Interesting Quotes
"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."
C. S. LEWIS
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
— Dalai Lama
A kind and compassionate act is often its own reward.
— William John Bennett
Sometimes it takes only one act of kindness and caring to change a person’s life.
— Jackie Chan
If you see someone without a smile, give them one of yours.
— Dolly Parton
In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.
ANNE FRANK
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
— Aesop
"I have lived to thank God that all my prayers have not been answered."
JEAN INGELOW
When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.
Ernest Hemingway
To make a difference in someone’s life, you don’t have to be beautiful, rich, or perfect. You just have to care.
Ginny Sale’s webpage.
Interesting Facts (most from InterestingFacts.com or Need to Know Facts)
Did you know that woodpeckers can peck 16 times per second? That means almost 1,000 times per minute.
Did you know that Crans-Montana is not in the United States? It is a city in Switzerland that is renowned for its Alpine racing.
Most of you know about the search engine Yahoo. Did you know that Yahoo is supposedly an acronym that stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."
Florida is the flattest state in the United States.
There are 2.5 million ants for every human on the earth.
Remembering Rodney Stark
For most of his life Rodney Stark was a famous academic agnostic, but after decades of studying religion and especially Christianity, he became a believer himself. To learn of the fascinating progression in his thinking, take a moment to read these comments from Breakpoint.
Click here to read full article.
3 common thinking traps and how to avoid them, according to a Yale psychologist
This Yale psychologist has written a short article on three thinking traps which you undoubtedly can use with your clients. This article introduces you to her book, which may be useful to recommend to some of your clients. I recommend you at least take a few minutes to read her article and see what you think.
Click here to read full article.
What If I Hate Sex?
Dr. Juli Slattery is a counselor who has an incredible ability to talk with Christian women who are struggling in their sexual lives. This is an excerpt from her book 25 Questions You’re Afraid to Ask About Love, Sex, and Intimacy. You may find it helpful if you are working with a woman who has struggles in this area, and she may find she wants to purchase the entire book.
Click here to read full article.
Idaho Teaching Elementary Students ‘Porn Literacy’
Here is a quote from this article, so you can decide whether or not you want to read it in its entirety. I think it’s clear that parents need to stay involved to see what’s happening in their schools and be willing to push back if they disagree. It’s particularly frustrating that this program is designed to teach elementary students!
“Idaho parents are outraged at a program revealed by the Idaho Freedom Foundation in which the state will teach “porn literacy” to elementary students, including how to hide it from their parents. The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW) is reportedly buying materials from “Education, Training and Research (ETR), which is a progressive nonprofit organization distributing these so-called “porn literacy” programs.”
Click here to read full article.
When Angry Kids Lash Out: How to Defuse Explosive Reactions
Many children have difficulties with emotional regulation, but this is particularly true of many children with ADHD. Here is an article by William Dodson, a psychiatrist and expert in working with children with ADHD, with some good, practical advice about handling these kind of situations.
Click here to read full article.
How ‘social justice’ is corrupting science
Quote from this article: “Nature Human Behavior, one of the most prestigious journals for social-science research, recently published an editorial, “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans,” that generated tremendous pushback among academics and intellectuals concerned about the spread of social-justice ideology into science.
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, for one, said the journal was “no longer a peer-reviewed scientific journal but an enforcer of a political creed.” [End of quotation.]
This is a very important article, and I hope you’ll take a moment to read it, for it shows the ways that some of our most respected psychological and social-psychology journals are being contaminated by political correctness. It also shows how, in the transition from scientific studies to newspaper articles, newspaper writers often make mistakes that cause laypersons to believe something was proven when it was not (e.g., a study that showed a correlation between two things is described as demonstrating that one thing causes the other.)
Unless we all do our part to stay alert to this trend and confront it when we see it, our research journals will become more and more captive to what is politically correct rather than what is actually true.
Click here to read full article.
Serious Threats to Religious Liberty
Two newspaper articles this week demonstrate the thinking that represents a serious threat to religious liberty. Respect for the religious beliefs of American citizens is enshrined in our Constitution and for most of our nation’s history, those religious beliefs of various groups have been respected. But now an assertive movement propelled by agnostics or atheists are questioning whether religious beliefs need to give way to the current politically correct views of various groups. One of those articles—“When Did Religious Belief Become An Excuse to Discriminate?”—appeared in the Washington Times. Another article—“Extreme Religious Liberty Is Undermining Public Health”—appeared in the New York Times. I believe we need to pray for God’s wisdom and power in responding to these trends, and also be aware that the persons we elect to our legislatures and the person we elect as President (who appoints Supreme Court Justices) are very important.
