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It was this past Monday that I was on a taped program with Larry King. I have mentioned to you that that was a possibility, and it happened on Monday. The program was taped to be aired on Christmas Eve. So, wherever you might be, if you'd like to tune in, you'll find it an interesting discussion. Some of the familiar folks that he likes to put me next to were there: Father Manning and Deepak Chopra, who is a mystic from India, and Dennis Prager, who is a radio talk show host, and a Jew, and the author of the lead article in Newsweek Magazine on the birth of Christ, John Meacham. And John Meacham said that - he introduced himself as a devout Episcopalian, to which Dennis Prager said, "That's an oxymoron". But, whatever it may be.
Nonetheless, we had a very interesting discussion. And what made it so interesting was every other time that we've been on discussing things, we've been discussing 9/11 and why do bad things happen to good people, and what about homosexual marriage, and I've always had to sort of get the conversation over to Jesus. But this one is on why - rather, who is Jesus Christ? And so, that was the subject. And that made it very dramatic, I think, and a very wonderful opportunity.
But in the middle of this, the discussion came up on the virgin birth. Was Jesus really born of a Virgin? Does it matter? Now, I confess to you that this discussion ones on all the time, even when we're not on the air. So I never know whether what I'm saying is gonna be broadcast or not. But somewhere along the line, the issue of the virgin birth came up.
And the basic idea is this: well, that's your truth. And we're happy for you that you believe. If it helps you, then it's really nice that you believe that. But let's not say it actually happened in history, necessarily. It happened in spiritual history. And you're certainly welcome to believe that. It doesn't matter that it actually happened. It only matters that you believe it happened, because it helps you. And at one point, John Meacham said that there's a great statement made by the Pope, who said that religion flies on two wings: the wing of reason, and the wing of faith. And I responded to that, that "understanding what you mean by that, that reason and faith are two completely separate things, I find that very frightening. I personally have faith in what is reasonable", I said. "I have faith in what is actual. I have faith in reality. I have faith in history." And at one point, one of them said, "well, the Bible says faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Well, that's true. That's hubris. But it doesn't say it's the evidence of things that didn't happen. It's the evidence of things you didn't see, that's all. Here is this idea that somehow religion belongs up in the stratosphere in the airy, fairy space of mystical intuitive experience. And we certainly want to keep it out of history. It's a very tolerant attitude towards you believing what you wanna believe. But don't tell me this is history, and this is reality, and this is absolute truth, and this is necessary.
There's a tremendous resistance to the virgin birth, because if in fact Jesus is born of a virgin, then he's God. And if he's God, then what he has said is absolutely authoritative. And that has massive implications on people's lives, and how they conduct their lives, and how they view their lives, and how they look at time and eternity. People do not wanna live according to the teaching of Jesus Christ. They do not wanna live according to the Bible. They love darkness rather than light. They love sin rather than righteousness. They don't wanna live the way Jesus told them to live. And they certainly don't wanna live under guilt trip that not living the way Jesus told them to live is gonna catapult them into eternal hell. And so, you have to sort of cut off the head of this thing at its very start, and you go all the way back to the virgin birth. If he's not born of a virgin, then he's just a man. If he's just a man, he's just a good teacher.
At one point, Dennis Prager said, "I don't believe that he's God. I just believe that he's a good rabbi." A good teacher. And I said, "Well, he said he was the eternal God. He said before Abraham was, I am." Good teachers don't talk like that. Crazy people do. And you really don't have that option. If you went to class anywhere, and the teacher got up and said, I'm eternal. You'd question everything else that teacher said about anything. That's one thing you can't say about Jesus. Either he's God, or he's a lunatic, or he's a masterful deceiver.
If you're going to cut down the Christian gospel, you've got to cut it down at the point of the virgin birth. There's an article also in Time Magazine that essentially did the same thing. And the critics are always after the virgin birth. It seems to me that Christians don't talk about it very much. But critics do, because they understand its importance. If you have a virgin born person in Jesus Christ, then Christianity is a real problem to people who wanna deny, particularly, when you look at the life that Jesus lived.
So I had planned to do something else this morning, but I wanna go back to this, because I know people are being influenced by this kind of thinking. I wanna talk the virgin birth. We talked about it a little bit when we were studying the Luke chapter 1. And I read that to you this morning, that passage from verse 26 down through verse 38 or so. And I wanna look at Matthew's account of it, as well. So turn to Matthew chapter 1. One of the criticisms that was made in our little discussion was well, how important is the virgin birth anyway? It's only mentioned by two of the four gospels. To which the response would be, how many times does God have to say something to make it true? Once is enough. Matthew 1:18: "The birth of Jesus Christ was as follows: When his mother, Mary, had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together", before they had any physical relationship, "she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit". That's unambiguous. She was pregnant by the Holy Spirit. "And Joseph, her husband, being a righteous man, and not wanting to disgrace her desire to divorce her secretly". He had a right to do that, because the period of betrothal before the marriage was consummated was the period in which the people proved their purity and their virginity and their faithfulness. And he couldn't figure out how she was pregnant. Obviously, he didn't know about this miracle. "But when he was considering this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David, fear not be afraid to take Mary as your wife; for that which has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. And she will bear a son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for it is He who will save His people from their sins. Now all this took place that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled saying, behold, the virgin shall be with child", there's a paradox of all paradoxes, "and shall bear a son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel, which translated means God with us. Joseph, arose from his sleep, did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, took her as his wife, and kept her a virgin until she gave birth to his son, and he called His name Jesus."
Virgin birth. We actually have a word in the English language that refers to this. It's the word Parthenogenesis. Comes from two Greek words, really. Parthenos is the word for virgin. Genesis means to begin. To begin live from a virgin. Parthenogenesis. And there are some lab experiments that have been done to see if Parthenogenic life can be produced; that is if life can be produced from a source without a male being involved. Honeybees have been tested, and unfertilized eggs of course develop into drones, or males. Artificial Parthenogenesis has been successful with some unfertilized eggs in silkworms. This goes back into the 19thcentury. In the 20thcentury, the eggs of sea urchins and some certain marine worms have developed on their own by being placed in a particular kind of solution. There have even been experiments back in the 1940's regarding rabbits supposedly produced through some external effects on ova apart from a male rabbit, always producing only females in very inferior life forms. Such virgin births, however, have never ever reached into the human realm. There is no possibility. None has ever been discovered. None is possible for a human egg to be fertilized without a male seed.
And even if hypothetically you could do it, if somehow some experiment could cause an unfertilized egg to produce, it could only produce a girl, a female, because males have an XY chromosome, and females have only 2X chromosomes. So if there's no male in the equation, then there cannot be a male produced. And so, if by some scientific means some artificial Parthenogenic experiment could produce a human, it would produce a daughter. But never a son. I mean, that's all hypothetical anyway, because it can't be done. When Mary gave birth to Jesus without a human father, she gave birth to a son. There is no explanation for that, since the human male determines the sex of the son. It's obvious that Jesus' human nature, his nature as a son, as a man, was determined by God. And what we read is that the Holy Spirit basically, miraculously produced the male chromosomes in Mary. This is what the Bible says. Jesus is born of a virgin. Without a human male source for a seed, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit in the body of Mary, that is the New Testament message, crystal clear, simple, straightforward. A very uncomplicated presentation. And it makes sense, because if God is to be born, he has to be born of God. And if he is to be man, he has to be born of man. And so, you have God, and Mary.
I want us to look a little bit at the foundations of the virgin birth, because I think we can't let go of this very important matter. The virgin birth, in a sense, is not really new in the New Testament. It's anticipated. Go back to Genesis, chapter 3. And you remember, of course, that God creates the world, and creates it perfect, and he looks at it and says it's very good. Adam and Eve are innocent of any evil, and then the tempter comes, and they succumb to his temptation, and they believe the liar and the deceiver, Satan. And they cease believing in God. And of course, they fall, and the whole human race falls with them. And the disaster is recorded in chapter 3. And then God pronounces some curses, and I just want to look at verse 15. God here curses the serpent. Verse 14, he actually curses the physical snake, the actual snake that Satan used to be the visual representation. He went into the snake, spoke through the very mouth of the snake, and the animal itself is cursed, and all snakes after that. But verse 15, speaking not to the animal, but to Satan, "I will put enmity between you and the woman", you haven't won the final battle. You have not won the final battle. There is gonna be hatred between you and the woman, "and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel." If you think you've won, and maybe he did. After all, when the angels fell, there was no remedy. When the angels fell, it was permanent. And maybe he thought when men fell, there wouldn't be a remedy, either. He in his own experience knew that there was no redemption for angels, no salvation for angels. They were forever fixed in their fallen wretchedness, and headed for the lake of fire. And maybe he thought that if he could do this to men, there was some hope that maybe this was permanent, and he had thereby captured the whole human race.
But God says to him, it's not over. There is gonna be hatred between your seed and her seed. Between those who are Satan's, and those who are God's, that's the idea. But the term or the phrase "her seed" introduces the possibility of something that's not ever possible. A woman with a seed? Seed's in the man, not the woman. But there will be a woman who will have a seed. And that seed, verse 15, "shall crush the head of Satan, though Satan will bruise him on the heel". All Satan could do was bruise the heel of Christ, whereas Christ, born of her seed, crushed Satan's head. He is the only one who ever could be called, in the specific sense, the seed of a woman.
In Isaiah chapter 7, I want you to look at the familiar verse there which I read to you in Matthew 1, because it's quoted there. But Isaiah chapter 7, verse 14, "therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a virgin will be with child, and bear a son, and she will call his name Emmanuel. Emmanuel means God with us." El is God. El ______, El-Shabbai, God, the almighty. God, the most high. A virgin is going to have a child, a son, and he will be God with us. In our discussion on Monday, it came up well, that word doesn't mean virgin. It just means young girl. That word is alma, and the translators translated virgin because it is used nine times in the Old Testament, eight of the absolutely require that it mean virgin. The idea of the word was just another way to say a young girl, assuming this young girl was not married. She was prior to marriage age eight of the nine times. It requires that it be translated virgin. But the word always carries that connotation.
Even in English, if you put the world maiden in, when we talk about a maiden, it assumes that this is a young girl. And of course the New Testament makes it very clear, because the New Testament quoting this virgin will be with child, requires Parthenos, which means a virgin. And it means nothing other than virgin. Jesus used it three times in the parable of the ten virgins, Matthew 25. Luke used it twice of Mary, as I read earlier in the service. It's used in Phillip's four virgin daughters by Luke also in Acts 21. Paul distinguishes in 1 Corinthians 7 the difference between a wife and a Parthenos, a virgin. John records the word as descriptive of those who had no sexual relationships at all, but were totally yielded to God, and there so identified in Revelation 14. It is a word that means a person whose had no sexual involvement. This is Mary. And when Joseph is told by the angel that she is to bear a child, obviously she's a virgin. And when the angel says this is a fulfillment of Isaiah, obviously that is the intent of the prophecy and it's inherent in the prophecy itself. Behold literally the pregnant virgin is bearing a son. And she calls his name Emmanuel.
So when you look at the Old Testament, you find the foundation of the virgin birth. There is a verse in Jeremiah 31:22, some Rabbis said through the years that this verse is about the Messiah. Jeremiah 31:22, "The Lord has created a new thing in the earth, a woman shall encompass a man." Well, a woman having a male child isn't a new thing in the Earth. So some of the rabbis said, what could it mean? A new thing in the Earth? A woman encompasses a man. And some rabbis said messiah is to have no earthly father. And other rabbis said the birth of Messiah would be like the dew of the Lord as it drops on the grass without the action of Man. Other messiahs - other rabbis said about Messiah, his birth will not be like that of anyone else. So there may have been some Jews who expected or at least were open to a virgin birth, who understood the implications of Genesis 3:15, Isaiah 7:14. Not all of them did. But the Old Testament did say in no uncertain terms in Isaiah 7:14 that he would be born of a virgin.
There were some rabbis actually who taught that the Messiah would be of heavenly origin. There were some, for example, in the 150 B.C. there's a writing called the Book of Enoch. Jude refers to it. And in it, it says that he appears by the side of the ancient of days. So he was beside God, and he came from Heaven. And of course Psalm 2 talks about the son, verse 7, "he said to me, thou art my son. Today, I hath begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the nations as thy inheritance, and the very ends of the Earth as thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron. Thou shalt shatter them like earthenware." This is a Messianic psalm talking about the Messianic kingdom. It says, "Do homage to the son, lest he become angry, and you'll perish in the way."
And so, here is the son of God, the King, the one who will rule and establish his kingdom. The heavenly origins of Messiah combined with the passage of the virgin birth in Isaiah, and a hit of it in Genesis, led some to think it was a possibility.
So you could see the virgin birth certainly introduced in the Old Testament. Also, the doctrine of the trinity calls for the virgin birth. If you think about God, you have to think about God as one, and yet three, right? And we all know that's not easy to do. We have a difficult time with that apparent paradox. Deuteronomy says, and this is the schmod, this is that which sets Israel apart from all other nations, "the Lord is one". They are monotheists in a polytheistic world. There's only one God, and you are to love him with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and you are to have no other Gods at all. There are not three Gods. There is only one God. There are not two Gods, or you would maybe love one and not love the other two equally, or love two and not love the other one equally, or whatever. You don't give a third of your love to each of the three. There is one God.
