Forever Friends – Anthology Tour

Thank you for reading this blog entry! This is the fourteenth post on the blog tour. If you are new to the tour, welcome! If you read the first blog entry and stayed around for the last two weeks, thank you for following the tour! A great deal has happened during the last fortnight. The price for Forever Friends finally showed up on amazon.com at an amazing $9.99! I received the first review from Apex Reviews. The book is about to be featured on Internet Book Database with a chance to win a signed copy and the £9.99 price tag on amazon.co.uk has been removed! I wonder what next week will bring?

On Lynn Johnston’s blog, I talked about the poems in the anthology and today I would like to say a little about the short stories in Forever Friends. When I set the submission guidelines for the anthology, I asked contributors to submit works of fiction between two thousand and four thousand words. From the submissions, it soon became apparent that I would have to make the guidelines less rigid and allow contributors to submit non-fiction stories as well as fiction and reduce the length to less than two thousand words and greater than four thousand. With the new guidelines in place, the final tally of contributors was forty-seven, just three short of the fifty target. This worked out well and added a greater variety of stories in both depth and length.

The Great Watermelon Heist by Donald James Parker, a fictional short story of two thousand nine hundred and eighty-eighty words, was exactly the type and length of story I had in mind. The story’s reminiscences of long summers from childhood will bring back fond memories to everyone of any age. There is something about the way we all remember the days of our youth that Don captures so well. This is a well-crafted, enjoyable story about a gang of boys with time on their hands to do mischief, and how the tables are turned on the gang leader who thinks he’s a smart guy. This story is one of the gems of the anthology.

I would like to thank Don for inviting me to his blog to talk about Forever Friends and I wish him success with his new publishing company, Sword of the Spirit Publishing.

Buy the book and read Don’s story along with all the other entertaining stories!

Thanks again for reading this and best wishes for the holiday season!

Shelagh Watkins

Please follow the tour to learn more about the book.

Blog Tour

December 1 Chelle Cordero
December 2 Zada Connaway
December 3 Mary Muhammad
December 4 Helen Wisocki
December 5 Pam Robertson
December 6 Dick Stodghill
December 7 Philip Spires
December 8 Milena Gomez
December 9 L. Sue Durkin
December 10 A. Ahad
December 11 Malcolm R. Campbell
December 12 Lynn C. Johnston
December 13 Dianne Sagan
December 14 Donald James Parker
December 15 Karina Kantas
December 16 Grace Bridges
December 17 Tiziana Rinaldi Castro
December 18 Yvonne Oots
December 19 Dana Rettig

Mixing Evolution and Christianity

I just watched a YouTube presentation entitled The Collapse of Intelligent Design featuring Dr. Kenneth Miller, a Brown University biology professor and researcher, addressing a university crowd. I was intrigued by that title since I was under the impression that ID is just gaining momentum. The talk started off with a prayer beseeching our Heavenly Father to help in finding the truth. I find that ironic when the talk was designed to help people understand that God didn’t design or create the world. Miller, a professed Catholic, stated he was praying right along with that benediction, which did not end with “In the Name of Jesus” (surprise, surprise). How Miller can be fighting so hard against the rights of people to bring up Intelligent Design as an option for the origin of our world and the teeming life within it baffles me.

Miller starts out talking about Answers in Genesis and showing a drawing that depicts two warships at battle with the word “Satan” underneath the one entitled Evolution. He gets lots of laughs from the crowd making fun of the AIG mentality. I am well familiar with that drawing. However, last time I checked, AIG was not an agency espousing Intelligent Design. They totally emphasize 6 day creationism. How the ID movement featuring a total focus on scientific arguments and a total exclusion of specific mention of religion from the agenda is confused with the Creationism movement is a real fascinating area of study. Talk about your red herrings. I’ve come to the conclusion that evolution proponents have so turned off their minds to anything that detracts from Darwinistic philosophy that they don’t even hear the arguments being laid out by ID proponents. That is really frustrating because we argue against someone who isn’t listening and have to listen to claims of how they’ve debunked intelligent design when they don’t even know what it is they’re trying to debunk. I object on the grounds that the answers and questions are irrelevant and immaterial. No doubt the Judge will overrule my objection (they have in just about every venue where this topic has come up). Even more painful is hearing evolutionists talking about proofs of evolution using examples that don’t even fit into the Darwin hypothesis of slow undirected changes.

