The belief of fools and wise men

 Superstitious prophecies are not only the belief of fools, but the talk sometimes of wise men.

-- Francis Bacon

The light of day deceives us

Paint, patches, jewels laid aside,

At night astronomers agree,

The evening has the day bely'd,

And Phillis is some forty-three.

-- Matthew Prior

The greatest line uttered in a Jesus movie was by Telly Savalas playing Pontius Pilate in 1965's The Greatest Story Ever Told

 

Passion has a way of suddenly appearing and blowing one off course

18th century compass card

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On life's vast ocean diversly we sail;

Reason the card, but passion is the gale.

-- Alexander Pope

What's in your soup?

Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips;

Finger of birth-strangled babe,

Ditch-delivered by a drab;

Make the gruel thick and slab.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

The Academy, the destroyer within

 The vice of professors exceeds the destructiveness of the most hostile assaults, as intestine treachery is more ruinous than foreign violence.

-- The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety

Tut-tut, my pain spells rain

 

 

 

 

 

Aches, and hurts, and cords, do engrieve either towards rain, or towards frost.

-- Francis Bacon

Lent so phony a Jesuit is embarrassed by it

With that in mind, can we talk about our choices for Friday evening meals this Lent? Because over the years I feel like I’ve seen—and been a part of—quite a few Friday Lenten dinners that were every bit as fancy as any non-Lenten meal I have ever eaten. Kingfish ceviche tacos, coconut macadamia-crusted salmon steaks, Lobster Thermidor. Hey, it’s not meat!

I know of nothing in the literature about Lent that says food on Fridays shouldn’t taste good. Nobody wants that. But when our Lenten fasts start to resemble this recipe site’s announcement that “Fish on Good Friday doesn’t have to be a tired tradition. Indulge your guests (or treat yourself) to a fishy dish that’s equal parts impressive and delicious,” I think we might be headed in the wrong direction.

 

Jim McDermott, here.

Man, five foot six, fights off great Russian bear for 18 days and counting

Thus, by degrees, he rose to Jove's imperial seat:

Thus difficulties prove a soul legitimately great.

-- John Dryden

Conservative Methodists have had it with liberal dithering

Last week, when the United Methodist Church postponed — for the third time in as many years — a vote on an orderly plan to split the mainline Protestant denomination long riven by disagreement over the full inclusion of its LGBTQ members, some conservative United Methodists announced they were finally done: They would launch a new denomination in May, orderly plan or no. ... For decades, debate over ordaining and marrying LGBTQ United Methodists has roiled the United Methodist Church, one of the largest Protestant denominations in the United States. 

More.

Why they say "don't let it go to your head"

Fame makes the mind loose and gayish, scatters the spirits, and leaves a kind of dissolution upon all the faculties.

-- Robert South

Intemperance destroys both the knowledgeable and the ignorant

 

Thou hast not half that power to do me harm,

As I have to be hurt:

oh gull, oh dolt,

As ignorant as dirt!

-- William Shakespeare, Emilia to Othello, Act V, Scene 2

The wonder of the ignorant

We find in sullen writs,

And cross grain'd works of modern wits,

The wonder of the ignorant.

 

-- Hudibras

On the confident certainty of the ignorant

Shallow unimproved intellects, are confident pretenders to certainty;

as if, contrary to the adage, science had no friend but ignorance.

-- Joseph Glanvill

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow

What differ more, you cry, than crown and cowl?

I'll tell you, friend, a wise man and a fool.

-- Alexander Pope

LOL, leave it to WaPo to stir up trouble over the Phoenix baptism story

(((Michelle Boorstein))) right out of the box whips out her pilpul, here:

Their marriages, confessions, promises of salvation — all of these things ceased to exist for thousands of Catholics baptized by an Arizona priest who, it turns out, was saying the sacrament script wrong. ... diocesan officials ... said last month that people who Arango baptized aren’t technically Catholic. That means they weren’t eligible, from a Catholic point of view, for other sacraments.

 

Except the diocese didn't actually say so:

According to the Diocese of Phoenix, Arango remains in "good standing" as a priest and "has not disqualified himself from his vocation and ministry." As of right now, other sacraments performed by Arango are considered valid, the diocese said.

More. 

Still, ex opere operato is having a bad week.

The diocese is obviously confused because the bishop is. He evidently doesn't understand that doctrine. Though defending the "other sacraments performed" by the errant priest, the bishop nevertheless has said, "You will need to be baptized."

St. Augustine would have disagreed.