James 2, "You believe there's one God, you do well." And yet, the name of that one God in Genesis 1 is Elohim. God is introduced in the beginning, God, Elohim is plural. The -im ending is plural. There is one God who is spoken of in the plural. Genesis 1:26, "God says let us create man in our image." In Isaiah, God speaks and says, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" Isaiah 48:16, "Come near to me and listen to this, I have not spoken in secret from the beginning, from the time it was, there am I. Now, the Lord, God and his spirit have sent me." Here's a reference to the Holy Spirit as well as God, the father. The Old Testament understands that God is a father, that God also is the Holy Spirit, and that God also is the son. Psalms tell us that my Lord, the Lord said unto my Lord. Intertrinitarian conversation, when Jesus was baptized, the spirit descended as a dove. There he was being baptized, and the father's voice came out of heaven, this is my beloved son, and whom I'm well pleased. When we baptize people, Matthew 28, it says that we ought to do so "In the name of the father, the son and the Holy Spirit". The New Testament makes very clear the reality of the triune God. Now listen, if Jesus then is God, if he is God, the son, as eternal as God, living with God face to face, ______, from all eternity. And if he comes into this world that is born of a man, there must then be the fatherhood of God. You cannot have God born unless God is born to God, not man. If Jesus just had an earthly father, and an earthly mother, then you don't have God. The Old Testament demands it. And so it is the doctrine of the trinity.
And see, this is why this doctrine is more important to critics of Christianity and skeptics of Christianity than many times it is to Christians, because they understand the implications of eliminating it. If he's not born from God, then he's not God. Changes everything. All his claims are bogus. All that's written about him is untrue. Christianity is a sham. But if it makes you feel okay, have at it. That's all you're left with.
When you think about Old Testament messianic promises, when you think about messianic promises, the Messiah has to be God in human flesh to fulfill them. Let me just give you - and there are so many passages on this, so we could go on forever. But Isaiah 43 is a good place to look. Let's look at Isaiah 43 for a couple of minutes. In Isaiah 43, which is a great chapter, in fact, a great section in this wonderful prophecy, in which God reveals his nature. Isaiah 43:11. If the Messiah is God's deliverer, if the Messiah is God's redeemer, if the Messiah is God's King, if the Messiah is God's holy one who is going to accomplish God's purpose on behalf of his people in the world, then he must be God. And I'll show you how that works. Verse 11, "I, even I, am the Lord, and there is no savior besides me." That's God speaking, "I, even I, am the Lord, and there is no savior besides me." Go down to verse 14, "Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel. Verse 15, "I am the Lord, your Holy One, the creator of Israel, your king." Now God says, I am the savior. I am the redeemer. I am the Holy One. I am the creator. I am the king. And, all of those things were true of Jesus. Call his name Jesus, Matthew 1:21. We will save these people from their sins. He's the savior. Galatians 3, "He redeems us from the curse of the law. He is our redeemer." Luke 1:35 calls him that "Holy offspring". And clearly he is presented in unmistakable terms, in Philippians 2 as, "Lord", and in Revelations 19 as "King of Kings", and "Lord of Lords".
Now if God alone is savior, and God alone is redeemer, and God alone is the Holy One, and God alone is the king, and Christ is all of those, then clearly Christ is God. In Deuteronomy 6:13, it says, "You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him only." And then in Hebrews 1:6, and again, when God brought Christ into the world, he said, "Let all the angels of God worship him". If you can only worship God, and God tells you to worship Christ, then Christ is God. Psalm 148:2 calls on us to praise him, "all ye angels to praise God", and God says to praise him, Christ. It's unmistakable.
God saves, but he saves through the savior, which is Christ. God redeems, but he redeems through the redeemer, who is Christ. God makes us holy, but he does it through the Holy One, who is Christ. God draws us into his kingdom, he alone is king, and yet Christ is our king. In Isaiah 45, you have very similar testimonies to the uniqueness of God that are also fulfilled in Jesus. You have the same in Isaiah 42, and I'm not gonna read them. They're just everywhere. Listen, for example, Isaiah 45:23, I will read you this. "God says, I have sworn by myself. The word has gone from my mouth in righteousness, and will not turn back." Listen to what God says, "To me, every knee will bow. Every tongue will swear allegiance." God said that. And yet it was God who said in Philippians 2 that he gave Christ a name above the name, but at the name of Jesus, every knee should what? Should bow, and every tongue should what? Confess Jesus as the Lord. It's God himself affirming the deity of his son. And those Scriptures just barely scratch the surface of the parallels between the old and the new. God says, I'm the Lord, and my glory will not give to another." And yet Jesus comes into the world, and John writes, "He was glory personified. He is the glory of God. The word became flesh among us, and we would be held", what, "his glory". And it was the very glory of the only begotten of the father, full of grace and truth.
When you think about the virgin birth, it takes you back to the Old Testament, and there are indications in the Old Testament of the virgin birth. It also takes you back to the doctrine of the trinity, you can't have God being born unless God is born of God. And it takes you back to all of the messianic purposes of redemption that are found in God, and are also found in Christ. But in spite of all of this, it's very popular to attack the virgin birth, because if he's not born of a virgin, everything collapses. It's not optional. It's very hard for me to sit in a discussion where people are making some kind of an optional thing about the virgin birth, because I understand that if you can create doubt in people's minds about that, then everything else if up to doubting. In fact, if Jesus isn't born of a virgin, I don't even have any doubt left. I would be convinced he wasn't who he said he was.
There are all kinds of attacks on the virgin birth, and they basically come in two forms: denial and deception. There are people who just flatly deny it. I remember that song they kept playing on the radio years ago, the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, he is a man. He's just a man. That's one attack. Others have said he was the illegitimate child of a Roman soldier. And they think they invented something clever and new. No, the Jews came up with that one. They did. The eight chapter of John. You know what they said about Jesus, or to him? At leas we weren't born of fornication. That's what they said. They called him a Samaritan who had a demon. They thought of every evil thing they could throw at him. But really, the worse was to call him illegitimate. That's something they invented. There grew this idea that Jesus couldn't be the Messiah. It couldn't be true, because he was from Nazareth. Even Nathaniel said, can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Why did he say that? Because Nazareth was a - well, it was a bad place. You wouldn't wanna live there. Full of Roman soldiers. Not good. Full of Greek merchants. Notorious for corruption and vice. Main highway, ______ where the ships came in south to Judea and Jerusalem. And out of that came this ridiculous Pandera, perdition, a Roman soldier named Pandera lay with Mary, produced a child, that came in the 6thcentury in some Jewish writings wanting to discredit Jesus as the Messiah. Another explanation again around the name Pandera, was that somebody by the name of Joseph Pandera was married to Mary. But that wouldn't be good enough that she got married and had a child. That's what Brown says in the Da Vinci Code, what that says about Jesus, that he married and had a baby together. That might be too simple of an explanation for how Jesus was born. This one says, just to heap on the scorn, that she married this guy named Pandera, but it was a neighbor, Jarkanen, who sneaked in one night and got her pregnant. So that even though she was married to this soldier named Pandera, her child was illegitimate. However, he stayed with her anyway, this Joseph Pandera guy, and then after the child was born, he deserted the family. And that's why you don't find him in the New Testament. These have been coming against the virgin birth for centuries. And people understand how important it is. You remember the Passover plot, right? Schoenfeld 20 years ago? Said that Jesus actually was the natural son of Joseph and Mary who became the master conspirator who had a Messiah complex. He was like Charles Manson. But it was the Messiah. And he set out to fulfill messianic prophecies and made a noble effort at it. But he failed. Why do you write this book to exonerate the Jews from genocide, to get the Jews off the hook for having crucified God. You gotta get rid of the deity of Christ, and that's one way to get rid of it. Just get rid of the virgin birth, and come up with this blasphemous, hypothetical ideas.
In fact, Schoenfeld wrote, "there's nothing peculiar about the birth of Jesus. He was not God incarnate." See, that's what he's after. "He was not God incarnate. No virgin mother bore him. The church, in its ancient zeal fathered a myth and became bound to it as a dogma. One writer said, and I read, "The virgin birth is a myth in the highest and noblest sense of the word." There isn't many high, noble sense of a myth. This has found its way into so many elements of what is called Christianity.
But that's not the only attack. Deception is another one. And sometimes, it's not the assault, the frontal assault. In this discussion we were having Monday, one of the people said, I don't remember if it was while we were shooting or not, and said, "Well, look. Christianity has a virgin birth myth, and all kinds of religions have these virgin birth stories, and it's just a story that got passed through societal evolution." Oh, you know, there's some truth to that, that other societies do have virgin birth stories? The Romans have a myth that Zeus impregnated Semole. Zeus, you know, the great god of war. And he did it without contacting her, and she gave birth to Dioneccius, who became lord of the Earth. That's a mythological sort of virgin birth. The Babylonians had their first cult priestess named Semaramus, the wife of Nimrod. And she conceived a son whose name is Tamuz. By the way, that legend appears in Ezekiel chapter 8 and Jeremiah 44. And it says, in the old Babylonian legend, not in those texts, that this son of Semaramus, who was actually not conceived by Nimrod at all, but by a sunbeam. And so, you have Semaramus and Tamuz as the mother-child cult in Babylonian literature. In Egypt, their names change. Isis and Ociris. In India, they become Iciand Eswara. In China, Chin-Mu, the holy mother with a child in her arms. This has nothing to do with Christianity. In Phoenicia, it's Astrolovand Bale. In Greece, it's Aphrodite and Eros. They're all over the place. And they all come out of the Babylonian mystery religions. Why? Because Satan in the arch-counterfeiter. You understand counterfeiting, right? People don't counterfeit brown sticks and paper. They counterfeit what's valuable, what's real. And Satan counterfeits what's real. It's a smoke screen. He knows what's gonna happen in history. Muddy the waters with all these bizarre things. And by the way, that's what Roman Catholicism is today. It is the mingling of the Babylonian mother-child cult and the mystery religions with the Mary-Jesus story. And that's how you get Mary being called the queen of heaven. Queen of heaven comes out of cultic worship. In the ancient Samarian and Acadian story, inscribed on a building that tells how the Gods create life in the womb. It's even claimed that the Gods of procreation superintended conception in the womb stage of King Sanacharib, who lived six, 700 years before Christ. And, you might want to know this, Buddha, you know how Buddha has said to been conceived? A noble elephant white as silver or snow, having six tusks, well proportioned trunk and feet, blood red veins, firmness of joints an easy pace has entered my belly, says the mother of Buddha. Ten months later, Buddha is born. Hinduism, nobody really left out. All coming from the same Satanic source, Hinduism says the divine Vishnu had seven incarnations. He was once a fish, and then a turtle, and then a boar, and then a lion, and finally Vishnu descends to the womb of Devali. And she gives birth to Krishna, and the Beatles say, "My sweet Lord, Hare Krishna, My sweet Lord, Hare Krishna." Same story, virgin birth. In Greco-Roman mythology, the mother of Perseuswas supposedly impregnated by Jupiter, who impregnated her through some kind of rain from heaven. There were legends about Alexander the Great being virgin born. The story was that some serpent got in bed with his mother. That's pretty close. And they decided, those Greeks did, that that serpent was Zeus, because Zeus was a very deviant sexual God. And so he impregnated Olympius, the wife of Philip of Mastodon, who was in fact the father of Alexander. And so, Alexander was not born of Philip and Olympius, but Olympius and Zeus.
Satan knew God's plan, and you can either attack it head on, or you can create a counterfeit to confuse. One of the most bizarre is the birth of Polus Athena, who had no mother at all, but sprang out of the head of Zeus full grown, and in full armor. That could be painful. What is the point of all of this, and why am I telling you all of this? I don't want you to be ignorant of these things. I want you to understand that there has been throughout the ends of this world, throughout all of society, there have been assaults and attacks on the virgin birth, both by denying it, and by counterfeiting it. And it came up in the discussion, oh, there are virgin birth stories in all religions. Everybody's got - yeah, of course. Satan is a liar. Every religion has a salvation form, doesn't it? Every religion has a heaven, and a way to get there. Because the master deceiver is at work in all of them.
Well, we come back to where we started, don't we? Back to Matthew chapter 1. Back to Luke chapter 1. The child is never called the child of Joseph. Never called the son of Joseph. And Mary calls him My Lord, a messianic title. And in Mary's magnificatein Luke 1, when she praises the Lord, she never even mentions Joseph. "The mighty one has done great things for me", she says. "And all generations are calling me blessed." And after all, in Matthew's record, we just read it, Joseph knew the child was not his. Joseph knew, and when the angel told him the child was the child of the Holy Spirit, Mary has always stated to be his mother. Never is Joseph said in the Bible to be his father. But there's one other great proof of the virgin birth that makes it all real to me, to anybody who's thinking. And it's this: the greatest proof of the virgin birth is the life of Christ. Somebody said to a Christian, "If I ever tell you that a child was born today to a woman, and there was no one who fathered that child, would you believe it?" To which the Christian said, "Well, if he lived as Jesus lived, yes." How else can you explain sinless perfection? How else can you explain infinite wisdom? How else can you explain tower over the forces of hell? How else can you explain power over disease? How else can you explain power over death? How else can you explain his own resurrection? There's no other explanation. He must be God. If he must be God, then he must have been born of God. And why all this? Turn to Galatians 4:4, we'll stop at that one. Galatians 4:4, why? What is the purpose of this? "When the fullness of time came", that means in perfect timing in God's prescribed moment, when it was precisely God's time, "God sent forth his son." Didn't make him, didn't create him. He sent him, which means he already existed. He sent forth his son. These guys said in that discussion Monday, the virgin birth is never talked about anywhere in the New Testament but in Matthew and Luke. Wait a minute. God sent forth his son. He sent him forth. And he was born of a woman. Fully God, sent from heaven, fully man, born of a woman. Why? Verse 5, "In order that he might redeem those who were under the law." He was under the law, but he kept it perfectly. We're under the law, and we violate it all the time. We have to be redeemed. Since he never broke the law, he could be the redeemer. "That he might redeem those who were under the law." That means to buy us back from just damnation, punishment, and to give us the adoption of the status of sons. That's why he came. He came to redeem us. And in order to redeem us, he had to be God to conquer sin and death and hell and Satan. And he also had to be man to pay the price for our sin. And it all goes back to the virgin birth, which is the foundation of his work as our redeemer.
Lord, we thank you for helping us to grasp the critical essence of this great truth. There is no other way to explain Jesus, other than this. And this explains everything. Everything. In a sense, this is the foundation of everything he is as does. Even his high priestly work now he does because he was fully man, and could sympathize with us and all of our troubles. And, because he's fully God, he was in all points tempted _____ because we are yet without sin. Even his right to return and reign is bound up in his being worthy to be called Lord, being worthy to take the scroll and take back the universe which is rightfully his. And the fact that he was man allowed him to redeem a people to rule and to love and to serve and to fellowship with forever. It all goes back to this great event. And we celebrate the virgin conception and the virgin birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Grateful for this really unspeakable gift, the glory of this truth.
Father, we ask that you convince every heart here of its voracity, and that we might all indeed bow to knee to Christ, our Lord and our God. Father, now we come again at the end of this service, not as those who are setting aside something, but as those who are beginning. We have now received the truth to be carried from here and proclaimed. And may we do so faithfully as we rejoice, and that we pray in Christ's name. Amen.
This article is also available and sold as a booklet.
This sermon series includes the following messages:
Please contact the publisher to obtain copies of this resource.Publisher Information


