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

 

 

 

 

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.  

Scholarship which presses Matthew 10 for the sake of a high Christology focuses on a tiny sapling and misses the entire forest

 

 Seen here:

For example, one case that Pitre makes is that scholars are almost unanimous in their belief in the historical plausibility of Jesus’ demand that His disciples love Him more than their parents [Matthew 10:37]. But many scholars also agree that in a first-century Jewish context, the love of parents is second only to the love of God. Pitre thus persuasively argues that we must logically conclude that Jesus of Nazareth makes a demand of His followers that only the God of Israel can make. He quotes Rabbi Jacob Neusner, who says, “For, I now realize, only God can demand of me what Jesus is asking… In the end the master, Jesus, makes a demand that only God makes.”

This point of view comes from the introspective conscience of the West, not from the text.

The Jesus of Matthew 10 does not imagine our existence, that we would be born to live and worship him. The entire narrative is about the sending out of the Twelve and the imminent end of the world and about their role in it. Jesus actually elevates the disciples as fellow itinerant prophets. He does not demand their worship.

The Matthew 10 narrative is the eschatological prophet sending out his disciples to evangelize Israel, which they will not complete before the end of the world comes, the climax of which is the coming of the Son of man:

But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come. The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord.

The impending judgment of the world demands a kind of repentance which turns away from all conventions of family, work, and life. It is not simply a question of loving parents more than their master, but also of sons and daughters.  The narrative describes a climactic descent into social chaos involving the persecution of Jesus' true and few followers by their very own kin:

And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. ... He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward;    

This is not about Christology, but about eschatology and the cost of discipleship. The price is intensely personal.

There is hardly a more vivid repudiation of the idea of the Christian family anywhere in the gospels, let alone of a high Christology, except in Luke:

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple. ... So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. 

-- Luke 14:26f., 33 

The plagiarism committed by today's academics only seems new

 Their fox-like thefts are so rank, as a man may find whole pages usurped from one author.

-- Ben Jonson

LOL Gerald O'Collins, Society of Jesus, 1971, speaking up for the Cosmic Christ without the slightest hint of self-awareness

 First, Jesus must not be turned into a contemporary. He is rightly viewed within the historical framework of the first century. To describe Him as a revolutionary leader, a truly secular man or the first hippie may be emotionally satisfying, but for the most part these stereotypes are intellectually worthless. Albert Schweitzer’s warnings against creating Jesus in accordance with one’s own character still stand. ...

We meet God in the cosmic Christ who encounters us now, as well as in the strangeness of a first-century Galilean whose preaching resulted in His crucifixion.

-- America: The Jesuit Review, March 6, 1971 and August 26, 2024 

Gerald O'Collins was a systematic theologian, not a philologist, who passed away August 22, 2024 after a long and distinguished Catholic academic career at Pontifical Gregorian University, 1973-2006.

Perhaps the most famous proponent of the cosmic Christ was the fellow Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose offenses against Catholic doctrine were repeatedly warned against but never proscribed. Several Catholic intellectuals sought to rehabilitate his reputation after his death in 1955, not the least of whom was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI.

O'Collins was a child of this time.

The theological idea of the cosmic Christ certainly has its germ in the Pauline Colossian epistle and later in Irenaeus, but can hardly be said to be a Synoptic idea. O'Collins wanted these to have equal weight:

Both the Synoptic account of the preacher from Nazareth and Paul’s reflections on his Lord’s death and resurrection belong within the canon of scripture.

Yet it was Paul himself who eschewed the historical Jesus:

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer.

-- II Corinthians 5:16 

 

The climate apocalypse predicted by high school dropout Greta Thunberg has failed, just like the religious apocalypse predicted by the Gospels

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  For his part Jesus at least stuck to his guns to the bitter end, though even he kept adjusting the timeline incrementally forward. It was his followers who did most of the covering up for him. In deleting her tweet prediction back in March of this year, Greta resembles them.

