CD

Hello everyone!

The CD release was scrumtrelescent. (pretty dang awesome) We were joined by a bunch of good friends and amazing musicians on stage. Afterwards there was a little party for the patrons and it was hosted by the fabuloso Holtzman family (mainly by Stacey) That was more fun than the concert. barbecue....goood.

I cant tell you how much work goes into a concert when you don't have a crew it is a multimedia event (lights, video, sound-equip) but its pretty dang huge. Me and the band pretty much sweated (is that a word?) for about 4 hours straight, scarfed down a couple of oreos, a half a coke, burped, and walked on stage and commenced jamming. One of the songs we did was a song called Lucy. Its a little song about Charlie brown. i put a video to it came of very cool. Ill try to post it as soon as I figure out how the crap to do that.

We are talking to some booking agents and distributors right now so pray for us. We haven't tried any labels but we aren't in a big hurry for that move. Anywho, ill be taking a crash course in blog-be-better-looking this week so i can start putting some fun pics up.

Quote for the day: "There is no excellent beauty without some strangeness in proportion." - Bacon

Madness

Why are we so possessed by the urge to perform practically the miraculous to save a dying whale in a beached state and we are unwilling to consider the possibility of giving an unborn human being the chance at life. Why can I sit so quietly in my apartment, house or hotel, watch the news and see and know that somewhere on the earth children are dying but when I see a starving animal on the street I go buy dog-food and feed him. Why is the attention of compassion and dignity that I feel, fit for a dog and not for a man. Why is my heart broken when I see trees being cut down to make way for cattle grazing so that I can by a big-mac at a cheaper price, and I am not heart broken when a family is evicted from their homes because of a loss of a job.

Some of it has to do with the fact that it is too painful to bare. It is easier to draw our pale down into a well of compassion, which would be all we could have for a dying whale, then to face the ocean inside each of us that would quake and drown us if we were to begin to love our fellow man. Jesus taught us what would happen, if we love and embrace the suffering of others. We would weep. He felt the enormous pain of his friends at the loss of their brother, son, and friend. When one feels compassion on another, it is real. It is deep and it strikes us so powerfully that we either embrace it, or turn cold to it. Jesus knew more than anyone what this compassion and empathy felt like because he Loved the most. As a Christian the more we have Christ in us the more we will love. Different from the love of the world which can bring a feeling of despair and loss after it is given so freely, or in other cases one feels better about themselves and in some way, society is better of with them waving their flag of goodness. The Christian should give compassion and Love with out condition. Without our own expectations of what God’s favor upon us will be - as in lavishing us with more material wealth because we have given to Jesus when he was poor, or sick or in prison.

Through faith we can count on and Hope for a continuing river of Love that does not cease, where the more we give the more we receive and the more we receive the more we become like Him who saved us. This is what Jesus means when he describes the well springing up in us. And the more we become like him then the more we are face to face with God which is what we were made for. To see Him so clearly that sin is no longer possible, where we are once and for all truly free.


Human

I have the upper hand
And always play the lose
My hands are miraculous but I am cripple
I cant sleep in my own skin
So I wrap my self in bandages and call them clothes
I walk upright when this world seems to be made
To make me crawl

I go mad when I laugh
This madness comes when I glimpse the face of God
A secret revealed, a mirror in a room dimly lit
Laughter brings my madness and I feel like I should
For a moment I taste the air of heaven’s table
A feast where joy is the embrace of each moment.
Time becomes a friend
He is welcomed, renamed, and becomes a quickly forgotten garment.

For now I hide with the mystery of shame in my breast
And I beat this earth with my feet and find no place
For my head or hands to rest while
I look for mirrors that see in part
And hope that someone
On some street corner will sip their cup
And show me the face of God
To embrace the madness again, the vision
Of a universe hidden from itself and me.

What I Know, or think i Know; Part 1

CREATION



Billions of years ago God made something out of nothing. That something was the first something that we know of that ever was. What we know about that something is very little. In that we know it was…well, very, very little. Smaller, in fact, than anything that has ever been or ever will be. In fact the first thing that God created was something so small and dense that if we were in the same room (unaffected of course, by its immense off-the- charts gravity) we wouldn’t have the faintest clue of its presence. Now scientists have a word for this something: singularity. But singularity to some is a pretty boring word and when people see a word like singularity an intensive urge to yawn comes over them. So, for the purpose of interest we are going to rename the singularity for now and call it speck. Now we don’t know why God created this speck, and we don’t know if before this speck there were other specks like it. But we do know that God created this something or speck out of nothing, because if we do know something about the universe or anything at all for that matter, it is that for something to happen, then something has to ‘happen’ it. In other words, if there is something, then there must have been nothing, and for there to have been nothing before there was something, there must have been a constant something else with no beginning and no end that was neither nothing or something, but simply was and is. This something else was and is God.

