I said in my ecstasy: Every man is a liar

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.

KJV Psalm 116.11:  I said in my haste, All men are liars.  

RSV Psalm 116.11:  I said in my consternation, "Men are all a vain hope."

LXX Psalm 115.2:   ἐγὼ εἶπα ἐν τῇ ἐκστάσει μου πᾶς ἄνθρωπος ψεύστης

Some results from the decadal Religion Census of the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies for 2010-2020

 As reported here in The Economist:

the ranks of all religious Americans rose by 10.6m (7%) ...

overall population grew by 7.5% ...

the number of Episcopalians and Methodists dropped by 19% each ...

the Lutherans plunged by 25% ...

Presbyterians lost nearly 1m (40%) ...

The Southern Baptist Convention shrank 11% ...

non-denominational Christian churches recruited 9m new members ...

Catholics claim they gained nearly 3m members (a 5% increase) despite closing over 1,100 churches. 

      

Color me skeptical.

Start with the big number.

Average population grew 7.1% or 22 million over the period, according to POPTHM, which is the data of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, not 7.5% as stated in the story.

The data of the U.S. Census, as shown by POP, shows average population grew by even less over the period: 6.97% or 21.6 million, not 7.5% as stated in the story.

Obviously these are estimates, not counts, but the reported overall population growth claim in the story is up to a half-point larger than these big baseline numbers reported by the official organs of the U.S. government.

One half point of 310 million is 1.55 million people. One false move and you've just wiped out the entire denomination of the American Baptist Churches USA. When you study religion in America, you are discussing a bewildering number of splinter groups, many of which are simply microscopic in size.

It's extremely difficult to get data about groups like that right. Fully 40% are left out of even good surveys.

We are then confidently given to believe that hardly half the population growth went on to affiliate with a religion over the period: 10.6 million out of something north of 22 million, but by the end of the story you then have to believe also that 9 million new non-denoms plus 3 million new Catholics still equals 10.6 million.

Hello, is there an economist in the house?

Separately, there is the recent claim, supported by Pew, that Mormonism is the fastest reproducing American religious group, the implications of which go wholly unaddressed by the story.

On the other hand, reported Mormon membership in the U.S. grew by fewer than 700k 2011-2023, according to the latest Mormon data.

As pointed out previously, Christians themselves variously and significantly exaggerate how much money they give to their churches. Relying on their statements of membership in surveys even such as this one is . . . problematic.

They resemble in these respects nothing so much as the wider culture of exaggeration.

I'm doing great. Everything is fine. Awesome, in fact.

57% can't afford a $1,000 emergency. 85% say the country is headed in the wrong direction. The world is going to end in 2031 if we don't address climate change.

All of Pope Francis' American appointments to cardinal have been the acolytes of a pervert, liar, and abuser of the highest order

It is disturbing that all of Francis’s American appointments to the College of Cardinals have been acolytes of Cardinal McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, DC and a pervert, liar, and abuser par excellence. 

It's quite a bit more than disturbing . . . 

None of this is remotely Catholic.

Well, there it is.

Read it all, here.

Forget stereotyping and paradox, Scripture affirms the immortality of . . . Zeus, whose children we are, and in whom we live and move and have our being

Even one of their own men, a prophet from Crete, has said about them, “The people of Crete are all liars, cruel animals, and lazy gluttons.”

 This is true.

-- Titus 1:12f.

They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one, The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies! But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever, For in thee we live and move and have our being.

-- Epimenides, Cretica

 

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.   

 

-- Acts 17:28  

Pick your poison.

Even sound money tells lies: "The golden age is back" (for about five minutes)

Western Caesar, AD 286-293

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whatever victories the several pretenders to the empire obtained over one another, they are recorded on coins without the least reflection.

-- Joseph Addison

Promising Renewed Greatness: Slogans from Two Insurgents :

The coins [he issued] include many literary allusions but none more so than in the cryptic … legend that appears on many of the silver coins:  RSR.  This was short for Redeunt Saturnia Regna, ‘The Golden Age is back’, from Virgil’s Fourth Ecologue. 

Lies the secularists tell: "Secular people are more supportive of sex education, which reduces sexually transmitted diseases"

Phil Zuckerman in the failing Los Angeles Times, owned since 2018 by a biotech billionaire who invented Abraxane:

Op-Ed: Why America’s record godlessness is good news for the nation :

"Secularity is highly correlated with a host of moral orientations that will markedly improve our nation. ... Secular people are more supportive of sex education, which reduces sexually transmitted diseases".

The lie here isn't the support of sex education. It's that sex education has that effect.