The bishop of Hippo in North Africa taught the church in the Donatist Controversy that the validity of sacraments doesn't depend on the character of the priest, or on his theology. The sacraments work by themselves as long as they are reasonably Christian and the individuals come under the jurisdiction of the Catholic church.

All the attention here is misplaced on the personal pronouns used, "I baptize you" vs. "We baptize you", in keeping with the spirit of the current age, when the triune formula "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost" plus the corporate idea is the important thing according to Augustine. Arguably "We baptize you" emphasizes the latter, in good Augustinian manner.

Augustine's principles are charitable and Pauline. The bishops could learn from them.

Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel; the former proclaim Christ out of partisanship, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in that I rejoice. 

-- Philippians 1:15ff.

 

 

 

The superstition around baptism remains strong in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix

Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of the Diocese

Thousands of baptisms over 20 years were declared "invalid" and "nullified" in St. Gregory parish because the priest in question routinely said "We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," instead of "I baptize you . . .", an "incorrect formula" which failed to indicate that it is Christ who baptizes in the sacrament since it is the ordained priest who is uniquely invested with the spiritual power and presence of Christ:

"The issue with using 'We' is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes."

More.

This is pure magical thinking, an example of decadence, the degeneration of the original conception of baptism, from sign of repentance, renunciation of the world, and attachment to the new community of the elect to mysterious, wonder-working ritual imparting divine grace and forgiveness of sins.

The evidence of the Synoptics shows that Jesus himself did not baptize anyone like John the Baptist did. Only the Fourth Gospel says that Jesus so baptized, in John 3, but that is deliberately corrected in John 4 to state that Jesus himself did not baptize, and that only his disciples did.

Well, set aside the contradiction and ask, what formula did they use?

Did the disciples of Jesus use the formula "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost"? 

The idea is preposterous.

So did that make those baptisms "invalid" and therefore null?

Totally kooky.

Magic is for a world continuing on into the indefinite future, with billions of possible customers. The baptism of repentance was for salvation from a world soon coming to an abrupt end. The failure of the latter paved the way for the former.

David French, call your office

The Presbyterian clergy are the loudest, the most intolerant of all sects; the most tyrannical and ambitious, ready at the word of the law-giver, if such a word could now be obtained, to put their torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flame in which their oracle, Calvin, consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not subscribe to the proposition of Calvin, that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to the Calvinistic creed! They pant to re-establish by law that holy inquisition.

-- Thomas Jefferson to William Short, April 13, 1820

LOL, Presbyterian David French is completely unfamiliar with the far-right road show in revolutionary America which repeatedly called the people to arms from Protestant pulpits

He's shocked, I tell you, shocked:

 If you think it’s remotely unusual that a truly extremist event (which included more than one person who’d called for hanging his political opponents) was held at a church, then you’re not familiar with far-right road shows that are stoking extremism in church after church at event after event. ... We know that fanatical religious subcultures can do an immense amount of damage to the body politic. ... what we face is an Christian subculture that is full of terrible religious purpose. The seeds of renewed political violence are being sown in churches across our land.

 More.

In 1776 the David French of 2022 would almost certainly have been a Loyalist, and the sworn enemy of the Presbyterian Rebellion condemned by George III.

Unlike today's fire-breathing right-wing lunatics, French is a proud proponent of "elite Evangelicalism" and "elite American culture" for whom "Christian nationalism" is an oxymoron. Those crazy Pentecostal patriots supporting Donald Trump come from the other side of the tracks, in case you needed reminding. David French is above all that, and stands for everything good, proper, and reasonable, you see. Like the Pharisees did. He is not like other men.

But his idea that a "new insurrection is being organized, in a sanctuary near you" is just as crazy as his idea that January 6th actually was one.

How a now de-Christianized America is suddenly going to embrace a bunch of religious fanatics with their hair on fire is not explained, but the "apocalyptic message" of "national doom" comes for us all, including for David French.

Is there a public Christian today who is more out of touch with the deeply political nature of the history of Protestant experience in America than he?

At least six popes have been alleged to have had sexual relations with men, so why don't the Catholics just get it over with and call it Tradition?

Julius II

Paul II

Sixtus IV

Leo X

Julius III

Benedict IX

Cardinal Hollerich: Church teaching on gay sex is ‘false’ and can be changed

He was asked by a reporter: “How do you get around the Church’s teaching that homosexuality is sin?”

He replied: “I believe that this is false. ..."

The Pharisees would not have agreed with Krister Stendahl . . . at all

 

For Judaism has never thought that God's hottest dream was that everyone become a Jew.

-- Krister Stendahl, here

 

 

 

 

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. 

-- Matthew 23:15

For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh:  But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God. 

