Monday 7 October 2013

Xanga Toe Stepper made silent

'Stepping toes' was originally a Xanga website opened on the 28th of September 2011, but in the Summer 2013 Xanga changed its policy and the Christadelphians had to find a solution for recovering their texts on October 6 of 2013.
Image representing Xanga as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
The reason why the Christadelphians started a Xanga site was because they were confronted with a lot of wrong sayings on several Xanga sites about serious Bible Students, Jehovah Witnesses and Christadelphians or Brothers in Christ. Because they could not react to certain writings on Xanga, because  to reply the person had to be a member and some writings on the Xanga sites could use some reactions from outside the Christadelphians decided to put on their boots and join the community.

I and and the Christadelphians knew it would not be a place where many writings from our site would be placed on the net. We had our hands full already with other websites and other real life stuff, printing work and distribution of hard copy magazines.

Image representing Skype as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
In the recent previous years we saw many changes in the bloggers world. Also in the system of communicating with each other many changes came very quickly. I still remember to be one of the earlier messengusers having a @messengeruser.com account which later became the better know @hotmail.com account, which still many use today but also has been changed to @outlook.com accounts, and the messenger gave way to the more succesfull Skype.

The "Stepping toes" site got his name from the Dutch saying “Op de tenen stappen” or “Stepping on the toes” being the figuratively  “to thread on a person’s toes” or making that somebody carries a chip on the shoulder.

At the time we did hope that the visitors on that site would not be to quickly to take offence, but would be brought to think about serious and debatable matters. We knew that the matters which we brought forward on that site were texts which could cause commotion, hence the name.

It is our awareness that people like to hold fast on tradition and want to keep to certainties which are given from one generation onto the other. We know that certain ideas we share, are not favoured by so many. First of all do we love and honour only One God, who we want to address to with His Name. And that Name is one which frightens a lot of people. Once people do hear the Name of that Creator they also often of only one denomination in christianity, forgetting that there are (luckilly) more denominations which use that Sacred Name of God.

People are easily put out when they hear whom we adhere.
But we are also sure that the die is been cast and that we have come in a special time where it is more important to share our love to the whole world, like our Masterteacher Jesus/Jeshua, the Messiah did.

The man we do like to follow on this earth not only wanted that everybody knew his Father, he also proclaimed the Good News of the coming Kingdom of God and wanted that all his followers went out into the world to bring that Evangelion of good Tidings.
You could say that nobody can quarrel with such good news that Jesus of Nazareth brought, but as the world went against him so they were not pleased either with his followers.

At the time of going on the Xanga platform the Christadelphians wrote:
Now we pitch our own tents here also on this Xanga Group we do hope we shall find enough spirits eager to share their ideas and to welk along on the long road to … Tipperary and beyond. happy
Today they have to tell the readers:

From Monday 7 October we shall try to place the previous publicised articles from Xanga on some of our other websites.
Most of the Christadelphian writings you can find at our other web pages, to which we would like to invite you:

Our main site: Belgian Christadelphians
Christadelphian Ecclesia
Brethren in Christ – Broeders in Christus
Christadelphia
Hoop tot Leven | Redding door Christus Jezus
Hope to find you there also.heart

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Wednesday 2 October 2013

Has the Bible’s Garden of Eden been found — and restored

Despite ongoing violence in the region, NewScientist is reporting that the “‘Garden of Eden’ has been saved.” The country’s Council of Ministers recently approved its first national park, restoring Mesopotamian marshes in Iraqi’s southern region.

Biblical scholars say this massive oasis in the desert may have been the Garden of Eden. For more than five millennia, tribal groups of Marsh Arabs lived sustainably in this water world, using the dominant plant, a giant grass called Phragmites australis, for housing, animal feed, fuel, and commerce. Under their ministrations, the marshes teemed with life, serving as one of the world’s most important stopovers for migratory birds and as breeding habitat for Persian Gulf fisheries. 

After the Gulf war in 1991, Iraq's president, Saddam Hussain, used dykes, sluices and diversions to cut off the country's two major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. This drained 93 per cent of the marshes, largely obliterating the largest wetland ecosystem in the Middle East.

