Tell how learning shoots

 Tell like a tall old oak how learning shoots

To heav'n her branches, to hell her roots.

 

-- John Denham 

Interview with Religious Studies academic states right out of the box that many UFO experiencers learn from it that a bad end of the world is coming lol

Gee, where did they get that idea?

The possible answers to that are not seriously addressed in this more-ways-than-one frustrating podcast with Ross Douthat of The New York Times.

 

... Douthat: When people report having a telepathic connection, you said they get information from, or they feel like they’ve gotten information from, these experiences. What kind of information do they get? What does that mean when people report this?

Pasulka: A lot of the people would report the information as something that had to do with the future. They would have ideas of basically an apocalypse, a bad scenario for the future.

The people who I talked to at this conference were pretty convinced that we were going to face some type of cataclysm. So I talked to them a little bit about how people have thought that for about 2,000 years. [Chuckles.] ...

Pasulka: It appears to be a perennial thing. So there appears to be something that interfaces with humans and has been identified in the various traditional religions.

Douthat: Identified as what?

Pasulka: Well, I’m not going to name it, because in some traditional religions it’s named in different ways. So it could be bodhisattvas, angels, demons — things like that. ...

 

The whole thing is here in "What if the Government Believes in U.F.O.s More Than You Do?"

If you are looking for a religion scholar to say that the UFO cult is a human creation just like every other religion, you won't find that from Diana Walsh Pasulka, a practicing Catholic who wants to argue for the legitimacy of mystery and of people's experience of that mystery, even if they work for a government which cannot be trusted on UFOs.

It is telling that a member of a hierarchical religion which is imbued with deference to authority finds the belief in UFOs among government employees somehow more compelling than that belief among private individuals:

... they have various titles. They have quote-unquote “day jobs” as, say, a mission controller at Cape Canaveral, things like that. And almost all of them called it this: They said, “my hobby job.” They would call it their hobby.           

Elites also run in herds.  

I said in my ecstasy: Every man is a liar

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.

KJV Psalm 116.11:  I said in my haste, All men are liars.  

RSV Psalm 116.11:  I said in my consternation, "Men are all a vain hope."

LXX Psalm 115.2:   ἐγὼ εἶπα ἐν τῇ ἐκστάσει μου πᾶς ἄνθρωπος ψεύστης

God bites off head of Satanist, 76

 

Ozzy Osbourne, pioneering heavy metal singer and Black Sabbath frontman, dies at 76

 

... Their 1970 self-titled debut album hit the top 10 in the U.K. and No. 23 on the U.S. charts. A year later, their second album, “Paranoid,” topped the charts in the U.K. and reached No. 12 across the pond.

Still, the critics were not kind at first. Black Sabbath was dismissed by some as “Satanic claptrap” and worse.

... Despite all his success, Osbourne — in the eyes of many in the public — continued to be the madman who outraged animal rights groups in 1982 by biting the head off a live bat during a concert in Des Moines, Iowa.

“I thought it was a rubber bat,” Osbourne said at the time. “I picked it up, put it in my mouth, crunched down, bit into it, being the clown that I am.”

That same year, Osbourne infuriated the state of Texas by urinating on the Alamo, a stunt that got him arrested. ...

Human flailing, divine economy

 

 

 In human works, though labour'd on with pain,

A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain;

In God's, one single can its ends produce,

Yet serves to second too some other use.

 

-- Alexander Pope 

 

The dreams of avarice, we all have them

 I often wish'd that I had clear,

For life, six hundred pounds a year.

 

-- Jonathan Swift 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Samuel Johnson, who quoted Jonathan Swift more than three thousand times in his dictionary, had himself to write for money most of his life, until he received a royal pension of £300 a year from King George III in 1762, the equivalent of about £53,400 today, or about $72,500.

 

In death, Johnson left his servant and friend Francis Barber an annuity of but £70 a year, from a fortune of just £750. This, however, turned out to be too generous an annual sum, seeing that only skilled tradesmen might make as much as £50 a year. A prudent man could have lived comfortably on less.

 

The money did run out in the hands of the spendthrift Barber. Not many years later he was forced to sell off Johnson memorabilia which he had inherited to pay debts he had incurred, and he died in poverty not seventeen years after Johnson had died.