Notice the "will" in the claim, however, anticipating anyone with the temerity to bring up the facts. You know, the science. Despite record STDs in now secular America they would doubtlessly respond that sex education still hasn't failed. Like Keynesian economics hasn't failed, we just haven't had enough sex education yet.

Progressives sell a this-worldly version of hopium no less fantastic than the promised imminently coming army of angelic legions appearing in the heavens lead by the Son of Man in ~ A.D. 30.

Just give it a little more time and a new age of dignity, liberty and well-being will dawn.

"Research shows that secular people are more likely to support women’s reproductive rights, universal healthcare, gay rights, environmental protections, death with dignity, gun safety legislation and treating drug abuse as a medical rather than criminal problem — all of which will serve to increase dignity, liberty and well-being in America." 

At least until the Muslims take over.

Sexually Transmitted Disease Cases Reach Record High In The U.S. [Infographic]

OK, so not everyone's a liar

 Even if everyone else is a liar, God is true.

-- Romans 3:4

Jesus saw Nathan'a-el coming to him, and said of him, "Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!" 

-- John 1:47

Paul in Romans 3: Let God be found true, though every man be found a liar

 This whole thing is priceless, but this is perhaps the most telling part:

Stephens-Davidowitz analyzed data from the General Society Survey which is one of the authoritative sources for information on the behavior of Americans. Extrapolating data from that survey, men said they use 1.6 billion condoms every year while women claimed to use 1.1 billion. If 2.7 billion condoms every year sounds like a big number that’s because it is. Unfortunately, the actual number of condoms sold is just 600 million per year.

The upshot is that people exaggerate a lot, and in large numbers ("Man, I have a lot of sex! Look at all these condoms I use! Yeah, I practice safe sex!"), which may help explain why the presidential race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is as close as it is.

The polls clearly demonstrated exaggerated support for Joe Biden and exaggerated distaste for Donald Trump, except for a couple of firms' product which showed a tight race in the final days of the campaign.

Rasmussen Reports, for example, in its daily poll conducted only in the last week before the election, found either Trump or Biden ahead nationally, flip-flopping from day to day but only to +1 or +2. The final Rasmussen poll had Biden +1, whereas the final national average of polls calculated by Real Clear Politics had Biden +7.2. 

The provisional outcome Biden +2.9 is more consistent with the narrower polling spread from the final week than with the final "lying" national average of Biden +7.2: Biden/Harris 50.6% (253 Electoral College) vs. Trump/Pence 47.7% (214 EC).

On the other hand, Biden's average predicted support of 51.2% was nearly dead on, overshooting by only 0.6 points. But Trump's predicted support of 44% undershot by 3.7 points (47.7%).

Exaggerated support for Biden was the lie which dominated the predicted polling spread, and exaggerated lack of support for Trump was the lie which dominated the predicted share of the vote.

So there were two "lies".

For whatever reasons it was more fashionable to express support for Biden than for Trump. That so-called "shy Trump supporter" phenomenon much talked about in the final days of the campaign appears to be confirmed and on display. More people appear to have lied when they said they supported Biden than when they said they supported Trump. A fair number of Americans who actually supported Trump may have lied and said they supported Biden.

Or . . . 

maybe it wasn't exactly a lie and they just changed their minds.

Or maybe they just didn't vote. I mean, c'mon, in Michigan there was a huge turnout but nearly 2 million people who still could have voted didn't. What about that? Could be a lot of Biden supporters not voting in the end, right?

Or maybe the pollsters tampered with the polling and lied about it to promote Biden! A lot of these polls are in fact overweighted AWFL anyway (affluent, white, female, liberal), so arguably some of them overstate support for Biden. 

Or maybe someone is tampering with the voting results and the results saying Biden won by +2.9 are a lie! Maybe Biden really did win by more.

Or maybe he actually lost! What about that?! Software glitches. Ballots in ditches. Military ballots in dumpsters. Antifa faggots beating up Trumpsters.

How will we ever know for certain?!

I don't think we will. Somebody's lying about something, and only God knows who, what, when, where and why.

At least I hope so. And I do mean that. I honestly do.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Because the Bible tells me so.

Rod Dreher, author of Live Not By Lies, thanks Van Halen for the memories

 

A poor man is better than a liar

Routinely lied to over 30,000 homeowners to get $31 million

Proverbs 19:22

Everyman a liar

The Summoning of Everyman

Rather, let God be found true, though every man be found a liar.

