Angry Pope slaps St. Peter's Square pilgrim's grasping hand

Video.

God is dog spelled backwards

David Bentley Hart not gonna be happy about this development, no siree

The kingdom of God is at hand: Repent and believe

The incapacity of Catholicism to rebel against evil is a feature, not a bug

Submission is the meaning of both Islam and Catholicism. It's not for nothing that the American Revolution was called a "Presbyterian Rebellion". A Catholic America is a supine America.

John's pre-crucifixion Jesus leaves an opening for Gentile Christian self-identity, Matthew's denies the possibility of it

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.

-- Matthew 10:5f.

But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

-- Matthew 15:24

And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.

-- John 10:16

And the word is Lutherans

Heretic Bill Johnson's Bethel Church in California is in the news trying to resurrect church member's 2-year old who died December 14th

Opinion: Tragically, Bethel leaders praying for 2-year-old's resurrection are believing God for promises He hasn't made

Bethel Church leaders, members trying to resurrect worship leader's deceased 2-year-old daughter

ἤδη ὄζει -- John 11:39

Oswald Spengler: The opposite of noble is not poor, but vulgar

Pride and quietly borne poverty, silent fulfilment of duty, renunciation for the sake of a task or conviction, greatness in enduring one's fate, loyalty, honour, responsibility, achievement: All this is a constant reproach to the "humiliated and insulted".

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934), p. 94.

The mingled paint of living, good and ill together

'Tis in life as 'tis in painting,

Much may be right, yet much be wanting.

-- Matthew Prior

Atheist, feminist from a Texas family full of Trump supporters says Trump has ruined Christmas and turned it ugly

Here:

He ruins everything he touches. ... Now [Christmas] has morphed into something even uglier.

So it was already ugly, right?

But Ms. Amanda Marcotte obviously hasn't seen the big, ugly above-ground pool my new liberal neighbors installed next to my rear lot line. They are big Rachel Madcow fans and proponents of gun control who chose to live out here in rural America where gunfire is something of an evening ritual. Nor has the Salon writer heard the loud, drunken parties until the wee hours of the morning these liberals have brought with them, disturbing the peace. And now we've got a big ole SUV in the front yard with the hood up for at least the last month! Who leaves their hood up in the rain and the snow? It's a $330,000 house on two acres, quickly turning into White Trash America.

I sure do miss those Calvinists who used to own the property, even if they didn't think too much of me because I wasn't Dutch. At least they were tidy and quiet. And they had a beautiful lawn, too, underneath that pool.

Donald Trump has no corner on ugly.   

Sharper than a serpent's tooth it is, to have a thankless child

I'm not going to learn cuneiform just so I can appreciate Sumerian sarcasm

A Paulinist who wears cultural appropriation like a badge of honor

Christians are big time cultural appropriators. ... We have done much more than pinch a few pagan festivals and Christianise them. ... If we were to follow our sensitive compatriots [Paul] is clearly a hegemonic, imperialist Zionist/Christian cultural appropriator.

In I Corinthians 9:19-23 Paul boasts, ‘I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.' To the ever sensitive this is nothing less than a deliberate attempt to appropriate the culture of others in order to gain control of their minds and manipulate them. A vicious plot to destroy centuries-old indigenous belief systems and replace them with the beliefs of the powerful. Cultural appropriation of the very worst kind.

More here.

The USA had never existed without the Protestant reformers

“I love and revere the memories of Huss Wickliff Luther Calvin Zwinglius Melancton and all the other reformers how muchsoever I may differ from them all in many theological metaphysical & philosophical points. As you justly observe, without their great exertions & severe sufferings, the USA had never existed.”

 

-- John Adams to F. C. Schaeffer, November 25, 1821

Ignoramus writing for Inquisitr thinks he wrote a gotcha piece on Senator Blackburn

Failed prophecy: Worldwide "Jewish" population in 2018 was 23.5 million, tops, that's it

And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:

-- Genesis 12:2

Sacrifice

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. 

-- Isaiah 11:6

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent's meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the LORD.  

-- Isaiah 65:25

 

Jesuit father James Martin, present at the temptation of Eve

Jesus believed only a few in Israel would be saved, Paul believed all Israel would be, along with many Gentiles

For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins. ... For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all.

-- Romans 11:25ff., 32

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you. ... Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:  Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. 

-- Matthew 7:6, 13f.

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 ye shall be brought before governors and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them and the Gentiles. ... But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come.

