J.W.V.

2007-01-06T12:10:00.000-08:00

A Miracle Within a Miracle.

I recently came upon something interesting when I was thinking about Jesus. I believe that during the mass, the bread and the wine are transubstantiated into the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. This is very miraculous, because man-made things do not routinely become divine, to say the least. However, when I thought about this, not only is the transubstantiation a miracle, but the "act" (for lack of a better word) is miraculous too.
Think about this: Jesus asked us to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Christians have been doing it for centuries. But look closer, and there is a second miracle. In a normal human, thousands of years of eating of the flesh and drinking of the blood would have depleted all the muscle and blood to be eaten and drunk. But because Jesus is not normal, he can multiply his own flesh and blood to feed the masses, like he did with the fish and the loves during his ministry. It was ########## reading of that story, many months ago, that triggered the thought, which I couldn't say at the beginnig or else you would figure out "the secret" and the dramatic tension would be broken.
God is real, and this just goes to show that everything has a purpose, and nothing is accedental. And, if you're wondewring what's up with the fish, it's that I just figured out how to do pictures (press the "add picture" button; what a novel concept!) and fish are cool.

2007-01-03T20:33:00.000-08:00

The All-New Navigatrix!

This is not a post. I decided to make a way of navigating about the blogging community, so on this pseudopost you will find links to all the other blogs I think you might care about. I know there is a way to do this on your side bar, but oh well, enjoy the convenience.

First, Ryans 2 (count 'em!) 2 blogs
http://theoneblogtrulethemallmepie.blogspot.com/
http://theoneblogtorulethemallme.blogspot.com/

Also, Paul's
http://blacklight-arena.blogspot.com/

Victoria's Next
http://my-stream-of-consciousness.blogspot.com/

Izzy's as well
http://izzygalvez.blogspot.com/

If you can think of any more, or can tell me how to do the links, tell me about it so that I can make this more convienent for you.

Will

2007-01-02T20:01:00.000-08:00

I'm A Nerd!

I have for your enjoyment, on this page, a link to wierd al's "white and nerdy" video. I just learned how to do links, thanks to Paul. Anyway, if you have not seen the video, it's really hilarious, and if you have, then watch it again, because it is still hilarious. It embodies the "soul of a nerd"

Will

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJehVbe7Cxs

2006-11-30T16:31:00.000-08:00

True senses.

Here is one theory I recently theorized; it is about the brain and the response of stimuli.
First, imagine something you have touched, now something you have seen, now imagine something you have heard, now smelled, now tasted. How do you describe what you have just imagined? You can clearly imagine in your mind the thing you are touching, seeing, hearing etcetera, but you cannot actually feel, or see or hear this thing. Despite this though, you can "picture" something in your mind and still see other things with your eyes at the same time. What are these things in your head. Obviously, they are thoughts, created by chemical reactions taking place within the brain. But then how can you feel like you're experiencing an event in you thoughts, by imagining it? I theorize that when the brain receives a stimulus, like seeing a house, chemicals react in the brain to what your eyes are telling it (the brain), so that your brain can say "Oh, it's a house". Similarly, the thoughts one experiences are replications of these chemical reactions that told the brain the eyes see a house. So, in other words, when a neuron wants to send the message that the eyes have seen a house, it releases "chemical A", and when the neuron thinks about the house, it releases chemical A again to replicate the experience. It is "response without stimulus", because the neurons are saying that a house has been seen, when the house has not actually been seen. There is a stimulus, of course, it is stimulus the act of replication of chemical reactions that replace the stimulus, but since the experience that under normal stimulus/response reactions is absent, it can be said that it is "response without stimulus". I call these "true senses" because when one thinks about such experiences (such as seeing a house) one only experiences what the sense really is: a chemical reaction in the brain, they don't see with their eyes and hear with their ears, they do it all within their head, and are this time, conscious that they are doing so. Which brings me to a little side topic: how do we know what feelings are, and where they are gathered? I say this because we cant really describe things we feel; the next time you touch something, ask yourself, "what exactly am I feeling (in the sense of reaction, not the thing you are touching)?" Also, how do we know that we hear from our ears, and feel that we hurt our arm in our arm, if all the processing of information is done in the brain? Just some interesting things to think about.

