Not a simple change, such as rearranging furniture or suddenly deciding to go to a different restaurant. No. Not at all. The abrupt change was at the very core of my being, a momentary change that alters lives forever. She entered the living room from a hallway, smiling, kind of curious like a girl can be. I am not sure if she was sizing up the new visitor to her home or whether she was not particularly interested. But I was. This was 6-year-old Kristin, and, as unexplainable as it may be, I knew looking at her the first time that this was my daughter. She was to change my life, and, unbeknown to her at that time, I was to change hers. Do not expect a rational explanation. There is none. Maybe that is the way it is with many important events. Kristin lived in a nice house off Memorial Drive in Houston, on a street called by the sweet name of Butterfly Lane. It was a nice area of town. Judy, Kristin’s mother, and I had been on a few dates. Judy lived with her …
Post 20 – Is Christianity True?
Is there anything more bizarre than a claim that someone rose from the dead? Jesus reportedly performed miracles, such as instant healings. However, Christianity ultimately hinges on whether Jesus rose from the dead after being crucified by the Romans. It is no wonder that many people have a hard time believing the New Testament’s message that the resurrection occurred. However, many do believe it, which raises the question, "Is the resurrection message in the New Testament reliable history?" Historians have developed tools to determine accuracy of accounts in ancient documents. Here are a few Multiple sources of the accounts add to validity. In the Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James, and the writer of the book Hebrews, cite or allude to the resurrection. The differences in these accounts indicate they are not from one source. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, Paul names Cephas and the apostles as eyewitnesses to the resurrected Jesus, but also …
POST 19 – Ancestors and a Powder Horn
I have been blessed to know those who came before. Well, not all of them. A “Fry relative” traced our family back to “Big John” Fry, who lived in Virginia in the 1700s. Given my low-slung height, I was happy we had a tall Fry in the family, but then it occurred to be that Big John might just have been short and fat. The 1700s means the Frys were here during the American Revolution. Were they fighting against the British “homeland,” were they British sympathizers, or did they just hide in a cave until the battles were over? Who knows? One thing for sure, some of them were busy having babies. Fast forward to the 1800s, and Absalom Fry, who lived in Kentucky, made a powder horn and evidently enjoyed carving on it. Absalom was killed in a horse race in 1850 when he fell off the horse (or did the horse fall?) and sustained fatal head injuries with the help of a tree stump (not quite like dying fighting at the Alamo). Shortly before my father died he gave me this …
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POST 17- THIS WEEK IN AMERICA The Ric Bratton Radio Program
On Thursday morning of this week, Ric Bratton interviewed me for about 20 minutes on his radio program, This Week in America, which is broadcast in more than 100 stations around the U.S. It is also available as a podcast on streaming services. I am glad it was a telephone interview, because the night before I got little sleep, for reasons unrelated to his program. Sometimes we look our best, and sometimes not. Ha. The topic is my book IS YOUR ANCESTOR A MONKEY? and, if interested, you can listen to the interview at the following link. IS YOUR ANCESTOR A MONKEY? by Clifford L. Fry, Ph.D. (podomatic.com) Best wishes to all, Clifford Get My New Book on Amazon! Is Your Ancestor A Monkey?: An Exploration of Key Issues in the Evolution Versus Creation Debate …
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POST 15- Forgetting God
In the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence we find the stirring words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.” Remove “Creator” in the Preamble and you erase the premise of inherent rights. The Preamble is not the only reference to God in our government documents. A Pew Research Center Analysis of August 17, 2017 reports that God or the divine is mentioned at least once in each of the 50 state constitutions and nearly 200 times overall. Yet, we have forgotten God in our public-school classrooms to our potentail peril. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes the horrors of his 8-year imprisonment in the Soviet Union’s labor camps in his book The Gulag Archipelago. The Gulag is the Soviet government agency in charge of a network of labor camps established by Lenin and later expanded by Stalin. They were …
Post 7 – Aggie Jokes and Aggie’s Jokes
I arrived at Texas A&M in the fall of 1963. I was 17 years old and the only one in my high school class in Kingsville that year to attend Texas A&M. At the time, Aggie jokes were common in Texas, and none of them were flattering. A friend of mine told me that some Aggie jokes were the same as Polack jokes up north, which derided those from Poland. However, some were too specific to Texas A&M to be shared by those from Poland. Aggies at that time came primarily from small towns, farms, and ranches. Most of the Aggies in my class had little money, so we differed from "teasips" in the elite fraternities at the University of Texas, which we affectionately referred to as "TU". However, we expected nothing from others, and we were used to hard work, and I know for many of my college colleagues that paid off well in life. Ol’ Sarge, a depiction created by Pete Tumlinson from the Texas A&M class of 1942, was a common image around campus. Ol’ Sarge was a …
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