tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57743172024-03-18T20:47:28.783-05:00The Fifth ColumnOrthodox Catholic commentary on current events.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1254125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-53394837404542141882024-03-17T16:41:00.004-05:002024-03-17T16:41:41.253-05:00Prenups and Catholics<h3> <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@lewis/video/7314823472067202347?lang=en" target="_blank">Why Women Should Want a Prenup</a></h3><h3><div style="font-size: medium; font-weight: 400;"><div>The linked TikTok above makes a hell of a good point.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now, according to Catholic doctrine, it is a sin, and renders a marriage invalid, for you and your prospective spouse to write a prenup. </div><div><br /></div><div>But it's not like you don't end up with a prenup. You always have a prenup. If you don't write it, then the government writes it. </div><div><br /></div><div>Now, you can argue that since you and your fiancee didn't write it, it isn't your fault that this situation exists. OK. But you cannot know you are even entering into a marriage. Even if you have correct intent, etc., your intended may not.</div><div><br /></div><div>You know you're receiving absolution, you know you're receiving the Eucharist, you know you are being confirmed, baptized, anointing of the sick, ordained.</div><div><br /></div><div>But you never really know if you're getting married, nor do you know, once through the ceremony, if you are, in fact, married. </div></div></h3>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-52326546566848045572024-03-17T15:33:00.006-05:002024-03-17T16:16:35.398-05:00Bible Lengths<h3 style="text-align: left;"><b>Jewish version</b></h3><p>The Hebrew Bible is generally considered to consist of 24 books, but this number is somewhat arbitrary, as (for example) it regards 12 separate books of minor prophets as a single book. The traditional rabbinic count of 24 books appears in the Talmud and numerous works of midrash</p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_Bible">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_Bible</a></p><p>But even here, it depends on whether you accept the corrupted Masoretic text (written in Assyrian Hebrew) or the Septuagint (written in Greek). The Masoretic text is corrupted and less complete than the Septuagint. Also, the Masoretic isn't written in the same Hebrew that Moses used. The original Old Testament scriptures were written in Paleo-Hebrew, a text closely related to the ancient Phoenecian writing system. The Masoretic Text, on the other hand, is written with an alphabet which was borrowed from Assyria (Persia) around the 6th-7th century B.C., and is almost 1000 years newer than the form of writing used by Moses, David, and most of the Old Testament authors. </p><p><a href="https://russian-faith.com/explaining-orthodoxy/russian-bibles-are-totally-different-american-ones-heres-why-n1470">https://russian-faith.com/explaining-orthodoxy/russian-bibles-are-totally-different-american-ones-heres-why-n1470</a></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b>Luther's version</b></h3><p>Now, Luther built his Old Testament on the corrupted Masoretic text. Luther also considered Hebrews, James, Jude, and the Revelation to be "disputed books", which he included in his translation but placed separately at the end in his New Testament published in 1522. His translation also places what Catholics view as the deuterocanonical books in an intertestamental section, between the Old Testament and New Testament, terming these as Apocrypha. The books of the Apocrypha, in the Lutheran tradition, are non-canonical, but "worthy of reverence." The Luther Bible is widely used by Anabaptist Christians, such as the Amish. </p><p>In 1596 Jacob Lucius published a Bible at Hamburg which labeled as Apocrypha Luther's four Antilegomena: Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation; Lucius explained this category of "Apocrypha" as "That is, books that are not held equal to the other holy Scripture". David Wolder, the pastor of Hamburg's Church of St. Peter, published in the same year a triglot Bible which labeled those books as "non canonical". J. Vogt published a Bible at Goslar in 1614 similar to Lucius'. In Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus published in 1618 the Gustavus Adolphus Bible with those four books labeled as "Apocr(yphal) New Testament."</p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther%27s_canon" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther%27s_canon</a></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b>Other Protestant versions</b></h3><p>The non-Lutheran Protestant versions settled on 66 books.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b>Catholic version</b></h3><p>Catholic Bible has 73 books (if Lamentations is separate from Jeremiah).</p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Bible">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Bible</a></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b>Coptic version</b></h3><p>The Coptic Bible has 74 books, it includes the Prayer of Manasseh</p><p><a href="https://copticchurch.online/en/bible-books/">https://copticchurch.online/en/bible-books/</a></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b>Slavic Orthodox version</b></h3><p>The Slavic Bible has in excess of 70 books, but is based on the corrupted Masoretic text.</p><p><a href="https://russian-faith.com/explaining-orthodoxy/russian-bibles-are-totally-different-american-ones-heres-why-n1470">https://russian-faith.com/explaining-orthodoxy/russian-bibles-are-totally-different-american-ones-heres-why-n1470</a></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b>Greek Orthodox version</b></h3><p>The Greek Orthodox Bible—without an official number—is somewhat larger, with somewhere between 75 and 79 books.</p><p><a href="https://earlychristiantexts.com/how-many-books-in-the-bible/">https://earlychristiantexts.com/how-many-books-in-the-bible/</a></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b>Ethiopian Christian version</b></h3><p>The Ethiopian Bible, which is perhaps the oldest Christian Bible, includes somewhere between 81 to 84 books, depending on different factors.