This is what a stupid fucking Christian asshole wrote:
All of that, but yet you can't see the fact that science still calls it a theory because they still have no more proof that darwin did.
As a matter of fact the DNA science is actually putting the final nails in that evolution theory. I stand ready for your dinosaur DNA explanation please explain. Accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and He will forgive you all of your sins. That guilty heavy heart of yours will be lifted and freed.
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This is what I wrote for the stupid fucking asshole:
You don't know what you're talking about. You don't even know what a scientific theory is. Read this several times to help you understand:
"Theory: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses. The contention that evolution should be taught as a "theory, not as a fact" confuses the common use of these words with the scientific use. In science, theories do not turn into facts through the accumulation of evidence. Rather, theories are the end points of science. They are understandings that develop from extensive observation, experimentation, and creative reflection. They incorporate a large body of scientific facts, laws, tested hypotheses, and logical inferences. In this sense, evolution is one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have." -- National Academy of Sciences
Thanks for wasting my time. Why don't you look things up instead of making a fool out of yourself. Ask a child how to use Google then search for "Wikipedia evidence for evolution" and when you get there, stay there and learn something. There's about 100 links to more information that you know nothing about. Study the whole thing, and work hard to understand it. It will take you the rest of your life so you should start right now. Or does thinking make you cry?
And please take your Magic Jeebus Man and shove it somewhere. You people are disgusting. We would still be living in the Dark Ages if everyone was like you.
Showing posts with label 2018/03 MARCH. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2018/03 MARCH. Show all posts
Thursday, March 5, 2020
Saturday, March 31, 2018
What somebody else wrote about the bullshit in the disgusting bible. It was well done.
I have to laugh when I see folks below posting quotes from the Bible as if they are evidence of anything. What would these posters think of "proofs" from the Quran or the Book of Mormon?
The Bible is riddled with errors and inconsistencies, yet believers seem blissfully unaware of these facts.
Here's challenge for believers (one that I've never seen answered):
Read the resurrection stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Then answer:
1) Did "they" go to the tomb before or after sunrise?
2) Who were "they"?
3) Was the stone in place or rolled away?
4) How many angels were present?
5) Was(were) the angel(s) in or out of the tomb?
6) Where was the risen Jesus first met?
7) Who first met the risen Jesus?
8) How many days elapsed before Jesus "went to Heaven"
9) On what day was Jesus crucified?
There are more inconsistencies, but these will suffice for now.
The Bible is riddled with errors and inconsistencies, yet believers seem blissfully unaware of these facts.
Here's challenge for believers (one that I've never seen answered):
Read the resurrection stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Then answer:
1) Did "they" go to the tomb before or after sunrise?
2) Who were "they"?
3) Was the stone in place or rolled away?
4) How many angels were present?
5) Was(were) the angel(s) in or out of the tomb?
6) Where was the risen Jesus first met?
7) Who first met the risen Jesus?
8) How many days elapsed before Jesus "went to Heaven"
9) On what day was Jesus crucified?
There are more inconsistencies, but these will suffice for now.
Christian morons think the Earth is a big fucking deal. They are wrong.
I looked this stuff up. Google is my friend.
Hubble reveals an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe or so, but this number is likely to increase to about 200 billion as telescope technology in space improves. Every galaxy has billions of stars.
Why would a magical master of the entire universe, aka God, Zeus, Allah, give this tiny insignificant planet in the middle of nowhere so much special treatment?
One of my favorite quotes:
"So altogether I can’t believe the special stories that’ve been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be too simple, too connected, too local, too provincial. The 'earth,' He came to 'the earth', one of the aspects of God came to 'the earth!' mind you, and look at what’s out there. It isn’t in proportion!"
-- Richard Feynman
Hubble reveals an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe or so, but this number is likely to increase to about 200 billion as telescope technology in space improves. Every galaxy has billions of stars.
Why would a magical master of the entire universe, aka God, Zeus, Allah, give this tiny insignificant planet in the middle of nowhere so much special treatment?
One of my favorite quotes:
"So altogether I can’t believe the special stories that’ve been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be too simple, too connected, too local, too provincial. The 'earth,' He came to 'the earth', one of the aspects of God came to 'the earth!' mind you, and look at what’s out there. It isn’t in proportion!"
-- Richard Feynman
What I wrote at the Wall Street Journal about reality.
Every miracle, including the Muslim belief in a moon that split in half, and the Christian belief in a decomposing preacher who rose from the dead, is a belief in supernatural magic.
Is supernatural magic real? Can a god with unlimited magical powers throw out reality and make impossible things happen?
I'm convinced supernatural magic including magic god fairies are just childish fantasies. I can't imagine how reality can be thrown out. Reality is not going anywhere.
Everything we see in the universe can be explained or eventually will be explained by science. Scientific progress will continue forever. Meanwhile primitive religions are permanently stuck in the Dark Ages.
One of my favorite quotes:
"There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."
-- Stephen Hawking
Is supernatural magic real? Can a god with unlimited magical powers throw out reality and make impossible things happen?
I'm convinced supernatural magic including magic god fairies are just childish fantasies. I can't imagine how reality can be thrown out. Reality is not going anywhere.
Everything we see in the universe can be explained or eventually will be explained by science. Scientific progress will continue forever. Meanwhile primitive religions are permanently stuck in the Dark Ages.
