​One of my girls has been having an uphill battle with her acne for about a year and a half now. She had a few, mild, zits at 14, but in the month before she was due to start ulpana, the term for boarding school for religious girls in Israel, her spots suddenly and aggressively transformed into full-blown acne.

I knew it was related to her stress and worry about going to the new school – and sadly, her first year there was so stressful, and the food they serve in the ulpana is so very bad, that the acne became a permanent feature of her life.

It’s really, really hard to have disfiguring spots when you’re a 14 year old girl.

So, we tried this cream, that gel, this wash. I paid for all sorts of people to squeeze blackheads out of her face.

I even spent an afternoon concocting all sorts of ‘natural’ treatments for her, from my essential oils collection. After a day or two, four days max, she’d get discouraged and just stop whatever the new thing was we were trying to do for her face.

So then, I agreed with my husband that we’d spend whatever it took to take her to a professional aesthetician, to get the acne reduced. It took around 5,000 shekels (no, that’s not a typo…) and we’re still paying it off every month.

Sadly, the debt is outliving the positive effects of the treatment.

​For six months, the acne did reduce a little, and did seem to be dying down. But as soon as we stopped – it came back again.

​Which is when my daughter started talking about Acutane / Roacutane, or ‘Roktan’, as they call it in Israel, and my heart sank.

Because that stuff is poisonous, and a whole bunch of people launched lawsuits against its maker, Hoffman LaRoche, claiming that Acutane had caused them to develop serious Irritable Bowel issues – one guy even had to have his colon removed.

And let’s not even talk about all the terrible birth defects associated with its use, which was another serious concern for me, as the mother of a teenager girl.

And let’s not even talk about all the other, awful side effects, that so many people like to claim are not so bad, or not so widespread. This comes from Wikipedia:

“Isotretinoin is the only non-psychiatric drug on the FDA's top 10 list of drugs associated with depression[35][39] and is also within the top 10 for suicide attempts.[40] A black box warning for suicide, depression and psychosis has been present on isotretinoin's packaging in the United States since 2005.[39]”

(Isotretinoin is the generic name of the compound previously branded as Acutane, or ‘Roktan’.)

Hmm.

I sat down with my daughter, and explained to her: Roktan has a terrifyingly large number of awful side-effects. Let’s go through them in detail, and then if you still feel you want to explore it, we’ll take it from there.

Acne is really, really hard to live with, so I didn’t want to take my daughter’s free choice away when it came to deciding how to deal with it, but I also really, really didn’t want her to go the drug route.
​
Which is when God really helped me out.

Dangerous drugs

​My daughter had a friend dorming with her with bad acne who’d first been put on long-term doses of oral antibiotics, which had worked for a while.

And then, the zits came back.

(As a side note, my hairdresser was also put on oral antibiotics for acne, and stayed on them for a year and a half. This stopped when her legs started to puff up and swell, when her skin turned a yucky yellow and she started to feel really, really ill – at the age of 22. The antibiotics almost caused her liver to fail, and the Dr who’d prescribed them for acne never once thought to mention that it could be potentially fatal to continue them long term. But I digress.)

So then, the doctors put this roommate on ‘Roktan’ – which is where my daughter had first heard about it. “Her skin is like a baby’s! All her spots have gone!” my daughter told me, two months into the girl’s treatment.

So, we sat down and went through all the horrifying side-effects of Roktan – and by the end my daughter told me: “My friend has got most of those.” The friend’s eyes were puffy and blurry; her skin had started to spontaneously bleed when she waded into the Dead Sea whilst on a school trip. She was hyper-sensitive to sun (a big deal, when you live somewhere like Israel); her back and stomach hurt really badly, all of the time.

But her zits had gone!

So at least that.

But thankfully for my daughter, it was enough of a wake-up call to convince her that ‘Roktan’ was not the answer to the acne. So in the meantime, she started trying to eat a little bit healthier. She started trying to make the links herself, between suppressed feelings of worry and anxiety and massive flare-ups in her face.

And slowly, slowly, the zits are starting to come around.

