Why Peter, Paul, and Mary are still relevant today

The history of El Salvador is long and complicated, and dates back to pre-Columbian times, when the population existed on the eastern edges of the Mayan Empire. The first Europeans landed in the country in 1522, and the country remained under Spanish control until 1821, when it received independence from Spain.

Life in El Salvador in the 20th Century was marked by a series of coups and much political instability. A few years prior to the start of the (highly illegal) Iran-Contra scandal, the United States decided to get involved in the politics of El Salvador, and threw its support to one of the military juntas vying for power. Notes from the Wikipedia article about El Salvador under “the October 1979 coup d’etat” provide more details, but the reality is that our “assistance” led to the start of the Salvadoran Civil War, which lasted from 1980 to 1992.

The human rights violations that we caused during that civil war stirred outrage in a singing trio that we’re all familiar with, and they released a song titled “El Salvador” in 1982. It turned out to be one of the most controversial songs that they had ever recorded, and caused them to be booed at some of their concerts in the mid to late 1980’s. Group member Mary Travers traveled to El Salvador in 1983, and was appalled at “the terrorism, rapes, and murders” that our country was paying for.

The song itself is a nice tune, and can be heard by clicking on the link below:

El Salvador song

If you're comfortable with working with multiple Windows at the same time, and would like to follow along with the song, the lyrics are posted below:

There's a sunny little country south of Mexico

Where the winds are gentle and the waters flow

But breezes aren't the only things that blow

in El Salvador



If you took the little lady for a moonlight drive

Odds are still good you'd come back alive

But everyone is innocent until they arrive

in El Salvador



If the rebels take a bus on the grand highway

The government destroys a village miles away

The man on the radio says 'now we'll play South of the Border'

And in the morning the natives say,

We're happy you have lived another day

Last night a thousand more passed away

in El Salvador



There's a television crew here from ABC

Filming Rio Lempa and the refugees

Calling murdered children the 'tragedy'

of El Salvador



Before the government cameras 20 feet away

Another man is asking for continued aid

Food and medicine and hand grenades

for El Salvador



There's a thump, a rumble, and the buildings sway

A soldier fires the acid spray

The public address system starts to play South of the Border

You run for cover and hide your eyes

You hear the screams from paradise

They've fallen further than you realize

in El Salvador



Just like Poland is 'protected' by her Russian friends

The junta is 'assisted' by Americans

And if 60 million dollars seems too much to spend

in El Salvador



They say for half a billion they could do it right

Bomb all day, burn all night

Until there's not a living thing upright

in El Salvador



They'll continue training troops in the USA

And watch the nuns that got away

And teach the military bands to play South of the Border

And kill the people to set them free

Who put this price on their liberty?

Don't you think it's time to leave El Salvador?



Since the civil war in El Salvador ended more than 20 years ago, most of us have forgotten all about our neighbor in Central America, but recent events have brought the country very much back in focus in recent months, and have reignited yet another “culture war” between the liberals and the conservatives in our country. In the past 8 months, 47,000 unaccompanied migrant children have crossed into the United States, and the vast majority of them have come from the Central American countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Their arrival has swamped immigration centers in Texas, which has caused a fairly large number of them to be diverted to Arizona.

Their reasons for coming here are clear, since all three countries are plagued with gang and drug violence. Honduras now has the highest murder rate in the entire world, at 90.4 homicides per 100,000 or population. El Salvador is #4, at 41.2 per 100,000, and Guatemala is #5, with 39.9 murders per 100,000.

What's less clear is the fact that the massive influx of refuges is, in large part, OUR FAULT. The Inter-American Convention against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and Other Related Materials was ratified by 31 of the 34 nations in the Organization of American States in 1997. Although Canada, Jamaica, and the United States signed the treaty, none of them have ratified the treaty as of today's date. President Obama has asked the Senate, once again, to ratify the treaty, but no action has been taken as of yet. Since 70% of the weapons seized by Mexican authorities were made in America, and a similar percentage of the weapons in Central America come from the same source, it's fairly obvious that our ratification of the treaty would have resulted in lower crime rates in the three countries involved, which would result in far fewer refugees being forced to flee their home country.

The United States has maintained an aggressive deportation program since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, and we deported 409, 849 in 2012. Although 59% of the undocumented migrants are from Mexico, the Pew Hispanic center announced in April of 2012 that net migration from Mexico to the United States is now actually negative. From 2005 to 2010, 1.4 million Mexicans immigrated to the United States. In the same time period, slightly MORE than that number went the other day, due to REDUCED job opportunities in the United States, and INCREASED opportunities in Mexico.