The deletion of the prediction, and of ~54 other such predictions, is the subject of some well-deserved derision here and here.

The merriment aside, it is safe to say that faith in the ever-coming, ever-delayed climate apocalypse will continue despite all being lost, now that we have reached the five-year-point of no return.

More and more the climate hysterics look like the already/not yet Kingdom of God enthusiasts among the world's Christians. The latter have their cake and eat it too as their answer to the problem of Jesus' expected in-breaking of the kingdom before the end of the mission of The Twelve in Matthew 10. As no Christian will concede that Jesus was mistaken about this, no climate fanatic will concede that their predictions have been false.

Like Christians in every age since, climate ideologues in academe, in organizations, and in the press routinely conflate instances of extreme weather with climate as signs of the predicted imminent catastrophe. The steady drumbeat of boy crying wolf is meant to whip up expectation and devotion, and above all money, which give the movement coherence and hope as the coming end is delayed again and again and again. You might even say that the Christian apocalyptic delusion, embedded into the very thinking of the West over the long centuries, prepared the way for the victory of the Climate delusion.

It is a useful meditation in how the original "apocalyptic" message of Jesus really wasn't apocalyptic at all, predicting signs and wonders in the heavens above and in the earth below. It only became so in the hands of the Gospel authors after its failure. As Vincent Taylor matter-of-factly pointed out decades ago, the Gospels were primarily composed in response to the delay of the parousia. The Gospels make Jesus predict a second coming, but its delay too was no less of problem than the failure of the first coming.

Jesus' original message was truly, dare we say merely, thorough-goingly eschatological, as Albert Schweitzer had said over 100 years ago. It was not apocalyptic.

Jesus said there would be no sign of the coming of the Son of Man (Mark 8:12). He would come quickly, like a thief in the night, leading the reaper angels who would pluck out from the world everything which offendeth. Two would be in a field, one would be taken and the other left. Two in a bed, one taken, one left. The taken would be bundled up together and burned. The kingdom of God would descend from heaven above. Its heavenly temple would descend and crush its earthly counterpart. The Twelve would rule over the Twelve Tribes of Israel as God made his will done on earth as it is in heaven. Everything in Jesus' generation would continue briefly just as it is, as in the days of Noah, people buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, and then Bam!

All would be calm and normal before the great and terrible day of the Lord.

This message is still embedded in the Gospel data, but its timeline and details were all recast in specifically apocalyptic terms of a second coming, the delay of which the Gospels are meant to address as a cope. Apocalyptic and eschatology have been hopelessly conflated ever since, with Christians forever preoccupied with the signs of the times.

People who marvel at how Christianity ever achieved its status as a universal religion which has endured through the ages and commanded the assent of billions over two millennia despite the on-going delay of the parousia rarely reflect on the power fanaticism has to delude thoroughly, and on a grand scale.

They have the climate hysteria now before their very eyes. They are actually living it. And yet they cannot see it.

The climate delusion has reached astounding proportions since its laughable prophet Al Gore, divinity school dropout (what a coincidence, right?), first began his climate ministry in 1993. The whole world is feeling its grip, banking on so-called green electricity when its capacity to generate enough of it to replace fossil fuel and nuclear sources is nothing but a pipe-dream.

And to think America almost made him president.

Nothing good has come out of Carthage, Tennessee.

Hysteria characterizes academic literature on Christian nationalism today

 From the story here:

If a conservative Presbyterian who has long argued that the church should stay out of politics tests positive for Christian nationalism, someone could wonder if sociologists need an equivalent to what epidemiologists have in asymptomatic carriers of COVID. Can a class of Christian nationalists exist who have no strong symptoms of this political virus? If so, do they need to be in political isolation? 

The Academy, the destroyer within

 The vice of professors exceeds the destructiveness of the most hostile assaults, as intestine treachery is more ruinous than foreign violence.

