Firm grasp of the obvious

 

MI Church Shooting, Fire was Motivated By Anti-Religious Beliefs

NBC News

God bites off head of Satanist, 76

 

Ozzy Osbourne, pioneering heavy metal singer and Black Sabbath frontman, dies at 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. ...

Donald Trump is again taught the meaning of Homo proponit sed Deus disponit but it obviously won't do him any good

 

 Man proposes but God disposes.

The locution belongs to Thomas von Kempen (1380-1471), Imitation of Christ 1.19. It is the template for the American adage that "the president proposes but the Congress disposes".

In America the power of the purse rests in the people's representatives in the House and Senate assembled. It does not rest in the hands of one man.

Donald Trump has once again been taught this lesson about who's boss around here, and that the president can't always get what he wants.

On Thursday he suddenly sprang the wish for an elimination of the US national debt ceiling entirely, which is what Democrats have long wanted. He then hedged for at least an extension of the time limit for a decision about it through Jan 30, 2027 after the primaries, but he didn't get that either, let alone an extension into 2029 after he's out of the picture. Congress taught him similar lessons multiple times during his first presidency, but he obviously learned nothing.

The compromise passed by the House and the Senate overnight funds the government through March 14, 2025, and forces Trump to deal with the debt ceiling in 2025. He promised to primary any Republican in 2026 who voted for that.

He's going to be very busy!

He'll have to primary 170 Republicans in the US House lol, which I'm sure will smooth the way to getting passed what he wants passed there the next two years lol.

Trump's threats aren't just rash. They are idle, and self-defeating to boot, displaying nothing so much as his impotence.

Democrats who said they feared another Hitler were just lying to their fool followers, or were the fools themselves.

 

 

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

She has deleted this

 

 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.

Suddenly the Trump administration is all about promoting faggotry in the Middle East, about which Trump is clueless

Trump Administration Betrays America First With Gay Decriminalization Plan:

The Trump administration wants to pressure every country in the world to legalize homosexuality for the purpose of ostracizing Iran from the global stage. ... Trump himself seems unaware of the proposal, telling reporters “I don’t know” which reports they referred to. ...

"We need a new rational American foreign policy,” he said in an April 2016 speech outlining his foreign policy agenda. ... “In the Middle East our goals must be, and I mean must be, to defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change."

“Instead of trying to spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants, we should understand that strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world than military interventions.”