Pope Francis' last laugh: Latin Mass for me, but not for thee

 

 ... While Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the dean of the College of Cardinals, began the liturgy, the crowd stayed silent. Most of the mass was in Latin and punctuated with hymns and Gregorian chants. A light breeze ruffled an open gospel placed on the coffin. ...

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Cave art all over the world shows digits may have been ritually removed, rendering Christian gospel accounts calling for self-mutilation less exceptional

In a paper presented at a recent meeting of the European Society for Human Evolution, researchers point to 25,000-year-old paintings in France and Spain that depict silhouettes of hands. On more than 200 of these prints, the hands lack at least one digit. In some cases, only a single upper segment is missing; in others, several fingers are gone. ... Four sites in Africa, three in Australia, nine in North America, five in south Asia and one in south-east Asia contain evidence of finger amputation. “This form of self-mutilation has been practised by groups from all inhabited continents,” said Collard. “More to the point, it is still carried out today, as we can see in the behaviour of people like the Dani.”

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The Christian gospel accounts have been dismissed perennially as mere hyperbole:

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. 

-- Matthew 5:29f.

Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.

-- Matthew 18:8f.

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:

Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:

Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire:

Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

-- Mark 9:43ff.

 

This older tradition is remembered in stark contrast to the miracle working Jesus of resurrection imagination who is wont to undo some of these extreme expressions of repentance:

The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. 

-- Matthew 11:5

And great multitudes came unto him, having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many others, and cast them down at Jesus' feet; and he healed them:  Insomuch that the multitude wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see: and they glorified the God of Israel. 

-- Matthew 15:30f. 

And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple; and he healed them. 

-- Matthew 21:14 

And in that same hour he cured many of their infirmities and plagues, and of evil spirits; and unto many that were blind he gave sight. Then Jesus answering said unto them, Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.

-- Luke 7:21f.

The intellectual tyranny of a past unscientific age sadly continues with The Climate Religion of the current one

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A way of avoiding the disease was discovered.

This is to doubt that what is being passed from the past is in fact true, and to try to find out ab initio again from experience what the situation is, rather than trusting the experience of the past in the form in which it is passed down. And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the [human] race[‘s] experience from the past. I see it that way. That is my best definition. ...

The experts who are leading you may be wrong.

I have probably ruined the system, and the students that are coming into Caltech no longer will be any good.

We live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television–words, books, and so on–are [sic] unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science. -- Richard Feynman 1966

The Archbishop of York has a much bigger problem than the Lord's Prayer and the fatherhood of God: The Trinity's pronouns are he/him

Lord’s Prayer opening may be ‘problematic’, says archbishop :

 

“I know the word ‘father’ is problematic for those whose experience of earthly fathers has been destructive and abusive, and for all of us who have laboured rather too much from an oppressively patriarchal grip on life,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That the Father is a man, the Son is a man, and the Holy Ghost is a man is shot through the Scriptures. They'll have to chuck the whole thing in the Thames.

 

 

See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand. 

-- Deuteronomy 32:39

Who hath wrought and done it, calling the generations from the beginning? I the LORD, the first, and with the last; I am he. 

-- Isaiah 41:4

Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.  I, even I, am the LORD; and beside me there is no saviour.  ... Yea, before the day was I am he; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand: I will work, and who shall let it? ... I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins.

-- Isaiah 43:10f.,13,25 

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you. 

-- Isaiah 46:4

Hearken unto me, O Jacob and Israel, my called; I am he; I am the first, I also am the last.  

-- Isaiah 48:12

I, even I, am he that comforteth you: who art thou, that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man which shall be made as grass; 

-- Isaiah 51:12

Therefore my people shall know my name: therefore they shall know in that day that I am he that doth speak: behold, it is I.  

-- Isaiah 52:6

The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things. Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he. 

-- John 4:25f.

But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me:  

-- John 15:26

Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man!  

