Asteroids coming - so we need to be prepared

They declared June 30, 2015, the world's first Asteroid Day.  

Asteroid

This story has an eerie Advent feel, but it's futuristic rather than Scriptural.

It makes no sense for our increasingly dangerous world to be obsessed with the epidemic death and destruction caused by religious extremism. Instead, we must put our earth in order, because it appears we're doomed by an incoming asteroid. Although the impact date is yet to be determined, the collision will eventually occur. We've been forewarned about this catastrophe by a Russian astrophysicist. 

Unfortunately, this asteroid collision is fact and not a made for television movie, reported in the Christian Science Monitor.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2014/1208/Russian-scientist-spies-mountain-sized-asteroid-heading-our-way

Moscow - A Russian astrophysicist says his team located a huge, mountain-sized asteroid whose orbit crosses the Earth's every three years.

Even though experts say the giant object, known as 2014 UR116, poses no immediate threat of collision, its unexpected discovery underscores how little is still known about asteroids and their unpredictable orbits.

Vladimir Lipunov, a professor at Moscow State University, announced the find in "Asteroid Attack,", a short documentary posted on the website of the Russian Space Agency, on Sunday. 
Mr. Lipunov says the asteroid, which he calculates is 370 meters in diameter, could hit the Earth with an explosion 1,000 times greater than the surprise 2013 impact of a bus-sized meteor in Russia. That object entered Earth’s atmosphere over the city of Chelyabinsk, resulting in a series of ferocious blasts that blew out windows and damaged buildings for miles around.
 
In the documentary, Lipunov says it's difficult to calculate the orbit of big objects like 2014 UR116 because, as they hurtle through the solar system, their trajectories are constantly being altered by the gravitational pull of nearby planets. "We need to permanently track this asteroid, because even a small mistake in calculations could have serious consequences," he said.

There is little indication that this particular asteroid could hit Earth in the next few decades, though over a much longer period a collision looks quite likely, says Natan Esmant, an expert with the official Space Research Institute in Moscow. 

A more serious issue, he says, is the estimated 100,000 near-Earth objects, such as asteroids and comets, which can cross our planet's orbit and are large enough to be dangerous. Only about 11,000 have so far been tracked and cataloged.

"Every couple of days new ones are being discovered," he says. "Scientists have increasingly powerful tools to do this work, but there's a lot still to be done. Every object that crosses the Earth's path can be a potential threat."

Since the Chelyabinsk meteor, which came as a complete surprise to experts, scientists have been warning about the danger and trying to pool their data in order to get a clearer picture of the swarms of debris that are lurking in space. Scientists use conventional telescopes, radar and infrared detectors to hunt asteroids. The first satellite specifically designed to identify asteroids was launched last year. A movement of scientists, astronauts, musicians, and business people have launched a campaign to dramatize the danger and seek ways of protecting Earth from what seems like an inevitable destructive collision.

They declared June 30, 2015, the world's first Asteroid Day. 

Bible Scripture reinforces this astro-inevitability:

The sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from heaven,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
- Mark 13.24

But, thanks to a Russian astrophysicist and other scientists, we are forewarned about this inevitability.  

Whether the asteroid collision happens or not, the fact it, many people are tragically preoccupied with religious extremism, while the danger to our existence lies outside of our control.  

Therefore, we must put our earth in order. Humans can do this by working together for a common good, rather than wasting our time fueling polarizing ideologies. As we are now in the Liturgical season of Advent, we must prepare....

http://biblehub.com/1_thessalonians/5-2.htm....
....so cometh, as a thief in the night.

Obituary for Helen Bamber - anti torture advocate

It's sad when a person's obituary tells us all we know about a person. When I read the obituary of Helen Bamber (1925-2014), I became sad because of her death, but I had never heard of her, until after reading her obituary.

Helen Bamber 1925–2014:  The campaigner who cared for torture victims

In 1945, Helen Bamber, then 19, volunteered to help survivors of the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp. She distributed food and clothing to the few thousand remaining survivors, many of whom were emaciated and close to death. “People wanted to tell their story,” she recalled. “They would hold me and dig their fingers in and rasp this story out.” At first she didn’t know how to react, but she realized that all she could do was listen and assure them: “Your story will be told; I will be your witness.” It proved a formative experience. Over the next seven decades, Bamber became a leading campaigner for victims of human rights atrocities, helping more than 50,000 people in 90 countries. After Bergen-Belsen, she said, “I just couldn’t remain a bystander.”

