Sunday, July 27, 2025
Thursday, July 24, 2025
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.
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
I said in my ecstasy: Every man is a liar
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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
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
God bites off head of Satanist, 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.
“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. ...
Friday, July 18, 2025
Human flailing, divine economy
Monday, July 14, 2025
The dreams of avarice, we all have them
Sunday, July 13, 2025
Few want to consider that the impulse to genocide has deep roots in human nature, and even in Jewish religion itself
Friday, July 11, 2025
On Repentance
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Salvation for Narcissus
Wednesday, July 9, 2025
'Tis better to be lowly born . . .
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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.
Monday, July 7, 2025
Hymn for a School of Biblical Studies in a Secular University
Hymn for a School of Biblical Studies in a Secular University
Friday, July 4, 2025
Wednesday, July 2, 2025
Tuesday, July 1, 2025
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
Monday, June 30, 2025
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
Friday, June 27, 2025
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Gospel claims forty years removed and more from Jesus' resurrection are not the same thing as claims which are "only a short time later"
... 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
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
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.
Sunday, June 22, 2025
This day be bread and peace my lot . . .
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Friday, June 20, 2025
Some men left us constitutional papers, others left us the trees
Monday, June 16, 2025
Saturday, June 14, 2025
Thursday, June 12, 2025
Good riddance, phony demon UFO, Good riddance, infernal Pentagon!
Saturday, June 7, 2025
Poor Rod Dreher: Evidence is emerging that government efforts to propagate UFO mythology date back all the way to the 1950s
... 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.
Friday, June 6, 2025
It will die out soon enough, like the Shakers
Thursday, June 5, 2025
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.
Monday, June 2, 2025
The folly of strong drink
Sunday, June 1, 2025
Infant woe awaits us all
Saturday, May 31, 2025
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:
Friday, May 30, 2025
Beware of sadness
Thursday, May 29, 2025
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