Peter Wood gets stuck in a Vermont ditch for hours and ruminates on the essence of his 14,000-tome library: We are our imperfections

 

Here:

Read enough old ethnography, and the story of people victimizing one another is inescapable, but so is the deep knowledge of human commonality. As Pritchard grasped some 200 years ago, our cultural differences are myriad, but they aren’t everything, and the more we make of them, the worse our plight. Anthropology at its best taught us that our follies are as universal as our aspirations; and that grasping for ascendency in the name of justice is just another path to hardship and division. We are our imperfections. Best to get back on the road.

Because man is a political animal, and politics has been successful in the West, no raiding party happened by and scalped poor Mr. Wood. Instead he was rescued by a tow-truck, eventually.

The angels, once again, were mistaken

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. 

-- Luke 2:14

Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division:  

-- Luke 12:51

Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas!

 Doubtless the pleasure is as great

Of being cheated, as to cheat;

As lookers on feel most delight,

That least perceive the juggler's sleight.

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

On the priority of philology

 The multiplication and obstinacy of disputes, which have so laid waste the intellectual world, is owing to nothing more than to the ill use of words.

-- John Locke

Welcome to unsufferable winter

Instead of golden fruits,

By genial show'rs and solar heat supplied,

Unsufferable winter had defac'd

Earth's blooming charms, and made a barren waste.

-- Richard Blackmore

An Aristotelian critique of solitude

 Whosoever is delighted with solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.

-- Francis Bacon

Gender dysphoria in one lesson

 

LOL Slovakia and Hungary, you were doing just fine until the Pope decided to visit in September

 

LOL, very successful YouTuber who preaches off-grid self-reliance decries following false narratives, urges action now or society is doomed!

The doomsaying narrative is the oldest narrative of the Christian West, expressing as it does the core message of Jesus of Nazareth.

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.

-- Mark 1:15

From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation.  

-- Luke 11:51

It has routinely erupted century upon century ever since in explicitly religious predictions of the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Yet here we are.

In our times it has taken on secularized elements, like WWI as "the war to end all wars", or warnings of global communist tyranny, a coming ice age, devastation by global thermonuclear war, the ozone hole, pandemic disease, the population bomb, man-made environmental and climate catastrophe, "the end of history", global warming, starvation, and now mass anxiety and depression!

Don't just sit there! Do something!

Preferably with your hands, outdoors.

That way you might catch a better glimpse of The Mother of All Asteroids before it blows us all to smithereens.

The way of truth is strewn with many errors, which must be censored

Wise men know, that arts and learning want expurgation; and if the course of truth be permitted to itself, it cannot escape many errours.

-- Thomas Browne

God is the Alpha and Omega of censorship

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

-- Genesis 3:24

As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

-- Matthew 13:40ff.

We are plagued by a plague of vaccine hysteria

People are stormed out of their reason, plagued into a compliance, and forced to yield in their own defence.

-- Jeremy Collier

Don't be a prick

 If God would have had men live like wild beasts, he would have armed them with horns, tusks, talons, or pricks.

-- John Bramhall (1594-1663)

We've gone from Bungle in the Jungle to simply unrepeatable in less than fifty years

Wit, as the chief of virtue's friends,

Disdains to serve ignoble ends:

Observe what loads of stupid rhimes

Oppress us in corrupted times.

 

-- Jonathan Swift

The superstition of bells and smells

 The causes of superstition are pleasing and sensual rites, excess of outward and pharisaical holiness, over-great reverence of traditions which cannot but load the church.

-- Francis Bacon

The unreliable testimony of sense

Whether the earth move or rest, I undertake not to determine: my work is to prove, that the common inducement to the belief of its quiescence, the testimony of sense, is weak and frivolous. ... Though the earth move, its motion must needs be as insensible as if it were quiescent.

-- Joseph Glanvill

Hither, thither, and yon: The way shown by the gods

The gods, when they descended, hither

From heav'n did always chuse their way;

And therefore we may boldly say,

That 'tis the way too thither.

-- Abraham Cowley

Two pricks take five grand from 77-year old woman who wouldn't make their wedding flowers to settle eight year old case

 

“At age 77, it’s time to retire and give my business to someone else,” Stutzman wrote in a letter.

