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.  

Jesus wasn't killed for blasphemy but for challenging Jewish complicity with Roman economic tyranny

 

I'm glad to see this argument gaining wider circulation, even if it appears in an essay which more broadly is mistaken to think that Jesus imagined that terrestrial injustice could be overcome by anyone or anything short of the coming of God's celestial kingdom to earth. Not even the resurrection has done that.

The argument was first made by St. Luke.

And the whole multitude of them arose, and led him unto Pilate. And they began to accuse him, saying, We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ a King.  

-- Luke 23:1f.

Palm Sunday Was a Protest, Not a Procession

 ... The next day, Jesus walked into the Temple, the heart of Jerusalem’s religious and economic life, and flipped the tables in the marketplace, which he described as “a den of robbers.” The Temple wasn’t just a house of prayer. It was a financial engine, operated by complicit leaders under the constraints and demands of the occupying empire. Jesus shuts it down. This is what gets him killed.

Jesus wasn’t killed for preaching love, or healing the sick, or discussing theology routinely debated in the Temple’s courtyards, or blasphemy (the punishment for which was stoning). Rome didn’t crucify philosophers or miracle workers. Rome crucified insurrectionists. The sign nailed above his head — “King of the Jews” — was a political indictment and public warning. ...

Oh, the pervert is dead . . .

 

Theodore McCarrick, Cardinal Defrocked Over Sex Abuse, Dies at 94

NYTimes

 

"... Three of the four bishops, it said, found that Mr. McCarrick had shared a bed with seminarians and young adult men, but said they were not sure there had been sexual contact. ..."

 

 

Oh, McCarrick is dead, and his boyfriend don't know it

His boyfriend is dead, and McCarrick don't know it

They both are dead in the very same bed

And neither one knows that the other is dead.    

-- Johnny

 

 

Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con Christian moms fall for human train wreck Robert F Kennedy Jr's Make America Healthy Again

  

 Anna Gleaton and her husband operate a small homestead on 60 acres outside Gainesville, Texas, a rural town just south of the Oklahoma state line. Their farm, which operates on the principles of regenerative agriculture, includes pigs, goats and a dairy cow, which Ms. Gleaton described as “an adventure.” Another adventure: home-schooling their nine children, ages 2 to 16.

Ms. Gleaton, 36, describes herself as a conservative Christian, and she voted for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. This time, she had not been optimistic that he would focus on issues that most concern her, including contaminated soil and waterways, factory-farmed meat and the lobbying by agricultural corporations.

But Ms. Gleaton now gets goose bumps when she looks ahead, largely because Mr. Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mr. Kennedy faces Senate confirmation hearings on Wednesday and Thursday.

“It’s not very often that my world, my realm, is mainstream,” she said.

Ms. Gleaton is part of a growing crowd who question not only educational institutions for what they see as liberal orthodoxy, but also “Big Ag” and “Big Pharma” — leanings coded as progressive not long ago.

In that sense, Mr. Kennedy has been speaking her language for years. He has criticized ultraprocessed foods, warned about the dangers of specific food additives and questioned the safety of fluoride in the water supply. ...

But among home-schooling mothers like Ms. Gleaton, Mr. Kennedy has long been seen as a bold truth-teller, one who understands their skepticism about the education and health establishments, including traditional vaccine regimens. And his rising profile comes as this particular constituency is also coming into its own politically and culturally.

More.

 

Rod Dreher is quoted at the end of the story.

 

The ignorance of these people about this devil must be willful, pretending not to see.

Theories about Kennedy’s reckless behaviors abound. Long before it was reported, members of the family knew about the brain worm, which in court testimonies Kennedy conjectured he’d picked up from food he ate in South Asia. He said the tapeworm consumed a portion of his brain and led to protracted “brain fog.” But more often his family points to Kennedy’s 14 years as a heroin user, which began when Kennedy was 15 and didn’t end until he was 29. 

 

More.

Who needs The New York Times?

 Provok'd by those incorrigible fools,

I left declaiming in pedantick schools.

-- John Dryden

The comments to this are appalling:

The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be

A prophet without honor in his own country

The New York Times religion columnist Ross Douthat accurately predicted the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election. 

The commenters on election day, for the most part, weren't having it, notably the ones who thought it was invalid simply because it hadn't changed over time even though the Democrat candidate did.