</p><p><a href="https://earlychristiantexts.com/how-many-books-in-the-bible/">https://earlychristiantexts.com/how-many-books-in-the-bible/</a></p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Tewahedo_biblical_canon">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Tewahedo_biblical_canon</a></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-63493265736429579322024-03-13T11:55:00.006-05:002024-03-13T11:55:50.288-05:00Internet Makes Teens Mature Faster<p>Interesting stats here. <a href="https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/westrick-payne-lin-age-variation-divorce-rate-1990-2021-fp-23-16.html" target="_blank">According to this article</a>, the divorce rate among teen couples has dropped to match that of adults. It's almost as if the Internet and smart phones makes teens mature faster.</p><div>2021 divorce rate for 15-25 was 19.7</div><div>2021 divorce rate for 25-34 was 19.4 </div><div>2021 divorce rate for 35-44 was 18.1</div><div><br /></div><div>Women are now LESS LIKELY to get divorced between 15 and 24 then they are between 25 and 44.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.bgsu.edu/content/dam/BGSU/college-of-arts-and-sciences/NCFMR/images/family-profiles/fp-23-16-fig1.png/jcr:content/renditions/kraken-medium.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="477" data-original-width="800" height="477" src="https://www.bgsu.edu/content/dam/BGSU/college-of-arts-and-sciences/NCFMR/images/family-profiles/fp-23-16-fig1.png/jcr:content/renditions/kraken-medium.png" width="800" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>The divorce rate for teenagers is now indistinguishable from that between 30-year olds. Either teenagers are maturing faster, are adults are becoming less mature.</div><div><br /></div><div>Given that divorce rates dropped, it seems that smart phones and the Internet might be making teens <b><i>MATURE FASTER. </i></b></div><div><br /></div><div>That is counter-intuitive.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-40775205230145375882024-02-03T10:52:00.001-06:002024-02-03T10:52:17.837-06:00John Vianney, the Cure d'Ars<p></p><blockquote><p> "In 1809, though still a student, <a href="https://mycatholic.life/saints/saints-of-the-liturgical-year/august-4-saint-jean-vianney-the-cur-of-ars-priest/" target="_blank">John Vianney was recruited in the draft</a>. However, because he failed to join his detachment in Renaison, John was considered a deserter. Finding refuge in a small village known as Les Robins, John Vianney settled there for a couple of years. Although this village was obscured by the forest, the gendarmes still arrived to meticulously search for deserters. John Vianney, who had only seconds to hide, dove into the hayloft, where he felt himself sweating and could hardly breathe..."</p><p>... <a href="https://www.thedivinemercy.org/articles/cur%C3%A9-ars-and-mercy" target="_blank">Since he had deserted</a>, he had to be replaced in the Napoleonic armies. His brother François was drafted into the army in his place, went to the front to Phalsbourg (Moselle today the borders of Alsace) and died in the fighting. "</p></blockquote><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-14730417716303318152024-01-07T14:27:00.009-06:002024-01-07T17:15:19.185-06:00Salvation Forbidden to Latin Rite<p><span face="var(--tr-font-regular)" style="color: #404040;"></span></p><p>So, now <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/senior-vatican-official-makes-case-married-priesthood-2024-01-07/" target="_blank">a senior Vatican official</a> is making the case for a married priesthood:</p><blockquote><p><span face="var(--tr-font-regular)" style="color: #404040;">Priests are allowed to marry in the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church as well as in the Orthodox, Protestant and Anglican Churches.</span></p><p class="text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__small__1kGq2 body__full_width__ekUdw body__small_body__2vQyf article-body__paragraph__2-BtD" data-testid="paragraph-10" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #404040; font-family: var(--tr-font-regular); line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 12px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;">Opponents of a married priesthood say celibacy allows a priest to dedicate himself entirely to the Church.</p><p class="text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__small__1kGq2 body__full_width__ekUdw body__small_body__2vQyf article-body__paragraph__2-BtD" data-testid="paragraph-11" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #404040; font-family: var(--tr-font-regular); line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 12px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;">In 2021, the pope <a class="text__text__1FZLe text__inherit-color__3208F text__inherit-font__1Y8w3 text__inherit-size__1DZJi link__underline_default__2prE_" data-testid="Link" href="n2ab7x4:0" referrerpolicy="no-referrer-when-downgrade" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-transform: inherit;" target="_blank">dismissed</a> a proposal to allow some elderly married men to be ordained in remote areas in the Amazon where in some places the faithful saw a priest as little as once a year.</p><p class="text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__small__1kGq2 body__full_width__ekUdw body__small_body__2vQyf article-body__paragraph__2-BtD" data-testid="paragraph-11" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #404040; font-family: var(--tr-font-regular); line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 12px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;"></p></blockquote><p class="text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__small__1kGq2 body__full_width__ekUdw body__small_body__2vQyf article-body__paragraph__2-BtD" data-testid="paragraph-11" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #404040; font-family: var(--tr-font-regular); line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 12px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;">You know, if it was REALLY the case that the sacraments are the centerpiece of Christian life, that the sacraments are essential for salvation, or anything like that, then this would be a no-brainer. Of course, you would allow the salvational needs of lay people to trump a mere discipline of the Church, a discipline that has been permitted in the past, and is currently established otherwise within various other liturgical-sister organizations. In fact, the discipline of married priests is <a href="https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/vatican-lifts-ban-married-priests-eastern-catholics-diaspora" target="_blank">even permitted</a> within the Catholic Church in <a href="https://www.ncregister.com/news/married-man-s-ordination-reveals-unusual-prohibition-on-eastern-catholics" target="_blank">20 of the 21 rites of the Church.