mechanism, they won't have any problem declaring it evolved anyway.

Sigh. 

While I'm at it, since I do not want to be tempted to post at EvC any more (and thankfully there have been very few temptations since I left), I'll answer something here:  Coyote who always says he misses me, which is nice except we never agree on anything, claimed that I place the Flood at the time of the "KT boundary," which is absolutely false.  I've so many times said that I place it where the Bible genealogies place it, about 4300 years ago, that I'm amazed anyone could misquote me. 

Some Ruminations on Natural Selection and Genetics off the film "Evolution's Achilles' Heels."

Watching the film again, Evolution's Achilles' Heels, have a couple of comments I might as well get said.  I've seen just the first two segments, the one on Natural Selection and the next one on Genetics.

Taking down Natural Selection is really pretty easy, although of course it's strongly resisted by believers in evolution.  Remember that Darwin's big discovery was Natural Selection as the supposed engine of evolution, the title of his book being The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection.  The obvious simple fact is that Natural Selection works by subtracting or eliminating, not by adding anything, while of course evolution to be true beyond variation within a Kind requires the addition of novel features.  In fact the way natural selection produces new variations is by eliminating other variations.  Natural Selection is one of the ways new variations occur, which are sometimes called "species" if they seem quite different from the parent organism, but the point is that the processes involved are subtractive, and my own observation is that you can only subtract to a certain point when there is no more change possible -- which is my own argument in a nutshell, Evolution Defeats Evolution.  But the film simply makes the point that selection subtracts and that in itself is contrary to what evolution needs in order to be true.

The film doesn't make a distinction between the phenotype or outward form of a creature and its genotype or genetic information, but the changes that are seen in the outward form that is brought about by natural selection occur by the elimination of other forms or phenotypes, and the corresponding elimination of the genetic information that codes for the different forms.   You can have part of the genome being eliminated in one population of a species to produce one new variation, while in a separate population another part of the genome may be eliminated to produce a completely different new variation.  Either way you've got your new variation as a result of subtracting genetic information, and that can never ever produce anything truly new, it can only bring out a new combination of traits already existing in the genome, which makes the whole idea of evolution of species from species impossible.

The next subject is genetics and they cover the amazingly complex workings of DNA replication within a single cell.   They point out that the different parts of the cell couldn't have evolved separately because of their interdependence, one part needing to exist in order to produce another part, that in turn needs to exist for the first part to operate.  They also point out the essential roles of information, communication and language, also interdependent and inseparable, another proof that evolution could not possibly have designed the cell.

Mutation is of course discussed as evolution's only hope of producing anything truly novel, but of course it usually does nothing but destroy things, destroy DNA itself, destroy genes, remove parts of an organism which under certain circumstances can be adaptive, such as wingless beetles on a windy island, sickle cell anemia as the cost of protection from malaria, the loss of the ability to ingest some things protecting against poisons and so on.  All subtractions and eliminations that are sometimes adaptive but not in any sense the Theory of Evolution requires.

They don't discuss the argument I've so frequently encountered, about mutation increasing genetic diversity, which would take too much discussion for this post.  The main answer is that the increase in diversity is usually an increase in disease of one sort or another, that is, ultimately a loss to the organism rather than anything beneficial, let alone of any value toward species evolution.

They present the idea that the term Junk DNA for or the 98% of the genome that does not code for protein, was based on the ideological commitment to the theory of evolution, the interpretation being that it represents former functions in the history of the organism back to the primordial soup, that are no longer of use as the creature has evolved.   Now it is claimed that these noncoding regions of the genome actually do have functions, and many were listed though none of them discussed, so I don't know what science supports them or why there are so many different functions involved. 

I still think that Junk DNA probably IS junk, though not for the evolutionist reasons.  My creationist interpretation is that it represents the result of the Fall, or in other words the operation of death on living things since that event, death not having been part of the original Creation.  Since the Flood wiped out all but eight human beings, and an even higher percentage of animals, a lot of genetic material would eventually have died out in each species as it went on reproducing after the Flood.  So many alleles for a great number of genes would have perished that eventually those genes would themselves die out in the population wherever they were already reduced among the survivors on the ark.  Of course the increase in the destructive effects of mutations in the genome, which the film pointed out are cumulative down the generations, would facilitate the death of genes by destroying alleles to the point that a given gene locus would have no functional alleles left.  What would that be but a "junk" or unfunctional or dead gene?  Thus whatever the junk DNA used to code for is lost to all living things, former functions that would once have supported the enormous longevity that existed before the Flood. 

I like this interpretation because it fits with the Biblical understanding of the Fall.  But again, the idea that noncoding DNA has other functions has to be considered.