Very superstitious: Rod Dreher's demons posing as UFOs obey the FAA lol

 

Rod lives in another land.

 Northeast drone sightings surge again after FAA lifts restrictions

A brief lull in activity that coincided with flight restrictions imposed by the feds has ended, now that the Federal Aviation Administration lifted the ban. ...

The uptick came after sightings plummeted by 43% following the FAA flight restrictions imposed on Dec. 18, Kim said.

On that same day, Enigma received nearly 50 sightings. A week later, only four sightings were reported.

The restrictions were lifted Jan. 17, and since then, Enigma’s received 22 reports of sightings.

Rod Dreher: The UFOs are full of demonic entities, you see

Hal Lindsey and Larry Norman hardly exhausted the market for bad popular theology lol.

Larry Norman evidently took "Why should the devil have all the good music" and his anti-middle class stance directly from The Salvation Army of 1880

 Such stories [of its militancy] were common in the early decades of the Salvation Army. Whatever the Booths and their soldiers were, they were not content with a genteel and respectable Christianity that fit snugly into the cultural milieu of the day. William Booth once said, “The great curse of the church is respectability. Throw reputation and so-called respectability overboard.”  Despite using common and popular forms – such as the military metaphor and changing words of popular songs (“Why should the devil have all the best tunes?” Salvationists often asked) – the Army subverted expectations of what Christians should be and took much criticism. 

More.

Larry Norman's spiritual movement was quickly co-opted by the business of Christian music in just the same way that the Salvation Army's specifically religious character came to be swallowed up by its charitable business. 

There is nothing new under the sun.

 

 

Ryan Burge discovers what Larry Norman always knew: Church is middle class, a hospital for the healthy

 The group that is the most likely to attend services are not the poor, nor the wealthy. Instead, it’s people who smack in the middle of the income distribution. This analysis points to the following conclusion: the people who are the most likely to attend services this weekend are those with college degrees making $60K-$100K. In other words, middle class professionals. ...

Increasingly religion has become the enclave for those who have lived a “proper” life. College degree, middle class income, married with children. If you check all those boxes, the likelihood of you regularly attending church is about double the rate of folks who don’t.

Data here.

Church is middle-class

Somehow we will pay

I can remember when it meant something completely different

ONE WAY.

Larry Norman: Is Christ a myth? a madman's whim?

The happy whimsey you pursue,

Till you at length believe it true,

Caught by your own delusive art,

You fancy first, and then assert.

-- Matthew Prior

For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. 

-- Mark 11:23f.

 

Larry Norman - First Day In Church (Poem Spoken) - [Live]

Pagan church, pagan people with their eyes upon the Lord

Pagan, from Latin paganus, a country boy.

I know, I know, that's completely politically incorrect.

Larry Norman, here.

Christian Piatt explores the idea that Jesus was crazy

Here.

The context of apocalyptic is glaringly missing, but it's still an amusing read, including the insane commenters, who remind me of nothing so much as the proverbial moths drawn to the flame . . .

"But like a moth drawn to the flame, here I am talkin' 'bout Jesus just the same".

Love is a corpse . . .

From Larry Norman's 1973 So Long Ago The Garden, his prescient "Nightmare Number 71" (1971 was the last year the total fertility rate in the US exceeded the replacement rate, except for 2006 and 2007):

Last night i had that same old dream it rocked me in my sleep

And left me the impression that the sandman plays for keeps


I dreamed i was in concert in the middle of the clouds


John wayne and billy graham were giving breath mints to the crowds

I fell through a hole in heaven i left the stage for good


And when i landed on the earth i was back in hollywood



The california earthquake it tore the land in half

While san andreas cleared her throat i heard tsunami laugh

The ground began to tremble the land began to sway

And people in the other states they were glad they'd moved away


But suddenly california just floated in the breeze

While every state that wasn't sank down into the seas

And soon i saw atlantis rumble and rise high

And the great egg of euphrates came down out of the sky


And out stepped shirley temple with guy kippee who was dead


And that communist bill robinson whom shirley called black red


They have a marionette of harpo marx they said it was an inside joke

But when i honked his horn he came alive and these were the words he spoke



With the continents adrift and the sun about to shift

Will the ice caps drown us all or will we burn


We've polluted what we own will we reap what we have sown?


Are we headed for the end or can we turn?

We've paved the forests killed the streams

Burned the bridges to our dreams

The earth is bursting at the seams


And in pain of childbirth screams


As it gives life to what seems

To either be an age that gleams


Or simply lays there dying


If this goes on will life survive how can it


Out of the grave oh who will save our planet?

I said i'm pleased to meet you i always thought you were a scream

He said have you ever thought of having helen keller in your dreams

I said errol flynn dropped by but he tried to steal my girl


Then she ran off with ronald colman said something about a new world

Now i'm stuck with my own cooking hey i'm lonely can't you see


Well he grabbed my leg and said exactly eighty nine words to me

Count them

: let the proud but dying nation kiss the last generation


It's the year of the pill, age of the gland

We have landed on the moon but we'll clutter that up soon


Our sense of freedom's gotten out of hand


We kill our children swap our wives


We've learned to greet a man with knives


We swallow pills in fours and fives

Our cities look like crumbling hives

Man does not live he just survives

We sleep till he arrives


Love is a corpse we sit and watch it harden


We left it oh so long ago the garden

The strings snapped briskly then went slack the marionette lay dead

While hoover played with the motorcade the body slumped and bled

The man who held the camera disappeared into the crowd


I said the hope of youth, fictitious truth, lays covered in a shroud


Then up walked elmo lincoln and he said i beg your pardon


But we left it oh so long ago, the garden

Christ Mad? Perhaps. But Still Right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 But is there anyone here, right now, who can explain to me . . . Is Christ a myth? A madman's whim? Some say Christ can cure our sin. Is there a way to contact Him? Or will I die not knowing how? Listen, I only came to church to see if they could offer hope, but everything that happened there was way outside my scope. Like afterwards, outside . . . was a beggar on the grass. He held out his hand, and people'd smile, then they'd pass. I'm sure he reached for something real, for something more than cash. He begged them for a little cheer, and they all pretended . . . not to hear. I get the message, loud and clear: Church is middle-class.