Born to Jewish parents in London, Bamber grew up “in a home where the Nazi threat was drummed into her relentlessly,” said The Washington Post. “At bedtime, her father read her passages of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” After the war, she spent two years at Bergen-Belsen before returning to Britain to work with children who survived the Holocaust. In 1961, Bamber joined Amnesty International, where she “became an expert in identifying torture used for political motives in Latin America and South Africa,” said The Times(U.K.). In 1985, when British doctors said they didn’t have time to deal with the complexities of torture victims, she decided to fill the void herself, setting up the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Launched in “two disused hospital rooms with a typewriter and assistant,” the charity now helps thousands of torture victims from around the world.

“Relentless and tireless even at 80,” Bamber set up the Helen Bamber Foundation in 2005, said The Guardian (U.K). “The culmination of her life’s work,” the charity cares for torture victims as well as those who have been “brutalized by criminal gangs, trafficked for labor or sexual exploitation, or kept as slaves.” Though proud of her achievements, Bamber was always saddened by the continued need for her work. 

“If we look at the world today,” she said in 1995, “humanity seems to have learnt very little.”

Helen Bamber New York Times obituary:

Helen Bamber, whose volunteering to comfort broken survivors of a Nazi concentration camp when she was 19 inspired her to devote her next seven decades to helping more than 50,000 victims of torture in 90 countries, died on Aug. 21 in London. She was 89.

Her death was announced by the Helen Bamber Foundation, a British charity.

Started in 2005, the organization grew out of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which Ms. Bamber started in 1985. The foundation emerged from the Medical Group of the British Section of Amnesty International, which she and a small group of colleagues began in the early 1970s. The actress Emma Thompson is the current president of the Bamber foundation.

Together, through a “holistic” combination of medicine and psychological, social and physical therapies, the organizations have helped torture victims recover a sense of identity and purpose after being subjected to often unspeakable horrors: electrical shocks to genitals, beatings on the bottom of feet, nonlethal hangings.

Ms. Bamber recalled listening to a 10-year-old Bosnian girl describe seeing Serb soldiers cut off her brother’s testicles. A mother recounted the beheading of her son.

Ms. Bamber said the worst toll of torture was psychic — “the act of killing a man without dying,” a survivor once told her. Torture, she wrote in an autobiography for her foundation, constitutes “a total perversion of all that is good in human relationships.”

“It is designed to destroy not only the physical and psychological integrity of one individual, but with every blow, with every electrode, his or her family and the next generation,” she continued. “The body betrays and is often discarded, a body to be hated for its scars and injuries, a body which is a constant reminder even if there are no scars or remaining injuries.”

Her approach was to treat the whole person, often in group therapy, which she saw as giving alienated victims a sense of community. She recruited dozens of professionals to treat more than 2,000 victims a year, and worked with many patients herself as a psychotherapist — which she became through experience, she said, rather than an academic degree.

Her method involved revisiting victims’ worst horrors and letting them “vomit” them out.

“You have to move into the torture chamber with them,” she told the British newspaper The Observer in 1999. “You almost have to be tortured with them.”

The next step, she told The Irish Times in 1995, is to work with the “noble and good” qualities that can enable a victim to survive. It was enough, she said, to take a victim’s story, hold it and say, “Yes, I believe you.”

***********

Dear Helen Bamber, I regret learning about you from your obituary. I wish you were still alive and with us as people are challenged by terrible human rights violations in human sex trafficking and the humanitarian refugee crises in Syria, Turkey and Jordan, to name a few horrific situations. 

When Saint Mother Theresa died, the world lost a compassionate humanitarian. Now, with your death, we'll live in a world without the dignity and respect you demonstrated for all who are victims of torture and human rights indignities.  

May you rest in peace.  

Meanwhile, we must find a way to prevent torture and human indignities, spread by evil religious extremists intent on claiming power through their barbaric intentions and actions.

When Helen Bamber interviewed victims of Bergen-Belsen, it's likely she thought the world would never see another genocide.

Sadly, unbelievable barbarism and genocides continue in spite of all efforts to pray for world peace and teach understanding.

Helen Bamber died in London on August 21, 2014.

Only a month since she died and the world is already missing her 

I'm sorry I never had the chance to meet her.