-- John 19:5

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; 

-- I Timothy 2:5

Dr Sigmund Freud's been dead since 1939, but the vivid imagination of the neurotic Jew lives on comically and robustly in Dr Irving Finkel

Emphases added:

“It’s obviously a male ghost and he’s miserable. You can imagine a tall, thin, bearded ghost hanging about the house did get on people’s nerves. The final analysis was that what this ghost needed was a lover,” he said.

“You can’t help but imagine what happened before. ‘Oh God, Uncle Henry’s back.’ Maybe Uncle Henry’s lost three wives. Something that everybody knew was that the way to get rid of the old bugger was to marry him off. It’s not fanciful to read this into it. It’s a kind of explicit message. There’s very high-quality writing there and immaculate draughtsmanship.

“That somebody thinks they can get rid of a ghost by giving them a bedfellow is quite comic.” ...

“All the fears and weaknesses and characteristics that make the human race so fascinating, assuredly were there in spades 3,500 years ago.

“I want people to know about this culture. Egypt always wins in Hollywood. If the Babylonian underworld is anything like it was described, then they’re all still there. So just remember that.”

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I'm sure everyone joins me in hoping that Dr Finkel's going to be altogether alright already. Please buy his new book.

 

 

 

"Pure liberal" who refuses to vote is not a man but rather Aristotle's god or beast, either way an anti-social being not part of the human community

Michael Malice, here, because when it comes down to it in the end, he simply wants to be alone:

"I simply pray to be left alone."

Aristotle, Politics 1, 1253:

A man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it inasmuch as he is solitary ... the clanless, lawless, hearthless man reviled by Homer, for one by nature unsocial is also a lover of war. ...

The city-state is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually. ...

When the whole body is destroyed, foot or hand will not exist except in an equivocal sense. ...

If each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole state as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god. ...

Christian Science, the church which paved the way for legislation allowing every crackpot cult to hurt and kill families and children

Dying the Christian Science way: the horror of my father’s last days:

It was church officials who engineered the 1970s US federal regulation that led to virtually every state enacting laws allowing parents to neglect children and get away with it. ... [C]hildren have died of everything from pneumonia, seizures and sepsis to a ruptured esophagus, mostly due to medical neglect – and the name of every one of them should be nailed to the door of the Mother Church. ... It could disappear today or tomorrow or years from now, but its own beliefs, and the religious exemptions it has seeded in laws all across the US, will leave a disaster in their wake, resulting in lives ruined, in unnecessary suffering and death, and in legislation that allows every crackpot cult and anti-vaccination zealot to sacrifice their children. Christian Scientists can renounce Eddy all they want, but it will not undo the evil they have done. That is their legacy.

Pope defrocks former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick for sexually abusing "minors", should say "boys"

Pope defrocks ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick over abuse claims: 

 

 

A former Roman Catholic archbishop and cardinal has been dismissed from the priesthood after the Vatican found him guilty of sexually abusing minors in a sign of an increasingly hardline stance taken by the church. Theodore McCarrick, 88, one of the prominent figures in the church, was defrocked just days before an unprecedented global summit of bishops to discuss child sexual abuse is convened by the Vatican. The Vatican’s move makes McCarrick the most senior figure to be removed from the priesthood in modern times. ...

An earlier Vatican hearing had found him guilty of soliciting for sex while hearing confession “with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power” and ordered his “dismissal from the clerical state”. McCarrick, who retired as archbishop of Washington DC in 2006, was forced to resign as a cardinal last July after a man publicly alleged that he had been sexually abused by the cleric from 1971, when he was a 16-year-old altar boy in New York. ...

Another man subsequently claimed he had also been abused as a child by McCarrick, and several former trainee priests alleged they had been sexually harassed by the former cardinal at his New Jersey beach house.

 

80% of Vatican priests are homosexuals, says new book

Four in five Vatican priests are gay, book claims:

 

Eighty per cent of priests working at the Vatican are gay, although not necessarily sexually active, it is claimed in the book, In the Closet of the Vatican.
 