In the meantime, the poor girl who’d been ‘cured’ by Roktan found that her zits returned as soon as she stopped treatment. The latest I heard is that she’s still having a number of bad side effects even though she stopped taking the drug two months ago, and has been off school now for a week, while the doctors are trying to figure things out.

​One thing they are sure of, and have already clearly told the girls’ parents: It’s not related to the acne drug!!!

​In the meantime, what can we learn from all this?

Let’s try to sum it up:

1. Oral antibiotics is a really bad idea for treating acne, especially if taken for any period of time beyond 10 days. (Even the doctors themselves are starting to realise that, but more due to worries about growing resistance to antibiotics, than anything to do with potentially causing liver failure in their patients.)
2. Acutane / Roacutane was actually recalled by its makers a few years back, before it went generic in 2017, because there were so many people suing over its damaging side effects, including Irritable Bowel Syndrome and severe depression / suicide. And if you’re a woman of child-bearing age, then there are severe risks of major birth defects associated with the drug.
3. While the drugs work for some, they don’t work for all. And even when they work for some, it’s not always a permanent cure.
4. Acne is profoundly affected by deep-seated emotional issues, especially stress and anxiety, and also hormonal imbalances.
5. There are no quick fixes.

And that last one holds true even if the Roktan works, because the zits are just signposts to some deeper issue, or deeper work, that’s required for the person to really feel happy and spiritually-fulfilled in life.

So in the meantime, I’m continuing to buy my kid any cream she wants for her face, and to splash out on any treatment she wants to try (that isn’t potentially extremely dangerous).

I’m praying on her, I’m encouraging her, I’m buying her nice clothes.

In short, whatever I can do to ease her burden, and ease her test, I’m trying to do that, and in the meantime, her state of mind is really good, considering how hard the test actually is.
Poor kid.
But “Roktan” is off the table, and so is long-term oral antibiotics. Because even if they do work, the long-term risks to my kid’s health are just too great to be worth the gamble.
​
And thank God, now she actually saw what happened to her friend, and learned about the scope of the side-effects involved, she thinks so, too.

​ALASKA

In 1940, F. Rainey from the University of Alaska described a curious scene unfolding along the banks of the Tanana River gold rush occurring at that time:

“Wide cuts, often several miles in length and sometimes as much as 140 ft in depth are now being sluiced out along stream valleys tributary to the Tanana in the Fairbanks District. In order to reach gold-bearing gravel bed and overburden of frozen silt or ‘muck’ is removed with hydraulic giants. This ‘muck’ contains enormous numbers of frozen bones of extinct animals such as the mammoth, mastodon, super-bison and horse.”

All these animals were shown to have died in recent times, measured in a few thousands, and not millions of years, even according to standard Scientific dating methods. Rainey found worked flints in this ‘muck’, including spear points that were found in situ stabbed through the jaw of a lion, or the tusk of a mammoth. He concluded that: “men were contemporary with extinct animals in Alaska.”

F.C. Hibben from the University of Mexico takes up the story:

“Although the formation of the deposits of muck is not clear, there is ample evidence that at least portions of this material were deposited under catastrophic conditions. Mammal remains are for the most part dismembered and disarticulated, even though some fragments yet retain, in their frozen state, portions of ligaments, skin, hair and flesh. Twisted and torn trees are piled in splintered masses… At least four considerable layers of volcanic ash may be traced in these deposits, although they are extremely warped and distorted.”

Clearly, whatever killed and dismembered millions of these animals, and uprooted and splintered millions of trees at the same time, was not a ‘gentle accretion of mud’, as the evolutionists would have us believe - and all this happened just a few thousand years ago, and was witnessed by human beings.

​SIBERIA

The Liakhov Islands are located 600 miles inside the Polar Circle, to the north of Siberia. Liakhov reported to his sovereign, Russia’s Catherine II that: “Such was the enormous quantity of mammoths’ remains that it seemed that the island was actually composed of the bones and tusks of elephants, cemented together by icy sand.”

The Islands of New Siberia were discovered in 1805-6, and were similarly found to be packed full of the remains of creatures who thrive in hot climates: “The soil of these desolate islands is absolutely packed full of the bones of elephants and rhinoceroses in astonishing numbers.”

