Being king is not the thing

 Condition, circumstance is not the thing;

Bliss is the same in subject or in king. 

 

-- Alexander Pope 

Sometimes the news is just too much for me

 How didst thou grieve then, Adam, to behold

The end of all thy offspring end so sad.

 

-- John Milton 

 

 

Look thou be true

 

 Look thou be true: do not give dalliance

Too much the rein; the strongest oaths are straw

To th' fire i' th' blood.

 

-- William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1

Rod Dreher is going to need a better book, a degree in Greek from Dallas Theological Seminary, and three more wives if he hopes ever to compete with Hal Lindsey

 

 

 Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth was translated into 50 languages and sold 35 million copies by the year 2000.

In 2020 Dreher reported his The Benedict Option had sold over 70,000 copies. His Live Not By Lies has sold over 200,000 copies, "by far my bestselling book".

 

Meanwhile the British and Foreign Bible Society estimated in 2021 that printed copies of the Bible number somewhere between 5 and 7 billion, as reported here.  Just between the invention of the printing press in 1454 and 1815, it is estimated that 1.3 billion copies alone were produced.

 

Signs and wonders, miracles and prophecies, sell.

 

Is it an accident then that Dreher's latest book is a book about all this woo-woo? "No one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Methinks of Lindsey Dreher doth protest too much.

 

"unconventional beliefs regarded as having little or no scientific basis, especially those relating to spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine: some kind of metaphysical woo-woo". 

 

Peter Hitchens: What to teach our children?

 

The question of grace before or after meals faded from my life for many atheist and secular years until my wife (raised as an atheist by a Communist father and radical mother) and I were confronted with the problem of what to teach our children. A series of revolutions had come crashing through our lives, previously filled only with ambition, long days of hard work, wanderings in foreign countries and too much wine. At some point in all this, I and then my wife found an insatiable need for what I would now call the authority of God. We weren’t going to face this business alone.

Anyone with any sort of upbringing presumably experiences this moral need in their lives if they become parents.

Birth itself is like a painful war, ending in victory. But your victory has given you a new and demanding kingdom to govern. What powers do you now have? What are the limits on them? To whom are you accountable, and what is good? You are no longer responsible only to yourselves and each other for how you behave. You are observed, and will be remembered after you are dead, in your private moments. You have to stop doing some things, hide some things and start doing others. I will not go into details, but one of the things we felt a strong need to do, quite soon, was to say grace before eating. We groped for what to say.

More.

Pope Francis, 87, has geezer eruption, lets the cat out of the bag, UK Daily Mail publishes the Italian but not the English thinking we're too dumb to know what it means

 

  Pope Francis has allegedly shocked bishops in Italy by using an offensive slur when saying that homosexual men should not be admitted to church seminaries because there is already 'too much' gay sexual activity.

The pontiff told a closed-door meeting at an episcopal conference at the Vatican that homosexual men should not be allowed into colleges to train for the priesthood, Italian media reports.

Bishops at the meeting were reportedly taken aback by the language the 87-year-old used to make the statement - the derogatory word 'frociaggine', which roughly translates to f*****ry.

Italian news agency Adnkronos, citing sources, reported that the Pope said in the speech: 'Look: there is already an air of f*****ry around that is not good. There is today's culture of homosexuality with respect to those who have a homosexual orientation [who] are better off not being accepted [into the seminary].' 

More.

 

Everyone is blaming the slip on Italian being the pope's second language.

 

Meanwhile the eggheads for USA Today write yet another story speculating about why people are running away from church, not mentioning that the Roman Catholic Church teaches that homosexuals are "born that way", but must not act that way.

 

The pope reportedly has no sympathy for that distinction anymore when it comes to seminary admissions. He's no dummy.

 

Meanwhile, according to that story, fellow Argentine Cardinal Victor Mánuel Fernandez, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, ten days ago when presenting the new rules on apparitions had let slip a similarly vulgar phrase "doing some bullshit".

 

He would know. Argentina is the world's 5th largest beef exporter.

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.

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

Christian financial guru Dave Ramsey appeals to the invisible hand of capitalism like the Pharisees appealed to the tradition of the elders

Dave Ramsey, quoted here:

If I raise my rent to be market rent, that does not make me a bad Christian. I did not displace that person out of that house if they can no longer afford it. The marketplace did. The economy did. The ratio of the income that they earn to their housing expense displaced them. I didn’t cause any of that. And so you are not displacing them. You are taking too much credit for what is going on …

 

 

 

 

 

"Not my problem" is man's perennial problem:

But you say it is all right for people to say to their parents, 'Sorry, I can't help you. For I have vowed to give to God what I would have given to you.' In this way, you let them disregard their needy parents. And so you cancel the word of God in order to hand down your own tradition.

-- Mark 7:11ff.

What raiment shall we put on?

 

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?... And why take ye thought for raiment?

-- Matthew 6:25, 28

And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on.

