As with the American Revolution, "Presbyterians" to blame for starting the rebellion, but now against American immigration laws

But these Presbyterians might have been drawn and quartered by their forebears in 1776.

Increasing number of churches agree to protect immigrants from deportation:

The modern sanctuary movement in the U.S. dates back to the 1980s and Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona. ... Hundreds of churches have said they are willing to take in an illegal immigrant, but only several dozen are actively hosting someone and there has been a drop in migrants entering sanctuary in 2018.

Laws are like cobwebs

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

-- Jonathan Swift

Actually Jesus would be appalled by how many of you so-called social justice warriors commit injustice, as fornicators and adulterers for example

They tell me 'tis my birthday

 

 

They tell me 'tis my birthday, and I'll keep it

with double pomp of sadness;

'Tis what the day deserves,

which gave me breath.

-- John Dryden

No offence meant to the holy incarnate Logos, but the baby Jesus didn't have a clue that there was no room for him at The Inn

George Harrison was a would be follower of Hindu fundamentalist A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada: All the answers are in the Bhagavad Gita

The video is here.

These restrictions are required of all initiates:

No illicit sex

No intoxication

No meat-eating

No gambling.

Having polished off his $90 six-pack, the saviour of American Christianity moves on to lesser fare

Christopher Caldwell thinks Christmas' excess is German-Americans' last stand

Why are Americans so unhinged about Christmas?:

The most obnoxious advert on American television this Christmas season features a thirtyish man telling his wife he ‘got us a little something’ at a holiday sale. ...

[W]e are talking about $135,000 worth of truck and — even if you get it on sale — about a man giving a Christmas gift to himself that is worth more than the annual income of the median American family. ... 

Today there are articles in women’s magazines and on gossipy websites with titles like ‘How Not to Go Bankrupt This Christmas’. ...

Nothing is ever enough. Radio stations, in the age before the internet, used to play Christmas carols now and then. Some would play carols nonstop after 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Today, the streaming wireless network Sirius XM Radio has 16 whole channels dedicated to different sub-genres of holiday-season music, and they run all month long. ...

The country gets more Christmassy even as it gets less Christian. That is probably not an accident. Most of America’s Christmas traditions — with trees, stockings, fires, carols — were imported with the German immigration of the 19th century. Germans remain the largest ethnic group in the United States. After the German language and most of its folkways were driven out of American life during the first world war, Christmas became the main avenue through which German-American culture lived on. Its pleasures, as Americans understand them, are hard to distinguish from those of today’s faddish Teutonic concept, hygge: cosiness, family and making the best of bad weather. Christmas now seems like the opposite of the American way of life, as hygge seems a dangerous kind of anti-Americanism. For as long as the season lasts, Christmas supplies what Americans don’t have enough of in their lives. It is a counterculture.

The great American Christmas songs — ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’, ‘White Christmas’, ‘Winter Wonderland’ — are about the warmth of family, the solidity of small-town life, the building of human relations on a bedrock of decency, and above all the love of tradition. If Americans are devoted to Christmas more zealously, fanatically, excessively than ever, it may be because the destruction of familiar traditions has ceased to be an unfortunate side-effect of American culture and started being its raison d’être.

 

What became of Hitler

When thou from this world wilt go,

The whole world vapours in thy breath.

-- John Donne

Earthquakes in divers places: A big New Madrid earthquake in Midwest would liquify the soil

How likely is an earthquake in the Midwest, South? The Big One could be coming:

Today, an estimated 11 million people live in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, according to TransRe, a reinsurance company that essentially insures the property insurance companies. "The big thing we prepare for is with New Madrid," [John] Bobel [Kentucky public emergency management information officer] said. "Depending on the significance of an earthquake, Memphis, Tennessee, would be gone; St. Louis would be wrecked."...

Bobel didn't sugarcoat it. It would be bad. "Anything west of I-65, infrastructure would be severely damaged," Bobel said of the interstate that bisects Kentucky and Tennessee. "The ground could even liquify and turn to mud," which happened in 1811 and 1812.