</a></p><p class="text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__small__1kGq2 body__full_width__ekUdw body__small_body__2vQyf article-body__paragraph__2-BtD" data-testid="paragraph-11" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #404040; font-family: var(--tr-font-regular); line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 12px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;">So, if you cared about the salvation of people in the Amazon, or lay people anywhere, for that matter, the discipline would have to be relaxed in order to help assure the salvation of the laity who rely on the priesthood as the sole officially recognized conduit of saving grace, i.e., sacramental grace. Without this discipline relaxation, the lay faithful are cut off from the sacrament of the Eucharist, the "source and summit" of Catholic faith.</p><p class="text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__small__1kGq2 body__full_width__ekUdw body__small_body__2vQyf article-body__paragraph__2-BtD" data-testid="paragraph-11" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #404040; font-family: var(--tr-font-regular); line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 12px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;">But, that's not how Pope Francis or previous popes see it. The laity can literally go to hell, and the Church still won't relax a mere DISCIPLINE. Keep in mind, the Church is happy to bless homosexual persons who are engaged in an intrinsically evil relationship, but she won't grant the actual saving grace of liturgical sacraments to Latin-rite laity if those sacraments need to come to said laity through a married priesthood. Other rites can be saved by the sacramental action of married priests, but Latin-rite laity can literally go to hell unshriven due to lack of priests to absolve in confession or confect Anointing of the Sick. </p><p class="text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__small__1kGq2 body__full_width__ekUdw body__small_body__2vQyf article-body__paragraph__2-BtD" data-testid="paragraph-11" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #404040; font-family: var(--tr-font-regular); line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 12px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;">It is increasingly hard to see how any of this makes sense. </p><p class="text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__small__1kGq2 body__full_width__ekUdw body__small_body__2vQyf article-body__paragraph__2-BtD" data-testid="paragraph-11" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #404040; font-family: var(--tr-font-regular); line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 12px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;">Now, I will readily grant that once celibacy is no longer required in the Latin Rite, then celibacy will be gone FOREVER. It will never come back. </p><p class="text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__small__1kGq2 body__full_width__ekUdw body__small_body__2vQyf article-body__paragraph__2-BtD" data-testid="paragraph-11" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #404040; font-family: var(--tr-font-regular); line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 12px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://liturgyguy.com/2013/10/13/big-families-big-vocations/" target="_blank">Vocations come from large families</a>. Large families come from poor families with <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK233807/" target="_blank">high infant mortality</a> rates. The TFR for all first-world countries is below 2.1 children per woman. The TFR for sub-Saharan Africa is still well above that, but over the course of the next century, those countries will leave poverty behind. As poverty drops, education increases and more children survive into their teen and adult years. As they do, the TFR of sub-Saharan countries will drop to that of first-world countries. As family sizes drop, ordinations will drop. Every country in the world will soon occupy the same space the remote Amazonian tribes live - far from priests, far from sacraments, far from the Mass, no way to remedy any of it. </p><p class="text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__small__1kGq2 body__full_width__ekUdw body__small_body__2vQyf article-body__paragraph__2-BtD" data-testid="paragraph-11" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #404040; font-family: var(--tr-font-regular); line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 12px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;">Without high TFR there simply won't be any ordinations to speak of, and that spells the end of the Church or at least the end of the celibate priesthood. Allowing married priests is a sea change that cannot be undone or walked back. Given that a married priesthood won't have any effect on TFR, it will only incrementally extend the life of the Church.