Thomas Paine grasped that Christianity implied the suicide of God long before the God is Dead theologians of the 1960s came along

Somewhere in Texas, out of which nothing good comes

... A man is preached instead of a God; an execution is an object for gratitude; the preachers daub themselves with the blood, like a troop of assassins, and pretend to admire the brilliancy it gives them; they preach a humdrum sermon on the merits of the execution; then praise Jesus Christ for being executed, and condemn the Jews for doing it. ...   So many wild and blasphemous conceits have been formed of the Almighty. The Jews have made him the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to find pretence and admission for these things, they must have supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable ...

-- Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

How do you cleanse the land of the blood of the innocent Jesus when it is God himself who defiled it?

 

So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.

-- Numbers 35:33

 

New Testament "theology" is pretty clear that it is the Jewish god who is ultimately responsible for shedding Jesus' blood:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son ...

-- John 3:16

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all ...

-- Romans 8:32 

God sent his Son to be our sin offering ...

-- I John 4:10

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

-- Romans 5:8. 

The penalty for Jesus' murder is death according to the Law of Moses, but who could possibly kill God, the murderer, except God himself?

 

The Christian atheist Thomas J. J. Altizer, who died in 2018 at the age of 91, wrote in 1966 that the transcendent God of the Bible had truly died when he immanentized himself and entered human history through the Incarnation and was crucified. As a leading representative of The God Is Dead movement, the highly animated Altizer instantly became a pariah in America, which at the time literally wanted to kill him over it, as his obituary remembered:

 He even went on the “Merv Griffin Show,” a popular television talk program, though the event, held before a live audience in a Broadway theater, was a debacle. He was given two minutes to speak. “The response was a violent one,” he wrote later, “forcing the director to close the curtains and order the band to play forcefully, and after this event a crowd greeted me at the stage door, demanding my death.”

But logically one should really go a step farther than Altizer and say that the Jewish god actually committed suicide according to this God Is Dead "theology" because God did all this on purpose.

After all, Jesus allowed himself to be crucified according to the wide evidence of the gospels and the New Testament, which insists that Jesus went to the slaughter like a sheep and opened not his mouth (Acts 8:32). This is exactly what one should have expected of a truly Divine Man bent on death.

This problem again illustrates the limits of "theology", Aquinas' queen of the sciences.

Her rational talk about God goes only so far, which Tertullian recognized when he said that the resurrection is certain because it is impossible (certum est, quia impossibile).

There are more things than the resurrection which are impossible.

 

 

It will die out soon enough, like the Shakers

 

The Assisted Suicide Movement is Gaining Momentum

Mariya Manzhos, Deseret 

 

"I joined a suicide cult but we just couldn't grow our membership for some reason." 😏

The celibate Shakers are down to just three members.

Pope Francis rebukes 88% of the adult American population for being unvaccinated against COVID-19

Speaking as part of his newly released memoirs, in a series of interviews conducted by journalist Fabio Marchese Ragona, Pope Francis highlighted his thoughts and responses to the COVID-19 era, including the abortion-tainted COVID jabs and his warm welcome of them.

The Pontiff rebuked those who did not receive an injection, or who voiced opposition to them publicly, saying:

Deciding whether to get vaccinated is always an ethical choice, but I know that many people signed up to movements opposed to the administration of the medication. This distressed me because in my view, being against the antidote is an almost suicidal act of denial.

More here. 

Through Feb 24, 2024, hardly 12% of the adult American population is up-to-date with the latest COVID-19 vaccination introduced in Sep 2023 according to the CDC. Fewer than 32 million adults have received the new jab since then, meaning 236 million have not.

But hardly anyone is dying from, or with, COVID-19.

There have been 3.46 million new cases of COVID-19 in the last 6.5 months, but only about 26,000 have died nationally, which is comparable to an average influenza season. Many, many tens of millions of Americans didn't get the new jabs, didn't get sick, and didn't die.

It remains an article of faith among the elites that the jabs prevent death.