How did millions of sun-loving elephants and rhinoceroses meet their death, and get deep-frozen, in Siberia? Some of these creatures were recovered with their eyeballs still intact: they were flash frozen in a matter of hours after dying.

Geologist geologist J.D. Dana wrote about this discovery:

“The encasing in ice of huge elephants, and the perfect preservation of the flesh, shows that the cold finally became suddenly extreme, as of a single winter’s night, and knew no relenting afterward.”

Writing in 1910, a British researcher called Whitley marveled that: “neither trees, nor shrubs, not bushes, exist… and yet the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, buffaloes and horses are found in this icy wilderness in numbers which defy all calculation.”

But that wasn’t the only mystery posed by the New Siberian Islands. Explorers also found a number of what they termed ‘wood hills’, which ranged between 250-300 ft high, and contained the petrified trunks of millions of uprooted trees, cemented together by frozen sand, and layered with millions of splintered and crushed animal skeletons.

In 1848, German scientist G.A. Erman wrote:

“On the summit of the hills, they [the tree trunks] lie flung one upon another in the wildest disorder, forced upright in spite of gravitation, and with their tops broken off or crush, as if they had been thrown with great violence from the south on a bank, and there heaped up.”

Immanuel Velikovsky explains how this occurred:

“A hurricane, apparently, uprooted the trees of Siberia and flung them to the extreme North; mountainous waves of the ocean piled them in huge hills, and some agent of a bituminous nature transformed them into charcoal, either before or after they were deposited and cemented in drifted masses of sand that became baked in sandstone.”

But what could batter, drown, burn and then bake together such masses of uprooted forests and animals, and do it so quickly that these remains would freeze perfectly solid in just a few hours?

Evolution has no answer for this. But there is a natural explanation that fits exactly with what we’ve been discussing on this blog and over on Emunaroma, about how the earth was really formed, and when.

Read on.

​ERRATIC BOULDERS

‘Erratic boulders’ is the name given to rocks that have a different formation, or composition, from the places where they are found. For example, the erratic boulder called ‘Pierre a Martin’ measures more than 10,000 cubic feet, and is to be found on the Jura Mountain range above Lake Geneva, in Switzerland.

Yet it comes from the Alps, many miles distant. How did ‘Pierre a Martin’ get up a mountain, tens of miles away?

How did so many ‘erractic boulders’ originating in Norway somehow travel across the sea to come to rest on the British coastline, and also high up in the Harz mountains, in Central Germany?

The same can be asked of large chunks of rock that somehow travelled from Finland over to the Carpathians, and even to Moscow, while other blocks of granite from Canada were ripped off and scattered all over Maine, New York, Massachusetts and Ohio, to name but a few - and are frequently found on the tops of the highest mountain ranges.

How did they get there?

Some of these stones weigh 10,000 tons or more, like that in Warren County, Ohio (13,500 tons), while the chalk stone erratic boulder in Malmo, Sweden measures three miles long. Even today, mankind hasn’t got the sort of technology that would enable it to transport a three mile long rock overland.

GEORGES CUVIER, FOUNDING FATHER OF PALEONTOLOGY

French naturalist Georges Cuvier was the founding father of paleontology (the study of fossil bones). In 1827, after spending many a long month studying the gypsum deposits located in Montmatre in Paris, and elsewhere in France, he wrote that:

“It has frequently happened that lands which have been laid dry have been covered again by the waters, in consequence either of their being engulfed in the abyss, or of the sea having merely risen over them…These repeated eruptions and retreats of the sea have been neither slow nor gradual; on the contrary, most of the catastrophes that have occasioned them have been sudden…

“Life has often been disturbed on this earth by terrific events. Numberless living beings have been the victims of these catastrophes; some, which inhabited the dry land, have been swallowed up by inundations; others, which peopled the waters, have been laid dry, their very races have been extinguished forever.”

The limestone deposits that Cuvier was examining painted a clear picture of large swathes of what is now France being deep underwater before becoming a land swarming with reptiles, before again being submerged under the waves and becoming home to marine life, then once again becoming land, this time populated by mammals - and so the cycle repeated itself again.