-- The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety

Another Lincoln and state worshiper pretends that local militias and the Union Army weren't mobs

Uniforms are placed upon them from the start to help obscure this fact. In the end, the winners' mobs are always anything but mobs, especially to their partisans.

Like John Bicknell, here, in "The Philadelphia Bible Riots":

In Philadelphia, after some stops and starts, the civil authority in the form of local militias defended order. ... In Illinois, the civil authorities sided with the mob. Philadelphia’s Catholics survived. Nauvoo’s Mormons, having seen their government abandon them to the mob, fled.

Six years earlier in Springfield, a mere 130 miles from Nauvoo, a young Whig lawyer had warned that “if the laws be continually despised and disregarded, if their rights to be secure in their persons and property, are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob, the alienation of their affections from the government is the natural consequence; and to that, sooner or later, it must come.” As would so often be the case, Abraham Lincoln was prophetic. ...

But the useful lesson from the Philadelphia riots of 1844, the mob assassination of Joseph Smith, and countless other examples across the centuries, is that those with power will always act to defend that power and are not too particular about how they do it. It makes little difference if that power is derived from positions of authority in government, business, religion, the media, academia, or any other institution. If mobs, in the street or online, will help them achieve their ends, they’re willing to exploit them, ignoring Lincoln’s admonition that “there is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” The question—in 1844 as it remains today—is whether the authority of the state will be employed to quell the mob or to augment it. The former is the foundation of ordered liberty. The latter is something else entirely.

I'm sure that the British crown thought that sending 24,000 Redcoats to Long Island in August 1776 was meant to maintain ordered liberty, too, against the Presbyterian Rebellion, just as Lincoln came to think both disunion and slavery were grievances which had become quite fit indeed for redress by force of arms. Eventually the chartered rights of Englishmen in New York prevailed over the forces of a foreign king, only to suffer loss 89 years later from the Bluebellies of a domestic tyrant.  

As Bicknell otherwise rightly says,

Human affairs are morally complex and attempts to simplify them—even for supposedly well-intentioned purposes—are almost always bound to come up short.

Academic co-authors of famous study about honesty now shown to contain fake data still think it OK how remarkably uninvolved they were in it

This is how it works. It's about credentialism and arguments from authority, not about "science". Academia is rife with this sort of thing. Today's academics are as phony as the medieval clerisy ever was.

 

Renowned psychologist Dan Ariely literally wrote the book on dishonesty. Now some are questioning whether the scientist himself is being dishonest:

... four of the five authors said they played no part in collecting the data for the test in question.

That leaves Ariely, who confirmed that he alone was in touch with the insurance company that ran the test with its customers and provided him with the data. But he insisted that he was innocent, implying it was the company that was responsible. ...

Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor and one of the authors, wrote, “I was not involved in conversations with the insurance company that conducted the field experiment, nor in any of the steps of running it or analyzing the data.”

Another author, Nina Mazar, then at the University of Toronto and now a marketing professor at Boston University, told the blog, “I want to make clear that I was not involved in conducting the field study, had no interactions with the insurance company, and don’t know when, how, or by whom exactly the data was collected and entered. I have no knowledge of who fabricated the data.”

Gino declined to be interviewed for this story, and Mazar did not return a request for comment. ...

Bazerman of Harvard ... had questions about the insurance experiment’s seemingly “implausible data.” A coauthor assured him the data were accurate and another showed him the file, though he admitted that he did not personally examine it. When the 2012 paper made waves, he “then believed the core result” and taught it to students and corporate executives alike. In retrospect, he wrote, “I wish I had worked harder to identify the data were fraudulent, to ensure rigorous research in a collaborative context, and to promptly retract the 2012 paper.”

Shu, another coauthor who now works in venture capital, voiced similar regrets on Twitter this week. “We began our collaboration from a place of assumed trust — rather than earned trust,” she wrote. “Lesson learned.” She declined to comment for this story.

Yes, the New Testament is full of ideas torn from their eschatological milieu and misused by utopians, communists and other ideologues

But academically rigorous this is not.