-- Matthew 10:5f., 18, 23

But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. ... But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs.

-- Matthew 15:24, 26

So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.

-- Matthew 20:16

For many are called, but few are chosen.

-- Matthew 22:14

Both things cannot be true.

St. John Henry Newman rationalized Catholic adoption of paganism from time immemorial as sanctifying and transmuting it, same as bread and wine are transformed into holy body and blood by priests

Canonized a week ago, Newman was originally an evangelical Anglican.

Former Protestant and convert to Catholicism advocates clerical celibacy while completely ignoring that Peter and the apostles all were married

One John Bergsma, here, professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH, omitting from his discussion this:

Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?

-- I Corinthians 9:5;

And this:

CANON 21 of the First Council of the Lateran, Rome, A.D. 1122-1123, which is so emphatic against clerical marriage because it was still so common:

We absolutely forbid priests, deacons, subdeacons, and monks to have concubines or to contract marriage. We decree in accordance with the definitions of the sacred canons, that marriages already contracted by such persons must be dissolved, and that the persons be condemned to do penance.

The sign of perpetual slavery

 

 

He which was minded to make himself a perpetual servant, should, for a visible token thereof, have also his ear bored through with an awl.

-- Richard Hooker (1554-1600)

One of Nature's little kings

"Man"

  I know my soul hath power to know all things,  
Yet she is blind and ignorant in all:  
I know I'm one of Nature's little kings,  
Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.  

I know my life's a pain and but a span;
I know my sense is mock'd in everything;  
And, to conclude, I know myself a Man—  
Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.  

-- Sir John Davies (1569–1626)

Catholic social ethicist advocates that white people become vulnerable to people of color, and to rocks, minnows, and wind

And also believes the fantasy of 54-60 million indigenous people living in the Americas in 1492, reduced to 6 million in 1650 by white colonization, all without the aid of gas chambers and crematoria!

20th century whitey clearly has nothing on 16th century whitey.

The National Catholic Reporter may be kookier than America Magazine:

Indigenous scholars invite decolonization of the Anthropocene

Can't wait for the headline:

"Catholic social ethicist ignored warning signs, crushed to death in Rocky Mountain National Park rockslide: Autopsy reveals last meal of brook trout"

Religion is not the cornerstone of the American Republic

Religion is not the cornerstone of the American Republic, but know-nothings keep repeating that it is, such as "the Framers first listed religious liberty for a reason".

No, they did not.

The original First Amendment to the US Constitution involved representation, not religion. The original Second Amendment in its turn addressed representation's remuneration, not religion. Not until the original Third Amendment did religious liberty come up, and guns in turn in the Fourth, and so on through what is now our Tenth Amendment. The original First and Second Amendments were the first two of twelve, but failed of ratification.

The supposed primacy of religion because it was a subject of the First Amendment is a myth, recently repeated again here by one Josh Hammer:

Religious liberty, defined perhaps as the ability of the religious to freely and unobtrusively practice their faiths and worship and obey the Almighty in accordance with the idiosyncratic dictates of one’s own conscience, is the cornerstone of the American republic. Numerically, the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment are the first enumerated provisions of the very first ratified constitutional amendment. That is no mere coincident — the Framers first listed religious liberty for a reason.

This is nonsense. The original First Amendment, Article the First below, was about a formula for regularizing representation. That was the matter of first importance at the founding of the country. It is first in all the bills of rights which passed the Congress in 1789. Because it and its companion amendment were not ratifed at the founding, however, the Third Amendment became the First only by accident. While Article the First should have been ratified in view of what the Congress later did because the article wasn't ratified, as we'll see below, Article the Second was at least eventually ratified in the 27th Amendment ... in 1992.

Ratification of Article the First remains the great unfinished task from the Revolutionary era. If Article the Second could live on and be ratified in 1992, so can Article the First still be ratified today, or something close to it.

If the Revolution was sparked by a central animating outrage, it was taxation without representation. More than anything else it drove the first Americans to revolt against their English countrymen, with whom they otherwise shared the most intimate bonds of religious feeling, language, law, history, blood and custom. But religion or no, a distant parliament across the sea thought it could pick their fellow countrymen's pockets without their input or consent.