He that laboreth to be merely a lame duck laboreth in vain

With endless pain this man pursues,

What, if he gain'd, he could not use:

And t'other fondly hopes to see

What never was, nor e'er shall be.

 

-- Matthew Prior

 

When the cosmos chases its tail

When, like a bridegroom from the east, the sun

Sets forth; he thither, whence he came, doth run.

 

-- John Denham

The false, faithless man is an eviscerated man

There is no more faith in thee than in a stoned prune;

no more truth in thee than in a drawn fox.

 

-- William Shakespeare, King Henry IV Part 1, III.3

Glenn A. Moots ably defends Luther and Calvin from the charge of being radical revolutionaries, but too readily accepts their recent Catholic opponents' definition of "revolutionary"

Glenn A. Moots ably defends Luther and Calvin from the charge of being radical revolutionaries in "Was the Protestant Reformation a Radical Revolution?", but he could have done better by framing them as restorationists who returned the Christian religion to its rightful origins as revealed in Holy Scripture. That is most certainly how they saw themselves.

 

And this was not coincidentally how American Protestant revolutionaries also saw themselves:

 

Magisterial Protestants rejected the proliferation of radical sects and dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic and were, by liberal standards, quite severe with their opponents (e.g., Anabaptists or Quakers). According to Sidney Ahlstrom, three-quarters of eighteenth-century Americans were magisterial Protestants.

To revolt derives from revolve, to roll back or around. In Biblical terms this is the meaning of repentance, a turning away from present evil and going back to the original, right way.

This old meaning of "revolution" still dominated at the time of Alexander Hamilton and the American founders, and is inextricably bound up with the development of English Protestantism, which of course derived from Luther and Calvin.

What Is Conservatism? :

First, there were those who admired the English constitution that they had inherited and studied. Believing they had been deprived of their rights under the English constitution, their aim was to regain these rights. Identifying themselves with the tradition of Coke and Selden, they hoped to achieve a victory against royal absolutism comparable to what their English forefathers had achieved in the Petition of Right and Bill of Rights. To individuals of this type, the word revolution still had its older meaning, invoking something that “revolves” and would, through their efforts, return to its rightful place—in effect, a restoration. Alexander Hamilton was probably the best-known exponent of this kind of conservative politics, telling the assembled delegates to the constitutional convention of 1787, for example, that “I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced.” Or, as John Dickinson told the convention: “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us. It was not reason that discovered the singular and admirable mechanism of the English constitution…. Accidents probably produced these discoveries, and experience has given a sanction to them.” And it is evident that they were quietly supported behind the scenes by other adherents of this view, among them the president of the convention, General George Washington. ...

Anyone comparing the Constitution that emerged with the earlier Articles of Confederation immediately recognizes that what took place at this convention was a reprise of the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Despite being adapted to the American context, the document that the convention produced proposed a restoration of the fundamental forms of the English constitution . . .. Even the American Bill of Rights of 1789 is modeled upon the Petition of Right and the English Bill of Rights, largely elaborating the same rights that had been described by Coke and Selden and their followers, and breathing not a word anywhere about universal reason or universal rights.

Happy Reformation Day!

 

The endless itch

 

 

 The charms of poetry our souls bewitch;

The curse of writing is an endless itch.

-- John Dryden

It never occurs, and probably little matters, to Pete Wehner that the empire transformed by the love and service of the followers of his gentle Jesus quickly FELL

Details, details.

 

The Jesus who won his heart is as much a  caricature as the one he criticizes, in the gooey mess here:

The Evangelical Church Is Breaking Apart

 

The school of experience

But apt the mind or fancy is to rove,

Uncheck'd, and of her roving is no end,

'Till warn'd, or by experience taught, she learn,

That not to know at large of things remote

From use, obscure and subtle, but to know

That which before us lies in daily life,

Is the prime wisdom; what is more, is fume

Or emptiness, or fond impertinence,

And renders us in things that most concern

Unpractis'd, unprepar'd, and still to seek.

