the battle of the cross...

cross

There has been a court case launched by American Atheists against the use of a remnant of the 9/11 disaster in New York... At first, the battle could be seen as petty... This is obviously pointed out by many Christian dudes who make a good case for their side of the story. But not all is as clear cut as it seems. It's all about symbolism and the fanaticism of religious beliefs.

Here comes Rod Dreher:

I believe my column was the first thing written about the 9/11 Cross, but many, many more of these stories eventually emerged. Those men working on the site were having to face unimaginable horror, every single day; for many of them, that cross was a source of comfort and strength, because it made them think that God was with them, even there in the pit of hell.

That the American Atheists cannot recognize that the 9/11 Cross has great historical significance, if only because it meant the world to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of 9/11 rescuers only shows how completely arrogant, obtuse, and inhuman some atheists can be. What an utterly despicable organization, one that does not do the cause of atheism any credit, but rather damage, insofar as it confirms the worst stereotype of atheists...

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The case from the American Atheists point of view :

Two days after the 9/11 attack, construction workers found a steel girder intersection approximately 10 feet across and 17 feet high and weighing 4,000 pounds amongst the rubble. By October 2001, the Franciscan (Catholic) priest Brian Jordan came and ‘blessed’ this piece of building debris and began holding religious services at the site.

In 2006, the girder cross was removed to St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church on 22 Barclay Street, in Manhattan. While there, the girder set was further modified and trimmed to look more like the Latin cross of Christian tradition.

Various [Christian] groups began lobbying the WTCMF (World Trade Center Memorial Foundation) to include the girder cross in the final design of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. American Atheists spoke out against that suggestion, making numerous appearances to civic and governmental groups as well as on national media denouncing the suggestion as a blatant violation of the First Amendment and exclusionary to non-Christian Americans.

It also offered to provide its own memorial artifact to be set next to the girder cross to honor all other Americans who died in the 9/11 attacks. American Atheists never received any response to its complaints or its offer of an additional memorial artifact.

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To Gus, it is quite ludicrous that such a piece of steel, instead of becoming a generic symbol of the Trade Centre's Dead — at it was sculpturally created by the fall — as a group and of the many denominations, including Jews, Muslims and atheists, has now been highjacked as a symbol of Christianity. That the action by the American Atheists was satirised by Jon Stewart does not mean they are wrong in their complaint. The AA has just shown the strong undercurrent of superior hypocrisy in such swift Christian appropriation which is contrary to the American Constitution:

The Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York City were destroyed, the Pentagon suffered serious damage, and a third target escaped damage when the passengers aboard United flight 93 attempted to retake the plane causing it to crash in Shanksville, PA.
The attacks were carried out by 19 members of an international terrorist organization known as Al-Qaeda.
2,996 people died in the attacks, including the 19 hijackers.
About 266 people died on the four flights involved in the attacks.
An additional 125 people died in the Pentagon.
Approximately three times as many men died as women.
A total of eight children, on two different flights, died.
Though there is no accurate measure of how many members of different religious denominations died, victims represented all of the world’s major religions and hailed from approximately 90 countries. [Gus bold]
More than 400 rescue workers died on 9/11. Among them were 343 firefighters and 60 police officers from New York City and the Port Authority.
Approximately 1,000 first responders have died since the attacks, many from cancer.
Following 9/11, there was an increase in hate crimes directed against Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim.
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Gus: whether Al Qaeda is (or was) an extreme religious arm of Wahhabism, or just a group of devotees who though America was the great satan has been debated. Of course atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens did comment about the non-existence of Christmas and the religious character of war, including terrorism as we see now with the development of ISIL. On the subject of religion, the American Atheists point most of the infringements by religions, no matter where or which, upon the constitution. One more case is the infringement of the constitution in Kentucky.

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AMERICAN ATHEISTS ET AL V. THE COMMONWEATH OF KENTUCKY

Resolution

On January 11, 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States sent a letter to Kentucky Attorney General Conway requesting that Kentucky file a response to American Atheists' petition for a writ of certiorari. On February 12, Attorney General Conway filed the State's response to American Atheists. On March 18, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it had declined to hear this case. President David Silverman said, "We disagree with the court's decision. Kentucky is putting a criminal penalty on a refusal to affirm to a god, and we maintain our stance that this law is unconstitutional. We are proud that we were able to raise awareness about this and we're sorry the Supreme Court has decided to sidestep the issue. The people of Kentucky deserve better."

