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.

When it comes to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy by religion, nones are the most hesitant, not Evangelicals

The Young And Secular Are Least Vaccinated, Not Evangelicals:

In fact, I find that those without any religious affiliation were the least likely to have received at least one dose of any COVID-19 vaccine. ... By May, 70% of non-evangelical Protestants had gotten at least one dose. Sixty-two percent of both evangelical Protestants and Catholics reported the same. However, it was the “nones” (no religious affiliation) who were lagging farther behind. By May 11, only 47% of nones had reported receiving at least one dose.

One can observe the hesitancy phenomenon among the young (who are the majority of the nones) without screening for religion from the CDC data by comparing the percent 18-49 who get flu vaccination on average with the percent getting full COVID-19 vaccination. On average over the last ten years 32.25% of those aged 18-49 get flu vaccines every year compared to just 25.48% getting full COVID-19 vaccination through May 22 (10.047 million aged 18-29 + 25.177 million aged 30-49 = 35.224 million out of 138.216 million).

People aged 50-64 get full COVID-19 vaccination at almost the same rate they get flu vaccine on average, and those aged 65+ get full COVID-19 vaccination at a much higher rate than flu vax, which one would expect given that it kills that population in the highest numbers, and that the media whips up the hysteria about it 24/7 despite the fact that in the first year of the outbreak barely 3% of confirmed cases across all age groups were ever hospitalized and only 1.8% of confirmed cases died.

We shouldn't blame young people for not getting vaccinated, however, given that myocarditis among the young is a known side-effect of COVID-19 vaccination. Word gets around.

It's one of the few instances where the young may be wiser than their elders.

 

Prattle on all you like, the "saints" can't hear you when you ask them to intercede

 

Behold therefore, I will gather thee unto thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered into thy grave in peace; and thine eyes shall not see all the evil which I will bring upon this place. And they brought the king word again.

-- 2 Kings 22:20

Behold, I will gather thee to thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered to thy grave in peace, neither shall thine eyes see all the evil that I will bring upon this place, and upon the inhabitants of the same. So they brought the king word again.  

-- 2 Chronicles 34:28

Kalamazoo, Michigan, will be ground zero for superstition, bunkum, and rot come August 21, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kalamazoo County overwhelmingly voted for Catholic Democrat Joe Biden in 2020, who garnered 58.2% of the popular vote. As of 2010, Michigan overall is 58% Catholic.

Catholic charities are expediting the processing and settlement of Catholic illegal immigrants to the United States, let in by its Catholic president

 Politics is downstream of the cult-ure.

The 19th Amendment has been the deciding factor in America's leftward lurch from the early 20th century

 

Men, some to business, some to pleasure take,

But ev'ry woman is at heart a rake.

-- Alexander Pope

Mormons remain in denial about polygamy's centrality not just to their religious history but to their theology

Even with the church-sponsored Gospel Topics essays on the subject and various historic works, including those in the church-sponsored Joseph Smith Papers, far too many members still believe that polygamy is an unspeakable word or maintain that Smith never practiced it. ...

Brigham Young, among others, taught that those men who were to be elevated to the highest degree of heaven and become Gods were those who entered into polygamy. ...

... over 40% of [Manti, Utah's] population was in polygamous households [at its height]. ...

... the age of Joseph Smith’s youngest wife, Helen Mar Kimball, [w]as 14, not, as the Gospel Topics essay does, “sealed to Joseph several months before her 15th birthday.”

More .

It is also little appreciated how important was the place occupied by polygamy in the politics of America leading up to the Civil War.

The Republicans of 1856 called polygamy and slavery the "twin relics of barbarism":

Resolved: That the Constitution confers upon Congress sovereign powers over the Territories of the United States for their government; and that in the exercise of this power, it is both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism--Polygamy, and Slavery.