Imagine the National Catholic Reporter running a story urging Catholics to be on Hitler's side in World War II

 

In Israel-Hamas War, Christians Should Be on Every Side

T. Roberts, NCReporter

 

 We know that people of many religious stripes, Catholics included, are involved in various ways on every side of the current dispute. Maybe that's where we should be, on every side, not to exacerbate or further inflame but to do what we can to tamp down the ancient hatreds and the inclinations to violence.

 

 

Sounds all too familiar.

 

Scholars Are Learning More About What the Catholic Church Did—and Didn't Do—to Save Jews During the Holocaust

 

At the same time Catholic rescuers were helping Jews, some of those same people were also helping Nazis. The Catholic Church worked to win clemency for convicted Nazi war criminals after the war. “The justification given for aid to Nazi war criminals was Christian love and mercy,” says Brown-Fleming, whose research focuses on this effort.

Phyllis Diller's short course in comparative religion

 I've tried Buddhism, Scientology, Numerology, Transcendental Meditation, Qabbala, t'ai chi, feng shui, and Deepak Chopra, but I find straight gin works best.

Apparently she's experienced both things lol

 GOLDIE HAWN: An alien touched me and it felt like the finger of God...

Bibi Netanyahu identifies Hamas with the Sons of Darkness from the War Scroll at Qumran Cave 1

 Netanyahu: "All Hamas Activists Must Die," "We Are The People Of Light, They Are The People Of Darkness"

October 7th felt apocalyptic to Israelis.

Commie Pope Francis has intemperate geezer eruption, says he's ignorant about international politics but eagerly blames The West for ISIS

 Yeah, and those Israelis had it coming from Hamas.

I consider myself ignorant when it comes to international politics, but I believe that the appearance of ISIS is based on an unfortunate Western choice.

More.

Swift against the Stoics

 The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.

-- Jonathan Swift

War erased Adolf Hitler and Nazi genocide, but the pope is a terrible simplifier whose ideological blinders keep him from seeing that

 

One thing leads to another

 

OMG hardly ever springs to my lips anymore, and then I stumbled over this

 

IVP used to be a respectable evangelical publisher, now also gone the way of Eerdmans.

... helpless man, in ignorance sedate, rolls darkling down the torrent of his fate.

Run for your lives.

Pope Chicken Little

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Pope Francis warns planet ‘is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point’ :

The world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.

Sanctities thick as stars

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 About him all the sanctities of heav'n 

Stood thick as stars, and from his sight receiv'd 

Beatitude past utt'rance.

 

-- John Milton

The likes of John and Paul made this man to offend above all others, others not so much

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This man, that of earthly matter maketh graven images, knoweth himself to offend above all others.

-- Wisdom of Solomon 15:13 

Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.

-- John 5:18

The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.

-- John 10:33

Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:

-- Philippians 2:6

Indeed, Allah does not forgive associating others with Him in worship, but forgives anything else of whoever He wills. And whoever associates others with Allah has indeed committed a grave sin. ... Surely Allah does not forgive associating others with Him in worship, but forgives anything else of whoever He wills. Indeed, whoever associates others with Allah has clearly gone far astray.

 

-- Qur'an 4:48, 116

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: 

 

-- Deuteronomy 6:4

 

And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:  

-- Mark 12:29

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

 

John Dryden describes justice according to The Democrat Party

 Cheaply you sin, and punish crimes with ease,

Not as th' offended, but the offenders please.

-- John Dryden

The Disciples of Christ are down to fewer than 300,000 members as COVID-19 all but buries denomination decimated by "theological revisionism"

 

Membership is down a whopping 85% from almost 2 million since the 1960s.

By the 1990s it was already down 50%, and another 50% by the 2010s. But COVID-19 has now all but buried the Christian Church Disciples of Christ.

Who will attend the funeral?

From the story, here:

From 2019-2022, there was a 21 percent drop in membership, a cataclysmic rate of decline. … Disciples have firmly moved in a theologically revisionist direction on matters of human sexuality, gender expression, and radical individual moral autonomy. …

Somehow I don't think Christianity Today's Paul D. Miller would have been in favor of the American Revolution at the time

 

On June 9, 1772, the Sons of Liberty burned HMS Gaspee, a British customs schooner in Narragansett Bay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unless it was “moderate” lol.

The Problem with Anti-Anti-Christian Nationalism :

Moderate Christian nationalists shouldn't be smeared. But neither should extremism be defended. … American Christians have a special duty to lovingly correct Christian nationalism. … moderate Christian nationalists have a special duty to denounce extremists in their ranks, even if they remain persuaded of Christian nationalism’s tenets.

That son, affecting to subdue rational liberty

 Justly thou abhorr'st

That son, who on the quiet state of men

Such trouble brought, affecting to subdue

Rational liberty.

-- John Milton, Paradise Lost

Eyewitness to earth-shattering day 60 years ago doubts himself, contradicts official statements he filed at the time, says he put the magic bullet he found in JFK's seat on JFK's stretcher

Mr. Landis’s account, included in a forthcoming memoir, would rewrite the narrative of one of modern American history’s most earth-shattering days in an important way. It may not mean any more than that. But it could also encourage those who have long suspected that there was more than one gunman in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, adding new grist to one of the nation’s enduring mysteries.

 

 As with all things related to the assassination, of course, his account raises questions of its own. Mr. Landis remained silent for 60 years, which has fueled doubts even for his former Secret Service partner, and memories are tricky even for those sincerely certain of their recollections. A couple elements of his account contradict the official statements he filed with authorities immediately after the shooting, and some of the implications of his version cannot be easily reconciled to the existing record.  

 

But he was there, a firsthand witness, and it is rare for new testimony to emerge six decades after the fact. He has never subscribed to the conspiracy theories and stresses that he is not promoting one now. At age 88, he said, all he wants is to tell what he saw and what he did. He will leave it to everyone else to draw conclusions.

More. 

 

Peter, James, and John, in the holy mount: We were eyewitnesses of his majesty

 

 

 For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount. 

 

-- II Peter 1:16ff.

Religion begins with experience of the holy

 The holy man, amaz'd at what he saw,

Made haste to sanctify the bliss by law.

-- John Dryden

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.