Some commit murder, the rest just think about it

 

And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders . . .

-- Mark 7:20f. 

It is amusing to read that The School of Salamanca shows that the teachings of the Bible are completely compatible with the notions of free markets

Martín de Azpilcueta (1492?-1586)

 

Completely compatible, except for the usury lol.

Studying in the School of Salamanca

Daniel Lacalle, The Acton Institute 

 

The School of Salamanca was key to the development of our understanding of the importance of human action and freedom as basic principles of prosperity and growth, but also the moral superiority of free trade, private property rights, and economic freedom. Salamanca also reminds us that the moral principles of Catholic doctrine and the teachings of the Bible are completely compatible with the notions of free markets, individual liberty, and small government. ...

The Salamanca scholars also highlighted the importance of interest rates, not as a measure of greed but as a measure of risk. In his writings, Azpilcueta asserted that “the lender may licitly demand something beyond the principal, because he loses the chance to profit from that money in some other way.” Any loan involving capital investment necessitates an interest rate to differentiate it from other loans that are either less risky or less vital for society.

Interest rates serve as a moral guideline to determine the most effective way to use capital, making it worthwhile for lenders to take risk and lend to those who will return it safely, quickly, and productively, thus making the virtuous credit cycle the most effective way to get capital to work. At the time, it was common to think that charging interest was immoral, and that speculators, bankers, and the financial sector in general existed only to exploit the most productive sectors of society. Scholars from the School of Salamanca took the counterintuitive position that charging interest played a crucial role in enhancing opportunities for business, traders, and ultimately the growth of the most productive sectors. ...

  

Gee, why was it common to think that usury was immoral and exploitative at the time? 

 

If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.

-- Exodus 22:25

Take thou no usury of him, or increase: but fear thy God; that thy brother may live with thee.

-- Exodus 25:36

Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.

-- Leviticus 25:37

Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury:

-- Deuteronomy 23:19

Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury: that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand to in the land whither thou goest to possess it.

-- Deuteronomy 23:20

When thou dost lend thy brother any thing, thou shalt not go into his house to fetch his pledge.

-- Deuteronomy 24:10 

Hath given forth upon usury, and hath taken increase: shall he then live? he shall not live: he hath done all these abominations; he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon him.

-- Ezekiel 18:13 

And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.

-- Luke 6:34f.

 

As with the usurers who crept into Catholicism at Salamanca, they crept also into the Gospels, turning Jesus himself into a usurer.

Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.

-- Matthew 25:27

Wherefore then gavest not thou my money into the bank, that at my coming I might have required mine own with usury?

-- Luke 19:23

The Jesuits crept into Salamanca not far behind the usurers, the ground already prepared there for such casuistry. 

Meanwhile a Jesus who teaches giving everything away to the poor to become a disciple (Luke 14:33) wouldn't have any money himself left over for "the exchangers" or "the bank" to increase it, let alone money for the taxman:

Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them, go thou to the sea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them for me and thee. 

-- Matthew 17:27

Jesus' followers are to be as poor as their master, and utterly rely on their father in heaven: 

The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his master.

-- Luke 6:40

No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. 

-- Luke 16:13 

A new creation-myth we've heard before, in the Christian argument from design

 

The creator God, in whom few believe anymore, replaced by advanced ET creators, in whom many increasingly do.

It's all so predictable. 

 

Paper Finds Earth May Have Been Terraformed by 'Advanced Extraterrestrials'...

... according to one new paper, the chances that life emerged by pure chance on Earth are so slim that it's possible that our planet was instead seeded by "advanced extraterrestrials." ...

The theory was first proposed in the early 1970s to explain the incredible unlikeliness of life on Earth. Even at the time, the authors — including molecular biologist Francis Crick, famous for discovering the helical structure of DNA, and Salk Institute for Biological Studies chemist Leslie Orgel — admitted that "scientific evidence" was "inadequate" to "say anything about the probability." ...

You could almost call it divine pedophilia

 

Those great corrupters of Christianity, the Jesuits

 

 Those great corrupters of Christianity, and indeed of natural religion, the Jesuits.

-- Joseph Addison 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe Trump could get there if he didn't murder people in cold blood like Obama murdered American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki

 Trump asks supporters for $15 donations to 'get him to heaven'...

 

Pope Leo XIV continues Pope Francis' legacy of inclusion for LGBT after maintaining in 2012 that their behavior should not be promoted

 Pope Leo meets LGBTQ+ Catholic advocate and vows continuity with Pope Francis’ legacy of welcome

 ... The meeting, which lasted about half an hour, was officially announced by the Vatican in a sign that Leo wanted it made public. It came just days before LGBTQ+ Catholics participate in a Holy Year pilgrimage to the Vatican in another sign of welcome. ...

