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.