</p><p class="text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__small__1kGq2 body__full_width__ekUdw body__small_body__2vQyf article-body__paragraph__2-BtD" data-testid="paragraph-11" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #404040; font-family: var(--tr-font-regular); line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 12px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;">But, which does the Church value more? </p><p class="text__text__1FZLe text__dark-grey__3Ml43 text__regular__2N1Xr text__small__1kGq2 body__full_width__ekUdw body__small_body__2vQyf article-body__paragraph__2-BtD" data-testid="paragraph-11" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: #404040; font-family: var(--tr-font-regular); line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 12px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;">The discipline or the sacraments? </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-85166198566403379802023-12-19T11:21:00.005-06:002023-12-31T11:42:06.150-06:00Fiducia Supplicans<p></p><blockquote> <span style="background-color: white; color: #303030; font-family: "Georgia Pro", Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; font-size: 18px;">"Fiducia supplicans, issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and approved by Pope Francis, has reaffirmed that the Church does not have the power to impart a liturgical blessing on irregular or same-sex couples or to bless their union," <a href="https://www.telegram.com/story/news/local/2023/12/18/worcester-diocese-responds-to-pope-francis-on-same-sex-blessings/71960576007/" target="_blank">McManus said</a>. "It can, however, offer a type of blessing that can be conferred on anyone to invoke God’s help and mercy in their lives if the individuals seek to be guided by a greater understanding of God’s plan for love and truth. These blessings are offered for the people themselves, not their union."</span></blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #303030; font-family: "Georgia Pro", Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; font-size: 18px;">Of course, the problem for the good bishop, for the Pope, and for the Church as a whole, is precisely what <a href="https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2023/12/18/231218b.html" target="_blank">Fiducia Supplicans</a> says:</span><div><span style="color: #303030; font-family: Georgia Pro, Georgia, Droid Serif, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;"></span></span><blockquote><span style="color: #303030; font-family: Georgia Pro, Georgia, Droid Serif, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">25. ... Thus, when people ask for a blessing, an exhaustive moral analysis should not be placed as a precondition for conferring it. For, those seeking a blessing should not be required to have prior moral perfection.</span></span></blockquote><span style="color: #303030; font-family: Georgia Pro, Georgia, Droid Serif, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">Well, who can seek these blessings? Well, the preface to the document explains: </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #303030; font-family: "Georgia Pro", Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; font-size: 18px;"><blockquote>It is precisely in this context that one can understand the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage.</blockquote></span></div><div><span style="color: #303030; font-family: "Georgia Pro", Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; font-size: 18px;">Notice blessings are not restricted to individuals. The document explicitly specifices that blessings may be bestowed upon "same-sex couples." Now, homosexual inclination is intrinsically disordered, while homosexual activity itself is intrinsically<span style="background-color: white;"> evil. What stops a priest from blessing polygamy? Sure, the document may specify "couples", but certainly any two-person combination of a polygamous relationship would constitute a couple. </span></span></div><div><span style="color: #303030; font-family: "Georgia Pro", Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="color: #303030; font-family: "Georgia Pro", Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="background-color: white;">If we are now able to bless intrinsically evil situations, then can we ask for a blessing on our abortifacient pills? Can a woman and her abortionist ask for a blessing before they enter the abattoir to slaughter a child? In principle, there is no clear reason why such blessings couldn't be delivered, as we are not supposed to bother our sweet little heads with "an exhaustive moral analysis."</span></span></div><div><span style="color: #303030; font-family: "Georgia Pro", Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="color: #303030; font-family: "Georgia Pro", Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="background-color: white;">And, to be fair, this nonsense did not start with Pope Francis. Read this passage from FS...</span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #303030; font-family: "Georgia Pro", Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; font-size: 18px;"><blockquote>40. ... Indeed, through these blessings that are given not through the ritual forms proper to the liturgy but as an expression of the Church’s maternal heart—similar to those that emanate from the core of popular piety—there is no intention to legitimize anything, but rather to open one’s life to God, to ask for his help to live better, and also to invoke the Holy Spirit so that the values of the Gospel may be lived with greater faithfulness.</blockquote></span></div><div><span style="color: #303030; font-family: "Georgia Pro", Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="background-color: white;">Then read what <a href="https://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/search?q=outrageous+nonsense" target="_blank">Pope Benedict had to say about the use of condoms</a> by heterosexual couples: </span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #303030; font-family: "Georgia Pro", Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; font-size: 18px;"><blockquote><a href="https://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2010/11/pope-and-condoms.html" target="_blank">"There may be justified individual cases</a>, for example when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be ... a first bit of responsibility, to re-develop the understanding that not everything is permitted and that one may not do everything one wishes," Benedict was quoted as saying.