Why Lutherans are particularly susceptible to white guilt

Lutherans are particularly susceptible to "white guilt" because guilt has been a way of life for them as Protestants. The whole idea of "systemic racism" in America wouldn't be flourishing without it.

Every Sunday Lutherans stand, confess and agree that they "are by nature sinful and unclean". "Confession", remember, literally means agreement, "saying the same thing". The gospel which they believe, preach, and teach, week in and week out, tells them that their individual sins put Jesus on the cross 2,000 years ago. Yours did too, they say. It isn't a big leap from accepting guilt for Jesus' death to accepting guilt for what white slavers and white supremacists did ages ago, even though they had nothing to do with it.

Lutherans have been repeating this guilt and stewing in this guilt mentality for over 500 years, and have infected all of Protestantism with it, perhaps no more successfully than among the Baptists in America, who flourished in the slave states. With their "come to Jesus moment" the Baptists gave America a uniquely personalized religion whose key experience is like nothing so much as a Maoist struggle session in which the accused breaks down in front of a crowd in emotional crisis and agrees to his crimes in his testimony of faith. The Baptist dramatically confesses the Lord Jesus with his mouth and is baptized, and so is saved.

It needs hardly be said that the groundwork for the success of this individualistic Baptist faith in America, forged in the Protestant Reformation, had already been laid for it by other influences resulting in the development of American "rugged" individualism.

And you might want to just leave it at that, and not appreciate other antecedents deep in our history beyond the relatively recent theological, philosophical and psychological ones which are germane to this moment in our history. For example in Roman Catholicism itself, before the Reformation, with its aggressively hierarchical system of religious specialists on top getting their living from the offerings coerced of the sinners below in exchange for the absolution of the guilt they successfully convinced them of.

Or in Paul's transformation of an eschatological cult centered on The Temple, which called no man "rabbi" and no man "father", into a more successful form of Pharisaism with its "synagogues" everywhere actually run by the equivalent of rabbis, and eventually fathers, and assembling at which and financially supporting became the central part of religious obligation. "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes" has to happen somewhere.

Or in Judaism more anciently. The exploitation of guilt, after all, goes all the way back at the very least to one tribe's control over eleven others in ancient Israel. This arrangement also came to a head in a kind of "reformation" moment when the northern kingdom rejected the manipulation by the southern, which controlled the Temple cult, over the issue of taxation and set up its rival cult at Bethel. The Deuteronomic code, well spring of imagination at the American founding, was written by the Temple cult winners of that duel.

Guilt, specifically religious guilt, has been key to manipulating people in the West from its beginnings, and it comes as no surprise that some white people in America today, secularized and demoralized, should still so easily fall victim to such gaslighting, now by black race hustlers. They've been gaslighted for centuries after all, so what's a little more?

The guilt habit of mind has become endemic, whether religious or not, and it's a threat to the liberal order given that perhaps 15 million Americans have recently protested in the streets in its favor, some violently. You might conclude more cynically that this is happening because there's a sucker born every minute, or more charitably because it's a natural consequence of natural human inequality. In either case, the good society may be measured by the degree to which that good society protects such people from being manipulated, and still others from being hurt by the manipulated, and since it's not, the liberal order has failed, or is failing. The whole affair is a cautionary tale. People who think it preposterous that America might one day descend into the barbarism of 7th century Islamism, or into Adrian Vermeule's vision of Catholic integralism governing the Western hemisphere from Quebec to Buenos Ares should think again. Instead another reformation is needed, one which rejects "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me".

The tell of it all is that even as the very strength of the enslaved peoples of America has long been acknowledged by themselves to be this same Christian gospel, some of their descendants, too, have now finally learned how to leverage all the same tricks of guilt and manipulation it teaches.

The objective, let it not ever be forgotten, is your stuff.

