When I read this, I scratched my head:

I think I've now seen everything.  And yes, I'll be downloading it tonight.  Do you want it too?  It can be found here.

Important note:  The image below is not a subsitute for a belief in God.. it's just a trick!

Make sure you stare at the four dots in the image for 30 seconds straight, then lean back and shut you eyes.  Keep them shut!  Now look for the circle of light.. do you see it?

After seeing this video at Passion 2006 and with Lyndsey inviting them to our local college campus to show the video, I've got a soft spot in my heart for these kids in Uganda.

The story is one that we in America continue to ignore, because it's on the other side of the world.  It doesn't affect our daily lives and we are happy and content here sheltered from the truths of some parts of our world.

“It’s a moral outrage to see thousands of children that have been
abducted, that have been maltreated. They are going through the most
horrendous torture by the rebel movement and that same group is now
being neglected by the whole international community,” said Jan
Egeland, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian
Affairs. “I cannot find any other part of the world having an emergency
on the scale of Uganda with so little international attention.”

Watch the trailer for the movie by Clicking Here.

Now… do whatever it takes to watch the full movie or the one that is slated for box office release soon.  Purchase the DVD, a bracelet, or something else from the Invisible Children Web Site.  Do something, don't sit idle any more. 

If you have no other options, the full movie is available by Clicking Here.  (Keep in mind that the quality and aspect ratio isn't perfect, so a better option is to buy the DVD)

Tagged: Invisible Children

Pretty funny right?  Click Here to read the whole news article.

Tagged: Da Vinci Code, Smith Code, Da Vinci

serious

He will quote the bible (with ridiculously literal interpretations) to back it all up and in no way am I poking fun at Christianity by posting this article, I simply find his conclusions hilariously interesting.

 So remember, I do not condone nor endorse the viewpoints expressed below.  You can make your own judgements in life, but I highly reccommend taking the stuff Mr. Johnson believes with a grain of salt:

————————————————————————————

[Copyright 1980 Robert J. Schadewald Reprinted
from Science Digest, July 1980]

The Flat-out Truth: Earth Orbits? Moon Landings?
“The
idea of a spinning globe is only a conspiracy of error that Moses, Columbus, and
FDR all fought…”

“The facts are simple,” says Charles K. Johnson, president of
the International Flat Earth Research Society. “The earth is flat.”

As you stand in his front yard, it is hard to argue the point.
From among the Joshua trees, creosote bushes, and tumbleweeds surrounding his
southern California hillside home, you have a spectacular view of the Mojave
Desert. It looks as flat as a pool table. Nearly 20 miles to the west lies the
small city of Lancaster; you can see right over it. Beyond Lancaster, 20 more
miles as the cueball rolls, the Tehachepi Mountains rise up from the desert
floor. Los Angeles is not far to the south.

Near Lancaster, you see the Rockwell International plant where
the Space Shuttle was built. To the north, beyond the next hill, lies Edwards
Air Force Base, where the Shuttle was tested. There, also, the Shuttle will land
when it returns from orbiting the earth. (At least, that's NASA's story.)

“You can't orbit a flat earth,” says Mr. Johnson. “The Space Shuttle
is a joke–and a very ludicrous joke.”

His soft voice carries conviction, for Charles Johnson is on the
level. He believes that the main purpose of the space program is to prop up a
dying myth–the myth that the earth is a globe.

“Nobody knows anything about the true shape of the world,” he
contends. “The known, inhabited world is flat. Just as a guess, I'd say that the
dome of heaven is about 4,000 miles away, and the stars are about as far as San
Francisco is from Boston.”

As shown in a map published by Johnson, the known world is as
circular and as flat as a phonograph record. The North Pole is at the center. At
the outer edge lies the southern ice, reputed to be a wall 150 feet high; no one
has ever crossed it, and therefore what lies beyond is unknown.

The sun and moon, in the Johnson version, are only about 32
miles in diameter. They circle above the earth in the vicinity of the equator,
and their apparent rising and setting are tricks of perspective, like railroad
tracks that appear to meet in the distance. The moon shines by its own light and
is not eclipsed by the earth. Rather, lunar eclipses are caused by an
unseen dark body occasionally passing in front of the moon.

Johnson's beliefs are firmly grounded in the Bible. Many verses
of the Old Testament imply that the earth is flat, but there's more to it than
that. According to the New Testament, Jesus ascended up into
heaven.

“The whole point of the Copernican theory is to get rid of Jesus
by saying there is no up and no down,” declares Johnson. “The spinning ball
thing just makes the whole Bible a big joke.”

Not the Bible but Johnson's own common sense allowed him to see
through the globe myth while he was still in grade school. He contends that
sensible people all over the world, not just Bible believers, realize that the
earth really is flat.

