IQ

Messy homes 'cause messy minds'
Growing up in a chaotic home may be bad for children's minds, a study suggests.
Researchers studied nearly 8,000 twins born in Britain between 1994 and 1996. Some were identical, others were not. London's Institute of Psychiatry found those living in noisy, disorganised and cramped homes were less intelligent, New Scientist magazine reported. Since the children were twins, the researchers were able to establish that this was caused by their environment and not their genes. Other studies have come up with similar findings. However, it has not been clear until now whether genetics or environment is the biggest factor.
Researchers were able to tease out the answer because the children were a mixture of identical and fraternal twins. This meant that some of the children had exactly the same set of genes while others shared only half their genes. The study found that the homes of wealthier and better-educated parents were slightly more organised. Their children were also slightly more intelligent.
Household chaos
However, when they took genes out of the equation they found that household chaos had a significant impact on intelligence.
Those living in organised homes were more intelligent than those living in chaotic homes.
"It just makes sense," said Professor Robert Plomin, the lead researcher.
"If a kid is in a really chaotic home, it's hard to imagine that they can learn in a normal way.
"Their surroundings just aren't subtle enough for them to tease apart the world."

My comment is
Now I know that what is touted to be intelligence has really, as I have suspected, at least as much to do with Knowledge as Ability. A lot of IQ tests are tests of what you know. I do understand that it is hard to test ability without using reference to knowledge eg in order to give a written test the testeee must be able to read the language proficiently that the test is written in. The more proficient the reader is in the language the higher his IQ because he will be able to pick up the “subtle” things in the questions. Right?
“learn in a normal way” what is a ‘normal’ way to learn? How does that go quoting William “lord what fools these mortals be” We think that we know so much! Like I said it is very amazing that we humans can know that what we know is only a fraction of what there is to know. How do we do that? How are we smart enough to know that when we answer a question there are a dozen more lurking there for us to find and then answer?
It is difficult to run a test that is really really objective. So there is not only more organized but also “wealthier and better-educated parents” (Is that a slur? Poorer parents have messier homes) that might affect the results?
In the long run, Yes I really do like to have an organized place and less cluttered. I would like to be a little wealthier so that we could fix things up. I think of that book about the corvettes in WWII. The author said that those boats that were a mess where the inhabitants claimed that “we are a working boat no time to ‘keep clean’” were fooling themselves. The most efficient boats were the ones that were neat and tidy and organized. But not overly so. The ones that were spit shined were spending to much time cleaning and to worried about keeping clean to get in there and fight.

Control

So now that we have every confidence of the future of US with Dick’s daughter in command taking over control from Jane. (Dick and Jane ? ? ) That is NOT Tarzan’s Jane either ! She would Never have questioned the prevailing authority, poor primitive ape-man’s wife that she was . . .
who is in control of Mother Church ? ? Long time ago Gorbechov promised the pope religious freedom in Russia. That, I thought at the time, was funny because Russia all along has officially had religious freedom. So, I thought, were ther pope angling for a set up for reuniting of the orthodox into the fold? Seems that he wants two things, to visit Moscow and to be known as the one to reverse the Great Schism. This I found out today. I have thought as much for some time but now thanks to the internet I have The Media affirming my suspicion. So who’s who? Let me think back. One of those guys back there decided to move the capital of the Roman Empire to – what was it then? Istanbul Constantinople? – So who is the official keeper of the flame, church? East. West. I guess west. When? Don’t know. The pope with his cheap gaudy imitation (not that I wouldn’t like to have the price of it in my bank account) imitation of the real icon hasn’t made an impact on the east yet so what will it take to bring them back together? By the way how Did the pope get a hold of that copy, who made it? and what Did happen to the real thing?
I always have wondered who is pulling the strings of the manikin world kind. I would like to sit in on a few, what golf games, saunas, wherever they carry on their trade, meetings. How much of what the media really knows do we ever get to listen in on? Well whatever the world is doing it is good to know that everything will work out in the end to God’s glory!

freedom

VP Dick said he and his wife "have a gay daughter, so it's an issue our family is very familiar with". Regarding the issue of same-sex relationships, he said, "my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone".
What a blast ! Dick says that there are no laws in the good ol US of A ! Just think we can all do whatever we want. “Freedom means freedom for everyone”. So whoever wants to can move into Dick’s house and camp out for a while.
When are we going to realize what the sixties did to this continent? Without absolutes there is no God and without either one of them freedom means freedom for everyone.
Too bad the fine print says “reserved for those with enough money and guns”!