The ultra conservative faction of our society (the group that keeps trying to impeach Barack Obama for a variety of imagined offenses) feels that the flood of children from Central America to the United States is “an invasion”.

In full recognition of the fact that simply sending the children back to their country of origin would likely be a death sentence, the Border Patrol is providing basic shelter to the children until they can be sent to juvenile detention centers around the country. Once there, efforts are made to release them to relatives in the United States, on the condition that they cooperate with deportation proceedings.

Due to the fact that the flood of children from Central America is a REGIONAL problem, and not just a United States problem, President Obama spoke with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on Thursday of this week, and Vice President Joe Biden met with Central American leaders in Guatemala on Friday to discuss ways to handle the situation. On Tuesday of this week, Congress increased funding so that the Department of Health and Human Services would be able to provide temporary food and shelter for the estimated 130,000 minors that are expected to arrive here in the next year.

As always, the issue of how to deal with illegal immigrants to our country is a thorny issue, one we’ve been plagued with for a long time. For now, immigration reform of any kind is unlikely until after the mid-term elections, but COULD happen during the last two years of Obama’s Presidency IF the right combination of people get elected in November. In the interim, Paul Stookey traveled to Dallas just last week to address that very issue.

For many years, Peter, Paul, and Mary were concerned with social issues, and essentially became a milder version of the protest songs of Pete Seeger. Although Mary Travers passed away in 2009, both Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow (both 76 years old) continue to perform today. Neither of them could possibly have imagined that the humanitarian crisis that they sang about in 1982 would still exist today. The closing line of their song was “don’t you think it’s time we leave El Salvador?“. Ultimately, we did, but now we have a new problem.

El Salvador has come to us.

Love on the rocks

New Mexico calls itself “the Land of Enchantment”, but it’s clear that my new home state of Arizona also has plenty of magic, and it’s not limited to the Grand Canyon, which is the 2nd most visited National Park in America (the Great Smoky Mountains are #1)

The first time that I saw Sedona, the sight of all those magnificent red rocks literally took my breath away. Since that first visit in 1998, we’ve been back to Sedona numerous times, due to the fact that the town has PLENTY of things to do and LOTS of gorgeous sights to see.

My favorite place in Sedona, though, is a local church that I’ve been to more times than I can count. Officially, it’s called the Chapel of the Holy Cross, and it’s owned by the Diocese of Phoenix. A local Catholic parish, St. John Vianney, maintains the property.

The chapel was commissioned by local rancher and sculptor Marguerite Brunswig Staude, who had been inspired in 1932 by the newly constructed Empire State Building to build a church that incorporated a cross in its design. After an attempt to do so in Europe (with the help of the noted architect Frank Lloyd Wright), was aborted due to the outbreak of World War II, she decided to build the church in her native region.

It literally took an act of Congress (thanks to the late Senator Barry Goldwater) to get a special use permit to build the chapel on land of the Coconino National Forest. The chapel first opened its doors in 1956, and won an Award of Honor from the American Institute of Architects the following year. It has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the Department of the Interior, and is landmark #19 of the City of Sedona.

The chapel gets thousands of visitors each month. If you page through the guest book just inside the front door, you’ll notice that visitors come here from all over the world, and it’s not unusual to see visitors from China mixed in with visitors from virtually every state in America. On our most recent visit, on June 7, we met 2 couples from Canada, but we also learned something about the chapel that I previously had been unaware of, and it’s related to love.

Marguerite Staude had the chapel build as a memorial to her parents, who were devout Catholics. As a result, it makes it one of the most dramatic show of love of parents that you’ll see anywhere.

Rather than limit the beauty of the place just to Catholics, Marguerite Staude declared that no services could be held at the chapel. It was, and is, still a place for people of all faiths to pray and reflect and find God through the beauty of art. Marguerite created a Madonna sculpture for the Chapel, and she created the Stations of the Cross of rough antique nails, Another stone carved sculpture, of the head of Jesus, sits to the rear of the Chapel. Until her death in 1988, Marguerite received letters from all over the world from visitors who had marveled at the beauty of the Chapel and the surrounding area, proof that she had achieved her goal to build a place that would "send the spirit onward."

As we were leaving the chapel last Saturday, a group of people standing near the entrance started clapping. We quickly learned that a couple standing outside the entrance, on the right side, had just become engaged. We congratulated Thomas and Ashley as we left, and I suddenly realized that their story needed to be told. According to one of the on site volunteers, there have been LOTS of couples that have become engaged on the grounds of the chapel. Although I have no way of proving it, I suspect that an awful lot of marriages that started out as “love on the rocks” are still going strong today.

