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