One of my favorite quotes:
"There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."
-- Stephen Hawking
What I wrote at the god-soaked Wall Street Journal about the moronic Christian death cult.
A few years ago I wondered how Christians could justify the resurrection of a decomposing corpse because after 3 days nothing is going to work.
So I looked it up and found something from the Catholic Church. Their idea was the corpse never decomposed at all.
In other words to justify a magical resurrection they invented more magic. How convenient that is. Just keep making stuff up.
Christianity completely depends on a magical resurrection being true even though it's impossible. The problem is reality can't be thrown out. Reality doesn't care if people don't like it.
The logical thing to do is just give up and admit Christianity is the most ridiculous cult ever invented. Then throw it in the garbage where it belongs.
Reality is a wonderful thing because it's interesting and because it's real.
Religious fantasies are boring not to mention disgusting. They are not real.
Science hard, hurts brain.
God easy, no think.
So I looked it up and found something from the Catholic Church. Their idea was the corpse never decomposed at all.
In other words to justify a magical resurrection they invented more magic. How convenient that is. Just keep making stuff up.
Christianity completely depends on a magical resurrection being true even though it's impossible. The problem is reality can't be thrown out. Reality doesn't care if people don't like it.
The logical thing to do is just give up and admit Christianity is the most ridiculous cult ever invented. Then throw it in the garbage where it belongs.
Reality is a wonderful thing because it's interesting and because it's real.
Religious fantasies are boring not to mention disgusting. They are not real.
Science hard, hurts brain.
God easy, no think.
The pope is a stupid fucking asshole.
Pope faces indigenous Canadians' anger over refusal to apologize for past abuse
Canada bishops’ group said Francis would not offer personal apology for residential school system that abused generations of children.
Leyland Cecco in Toronto Friday 30 March 2018
Survivors of Canada’s residential schools have expressed dismay after Pope Francis refused to apologize on behalf of the Catholic church for a system that abused thousands of indigenous children for generations.
The schools, many of which were run by missionaries, were used to convert indigenous children to Christianity through a governmental policy of “aggressive assimilation”. More than 150,000 children passed through around 80 schools across the country until the last one closed in 1996.
The Canadian government formally apologized for the program 10 years ago. In 2014, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended a papal apology, which the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, personally lobbied for when he visited the Vatican last year.
While he has apologized for the “grave sins” of colonialism in South America, in a letter released Tuesday by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, the president of the organization said Pope Francis would not issue a personal apology.
Stephen Kakfwi, the former premier of the Northwest Territories, attended a number of residential schools in the Canadian Arctic. He argued that survivors of the schools were not calling for a personal apology from the pontiff, but an institutional response from the Catholic church.
“We asked as for an apology from the pope, the head of the Catholic faith, for the millions of people who are Catholics around the world,” said Kakfwi, who helped arrange visits by Pope John Paul II to the Arctic.
“He would, as a spiritual leader, say that this should have never happened if the clergy followed the true teachings of Jesus. He would be saying: ‘I’m sorry for the failings of the church as an institution.’”
Kakfwi said he suspected that part of the reason for Francis’s refusal was a difference of opinions amongst bishops in Canada, who remain divided on the issue.
Other survivors said the pope’s decision marked a perpetuation of the colonial mindset that gave rise to the system in the first place.
“It’s the continuation of a policy that we are always hoping would be discontinued by the church: the implication that indigenous people are less closer to God than the average non-indigenous person,” said Edmund Metatawabin, a former chief of the Fort Albany First Nation in Ontario.
Much of church doctrine taught to the students was aimed at separating them from their indigenous identity. Metatawabin’s father, himself the product of a residential school, had become “brainwashed” to believe traditional ceremonies and beliefs were bad.
As a youth, Metatawabin was only able to learn of his community’s tradition from his great grandmother and grandfather, who discreetly passed on the knowledge under the promise of secrecy.
Metatawabin attended the notorious St Anne’s Indian residential school for eight years, where he witnessed and experienced rampant sexual and physical abuse. Once, after vomiting into his porridge, he was forced to eat that same bowl of food.
The school even had a homemade electric chair, used for both punishment and the amusement of the staff.
“The pope is saying that white people have more to give the world than any indigenous person,” he said.
Canada bishops’ group said Francis would not offer personal apology for residential school system that abused generations of children.
Leyland Cecco in Toronto Friday 30 March 2018
Survivors of Canada’s residential schools have expressed dismay after Pope Francis refused to apologize on behalf of the Catholic church for a system that abused thousands of indigenous children for generations.
The schools, many of which were run by missionaries, were used to convert indigenous children to Christianity through a governmental policy of “aggressive assimilation”. More than 150,000 children passed through around 80 schools across the country until the last one closed in 1996.
The Canadian government formally apologized for the program 10 years ago. In 2014, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended a papal apology, which the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, personally lobbied for when he visited the Vatican last year.
While he has apologized for the “grave sins” of colonialism in South America, in a letter released Tuesday by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, the president of the organization said Pope Francis would not issue a personal apology.
Stephen Kakfwi, the former premier of the Northwest Territories, attended a number of residential schools in the Canadian Arctic. He argued that survivors of the schools were not calling for a personal apology from the pontiff, but an institutional response from the Catholic church.
“We asked as for an apology from the pope, the head of the Catholic faith, for the millions of people who are Catholics around the world,” said Kakfwi, who helped arrange visits by Pope John Paul II to the Arctic.