A D-Day tribute

Even though it’s been 70 years since the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy, there are still 1.7 million Americans living today who served in World War II. Of the more than 16,000,000 people who served in that conflict, over 400,000 were killed, and nearly 700,000 were wounded. By the year 2036, the VA estimates that all of the World War II veterans will be gone.

Most of us have seen “Saving Private Ryan” , one of the six movies produced that were devoted either entirely or largely to the D-Day invasion. All of them pay tribute to the brave guys who participated in “Operation Overlord”, but it’s already been 13 years since the most recent production, Band of Brothers, was released.

Although the vets who served in World War II deserve our respect, so do the men and women who have donned the uniform since that time. One of the best tributes to our servicemen and women that I've seen doesn‘t need any words to convey our gratitude, and is worth watching:

a tribute to our soldiers

If you’d like to thank Food City for producing this ad (I used one of the 2 stores in Tucson as a reference point), their contact information is listed below:

contact Food City

There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight

The song posted at the link below came to mind the other day due to an event that has been occurring in our area this week:

the 1958 version of an OLD song

The first clue that I had that something was amiss came at a little after noon on Wednesday, when Sharon stopped by the high school where I was working in order to bring me home. As it turns out, a small campfire had grown out of control near Slide Rock State Park north of Sedona on the afternoon of the 20th, and by noon the next day, fire department officials had declared a “pre-evacuation order” for the subdivision that we live in. After attending an informational meeting at the local fire station, we rushed home and packed up our important papers, some pictures, some clothing, our cat, and my trusty computer, and by 4:00, we were heading east to spend the night at a friend’s house in Doney Park.

Due to the rugged terrain near Sedona, (see picture below) putting firemen on the ground to fight the fire was difficult, which led to a rapid escalation in the size of the fire. At the break of dawn on the 21st, the fire had consumed 450 acres. By the time the sun set later on in the day, the fire had spread to 4500 acres, and by the morning of the 24th, it had consumed 10,000 acres. Fire officials estimate that by the time the fire is finally extinguished, 25,000 acres will have been burned.

To date, 20 separate fire departments from around the state have rushed to the area in order to fight the fire. If you looked hard enough, you could probably find the guy pictured below among the 900 firemen on the ground.

Due to the fact that the fire suppression techniques on the north end of the blaze had largely eliminated the possibility that the fire would reach our house, we moved back home again on the afternoon of the 22nd.

As is true with most fires, the mess that we now have in Sedona was caused by humans. Last week’s fires in San Diego were caused by an arsonist, who has since been arrested. By the time the 10 separate blazes had been extinguished, 10,000 acres had been burned, causing more than $20,000,000 in damage and at least one death.

Arizona and California, incidentally, are 2 of the 7 states in America that are literally running out of water.

Even without direct involvement in the fires, though, the human race is INDIRECTLY responsible for the increasing severity of the fires that occur every year in our country. Not everyone is a believer in global warming (more on that later) but the 40 years of data from the link below strongly suggest that it’s the reason that fires have been getting more dangerous every year.

fun fire facts

For nearly all of the last 30 years, the NUMBER of fires has been remarkably consistent, ranging from 50,000 to roughly 80,000 in most years. What HAS changed is the average size of the fires, in terms of acres burned.

In 1973, the average fire consumed 16 areas.

In 1983, the average fire size was 72 acres.

In 1993, the average fire had dropped to 30 acres, but increased to an average of 51 acres the following year.

In 2003, average fire size had increased to 62 acres, but by 2012 (the most recent year available) the average fire size was 137 acres.

Whether you believe in global warming or not is (obviously) dependent on the news sources that you rely on for your information. Most people would regard NASA to be a credible source of information about climate change due to the fact that the organizations has “eyes in the sky” at all times. According to NASA, the main cause of the current global warming trend is the human expansion of the “greenhouse effect”, and their opinion is shared by the United Nations, whose Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (comprised of 1300 independent experts from countries around the world) has concluded that there’s more than a 90% probability that human activities over the last 250 years have warmed the planet.

Unfortunately, the leading cable channel in America is FOX “news”, whose viewers are subjected to a constant stream of climate change denial, and a recent headline helps to explain why. On April 9, FOX published an article with the headline “UN finding on climate change is just a bunch of hot air, new report claims”. Even though the article pointed out that the report had been published by the conservative (and unreliable) Heartland Institute, and actually referenced the UN report in the article, a large percentage of the audience is likely to simply stop at the headline, and read no further.