First fruits. Tithes. Offerings. Taxes. Reparations. Pay-back. Redistribution. Same as it ever was. Figure out a way to manipulate people to get their stuff for free, or at least at little cost, to make a handsome living without having to really work for it (think priests, Levites, pastors, academics, bureaucrats, teachers, politicians, activists, tub-thumpers, and other assorted pests).

Working for it is what whitey does. That's the racist part of the current hysteria. The Marxist part of Black Lives Matter is the old religious system denuded of The Deity and Society elevated to the level of Magic Cash Register, at which everyone is equal. That's the utopian theory anyway, the hope, but not the hope of glory.

What happens in reality is that communism wherever it has been tried ends always the same way, in brutal dictatorship, brutal totalitarianism or both, with an elite in charge, hoarding all the benefits for itself at the expense of the many as they mouth the words everyone knows to be false at the point of a gun but must sing in order to survive:

"In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic"...

"By...the abolition of private property...then the liberation of each single individual will be accomplished..."

Ariel Sabar strikes again in a good, long read about a con allegedly perpetrated by an academic and other shady characters against the Green family of Hobby Lobby fame and their Museum of the Bible

A Biblical Mystery at Oxford:

'In June 2019, Michael Holmes, who replaced Pattengale as the director of the scholars initiative, flew to London to meet with leaders of the Egypt Exploration Society, who remained skeptical that Obbink, whatever his other shortcomings, might have sold Oxyrhynchus papyri.

'Over lunch at a private club, Holmes pulled out a purchase agreement between Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. and Dirk Obbink. Co-signed by the Oxford professor on February 4, 2013, it showed that Obbink had sold the company not just the Mark papyrus, but also fragments of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John. In the contract, Obbink describes the manuscripts as his personal property, vows to “ship/hand carry” them from “Oxford Ancient,” and dates all four to a historically unprecedented “circa 100 AD,” making each a one-of-a-kind worth millions.

'When EES officials saw the contract, Holmes told me, “any uncertainties they had evaporated very quickly.” They banned Obbink from the collection.'

 

A Talmudic picture of heaven shares with Plato's Socrates that the debate continues in the afterlife

What Happens in Heaven? Study. Of What? Jewish Law:

But, in one particular text [Bava Metzia 86a], the Talmud presents a picture of heaven quite unlike anything in the Bible, an image that is indeed unthinkable, if not blasphemous, outside of its uniquely rabbinic context . . . :

They were arguing in the Academy of Heaven. If the blotch on the [individual’s] skin preceded the white hair, he is impure. If the white hair preceded the blotch on the skin, he is pure.

Not only does the Academy of Heaven forgo any discussion of ultimate truths, but the question being debated at this highest imaginable institution of learning centers on an issue of law—and not just any issue, but one involving some of the most obscure, picayune, and technical details that can be found in the entire rabbinic canon. 

The picture is hardly unthinkable, nor is it uniquely rabbinic.

Plato's Socrates [Apology 40f.]:

But on the other hand, if death is, as it were, a change of habitation from here to some other place, and if what we are told is true, that all the dead are there, what greater blessing could there be, judges? For if a man when he reaches the other world, after leaving behind these who claim to be judges, shall find those who are really judges who are said to sit in judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and all the other demigods who were just men in their lives, would the change of habitation be undesirable? Or again, what would any of you give to meet with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? I am willing to die many times over, if these things are true; for I personally should find the life there wonderful, when I met Palamedes or Ajax, the son of Telamon, or any other men of old who lost their lives through an unjust judgement, and compared my experience with theirs. I think that would not be unpleasant.

And the greatest pleasure would be to pass my time in examining and investigating the people there, as I do those here, to find out who among them is wise and who thinks he is when he is not. What price would any of you pay, judges, to examine him who led the great army against Troy, or Odysseus, or Sisyphus, or countless others, both men and women, whom I might mention? To converse and associate with them and examine them would be immeasurable happiness. At any rate, the folk there do not kill people for it; since, if what we are told is true, they are immortal for all future time, besides being happier in other respects than men are here.