Cuvier concluded:

“Admitting that there has been a gradual diminution of the waters; that the sea has transported solid matter in all directions; that the temperature of the globe is either diminishing or increasing - none of these cases could have overturned our strata, enveloped large animals in ice, together with their flesh and skin, laid dry marine [animals]… and lastly, destroyed numerous species, and even entire genera.”

Cuvier’s observation is still wholly applicable today. So what did cause all these things to happen?

(We already know WHO caused these things to happen, i.e. God, the Creator of the world, and why, as set out by our Midrashim. We also know how many times the strata were overturned before man came on the scene, i.e. 974 times, plus at least a couple more timeS in the last 5777 years, during the time of Enosh, and during the time of Noah’s flood. But it’s amazing to see that the scientific evidence increasingly stacks up IN FAVOR of the genuine, Jewish account of the planet’s dramatic history. And there’s still so much more to come…)

​TIGER REMAINS IN YORKSHIRE CAVES

William Buckland was a professor of geology at Oxford University at the beginning of the 19th century. In 1823, he published a work called ‘Relics of the Flood’, which detailed a number of strange findings that he attributed to some massive, world-wide ‘deluge’ or natural disaster.

For example, Buckland had excavated a cave in Kirkdale, Yorkshire, that was at an elevation of 80 foot, which contained the teeth and bones of a veritable zoo, including rhinoceroses, hippotamuses, horses, deer, tigers, bears, wolves, hyenas, foxes, hares, rabbits, pigeons, larks and ducks.

How did this conglomeration of animals come to be in the United Kingdom in the first place, and what where they doing crushed together in a cave in Yorkshire?

The same question could be asked about the group of hippopotamus, reindeer and mammoth found at Brentford, in the South East of England, the reindeers and grizzly bears that were at Cefn in Wales, and the reindeers, cave lions and hyenas that were found crushed together in a cave in Bleadon, Somerset.

To quote Velikovsky again: “According to the prophecy of Isaiah (11:6) in messianic times to come the lion and the calf would pasture together. But even prophetic vision hasn’t conceived of a reindeer from snow-covered Lapland and a hippopotamus from the tropical Congo River living together on the British Isles.”

But while these animals certainly died together, and their bones were entombed together, it’s highly unlikely that they actually lived together for any length of time. Buckland asserted that he was: “nearly certain that if any change of climate has taken place, it took place suddenly.”
​
Like Cuvier before him, Buckland was of the opinion that the flood, or natural disaster that caused these strange burial groupings must have occurred no more than 5000-6000 years previously.

He concluded: “What the cause was, whether a change in the inclination of the earth’s axis, or the near approach of a comet, or any other cause or combination of causes purely astronomical, is a question the discussion of which is foreign to the object of the present memoir.”
​
THE MASS EXTINCTION OF FISH LIFE

At the same time that the Victorian researchers were amassing accounts of the violent, dramatic and almost instant death of millions of animals on land, the same picture was also emerging from the depths of the oceans, too.

Writing in 1865, Hugh Miller examined the Old Red Sandstone strata located in Northern Scotland, and noted that:

“some terrible catastrophe involved the sudden destruction of fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more… [the remains] exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death…. The remains too, appear to have suffered nothing from the after-attacks of predaceous fish; none such seem to have survived. The record is one of destruction, at once widely spread and total….”

Again, this was not an unusual scene. Writing about what he’d seen in northern Italy, Buckland wrote:

“The circumstances under which the fossil fishes are found at Monte Bolca seem to indicate that they perished suddenly…All these fishes must have died suddenly… and have been speedily buried in the calcareous sediment.”

The same held true for fish deposits found in the German Harz  Mountains, and in Saarbrucken, and Oensingen in Switzerland, and Aix-en-Provence in France, and also in Ohio, Michigan, Arizona and California.
​
Millions upon millions of fish died a sudden, agonizing death, and then were instantly buried and ‘fossilised’ by sand and gravel as a violent upheaval pulled the sea bottom up out of the ocean, and turned their formerly watery environment into dry land.