 

-- John Milton 

LOL, Calvinist John Piper says you are free to obey The Emperor and get vaccinated

And you thought "freedom is slavery" was an Orwellian idea. The inspiration is thoroughly Christian, and "The question is", said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master, that's all".

 

The apostle Peter said,

This is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as slaves of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor. (1 Peter 2:15–17)

“Live as people who are free.”

Peter had just said, “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether to the emperor as supreme, or to governors” (1 Peter 2:13). So how can you “be subject” and “be free” at the same time?

Peter’s answer is that Christians are “slaves of God.” In other words, when you submit to a “human institution” (1 Peter 2:13), you don’t do it as the slave of that institution. You do it in freedom, because you are slaves of God, not man. God owns his people — by creation and redemption. ...

When we submit, we do so for the Lord’s sake. Because he said to. God’s ownership of his people strips every decisive entitlement from human authority. It turns every act of human compliance into worship. When we submit, we do so for the glory of our one Owner and Master. Life is radically Godward.

More.

 

Every act of compliance is worship, eh?

In the 3rd century many Christians found one act of compliance utterly beyond the pale. They refused to comply with an edict of Decius requiring everyone to perform a sacrifice to the gods in the presence of a Roman magistrate, which was deemed sufficient to demonstrate one's loyalty to the empire.

Some Christians at the time thought such sacrifices to be idolatrous. Many were killed for refusing to offer them.

Many people today, and not just Christians, think that the vaccines can cause harm, to their children and/or to themselves, and refuse to take them or allow them. Some people are losing their jobs as a result.

Many wonder what happened to the ideas we grew up with, that in America health decisions are between the individual and her doctor and are no one else's business, especially not the government's business. Many today wonder what happened to the "first, do no harm" line in the Hippocratic oath.

Circumstances likewise changed a great deal between the composition of I Peter and the 3rd century. There was no formal empire-wide persecution of Christians before the Decian edict of 250 AD. In the absence of official edicts requiring apostasy, obeying the law was not at issue and was promoted in the interests of evangelism and comity, especially in the 1st century.

Similarly Paul in I Corinthians 8 knew that eating meat offered to idols was nothing because no other gods actually exist, but that weak minds found it offensive, for which reason he said that one should not eat meat offered to idols to protect their feelings.

This advice had unintended consequences. The weak minds proliferated, to the point that by the 3rd century the Christians were literally a people living apart from the wider Roman society, attracting suspicion and ultimately the ire of the authorities for failing to behave like Romans. Rod Dreher fans should take note. His prescription in The Benedict Option might be more cause than effect of the troubles he believes are coming, and may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Today vaccine compliance earns you a proof of vaccination card. With it you can go about the normal business of living, including going to work. In the 3rd century, sacrifice earned you a libellus, a proof of sacrifice card. With it you could escape execution.

You would expect that in a liberal society, a free society such as that bequeathed to us by the Protestant founders of America who inherited the ideas of Paulinism, the, if you will, weak-minded anti-vaxxers among us would be cut the same slack Paul cut those who were superstitious about idol meat.

But we don't live in that world any longer. We live in an absurd world where the vaccinated, the protected, promote fear of the unvaccinated, which is superstition. It's getting to be more and more like the 3rd century world of suspicion and compulsion.

John Piper has as little to say to the one as to the other. But the 3rd century speaks volumes.

 

 

The ungodly are unreliable

 No prince can ever rely on the fidelity of that man, who is a rebel to his Creator.

-- John Rogers (1679-1729)

Dr Sigmund Freud's been dead since 1939, but the vivid imagination of the neurotic Jew lives on comically and robustly in Dr Irving Finkel

Emphases added:

“It’s obviously a male ghost and he’s miserable. You can imagine a tall, thin, bearded ghost hanging about the house did get on people’s nerves. The final analysis was that what this ghost needed was a lover,” he said.

“You can’t help but imagine what happened before. ‘Oh God, Uncle Henry’s back.’ Maybe Uncle Henry’s lost three wives. Something that everybody knew was that the way to get rid of the old bugger was to marry him off. It’s not fanciful to read this into it. It’s a kind of explicit message. There’s very high-quality writing there and immaculate draughtsmanship.

