Friday Church News Notes, Vol 14, Issue 20
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Eric Wyse and Contemporary Praise Music
Wyse served as organist at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Nashville from 1993 to 2001, when he was named music director. This church’s 2012 Summer Movie Nights features such filthy fare as the R-rated film “Knocked Up,” which “follows the repercussions of a drunken one-night stand that results in an unintended pregnancy.” The church also hosts Jazzercise classes in its gym.
As a producer and consultant, Wyse has worked with ecumenical rockers such as Keith and Kristyn Getty, Amy Grant, and CeCe Winans.
Wyse is a one-world church builder who sees music as a major aspect of this endeavor. One of the web sites most highly recommended by Wyse is Internetmonk.com, which promotes such things as handmade Franciscan-inspired rosaries, the blogs of apostate emerging church leaders Shane Claiborne and Scott McKnight, and the Merton Institute for Contemplative Living, which is dedicated to the philosophy of the Buddhist-Catholic monk Thomas Merton.
In his blog Wyse published a statement by Steven Harmon promoting ecumenical relations with the Roman Catholic Church. Note the following from Wyse’s web site:
“In a previous post I expressed my my appreciation for the Baptist-produced Celebrating Grace Hymnal (2010) in light of the implications for receptive ecumenism of the Baptist practice of hymn singing that I noted in my 2010 Lourdes College Ecumenical Lecture (subsequently published as ”HOW BAPTISTS RECEIVE THE GIFTS OF CATHOLICS AND OTHER CHRISTIANS” in Ecumenical Trends 39, no. 6, June 2010, pp. 1/81-5/85). BAPTIST HYMNALS ARE ARGUABLY THE MOST SIGNIFICANT ECUMENICAL DOCUMENTS PRODUCED BY BAPTISTS. They implicitly recognize hymn writers from a wide variety of traditions throughout the history of the church as sisters and brothers in Christ by including their hymns alongside hymns by Baptists…[In addition to numerous] patristic hymns, Baptists receive through their hymnals the gifts of Francis of Assisi and Teresa of Jesus, Martin Luther, the post-Reformation Roman Catholic author of ‘Fairest Lord Jesus’ from the Münster Gesangbuch, the Methodist Charles Wesley, and more recently the Pentecostal pastor Jack Hayford, to name a few hymn writers whose ecclesial gifts Baptists have gladly received with their voices and hearts” (“Baptist Hymn Singing, Receptive Ecumenism, and the Nicene Creed” by Steven Harmon, published by Eric Wyse at HymnWyse, March 14, 2011).
This statement reflects the spiritual blindness that permeates the contemporary praise music movement, and fundamentalist, Bible-believing Baptist churches that are messing around with this music by “adapting it” are building bridges to this extremely dangerous world. The adapters, who are trying to take the rock out of Christian rock, argue that since Baptist churches sing some Lutheran or Methodist hymns from the past, it is inconsistent to reject music written by contemporary worshippers today. This is a foolish argument used by people who are following their feelings and lusts rather than living strictly by God’s Word. I don’t know of one Baptist church that became Lutheran by singing Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress,” but I know of dozens that have become contemporary by messing around with contemporary worship music. Further, I don’t know of any teenagers in Bible-believing Baptist churches that became rock & rollers by listening to Fanny Crosby’s hymns, but I know of many that have become out-and-out worldly rock & rollers by messing around with Christian rock. Whatever Luther was, he left Rome and was not trying to yoke together with the Harlot to build a one-world church, but playing footsie with Rome and building the one-world church is exactly what contemporary worship musicians are doing. We have documented this extensively and irrefutably in The Directory of Contemporary Worship Musicians, which is available in print or as a free eBook from Way of Life -- www.wayoflife.org.
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Red Blood Cells
The blood cells flow in plasma through the body’s breathtakingly complex circulatory system, which is used to maintain the body’s temperature, regulate the body’s pH balance, provide communication, transport oxygen, nutrients, hormones, clotting agents, and immune defense mechanisms such as antibodies, white blood cells, and platelets, and remove waste. Blood flows everywhere in the body, from the roots of the hair to the toes.
The red blood cells are formed in the marrow of the ribs, pelvis, and some other bones. They are 1/25,000 of an inch in size. There are about 25 trillion of them in the body, and they live only 100-120 days. They must be replaced because they are unable to synthesize new enzymes to replace those lost during normal cell metabolic process due to their lack of organelles. The body replaces the blood cells at the rate of about 2.5 million per second, but that rate can be increased if the body needs more blood cells due to heavy bleeding or a reduction in oxygen content of the air at high altitude.
The main function of the red blood cell is to carry oxygen throughout the human body, and it is perfectly designed for this. First of all, its shape, which is biconcave and looks similar to a donut, allows more surface area to facilitate absorption and diffusion of oxygen. The shape of the red blood cell also allows it to contort through minute blood capillaries that are smaller in diameter than itself, and it can spring back to its original shape. Further, it can carry more hemoglobin molecules because it loses its nucleus, and its internal organelles (cell organs) are degraded soon after it is made, and it thus has more storage capacity than other types of cells in the body. Each red blood cell carries about 300 million hemoglobin molecules.