 

Don't drink the hemlock of today's Shakespeare scholars

[Shakespeare] scholars ... are participants in a “long-term project to discredit altogether the culture” of the West. Insofar as they succeed at shaping the minds and hearts of future generations, their project threatens us with civilizational suicide. Rescuing the Western soul from a tragic demise requires us to see their medicine for the hemlock it is. ...

 

 

Relentless as they are, the waves of Shakespeare abuse cannot help breaking upon the rock of the man and his achievements. Due to the Bard’s “unique combination of imaginative intelligence, skill, and creative genius,” he continues to be “cherished,” studied, and performed throughout the world. To encounter his works is to encounter a powerful reaffirmation of the complex, paradoxical, and liberating tradition of which he is the “principal poet.”

More.

Suicide of The West, in one table

Michael Savage: Suicide is an anciently outlawed impulse and is wrong because it's self-murder

Of course.

In German we call it exactly that: der Selbstmord.

US Christians under thirty endorsing suicide bombings 0%, Muslims 15%

Pew, here.

People who want more Muslims here are nuts, or evil haters of their fellow Americans, or anti-American, or maybe a combination of these. Note how many young Muslims refused to answer the al-Qaeda question compared with the other questions.

Perhaps Jesus' worst legacy is the trail of "heroic" but really mentally ill "self-sacrificial" suicides he encouraged, starting with Paul

He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. -- Matthew 10:39

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. -- Matthew 16:25

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. -- Mark 8:35

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. -- Luke 9:24

Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it. -- Luke 17:33

He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. -- John 12:25 (!)

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. -- Philippians 1:21

However consequential Jesus has been for human history, zeal for Muhammad's message and its success have been at least comparable

From a follower of NT Wright, here:

"The real Jesus must have been . . . consequential. Jesus left such an impact on the early Christians that they were willing to suffer and die for their testimony that he’d risen from the dead. A failed prophet or revolutionary might have attracted lasting admiration at best, but what could’ve happened to make devout monotheistic Jews worship this man after his death?"

For a false prophet in the opinion of Christians, Muhammad's message has built quite a following in the world despite being a younger religion in the history of humankind. It's laughable not to notice how successfully Islam has revolutionized vast swaths of the globe despite having no divine man who rose from the dead to worship, and how many have died in the cause of pressing its case on an unbelieving world in the past and in our own time, through war and through martyrdom. 

Worldwide the 1.6 billion adherents of Islam face Mecca five times a day in something more than "lasting admiration", and now equal more than 70% of the global Christian population, while Hinduism's practitioners equal another 50%. Together the Muslims and Hindus outnumber the followers of Christ by over 20%.

Consider how many Muslims have martyred themselves in suicide bombings just in the period since 1982, as tracked by the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, here. There are in excess of 4,600 cases. Compare that with the number of Christians martyred until the time of Constantine, which my late teacher Robert M. Grant in a seminar on the apologists back in the day once put at no more than 5,000.  

Carly Fiorina's non-denominational Christianity is of the Willow Creek variety, dating to about 2010 after battling cancer in 2009

Reported here in August 2012:

'Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, came to the stage as a guest at the end of the first day to share her story of coming to faith in the midst of battling cancer, losing her daughter to suicide, and serving for years as a high-powered business executive. According to Fiorina, Bill Hybels's persistence kept her pondering the complexities of faith, and after praying with him on stage at the summit a couple years ago, then praying to God on her own for a sign, she began seeing little miracles. At the end of her talk, Fiorina stated that now she lives "unburdened by fear," because she sees life as "not measured in time—it's measured in love and contribution and moments of grace."'

Rebellion To Tyrants Is Obedience To God

"I don't understand how people can call themselves Christians today who are not at the same time enraged opponents of this regime. A truly devoted Christian must be a devoted opponent!"

