Psalm29-35 New American Bible

29)A psalm of David.

I
Give to the LORD, you sons of God,*
give to the LORD glory and might;
2
Give to the LORD the glory due his name.
Bow down before the LORD’s holy splendor!a
II
3
The voice of the LORD* is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the LORD, over the mighty waters.
4
The voice of the LORD is power;
the voice of the LORD is splendor.b
5
The voice of the LORD cracks the cedars;
the LORD splinters the cedars of Lebanon,
6
Makes Lebanon leap like a calf,
and Sirion* like a young bull.
7
The voice of the LORD strikes with fiery flame;
8
the voice of the LORD shakes the desert;
the LORD shakes the desert of Kadesh.
9
*The voice of the LORD makes the deer dance
and strips the forests bare.
All in his Temple say, “Glory!”
III
10
The LORD sits enthroned above the flood!*c
The LORD reigns as king forever!
11
May the LORD give might to his people;*
may the LORD bless his people with peace!
30)A psalm. A song for the dedication of the Temple.* Of David.

I
2
I praise you, LORD, for you raised me up
and did not let my enemies rejoice over me.
3
O LORD, my God,
I cried out to you for help and you healed* me.
4
LORD, you brought my soul up from Sheol;
you let me live, from going down to the pit.*a
II
5
Sing praise to the LORD, you faithful;
give thanks to his holy memory.
6
For his anger lasts but a moment;
his favor a lifetime.
At dusk weeping comes for the night;
but at dawn there is rejoicing.
III
7
Complacent,* I once said,
“I shall never be shaken.”
8
LORD, you showed me favor,
established for me mountains of virtue.
But when you hid your face
I was struck with terror.b
9
To you, LORD, I cried out;
with the Lord I pleaded for mercy:
10
*“What gain is there from my lifeblood,
from my going down to the grave?
Does dust give you thanks
or declare your faithfulness?
11
Hear, O LORD, have mercy on me;
LORD, be my helper.”
IV
12
You changed my mourning into dancing;
you took off my sackcloth
and clothed me with gladness.c
13
So that my glory may praise you
and not be silent.
O LORD, my God,
forever will I give you thanks.
31)For the leader. A psalm of David.

I
2
In you, LORD, I take refuge;a
let me never be put to shame.
In your righteousness deliver me;
3
incline your ear to me;
make haste to rescue me!
Be my rock of refuge,
a stronghold to save me.
4
For you are my rock and my fortress;b
for your name’s sake lead me and guide me.
5
Free me from the net they have set for me,
for you are my refuge.
6
*Into your hands I commend my spirit;c
you will redeem me, LORD, God of truth.
7
You hate those who serve worthless idols,
but I trust in the LORD.
8
I will rejoice and be glad in your mercy,
once you have seen my misery,
[and] gotten to know the distress of my soul.d
9
You will not abandon me into enemy hands,
but will set my feet in a free and open space.
II
10
Be gracious to me, LORD, for I am in distress;
affliction is wearing down my eyes,
my throat and my insides.
11
My life is worn out by sorrow,
and my years by sighing.
My strength fails in my affliction;
my bones are wearing down.e
12
To all my foes I am a thing of scorn,
and especially to my neighbors
a horror to my friends.
When they see me in public,
they quickly shy away.f
13
I am forgotten, out of mind like the dead;
I am like a worn-out tool.*
14
I hear the whispers of the crowd;
terrors are all around me.*
They conspire together against me;
they plot to take my life.
15
But I trust in you, LORD;
I say, “You are my God.”g
16
My destiny is in your hands;
rescue me from my enemies,
from the hands of my pursuers.
17
Let your face shine on your servant;h
save me in your mercy.
18
Do not let me be put to shame,
for I have called to you, LORD.
Put the wicked to shame;
reduce them to silence in Sheol.
19
Strike dumb their lying lips,
which speak arrogantly against the righteous
in contempt and scorn.i
III
20
How great is your goodness, Lord,
stored up for those who fear you.
You display it for those who trust you,
in the sight of the children of Adam.
21
You hide them in the shelter of your presence,
safe from scheming enemies.
You conceal them in your tent,
away from the strife of tongues.j
22
Blessed be the LORD,
marvelously he showed to me
his mercy in a fortified city.
23
Though I had said in my alarm,
“I am cut off from your eyes.”k
Yet you heard my voice, my cry for mercy,
when I pleaded with you for help.
24
Love the LORD, all you who are faithful to him.
The LORD protects the loyal,
but repays the arrogant in full.
25
Be strong and take heart,
all who hope in the LORD.
32)Of David. A maskil.

