Scientists believe the world's largest garbage dump isn't on land – it is The Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a sprawling mass of waste estimated to be 90% plastic reaching a depth of 90 feet. It is a floating raft of debris that is now sprawling from the coast of California to the coast of Japan, and estimated to be twice the size of Texas!

The atheistic philosopher Karl Marx, an evolutionist and a contemporary of Charles Darwin, once called religion the "opium of the people."  In our day, however, Darwin's theories and their successors have become the "opium of the people"—dulling the mindset of the educated and uneducated alike.

More than 1 billion of the earth's nearly 6.8 billion inhabitants are chronically undernourished.  Today alone, 16,000 children starved to death or died from hunger-related causes – this is one child every five seconds!  And 2009 is predicted to be the worst year yet by far for global hunger.  For millions and millions, hope is turning to hunger.  Why?

By a coincidence of history, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born the same day--February 12, 1809. Last week marked their birth bicentennial. These history-making, world-changing men from two very different environments effected major revisions in thinking which, for better or worse, have shaped much of our modern Western culture.

Each year in January our community holds a ceremony commemorating religious freedom in America.  My wife and I have attended several of these memorials over the years.  They are celebrated here because it was in January, 1777 that Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Pendleton, George Mason, George Wythe and Thomas Ludwell Lee met at Weedon's Tavern in Fredericksburg, Virginia to discuss and eventually draft The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom.  Only six months earlier, the 13 American Colonies had declared independence from Britain.