“That somebody thinks they can get rid of a ghost by giving them a bedfellow is quite comic.” ...

“All the fears and weaknesses and characteristics that make the human race so fascinating, assuredly were there in spades 3,500 years ago.

“I want people to know about this culture. Egypt always wins in Hollywood. If the Babylonian underworld is anything like it was described, then they’re all still there. So just remember that.”

More.

I'm sure everyone joins me in hoping that Dr Finkel's going to be altogether alright already. Please buy his new book.

 

 

 

Another Lincoln and state worshiper pretends that local militias and the Union Army weren't mobs

Uniforms are placed upon them from the start to help obscure this fact. In the end, the winners' mobs are always anything but mobs, especially to their partisans.

Like John Bicknell, here, in "The Philadelphia Bible Riots":

In Philadelphia, after some stops and starts, the civil authority in the form of local militias defended order. ... In Illinois, the civil authorities sided with the mob. Philadelphia’s Catholics survived. Nauvoo’s Mormons, having seen their government abandon them to the mob, fled.

Six years earlier in Springfield, a mere 130 miles from Nauvoo, a young Whig lawyer had warned that “if the laws be continually despised and disregarded, if their rights to be secure in their persons and property, are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob, the alienation of their affections from the government is the natural consequence; and to that, sooner or later, it must come.” As would so often be the case, Abraham Lincoln was prophetic. ...

But the useful lesson from the Philadelphia riots of 1844, the mob assassination of Joseph Smith, and countless other examples across the centuries, is that those with power will always act to defend that power and are not too particular about how they do it. It makes little difference if that power is derived from positions of authority in government, business, religion, the media, academia, or any other institution. If mobs, in the street or online, will help them achieve their ends, they’re willing to exploit them, ignoring Lincoln’s admonition that “there is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” The question—in 1844 as it remains today—is whether the authority of the state will be employed to quell the mob or to augment it. The former is the foundation of ordered liberty. The latter is something else entirely.

I'm sure that the British crown thought that sending 24,000 Redcoats to Long Island in August 1776 was meant to maintain ordered liberty, too, against the Presbyterian Rebellion, just as Lincoln came to think both disunion and slavery were grievances which had become quite fit indeed for redress by force of arms. Eventually the chartered rights of Englishmen in New York prevailed over the forces of a foreign king, only to suffer loss 89 years later from the Bluebellies of a domestic tyrant.  

As Bicknell otherwise rightly says,

Human affairs are morally complex and attempts to simplify them—even for supposedly well-intentioned purposes—are almost always bound to come up short.

The Amish response to coronavirus may have contributed to higher death rates from COVID-19 among their communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Indiana

It appears that the Amish response to coronavirus, which was to resume life as normal after lockdowns in 2020 and among other things share the common cup at Holy Communion at church, may have contributed to higher death rates from COVID-19 in their communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Indiana. 

Death rates per 100k of population currently exceed overall state rates in 17 Amish counties out of 30 top Amish counties which together form the 10 largest Amish communities in the nation.

The data is from The New York Times at us-covid-tracker.com, pandemic to date as of Oct 11, 2021.

Ohio (197 deaths/100k):

Holmes, putatively the most Amish county in the nation, 273 deaths/100k, which is 38.6% higher than the current overall Ohio rate of 197/100k.

Wayne 224

Coshocton 216

Tuscarawas 316

Stark 279

Trumbull 273

Ashtabula 200

Mercer 224.

 

Indiana (239 deaths/100k):

 

Elkhart 251

Jay 240

Wells 311

Marshall 296

Daviess 342.

 

Illinois (221 deaths/100k):

Moultrie 283

Coles 241.

 

Pennsylvania (235 deaths/100k):

 

Mifflin 403

Huntingdon 332.