I
Blessed is the one whose fault is removed,
whose sin is forgiven.
2
Blessed is the man to whom the LORD imputes no guilt,
in whose spirit is no deceit.
II
3
Because I kept silent,* my bones wasted away;
I groaned all day long.b
4
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength withered as in dry summer heat.
Selah
5
Then I declared my sin to you;
my guilt I did not hide.c
I said, “I confess my transgression to the LORD,”
and you took away the guilt of my sin.
Selah
6
Therefore every loyal person should pray to you
in time of distress.
Though flood waters* threaten,
they will never reach him.d
7
You are my shelter; you guard me from distress;
with joyful shouts of deliverance you surround me.
Selah
III
8
I will instruct you and show you the way you should walk,
give you counsel with my eye upon you.
9
Do not be like a horse or mule, without understanding;
with bit and bridle their temper is curbed,
else they will not come to you.
IV
10
Many are the sorrows of the wicked one,
but mercy surrounds the one who trusts in the LORD.
11
Be glad in the LORD and rejoice, you righteous;
exult, all you upright of heart.
33)I
1
Rejoice, you righteous, in the LORD;
praise from the upright is fitting.a
2
Give thanks to the LORD on the harp;
on the ten-stringed lyre offer praise.b
3
Sing to him a new song;
skillfully play with joyful chant.
4
For the LORD’s word is upright;
all his works are trustworthy.
5
He loves justice and right.
The earth is full of the mercy of the LORD.c
II
6
By the LORD’s word the heavens were made;
by the breath of his mouth all their host.*d
7
*He gathered the waters of the sea as a mound;
he sets the deep into storage vaults.e
III
8
Let all the earth fear the LORD;
let all who dwell in the world show him reverence.
9
For he spoke, and it came to be,
commanded, and it stood in place.f
10
The LORD foils the plan of nations,
frustrates the designs of peoples.
11
But the plan of the LORD stands forever,
the designs of his heart through all generations.g
12
Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD,
the people chosen as his inheritance.h
IV
13
From heaven the LORD looks down
and observes the children of Adam,i
14
From his dwelling place he surveys
all who dwell on earth.
15
The One who fashioned together their hearts
is the One who knows all their works.
V
16
A king is not saved by a great army,
nor a warrior delivered by great strength.
17
Useless is the horse for safety;
despite its great strength, it cannot be saved.
18
Behold, the eye of the LORD is upon those who fear him,
upon those who count on his mercy,
19
To deliver their soul from death,
and to keep them alive through famine.
VI
20
Our soul waits for the LORD,
he is our help and shield.j
21
For in him our hearts rejoice;
in his holy name we trust.
22
May your mercy, LORD, be upon us;
as we put our hope in you.
34)Of David, when he feigned madness before Abimelech,* who drove him out and he went away.

I
2
I will bless the LORD at all times;
his praise shall be always in my mouth.a
3
My soul will glory in the LORD;
let the poor hear and be glad.
4
Magnify the LORD with me;
and let us exalt his name together.
II
5
I sought the LORD, and he answered me,
delivered me from all my fears.
6
Look to him and be radiant,
and your faces may not blush for shame.
7
This poor one cried out and the LORD heard,
and from all his distress he saved him.
8
The angel of the LORD encamps
around those who fear him, and he saves them.b
9
Taste and see that the LORD is good;
blessed is the stalwart one who takes refuge in him.c
10
Fear the LORD, you his holy ones;
nothing is lacking to those who fear him.d
11
The rich grow poor and go hungry,
but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing.
III
12
Come, children,* listen to me;e
I will teach you fear of the LORD.
13
Who is the man who delights in life,f
who loves to see the good days?
14
Keep your tongue from evil,
your lips from speaking lies.
15
Turn from evil and do good;g
seek peace and pursue it.
16
The eyes of the LORD are directed toward the righteoush
and his ears toward their cry.
17
The LORD’s face is against evildoers
to wipe out their memory from the earth.
18
The righteous cry out, the LORD hears
and he rescues them from all their afflictions.
19
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted,
saves those whose spirit is crushed.
20
Many are the troubles of the righteous,
but the LORD delivers him from them all.
21
He watches over all his bones;
not one of them shall be broken.i
22
Evil will slay the wicked;
those who hate the righteous are condemned.
23
The LORD is the redeemer of the souls of his servants;
and none are condemned who take refuge in him.
35)Of David.

