Urban Family Communications is a multi-media communications network and outreach ministry. UFC is born from the conviction that the Black community deserves truth, more specifically, Biblical truth. We are a collection of people operating in ministry, media, and politics who are committed to one goal: the spiritual revitalization of urban communities.
UFC’s mission is: To inform and empower Black families to grow into mature disciples by wisely applying Biblical truth to our issues and interests. In short, we stand for truth, wisdom, and empowerment.
Not long ago our communities were overrun primarily by drugs and violence. Today we have a new perpetrator with which to contend… ethnicity. Increasingly, more and more Black Americans pledge allegiance to causes and people who stand blatantly opposed to God and His righteous requirements. We do it because we’ve been told our highest allegiance is to the color of our skin. Just as Esau shortsightedly traded his birthright for soup, black Americans have traded our deep, spiritual heritage for an allusion of progress that will never satisfy our souls.
UFC is designed to provide the basis for a unified movement in our country. Within this movement we believe that God still has a standard and He calls men everywhere to live by that standard. We believe the Church is still the body of Christ and an integral part of fulfilling the great commission. We believe spiritual compromise in the name of tolerance is not only ineffective but destructive. We believe the ability to think independently is an asset not a liability. We believe it’s important to celebrate our culture while not idolizing it. Finally, we believe that when the Black family turns back to Biblical truth, our communities will be transformed. When our communities are transformed, our nation will be transformed.
http://urbanfamilytalk.com/
Biology teachers often dismiss evolution
evolution.jpgAlmost a century after the famed Scopes Monkey Trial, battles over teaching evolution versus creationism in US public schools persist – but they have shifted to individual classrooms where teachers have a vast influence over whether evolution is present, a new study finds. In the courtroom, advocates for creationist thinking, or its re-packaged equivalent “intelligent design”, have lost nearly every major case in the last 40 years. While this has undoubtedly helped set a high scientific standard for state curricula, the study finds that a majority of public high school teachers are either uncomfortable with teaching evolution or doubtful of its accuracy.
“The official state content standards actually have very little impact on the way teachers teach in the classroom,” says Eric Plutzer, a political scientist from Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who co-authored the paper, which appears 27 January in Science. The major factors affecting what teachers taught were their own personal values and beliefs as well as the values and culture of their community, he adds.
Plutzer and his co-author, Michael Berkman, also of Pennsylvania State University, used a nationally representative sample of 926 public biology instructors and found that less than a third of teachers consistently crafted their lesson plans around evolution. At the same time, about 13% of teachers spent an hour or more of class time presenting creationism “in a positive light”.
Meanwhile, as the law's restrictions, including requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals, take effect, Texas women are being forced to travel greater and greater distances, at greater and greater expense, to obtain abortions. Women in rural areas, and especially undocumented immigrants, face enormous hurdles, with long travel distances that can include border checkpoints. As a result, more and more women are attempting self-induced abortions using the ulcer drug misoprostol. Though misoprostol often works, the fact that women are turning to an off-label use of an illegally obtained drug without medical care is a strong reminder that Texas Republicans were always lying when they claimed that the clinic-closing law was about women's health. [My emphasis]
Unvaccinated Amish help create largest US measles outbreak in 20 years
Some Amish missionaries from Ohio decided to go to the Philippines to do some aid work after a recent devastating typhoon.
The missionaries’ parents didn’t bother vaccinating them as children.
Nor did the missionaries bother getting vaccinated as adults.
So they went to the Philippines and brought back a very special gift for the people of Ohio: A measles outbreak that’s become the worst in the US in nearly 20 years.
And you thought the Amish were only good at making furniture.
Our own Dr. Thoma wrote previously about the growing problem of resurgent diseases in the US due to the anti-vaccine movement — a kind of birther/truther movement that is convinced vaccines cause autism (they don’t).
Apparently the Amish have traditionally low vaccination rates among their children. (And why exactly is that tolerated by the local health department the state of Ohio?) But that’s no excuse for not being vaccinated as an adult, and for not getting your shots before you go on a trip to a foreign region that’s been devastated in a disaster, which often means disease takes hold. Anyone who does international work, especially relief work, knows about getting vaccinated. Who organized this trip? Who let these people go without checking on the health situation in the Philippines, and the vaccination status of the missionaries?
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