Click here to read full article.
The Goat Ate My Paperwork!
We’ve all heard the stories of students who told their teacher that they completed their homework, but they couldn’t bring it in because their dog ate it. The success of that tactic probably depends on the credulousness of their teacher. But a sheriff’s deputy in Alabama experienced a variation on that theme. While serving civil papers at a residence he left his squad car door open for a few moments. When he returned he found two goats had inhabited his car and were chewing on some of the reports still in his car. Fortunately he was able to capture the evidence on his cell phone so he had an excuse to take to his supervisors.
Click here to read full article.
The Transformative Power of an ADHD Diagnosis for Older Women
Some people, especially women, are not diagnosed with ADHD until later in life. But even though it would have been preferable for them to have been diagnosed earlier, many have found their diagnosis to have positive, transformative effects.
Click here to read full article.
Ask the Doctor: Coming to Terms with Anxiety & Irritability
This psychiatrist, who often works with bipolar patients, included some insights that many people do not know. He says, in this article, that many people with milder bipolar symptoms, often have chronic anxiety and irritability that they, and their loved ones, have to deal with. This article could be valuable to anyone with bipolar disorder or counselors who sometimes work with bipolar clients.
Click here to read full article.
How consensus-building conversation changes our minds and aligns our brains
This research article, from some researchers at Harvard, Princeton, and a few other schools, indirectly supports what happens in group therapy, and also clearly has implications for team building in a work setting. It found that good discussions actually resulted in the brains of participants becoming more aligned with one another. The only exceptions is when groups had one or two blowhards who monopolized the discussion.
Click here to read full article.
Heart medication shows potential as treatment for alcohol use disorder
There are currently three medications that seem to have some efficacy in treating alcohol use disorder. Now there is a fourth—spironolactone—which was originally developed to treat heart disorders and high blood pressure. So if you have a client who is struggling with alcohol use and hasn’t responded to one of the other medications, this gives you another option to consider recommending they talk with their doctor about.
Click here to read full article.
School Board Now Backing Trans Teacher Who Taught Class in Perverse Outfit
If you look at the pictures of this teacher (included in this article), you will probably be (appalled, amazed) that this school board is backing a teacher who came to school in such an outfit. Thank God this is in Canada!
Click here to read full article.
Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools
Since this week has been designated as Banned Book Week, Pen America has come out with a new report about banned books. Florida is mentioned by name in the report, and Palm Beach County even gets specific mention. Most books are not banned, except in totalitarian regimes such as Iran, Communist China, and North Korea. Here in the U.S. adults can usually access any book that is still in print. The issue of book banning here in the U.S. primarily concerns what books are available in public school libraries, and in particular, elementary school libraries. Although Pen America decries all book banning as a violation of public school students’ free exchange of ideas, I think most parents believe that young children should not be encouraged to read certain types of materials until they have greater maturity.
Click here to read full article.
Meet the Taxpayer-Funded Group Pushing ‘Transgender Identity’ on Two-Year-Olds
Quote from the article: “The nation's top early childhood development organization, which has received more than $230 million in federal funds since 2008, claims that children as young as two years old can show signs of "transgender identity" and encourages educators to "use tenets of Critical Race Theory" when they work with newborns.
“The group, Zero to Three, promoted these controversial views during its virtual conference this month, which included educational sessions titled "What Does It Mean to Be Transgender and How Can You Support Kids Who Might Be?" and "Elevating Racial Equity in the First 1,000 Days: Protecting, Promoting, and Preserving the Health, Wealth, and Learning of Our Families and Babies."
Click here to read full article.
COVID raises risk of long-term brain injury, large U.S. study finds
This large study 154,000 veterans who had COVID versus veterans who did not, found that there was an increase in brain fog, ischemic strokes, anxiety and depression, seizures and movement disorders among those who had COVID.
Click here to read full article.
Is the New Atheism Dead?
A few years ago, the “New Atheists” were quite popular in secular circles. This Breakpoint article points to their impending demise.
Click here to read full article.
A Short History of Slavery
This five-minute video by Candace Owens, is very worth your time.
Click here to read full article.
I hope you enjoyed these articles. Let’s pray that Tropical Storm 9 (on Friday in the Caribbean), decides to go another way.
Henry Virkler