Americans today face a similar situation with the US Congress, even if they can't quite put it into words. The US president today may be greatly disapproved, but even he routinely far outscores the 535 men and women of an insular Congress in far away Washington, DC, who do not and cannot represent the 329 million people sprawled across this continent. The members of Congress go on and on wildly spending money which they no longer even collect sufficient taxes to cover but instead just borrow, in the people's name. This has been the default position of both parties in the wake of tax reform since the 1980s: "If you won't let us tax you to pay for it, we'll just borrow it instead", they seem to say. There is no brake on the spending, and in truth many don't want there to be.

We've seen this default behavior before.

Never too terribly bright in the first place, it finally dawned on the Congress back in the 1920s that it could fix the number in the US House at 435 because the founding generation had never settled the issue in Article the First.  With the Senate becoming a "super House" by virtue of the change to popular election, the House found it expedient to protect its own power by stopping itself from growing. Every new member, after all, dilutes the power of those already there and adds a vote for or against something current membership is already for or against. At the same time burgeoning immigration meant there were many new Germans, Irish and Italians in America which a WASPy Congress would rather not sit next to in the Capitol. The time was ripe to end the growth of representation.

The people, no longer reliably connected to the well springs of the founding, were none the wiser. They still aren't. Yet that act was the biggest power grab in the history of the Republic, second only to Abraham Lincoln's violation of the sovereign rights of the States. Each member of Congress since that time has accrued more and more power as a simple consequence of the country growing in population. Each one wields authority over ever larger legions of nameless faces in congressional districts now bloated to an average of 756,000 souls each in 2019. This subversion of the growth of representation with population was as sure a violation of the original intent of the constitution as was the Executive's War On the States. From the point of view of self-government, the one was as much an expression of tyranny as the other.

The results haven't been pretty. We now have a Congress the election of whose members routinely costs $10 million for a representative on average, $20 million for a Senator, none of whom know your name or care what you think. They pay more attention to the 11,586 registered lobbyists in 2018 than they do to us. There are nearly 27 lobbyists per member of the US House, and nearly one lobbyist for every 30,000 Americans, which ironically is the ratio for initial representation which Article the First originally had in mind. We have the best government which special interest money can buy. But just imagine: The founding generation fought bitterly over representation ratios of 1:30,000 vs. 1:50,000 and couldn't agree about them, but we sit idly by and let grifters domineer over ever growing hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans. The founding generation would not recognize us as a free people.

As a consequence of this concentration of more and more power in fewer and fewer hands in the US House and Senate, the leaders of Congress such as Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell also loom much larger in importance than they ever should have, as have the political parties they represent. Minority voices get no hearing and gain no traction. A stultifying degeneration to the lowest common denominator prevails, purple in hue, mostly. Mediocrity spreads everywhere. Millions feel disaffected, to the extent that ex-patriation has become a thing in the last refuge for freedom on earth.

A US House today of 6,580 under Article the First, on the other hand, would indeed be more cumbersome and inefficient than the Speaker of the House having to whip just 218 votes to spend us blind, but that's kind of THE WHOLE IDEA. It's much harder to rack up a national debt of $22.829 trillion when you have to herd 3,291 cats to do it instead of 218, but that's exactly what passing the Reapportionment Act of 1929 was designed to forestall. The 1920s was about nothing if not about revolutionizing America in the interests of power concentrated in a large, professional and centralized government controlled by specialists, answering only to an elite of 535 zeroes which has gone on to bequeath to us a debt of $23 with twelve zeroes after it. 

Meanwhile religious people today still have their choice of roughly 345,000 congregations in the US where 151 million worship as they please, and the rest don't. We are not suffering under the dim pall of an Established Religion of Rome, Wittenberg, Jerusalem or Mecca. Yet somehow all this religious activity has done absolutely nothing to prevent all this profligacy and debt slavery. Some would even go so far as to say that religion has more than contributed to this sorry state of affairs. 

The inescapable truth is that WE ALL are indeed in servitude. WE ALL are on the hook for those trillions upon trillions of dollars, with no end in sight. Not individually perhaps, but when countries can no longer pay their bills, they tend not to last too long, and the innocent end up paying the same price as the spendthrifts, usually involuntarily through social decay, disease, famine and war.

We really ought to fix this while we still can. Representation is the cornerstone of the Republic, not religion, and it's high time we had some of the former again.     

Article the First:

"After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons."

Article the Second:

"No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened."