2006-11-21T18:34:00.000-08:00

The Stupendous Story Of Me and The Magic Paper.

One week ago, on my birthday, I dropped my binder. There is absolutely nothing abnormal about that: I must have dropped it hundreds of times by now. However, when it fell, a folded piece of paper fell out. The paper said on it "do not open until 11-14-06". Guess what the date was? 11-14-06. "Wow" I said. Out of the innumerable times I have spilled my binder all over the place, why is it today, they specific date demanded on the paper, that it fell out. It was like it was meant to happen. When I opened it, it had a list of tactful pickup lines; and I'm not talking about the kind that go: "Do you believe at love at first sight, or should I walk by again?" No, these were actually intelligent: They said things like "You give the sun a reason to shine" and "When God made you he was showing off" What, by the name of Thomas Edison, could this mean? You tell. I Haven't the foggiest clue.

2006-11-19T12:47:00.000-08:00

Time.

Time is, to say the least, enigmatic. It exists everywhere and nowhere at the same time. However, one thing that makes me angry, people who think they can change the past. HaHaHa! How laughable.
I have been saying it for years, there is no way to change the past, even with a time machine. This is because if one believes that they are capable of traveling through time, then to them, time is a string of events, one occurring after another. Now, if Bob wanted to go back in time so that he would not get tripped by brad the jock at his senior prom and fell into the punch, he would get in his time machine and leave in, say 10 seconds. But, from the time he set the timer, he would have already left 10 seconds in the future, and 20 years in the past, when he got "punched" he would have already been there, in the past. Since the event Bob was trying to prevent was in the past, future bob would have already travelled to the past to save past bob, and future bob cannot be successful or else present bob would have no reason to go back in time, and would therefore negate the actions of future bob. So in summary, one cannot travel backwars in time to prevent past events, because their presence in the past would have already happened in the past.
Wrap your brain around that, and then go watch "Back to the Future", which is an excellent movie.

2006-11-04T15:05:00.000-08:00

Vive Le Evolution!

