Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Quotes by Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell is a conservative professor, author, columnist.  He also happens to be black and grew up in North Carolina and New York.  He was born in AD 1930 and proudly considers himself a relic of the past. 

Sowell has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, taught at UCLA and is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.  Senator Ted Cruz called  him a “brilliant thinker and writer.”  Sowell recently retired at age 86. 

I like quotes.  Even though I may not always agree with the author.  Even though I may not even agree with every nuance of the quote.  
Here are a few thoughts to ponder from Dr. Thomas Sowell. 

1. People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

2. If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago, and a racist today.

3. Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them.

4. No community is better off for having large numbers of idle young males, hanging around with nothing to do except getting into trouble.

5. Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

6. The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

7. The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

8. The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.

9. The real minimum wage is zero.

10. What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

11. Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.

12. The word ‘racism’ is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evidence makes you a ‘racist.’ 

13. I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

14. The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state. 

15.  Chief among those who generate this poisonous atmosphere are career race hustlers like Al Sharpton and racist institutions like the "Black Lives Matter" movement. All such demagogues need is a situation where there has been a confrontation where someone was white and someone else was black. The facts don't matter to them. 

16. We have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain. 

-Thomas Sowell (tsowell.com

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.  
-Proverbs 25:11

-David R. Brumbelow, Gulf Coast Pastor, December 28, AD 2016. 

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Thursday, December 8, 2016

R. L. Sumner funeral

Evangelist Robert L. Sumner died December 5, AD 2016.  His funeral will be December 17 in Lynchburg, Virginia. 
R. L. Sumner was the founding editor of The Biblical Evangelist (biblicalevangelist.org). 

He was Associate Editor of the Sword of the Lord with John R. Rice, and a prolific author.  

For more information. 


I will be writing more about him in the days ahead. 

For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with Him. 
-1 Thessalonians 5:9-10
-David R. Brumbelow, Gulf Coast Pastor, December 8, AD 2016. 


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Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Clean Drinking Water & Wine in Bible Times

For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, that flow out of valleys and hills.  -Deuteronomy 8:7

 For years I’ve heard the claim by otherwise intelligent people, “You can’t drink the water in Israel.  The water is contaminated.  Therefore, they had to drink alcoholic wine.  They had no choice.”
Or, a variation of this, “They had to have alcoholic wine to kill the germs or pathogens in their water.”

These claims are simply, false.  False for several reasons. 

1.  The expense.  Wine is expensive.  Imagine having to pay for wine for all your drinking and hydration needs.  It gets hot in Israel and they worked hard.  They would have needed a lot of liquid. 
2.  If alcoholic wine is all they had to drink, the men, women, children of Israel would have been drunk 24 hours a day every day.  That just doesn’t make sense. 
3.  If they could not drink the water, what would have happened if their yearly supply of wine ran out, was stolen, or destroyed?  What if they had a crop failure in the vineyard?  And, could they consistently grow that many grapes?  It would take a lot of grapes to provide a family with enough wine for all, not part, of their thirst for an entire year. 
4.  They knew how to make and preserve both alcoholic and nonalcoholic wine.  They called both wine (Isaiah 65:8, etc.).  Much like today, they had a choice of what to drink.  See articles below and the book “Ancient Wine and the Bible” for more evidence. 
5.  Israelis were masters on the subject of water.  They had to have drinkable water or not survive.  They dug wells, both shallow and deep.  They maintained them for centuries (John 4:5-11; etc.).  They knew about springs and how the water from them was generally safe and good.  They dug cisterns, and used natural cisterns (Genesis 21:25; Leviticus 11:36; Deuteronomy 8:7; 2 Kings 18:31; Nehemiah 9:25; James 3:11; etc.).  Of course they also used rivers and streams.  They valued running water.  They collected rain water.  They even knew the value of dew.  They knew bad water, probably both by training and by experience (Proverbs 25:26).  By the way, modern day Israelis are still exceptional in the areas of water, irrigation, farming, agriculture. 
6.  In Bible times, while they did not know about micro-organisms, they certainly knew clean water from dirty water.  They knew how to find clean water.  Also, to some extent, locals can build a tolerance for some defects in water. 
7.  To sum up, in Bible times they drank water on a regular basis.  Many Scripture passages support this fact  (Genesis 21:19; Genesis 24:17; 1 Samuel 30:11; 2 Samuel 23:15; 1 Kings 17:10; 2 Kings 6:22; Job 22:7; Proverbs 5:15; Proverbs 25:21; Lamentations 5:4; Ezekiel 12:18; Daniel 1:12; Mark 9:41; John 4:7).
8.  Alcoholic wine does not sterilize impure water.  It just doesn’t.  I’ve never seen a modern or ancient scientific authority recommend you take a bottle of wine on your next camping or hunting trip so you can make the water safe to drink.  Alcoholic wine does not disinfect water to make it drinkable. 

It should also be noted that even the alcoholic wine in Bible times was of a rather low alcohol content, making it even less likely to sanitize contaminated water.  Distilled alcohol, which can dramatically increase alcohol content, was unknown in Bible times.  

The word “water” is used 634 times in the Bible (NKJV).  This does not even include related words such as well, drink, spring, river, cistern… So there are many more biblical references than those listed above. 

In short, the oft repeated claim that they had to drink alcohol because the water was undrinkable is a false claim.  Don’t buy it.  Also, the oft repeated claim that you can make contaminated water safe by adding alcoholic wine is a false claim.  These are some of the weakest arguments by social drinkers.  Arguments that do not hold up to a valid investigation.

Parenthetical Note: That there be no misunderstanding.  while we may disagree on details, I’m on the side of all who wisely choose to abstain from alcoholic beverages. 

-David R. Brumbelow, Gulf Coast Pastor, December 6, AD 2016. 

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