Goods needed in the New Year.

We welcome the New Year and wish you all the best for 2024.

A little good goes a long way

Living in peace through restoration

In times of war, there exist the danger, people getting frustrated and angry, wanting to do the wrong things against others.

In wartime, the greatest need is for friends.
Here one should not forget Who is always ready to be the Greatest Friend and the Saviour in high need. In times of fear and suffering, the Elohim Hashem Jehovah, the Most High and Only True God, is there to guide us through those dark times. Best we give Him our hand and let Him lead us through this darkness to light full of hope.

Susan Reimer

With everything that’s going on in our world the idea of living in peace might seem impossible. But what is impossible for man is possible with God.

2 Corinthians 13:11 says: “Finally, brothers and sisters, rejoice! Strive for full restoration, encourage one another, be of one mind, live in peace. And the God of love and peace will be with you.”

Restoration. I don’t think I’ve noticed that particular word before. Restoration means bringing back to a former position or condition. Rebuilding, reconstructing, renewing or recovering. What would restoration look like in your life? Forgiving a betrayal so that a friendship can begin again? Studying every night for an hour instead of scrolling social media to raise your grades? Sitting down with a counsellor to discuss a hurt that is preventing you from moving forward?

Only you know the answer to that question but restoration is possible and the end…

View original post 26 more words

Needs Beyond the Sacred Page

 

vwoods1212

God – will provide our needs beyond what we can ask or think….

Philippians 3:19-20 (KJV) “But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus. Now unto God and our Father be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”

In this life we can go through many types of needs which at times we have no control over; things can come at us from the left field with no warning and although we are stable and upright, it takes time to adjust.

We have a support system in Christ Jesus and in spite of this, when the cares of life unfolds, it takes a firm hand to stand firm and understand that this also is just for a moment.

One surety we have in this life is that if God be for us, no one can be against us and it is…

View original post 51 more words

Someone needs …

”Someone not far from where you are,
needs your tender touch, your simple smile, your holy hug…today.”

 

 

‘A friend loves at all times…’ Proverbs 17:17

*

 

 

What We Want or Need?

Often we want things we not really need. Regularly we are caught in the trap of our wants, getting frustrated not finding what we hoped for.

Source of Inspiration

We know what we want
but only God knows what
we need.
Pray to give thanks
not to ask.
No ulterior motives.

Both armies pray
to win the war.
Take yourself
out of your prayers.
Seek only to learn to love,
to be in the presence
of God.

Our selfishness
is a trap.
Pray only for the
good of all
ending all prayer with
“Thy will be done.”

View original post

Happiness mapping and getting over gender mapping

For years people did believe that it was important to mark the differences between boys’ and girls’ because they would have different brains, and therefore the two should be taught differently, and possibly separately.

Developing back to such a trend may be dangerous, enabling again creating a trend, which can have damaging consequences – not only in classrooms, but at home and work.

Such claims may often be made on the basis of isolated brain imaging studies that have not been replicated, and in some cases have found to be wrong.

Studies have shown that the differences between the sexes are either non-existent or they are so small so as to be of no practical importance in, for example, an educational setting.
Dr Cordelia Fine presented also such an argument in 2013 at the Australian Council for Educational Research Conference in Melbourne on the brain and learning, where she said that males, for example, are often described as having a “spotlight brain” that processes information such as language in one hemisphere, while girls are supposed to have a “floodlight brain”, using both sides of the brain.

Fine says everyone is a mix of masculine and feminine qualities and there’s no fixed way in which the qualities line up.

“So being good at maths doesn’t make it more likely that you’ll be more aggressive, for example,” she says.

“That’s not to say that biological sex doesn’t make a difference in terms of the brain, brain development, or brain responsiveness, but it does undermine the idea of the male brain and the female brain.”

As part of this idea of a more interconnected female brain, females are supposed to have a larger corpus callosum, the thick band of neurones that connect the two hemispheres.

She says while older smaller studies support these differences, the bulk of more recent data has found otherwise.

+

Additional reading:

1. Equal?
2. Welfare state and Poverty in Flanders #3 Right to Human dignity
3. Poverty and conservative role patterns
4. Milestones for women ordered
5. Women their education and chances to become a parliamentary
6. Gender connections
7. A bird’s eye and reflecting from within
8. Father and motherhood
9. Father counterpart of the mother
10. Women, conservative evangelicals and their counter-offensive
11. Dignified role for the woman
12. Cosmina Craciunescu looks on Positivism
13. Let’s Talk Happiness
14. 30 things to start doing for yourself – #6 is vital.
15. Subcutaneous power for humanity 4 Not crossing borders of friendship
16. Thirst for happiness and meaning
17. We all have to have dreams
18. Happiness an inner state
19. The business of this life
20. The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands

+++

 

Related articles

• What’s stopping the spread of gender-neutral restrooms? (mydoorsign.com)
  Last year, Philadelphia introduced a pro-LGBT bill that was touted as “the next iteration of civil rights and freedom in the United States.” The bill aims to provide equal rights to the trans community and Mayor Michael Nutter hopes that with this new law, Philadelphia might become “the most LGBT-friendly” city in the world. As part of the new legislation, new or renovated city-owned buildings are required to include gender-neutral bathrooms in addition to traditional men and women’s restrooms.