You win some You loose some

The world record for number of players playing chess at the same time is now 13,000. Set in the Che Guevara square. Former chess champion Anatoly Karpov was there. Che was a keen player who is credited with sparking Cuban interest in the game. (Last time a record was set Fidel played, that was in 2002 with 11,320 people.) But where was Bobby?
Bobby was in Japan. He has been. He even tried to marry a Japanese lady in order to stay there. But it didn’t work. He will be back in the good ol US of A on charges of beating Boris in Yugoslavia in 1992. And winning 3million. Apparently there was a US embargo on deeling with that country at that time. So when Bobby heard of the 9/11 attack he said good and wished that they would finish the job. Poor Bobby. He played such good chess.
So was it worth it? The US won the cold war but it lost its only Grand Master?

rock

When we finished grade twelve we faced a two day two part English exam. The first part was grammer and all that good stuff and the second part was a three hour essay. There was the usual set of instructions, bla bla and absolute silence must be observed at all times. . . Choose one of the four titles and write an essay. For the life of me I can not remember the other three titles but one was Silence is Golden. I said to myself I said, Ian it does not matter which other topic I choose or what I write about it, even with my terrible handwritting and atrocious spelling and awefull grammer it will be like a breath of fresh air for the examiner after all that ‘Silence’. Sure enough all the others in that exam room wrote on silence AND I did get a very good grade.
Too much Silence will cause you to scream but rock has, does and will keep people interested. There is our Rock as christians, the girls best friend the rock on her finger and rock salt and OK OK rock. Can I rock the boat? Should we grace it with the adjective music? Now I have put my foot in it. The gauntlet has been thrown down, will I take it up? "So what is it about rock that you do not like?"
I keep hearing this echo "we will we will rock you"

rock

When I finished grade twelve we faced a two part english exam. Part one was grammer and all that good stuff and part two was a - three hour? essay. On the essay there was the usual hundred and fifty page instruction manual and then "pick one of these four topics". For the life of me I can not remember what the other three topics were but one was Silence is Golden. I said to myself I said, self it will not matter which of the other three topics you write nor will it matter what you write about them you will get a good grade BEcause the examiner will be so tired of Silence is Golden that mine with its terrible handwritting and atrocious spelling and awefull grammer will be a breath of fresh air. Of all the people who wrote the exam with me that day - the way I said that may just lead you astray, we only had twenty five people in the class - I was the only one who wrote on a differant topic AND I did get a very good grade.
While Silence is Golden could eventualy make you screeeem 'Rock' can, has and will continue to claim the intrest of countless people. Let me see there is our Rock as christians, there is rock salt there is OK OK to the point there is Rock. Should we grace it with the adjective music? Now I am in the spotlight, what will I say? "What is it about rock that you don't like?" Should I stick my neck out and give an answer? That is the Question, whether to suffer the slings and arrows . . .