Please find more about it in:

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Jew refering to be religious or to be a people


Not only the Catholic church faces lots of people who do not want to be active in their 'faith' or who perhaps still take part in certain traditional feasts, like child-baptism, first and second communion, but really do not believe in any God or would ever read the Bible.

In Belgium we still do have a very active Jewish community but everywhere in the world we also notice people who call themselves Jew but have no interest in any god whatsoever.

In the United States the number of nonreligious Jews is rising. When you would go around and ask passers by how active they are in their religion, you probably would find many who are not religious at all. According to a new survey of the Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project more than one in five so called Jews, saying they are not affiliated with a religion.

The size of the U.S. Jewish population has been a matter of lively debate among academic experts for more than a decade. Because the Pew Research survey involves a representative sample of Jews, rather than a census of all American Jews, it cannot definitively answer the question. However, data from the survey can be used to derive a rough estimate of the size of the U.S. Jewish population. Perhaps even more valuably, the survey illuminates the many different ways in which Americans self-identify as Jewish or partially Jewish, and it therefore provides a sense of how the size of the population varies depending on one’s definition of who is a Jew.

If Jewish refers only to people whose religion is Jewish (Jews by religion), then the survey indicates that the Jewish population currently stands at about 1.8% of the total U.S. adult population, or 4.2 million people. If one includes secular or cultural Jews – those who say they have no religion but who were raised Jewish or have a Jewish parent and who still consider themselves Jewish aside from religion – then the estimate grows to 2.2% of American adults, or about 5.3 million. For the purposes of the analysis in this report, these two groups make up the “net” Jewish population.

In traditional Jewish law (halakha), Jewish identity is passed down through matrilineal descent, and the survey finds that about 90% of Jews by religion and 64% of Jews of no religion – a total of about 4.4 million U.S. adults – say they have a Jewish mother. Additionally, about 1.3 million people who are not classified as Jews in this report (49% of non-Jews of Jewish background) say they have a Jewish mother.  {Since 1983, the Reform movement formally has embraced a more expansive definition of who is a Jew, accepting children born of either a Jewish father or a Jewish mother if the children are raised Jewish and engage in public acts of Jewish identification, such as acquiring a Hebrew name, studying Torah and having a bar or bat mitzvah. See the Reform movement’s March 15, 1983, Resolution on Patrilineal Descent.}

Jewish leaders say the new survey spotlights several unique obstacles for the future of their faith. You can wonder when even among religious Jews, most of them say it's not necessary to believe in God to be Jewish, and less than one in three say religion is very important to their lives. Like in Catholicism and protestantism in the Western World, the people living in a luxury world are more interested in material wealth than in spiritual richness.

Though Greg Smith, director of religious surveys for the Pew Research Center says:
"The fact that many Jews tell us that religion is not particularly important to them doesn't mean that being Jewish is not important to them."
The long-term decline in the Jewish by religion share of the population results partly from differences in the median age and fertility of Jews compared with the public at large. As early as 1957, Jews by religion were significantly older and had fewer children than the U.S. population as a whole. At that time, the median age of Jews older than age 14 was 44.5 years, compared with 40.4 years among the population as a whole, and Jewish women ages 15-44 had 1.2 children on average, compared with 1.7 children among this age group in the general public. {The 1957 Current Population Survey results were published in Goldstein, S. 1969. “Socioeconomic Differentials Among Religious Groups in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology, volume 74, issue 6, pages 612-631, and Mueller, S. A., and Lane, A. V. 1972. “Tabulations from the 1957 Current Population Survey on Religion: A Contribution to the Demography of American Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, volume 11, issue 1, pages 76-98. Unfortunately, raw data from the 1957 survey were destroyed, so it is not possible to reanalyze them using the various age categories used in the new survey. In the 1957 survey, completed interviews were obtained for roughly 35,000 households.}

Today, Jews by religion still are considerably older than U.S. adults as a whole, although they are similar to the general public in the number of children ever born. (See discussion of median age and fertility in the Age and Fertility sections in Chapter 2.)