-- Romans 2:28f.

Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham.

-- Galatians 3:7

The revenge of Bishop Krister Stendahl's ecumenism against Lutheran Sweden

In 1985 Krister Stendahl infamously advised leaving room for "holy envy" in response to the uproar over the Mormons' plan to build a temple in Stockholm. 

Sweden ended up getting fewer than 10,000 Mormons, but got 800,000 Muslims instead.

Stendahl, who repudiated his own faith tradition in favor of "ecumenism", wasn't careful in what he wished for.

Here he was in 1997, blaming both (Pauline) Christianity and Islam for the trouble caused by their "universal claims": 

But there can be no doubt that it is exactly the universal claim of Christianity (or Islam) that makes for trouble rather than for peace. 

Sweden liberalized under the influence of his ilk, invited in the world, and was repaid with soaring immigrant crime. Twenty-five years later there is no doubt that such multiculturalism has also made for trouble rather than for peace:

Crime has become the number one issue in Sweden; before she said a word about migration, Andersson boasted that her party added 7,000 new police officers, built more prisons, and drafted laws creating 30 new crimes. She decried “those who claim that it is certain cultures, certain languages, certain religions that make people more likely to commit crimes”—yet her own government has substantiated those claims.

The Christian shopkeeper, that rare thing hardly anymore observed

From a confin'd, well-manag'd store,

You both employ and feed the poor.

 

-- Edmund Waller

The law is light and life, but Paul the Apostle thought it only a light . . . on sin

Mosaic of Christ before Pilate, Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, early sixth century. Pilate washes his hands in a bowl held by a figure on the right. "I find no fault in this man".

 

 

All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers.

 

-- Deuteronomy 8:1

 

In that I command thee this day to love the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that thou mayest live and multiply: and the LORD thy God shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest to possess it.  

-- Deuteronomy 30:16

 

He taught me also, and said unto me, Let thine heart retain my words: keep my commandments, and live.

 

-- Proverbs 4:4

 

For the commandment is a lamp; and the law is light; and reproofs of instruction are the way of life:

 

-- Proverbs 6:23

 

Keep my commandments and live;

 

-- Proverbs 7:2

 

The law of the wise is a fountain of life, to depart from the snares of death. 

 

-- Proverbs 13:14

He that keepeth the commandment keepeth his own soul;

-- Proverbs 19:16

 

And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.  

-- Matthew 19:17

If there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law.

 

-- Galatians 3:21

 

I had not known sin, but by the law ... For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.  And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me. 

 

-- Romans 7:7, 9ff.

Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.

 

-- Revelation 22:14

The wise man doesn't just die like the fool, he is also forgotten like the fool

 

For the wise, like the fool, will not be long remembered; the days have already come when both have been forgotten. Like the fool, the wise too must die! 

-- Ecclesiastes 2:16

The world has progressed so much from primitive times that evidence of racism is scarcely detectable anymore

 

Too late to get smart

 

They take up a book in their declining years, and grow very hopeful scholars by that time they are threescore.

-- Joseph Addison

George Weigel thinks the resurrection of Jesus made possible "the individual" in the West when it was really the example of Jesus

Rebels like Paul and Luther would be unthinkable without that example.

Catholics used to understand this. It is amusing that Weigel argues like a Protestant fixated on the resurrection instead of on the life and teaching of Jesus.

Who Invented the Individual? 

George Weigel, First Things

Before Christianity, immortality was a family concept: One lived on in one’s family. The Resurrection of Jesus and the promise of a “resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5) changed all that, as the individual human being became the locus of immortality—and thus the bearer of a unique, personal, “individual” dignity. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

None of that would have been even thinkable were it not for the example of the supreme individuality of the forerunner as the "true man", whose vertical faith relation to God superceded [sic!] the social dimension and made it irrelevant:

 

And [the Pharisees] sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men.

 

-- Matthew 22:16

This aloofness of Jesus, if we may call it that, is one of the things which marks out the unique individual qua individual so characteristic of the figures we name "religious founders". For good or for ill, it is that attitude which triumphed in the West and has been democratized to an extreme degree, in large measure due to Protestantism. Positively it has evolved into what we call "leadership". Negatively it is what is known as "a Messiah complex".

The example of Jesus is not unalloyed.

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.

That time when Red Forman had his very own Road to Dumbasscus moment

 

Martin Luther would tell Andre Henry to reach up with his hands and touch his ears, and feel that they are the long, furry ears of an ass

 

 

Deconstruction is a Valid Christian Practice. Ask Martin Luther

Andre Henry, RNS

"You said all we needed to do was believe"

 

I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers.