I
*Oppose, O LORD, those who oppose me;
war upon those who make war upon me.
2
Take up the shield and buckler;
rise up in my defense.
3
Brandish lance and battle-ax
against my pursuers.
Say to my soul,
“I am your salvation.”
4
Let those who seek my life
be put to shame and disgrace.
Let those who plot evil against mea
be turned back and confounded.
5
Make them like chaff before the wind,b
with the angel of the LORD driving them on.
6
Make their way slippery and dark,
with the angel of the LORD pursuing them.
II
7
Without cause they set their snare for me;
without cause they dug a pit for me.
8
Let ruin overtake them unawares;
let the snare they have set catch them;
let them fall into the pit they have dug.c
9
Then I will rejoice in the LORD,
exult in God’s salvation.
10
My very bones shall say,
“O LORD, who is like you,d
Who rescue the afflicted from the powerful,
the afflicted and needy from the despoiler?”
III
11
Malicious witnesses rise up,
accuse me of things I do not know.
12
They repay me evil for good;
my soul is desolate.e
13
*Yet I, when they were ill, put on sackcloth,
afflicted myself with fasting,
sobbed my prayers upon my bosom.
14
I went about in grief as for my brother,
bent in mourning as for my mother.
15
Yet when I stumbled they gathered with glee,
gathered against me and I did not know it.
They slandered me without ceasing;
16
without respect they mocked me,
gnashed their teeth against me.
IV
17
O Lord, how long will you look on?
Restore my soul from their destruction,
my very life from lions!f
18
Then I will thank you in the great assembly;
I will praise you before the mighty throng.g
19
Do not let lying foes rejoice over me,
my undeserved enemies wink knowingly.h
20
They speak no words of peace,
but against the quiet in the land
they fashion deceitful speech.i
21
They open wide their mouths against me.
They say, “Aha! Good!
Our eyes have seen it!”j
22
You see this, LORD; do not be silent;k
Lord, do not withdraw from me.
23
Awake, be vigilant in my defense,
in my cause, my God and my Lord.
24
Defend me because you are just, LORD;
my God, do not let them rejoice over me.
25
Do not let them say in their hearts,
“Aha! Our soul!”*
Do not let them say,
“We have devoured that one!”
26
Put to shame and confound
all who relish my misfortune.
Clothe with shame and disgrace
those who lord it over me.
27
But let those who favor my just cause
shout for joy and be glad.
May they ever say, “Exalted be the LORD
who delights in the peace of his loyal servant.”
28
Then my tongue shall recount your justice,
declare your praise, all the day long.l

Russia continues to fall short re:religious liberty.

Experts Object to Russia’s Banning of JW.ORG:

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia—On July 21, 2015, the Russian Federation banned jw.org, the official website of Jehovah’s Witnesses, making it a criminal offense to promote it from within the federation. Russia is the only country in the world to ban jw.org.

Religious studies specialist and professor at the Academy of Labor and Social Relations in Moscow, Yekaterina Elbakyan, comments on jw.org: “I think the website is necessary because it contains objective information directly from Jehovah’s Witnesses about their organization rather than third-party opinions. . . . Not only are its members interested in the website, but also those who are simply interested in various religions. And I’m not only speaking about professional religious scholars like myself but also journalists and publicists who write about religion.”

“I think the website is necessary because it contains objective information directly from Jehovah’s Witnesses”—Yekaterina Elbakyan, Professor, Academy of Labor and Social Relations, Moscow
A legal expert at the Human Rights Institute in Moscow, Lev Levinson, puts this action by the government in historical context: “Twenty-first century Russia has a constitution that guarantees freedom of religion and equality of religious associations before the law. However, as in the 19th century, Russia is again restricting the freedom of sharing one’s religious views by confiscating literature and banning websites. And this is all being done by judges and experts who apply unlawful regulations under the guise of counteracting extremism.”