Tom Holland, author of DOMINION, observes that Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism, just as Oswald Spengler had maintained

Inescapable Influence, ‘How the Christian Revolution Remade the World’:

“That’s fine,” I seem to hear a skeptical reader saying. “This may work in the case of the Enlightenment, but you are not going to say that Marxism or Communism, for example, also had Christian roots, are you?” That’s precisely one of the subtler points Holland is making in Dominion. In the foundational texts of Christianity there are places where a fundamental solidarity with the poor and the hungry, the powerless and downtrodden, is formulated.  Jesus himself called these people “brothers,” and identified with them unreservedly (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”), whereas for those at the other end of the power spectrum, he had a different message (“Woe to you who are rich!”). And the first generations of Christians understood quite well what Christ had meant: “We have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world,” writes Paul (1 Corinthians 4:13). Importantly, such a social vision is not just a peripheral feature of Christianity, or something added later by charitable souls, but stems from the central doctrine of Christianity: the Incarnation. As Holland puts it, “by making himself nothing, by taking on the very nature of a slave,” Christ had “plumbed the depths to which only the lowest, the poorest, the most persecuted and abused of mortals were confined.” In early Christian communities, all were “brothers” and “sisters,” everything was held in common, and power was deliberately shunned—a radical response to the radicalism of Christ’s own message. Various forms of what would later be called “socialism” or “communism,” recurrent throughout Christian history (from the Taborites to the Münster Anabaptists to countless other fringe groups) took those early communities as a good model to follow.

By the time Karl Marx entered the scene, then, Christianity already had a long and colorful history of toying with the communist idea. Coming from a solid rabbinical environment as he did, Marx didn’t fail to recognize a great Jewish teacher when he saw one, even when that teacher had ended up inspiring another religion altogether. Even the terminology used by Marx “to construct his model of class struggle—‘exploitation,’ ‘enslavement,’ ‘avarice’—owed less to the chill formulations of economists than to something far older: the claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets.” Marx’s famous formulation “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” looks to Holland like a cheeky act of plagiarism from the Acts of the Apostles: “Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to everyone as he had needed.” 

Lutherans put the best construction on everything, including the president whom crazy Jihadists elected to Congress want to impeach

Luther's explanation of the eighth commandment "Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor": "We should fear and love God that we may not deceitfully belie, betray, slander nor defame our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and put the best construction on everything."

It raineth chiefly on the just

Near-religious fervor among climate activists recalls troubling traits of extreme religious cults

Yes indeedy, but the balance of this op-ed in The Wall Street Journal goes much too easy on the fanatics, and is much too accepting of the current climate orthodoxy, paying no attention whatsoever to the outright fraud being committed by politically-motivated anti-capitalists in the scientific community.

St. Greta Spreads the Climate Gospel:

A movement that believes in sin, penance and salvation doesn’t sound very scientific

It’s been noted before that the cause of addressing climate change has become something like the modern world’s version of a secular religion. In much of Europe especially, but in sections of American society too, a kind of climate theology has replaced traditional Christianity as the ultimate source of authority over human behavior, comprising both an all-embracing teleology of our existence and a prescriptive moral code. 

The High Church of Environmentalism has acquired many of the characteristics of its ecclesiastical predecessor. An apocalyptic eschatology warns that we will all be consumed by fire if we don’t follow the ordained rules. The notion that it is our sinful nature that has brought us to mortal peril—from the Original Sin of a carbon-unleashing industrial revolution to daily transgressions with plastic bottles and long-haul flights—is as central to its message as it was to the Catholic Church’s. But repentance is near. A gospel of redemption emphasizes that salvation lies in reducing our carbon footprint, with reusable shopping bags and bike-sharing. The secular authorities preach the virtues of abstinence. Meatless Fridays are no longer just for Lenten observance. ...

[T]here is something about this near-religious fervor among the climate change activists—a growing fanaticism—that recalls some of the more troubling traits of extreme religious cults.

Polk County, Iowa, Democrats to offer up holocaust of 10,500 steaks to placate the climate change gods

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The end of the world never tasted so good.

Children have no business participating in the School Strike for Climate

To criticize a particular subject, therefore, a man must have been trained in that subject: to be a good critic generally, he must have had an all-round education. Hence the young are not fit to be students of Political Science. For they have no experience of life and conduct, and it is these that supply the premises and subject matter of this branch of philosophy. And moreover they are led by their feelings; so that they will study the subject to no purpose or advantage, since the end of this science is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether they are young in years or immature in character: the defect is not a question of time, it is because their life and its various aims are guided by feeling; for to such persons their knowledge is of no use, any more than it is to persons of defective self-restraint.

-- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1095

Lockean liberalism is in the final analysis a creature of Christianity as universal but benign religion, without which it stands to reason it will not survive

The wonder is that Locke seemed blissfully unaware, or unconcerned, that Islam was not benign and was therefore incompatible with political liberalism because it was a political religion which spread by the sword, not by the dictates of conscience.

The Need for a Revival of Lockean Liberalism:

A manuscript titled “Reasons for Tolerating Papists Equally with Others,” written in Locke’s hand in 1667 or 1668, has just been published for the first time, in The Historical Journal of Cambridge University Press. The document challenges the conventional view that Locke shared the anti-Catholicism of his fellow Protestants. Instead, it offers a glimpse into the radical quality of his political liberalism, which so influenced the First Amendment and the American Founding. “If all subjects should be equally countenanced, & imployed by the Prince,” he wrote, “the Papist[s] have an equall title.” ...

In his first major treatise supporting religious liberty, An Essay Concerning Toleration (1667), Locke constructs an argument, a defense of the rights of conscience, that he will build upon for the rest of his life. He argues that magistrates have no right interfering in religious beliefs that pose no obvious threat to the social order: “In speculations & religious worship every man hath a perfect uncontrolled liberty, which he may freely use without or contrary to the magistrate’s command.” The challenge of accommodating different religious traditions, including Roman Catholicism, is front and center. “If I observe the Friday with the Mahumetan, or the Saturday with the Jew, or the Sunday with the Christian, . . . whether I worship God in the various & pompous ceremonies of the papists, or in the plainer way of the Calvinists,” he wrote, “I see no thing in any of these, if they be done sincerely & out of conscience, that can of itself make me, either the worse subject to my prince, or worse neighbor to my fellow subject.” ...

What Locke found intolerable was not Catholic theology per se but rather the agents of political subversion operating under the guise of religious obedience. As he put it in the newly discovered manuscript: “It is not the difference of their opinion in religion, or of their ceremonys in worship; but their dangerous & factious tenets in reference to the state . . . that exclude them from the benefit of toleration.” On this point, Locke could be as tough on Protestants as he was on Catholics. ...

Political philosopher Greg Forster insightfully observes that Locke “towers over the history of liberalism precisely because virtually everything he wrote was directed at coping with the problem that gave birth to liberalism — religious violence and moral discord.” ...

America’s experiment in human liberty and equality is profoundly Lockean. It is also, in some important respects, deeply Christian. Locke believed that the gospel message of divine mercy — intended for all — implied political liberalism. The founder of Christianity, he wrote, “opened the kingdom of heaven to all equally, who believed in him, without any the least distinction of nation, blood, profession, or religion.”

It would be hard to conceive of a better doctrine on which to build a more just and humane society. A revival of Lockean liberalism would do much to tame the hatreds now afflicting the soul of the West.

The Evangelicals also are the grandmothers of Bolshevism

How Evangelicals Invented Liberals’ Favorite Legal Doctrine:

[T]he political and moral perfectionism of antebellum Protestants created standards of public morality that “threatened the core ideals of the commercial republic” that the Constitution was drafted to engender and protect. That is, evangelicals wanted to regulate public morality in ways that impinged upon commercial and business practices that had been legal, if not always favorably smiled upon, since the country’s founding. ...

[John] Compton’s thesis demonstrates that within the many ironies of history, the social and political instruments a perfectionist movement deploys may be easily co-opted for ends and purposes never imagined in their development.

Sundays are so hard, being deprived of hate sandwiches as they are

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The kids are back in school, and so are the predators

In learning let a nymph delight,

The pedant gets a mistress by't.

-- Jonathan Swift

First remove the hell from your own potty mouth, Rod Dreher, then you may address the f-bomb in your brother's

The jetting-around-for-Jesus of the Little Big Man of Christianity has gone straight to his head:

Bret Stephens of The New York Times: "It was a revelation to me that you could be a sincere Christian and not be a peasant"

The former editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post, quoted here in 2003, is a secular Jew.

Rhymes with insular.

Donna Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, opts for Athenian ostracism (and maybe worse): Lincoln and Douglas debates = good, Socrates' debates = bad

The unemployed classics PhD (Princeton) lives in Silicon Valley with her husband and two children, and runs a much fancier online presence than yours truly. She remains discomfited that America is more Rome than Athens.