</blockquote></span></div><div><span style="color: #303030; font-family: "Georgia Pro", Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="background-color: white;">And the <a href="https://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2010/11/anyone-can-use-condom.html" target="_blank">Vatican spokesman doubled down</a>:</span></span></div><div><span><span style="background-color: white; color: #303030; font-family: Georgia Pro, Georgia, Droid Serif, serif;"><div style="font-size: 18px;"></div><blockquote style="font-size: 18px;"><div>"I personally asked the pope if there was a serious, important problem in the choice of the masculine over the feminine," [Vatican spokesman] Lombardi said. "He told me no. The problem is this ... It's the first step of taking responsibility, of taking into consideration the risk of the life of another with whom you have a relationship." [There is that insistence that condom use is a move towards objective good. Again.]</div><div><br /></div><div>"This is if you're a woman, a man, or a transsexual. We're at the same point. The point is it's a first step of taking responsibility, of avoiding passing a grave risk onto another," Lombardi said.</div></blockquote><p style="font-size: 18px;">Do you see the similarity between the concepts here? <a href="https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2023/12/18/231218b.html" style="background-color: transparent;" target="_blank">Fiducia Supplicans</a> merely re-iterates in 2023 what Pope Benedict privately told a reporter for an Ignatius Press book in 2010. And, to be fair, Pope Benedict's statement was merely a positive affirmation of the negative nonsense that emerged from JP II's TOB. In a series of audiences that were ostensibly about the human body and human sexuality, JP II managed to omit all discussion of children, family and suffering.</p><p style="font-size: 18px;"><a href="https://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-embarrassment-of-jpiis-tob.html" target="_blank">How on earth do you develop a theology of human sexuality</a> without even mentioning children or family? What kind of theological nonsense pretends to be a theology of the body, yet does not mention suffering? The Second Person of the Trinity took on human flesh, a human body, in order to suffer and die, yet you don't mention suffering or death in your Theology of the Body? SERIOUSLY? </p><p style="font-size: 18px;">John Paul II's TOB audiences were so atrocious that, once delivered, they are never again referenced by any Magisterial document. There is a straight line from JP II's silence, through Benedict's "moral" condom use to Francis' blessing of same-sex couples. The papacy has been building this line for the last fifty years.</p><p style="font-size: 18px;">So, don't be surprised to see a new liturgical rite within the next 18 to 24 months for the ordination of women deacons. It may differ from the male rite of ordination, but it is coming. Pope Francis made that clear when he started washing <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/03/28/175601237/in-ritual-pope-francis-washes-the-feet-of-young-inmates-women" target="_blank">women's feet on Holy Thursday in 2013</a>. </p><p style="font-size: 18px;"><a href="https://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2021/07/why-church-is-losing-relevance.html" target="_blank">As I've noted elsewhere</a>, the Catholic Faith was a superb faith for a subsistence-level society. But Catholic ideas are completely unable to adequately respond to a surplus-goods society. One of the hallmarks of the wealth the world is now experiencing is a change in the foundational meaning of human sexuality. In a subsistence-level society, procreation is the foundational meaning, but in a surplus-goods society, human sexuality becomes primarily about communication, not procreation. If the Church has no poor to minister to, She has no way to evangelize. If the foundational meaning of sexuality changes, her message cannot be changed to match without breaking everything that came before. </p><p style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></p><p style="font-size: 18px;"><b>UPDATE:</b><br /></p><p style="font-size: 18px;">Homosexual activity may be intrinsically evil, but the participants can be blessed, as long as they aren't participants in a duel. If you are, you don't even get the sacrament of confession. In fact, if a priest tries to absolve a penitent involved in a duel, the <b><i>priest</i></b> will be excommunicate.</p><p><span style="font-size: 18px;">[From the Response of the Holy Office to the Bishop of Poitiers, May 31, 1884]</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 18px;">To the question:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 18px;">1862 I. Can a physician when invited by duelists assist at a duel with the intention of bringing an end to the fight more quickly, or simply to bind and cure wounds, without incurring the excommunication reserved simply to the Highest Pontiff? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 18px;"> II. Can he at least, without being present at the duel, stay at a neighboring house or in a place nearby, ready to offer his service, if the duelists have need of it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 18px;">III. What about a confessor under the same conditions?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 18px;">The answers are: </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 18px;">To I, he cannot, and excommunication is incurred.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 18px;">To II and III, that, insofar as it takes place as described, he cannot, and likewise excommunication is incurred.</span></p><div style="font-size: 18px;"></div></span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-38364472161491036132023-11-07T15:44:00.074-06:002023-12-22T11:50:49.743-06:00Who is a Christian? Who is a Jew?<h3 style="text-align: left;"><b>Who is a Christian?