In a 7.7 magnitude earthquake along the New Madrid Fault, the Mid-America Earthquake Center at the University of Illinois estimated in 2008 that Tennessee would have the worst damage: 250,000 buildings moderately or severely damaged, more than 260,000 people displaced, significantly more than 60,000 injuries and fatalities, total direct economic losses surpassing $56 billion, $64 billion today when adjusted for inflation. Kentucky would have the next most significant damage, totaling $45 billion, $52 billion today.

Twilight of the gods: The man who would save Christianity in America pays $90 for a 6-pack of beer

And Rod Dreher says our elites are decadent.

Keep trying Rod, you'll get it eventually

This was that: Misinterpreting the past with the present

What are we to make of John Allen Chau, an American missionary murdered in India?:

I think his was authentically a Christian death. ... I believe he is indeed a martyr.

I believe this, one, because of all the laughter, because his sanity's been questioned. Some thought the same of Jesus, you see, some even from his own family. In early accounts of Christian martyrs, centuries ago, repeatedly, the scorn leveled against them was that they were crazy too, unbalanced, that they had a death wish. "Why do you rush towards death?" they asked Pionius, one of our early martyrs, a mouthy Christian priest crucified, the story goes, just like Christ. "I am not rushing towards death, but towards life," he said. It's a misunderstanding typical between those who believe and those who don't; one thinking the other one crazy, the other embracing life in death amid the ridicule of those playing it safe. It's why nothing of the laughter or of the disapproval of the agnostically sane persuades me to pass judgment. Because martyrs don't make sense, never have. But neither did Jesus, nor his Crucifixion.

Jesus wasn't thought crazy by his family because he had a death wish.

He was thought crazy because he renounced his family and his social responsibilities and took up the mantle of prophet, urging others to do just as he had done in order to escape the imminently coming judgment.

The death wish idea was imported ex post facto and superimposed on a narrative which remarkably resisted and survived.

The only thing worthy of scorn is Jesus' would-be followers' immemorial ignorance of why he believed Israel deserved the judgment he preached in the first place. 

Loyalty, like grace, shows the nobility of the giver of it more than the nobility of the receiver

Though loyalty, well held, to fools does make

Our faith mere folly; yet he that can endure

To follow with allegiance a fall'n lord,

Does conquer him that did his master conquer.

-- William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act III, Scene XIII

For loyalty is still the same,

Whether it win or lose the game;

True as the dial to the sun,

Although it be not shone upon.

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

I have coveted no man's silver, or gold, or apparel. Yea, ye yourselves know, that these hands have ministered unto my necessities, and to them that were with me. I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.

-- Acts 20:33ff.

Who among us anymore is high-souled enough actually to disdain the trappings of greatness?

Nothing, says Longinus, can be great, the contempt of which is great.

-- Joseph Addison

YOU must know, my dear friend, that it is with the sublime as in the common life of man. In life nothing can be considered great which it is held great to despise. For instance, riches, honours, distinctions, sovereignties, and all other things which possess in abundance the external trappings of the stage, will not seem, to a man of sense, to be supreme blessings, since the very contempt of them is reckoned good in no small degree, and in any case those who could have them, but are high-souled enough to disdain them, are more admired than those who have them.

-- Longinus, On the Sublime, tr. W. Rhys Roberts, VII, 1

Agence France Presse stumbles into the truth: Clergy "suspectible" of being gay

Ya think?

Earthquakes in divers places: Latest Anchorage AK earthquake at 7.0 was dwarfed by the 9.2 in 1964

The Good Friday Earthquake of 1964 in Southern Alaska at 9.2 was the second greatest ever recorded in the list of the world's 20 biggest quakes, which all range on the scale from 8.4 to 9.5. The Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 doesn't even make the list at 7.9.

With 2018 almost over the total of 13 so far is about average for a year since 1977. Big ones at 8 or greater are quite rare, averaging less than one per year over the period. And since 1977 there have been just two at 9 or greater, one in 2004 in Sumatra and one in 2011, the great Tohoku earthquake in Fukushima, Japan, often referred to as Japan's 311. 

Michael Savage: Suicide is an anciently outlawed impulse and is wrong because it's self-murder

Of course.