 

This means that, for his part, Johnson himself had run through about £5,800 or so by the time he died in 1784. The servant had learned from his master. 

 

Swift, meanwhile, had died with a fortune of £12,000 in 1745. 

Few want to consider that the impulse to genocide has deep roots in human nature, and even in Jewish religion itself

 

Mandy Patinkin on Gaza: "How Could It Be Done To Your Ancestors, And Then You Turn Around And Do It To Someone Else?"

But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.

-- Deuteronomy 20:16

 

They did not destroy the nations, concerning whom the LORD commanded them: But were mingled among the heathen, and learned their works.

 

 -- Psalm 106:34

 

 

On Repentance

 

 Repentance so altereth and changeth a man through the mercy of God,

be he never so defiled, that it maketh him pure and clear.

 

-- John Whitgift (1530?-1604), Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University from 1567, tutor of Francis Bacon in the 1570s, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1583, and persecutor of the Puritans 

Salvation for Narcissus

 

 The stream is so transparent, pure, and clear,

That, had the self-enamour'd youth gaz'd here,

He but the bottom, not his face, had seen.

 

-- John Denham 

'Tis better to be lowly born . . .

I would rather be a poor beggar's wife and be sure of heaven, than queen of all the world . . ..

 

Verily, I swear, ’tis better to be lowly born
And range with humble livers in content
Than to be perked up in a glist’ring grief
And wear a golden sorrow.

 

-- Anne Boleyn of Catherine, in William Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act 2, scene 3

Hymn for a School of Biblical Studies in a Secular University

 

 Hymn for a School of Biblical Studies in a Secular University 

Come, all ye sons of Science,

   That magic name of awe,

And Medicine, and Music,

  And Arts (poor thing), and Law;

 

Here shall we speak of gospels

  That to your peace belong,

And faith that hath moved mountains

  And filled men's mouths with song.

 

Fear not ye be converted:

  The University

For truth has strictly ordered

  No bias here shall be;

 

Here shall we hold the balance

  That weighs the creeds divine

In scales that may not falter

  Nor thus, nor thus, incline:

 

That so, with faith unfaithful,

  We tread the narrow way --

Of truth (but not too much truth) --

  That lies 'twixt Yea and Nay.

 

-- P. B. R. Forbes, The University of Edinburgh, 1947, reproduced in F. F. Bruce, In Retrospect: Remembrance of Things Past (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), p. 141.

Donald Trump is the decay of a whole age teeming with zeroes

 

 He that plots to be the only figure among cyphers, is the decay of a whole age. 

 

-- Francis Bacon 

Alrighty then

 

 

Dalai Lama Says He Plans to Reincarnate, Ensuring Institution Will Continue

AP

If you are wondering why Jews have always been reticent to utter the holy name of G-d, you won't learn why in this article in Christianity Today by a Texas theology professor, lol

 

 

The God Who Must Not Be Named

Brad East, Christianity Today

 

He makes no reference whatsoever to The Ten Commandments, which constituted from the time of Luther the first of the six chief parts of the Christian catechism, and from time immemorial the heart of the Torah for Jews. But the professor is otherwise a very educated imbecile. 

 

Now you may understand why Texas law will require Ten Commandments posted in every classroom... ! 

 

 

Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

 

-- Exodus 20:7

 

Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain: for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

 

-- Deuteronomy 5:11

Peter Thiel rationalizing the post-war as the Age of Antichrist is the flip side of Christians rationalizing the church age as the kingdom of God

... Douthat: ... I’m just interested in how you get to a world willing to submit to permanent authoritarian rule.

 

Thiel: Well, there are these different gradations of this we can describe. But is what I’ve just told you so preposterous, as a broad account of the stagnation, that the entire world has submitted for 50 years to peace and safetyism? This is I Thessalonians 5:3 — the slogan of the Antichrist is “peace and safety.” And we’ve submitted to the F.D.A. — it regulates not just drugs in the U.S. but de facto in the whole world, because the rest of the world defers to the F.D.A. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission effectively regulates nuclear power plants all over the world. You can’t design a modular nuclear reactor and just build it in Argentina. They won’t trust the Argentinian regulators. They’re going to defer to the U.S. And so it is at least a question about why we’ve had 50 years of stagnation. And one answer is we ran out of ideas. The other answer is that something happened culturally where it wasn’t allowed. And the cultural answer can be sort of a bottom-up answer, that it was just some transformation of humanity into this more docile kind of a species. Or it can be at least partially top-down, that there is this machinery of government that got changed into this stagnationist thing. Nuclear power was supposed to be the power of the 21st century. And it somehow has gotten off-ramped all over the world, on a worldwide basis.