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After creating the shared library that defines the new tag, you load the library into Web Server by adding the following directives to the configuration file magnus.conf:
An Init directive whose fn parameter is load-modules and whose shlib parameter is the shared library to load.
For example, if you compiled your tag into the shared object install_dir /hello.so, would be:Init funcs="mytag,mytag_init" shlib="install_dir/hello.so" fn="load-modules"
An Init directive whose fn parameter is the initialization function in the shared library that uses shtml_add_tag to register the tag. For example:
Init fn="mytag_init"

subset: commoncrawl


text: I'm observing an odd asymmetry in memory utilization on Athlons. Trivial array operations (read then write) are up to 30% faster going up through the array then down through the array. This was true with both gcc and Intel C compilers on Linux and with the Intel C compiler on Windows XP. It was true on Athlon 2000MP, 2200MP and 2000XP. My one Sparc machine gave symmetric memory speeds (to within a percent or two). There is a known prefetch issue on Athlon's but my understanding of that was that it affected only self modifying code. I didn't go looking for this odd effect - it fell out when benchmarking a combsort variant which swapped directions on every pass - and anomolously ran much slower than the original which only went up through memory. Here's a tiny example program (97 lines, mostly comments): ftp://saf.bio.caltech.edu/pub/software/linux_or_unix_tools/memasymmetry.c # gcc -O3 -o memasymmetry memasymmetry.c # ( time ./memasymmetry 10000000 ) 2>&1 | grep real real 0m0.188s # ( time ./memasymmetry -10000000 ) 2>&1 | grep real real 0m0.221s AMD support has been contacted but has not got back to me on this yet. Anybody else seen this before? Who knows what causes it? Is there a way around it on these Athlons? Thanks, David Mathog mathog at caltech.edu Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech


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Often it can be hard to tell whether you made a dazzling impression on your date. Take a look at the 7 weird signs he's into you, offered by dating advisers ready to arm you up with the best flirting tricks. If you have great problems figuring out the body language of your cutie, it is highly recommended to skim through these fascinating indicators. Find out whether your crush has serious intentions with your blooming relationship.No.1 He Starts Talking Like You Believe it or not, this act can be either conscious or unconscious. Guys who are... Read More


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HARROGATE, TENN. – With under 25-seconds remaining in a tied ball game, Hailey Yohn connected on a three-point shot to put Coker (1-0) up 59-56 over the Eagles of Carson Newman (0-1). The Eagles' desperation shot was then rebounded by the Cobra defense to secure the win.
The Coker offense opened the game strong with a 10-2 run. The Lady Eagles would come back with 11-3 run of their own, and would eventually tie the score at 13. The two teams played back-and-forth basketball for the rest of the half, and battled to a 26-point tie at the end of the first half.
Senior guard Amber Lau led the Cobras with a team high of 24-points. Twelve of Laus' points came from three-point range.
The Cobras will have little time to celebrate their victory, with their next competition coming on Saturday (Nov. 9) against Lincoln Memorial. Tip-off is scheduled for 6 p.m.


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Cirroc Lofton as Sevar
Cirroc Lofton played Jake Sisko, the son of Captain Benjamin Sisko, and the youngest regular cast member of any Star Trek series. An army brat who doesn't remember life on Earth, Jake had been aboard four different starships before his arrival on Deep Space Nine.
Born in Los Angeles, Lofton entered the acting arena at the age of nine, when he appeared in an educational program entitled "Agency for Instructional Technology." Lofton describes his acting debut, "I have always loved to act, in fact my first starring role was in an elementary school play when I portrayed Martin Luther King, Jr." Lofton's ability to portray a variety of characters enabled him to do national commercials for McDonald's Corporation, Tropicana Orange Juice, Kellogg's Rice Krispies and Capri Sun. In 1990, Lofton appeared in the Universal film "Beethoven," starring Charles Grodin. After ST:DS9's end, Lofton starred in the Showtime series The Hoop Life.
Lofton acknowledges the warm relationship he developed with on-screen father Avery Brooks, "We became very close," he continues, "I enjoyed Avery's companionship on and off the set."Biography courtesy of http://www.startrek.com/


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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Treasury Department investigator whose probe of the Internal Revenue Service's treatment of tea party groups helped fuel a national uproar failed to tell Congress that his own investigators found no evidence the targeting of conservatives was politically motivated, a top House Democrat said Friday.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., released documents that also seemed to indicate progressive groups seeking tax-exempt status may have been handled the same way as conservative organizations. While it has been known the term "progressive" appeared on a list that IRS screeners used, it is unclear whether liberal organizations received the same close scrutiny as conservative groups.
The documents were attached to a letter Cummings sent Friday to Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. That panel, on which Cummings is top Democrat, has been among three congressional committees investigating the IRS' handling of conservatives' applications for the tax-exempt designation.
Cummings' letter is the latest Democratic attempt to challenge the fairness and accuracy of the Treasury investigator's probe of the IRS.
Several Republicans have said they believe the IRS' tough handling of conservative groups was politically motivated and flowed from the White House or allies of President Barack Obama. There has been no evidence of any political motivation or of involvement by any top officials outside of the IRS.
Ali Ahmad, a spokesman for Issa, said the documents Cummings released don't disprove that conservative groups received harsher treatment than others.
"These documents, once again, refute misleading attempts to equate routine scrutiny of other groups involved in advocacy to the systematic scrutiny of Tea Party groups by IRS officials," Ahmad said.
Documents attached to Cummings' letter included an email that a top investigator for Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George sent on May 3, 2013, to other officials in George's office. George conducted the IRS probe and released a report two weeks later.
The email said that after meeting with George, his investigators examined 5,500 emails from IRS screeners. Those emails showed that the workers set aside applications from tea party and other groups "because the IRS employees were not sure how to process them, not because they wanted to stall or hinder the application.
"There was no indication that pulling these selected applications was politically motivated," the May email from the top investigator said.
Cummings wrote that George's report should have included that top investigator's finding. George's report said IRS officials denied any outside influence in their decision to closely scrutinize conservative groups.
A spokeswoman for George said he would stand by his report and previous congressional testimony.
Cummings released a PowerPoint document used at a July 2010 meeting of IRS screeners that listed "progressive" groups along with "tea party," ''patriots" and "9/12 project" — an effort supported by conservative Glenn Beck — as groups for whom the workers should look.
He also released minutes from that meeting that made the treatment of progressive groups less clear. The minutes said "progressive" groups should be flagged for review, but also said progressives "are not considered 'tea parties.'"
Another document Cummings released showed that "Occupy organizations" were also on a watch list for IRS screeners.
Cummings' letter asked Issa to have George testify at an Oversight committee hearing scheduled for Thursday on the IRS controversy.
The investigation "has been characterized by one-sided and partial information leading to unsubstantiated accusations with no basis in fact," Cummings wrote.


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Welcome to the CRG Discussion Forum!Forum registration problems: Make sure you enter your email correctly and you check your spam box first. *Then* email KurtS2@gmail for help.Classified ads are not allowed on the forum.
Total Members Voted: 178
BTW, I know what a Seadoo is. But humor an old man, what does CBR9 mean?


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Firefighters are awesome, but it doesn't change the fact that the job puts their lives on the line. This Wi-Fi ball, courtesy of Intel, has sensors built-in that, if thrown into a burning building, could keep our bravest out of harm's way.
Intel showed their fireball off at their IDF Day Zero presentations. It's really simple: the ball is outfitted with gas sensors that detects carbon monoxide, ammonia, and chemicals in the smoky air, as well as the air temperature, and sends it back via Wi-Fi to a server on the fire truck. The signal then gets shot back to the site commander's smartphone, and he or she can advise about the safety of the building.
It wouldn't be ideal for occupied buildings, but it'd be great for industrial fires where a lot of chemicals would be exposed to extreme heat. Intel will be testing the little guy out in firehouses in the next few weeks to see how they hold up in actual fires. Maybe they'll become part of the first responders' toolkit. [Laptop Mag]


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"Welcome to the Poconos. Welcome to the home of gangs," read a slide at a presentation sponsored by the Pocono Mountains chapter of the Community Association Institute.
"Welcome to the Poconos. Welcome to the home of gangs," read a slide at a presentation sponsored by the Pocono Mountains chapter of the Community Association Institute.
Interspersed in the slideshow of inner city tribes of Bloods, Crips and Latin Kings were photos of gang members in quaint gated communities and the parking lots of suburban malls.
"You never get rid of crime. You displace crime," said retired Allentown cop Edward Bachert Jr., who worked the gang detail for more than 15 years. "Gangs are like cancer."
Twenty-eight managers and representatives of community developments gathered Wednesday at the forum entitled "Crimewatch: Tackling Drugs, Crime and Gang Activity."
There are about 140 Pocono area members in the Community Association Institute who gather at these regular events to network. This was the third event in the last eight years to focus on gangs.
More than 56,000 homes populate private communities in Monroe and Pike counties, according to a 2010 state study. And those communities present their own unique challenges to combating crime and gangs because of issues with private roads and gated access, according to local law enforcement.
The presentation was part of an effort to educate private community leaders.
"Part of their job is to help protect the resell value of their communities," said Bob Travis, president of the Pennsylvania and Delaware Valley Chapter of Community Associations Institute.
Locally, gangs came to the forefront around 2006 when media attention focused on an incident involving Bloods and Crips in A Pocono Country Place in Coolbaugh Township, the largest private community in the Poconos with about 3,900 homes.
But according to gang experts, the problem today is much more widespread and more difficult to eradicate given the nature of some private communities and the expanded territory of tri-state area gangs.
Dressed in a suit with a beard and mohawk, Monroe County District Attorney detective and drug task force leader Robert Burns described some of the difficulties law enforcers have in dealing with gangs in private communities, which often deal in drugs as well.
"Some of the issues that we run into," he told the audience, "pertain to getting confidential informants in there, the IDs you need to get through the gate."
Burns said that sometimes gangs may infiltrate the private security firms that work in these communities by tipping off suspected drug dealers.
"We come through a gate and we flash a badge to get through because we don't have a properly marked car, and by the time we get to the house that we're trying to do a drug buy, the guy at the gate's already called him and said, 'The cops are here.'"
The other issue investigators face, according to Burns, involves working with confidential informants.
"You can't always trust security," Burns said. "This is why we can't say, 'Hey, the car behind us, that's our informant. From now on when you see him can you please let him in so he can buy some coke from so-and-so's house?'"
Burns said he wanted to work with leaders to improve police access to communities, as well as improve law enforcement's authority on the private roads inside those areas.
Not every community leader saw access as a problem.
"We work with local authorities to give them access," said Cathleen LaBosco, community manager at A Pocono Country Place, which is gated.
"We're no different than any other community," said Dave Timko, general manager of Pocono Farms. "From a community standpoint," he said, "it's going to affect property values if you don't do anything about it."
He said speakers were right on point about crime and gangs. While he said he hasn't seen any rise in gangs in his area, he was realistic about it.
"Gangs are here," he said.