 

For 5 Amish counties in Pennsylvania, the current average death rate exceeds the state rate to date by 14%. For 10 Amish counties in Ohio the average death rate exceeds the state rate by 18%. For 3 Amish counties in Illinois the average death rate exceeds the state rate by 12%. And for 12 Amish counties in Indiana the average death rate exceeds the state rate, to date, by just over 1%. Two multi-county Amish communities within Indiana exceed the state death rate to date by an average of 9.2%. One of those Indiana Amish communities abuts Ohio's Mercer County whose death rate exceeds the Ohio death rate to date by 13.7% (included in the Ohio total above).

 

Since the data used here is cumulative, it was not possible to reconstruct the rates at previous points in the past. It is likely that the current rates represent the state of affairs long after the height of the damage was done by the pandemic.

 

More granular data showing specifically Amish deaths would be needed to verify that the deaths were contained within the Amish community. The Amish typically do not participate in government in general, or public education or public health care in particular.

America's Amish willingly got the coronavirus at church by taking the common cup at Holy Communion

After a short shutdown last year, the Amish chose a unique path that led to Covid-19 tearing through at warp speed. It began with an important religious holiday in May.

Lapp: When they take communion, they dump their wine into a cup and they take turns to drink out of that cup. So, you go the whole way down the line, and everybody drinks out of that cup, if one person has coronavirus, the rest of church is going to get coronavirus. The first time they went back to church, everybody got coronavirus.

Lapp says they weren’t denying coronavirus, they were facing it head on.

More.

US Catholics are so out of touch with their faith 65% of them have not one clue the Pope put restrictions on the Latin Mass in July

Maybe because they go to Mass HARDLY AT ALL, Latin or otherwise, lol?

A survey from a year ago put weekly pre-pandemic Mass attendance as low as 13%. Gallup in 2018 put the figure much higher, at 39%, vs. 45% weekly church attendance for Protestants.

PEW has the story, "Two-thirds of U.S. Catholics unaware of pope’s new restrictions on traditional Latin Mass", here:

Catholics who attend Mass weekly are both more likely to be aware of the new restrictions and more inclined to oppose them than Catholics who attend less frequently, the survey finds.

Duh.

America: The most English, the most German, the most Protestant, the most guilt-ridden this Columbus Day

 

... the idea that Britain might celebrate, say, Cecil Rhodes in the way that Spain does Columbus seems almost heretical. The English-speaking peoples evince a peculiar compulsion to apologize for their overseas victories — a compulsion not much shared by Arabs or Portuguese or Russians or Turks or Italians. When it comes to self-criticism, only the Germans give us a run for our money.

Why should that be? Is it some curious manifestation of Protestant guilt? Is it that Anglosphere universities, unusually, remove students from their families and their hometowns, leaving them in each other’s company and making them unusually vulnerable to purity spirals and silly ideas? Or is it simply that everyone loves an underdog and the English-speaking peoples are almost never underdogs?

Whatever the explanation, we have reached a strange cultural moment when the countries that did the most to spread personal freedom and representative government across the globe are also the ones most embarrassed about their achievements.

 

More.

Peter Leithart observes that William Lane Craig is a moderate on Genesis, and Craig responds that a figurative reading was the Pentateuchal author's intent!

In which Leithart amusingly puts back on his discarded Protestant hat to defend the faith from a mind-reader trapped in a cul-de-sac.

[H]e sneaks into the head of the author of Genesis to discover that the biblical account of Eden and the fall was “fantastic, even to the Pentateuchal author himself.” ... Some Evangelical theologians deny the existence of a historical Adam entirely, which means that Craig’s position is a moderate one.

-- Leithart, here in "Doubts About William Lane Craig’s Creation Account"

If an aspect of a story contradicts what the Pentateuchal author believed, it is unlikely to be literally intended.

... the Pentateuchal author would have known that ... sunset and sunrise could not have occurred prior to the creation of the sun ...

... If the stories are inconsistent with one another when read literally, that suggests that a literal interpretation is not intended.

-- Craig, here in "Mytho-History in Genesis"

 

Nothing like to ours at all

Neither their sighs nor tears are true,

Those idly blow, these idly fall,

Nothing like to ours at all,

But sighs and tears have sexes too.

-- Abraham Cowley

Why our preferred pronoun for God should not be they

https://religionnews.com/2021/09/29/why-our-preferred-pronoun-for-god-should-be-they/

 

They is the plural of he or she,

or this, or that, or it;

There is but one God, and none but He,

not these nor those, dimwit.