Believe it or not, there ARE news sources that are even goofier than FOX. The ultra conservative Personal Liberty Digest believes that "the theory of man made global warming is based on spurious science, phony statistics, and outright lies".

Sadly, the remedy for improving our climate is a political one, and it’s going to be very difficult to achieve, largely due to the fact that the 113th Congress is officially the worst Congress in the last 40 years.

The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee has spent more time holding hearings (15) on the existence of extraterrestrial life than on the repercussions of climate change (2 hearings). The chairman of the committee, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, has a long track record of climate change denial, and several committee members have similar attitudes. Committee member James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin has called climate change “a massive international scientific fraud” and committee member Paul Broun of Georgia, a young Earth creationist, believes that the world was created in six days as we know them.

Other House committees that are responsible for addressing U.S energy and environmental issues have been equally negligent. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has held only one hearing on climate change, and the House Natural Resources Committee has yet to take up the issue in the 113th Congress.

On top of all that, on Thursday of this week, 227 Republicans (and 4 Democrats) in the House of Representatives voted for an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would prevent the Pentagon from spending money to carry out the policy recommendations from the National Climate Assessment report that was released by the Obama administration earlier this month, or from several United Nations reports on climate change and sustainability. Although the amendment is unlikely to survive, it’s a clear indication of the mindset of an awful lot of people in Congress.

In case you’re wondering, the United States Department of Defense is one of the largest single consumers of energy in the entire world, and it’s responsible for 93% of all U.S. Government fuel consumption. The new solar panels that were installed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base earlier this year are a step in the right direction (they’ll save an estimated $500,000 a year in energy costs) , but the Defense Department still has a long ways to go. Fortunately, the military is smarter than the members of Congress. According to retired Air Force General Donald Hoffman, "it is not possible to discuss the future of national and international security without addressing climate change". As further proof of the intelligence of our Armed Services, our Navy has actually figured out a way to turn seawater into fuel.

I’m normally not one to tell people how to vote, but it’s pretty clear (to me, at least) that we need to elect as many Democrats as possible in both 2014 and 2016 in order to protect our country’s interests.

The President had tried, without success, to move a climate change bill through Congress in his first term, and such legislation would now stand no chance of getting past the resistance of Republican lawmakers who question the science of climate change. As a result, Mr. Obama is taking a controversial step - he is using his executive authority under the 1970 Clean Air Act to issue an E.P.A. regulation taking aim at coal-fired power plants, the nation’s largest source of carbon pollution. Ironically, the "cap and trade" program that would pay for the costs of the new pollution controls were put into place at the state level at least 5 years ago by two Republican governors, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Arnold Schwarznegger of California.

Despite predictions that the new regulations will kill the coal industry, the coal plant in Homer City, Pennsylvania, is proof that pollutants can be reduced substantially without causing the loss of jobs or the closure of coal plants. Currently one of the dirtiest coal plants in the country, within a few years the plant will have reduced sulfur dioxide pollution to a level 80% below its current production, with no loss of jobs or increases in electrical bills.

The United States currently gets 37% of its electricity from coal, the leading source of electrical generation. In contrast, China gets 69% of its electricity from coal, which leads to air quality like that in the picture below.

Not all Republicans are bad (unless you’re talking about the Tea Party), but there simply aren’t enough of them that are concerned about climate change. Of the 107 Republicans currently running for Senate, only one of them (Jim Rubens of New Hampshire) has declared that global warming exists, and that it is caused by human activity. The vast majority of the other 106 either ignored the issue entirely, or listed the reasons that they oppose environmental regulations more broadly.

The fight to stop the wildfire just south of our house is likely to continue for another 2 to 3 weeks, but the fight to save our planet is gong to be a never ending story, and it’s up to all of us to make sure that it has a happy ending.

Be sure to vote in November.

The ghost of Father Karras

Earlier this week, I was a substitute teacher for one of the teachers at Flagstaff High School, and provided assistance for three of her classes the day that I was there.

The most interesting class of the day was the first hour class, which was working on a budget plan related to their choice of careers. Future career choices included auto mechanic, fire fighter, Navy SWAT team, animal care, carpenter, and psychiatrist. The most intriguing career choice, however, was one that you don’t run across very often.

Exorcist.