 

The traducian theory of the origin of the soul

 

 If by traduction came thy mind,

Our wonder is the less to find

A soul so charming from a stock so good;

Thy father was transfus'd into thy blood.

 

-- John Dryden 

We are fearfully and wonderfully made

 

 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

-- Psalm 139:14 

Trump's Commerce Secretary Howie Lutnick says you are among the best only if you are rich

 

 

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned, you have killed the righteous man; he does not resist you.

 -- James 5:1ff.

American Academe has a really bad case of truth decay

 

 

 

 

 They think, that whatever is called old must have the decay of time upon it, and truth too were liable to mould and rottenness.

 

-- John Locke

 

 

 

 

A Jungian psychologist decides that the Gospel of Mark ends without resurrection, on purpose, but apparently he has never read the damn thing lol

 The Transcendent Absence: Mark's Unresurrected Christ and the Creative Imperative

... Mark's unresurrected Christ ... The absence of resurrection in Mark's Gospel . . ..                                                                                                                                                                                                    

There's just one little problem with these statements: They are falsehoods. The text says Jesus rose.

Everyone agrees that Mark's "narrative rupture" occurs at the close of 16:8.

But the resurrection occurs before that:

And entering into the sepulchre, [the women] saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. 

And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. 

But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you [in Mark 14:28]. 

And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid. 

-- Mark 16:5-8

The endings after this are obviously supplied based on internal evidence of language and style which differ from Mark's. And their variety is a sign that something was felt to be wanting from a very early time. External evidence shows the gospel ending at 16:8 in two famous codices from the fourth century: Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. And Matthew and Luke and John in their turn each supply their own fuller accounts, some of the elements of which resemble the endings supplied to Mark. 

The twice promised resurrection appearance in Galilee in Mark is perhaps the most wanting thing. Simply on that basis it strains credulity to think Mark intended the ending to be 16:8. The composition is unfinished, or was early on damaged. 

But the resurrection is not missing from this abruptly ending gospel. One cannot speak of an unresurrected Christ in Mark. One cannot say there is no resurrection in Mark. It's right there in verse six.

Meanwhile we are told that "the sacred emerges through collective human action rather than through divine intervention", and that "the kingdom of God exists only insofar as we create it through revolutionary praxis within history's unfolding".

Unfortunately for the author, Brian Nuckols, Mark's Jesus doesn't believe any of that hooey.

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

-- Mark 1:15

And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power. 

-- Mark 9:1   

The opponents of liberalism will win, but they will not convince; they will conquer, but they will not convert

 

Primitive religions have routinely thought sacrificed humans paid a debt demanded by the gods, Christianity included (but Rod Dreher doesn't think so)

 

How Science Is Helping Us Understand Human Sacrifice

Ancient DNA reveals mysteries surrounding once-widespread practice

By Aylin Woodward

July 3, 2024

Death by strangulation, decapitation, exsanguination. Buried alive, burned on pyres, crushed by stones, thrown off cliffs. 

Homo sapiens in nearly every part of the world has practiced human sacrifice at some point over at least five millennia, often killing females in fertility rites or for burial alongside powerful males.  

But new research enabled by DNA analysis and other scientific advances has challenged assumptions about the identity of sacrificial victims, at least among the Maya of Central America. 

Between 900 and 1,400 years ago, the Maya regularly sacrificed boys—particularly twins or close male relatives—according to a study published in June in the journal Nature. 

The findings are based on the ancient DNA of 64 children who had been deposited in an underground cistern at the site of Chichén Itzá, a city built on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

For the ancient Maya, being sacrificed was considered a privilege, so these boys—most of whom were between the ages of 3 and 6—were likely given up willingly by their families, according to Rodrigo Barquera, an immunogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and co-author of the recent study. 

A possible explanation for the sacrifices lies in Maya lore. According to the culture’s written traditions, “Hero Twins”—both male—traveled to the underworld to avenge their father, a twin himself, who was killed by the lords of the underworld. Sacrifices of two male children were likely part of a ritual that helped the Maya honor this part of their mythology and belief system. 

At the distance of millennia, these and other ritual killings appear barbaric. But to the cultures that carried them out, human sacrifices served myriad purposes, including fulfilling a universal desire to manage the uncontrollable world in which they lived.

“We think of this as such a bizarre practice, something very unusual and unexplainable, but three-quarters of societies did it,” according to Peter Turchin, an evolutionary scientist at the Complexity Science Hub, a Vienna-based research organization, who wasn’t involved in the research.

For the most part, ritual killings fell into one of two categories. 

The first was what anthropologists called a retainer sacrifice, when servants or consorts, for example, were killed to accompany someone who had died—usually a member of the elite—into the great beyond.

It was particularly prevalent among members of the African Kingdom of Dahomey, which persisted until roughly the beginning of the 20th century; during the Shang Dynasty of China some three millennia ago; and in Egypt between about 3100 and 2900 B.C. King Djer, a pharaoh who ruled during ancient Egypt’s first dynasty, had more than 500 retainer sacrifices surrounding his tomb in Abydos.