“He would, as a spiritual leader, say that this should have never happened if the clergy followed the true teachings of Jesus. He would be saying: ‘I’m sorry for the failings of the church as an institution.’”
Kakfwi said he suspected that part of the reason for Francis’s refusal was a difference of opinions amongst bishops in Canada, who remain divided on the issue.
Other survivors said the pope’s decision marked a perpetuation of the colonial mindset that gave rise to the system in the first place.
“It’s the continuation of a policy that we are always hoping would be discontinued by the church: the implication that indigenous people are less closer to God than the average non-indigenous person,” said Edmund Metatawabin, a former chief of the Fort Albany First Nation in Ontario.
Much of church doctrine taught to the students was aimed at separating them from their indigenous identity. Metatawabin’s father, himself the product of a residential school, had become “brainwashed” to believe traditional ceremonies and beliefs were bad.
As a youth, Metatawabin was only able to learn of his community’s tradition from his great grandmother and grandfather, who discreetly passed on the knowledge under the promise of secrecy.
Metatawabin attended the notorious St Anne’s Indian residential school for eight years, where he witnessed and experienced rampant sexual and physical abuse. Once, after vomiting into his porridge, he was forced to eat that same bowl of food.
The school even had a homemade electric chair, used for both punishment and the amusement of the staff.
“The pope is saying that white people have more to give the world than any indigenous person,” he said.
March 31, 2018. A Wall Street Journal article about the magical resurrection of the Magic Jeebus Man. I wrote a comment to explain why the magical resurrection of a decomposing corpse is impossible. The numerous other comments: Lots of extreme stupid.
Today's March 31, 2018 Wall Street Journal, also known as the Christian Journal because it has so much Christian bullshit in it, has an article about the magical resurrection of the Magic Jeebus Man. I usually avoid writing comments at the WSJ because the place is infested with stupid fucking assholes, aka Christian scum, but this time I had to write something about it. Here it is:
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This article, I never saw so much gibberish. Never once did Mr. Weigel provide any evidence for the resurrection fantasy.
Ancient paintings are not evidence for anything. Bible stories are not evidence for anything. 500 dead witnesses, even if they weren't invented, is not evidence for anything. Wishful thinking is not evidence for anything.
The magical resurrection of a decomposing corpse never happened because it's impossible. This is a basic fact of reality. Reality doesn't care about a god fairy's magical powers. Reality doesn't care about what makes cowards feel good. Reality isn't going anywhere.
Less than one third of the human race believes in this ridiculous disgusting resurrection. A thousand years from now nobody will believe it. The stupidity can't last forever.
Christian crybabies will cry. Nobody cares. These crybabies brainwash their children and everyone else's children if they can get away with it. This is child abuse. The child abusers have my contempt.
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A typical comment. The stupid, it burns. "He is risen indeed--factually, historically, literally. There is no hope for the world outside of the resurrection of Christ."
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Here is the entire ridiculous article:
The Easter Effect and How It Changed the World
The first Christians were baffled by what they called ‘the Resurrection.’ Their struggle to understand it brought about astonishing success for their faith.
By George Weigel March 30, 2018
Mr. Weigel is distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.
In the year 312, just before his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge won him the undisputed leadership of the Roman Empire, Constantine the Great had a heavenly vision of Christian symbols. That augury led him, a year later, to end all legal sanctions on the public profession of Christianity.
Or so a pious tradition has it.
But there’s a more mundane explanation for Constantine’s decision: He was a politician who had shrewdly decided to join the winning side. By the early 4th century, Christians likely counted for between a quarter and a half of the population of the Roman Empire, and their exponential growth seemed likely to continue.
How did this happen? How did a ragtag band of nobodies from the far edges of the Mediterranean world become such a dominant force in just two and a half centuries? The historical sociology of this extraordinary phenomenon has been explored by Rodney Stark of Baylor University, who argues that Christianity modeled a nobler way of life than what was on offer elsewhere in the rather brutal society of the day. In Christianity, women were respected as they weren’t in classical culture and played a critical role in bringing men to the faith and attracting converts. In an age of plagues, the readiness of Christians to care for all the sick, not just their own, was a factor, as was the impressive witness to faith of countless martyrs. Christianity also grew from within because Christians had larger families, a byproduct of their faith’s prohibition of contraception, abortion and infanticide.
For theologians who like to think that arguments won the day for the Christian faith, this sort of historical reconstruction is not particularly gratifying, but it makes a lot of human sense. Prof. Stark’s analysis still leaves us with a question, though: How did all that modeling of a compelling, alternative way of life get started? And that, in turn, brings us back to that gaggle of nobodies in the early first century A.D. and what happened to them.
What happened to them was the Easter Effect.
There is no accounting for the rise of Christianity without weighing the revolutionary effect on those nobodies of what they called “the Resurrection”: their encounter with the one whom they embraced as the Risen Lord, whom they first knew as the itinerant Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, and who died an agonizing and shameful death on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem. As N.T. Wright, one of the Anglosphere’s pre-eminent biblical scholars, makes clear, that first generation answered the question of why they were Christians with a straightforward answer: because Jesus was raised from the dead.