  In a positive response to transgender students’ complaints of harassment or discrimination, more than 150 colleges and universities have created gender-neutral bathrooms on campus.

  Whether to construct each restroom separately on the basis of socially accepted genders, or to create one restroom that is open for all, is still under debate. Some universities have taken the middle ground, and have built another gender-neutral restroom apart from the already existing gender-segregated ones.

• Sexing the Brain Part 2: Function, Anatomy, and Structure (psychologytoday.com)
  My previous post, “Sexing the Brain (Early Days)” considered the early approach to consider sex differences in terms of perceptual asymmetries. That post ended on McGlone’s (1980) conclusion that men were more lateralized than women, supporting Levy’s (1971) hypothesis. This conclusion was as definite as it could get in 1980. However, McGlone could not quantify the sex differences.

  From this perspective, my contribution to this debate came in the form of a meta-analysis that quantified the magnitude of sex differences in perceptual asymmetries. In my 1996 meta-analysis (Voyer, 1996), I considered measures of perceptual asymmetries in the visual, auditory, and tactile modalities and provided some support for Levy’s hypothesis.

• Langton and Dupre try to unconfuse journalists about minds, brains, and gender (leiterreports.typepad.com)
  if the mind is the brain, any mental difference will be a brain difference. Suppose there are some actual mental differences between men and women, whatever their prior causes. (Hard to imagine training up half of humanity one way, half another, without creating some differences between them.) There will then be some neural differences. Suppose you have two televisions, whose images are different. You call in the technician, who trumpets the discovery that they differ in their pattern of pixels.
• Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (sciencebookaday.wordpress.com)
• Getting in a Tangle Over Men’s and Women’s Brain Wiring (wired.com)
  You may have heard there’s a new study that claims to have found that men’s and women’s brains are wired differently. Published in the respected journal PNAS, the researchers based at the University of Pennsylvania used a technique known as diffusion tensor imaging to plot the brain wiring maps of 949 people aged 8 to 22. Ragini Verma and her colleagues said their results showed “fundamentally different connectivity patterns in males and females.”

  Specifically, they reported that men’s brains had more connectivity within each brain hemisphere, whereas women’s brains had more connectivity across the two hemispheres. Moreover, they stated or implied, in their paper and in statements to the press, that these findings help explain behavioral differences between the sexes, such as that women are intuitive thinkers and good at multi-tasking whereas men are good at sports and map-reading.

• Brain Mapping Gender Identity: What Makes A Boy A Girl? (kiramoorescloset.wordpress.com)
  An article written by Susan Scutti and posted at the Medical Daily reports on a study published last year which explores the extent to which brain anatomy is associated with gender identity.
  +
  The degree to which one identifies as male or female has a profound impact on one’s life. Yet, there is a limited understanding of what contributes to this important characteristic termed gender identity. In order to reveal factors influencing gender identity, studies have focused on people who report strong feelings of being the opposite sex, such as male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals.
• So my mushy head is ‘hardwired’ for girly things, is it? If this is science, I am Richard Dawkins | Suzanne Moore (theguardian.com)
  

  Is female inferiority located in individual brains or in culture? Photograph: SMC Images/Getty Images

  If you cut my head in half, out would spill sugar and spice and all things nice, obviously. The part of the brain that does parking would be small, but the part that organises cupcakes and friendship would fizz like sparkling rose. Because I am a girl whose mushy head is “hardwired” for girly things.

  As ever, when I see the latest stuff on gender differences in the brain, I feel that I am barely female. Some parts of my brain have gone rogue. But before anyone gets out a soldering iron to rewire me, let’s um … think about it.

• Gender gap a scientific myth, says psychology expert (guardian.co.uk)
  “Avid readers of popular science books and articles about gender may well have formed the impression that science has shown that the path to a male or a female brain is set in utero, and that these differently structured brains create essentially different minds,” says Fine, whose book is published in the UK this week.

  “These cultural lores, which in popular hands can become nothing short of monstrous fiction, are standing in the way of greater sex equality – just as measures of skull volume, brain weight and neuron delicacy did in the past”.