</b></h3><p>Determining who is a Christian is a somewhat daunting task. Liturgical Christians, such as the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Copts, would say a Christian is a baptized person, or at least someone actively seeking baptism. Non-liturgical Christians, like Baptists or Anabaptists, would say becoming a Christian is merely a matter of accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour. Anyone who proclaims with their mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believes in their heart that He is risen from the dead, is a Christian. </p><p>Since the act of baptism is understood to deliver the grace to believe in Christ, a Christian is defined by by belief, and to a certain extent, or for certain groups, by baptism. "Right belief" (aka orthodoxy) is paramount, and the extent of right belief is not limited to the deity of Christ. It also includes proper understanding of the Trinity. So, even though Mormons agree that Jesus Christ is God, Mormons are not considered Christians because Mormons insist that the Trinity is made up of three SEPARATE persons, while Christianity teaches the Trinity is made up of three DISTINCT persons. </p><p>The difference between "separate" and "distinct" is important. Each member of a family is separate from every other member. Even conjoined (aka Siamese) twins each have separate body parts that only one of the two twins control. Distinct, on the other hand, is like the facets of a diamond: each facet is distinct, but all the facets together are aspects of the same diamond. <br /><br />In a similar (but not identical) way, the One Divine Nature is completely owned by each of the Three Persons, each Person of the Godhead owning the one Divine Nature completely unto Himself, the Godhead is not shared. Yet there is only one Godhead. It is not clear how this works, Christians are just required to believe that it does. In this sense, understanding the Trinity is similar in some aspects to understanding quantum mechanics or gravity - we don't know how it works, we just know that it does.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Who is a Jew?</h3><p>If defining a Christian is hard, now let's try defining who is a Jew. Being Jewish is neither a matter of belief nor a matter of praxis. Christians have a hard time wrapping their heads around this:</p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif"><span style="color: #2a2e2e; font-size: 15px;"></span></span></p><blockquote style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif"><span style="color: #2a2e2e; font-size: 15px;"><a href="https://www.jewfaq.org/who_is_a_jew" style="color: #cc6611; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">It is important to note that being a Jew has nothing to do with what you believe or what you do</a>. A person born to non-Jewish parents who has not undergone the formal process of conversion but who believes everything that Orthodox Jews believe and observes every law and custom of Judaism is still a non-Jew, even in the eyes of the most liberal movements of Judaism, and a person born to a Jewish mother who is an atheist and never practices the Jewish religion is still a Jew, even in the eyes of the ultra-Orthodox. In this sense, Judaism is more like a nationality than like other religions, and being Jewish is like a citizenship.</span></span></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;">Unfortunately, being Jewish is not <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2014.00462/full" style="color: #cc6611; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">identifiably genetic either</a>: </p><p style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"></p><blockquote><b style="color: #282828; font-family: MuseoSans, Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 10pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0em;">Genetic markers cannot determine Jewish descent: </b></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote>It becomes overwhelmingly clear that although Jews maintained detectable vertical genetic continuity along generations of socio-religious-cultural relationship, also intensive horizontal genetic relations were maintained both between Jewish communities and with the gentile surrounding. Thus, in spite of considerable consanguinity, there is no Jewish genotype to identify. </blockquote><p>And since it is not genetically identifiable, being Jewish is most assuredly <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2014.00462/full" target="_blank">not a tribal or national identity</a>: </p><blockquote><p>The refusal of the [Israeli] Supreme Court to accept the plea of 21 citizens [most of them well-known veterans of movements of civil rights], to recognize them as belonging to an Israeli nation […] is another expression of the failure of the civil struggle for the image of Israel. Sixty-five years after its establishment the authorities do not recognize an Israeli nation, disconnected of a religious definition or ethnic belonging. […] </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>In their decision, the judges deny the existence of an Israeli nation, and assert that it has not been proven that an Israeli nationality disconnected of a religious definition or ethnic belonging exists... </p></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote>...Judge Haim Cohen responded: “the definition must be given by every single Jew for himself. If a person says of himself that he is a Jew, for me he is a Jew. This is his autonomy and nobody can decide for him or instead of him whether he is a Jew or not. There is no need in definitions.” </blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: #f7f7f7; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: MuseoSans, Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 1.375rem; margin: 0em 1em 1em; outline: 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;"></p><p>Now, it is clearly the case that many (but not all) Jews have distinct DNA links to historical groups. <a href="https://aish.com/48936742/" target="_blank">The Cohen priesthood lineage,</a> for example, is interesting:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote><p>The results of the analysis of the Y chromosome markers of the Cohanim and non-Cohanim were indeed significant. A particular marker, (YAP-) was detected in 98.5 percent of the Cohanim, and <b><i>in a significantly lower percentage of non-Cohanim (emphasis added).</i></b></p><p>FURTHER CONFIRMATION</p><p>In a second study, Dr. Skorecki and associates gathered more DNA samples and expanded their selection of Y chromosome markers. Solidifying their hypothesis of the Cohens' common ancestor, they found that a particular array of six chromosomal markers was found in 97 of the 106 Cohens tested.