From Fox News,

Two Pretty College Students Escorted from Flight

Two attractive 18-year-olds claim they were escorted off a Southwest Airlines flight for being too pretty, TampaBays10.com reported.

University of South Florida student Nisreen Swedberg and friend Sarah Williams said the flight crew was rude to them from the start of their flight from Tampa Bay to Los Angeles on Feb. 14, TampaBays10.com wrote.

“I think they were just discriminating against [us] because we were young decent-looking girls. I mean, nobody else on the plane looked like us except us,” Williams told TampaBays10.com. “[The flight attendants] were like older ladies. We were younger. Who knows, they could have been just jealous of us because we were younger.”

Southwest defended its actions, saying it was the women who caused a disruption on the flight. They were released about two hours after the plane landed, and no charges were filed.

Today, the Associated Press published a story about a six year old girl who was bitten by a swan. This will serve as a helpful introduction to a reflection on the nature of evil, Christianity, and two interviews on the topic.

LONDON — Elishia Stevenson wanted an apology when she was bitten by a swan. So she wrote to Queen Elizabeth II.

The 6-year-old girl from Cornwall, south west England, wrote to Buckingham Palace because her mother told her the queen owns all the swans in Britain. She decorated her letter with flowers and a picture of a swan with a sad face.

A lady-in-waiting responded, saying the queen was “sorry to hear about the swan.”

Though the queen doesn’t own every swan in Britain, she does own certain mute swans in the Thames. This tradition goes back to the 12th century, when roast swan was considered a delicious dish, and continues today with the annual “Swan Upping,” a census of swans on the Thames.

David Pogson, a Buckingham Palace spokesman, said the idea the queen owns all the swans is a myth.

Sometimes when things do bad, we want to draw a picture of ourselves in our situation and ask God to say he is sorry. The very fact that this story made the news speaks of the audacity of a child to ask for an apology from the queen for her bite. Now, maybe the letter was in a spirit of humor. If it was, I should have thought to do something like this myself. It is very funny. But we must admit, there is something familiar about this occasion of victimization.

When I visit a local restaurant and am delivered a cold burger, I complain. If that burger makes me throw up because it was undercooked, that might justify a request for an apology and a free meal. If I eat a burger and die because it was undercooked, my wife better take the company to court. We are creatures of justice and that’s a good thing. But when we translate the service we should expect at the local restaurant to the service we should expect from God, we have made a major category mistake. God was not made for our pleasure, we were made for his. God does not owe us anything, we owe him everything.

Queen Elizabeth II may not own all the swans, but God does. What can it mean that God in all his goodness, all his power and all his knowledge would allow one of his swans to bite a six year old girl? This is the question of the ages and every worldview system must provide an answer to why bad things happen to us. Naturalistic Atheism cannot explain why we are bothered by such things in the first place. How is bad actually worse than good, and not just different? What makes bad things bad and good things good and who decides? Monistic religions of the east which say that everything in the universe is really just one thing purport that evil is an illusion. That doesn’t seem to fit with my experience of the world. Deistic religions accept a Creator but believe he is removed from the people and the processes of the world. Evil, then is the determined consequence of God’s character. At the end of a long line of dominoes, this is the result of what he set in order.

But Christianity maintains the existence of a personal Creator, the one from whom all morally sentient creatures get their sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice. We are offended by the way things are because we know things should be and not be a certain way. Christianity also maintains a distinction between the Creation and the creature. This blog post is not an illusion and neither is evil. Evil is real, both moral and natural evil. These are all departures from the way things are supposed to be. But they are the way things must be. When humankind, the crown of God’s creation, rebelled against the Sovereign of the universe, the created order was turned on its head. Now, instead of ruling the world under God’s authority, the world rules us. Adam did, after all, reject the authority of God for the word of a snake. This is what we asked for – life without the presence of God.

But if Christianity is right and the problems of this world come back to a problem with us, then this conception of the universe may explain the universe, but it leaves us in a difficult position. If God is to right the wrongs of the universe, does not this entail our own destruction? So impossible is this problem for any human person to overcome, we make up religions to work ourselves out of it. Every system of belief addresses the problem of personal culpability. Naturalistic Atheism writes off the personal God of the universe for the impersonal God who is the universe. Morality is just part of our evolutionary development but cannot be grounded in anything deeper than evolutionary processes. Naturalism gets us off the hook by ignoring the very ground of morality. But in the process this worldview takes the justice out of injustice.