Ha ha ha! Just a bit of tasteless humor to get us started on a topic I know Paul has been DIEING to see me write about.
Anyway, in the beginning, there was nothing. These words come from the bible, but for artistic reasons, I use them as me own. Only God exitsed, but since he had always existed, and had existed outside of time (which also did not yet exist), he did not exist in the universe we now live in, due to its lack of existence. At the risk of conjugating the verb "to exist" again, God decided to create the universe. First, I believe God created the laws of physics and nature (you know, the ones that insure his chosen people would not be sucked into space due to the lack of a tangible system of rules). These laws were created in a way so that at any given time, all particles in the universe are behaving according to God's divine will. Then, God created all matter, via the "big bang" he used physics and the big bang because God knew his ultimate creation, man, would have a very curious nature, and therefore would desire to understand everything around him. If man discovered that the only reasons that planes fly, or the atmosphere doesn't ignite when you light a match is because of God's miracles, then we would worship him only because of fear of the repeal of these miracles, not because we actually loved him. The big bang has often been described as a huge (hence the "big) explosion (hence the "bang"). From this point, God created all matter in the universe. Now a couple of weeks ago, an atheist was on "The Colbert Report", and had claimed that he had disproved the existence of God. He said that by saying some sort of supernatural deity who exists outside of time created everything is a very convenient belief, but not a good one. I disagree. Ask yourself: where did all matter come from if these is no God? Maybe is is just part of a bigger, much older whole. Then where did that come from? To me it seems as if matter creating itself or always existing is tremendously more far-feched than God. The concept of something creating itself from nothing into something gives me this frustrated feeling, because my brain is saying "Will, that logic makes absolutely no sense in any way, shape, or form." Also, it has been said that the big bang disagrees with the biblical concept of "chaos to cosmos". This is untrue. When the big bang happened, all matter in the universe was in the exact same spot. I don't want to take the time and describe Einstein's theory of relativity, but basically, according to his theory, an early universe like that would have been very chaotic, with many celestial bodies' respective gravitational fields. They are inherently more stable and less chaotic the farther they are away from each other, so by the action of spreading outward by the big bang, it created a much more peaceful universe. Also, that shows why the universe is expanding (I guess the reason isn't to get away from Chuck Norris).
Billions of years later, earth formed in pristine conditions: at just the right distance from the sun, and with Jupiter do deflect asteroids that might obliterate life on earth. These conditions have yet to be located elsewhere (if you get my drift). When there was things on earth like a surface that was not molten rock, water and an atmosphere, God created life. Life started out as a single cell, the most basic of all life. This cell then evolved into greater and greater life forms, through natural selection. Don't tell me that natural selection does not exist, because it is an effect between an organism and it's environment. Because of that, it does not technically exist, but we can see the effects of it (much like night, which also does not exist). Life went on, and on, and on, punctuated infrequently be mass extinction. Life got bigger and bigger, because at that point, natural defense was in its crudest form: if you're the biggest, you wont die. But then, a few million years ago, God created man.
When God made man, He did so along the same lines as he did other organisms, using DNA, cells, and other traits. Man was given a soul and free will, however, which insured their dominance over all other life forms. Man is very different form all other organisms. Other organisms have poisons, fangs, claws, camouflage, and other mediums of self preservation; man was just soft flesh. But man was given a brain that was much more advanced than any other organisms', because of this, God made man the stewards of his planet (earth). I am not sure if there was just two humans made in the beginning of time (a.k.a. Adam and Eve) or a whole group of humans made all at once. One one side, the genesis story could be a clever portrayal of man's unintelligible use of his free will, and that there were many humans, who over time resisted the holy path. Or, there could have been only one Adam and one Eve, and then a lot of inbreeding. They did it during the middle ages frequently, and people today aren't horribly disfigured.
In conclusion, evolution does, in every way, exist. One just need to know where they draw the line. You could be like Ryan Stiles, who on "whose line is it anyway?" said that first came Drew Carry, then apes, and then man. (I laughed hard at that one) Or you can believe in the divine will of God. It's your free will.

