a sorrowful truth

“We’re not interested in the truth.”
Ken Burns

(Julie Cook / 2021)

Doesn’t seem to matter whether I purposely keep the television off…off
from any sort of current events and news…it still seems to seep out of
those dark and odious cracks.

Two different stories caught my eye via an electronic news feed.

The first tale is distressing, disturbing and actually quite stomach turning—
as in I felt as if I was reading some surreal Frankenstein tale…

The reality, however, was that this tale is actually rooted in the research
facility of a major leading University.

Here are a few of the highlights in which to whet your curious whistle.

With tales of harvesting body parts…body parts from freshly aborted,
near term babies.

I felt sick to my stomach as well as broken hearted.

Sick to my stomach that aborted babies are teated like a “pull down menu”
of body parts.
Broken hearted that we humans have relegated our most vulnerable to
being literally harvested for research.

There is a cold callousness to such a business.

As well as emptiness which has lead to a true loss of humanity.

Harvesting is for fruits and vegetables, not body parts from
near term aborted babies.

Yep. Aborted. Near term. Babies.

And how odd Dr. Fauci’s name pops up in this stomach churning tale.

The link to the full tale is at the end….following

A few paragraphs I’ve chosen to highlight.

Millions in federal money flowing to tissue bank that collects fetal ‘heart, gonads, legs, brain’: report
University of Pittsburgh said it ‘complies with rigorous regulatory and ethical oversight’
By Sam Dorman

In a PureFlix interview last year, former university employee Lori Kelly
discussed a federally funded project with researchers seeking to collect
bladders and kidneys from babies as late as 24 weeks into pregnancy.
Kelly said that as project manager, she worked to develop
“a pull-down menu of baby body parts for researchers to choose
from to submit to the tissue bank, so that we could send the
body parts to them.”

Tuesday’s revelation adds mounting scrutiny to a program that has
already received attention for fetal experiments.

Earlier this year, Pennsylvania’s state legislature held a hearing
in which members discussed an experiment involving grafting
fetal scalps, containing “full-thickness human skin,”
onto rodents.

That particular project utilized tissue from the university’s
human tissue bank. It was also supported by grants from the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID),
which is led by top coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci.
While it’s unclear exactly how much federal money was spent on that project,
it was funded through two large grants —
one $1,498,642 and one $430,270.

The documents uncovered by Judicial Watch also show Pitt discussing
its effort to minimize warm ischemic time, or the amount of time an
organ maintains its body temperature after blood flow has been severed.
It’s unclear how these procedures take place, but Daleiden
has raised concerns about the university’s stated use of labor
induction abortions.

“If the fetus’ heartbeat and blood circulation continue in a labor
induction abortion for harvesting organs,
it means the fetus is being delivered while still alive and the cause
of death is the removal of the organs,” reads a press release from his
Center for Medical Progress.
Typically, abortion procedures rely
on digoxin to kill a fetus. However,
both that and dismemberment tactics can ruin viable tissue intended
for donations.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pittsburgh-fetal-tissue-project

The next tale dealt with a story regarding filmmaker historian Ken Burns.

If you’ve ever watched a PBS special, no doubt you’ve seen and heard
Ken Burns with his melodious voice extol the paths of our collective US history.

And now it appears as if Ken Burns is taking FB mogul Mark Zuckerberg to task.

Ken Burns is no conservative Republican…he is a historian… an individual who looks back to just how we came to where we are today.
A historian who is keen to the truth of past…be it good or bad or both…
because he understands that history is indeed both, good and bad… as we today must learn from both that good and bad.

Yet, as Ken Burns is learning, there are many who no longer wish to learn but rather those who wish to forget…all the while preferring to rewrite what was…

“Filmmaker Ken Burns calls Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg ‘an enemy of the state’
who belongs in jail
‘He doesn’t give a sh-t about us, the United States,’ Burns said”
story by Brian Flood

https://www.foxnews.com/media/ken-burns-facebook-mark-zuckerberg

“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship
in spirit and truth.”
John 4:24

alligators and the capitulation of the church

“We need more public Christians, even though being a Christian in public is
getting tougher, says David Robertson, a Presbyterian pastor from Scotland –
a nation that has “secularised quicker than any other nation in history”
Excerpt from an interview with Eternity Magazine in Sydney, Australia

(Gulf coast alligator courtesy the Gaurdian)

The last time I visited the state of Louisiana was in 1982 for the Sugar Bowl.
My Dawgs were playing Pitt…we won’t talk about the outcome…it was such a long
time ago, I think I’ve forgotten.

