However, there are 65 scientifically documented cases of scientists using adult stem cells to treat diseases ranging from Autoimmune Cytopenia to X-linked lymphoproliferative syndrome.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has reported another successful treatment using adult stem cells. Jennifer Molson, of Kanata, Ontario, has MS. In 1996, as an otherwise healthy 21 year old, she was diagnosed with the disease. As the disease progressed, she lost motor control of the left side of her body, and was on her way to needing a wheel chair. In 2002 she underwent an experimental treatment using her own stem cells. Today she is going on walks, and even driving to work.

The best part? Not a single baby had to die for her to be cured! A major plus, in my opinion.

It turns out that John Edwards may have been right after all about people with crippling diseases walking again thanks to stem cell research. Unfortunately for him, it looks like he was backing both the wrong presidential candidate and the wrong type of stem cell research.

To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?
An idol! A craftsman casts it, and a goldsmith overlays it with gold and casts for it silver chains.
He who is too impoverished for an offering chooses wood that will not rot;
he seeks out a skillful craftsman to set up an idol that will not move. - Isaiah 40:18-20

There is a church in San Fransisco called Ebenezer Lutheran Church. They are now also calling themselves "Her Church." You can visit their website at herchurch.org, if you would like to learn more about them. Pastor Stacy and her congregation are:

a diverse community, standing firmly within the Christian tradition in order to re-image the divine by claiming her feminine persona in thealogy, liturgy, church structure, art, language, practices, leadership, and acts of justice. Challenging the church?s restricted language of the past, we pay special attention to images and metaphors that attempt to embrace divine fullness and that offer a witness of holy nurture and inclusive justice, both to the church and to the world.

This is what happens when man begins to instruct God. When we tell him how things are going to be, anything goes. When we tell him what church should be like, we are free to make it as absurd as we want, as Pastor Stacy proves for us.

Her Church had a "Retreat with She Who Is" where they got together to pray the "Goddess rosary" and build clay statues representing the femininity of the "god/dess." Jo Ann Heydron writes:

Pastor Stacy reminded us of some of the discounted feminine images of God in the Old Testament?probably none of which were the products of female imaginations?and invited us to form our own images in clay of Asherah, the mother goddess of the Canaanites familiar to early Jewish inhabitants of Canaan. I am no artist. Warming and working the clay with my hands, I wondered whether my goddess would look anything like the photograph of an Asherah figure Stacy provided as a possible starting point. Almost immediately I forget all about the picture. I began to form, as well as I could, my own breasts and hips, my own hair and face and arms and belly, my 52-year-old self, an Asherah with a sacred body just like mine. I can't tell you how healing that was.

In other words, these ladies were instructed to make idols that were in their own image. I'm no Old Testament scholar, but I seem to remember quite a few stories of God getting pretty angry with the Israelites for building Asherah idols (21 different stories, according to the ESV). In fact, if the Israelites were "familiar" with Asherah, it was because God dealt with them very severely when they worshipped the false god.

Like many (most?) churches in North America, these ladies need to open their Bibles and find out what God, the Father, has told us about himself, and about Jesus, his Son. God is real, and he has told us plenty about himself. When we worship a god who is how we think he/she/it should be, but not how he really is, we are guilty of idolatry even if we don't get out the modeling clay and form a statue.

God isn't just some little statue we can make with our own hands, but he gets pretty angry when we act like he is.

In America, we now have become guilty of "Born-Againism." We have replaced the Catholics' baptism for salvation with a silly prayer at the end of the four spiritual laws or the Romans Road. We make a person pray a prayer, and then declare that their sins have been forgiven! If the rich young ruler had come to one of our churches, he would have been asked to walk down the aisle, say a prayer, and fill out a card. We would send him through the baptismal, and assure him of his salvation. We would, of course, be consigning his soul to Hell by our negligence.

I say he said "something like this" because I was scribbling in my notebook as fast as I could, but I know I didn't get it all. When I get my CDs of the audio from the conference I'll try to clarify a little.

Born-Againism was a new term for me, but I think he's got it completely right. American evangelical theology is as watered down as American beer. In an effort to make the gospel simpler and easier to comprehend, we have lost the very gospel itself. We've made the gospel comfortable for the very "lost" we are trying to save. In our zeal to proclaim salvation by grace alone, we've conveniently erased repentance from the equation. We think we need to "get someone saved" and then move on to repentance and growth as step two, at some later date.

In fact, many of our churches don't even teach their members theological terms and their meanings, leading to great ignorance about salvation and evangelism even in their simples forms. If you're in an SBC church, I'm sure you've heard that people need to "accept Jesus into their heart" if they want to be saved, though the Bible mentions no such event. But, do you have any idea what the terms regeneration, justification, sanctification, and glorification mean? We can't understand how Paul can say salvation is "not of works" and yet James says "a person is justified by works and not by faith alone." If you don't understand the words describing the categories or stages of salvation, this will never make sense to you. So, you throw out James in an effort to preserve the grace of God.

If that's the case, what do you do with Philippians 2, where Paul tells us to work out our salvation? What do you do with 1 John 2, where John says "whoever says 'I know him' but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him"? What do you do with Peter when he says, in 2 Peter 1, that you are to "make your calling and election sure" by practicing a long list of virtues?

In classic Christian over reaction, Continue reading this post »