Since 2000, the share of American adults who say their religion is Jewish has generally ranged between 1.2% and 2% in national surveys. 
The estimate from the new Pew Research survey that there are approximately 5.3 million “net” Jewish adults and 1 million children who are being raised exclusively as Jewish (or 1.3 million children being raised at least partly Jewish) falls roughly in the middle of these prior estimates – somewhat higher than DellaPergola’s numbers, somewhat lower than the Dashefsky-Sheskin figure and fairly close to the Saxe-Tighe estimates.

The estimate that Jews by religion make up 1.8% of U.S. adults also is consistent with the results of Pew Research surveys over the past five years and close to the findings of other recent national surveys (such as Gallup polls and the General Social Surveys conducted by the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago) that use similar, close-ended questions about religious affiliation. {A close-ended question provides the respondent with a list of possible responses to choose from. Pew Research’s typical wording is: “What is your present religion, if any? Are you Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox such as Greek or Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, something else or nothing in particular.” Other studies, such as the National Jewish Population Surveys (NJPS) and American Religious Identification Surveys (ARIS) have used open-ended questions about religious affiliation – offering no specific response options – and the results therefore are not directly comparable. Open-ended questions about religious affiliation tend to find smaller numbers of Jews by religion. See, for example, Schulman, M. A., chair. NJPS 2000-2001 Review Committee. 2003. “National Jewish Population Survey 2000-2001: Study Review Memo;” and Tighe, E., Saxe, L., and Livert, D. 2006. “Research synthesis of national survey estimates of the U.S. Jewish population,” presented at the 61st Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.}


In aggregated Pew Research polling, the Jewish by religion share of the population has ranged in recent years between 1.5% (in 2009) and 1.9% (in 2010). GSS estimates have ranged from 1.5% (in 2012) to 1.7% (in 2008). Combining its own surveys conducted since 2008, Pew Research finds that a weighted average of 1.7% of U.S. adults identify as Jews by religion, while the GSS and Gallup find 1.6% identifying as Jews by religion.

According to the survey, a full 16 percent of Orthodox Jews “attend non-Jewish religious services at least a few times a year.” The proportion is identical for Modern Orthodox Jews and what the survey describes as “ultra-Orthodox Jews” — 15 percent for both sub-groups. Shockingly, that’s slightly higher than the proportions of Reform Jews (15 percent) and non-denominational Jews (12%) who report attending non-Jewish religious services with similar frequency.

Jane Eisner, editor-in-chief of the Jewish Daily Forward, said she is not surprised that the study found relatively low interest in Jewish religious beliefs.
"We are a people very much defined by what we do, rather than what we believe," she said.
But Eisner said she is concerned that millennials are less likely to donate to Jewish charities, care strongly about Israel or belong to Jewish groups.
"It's great that these non-religious Jews feel pride in being Jewish," Eisner said. "What worries me is their tenuous ties to the community."

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Tuesday 1 October 2013

The Gabriel Revelation Real or forgery

When older works are found it is not always as easy to find out if it is a real artefact.

Just after world war II the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls brought many scientist wondering of the ingenuity of those scrolls. Nobody ever thought they were the original Old Testament manuscripts, yet radio carbon dating places many of the scrolls at 150-100 bCE.

The new stone tablet unearthed near the Dead Sea, which contains prophecies about the Messiah as well as revelations from the Angel Gabriel has muddled scientists again.
For the last year professor, author and researcher Dr. Ken Hanson has been studying the 3-ft. tablet, known as the ‘Gabriel Revelation’.


Containing 87 lines of Hebrew, the ink is inscribed directly into the stone, which prevents it from being carbon dated, he explained, noting that it’s possible the artefact is a forgery.
English: The Psalms scroll, one of the Dead Se...
The Psalms scroll, one of the Dead Sea scrolls. Hebrew transcription included. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But Hanson said he’s come to believe the tablet is genuine. Thought to be made in the decade before Jesus’ birth, it speaks of a messianic figure who will rise from the dead after three days. “The implications are overwhelming,” he said, in that the resurrection of a messiah could be part of Jewish tradition.The ancient Judeans known as the Essenes believed in the coming of two messiahs– one from the priestly branch, the other from the lineage of King David, Hanson pointed out.


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