America has long since become Richard Mitchell's civilization of the ignorant who think that they are educated

"It is possible, of course, to keep educated people unfree in a state of civilization, but it’s much easier to keep ignorant people unfree in a state of civilization. And it is easiest of all if you can convince the ignorant that they are educated, for you can thus make them collaborators in your disposition of their liberty and property. That is the institutionally assigned task, for all that it may be invisible to those who perform it, of American public education." 

-- Richard Mitchell, underground grammarian and author of The Graves of Academe

Since when, you ask? Oh, since about 1913 or thereabouts.

Modernity is a war of religious ideas, not a war on them

Very ably argued here, by Dominic Erdozain, from which this snippet on Voltaire:

Rousseau's "heart," Voltaire complained, could justify him in anything. Guided by the "inner voice" of conscience, a man could do as he pleased. From the murderous and adulterous David, in the Old Testament, to any number of latter-day tyrants, Voltaire lamented, history was strewn with icy campaigners who had learned to manage the accusing conscience to expert degree. "There is a natural law," he declared rather plaintively in his Philosophical Dictionary, "but it is still more natural to many people to forget it."

The sin of religious "fanaticism" was to subordinate conscience to the "passions" - under the dangerous delusion that my desire represents God's will. The problem with religion - even in its more acceptable formulations - is that it too often flattered, rather than stirred, the slumbering conscience. The moralizing philosopher defined his task in self-consciously homiletic terms: "it is judicious to endeavor to awaken conscience both in mantua-makers and in monarchs." Indeed, "it is necessary to preach better than modern preachers usually do, who seldom talk effectively to either." Enlightenment was again strangely evangelical.

John Shelby Spong's mother helps explain the obsessions of the man

From an interview here:

I happen to know the Bible pretty deeply and I didn’t reject the Bible when I rejected its literal frame of reference. I happen to be a believing, practicing Christian. I don’t go to church on Sunday mornings for show. I go because I want to be there and I need to worship. It’s not an option for me to sleep in on Sunday. My faith is deeper than that. I do not eat a meal that I don’t stop and say grace beforehand because that’s how I acknowledge the presence of God in my life at a regular time. I try to live a life of absolute commitment. I claim my Christian identity publicly.

This puts me at odds with my colleagues in the Jesus Seminar who are so scholarly but they are not devoted. They really think the church is a sick institution and they don’t want to be part of it. I think the church is the only place we’ve got, but we’ve got to transform and redeem it. If the church is not going to be the place where people encounter God and Christ I don’t see any other place in our society to do so. I work to transform the church. I don’t work to get rid of the church. I work to transform the meaning of what it means to be a Christian, not to get rid of that meaning. ...

I wrote a book once about reclaiming the Bible for a nonreligious world. I really want to take it back from those people who I think are ruining it. I don’t dislike those people. My mother was a fundamentalist. She had not finished the 9th grade. She knew no other way to approach the biblical story.

Spong was more inclined to wear membership in the Jesus Seminar as a badge of honor as recently as 2012, here:

In the 1990’s, Robert Funk invited me to become a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar. I was the first Fellow not to be a professional academic. ... While being a successful author and possessing a number of honorary doctorates, I did not have an earned PhD, which was normally regarded as a pre-requisite for becoming a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar. Nonetheless, the Seminar honored me by accepting me to its membership.  I have loved my association with them over the years.  I have participated in their debates and deliberations.  I have been invited to address some of their largest gatherings, including the 2004 event called “The Jesus Seminar at Times Square.”  The Seminar has adopted some of the perspectives that I have offered and they have under-girded my career with their incisive scholarship.  I have previously been recognized by them in several ways.  I was chosen for membership in the “David Friedrich Strauss Society of Biblical Scholars,” a society named for an early 19th century German New Testament scholar, who first brought the findings of the academy to the attention of the people of Europe.  Later I was given the “John A. T. Robinson Award” for “Courage and Integrity in Theology.”

