Sunday, February 18, 2007

The House of the Lord

Church is a building designed as a place of worship for Christians. In size and design, churches range from the small parish church of simple construction—just large enough to hold a small village congregation—to the huge and complicated cathedral, a church that is the seat of a bishop. Cathedrals were generally built as an ostentatious feat of architecture and to bestow prestige upon a city; with lavish decoration and with different spaces for various religious activities and observances. Because many branches of Christianity exist, no single type of church building predominates. Some Christians worship with little ceremony, some with elaborate ritual; some make use of statues and paintings, some do not. Thus, churches vary in appearance, having been planned to suit one or another kind of religious practice. In general, two types of plans predominate: the basilica form, with a long axis running from a doorway centered at one narrow end to the altar at the other; and the centralized church, circular or polygonal in plan, with one large central space, usually with a dome overhead. The two basic shapes are combined in many different ways, and either one can be modulated to a cross like form by the addition of projecting wings, either in the form of a Greek cross (with arms of equal length) or a Latin cross (with one longer arm, the nave). Elaborate churches may have separate rooms for baptism, for treasures and relics, for robing the clergy, and for administration. They may also have more than one altar and subsidiary chapels. The design of churches also varies according to the architectural style prevalent at the period in which they were built; styles of the past have often been revived and reinterpreted. The earliest Christian meeting places were converted houses called titular. After Christianity was legitimized by the Edict of Milan in 313, basilicas and centralized churches sprang up quickly in the next 50 years throughout the Roman Empire. The major ones were built over the most sacred shrines; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was built over the supposed spots where Christ was crucified and entombed, and St Peter's Basilica in Rome was built over the grave of St Peter, for example. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre consisted of a circular, domed structure (still partly preserved), and a basilica nearby; the two are now combined. The original St Peter's Basilica in Rome, replaced by the present church during the Renaissance, was a huge processional basilica with projecting wings—transepts—forming a Latin cross in plan. The domed, centralized form persisted in the Byzantine and Slavic East, where medieval churches, small in scale, often took the form of five domes arranged on a Greek cross plan.
A church symbolizes the unity of the people to God. This serves as a pathway to heaven. The church also symbolizes of being a true Filipino. The Lord loves us, so he built a covenant. The covenant was placed inside the church because He wants us to see him and praised him.

The Planet Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the fifth-largest of the nine major planets. The mean distance of the Earth from the Sun is 149,503,000 km (92,897,000 mi). It is the only planet known to support life, although some of the other planets have atmospheres and contain water. The Earth is not a perfect sphere but is slightly pear-shaped. Calculations based on perturbations in the orbits of artificial satellites reveal that the Earth is an imperfect sphere, because the equator bulges, or is distended, by 21 km (13 mi); the North Pole bulges by 10 m (33 ft); and the South Pole is depressed by about 31 m (100 ft). In common with the entire solar system, the Earth is moving through space at the rate of approximately 20.1 km/s or 72,360 km/h (approximately 12.5 mi/s or 45,000 mph) towards the constellation of Hercules. The Milky Way galaxy as a whole, however, is moving towards the constellation Leo at about 600 km/s (375 mi/s). The Earth and its satellite, the Moon, also move together in an elliptical orbit about the Sun. The eccentricity of the orbit is slight, so that the orbit is virtually circular. The approximate circumference of the Earth’s orbit is 938,900,000 km (583,400,000 mi), and the Earth travels along it at a velocity of about 106,000 km/h (66,000 mph). The Earth rotates on its axis once every 23 hr 56 min 4.1 sec. A point on the equator therefore rotates at a rate of a little more than 1,600 km/h (about 1,000 mph), and a point on the Earth at a latitude of 45° North, rotates at about 1,073 km/h (667 mph). An oxygen-rich protective atmosphere, moderate temperatures, abundant water, and a varied chemical composition allow earth to support life, the only planet known to do so. The planet is composed of rock and metal, solid in the outer parts but molten throughout most of the core.
The Earth may be regarded as consisting of five parts: the first, the atmosphere, is gaseous; the second, the hydrosphere, is liquid; the third, fourth, and fifth, the lithosphere, mantle, and core, are largely solid. The atmosphere is the gaseous envelope that surrounds the solid body of the planet. Although it has a thickness of more than 1,100 km (700 mi), about half its mass is concentrated in the lower 5.6 km (3.5 mi). The lithosphere, consisting mainly of the cold, rigid, rocky crust of the Earth, extends to depths of 100 km (60 mi). The hydrosphere is the layer of water that, in the form of the oceans, covers approximately 70.8 per cent of the surface of the Earth. The mantle and core are the heavy interior of the Earth, making up most of the Earth’s mass. Radiometric dating has enabled scientists to arrive at an estimate of 4.65 billion years for the age of the Earth. Although the oldest Earth rocks dated this way are not quite 4 billion years old, meteorites, some of which correlate geologically with the Earth’s core, give dates of about 4.5 billion years, and crystallization of the core and of the parent bodies of meteorites is considered to have occurred at the same time, some 150 million years after the Earth and solar system first formed.