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Fire put out at Stony Brook University sports complex
Volunteers from the Setauket Fire Department extinguished a construction-related fire under the bleachers at the indoor sports complex at Stony Brook University Wednesday morning, school and Suffolk County fire officials said.
A university official said in an email that the fire broke out at about 11:18 a.m. in a part of the sports complex "that was largely unoccupied due to construction,"
There were no injuries and the building was evacuated, the official said.
Stony Brook University Police, Stony Brook fire marshals and the Stony Brook Volunteer Ambulance Corps responded to the scene along with the Setauket, Stony Brook, Centereach, Terryville and St. James Fire Departments, the email said.
Damage to the building is being assessed, the official said.
Lawrence Zacarese, assistant chief of police and director of the Office of Emergency Management at the university, alerted students and faculty of the fire in an email and asked that they stay clear of the area.
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Magazine Staff
Nels Rodefeld - Editor
Micah Holmes - Associate Editor
Donald Brown - Associate Editor
Contributing Staff:
Jennifer Benge, Michael Bergin, Todd Craighead, Darrin Hill, Lance Meek, Kelly Adams, Blake Podhajsky, Jena Donnell, Skylar St. Yves, Whitney Jenkins
Field Reporters
Colin Berg and Daniel Griffith
Outdoor Oklahoma editorial offices:
PO Box 53465,
Oklahoma City, OK 73152
Phone (405) 521-4632
Contact Form
Ordering Outdoor Oklahoma Magazine:
By phone: 1-800-777-0019
By mail: Send in a filled out card from the back of an Outdoor Oklahoma magazine
Or from a licensed vendor of the magazine
Subscriptions are $10 per year, $18 for two years and $25 for three years.
Single copies are $3 ($4 if mailed). Any costs of production and distribution not covered by subscription costs are borne by the sportsmen of Oklahoma through their hunting and fishing fees.
Copyright © by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. "Outdoor Oklahoma" (ISSN 0030-7106) is published bimonthly by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, 1801 N. Lincoln Blvd., Oklahoma City, OK 73105. Periodicals postage paid at Oklahoma City, OK, and additional mailing offices. Notification of address change must include both old and new addresses and zip codes, with six weeks notice.


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Bumper apple crop means one thing: Cider pressing. And lots of it.
It's been an incredible year for apples in Colorado. And that means anyone with an apple tree or a few apple trees – my friends Paula and Steve in LaPorte and Perry and Rosalind in south Larimer County and Kathleen and Carl in Loveland and and all of their friends included – has more apples than they know what to do with.
Or they would, if they weren't pretty ingenious people and home brewers. But they are, and so two years ago, Steve and Perry did a bunch of research and then Steve built a cider press. Over the last couple of autumns, they've honed cider pressing into an fine art and an assembly-line process, figuring out a quick and efficient way to reduce the picked, washed, and quartered apples (wormy parts removed) into a slurry.
That essential, but totally unglamorous, step now uses an old stainless kitchen sink and a three-quarter-horse garbage disposal. The chopped apples are dumped into the sink, pushed through the garbage disposal, and then a five-gallon-bucket of apple mash at a time goes through the press.
It takes nearly a village to make a big batch of cider, unless you've got a factory. With Steve's operation running at full efficiency, it takes two to run the cider press, three or four to chop apples, one to feed them into the grinder. And it doesn't hurt to have an eighth person just running buckets back and forth, swabbing the chopping table and keeping things relatively clean so that the operation doesn't send out an engraved invitation to every yellowjacket nest in five counties. Plus a crew of eight people is generally pretty grateful if there are yet a few more people cooking something up in the background. Cider pressing, of course, can't even begin until after those apple trees get picked, which is a multi-week labor of love and muscle-straining itself.
It was fun, messy and exhausting. We made cinnamon doughnuts, pumpkin biscotti, and then cooked a stew over Steve and Paula's firepit. This year I was thrilled that crabapples from my own tree will be part of one batch. I don't brew, but I've chopped and cleaned and picked most years and this year, helped to work the press, which involves getting coated in apple mash up past my elbows, scooping it into the pressing form as another person pours it from the other side of the press.
The pressed juice gets put into sanitized glass carboys, dosed with yeast and left to ferment. My part of the cider pressing process, other than helping with cleanup and eating Paula's Dutch-oven stew, is done. I know that at some point the cider gets bottled and caped and set in the dark, cool basement of Steve and Paula's four-level garage/workshop, another "little" project they built, again mostly by hand and themselves. Then, over the next few months, a biochemical magic happens.
The next time I see that apple juice, it'll be sparkling, crisp, and convivially alcoholic, tasting of apples and autumn sunshine and a long, messy day of serious fun.


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Campground Reviews is now Available through the RV LIFE App on iPhones, iPads, and Android Devices.
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1 RV Park near Tlaltetelco (San Miguel Tlaltetelco), Morelos
Atlatlahucan, Morelos 1.33 miles SW
San Juan Texcalpan, Morelos 2.9 miles SW
Totolapan, Morelos 3.1 miles NW
Colonia San Francisco, Morelos 3.99 miles SW
Cuauhtempan (San Andr�s Cuauhtempan), Morelos 4.12 miles NW
We did however find 1 campgrounds within 25 miles of Tlaltetelco (San Miguel Tlaltetelco). You can also find a list of cities with campgrounds or RV Parks near Tlaltetelco (San Miguel Tlaltetelco) in the left hand column.
Calle El Paraiso s/n Atlacholoaya Xochitepec, Morelos 62790 (map) | Click To View Phone
Sites: 150 | Recent Rate: $$$$ | 1 Reviews
|Clean Restrooms:
|Clean Showers:
Feb 2010 - $32.00
GPS Coordinates: 18.76469 N, 99.22194 W. The owners of this campground were perfect hosts: They turned what could have been a totally miserable experience into something wonderful. Because of heavy, unseasonable rains, we got stuck in the mud trying to back into our space. The owner was kind and let us park in the middle of his road and use a nearby faucet and outlet. We also had a great Wi-Fi connection in that location. He then repaired the road problem by buying a load of gravel, so we were able to get out. When he found out that we wanted to use his park as a base for exploring Mexico City, he contacted a guide who was already taking some other guests. The seven of us were able to share the cost of hiring the guide and renting his van. We also had a really fun bonfire. The campground was very homey with beautiful landscaping. The kids loved the garden maze and playground. It was a little cold to swim, but the pool was beautiful and very clean. The owners sold beer and basic groceries. On the down side, the bathhouses could use a little paint and some repairs. The road into the park was also extremely bumpy and narrow with a tight turn into the gate (locked when we got here). But once you were through the gate, the place was delightful. The owner speaks excellent English, and he and his wife were both friendly and hospitable. By the way, the owner mentioned that he had trouble grounding his wiring properly. Although we didn't have problems with the electricity, you might want to be careful with your electronics. - Family on the road


