Showing posts with label astonishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label astonishing. Show all posts

Monday, 20 July 2015

Angels-Servents of God: Interesting facts

An angel is a supernatural being or spirit found in various religions and mythologies. In Abrahamic religions and Zoroastrianism, angels are often depicted as benevolent celestial beings who act as intermediaries between God or Heaven and Earth, or as guardian spirits or a guiding influence. Other roles of angels include protecting and guiding human beings, and carrying out God's tasks.The term "angel" has also been expanded to various notions of spirits found in many other religious traditions. The theological study of angels is known as "angelology".

In art, angels are often depicted with bird-like wings on their back, a halo, robes and various forms of glowing light.




History of Angels:


The angels are two days and two nights older than we: the Lord created them on the fourth day, and from their high balcony between the recently invented sun and the first moon they scanned the infant earth, barely more than a few wheat fields and some orchards beside the waters. These primitive angels were stars. For the Hebrews, the concepts of angel and star merged effortlessly: I will select, from among many, the passage of the Book of Job (38:7) in which the Lord spoke out of the whirlwind and recalled the beginning of the world, "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." Quite apparently, these sons of God and singing stars are the same as the angels. Isaiah, too (14:12), calls the fallen angel "the morning star", a phrase Quevedo did not forget when he called him "lucero inobediente, ángel amotinado" [defiant star, rebel angel]. This equivalency between stars and angels (those populators of nighttime solitudes) strikes me as beautiful; it is among the distinctions of the Hebrews that they vitalized the astral bodies with souls, exalting their brilliance into life. 

From the beginning to the end, the Old Testament throngs with angels. There are ambiguous angels who come along the straight paths of the plain and whose superhuman nature cannot immediately be divined; there are angels brawny as farmhands, like the one who fought with Jacob a whole night until the breaking of the day; there are regimental angels, like the captain of the Lord's host who appeared to Joshua; there are angels who threaten cities and others who are like expert guides through solitude; the angels in God's engine of war number two thousand times a thousand. The best-equipped angelary, or arsenal of angels, is the Revelation of St. John: there are the strong angels, who cast out the dragon; those who stand at the four corners of the earth so that it does not blow away; those who gather up the clusters of the vine of the earth and cast them into the great winepress of the wrath of God; those who are implements of wrath; those who are bound in the great river Euphrates and let loose like tempests; those who are a mixture of eagle and man.

Islam, too, knows of angels. The Muslims of Cairo live blotted out by angels, the real world virtually deluged by the angelic, for according to Edward William Lane, each follower of the Prophet is assigned two guardian angels, or five, or sixty, or one hundred and sixty.

The Celestial Hierarchy, erroneously attributed to the Greek convert Dionysius and composed around the fifth century of our era, is a highly documented ranking of angelic order that distinguishes, for example, between the cherubim and the seraphim, allocating to the first the full, perfect, and overflowing vision of God and to the second an eternal ascension toward Him in a gesture both ecstatic and trembling, like a sudden blaze rushing upward. Twelve hundred years later, Alexander Pope, archetype of the learned poet, would recall this distinction when he penned his famous line: "As the rapt seraph, that adores and burns..."

Theologians, admirable in their intellectualism, did not shrink from angels and tried to penetrate this world of wings and mirages with their reasoning minds. This was no uncomplicated matter, for angels had to be defined as beings superior to man but necessarily inferior to divinity. The German speculative theologian Rothe records numerous examples of the push and pull of this dialectic. His list of angelic attributes include intellectual force; free will; immateriality (capable, however, of accidentally uniting itself with matter); aspatiality (neither taking up any space nor being enclosed by it); lasting duration, with a beginning but without end; invisibility, and even immutability, an attribute that harbors them in the eternal. As for the faculties they exercise, they are granted the utmost suppleness, the power of conversing amongst themselves instantaneously without words or signs, and that of working wonders, but not miracles. They cannot create from nothing or raise the dead. The angelic zone that lies halfway between God and man is, it would seem, highly regulated.