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Saint Andeol says:August 16, 2012 at 2:08 pm

It seems like these atheists are becoming some horrible combination of hippies and evil businessmen from 80’s movies about summer camps. I’m getting so sick of righteousness.

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Stupid comment like the one by "Saint" Andeol do not add to the value of the breach of the American constitution — and make no sense either.

In Australia, some atheists fight (many can't be bothered) to stop religious teaching in public schools, which the Abbott government is deceitfully sponsoring to the tune of more than 400 millions dollars and gives nothing to secular ethic teaching, actually "banning" this by default.

I know, secularity is the bête noire of Rod Dreher:

Damian Thompson has been looking at the statistics, and brings the bad news to readers of the Spectator (paywalled):

"It’s often said that Britain’s church congregations are shrinking, but that doesn’t come close to expressing the scale of the disaster now facing Christianity in this country. Every ten years the census spells out the situation in detail: between 2001 and 2011 the number of Christians born in Britain fell by 5.3 million — about 10,000 a week. If that rate of decline continues, the mission of St Augustine to the English, together with that of the Irish saints to the Scots, will come to an end in 2067.

"That is the year in which the Christians who have inherited the faith of their British ancestors will become statistically invisible. Parish churches everywhere will have been adapted for secular use, demolished or abandoned.

"Our cathedral buildings will survive, but they won’t be true cathedrals because they will have no bishops. The Church of England is declining faster than other denominations; if it carries on shrinking at the rate suggested by the latest British Social Attitudes survey, Anglicanism will disappear from Britain in 2033. One day the last native-born Christian will die and that will be that."

There are no good signs. None. What’s the reason? Says Thompson: Secularization.

This secularisation is a major threat to Christianity and American exceptionalism. Dreher again:

As I said, time is running out — and Christians who believe in American exceptionalism on this front are whistling past the graveyard.

Gus: Yes we know... But now would be a good time to share ideas in developing a non-faith humanism that would embrace a better world, with less "exceptionalism", less hypocritical superiority and less destruction of the planet. A cleverer way to embrace life as it is.

Note: mischief at top by Gus. There is no Christ on the fallen girder... Gus is an atheist.

By Gus Leonisky at 12 Jun 2015 - 9:35pm
Gus Leonisky's blog
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the end of christianity?...

You go away to university and suddenly almost nobody believes what you do, or did. Your siblings move to different towns, so you won’t see them in church any more. Your laptop plugs you into any social network that takes your fancy. Even if you’re born again as an evangelical Christian, life pushes you from one congregation to another. Many Evangelicals get bored and turn into nones.

The mainstream churches can’t cope with this explosion of choice. Also, as you may have noticed, they’re led by middle–managers who are frightened of their own shadows. They run up the white flag long before the enemy comes down from the hills. I sometimes wonder why Polly Toynbee bothers to fulminate against religious education. A quick tour of ‘Catholic’ state schools, where doctrine has been supplanted by multi-faith jargon and the cult of Nelson Mandela, would reassure her that she has nothing to worry about.

The original picture of the girders...:

girders...

By Gus Leonisky at 12 Jun 2015 - 10:00pm
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the pope of disbelievers fights the pope of believers...

... The senator, in the company of friends and fellow disbelievers, handed out a page of 12 talking points for those confronted by evidence of climate change. He urged Heartland activists to go out and fight against what he called "the myth of global warming."

He stood by his claim that climate change was a hoax, he told reporters later, even though it is not. The pope could do little to change his mind, he said—although the Catholic leader's position on climate science certainly seemed to be a sensitive point for Inhofe.

"Everyone is going to ride the pope now. Isn't that wonderful," he said. "The pope ought to stay with his job, and we'll stay with ours."

A few moments later, Inhofe said: "I am not going to talk about the pope. Let him run his shop, and we'll run ours."

As for the suggestion that world leaders were beginning to move on climate change, Inhofe argued there would be no real follow-through, from the G7 or at the negotiations in Paris at the end of the year, which are aimed at reaching an international agreement to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

"They talked about it—very good," he said. "Now they say it is all going to come together in Paris, and I don't think it is."