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"People think we're not emotionally capable, let alone physically capable, of carrying this out," says Jerri Lyons. "Well, what were we doing before when we weren't supposedly able to take care of people?"
Lyons is making tea in the small cottage she shares with her husband in a leafy glade in Sebastopol. Bookshelves overspill, a computer is crammed into a nook and there is no room for a dining set, so Lyons sets the teacups on her massage table, which, in any case, is multipurpose.
"We use it to turn people during seminars," she says. "We use it for reiki, and we also lend it to families that want to have a showing at home."
What she means by "a showing" is a wake. But Lyons, a 57-year-old former Costco rep and café owner, is not an undertaker, or, in her euphemistic parlance, a "well-intended grief choreographer." In fact, there is as yet no title for what she does, which is to teach people about their right to a home funeral and how to prepare the body for it.
There's an alternative-death movement fomenting in Northern California, one that leaves the funeral industry out of the picture altogether. Proponents of home funerals and of green burials, wherein bodies are interred in natural environments and in ways that promote decomposition, insist that this country's "death-denying tradition," in Lyons' term, is not merely costly but corrosive to body and spirit, to land and communities. Fear and doubt, they say, crept into the space left when we handed death to others, and our attendant helplessness supports the multibillion-dollar death-care industry. And they know, even if we don't yet, just how badly we want to bury our own dead.
"We're always afraid of the unknown, until we've been exposed to it and seen that it isn't frightening," says Lyons, proffering several fat albums containing photographs of former clients: dark-haired Donna, who stenciled her own casket before dying of a brain tumor at 32; Bernd, who also died of cancer, lying in bed, wearing a prayer shawl, his mouth curled in an easy smile. There is nothing ghoulish or grotesque about the images; there is neither rictus nor putrefaction. Instead, there's a 3-year-old in foot-pajamas peering at Aunt Donna, lain out after death in her own bedroom.
There's also a picture of Carolyn Whiting, who died suddenly of respiratory failure in 1994 and whose friends, Lyons says, "were simply not ready to let her go."
It turned out that they did not have to. Convening at Whiting's home the night of her death, Lyons and others learned that she had left instructions as to how she wanted to be cared for. "She did not want to be turned over to a mortuary," Lyons says, "but rather wanted her friends to bring her body home if she was in the hospital, and prepare her body."
Lyons admits that they were caught off guard. "I don't think this would have occurred to us. At all," she says. "We, like everyone else I talk to about home funerals, would have asked, 'Is that legal?' "
Home preparation of the deceased, without an undertaker's involvement, is legal in every state but four. Today there are books (such as Lyons' "Creating Home Funerals" and Lisa Carlson's "Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love") that give detailed instructions in after-death care. At the time, Whiting's friends winged it: They took her body home, bathed and perfumed her, picked out clothing, held a wake, and then loaded Whiting into a van and drove her to the crematory.
"It was so helpful to us, to deal with our shock and our grief, and in such a loving, beautiful way to celebrate her life," says Lyons, who went on to found Final Passages, a nonprofit educational program, and Home and Family Funerals, a service wherein Lyons is paid as a "death-midwife," helping the dying and their families with everything from preparing the body to filing paperwork. She works on a sliding scale, but says a full cremation with her facilitation could cost $750. She estimates that in the last 10 years she's helped more than 250 people "pass over."
"A person, their body doesn't immediately look white as a ghost, or change rapidly," Lyons says. "People think they're going to start decomposing instantly. And that's not so."
As she teaches in seminars around the country, the body can lie in state at home for up to three days, and perhaps longer, provided measures are taken within the first six to 12 hours. The body should be well washed, especially the genitals, with warm, soapy water; the abdomen should be pressed to expel any waste. After the body is dried and dressed, ice (preferably dry but regular will do), which has been wrapped in grocery bags and then cloth, should be placed beneath the torso to keep the organs cool, as these are the first parts of the body to break down. The body should be kept in a cool room. If the person dies with his mouth open, which can be disconcerting to visitors, a scarf may be looped beneath the chin and tied around the head until the mouth sets shut. Similarly, eyes may be closed by gently weighing them down with small bags filled with rice or sand. The casket can be decorated, and a memorial display set up, plain or fancy. One family Lyons helped watched a video with their departed father that he'd rented but had not had a chance to see; another put hiking boots on dad and wheeled him into the woods for a final "hiking trip to heaven."
These people were able to take a deep breath and do what needed to be done. Others need hand-holding. Lyons recently helped a family whose belief in anthroposophy (the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner) dictated that the father's body be kept at home for three days, surrounded by loved ones, read to and cared for. This frightened his teenage daughter.
"She did not come in the room as we were bathing him," Lyons says, "but eventually she came in and started asking questions, and started feeling really relaxed and comfortable." So comfortable that a while later she had her friends over. "They were in the other room, talking and being normal teenagers. It was all a part of family life."
Feeling the body lose its warmth, seeing the tension leave the face, being present for the transition from life to death, Lyons says, helps us to accept that the person is gone. "The actual doing does help, because you're moving through your grief with a process, a ritual," she says. "You're present to it not just with your mind but with your senses . You're not escaping, or pretending it didn't happen, or getting busy doing something else."
Northern California was the site of an earlier revolt against the funeral industry, when Oakland resident Jessica Mitford wrote her scathing 1963 exposé, "The American Way of Death." In updating the book for a revised edition published posthumously in 1998, Mitford found that, though consumers had put the brakes on burials, they were still being taken for a ride. "Cremation, once the best hope for a low-cost simple getaway, has become increasingly expensive," she wrote in her new introduction. "[M]orticians are fast developing techniques for upgrading this procedure into a full-fig funeral."
The "full-fig" or fancy-dress funeral in America includes embalming, whether or not one chooses cremation, so the body will have a lifelike appearance in its coffin, which will be metal. After the viewing, those who choose cremation will be transferred to a burnable container and their ashes transferred to an urn, such as the gold-plated Olympus model that Forest Lawn Memorial Parks and Mortuaries sells for $5,000. Those being buried will have their coffin placed in a concrete vault to ensure that the ground cover does not buckle, thus maintaining the putting-green uniformity of most cemeteries. Or vaults and urns may be placed in a mausoleum, for which there is a perpetual-care fee. These final dispositions typically cost $8,000, though can easily run to $10,000, $20,000 or more.
"If you ask people, they don't want any of this stuff," says Joe Sehee as he speed-hikes up a shady path in Mill Valley. "Half of what they spend money on is because they think they have to because it's required by law, mainly caskets and embalming fluid. That just angers me so much, because that's really some toxic stuff that no one should be exposed to, let alone put in the ground. And it doesn't serve any purpose!"
Sehee reaches a crest on the 32-acre property known as Fernwood and takes in the view: the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and a necklace of multimillion-dollar homes on a nearby ridge. This is prime Marin County real estate, for which one of Sehee's partners in Fernwood paid $495,000 in 2003, a figure that will no doubt make developers keen. But the Fernwoodians do not plan to build on the land, and couldn't even if they wanted to, because there are bodies buried beneath the grounds of this former cemetery. They plan to bury more.
Fernwood is the nation's second commercial "green" cemetery, which means only natural burial techniques are used: no embalming fluid; biodegradable burial containers such as wood or a simple shroud; the vertical headstone replaced with a flat rock or a tree—or nothing, as a loved one's location is available by global positioning satellite. Since its opening in August, 1,000 people have requested a tour.
Sehee took a circuitous route to get here. In 1998, IBM recruited him to lead a research project examining how big ideas are born. The following year, he began to do consulting work for Tyler Cassity, who wanted to open up Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which he'd just purchased, to the community. They started by screening a Rudolph Valentino film against the side of a mausoleum; other charitable events followed; the cemetery wound up on Los Angeles magazine's "101 Sexiest People, Places and Things in L.A." list, and Sehee saw how easily life thrived in a place assumed to be reserved for the dead.
Which is when he got his own big idea: to combine landscape conservation and natural burial. Cassity encouraged Sehee to run with it, and so he did—right into someone who'd done it before. In 1996 Dr. Billy Campbell founded Memorial EcoSystems, which seeks to establish memorial parks that will save and restore wildlands, as well as Ramsey Creek Preserve, the nation's first commercial green cemetery, in South Carolina. Sehee says he then "played yentl" for Campbell and Cassity.
"Billy's incredibly altruistic, has donated land and money to conservation efforts, but he's had this idea since 1996 and has never really been able to make any traction," Sehee says. "He was looking for a partner within the industry, and in this industry there's no more progressive element than Tyler, really. Tyler has allowed us to get behind enemy lines, and he's absolutely integral to this concept."
Sehee, a former Jesuit lay minister as well as the former Los Angeles-based rollerblading lounge singer known as Joey Cheezhee, acknowledges that it's an odd partnership. "We fight a lot," he says. "Billy's a super-purist. Tyler understands the economics of the industry. Billy Campbell has done 40 burials in seven years it was an ecological prototype, not a business prototype. That's what this is."
Their business model is threefold: natural burial techniques; an endowment fund dedicated to ecological restoration as opposed to typical cemetery maintenance, such as the $15,000 a month Cassity spends watering the lawn at Hollywood Forever; and a conservation easement for the land, so that it cannot be developed in the future.
Although Fernwood is owned outright by one of Cassity's holdings, Sehee says they'd rather the land itself be owned by a nonprofit such as the National Audubon Society, or a government agency such as the Park Service, any organization with a mandate if not the money to protect land and wildlife. "Think of another idea where you can generate money by having land stay fallow," he says. "Our vision is to sort of be concessionaires, almost like the inverse of mining. Instead of paying for extraction rights, we're paying for insertion rights, but then we have money set aside to do ecological restoration and keep the land up forever. Then we have this for-profit management that operates the facility, digs the holes, builds the trails, markets the facility and moves on as this thing fills up. We can use the concept to, hopefully, restore other land. Our goal is a million acres over the next 30 years."
Sehee nods at the homes across the canyon. "Guess who some of the first customers will be to buy this property?" he asks. "All those people who want to preserve the ridge top, who live here. Those are the people who've been approaching us."
As if to illustrate his point, a family and their dogs pass by. They may be folks from the area out for a weekend walk, as Fernwood is open to the public, or they may be clients picking out their final resting spots, which they can mark with little flags.
"The people [we're] talking to are in their 40s and 50s who would never prearrange, but they know this place is going to be filled up in five or six years," says Sehee. "They also know that if they help do this, it's enlightened self-interest—they're keeping the space open for their community. Mrs. Jones is keeping her property value up by buying space to be buried here."
It's not just Mrs. Jones who's interested. When an article about Ramsey Creek Preserve appeared in the July/August 2004 issue of the AARP Bulletin, the AARP website polled readers, asking: "Which type of burial is most appealing?" Only 8.1% wanted a traditional cemetery burial; 18.6% picked cremation, while 2.9% went for "exotic burial," such as being shot into space. The rest—70.4%—chose green burial.
Which is not surprising, considering that a sizable number of AARP's 35 million members are baby boomers, a generation that never met a ritual it didn't want to retool. These are the folks who wrote their own marriage vows and demanded home birth and hospices, and now that they're burying parents and considering their own final arrangements, they're looking for alternatives to being pumped with chemicals that demean the body and degrade the earth, and caskets that cost as much as cars. Lawsuits filed in recent years, after the buildup of anaerobic bacteria in bodies in "sealer caskets" caused corpses to explode, forcing the liquefied remains to flow down the fronts of mausoleum crypts, have done similarly little to endear them to the industry
"Universally, almost all Americans are dissatisfied with death-care options," Sehee says. "This article in AARP came out, and we realized it's religious traditionalists, it's conservatives, it's outdoors enthusiasts. Evangelical Christians love the shroud burial concept. It's obviously been part of the Jewish tradition, the Bahai tradition. It's the way most cultures buried their own until 130 years ago."
Although one does not imagine that there was a whole lot of profit in the graveyard business back in 1875, funeral arrangements and cemeteries currently generate $11 billion a year in revenue, according to the National Funeral Directors Assn., though numbers vary widely, with some estimates as high as $20 billion. The industry is dominated by just three conglomerates—Service Corp. International, Alderwoods (formerly the Loewen Group) and Stewart Enterprises.
Robyn Sadowsky, a director for corporate communication at Service Corp. International, says the traditional funeral industry is well aware of the alt-death trend. After directing inquiries to a few industry websites (where there is no information on either green or natural burial), she says the 1,800 funeral homes in the SCI network have a sole mandate: "Our role as funeral care providers is to celebrate the life of the person who has passed on, and to do it in a way that they would have liked, as well as their family."
She mentions several recent funerals that were far from traditional, such as one that included a procession of vintage cars, and another in which a person's ashes rode to the cemetery in the sidecar of a Harley-Davidson. She also mentions cremation "wreaths" that, when tossed on the water, slowly release the ashes.
And if, say, a woman went to an SCI funeral home and requested that her husband not be embalmed and casketed, but simply wrapped in a shroud and buried green?
"We would try to accommodate that," Sadowsky says, "but you have to think, what are the shroud regulations in that state? Where is the closest green cemetery? Are there refrigeration issues? There are legal and health considerations, and we have to look into all of those. A shroud and a green burial may sound dignified, and respectful of the environment, and everything the person wanted, but what do we have to do to accommodate that wish?"
Sehee is skeptical. "There's this notion of socially disruptive technology or innovation," he says. "These are ideas that completely revolutionize industries that the industries weren't interested in, because you're dealing with lower margins and problem customers. You're talking about taking away all their opportunities to make money on floral arrangements and big headstones and $7,000 caskets—why would they want to get involved in that?"
Not that it's cheap to buy at Fernwood. The least expensive burial of "cremains" is $1,000, burial of a body is $3,000, and all interments require a one-time 10% endowment fee to preserve and restore the land. Prime spots on the property can fetch three times as much. But it's still considerably less than at Forest Lawn, where a mid-range casket alone costs more than $9,000.
"Our bet is that this is the future, this is the way people are going to want to be buried," says Sehee. "You'll probably see a lot of green-washing [in the funeral industry]. You'll see people say they're doing green burials, and there's a couple of acres out back where you don't have to have a casket and use embalming fluid, which is great, but they'll never do conservation."
Dr. Billy Campbell calls late one night from South Carolina, saying he's "pretty tired," having hand-dug a grave earlier in the day. How deep should a grave be?
"You want the nutrients in the human body to get to the surface, so you don't want to dig too deep—I learned that the hard way," says Campbell, an environmentalist and medical doctor who started to see how out of whack the burying business had become when he lost his father.
The funeral director "was talking about the vault, and he said, 'It'll take 20,000 pounds per square foot,' " Campbell says. "And I can remember saying to him, 'We're trying to protect the corpse from a direct nuclear strike or a runaway tractor-trailer, but what's the point? What is it we're protecting him from?' And you know what it was? Nature. That's the thing. We don't want the body to be violated by natural processes. I thought, this is stupid, and not only that, it's wasteful."
Mary Woodsen, a member of Commemorative Nature Preserves of New York, an organization that advocates memorial nature preserves, calculated three years ago what American cemeteries inter annually in addition to bodies: 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid, 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete, 104,272 tons of steel, 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, and 30 million board feet of hardwoods. Although the Cremation Assn. of North America predicts the national cremation rate will rise to 35% by 2010, "people don't really actively save land when they're cremated," Campbell says, "they just don't waste land."
Campbell began to look for examples of natural burial, and found them in the tall grass prairies of Iowa and Ohio. "The most diverse places were the old pioneer cemeteries," he says. "It wasn't deep-plowed, so the old cemeteries became some of the best areas for remnant prairies. If that's by accident, why can't we do it intentionally now and turn this into a powerful [conservation] tool? You've got a $20-billion-a-year industry, you've got baby boomers—you can create places that aren't just cemeteries but where you learn about plants, and they become these multidimensional social spaces, and, oh yeah, you can be buried there too."
Campbell says that as the only doctor in the town of Westminster, he's taken some flak. "My favorite line was, 'You know, Doc, you going into the cemetery business is like a vet who got a taxidermy license and put a sign in the window that says, 'Either way, you get your dog back.' " But he's also seen the healing that happens when the grief-stricken get their hands in the dirt—as recently as this afternoon, at the burial of a 44-year-old man who died in a car accident two days before Christmas, leaving a wife and four daughters.
"If you're alienated from nature and someone dies and you fix them up like they're not really dead, and you spend a lot of money and put them in a box in a box in a box and put turf on top of them and make it like it never happened, that's normative," he says. "But there is this potential for people to be transformed, where you see where someone is buried, like today . The pallbearers actually lower the casket into the ground, and people throw dirt on top of the casket. It's amazing when you hear the dirt bouncing off the top of the casket—people break down sometimes and will actually wail. There's one guy who was there today, he was crying and digging, crying and digging, and I think that probably was therapeutic. We had one lady who came and helped dig her mom's grave and said, 'I could be back on the couch popping Xanax with the rest of them, but I'd rather be out here doing something for Mom.' "
After the AARP article ran, Ramsey Creek Preserve received 6,000 e-mails from people asking how they could be buried this way. They were not, as Campbell expected, "my fellow granola tree-hugging hippie people."
"We bury people in overalls, playing country music and throwing cigarettes in the grave," he says. "I had one guy who was buried there who said, 'I love the woods, I just don't like environmentalists.' It wasn't an ideological thing for him. It does appeal to free-market Republicans who want to see a business do this and see people make individual choices. It appeals to people who are hard-core environmentalists. We've seen a lot of support from evangelical Christians, who are talking about the Rapture and the whole nine yards, who think this is more in keeping with what the Bible says. It's like Genesis 3:19: Dust are thou and to dust thou shall return.
"I'll be 50 years old this year," Campbell says, "and I would rather protect a million acres than make a gazillion dollars, and whatever we have to do to make that happen, that's what I'm going to do."
It may soon be happening in Southern California. In December, Campbell and Sehee met with city and cemetery officials about taking over a 1,400-acre parcel in Chatsworth, as well as several pieces of land in Orange County.
"Remember when your grandfather said, 'Just put me in a pine box'?" asks Tyler Cassity. "We're going to."
It's late afternoon, and Cassity is sitting on a low, crumbling wall that runs between ancient slate tombstones. It is a section of Fernwood that was built for employees of the Sausalito Land & Ferry Co. back in the 1880s but has gone largely unused for the last 50 years.
If his partners are concerned with environmentalism and big ideas, Cassity is obsessed with ritual and remembrance. Part of this is reactionary: His father and brother sold pre-need insurance products to the funeral industry, and 10 years ago he reluctantly followed them into the business, albeit with his own twist—digital archiving, the sorts of life-story videos that now are commonplace but which, at the time, were considered in very bad taste. Cassity recalls one mortuary in his hometown of St. Louis running ads on the radio that said, "We don't have the video gimmick!"
But Cassity had seen the effect that memories had on mourners. "I did one [video], and went to a funeral and sat up in the balcony and saw it," he says. "It was a compilation of photos, and I saw it work on people—saw them laugh, saw them cry, saw them grow closer and need to be consoled, but it was catharsis."
Catharsis, he says, is what was lost when the funeral industry took over ritual. "The funeral director was just a cabinetmaker," Cassity says of the layman who built the caskets, and later learned to embalm, and over the course of 100 years remade himself. "He took the visitation away first, saying it was very unsafe, very unhealthy in this culture of science and medicine—'You cannot be around that body'—and he took the body and the visitation into his home. From the minister he took the service. He had a parlor and a chapel. And then he directed. It's key that he directs, because he's the expert, he knows, and therefore you have to listen to him, like you listen to the doctor and the priest . [But] the cabinetmaker never stopped making cabinets. He's just selling boxes—that's all he cares about."
At Hollywood Forever, Cassity sees how crucial the box is to the living, how it becomes the final manifestation of their devotion. He sees people overspend and attempt to care for the deceased in ways that are injudicious. He knows all about the class-action suits and sealer caskets. And yet
"I do it," he says. Prompting the question: Did he get into the green cemetery business to expand or to atone?
"It's very selfish," he says. "Walking through those gates [at Hollywood Forever], one of the things I knew was that I couldn't change the business because I had no idea what it was . But I also knew it would teach me what I did not know, and it did, in the best way possible—and that was with the Buddhists, the Armenians, the Russians, the Latins, everyone who brought their traditions with them and still cared. Neptune seems like the right thing to do, but it's not."
He refers to the Neptune Society, which offers burials at sea. The $1,200 to $1,800 fee can be prepaid, and is all-inclusive: The client dies, his or her arranger calls Neptune, a van comes and collects the body, and the body is gone, with no more fuss than setting a couch on the curb for Goodwill. Soon after, the body is cremated and the ashes are dropped into the ocean. For a nominally higher fee, loved ones may receive the ashes, and for more money still, attend the at-sea burial. Many people choose Neptune because it gives them a modicum of control over the uncontrollable, it lifts the burden from family and friends during a difficult time, it seems like the right thing to do.
"It's very socially acceptable to call the Neptune Society. It sounds like a nice name," says Cassity. "But all those hard parts, those are the good parts."
Cassity has now tasked himself to convince people who've rejected burial that it's safe to get back in the water, so to speak. Since it opened, Fernwood has interred a dozen bodies and cremains, and performed direct cremation (meaning without a funeral home's involvement) in the onsite crematory of perhaps two dozen more.
But the numbers are of no concern to Cassity. Death is not a trend, he says, despite his agent calling him, hoping to cash in on the recent seepage of death into the popular culture with books such as "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach, and the HBO series "Six Feet Under," on which Cassity has consulted. "Death is not going to just come and go," he says. "People do think it's sexy right now, and 'Six Feet Under' was sexy when it came out, but it's sexy because it's emerged and it's naked, and it's the last naked thing. Sex and death—and sex ends in 'the little death.' "
He stands up in the graveyard; it's getting dark. He says his wish for immortality, and his realization that "everyone had that wish," are what led him here.
"That's when I moved out of the cabinetmaker's beautiful parlor and into the cemetery," he says. "We're supposed to preserve memories. That's our task, whoever we are."
For More Information
Home preparation of the deceased, without an undertaker's involvement, is legal in every state but New York, Louisiana, Indiana and Nebraska.
Final Passages, based in Sebastopol, Calif., holds educational seminars on home funerals; the next workshop is Feb. 17-20 in Seattle. It also offers literature about dying and death, including its own handbooks on home funerals, pre-planning and final disposition. (707) 824-0268; http://www.finalpassages.org
The Redwood Funeral Society is a nonprofit consumer organization, in Forestville, Calif., whose mission is "to protect and defend individual choice for dignified, ethical and fairly priced death care, through education, referral and advocacy." (707) 568-7684; http://www.funeral.org
Thresholds Home and Family-Directed Funerals, near San Diego, offers direct cremation and burial, as well as classes and events. (619) 390-1411; http://www.thresholds.us
Funeral Consumers Alliance is a federation of nonprofit consumer information societies that helps people make end-of-life choices. (800) 765-0107; http://www.funerals.org
Consumer Guide to Funeral and Cemetery Purchases is available free from the California Department of Consumer Affairs' Cemetery and Funeral Bureau, Suite 3080, 400 R Street, Sacramento, CA 95814. (800) 952-5210; http://www.cfb.ca.gov/funeral.htm
Information about the documentary "A Family Undertaking" can be found online at http://www.pbs.org/pov/pofv2004/afamilyundertaking
For more information about green burial sites in this article: Fernwood, (415) 383-7100, http://www.foreverfernwood.com ; Ramsey Creek Preserve, (864) 647-7798, www.memorialecosystems.com


