New owl and spider species discovered, Touchdown Jesus resurrected, chastity glasses

Some news for you:

Without the Holy Spirit to help men keep covenant eyes, they resort to the silliest things. They will also fail.

Chastity’ lenses help devout Jewish men avoid impure thoughts
"If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. That or wear glasses that make your vision so blurry that you can’t see three yards in front of you. That is the solution being tested out by a subset of ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel whose self-control is evidently not up to the test. The website RT.com reports that pious Jews who find themselves tempted by scantily clad girls strutting through their neighborhoods of Jerusalem have taken to wearing blurry spectacles that “literally put beautiful women out of sight, if not out of mind.”

Specs not sex: New glasses blur women for Orthodox Jews
"Stores in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Sharim will soon start stocking glasses that leaves one’s immediate vision intact, but makes everything beyond 10 feet completely out of focus, Yedioth Ahronoth’s Hebrew website Mynet reports. For those cursed with 20/20 vision, the organization provides a pair of non-prescription spectacles at a price of $32.50, onto which two semi-transparent stickers can be slapped. And if their vision is already failing them, the stickers can be applied to the lenses of prescription glasses, leaving the wearer even more myopic than they were before."

Sigh. I hope you can appreciate the ministry of the Holy Spirit, who helps us resist sin. And appreciate even more the gift that he is, a gift of mercy and helps from our Holy God.

Now on to Touchdown Jesus. He may have been struck by lightning and burned to a cinder, but now he is back. Two years ago, I'd posted about the Touchdown Jesus getting zapped.

I had written back then, "Lightning is in the news today in the mid-section of the nation. The King of Kings statue located at Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. The statue is 62 feet high, presents only Jesus's torso with arms upraised, causing the aptness of the nickname "Touchdown Jesus" to be all too ruefully honest. The statue is in a baptismal pool and at night, is lit from underneath from multi-colored lights. It is gaudy and not to my liking, and not to many of the locals' either: 75% of those polled said it was in bad taste and reflected poorly on the city of Monroe."

So it got hit by a bolt of lighting and burned up. Now this blogger says he is going to be resurrected.

"“Touchdown Jesus” is about to rise again, though—although this time, his resurrected form has been titled “Lux Mundi,”, from the Latin for “Light of the World.” He’s a more traditional Jesus with arms outstretched; and already the blogosphere has given him the affectionate nickname “Hug Me Jesus.” The new statue has been engineered to fit the existing steel frame and concrete base, but will stand only 52 feet, as compared to the 62-foot original."

The statue will be put up in September. So we have that to look forward to.

After a quiet first half of the year in the earthquake front, several major earthquakes have occurred this week. In order from today's quake to a week ago-

6.3 Sulawesi, Indonesia
7.7 Sea of Okhotsk
6.3 Xinjiang-Xizang Border Region
6.4 NW Iran
6.3 NW Iran

On the volcano front, we continue to read reports of eruptions that are reported as "the first eruption since..." or "the first eruption ever..." Like this one from Geologist Erik Klemetti's blog, Eruptions:

"It took a little bit to decipher, but it appears that the Grozny Group in the Kuril Islands may have had its first eruption since 1989."

Or the identification of the mysterious 26,000 square km pumice raft that had no readily located source, except maybe,

"it appears that this is Havre seamount (near Havre Rock), a volcano that we don’t know very much about at all. In fact, Havre doesn’t even have an entry in the GVP database or really any information about it – heck, it doesn’t even show up on many maps of the active Kermadec volcanoes."

As of Friday, Aug. 18, the website VolcanoDiscovery reports, "A small swarm of quakes has been going on at Katla volcano since yesterday. So far, 10 quakes have occurred today, including a M2.8 quake at 1.8 km depth 6.8 km E of Goðabunga."

Any mention of evil and powerful Katla always sends tremors to everyone from geologists to conspiracy theorists.

Good news! A new velociraptor spider with vicious claws has been discovered in Oregon! And you thought the brown spider was bad enough! Just when man thought he had classified the world, God goes and shows us we know nothin', nothin' at all really, about His complex and immense creation.

Velociraptor spider discovered in Oregon cave (pictures)
"Scouring the caves of Southwest Oregon, scientists have made the incredible discovery of a fearsome apex predator with massive, sickle claws. No, it's not the Velociraptor from Jurassic Park: it's a large spider that is so unique scientists were forced to create a new taxonomic family for it. "This is something completely new," lead author of a paper on the species, Charles Griswold with the California Academy of Sciences, told SFGate. "It's a historic event."

And just in case you thought that a new spider discovery was an anomaly, and that science really has figured out the earth and its animals,

Two new species of owls identified in Philippines
"Two new owl species have been identified in the Philippines, and researchers say the birds' songs led them to the discovery. "More than 15 years ago, we realized that new subspecies of Ninox hawk-owls existed in the Philippines," zoologist Pam Rasmussen of Michigan State University said in a statement. "But it wasn't until last year that we obtained enough recordings that we could confirm that they were not just subspecies, but two new species of owls."

Now put this into perspective. For 6000 years discoveries of our earth have unfolded constantly, and man still isn't done finding out all there is to know about this planet upon which we live. Yet God created all the animals in one day. One day. He created the entire earth and all that is above it and all that is in it in 6 days. Don't you just love His creativity and power? I do!!!