Your brains were a noddle before they were a noodle

Poor slaves in metre, dull and addle-pated,

Who rhyme below even David's psalms translated.

Thus far the poet; but his brains grow addle:

And all the rest is purely from this noddle.

-- John Dryden

On the benefits of Lenten fasting

After much solitariness, fasting, or long sickness,

their brains were addle, and their bellies as empty

of meat as their brains of wit.

-- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1577-1640) 

Yes, my son, do something important with your life: Become a doctor, a man of the cloth, a lawyer

Time, which rots all, and makes botches pox,

And, plodding on, must make a calf an ox, 

Hath made a lawyer.

-- John Donne

And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven

 

There are lots of things just as phony as Christians and Republicans

Self-aggrandizing Democrats, for instance. 

Former Obama administration officials reportedly have increased their wealth dramatically since 2009 and now a bunch of them occupy high positions in the Biden administration, which is supposed to represent a return to normalcy :

Susan Rice, Domestic Policy Council Director, now worth as much as $149 million.

Ron Klain, Biden Chief of Staff, as much as $12.2 million.

Jeff Zients, Coronavirus Response Coordinator, $442.8 million.

Jen Psaki, White House Press Secretary, $1.5 million.

Brian Deese, National Economic Council Director, $7 million.

Jen O'Malley Dillon, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, $4.7 million.

Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser, $27.5 million.

Julissa Reynoso, Jill Biden Chief of Staff, $14.8 million.

Story.

What raiment shall we put on?

 

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?... And why take ye thought for raiment?

-- Matthew 6:25, 28

And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on.

-- Luke 12:22

How hardly shall the pastors that have riches, or anyone else, enter into the kingdom of God

Preachers and their $5,000 sneakers: Why one man started an Instagram account showing churches’ wealth :

From his couch in Dallas, Ben Kirby began asking questions about the lifestyles of the rich and famous pastors when he was watching some worship songs on YouTube on a Sunday morning in 2019. ...

Kirby said he has been to churches where a volunteer was designated solely for the purpose of carrying the pastor’s Bible. Often, he writes, these pastors have private entrances, reserved parking spaces, security details and a gaggle of personal assistants or handlers. And, often, they promise blessings from God to their followers if their followers bless the church. ...

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the median salary for clergy was $53,180 in 2019 [55% higher than the median wage in 2019 of $34,248 for all Americans], but Kirby’s Instagram feed showcases how a nationwide evangelical market has become lucrative for leaders with celebrity status. Like other social media influencers, sometimes these pastors are gifted the shoes and clothes they wear. ...

Since starting the Instagram account, Kirby has been dipping his own toes into the evangelical marketplace, entering a world that he has so openly critiqued. Like church leaders, his income is partially dependent on his podcast advertising and book sales, and he sells merch based off the brand. ...

Kirby doesn’t want Christians to abandon fashion or celebrities, but he does want more transparency and accountability.

“I’m getting people to question the status quo within the church and hopefully push for a reevaluation of what we value,” he said. “People aren’t going to reach God without this guy wearing Yeezys? Come on.”

C’mon man.

Paul's ideas of imitation, from which we get Imitatio Christi, are quite contrary to the teaching and intent of Jesus

Paul's idea of imitation is a repudiation of Jesus' radical ideas of eschatological repentance, which involved flight from traditional social conventions in order to escape the imminently coming judgment. In point of fact Jesus' idea left nothing positive to imitate. This is why Schweitzer could speak of Jesus' ethic as a negation of ethics.

Paul's "way" on the other hand was a rationalization of those conventions after the failure of the eschaton and the impending failure of the parousia. Instead of rejecting traditional social roles he simply accepted them and invested them with new meaning.

For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. I urge you, then, be imitators of me. Therefore I sent to you Timothy, my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, to remind you of my ways in Christ, as I teach them everywhere in every church.

-- I Corinthians 4:15ff. (RSV)

And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you received the word in much affliction, with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit;

-- I Thessalonians 1:6 (RSV)

As ye know how we exhorted and comforted and charged every one of you, as a father doth his children,

-- I Thessalonians 2:11

Paul is, in fact, all over the map on this, spilling a lot of ink on the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as fathers even though he knows we have but one father, God. He seems completely ignorant of the teaching of Jesus, which rejected all human fathers in favor of the fatherhood of God. Paul notably also does not use the language of "following" as found in the gospels ("come after me", "follow me"). Instead he speaks of mimesis, which in its turn is foreign to the gospels.

Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all, 

-- Romans 4:16

And not only this; but when Rebecca also had conceived by one, even by our father Isaac; 

-- Romans 9:10

As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers' sakes.

-- Romans 11:28

... all our fathers were under the cloud ...

-- I Corinthians 10:1

But ye know the proof of him [Timothy], that, as a son with the father, he hath served with me in the gospel.

-- Philippians 2:22

The whole thing degenerates into the familial as the pressure of the delay of the parousia re-invigorates traditional human social roles:

Unto Timothy, my own son in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord.

-- I Timothy 1:2

Rebuke not an elder, but intreat him as a father; and the younger men as brethren;

-- I Timothy 5:1

To Timothy, my dearly beloved son: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

-- II Timothy 1:2

To Titus, mine own son after the common faith: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour.

-- Titus 1:4

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And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.