-- Larry Norman, "Poem", Street Level (1970)

Jesus didn't teach a rapture of the just

Jesus Didn't Teach a 'Rapture' of the Just

Jesus simply taught an imminent end of the world and final judgment, at which time the Son of Man (himself) would appear in the heavens with the clouds of glory and with the holy angels, who would separate the wicked from the just, cleansing God's kingdom, the world, from all evil, casting the wicked into eternal fire, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Jesus called for removing all evil from the world as a matter of first importance, then gathering the righteous together after that.

This is the plain meaning of the parable of the tares and of the wheat, which must grow up together until the end in order to preserve the just alive. We are told that the angels first bundle up the tares, and throw them into the flames. Otherwise their presence would complicate what comes next. The wheat left behind must be winnowed with a fork, and its kernel separated and gathered with the rest into God's barn.

This is also the plain meaning of Jesus' analogy to the days of Noah, when the earth was cleansed of evil by water. So of the two workers in the field and of the two women at the mill, the one removed in each instance is the wicked one, not the righteous one. They are gathered by the angels, yes even caught up in the air perhaps, and consigned immediately to the flames.

This is the plain meaning of Matthew 13, and even of Matthew 24 which is a later attempt to rationalize the teaching of Jesus from the point of view of the failure of his prediction of the end of the world during his lifetime. The evidence is conveniently assembled for you here.

Larry Norman in the early 1970s is an example of one who popularized (in his music-"the Son has come and you've been left behind") the misconception that the just would be "raptured" from the earth, leaving the damned behind to suffer the end of the world.

In truth, the idea goes back to J.N. Darby in the early 19th century, and before him into the 18th, in keeping with all the other bad ideas of modernity. We seem to get things exactly backwards.

So if you're still here at 7 PM tomorrow night, count it all joy my brethren! Old men dream dreams. It's just that they might not know what they mean. 

In the Pox-Eclipse . . .

. . . a piece of bread . . .

. . . could buy a bag of gold.

Advent: The Season of Eschatological Denial

For the First Sunday of Advent, Nov. 29, the text for the sermon in the Presbyterian Church came from 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, the last verse of which speaks of "the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all his saints."

Nary a mention was made of the meaning of this text, even though the preacher carved it up into three's and expounded upon it at great length. He simply assumed that it was appropriate to the season of advent, of "coming," when we celebrate the coming of Jesus into the world. But the text, of course, does not refer to the birth of Jesus at all. It refers, instead, to the fervent expectation of the return of Jesus, that he would "be beside" us again soon, an expectation shared by Paul with most, if not all, Christians of the first century.

The underlying Greek word, parousia, in the Latin vulgate is adventu, which of course means "coming," but not the one we celebrate at Christmas. It is, rather, the final coming of the Lord to end history as we know it and commence the final judgment. It would be no babe, meek and mild, spreading peace on earth to men of good will, but a victorious king separating the wheat from the chaff, purifying the former and consuming the latter with the fire of divine justice.

The failure of Jesus to return "soon" caused a crisis for Christianity, the effects of which are detectable as much in the development of its practices and theology as they are in the development of the gospel texts themselves. It should not surprise us, however, that Christianity's devotees would fall back on more familiar conceptions and, for example, eventually co-opt the term advent for other purposes. In doing so they acquiesced to a very old idea of a seasonal round, in which the celebrating of the coming of Jesus into the world and his going out again was loosely made to coincide with the times of harvest and planting in the autumn and the spring. It was a concession to the rhythm of life going back millennia, and to the impulse of human beings to attach religious significance to these facts of existence. A paganus, a pagan, after all, was just a country boy, nothing more than a farmer who, like all his fellows, marked the times and the seasons with rites and rituals meant to enlist the blessing and deflect the displeasure of the gods on his efforts in the fields.

And so it is today. The typical Christian is a pagan with no more sense of urgency about the imminent return of Jesus than an audiophile has of the return of vinyl. Whether he celebrates a liturgical calendar or not, his life revolves around seasons just the same, more often than not "the kids are back in school," "spring break," and "summer vacation." He goes to church seeking God's blessings on his life all the same, so that he may excel at his career, place his children in good schools, take a nice trip somewhere in June, save for their college and his own retirement, and generally enjoy life, within limits if he is wise. There is no such thing today as a disciple, who leaves all and follows Jesus.

Some of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies and listened to Christian balladeers like Larry Norman or read The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey acquired a veneer of the expectation only to lose it again because we finally realized that almost every century since the first has seen such expectation frustrated, or we came to grips with the fact that just because the expectation was preserved on papyri doesn't necessarily make it true, or translatable to now.

If Christianity is to remain relevant to such-minded people, it must do better than yet one more celebration of the Savior's birth. Saved from what? And for what? More of the same, day after day, year upon year, only to "fly forgotten as a dream, dies at the opening day?"