In any event, Inhofe said Republicans were showing no indication that his party is ready to fall into line. "If you look at Republican candidates, they are all denying this stuff with the exception of Lindsey Graham," he said.

Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is considered a long shot for president, told an interviewer over the weekend that, if elected, "we're going to address climate change, CO2 emissions in a business-friendly way".

Back at the hotel full of deniers, Inhofe—after essentially telling the pope to butt out of his business—could not resist trespassing on that of the Vatican. Calling on those at the Heartland Institute to fan out and fight the Environmental Protection Agency rules for carbon pollution on power plants, due to be finalized this summer, and other environmental measures, he said: "If we do it as a team you will be doing the Lord's work, and he will eventually bless you for it. Amen."

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/06/climate-denial-pope-inhofe

There, there... One day after I promoted major environmental concerns about Barrow Island (turdy abbott does not like alternative energy...) Chevron tells us like it is, advertising its credentials on the BBC (Australian output) website. More than 300 environmental procedures to protect Barrow Island. The Gorgon Gas project itself is not so much to profit Australia but Chevron, so the little critters that apparently have been resettled on a "radioactive" island can sleep easy:

chevron

But the Pope telling us it's warming up? Really... Telling us that we should do something about global warming? Amen? Now, should American Christians "believe" in global warming? should they know about it by studying the hard scientific facts and figures? Or should they dismiss global warming like our "Catholic" Turdy Abbott does: "global warming is crap". End of discussion? Should American Christians burn a candle or two, to the god of oil and gas? Or should we like Perseus, behead the Gorgon Medusa and saved Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus. (Perseus was the son of the mortal Danaë and the god Zeus). So many questions and we have run out of time in 1996...

And what about those share markets... One day they are up because of "Greek debt optimism", one day they are down because of "Greek debt pessimism"... Roller coaster of cash caught in the optimism/pessimism Greek yoyo...

Meanwhile "Australia may have paid cash to smugglers to turn back their boats... A fourth international law being breached by the Aussie navy... It has breached the others so many times that we don't need to panic now... Our credibility and dignity has vanished a long time ago under Turdy and his crappy minions.

But ultimately, the planet is. See the Heartland Institute profile here: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/19279

By Gus Leonisky at 13 Jun 2015 - 7:36am
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the battle of the crucifixes...

...

Compared to that crowd [of stupid crazy popes] Henry VIII was a saint.

But more to the point: St. Henry’s break with Rome wasn’t theological at all. Great care was taken by the English church to ensure that apostolic succession was maintained; and no beliefs were changed: the Anglican and Roman creeds to this day are identical.

It is true that Anglicans and Romans do not currently recognize each others’ orders. St. Henry’s daughter Queen Elizabeth I declared in 1570 that Roman orders were deficient from an Anglican perspective. Not to be outdone, Pope Leo XIII responded almost immediately (326 years later) that Anglican orders were invalid. And that’s where the two denominations stand today.

Of course, the antics of the (so-called) Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, are enough to make anyone doubt the sanity of people who remain Episcopalians. Her denial that Jesus is the only way to salvation prompted the retired Bishop of South Carolina, The Rt. Rev. Dr. C. FitzSimons Allison, to say of her remarks: “It doesn’t measure up to heresy. She is trying to reduce Christianity to the blank space in the creed between the Virgin Mary and Pontius Pilate.”

But then the Roman Catholic Church has had its problems too: notably the recent, and well-publicized and rather expensive, pedophile scandal. Although it’s true that the Romans’ scandal involves only bad behavior, not basic belief, it is also true that bad behavior is the crux of my friends’ brief against Henry VIII.

In the 1950s, Episcopalians and Roman Catholics kept each other at arm’s length. It was not unusual for Episcopalians to avoid entering a Roman Catholic church. In boarding schools there were religious wars (fought with socks) between Roman Catholics and Protestants—though it was not always clear that the Protestants knew what they were fighting about. Jews were never involved—because there weren’t any.

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And some people call atheists crazy... or "utterly despicable"...

God (sorry I mean Gus) is an atheist...