In German we call it exactly that: der Selbstmord.

The tyrant Lucre

 

Up, up, says Avarice; thou snor'st again,

Stretchest thy limbs, and yawn'st, but all in vain:

The tyrant Lucre no denial takes;

At his command the unwilling sluggard wakes.

-- John Dryden

The one and only temple

 

 

The heav'n, the air, the earth, and boundless sea,

Make but one temple for the deity.

-- Edmund Waller

Welcome to I Can Hardly Remember Orthodox Catholicism Day

Jesus hardly speaks of thanksgiving as characteristic of the daily spiritual life the way Paul does, but is instead more unsettled and on guard in his estimation of it

In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. 

-- I Thessalonians 5:18

And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint;

-- Luke 18:1

Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.

-- Luke 21:36

For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.

-- Mark 3:35

Newly-elected Marxist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks just like a Christian end-of-the-world fanatic

Atheist Camille Paglia: The remodeled university of the future should have comparative religion for its undergraduate core curriculum

Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World:

Post-structuralism, along with identity politics, made huge gains in the 1970s, as the old guard professors proved helpless against a rising tide of rapid add-on programs and departments like women’s studies and African-American studies. The tenured professoriate seemed not to realize that change of some kind was necessary, and thus they failed to provide an alternative vision of a remodeled university of the future. I myself was lobbying for interdisciplinary innovation in the humanities—something that remained highly controversial right through the 1980s, when there were fierce battles over it where I was then teaching (during the merger of the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts with the Philadelphia College of Art to form the present University of the Arts). Another persistent proposal of mine has been for comparative religion to become the undergraduate core curriculum, an authentically global multiculturalism.

The wrath of the Son may soon be kindled

Do homage to the Son,

that He not become angry,

and you perish in the way,

For His wrath may soon be kindled.

How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!

-- Psalm 2:12

The individual's last stand

 

Must the whole man, amazing thought! return

To the cold marble, or the contracted urn!

And never shall those particles agree, 

That were in life this individual he?

-- Matthew Prior

How to lose your country through magical thinking

News from the future, UK Daily Mail:

MING THE MERCILESS CROWNED EMPEROR OF CALIFORNIA IN PACT WITH NEW CHINESE GOVERNOR

• Christians insist they did their part and that life goes on

• Say happiness is not dependent on who loses elections

National Catholic Reporter attacks its conservative luminaries and First Things, denies Catholic abuse scandal is primarily homosexual in origin

This snooty editorial demanding deep self-examination is itself blind to the sin of homosexuality which has metastisized in the Catholic priesthood. The church's view that God has created people homosexual is the little leaven that has leavened the whole lump.

Here:

Those who worked so ardently in the past to enable you — the faithful, so betrayed, who just couldn't believe you would engage in such a deliberate cover up; the likes of George Weigel and his blind, uncritical hagiography of Pope John Paul II; Dr. Mary Ann Glendon and the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and their naive celebration and defense of Maciel; the rest of the chorus at First Things and like publications; the telling silence of so many other Catholic outlets; the absurdity of charlatan William Donohue and his silly "Catholic" League — they helped sustain your weak narrative as many of them denigrated those who raised the tough questions and pursued the truth.

It's over.

None of them any longer has a persuasive case to make. Some of them now try to blame the crisis on gay priests. You might be tempted to latch onto that diversion, but it will only prolong the already intolerably long agony.

Gay priests and bishops are certainly among us — probably a greater percentage of gays in the Catholic clergy, if anecdotal evidence and the private chatter of seminary rectors and heads of orders is to be believed, than one would find in the general population. ...

Unless the preponderance of credible experts has suddenly flipped its understanding of things, however, sexual orientation is not one of the topics that match with sexual abuse.

The mother's womb the dressing room

 

 

Man's life's a tragedy; his mother's womb,

From which he enters, is the tiringroom;

This spacious earth the theatre, and the stage

That country which he lives in; passions, rage,

Folly, and vice, are actors.

-- Henry Wotton (1568-1639)

Everything is awesome, same as ever

 

 

Some have a violent and turgid manner of talking and thinking; they are always in extremes, and pronounce concerning everything in the superlative.

