Two African American Christian men

"Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good--except God alone. Mark 10:18

kingdom of heaven is within

Luke 17:20-21

New King James Version (NKJV)

The Coming of the Kingdom

²⁰ Now when He was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; ²¹ nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’^[a] For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.”

Ignorant righteousness is often the prey of knowledgeable evil. "Study to show thyself approved before God, a righteous person who need not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth!"

The least of these

President Barack Obama would be better served in his new term by working with and for the "least of these," which includes the great bulk of our, long-forgotten, African American people!

African American Christian

President Barack Obama is, archetypically, today's nonesuch, paragon, nonpareil. But, tomorrow there will be others, many others, who, like him, also are transformed African American Christians, thoroughly steeped in the history, lore and legacy of each, while exemplifying the same, by love, in Jesus' mighty name!

Siamese Crocodiles

FUNTUNFUNEFU-
DENKYEMFUNEFU

"Siamese crocodiles"

symbol of democracy and unity

The Siamese crocodiles share one stomach, yet they fight over food. This popular symbol is a reminder that infighting and tribalism is harmful to all who engage in it.

ORIGINS: FOURTEEN BILLION YEARS OF COSMIC EVOLUTION, by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith

“In 1979, Alan Guth,a physicist working at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California, hypothesized that during its earliest moments, the cosmos expanded at an incredibly rapid rate—so rapidly that different bits of matter accelerated away from one another, reaching speeds far greater than the speed of light. But doesn't Einstein's theory of special relativity make the speed of light a universal speed limit for all motion? Not exactly, Einstein's limit applies only to objects moving within space and not the expansion of space itself. During the “inflationary epoch,” which lasted only about 10^-37 second to 10^-34 second after the big bang, the cosmos expanded by a factor of about 10⁵⁰.

“What produced this enormous cosmic expansion? Guth speculated that all of space must have undergone a “phase transition,” something analogous to what happens when liquid water quickly freezes into ice. After some crucial tweaking by his colleagues in the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Guth's idea became so attractive that it has dominated theoretical models of the extremely early universe for two decades.

“And what makes inflation such an attractive theory? The inflationary era explains why the universe, in its overall properties,looks the same in all directions: everything that we can see (and a good deal more than that) inflated from a single tiny region of space, converting its local properties into universal ones. Other advantages, which need not detain us here, accrue to the theory, at least among those who create model universes in their minds. One additional feature deserves emphasis, however. The inflationary model makes a straightforward, testable prediction: space in the universe should be flat, neither positively, nor negatively curved, but just as flat as our intuition imagines it.

“According to this theory, the flatness of space arises from the enormous explosion that occurred during the inflationary epoch. Picture yourself, in analogy, on the surface of a balloon, and let the balloon expand by a factor so large you lose track of the zeroes. After this expansion,the part of the balloon's surface that you can see will be flat as a pancake. So too should be all the space that we can ever hope to measure—if the inflationary model actually describes the real universe.

“But the total density of matter amounts to only about one quarter of the amount required to make space flat. During the 1980's and 1990's, many theoretically minded cosmologists believed that because the inflationary model must be valid, new data would eventually close the cosmic “mass gap,” the difference between the total density of matter, which pointed toward a negatively curved universe, and the critical density, seemingly required to achieve a cosmos with flat space. Their beliefs carried them buoyantly onward, even as the observationally oriented cosmologists mocked their overreliance on theoretical analysis. And then the mocking stopped.”

(italics added)

ORIGINS: FOURTEEN BILLION YEARS OF COSMIC EVOLUTION, by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith,pp.84-85 (W.W. Norton & Co., NY, London:2004)