​TO SUM THIS BIT UP:

While modern science likes to pretend that the world is many millions of years old, and that nothing ‘dramatic’ ever occurred, and certainly not within a few thousand years of our present time, and certainly not instantly, the scientific evidence demonstrating the exact opposite is literally found all over the world, in the fossil record.

Land became sea, and sea became land, repeatedly, literally overnight. Mountains became valleys, and vice-versa, instantly. Whole swathes of formerly tropical, lush countryside was destroyed, petrified and then instantly flash-frozen - and much of this was witnessed by modern man.

So far, the scientific evidence is clearly showing score one for the Torah’s account of the history of the world, and score zero for evolution, and modern science’s theories of what occurred, when, and how.

But there is still a huge amount of additional scientific evidence that we need to enter into the record, in the next few posts.

To be continued…

I've started writing a new book, with the working title ELECTRIC PEOPLE, that will hopefully explain how bio-electricity is the 'missing link' in human health, and that will hopefully give you, dear reader, a much better idea of HOW different treatments, both alternative and conventional work - and why they often don't work.

I don't have time to post on spiritualselfhelp AND write the book, so I've decided to stick up chunks of the rough draft as I go along. Please feel free to comment (respectfully...) on anything you'd like to hear more about, or have more details about, or if something doesn't make sense, and I'll try my best to answer your queries in future posts.

Enjoy!

The idea that people are just chunks of animated meat is fairly new, and like many things that have corrupted the world of modern science, it can be laid at the feet of Charles Darwin.

Before Darwin came along with his theory of evolution, the idea that people had souls, and that there was a spiritual dimension to life, and that God existed and had created the world, was a given for nearly all scientists. Of course, there were always a few dissenters in the corner, but they normally kept their atheistic views to themselves, in much the same way that modern-day scientists who believe in God are forced to keep quiet, or see their career and reputation disappear down the tubes.

Then Darwin showed up, and challenged the God-centric view of the world in a number of key ways.

Firstly, he suggested that far from there being a specific plan behind, and a specific goal leading creation, everything in the world occurred due to random happenstance.

To put this another way, Darwin’s theory took an axe to the principal of ‘cause and effect’, and reduced everything in the world down to some kind of happy accident.

The next piece of mischief that the theory of evolution wrought in scientific minds is that it planted the idea that the world HAD to be incredibly old. After all, it would take billions and trillions of years before an amoeba could turn into a monkey, or a fully-sentient human being - if it could happen at all.

Sadly for Darwin, pioneering molecular biologist Douglas Axe recently proved conclusively that the amount of time it would actually take for even one of Darwin’s ‘happy evolutionary coincidences’ to occur was a number so big, it’s practically impossible. The world simply isn’t old enough for all the millions of evolutionary tweaks that could turn an amoeba into anything remotely similar to a biped - or even something more modest, like an earthworm or fruit-fly.[i]

Sadly for Axe - and everyone else who believes in God - the theory of evolution was so compelling for those individuals who wished to find an ‘intellectually satisfying[ii]’ way of denying God’s role in creation that no amount of scientific investigation, facts or research has been able to dislodge it.

And so, modern science continues to claim that the world is billions of years’ old, and to view every discipline through the lens of ‘evolution’, disregarding any of the uncomfortably mounting evidence that categorically disproves it.

VITALISM VS MECHANISM

All this set the scene for the big schism that occurred throughout the 19th century [CHECK] between the ‘vitalist’ and ‘mechanist’ biological schools of thought. Again, until Darwin arrived on the scene, practically every scientist considered themselves to be a ‘vitalist’, inasmuch as they believed that some sort of invisible animating force, or soul, that they called the anima or elan vital, must be working through the physical body. This idea was so self-evident, it was axiomatic.

Vitalism held that this animating force was what separated living beings, including man, from the rest of the inanimate landscape.

But post-Darwin, when a new, God-less paradigm for life started to come into focus, many of the scientists of the day developed an almost religious zeal to root God and spirituality out of every last vestige of scientific endeavor - including the question of what animated man, himself.