As it turns out, there is a school in Denver, Colorado called the International School of Exorcism, and it was founded by noted cult and occult expert Bob Larson in 2012. In the last 30 years, Mr. Larson has performed more than 20,000 exorcisms, which would likely make him the number one exorcism expert in the world. In a nod to the electronic world, Mr. Larson recently has been offering exorcisms by Skype, and the suggested cost of a one hour exorcism is $295.

For most of us, our exposure to exorcism is due to the 1973 movie, The Exorcist, which was actually based on a true story, the 1949 exorcism case of a boy in Maryland named Roland Doe. Roland Doe, as you might suspect, was the pseudonym assigned by the Catholic church in order to protect the privacy of the family involved. The movie was extremely successful commercially, and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, It eventually became one of the highest grossing films of all time, grossing over $441 million worldwide.

In the movie, the team of Father Lankester Merrin and Father Damien Karras are assigned to perform an exorcism on young Regan Burstyn (Linda Blair) , who looks more than a little scary in the movie.

Ultimately, Father Karras is forced to perform the exorcism alone, after the demon possessing the young girl manages to kill the elderly Father Merrin (played by Max von Sydow). Many people consider The Exodus to be the scariest movie off all time, and if you view the 5 minute clip posted below, I think that you’ll agree with that assessment:

how does she get her head to move like that?

The ritual of exorcism has been practiced for more than 2000 years, and it’s not limited to the ritual performed by members of the Catholic Church. Exorcisms have also been performed by Hindus, Muslims, and Jews, and the act of exorcism is mentioned in the Dead Sea scrolls, which go back as far as 400 B.C..

In general, the scientific community does not recognize possession as a valid psychiatric or medical condition, but there ARE those in the scientific community (notably Psychiatrist . M. Scott Peck) who believe otherwise. During the early years of the 20th Century, lobotomies (including surgery with an ice pick) were performed to rid the patient of what was considered to be a mental illness, but the practice of performing lobotomies has largely disappeared throughout most of the world.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the occult, which caused the Vatican to offer a course in Satanism and exorcism starting in 2005. Dan Brown may be partially to blame, since The DaVinci Code has sold more than 80,000,000 copies since its release in 2003.

Satanism has become mainstream enough that a Harvard University student club recently announced plans to host a Satanic Black Mass on May 12th. Due to public outrage, and condemnation by the Archdiocese of Boston and the University’s President, the event was cancelled before it could occur.

I’m not a believer in giving people advice on their career choice, especially in view of the fact that most people will have more than one career in their lifetime (I’ve had 5, so far), but I’d likely recommend something other than being an exorcist.

For those who are still considering the career, they may wish to follow in the footsteps of Washington Post columnist Anthony Faiola, who recently traveled to the Vatican to witness an exorcism being performed by the Catholic Church’s best known exorcist, an 89 year old priest named Father Gabriele Amorth.

If they are still interested after that, my advice would be to feel free to move forward.

Have you ever wondered about Wonder bread ?

Like most of the folks who were growing up when The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was still on prime time television (ABC network), I ate a lot of Wonder Bread, a brand that has been in existence since 1921, when it was created by a small Indiana bakery named Taggart Baking Company.

In 1925, the bakery was sold to Continental Baking, who retained ownership of the company until 1995, when Continental Baking was purchased by Interstate Baking Corporation, which later became Hostess Brands.

Hostess Brands filed for bankruptcy protection in November of 2012, and the United States portion of the company was purchased by Flowers Foods in January of 2013 (Weston Bakeries produces Wonder bread in Canada, and Grupo Bimbo produces Wonder bread in Mexico.)

Continental Baking was responsible for two major innovations during the company’s years of ownership. The first major innovation was that it was one of the very first bakeries to sell pre-sliced bread (in 1930). Its second major innovation came in the 1940’s, when the company began adding vitamins and minerals to its breads as part of a government-sponsored program to enrich white bread, Ultimately, the company was adding 12 vitamins and minerals to Wonder bread, which led to the creation of the slogan “helps build strong bodies 12 ways”. A 1956 ad from Life magazine will bring back a lot of memories for most of us:



I haven’t purchased Wonder bread for years, and probably for decades. My memory of the stuff was that it usually got stuck to the roof of my mouth, and I graduated to more substantial breads a long time ago.

Surprisingly, Wonder bread actually DOES offer good nutritional value, and a significant number of the wide variety of breads sold as Wonder Bread have nutritional values of either A or B:

is that stuff really good for you?