The problems with online ‘debate me’ culture:

As the editor of an online publication that runs articles about the intersections of classical antiquity and the modern world, often from a feminist and progressive perspective, I’ve gotten my fair share of “debate me” challenges. Many of these have come after I began writing about far-right interest in ancient Greece and Rome in 2016. Blocking some of my would-be adversaries on Twitter seemed to just energize them — and convince them I was afraid to engage.

A call to debate may seem intellectual, even civilized. In theory, well-structured and respectful debates are an ideal opportunity to reach an audience that isn’t fixed in its views. In reality, however, most “debate me” types seem to view them mainly as a chance to attack their opponent’s credibility. Their model is not Lincoln and Douglas, but rather Socrates: By needling their interlocutors with rapid-fire questions, they aim to reveal, as they see it, their opponents’ ignorance and stupidity, and their own superior intelligence and logic. ...

These modest men also identify with Socrates, the original “debate me” troll. The Platonic texts show Socrates pulling any number of Athenians into debates, and although some are eager to argue with him, others can hardly wait to escape him by the end of the dialogue. Plato’s “Euthyphro” concludes with Euthyphro insisting that he has to leave, while Socrates calls after him, complaining that they haven’t yet figured out the nature of piety. Many of the dialogues end when the interlocutor has been bludgeoned into submission and seems to find it easier to agree with Socrates than continue further — every “debate me” man’s dream. ...

As Laurie Penny noted last year with respect to Milo Yiannopoulos, deplatforming white supremacists is a much more successful way to shut them down than insisting that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and allowing them to air their hateful views in a structured debate setting. 

AP: 0% of black Protestants favor married gay Democrat Pete Buttigieg for president in Pew survey

Gee, I wonder why.

Hm, could it be because he's . . . white?

Story.

Culture and enlightenment are powerless against delusions such as astrology

But in another way . . . antiquity exercised a perilous influence. It imparted to the Renaissance its own forms of superstition. ... The belief in a Divine government of the world was in many minds destroyed by the spectacle of so much injustice and misery. Others, like Dante, surrendered at all events this life to the caprices of chance . . .. But when the belief in immortality began to waver, then Fatalism got the upper hand, or sometimes the latter came first and had the former as its consequence. The gap thus opened was in the first place filled by the astrology of antiquity, or even of the Arabs. ... It is profoundly instructive to observe how powerless culture and enlightenment were against this delusion; since the latter had its support in the ardent imagination of the people, in the passionate wish to penetrate and determine the future. Antiquity, too, was on the side of astrology.

-- Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1945), 313f.

Life eludes us

Like following life in creatures we dissect,

We lose it in the moment we detect.

-- Alexander Pope

This is most certainly true: Catholics today are functionally Protestant because of capitalism, a Protestant invention

Man over man He made not lord

Human predator seeks human prey

He gave us only over beast, fish, fowl,

dominion absolute; that right we hold

by his donation: but man over man

He made not lord.

-- John Milton

Baby Boomer, 63, retires in Mazatlán on $1,000 a month, goes all-in for the life of mañana

She’s 63 and living by the beach in Mexico on $1,000 a month: ‘I can’t imagine living in the U.S. again’ :

“It’s a very different vibe here that’s kind of hard to explain. It’s not about being retired, because I wasn’t that until a year ago. It’s just a different understanding of what’s important in life, and a more relaxed live-and-let-live attitude. If something doesn’t get done today — there’s always tomorrow, or the next day. What’s the big deal?,” she explains. 

Tomorrow you will live, you always cry,
In what far country doth this morrow lie?
That 'tis so mighty long e'er it arrive:
Beyond the Indies does this morrow live?
'Tis so far-fetch'd this morrow, that I fear
'Twill be both very old, and very dear.
Tomorrow will I live, the fool does say,
Today itself's too late, the wise liv'd yesterday.

-- Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) 

Potty mouth: What President Trump and Rod Dreher have in common

The president's profanity is the subject of a recent article:

‘Using the Lord’s name in vain’: Evangelicals chafe at Trump’s blasphemy.

Rod Dreher has been on a tear with his own profanity this summer in his Twitter feed:

6/20: Somehow, the damn things fit!

6/22: Watch Tucker Carlson give John Bolton and others hell.

6/25: This guy is a first-class bullshitter.

6/25: Not a damn thing playing that an actual adult would want to see.

6/25: Stop tasing him! Goddamn!

6/27: Retweet: "the most batshit idea the Dems have come up with".

7/05: hell of a writer

7/08: hell of a writer

7/09: I had these for a starter. Savory walnut paste is pretty damn great.

7/09: Retweet: Perfect response: "I am so sick of this shit".