Now that, as some disgruntled listeners once complained about Jesus’ preaching, is “a hard saying.” It was no less challenging two millennia ago than it is today. And one of the most striking things about the New Testament accounts of Easter, and what followed in the days immediately after Easter, is that the Gospel writers and editors carefully preserved the memory of the first Christians’ bafflement, skepticism and even fright about what had happened to their former teacher and what was happening to them.
In Mark’s gospel, Mary Magdalene and other women in Jesus’ entourage find his tomb empty and a young man sitting nearby telling them that “Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified…has risen; he is not here.” But they had no idea what that was all about, “and went out and fled from the tomb…[and] said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Two disciples walking to Emmaus from Jerusalem on Easter afternoon haven’t a clue as to who’s talking with them along their way, interpreting the scriptures and explaining Jesus’ suffering as part of his messianic mission. They don’t even recognize who it is that sits down to supper with them until he breaks bread and asks a blessing: “…and their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” They high-tail it back to Jerusalem to tell the other friends of Jesus, who report that Peter has had a similarly strange experience, but when “Jesus himself stood among them…they were startled and frightened, and supposed that they saw a ghost.”
Some time later, Peter, John and others in Jesus’ core group are fishing on the Sea of Tiberias. “Jesus stood on the beach,” we are told, “yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.” At the very end of these post-Easter accounts, those whom we might expect to have been the first to grasp what was afoot are still skeptical. When that core group of Jesus’ followers goes back to Galilee, they see him, “but some doubted.”
This remarkable and deliberate recording of the first Christians’ incomprehension of what they insisted was the irreducible bottom line of their faith teaches us two things. First, it tells us that the early Christians were confident enough about what they called the Resurrection that (to borrow from Prof. Wright) they were prepared to say something like, “I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s what happened.” And the second thing it tells us is that it took time for the first Christians to figure out what the events of Easter meant—not only for Jesus but for themselves. As they worked that out, their thinking about a lot of things changed profoundly, as Prof. Wright and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI help us to understand in their biblical commentaries.
The way they thought about time and history changed. During Jesus’ public ministry, many of his followers shared in the Jewish messianic expectations of the time: God would soon work something grand for his people in Israel, liberating them from their oppressors and bringing about a new age in which (as Isaiah had prophesied) the nations would stream to the mountain of the Lord and history would end. The early Christians came to understand that the cataclysmic, world-redeeming act that God had promised had taken place at Easter. God’s Kingdom had come not at the end of time but within time—and that had changed the texture of both time and history. History continued, but those shaped by the Easter Effect became the people who knew how history was going to turn out. Because of that, they could live differently. The Easter Effect impelled them to bring a new standard of equality into the world and to embrace death as martyrs if necessary—because they knew, now, that death did not have the final word in the human story.
The way they thought about “resurrection” changed. Pious Jews taught by the reforming Pharisees of Jesus’ time believed in the resurrection of the dead. Easter taught the first Christians, who were all pious Jews, that this resurrection was not the resuscitation of a corpse, nor did it involve the decomposition of a corpse. Jesus’ tomb was empty, but the Risen Lord appeared to his disciples in a transformed body. Those who first experienced the Easter Effect would not have put it in these terms, but as their understanding of what had happened to Jesus and to themselves grew, they grasped that (as Benedict XVI put it in “Jesus of Nazareth–Holy Week”) there had been an “evolutionary leap” in the human condition. A new way of being had been encountered in the manifestly human but utterly different life of the one they met as the Risen Lord. That insight radically changed all those who embraced it.
Which brings us to the next manifestation of the Easter Effect among the first Christians: The way they thought about their responsibilities changed. What had happened to Jesus, they slowly began to grasp, was not just about their former teacher and friend; it was about all of them. His destiny was their destiny. So not only could they face opposition, scorn and even death with confidence; they could offer to others the truth and the fellowship they had been given. Indeed, they had to do so, to be faithful to what they had experienced. Christian mission is inconceivable without Easter. And that mission would eventually lead these sons and daughters of Abraham to the conviction that the promise that God had made to the People of Israel had been extended to those who were not sons and daughters of Abraham. Because of Easter, the gentiles, too, could be embraced in a relationship—a covenant—with the one God, which was embodied in righteous living.
The way they thought about worship and its temporal rhythms changed. For the Jews who were the first members of the Jesus movement, nothing was more sacrosanct than the Sabbath, the seventh day of rest and worship. The Sabbath was enshrined in creation, for God himself had rested on the seventh day. The Sabbath’s importance as a key behavioral marker of the People of God had been reaffirmed in the Ten Commandments. Yet these first Christians, all Jews, quickly fixed Sunday as the “Lord’s Day,” because Easter had been a Sunday. Benedict XVI draws out the crucial point here:
“Only an event that marked souls indelibly could bring about such a profound realignment of the religious culture of the week. Mere theological speculations could not have achieved this... [The] celebration of the Lord’s day, which was characteristic of the Christian community from the outset, is one of the most convincing proofs that something extraordinary happened [at Easter]—the discovery of the empty tomb and the encounter with the Risen Lord.”
Without the Easter Effect, there is really no explaining why there was a winning side—the Christian side—for Constantine the Great to choose. That effect, as Prof. Wright puts it, begins with, and is incomprehensible without, the first Christians’ conviction that “Jesus of Nazareth was raised bodily to a new sort of life, three days after his execution.” Recognizing that does not, of course, convince everyone. Nor does it end the mystery of Easter. The first Christians, like Christians today, cannot fully comprehend resurrected life: the life depicted in the Gospels of a transphysical body that can eat, drink and be touched but that also appears and disappears, unbothered by obstacles like doors and distance.