Wonder Bread was in the news recently, but not for reasons that you might expect. According to a recent article in the New York Times, the new owner of Wonder Bread, Flowers Foods, was rated as the most Republican-leaning company in the country. Since 1979, the company has given 99% of its political contributions to the Republican Party, a full 11% higher than the amount contributed by the ultra conservative Koch Industries.

If you’re a died-in-the-wool Democrat (like me) that kind of news is hard to swallow, but you actually wouldn’t accomplish much if you stopped buying the products sold by Flowers Foods. Sharon and I stopped buying Papa John’s pizzas a while back due to John Schnattner’s political affiliations and abysmal employee compensation, but the guy has a net worth of $600 million, so he obviously won’t miss our money very much.

Regardless of your political affiliation, however, there’s one thing that all of us can agree on, and that is that there’s simply too much dough in politics. It’s actually a wonder that our democracy works as well as it does.

Out of Africa

In theory, science and religion should be able to co-exist peacefully, but too often, that’s simply not the case. If you go back in history a few hundred years, you’ll discover that the astronomer Galileo Galilei was convicted of heresy by the Catholic Church in April of 1633 because he believed that the Earth revolved around the Sun. The Church, in contrast, had decided that the idea that the Sun revolved around the Earth was an absolute fact of scripture, and could not be disputed. The view of the Church was still its dogma in 1633, even though scientists had known for centuries that the earth was NOT the center of the universe.

As a result of the hearing before chief inquisitor Father Vincenzo da Firenzuola, Galileo agreed not to teach his “heresy” anymore, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It took the Church more than 300 years (1992) to admit that it was wrong, and before they finally cleared Galileo of the heresy charge.

One of the modern arguments that pits religion against science is the discussion of how old the earth is, and there is a HUGE difference of opinion between the two interpretations of the issue.

Young Earth creationism is the religious belief that the Universe, Earth, and all life on earth began somewhere between 5700 and 10,000 years ago. According to Gallup polls, somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the American population believe in Young Earth creationism.

For those who believe in the scientific view of the age of the Earth, scientific facts state that the Earth is at least 3.8 billion years old, and scientists have found ice in Antarctica that is roughly 1,000,000 years old. These facts are unlikely to change the opinion of the 30% of the American population who believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible.

Since there are large groups of people who can’t agree how old the Earth is, it’s pretty obvious that there isn’t going to be any agreement on how old the human race is.

Ken Ham, the founder of The Creation Museum, believes that the human race is less than 10,000 years old, and co-existed with dinosaurs (who actually disappeared 65,000,000 years ago). Although Mr. Ham was a high school science teacher for a brief period of time early in his career, he quickly switched to working for the Institute for Creation Research, which is a Young Earth creationist organization.

The most comprehensive discussion on the scientific viewpoint of the age of the human race was a 5 part series presented by Dr. Alice Roberts, and released by the BBC in 2009. In total, the series runs just under five hours, and can be viewed by clicking on the links below:

Part 1: (Africa)

Part 2: (Asia)

Part 3: (Europe)

Part 4: (Australia)

Part 5 (the Americas)

In addition to being a medical doctor, Dr. Roberts is an anatomist, osteoarachaelogist, anthropologist, paleopathologist, television presenter and author. In her spare time, she is professor of public engagement in science at the University of Birmingham in England).

It is her belief that modern home sapiens evolved from dark skinned humans that originated in modern day Ethiopia approximate 195,000 years ago. Although she briefly mentions the Neanderthal race in her video on Europe, she does not discuss even earlier versions of the genus Homo, which evolved around 2.3 million years ago.

To a very large degree, the series narrated by Dr. Roberts confirms the findings of an American geneticist and anthropologist named Spencer Wells, who published a book titled "The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey" in 2002. His book became a TV documentary in 2003.

You are free to believe whatever you want about the age of the Earth, or the age of the human race, but I’m of the opinion that Dr. Roberts’ version of things is a lot closer to the truth than the opinion held by Ken Ham. If we really ARE all descended from dark skinned people in Eastern Africa, then it makes absolutely no sense to criticize our fellow humans because of their skin color or their national origin. Unfortunately, the bigotry that was very evident in Little Rock in 1957 still exists today, it’s just a little more subtle. In some states, it’s known as Voter ID laws, but it takes other forms as well.

I wish that we could forever keep religion and science separate, but when you add politics into the mix, we’re all faced with a virtually impossible situation, one that our African ancestors never had to deal with. Fortunately, we can, and the best place to start is the Big Bang theory, which theorizes that the universe started out with a "Big Bang" more than 13 billion years ago. The "father" of the Big Bang theory is a Catholic priest named Georges Lemaitre.