-- Johnny 

 

εἷς ἐστιν Θεὸς, καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν ἄλλος πλὴν αὐτοῦ·

The batchelors conspire to destroy the world

There is in man a natural possibility to destroy the world; that is, to conspire to know no woman.

-- Thomas Browne

Punishment must reach the mind and bend the will

 

 

If punishment reaches not the mind, and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

-- John Locke

Lying means the death of conversation

 

 Lying is a vice subversive of the very ends and design of conversation.

-- John Rogers (1679-1729)

It's heartwarming to observe that a deceased stand-up comic was wiser than an astrophysicist

 

They are the enemies of the cross of Christ whose god is their belly and whose glory is in their shame

 

 

 

 Had the upper part, to the middle, been of human shape, and all below swine, had it been murder to destroy it?

-- John Locke

The most natural division of all offenses

The most natural division of all offenses, is into those of omission and those of commission.

-- Joseph Addison

John Locke, no New Testament scholar, correctly understood 350 years ago that St. Paul's religion was entirely a matter of private interpretation

Saint Paul was miraculously called to the ministry of the gospel, and had the whole doctrine of the gospel from God by immediate revelation; and was appointed the apostle of the Gentiles for propagating it in the heathen world.

-- John Locke

That he accepted this enthusiasm as a miracle is beside the point, making him but a child of his time and therefore not the radical he is sometimes made out to be.

No one is above the law

 

Should vice expect to 'scape rebuke,

Because its owner is a duke?

 

-- Jonathan Swift

Love thy neighbor this, and love thy neighbor that, but they always seem to leave this part out

 

. . . You shall surely rebuke your neighbor, and not bear sin because of him.

-- Leviticus 19:17

Lying by omission is our way of life here in America, in service of our "live and let live" ideology, perhaps made most famous in the old "Don't ask, don't tell" policy of Bill Clinton about gays in the military.

Truth no longer exists. There is only "my truth".

Libertarianism = injustice.

The Lord raises up evil

Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house ... 

τάδε λέγει κύριος ἰδοὺ ἐγὼ ἐξεγείρω ἐπὶ σὲ κακὰ ἐκ τοῦ οἴκου σου ...

-- II Samuel 12:11

When the Presbyterians were the fanaticks

 

The presbyterians, and other fanaticks that dangle after them, are well inclined to pull down the present establishment.

-- Jonathan Swift

The well worn way

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nature, that rude, and in her first essay,

Stood boggling at the roughness of the way;

Us'd to the road, unknowing to return,

Goes boldly on, and loves the path when worn.

-- John Dryden, 13th Satire of Juvenal

For the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.

 

-- Matthew 7:13

The good man melts

 

 

A few soft words and a kiss, and the good man melts; see how nature works and boils over in him.

 

--  William Congreve (1670-1729)

If only this ignoramus knew about The Presbyterian Rebellion he'd be crowing more than he usually does about how right he is

 

The write stuff

Every man cannot distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry;

every man therefore is not fit to innovate.

-- John Dryden

Catholic systematic theologian Thomas Weinandy featured at First Things appears to be a process theologian in disguise, not an orthodox one

He appears to be driven to his conclusions by his reading of the Fourth Gospel, which has the risen Jesus still in process in heaven "preparing a place for you" (John 14:2f.).

As a consequence the historical Jesus wasn't really fully Jesus, nor are Christians ever fully Christians, until the end of the world when they all are reunited in that place.

... the Incarnation of God’s eternal Word, his “pitching his tent among us” (Jn. 1:14) in our mortal condition is not an instantaneous happening, confined to Annunciation or Nativity, but an ever-deeper process of immersion and transformation. ...

In his coming down out of heaven at the end of time, and in his taking up with him the faithful into his ascended glory, Jesus will then become fully Jesus, for he will have fully enacted his name—YHWH-Saves. ...

As Jesus becomes fully in act at the end of time, so Christians, who fully abide in Christ, become Christians fully in act at the end of time ...

More.