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GASTONIA � Auburn University�s ninth annual Home Run Derby will have former Ashbrook High star and Atlanta Braves infielder Wes Helms among the participants.
The derby, which takes place at Auburn�s Plainsman Park on Friday night, will feature former Auburn star current Braves pitcher Tim Hudson in addition to Helms, Braves pitcher Kris Medlen, former Auburn standout and current Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Evan Crawford, current Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Matt Guerrier and former Auburn standouts Chris Bootcheck, Dan Gamache, Ryan Jenkins and Trent Mummey.
Helms, a 1994 Ashbrook High graduate, is a 13-year major league veteran who lives in Birmingham, Ala., and didn�t play in 2012 due to a heel injury. A member of the three Braves� National League East championship teams, Helms also has played for the Milwaukee Brewers, Miami Marlins and Philadelphia Phillies.
Pro football
Brandon Spikes (Crest 2006) and the New England Patriots (4-3) visit the St. Louis Rams at 1 p.m. Sunday. Spikes has 40 tackles in seven games as a linebacker this season after making a season-high 10 tackles in last Sunday�s 29-26 overtime win over the New York Jets.
Lamar Holmes (Hunter Huss 2008) and the Atlanta Falcons (6-0) visit the Philadephia Eagles at 1 p.m. Sunday. Holmes, an offensive tackle, has been been inactive all six games this season.
College football
Four former local standouts have helped Gardner-Webb to a 1-6, 0-2 start as its hosts Big South Conference rival VMI Saturday at 1:30 p.m. in its homecoming game.
For the Bulldogs, Trever Austin (Crest 2011) has six field goals and 13 extra points for a team-high 31 points, Michael Cunningham (Lincolnton 2012) has eight tackles, Jonathan Sherrill (Lincolnton 2012) has seven tackles and Dylan Hopper (Crest 2012) has started all seven games at right offensive guard.
Also celebrating homecoming is North Carolina (3-4, 1-3) against Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference rival Norfolk State Saturday at 1:30 p.m.
For the Aggies, Larry Raper (Shelby 2009) has 260 all-purpose yards including 222 with one touchdown on eight receptions and Major Kay (North Lincoln 2012) has played in one game.
At Wingate, five former local standouts can help the Bulldogs (5-3, 3-1) remain atop the South Atlantic Conference with Saturday�s 1:30 p.m. home game against Lenoir-Rhyne.
Josh Clawson (Clover 2009) has 17 catches for 143 yards and one touchdown, Hamilton Bradley (Ashbrook 2007) has 14 tackles, Nortavius Otis (Ashbrook 20120 has seven tackles, Bradley Carpenter (Lincolnton 2011) has played in eight games and Will Poteat (West Lincoln 2010) has started seven games on the offensive line.
And at Elizabeth City State, Tyler Gill (Burns 2008) and the Vikings (5-3, 4-1) lead the Northern Division of the CIAA entering Saturday�s 1 p.m. home game against Virginia Union. Gill has one tackle in seven games for ECSU.
Coming up: Nov. 8 � 2012-13 Women�s college basketball preview, Nov. 15 � 2012-13 Men�s college basketball preview, Dec. 13 � 2012 College soccer review, Dec. 20 � 2012 College football review.
Richard Walker: 704-869-1841; twitter.com/JRWalk22