-- Henning von Tresckow to his wife in April 1943, quoted in Bodo Scheurig, Henning Von Tresckow: Ein Preusse Gegen Hitler (Gerhard Stalling Verlag, 1973), 147

"The whole world will vilify us now, but I am still totally convinced that we did the right thing. Hitler is the archenemy not only of Germany but of the world. When, in few hours' time, I go before God to account for what I have done and left undone, I know I will be able to justify what I did in the struggle against Hitler. God promised Abraham that He would not destroy Sodom if only ten righteous men could be found in the city, and so I hope for our sake God will not destroy Germany. No one among us can complain about dying, for whoever joined our ranks put on the shirt of Nessus. A man's moral worth is established only at the point where he is ready to give his life in defense of his convictions."

-- Henning von Tresckow before his suicide, after the failure of the July 20th plot, 1944, quoted in Joachim Fest, Plotting Hitler's Death (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1996), 289–290

The Sickness at the Highest Levels of United Methodism

The sickness at the highest levels of United Methodism is most lately demonstrated by this statement from an emeritus professor of theology at Perkins School of Theology:

The church should be concerned with being biblical in the deepest sense. What might that look like? The ranking of a few statements by Paul above all the persuasive and powerful texts related to God’s radical love through Jesus Christ can hardly qualify as serious biblical inquiry and authority. Paul and his generation had no knowledge or awareness of long-term consensual same-gender loving relationships so prevalent today.

At this late date in the study of the New Testament one would think that there would be other matters over which to argue when it comes to the differences between Jesus and Paul than the categories of their moral universe.

It is only a measure of contemporary decadence that a person who should know better would seek to divide them over an issue which would have been non-existent at the time, not just for Paul but for Jesus himself. No one can say with a straight face that Jesus and his generation knew of "long-term consensual same-gender loving relationships." The reason for this is that in Judaism they were stoned to death when they were found out, not unlike other malefactors.

Like the Christians, for example. Just ask Saul. He stood by holding the coats while Stephen was dispatched to the next world. I suppose it won't be long before some enterprising New Testament scholar tries to make a name for himself by claiming homosexuality was a chief tenet of Stephen's Hellenistic circle in Jerusalem. We already have one claiming there was advocacy for suicide in early Christianity, so why not Greek homosexuality, too?

No, the law of God is wise because it demands that evil be stamped out when it is discovered before the people can become inured to it. But, of course, inuring the people is the modus operandi of Fabian socialism.

The problem with the preachers of the radical love of Jesus is that to them, radical is measured on a meter whose needle only goes into the red zone when fellow Christians are outraged, not the world. What they intend is anarchism, not radicalism. It drinks from the same well as the revolution of the 1960s. A new order is not its object, merely overthrow of the existing order. These would give us license, not liberation.

These people don't know the first thing about radicalism, otherwise they'd be out of a job. The sorry truth about the church since the dawn of the twentieth century is the way it has made peace with the liberal Jesus of the nineteenth. Jesus is nothing more than a moralist who taught forgiveness and love, reigning interminably in heaven while ceaseless ages here below roll on and on and on, to be improved year upon year by the presence of God's holy people. This Jesus was a sitting duck for the Progressive Movement, the Social Gospel, liberation theology, the civil rights movement, and all the other forms of Marxism which now plague the world, and the United Methodist Church now in particular. Rick Santorum was more right than he knows.

If the church were "biblical in the deepest sense," the church as we know it wouldn't exist. The cost of discipleship rules that out, but, of course, recovering what that means is almost impossible for the church because it has been trimming and compromising Jesus since the beginning. Jesus asked his followers to turn their backs on their jobs, their money, and their wives and children because the form of this world was passing away in an instant. So urgent was his message of the kingdom and the coming judgment that there was no time even to bury the dead. The judgment would come even before the disciples had finished preaching in Israel.

Yes, judgment. And Jesus' vision of it is horrific. Many are called, but few are chosen. Homosexuals will make up only a small few of us who don't make it.

Radical.

1,048 Facebook 'Friends' Ignored Suicide's Message

As reported here by the UK Telegraph:

Mental health charities said the case was a sad reflection on today’s society where friends made online are not necessarily friends in real life.

Gee, do ya think?!

With friends like these . . ..