7/11: There's just too damn much weather in Louisiana.

7/23: You damn right that Gina Schock was the sexiest Go-Go!

7/24: And these Jesuit dipshits have the gall to publish this.

8/04: This is true: none of us has a damn clue how we're supposed to respond.

8/07: What the hell?

8/10: Every damn US Senator should co-sign.

I think the evangelicals would call this habit speech a sign of being unredeemed.

Others might chalk it up to being unintelligent, or intellectually lazy. Trump is the former, Dreher the latter.

Churches were appropriated from synagogues which appropriated The Temple which appropriated the high places which derived from ancient altars . . .

Yes, but I think in the heat of the moment you meant "so as to be unable". Hostile much?

This behavior of appropriation might seem to be a major inheritance learned from just one peculiar people, which could be true in the sphere of religion, but in many other spheres such as law, history, medicine, science and philosophy the phenomenon of appropriation is no different from how Roman civilization consciously imitated everything Greek. In fact the Roman habit of synthesizing was a model for founding generation Americans, which is how America came to be a nation of immigrants.

This used to be a source of pride and self-identity among Americans regardless of background, who happily learned to imagine themselves as part of a great tradition spanning millennia and ethnicities. Now appropriation somehow makes one inauthentic.

Is a frame house preferable to a yurt?

Complains the guy who once forked over $90 for a six-pack of beer

Christian Science, the church which paved the way for legislation allowing every crackpot cult to hurt and kill families and children

Dying the Christian Science way: the horror of my father’s last days:

It was church officials who engineered the 1970s US federal regulation that led to virtually every state enacting laws allowing parents to neglect children and get away with it. ... [C]hildren have died of everything from pneumonia, seizures and sepsis to a ruptured esophagus, mostly due to medical neglect – and the name of every one of them should be nailed to the door of the Mother Church. ... It could disappear today or tomorrow or years from now, but its own beliefs, and the religious exemptions it has seeded in laws all across the US, will leave a disaster in their wake, resulting in lives ruined, in unnecessary suffering and death, and in legislation that allows every crackpot cult and anti-vaccination zealot to sacrifice their children. Christian Scientists can renounce Eddy all they want, but it will not undo the evil they have done. That is their legacy.

I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With listless eyes the dotard views the store--

He views, and wonders that they please no more.

Now pall the tasteless meats and joyless wines,

And Luxury with sighs her slave resigns.

-- Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes 

Ah, the temperate voice of Islam in America calls for "eradicating evil" white woman: Typical religion PhD hewing to type

The mediocre men

 

Men of age object too much, adventure too little,

and seldom drive business home to the full period;

but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

-- Francis Bacon

The Old Order Amish have made simplicity a way of life in America since its inception, but today people shell out big bucks to flirt with it "on vacation"

Guess which one is the example of terrible simplification.

The Ultimate Luxury Vacation: Doing Nothing in the Middle of Nowhere:

Simplicity is the ultimate luxury as travelers search for new ways to unplug this summer. The promise of escaping everyday life has always lured vacationers. But now people whose daily routines are consumed by digital demands and distractions are going to ever-greater lengths to do nothing in the middle of nowhere.

Paul of Tarsus, a man so possessed with his own fancies that he took them for oracles

 

Men are so possessed with their own fancies, that they take them for oracles; and are arrived to some extraordinary revelations of truth, when indeed they but do dream dreams, and amuse themselves with the fantastick ideas of a busy imagination.

-- Authorship disputed, The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety (1667)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.

-- Galatians 1:11f.

American education also failed Rod Dreher, who remains unaware that Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism

Jesus posits but one singular good transcendent above the world, including himself

If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

-- Matthew 7:11

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

-- Matthew 12:34

If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?

-- Luke 11:13

And when the people were gathered thick together, he began to say, This is an evil generation: they seek a sign; and there shall no sign be given it, but the sign of Jonas the prophet.

-- Luke 11:29

And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.

-- Matthew 19:17

And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.

-- Mark 10:18

And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good, save one, that is, God.

-- Luke 18:19

Rod Dreher is praying for 1.1 million dead at Auschwitz, 100+ BILLION dead since 50,000 BC are chopped liver

The chosen people.

Death makes these odds all even

If thou art rich, thou'rt poor;

For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,

Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey,

And death unloads thee.

-- William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act 3, Scene 1

There are the sin forgivers, and then there are the sin retainers, like evangelical Pete Wehner

You've got to wonder if Pete Wehner ever seriously considered that evangelicals who give Trump a pass are instead practicing forgiveness.