Eastern religions have their own solution. Through a series of incarnations we receive in this life what we deserve from our last. Likewise, in the next life we will get what we earned in this life. But what of the child rapist? Even the chance to be a rock would be too lofty a reward for many of the crimes we witness in the world.

Enter Christ.

At the heart of Christianity is a cross with God in human-form suffering. Christianity takes our evil seriously enough to demand a hellish eternity for those who are a part of the problem – and that’s all of us. This is a perfect solution – that is, for God – in that it vindicates God’s righteous character. Now we can call evil for what it is – evil. But Christianity does not leave us with hell. The message of the gospel is that human beings may be rescued from the punishment they deserve by fleeing to the Christ, who accepted this infinite punishment in his own body. In the cross, God says to us that evil is much worse than we thought it was, for it demanded this great a solution. In the cross, God says that we are much worse than we thought we were. Jesus had to become a human, not an animal, but a human to pay for sin. But in the cross, God also says that he is more loving than we could ever imagine. It was to the cross that God sent his only Son and to the cross that his Son willingly went so so that God could accept into his presence forever evil people like you and people like me.

For as much as we are good at feeling and responding to an injustice, we are equally good at totally ignoring the injustice in ourselves. The six year old girl who was offended at a swan bite is probably a sweet girl, but her mother is not preparing her for the real world. I have yet to meet a person of any significant life experience who says that life is easy or that relationships are easy or that work is easy or that being themselves is easy. The world is a problem and we are that problem. A swan bite is a reminder of these things and a frowning providence of God to stimulate the repentance of a sinful heart. Swans bite humans because humans spite God.

In the next week, I will transcribe recent television interviews with pastors, Erwin Lutzer and Timothy Keller, on the question of moral and physical Evil.

Christianity Today interviews Keith and Kristyn Getty,

Keith and Kristyn Getty have been at the forefront of the modern hymn movement over the last decade. (For a review of their latest album, see “Hymn Revival,” CT, January 2007.) The Belfast couple, along with Stuart Townend, has written popular standards rich in Christian doctrine, including the much-covered “In Christ Alone”—a hymn that has been recorded in more than 100 versions by other artists. ct editors Stan Guthrie, David Neff, and Madison Trammel sat down with the Gettys in the CT offices.

How did you get started?

Keith: During my twenties, I started to have a passion to write good songs for a church. They quickly were called modern hymns. I wrote these for my little Baptist church of 160 to 170 people. We thought the way the church and society are going, there’s a bigger future in typewriters or black-and-white televisions.

Why the emphasis on doctrine?

Keith: I’m a child of the modern worship movement. We both are. I have a great affection for both modern worship music and traditional church music. I wanted to do two things. One was to write songs that helped teach the faith, and the second was to write songs that every generation could sing. I don’t think of music as only teaching, but I do think that what we sing profoundly affects how we think. It profoundly affects how we feel. It affects, therefore, our emotional and our didactic relationship with God. But what we sing is for people of all ages.

The radical thing is that in the Old Testament, everybody came together and sang. And in the New Testament, the Jew and the Gentile, the Greek and the Roman, the young and the old all came together and sang together. That’s the witness of church history. It’s not some kind of food court where everyone chooses their favorite music and goes that direction.

I don’t for a minute think that what I write will become everyone’s favorite. That’s just nonsense. The radical thing about a church service is that people of every age and every wealth bracket and every background come together and sing together. So we write these quasi-folk melodies that everyone can sing, and we hope there’s an enduring quality to them.

Kristyn: Every generation needs its new music. It’s important to capture new music and the more contemporary vernacular in songs that people can understand.

That’s why we work with a lot of pastors and theologians, who advise us, help us, and correct us if we go slightly amiss. They keep us on the right track, and also inspire us with new ideas. It’s just an inexhaustible thing that we have to write about, so there’s always another song we need to write.

To what do you attribute your success?

Keith: I think there is a rise in Bible teachers who are trying to draw the connection between what is taught and what is real in everyday experience, and who are struggling to find a connection—where a generation ago, they just used hymns. While there’s a lot of excellent worship songs, they tend to focus on very small aspects of the Christian faith.

If you took a list of subjects, say, attributes of God in the Psalms, probably only 10 percent of them are used in virtually the entire canon of modern worship music. Modern worship songs tend to have a very thin range of subjects. They also tend to explore subjects in a less deep way than traditional hymnody does.