Some people just don't get it that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

76% of American Christians are now the very antithesis of disciples of Jesus

Relevant Magazine, August 23, 2023, here:

76 percent of Christians now believe God wants them to prosper financially. That number rises among younger generations, with 81 percent of churchgoers between the ages of 18 to 34 and 85 percent of churchgoers 35-49 holding onto that belief.

Luke 14:33 :

So you cannot become my disciple without giving up everything you own. 

      

Tara Isabella Burton traces the origin of this prosperity gospel heresy to a new England faith healer named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby who influenced Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.   

Dubbed "the mind cure" and "New Thought" historically, it mushroomed into a diverse number of iterations over time both religious and secular beyond this humble beginning, not the least of which was in Norman Vincent Peale. Today it broadly goes by the term "manifesting, the art and quasi-spiritual science of willing things into existence".

The latter succinctly encapsulates what faith-healing, prosperity Pentecostalists like Kenneth Hagin and Ken Copeland styled "calling those things which be not as though they were" (Romans 4:17). They believe the Christian's tongue has the power to create something out of nothing, just like God.

Burton aptly describes it as

  the instinct to conflate spiritual forces, political and economic outcomes and our own personal desires.

Here, for The New York Times.

Eyewitness to earth-shattering day 60 years ago doubts himself, contradicts official statements he filed at the time, says he put the magic bullet he found in JFK's seat on JFK's stretcher

Mr. Landis’s account, included in a forthcoming memoir, would rewrite the narrative of one of modern American history’s most earth-shattering days in an important way. It may not mean any more than that. But it could also encourage those who have long suspected that there was more than one gunman in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, adding new grist to one of the nation’s enduring mysteries.

 

 As with all things related to the assassination, of course, his account raises questions of its own. Mr. Landis remained silent for 60 years, which has fueled doubts even for his former Secret Service partner, and memories are tricky even for those sincerely certain of their recollections. A couple elements of his account contradict the official statements he filed with authorities immediately after the shooting, and some of the implications of his version cannot be easily reconciled to the existing record.  

 

But he was there, a firsthand witness, and it is rare for new testimony to emerge six decades after the fact. He has never subscribed to the conspiracy theories and stresses that he is not promoting one now. At age 88, he said, all he wants is to tell what he saw and what he did. He will leave it to everyone else to draw conclusions.

More. 

 

All kidding aside, it's stunning that a believing Catholic like Ross Douthat thinks morality is a secondary aspect of religion

 Here:

But the challenge does run a little deeper if the only parts of church that Dad believes in are the secondary goods of religion (community and morality and solidarity and choral music), while the primary good — communion with God and the integration of human life with divine purposes — is assumed to probably be so much wishful thinking even before the specific dogmatic questions get involved.

 

 

Stunning because Douthat elsewhere recognized, in 2011, that the unique human characteristic of passing moral judgment is demonstrative of the way human beings strangely stand outside nature, just like God:

Second, the idea that human beings are fashioned, in some way, in the image of the universe’s creator explained why your own relationship to the world was particularly strange. Your fourth- or 14th-century self was obviously part of nature, an embodied creature with an animal form, and yet your consciousness also seemed to stand outside it, with a peculiar sense of immaterial objectivity, an almost God’s-eye view — constantly analyzing, tinkering, appreciating, passing moral judgment.

God desires mercy, not sacrifice (Matthew 9:13; 12:7):

Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me:  Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee? And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.  

-- Matthew 18:32ff.

Douthat, like much of Christianity and the West, suffers from too much vertically-oriented individualism, at least this year, for which we'll just have to forgive him.

Elmo knows

 

Where Should Agnostics Go on Sundays?

Ross Douthat, New York Times 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ross Douthat doesn't consider that the testimony of the eyes failed Mary Magdalene before it succeeded

 

 

 

 

 

 

. . . you have to go into the Gospels with a skeptical framework already to come away from them feeling that the core narrative isn’t deeply rooted in eyewitness testimony, in things that either the authors or their immediate sources really experienced and saw.

 More.

Was eyewitness testimony ever more unreliable than in the case of Mary, who we are told really did experience and see, according to the Fourth Gospel?

And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.

 -- John 20:14ff.

The idea that only prejudiced skeptics read the Gospels and come away doubting "eyewitness" testimony is quite the cope. Many former true believers have come to doubt what they once firmly believed to be true, their carefully constructed apologetic frameworks dismantled piece by piece until at length the whole structure imploded.

But Mary wasn't such a one. She did not believe in the resurrection promise in the first place, and her eyes utterly failed her when there it was, staring her in the face.