The other form was the sacrifice of captives or community members to placate, please or ask favors of gods and ancestors. “You’re supplying the divine world with something valuable in order to get something in return,” said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s often discussed in the literature as a gift-giving enterprise.”

The Aztec, who mostly postdated the Maya and were famous for cutting out the hearts of prisoners atop pyramids as an offering to their gods, didn’t even have a word for human sacrifice.

“The word they always used for these ceremonies was debt payment,” said Davíd Carrasco, a historian of religions at Harvard University.

Children were believed to be among the best emissaries to the gods because in many cultures they were considered purer than adults, and thus better able to communicate with the spirit world.

The ancient Carthaginians sacrificed their infants and buried the ashes in urns at special seaside burial grounds, perhaps to engender safe voyages across the Mediterranean. 

Centuries ago, the Inca drugged and sacrificed their children in a ritual known as capacocha to appease the gods during times of crisis, such as a drought or disease, according to Angelique Corthals, a forensic anthropologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“The Inca were trying to control that event by offering the most precious thing that they had,” she said. Some of these children were brought high atop a dormant volcano in the Andes, where their bodies ended up mummified and exceptionally preserved because of the cold atop the peak.

In one of the largest known examples of child sacrifice, the Chimú killed more than 100 boys and girls in prehispanic Peru some 500 years ago. Hundreds of baby llamas were killed too.

Experts have interpreted the Chimú sacrifice as “a very desperate act to communicate with the gods during a period of extreme climate change,” said Brenna Hassett, a biological anthropologist and lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. It followed a time of heavy rainfall and flooding from an El Niño event, concurrent with an invasion threat from the nearby Inca.

But inferring motives, or even distinguishing ritual killings from executions with nothing more than visual examinations of bones or burials is challenging. 

The contents of a tomb can offer hints—such as the presence of objects for use in the afterlife called grave goods or the positioning of bodies in relation to one another—but now a new wave of studies is using genetic analysis to shed light on archaeological mysteries. 

DNA analysis and other tools enable anthropologists to discern where a person was from, the quality of their diet and health and their sex—something previously impossible for children and a key to the discovery of the Maya boys. 

“While you can determine sex from adult bones, the result of hormone changes during puberty, these changes are lacking in children,” said Barquera’s co-author, Christina Warinner, a biomolecular archaeologist at Harvard. 

Barquera and his group analyzed the petrous bone—a dense part of the skull’s temporal bone that preserves DNA well—from 64 children found in the Maya cistern. 

In addition to learning that the children were male, they found identical genomes in the different bones, revealing the pairs of identical twins. The DNA also revealed genetic continuity between these boys and the modern-day Maya living in the area today, underscoring that those being sacrificed had been chosen from within the local community near Chichén Itzá, rather than being outsiders. The findings run counter to historical narratives passed down by Spanish officials and priests that Mesoamerican cultures tended to sacrifice enslaved captives.

Radiocarbon dating of the bones showed the boys weren’t all killed at once, hinting, Warinner said, that the sacrifices might have been related to a cyclic ritual ceremony. Isotopic analysis showed that most of the boys shared the same diet, suggesting they were raised together and deliberately prepared for sacrifice, Barquera added.

“It’s such an exciting time to be doing archaeology,” said Nawa Sugiyama, an anthropologist from the University of California, Riverside, who wasn’t involved in the Maya work. “The level of detail with which we’re able to reconstruct these rituals has really opened up our ability to be there and relate to these families and communities.”

Write to Aylin Woodward at aylin.woodward@wsj.com 

 

Primitive Christianity reflects, rather than repudiates, this ancient human barbarism by insisting on the salvific meaning of the man Jesus' death as a pure sacrifice which paid a debt owed to the one God.

That is another milestone in the long trend of regressive thinking in Judaism (as was apocalyptic in particular, which the historical Jesus eschewed, and eschatology in general, which he did not; the establishment of human kingship over Israel; the building of a box for God called the temple; et cetera), which putatively from the time of Moses had repudiated human sacrifice as an abomination (Deuteronomy 12:31; 18:9ff.), or even earlier as foreshadowed in the halted sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22), aka the temptation of Abraham.

But in the New Testament the Jewish God himself, completely out of character, is actively nailing his own son to the cross as a sacrifice for sins.

And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. 

-- Hebrews 10:10 

For I testify again to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law. 

-- Galatians 5:3

And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross.  

-- Colossians 2:13f.

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. 

-- II Corinthians 5:21 

Yet God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood.

-- Romans 3:24f.

Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot:  

-- I Peter 1:18f.

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? 

-- Matthew 27:46

And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? 

-- Mark 15:34