The hemoglobin (or haemoglobin) molecule that is carried within the red blood cell (and that gives the bright red color) is a miracle of design in its own right. It is an iron-containing protein that allows oxygen to be picked up from the lungs and carried through the fluid of the circulatory system. The hemoglobin molecule has a single atom of iron at its center, and in the lungs this iron atom combines with oxygen to create a compound called oxyhemoglobin. Oxygen by itself is not very soluble in water, but the hemoglobin molecule binds four oxygen molecules to itself, “consequently hemoglobin permits human blood to carry more than 70 times the amount of oxygen that it could have carried otherwise” (http://help.com/post/202779-are-there-any-parts-inside-a-red-bl).
Do We Have the "Right to Die?"
• In 1985, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that all life-sustaining medical treatment can be withheld from terminally ill patients, whether incompetent or competent. In that ruling the court included feeding tubes as “medical treatment.”
• In 1985, a Virginia woman who killed her cancer-ridden husband with an ice pick was sentenced merely to two years’ probation and psychiatric treatment.
• The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in 1986 to allow a woman to stop the feeding of her comatose husband.
• In 1987, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled unanimously that an alert, mentally competent but dying woman, suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, a fatal nerve disorder, should have been allowed to order her respirator disconnected. The woman had died a few days before her case reached the Court. The same court ruled to allow a man to remove the feeding tube from his 32-year-old wife.
• A U.S. District Court in Rhode Island ruled in 1988 that the feeding tube could be removed from a 49-year-old woman. The woman was in a coma as a result of a brain hemorrhage, and since she could not swallow, she received nourishment and liquids through a feeding tube. Her family had sued in court to compel the hospital to terminate her food and water. The medical workers who were caring for the woman were unanimous in opposing the action, but the court ordered them to remove the tubes so the woman would starve to death.
• A man severely crippled by a 1985 motorcycle accident went to court in an attempt to gain the “right” to kill himself. In 1989, the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously ruled that he could kill himself by shutting off the breathing apparatus that kept him alive.
• The parents of Nancy Cruzen, a young woman who suffered severe brain damage in a 1983 car crash, spent three and a half years in court in an attempt to remove the feeding tube which was keeping her alive. Though severely disabled, Nancy was not comatose nor did she require any life-support equipment. She even smiled at funny stories and cried when visitors would leave. In spite of this, on December 14, 1990, County Circuit Court Judge Charles E. Teel, Jr., ordered Nancy’s caregivers to withhold all food and water. Twelve days later, the 33-year-old woman died of dehydration.
• On June 4, 1990, Jack Kevorkian claimed his first victim when he assisted in the administration of a lethal dosage of drugs to 54-year-old Janet Adkins. She was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and her own doctor said she had at least ten years of productive life ahead of her. She had never met or talked with Kevorkian until she arrived in Michigan two days before her death. All arrangements were made by her husband, Ron, (64) who subsequently became president of the Oregon Hemlock Society. In the year before her death, Janet Adkins and her family were counseled by a family therapist who was coordinator of the Oregon Hemlock Society. According to an aunt, “She did not want to be a burden to her husband and family” and a friend explained, “She felt it [her death] was a gift to her family, sparing them the burden of taking care of her” (“The Real Jack Kevorkian, International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force, http://www.iaetf.org/fctkev.htm). Kevorkian, who went on to participate in a reported 137 assisted suicides, does not have a license to practice medicine. His Michigan license was suspended in 1991 and his California license was suspended in 1993. According to the California Attorney General’s office, Kevorkian is “fundamentally unfit to practice medicine” (California Medical Board, Complainants Brief, 12/28/93, p. 19). Kevorkian proposed a “auction market for available organs” taken from “subjects” who are “hopelessly crippled by arthritis or malformations.” Part of the money from the dead disabled person’s auctioned organs could go to relatives whose financial burdens would be eased and “their standard of living enhanced.”
• A poll of adults conducted by CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll published January 1991 found that 58% believe doctors ought to be allowed to help terminally ill patients die if the patient asks for assistance.
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Friday Church News Notes, Vol 14, Issue 19
ADVISOR TO PENTAGON CALLS BIBLE-BELIEVING CHRISTIANS DANGEROUS “MONSTERS” (Friday Church News Notes, May 10, 2013, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Pentagon Taps Anti-Christian Extremist,” Breitbart.com, Apr. 28, 2013: “‘Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.’ Those words were recently written by Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), in a column he wrote for the Huffington Post. Weinstein will be a consultant to the Pentagon to develop new policies on religious tolerance, including a policy for court-martialing military chaplains who share the Christian Gospel during spiritual counseling of American troops. Weinstein decries what he calls the ‘virulent religious oppression’ perpetrated by conservative Christians, whom he refers to as ‘monstrosities’ and ‘pitiable unconstitutional carpetbaggers,’ comparing them to ‘bigots’ in the Deep South during the civil rights era. He cites Dr. James Dobson--the famous Christian founder of Focus on the Family--as ‘illustrating the extremist, militant nature of these virulently homophobic organizations’ rhetorically-charged propaganda.’ Regarding those who teach orthodox Christian beliefs from the Bible, Weinstein concludes, ‘Let’s call these ignoble actions what they are: the senseless and cowardly squallings of human monsters.’ Weinstein then endorses the ultra-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which publishes a list of ‘hate groups.’ Alongside truly deplorable organizations like the KKK, the SPLC’s list includes a host of traditional Christian organizations (for their support of traditional marriage) and Tea Party organizations (for supporting limited government). Weinstein says SPLC correctly labels them all as ‘hate groups.’”