The Ark of the Covenant

Ark of the Covenant, in Judaism is a sacred repository. Mentioned frequently in the Bible, the ark is described in Exodus 25 as a chest of acacia wood. It was known also as the Ark of the Law, the Ark of the Testimony, or the Ark of God. The chest was 2.5 cubits (1.15m/3 ft 9 in) in length and 1.5 cubits (0.69m/2 ft 3 in) in breadth and height; it could be carried by poles at the long sides. The ark lay in the Holy of Holies, the sacrosanct enclosure of the tabernacle and of the Temple in Jerusalem. The chest contained, according to various sources, Aaron's rod, a pot of manna, and the stone tablets of the Decalogue, Ten Commandments. In the synagogues today, the term ark designates the repository for the scrolls of the Law used in the sacred service.
Covenant in law is a promise signed in the presence of a witness that a certain act shall be performed or shall not be performed, or a solemn declaration that certain facts are true. Covenants are used most often in deeds. An express covenant is an express declaration of intention by the parties to the deed. An implied covenant is inferred by the law from certain words in a deed; for example, the law holds that implied in a lease is a covenant that the lessee shall quietly enjoy possession of the premises as long as the terms of the lease are honored. A similar covenant is implied in absolute transfer of property. A covenant may be collateral, that is, purely personal to the original parties; or it may run with the land, so that it can be enforced upon subsequent owners of the property, although they were not parties to the original covenant or agreement. Covenants also fall into many other classifications.
Covenant in Old Testament is also a compact between God and his worshippers. Exodus 24:7 relates that Moses took “the book of the covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, ‘All that the Lord has spoken we will do and we will be obedient.'!” Contemporary scholars believe that “the book of the covenant” includes the section in Exodus from 20:23 to 23:33. From this and other passages in the Pentateuch has arisen the conception of a covenant between Yahweh and the people of Israel, whereby the Israelites were to enjoy the blessing and protection of Yahweh in return for remaining obedient and faithful to him. After the Jews were driven out of Palestine and scattered over the Earth, the covenant between the Jews and Yahweh was interpreted by them to include an eventual restoration of their ancient homeland. According to Christian theology, Jesus Christ, by his death on the cross, made a covenant for the redemption of humanity. Theologians differ about the precise meaning of this covenant, sometimes called the New Covenant or the Covenant of the New Testament. Some believe that Christ's voluntary sacrifice redeemed all; others contend that only those who earn their redemption by faith alone, or by faith and good works, can or will be saved. A notable example of the use of the term covenant in later Christian theology is contained in the writings of the 17th-century Dutch Protestant theologian Johannes Cocceius, who taught that the entire relationship between God and the human race is a continuing covenant.