2006-10-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

It was a normal morning in Hiroshima, Japan, or as normal as it could be on August 6, 1945, during World War Two: people were going about their business at work, at school or at home. There had been an air raid threat earlier that day, but there was no reason to be worried: Hiroshima had suffered barely any damage during the present war. Suddenly, the low buzz of engines filled the air; people looked up to see a group of bombers cruising into the city. People were still not worried; it was a small group, one that could not do much damage with the popular TNT explosive, or even the incendiary weapon napalm. But the people should have been worried, because, unknown to them, The Enola ### was flying overhead. The Enola ### was a B-29 Super Fortress, specially built and modified to carry one very large 9,000 pound bomb named Little Boy instead of many small bombs. Little Boy was a special, new bomb made from an isotope of the element uranium. The Enola ### reached its designated target and then the bombardier discharged his deadly cargo, causing the bomber to vault upward from the sudden change in weight. The leviathan bomb plummeted toward the ground, and then, with a fury until then unseen, detonated. Tens of thousands of lives were snuffed out like a lone candle, instantaneously as if it was before the terrible maws of a mighty hurricane; its flame waning and smoldering like a burning funeral pyre. Some people were simply vaporized by the uncontrollable fission reaction virtually disassembling their molecules; other unlucky people were eviscerated by flying debris; some had their flesh ripped to the bone or got intense burns on every inch of their skin, skin that would soon become thick with scars; the most unfortunate of them all, with their cloths literally blown off, were indistinguishable as a man or a woman, as all their bodily features had been melted off. A billowing purple mushroom cloud with a violent, fiery core rose over the city, and in a few minutes, sickly purple clouds rained giant black drops that left irremovable stains on anything they touched: wood, stone, cement and flesh alike. The dust and smoke rose, and when they did people saw most of the city had been annihilated. People wandered about, dazed, disoriented, and dieing, like somber, grim pallbearers bearing the weight of heavy coffins to their own inevitable graves. For years to come people who witnessed the event would suffer from a thing called radiation sickness: their hair would fall out, they would become nauseous and have large bruises and scars all over their body; many would wither and die. Despite all this carnage and destruction, the dropping of the atomic bomb upon the city of Hiroshima was an absolutely justified action in accordance with the definition of a just war.
The date on which this earth-shaking event occurred was August 6, 1945, when the Allies were chasing down the very last specters of World War Two. Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy had already bent and yielded under the crushing boot of allied might, but the tenacious Japanese persevered under Emperor Hirohito; that is of course, until the two atomic bombs shook its soil. The Hiroshima bomb was justified by the just war definition, containing nine criteria, usually attributed to St. Augustine.
The first criterion for a just war is a just cause. Just cause means that the act of war is to correct a grave public evil. The bomb obviously did end grave public evil, not only because it ended that war, but because it saved many troop's lives: The U.S. had already lost a great many soldiers to the war, and both the Japanese and United States armies were suffering more casualties every day, casualties which could have continued indefinitely if it was not for the bomb . Furthermore as unattractive as slaughtering thousands of Japanese people via the atomic bomb was, the only other option for winning the war was to invade Japan, which was even less attractive. It was estimated that between 500,000 and 1,000,000 U.S. soldiers would die in order to successfully invade Japan, and furthermore, it would cost millions of Japanese citizen's lives to invade. So therefore the public evil was that the invasion would cost so many more lives, it was gravely evil compared to the bomb. That was one piece of the puzzle, but more are still needed.
Second, the action must have comparative justice; that is, the injustices suffered by one party must out weigh the other. Although a great many thousands of Americans died in the war, few died in the bomb: twenty-three American prisoners of war were being held in Hiroshima castle when the bomb exploded. Conversely, the Japanese suffered many thousands of losses during both the war and the bomb, both military and civilian. Next, a public authority is needed.
For an action to be considered just, it must also be ordered by a legitimate public authority, or a constituted public authority. This authority was Harry S Truman, president of the United States of America. Truman became President when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of polio, and since when one elects a president, they elect his vice, and since Truman was the deceased president's vice, his authority was legitimate. Even more so, Truman chose the target himself, not and aide acting in his stead. Also, for a just war, it must be for a truly just cause.
In this instance, the fourth element of a just war, a truly just cause, is defined as not for material gain. The United States wanted nothing material from Japan, save the signature of Emperor Hirohito on a document of formal surrender. The U.S. only wanted to end the war, and thereby save the live of the troops both Japanese and American, that were continually dieing in the ongoing frays. Next, the action needs a probability of success.
To have a probability of success means that it is not a futile effort that would lead to an unnecessary loss of life. First of all, the bomb was a psychological threat to Japan; the U.S.'s way of saying: "look out Japan! We did it once and we'll do it again!" This threat was meant to scare the Emperor into submitting to the United States. As stated previously, millions of Japanese and Americans would have died in an invasion, lives that would be considered futile as long as so many less lives could be lost with an atomic bomb strike. Therefore, since so many less lives were lost in the bomb compared to the invasion, an invasion would be unjustifiable. Also, proportionality is needed to justify the action.
"To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon a tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and peril, a miracle of development". When Winston Churchill said these words, he was referring to the atomic bomb and how much good it did; appropriately, the seventh element for a just war is proportionality, which means that the loss must be out weighed by the good achieved. The loss in this instance is obviously the thousands of civilian live that Japan suffered under the atomic bomb. As stated in the previous section, many countless less live were lost by dropping an atomic bomb, as opposed to an invasion. And, of course, it ended the deaths of Japanese and American soldiers that were loosing their lives in a struggle for victory. Also, after the war, the United States set up a democracy in Japan, the Emperor renounced his divinity, and as a result Japan's present economy is booming. Next, the action must be a last resort.