“Wherever you find people with a great reservoir of common
sense,” he says, “they don't believe idiotic things such as the earth spinning
around the sun. Reasonable, intelligent people have always recognized that the
earth is flat.”

He pauses for a sip of coffee, his eyes sparkling with
animation. At 56, Charles Johnson is a bearded, distinguished-looking man who
drinks coffee seemingly by the gallon. He chain-smokes, hand-rolling cigarettes
so skillfully that they seem factory made. Unlike the stereotypical prophet, he
has a wry sense of humor and a booming laugh. Fond of plays on words, he
consistently pronounces Nicolaus Koppernigk's Latinized surname as
“co-pernicious.”

The Flat Earth Society's presidency descended upon Charles
Johnson in accord with the last wishes of its founder, Samuel Shenton, an
Englishman who died in 1971. The society, which will round out a quarter-century
next year, is a spiritual inheritor of the Universal Zetetic Society, which
flourished in England in the last century.

Under Johnson's full-time presidency, the society's paid-up
membership has grown from a few persons to a few hundred. Membership is open to
anyone who is regarded as sincerely seeking the truth; prospective members must
sign a statement agreeing never to defame the society. Part of the $10 annual
dues pays for a subscription to the Flat Earth News, a marvelously
outspoken four-page tabloid quarterly with an editorial style reminiscent of
19th-century rural journalism.

Johnson's office is barely controlled chaos. Books, papers, and
files are everywhere; his desk is covered with correspondence. The flow of
letters, still increasing, now runs around 2,000 a year, or a half-dozen every
day. Some are properly addressed (Box 2533, Lancaster, CA 93534), but he
receives any mail that reaches Lancaster with “flat-earth” on it. And such
letters sometimes come from the far edges of the world (an expression which
Johnson and his membership accept quite literally). Rummaging in a box on the
floor, Johnson produces inquiries from Saudi Arabia, Iran, India.

“Everybody who writes gets an answer,” he reports. “An
application or whatever is called for. We serve our purpose in keeping it alive.
Whosoever asks, receives.” The “we” includes his wife, Marjory, who is a native
of Australia. The Johnsons met by chance in 1959, when they both went into a San
Francisco store to buy the same record, Acker Bilk's haunting “Stranger on the
Shore.” They discovered that they had more in common than their tastes in music.
They're both vegetarians, for one thing, but the overriding interest is
geography

“Marjory has always known that the earth is flat, too,” says
Charles Johnson. “As far as she knew, everybody in Australia knew it. She was
rather shocked when she arrived here and found people speaking of Australia as
being 'down under.' It really offended her. She would get in quite heated
arguments with people who seemed to accuse her of coming from down under the
world.” Ultimately, Marjory Johnson swore in an affidavit that she had never
hung by her feet in Australia.

As secretary of the Flat Earth Society, she assists in running
it, and writes a regular column in the News. She has also helped her
husband perform experiments to determine the earth's shape. If it is a sphere,
the surface of a large body of water must be curved. The Johnsons have checked
the surfaces of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea (a shallow salt lake in southern
California near the Mexican border) without detecting any curvature.

Their home is a half-mile from the nearest neighbor. Friends
drop by now and then, but their primary companions are a half-dozen dogs,
several cats, a flock of chickens, and a myriad of sparrows roosting in a Joshua
tree just outside the door. No electric-power line runs to the house, for which
water must be carried up the hill. The physical isolation is the ultimate in
privacy–but another kind of isolation proves to be less desirable.

“We're two witnesses against the whole world,” observes Charles
Johnson. “We've chosen that path, but it isolates us from everyone. We're not
complaining; it has to be. But it does kind of get to you sometimes.”

In spite of the loneliness and the frustrations, they press on.
Charles Johnson claims that most of the people who shaped our modern world were
flat-earthers, and some of them didn't have it easy, either.

You weren't aware that flat-earthers have played an
important part in history? Well, conventional histories don't make that
clear. But inasmuch as revisionist history is in vogue, Charles Johnson should
be recognized as one of the leading practitioners.

“Moses was a flat-earther,” he reveals. “The Flat Earth Society
was founded in 1492 B.C., when Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt and
gave them the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai.”

Conventional biblical chronology dates the Ten Commandments to
1491 B.C., but it may be imprecise. Perhaps Johnson prefers 1492 for the
symmetry. It was, after all, in 1492 A.D. that another famous flat-earther made
history.

Have you heard the story about Columbus's problems with his
crew? As some tell it, the crew nearly mutinied because they regarded the earth
as flat, and feared they might sail off its edge.

“It was exactly the reverse,” explains Johnson. “There was a
dispute out on the ship, but it was because Columbus was a flat-earther. The
others believed the earth to be a ball, and they just knew that they were
falling over the edge and couldn't get back. Columbus had to put them in irons
and beat them until he convinced them they weren't going over any curve, and
they could return. He finally calmed them down.”