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>But, notice, the DNA linkage is not perfect. There are a significant number of gentile men who bear the Cohen gene, yet are not identified by anyone as being Jewish. There are Jewish men who claim to be descended from the ancient priestly caste, they are even recognized as being related to that caste, yet they have no DNA marker to indicate that they actually are. Genetic tests may show that <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1336798/" target="_blank">two-fifths of Ashkenazi Jews</a> are descended from four women, but that means three-fifths are not. And it says nothing at all about Mizhraic, Sephardic, Ethiopian, or Cochin Jews, the last two of which trace their own lines via patrilineal descent, not matrilineal descent. </p><p>Despite this, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/12/what-does-it-mean-to-be-genetically-jewish" target="_blank">Israel still uses genetic testing</a> to determine if someone is Jewish.</p><p><strong style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #121212; font-family: GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></strong></p><blockquote><strong style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #121212; font-family: GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">In February of this year,</strong><span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures;"> the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, </span><a data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israeli-rabbinate-accused-of-using-dna-testing-to-prove-jewishness-1.6902132" style="background-color: white; border-bottom: 1px solid var(--article-link-border); border-image: initial; border-left: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">reported</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures;"> that the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, the peak religious authority in the country, had been requesting DNA tests to confirm Jewishness before issuing some marriage licenses.</span></blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures;"></span><p></p><p>But, this <a href="https://lupress.cas.lehigh.edu/content/myth-jewish-race" target="_blank">farcical</a> "genetic Judaism" is no more or less reliable than <a href="https://www.xcode.life/dna-and-ancestry/physical-signs-of-viking-ancestry/" target="_blank">the claim to be genetically a Viking:</a> </p><p></p><blockquote><p>Vikings as a group don't exist anymore.</p><p>However, they have descendants all over Europe and the Scandinavian countries.</p><p>In many Scandinavian countries, many people dedicate their lives to living like the Vikings did long ago. </p><p>There are Viking villages in Norway and Sweden where people recreate the Viking way of life.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>So, we have the odd situation wherein there seems to be no clear definition of what constitutes being Jewish, nor any authority who can clarify it. There are merely a lot of people who recreate what they understand to be the ancient Jewish way of life, and on that basis, claim to be Jewish.</p><p>But <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2016/04/what-makes-a-jew-a-jew/624346/" target="_blank">there is not even any real agreement on what constitutes that way of life</a>. For instance, Jews who accept the Talmud as authoritative will necessarily follow the teachings of one or more of the rabbis whose commentary makes up the Talmud. Such Jews will insist that anyone born of a Jewish mother is Jewish, regardless of belief, because that's what they read in the Talmud. Of course, this opens the question: which Talmud? For there are actually two versions, and no clear way to determine which is authoritative: the <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/FullTalmud.pdf" target="_blank">Babylonian Talmud</a> or the <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/talmud-jerusalem" target="_blank">Jerusalem (Palestinian) Talmud</a>? </p><p>The differences are significant. For instance, the <a href="https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/history-ideas/2016/10/the-origins-of-the-precept-whoever-saves-a-life-saves-the-world/" target="_blank">Jerusalem Talmud</a> says, "“Whoever saves a single life is considered by scripture to have saved the whole world." while the Babylonian Talmud says, ""Whoever destroys a soul from Israel, the Scripture considers it as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life from Israel, the Scripture considers it as if he saved an entire world." One version of the Talmud says saving <b><i>anyone's</i></b> life is like saving the whole world, the other says that only the saving of a <b><i>Jewish life</i></b> is like saving the whole world. Which one is authoritative?</p><p>And once we ask which Talmud is authoritative, we must first ask if either Talmud should be accepted as authoritative at all. For instance, <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/karaites" target="_blank">Karaite Jews</a> reject the Talmud, the authority of rabbis and they also reject the idea of matrilineal descent. For Karaites, whose chief authority is the Torah, and who hold rabbinic commentary in no special esteem, the patrilineal descent determines whether you are Jewish. That is, if you are born of a Jewish <i>father</i>, you are Jewish. For the Karaites, how Jewish your mother is does not enter into it. And, <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/patrilineal-descent" target="_blank">increasingly</a>, <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/patrilineal-descent/" target="_blank">Reform Judaism sees the matter the same way</a>. In fact, <a href="https://www.jpost.com/judaism/article-717589" target="_blank">25% of Israeli Jews</a> say patrilineal descent is enough. “Reform Judaism accepts a child… as Jewish without a formal conversion if he attends a Jewish school and follows a course of study leading to confirmation.”