• Gender and Sexual Diversity (dissidentvoice.org)
  The recent article by Robert Jensen, “Some Basic Propositions about Sex, Gender, and Patriarchy,” espouses concepts that both reflect and perpetuate cissexism and transphobia. Jensen correctly anticipates that readers will recognize much of his article as unabashedly transphobic. He reacts by preemptively dismissing any such observations as mere “tactics.” In the third to last paragraph he writes, “Labeling a radical feminist position on these public policy issues as inherently “transphobic” or describing radical feminist arguments on the issues as “hate speech” are diversionary tactics that undermine productive intellectual and political discussion. A critique of an idea is not a personal attack on any individual who holds the idea.”
• From the comments, more on LBGT as deserving of respect (marginalrevolution.com)
  If it turns out you are born “different” in these ways (I’m not even sure what are the right words to use to cover all the relevant cases), what is the chance that your social structure will be supportive?  Or will you feel tortured, mocked, and out of place?  Might you even face forced institutionalization, as McCloskey was threatened with?  Most likely things will not go so well for you, even in an America of 2014 which is far more tolerant overall than in times past, including on gay issues.  Current attitudes toward transsexuals and other related groups remain a great shame.  A simple question is how many teenagers have been miserable or even committed suicide or have had parts of their lives ruined because they were born different in these ways and did not find the right support structures early on or perhaps ever.  And if you are mocking individuals for their differences in this regard, as some of you did in the comments thread, I will agree with Barkley Rosser’s response: “Some of you people really need to rethink who you are.  Seriously.”

Marcus Ampe's Space

When we look at the different societies in this world we notice that everywhere people are looking for the same answers and trying to find the best of luck and happiness.

Happy girl 5 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We could have a look at those people around the world and see how much their ideas about happiness co-inside. We could use a scale from 1 to 10 to let them allow to give a rate for them feeling sad, happy, or somewhere in-between in their lives. Such scores could allow us to evaluate whether members were less or more happy as changes took place in their environment or surroundings.

An other way, certainly for places where people are not so literate or can not write, is to let them draw three faces – sad face, moderate face, and happy face. When present at the evaluation and the person is not…

View original post 2,044 more words

Welcome to Easter 2014

In Belgium and in many other countries we can see around us, in the shops and on social media that more and more attention is given to a time of celebration with gifts. Everything turns more around the material gift instead of the spiritual gift of blessings and of the Grace given to humankind.

*

In this writing:

1. Easter about big rabbit who invaded home and left candy everywhere
2. large meals (usually brunch) or fancy dinner
3. materialization of goods at Easter.
4. like Christmas, Easter =  becoming about how much money can be spend on children or grand children
5. Holiday’s = disguise Needs as gifts
6. when do we draw the line?
7. Easter has (like Christmas) lost it’s true meaning over the years
8. Generations trying to compensate for what they never had?
9. Trying to “be the parent you mother/father wasn’t”?
10. holiday become just another money grab.

+++

Related articles

• Easter Eggs, Bunny Rabbits and Easter Time Fun (roomtogrow.co.uk)
  With Easter fast approaching your little ones will be getting excited about the eggs that the Easter Bunny will no doubt bring them.  Easter is a fab festival with lots of craft and play activities that children enjoy.  Here are some great Easter activities that you can enjoy with the kids as they wait for the arrival of the Easter Bunny.
• Bunny Snake Is Ready for Easter (neatorama.com)
  DeviantART member NocturneJewel loves her pet snakes. She dresses them appropriately for different holidays, including Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day, and East
• Avoiding the Empty Calories of Chocolate Easter Eggs (connectevolvethrive.com)
  When I was a child, a neighbor who was a devout Christian came over to our house and sat distraught, talking to my mother. She had just returned from the grocery store and found it filled with chocolate bunnies and cream eggs for Easter. She said to my mother, “we, as Christians, have already lost Christmas to commercialism, if we lose Easter too, our religion is in serious trouble.”What my neighbor was decrying was the substitution of commercialism for content- of surface for substance. When advertisers come in to our lives and try and sell back to us our own experiences, they diminish them.
• All About Easter (cristina1395.wordpress.com)
  The Easter Bunny is another story. He wasn’t always the pink or white bunny that hides chocolate eggs in your house. Long ago, he was called the Easter Hare. Some say he was a large, handsome bird who changed himself into a rabbit, which explains why the Easter Bunny now builds a nest and fills it with colored eggs.
• 10 Kids Completely Freaked Out By the Easter Bunny (k99.com)

  Bunnies, in their normal form, are small, cute, bouncy and fluffy with cute little cotton ball tails. But, the Easter Bunny is no regular bunny. For children, the Easter Bunny is not only a source of chocolates and marshmallow Peeps, but also a source of terror. (Like you weren’t scared of a giant walking bunny dressed in human clothes when you were a wee one.) Here are 10 adorable videos featuring kids who are completely freaked out by the Easter Bunny.

