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A professor who wrote a book about fascinating archaeological finds that help bring the Bible to life said such findings keep corroborating what Christians already know to be true about the Scriptures.

Tom Meyer, known as “The Bible Memory Man” for his ability to memorize entire books of the Bible, knows a thing or two about how these discoveries are helping illuminate Scripture.

A professor at Shasta Bible College, Meyer also penned the book, “Archaeology and the Bible: 50 Fascinating Finds That Bring the Bible to Life,” offering key insights into the Holy Book.

While he believes these archaeological discoveries are important, he also notes the Old and New Testaments stand on solid footing even without them.

“We don’t need archaeology to prove the Bible’s true,” Meyer recently told CBN News. “The Bible stands on its own. It’s totally authoritative in all manners.”

But the author said Christians often face challenges when evangelizing and sharing their faith, particularly when interacting with those who don’t believe the Scriptures hold any authority.

“You know how it is if you’re sharing your faith, or you’re evangelizing,” Meyer said. “If you tell someone, ‘You need to believe the Bible because the Bible says it’s true,’ you’re going to get some pushback.”

That’s why Meyer said it’s helpful to have “different apologetics” that can be used to point to the Gospel, noting that archaeology keeps “revealing new information from the pages of the Bible.”

Thus, this study of the ancient past helps validate Scripture.

“Bible archaeology has given us a tsunami of evidence that we already know — that all these people existed,” he said. “But we have proof their names. … I think 50 to 100 people [who are] mentioned in the Bible, that person’s exact name — King David, Isaiah, the prophet, King Hezekiah, et cetera — we found their names and archaeological objects, which … demonstrates the reliability and the accuracy of Scripture.”

Meyer also spoke about some of the specific finds, arguing a few of the most compelling have centered on King David and his kingdom, with the professor noting there wasn’t even definitive extra-biblical evidence of King David until 1994.

“We found in 1994 … King David’s name on a monument in the gate at Tel Dan, which is the north pole of Israel,” Meyer said. “Ever since then, we’ve been getting these little drips and drops of information about King David’s kingdom and et cetera.”

In 2023, he said another finding — forts built by King David — further illuminates one of the Bible’s most key figures.

“When they dug in Jerusalem, they found a giant moat,” he said. “A moat that dates from the time of David, a defensive fortification right in the city of Jerusalem.”

Read more at: faithwire.com

French President Emmanuel Macron has announced new legislation to legalize “aid in dying” that will allow adults facing end-of-life illness to take lethal medication, a first in the country.

The move follows last year’s report indicating that most French citizens support legalizing end-of-life options.

In an interview published Monday by French newspapers La Croix and Liberation, Macron said the new bill will be restricted to adults suffering from an incurable illness who are expected to die in the “short or middle-term” and who are suffering “intractable” physical or psychological pain.

Macron said the law will offer “a possible path, in a determined situation, with precise criteria, where the medical decision is playing its role.”

He gave the example of of people with terminal cancer, some of whom until now have gone abroad to end their lives.

Only people aged 18 or above who are capable of forming their own views will be allowed to get in the process, meaning those with severe psychiatric conditions and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease won’t be eligible, Macron specified.

Patients who seek to enter the process will need to reconfirm their choice after 48 hours and they should then receive an answer from a medical team within two weeks maximum, Macron said. A doctor will then deliver a prescription, valid for three months, for the lethal medication.

People will be able to take the medication at home, at a nursing home or at a health care facility, Macron said.

If their physical condition doesn’t allow them to do it alone, they will be allowed to get help from someone of their choice or by a doctor or a nurse.

Macron said the new bill will refer to “aid in dying … because it’s simple and humane,” rather than terms like euthanasia or medically assisted suicide.

Medically assisted suicide involves patients taking, of their own free will, a lethal drink or medication that has been prescribed by a doctor to those who meet certain criteria. Euthanasia involves doctors or other health practitioners giving patients who meet certain criteria a lethal injection at their own request.

