Sunday, July 27, 2025

Tell how learning shoots


 Tell like a tall old oak how learning shoots
To heav'n her branches, to hell her roots.
 
-- John Denham 

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

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.

... 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. ...

Friday, July 18, 2025

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 
 

Monday, July 14, 2025

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. 

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


 



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
 
 

Friday, July 11, 2025

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 

Thursday, July 10, 2025

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 

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

'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

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 

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.

Friday, July 4, 2025

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 

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