-- Romans 3:4

Davis California imam calls for killing Jews just like Iranians do, Reza Aslan claims Islam in US "is vastly different from Islam in Iran"

Reza Aslan, here in Foreign Policy on July 24th:

"What we call Islam in the United States is vastly different from Islam in Iran . . .."

CBS Sacramento reported on the 25th what the Davis, CA imam said in a sermon, here:

"Ammar Shahin calls for the annihilation of Jews . . .. 'He spelled out what he wishes for every Muslim who follows the Quran and the Hadith to follow what the Hadith says which is …find the Jews hiding behind trees and stones and kill them,' said Sorele Brownstein."

In otherwise godless Sweden "religious" = murderous cheating liar

Must be a Lutheran, right?

From the story here:

While the suspect calls himself a “genius in cheating” in school and says he is religious and does not use drugs, he lied when asked whether or not his parents are alive. “In the next life,” he reportedly answered, while only one of them passed away. While he calls himself “170% healthy” the coroner recommends an extensive investigation to find out if the 21-year-old is not mentally ill.

Mr. Ariel Sabar uncovers the lies, damn lies and rotten scholarship involving The Gospel of Jesus' Wife

Here in "The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife" for The Atlantic, where the old-fashioned work of a gumshoe reporter exposes the hard work too often lacking in much of contemporary scholarship:

[S]keptics had identified other problems. Among the most damning was an odd typographical error that appears in both the Jesus’s-wife fragment and an edition of the Gospel of Thomas that was posted online in 2002, suggesting an easily available source for a modern forger’s cut-and-paste job.

With [Karen L.] King [Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard] and her critics at loggerheads, each insisting on the primacy of their evidence, I wondered why no one had conducted a different sort of test: a thorough vetting of the papyrus’s chain of ownership. 

Prof. King has replied to the author, here:

For four years, Karen L. King, a Harvard historian of Christianity, has defended the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” against scholars who argued it was a forgery. But Thursday, for the first time, King said the papyrus—which she introduced to the world in 2012—is a probable fake.

She reached this conclusion, she said, after reading The Atlantic’s investigation into the papyrus’s origins, which appears in the magazine’s July/August issue and was posted to its website Wednesday night.

“It tips the balance towards forgery,” she said. ...

Thursday afternoon, however, she called me to say the story was “fascinating” and “very helpful.” ...

“I had no idea about this guy, obviously,” she said. “He lied to me.”

I asked why she hadn’t undertaken an investigation of the papyrus’s origins and the owner’s background. “Your article has helped me see that provenance can be investigated,” she said. ...

[T]he preponderance of the evidence, she said, now “presses in the direction of forgery.”

Atheist George Will baldly lies about the Christian origins of the English common law

Here, in the formerly conservative National Review:

'Morality evolves: Religious and other moral instructors base their moral codes on the way people who are considered moral behave, people who are deemed moral because they exemplify rules conducive to human flourishing. Legal systems evolve: The common-law basis of the system under which Americans live had no inspired law-giver; it emerged from centuries of the Anglosphere’s trial and error.'

F. N. Lee explains here, at considerably more length than I dare quote.

From the opening:

'In 1892, the famous German Church Historian Rev. Professor Dr. J. H. Kurtz called King Alfred the greatest and noblest of all the monarchs England has ever had. King Alfred ruled from 871 to 901 A.D. He applied all the energy of his mind to the difficult problems of government; to the emancipation of his Christian country by driving out the Pagan Danish invaders and robbers; and then to improving the internal condition of the land.

'Alfred is perhaps best of all remembered for his famous Law Code. According to the celebrated former British Statesman and Historian Sir Winston Churchill, the roots of King Alfred's Book of Laws or Dooms (alias his "Deemings") came forth from the (as then already long-established) laws of Kent, Mercia and Wessex. All these attempted to blend the Mosaic Code with the Christian principles of Celto-Brythonic Law and old Germanic customs.

'Churchill adds that the laws of Alfred, continually amplified by his successors, grew into that body of Customary Law which was administered [as the ‘Common Law’] by the Shire and the Hundred Courts. Cf. Exodus 18:21f. That, under the name of the ‘Laws of St. Edward’ [the ‘Confessor’] — as the A.D. 1042f last Anglo-Saxon Christian King of England — the Norman kings undertook to respect, after their 1066f invasion and conquest of England and hegemony over Britain. Out of that, with much dexterity by feudal lawyers, the Common Law emerged (which was re-confirmed by Magna Carta in 1215).'

Cretans are always lazy bellies

A certain one of them, a prophet of their own, said -- 'Cretans! always liars, evil beasts, lazy bellies!'

-- Titus 1:12