Jesus Turned Water Into Wine and Now You Can, Too!

Did you hear about this news story?

A couple days ago I came across a news piece talking about a new FDA approved powdered alcohol called Palcohol. Of course, good Christian folk were upset.

What about the kids? What about the potential for abusing this product? You can drink it and get drunk or you can snort it like drugs! (kudos to Fox News for that spiffy white board in the news segment – way to go all out, guys).

But, alas, it turns out that everyone got hyped up for nothing.

The product is not a close to market-release as we were initially led to believe. USAToday followed up about palcohol.

So we can turn off the rage machine. Kids won’t be getting drunk from nor snorting powdered booze.

But it doesn’t really matter what form the substance comes in. People who will abuse it are going to abuse it. We’re quick to hop on the “ban the substance!” bandwagon because some people might go too far.

But isn’t that true in every area of life?

– Some people will go too far with eating (that thing we call gluttony) but we don’t ban food.
– Some people will go too far with sexuality but we don’t ban marriage.
– Some people will go too far with…

You see, everything that God made has the potential to be corrupted. It doesn’t matter if it’s powdered, liquid, visual, aural…whatever! Humanity has the ability to corrupt and abuse anything. Just because something is corruptible doesn’t make it evil. Food, beer, movies, music – you name it. The Bible doesn’t condemn these things. But everything taken to corruptible excess can lead to sin.

We should be more concerned about being in right standing before God and raising our kids (as best we can) to do the same. Let God be the judge of peoples’ hearts, and give others the freedom to enjoy their Vodka Kool-Aid (or whatever they’re gonna call it). 🙂

***UPDATE***

A friend who knows more of the science than I do told me:

Alcohol is a solvent similar to water with the three states of solid, liquid and gas like all matter (there is of course plasma, but unimportant here). However, powdering something like this implies removing the water from it (the H20) and leaving the solid elements behind. This is possible with other foods, because there is a great deal of matter that is solid at room temperature to be left behind. Ethanol is CH3CH2OH. If you chemically broke it down and removed two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom from it and recombined the remainder, you are left with CH3CH–a form of butane! The only way to ‘powder’ alcohol would be to take it down into its solid state–which with alcohol is -173 deg. F. That would be a bit hard to package for the shelf.

Is this whole thing a gag? Thoughts?

***Update #2***

Seems “powdered alcohol” isn’t quite the correct term. See this great article from Time about the whole thing…

Related Post:
– Christian Beer…I Mean Liberty