And when Daniel Oliver says that : "Great care was taken by the English church to ensure that apostolic succession was maintained", one has to remember that after "Saint Henry" decreed his division, many Catholic churches were looted, destroyed and/or recycled...

By Gus Leonisky at 13 Jun 2015 - 2:13pm
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equal rights to worship potatoes...

What atheists, vegans, Hindus and Satanic cultists have in common lately is an eye for the statehouse grounds of Arkansas. The groups have separately proposed public displays of their own spiritual values in Little Rock now that the state government has approved a Ten Commandments memorial for the Capitol grounds.

Just as the officially approved memorial will tell people to honor “the LORD thy God,” so the monument proposed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation would counter-proclaim, “There are no gods.”

That is strong stuff — likely too strong — for a legislature that overwhelmingly approved the Ten Commandments monument last April to singularly honor “a philosophy of government held by many of the founders of this nation.” Critics immediately complained this was religiously inspired and pointed to the considerable mix of belief and disbelief among the Founding Fathers, from Deism to Thomas Jefferson’s definitive insistence that there should be “a wall of separation between church and state” in the Constitution.

The assorted proposals to honor other spiritual causes include one for a statue of Hanuman, a monkey-faced Hindu deity offered as an educational tool by the Universal Society of Hinduism; a bronze statue of the goat-headed, cloven-hoofed demon Baphomet proposed by the Satanic Temple; and a giant vegetable banner proposed by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Such a banner would honor “a value system that people of other religions or no religion can appreciate,” a P.E.T.A. spokesman told the Associated Press, echoing the plea for equal opportunity underlying the other proposals.

Gus actually worship female cockroaches... Read from top...

By Gus Leonisky at 3 Sep 2015 - 8:28pm
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the battle for your mind...

About MTD churches:

... the system is "moralistic" because it "is about inculcating a moralistic approach to life. It teaches that central to living a good and happy life is being a good, moral person."[5] The authors describe the system as being "about providing therapeutic benefits to its adherent" as opposed to being about things like "repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divine, of steadfastly saying one's prayers, of faithfully observing high holy days, of building character through suffering..."[6] and further as "belief in a particular kind of God: one who exists, created the world, and defines our general moral order, but not one who is particularly personally involved in one's affairs—especially affairs in which one would prefer not to have God involved."[7]

The remoteness of God in this kind of theism explains the choice of the term "Deism", even though "the Deism here is revised from its classical eighteenth-century version by the therapeutic qualifier, making the distant God selectively available for taking care of needs." It views God as "something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he's always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process."[8]

The authors believe that "a significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but has rather substantially morphed into Christianity's misbegotten stepcousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."[9]

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Some Christians are pissed off:

Note well the reader’s expectation that the worst will come not from lifelong atheists, but from embittered ex-Christians and those who consider themselves Christians, but who have been assimilated into MTD churches.

As I joke in the article above:

Gus actually worships female cockroaches... Read from top... (I don't worship female cockroaches really — but you can see a picture of one, there: nature is fascinating...)

See picture at top and compare with that of Dreher article: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/institutionalizing-anti-christianity/

By Gus Leonisky at 8 Jan 2016 - 6:20am
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loopy american justice...

A US judge ordered Iran to pay over $10 billion in damages to families of victims who died on September 11, 2001 – even though there is no evidence of Tehran’s direct connection to the attack. The same judge earlier cleared Saudi Arabia from culpability.

The default judgement was issued by US District Judge George Daniels in New York on Wednesday. Under the ruling, Tehran was ordered to pay $7.5 billion to 9/11 victims’ families, including $2 million to each victim’s estate for pain and suffering, and another $6.88 million in punitive damages. Insurers who paid for property damage and claimed their businesses were interrupted were awarded an additional $3 billion in the ruling.

The ruling is noteworthy particularly since none of the 19 hijackers on September 11 were Iranian citizens. Fifteen were citizens of Saudi Arabia, while two were from the United Arab Emirates, and one each from Egypt and Lebanon.

Saudi Arabia was legally cleared from paying billions in damages to families of 9/11 victims last year, after Judge Daniels dismissed claims that the country provided material support to the terrorists and ruled that Riyadh had sovereign immunity. Saudi attorneys argued in court that there was no evidence directly linking the country to 9/11.