Johnson believes that the ball business–though it goes back to
the Greek philosophers–really got rolling after the Protestant
Reformation.

“It's the Church of England that's taught that the world is a
ball,” he argues. “George Washington, on the other hand, was a flat-earther. He
broke with England to get away from those superstitions.” If Johnson is right,
the American Revolution failed. No prominent American politician is known to
have publicly endorsed the flat-earth theory in the past two centuries.
Nevertheless, Johnson contends that this nearly happened right after World War
II, not for the U.S. alone, but for the entire world. Consider the United
Nations:

“Uncle Joe (Stalin), Churchill, and Roosevelt laid the master
plan to bring in the New Age under the United Nations,” Johnson discloses with
confidence. “The world ruling power was to be right here in this country. After
the war, the world would be declared flat and Roosevelt would be elected first
president of the world. When the UN Charter was drafted in San Francisco, they
took the flat-earth map as their symbol.”

Why declare the world flat? Johnson responds that a prophesied
condition for world government (Isaiah 60:20) is that the “sun shall no more go
down.” This could be fulfilled by admitting that sunrise and sunset are optical
illusions. The UN did adopt for its official seal a world map identical with the
one on Johnson's office wall. But Franklin Roosevelt died coincident with the
UN's birth, and the other imminent events described by Johnson never came
about.

What did happen, according to conventional historians, was that
Russia and the U.S. began space programs. After the Russians sent up Sputnik in
1957, the space race was on in earnest. The high point came in 1969, when the
U.S. landed men on the moon.

That, according to Johnson, is nonsense, because the moon
landings were faked by Hollywood studios. He even names the man who wrote the
scripts: the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. But he acknowledges that
the moon landings were at least partly successful.

“Until then,” he says, “almost no one seriously considered the
world a ball. The landings converted a few of them, but many are coming back now
and getting off of it.”

Perhaps the Space Shuttle is intended to bolster the beliefs of
these backsliders. Whatever its purpose, Johnson is convinced that it is not
intended to actually fly. Because it was built and tested almost in his back
yard, he knows many people who worked on it. What they've told him about some
aspects of its construction only reinforces his convictions.

“They moved it across the field,” he sneers, “and it almost fell
apart. All those little side pieces are on with epoxy, and half fell
off!”

The Shuttle had other problems besides heat resistant tiles that
wouldn't stick. For instance, when the testers tried to mount it on a 747 for
its first piggy-back test flight, it wouldn't fit.

“Can you imagine that?” chortles Johnson. “Millions of dollars
they spent, and it wouldn't fit! They had to call in a handyman to drill some
new holes to make the thing fit. Then they took it up in the air–and some more
of it fell to pieces.”

If the Shuttle ever does orbit on its own, it's supposed to
return to Edwards Air Force Base. To Johnson, that's appropriate enough.

“Do you know what they're doing at Edwards right now?” he asks.
“'Buck Rogers in the 25th Century' is made right where they claim they're going
to land the Shuttle. Edwards is strictly a science-fiction base now.

“Buck is a much better science program, considerably more
authentic. In fact, I recommend that the government get out of the space
business and turn the whole thing over to ABC, CBS, and NBC. The tv networks do
a far superior job. They could actually pay the government for rights, and it
wouldn't cost the taxpayers a penny.”

Flat Earth Society members are working actively to bring the
Shuttle charade to an end. They hope to force the government to let the public
in on what the power elite has known all along: the plane truth.

“When the United States declares the earth is flat,” says
Charles Johnson, “and we hope to be instrumental in making it do so, it will be
the first nation in all recorded history to be known as a flat-earth
nation.

“In the old days, people believed the earth was flat, because
it's logical, but they didn't have a picture of the way it was, as we have
today. Our concept of the world is new.

“Marjory and I are the avant garde. We're way ahead of
the pack.”

– The end –

Postscript: Much has changed since I wrote this
article, both in the world at large and in Charles Johnson's life. In late
September 1995, the Johnsons' venerable high-desert home caught fire. Charles
managed to pull Marjory, by then a semi-invalid on supplemental oxygen, to
safety, but everything else in the house was destroyed–their personal
possessions, the Flat Earth Society library and archives, the membership list,
everything. Having no fire insurance, the Johnsons were unable to rebuild. A
dilapidated old house trailer, bought as a storage shed, survived the fire, and
they took refuge there. A few months later, Marjory fell and broke a hip. She
survived hip replacement surgery but never recovered her strength. On May 16,
1996, she died.

The Flat Earth Society lives on, still doing business at Box
2533, Lancaster, CA 93534. Charles Johnson has immersed himself in rebuilding
the membership roster. Publication of the Flat Earth News, in hiatus
since 1994, will resume with the December 1996 issue.

————————————————————————————

Tagged: flat earth society