Nor does Easter mean that everything is always going to turn out just fine, for there is still work to be done in history. As Benedict XVI put it in his 2010 Easter message: “Easter does not work magic. Just as the Israelites found the desert awaiting them on the far side of the Red Sea, so the Church, after the Resurrection, always finds history filled with joy and hope, grief and anguish. And yet this history is changed…it is truly open to the future.”
Which perhaps offers one final insight into the question with which we began: How did the Jesus movement, beginning on the margins of civilization and led by people of seeming inconsequence, end up being what Constantine regarded as the winning side? However important the role of sociological factors in explaining why Christianity carried the day, there also was that curious and inexplicable joy that marked the early Christians, even as they were being marched off to execution. Was that joy simply delusion? Denial?
Perhaps it was the Easter Effect: the joy of people who had become convinced that they were witnesses to something inexplicable but nonetheless true. Something that gave a superabundance of meaning to life and that erased the fear of death. Something that had to be shared. Something with which to change the world.
Appeared in the March 31, 2018, print edition as 'The Easter Effect.'
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This article, I never saw so much gibberish. Never once did Mr. Weigel provide any evidence for the resurrection fantasy.
Ancient paintings are not evidence for anything. Bible stories are not evidence for anything. 500 dead witnesses, even if they weren't invented, is not evidence for anything. Wishful thinking is not evidence for anything.
The magical resurrection of a decomposing corpse never happened because it's impossible. This is a basic fact of reality. Reality doesn't care about a god fairy's magical powers. Reality doesn't care about what makes cowards feel good. Reality isn't going anywhere.
Less than one third of the human race believes in this ridiculous disgusting resurrection. A thousand years from now nobody will believe it. The stupidity can't last forever.
Christian crybabies will cry. Nobody cares. These crybabies brainwash their children and everyone else's children if they can get away with it. This is child abuse. The child abusers have my contempt.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
A typical comment. The stupid, it burns. "He is risen indeed--factually, historically, literally. There is no hope for the world outside of the resurrection of Christ."
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Here is the entire ridiculous article:
The Easter Effect and How It Changed the World
The first Christians were baffled by what they called ‘the Resurrection.’ Their struggle to understand it brought about astonishing success for their faith.
By George Weigel March 30, 2018
Mr. Weigel is distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.
In the year 312, just before his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge won him the undisputed leadership of the Roman Empire, Constantine the Great had a heavenly vision of Christian symbols. That augury led him, a year later, to end all legal sanctions on the public profession of Christianity.
Or so a pious tradition has it.
But there’s a more mundane explanation for Constantine’s decision: He was a politician who had shrewdly decided to join the winning side. By the early 4th century, Christians likely counted for between a quarter and a half of the population of the Roman Empire, and their exponential growth seemed likely to continue.
How did this happen? How did a ragtag band of nobodies from the far edges of the Mediterranean world become such a dominant force in just two and a half centuries? The historical sociology of this extraordinary phenomenon has been explored by Rodney Stark of Baylor University, who argues that Christianity modeled a nobler way of life than what was on offer elsewhere in the rather brutal society of the day. In Christianity, women were respected as they weren’t in classical culture and played a critical role in bringing men to the faith and attracting converts. In an age of plagues, the readiness of Christians to care for all the sick, not just their own, was a factor, as was the impressive witness to faith of countless martyrs. Christianity also grew from within because Christians had larger families, a byproduct of their faith’s prohibition of contraception, abortion and infanticide.
For theologians who like to think that arguments won the day for the Christian faith, this sort of historical reconstruction is not particularly gratifying, but it makes a lot of human sense. Prof. Stark’s analysis still leaves us with a question, though: How did all that modeling of a compelling, alternative way of life get started? And that, in turn, brings us back to that gaggle of nobodies in the early first century A.D. and what happened to them.
What happened to them was the Easter Effect.
There is no accounting for the rise of Christianity without weighing the revolutionary effect on those nobodies of what they called “the Resurrection”: their encounter with the one whom they embraced as the Risen Lord, whom they first knew as the itinerant Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, and who died an agonizing and shameful death on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem. As N.T. Wright, one of the Anglosphere’s pre-eminent biblical scholars, makes clear, that first generation answered the question of why they were Christians with a straightforward answer: because Jesus was raised from the dead.
Now that, as some disgruntled listeners once complained about Jesus’ preaching, is “a hard saying.” It was no less challenging two millennia ago than it is today. And one of the most striking things about the New Testament accounts of Easter, and what followed in the days immediately after Easter, is that the Gospel writers and editors carefully preserved the memory of the first Christians’ bafflement, skepticism and even fright about what had happened to their former teacher and what was happening to them.
In Mark’s gospel, Mary Magdalene and other women in Jesus’ entourage find his tomb empty and a young man sitting nearby telling them that “Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified…has risen; he is not here.” But they had no idea what that was all about, “and went out and fled from the tomb…[and] said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Two disciples walking to Emmaus from Jerusalem on Easter afternoon haven’t a clue as to who’s talking with them along their way, interpreting the scriptures and explaining Jesus’ suffering as part of his messianic mission. They don’t even recognize who it is that sits down to supper with them until he breaks bread and asks a blessing: “…and their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” They high-tail it back to Jerusalem to tell the other friends of Jesus, who report that Peter has had a similarly strange experience, but when “Jesus himself stood among them…they were startled and frightened, and supposed that they saw a ghost.”