The ban is the latest development in a legal battle stretching back to 2013. On August 7 of that year, a Russian district court declared the website “extremist” during a secret trial, but that decision was reversed by a regional court on January 22, 2014. However, a Deputy of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation appealed to the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation to reinstate the trial decision. On December 2, 2014, the Supreme Court heard the prosecution’s appeal without the Witnesses present to defend themselves, as they were not properly notified of the hearing. The Supreme Court reinstated the trial decision, declaring the entire website “extremist” although the court conceded that the website no longer contained any religious material prohibited by the Russian authorities. The Witnesses contested the decision and appealed to the chairman of the Supreme Court, but without success. As a result of that decision, on July 21, 2015, the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation added the website to the Federal List of Extremist Materials, banning the website throughout Russia.

Yaroslav Sivulskiy, a spokesman for Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia, comments on the impact of the ban: “We are disappointed that the Russian authorities have taken this unwarranted action. This ban curtails the worship of over 170,000 in this country who are Jehovah’s Witnesses. But when you consider that some 285,000 people in Russia accessed the website every day, it is clear that even those who are not members of our faith have been deprived of an excellent resource for Bible study.”

Speaking from the Witnesses’ world headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, J. R. Brown, an international spokesman for Jehovah’s Witnesses, states: “Our official website, jw.org, hosts award-winning videos, publications for Bible study in hundreds of languages, and the two most widely distributed magazines in the world, The Watchtower and Awake! It has been featured in some of the largest international book fairs and has even been used extensively in schools. It has benefited many communities around the world and was widely used in Russia. Really, this is a website that should be promoted.”

Media Contact(s):

International: J. R. Brown, Office of Public Information, tel. +1 718 560 5000


Russia: Yaroslav Sivulskiy, tel. +7 812 702 2691

Methodological naturalists raid design advocates' tool kit again.

Chemistry Nobel Prize Based on Design Inference
Evolution News & Views October 21, 2015 3:58 AM

This month's announcement of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry should cause design advocates to celebrate. We have just seen the biggest prize for science go to three biologists who made a design inference about genetic information. Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar shared the prestigious honor for their work on DNA repair mechanisms.

Of course, intelligent design was never mentioned in the Nobel Committee's announcement, either the popular version or the scientific version. We know also that the committee assumes that the repair mechanisms came about by a Darwinian process. In all likelihood, the winners are evolutionists, too. But think about it; their work was about information quality control -- a subject related to our new video that came out the very next day after the news. The Information Enigma asks three questions: (1) What is information? (2) How do we detect it? and (3) Where does it come from? The Nobel announcement suggests a fourth question: (4) How is information maintained?



The 1970s and 80s were a heady time for molecular biology, when the prizewinners were doing their research. The realization that life is based on digital information encoded in DNA was only a couple of decades old. DNA's structure had been revealed by Watson and Crick in 1953. Further work by Crick revealed the molecular basis of the genetic code in the "letters" of DNA bases (see Nature Scitable Education Library). Watson, Crick, and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in 1962 "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material" (emphasis added.) Their work relied on findings by many other scientists, Nature Scitable reminds us, that were converging on the fundamental discovery that life is information-based.

This month's announcement is not the first time the design inference led to a Nobel Prize. The NIH Record, for instance, honors Marshall Warren Nirenberg as "discoverer of the genetic code" for his work on "the genetic code used by virtually all living organisms to translate the information in DNA molecules into protein structure." Nirenberg shared the Nobel Prize in 1968 with Robert W. Holley and H. Gobind Khorana.

The discovery of the genetic code and the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953 are generally considered the two transformational events in making biology a molecular science and are the fundamental basis of the subsequent sequencing of the billions of nucleotides in human DNA molecules, as part of the Human Genome Project, and the sequencing of the DNA of hundreds of other living organisms.
Sequencing would make no sense, obviously, if the order of the DNA bases were meaningless. Genome sequencing relies on the principle that the precise order of the bases is critical for function.