Read more at: breitbart.com

The windmills are spinning golden subsidies in the central German ‘fairy tale’ forest of Reinhardswald, but the payment is the partial destruction of the 1,000 year-old ancient wood itself. Work has started on the clearing of up to 120,000 trees in the forest, the setting for many of the Brothers Grimm mythical stories, to provide access for an initial 18 giant wind turbines around the Sababurg ‘Sleeping Beauty’ castle. Who is opposing this massive destruction of the ancient forest teeming with wildlife with trees over 200 years old? Certainly not the Green party, now in power at national and local level. In fact the project is being led by local Hesse Green Minister Priska Hinz who is reported to have said: “Wind energy makes a decisive contribution to the energy transition and the preservation of nature. It is the only way to preserve forests and important ecosystems.”

There is some local press interest in Germany about the destruction of part of the forest that covers a 200 square kilometre area. Nevertheless, the mainstream media generally keep well away from covering environmental destruction when the Greens are doing it in the claimed cause of saving the planet. The BBC did cover the story under the headline ‘Battle over wind turbines in the land of Sleeping Beauty‘, but that was in 2013 when plans for the industrial development were first announced. It seems that the state-reliant broadcaster is less interested now that the Big Bad Wolf has finally made a meal of Little Red Riding Hood.

Pierre Gosselin, who runs the German-based science site No Tricks Zone, has been covering the outrage felt in a number of German quarters at the plans to destroy some of the Reinhardswald forest in the interest of inferior green technology. He feels the affair shows what an inefficient and costly scam green energy is. “It’s not cost-free, it’s full of corrupt and unresponsive politicians who no longer care about democracy, and it certainly doesn’t make the environment better. It’s a nasty juggernaut of waste, fraud, corruption and ecological degradation – with dead birds, turbine vibration sickness, strobe dizziness and landscape pollution,” he adds.

The Guardian has been curiously silent over the clearing of woodland to build wind turbines in Hesse. In 2020 it was less reticent about reporting on the construction of a 3 km highway in another Hessian forest at Dannenroder. Thousands of climate activists gathered on the site north of Frankfurt, it reported. Dannenroder tree-felling would be a catastrophe, environmental campaigners are reported to have said. “Some parts of this forest are 250 years old,” noted Nicola Uhde of the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (Bund), “and there is simply not much of this kind of woodland around anymore.” At the time, the Guardian noted the fate of Dannenroder was a “litmus test for the Green party” which governed the state as part of a coalition. It seems to have been remiss in not suggesting such a test with the Reinhardswald deforestation. But then it seems none of the usual climate activists have been protesting about the loss of trees and wildlife habitat on this occasion.

The Daily Sceptic has reported on numerous recent examples where the lack of interest in ecological damage is a feature of green industrial development. Last month, we noted that one of India’s iconic large birds, the great Indian bustard, was on the verge of extinction due to the growth of electric power lines in its home area of the Thar desert. To reach global Net Zero, it has been estimated that new power lines equivalent to circling the globe 2,000 times will need to be built in the next few years.

Read more at: dailysceptic.org

The app will help in cases where ‘a person’s voice does not match their gender identity’

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has awarded over $200,000 to researchers to create a “transgender voice training” app that aims, in part, to help trans women sound more feminine.

A transgender professor and two speech therapy experts have teamed up to create the software at the cost of $213,878 in taxpayer funds from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, an agency of the National Institutes of Health, according to documentation. The research will be conducted by the University of Cincinnati, led by Associate Professor Vesna Novak, as well as speech scientist Victoria McKenna of UC and speech-language pathologist Tara McAllister of New York University.

“Transgender and gender diverse people exhibit a significantly lower quality of life than the general public,” according to an abstract of the study first reported by The College Fix. “One reason for this is voice dysphoria: distress because a person’s voice does not match their gender identity (e.g., trans women with deep voices).”

The project, titled “Improving the Accessibility of Transgender Voice Training with Visual-acoustic Biofeedback,” aims to improve “gender-affirming voice and communication training (GAVT)” with software to coach trans women on their “pitch and resonance” through voice exercises, which are the two main indicators of voice femininity and masculinity the abstract states.

In an announcement of the NIH grant, McAllister discussed the goals of the study.

“Some trans people can be negatively impacted if their voice is perceived as incongruous with their gender identity, and they may choose to work with a speech pathologist to achieve a vocal presentation that is comfortable for them,” McAllister said.