-- Isaac Watts (1674-1748)

Your new electorate: More than a third of millennials are nones but many share the irrational beliefs of the young

Michael Graham, here:

About 35 percent of all adult millennials (born between 1981-1996) are part of the “nones,” people with no identified religious faith. ...

It’s not that millennials and young Americans are too rational to be believers — far from it. According to a new report from MarketWatch, half of all young Americans “believe astrology is a science.”

“The psychic services industry — which includes astrology, aura reading, mediumship, tarot-card reading and palmistry, among other metaphysical services — is now worth $2 billion annually,” MarketWatch reports.

The human capacity to believe in the beyond believable is all but limitless.

When your name is Martha

Verily, verily, I say un-to thee:

One thing is needful when your name is Mary;

But if you should happen to go by Martha,

You're stuck serving lunch because that's your karma.

-- Johnny

From the It's-OK-When-We-Say-It Department: American Jew Mark Levin calls Pittsburgh shooter "sub-human"

Here:

"It’s sickening that the media is blaming the mass murder of American Jews by a sub-human killer on rhetoric instead of on the killers hateful actions."

The Untermensch lives in every man, not simply in some.

The price of calling Muhammad a pedophile in Europe is $547

Sex, the sixth pillar of Islam

Telling the truth is now defamation in Europe, unless you're Charlie Hebdo apparently.

Defaming Muhammad does not fall under purview of free speech, European court rules:

The court’s decision comes after it rejected an Austrian woman’s claim that her previous conviction for calling Muhammad a pedophile, due to his marriage to a 6-year-old girl, violated her freedom of speech. ... A Vienna court convicted her in 2011 of disparaging religious doctrines, ordering her to pay a $547 fine, plus legal costs. The ruling was later upheld by an Austrian appeals court.

The Gospel of John is truer, you see . . .

The Gospel of John is truer, you see

than Synoptic Gospels ever could be:

Where it's "Verily, Verily I say unto thee",

and a single "Verily" won't quite do it for Me.

-- Johnny

'Twere profanation to tell our love

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
   And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
   “The breath goes now," and some say, “No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
   Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
   Though greater far, is innocent.



Dull sublunary lovers’ love
   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
   Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,
   Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.

-- John Donne

He who borrows to give is no liberal

Such moderation with thy bounty join,

That thou may'st nothing give that is not thine;

That liberality is but cast away,

Which makes us borrow what we cannot pay.

-- John Denham

George Scialabba isn't convinced by John Gray's attack on The Enlightenment, but still finds his new book worthwhile

The true believer dies hard.

From Scialabba's review in The New Republic here:

As Carl Becker argued 85 years ago in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (still “the best book on the Enlightenment,” in Gray’s opinion), the philosophes “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.” Gray’s verdict is even harsher: “Racism and anti-Semitism are not incidental defects in Enlightenment thinking. They flow from some of the Enlightenment’s central beliefs.” ... [A]gain and again, Gray finds, ... a mode of thought overthrows religion, only to imitate some of its characteristic intellectual moves. ... In fact, some of the resemblances Gray claims to see between Christianity and various types of atheism are less than compelling. In a devastating critique of Becker’s Heavenly City, Peter Gay coined the phrase “the fallacy of spurious persistence” to name a tendency to claim false or exaggerated continuities. ... Of course we should keep Gray’s cautions well in mind. The catastrophic revolutionary ideologies of the past were ersatz religions. Scientific utopias and promises to transform the human condition deserve the deepest suspicion. Moral and political progress are always subject to reversal. Humans are animals; human nature is riven with conflicts; reason is a frail reed. 

The never-failing vice of fools

Of all the causes which conspire to blind

Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind,

What the weak head with strongest bias rules

Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.

-- Alexander Pope

Rod Dreher's conversion experiences all come with an expiration date

Suborned tears

 

[Her] artful bosom heaves dissembled sighs;

And tears suborn'd fall dropping from [her] eyes.

