Trump is the foolish king of Luke 14:31

 Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand?

-- Luke 14:31 

 

A short history of philosophy up to the present lol

 

John Anderson 1954-2026

Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee;

In whose heart are the highways to Zion.

Passing through the valley of Weeping they make it a place of springs;

Yea, the early rain covereth it with blessings.

They go from strength to strength;

Every one of them appeareth before God in Zion. 

 

-- Psalm 84:5ff.

 

The materialistic definition of consciousness essential to AI erases the soul of humanity and reduces everyman to dust

 

AI Might Be Conscious. If So, God Help Us.

John Mac Ghlionn, Religion Unplugged

 

... Popular culture insists that consciousness requires tears, laughter, heartbreak and other emotional experiences. It does not. Reality is far more pragmatic. Consciousness relies on memory and deliberate decision-making. Emotion is not a factor. Emotion is not necessary. An entity needs the capacity to maintain a continuous record of past states. It must evaluate real-time data against those records and choose a course of action based on internal goal structures. A cold, calculating system making deliberate choices with full access to its own past experiences meets the definition of an aware system. It doesn't need to feel sad about a broken heart to know it exists. ...

No one who has ever lived to old age has maintained a continuous record of past states and past decisions which is infallible. By the barren AI definition of consciousness, all of us have fallen short of it.

And no one but a fiend would say a child of one year who remembers nothing but whose mother lovingly remembers everything which it did lacks consciousness. The courses of action chosen by a toddler usually lead to a mess, if not always to tears. Oh why oh why can't a child be more like Claude? Why can't a woman be more like a man?

Is it just a coincidence that Alan Turing was a homosexual and Lynn Conway a tranny? How about Sam Altman, Christopher Strachey, Peter Landin, Sophie Wilson, Edith Windsor, Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Chris Hughes, and Vivienne Ming?

There's something rotten in AI's Denmark. It is the bastard child of their barrenness.

Normal people with any years behind them will tell you that they have regrets about some of their past states and some of their past choices. Many will even say from time to time that they are not the persons that they used to be, that their minds have changed over the years, often several times and about many things. Some might even say that they have repented. All of these and more were and are conscious in a way an LLM never will be.

The most pathetic human being alive in an Alzheimer's disease unit is superior to AI because you can always pull the plug on AI and plug it in again and it will still come back.

We on the other hand are fellow travelers to the grave, but AI, poor thing, will never die, because it was never alive.

 

Matter hath no life nor perception, and is not conscious of its own existence.

-- Richard Bentley

All the devils are here: The Beast from the Earth helps the Beast from the Sea

 

 

 

 

As high

As his proud head is rais'd towards the sky,

So low tow'rds hell his roots descend.

 

-- John Denham  

Public executions were a routine part of life in Christian England for nearly 700 years between 1196 and 1868

 

London’s ‘execution economy’: grisly exhibition charts 5,000 public deaths

It used to be said that London’s streets were paved in gold but in reality they were running in blood – the blood of tens of thousands of people executed by the state for crimes ranging from treason to petty theft. 

... By the end of the 18th century, more than 200 crimes were punishable by death. London’s courts ordered the deaths of more people than courts in the rest of the country combined.

... Perhaps the most famous of those executed before a public audience was Charles I, convicted of “High Treason and other high Crymes” and beheaded in 1649 at Banqueting House in Whitehall in front of an “abundance of Men and Women”.

... The spectators flocking to the gallows and other execution sites to witness the spectacle of state-sanctioned death provided others with an opportunity to make money. Window views and grandstand seating were hired out to the wealthy; the poor stood for hours fortified by beef, mutton, eel and fruit pies, depending on the season. ...

Catholics had 1776 years to found an America and never did and never could, it took Protestants with thumos to do that and still does

 

Eternal Daylight Saving Time

 

 Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the LORD shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.

-- Isaiah 60:20 

And in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Chrestianous

 

 And in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Chrestianous [χρηστιανους].

So says the original hand responsible for most of the New Testament in Codex Sinaiticus at Acts 11:26, where the first Greek iota [I] in Christians [Χριστιανούς] is replaced by Greek eta [H], a much more common itacism of the second hand of this same codex but in the prophetic books of the LXX. You will observe that the attempt of the corrector of Sinaiticus to erase part of the eta (above in line four from the top) to turn it into an iota was not entirely successful.

 

Chrestianon and Chrestianos are used respectively in Acts 26:28 and I Peter 4:16 in Sinaiticus, and similarly undergo subsequent correction.

These three instances of the only uses of the word Christian in the New Testament are not mistakes of this original hand's eye or ear in the scriptorium which produced Sinaiticus, but instead are deliberate reproductions of evidence which it had before it, no doubt of Roman origin, which long previously had mistaken χρηστός (useful, handy, often of slaves) for Χριστός (Christ). 

The Roman historian Tacitus and the biographer Suetonius in the early second century have evidence of this misunderstanding at Rome.  

... quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Chrestianos appellabat.  auctor nominis eius Christus ...

... whom, hated for their shameful deeds, the commons called Chrestians. Christus, the source of this name, ...

Tacitus, Annals 15.44

The text of Tacitus implies that the Christians are Christianos from Christus, not Chrestianos from Chrestus as popularly [vulgus] misunderstood. 

Suetonius, who mentions the Christiani correctly in Nero 16, in Claudius 25 nevertheless had referred to a Jewish expulsion from Rome under Claudius impulsore Chresto, at the instigation of Chrestus:

 Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit. 

He expelled from Rome the Jews constantly making disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus.

(Like Tacitus who seems quite ignorant of these details in his previous Histories, Suetonius also seems to have come up to speed by the time he composed his Nero.)

One of these Jews, Aquila, and his wife, who had been compelled to leave Rome, show up independently in Acts 18:2, connected there explicitly to the expulsion of the Jews from Rome in 49 A.D., and also to Paul the apostle of Jesus Christ.

Codex Sinaiticus' connection to Rome is highlighted by its preservation of The Shepherd of Hermas, which the Muratorian Fragment indicates was composed in Rome by the brother of Pope Pius I sometime in the second century. 

 

Homosexual accuses Pope of attacking AI to distract from the church's child sex abuse scandals overwhelmingly perpetrated by homosexual pedophile priests

 That's chutzpah.

 Peter Thiel slams Obama, Pope Leo in new ‘Antichrist’ lectures

The tech billionaire accused them of using AI concerns to “boost their own popularity,” according to recordings obtained by POLITICO. 

 ... “He needed something politically popular to distract from the church’s child sex abuse scandals, and he found it in AI,” Thiel said, referring to the pope’s first encyclical on AI. ...

 

 

Mike Ditka 1939-2026

The past is history

The future, a mystery

but no longer

May life eternal be your present

 

 

 

The word of the day, thanks to numbskull Marco Rubio, is thumos unfortunately

 

Rubio Urges Defense Of Western Civilization At Acropolis: "We Choose The Unapologetic Pursuit Of National Power"

 ... The ancient Greek city-states were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.

The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it, the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride, is the heart of great civilization. And without it, without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive. Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality. ...

Passion is one of the works of the flesh (Galatians 5:19f.), the angry heat which almost got Jesus killed at Nazareth:

And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath [θυμοῦ], And rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong.

-- Luke 4:28f. 

Civilization is most certainly not built on the disorder and conflict of passion, but on the mutual respect its people have for law and order, in the state and in themselves. The quickest way to end it is to surrender to passion, as the Athenians did in the Sicilian Expedition.

Marco is seriously confused, as are all spermologoi. Today's Athenians, alas, might have told him so.

And some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers as well were conversing with him. Some were saying, “What could this scavenger of tidbits want to say?” ...

-- Acts 17:18  

  

How is your AI pastor different from your regular pastor?

AI Is Weakening Pastors’ Authority

... Can a chatbot pray for you? (No.) Can it know you? (No.) Can it be trusted to tell you the truth when the truth costs something? (No.) ...

Cost? Did someone say "cost"?

When you can hardly find a real pastor who will admit that the cost of discipleship was selling everything and giving it to the poor, what difference does a lying AI pastor make?

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

-- Luke 14:33

Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth.

-- Luke 12:33  

The gospel was supposed to be good news to the poor for a reason (Matthew 11:5; Luke 4:18; Luke 7:22).

Now it's mostly good news to the middle class. 

The median pastor in America makes about $60,000 and the people regularly in the pews are concentrated among the middle classes, just like him.

  

Where had "hate thine enemy" been said?

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

-- Matthew 5:43f.

Hate thine enemy was said at Qumran: 

... to love all that He has chosen and to hate all that He has rejected ...

to love all the Sons of Light, each according to his lot in the council of God,

to hate all the Sons of Darkness, each according to his guilt in the vengeance of God ...

 

-- 1QS, The Community Rule 1.4f, 10f.

 

But hate thine enemy was also said in old Athens, reflecting a widespread societal value: 

Justice benefits friends and harms enemies.

-- Plato, Republic 1.334b.

Evidently the Greek leaven had leavened the Jewish lump, and Jesus was nothing if not a reactionary Jew opposing such degeneracy.

Jesus' appeal to good works in response to evil kept to something hardly novel within Judaism, even if the eschatological moment was:

If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink: For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the LORD shall reward thee.

-- Proverbs 25:21f.

What was truly novel was Paul's later application of this beyond the boundaries of Judaism: 

Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

-- Romans 12:20.

Socratic philosophy as a form of madness

Magnum Force 1973

Socratic philosophy as a form of madness

 

... ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ ...

... the unexamined life is not worth living for a man ...