This all sounds suspiciously like it is tailored for the "Life is about the journey, not the destination" crowd, a theology for the consumers of pop-cultural Marxism not of the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

Of course one has to ignore, among many other things, the imminent end of the world preached by the Jesus of the Synoptics and its failure to come, to even begin to go down this path, which makes the reviewer's assertion that there is eschatological energy in all of this completely laughable.

That is precisely what one would expect of enthusiasm for systematic theology, which, pace the Pope, always ends up making a mockery of the inconvenient evidence.

"The dualism between exegesis and theology" which Francis laments is irreconcilable.

Orwell's "blackwhite" doublethink has a deep cultural pedigree

 

Knaves, who in full assemblies have the knack

Of turning truth to lies, and white to black.

 

-- John Dryden

Guy teaching Dante, 700 years dead, every year for 25 years at University of Dallas writes paean which proves that practice doesn't make perfect

But for boring, uninspiring, and convoluted, it's a masterpiece.

LOL Rod Dreher, center of the universe, is really upset that Pope Francis, Christ's Vicar on Earth, showed no interest in buying his book

 

 

Dreher hastily deleted the tweet after taking massive incoming.

LOL, Jews are really upset with Pope Francis for having the temerity to insist with St. Paul that the written code kills

 

At the audience, the pope, who was reflecting on what St. Paul said about the Torah in the New Testament, said: "The law (Torah) however does not give life.

"It does not offer the fulfilment of the promise because it is not capable of being able to fulfil it ... Those who seek life need to look to the promise and to its fulfilment in Christ."

Rabbi Arousi sent the letter on behalf of the Chief Rabbinate - the supreme rabbinic authority for Judaism in Israel - to Cardinal Kurt Koch, whose Vatican department includes a commission for religious relations with Jews.

"In his homily, the pope presents the Christian faith as not just superseding the Torah; but asserts that the latter no longer gives life, implying that Jewish religious practice in the present era is rendered obsolete," Arousi said in the letter.

More.

"Gee Mr. Pope, sir, you should disavow the core tenets of your religion because we think they are insulting and denigrating, even if they were written by one of us".

Is the law then against the promises of God? God forbid: for if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law.

-- Galatians 3:21

For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.

-- Romans 7:9

who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not in a written code but in the Spirit; for the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life.

-- 2 Corinthians 3:6

Make yourself great again

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate: it is this noble quality that makes all men to be of one kind; for every man would be a distinct species to himself, were there no sympathy among individuals.

-- Robert South

Existence of hell finally proven, captured in remarkable photograph

 

LOL, let's just pretend Saul of Tarsus and the Pharisees never existed, nevermind the other sects of the "chosen" people

It is later Christians, rather than first century Jews, who seek to exclude others based on interpretive disagreements.

-- Candida Moss 

Yeah, those guys at Qumran weren't exclusionary at all, and salvation was never "of the Jews".

I asked a poor man how he did

 I asked a poor man how he did; he said he was like a washball, always in decay.

-- Jonathan Swift

Academic co-authors of famous study about honesty now shown to contain fake data still think it OK how remarkably uninvolved they were in it

This is how it works. It's about credentialism and arguments from authority, not about "science". Academia is rife with this sort of thing. Today's academics are as phony as the medieval clerisy ever was.

 

Renowned psychologist Dan Ariely literally wrote the book on dishonesty. Now some are questioning whether the scientist himself is being dishonest:

... four of the five authors said they played no part in collecting the data for the test in question.

That leaves Ariely, who confirmed that he alone was in touch with the insurance company that ran the test with its customers and provided him with the data. But he insisted that he was innocent, implying it was the company that was responsible. ...

Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor and one of the authors, wrote, “I was not involved in conversations with the insurance company that conducted the field experiment, nor in any of the steps of running it or analyzing the data.”

Another author, Nina Mazar, then at the University of Toronto and now a marketing professor at Boston University, told the blog, “I want to make clear that I was not involved in conducting the field study, had no interactions with the insurance company, and don’t know when, how, or by whom exactly the data was collected and entered. I have no knowledge of who fabricated the data.”

Gino declined to be interviewed for this story, and Mazar did not return a request for comment. ...