This latter school came to be known as the ‘mechanists’, and they posited the idea that man was really just an intelligent collection of chemical compounds and cells, and was ultimately governed by the same laws of chemistry and physics that applied to inanimate matter.

Much of the debate between the vitalists and the mechanists took place around the subject of embryology, or the study of development. Ironically, Darwin himself gave the new field of embryology its name, and vainly hoped that the study of how life ‘developed’ would provide ample support for his theories of phylogeny, or what he termed the history of evolution.

​Yet, despite the fact that the field was eagerly embraced by leading mechanists like German scientist Wilhelm Roux, that didn’t happen. As the field continued to develop (pun intended), embryologists like Roux and his colleague August Weismann soon confirmed that a fertilized egg appeared to be an unstructured single cell that continually divided, proliferated, and then somehow became a collection of differentiated cells.

​While the vitalists argued, correctly, that epigenesis, or the external imposition of order on the cellular chaos of a fertilized egg, had to be coming from some intangible ‘vital’ force, the mechanists had a much more scientific explanation for what was really occurring: there had to be a little man, called a homunculus, in the sperm.

By the time Roux and Weissman were working on the problem of how a bunch of apparently simple cells could become a living creature, or a human being a hundred years’ later, the homunculus theory had fallen out of favor. However, the mechanists were still determined to find an alternative explanation for the creation of ‘life’ that didn’t include God or a spiritual element, so the ‘scientific’ search for how embryogenesis actually occurred continued unabated.
​
Weissman came up with a theory which postulated that the fertilized egg contained specific chemical structures called ‘determiners’, that would code for all the different cell types required. According to Weissman’s theory, once a cell had turned into muscle cell, or a blood cell, or a nerve cell, its function had been permanently fixed.

This was the earliest description of what came to be known as ‘genes’, and before long, DNA took the place of the homunculus in scientists’ minds, as the guiding force behind the development of life.
​
The father of modern genetics, American embryologist Thomas Hunt Morgan, proposed the theory that just as the genes contained inherited characteristics, they also contained the ‘code’ that would tell which cells to differentiate and become the endoderm (which gives rise to the glands and viscera in the fetus); the mesoderm (which gives rise to the bones, muscles and circulatory system) and the ectoderm (which becomes the skin, nervous system and sense organs.

At this stage in the game, it was believed that once a cell had been ‘coded’ at the beginning of the process to fulfill a particular function, that was set in stone and couldn’t be changed.

A MODERN TAKE ON DNA
It was only after work progressed on the human genome project that the cracks in this particular theory were discovered. Recent research has shown that there is no such thing as ‘one gene, one result’.

Science has now established that many genes work together to trigger a particular outcome. What’s more, the genes themselves are not ‘fixed’ and can be turned on or off by environmental factors that trigger biochemical messengers which in turn signal the gene to activate, or de-activate. 

This process is called ‘methylation’, where environmental factors and experiences trigger a cluster of carbon and hydrogen atom, called a ‘methyl group’ to the outside of the gene. When this occurs, that gene is rendered less sensitive or hyper sensitive to the messages it’s being sent by the body.

What’s more, this pattern of peculiar gene expression, or ‘methylation’ can be passed on to the person’s descendants, in a process called ‘epigenetics’.

RNA vs ‘Determinors’

Weissman and then Morgan suggested that once a cell had been coded, or ‘determined’, it somehow lost the rest of the genetic blueprint that was initially available to it before it differentiated, and got ‘stuck’ being whatever it now was - like a piece of skin, or a heart muscle, or a nerve ending.

But later research showed that wasn’t true, and that the full genetic blueprint could still be found in every cell nucleus. In theory, these genes could be re-activated in the future, and each cell could change into a different type of cell via a process called ‘de-differentiation’.

Something called the RNA decides which bit of the cell’s genetic code gets switched off, and which is activated at any given time.

But the question still remained (at least for the mechanists and modern science): how was the RNA itself making these decisions, about which parts of the genetic blueprint each cell should repress, and which parts should be activated?

​TBC

​[i] Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, 2016.

[ii] Famous atheist Richard Dawkins once stated that he liked the theory of evolution as it enabled him to be an ‘intellectually satisfied’ atheist.