  Read More: 10 Kids Completely Freaked Out By the Easter Bunny | http://k99.com/kids-scared-of-easter-bunny/?trackback=tsmclip

  Bunnies, in their normal form, are small, cute, bouncy and fluffy with cute little cotton ball tails. But, the Easter Bunny is no regular bunny. For children, the Easter Bunny is not only a source of chocolates and marshmallow Peeps, but also a source of terror. (Like you weren’t scared of a giant walking bunny dressed in human clothes when you were a wee one.) Here are 10 adorable videos featuring kids who are completely freaked out by the Easter Bunny.

  Read More: 10 Kids Completely Freaked Out By the Easter Bunny | http://k99.com/kids-scared-of-easter-bunny/?trackback=tsmclip

  Bunnies, in their normal form, are small, cute, bouncy and fluffy with cute little cotton ball tails. But, the Easter Bunny is no regular bunny. For children, the Easter Bunny is not only a source of chocolates and marshmallow Peeps, but also a source of terror. (Like you weren’t scared of a giant walking bunny dressed in human clothes when you were a wee one.) Here are 10 adorable videos featuring kids who are completely freaked out by the Easter Bunny.

  Read More: 10 Kids Completely Freaked Out By the Easter Bunny | http://k99.com/kids-scared-of-easter-bunny/?trackback=tsmclip

  For children, the Easter Bunny is not only a source of chocolates and marshmallow Peeps, but also a source of terror. (Like you weren’t scared of a giant walking bunny dressed in human clothes when you were a wee one.) Here are 10 adorable videos featuring kids who are completely freaked out by the Easter Bunny.

  Read More: 10 Kids Completely Freaked Out By the Easter Bunny | http://k99.com/kids-scared-of-easter-bunny/?trackback=tsmclip

• Would Jesus Like Easter Lilies? (thedivinenatureproject.com)
  Would Jesus like Easter lilies? Maybe. Maybe not. I mean, think about it–Easter lilies—those showy, scented, “look-at-me-flowers” are everything Jesus was not:
  +
  According to legend, lilies sprouted in the Garden of Gethsemane after Christ’s crucifixion—popping up from the sweat-soaked ground after his brutal bout of suffering.From this legend, the multi-million dollar Easter lily business is believed to have grown. And this week those stately flowers will adorn the altars of thousands of churches, representing hope and purity.
• Easter: An Awakening of Spirit (allthingsfulfilling.com)
  Easter gives us the spiritual power to do the work, accept the discipline, and make the sacrifice.
• Easter for the Dead (timmybrister.com)
  I’ve been thinking this week about the phenomena of Easter services as a cultural indicator or remnant of Christendom. Why do a rather large people attend an Easter service (and churches cater to these people) who otherwise have little to no interest in God? Certainly we want to seize the opportunity to preach the gospel to those in our communities who are open and accessible during this time (who otherwise would not have interest in God). But I can’t help but wonder if there is a serious disconnect or irony at play here.
  +
  Going back to the mass of people who will attend Easter services this Lord’s Day, are these realities motivating them to celebrate Easter? If so, then should not the good news mean more than a proverbial hat-tip to the greatest sacrifice by the greatest person who ever lived? Should not a true appraisal of Easter be that we find our death in His death, our live in His life, and our resurrection and in His resurrection? Certainly union with Christ and the presence of His indwelling Spirit would magnify the resurrection of Christ so that Easter is an every day reality, should it not?
• 5 Reasons you’ll want to be at BBC this Easter! (asocialshift.com)
  All families are invited to join us for BBC’s 3rd annual Easter Eggstravaganza! This is a free gift to the community for all boys and girls from babies through 5th grade. Free egg hunts, bounce houses, face painting, snacks and fun Easter photos! We’ll also have a special egg hunt for our children with special needs!
• Are You Amazed By His Love? (beyondbeautyblog.wordpress.com)
  Our Lord’s birth is the reason for the fun-filled, wildly decorative, frenzied gift exchange of  Christmas.

  But Easter…oh, Easter!  It is the celebration of God’s greatest gift to us.  By His death and resurrection, those who believe in Him will receive the gift of eternal life.

 

ColleenKnapp92

Easter^{[nb 1]} (Old English Ēostre; Latin: Pascha; Greek Πάσχα Paskha, the latter two derived from Hebrew: פֶּסַח‎ Pesaḥ^[4]) is aChristian festival and holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ on the third day after his crucifixion at Calvary as described in the New Testament.^[5][6] Easter is the culmination of the Passion of Christ, preceded by Lent, a forty-day period of fasting, prayer, and penance. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter )

Now, I’m not of religious views, so when I was a child Easter was about a big rabbit who invaded your home and left candy everywhere. Then the family would gather around for large meals (usually brunch) or a fancy dinner and just enjoy what the Easter Bunny brought us. Talk, and have family time. But I’ve noticed something that disturbs me…

View original post 191 more words