-- Matthew Prior

The blackest vices are the surest steps to favor

The fear of punishment in this life will preserve men from few vices, since some of the blackest often prove the surest steps to favour; such as ingratitude, hypocrisy, treachery and subornation.

-- Jonathan Swift

Fortune is a floozy

 

 

Dilatory fortune plays the jilt

With the brave, noble, honest, gallant man,

To throw herself away on fools and knaves.

-- Thomas Otway (1652-1685)

"Wit depends on dilatory time"

Lying lips

Let the lying lips be put to silence; which speak grievous things proudly and contemptuously against the righteous.

-- Psalm 31:18

The communist wing of the Catholic church in America un-endorses Brett Kavanaugh

The eldest law of nature

Poet Laureate of the UK, 1715

Witness for me, ye awful gods!

I took not arms till urg'd by self-defence,

The eldest law of nature.

-- Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718)

Accusers without at least two witnesses are worthless

Against an elder receive not an accusation, but before two or three witnesses. -- 1 Timothy 5:19

One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or for any sin, in any sin that he sinneth: at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established. -- Deuteronomy 19:15

On the astonishment of the spectators

 

 

 

In hysterick women the rarity of symptoms doth oft strike an astonishment into spectators.

-- Gideon Harvey (c. 1640-c. 1700)

An eternity of extremes of fire and ice in hell

Thither by harpy-footed Furies hal'd,

At certain revolutions, all the damn'd

Are brought, and feel by turns the bitter change

Of fierce extremes,—extremes by change more fierce;

From beds of raging fire to starve in ice

Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine

Immoveable, infix'd, and frozen round

Periods of time; thence hurried back to fire.

-- John Milton

Henry More: Infinite God filling infinite space

Henry More, 1614-1687

Discussed here:

God, an infinite and eternal spirit, is spread out through space. If God and space are infinite and eternal, and God is spread through space, perhaps God is space. More concluded that space is God’s immensity or presence in the world. Similarly, time or duration is God’s eternity.

It's Sunday, the day when Catholic offerings in New York go to pay off men sexually abused as boys by priests

Bishop Robert Morlino: Catholic homosexual subculture to blame for abuse crisis, homosexuals unfit to be priests

Quoted here:

"It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord," wrote Bishop Robert Morlino in an Aug. 18 letter to Catholics in the Diocese of Madison, Wisconsin. ... 

"We are talking about acts and actions which are not only in violation of the sacred promises made by some, in short, sacrilege, but also are in violation of the natural moral law for all. To call it anything else would be deceitful and would only ignore the problem further," Morlino said.

He continued: "There has been a great deal of effort to keep separate acts which fall under the category of now-culturally-acceptable acts of homosexuality from the publically-deplorable acts of pedophilia. That is to say, until recently the problems of the Church have been painted purely as problems of pedophilia — this despite clear evidence to the contrary. It is time to be honest that the problems are both and they are more." ... 

Morlino added in his letter that church teaching does not deem homosexual inclination sinful in itself, "but it is intrinsically disordered in a way that renders any man stably afflicted by it unfit to be a priest." ...

The 2011 John Jay report found 81 percent of abuse victims were male, but did not link that to a homosexual orientation among abusive priests; instead, the authors suggest greater access to young boys as a more likely factor.

Sure, sure.

Lawyer to bank robber: "Why do you rob banks?"

Bank robber to lawyer: "Because that's where they keep the money."

Protestantism's missionary gospel of inclusive brotherhood has been self-annulling

From the review of Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America, here:

As Hollinger notes, by the end of World War II, commentators such as Congregationalist leader Buell Gallagher were observing that the “gospel of inclusive brotherhood” that missionaries preached abroad had begun to return home like a boomerang to “smite the imperialism of white nations, as well as to confound the churches.” Many missionaries and their families who had been assigned a key role in converting the benighted darker races to Western ways had instead gained abroad an appreciation for cultural diversity and had come back to the United States to challenge “cultural imperialism and arrogant paternalism” and play a leading role in contesting white Protestant hegemony. Hollinger charts the intriguing flight of this boomerang. ... As he sees it, their greatest importance in the 20th century is to be found in the effects of a contradictory, potentially self-annulling belief system. 