Some time later, Peter, John and others in Jesus’ core group are fishing on the Sea of Tiberias. “Jesus stood on the beach,” we are told, “yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.” At the very end of these post-Easter accounts, those whom we might expect to have been the first to grasp what was afoot are still skeptical. When that core group of Jesus’ followers goes back to Galilee, they see him, “but some doubted.”
This remarkable and deliberate recording of the first Christians’ incomprehension of what they insisted was the irreducible bottom line of their faith teaches us two things. First, it tells us that the early Christians were confident enough about what they called the Resurrection that (to borrow from Prof. Wright) they were prepared to say something like, “I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s what happened.” And the second thing it tells us is that it took time for the first Christians to figure out what the events of Easter meant—not only for Jesus but for themselves. As they worked that out, their thinking about a lot of things changed profoundly, as Prof. Wright and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI help us to understand in their biblical commentaries.
The way they thought about time and history changed. During Jesus’ public ministry, many of his followers shared in the Jewish messianic expectations of the time: God would soon work something grand for his people in Israel, liberating them from their oppressors and bringing about a new age in which (as Isaiah had prophesied) the nations would stream to the mountain of the Lord and history would end. The early Christians came to understand that the cataclysmic, world-redeeming act that God had promised had taken place at Easter. God’s Kingdom had come not at the end of time but within time—and that had changed the texture of both time and history. History continued, but those shaped by the Easter Effect became the people who knew how history was going to turn out. Because of that, they could live differently. The Easter Effect impelled them to bring a new standard of equality into the world and to embrace death as martyrs if necessary—because they knew, now, that death did not have the final word in the human story.
The way they thought about “resurrection” changed. Pious Jews taught by the reforming Pharisees of Jesus’ time believed in the resurrection of the dead. Easter taught the first Christians, who were all pious Jews, that this resurrection was not the resuscitation of a corpse, nor did it involve the decomposition of a corpse. Jesus’ tomb was empty, but the Risen Lord appeared to his disciples in a transformed body. Those who first experienced the Easter Effect would not have put it in these terms, but as their understanding of what had happened to Jesus and to themselves grew, they grasped that (as Benedict XVI put it in “Jesus of Nazareth–Holy Week”) there had been an “evolutionary leap” in the human condition. A new way of being had been encountered in the manifestly human but utterly different life of the one they met as the Risen Lord. That insight radically changed all those who embraced it.
Which brings us to the next manifestation of the Easter Effect among the first Christians: The way they thought about their responsibilities changed. What had happened to Jesus, they slowly began to grasp, was not just about their former teacher and friend; it was about all of them. His destiny was their destiny. So not only could they face opposition, scorn and even death with confidence; they could offer to others the truth and the fellowship they had been given. Indeed, they had to do so, to be faithful to what they had experienced. Christian mission is inconceivable without Easter. And that mission would eventually lead these sons and daughters of Abraham to the conviction that the promise that God had made to the People of Israel had been extended to those who were not sons and daughters of Abraham. Because of Easter, the gentiles, too, could be embraced in a relationship—a covenant—with the one God, which was embodied in righteous living.
The way they thought about worship and its temporal rhythms changed. For the Jews who were the first members of the Jesus movement, nothing was more sacrosanct than the Sabbath, the seventh day of rest and worship. The Sabbath was enshrined in creation, for God himself had rested on the seventh day. The Sabbath’s importance as a key behavioral marker of the People of God had been reaffirmed in the Ten Commandments. Yet these first Christians, all Jews, quickly fixed Sunday as the “Lord’s Day,” because Easter had been a Sunday. Benedict XVI draws out the crucial point here:
“Only an event that marked souls indelibly could bring about such a profound realignment of the religious culture of the week. Mere theological speculations could not have achieved this... [The] celebration of the Lord’s day, which was characteristic of the Christian community from the outset, is one of the most convincing proofs that something extraordinary happened [at Easter]—the discovery of the empty tomb and the encounter with the Risen Lord.”
Without the Easter Effect, there is really no explaining why there was a winning side—the Christian side—for Constantine the Great to choose. That effect, as Prof. Wright puts it, begins with, and is incomprehensible without, the first Christians’ conviction that “Jesus of Nazareth was raised bodily to a new sort of life, three days after his execution.” Recognizing that does not, of course, convince everyone. Nor does it end the mystery of Easter. The first Christians, like Christians today, cannot fully comprehend resurrected life: the life depicted in the Gospels of a transphysical body that can eat, drink and be touched but that also appears and disappears, unbothered by obstacles like doors and distance.
Nor does Easter mean that everything is always going to turn out just fine, for there is still work to be done in history. As Benedict XVI put it in his 2010 Easter message: “Easter does not work magic. Just as the Israelites found the desert awaiting them on the far side of the Red Sea, so the Church, after the Resurrection, always finds history filled with joy and hope, grief and anguish. And yet this history is changed…it is truly open to the future.”