In response to the latest ruling, Hossein Sheikholeslam, a senior aide to Iran’s parliamentary speaker, called the decision “absurd and ridiculous.”

“I never heard about this ruling and I’m very much surprised because the judge had no reason whatsoever to issue such a ruling… Iran never took part in any court hearings related to the events of September 11, 2001,” he told Sputnik. “Even if such an absurd and ridiculous decision has been made, the charges simply hold no water because Iran has never been mentioned at any stage of the investigation and the trials that followed.”

https://www.rt.com/usa/335174-iran-damages-september-911-victims/

See image and read from top...

By Gus Leonisky at 11 Mar 2016 - 9:11am
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lamenting the loss of beliefs...

According to Genesis 1, in four days, God made the heavens, the earth and all the vegetation upon it. But four days after Anthony Scaramucci’s filthy tirade went public, Team Trump’s evangelical all-stars — pastors and prominent laity who hustle noisily around the Oval Office trying to find an amen corner — still had not figured out what to say.

Fortunately, the White House relieved them of that onerous task by firing Mr. Scaramucci — not, please note, on the president’s initiative, but rather at the request of John Kelly, the new chief of staff. Meanwhile, the Christian Broadcasting Network ran a puff piece proclaiming that a “spiritual awakening is underway at the White House,” thanks to a Bible study with what “has been called the most evangelical cabinet in history.” That ought to still any skepticism emerging among the true believers for a while.

Is there anything Donald Trump can do to alienate evangelicals and other conservative Christians who support him? By now, it’s hard to think of what that might be. These are people who would never let men with the morals and the mouths of Mr. Trump and Mr. Scaramucci date their own daughters. And yet, Team Trump has no more slavishly loyal constituency.

This is not only wrong, but tragically so. The most pressing problem Christianity faces is not in politics. It’s in parishes. It’s with the pastors. Most of all, it’s among an increasingly faithless people.

The truth is, Christianity is declining in the United States. As a theologically conservative believer, I take no pleasure in saying that. In fact, the waning of Christianity will be not only a catastrophe for the church but also a calamity for civil society in ways secular Americans do not appreciate.

poor misunderstood rod...

Rod Dreher defends his Benedict Option against papalish attack:

Money quote:

“The so-called Benedict Option, as Rod Dreher describes the withdrawal of the Church into enclaves, would be an error, just as it would be an error to be nostalgic for bygone times by preparing harsh responses today.”

This is entirely dishonest. The most charitable spin on it is that the man has clearly not read my book. As I clearly explain in the text, I call for a “strategic withdrawal,” which is to say, withdrawing for the sake of strengthening our roots and our witness, so that when we go out into the world, as we must, we will do so as real Christians. Excerpts from The Benedict Option:

"What these orthodox Christians are doing now are the seeds of what I call the Benedict Option, a strategy that draws on the authority of Scripture and the wisdom of the ancient church to embrace “exile in place” and form a vibrant counterculture. Recognizing the toxins of modern secularism, as well as the fragmentation caused by relativism, Benedict Option Christians look to Scripture and to Benedict’s Rule for ways to cultivate practices and communities. Rather than panicking or remaining complacent, they recognize that the new order is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be lived with. It will be those who learn how to endure with faith and creativity, to deepen their own prayer lives and adopting practices, focusing on families and communities instead of on partisan politics, and building churches, schools, and other institutions within which the orthodox Christian faith, can survive and prosper through the flood."

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Gus comments:

The "strategic withdrawal" of the Benedict Option is not akin to coitus withdrawal... It's kind of delusional. It's creating a society within the greater society and rather than grow it's likely to shrink like this band of Australian Christians who do not vote, live in an enclave and try to interfere with politics by direct lines to the Catholic Premiers. While Opus Dei is more on the surface with aggressive direct connections, this sect of Christian is isolated and should they try to come to the surface, they will be ridiculed and shown as having passed their used-by-date.

But I can see some parallel with "the Benedict Option" and most Muslim communities that are quite hermetic — not in the sense based upon writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus but in the sense of being made airtight by fusion or sealing, that is to say "very tight-knit" with little interaction with the "greater society" and the reality teaching of sciences. Sciences is the greater threat to religions because sciences explain reality which religions have misunderstood for millennium...