“In addition to the pitch of the voice, male and female vocal tracts also differ in their resonating characteristics, but resonance is harder to understand than pitch, and harder to target in therapy.” McAllister added. “The staRt software allows learners to visualize the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract, which could make it easier to adjust them to match a target that is appropriate for their personal speech goals.”

Forty trans women will be randomly assigned to either an experimental group that will use the researchers’ software or a control group that will use a generic voice analysis app. They will meet once a week with a speech-language pathologist for remotely administered GAVT, who will assign homework, while participants will self-report their amount of daily practice, self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation scores that will be compared between groups.

Read more at: foxnews.com

The Rising Tide of Shoplifting

In a significant effort to address the increasing problem of shoplifting, major retailers Walmart and Target have taken an unprecedented step by placing essential items such as underwear and socks under lock and key.

This move highlights the severity of theft issues affecting retailers across the country, with losses amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Two bills recently introduced in the Florida Legislature that would allow volunteer chaplains to provide counseling services in public schools have prompted The Satanic Temple to threaten legal action if its members are barred from participating.

Senate Bill 1044 and its companion House Bill 931, which already passed the Florida House of Representatives last month, would also mandate that principals in schools with volunteer chaplains tell parents about it and offer them a list of the volunteers, all of whom will be subject to a background check.

Parents will be allowed to choose from the list of chaplains and allow their children to receive counseling with written permission, though representatives from The Satanic Temple have expressed a desire for their chaplains to be included in such offerings.

“Any opportunity that exists for ministers or chaplains in the public sector must not discriminate based on religious affiliation,” Penemue Grigori, who serves as The Satanic Temple’s director of ministry, told The Tallahassee Democrat.

“Our ministers look forward to participating in opportunities to do good in the community, including the opportunities created by this bill, right alongside the clergy of other religions.”

Lucien Greaves, co-founder of The Satanic Temple, spoke out against what he described as the legislation’s attempt to allow a back door for religious instruction and “proselytizing evangelism” in Florida’s public schools, according to Fox News Digital.

“In an effort to dismiss concerns about bringing religious viewpoints into schools, advocates for chaplain bills have a scripted response that insists their interest is in merely providing additional ’emotional support’ for potentially troubled youth,” Greaves told the outlet.

“If that were true, they could simply be calling upon volunteers who hold licensure as counselors to offer their services in the schools in their communities.”

Greaves also said that school districts can expect legal action if satanic priests are prohibited from participating in the chaplain program, which would go into effect on July 1 and largely be left for individual districts to govern, according to local Fox 35.

“They should also not want to waste public funds on a lawsuit that’s certainly going to lose because of some superfluous effort to put chaplains in schools on a false rationale,” Greaves told the outlet.

Florida state Sen. Erin Grall, a Republican who represents Vero Beach, did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment but said she is concerned about the potential of satanic priests taking advantage of the legislation she sponsored.

“But I think that as soon as we get in the middle of defining what is religion and what is not, and whether or not someone can be available and be on a list, we start to run up to constitutional problems,” Grall said, according to The Tallahassee Democrat.

“So I think that us making sure that it’s open and available to anybody who wants to put themselves through the background screening, and let parents know they’re available for that service, is the best way to go,” she added.

The Satanic Temple of Iowa also made news in the lead-up to Christmas last December when they prompted fierce debate even among Republican lawmakers by erecting a statue of Baphomet near a Nativity scene in the Iowa state Capitol.

Read more at: christianpost.com

Federal debt is up $100 billion in just four days. We’re on track for $37 trillion by the end of this year. And $40 trillion by the end of next, Peter St. Onge warns.

A prominent Wharton professor is warning of a “meltdown” as early as 2025 as debt swamps financial markets.

At some point, the US will crash, probably sooner than later.

“Juan Gomez Wharton, senior vice Dean of Research at Wharton, warns the $34 trillion debt, soon to be 35 trillion, could trigger a spiral like we saw in Britain in 2022 when national debt fears spiked interest rates, sparking panic selling in bonds that threatened to crash the economy and bankrupt banks and even pensions…”

St. Onge said, “The CEO’s of Bank of America and JP Morgan, the two biggest in the country recently warned of a quote market rebellion over debt as we careen towards a $5 trillion quote fiscal Cliff at the end of next year.