Come with Me

From www.answersincreation.org re the book Refuting Compromise
Creation Was Very Good (page 195)
Yes, it was very good, even with death and suffering in the animal kingdom before Adam’s fall. God’s creation was “perfect.” It was a perfectly functioning ecosystem, self-renewing in its ability to sustain itself. If it were going to survive, it would have to be self-renewing. The cycle of life, where an animal dies, it decays, nourishes the plants, which are eaten by the plant eaters, who are eaten by the carnivores, is a perfect circle of life. This system does not contain evil. Unfortunately, the young earth proponents equate evil with death and suffering. The two are not related. I agree with Dr. Sarfati, there was no actual evil in the finished creation.
Sarfati appeals to Genesis 1:29-30, especially the statement “I have given every green plant for food.” From this, he “adds to the Bible,” saying that it teaches that vegetarianism was a worldwide phenomenon. It says no such thing…it is merely inferred from the passage. Yes, in combination with Genesis 9:3, I believe that mankind up until Noah were probably vegetarians. However, keep in mind this instruction that God gives Adam is for Adam himself and the human race…nowhere does it say that animals do not eat other animals. Without death, the ecosystem would not survive, because the food chain, which continually recycles itself through death, must have decay in order to survive. It is a perfect system, self-renewing. No decay (death), no renewing, hence imperfection.
Ian F says – One thing the Bible makes clear, “You must be born again” ! Above we have some of the discussion with regard to the question of how old the earth is. It proves that one man’s logic is another’s foolishness, or worse heresy. That word, heresy, seems to keep coming up in Christian ‘discussions’ about most anything that is arguable (which seems to be everything) and on both sides as often as not. So is the earth six thousand years old or is it billions? Are the old earthers heretics of the evolutionary fold or are the young eathers blindly clinging to their own creation of God’s work, trying ignorantly to uphold God’s honour? Well I think that I can safely say that it is not true that ‘we will never know’ ! One day we will find out the answers to these questions but how do we live in the mean time? One day at a time, ‘the Just live by faith’. We know It is interesting what juggling acts we concoct in order to keep fidelity with some doctrine that we got from the Bible. “Since this is true, then there are only three possibilities and the first two are clearly, self evidently and obviously wrong so it has to be ta da ta da ta da! ‘DOOOR NUUUMBER THRRREEE!’” Even nature itself shows us that . . . The earth is old – young old – young.
How can two walk together unless they agree? So you all just come along with me and we will get along just fine.

Hypocracy

So today we have a twenty two year old who apparently killed her new born baby. Can't remember if it was one week or one month old. The guys who went in there to investagate the situation were apalled ! Like how ? ? ? This is something horrible, how could she do it they ask ? So her mistake was not doing it a month or two earlier. If she had no one would ever have known about it. Just who do these guys think that they are kidding ? How can we call our country a great place to live with a bunch of hypocrates like them here ? Like it is not bad enough the attitude toward abortion but this kind of two face carrying on puts the icing on the cake ! ! !

Keep Balanced

As new research suggests one in four employers believe training a pregnant woman is valueless, two women told BBC News Online how telling their employers their good news ended in heartache and losing their jobs.

'All I ever wanted was to be a mother'

How does one comment on such a news headline in today’s world? No matter what one says one will be on the wrong side.
I wonder how this woman can claim “I want to be a mother” and insist on her right to keep her career. Being a mother is more than a nine month incubation period. An other BBC news headline said that the way baby boys are handled influences their reaction to the big bad world later in life. What did it say? ‘Molly Coddle’ them I think it was and they will not tend toward violence later on. How can a mother Molly Coddle a baby when the kid spends most of its mother’s time asleep or at the day care? Speaking of which, who would take their expensive car to the cheapest slap happy mechanic? Yet they will take their kid “all I ever wanted was to be a mother” to the cheapest day care. Some how it sounds like “all I ever wanted was to prove that I can have a baby and a career to, I am superwoman!” Like the astronaut sitting on the launch pad thinking, “this thing was put together by the cheapest bidder”! What can women expect? The employer wants to get the job done and their biggest expense is often employees and there are a lot of employees out there including women who are there to get max dollars out of the job for minimum input.
On the other hand women do have a lot to bring to the work force. They are responsible for a lot of inventions, things that have improved life for us all. Women have skills that men will never have that are sometimes invaluable in a field of endeavor.
Oh how to find the balance? No I do not think that for a woman, being married is the equivalent of being a housewife. But how to balance a demanding career with a family? Course a lot of men have never found a way to do it either. I often wonder how a lot of pastors think that they are doing a good job of looking after God’s family, the church, when their own family is suffering ‘dad is on a 100 hr a week schedule’.

