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