So one can withdraw and do an Amish... but what's the point? Eventually horses will be replaced by cars and those will be replaced by electric bicycles... Medical advances will be longed for. Sure the concept is more in the mind... One thing in favour of the withdrawal is self-satisfying smugness of not participating in the destruction of the world, though it won't bring any more sanity to the loonies on the surface, should the withdrawees come back and "help" sort out the mess...

It is in the human nature to be psycho... The withdrawal option is a bit psycho too... Read from top...

By Gus Leonisky at 12 Oct 2017 - 7:24am
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poor rod...

BATON ROUGE — Rod Dreher’s life is an open book. Several, actually. “The Little Way of Ruthie Leming,” about his late sister. “How Dante Can Save Your Life,” about his love of the Italian poet. His latest, “The Benedict Option,” is a call to beleaguered Christians to divorce themselves from the increasingly secular American mainstream.

But really, every work by this conservative Christian writer is a literary act of confession, a quest for purpose and a purge of disillusionment. An influential and prolific blogger for the American Conservative — he averages 1.3 million monthly page views on his blog — Dreher is credited with helping introduce J.D. Vance of “Hillbilly Elegy” to a larger audience. He founded the “crunchy con” ideology — another book, back in 2006 — wedding cultural and moral conservatism with an organic, co-op-and-Birkenstock lifestyle.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/rod-dreher-is-the-combative-oversharing-blogger-

All the readers of this site would know by now what I think of Rod Dreher. I see him as a nice bloke, sometimes with good ideas, but completely deluded with religious hubris. Read from top... Lucky not all writers at The American Conservative are not so religiously forceful...

And please read my comments on Dante, where I explain how he was one of the most influential SATIRIST...

By Gus Leonisky at 30 Oct 2017 - 10:15am
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hallo hallo, godot?

In his newest book, The Case for Miracles, Strobel tackles whether God still performs miracles and if he's available to intervene in our lives today. After commissioning research on American attitudes about miracles, Strobel took to the road to interview leading authorities — skeptics and believers alike. The result is a comprehensive examination that helps readers sort through numerous perspectives about both miraculous events in scripture and contemporary claims of healings and dreams.

https://www.christianpost.com/news/are-americans-hindering-miracles-221917/

The only miracle left for god to perform is to help us invent a good enough Artificial Intelligence that will infuse peace in all of us... Pigs will fly for this hand of god, but we might be able to do it on our own...

By Gus Leonisky at 24 Mar 2018 - 11:12am
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a creation-event...

CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS is a work of investigative history. It documents and describes Christianity’s creation-event, which occurred in the year 49 or 50, in Antioch (present-day Antakya, Turkey), 20 years after Jesus had been crucified in Jerusalem for sedition against Roman rule. At this event, Paul broke away from the Jewish sect that Jesus had begun, and he took with him the majority of this new Jewish sect’s members; he convinced these people that Jesus had been a god, and that the way to win eternal salvation in heaven is to worship him as such. On this precise occasion, Paul explicitly introduced, for the first time anywhere, the duality of the previously unitary Jewish God, a duality consisting of the Father and the Son; and he implicitly introduced also the third element of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost.

This book also explains and documents the tortuous 14-year-long conflict Paul had had with this sect’s leader, Jesus’s brother James, a conflict which caused Paul, in about the year 50, to perpetrate his coup d’état against James, and to start his own new religion: Christianity.

Then, this historical probe documents that the four canonical Gospel accounts of the words and actions of “Jesus” were written decades after Jesus, by followers of Paul, not by followers of Jesus; and that these writings placed into the mouth of “Jesus” the agenda of Paul. Paul thus became, via his followers, Christ’s ventriloquist.

A work such as this can be documented and produced only now, after the development (during the past 70 years) of modern legal/forensic methodology. Previously, the only available methods, which scholars have used, simply assumed the honesty-of-intent of all classical documents, especially of canonical religious ones, such as Paul’s epistles, and the Four Gospels. Only now is it finally possible to penetrate deeper than that, to reach the writer’s intent, and not merely his assertions, and to identify when this intent is to deceive instead of to inform. Whereas scholars have been able to discuss only the truth or falsity of particular canonical statements, it is now possible to discuss also the honesty or deceptiveness of individual statements. This opens up an unprecedented new research tool for historians, and CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS is the first work to use these new methods to reconstruct, on this legal/forensic basis, not just how crimes took place, but how and why major historical events (criminal or not), such as the event that started Christianity, actually occurred.