When the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, they did so only because all other peaceful alternatives had failed; in other words, it was a last resort, which is the next element of a just action. Throughout the war in the Pacific, the United States had been constantly pressuring Japan into an unconditional surrender, that is, a surrender in which the victor chooses every term of the surrender. The U.S. terms were usually as follows "We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction." This was very unlikely to happen without a bomb for two reasons; first, Japan was controlled by militarists. The militarists held it in extreme honor to die for one's country and extreme dishonor to surrender. This philosophy was evidenced on the Japanese islands of Okinawa and Iwo Jima earlier in the war. On these two islands, the U.S. forces had to kill every Japanese soldier on the islands because they refused to surrender. The two battles were crushing defeats for Japan, and it was thought that they would surrender shortly thereafter, but unfortunately, the militarists, who controlled the decision-making cabinet, still thought Japan could win, so the war went on. Secondly, by surrendering in such a way (unconditionally), the U.S. had the freedom to prosecute the Emperor as a war criminal; and since the Emperor was considered divine, the Japanese could not allow this to happen. They had good reason to fear a prosecution, thought, as evidenced by the Bataan Death March. This death march consisted of the Japanese marching thousands of U.S. prisoners of war 67miles through the Bataan peninsula. The Japanese held it in great dishonor to be a prisoner and therefore treated the American prisoners very badly; and as a result of this action, over 10,000 United States soldiers died during the death march. Lastly, the bomb was a threatening intimidation that was believed would compel Japan into surrender. For an action to be just, it must also be in self- defense.
The Action of the dropping of the atomic bomb was and act of redressing, or self defense, which fulfills the eighth criterion completely. Primarily, the United States did not start the war; in fact they wanted to stay out of the whole ordeal, but unfortunately Japan bombed the U.S. Naval Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in an unprecedented sneak attack. After this, the United States was compelled to join the war, as the Japanese had presented an act of war to them. Also, the driving force behind the Manhattan Project, the secret project devoted to designing an atomic bomb, was the threat of a German bomb. Ironically, the German nuclear weapons project, though there was one, fell woefully short of the U.S. nuclear weapons project, and was never really a threat. The Allies could not have known this, however, so their primary mission was to build an atomic bomb before Germany did. The next element deals with civilians as targets.
The ninth and easily most potentially problematic criterion is that civilians are not excusable as targets unless they are unavoidable casualties of a deliberate military attack. The bombing of Hiroshima was a lot of things, but one thing it was not was a civilian attack Harry Truman stated this very clearly: "In deciding to use the bomb I wanted to make sure it would be used as a weapon of war in the manner prescribed by the laws of war". The reason for attacking Hiroshima was a combination of three things; the first being an attack upon war factories. With the destruction of the numerous war factories in Hiroshima, the allies believed Japan's capability to wage war would be crippled, and they would subsequently surrender, about which Harry Truman also stated "I had told Stimson (Henry L. Stimson was the secretary of war at the time) that the bomb should be dropped as nearly as possible upon a war production center of prime military importance" . The U.S. was also attacking the troops and officers living at the time in Hiroshima; the logic behind this was simple: without warriors, one cannot have a war. Third, it was a psychological display of force, so as to scare the Japanese. The reason Hiroshima was used was because it was mostly undestroyed and so therefore the force of the bomb could be easily recognized. Some people wanted to drop the bomb in the ocean as a psychological effect, but that really has no psychological effect at all. Arthur Compton, a scientist working on the Manhattan project wrote "Though the possibility of a demonstration that would not destroy human lives was attractive, no one could suggest a way in which it could be made so convincing that it would be likely to stop the war." In addition, the Japanese civilians were not so innocent; the government had given men, women and children, boys and girls, poles, spears, pitch forks, and awls (a kind of knife) with which to kill Americans. They said that if they died without killing at least one American, they did not deserve to die. Since dieing for one's county was such a great honor, by saying that they meant that if they died without taking one American soldier with them, they would huntil honor in death. "we shall fight untill we eat stones!" was the Japanese motto during the war. Also, one must look at the comparative civilian deaths; that is, though many civilians died in the bomb, they were ultimately excusable because an invasion would have claimed unjustifiably more civilian lives than the bomb did. Also, the bombing of Hiroshima was no more of an atrocity that any other actions in the war: the firebombing of Hamburg cost 50,000 lives, Dresden, 130,000, Tokyo cost about 90,000, the simplyst, millions. The atom bomb was simpley more efficient: instead of taking seven hundred planes three quarters of a million incediarys to kill a hundred thousand, in HorisCurtis it took one psimilarlyone bomb. Curis LeMay saw it simmilarly: "No matter how you sclice it, you're going to kill an awful lot of civilians. Thousands and thousands. But, if you don't destroy the Japanese industry, we're going to have to invade Japan. And how many Americans will be killed in an invasion of Japan? Five hundred thousand seems to be the lowest estimate. Some say a million.
... We're at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?"
In conclusion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima was totally justified because of the definition of a just war. As the smoke and dust rose of the desolated rubble that was once Hiroshima, people were amazed at the utter destruction it wrought. Just days later, another towering mushroom cloud would stand threateningly over the city of Nagasaki, spawned from the mammoth bomb Fat Man, like a herald of doom. Though nuclear technology would increase rapidly over the coming years, with the development of ICBMs and thermonuclear warheads, no more terrifying mushroom clouds were to be seen looming menacingly over a ruined city and its dead inhabitance showering them with deadly radiation. This cataclysmic event was not to be repeated as far as anyone knows, since one cannot look into the future, but the event that did happen, though very justified, would become the dreaded symbol of the fearsome nuclear age.