Douthat: So in a sense, we’re already living under a moderate rule of the Antichrist, in that telling. ...

 

Here in The New York Times. 

 

It's truly precious to see a gay man's warnings about cultural decadence, and Christianity, taken seriously by a purportedly Christian interlocutor for a purportedly serious newspaper. 

 

As Rod Dreher likes to say . . . 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Decadence 101

 Taught, half by reason, half by mere decay,

To welcome death, and calmly pass away.

 

-- Alexander Pope 

Gospel claims forty years removed and more from Jesus' resurrection are not the same thing as claims which are "only a short time later"

Jesus After the Critics

Michael C. Legaspi  

 ... Like most New Testament scholars, she holds Mark to be the earliest Gospel (composed sometime around the year 70), with Matthew and Luke—both of whom use Mark as a source ­document—coming along a generation later. John, independent of the other three, came later still. ... 

Pagels’s own position is that the question of Jesus’s resurrection goes beyond what a historian can say: “Historical evidence can neither prove nor disprove the reality”; it can only verify that “after Jesus died many people claimed to have seen him alive.”

Pagels is not entirely wrong. The evidence that Jesus was put to death—actually killed, in public, on a cross, by the governing ­authority—and that many people claimed, only a short time later, that they saw the same Jesus alive cannot seriously be doubted. ...              

 

Nice try, but no. 

We do not know that many people claimed that they saw Jesus alive "only a short time later". 

Pagels' claim to fame has been all about making this very kind of chronological error, placing later Gnostic sources on the same level as the New Testament as evidence to argue for multiple Christianities and their legitimacy. That Legaspi shrinks from calling her out on that tells you everything you need to know about Legaspi.

The only sense in which it is true that the modern phenomenon of scholarship is "now in retreat" is in the extent to which scholars like Pagels and her reviewer Legaspi themselves retreat from the critical project.  

Meanwhile in A.D. 69, around the time of the composition of Mark, many dreamers thought Nero had come back from the dead, too, but just because they existed doesn't mean we take them seriously or believe them, any more than Tacitus did, whose case proves yet again that human nature is unchanging, a mixture of credulity and incredulity from time immemorial:

... About this time Achaia and Asia Minor were terrified by a false report that Nero was at hand. Various rumours were current about his death; and so there were many who pretended and believed that he was still alive. The adventures and enterprises of the other pretenders I shall relate in the regular course of my work. The pretender in this case was a slave from Pontus, or, according to some accounts, a freedman from Italy, a skilful harp-player and singer, accomplishments, which, added to a resemblance in the face, gave a very deceptive plausibility to his pretensions. After attaching to himself some deserters, needy vagrants whom he bribed with great offers, he put to sea. Driven by stress of weather to the island of Cythnus, he induced certain soldiers, who were on their way from the East, to join him, and ordered others, who refused, to be executed. He also robbed the traders and armed all the most able-bodied of the slaves. ... Thence the alarm spread far and wide, and many roused themselves at the well-known name, eager for change, and detesting the present state of things. The report was daily gaining credit when an accident put an end to it. ...

-- Tacitus, Histories 2.8 

 

Yeah, the filioque is such a novelty, it took 'em centuries to think of it lol

 

 Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.

-- John 20:21ff.

This day be bread and peace my lot . . .

 

 This day, be bread and peace my lot;

All else beneath the sun

Thou know'st if best bestow'd or not,

And let thy will be done.

-- Alexander Pope 

When the free are slaves

 

 We are industrious to preserve our bodies from slavery,

but we make nothing of suffering our souls to be slaves to our lusts.

 

-- John Ray (1627-1705) 

Some men left us constitutional papers, others left us the trees

 

 Hence, lastly, springs care of posterities,

For things their kind would everlasting make.