Which perhaps offers one final insight into the question with which we began: How did the Jesus movement, beginning on the margins of civilization and led by people of seeming inconsequence, end up being what Constantine regarded as the winning side? However important the role of sociological factors in explaining why Christianity carried the day, there also was that curious and inexplicable joy that marked the early Christians, even as they were being marched off to execution. Was that joy simply delusion? Denial?
Perhaps it was the Easter Effect: the joy of people who had become convinced that they were witnesses to something inexplicable but nonetheless true. Something that gave a superabundance of meaning to life and that erased the fear of death. Something that had to be shared. Something with which to change the world.
Appeared in the March 31, 2018, print edition as 'The Easter Effect.'
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| ‘Resurrection of Christ’ by Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi). |
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| ‘The Incredulity of St. Thomas’ by Caravaggio. |
Wall Street Journal article about President Fucktard Trump and his idiotic war against successful businesses including Amazon (which I love) and AT&T which is where I get most of my dividend income. Drop dead Trump.
Wall Street Journal - President Fucktard Trump Target's Amazon. The President’s tweets make any regulatory action seem political.
By The Editorial Board - March 29, 2018 449 COMMENTS
Donald Trump slammed Amazon on Twitter Thursday, and its stock price went up. Maybe investors are figuring out that deploying federal power against the online retailing behemoth isn’t as easy as pressing “Tweet”—for which Americans should be grateful no matter what they think of Amazon.
On Wednesday the Axios website reported what was hardly a secret—that Mr. Trump doesn’t like Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the relentlessly anti-Trump Washington Post. Amazon shares fell about 4.4% on the day, amid the general investor angst over political anger aimed at Facebook and the big tech companies.
Then on Thursday Mr. Trump, perhaps boiling over after a calm week, tweeted: “I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!”
Amazon wisely declined to respond, and the President is wrong to target a private company. That’s what Democrats do—as Barack Obama did against Staples for executive compensation (2015), Anthem for raising insurance premiums (2010), and the Koch brothers for opposing renewable fuels (2015), among others. But Amazon shares popped back 1.1% Thursday in a rising market.
The reality is that Mr. Trump and the executive branch can’t do much to hurt Amazon—at least not legally, or without an effort to build a far better case than his tweets offer.
Mr. Trump complains about Amazon’s state and local tax payments, but Amazon has collected billions of dollars in sales tax in the states that require it. It's true that cities and states competing for Amazon’s second headquarters have offered an embarrassment of taxpayer subsidies. But however regrettable, such corporate dowries aren’t the concern of the federal government.
Mr. Trump could try to unleash the Internal Revenue Service, though that would be a scandal that could be an impeachable offense. The press and prosecutors would not give the Trump IRS the pass they gave Lois Lerner during the Obama years for targeting conservative nonprofits with extra scrutiny.
Alternatively, Mr. Trump could try to gin up antitrust regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department. But the federal government would struggle to prove consumer harm, the most basic criterion for an antitrust case. Amazon has disrupted the retailing business by delivering online consumer goods conveniently and often at lower prices.
One place Amazon likely does enjoy an unfair competitive advantage is due to federal intervention. The Obama Justice Department brought an antitrust case against Apple for trying to compete with Amazon’s e-books dominance. These columns called the case “quarter-baked,” but liberal judges approved.
Amazon has been the main beneficiary, and today it accounts for around 75% of all e-book sales. Mr. Trump’s appointees at the Justice Department should review that case, though the President’s social-media outbursts will make any such intervention now seem politically motivated. Mr. Trump’s tweets have already cast a political pall on Justice’s legally dubious antitrust case against the AT&T -Time Warner merger.
Mr. Trump’s other big gripe is that taxpayers are on the losing end of Amazon’s deal with the U.S. Postal Service. But that story is also more complicated. The Post Office has often operated at a net loss, but package volumes grew in fiscal 2017 by more than 11%, making it a rare growth market. Many of the additional 589 million boxes delivered last year came from Amazon.
Though imperfect, the deal is mutually beneficial. The Post Office arguably needs Amazon more than Amazon needs the Post Office. The Post Office could drop Amazon as a delivery partner, but it would likely have to raise prices elsewhere or endure higher losses. Would Mr. Trump take credit for that?
Mr. Trump can rail against anyone he wants, but America is still a nation of laws, as Mr. Obama also discovered. This is a lesson Mr. Trump’s critics forgot as they cried wolf over a fascist takeover. The political reality is that the more Mr. Trump publicly assails Amazon, the harder it will be to take regulatory action, deserved or not.
Appeared in the March 30, 2018, print edition.
By The Editorial Board - March 29, 2018 449 COMMENTS
Donald Trump slammed Amazon on Twitter Thursday, and its stock price went up. Maybe investors are figuring out that deploying federal power against the online retailing behemoth isn’t as easy as pressing “Tweet”—for which Americans should be grateful no matter what they think of Amazon.
On Wednesday the Axios website reported what was hardly a secret—that Mr. Trump doesn’t like Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the relentlessly anti-Trump Washington Post. Amazon shares fell about 4.4% on the day, amid the general investor angst over political anger aimed at Facebook and the big tech companies.
Then on Thursday Mr. Trump, perhaps boiling over after a calm week, tweeted: “I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!”
Amazon wisely declined to respond, and the President is wrong to target a private company. That’s what Democrats do—as Barack Obama did against Staples for executive compensation (2015), Anthem for raising insurance premiums (2010), and the Koch brothers for opposing renewable fuels (2015), among others. But Amazon shares popped back 1.1% Thursday in a rising market.