The Kabbalists also made use of angels. Dr. Erich Bischoff, in his German book entitled The Elements of the Kabbalah, published in Berlin in 1920, enumerates the ten sefiroth, or eternal emanations of divinity, and makes each correspond to one of the regions of the sky, one of the names of God, one of the Ten Commandments, one part of the human body, and one class of angels. Stehelin, in his Rabbinical Literature, links the first ten letters of the aleph-beth, or alphabet of the Hebrews, to these ten lofty worlds. Thus the letter aleph corresponds to the brain, the First Commandment, the sky of fire, the divine name "I Am That I Am," and the seraphim known as the Sacred Beasts. Those who accuse the Kabbalists of imprecision are clearly mistaken. They were, instead, fanatics of reason, and they delineated a world of deification by installments that was nevertheless as rigorous and causal as the one we feel now...

Such a swarm of angels cannot have avoided meddling in literature. The examples are inexhaustible. In the sonnet by Juan de Jáuregui to Ignatius Loyola, the angel retains his biblical strength, his combative seriousness:

Ved sobre el mar, porque su golfo encienda
El ángel fuerte, de pureza armado.
[Look to the sea, for its gulf is set aflame/by the strong angel, armed with purity]

For Luis de Góngora, the angel is a valuable decorative trinket, good for gratifying ladies and children:

¿Cuándo será aquel día que por yerro
oh, Serafin, desates, bien nacido,
Con manos de Cristal nudos de Hierro?
[When will the day be that in error/oh, Seraph, you unloose, well-born/Knots of Iron with your Crystalline hands?]

In a sonnet by Lope de Vega, I ran across the agreeable and very twentieth-century metaphor:

Cuelgan racimos de ángeles
[Clusters of angels dangle]

And these angels, with a whiff of the countryside about them, are from Juan Ramón Jiménez:

Vagos ángeles malvas
apagaban las verdes estrellas
[Vague angels, mauve as mallows,/were putting out the green stars]

Here we arrive at the near miracle that is the true motive for this writing: what we might call the survival of the angel. The human imagination has pictured a horde of monsters (tritons, hippogriffs, chimeras, sea serpents, unicorns, devils, dragons, werewolves, cyclopes, fauns, basilisks, demigods, leviathans, and a legion of others) and all have disappeared, except angels. Today, what line of poetry would dare allude to the phoenix or make itself the promenade of a centaur? None; but no poetry, however modern, is unhappy to be a nest of angels and to shine brightly with them. I always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colors are like memories or premonitions of other colors. We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away.

FACTS ABOUT ANGELS

  1. Angels are created and unlike the believer, they are not born of God. “Praise Him, all His angels, praise Him, all His Heavenly hosts... Let them praise the name of the Lord, for He commanded and they were created ” Psalm 148:1-5.
  2. The word ‘Angel’ is from the Greek ‘angelos’ which means messenger. Angels, therefore, carry messages from God.
  3. Angels are spirit beings. They are invisible but have the ability to manifest in the physical realm.
  4. Angels look like human beings and can appear as strangers (Genesis 19:1-3; Hebrews 13:2 which says: “Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.”).
  5. Angels often manifest in dreams and visions. “One day at about three in the afternoon he had a vision. He distinctly saw an angel of God, who came to him and said, “Cornelius!” Acts 10:3 and Acts 27:23 “Last night an angel of the God whose I am and whom I serve stood beside me...”
  6. Angels are limited in their speech (Jude 9). They can only say what God has told them to say.
  7. Angels are always referred to as Masculine. There are no references in the Bible to angels of a feminine or child-like description.
  8. Angels are not Omnipotent (all powerful). Only God is.
  9. Angels are not Omnipresent (all present). Only God is.
  10. Angels are not Omniscient (all knowing) “It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the Gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from Heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.” 1 Pet 1:12
  11. Angels are incapable of dying “... and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels...” Luke 20:36
  12. Angels do not rest (Rev 4:8)
  13. Angels work in the lives of both Christians and non-believers. Their purpose is ultimately to bring glory to God and they do this through helping people see God’s hand at work in their lives.
  14. Angels have a language distinct from any earthly language. Angels can, however, speak earthly language. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal..” 1 Cor 13:1
  15. Angels do not marry or reproduce (Luke 20:35-36; Matt 22:30).
  16. There are so many angels that they cannot be counted by human understanding (Heb 12:22; Rev 5:11)
  17. Angels travel between Heaven and earth in a split second (Ezek 1:14). Remember that there is no time or distance in the Spirit world.
  18. Angels are powerful beings, mighty in strength (2 Thess 1:7; Rev 10:1; 20:1-3). They are more powerful than satan and his cohorts.
  19. When angels speak we can receive their message as from God (Heb 2:2).Their words cannot be broken. “We must pay more careful attention...to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation...received its just punishment...”
  20. Angels are not to be worshipped (Rev 22:8-9). They are our fellow servants.
  21. We will one day judge the fallen angels (1 Cor 6:3). 
Here is a documentary video that gives an account of History of Angels.