To Covenant or not

Covenanting can by definition only be moraly obliging to those who have made the covenant, there is no obligation to those who are outside of the embrace of the stipulations and promises. Indeed I may suggest that a covenant is by nature quite exclusive. The purpose for making a covenant is to protect the interests of the individuals or parties involved is it not? Covenanting was a duty under the covenant that God made with the decendants of Israel at Mt Sinai. The first Covenant ended in less than fourty days, Moses had to make new tablets Ex 34:1 and go up the mountain again, because the terms of the covenant had been broken. God said Ex 34:9 ‘I make a covenant – all the people among whom you are shall see the work of the LORD – Observe what I command you this day’. Ever notice that God did not require the people to make the same promise that they had made in Ex 19:7-8; this time it was just "observe to do!" God Himself undertook to make the covenant last untill its terms and conditions were fulfilled Ex 33:12-14. Why did Moses put a veil on his face? So that the people could not see that his face was shining? No! So that they could not see it fade away 11Cor 3:13 ! ! One purpose of the covenant that God made with the people was to vividly show them that new life is not possible without death first ! The law said ‘the soul that sins dies’. The end of the law is death for that all have sinned. That the covenant ended is without question, Heb 8:7,13 "if the first covenant had been faultless no place would have been sought for a second - In that He says, ‘A new covenant,’ He has made the first obsolete." Heb 9:15 "Christ is the mediator of a NEW covenant" not just a new administration of an already exixting covenant. When the covenant ended is open to discussion. When Babylon took the ark of the covenant? There is evidence that it never was in the temple built in Ezra’s time. Josephus sais that the High Priest sprinkled the blood of the sacrifice on the Day of Atonment on a rock in the Holy of Holies. Without the ark was there a covenant? Did it end the day Jesus was born, the day that He died? Did it end when Titus sacked Jersulam? It did end. Its terms and purposes had been fulfilled. All of them ! What ever term or purpose or stipulation or obligation or promise you can think of - it was fulfilled in and by Jesus ! When does a covenant end? Isn’t it when all its purpose has been acomplished? That was done in the life and death of one Jesus of Nazareth. Now the New Testament in Christs blood has its force not in His life and or death but in His resurection. The New Testament was forged in the furnace of His life and death , true, but they are not part of it. Till the bride to be stands with her intended, Rev 19:7 there are NO covenants mandated, Jesus himself is our defendant and the Holy Spirit our surity. When Jesus said ‘it is finished’ He had in mind all sorts of things – everything! there is Nothing left for us but Faith.

To Know

I was researching C.S. Lewis to find out what it was about his theology that made it so that I could not agree with him. I found out that he was Anglican and that he considered George MacDonald to be his mentor so I looked into George. To be sure I don’t know what C.S. thought of George’s theo. From his, George, stories I couldn’t tell what he taught - so I got a book of his sermons with a little biography in it. His theo was wild! For example, he considered that when God said that He was not willing that any should perish, that meant that after death everyone would realize the truth and accept it and go to heaven.
There is a one liner of George’s that I do agree with – as it stands (I don’t know what it really meant to George himself). To me it states a fundamental aspect of our freedom in Christ. "When a man can do a thing, then he can abstain from doing it" (The Lady’s Confession chp 21 Cowlane Chapel). My reading of Job tells me that God’s idea in creating us in His image and with the ability to make up our own mind was that He is pleased and honoured to have people choose to love Him for His own sake. "I can eat meat but if it will stumble my brother I will not" The Bible is not God, the law is not God, we have to get to know Him from His living Son with the help of the Holy Spirit whom He sent to be with us and in us for that very purpose. Why else did Jesus not stay here to be with us on earth? - because we would never get to know God, we would always be distracted by the human Jesus. God doesn’t want us to know the Bible, He wants us to choose Him and know Him!
My goal is to hear Him call me by name some day. I can claim to know a lot about Prince Charles. What do I think of him? Well it is a mixed bag. I do share a birth year with him, and Israel as a nation, so I have some extra interest in him. Now I could, and wouldn’t mind, some day meet Prince Charles and go around claiming to know him. But it will be a grand day when he sees me in a crowd and calls out, "Ian ol’ chap come here and let us talk."
Taking an oath to the seven sacred statements (ie, keep the laws of God) does not afford this kind of freedom any more than the cavalier attitude shown by so many christians. Cavalier, adjective; free and easy, gay and offhand. (just in case you forgot – gay adjective; lively, full of spirit, lighthearted bright, and sometimes tending toward frivolous)(unfortunatly gay has a dark side which has of late eclipsed the happy word that it used to be. Wanton, Licentious) We are not under the law, we are on the other side of death; and freedom in Christ is not for us to squander on ourselves. We are back to Maxwell 1:1 "Keep balanced" ! ! !