-- Matthew 23:9

Today's cancel culture is the very enemy of the Christian culture: "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors"

Thou, whom avenging pow'rs obey,

Cancel my debt, too great to pay,

Before the sad accounting day.

-- Roscommon

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. ... But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. 

-- Matthew 6:12, 15

Catholic Bishop cannot remember his Aristotle, says Aristotle good, Plato bad

I'm guessing he probably never read either one.

Bishop:

"The guardians, Plato’s philosopher-kings, can utterly control the lives of those in his charge, even to the point of censoring music and poetry, regulating pregnancy and childbirth, eliminating private property, and annulling the individual family. Aristotle departed from this conception of the good society and took as his point of departure the aspiration and freedom of the individual."

Aristotle, Politics, 1.1253a: 

"The city-state is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually...the state is prior by nature to the individual...a man incapable of entering into partnership...must be either a lower animal or a god."

Critics of Plato on this subject routinely omit that the idealistic elements of his utopian state apply only to the few, the guardian class, not to the general population, and that the guardians will be comprised only of the best sort. One may criticize Plato for making naive assumptions about human nature, but he does not deserve to be read any less carefully than does Aristotle, who is anything but a libertarian individualist.

The future of man in space is pregnant with promise and foreboding

SpaceX Starship 10 makes successful landing

  They with speed

  Their course through thickest constellations held,

  Spreading their bane.

  -- John Milton

That Jesus conceived of the coming eschatological kingdom as a Jewish kingdom of the twelve tribes of Israel is the simplest explanation of the evidence

There are but two survivals of the explicitly Jewish conception of the coming kingdom in the Gospels, without any thought of inclusion of Gentiles, in Matthew 19 and Luke 22.

But the choice of twelve disciples by Jesus as a function of this explicitly Jewish conception of the imminently coming kingdom as a kingdom of the twelve tribes of Israel is also evidence. If the former nearly was expunged from the record, the tradition of the twelve survived because they did.

Those elements, the future Jewish kingdom and its twelve Jewish judges, are consistent with other surviving evidence of Jesus' original Jewish Gospel, for example with the charge in Matthew 10 and 15 not to go into the way of the Gentiles but to go only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, as well as with the scattered derogatory references to Gentiles, for example as dogs.  

Needless to say, a future Gentile kingdom would have required more judges than the twelve, and a Gospel to the Gentiles worked out to go with it. The latter was the innovation of Paul, not coincidentally a missionary Pharisee. The former never existed but for him.

And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life. 

-- Matthew 19:28f.

Ye are they which have continued with me in my temptations. And I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father hath appointed unto me; That ye may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 

-- Luke 22:28ff.

That this conception of a future Jewish kingdom was there from the beginning explains the many instances of the disciples' fascination with who would be greatest in that kingdom which survive.

Those discourses need not be historical in all their particulars. The failure of the Jewish kingdom to appear necessitated rationalization of the conception involved under and for the new circumstances. Hence the emphasis upon selfless servanthood in the light of the reinterpretation of Jesus' death as a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? 

-- Matthew 18:1

But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant.

-- Matthew 23:11

And he came to Capernaum: and being in the house he asked them, What was it that ye disputed among yourselves by the way? But they held their peace: for by the way they had disputed among themselves, who should be the greatest.

-- Mark 9:33f. 

Then there arose a reasoning among them, which of them should be greatest.

-- Luke 9:46

Luke says the dispute among the twelve persisted even to the Last Supper, which is remarkably self-absorbed of them given the supposed gravity of the moment. It also suggests the lectures by Jesus all along didn't do them much good. It's almost as if the fact of the incipient nativism were a pretext for Luke's narrative invention. And then there's the irony that even in correcting the disciples' preoccupation with themselves, Luke still makes Jesus contrast the proper behavior with the improper behavior in terms of Jew vs. Gentile. 

And there was also a strife among them, which of them should be accounted the greatest. And he said unto them, The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve. For whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth? is not he that sitteth at meat? but I am among you as he that serveth.  

-- Luke 22:24ff.

But ye shall not be so.

It is easier to explain the more inclusive conception of the kingdom of God with Gentiles as a development from this original narrower one without Gentiles than the other way around. 

The narrower conception died hard, especially for example in the person of Peter, whom Paul accused of lingering hypocrisy about it in Galatians 2.

Luke, on the other hand, paints Peter in a more sympathetic light, in Acts 10, 11, and 15, showing how God himself miraculously intervened to change Peter's opinion about Gentiles.

But that Peter persisted in the nativism so long is the point. He didn't invent it. He got it from someone and stuck with it the whole time almost up until the moment he disappears from Luke's narrative never to be heard from again.

The impossibility of extremity: The worst is not

Who is't can say I'm at the worst?

I'm worse than e'er I was,

And worse I may be yet: The worst is not,

So long as I can say, this is the worst.

-- William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 4, Scene 1

The peevish are wasps, easily offended and soon angry

Lay the rough paths of peevish nature ev'n,

And open in each heart a little heav'n.

-- Matthew Prior

He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding:

but he that is hasty of spirit exalteth folly.

-- Proverbs 14:29 

The golden mean of equanimity

He laughs at all the vulgar cares and fears,

At their vain triumphs, and their vainer tears;

An equal temper in his mind he found,

When fortune flatter'd him, and when she frown'd.

-- John Dryden