Another principle was becoming known around that time, too: information can be degraded. Erik Stokstad, writing in Science, describes how these two forces in conflict with each other -- information creation and degradation -- led Tomas Lindahl to think that something unnatural must be going on in the cell nucleus:

Biologists have long known that DNA wasn't rock solid. Blasts of xrays, for example, could cause mutations in cells. Yet most researchers believed that the molecule was inherently stable. After all, cancer and other genetic malfunctions are the exception, not the rule.
As a postdoc in the late 1960s, however, Lindahl began to have doubts. Samples of RNA in his experiments rapidly degraded when heated. Further experiments showed that even under normal conditions, DNA quickly suffered enough damage to make life impossible. A light bulb went on. "Lindahl had the critical insight," says biochemist Bruce Alberts of the University of California, San Francisco.

Lindahl began to search for enzymes that might repair this unseen damage.

Stokstad goes on to tell about the mechanism Lindahl found and published in 1974. Then he tells about the work of Modrich and Sancar, who independently "felt the light bulb go on" when thinking about this "hugely important topic" of information repair. Stokstad begins his article on that theme:
Considering how much depends on the messages it bears, DNA is an alarmingly fragile molecule. It's vulnerable to UV light and mutagenic chemicals, as well as spontaneous decay. Life has survived through the ages because enzymes inside every cell ensure that DNA remains in proper working order. This year's Nobel Prize in chemistry, announced 7 October, recognizes three scientists who discovered key mechanisms for fixing the damage.
We suggested that DNA repair is in some way "unnatural" -- why is that? Well, look what happens under natural conditions. The Nobel Committee tells us what would happen without "systems" to maintain the genetic information:
Each day our DNA is damaged by UV radiation, free radicals and other carcinogenic substances, but even without such external attacks, a DNA molecule is inherently unstable. Thousands of spontaneous changes to a cell's genome occur on a daily basis. Furthermore, defects can also arise when DNA is copied during cell division, a process that occurs several million times every day in the human body.
The reason our genetic material does not disintegrate into complete chemical chaos is that a host of molecular systems continuously monitor and repair DNA. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015 awards three pioneering scientists who have mapped how several of these repair systems function at a detailed molecular level.

What's "natural" is for DNA to degrade, and thus, the information that rides on it. Mutations lead to cancer and other life-threatening diseases. We humans know all about the necessity of tools to fix things. So do cells; the cell keeps a "toolbox for DNA repair," the Nobel headline quips. The New York Times uses similar concepts, in its own words, to describe how the cell "fights" the natural tendency toward chemical chaos:
The human body is made up of trillions of living cells, each containing a coiled mass of DNA that if straightened out would extend about six feet. In turn, each strand carries the thousands of genetic instructions needed to run the body.
But the DNA molecule is unstable. The genome of each cell undergoes thousands of spontaneous changes each day. And DNA copying for cell division and multiplication, which happens in the body millions of times daily, also introduces defects. Finally, DNA is damaged by ultraviolet light from the sun as well as by industrial pollutants and natural toxins -- those in cigarette smoke, for example. What fights pandemonium are DNA repair mechanisms.

Notice that what they found was not simply mechanisms that "repair DNA" as if any order of base pairs would do. No; they found systems and mechanisms that worked to maintain the genetic instructions needed to run the body (i.e., functional information).
So it's fair to say that what is "natural" is the spontaneous degradation of information. Mechanisms designed by a mind, by contrast, can overcome the natural tendency toward "pandemonium." We know from experience that it takes the guidance of goal-directed intelligence to proofread and correct errors in digital code. The BBC News aptly calls this process debugging. Ever see an unguided debugger of computer code?

To address those defects, a host of molecular systems continuously monitor and de-bug our genetic information. The three new laureates mapped in detail how some of these mechanisms worked.
It's not necessary to use the phrase "intelligent design" to recognize it in action. Nor is it necessary to know the personal beliefs of the Nobel laureates. They made a design inference; that's what counts. Quality control, information monitoring, error correction systems -- these are phrases rich with design concepts.


We're glad that three intelligent scientists, Lindahl, Modrich and Sancar, received the world's highest scientific honors for uncovering "a molecular system that constantly counteracts DNA collapse" by what can fairly be called intelligent design. Whether or not anyone in fact calls it ID, the 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry reflects the validity and fruitfulness of the design inference for top-flight scientific research.