Friday, January 18, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Another Seal from Nehemiah (Imported Article)
A stone seal bearing the name of one of the families who acted as servants in the First Temple and then returned to Jerusalem after being exiled to Babylonia has been uncovered in an archeological excavation in Jerusalem's City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said Wednesday.
Photo: Edwin Trebels courtesy of Dr. Eilat Mazar
The 2,500-year-old black stone seal, which has the name "Temech" engraved on it, was found earlier this week amid stratified debris in the excavation under way just outside the Old City walls near the Dung Gate, said archeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar, who is leading the dig.
According to the Book of Nehemiah, the Temech family were servants of the First Temple and were sent into exile to Babylon following its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.
The family was among those who later returned to Jerusalem, the Bible recounts.
The seal, which was bought in Babylon and dates to 538-445 BCE, portrays a common and popular cultic scene, Mazar said.
The 2.1 x 1.8-cm. elliptical seal is engraved with two bearded priests standing on either side of an incense altar with their hands raised forward in a position of worship.
Dr. Eilat Mazar
Photo: Dr. Eilat Mazar Expedition
A crescent moon, the symbol of the chief Babylonian god Sin, appears on the top of the altar.
Under this scene are three Hebrew letters spelling Temech, Mazar said.
The Bible refers to the Temech family: "These are the children of the province, that went up out of the captivity, of those that had been carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away, and came again to Jerusalem and to Judah, every one unto his city." [Nehemiah 7:6]... "The Nethinim [7:46]"... The children of Temech." [7:55].
The fact that this cultic scene relates to the Babylonian chief god seemed not to have disturbed the Jews who used it on their own seal, she added.
The seal of one of the members of the Temech family was discovered just dozens of meters away from the Opel area, where the servants of the Temple, or "Nethinim," lived in the time of Nehemiah, Mazar said.
"The seal of the Temech family gives us a direct connection between archeology and the biblical sources and serves as actual evidence of a family mentioned in the Bible," she said. "One cannot help being astonished by the credibility of the biblical source as seen by the archaeological find."
The find will be announced by Mazar at the 8th annual Herzliya Conference on Sunday.
The archeologist, who rose to international prominence for her recent excavation that may have uncovered King David's palace, most recently uncovered the remnants of a wall from Nehemiah.
The dig is being sponsored by the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem research institute where Mazar serves as a senior fellow, and the City of David Foundation, which promotes Jewish settlement throughout east Jerusalem.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Bat those Eyes Pretty boy
And More Importantly... are those fake eyelashes?!
Silky Pony
“The pacifist is as surely a traitor
to his country and to humanity
as is the most brutal wrongdoer.”
~ Theodore Roosevelt
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
(Reminder) Time Off to Write
Much Thought,
Monday, January 14, 2008
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Gneder Feminism & Hillary
Defining Terms
To better understand what modern, or gender feminism means, we must understand what liberal feminism represents. The liberal feminist is not out to second guess what women want; if most women enjoy families, if they enjoy “la difference,” this is of no concern for them. On the other hand, the gender feminist “believes that women constitute an oppressed class within an oppressive system: what ails women cannot be cured by merely achieving equal opportunity. As a class women are seen to be politically at odds with the patriarchy that oppresses them.”[1] Consequently, the gender feminist will never accept the testimonies of ordinary women, since the gender feminist believes that ordinary women have unconsciously bought into a system that oppresses them.[2] Thus, the gender – modern – feminist simply presupposes her worldview[3] and reinterprets all contrary facts as examples of false consciousness. This worldview[4] permeates all that the modern feminist comes into contact with, including such things as history and religion. The gender feminist, then, has a radical perspective. She views social reality in terms of patriarchal “sex/gender system” that, in the words of Sandra Harding, “organizes social life throughout most of recorded history and in every culture today.”[5]
The liberal feminist, on the other hand, merely seeks legal equality for women and equality of opportunity in education and in the work place. It is this type of woman who wants what any classical liberal wants for anyone who suffers bias: fair treatment. The more extreme modern view of feminism is what has been institutionalized, unfortunately, in most of the Women’s Studies programs at the university level.
What’s Going On?
While Concerned Women for
How, though, can a civil rights movement be interested in capitalism? According to Tammy Bruce, who was the former president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW as well as being a former member of NOW’s national board of directors puts it: “What Gloria Steinem, Molly Yard, Patricia Ireland and all the rest have presented to you over the last 15 years (at least) has not been feminist theory.”[7]
Ms. Bruce goes on to show that Betty Friedan and Patricia Ireland, ex-president of NOW, (and others) are members of the Communist Party. In fact, Gloria Steinem is honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, which boasts of being the largest socialist organization in the
Now compare this to a statement made by feminist Mary Jo Bane (assistant professor of education at
- “Dramatic changes in the way we will raise our children in the year 2000 are indicated, particularly in terms of schooling...We will need to recognize that the so-called basic skills, which currently represent nearly the total effort in elementary schools, will be taught in one-quarter of the present school day...When this happens- and it's near- the teacher can rise to his true calling. More than a dispenser of information, the teacher will be a conveyor of values...We will be agents of change.”
[1] Christina Hoff Sommers, “Feminism and Philosophy,” APA (American Philosophical Association) Newsletter, 91, no. 1 (Spring 1992), p. 85.
[2] Francis J. Beckwith, Ed., Do the Right Thing: A Philosophical Dialogue on the Moral and Social Issues of Our Time, Jones & Bartlett Publishers,
[3] worldview: People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By “presuppositions” we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic worldview, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions. “As a man thinketh, so he is,” is really profound. An individual is not just the product of the forces around him. He has a mind, an inner world. Then, having thought, a person can bring forth actions into the external world and thus influence it. People are apt to look at the outer theater of action, forgetting the actor who “lives in the mind” and who therefore is the true actor in the external world. The inner thought world determines the outward action. Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles. But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what worldview is true. When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, “not many men are in the room” – that is, although worldviews have many variations, there are not many basic worldviews or presuppositions – Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, Crossway Books,
[4] Ronald H. Nash, Worldviews in Conflict: Choosing Christianity in a World of Ideas, Zondervan,
[5] Sandra Harding & Merrill Hintikka, Ed., Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Science, p. 312 – excerpted from Do the Right Thing, see footnote #55.
George Soros Money Trail
650,000 Dead… NOT
This, of course is old news, but the new twist is that Soros paid for it. I want to here point out the Drudge Report (props) here. Another blow to the Lefties! Aaawwww, poor little liberal… here, have a “sucker” (i.e., Obama)
From The Sunday Times
January 13, 2008
Anti-war Soros funded
Brendan Montague
A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of
Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.
The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but
New research published by The
“The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research,” said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway,
The Lancet study was commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and led by Les Roberts, an associate professor and epidemiologist at
His team surveyed 1,849 homes at 47 sites across
Professor John Tirman of MIT said this weekend that $46,000 (£23,000) of the approximate £50,000 cost of the study had come from Soros’s Open Society Institute.