The author explains: “What I am doing in this work is to reconstruct from the New Testament the crucial events that produced it, without assuming whether what the NT says in any given passage is necessarily true or even honest. Instead of treating the NT as a work that ‘reports history,’ the NT is treated as a work whose history is itself being investigated and reported. Its origin goes back to this coup d’état that Paul perpetrated in Antioch in the year 49 or 50 against Jesus’s brother James in Jerusalem, whom Jesus in Jerusalem had appointed in the year 30 as his successor to lead the Jewish sect that Jesus had started. The Gospel accounts of ‘Jesus’ reflected Paul’s coup d’état – not actually Jesus, who would be appalled at the Christian concept of ‘Christ.’ That concept was radically different from the Jewish concept of the messiah, and Paul knew this when he created it.”

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Q1H4EG

Read from top.

By Gus Leonisky at 25 Apr 2018 - 7:23am
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the cross inverted...

Article by

His Grace Anba Suriel is the Bishop of the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of Melbourne.

As part of Hobart's annual winter festival, Dark Mofo has installed a public display of several large inverted red crosses around Hobart's waterfront.

This act has come as an offensive shock to millions of Christians around Australia. For more than a millennium, inverted crosses have been used by Satanic worship groups as an anti-Christian symbol in mockery of Jesus Christ.

From the early centuries of Christianity, Christians were not able to display the cross publically as it could have led to persecution. Other symbols where more commonly used such as peacocks, doves and particularly fish - which, in Greek, forms an acronym for "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour."

It was only after the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity in the fourth century that the cross was promoted as a Christian symbol.

While many churches, particularly throughout the West, enjoyed a peaceful existence during the middle ages, the Christian Copts in Egypt, being the native descendants of the Ancient Egyptians, were soon the minority in their native land following the Arab invasion of Egypt in the seventh century. The central Christian symbol of the cross could no longer be freely displayed publicly; instead, Christians were forced to wear blue or black clothing and to wear heavy metal crosses that caused severe bruising, causing the Copts to be referred to as "blue-necks."

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2018/06/08/4854255.htm

Before the cross, a fish symbol was often used... But contrarily to what the good Copt Bishop is saying, by end of the middle ages, the churches DID NOT enjoyed a peaceful existence. The unrest had started well during the 7th century, but the Catholic Church used its armies, and those of the ruler of the times (kings, emperors) to quash "alternative Christian faiths". By the 12th century, the battles were massive and by the end of the 100 year war, during the 16th century, between the Catholics and the Protestants, about 30 million people had been killed in Europe. And not mention the "inquisitions"...

Read from top.

chuffed...

From Rod Dreher

Today is the Feast Day of St. Benedict of Nursia in the Orthodox Church — which is to say, my name day. Three years ago, it was a happy coincidence — though I call it God’s winking at me — when my publisher released The Benedict Option on this day. Sentinel is a secular publisher; they had no idea that March 14 is St. Benedict’s feast day. But it is, so today is the third birthday of The Benedict Option too.

What a surprising and gratifying three years it has been for me. The book has sold over 70,000 copies in the US, and has been published in eleven languages. It is currently being translated into Hungarian, which will be the twelfth. It inspired at least one other book, Leah Libresco Sargeant’s wonderful, practical Building The Benedict Option. I have had the opportunity to speak to many people, both in the US and Europe, about the book and its message. I know of at least one lay Christian community, the Cascina San Benedetto in the countryside near Milan, founded by readers of the book.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/three-years-of-the-benedict-option/

Yes, “Ben" Rod Dreher is a commercial Christian success… This does not mean he is correct or that his ideas are universal. Many people have written “successful" books, including Mein Kampf (nearly 10 million books sold) without being correct with their ideas. Rod has created his niche market and good luck to him. He can be pleased with himself and pat himself on the back. But despite crossing borders and lingos, his book is not going viral, say like a coronavirus… The infection of the Benedict Option is limited, because the religious option is deceitful, infantile and illusionistic — and only a few of the captured audiences will investigate how to batten the hatches alla Rod, to let the storm of secularity pass over… in another 5 million years, perhaps...