Miller is a good speaker, charismatic, humorous, and glib. However, those qualities don’t alter the amount of truth in the content. The best liars on earth have been very convincing. Let’s just look at the Satan aspect. Miller ridiculed the idea that the theory of evolution has been a plot of Satan and has caused several social problems. Let’s look at this analytically. If Satan does exist (Miller believes in Jesus Christ as the son of God according to his own claims so surely he must believe in the devil that Jesus mentions on numerous occasions) what would his modus operandi be? What is his original title? Let’s see – something about the great deceiver, right? How do deceitful people work? They use partial truths, act charmingly, elicit laughter, and distort reality. Satan wrote the book on the topic. If Satan is at war with God, wouldn’t the foundation of his game plan be to get people to deny that God (and even the devil himself), does not exist? That only sounds logical to me, but maybe we’re not allowed to use logic in this discussion since after all it is just a product of evolution.

One of the tactics used to stir up people against intelligent design is mentioning the “war against science.” Helllooooo. Intelligent Design (and not even creationism) is at war against “science”. Most of the people on the front lines are scientists. They’re at war with a false religion called Darwinism masquerading as science. The battle is not with the scientific method but rather with the Darwinian theory which somehow obtains exalted status in the world of science despite the fact that the scientific method cannot be deployed to test any of the speculations that arise. Until this is understood, evolutionist scientists are going to be totally involved in defending their turf and refuse to listen to any scientific rebuttal of Mr. Darwin.

I’ve had communication with Dr. Miller in the past. He laughs about those who tell him his eternal destiny will be hotter than the Mojave Desert in summer. I didn’t say that in my letters to him, but I did suggest that if Darwin’s work has been a tool of the devil that Miller was just a pawn in Satan’s army and finding that out on judgment day will be a bit of rude (and perhaps unpleasant) shock. If you truly love God, how would you feel to find out you have been giving support to his enemy?

Let me end with a little analogy from science. There is a certain parasitic worm called a brainworm which reproduces inside of sheep. The method they use to enter a sheep is very interesting. The worms gain entrance to the abdomen of an ant by being swallowed. After several of them are cozily snuggled away, one of the worms crawls to the brain of the ant and somehow gains control of the ant’s free will, causing it to climb to the top of a grass blade and just sit there until a sheep comes along and eats the grass, thus giving the worm entrance to the sheep. What goes through the ant’s mind as it gets controlled like a puppet on a string to perform an act that leads to its own destruction? Does it mock those ants below who cry out to him that he is being deceived and that unless he returns to the ground, he will perish? I haven’t mastered the art of intercepting ant communications yet so I can only venture a guess on the topic. However I think the same type of brain altering scheme allows a brilliant scientist like Kenneth Miller to fight to deny people the right to discuss intelligent design in school or even put labels on books labeling them as containing material that needs to be considered carefully while at the same time believing in God.

If God didn’t design life, then in what way is he God? Why would he need to send his son Jesus to earth to die a cruel death and suffer the mocking of inferior mortals to save something that he didn’t design? I don’t know if God created the world in six literal days, and I don’t get hung up on that detail. I do know it didn’t create itself using natural laws which themselves would have to be created, and life didn’t come along by itself. If God had any hand in how we arrived at where we are, that means it is designed. He has placed his signature in multiple places on this portrait known as the universe. How Miller can profess God and deny Intelligent Design is absolutely contradicting.

A man named Richard Bozarth once said, ‘Atheism is science’s natural ally. Atheism is the philosophy, both moral and ethical, most perfectly suited for a scientific civilization. If we work for the American Atheists today, atheism will be ready to fill the void of Christianity’s demise when science and evolution triumph. Without a doubt humans and civilization are in sore need of the intellectual cleanness and mental health of atheism. Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science to the desperate end over evolution because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of God. Take away the meaning of his death. If Jesus wasn’t the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing!’

Somehow Mr. Miller and other theistic evolutionists are convinced they are doing God and mankind a favor by being missionaries against creationism and Intelligent Design. I can only take a swag at the level of gratefulness that the Lord will express in the afterlife. Call me crazy, but maybe Mr. Miller would be less popular with the world and more endeared to God if he stood up to the Bozarths and Richard Dawkins of the world and spoke out for his faith in God and not his faith in Charles Darwin.