Robert Ballard says Noah's ark evidence comes to light

Robert Ballard says Noah's ark evidence comes to light:

By JENNA MILLMAN, BRYAN TAYLOR and LAUREN EFFRON (@LEffron831)

Dec. 10, 2012

The story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood is one of the most famous from the Bible, and now an acclaimed underwater archaeologist thinks he has found proof that the biblical flood was actually based on real events.

In an interview with Christiane Amanpour for ABC News, Robert Ballard, one of the world's best-known underwater archaeologists, talked about his findings. His team is probing the depths of the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey in search of traces of an ancient civilization hidden underwater since the time of Noah.

Tune in to Christiane Amanpour's two-part ABC News special, "Back to the Beginning," which explores the history of the Bible from Genesis to Jesus. Part one airs on Friday, Dec. 21 and part two on Friday, Dec. 28, both starting at 9 p.m. ET on ABC. See photos from her journey HERE

Ballard's track record for finding the impossible is well known. In 1985, using a robotic submersible equipped with remote-controlled cameras, Ballard and his crew hunted down the world's most famous shipwreck, the Titanic.

Now Ballard is using even more advanced robotic technology to travel farther back in time. He is on a marine archeological mission that might support the story of Noah. He said some 12,000 years ago, much of the world was covered in ice.

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"Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that's a big ice cube," he said. "But then it started to melt. We're talking about the floods of our living history."

The water from the melting glaciers began to rush toward the world's oceans, Ballard said, causing floods all around the world.

"The questions is, was there a mother of all floods," Ballard said.

According to a controversial theory proposed by two Columbia University scientists, there really was one in the Black Sea region. They believe that the now-salty Black Sea was once an isolated freshwater lake surrounded by farmland, until it was flooded by an enormous wall of water from the rising Mediterranean Sea. The force of the water was two hundred times that of Niagara Falls, sweeping away everything in its path.

Fascinated by the idea, Ballard and his team decided to investigate.

"We went in there to look for the flood," he said. "Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed... The land that went under stayed under."

Four hundred feet below the surface, they unearthed an ancient shoreline, proof to Ballard that a catastrophic event did happen in the Black Sea. By carbon dating shells found along the shoreline, Ballard said he believes they have established a timeline for that catastrophic event, which he estimates happened around 5,000 BC. Some experts believe this was around the time when Noah's flood could have occurred.

"It probably was a bad day," Ballard said. "At some magic moment, it broke through and flooded this place violently, and a lot of real estate, 150,000 square kilometers of land, went under."

The theory goes on to suggest that the story of this traumatic event, seared into the collective memory of the survivors, was passed down from generation to generation and eventually inspired the biblical account of Noah.

Noah is described in the Bible as a family man, a father of three, who is about to celebrate his 600th birthday.

'via Blog this'

Jesus Without Virgin Birth or the Resurrection

Time of Grace ladies auxiliary finally reads their "Statement of Faith."

The Statement of Faith from Mark Jeske was not a sudden revelation to me, nor a shock to my system.

Here is a far better one, which I wrote for our evangelism brochure in Columbus. It was copied by many congregations since that time. I did not copyright something already in the domain of the Holy Spirit -


If you hold to my teaching, then you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. John 8:31-32


In an age of anxiety, we still believe, teach and confess that peace comes from Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

In an age of confusion, we still believe, teach, and confess that the Bible is the Word of God, inerrant and infallible.

In an age of doubt, we still believe, teach, and confess that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.

In an age of guilt, we still believe, teach, and confess that Jesus Christ died on the cross to remove the power of sin, death, and Satan from our lives.

In an age of fear, we still believe, teach, and confess that Christ rose bodily from the dead to lead us to eternal life.

In an age of self-centeredness, we still believe, teach, and confess that God acts through the Sacraments of Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Holy Communion).

In an age of constant change, we still believe, teach, and confess the unchanging Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 


Context
I wrote the statement as a message to be used in any area where mainline congregations dominated. The locale? - a Church Growth bootcamp organized at Mequon by Paul Kelm and David Valleskey, complete with oozing references to Paul Y. Cho and the Church Growth Movement.

Copies of copies and variations exist all over the Net.

Statements of faith must be important to some, because congregations change the wording to reflect their peculiar dogmas. Thus Trinity (WELS) in Neenah has Christ rising from the dead to "win" eternal life - the Halle Easter absolution language.

The great irony here is is that Kelm's mission in life has been to make Lutherans into generic liberal Protestants, to attract more members--supposedly--even though his labor has had the exact opposite effect.

At this conference, I opposed what Valleskey and Kelm were doing, but they knew they were already in control of the entire WELS structure. Many lawsuits, failures, felony arrests, and millions of dollars later, they are even more in control of WELS. They are just too ashamed to admit it.

In their recent brochure on WELS mission funding, they omitted the huge sum given to The CORE for buying the stinky old bar in downtown Appleton, plus the loan to fix it up and kill the vermin. My theory is that their sugar daddy found it easier to pass through the money via Keith Free than Tim Glende. Some at Glende's church might have woke up, as they say.

Mark Jeske
The Gospel according to Mark and Avoid Jeske is central to this tale of woe.

One way to discern a mainline liberal (closet Unitarian) is to ask about the Virgin Birth of Christ and the actual Resurrection of Christ. Adverbs and adjectives really matter, because they like to parse both articles of faith as something believed by others (the Easter faith of the disciples) or a quaint reflection of antique values (honoring Jesus through Mary).

Both silence and denial are parts of the Unitarian creed of unfaith. Denial would leave some Time of Grace donors feeling awkward, so silence is the preferred gambit. "Leave it out" they say in the committee meeting or a secretive meeting at some Milwaukee ale house.

I met a high school classmate at reunion. He was a member of the Augustana Synod congregation I joined. Since that time he had become a Unitarian. His second wife was a Disciples of Christ seminarian, who bragged that her school was a joint operation with the Unitarians. Unfaith brings people together. I asked, "How can you tell who the Unitarians are?"

She was puzzled by my questions, which included, "Do you believe in the actual Virgin Birth of Christ?" and "Do you believe in the actually bodily Resurrection of Christ?" She dismissed both articles of faith as "not important," a phrase I heard or read many times among modern theologians.

If those articles of faith are not important, then why deny or avoid them? That makes them seem quite significant to me, the actual reason for the wording in the brochure I produced.

Jeske, Kelm, Olson, Bivens and their doppelganger in Missouri all represent an anti-confessional stance. The idea is to blend with current culture. In business, that means the Asian prosperity cult linked with the occult.

In one of his TV shows, Jeske said, "I am thankful we can call upon the powers of universe to help us." That is a paraphrase from memory, but it is close enough to alert anyone to his subservience to

• The Power of Positive Thinking - Norman Vincent Peale's book plagiarized from an occult writer.
• Possibility Thinking - Peale borrowed by Robert Schuller.
• The Fourth Dimension - Asian paganism borrowed by Paul Y. Cho, a hero to Fuller and Schuller.
• Nightingale Conant - More blah blah of the same occult genre.
• Napoleon Hill - possibly dumber than Napoleon Dynamite.

Napoleon Hill inspired Robert Schuller, Mary Kay Cosmetics,
and many others. As Paul Y. Cho has shown, the spirits of prosperity are
part of Asian occult concepts and ancestor worship -
"not that there is anything wrong with that."