It's as if Jesus had never preached resurrection at all, so that "the apostle to the apostles" was from the beginning to the end as ignorant as they. 

Can you remember the last time a professor was fired for saying Jesus didn't die for our sins?

 Me either.

A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job.

David Bentley Hart manages to find the only airport in America where he's not forced to listen to CNN

Can We Please Relax About ‘Socialism’?:

To be trapped in the boarding area of a smallish airport in the upper Midwest is, as often as not, to be subjected to that bestial din of fricatives, gutturals, plosives and shrieks of hysterical alarm that constitutes political discussion on Fox News . . .. The experience is especially nasty if one’s wait coincides with the prime-time shows hosted by those two almost indistinguishable fellows with the suety faces . . .. [O]nly in America, as they say. Only here is the word “socialism” freighted with so much perceived menace. I take this to be a symptom of our unique national genius for stupidity.

The disdain for what's left of the backbone of this country has grown strong and palpable in this blind snob, who, fittingly, has gained a lot of weight over the years as he dines out on his Christian, cultural criticism. Talk about a suety face.

I say blind because while Mr. Hart thinks he's proving the "everyday" merits of European "democratic socialism" in this New York Times op-ed he never once confronts the phony arithmetic which never subtracts the costs of European defense from their Treasuries but from ours. Remove their largely freely provided military umbrella and see how long healthcare remains "affordable" in those places, or those places remain politically free.

This pompous gasbag gets one thing nearly right, however: "Democratic socialism is, briefly put, . . . grounded in deep Christian convictions." Yes, in the deep Christian convictions of Americans who decade in and decade out keep thinking for some strange reason that defending the European civilization from which we sprang has been a worthwhile, indeed, Christian obligation. America, briefly put, makes the "success" of European "socialism" possible.

Maybe it's time we abandoned this sense of obligation and spent the money on ourselves instead. Mr. Hart can move over there and stay over there since he likes it so much and thinks it so superior, until he needs a cow or pig valve procedure like Mick Jagger.

Pig valve, I think, for Mr. David Pudding Head. We'll keep one ready. It's the Christian thing to do.

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.”

Four out of five victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic church are male, but The New York Times says this is impossible to sort out

Impossible only for The New York Times.

The unstated conclusion is that heterosexual priests, who outnumber their homosexual counterparts, would commit more offenses if only they had access to more girls, hence the Times' effort to exaggerate the number of homosexual priests to as high as 75% of the priesthood. The calumny implicit in this is as perverse as the growing acceptance of homosexuality is in the American Roman Catholic Church.

Homosexual priests overwhelming are to blame for these crimes against children, but we're supposed to feel all torn up about the homosexual priests' emotional health.

No wonder there's an exodus from the church (weekly attendance is half what it was in the 1970s), and from the readership of The New York Times (55% of what it was in 1993).

‘It Is Not a Closet. It Is a Cage.’ Gay Catholic Priests Speak Out: ... the priesthood ... a closet that is trapping thousands of men:

The idea that gay priests are responsible for child sexual abuse remains a persistent belief, especially in many conservative Catholic circles. For years, church leaders have been deeply confused about the relationship between gay men and sexual abuse. With every new abuse revelation, the tangled threads of the church’s sexual culture become even more impossible to sort out.

Study after study shows that homosexuality is not a predictor of child molestation. This is also true for priests, according to a famous study by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the wake of revelations in 2002 about child sex abuse in the church. The John Jay research, which church leaders commissioned, found that same-sex experience did not make priests more likely to abuse minors, and that four out of five people who said they were victims were male. Researchers found no single cause for this abuse, but identified that abusive priests’ extensive access to boys had been critical to their choice of victims.

Of stingy Catholics, zany Pentecostals and honest (sort of) Presbyterians

Have you ever noticed that Catholics are stingy, and not just with money?

Visit comments sections at websites frequented by Catholics and you will find relatively little upvoting even between Catholics who agree with one another.

It sort of gives the lie to this New York Times article from 1994 which chalked up Catholics' financial stinginess compared with other denominations to "dissatisfaction with being left out of financial decisions". No, they really are stingy, and they (honestly) lie about it almost as badly as do Baptists, who are the worst. 

To wit: The study which was the basis for the Times' story is interesting for the discrepancies between what congregations said their households gave on average and what the individual households said they gave:

Congregational reports per household vs. members' reports:

Assemblies of God $1696 vs. $2985 (members said 76% more)

Baptists $1154 vs. $2479 (115% more)

Presbyterians $1085 vs. $1635 (51% more)

Lutherans $746 vs. $1196 (60% more)

Catholics $386 vs. $819 (112% more).