“Keep in mind that’s all counting current projections. In other words, it assumes no new trillion dollar spending surprises and it also assumes no recession, so the fabled soft landing, if instead a recession does hit, then going by history, the deficit grows potentially by another couple trillion as social spending spikes and tax collection slump.

“Even without recession and those new spending surprises, we’re looking at 37 trillion in debt by the end of this year and 40 trillion by the end of next year. It’s worth noting that’s about twice the pace that the Congressional Budget Office forecast…

“$144 trillion…Yes, that was the forecast that said we’ll have $144 trillion in federal debt by 2053. Now, when it came out, that 144 trillion was met with an audible gasp. After all, that is more than literally all the money in the world. It’s about one-third of the accumulated assets of humanity, and at the moment, we’re actually going a lot faster…

“Washington has lost all semblance of fiscal sanity at this point. They’re competing for who can drain the treasury fastest…”

Read more at: independentsentinel.com

King Charles has reportedly begun work on his succession plan, sparking fears his cancer diagnosis may be ‘more dangerous than we have been led to believe.’

Earlier this month Charles revealed he had been diagnosed with cancer after being admitted to hospital for a separate issue regarding an enlarged prostate.

The type of cancer has not been revealed to the public, but it was reportedly caught early and the King has been undergoing ‘regular treatments’ ever since.

Nevertheless, the issue has reportedly prompted the King to start formalising his succession plans earlier than intended and ensure that Prince William is at the heart of them, sparking rumours that his illness could be more serious than we have been led to believe.

Tom Quinn, a Royal expert and author, told the Mirror: ‘Charles is also aware that, as future king, William is at the heart of the succession planning that is taking place right now – officials had assumed Charles would remain healthy at least into his mid-eighties before succession planning would need to begin but in fact it has now begun and indicates perhaps that Charles’ cancer is more dangerous than we have been led to believe.

‘Succession planning is highly secret and no one trusts Harry to be part of it for the simple reason that if he feels in any way slighted or not given what he feels he deserves he will run straight to the media.’

Prince Harry’s autobiography, Spare, caused major friction in the royal household following its release in January 2023 after the Duke of Sussex made a series of bombshell claims about his family members and took swipes at his father and brother.

Read more at: metro.co.uk

From the academic who warns of a robot uprising to the workers worried for their future – is it time we started paying attention to the tech sceptics?

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience – taking things slowly for a novice like me – that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines. “The difficulty is, people do not realise,” Yudkowsky says mildly, maybe sounding just a bit frustrated, as if irritated by a neighbour’s leaf blower or let down by the last pages of a novel. “We have a shred of a chance that humanity survives.”

It’s January. I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling world is tending. I want to find out why these techno-pessimists think the way they do. I want to know how they would render change. Out of all of those I speak to, Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and you could boil down the results of years of Yudkowsky’s theorising there to a couple of vowel sounds: “Oh fuuuuu–!”

“If you put me to a wall,” he continues, “and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10.” By “remaining timeline”, Yudkowsky means: until we face the machine-wrought end of all things. Think Terminator-like apocalypse. Think Matrix hellscape. Yudkowsky was once a founding figure in the development of human-made artificial intelligences – AIs. He has come to believe that these same AIs will soon evolve from their current state of “Ooh, look at that!” smartness, assuming an advanced, God-level super-intelligence, too fast and too ambitious for humans to contain or curtail. Don’t imagine a human-made brain in one box, Yudkowsky advises. To grasp where things are heading, he says, try to picture “an alien civilisation that thinks a thousand times faster than us”, in lots and lots of boxes, almost too many for us to feasibly dismantle, should we even decide to.

Trying to shake humanity from its complacency about this, Yudkowsky published an op-ed in Time last spring that advised shutting down the computer farms where AIs are grown and trained. In clear, crisp prose, he speculated about the possible need for airstrikes targeted own datacentres; perhaps even nuclear exchange. Was he on to something?

Read more at: theguardian.com

Egypt warned on Tuesday that Israel’s planned ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza would have “catastrophic repercussions” for peace in the Middle East.

Foreign ministers from Arab League countries told the United Nations Human Rights Council that some nations were turning a blind eye to the suffering in Gaza.