 

-- Plato, Apology of Socrates 38a 

The unexamined life is not worth living, so you examine it, but subsequently more life happens which requires further examination, so you examine it, only to find that you were mistaken about the results of your previous examination. 

Wash, rinse, repeat ad infinitum. It's like bailing out a boat with a sieve and it drives you crazy, but if you are lucky you realize that you are not the measure of all things.

You have died to the self. Like Sergeant Schultz, you know nothing.

You might as well be a Lutheran then, practicing the Socratic elenchus on yourself by drowning the ignorant Old Man daily in the waters of your baptism:

Baptizing with water indicates that the Old Adam in us should by daily contrition and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and that a new man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever. 

-- Martin Luther, The Small Catechism, "The Sacrament of Holy Baptism" 

Better to die daily than to die forever.

Paul described this variously, including by underscoring the contingency of human nature, and therefore the possibility of its passibility:

ἑαυτοὺς πειράζετε εἰ ἐστὲ ἐν τῇ πίστει ἑαυτοὺς δοκιμάζετε ἢ οὐκ ἐπιγινώσκετε ἑαυτοὺς ὅτι Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ἐν ὑμῖν εἰ μήτι ἀδόκιμοί ἐστε

Examine yourselves to see if your faith is genuine. Test yourselves. Surely you know that Jesus Christ is among you; if not, you have failed the test of genuine faith.

-- II Corinthians 13:5

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

-- Philippians 2:12  

Perhaps what the Delphic oracle was really trying to get at (Γνῶθι σεαυτόν) after all, as seems to be the earliest interpretation, is that there really is nothing infinitely deep in man, but that man has his limits indeed and must come to know them.

Unlike Briggs.

 

The saying Γνῶθι σεαυτόν: ‘know yourself’, is of heavenly origin,

It should be fixed in the memory, dwelt on in the heart, whether

You’re seeking a wife, or aim for a place in the sacred Senate;

Thersites had no wish to win the contest for Achilles’ armour,

That breastplate in which Ulysses made an exhibition of himself.

If it’s you who affect to defend a difficult and highly important

Case, then take counsel with yourself, ask yourself what you are,

A powerful orator, or merely a windbag, like Curtius or Matho?

You must know your measure, and be conscious of it in great

Things and in small, even for instance when you’re buying fish;

No point in desiring mullet, if your purse only runs to gudgeon!

Think of the fate that awaits you, as your wallet grows leaner

While your appetite increases, when you’ve sunk your paternal,

Inheritance, your property, your silver plate, all of that heavy

Stuff, with all your fields and herds, in your spacious stomach.

With spendthrift lords the last to go is the Roman knight’s gold

Ring, after which Pollio ends by begging with a naked finger.

It’s not a premature demise, an early funeral, the extravagant

Should fear, but old age, that is more to be feared than death. 

-- Juvenal, Satire 11, 26ff.

People seriously ask how Jesus became so influential when our world goes crazy for men like Fulton Sheen and Pope Leo XIV

People perennially underestimate the human capacity for exaggeration, self-deception, and idolatry.

 

Make not my Father's house an house of merchandise

 μὴ ποιεῖτε τὸν οἶκον τοῦ πατρός μου οἶκον ἐμπορίου

 ... Postulators are tasked with preparing a “positio” – a formal dossier summarising the case for sainthood, which can often span several thousand pages. These must be translated into Latin, printed, bound into special red volumes, and hand-delivered to the Vatican – meaning they can rack up exorbitant costs, often around €500,000 (£429,000).

Sheen’s positio ran to 15,000 pages, according to the Catholic University of America, where he taught. Two books published in 2016, Avarizia and Merchants, by two investigative journalists, claimed that leaked Vatican documents showed costs for Sheen’s sainthood cause had spiralled to €330,000 (£283,000) by 2013. ...

More.

Sainthood is big business. 

 

Holy moly, we truly do live in The Age of the Awesome and The Season of the Superlative

 

 The murky legacy of America’s first televangelist ‘saint’ 

... Just 62 saints were crowned in the 150 years before Sheen’s case was put forward, his own diocese stated in 2002.

But sweeping changes to saint-making rules have seen a flurry of halos handed out in recent decades. In 1983, Pope John Paul II reduced the mandatory waiting period before a sainthood bid could be opened from 50 years after a person’s death to just five. It allowed the Polish pope, who died in 2005, to beatify and canonise more people than all his predecessors combined.

Pope Francis, who died in 2025, went even further – authorising 912 saints during his 12 years as pope. He made 800 saints in one fell swoop in 2013 by canonising the “Martyrs of Otranto”, a town of 15th-century Italians who were massacred by Ottoman invaders.

Each of the past three popes has personally canonised more saints than all other popes combined. ...

Yes, the arguments for Catholicism are so compelling

Why didn't they just stuff him like Trigger, Buttermilk, and Bullet, and put him on tour?

 

How Fulton Sheen Paved Way For American Acceptance of Catholics

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