Apart from the fact that the congregational reports neatly ranked these denominations in an order which also reflects the degree of "religious enthusiasm" commonly thought characteristic of their respective theologies, from zaniest to sanest, the Presbyterians nevertheless come in first for honesty, if an exaggeration-of-giving rate of only 51% can be called honest.

Presbyterians. The golden mean, the solid middle.

David Bentley Hart finally grasps that the New Testament's apocalyptic communism makes "no sense even in the context of antiquity"

Here in The New York Times in "Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?":

The books of the New Testament, I came to see, constitute a historical conundrum — not because they come from the remote world of late antiquity, but rather because they often appear to make no sense even in the context of antiquity. ... While there are always clergy members and theologians swift to assure us that the New Testament condemns not wealth but its abuse, not a single verse (unless subjected to absurdly forced readings) confirms the claim. ... It was all much easier, no doubt — this nonchalance toward private possessions — for those first generations of Christians. They tended to see themselves as transient tenants of a rapidly vanishing world, refugees passing lightly through a history not their own. ...

[T]he transition was not quite as abrupt as one might imagine. Well into the second century, the pagan satirist Lucian of Samosata reported that Christians viewed possessions with contempt and owned all property communally. And the Christian writers of Lucian’s day largely confirm that picture: Justin Martyr, Tertullian and the anonymous treatise known as the Didache all claim that Christians must own everything in common, renounce private property and give their wealth to the poor. Even Clement of Alexandria, the first significant theologian to argue that the wealthy could be saved if they cultivated “spiritual poverty,” still insisted that ideally all goods should be held in common.

As late as the fourth and fifth centuries, bishops and theologians as eminent as Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria felt free to denounce private wealth as a form of theft and stored riches as plunder seized from the poor. The great John Chrysostom frequently issued pronouncements on wealth and poverty that make Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin sound like timid conservatives. According to him, there is but one human estate, belonging to all, and those who keep any more of it for themselves than barest necessity dictates are brigands and apostates from the true Christian enterprise of charity. And he said much of this while installed as Archbishop of Constantinople.

The whole thing is a splendid summation of the ideas discussed here at this blog, and I wholeheartedly recommend that you read it. 

Gaslighting your own son

From The New York Times, January 24, 1999, here:

The bare-bones account of Nietzsche's life begins not so much with his birth in 1844 as with the death of his father five years later. Carl Nietzsche was a Lutheran pastor who died of ''softening of the brain,'' which sounds very like a dementia caused by the syphilitic infection that killed his son. Responding to his mother's urgings, Nietzsche became a child prodigy, and he also began to suffer from the nightmares and headaches that plagued him all his life.

What brought him to the state of ardent discipleship in which he met Wagner in 1868 is obscure. He had known about Wagner from his teens, but had disliked the music even while he admired the mythic themes of operas like ''Tristan und Isolde'' and tried himself to write an opera based on Nordic legends. It is clearer what he admired once he had become intoxicated: Wagner promised to re-create for the Germans the cultural climate in which the classical Greek world had created the tragedies of Aeschylus. It was this that ''The Birth of Tragedy'' spelled out in 1872 to its astonished readers.

The Pecksniffian New York Times defends accepting Syrian refugees at a ratio of 1% Christian to 99% Muslim as representative

Ignoring the Obama administration's own declaration of a genocide against religious minorities on March 17, 2016, which Trump's policy seeks to address.

Here:

While only about one percent of the refugees from Syria resettled in the United States last year were Christian, the population of that country is 93 percent Muslim and only five percent Christian, according to Pew. And leaders of several refugee resettlement organizations said during interviews that it takes 18 months to three years for most refugees to go through the vetting process to get into the United States. Many Syrian Christians got into the pipeline more recently.

"Many Syrian Christians got into the pipeline more recently".

Yeah. They mean the ones who survived.

The rest were tortured, crucified or had their heads cut off before there even was a pipeline. An untold number of Christians has died in an officially declared genocide at the hands of ISIS since it took over parts of Syria and Iraq beginning in 2014. Perhaps over 1000 before that. 

The 12-year old Jew who ate a salami sandwich on his front porch on Yom Kippur 1937 has died

Nat Hentoff, uncompromising defender of freedom of speech, reported here.