of IVF and Fonda

Now here is a good one. bbcworld news, “A California woman has been awarded $1m damages after she was implanted with the wrong embryos during IVF. The embryos Susan Buchweitz received at a San Francisco clinic were intended for a married couple who underwent IVF on the same day.” We just go on creating all sorts of artificial dilemmas for ourselves to work through. Actually in my opinion it is all a smoke screen to cover the evil that lies in the heart of the world’s people. A smoke screen to cover the fact that they just do not want to do what is right and good.
“Doctors hid the mistake until Ms Buchweitz's son was 10-months old. The couple is seeking custody of the boy, who is now three years old. He was created using the husband's sperm and a different egg donor.”

Professor Jack Scarisbrick, of the UK prolife charity Life, said
"Nobody has considered the welfare of the child in this case," he said. My comment is “when do they ever”? Shouldn’t I comment on the use of the word “created” too? And the invitro adultery?

I am so thankful that I have a rock to stand on, there are absolutes, our God reigns ! !

So Fonda is back to haunt us too. Her and her running mate Kerry. I am still wondering how much of the Iraq prisoner abuse is real. Who is the master mind that allegedly brought all that out in the open? Someone opposed to Bush? To America, to good and decent and even Godly? We haven’t seen Fonda, or Kerry, in Viet Nam with some relief agency trying to make it up to those poor abused people . . .

The New Testament is the Real Thing

So you do not understand some concept that is introduced to us in the New Testament ? Read through the Old again. One teacher at a Bible School told me that at the beginning of the semester in his Bible course he would ask his class to find the New Birth in the Old Testament. At the end of semester he would ask, “so who found any reference to the New Birth?”. The Old Testament is full of pictures of the things that Jesus and the New Testament authors taught; sometimes called shadows, or types, or illustrations. A whole bunch of it is. When we look back we can see lots of pictures in the architecture of the temple, the colours, the location of the furniture, the ceremonies; we can see Jesus in all the little details. One whole book of the Old Testament exists to teach us one very important lesson about becoming a Christian and just to think, some people thought that that book did not deserve to be in the canon of the Bible ! Ezekiel is a good illustration of this principle, he used toy soldiers and a scale model city to teach his people what was in store for their home. I wonder, why did he spend so much time recording the dimensions of the temple, chapters and chapters of it ?

Fortunately for us the New Testament is not another chapter in the saga of back to the future. The New Testament is the here and now. It is the end all, be all, ultimation. It is true that when God made a covenant with the descendants of Israel He said that it would be everlasting, but there was a caveat; and it was not written in fine print. It said “keep the terms of the covenant”! The covenant of works. In other words the duration of the covenant was up to the people. It lasted something less than forty days. So Moses had to go all the way back up the mountain and get a new set of stone tablets and a new covenant with one new condition; God Himself secured the covenant till its purposes had been fulfilled. The New Testament is one hundred percent gaurnteed! The New Testament has terms as well and it required obedience but not on the part of any person or group thereof. Jesus already obeyed God. He both lived a perfect life and He died for sin; “the soul that sins it shall die!” In reality He did not die it was me who did. I died on the cross. The number one big major difference between me as a Christian and someone living under the Mt Sinai covenant is that I live on the other side of death, “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ”! Imagine telling someone who is dead, “you shall not steal”! Imagine a police man telling a dead man “sit up and pay attention!”


In the New Testament we have something unique, something that the Old Covenant or any other religion could or can or will never provide, and we have it now. It is not something that we look to the future for. It is very real and here and now. The New Testament is a new computer with a new operating system on it. Oh sure, we have to reprogram all the rest of the software (study and meditate on the Bible) and we are looking forward to getting a new case to put it into but we have all the benefits now.