The reality is that Mr. Trump and the executive branch can’t do much to hurt Amazon—at least not legally, or without an effort to build a far better case than his tweets offer.
Mr. Trump complains about Amazon’s state and local tax payments, but Amazon has collected billions of dollars in sales tax in the states that require it. It's true that cities and states competing for Amazon’s second headquarters have offered an embarrassment of taxpayer subsidies. But however regrettable, such corporate dowries aren’t the concern of the federal government.
Mr. Trump could try to unleash the Internal Revenue Service, though that would be a scandal that could be an impeachable offense. The press and prosecutors would not give the Trump IRS the pass they gave Lois Lerner during the Obama years for targeting conservative nonprofits with extra scrutiny.
Alternatively, Mr. Trump could try to gin up antitrust regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department. But the federal government would struggle to prove consumer harm, the most basic criterion for an antitrust case. Amazon has disrupted the retailing business by delivering online consumer goods conveniently and often at lower prices.
One place Amazon likely does enjoy an unfair competitive advantage is due to federal intervention. The Obama Justice Department brought an antitrust case against Apple for trying to compete with Amazon’s e-books dominance. These columns called the case “quarter-baked,” but liberal judges approved.
Amazon has been the main beneficiary, and today it accounts for around 75% of all e-book sales. Mr. Trump’s appointees at the Justice Department should review that case, though the President’s social-media outbursts will make any such intervention now seem politically motivated. Mr. Trump’s tweets have already cast a political pall on Justice’s legally dubious antitrust case against the AT&T -Time Warner merger.
Mr. Trump’s other big gripe is that taxpayers are on the losing end of Amazon’s deal with the U.S. Postal Service. But that story is also more complicated. The Post Office has often operated at a net loss, but package volumes grew in fiscal 2017 by more than 11%, making it a rare growth market. Many of the additional 589 million boxes delivered last year came from Amazon.
Though imperfect, the deal is mutually beneficial. The Post Office arguably needs Amazon more than Amazon needs the Post Office. The Post Office could drop Amazon as a delivery partner, but it would likely have to raise prices elsewhere or endure higher losses. Would Mr. Trump take credit for that?
Mr. Trump can rail against anyone he wants, but America is still a nation of laws, as Mr. Obama also discovered. This is a lesson Mr. Trump’s critics forgot as they cried wolf over a fascist takeover. The political reality is that the more Mr. Trump publicly assails Amazon, the harder it will be to take regulatory action, deserved or not.
Appeared in the March 30, 2018, print edition.
Friday, March 30, 2018
Muslim scum need to be wiped off this planet.
BBC News - video - Malala: 'I'm so happy to be home'
According to Malala there are 130 million girls who cannot go to school in Pakistan.
She was almost killed because she defended the right of girls to go to school. Cowardly Muslim assholes would like to shoot her in the head again. "Moderate Muslims" think it's wrong for women to be educated. Muslim morons are afraid of women.
According to Malala there are 130 million girls who cannot go to school in Pakistan.
She was almost killed because she defended the right of girls to go to school. Cowardly Muslim assholes would like to shoot her in the head again. "Moderate Muslims" think it's wrong for women to be educated. Muslim morons are afraid of women.
The time for being nice is over with. The only way to stop poaching which is wiping out entire species is kill the poachers. Don't warn them. Don't let them surrender. Just kill them.
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| Despite rising demand for illegal rhino horn, and plummeting numbers throughout Africa and South-East Asia, rhinos in Kaziranga are flourishing |
In Kaziranga, a national park in north-eastern India, rangers shoot people to protect rhinos. The park’s aggressive policing is, of course, controversial, but the results are clear: despite rising demand for illegal rhino horn, and plummeting numbers throughout Africa and southeast Asia, rhinos in Kaziranga are flourishing.
The BBC feature shows park rangers who have been given the licence to “shoot-on-sight,” a power they have used with deadly effect. In 2015 more than 20 poachers were killed—more than the number of rhinos poached that year.
American yellow warbler
Wikipedia - American yellow warbler
To humans, these birds are quite beneficial. For one thing, in particular the young devour many pest insects during the breeding season. For another, the plumage and song of the breeding males have been described[3] as "lovely" and "musical", and they can help to generate revenue from ecotourism. No significant negative effects of American yellow and mangrove warblers on humans have been recorded.[3]
You can hear these birds sing at Yellow Warbler Sounds.
A problem that will probably never be fixed. The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Such language has created considerable debate regarding the Amendment's intended scope.
Another quote for my list of favorite quotes. I wrote this one.
Every god-soaked idiot is a feeble-minded coward. These morons for Jeebus or Allah can't exist without their childish magical-2nd-life fantasy. Reality makes them cry.
This blog has 281 posts with my favorite quotes at My favorite quotes.
This blog has 281 posts with my favorite quotes at My favorite quotes.
What somebody else wrote about religious brainwashing, aka child abuse.
"The only way primitive religion exists today is through the child abuse of forcing it into very, very young children but thanks to better education and growing intellects so many teens are able to discover the truth, throw off the indoctrination and step into the real world."
"Atheism is not a conscious decision or a belief but a realization, those that cannot escape remain prisoners of their conditioning."
"Atheism is not a conscious decision or a belief but a realization, those that cannot escape remain prisoners of their conditioning."
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