WHEW! Now that we have that straight. For some reason, this singularity or speck exploded. An explosion so incredible that the effects of which can barely be measured. For a birds-eye view of the effects, walk out on a clear night and look at the stars and know that we are drifting on a sprinkle of dust from that initial explosion. (That is not to say that we are insignificant, some of the finest and most complex things in the universe can fit in the palm of our hand.) We are, in fact, still expanding billions of years later, from that first massive cosmic bang that came from the tiniest of points. All that galactic glittering above you came from a point so small that you could fit it on the tip of a needle. As you stare into the immenseness of space and imagine that you are moving out and away from that initial explosion, consider that we are moving at the perfect speed that allows us to expand forever. Now, imagine all of stars and galaxies you are seeing, the air you breath, to the grass under your feet being sucked back into a single tiny hole. Kind of like a balloon deflating. Now you are back to the beginning.

So, to review. There is God, God created something, a singularity and that singularity exploded. After this explosion atoms and subatomic things started happening that scientists are still trying to contemplate. What was once thought of as a random chain of events that brought forth the ordered universe is now appearing to be a fine-tuned symphony with a trillion expositions and a trillion developments. None of these elemental happenings ever seem to be robotic and boring in there inception. All things come together into being in a original and fantastic way, from the very basic building blocks of matter, to cells, to the most vast spiral galaxy. All these elements took shape and started behaving as they would behave until the present time. The atoms in your finger are behaving the same way as they behaved when they were in the core of a giant star. Yes, everthing that you touch or feel was once made in a firey cauldron of a giant burnig star. More on that later. Where were we?

WHAT I KNOW

(prelude)
There are two ways of looking at the Universe. A theistic way, (a belief in God), and an a-theistic way, (no God). Some say that there is a middle way, an Agnostic view where they are not sure either way, but in reality the Agnostic is both atheist and theist, it just depends on what time of the day you catch them or what is happening in their life. They have no problem when winning the lottery in saying THANK YOU GOD!, but when tragedy strikes, they shake their fist at God and say I KNEW YOU WERENT THERE ALL ALONG.

I will be approaching the Universe from a Theistic approach, because obviously I believe that there is a God. The purpose of this series is to present what I know as of today about the universe, how it works and Why I believe what I believe. In this blog I welcome all people who think, to engage in conversation. People from any or no faith are encouraged to read and participate. If you disagree, then argue with me. Just do it intelligently and politely. If you decide to say, “your full of crap” then just let me know why. You learn when you disagree and vocalize those disagreements. I do not know everything, or even close to everything, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. Some might consider this arrogance, but what is arrogant about discovery?

I will start this series with the idea that God created science. He likes it. So should we. We are daily discovering how God designed this Universe (or Universes) and correcting things and trying new ideas out all the time. Some people attribute what I am about to do as “the God of the Gaps” theory. I think that they are more right than they know. We are after all made up of mostly empty space, a Gap is empty space, and as one Atheist scientist stated studying string theory, “we are more of a thought than we are anything”, So therefore if God made everything, then Gaps are included. Is it wrong for a man to say, “God holds the storehouses of rain”? This was the writer of Job’s best attempt at describing the creative sovereignty of God. Now we know that the “storehouse” is mass of condensed water droplets or ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere above Earth. Did that make the writer of Job wrong? No. I still believe that he holds the storehouses of rain. I just call those storehouses clouds and have a better idea of what they are made of and how they work. I simply believe God created this universe and Science is a discovery of that process. I agree with the great Einstein who said: “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.”

I am not here to present all the theories of origins. There are several theories that are being discussed, researched and debated among scientists about the Creation of the universe. Feel free to add and enlighten. The one I will be using as the platform to spring from is the best theory, I believe we have to date: The Big Bang. Ironically the Big Bang was discovered by a Catholic priest Lemaitre. It goes a little something like this: