Tag Archives: #rcl1314

Plan for Presentation

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The plan for my presentation is mainly trying to get all of my ideas in the presentation in the allotted time. Here are the main ideas I am planning to talk about:

  1. Begin my presentation with a story (Anita, 19 when sold into slavery)
  2. Make the point that slavery did not end with the 13th amendment
  3. Numerous facts and data about slavery all around the world and in America (also the number of children sold into slavery in addition to women)
  4. Make the point that awareness is the first step
  5. Talk about the problems that occur even with people who are aware and trying to fight to help end sexual slavery (this includes talking briefly about the women who voluntarily decide to go back after being rescued and what organizations are doing wrong to cause this)
  6. Talk about two organizations that I believe are setting a good example in the fight to end slavery around the world (IJM and Bombay Teen Challenge)
  7. Give a glimmer of hope in the seemingly hopelessness that is sexual slavery
  8. Surprise ending that I don’t want to ruin on this blog

I am worried that I am not expanding upon the right things and that I will not get enough time to talk about the complicated issues that surround sexual slavery and the complex problems that surround trying to help. I hope that my presentation will at least make an impact on someone or begin to increase awareness in our class about the slavery that is currently happening in our country and our world.

The Puzzle of Psychology

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This week, I want to talk about how aspects of Psychology can relate to religion. I am currently taking the honors Psych 100 class, and recently we were learning about social influences on behavior. During our discussion my professor, Dr. Brown, said something that could have come straight out of a sermon (but in a very scientific way): “As a species we have a need to seek other’s approval, but don’t let others’ approval rule your lives.”

Dr. Brown was talking about that innate need of all humans to have community and love from others, but I noticed that he could not give a reason why this was true other than human nature. We all can feel that slight pulling to find the people that will truly understand you and hold you up when you are too weak to go on, and we all know too well that sting and emptiness that comes with feeling alone in this vast universe. This is true of everyone, but is it just human nature, or is there something behind it?

I hope you liked my rhetorical question because I’m going to use it to transition now into one possible explanation for this feeling that I have found to be true: we were created to be that way for a specific purpose, and in a few short paragraphs, I will tell you what I think that purpose might be.

1. We were created to build each other up

The reason we desire to be with others so much, is that we were created to support each other through everything. Here are a few Bible verses, so you know I’m not just pulling this all out of thin air:

  • Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up!”
  • Proverbs 27:17 “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”
  • 1 Thessalonians 5:11 “Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.”

These verses reflect what we already know; when you have people that love you and care about you, you build each other up and even make each other better. Even with how amazing this is, there is something that is even more incredible about our need to be with others…

2. We were created to know God better

Not only can we make each other better through fellowship, but through our differences and separate talents, we can actually see God more completely in the people we love!

  • 1 John 4:13 “We know that we live in [God] and he in us, because he has given us the spirit.”
  • 1 Corinthians 12:4-6 “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone the same God at work.”
  • 1 Corinthians 12:12-13,27 “”The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body – whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free – and we were all given the one Spirit to drink…. Now you are the body of Christ, and each of you is part of it.”

These verses teach me that in each of us, there is a little piece of God, and while we all have our faults, there is so much beauty in each and every one of us because we have some shared feature with God. Our need for companionship is actually spurring us on to come together and see different parts of God in other people that we do not ourselves have. At the end of the day, this is the beauty I’ve come to know: We were made for each other, to love each other and love our God, and just thinking about how loving each other can help us slowly piece together a puzzle on this earth of God in heaven is absolutely astounding.

Persuasive Paper and Advocacy Project Brainstorm

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For my persuasive paper, I want to continue the idea from my civic issues posts. So, I will try and expose the fact that slavery (especially sexual slavery) is still very common in the world, and there are even more slaves in the world today than there were when slavery was legal in the United States. I want to first prove that this is currently an issue in the world today (mostly through facts and statistics), highlight different organizations that are trying to help this situation, talk about the why some aspects of these organizations are not working (unfortunately, a lot of the time girls will escape the safe houses and return to the brothels), and then offer some hope to rebuke the seemingly insurmountable battle against sexual slavery. I think that this topic will be most effective in a journalistic style because I will be trying to bring light to an issue not commonly looked at and convince my audience that something needs to be done (even if I don’t know exactly how to solve it). Also, I will definitely include some pictures of sexual slaves in captivity and others that were rescued. I want to format it like a magazine article so that the pictures are integrated into the essay and it will be more pleasing to read.

As for my advocacy ideas, I am not as sure what I want to do. One of my more ambitious ideas is to start some kind IJM (international justice mission: an organization aimed at stopping sexual slavery and my dream job) club or organization in Penn State because I’m not sure that there is one in Penn State yet. If not, I could also do a multimedia project such as making an inspirational video to hopefully make people care about the fight to end slavery around the world. Other than that, I don’t have that many creative ideas for the advocacy project, so I’m up for suggestions!

Human Nature

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This week I wanted to talk about how religion can be related to the science of human nature. While human nature isn’t exactly a science, it is still something that everyone has in common and dictates how we think and process life in general. Lately, I’ve noticed that many people around me don’t really accept religion because books like the Bible don’t line up with their beliefs. So, I just wanted to dissolve some typical stereotypes of the Bible so that you can see that religion and human nature are more closely related than you might think.

 

There are many stereotypes around the Bible, but a majority of them can be dissolved with one concept: love. Many people ask why Christians judge people all the time or hate homosexuals so harshly… I’ll let you in on a little secret: the Christians that judge and hate aren’t truly abiding by the book they swear so strongly by. A criticism that I hear all too often is when someone asks why people can’t just forget about religion and just love each other. Well, it turns out (at least in the Bible) that love and religion actually walk hand in hand.

 

So to dissolve this myth, first I want to talk about what Christians are not supposed to do: judge and hate people. There are a plethora of verses about this, but here are some of my favorites:

 

 

Matthew 7:1-5 “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

  • I love this one. Basically what it is saying is that no one should criticize anyone else when we are all so at fault ourselves. Judging others when we all have faults is hypocritical, and it says it right here.

James 4:11-12 “Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?”

  • These verses echo the last example in the aspect that they tell Christians not to judge others, and also say that you should not speak against one another (aka no smack talk). It also makes the point that the only judge is God because we don’t have the authority or possess the perfection to be able to judge people with love the way God does

Romans 2:1-3 “Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things. We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God?”

  • This one is a little more harsh than the others, but serves the same purpose. If Christians go around and judge people who they think have sinned, they are really sinning themselves.

Luke 6:37 “Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven;”

  • This one is pretty simple. If you don’t want to be judged, don’t judge others (very “golden rule” ish. Also, as a side note, a few verses earlier in Luke 6:31, it says “Do to others as you would have them do to you” which is pretty much exactly the golden rule).

Okay so if Christians aren’t supposed to judge people or hate people, what should they do? The answer is simple, and you will find more verses and direct commands from Jesus about this than anything else: love is the most important thing.

  • In Mark 12: 30-31, Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” and the second greatest commandment is this: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” According to Jesus, “there is no commandment greater than these.”
  • In 1 Peter 4:8 it says, “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.”
  • In Luke 6:35, we are even instructed to “love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.”
  • Why should we love? In 1 John 4:19 it tells us: “We love because [God] first loved us.”
  • And how do we know that God first loved us? Just look at Romans 5:28, “But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” and of course, the most quoted verse in the Bible, John 3:16, “ For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

So there you have it. Don’t buy into the stereotypes about Christianity because any Christian that hates and judges is not doing what their Lord, Jesus, instructed them to do, and you should not listen to them. It frustrates me that people who hate can spoil the pure love and grace that was intended to surround Christians, but now you guys have some scripture to show the hypocritical Christians what they’re missing. Christianity is first and foremost about love, and many of the morals and values of Christianity probably come closer to your own personal belief system than the this broken world of people have made you think….

International Justice Mission

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This week, I want to talk about another organization that tries to stop sex slavery around the world, and that organization is the International Justice Mission. This organization is very dear to my heart, and it is both my dream job and one of the reasons that my major is international politics. On their website (http://www.ijm.org) , it states that “International Justice Mission is a human rights agency that brings rescue to victims of slavery, sexual exploitation, and other forms of violent oppression” because they believe that everyone deserves to feel safe.

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 (In this picture from IJM’s website “An IJM Bangalore lawyer leads the families out of the brick factory where they had been enslaved.”)

In IJM, teams of lawyers, social workers, and investigators intervene with state and local authorities on behalf of those oppressed. They work in cases of sexual violence and trafficking, illegal property seizure, illegal detention, gender based violence, and forced labor slavery. These teams first seek victim relief to stop the abuse that is occurring. Next, they seek perpetrator accountability so that those who abuse their local justice systems will be held accountable. Also, IJM is instrumental in survivor aftercare where they work alongside of the local authorities to ensure that the victims, as well as their physical and emotional abuse, are well cared for. Last, IJM seeks structural transformation so that they can prevent further abuse.

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(In this picture from IJM’s website, “Miriam (lower right) watches her great-granddaughter sing a song for IJM staff celebrating IJM’s help in restoring her family’s property after wealthy neighbors attempted to seize it. The legal battle for Miriam’s property rights lasted over five years, and her victory made national headlines in Kenya.”)

Currently, IJM has 18 ongoing operations in 18 cities in Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala, and they are working on many projects. The current movement that inspired me to write this blog is the “End It” movement that is happening today (February 27, 2014). This movement aims to shine a light on slavery by increasing awareness about the 27 million men and women trapped in slavery around the world today. IJM knows that awareness will not end slavery, but without the awareness slavery cannot end. In this promotional video, the speaker says, “We fight for freedom; we fight for justice. We speak for those who are oppressed with no voice, no light, and no hope. Let’s refuse to be quiet anymore.” To increase the awareness of the slavery that still exists around the world, everyone involved in the movement today drew a red x on their hand to stand for our opposition to slavery. (Here is the link to the video: http://www.enditmovement.com/#together_we_can)

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(Even some celebrities like Carrie Underwood show their support to stop slavery!)

 In a world of injustice, organizations like this give me some hope that a change can be made. I know there will always be poverty and corrupt people, but at least there is still a battle being fought against them.

A Case for Christ

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This week, I want to talk about a man named Lee Strobel. He clashed often with his wife due to the fact that she converted to Christianity and he couldn’t understand how she could believe in an all-powerful God. So, being the investigative journalist and Yale Law School Graduate that he is, he set out on what became a two-year journey to disprove Christianity. Strobel once said, “As far as I was concerned, the case was closed. There was enough proof for me to rest easy with the conclusion that the divinity of Jesus was nothing more than the fanciful invention of superstitious people. Or so I thought.” In the end, he found that there was more evidence supporting Christianity than not, and he wrote a book about his investigation titled A Case for Christ. Just to give you a little more of an idea of what it’s about, here is the trailer for the movie that was made based off the book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaW4Q8l-5B0

Here is an outline of the three parts of A Case for Christ:

1. Examining the Record:

When Lee Strobel’s wife was converted to Christianity, he was afraid that people who just wanted to draw her into their delusions had tricked her. Despite this, he saw positive changes in her that he couldn’t explain. So, he began reading and studying subjects such as archeology along with the Bible and interviewed a slew of experts on the topics. He studied the reliability of the eyewitnesses, the documents of the Bible themselves, evidence from outside of the Bible, scientific evidence, and rebuttal evidence. In the section about scientific evidence, Strobel concludes that archeology does not prove what Jesus said, but it does match up with some accounts in the gospels (such as in the books of Luke, Matthew, and John) to increase the overall credibility of the text.

 

2. Analyzing Jesus:

In the middle section of the book, Strobel examines identity evidence (Did Jesus actually claim to be the son of God?), psychological evidence (Was Jesus crazy when he claimed these things?), profile evidence (Did Jesus fulfill the attributes of God?), and fingerprint evidence (Did Jesus alone match the identity of the Messiah?). In the last part of this section, Strobel talks about how prophesies in the Old Testament reflect Jesus in the New Testament (some of the same stuff that I talked about last week!)

 

3. Researching the Resurrection:

Here, Strobel investigates the medical and historical evidence of Jesus’ crucifixion, the evidence of the missing body/empty tomb, the evidence of appearances, and the circumstantial evidence (inferences drawn from indirect facts, that do not aim to prove, but to support). Strobel provides six cases of circumstantial evidence: the disciples died for their beliefs, the conversion of skeptics such as Paul (a Pharasee, a member of the ancient Jewish sect devoted to the law, who also condemned and killed early Christians), changes to key social structures, conversion and baptism, the emergence of the church, and the religious experience of Christians.

 

I know that I did not go into depth about any of the proof that he found, but I couldn’t think of a way to include it and not incredibly exceed the word count. If you are curious to know more, just comment or message me over Facebook or something, and I would love to talk to you more about it!

Foreshadowing through Prophesies

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I realized through feedback and reading back over my blog posts that I haven’t been taking as much of a scientific approach as I probably should be taking. So this week, I wanted to provide some bible verses with some slightly more concrete evidence to back it up. Please keep in mind while reading all of these posts that I am only human, and I cannot begin to understand God, or even some of the science I talk about, so do not make your basis of religion or science on what you see here, whether that impression be good or bad. Let this be something that sparks your curiosity and spurs you to find a better place to find the answers you are looking for.

 

With that in mind, this week I want to take a step back and approach science in its most strict definition instead of trying to tackle the applications of it such as physics. Science is, first and foremost, a way of thinking that helps you draw sound conclusions, and I believe that can be applied to anything. So I am going to try something different this week and also bring lit into the discussion.

 

I am a huge lit nerd, and I thing I absolutely love finding in books I read is foreshadowing. It helps me to take this passion and use it to analyze the Bible so that I can take it for what it is. So this week, I am going to analyze the main example of foreshadowing in the Bible: prophesies.

 

If you look at the Bible like any other piece of literature you would study in class, you realize that Jesus was not what everyone expected. Jews at the time expected the messiah (the chosen one) to come handsomely riding in on horseback and be immediately accepted by everyone. But when you look in the Old Testament, prophesies of the messiah do not predict that to be the case. Yes, the Old Testament predicts that the messiah will be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2) and be born of a virgin mother (Isaiah 7:14), and that the messiah would suffer and die on a cross (Zechariah 12:10a, Psalm 22:14-16), but there is so much more in Jesus’ life that was predicted by prophesies….

 

  • Contrary to popular belief, the Old Testament actually predicted that the messiah will be rejected by his people (Isaiah 53: 1,3) and that Jesus would hang out and suffer with who society deemed as the “sinners” (Isaiah 53:12a)
  • And it was not only predicted that Jesus would be betrayed by someone he knows (Judas Iscariot), but also that he would be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver (Psalm 41:9, Zechariah 11:12-13)
  • And in addition to the prediction of Jesus’ death on the cross, there were even prophesies of specifics during the crucifixion like dividing up the messiah’s clothes (Psalm 22:18) and the fact that none of his bones would be broken (Numbers 9:12)
    • **In numbers, they were talking about how to sacrifice a Passover lamb (which temporarily atoned for the sins of Jewish people), and there is a beautiful poetry seen in many places in the Bible that depicts Jesus as the ultimate Passover Lamb, that atoned for everyone’s sins for past, present, and future. If you want to know more about the background of this, come talk to me!
    • Finally, it was even predicted that Jesus would be laid in a rich man’s grave (Isaiah 53:9) and that he would raise from the dead (Psalm 16:10, Psalm 30:3)

 

I know it seems like I’m using the Bible to back up the Bible, but the truth is that the Old Testament and the New Testament stand apart from each other. The interesting thing is that the Old Testament and the New Testament were separated by about 400 years, so the chance that so many finite details could line up is very small. And these are only the beginnings of the many incredibly detailed prophecies that were paralleled in the New Testament. The connections between the prophecies and the fulfillment are what draw these very different books together. Taking into consideration the gap of time between the books, the more I learn and study the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, it amazes me how every passage seems to reflect the New Testament, which is pretty freaking incredible.

 

This I Believe Reflection

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The peer review in class on Wednesday was very helpful. It was cool to see the different rough drafts of classmates, and compare and contrast the styles of different writers. The feedback I received for my “This I Believe” was very helpful. I liked the idea of reading each one anonymously and trying to guess who the author was. It was more difficult than I thought it would be to match each essay to its respective author, but I was incredibly impressed with the vulnerability poured out into each paper.

I received not only positive feedback to reassure myself that the material I had to work with was respectable, but also constructive feedback on things I could change. I realized that I had done well with establishing my tone and telling my story; Jeremy expressed to me that the build up and turnaround in my story was well reflected by my tone. He specifically referenced my sentence, “Everything seemed to converge in a giant cloud of suck.” I tried to keep my tone light despite a heavier topic, so I was glad that the effort translated successfully when others read my paper. What I needed to work on was more detailed imagery and a more sound development of the final idea. The imagery that was good was the glitter and my descriptions about my sickness, but I needed to put more descriptions in so that listeners can really imagine the story as it is being told. In regards to my ending, I has a few sentences to bring everything together, but the idea of what the ornament represented, was not emphasized enough. So, I tried to add in a few more sentences about ornaments representing those little acts of kindness that can lift someone’s spirits. I really appreciate the feedback from my group, and I hope I was able to take all of your feedback and improve my podcast!