2006-10-24T17:04:00.000-07:00

A Poem

Hey, everyone! Here's a poem I wrote this weekend. It's about loving and hating love at the same time. The whole concept is so paradoxial I just had to write about it. And of course, it is somewhat sad, because no one will ever swoon over " and then there was happiness in the world for flowers and bunnies and all the cute garden animals except the ones that are carnivorous". I apologize in advance for addressing it to the arbitrary "you": I lacked the creative inspiration to use something more eloquent.

The Paradox

I have seen in such few days
The oddity of mankind's ways
I've seen his filth, but that not above
The paradox of earthly love

Because of this, my earthly dread
Is not but pleasure to me head
For pain inside me, so it seared
But grateful for it, which is weird

When I see you every day
My cold heart ice melts away
And drowns my insides with its freeze
Take it from me will you please

To be near you is like a flame
Into my soul so fast it came
It burns my heart a great amount
But no desire to put it out

It's like a fear upon my mind
But no respite I desire to find
To tell the difference is quite a feat
But the end of it, not to meet

A coward for this, it has been said
True as it is no anger fled
I won't succumb to my emotion
A thought of its truth is quite a notion

No one can know how I feel
This is one thing I can't reveal
Others I have, if just a hint
But of this one not even a glint

To talk to you is a good day
I thank the Lord it happened that way
But a mask I wear; a good one too
So You will never know it's You

To see you happy without me
Or with another fools my destiny
You don't need me, but I need you
Love or not to me it's true

My face is good; they'll never know
My sparks or thoughts will never show
I'll never show them lest they burst
Like water dam from pressure worst

Maybe I'm a fool, maybe insane
Maybe a delusion or water on the brain
I'm like a ghost, but that's ok
What's wrong with solitude anyway?