Bazerman of Harvard ... had questions about the insurance experiment’s seemingly “implausible data.” A coauthor assured him the data were accurate and another showed him the file, though he admitted that he did not personally examine it. When the 2012 paper made waves, he “then believed the core result” and taught it to students and corporate executives alike. In retrospect, he wrote, “I wish I had worked harder to identify the data were fraudulent, to ensure rigorous research in a collaborative context, and to promptly retract the 2012 paper.”

Shu, another coauthor who now works in venture capital, voiced similar regrets on Twitter this week. “We began our collaboration from a place of assumed trust — rather than earned trust,” she wrote. “Lesson learned.” She declined to comment for this story.

Either way, the new wine's not so hot

No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better.

-- Luke 5:39 (KJV)

And no one after drinking old wine desires new; for he says, The old is good.

-- Luke 5:39 (RSV)

 

 

And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.  ... Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine. 

-- Acts 2:4, 13

Which is the good way?

Thus says the LORD: Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk in it.

-- Jeremiah 6:16 

 

 

 

But my people have forgotten me, they burn incense to false gods; they have stumbled in their ways, in the ancient roads, and have gone into bypaths, not the highway ...

-- Jeremiah 18:15

You can run but you cannot hide

O! if to dance all night and dress all day

Charm'd the small pox, or chac'd old age away.

 

-- John Milton 

   

The post-modern academy is the pre-modern academy but more perverse, arguing about how many gay angels can fit on the head of a pin

Seen here, where righteous Lot (2 Peter 2:7) might as well be the inhospitable bad guy and welcoming gay people might as well be the same thing as Abraham welcoming the Trinity at Mamre:

The men of Sodom were not “gay” in even the remotest sense of contemporary LGBT identity if for no other reason than the ancients did not share modern conceptions of sexual orientation. ... as Longman rightly insists, “We should not consider the city of Sodom to be filled with men who have same-sex attraction. Rather, these men want[ed] to humiliate their foreign visitors” through a heinous act of sexual violence. ... The ancient audience of this text would thus have seen the “abominable”/tôʿēbāh sexual acts of the men of Sodom as the culmination of gross inhospitality, not as sexual desire per se, and certainly not as a signifier of any kind of underlying LGBT sexual orientation. ... the sin of Sodom does not pertain to sexual orientation as conceptualized today. The men of Sodom were not sinful for “being gay,” but for attempting to commit an appalling crime—the humiliation of vulnerable foreign guests through an act of sexual violence. Despite the ugly caricature in Jack Chick’s Doom Town, the men of Sodom are emphatically not representative of loving, consensual same-sex couples today.

We're supposed to believe a town full of heterosexual men bent on sodomizing not Lot's daughters but his male guests is a more plausible tale?

Has a greater calumny been invented by the gay mafia against the heterosexual majority than this? Not even the Red Army invading Berlin in 1945 was said to have stooped to such lows, raping every German woman in sight.

The account in Genesis is obviously an etiological tale, invented to explain theologically the historical fact of the destruction of the cities of the plain in approximately 1700 B.C., as a place where predatory "men inflamed with lust for one another" (Romans 1:27) were fried to a crisp by "a Tunguskalike, cosmic airburst event". 

No, no, no, say our experts, defying the ancient theological explanations.

Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.  

-- Jude 1:7

We live in an age of delusion where facts exist merely as fodder to be blown to smithereens to please our perverted whims, including the fact of predatory homosexual promiscuity, which has existed proverbially since time immemorial for a reason, because it's real:

A 1978 study reported that 75 percent of male homosexuals had been with 100 or more partners; 28 percent, the largest subcategory, reported more than 1,000 partners; 79 percent said more than half their partners were strangers; and 79 percent said more than half their partners were men with whom they had sex only once. Another survey 16 years later found that while 67.6 percent of men and 75.5 percent of women had only one sex partner in the previous year, only 2.6 percent of men and 1.2 percent of women engaging in same-sex relationships had thus limited themselves. Supporters of homosexuality, and advocates of gay marriage, rarely acknowledge the many partners gays have -- including those living together as couples.