However, Sugar Bowls or not, for some reason or another,
I’ve always been partial to Louisiana.
At one point I thought I wanted to attend for LSU for college…but then I wouldn’t have
been at the 1982 Sugar Bowl watching my Bulldogs play those Pitt Panthers.

But we’re still not ready to talk about that game so let’s just move on.

I’ve got cousins who call Monroe as well as Lake Charles home.
My dad took us on a visit when I was in the 7th grade.

Maybe it’s her history.
Maybe it’s her food.
Maybe it’s her beauty…
but I’ve just always been partial to Louisiana.

So maybe that’s why I’ve been known to tune into the History Channel’s Swamp People
show from time to time.
That quasi-reality show about those who make their living hunting alligators.

I mean who sits around at a boardroom table in either New York or LA and ruminate over
creating a show around the livelihood of folks whose families have hunted,
for generations mind you, alligators???

But there is just something about these people that I like.

They are real.

Well— relatively real.

If they were really real, I doubt they’d be doing television…but then you’ve
got to consider that a TV supplement is a nice added bonus to a diminishing payout for
alligator hides and meat.
I’m just saying.

These folks are not what most other folks would call refined, well to do, polished,
overly educated or even poised.

Some would call them backward, backwoods or dare we say, white trash.

And that’s why I like them.

They are what they are… a what you see is what you get sort of individual.
Some have had run-ins with the Law, the IRS, the History Channel…
even run-ins with one another…but in the end, they are what they are…
nothing more and nothing less.

Many of them are of Cajun descent.
There is a heavy French Louisiana accent that often prompts the television folks
to provide subtitles.
Really History Channel???
Maybe because I’m from the South, but I don’t need subtitles…

And so it was on a recent episode that one particular fellow was out hunting for wild hogs
(barefoot of course) when he came upon a couple of lost puppies out in the middle of the
nowhere woods.
Lost in the woods in Louisiana is not for the faint of heart.
There are poisonous snakes, wild hogs, coyotes, and yes alligators…
a place I would not be keen to get lost.

The short of this long tale boiled down to this fellow telling the cameraman that
“that’s why God made puppies, they’re just so cute you’ve got to want to take care of them.”

A gem of wisdom found in the backwoods of Louisiana.

A simple faith from a rather rough-hewn individual.

And so his words made me think.

I thought how great that our God was so loving and so thoughtful that He saw fit
to prewire in us an inward drive to take care of those who are smaller,
younger and more vulnerable.

A role I often think of when I think of the Chruch.
For the Chruch, the collective body of Fatih is there to take care of the fold—
which is us. The Believing faithful.
And as we are akin to sheep in many respects, we tend to be sheep-like,
so we certainly need an earthly shepherd.

Enter the Chruch…our ministers, our pastors, our deacons, our priests…
our Spiritual guiding servants of Christ

They are to lead and guide the fold.
They are to offer God’s word to the lost, the wandering and to the hard of hearing.
They are to teach us, inform us and instruct us in the ways of the Master.

They are to set the standard, the bar, the benchmarks for living a “Godly” life.

And yet it is that very body, The Chruch, which is actually letting us down.

The Church is not standing up for God’s word but rather she is capitulating to the
strong-arm tactics of an ever-changing culture…
a culture who is holding her arm behind her back,
having her to bend down before the gods of all things of culture.
Acceptance of one and all regardless of God’s admonition.

“We were known as ‘the land of the people of the book’, the book being the Bible,”
he says about Scotland. “Even as late as the 1950s, you’d have 1.4 million out of
4.5 million people being members of the Church of Scotland,
as well as Catholics and other groups.”

Today the Church of Scotland’s membership is below 300,000.
Scotland is on a rapid slide downhill, both in church attendance numbers and in
“the quality of churches and the impact on society.
We are throwing overboard our Christian heritage right,
left and center and that will come back to bite us.”

Robertson does not blame secularists as the main cause for the decline in
Christianity in Scotland.
The church itself is “the primary reason” for the decline –
and he’s not just talking about liberal Christians, which, as a conservative,
he might have been expected to target.

He says denominations (church groups) such as his own Free Church of Scotland,
a small Presbyterian denomination, became afraid and inward looking with
a tendency towards legalism.
The Church of Scotland, a liberal denomination is also in freefall,
with fewer than 100,000 worshippers out of a population of 5.5 million.

Click the link to continue reading David’s interview…and then pray for our guiding force,
the bride of Christ, the Chruch…

“Don’t be like us” says a true Scotsman – Interview with Eternity magazine