These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. -- Matthew 10:5ff.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. -- Matthew 23:15

Cultural enrichment from Shia Islam: Spare the burning hot coals on the feet, spoil the child

Father makes his little boy walk over HOT COALS while men whip themselves with blades in gory self-flagellation Shiite Muslim ceremony

A poor man is better than a liar

Routinely lied to over 30,000 homeowners to get $31 million

Proverbs 19:22

Un-Chinese communists make new demands that indigenous Taoists Sinicize

If the Chinese communists were really serious about Sinicization, they would be promoting, not attacking, the indigenous Chinese traditions of Confucius, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Han era Buddhism. Instead they impose the foreign thought of Marx. What they are really interested in is power. The communists cynically manipulate belief in the old Confucian ideal of the harmonious society as their chief justification for the measures they take to eliminate competition for their on-going control of Chinese society.  

China's religious crackdown takes aim at Daoists, Buddhists:

Homegrown faiths not getting a 'free pass' by President Xi Jinping as Party fires salvo at over-commercialization of Daoism

It's not only Christianity and Islam the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) is cracking down on and asserting its control over; homegrown religions like Daoism and imported belief systems like Buddhism now face more measures aimed at curbing and rolling back their commercialization. ... 

Many of China's most popular tourist attractions revolve around centuries-old Buddhist and Daoist temples. For example, the 1,500-year-old Shaolin temple in central Henan Province has long been under the scrutiny of authorities. ...

All commercial investments in Buddhism and Daoism are prohibited under the new directive, while any temples deemed non-profit are banned from investing in the operations of other religious venues, according to a recent report in the South China Morning Post. ...

During the (1966-76) Cultural Revolution, Buddhists were forced to practice their faith in secret while the less formal rites associated with Daoism took a pummeling under Chairman Mao Zedong, who died in 1976. The temples and statues of both religions were routinely shut down and destroyed. In recent decades, as religious practice has experienced a remarkable revival in China, both Buddhism and Daoism have crept and then surged back into favor. By some estimates, their combined active adherents now number well into the hundred of millions.

A Talmudic picture of heaven shares with Plato's Socrates that the debate continues in the afterlife

What Happens in Heaven? Study. Of What? Jewish Law:

But, in one particular text [Bava Metzia 86a], the Talmud presents a picture of heaven quite unlike anything in the Bible, an image that is indeed unthinkable, if not blasphemous, outside of its uniquely rabbinic context . . . :

They were arguing in the Academy of Heaven. If the blotch on the [individual’s] skin preceded the white hair, he is impure. If the white hair preceded the blotch on the skin, he is pure.

Not only does the Academy of Heaven forgo any discussion of ultimate truths, but the question being debated at this highest imaginable institution of learning centers on an issue of law—and not just any issue, but one involving some of the most obscure, picayune, and technical details that can be found in the entire rabbinic canon. 

The picture is hardly unthinkable, nor is it uniquely rabbinic.

Plato's Socrates [Apology 40f.]:

But on the other hand, if death is, as it were, a change of habitation from here to some other place, and if what we are told is true, that all the dead are there, what greater blessing could there be, judges? For if a man when he reaches the other world, after leaving behind these who claim to be judges, shall find those who are really judges who are said to sit in judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and all the other demigods who were just men in their lives, would the change of habitation be undesirable? Or again, what would any of you give to meet with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? I am willing to die many times over, if these things are true; for I personally should find the life there wonderful, when I met Palamedes or Ajax, the son of Telamon, or any other men of old who lost their lives through an unjust judgement, and compared my experience with theirs. I think that would not be unpleasant.

And the greatest pleasure would be to pass my time in examining and investigating the people there, as I do those here, to find out who among them is wise and who thinks he is when he is not. What price would any of you pay, judges, to examine him who led the great army against Troy, or Odysseus, or Sisyphus, or countless others, both men and women, whom I might mention? To converse and associate with them and examine them would be immeasurable happiness. At any rate, the folk there do not kill people for it; since, if what we are told is true, they are immortal for all future time, besides being happier in other respects than men are here.