Maybe Christmas observance is on the wane because we have become the rich it offends

Madonna of the Magnificat by Jean-baptiste Jouvenet

He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

-- Luke 1:53

'Hallmark is offering 376 Christmas cards this year. By my count, only five are religious: three featuring Mary and Joseph in the stable and two Madonnas with child. Admittedly, Hallmark’s best-seller is called “little angels”, but they are simpering cherubs in a picture that carries no reference to the Christian story.

'In November, the peak time for buying Advent calendars, I checked the stock on Amazon. Once again, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and wise men had disappeared to the margins. There were more Star Wars than religious calendars – apparently, the Force is more powerful than the Holy Spirit today. If you were prepared to spend hundreds of pounds, you could buy calendars with doors which open to reveal gin miniatures, jewellery, make-up, sex toys … Everything and anything except a nativity scene.'

Read the rest here.

Martin Luther wanted to drain the Vatican swamp, using as his Twitter his German translation of the Bible and the Pamphlet

Peter Stanford, here:

The 95 theses – and much of what Luther subsequently said in public as his message spread across the continent, right up to his excommunication in 1521 – were the work of a classic disrupter who, in today’s terms, wanted to drain the “Vatican swamp”.

Fluent in the language of the street, the undeniably charismatic Luther wrote most of his best-known and most inflammatory texts not in church Latin but in German, going on to produce in 1522 the first translation of the New Testament into everyday German, and in 1534 a translation of the whole Bible.

Those in the pews no longer had to rely on the word of priests and bishops instead of the word of God. He realised the force of appealing over the head of “experts” long before Michael Gove hit upon it in the Brexit push.

And in working with the owners of newfangled printing presses, he was among the first to spot the potential of what was the social media of its day as an alternative means of spreading his new anti-establishment gospel. Pamphlets of edited versions of his tracts spread like ripples through Germany, then Europe, Rome and even England. In an age of widespread illiteracy, he made sure he engaged those who could not read by including illustrations, using crude, often satirical woodcuts from the studio of his close friend and fellow Wittenberger, Lucas Cranach the Elder.

So when he stood before the Holy Roman Emperor and the princes and prelates of Germany at the Diet of Worms in 1521, defending his writings on pain of death, Luther had crowds outside on the streets rallying to his defence, stirred up by leaflets and posters saturating the town.

Much as they wanted to be rid of “this petty monk”, as pope Adrian VI labelled him, the establishment could not hand him over to his fate for fear of igniting an uprising. So Luther, unlike those earlier would-be reformers, lived to put his theories into practice.

Obscure blogger reveals how he shrugs off Pope Francis

I'm not on tranquilizers either.

I have a daydream: Pope Francis travels to Lutheran Sweden to apologize on the eve of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation

The reality from the joint declaration:

"While we are profoundly thankful for the spiritual and theological gifts received through the Reformation, we also confess and lament before Christ that Lutherans and Catholics have wounded the visible unity of the church. Theological differences were accompanied by prejudice and conflicts, and religion was instrumentalised for political ends.”

The two leaders prayed for wounds to be healed, saying: “We emphatically reject all hatred and violence, past and present, especially that expressed in the name of religion.” ...

Recent moves towards closer coexistence have been resisted by hardliners on both sides, and few people have suggested that the Christian church could reunite even though Francis has made ecumenicalism a hallmark of his papacy.

The religion of pieces strikes again but the French remain in utter denial

In front of the theatre attacked in Paris last night, a piano is set out front on which a man comes up and plays "Imagine", John Lennon's ode to atheism, and leaves. A French soccer star who lost a cousin to the terrorists tweets that the important thing to maintain is that the horror in Paris last night "has no religion". And a rose and note are stuck in a bullet hole made by the Muslim terrorists asking "In the name of what?"

In the name of Allah, of course.

For a god who doesn't exist an awful lot of French people no longer do, either. Atheism, at any cost.

Image here.

Atheist John Gray notices that secularism presupposes the sacred, and ends up affirming an atheist form of original sin

Here:

The trouble is that it’s hard to make any sense of the idea of a universal morality without invoking an understanding of what it is to be human that has been borrowed from theism. The belief that the human species is a moral agent struggling to realise its inherent possibilities – the narrative of redemption that sustains secular humanists everywhere – is a hollowed-out version of a theistic myth.  ...