I don't know if me feelings are true
Or in a day, just something new
Either way these feelings I do rue
But love them as much as I love you

2006-10-07T16:34:00.000-07:00

The Bridegroom

One thing that is a real debate in our religion today is the topic of the marriage of priests. While I have always been in staunch opposition of it, My only reasons were pathetic ones like "uhhhhh.... Because I said so". So, in that respect, the belief was only a regurgitate of me parent's beliefs. This is bad, but fortunately, this weekend I had a major revelation about the subject.
In the Bible, Jesus constantly refers to himself as the bridegroom and the church, his bride. That means that we can consider the church as a whole "married" to Jesus. We lay people are allowed to marry each other because marriage makes reproduction morally possible. As you know, the only way to make new Christians is for the old ones to have children, or conversion.
So lay people are allowed to marry. But what, you must ask yourself, constitutes the church? The priests, deacons, bishops, cardinals, nuns, brothers and pope do, because they are the only ones that can change the bread and the wine into the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ (nuns and deacons, maybe even brothers-I honestly don't know- can't perform the Eucharist, but they are important parts of the church). So if the church is the priests, bishops and other clergy, and the church is the bride, then people in the clergy are "married" to the church and to Jesus. That is why the cannot marry themselves, because it would make themselves, and Jesus polygamists. Polygamy is morally, psycologicly, and emotionally BAD. Got it? "B" as in bad, "A" as in awful, and "D" as in dreadful. bad

2006-10-04T15:16:00.000-07:00

The Role Of Dinosaurs

65 million years ago, dinosaurs walked the earth. Innumerable plants, insects flying and swimming creatures lived alongside them. Unfortunately for the dinosaurs, they were all killed by a mysterious event, some cataclysmic happening that decimated the earth's population. Now, 65 million years later, we live in our heated house, eat refrigerated food, drive our cars, and listen to the radio. None of this would have been possible without these terrible lizards, the dinosaurs.
I believe that God has a plan for everything in the world, even the dinosaurs and especially us, humans, his greatest achievement. Since he wanted to take care of us, he created us humans at the best time possible, a few hundred thousand years ago. That is when God created us, special organisms that use brain instead of brawn to solve our problems. The climate was nice, food was plentiful, and the gigantisaurous and Tyrannosaurus had finally become extinct. This was a good thing, since cave-man Thag with a rock blade and a wooden club, dressed in his invulnerable armor (loincloth) , wouldn't have had any chance surviving against,
say, allosaurus or velociraptor. These monsters would have annihilated the human race, because even though now humans could just hide in a space station and shoot laser beams at all those darn dinosaurs, australopithicus could not; the first humans were inferior to dinosaurs. Since we can assume that God's master plan was not for us to be torn apart by ravenous theropods, dinosaurs too had a purpose for existing when they did, as did humans.
Most of the commodities me have now, like electricity, cars, and many other important things, can be attributed to the age of dinosaurs. When T. Rex tears up a stegosaurus,and the Stegosaurus gets buried under rubble and sediment, it could became a fossil, but it could also, through chemical reactions, become either coal, oil, or natural gas. Millions of years later, humans have an energy source, one which is used every day by billions of people. Without these natural resources, we would have to burn down trees for energy, or use whale oil or some other resource. Coal oil and natural gas play a profound role in our lives, and we have them thanks to dead dinosaurs, plants, and other prehistoric animals. God placed everything here for a reason, even an animal with a brain the size of a walnut, like that poor Stegosaurus