Life

Life is a term used to summarize the characteristic activities of all organisms—from cyan bacteria to plants and animals. The essence of life is reproduction, the formation of identical or near identical copies of a complex structure from simple starting materials. The increase of complexity involved in the formation of living organisms from their precursors distinguishes the processes of biological growth and reproduction from physical processes such as condensation or crystallization. This local increase of complexity, or decrease of entropy, appears to contradict the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that entropy must always increase in natural spontaneous processes. However, it can be shown that overall entropy always increases so long as the changes in the surroundings as well as the changes in the organisms themselves are included. There is thus no conflict between the basic laws of physics and chemistry and the existence of living organisms. But the understanding of the nature of living organisms has necessitated the creation of the new sciences of biochemistry and molecular biology, which have their own concepts, principles, and laws in addition to those of physics and chemistry. All living organisms possess a genome, which is the set of instructions for making the body, and this is always composed of nucleic acid. It is usually DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) or in the case of some viruses, RNA (ribonucleic acid). The genome consists of a number of genes each of which is a segment of nucleic acid coding for a particular type of protein molecule. Nucleic acids are linear polymers composed of four types of chemical unit (nucleotides, abbreviated as A, T, C, and G), that can occur in any order, and proteins are linear polymers composed of any number of twenty types of unit (amino acids). The relationship between the sequence of nucleotides in a gene and the sequence of amino acids in the corresponding protein is given by the genetic code. Each amino acid is encoded by 3 nucleotides, and since there are only 20 amino acids but 64 (=4×4×4) nucleotide triplets, most amino acids can be specified by more than 1 nucleotide triplet. The molecular structure of DNA is a double helix. One strand contains the coding sequence of a gene and the other strand contains a complementary sequence determined by the pairing rules for the four nucleotides (A pairs with T and C pairs with G). When a genome is reproduced, the DNA double helix separates and a new complementary strand is synthesized alongside each of the old strands, the final result being the formation of two identical double helical DNA molecules. There is a very wide diversity of proteins and they carry out most of the biochemical activities of living organisms, called metabolism. Many proteins are enzymes, bringing about chemical changes in other molecules under the conditions of temperature and concentration found in living organisms. These changes are required to build up the many macromolecules required to form the structure of the organism, including the proteins themselves, the carbohydrates (such as cellulose), and the lipids (fats). Other enzymes drive the metabolic processes needed to supply energy for this biosynthesis, in the case of animals this means breakdown of food, and in the case of plants the process of photosynthesis.

Dream

Dream is a form of mental activity, different from waking thought that occurs during sleep. The nature of dream activity has been characterized by many clinical and laboratory studies. These studies show that dreams are more perceptual than conceptual: things are seen and heard rather than being subjected to thought. In terms of the senses, visual experience is present in almost all dreams; auditory experience in 40 to 50 per cent; and touch, taste, smell, and pain in a relatively small percentage. A considerable amount of emotion is commonly present—usually a single, stark emotion such as fear, anger, or joy rather than the modulated emotions that occur in the waking state. Most dreams are in the form of interrupted stories, made up partly of memories, with frequent shifts of scene. This broad characterization includes a great variety of dream experiences. Many dreams collected in sleep laboratories are rather ordinary, but most people have at least some bizarre dreams. At the start of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud proposed that a mental process quite different from that used in the waking state dominates the dreaming mind. He described this “primary process” as characterized by more primitive mechanisms, by rapid shifts in energy and emotions, and by a good deal of sexual and aggressive content derived from childhood.
Research in recent years has clarified many of these aspects of dreaming, but what may be of greatest significance has been the discovery of biology of dreaming. Starting with the work of the American sleep researchers Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman in 1953, studies have shown that a dream does not consist of fleeting imagery that occurs while a person awakens from sleep, but instead that it takes place during a biological state of its own. Thus, two clearly distinguishable states of sleep exist. The first state, called S-synchronized sleep, or NREM-sleep (non-rapid-eye-movement sleep), occupies most of the sleep period and is associated with a relatively low pulse and blood pressure, little activation of the autonomic nervous system, and few or no reports of dreaming. The second type of sleep, known as D-sleep (dreaming, or desynchronized, sleep), or REM-sleep (rapid-eye-movement sleep), occurs cyclically during the sleep period and is characterized by activation of the autonomic nervous system, rapid eye movements, and frequent dream reports. Typically, a person has four or five periods of D-sleep during the night, whether the dreams are remembered often, rarely, or not at all; they occur at intervals of about 90 minutes and altogether constitute about 25 per cent of the night's sleep (as much as 50 per cent in a newborn child). Evidence indicates that a dream period usually lasts from 5 to 20 minutes. Such stimuli as sounds and touches impinging on a dreamer can be incorporated into a dream if they occur during a D-period. These stimuli, however, do not initiate a D-period if one is not already in progress, so that, at least in such cases, dreams do not “protect” sleep in the way that Freud suggested. Although mental activity may be reported during NREM-sleep, these are usually short, fragmented, thought-like experiences.