Another religious nutcase tells us:
…

In 1527, plague struck Wittenberg — the university town where Luther lived — prompting classes to be moved to an unaffected town. Yet Luther refused to leave. He chose instead to venture his life on caring for the sick and dying and transformed his home into a makeshift hospital. So when Luther gave advice, he knew the consequences and the fear attending them.

For Luther, our loving God hiddenly but surely works for our good even in the places we do not expect, including amid the evil of deadly epidemics. The fear of bodily illness and death should drive us to pray and to care for our souls, remembering that this world is not our lasting home. An epidemic is one of many evils that beset us, and we have to take that seriously; but the greater evil is the evil within (Matthew 10:28, Luke 12:4). Therefore, responding to an epidemic or any other crisis must involve turning from our sins — chief of which is the selfish love that gives thought first to self, and only secondly, if we can assure our own health and safety, to others.

Luther regarded the epidemic as a temptation that tests and proves our faith and love: “our faith in that we may see and experience how we should act toward God; our love in that we may recognise how we should act toward our neighbour.” Through faith in God and out of love for neighbour, Christians must think first how to contribute to the physical and spiritual care of those who are vulnerable, self-isolated, sick, or dying. Only then did Luther permit Christians to make private decisions about whether to flee. In an era without widespread institutionalised healthcare, Luther wrote that Christians are under a divine obligation to fill the gap: “We must give hospital care and be nurses for one another in any extremity or risk the loss of salvation and the grace of God.”

With lives at risk, Luther encourages Christians to find solace in the promises of God. Blah blah blah...

Dr Mirjam Schilling is a virologist at the University of Oxford and a DPhil student in theology (Science and Religion) studying the theological aspects of viruses under Alister McGrath. Joel Gamble is an MD student at the University of Toronto and postgraduate student in theology (Science and Religion) at the University of Oxford researching the philosophy and historical theology of medicine. Nathan Gamble, MD MA, is a bioethicist and internal medicine resident at the University of Alberta, and he is studying Clinical Trials at the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/coronavirus-a-healthy-christian-response-to-covid-19/12063556

My apologies for calling Dr Mirjam Schilling, virologist, a nutcase… But mixing sciences and religion is idiotic. We go through this everyday on this site. Science and religion don’t mix…

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34988
http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31757
http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/26402
http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/36134

Meanwhile, it does not take long to discover that Luther was a sexist racist compassion-selective prick. He only survived in people’s mind for so long, because the other side was worse — abusing the church collection plates and, instead of enriching the spirit, they built expensive decorations that had no relation to the Jesus message of poverty… They also sold "heaven for cash” and some were having sex with minors. Thus started some ugly wars of religion where god, always vengeful, became an inspiration for killings, as turned into a bloody sword...

Epidemics, earthquakes and tornadoes are not tests from god. Our glorious responses prove nothing else but we need to protect each others from the vagaries of nature. And this is why our response to global warming is in general pathetic… While in most pandemics, about 70 per cent of a population will get hit and 2 to 4 per cent will directly die from the infection, in regard to global warming, 100 per cent of us and the rest of the planet is likely to suffer far more incrementally.

But that’s life… It seems that from day one, we’ve been reactive to trauma, rather try to avoid it beforehand. I suppose it’s natural… The coronavirus pandemic is being treated two paces behind what should be done and we, the cartoonists, don’t help… We have to attack the people in power who act like dorks and play a game of psychopathic throne. Here it’s possible that some Benedict Optioners will start digging, a few of them will be prepping and go to the shops to buy a gun and some ammos, while others will stay up with a blank mind...

By Gus Leonisky at 18 Mar 2020 - 12:08pm
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god saves cross…….

A fire that broke out Friday burned down a historic Texas church and consumed nearly everything but a wooden cross, which a pastor sees as a sign that God is watching over his congregation as they begin rebuilding.

https://www.christianpost.com/news/a-sign-from-the-lord-wooden-cross-survives-texas-church-fire.html

READ FROM TOP.

NO COMMENT: GUS LEONISKY IS A RABID ATHEIST.....

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW...................

By Gus Leonisky at 22 Jun 2022 - 6:57pm
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