-- Matthew 7:23

The way of the many is identitarian collectivism, a primitive instinct of herd-following

 Like brute beasts we travel with the herd, and are never so solicitous for the rightness of the way, as for the number or figure of our company.

 

-- John Rogers (1679-1729)

The common louse, a gift from God

I look on the instinct of this noisome and troublesome creature, the louse, of searching out foul and nasty clothes to harbour and breed in, as an effect of divine providence, designed to deter men and women from sluttishness and sordidness, and to provoke them to cleanliness and neatness.

-- John Ray (1627-1705)

The folly of men and angels

Seeing God found folly in his angels, men's judgments, which inhabit these houses of clay, cannot be without their mistakings.

-- Walter Raleigh

Mistaken vision

Some have mistaken blocks and posts

For spectres, apparitions, ghosts,

With saucer eyes and horns.

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

The tedious new

 Whoever converses much among old books, will be something hard to please among new.

--  William Temple

2022, you gotta walk it by yourself

 

... still walkin'.

Peter Wood gets stuck in a Vermont ditch for hours and ruminates on the essence of his 14,000-tome library: We are our imperfections

 

Here:

Read enough old ethnography, and the story of people victimizing one another is inescapable, but so is the deep knowledge of human commonality. As Pritchard grasped some 200 years ago, our cultural differences are myriad, but they aren’t everything, and the more we make of them, the worse our plight. Anthropology at its best taught us that our follies are as universal as our aspirations; and that grasping for ascendency in the name of justice is just another path to hardship and division. We are our imperfections. Best to get back on the road.

Because man is a political animal, and politics has been successful in the West, no raiding party happened by and scalped poor Mr. Wood. Instead he was rescued by a tow-truck, eventually.

The angels, once again, were mistaken

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. 

-- Luke 2:14

Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division:  

-- Luke 12:51

Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas!

 Doubtless the pleasure is as great

Of being cheated, as to cheat;

As lookers on feel most delight,

That least perceive the juggler's sleight.

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

On the priority of philology

 The multiplication and obstinacy of disputes, which have so laid waste the intellectual world, is owing to nothing more than to the ill use of words.

-- John Locke

Welcome to unsufferable winter

Instead of golden fruits,

By genial show'rs and solar heat supplied,

Unsufferable winter had defac'd

Earth's blooming charms, and made a barren waste.

-- Richard Blackmore

An Aristotelian critique of solitude

 Whosoever is delighted with solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.

-- Francis Bacon

Gender dysphoria in one lesson

 

LOL Slovakia and Hungary, you were doing just fine until the Pope decided to visit in September

 

LOL, very successful YouTuber who preaches off-grid self-reliance decries following false narratives, urges action now or society is doomed!

The doomsaying narrative is the oldest narrative of the Christian West, expressing as it does the core message of Jesus of Nazareth.

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.

-- Mark 1:15

From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation.  

-- Luke 11:51

It has routinely erupted century upon century ever since in explicitly religious predictions of the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Yet here we are.

In our times it has taken on secularized elements, like WWI as "the war to end all wars", or warnings of global communist tyranny, a coming ice age, devastation by global thermonuclear war, the ozone hole, pandemic disease, the population bomb, man-made environmental and climate catastrophe, "the end of history", global warming, starvation, and now mass anxiety and depression!

Don't just sit there! Do something!

Preferably with your hands, outdoors.

That way you might catch a better glimpse of The Mother of All Asteroids before it blows us all to smithereens.

The way of truth is strewn with many errors, which must be censored

Wise men know, that arts and learning want expurgation; and if the course of truth be permitted to itself, it cannot escape many errours.

-- Thomas Browne

God is the Alpha and Omega of censorship

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

-- Genesis 3:24

As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

-- Matthew 13:40ff.

We are plagued by a plague of vaccine hysteria

People are stormed out of their reason, plagued into a compliance, and forced to yield in their own defence.

-- Jeremy Collier

Don't be a prick

 If God would have had men live like wild beasts, he would have armed them with horns, tusks, talons, or pricks.

-- John Bramhall (1594-1663)

We've gone from Bungle in the Jungle to simply unrepeatable in less than fifty years

Wit, as the chief of virtue's friends,

Disdains to serve ignoble ends:

Observe what loads of stupid rhimes

Oppress us in corrupted times.

 

-- Jonathan Swift

The superstition of bells and smells

 The causes of superstition are pleasing and sensual rites, excess of outward and pharisaical holiness, over-great reverence of traditions which cannot but load the church.

-- Francis Bacon