Astonishing FACTS about Facebook(MUST KNOW)

Facebook :

Facebook is an online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his Harvard College roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities and later to high-school students. Since 2006, anyone who is at least 13 years old is allowed to become a registered user of the website, though the age requirement may be higher depending on applicable local laws. Its name comes from a colloquialism for the directory given to it by American universities' students.


After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile, add other users as "friends", exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos and receive notifications when others update their profiles. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". Facebook had over 1.44 billion monthly active users as of March 2015. Because of the large volume of data users submit to the service, Facebook has come under scrutiny for their privacy policies. Facebook, Inc. held its initial public offering in February 2012 and began selling stock to the public three months later, reaching an original peak market capitalization of $104 billion. On July 13, 2015, Facebook became the fastest company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to reach a market cap of $250 billion.

Facts about Facebook :

  1. Facebook has over 350 million active users. More than 35 million users update their status each day, with more than 55 million status updates each day.
  2. More than 2.5 billion pictures are uploaded to Facebook each month.
  3. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and sends eight friend requests per month.
  4. Among children under 18, Facebook was ranked third in the top 100 searches of 2009, behind YouTube and Google. Sex and porn rounded out the top five searches.
  5. A recent survey of 500 top colleges found that 10% of admissions officers acknowledged looking at social networking sites such as Facebook to evaluate applicants. Thirty-eight percent of admissions officers said that what they saw negatively affected the applicant.
  6. Facebook is not only beating MySpace traffic, but it is also the second-ranked site overall in the U.S. behind Google.
  7. Americans spend 13.9 billion minutes a year on Facebook and five billion minutes on MySpace.
  8. In 2003, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg created Facemash, where he placed photos of undergraduates side by side so viewers could rank which one was “hotter.” Zuckerberg would later turn Facemash into the now ubiquitous Facebook.
  9. legs in bed
    A woman slept with 50 men she met on her Facebook page titled “I Need Sex”
  10. In 2008, a 23-year-old woman named Lauren Michaels created a group titled “I Need Sex” on Facebook. Within 10 minutes, she had 35 members and soon attracted 100—50 of whom she eventually slept with. Facebook has since removed her page.
  11. An 18-year-old Wisconsin man posed as several different girls on Facebook to blackmail underage male teens into performing sexual favors by coaxing them to send nude photos of themselves. He could be facing up to 300 years in prison.
  12. Beacon, part of Facebook’s controversial advertisement system that broadcasted information about a user’s shopping activity on other sites, was the target of a class action lawsuit in 2009. The resulting settlement required Facebook to pay $9.5 million into a settlement fund.
  13. If Facebook were a country, it would be the fifth-largest country in the world, afterChina, India, the U.S., and Indonesia.
  14. In 2009, an EMT at the crime scene took a cell phone picture of the body of a New York woman who had been strangled and beaten and then posted it on his Facebook profile. He was later arrested on charges of official misconduct and was fired from his job.
  15. The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales warned that Facebook and MySpace can lead children to commit suicide because such sites encourage teens to build transient relationships and dehumanize community life.
  16. Facebook includes eating disorder groups such as “Get Thin or Die Trying,” and “Quod me nutrit me destruit” (“What nourishes me destroys me”). While such eating disorder sites were typically anonymous on the Web, their growing presence on Facebook makes them more public and accessible to more people.h
  17. The New Oxford Dictionary announced that the 2009 Word of the Year was “unfriend,” as in “to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site” such as Facebook. However, there is some debate whether the word should be “defriend” rather than “unfriend.”l
  18. A 39-year-old Pennsylvania father was arrested for openly asking his 13-year-old daughter for sex over Facebook.
  19. While stressing that correlation does not equal causation, a recent poll suggested that Facebook users have lower overall grades than non-users.
  20. While initially created for college students, Facebook users over the age 26 now represent 60% of the total U.S. Facebook population.


  21. The average Facebook users spend more than 55 minutes a day on the site. They use the Like button nine times a month and write 25 comments each month.

Life Style of Mark Zukerberg :

Being the youngest billionare, any aspiring programmer would take Zuckerberg as an Inspiration. Wanna know the lifestyle of Zuck, view the video,