Hence is it, that old men do plant young trees,

The fruit whereof another age shall take.

 

-- Sir John Davies 

Being king is not the thing

 Condition, circumstance is not the thing;

Bliss is the same in subject or in king. 

 

-- Alexander Pope 

Sometimes the news is just too much for me

 How didst thou grieve then, Adam, to behold

The end of all thy offspring end so sad.

 

-- John Milton 

 

 

Good riddance, phony demon UFO, Good riddance, infernal Pentagon!

 

 I felt him strike, and now I see him fly:

Curs'd demon! O for ever broken lie

Those fatal shafts, by which I inward bleed!

 

-- Matthew Prior 

 

 

Poor Rod Dreher: Evidence is emerging that government efforts to propagate UFO mythology date back all the way to the 1950s

The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology: U.S. military fabricated evidence of alien technology and allowed rumors to fester to cover up real secret-weapons programs

... At times, as with the deception around Area 51, military officers spread false documents to create a smokescreen for real secret-weapons programs. In other cases, officials allowed UFO myths to take root in the interest of national security—for instance, to prevent the Soviet Union from detecting vulnerabilities in the systems protecting nuclear installations. Stories tended to take on a life of their own, such as the three-decade journey of a purported piece of space metal that turned out to be nothing of the sort. And one long-running practice was more like a fraternity hazing ritual that spun wildly out of control. ...

The many in America who have been gulled by the disinformation should take heart. Hundreds upon hundreds of military men have been taken in by the stories too, and some of them believe them to this day.

It will die out soon enough, like the Shakers

 

The Assisted Suicide Movement is Gaining Momentum

Mariya Manzhos, Deseret 

 

"I joined a suicide cult but we just couldn't grow our membership for some reason." 😏

The celibate Shakers are down to just three members.

NT Wright shreds his credibility singing about evolution in Genesis to the tune of Yesterday with the already incredible former NIH Director Francis Collins

 Here.

Probably the most cringe-worthy thing you'll see today in a world absolutely teeming with cringe-worthy.

New Testament scholar NT Wrong laughably believes in the unfolding Kingdom of God through the church, so it is entirely consistent for him to believe humans evolved from the cosmic kiss of heaven and earth 14 billion years ago. 

Genesis means DNA, double helix in the Milky Way, dontchaknow.

Francis Collins, with Anthony Fauci, suppressed from the very beginning of the pandemic the belief by some of their own trusted scientists that COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, a charge doggedly demonstrated with evidence over the years by none other than Richard H. Ebright, Professor of Chemistry at Rutgers.

 

 

The folly of strong drink

 

 The giant, gorg'd with flesh, and wine, and blood,

Lay stretch'd at length, and snoring in his den,

Belching raw gobbets from his maw, o'ercharg'd 

With purple wine and cruddled gore confus'd.

 

-- Joseph Addison

 

Thrice I brought and gave it him, and thrice he drained it in his folly. . . . and reeling fell upon his back, and lay there with his thick neck bent aslant, and sleep, that conquers all, laid hold on him. And from his gullet came forth wine and bits of human flesh, and he vomited in his drunken sleep.

 

-- Homer, Odyssey 9.360, 370

 

Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise. 

-- Proverbs 20:1

 

Infant woe awaits us all

 There oft are heard the notes of infant woe,

The short thick sob, loud scream, and shriller squall.

 

-- Alexander Pope

The dog must learn it, when he is a whelp, or else it will not be . . .

 

 . . . for it is hard to make an old dog to stoop [submit]. 

-- Anthony Fitzherbert, The Book of Husbandry (1523/1534), paragraph 41:

 

 

 

Beware of sadness

 

 Such a wantwit sadness makes of me,

That I have much ado to know myself.

 

-- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene 1

They need to think bigger at Big Think lol

 

 Why historians can only give Jesus a one-sentence biography

 ... In the ancient world, gods, heroes, and even Caesars were resurrected with fair regularity. ...

Right, right, that's why the Athenians laughed out loud at the idea.

And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked . . ..

-- Acts 17:32 

 

A certain diseased beggar named Lazarus was laid at the rich man's gate, but never once was he fed from his sumptuous table

 Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches, as to conceive how others can be in want.

 

-- Jonathan Swift