I was deeply touched by each of these honors.  To close the gap between the academy and the people in the pews has been both the goal of the Seminar and the primary ambition of my career.  The Jesus Seminar has been a major force in enabling me to fulfill that vocation.  I have many friends today among the Fellows of the Seminar and I believe they have a new respect for the willingness of the clergy and lay people that I represent to be engaged in biblical scholarship. 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali names religion academics John Esposito and Karen Armstrong "apologists for Islam"

It's about time somebody did.

Here in "Islam is a religion of violence" in Foreign Policy:

'Popular academics such as John Esposito at Georgetown and author Karen Armstrong believe that religion — Islam, in this case — is the “circumstantial” bit and that the real causes of Islamist violence are poverty, political marginalization, cultural isolation, and other forms of alienation, including real or perceived discrimination against Muslims. These apologists for Islam use words such as “radicalism,” “violent extremism,” and “terrorism” to describe the various attacks around the world committed in the name of Islam. If Islam is mentioned at all, it is to say that Islam is being perverted, or hijacked. They are quick to assert that Islam is no different from any other religion, that there are terrible aspects to other religions, and that Islam is in no way unique. That view is more or less the “official” view of policymakers, not only of the U.S. government, but also of most Western countries (though policy changes are beginning to appear on this front in some countries such as the U.K., Canada, and Australia). But the apologists’ position has been a complete policy failure because it denies the religious justifications the Quran and the Hadith provide for violence, gender inequality, and discrimination against other religions. ... [T]he intolerant and violent aspects of the Quran and the Hadith are never acknowledged or rejected.'

Phil Jenkins never tells you the crackpot solution of Ellen G. White to "The Great Disappointment"

Namely, The Investigative Judgment, a doctrine wholly derived from "a charismatic prophetic leader" and not found anywhere in Scripture, here:

"The Adventists grew out of the millenarian fervor that swept the United States in the 1840s. In 1844, William Miller warned of the Christ’s imminent return and the world’s destruction. In fact, he did so twice, and the double failure provoked what is termed the Great Disappoint­ment. A rem­nant of Millerites then reconstructed their movement under the visionary leadership of New England–born Ellen G. White."

Seventh-day Adventism is a failed apocalyptic cult, not unlike Christianity itself.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. By their fruit ye shall know them. "Does a spring pour forth from the same opening fresh water and brackish?" -- James 3:11

Phil Jenkins should know better, but practices a form of political correctness all too characteristic of the contemporary academic community by not addressing Seventh-day Adventism's raison d'être. Too prickly no doubt for The Christian Century, and for his career. So much for thinking critically, living faithfully.

The religion of Ben Carson does no real harm in the world, except insofar as its adherents are occasionally no better than your average criminal, which Jenkins does mention. Thank God for small favors, I suppose.

But Adventism is still nuts.

How the followers of Mao and the followers of Jesus are similar

John Gray reviewing some academics' essays about Mao's Little Red Book, here:

For Wang, the book “represented a scriptural authority and emanated a sacred aura”. During the Cultural Revolution study sessions were an unavoidable part of everyday life for people in China. Involving “ritualistic confessions of one’s errant thoughts and nightly diary-writing aimed at self-criticism”, these sessions, he writes, “may be seen as a form of text-based indoctrination that resembles religious hermeneutics and catechism” – a “quasi-religious practice of canonical texts”.

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The instinct to take a text as authoritative and sacred, put it at the center of living, and then to study it, confess one's falling short of it, and even journaling about it, a popular evangelical habit in America by the way, all of it in a decidedly secular, atheistic, and political historical context evinces something telling about human nature, not about the divine. Human beings have a proclivity for ideology and fanaticism which can be exploited through the cult of personality. You may think Maoism is over in comparison to Christianity, but Gray recognizes that it has a Nachleben, and it is no coincidence that that afterlife is mostly in the West.