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Mount Evans Wilderness
IntroductionThe United States Congress designated the Mount Evans Wilderness (map) in 1980 and it now has a total of 73,459 acres. All of this wilderness is located in Colorado and is managed by the Forest Service.
DescriptionMount Evans Wilderness is located approximately 40 miles west of Denver. The Mt. Evans Scenic Byway ascends a non-wilderness corridor into the center of the Wilderness. The road, two 14,000 foot peaks (14,264' Mt. Evans and 14,060' Mt. Bierstadt), and the close proximity to Denver have contributed to very heavy use. Despite the likelihood of encountering other users, the area offers several unique features worthy of a visit. Evidence of past glaciers can be seen in the steep granite cirques and glacial moraines surrounding the high peaks. The Wilderness contains small regions of arctic tundra, rare south of the Arctic Circle. Unlike typical Colorado alpine tundra, which is dry and brittle once the snow recedes, arctic tundra holds numerous small pools of water. Vegetation ranges from lower spruce-fir and lodgepole forests, through 2,000-year-old Bristlecone pines and krummholz near treeline, to delicate alpine vegetation reaching all the way to the highest peaks. Deer and elk inhabit the sub-alpine areas, and bighorn sheep and mountain goats are common above treeline. Special protection for the Mount Evans area began 1956 with the designation of the approximately 5,880 acre Abyss Lake Scenic Area under the precursor of the Wilderness Act, the "U-Regulations" of 1939. This was followed in 1980 by the creation of the Mount Evans Wilderness under the Colorado Wilderness Act. Mount Evans is accessed by a 110 mile trail network, 84 miles of which are within the Wilderness boundary.
Planning to Visit the Mount Evans Wilderness?
- Print a fact sheet
- General things to consider when visiting any wilderness
- Regulations, Permits
- Contact the Forest Service
- Visit the National Forest wilderness website
Leave No TraceHow to follow the seven standard Leave No Trace principles differs in different parts of the country (desert vs. Rocky Mountains). Click on any of the principles listed below to learn more about how they apply in the Mount Evans Wilderness.
- Plan Ahead and Prepare
- Travel and Camp on Durable Surfaces
- Dispose of Waste Properly
- Leave What You Find
- Minimize Campfire Impacts
- Respect Wildlife
- Be Considerate of Other Visitors


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Three of the newest additions to the talk show genre have been out and about this week in the city talk show queen Oprah Winfrey once called home.
Katie Couric – whose New York-based "Katie" talk show premieres September 10 on ABC – attended an ABC luncheon in her honor Monday at Roof in The Wit hotel. The former "Today" show co-host and "CBS Evening News" anchor took part in a Q & A with guests at the luncheon.
"Steve Harvey" host Steve Harvey celebrated his son's 21st birthday at Japonais Sunday and returned for lunch Tuesday. The comedian and "Family Feud" host is taping his talk show, which premieres September 4 on NBC, at NBC Tower.
Jenny McCarthy -- who will host a late night talk show for VH1 beginning in January -- co-hosted the Michigan Avenue magazine party Tuesday at Untitled. McCarthy is featured on the cover of the September issue.
Twitter @aboutluisgomez


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Malcolm X: the last speeches
Pathfinder, 1989 - History - 189 pages
"Any kind of movement for freedom of Black people based solely within the confines of America is absolutely doomed to fail. "Speeches and interviews from the last two years of his life.
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Publishers foreword by Steve Clark 7
Two December 1964 interviews
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Abdullah African continent Afro-American Unity Alabama Allah American white Audubon Ballroom Bandung Conference Bass believe Black Muslim movement brotherhood brothers and sisters civil rights Congo Crane criminal drop bombs Elijah Muham Elijah Muhammad says Elijah Muhammad teaches exploitation February 15 France French French West Indies Ghana give going Harlem hate Honorable Elijah Muhammad house Negro human integration involved Klux Klan Laughter and applause Lena Horne live look Malcolm X masses of Black mean Mecca ment Muslim world NAACP Nation of Islam Negro Negro community never Nigeria nonviolent Organization of Afro-American ourselves police political power structure President problem Question unintelligible racist realize religion of Islam religious Rochester segregation slaves so-called Negro solution solve someone speak speeches talk tell there's thing tion token trying type of Negro Uncle United Western Hemisphere what's white liberal York