What would forgiveness look like, Pete? Did Jesus ever once turn a blind eye to moral transgression?

But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. 

 

-- Matthew 6:15

Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots. 

 

-- Luke 23:34

Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more. 

 

-- John 8:11

Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained. 

 

-- John 20:23

Pete's clearly still a sin retainer, after all these years, just as many evangelicals have been in the past, for example in regard to Bill Clinton.

Kind of runs in the human family, but for a brief, shining moment.

The Deepening Crisis in Evangelical Christianity:

The enthusiastic, uncritical embrace of President Trump by white evangelicals is among the most mind-blowing developments of the Trump era. How can a group that for decades—and especially during the Bill Clinton presidency—insisted that character counts and that personal integrity is an essential component of presidential leadership not only turn a blind eye to the ethical and moral transgressions of Donald Trump, but also constantly defend him? Why are those who have been on the vanguard of “family values” so eager to give a man with a sordid personal and sexual history a mulligan? ...

[T]here is ... the undeniable hypocrisy of people who once made moral character, and especially sexual fidelity, central to their political calculus and who are now embracing a man of boundless corruptions. Don’t forget: Trump was essentially named an unindicted co-conspirator (“Individual 1”) in a scheme to make hush-money payments to a porn star who alleged she’d had an affair with him while he was married to his third wife, who had just given birth to their son.

This is priceless coming from an evangelical Christian, seeing that the foundation of evangelicalism requires buying into Pauline enthusiasm

“I Did Not Die. I Did Not Go to Heaven.”:

“The idea that someone could go to heaven and come back with visions and dreams and we should take that seriously is as far from historic evangelicalism as it’s possible to get,” Phil Johnson, the executive director of the ministry headed by MacArthur, the California pastor and author whose ministry Beth reached out to in 2012. “To me, one of the real signifiers that modern evangelical Christianity is badly astray and in serious jeopardy of even existing 50 years from now is the ease with which evangelicals buy into stories like this.”

It is not expedient for me doubtless to glory. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord.  I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. Of such an one will I glory: yet of myself I will not glory, but in mine infirmities.

-- II Corinthians 12:1ff.

The religious left is as unwoke as they claim is the right

The anti-Semitic theology behind the Christian Zionist lobby:

As clergy and people of deep faith and conscience, we do not know a God that ignores or justifies the suffering of one group of people for the security and comfort of others.

For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth. ... And repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them: he will not be slack to him that hateth him, he will repay him to his face. ... Thou shalt be blessed above all people ... . And the LORD will take away from thee all sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which thou knowest, upon thee; but will lay them upon all them that hate thee. And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee. ... Moreover the LORD thy God will send the hornet among them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed. ... And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven: there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them.

-- Deuteronomy 7:6, 10, 14, 15, 16, 20, 24

On Jewish Chosenness and Israeli Chauvinism:

 

A survey of the “Beliefs, Observance and Values among Israeli Jews” conducted in 2009 found that 70 percent of Israeli Jews believe that Jews are the chosen people. Since 46 percent of Israeli Jews define themselves as secular according to the survey, the numbers indicate that even within the secular minority, at least one-third maintains a belief in Jewish chosenness, and that the concept has taken on shades of simple ethnic chauvinism beyond any original theological significance. This is reminiscent of the quip about secular Zionists who don’t believe in God but do believe that God gave them the land. ... Half of Israeli Jews (48 percent) believe Arabs should be transferred or expelled from Israel.

Folly most in quickest sense is found

If we had nought but sense, then only they

Should have sound minds which have their senses sound;

But wisdom grows when senses do decay,

And folly most in quickest sense is found.

-- John Davies (1569-1626)

What does an elite tribe do when it runs out of its own tribes to exploit?

It invents more tribes, expanding the number and morphing from Judaism for Jews into Judaism for the whole world by way of Pauline Christianity.

And, behold, I have given the children of Levi all the tenth in Israel for an inheritance, for their service which they serve, even the service of the tabernacle of the congregation. -- Numbers 18:21

If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; -- Philippians 3:4f.

For it hath pleased them of Macedonia and Achaia to make a certain contribution for the poor saints which are at Jerusalem. It hath pleased them verily; and their debtors they are. For if the Gentiles have been made partakers of their spiritual things, their duty is also to minister unto them in carnal things. -- Romans 15:26f.

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