If you set aside any view of humankind that is borrowed from monotheism, you have to deal with human beings as you find them, with their perpetually warring values. ...

[R]eligions have their own distinctive flaws. But the fault is not with religion, any more than science is to blame for the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or medicine and psychology for the refinement of techniques of torture. The fault is in the intractable human animal.

What Do The UK Guardian And First Things Have In Common?

Both websites ruthlessly reject comments like the good little fascists they are.

Whether it's political religion or the real thing, ideologues invariably behave the same way in silencing their respective oppositions.

Anthea Butler, Black Athena, Puts Us In Our Place

Here:

"In this age of pseudo parity, when everyone, anyone with a computer can critique one's work and life, what passes for knowledge? We know how to measure the worth of articles and books in the academy. The public has another standard altogether."

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Yeah, that's why she turns off access to her Twitter when the natives get restless, which is wholly in keeping with ridding the university of the Great Books and replacing them with the fake books, you know, like those by Martin Bernal. There's no sense reading the old stuff from the past, no sense listening to different political opinions either, or, as Rachel Jeantel might put it: "they old, that’s old school people. We in a new school, our generation, my generation."

All together now: 

"O, come let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the goddess, our PhD with tenure, who knows better than we do."

Pope Francis Brings Back The BatShitCrazy Papacy Of Yesteryear

And high time, too, since things were getting pretty boring for us Protestant ne'er-do-wells.

The full story comes from our ever helpful friends on the left at the UK Guardian, here, from which this explanatory excerpt:

'Indulgences these days are granted to those who carry out certain tasks – such as climbing the Sacred Steps, in Rome (reportedly brought from Pontius Pilate's house after Jesus scaled them before his crucifixion), a feat that earns believers seven years off purgatory.

'But attendance at events such as the Catholic World Youth Day, in Rio de Janeiro, a week-long event starting on 22 July, can also win an indulgence.

'Mindful of the faithful who cannot afford to fly to Brazil, the Vatican's sacred apostolic penitentiary, a court which handles the forgiveness of sins, has also extended the privilege to those following the "rites and pious exercises" of the event on television, radio and through social media.

'"That includes following Twitter," said a source at the penitentiary, referring to Pope Francis' Twitter account, which has gathered seven million followers. "But you must be following the events live. It is not as if you can get an indulgence by chatting on the internet."'

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How easy it is to get out of seven years in ppppurgatory when there's not a thing you can do to escape eight years of Barack Obama. "Greater things than these shall ye do" my foot.

Let's Bring Back Hangings And The Age Of Edward

So says Peter Hitchens, here:

We disagree about almost everything, but I find him impossible to dislike. In person he is polite and engaged, and in print always a contrarian but never a controversialist, sincere in beliefs that are almost as unfashionable on the right as they are anathema to the left. He champions civil liberties but abhors libertarianism, would like to bring back hanging and see off pre-marital sex, and is in a perpetual state of lament for the passing of Christian values, which he dates back to the first world war. "If anybody else tells me that I think the 1950s were a golden age, I'll strangle them. I remember the 1950s – chilblains, Wall's ice cream, everybody smoked. I didn't like the 1950s." Hitchens's golden age was the late Victorian/early Edwardian era, a period of "How shall I say? Increasing self-imposed moral conduct."

John Lennon's biggest hit 'Imagine' is tosh

So says Paul Handley for the UK Guardian here, in defense of a New Year's Eve performance of the song which has outraged many who heard it because the performer altered the lyrics.

He's right. The song is a gooey mess, the sentimentality of which mocks the lyrics. But hasn't nonsense been the whole point of rock 'n roll from the beginning? 

That many people take this music too seriously isn't just evidence of a new belief which has taken the place of an old one. The new one is now an orthodoxy whose reactionaries can't abide messing with its sacred, atheocratic text.

Give Yoko Ono some of the credit for this. After all it was she who called Paul McCartney's songs all June, spoon and moon.

She ought to know.