What makes for a good song?

Kristyn: People have to want to sing it. So much of songwriting is editing, really. It’s just trying different words.

Keith: Ever since we started doing this, people have written to us with their versions of hymns based on Ephesians or predestination. But just because the subject is good does not necessarily mean the song will be good. Our goal is not to have every theological subject covered in song. Our goal is to write great songs, but through them to nourish and enrich and inspire and invigorate people with truth applied intellectually and emotionally. It is a tough goal, which is why in every 100 melodies I write, maybe half of one becomes a song!

In a worship service, is there an ideal mix between contemporary worship, modern hymns, and classic hymns?

Keith: I don’t think there’s an answer. You choose great songs that have great words and sing well. Every word you give people on a Sunday has to count for something. The same thing applies to what is sung—in fact, in some ways even more so.

Paul told persecuted churches to get together and teach and admonish one another and sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. There’s no intellectual reason to do that; there’s no church- growth reason to do that. It’s a command, because that is the radical thing.

If members of a congregation aren’t singing, serious questions must be asked, no matter how good the show is at the front.

We also need to remember the importance of learning from the pastor. A lot of people go into Christian music with the Bible in one hand and Coldplay in the other: “I’m going to slap something from the Bible onto whatever the contemporary style is, and that’s the way to relate to contemporary culture, because that’s what pastors do—they’ve got the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, and they apply this one to this one.”

But that’s not what pastors do. I don’t know any pastor who doesn’t read commentaries by people who came before. There is an unusual arrogance sometimes in music, where one side is disparaging of contemporary music as if the new generation has nothing to say. But then the flip side of that is the new generation has no interest in what’s been said before.

There are 20 centuries of Christian music history and a glorious history of sound traditions from before that. There’s so much we can learn. Even if we detest the musical styles or we feel they’re an irrelevancy to our particular gifting, there’s a rich legacy to be learned from.

Kristyn: Even to learn from mistakes.

Keith: Yes. Whether it’s the Salvation Army or music in the cathedrals in Rome or from the early saints, there’s such a rich history.

HT: Justin Taylor 

The weight of false-accusation or a broken relationship is so heavy on the human heart as to wake a woman from a coma. This article is a reminder that justice is worth living for!

A desperate husband who learned a hospital was about to take his comatose wife off life support managed to awaken her doing the one thing he knew she hated — being “told off,” it is reported by the Daily Mail.

Yvonne Sullivan, 28, of the English seaside resort town of Weston-super-Mare in Somerset suffered severe blood poisoning during childbirth July 5. The baby, named Clinton, died after the 14-hour labor and Sullivan fell into a coma moments later, according to the report.

Dom Sullivan, 37, stayed by his wife’s bedside for two weeks while she was in intensive care.

But when the hospital told him they planned to pull the plug on his wife, he snapped and gave his wife “a firm telling-off,” the report said.

Dom Sullivan told the Daily Mail his wife never liked getting a good chewing out. But the move appeared to work and Yvonne Sullivan started breathing on her own two hours later. Within five days, the hospital was able to shut the ventillator off as Yvonne Sullivan regained consciousness, according to the report.

Read on for the entire article from the Daily Mail:

Continue Reading…

This is just interesting,

Government Continues To Declare Living Tennessee Woman Dead 

Laura Todd is tired of being dead.

Because of an eight-year-old error that attached her Social Security number to a dead woman in Florida, the Nashville resident has had to prove over and over again that she is, in fact, alive, WSMV-TV reports.

Todd said that being dead off and on makes everyday life difficult.

“The IRS says I’m dead,” she told WSMV-TV. “Everybody says I’m dead.”

The Internal Revenue Service has twice refused to process Todd’s tax return. She was denied when trying to refinance her house in 2002 because her credit report said she was dead. Her bank closed her credit card account, and even attached a note of sympathy that read, “Please accept our condolences on the death of Laura Todd,” WSMV-TV reports.

Todd said it has even gone as far as her health insurance being canceled.

The government has assured her that they have deleted her death record, but on Wednesday she was hit with the problem again. The IRS once again rejected her electronic tax return, WSMV-TV reports.

“I will not be eligible for my refund,” Todd told WSMV-TV. “I’m not eligible for my rebate. I mean, I can’t do anything with it.”

According to a government audit, Social Security had to resurrect more than 23,000 people from the dead in two years, WSMV-TV reports.