2006-09-20T16:00:00.000-07:00

The War In Iraq. It affects everyone in so many ways, weather it be a brother or cousin in our armed forces or anything else, this fact is undeniable. Many people do not support the war, they say "Bush lied-thousands died!", they say we should "get our boys home" and many times "we never should have started this war!" However, these people are Delusional and complacent, and I'm going to tell you why.
The story of the war in Iraq, and also the war in Afghanistan, does not start on the unimportant dates when we invaded Iraq or Afghanistan. The story starts five years and nine days ago- the infamous and tragic day of Tuesday, September 11, 2001. If you do not know that on that day, brazen, cowardly terrorists hijacked four 767's and attempted to obliterate, and if not that, demoralize, American society vicariously. They killed thousands of innocent civilians and brave firemen in their attack, and thus changed America forever. They totally demolished our sense of immortality and impenetrability, by showing that no nation is too great to be assaulted. Many complacent people (myself included) opened their eyes and say the terrifying threat that the evil Osama bin Laden and his terrorist forces pose to us. That is why we started these wars: to annihilate the impending threat of terrorists that were based in the middle east. We started by warring Afghanistan because that is where bin Laden was presumed to be. Unfortunately, Osama is so rich he can pay of anyone to hide him, get him his liver pills, etcetera. After expunging the vicious regime of the Taliban. Then, Saddam Hussein again became a factor in the war.
Saddam then became relevant again for our cause. After the Gulf War, he agreed to let our weapons inspectors inspect his country for, well, weapons. For many years this was working out swell: Saddam was letting the inspectors inspect, and the inspectors were inspecting. But then, one fateful day, Saddam decided to not let weapons inspectors check part of his country, for no better reason than because he didn't want them to. The inspectors must have thought to themselves "hmmmm... I'm checking for weapons of mass destruction and Saddam won't let me check this area. I wonder why???" Anyone logical knows that it is because he obviously had weapons of mass destruction. At this point, there was nothing our poor President could do to make everyone happy. If he decided to start a war, which he did, people would complain since there ended up being no weapons of mass destruction, and it is obvious that Bush just wanted control over the oil in the area and he's killing our troops to do it, and maybe if a scream this loud enough I'll get on the evening news! The other option was to not invade, and if President Bush had decided to do that, they people would be screaming a different tune: "George, when Saddam's bombers drop a thermonuclear warhead into dowtown New York City during rush hour and kill a million people, the blood will be on your hands, all because you didn't want to invade Iraq." basically, the President was confronted with a lose-lose situation, and considering the point I'm trying to make is that the intelligence he had was bad, Bush made the fight decision by erring on the side of safety.
One other tremendous point is the war itself. Many people want to leave Iraq because they don't want to "waste" any more lives for "nothing" I don't consider these people compassionate to the fact that every human being has an undeniable right to life, I consider them "sissies" or "frady-cats". One thing they do not understand about war is that once you start one, you can't decide your no longer interested and quit, as if you were playing monopoly or something. You have to persevere until the end no matter what the cost, especially in Iraq, because if we leave now insurgents will run the country, and they are unequivocally worse than Saddam. Let us see what would have happened to America if we embraced this "run away when it gets tough" attitude. In the revolutionary War, we were losing until the very end, when George Washington outmaneuvered the formidable British army. If we had surrendered to Briton like these "war whiners" want us to do with Iraq, we would not had gained our independence for who knows how long. If these people were around during World War I, life in the trenches would have been "too much" and the Germans could have conquered the world. In World War II, they would have complained that the Japanese fighters and Nazi soldiers were just "too hard to fight against" and that "we aren't making much progress", that would have resulted in Hitler's cruel domination over the world and the subsequent genocide of all non-Aryans. Needless to say all of these situations would have been bad without seeing the war through. Anyway, there is no logical way we can leave Iraq without finishing our war. These people probably cannot see how a nation that spends more money on a plane could not crush an insurgency that could use a similar amount of money to outfit all their soldiers with some shiny new AK-47s and explosive chemicals. Another one of their major problems is that they are totally complacent. Remember when I said that September 11 shattered our complacency about terrorism? These people still somehow believe that these terrorists, who kill people every day, are no longer a threat. I thought that our exposure of our weakness would shake everybody loose of the "America is invincible" daydream, but some people, the kind that complain about the war, are so inertly complacent, so inescapably delusional, that they will simply not accept the fact that something can hurt them. Just as a side and finishing note, September 11 claimed more lives than the Japanese surprise attack on Perl Harbor. Perl Harbor started a war that ended with two mushroom clouds and 150,000 vaporized Japanese civilians, not to mention the uncountable allied casualties. Everyone who thinks we should handle the war in Iraq the same way we handled WWII, with fortitude and perseverance, please raise your hand. I thought so.