-- Luke 12:22

The golden mean of equanimity

He laughs at all the vulgar cares and fears,

At their vain triumphs, and their vainer tears;

An equal temper in his mind he found,

When fortune flatter'd him, and when she frown'd.

-- John Dryden

On the inevitability of income and wealth inequality

Experience teaches it, to be sure, and it's an old enough piece of common sense wisdom that it got enshrined by the Torah. Subsequently it was gifted to us by Christianity, in Pharisaical form, as crystallized by the tyranny of the Pauline consensus contaminating the gospels.

For the poor shall never cease out of the land . . ..

-- Deuteronomy 15:11a

For ye have the poor always with you . . ..

-- Matthew 26:11a 

For ye have the poor with you always . . ..

-- Mark 14:7a

For the poor always ye have with you . . ..

-- John 12:8a

For Paul, "poor" is what it has always been, an explicit category which is "other", and is not the essential element and mark of Christian self-definition, let alone Jewish:

only they would have us remember the poor, which very thing I was eager to do.

-- Galatians 2:10

Except Luke will have none of it.

He alone avoids the saying because it destroys the binary. Luke knows that voluntary poverty is the mark of true repentance qualifying one to be the disciple of Jesus, to be one of the few who will escape the imminently coming judgment. Luke's Jesus does not imagine a "church" which will feed and clothe the poor, let alone one which has enough substance to feed and clothe itself and "therewith be content". The choice is only binary, God or mammon.

Hence the unique Lukan witness, which takes the place occupied by "you have the poor always with you" in the other gospels:

So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. 

-- Luke 14:33

Not very commonsensical, not very Jewish, either. Moses Maimonides did not approve. And Christians today avoid talking about it like . . . well . . . the plague.

Coronavirus catastrophe exposes fraudulent Christianity at the heart of Trumpism: Love of money is the root of all libertarianism, more important than life itself

Texas lt. gov.: Grandparents 'don't want the whole country to be sacrificed' amid coronavirus closures:

“You’re basically saying that this disease could take your life but that’s not the scariest thing to you. There’s something that would be worse than dying,” Carlson said. “If I get sick, I’ll go and try to get better, but if I don’t, I don’t, and I’m not trying to think of any kind of morbid way, Tucker, I’m just saying that we’ve got a choice here and we’re going to be in a total collapse, recession, depression, collapse in our society if this goes on another several months, there won’t be any jobs to come back to for many people,” he said. ... “But the point is, our biggest gift we give to our country and our children and our grandchildren is the legacy of our country." 

And having food and raiment let us be therewith content. But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. 

-- I Timothy 6:8ff.

Atheist, feminist from a Texas family full of Trump supporters says Trump has ruined Christmas and turned it ugly

Here:

He ruins everything he touches. ... Now [Christmas] has morphed into something even uglier.

So it was already ugly, right?

But Ms. Amanda Marcotte obviously hasn't seen the big, ugly above-ground pool my new liberal neighbors installed next to my rear lot line. They are big Rachel Madcow fans and proponents of gun control who chose to live out here in rural America where gunfire is something of an evening ritual. Nor has the Salon writer heard the loud, drunken parties until the wee hours of the morning these liberals have brought with them, disturbing the peace. And now we've got a big ole SUV in the front yard with the hood up for at least the last month! Who leaves their hood up in the rain and the snow? It's a $330,000 house on two acres, quickly turning into White Trash America.

I sure do miss those Calvinists who used to own the property, even if they didn't think too much of me because I wasn't Dutch. At least they were tidy and quiet. And they had a beautiful lawn, too, underneath that pool.

Donald Trump has no corner on ugly.   

The mediocre men

 

Men of age object too much, adventure too little,

and seldom drive business home to the full period;

but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

-- Francis Bacon

What is more comical, Michel Houellebecq's misplaced faith in the competence of theologians or his ignorance of Catholicism's responsibility for schism?

Restoration: An Exchange of Views on Religion Between Michel Houellebecq and Geoffroy Lejeune

"Can the Catholic Church regain her former splendor? Yes, perhaps, I don’t know. It would be good if she moved away definitively from Protestantism and drew closer to Orthodoxy. Unity would be the best solution, but it would not be easy. The question of the Filioque could easily be resolved by competent theologians. ... Basically, it amounts to this: The Catholic Church, in the course of its history, has granted much too much importance to reason (aggravated over the centuries, probably, under the influence of Protestantism). Man is a being of reason: That’s true, from time to time. But he is above all a being of flesh, and of emotion. It would be good not to forget that."

The soul armed with poverty and virtue

Content with poverty, my soul I arm;

And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.

-- John Dryden

"Owned" is now popular but doth protest too much

Whole houses, of their whole desires possessed,

Are often ruin'd at their own request.

-- John Dryden

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.

Methinks seduced women protest too much

Then virtue was no more; her guard away,

She fell to lust a voluntary prey.

-- Alexander Pope, Homer's Odyssey