</p><p>But, as indicated above, the problem does not just concern an individual's belief system, it also concerns his actions. Jews cannot define Judaism according to action for a very simple reason. From Abraham through the destruction of the First Temple, Jews always performed ritual liturgical sacrifice. But the Temple was destroyed in 586 BC, rebuilt in 516 BC, then destroyed for the second time in 70 AD and never rebuilt. </p><p>As a result, because they do not have a Temple, Jews have not performed sacrifice for nearly two millennia. Synagogues were only created after the destruction of the First Temple, probably around <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/synagogue" target="_blank">the 3rd or 4th century BC</a>. The rabbinical system probably started around <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-guide-to-jewish-history-religion-and-culture/rabbinic-movement/15E505DDDFAE6F6F4A5F4D1552FE6D17" target="_blank">the 2nd century AD</a>, after the destruction of the Second Temple. Neither Abraham, nor Isaac nor Jacob, nor any of their progeny up through the 4th century BC had ever heard of a rabbi or a synagogue. The synagogue-rabbi system was invented out of whole cloth in order to deal with the loss of the First Temple and the exile to Babylon. This system has persisted for nearly two millennia because of the loss of the Second Temple in the 1st century (70 AD), but only for Jews who came from the Babylonian Exile. <a href="https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/plight-ethiopian-jews" target="_blank">Jews who departed Israel prior</a> to that event, such as the <a href="https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/plight-ethiopian-jews" target="_blank">Ethiopian</a> and <a href="https://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1904S42.pdf" target="_blank">Cochin</a> Jewish communities, and who therefore never lived in Babylon, do not recognize rabbis. The Ethiopians do not use synagogues, Cochin Jewish use of the synagogue was very late, no more than 400 years old. </p><p>But even if we were to grant an older provenance to these fabricated social structures, the problems do not end. For instance, it is quite clear the original rabbinic system from the 2nd century AD had no place for women rabbis, no place for homosexual activity, no place for atheism at all. But the modern rabbi-synagogue permutations accept all of these things. The ancient Hebrew faith insisted on the <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-covenant-of-circumcision/" target="_blank">mikveh and circumcision</a>, but modern Reform Judaism does not. The loss of liturgical sacrifice and Temple worship, the addition of rabbis, synagogues, women rabbis, homosexual activity and atheism, the discarding of the mikveh and circumcision, all attest to a single fact: clearly, no Jew today does what any of Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob's sons did for the first millennium of Hebrew faith. </p><p>And if we grant all of this, it gets worse still. If we restrict our understanding of who is Jewish just to the religious elements listed in the previous paragraphs, even the Jewish faith is disappearing. Religious Jews, both <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-06-12/ty-article-magazine/.premium/with-rising-extremism-more-israelis-are-leaving-orthodox-judaism/0000017f-e4c1-d38f-a57f-e6d345530000" target="_blank">in Israel</a> and <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/06/22/denominational-switching-among-u-s-jews-reform-judaism-has-gained-conservative-judaism-has-lost/" target="_blank">the US</a>, are increasingly abandoning their faith, with <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/report-low-retention-rate-for-orthodox-jews" target="_blank">more than half of children in Orthodox</a> families simply walking away. </p><p></p><blockquote>94 percent say a person is Jewish even if they work on Shabbat, 89 percent say a Jew can be strongly critical of Israel, and 68 percent say Jews don’t have to believe in God, but an astonishing 34 percent say a person is still Jewish even if they decide to believe in Jesus as the messiah.</blockquote><p><a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-paradox-of-jewish-liberalism" target="_blank">In fact</a>, for most Jews, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-identity-and-belief/" target="_blank">their relationships with their pets</a> matter more than their relationship with God:<br /></p><blockquote>Religion is not central to the lives of most U.S. Jews. Even Jews by religion are much less likely than Christian adults to consider religion to be very important in their lives (28% vs. 57%). And among Jews as a whole, far more report that they find meaning in spending time with their families or friends, engaging with arts and literature, being outdoors, and pursuing their education or careers than find meaning in their religious faith. Twice as many Jewish Americans say they derive a great deal of meaning and fulfillment from spending time with pets as say the same about their religion.</blockquote><p>So, being Jewish has nothing to do with anything specifically Jewish. <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-paradox-of-jewish-liberalism" target="_blank">Being liberal is sufficient</a> to "be Jewish":</p><p></p><blockquote>For the non-Orthodox, though, the top slots went to remembering the Holocaust, leading an ethical and moral life, working for justice and equality, and being intellectually curious. These last two, especially, identify Judaism with liberal values of intellectual independence and commitment to social justice. </blockquote><p></p><p></p><p> Consequently, the number of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/05/11/orthodox-jews-poll-secular-trump-republican/" target="_blank">irreligious Jews is growing</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote>While the Orthodox appear to be proportionally growing, Pew found even more Jews becoming more secular and unaffiliated. “Jews of no religion” — Pew’s term for people who identify as Jews and do things they see as Jewish but do not identify with the religious parts — in 2020 made up 27 percent of all U.S. Jews, up from 22 percent in 2013.</blockquote><h3 style="text-align: left;">LARPing as Culture</h3><p>So, given that Judaism is not based on belief, Judaism is not based on activity, Judaism is not based on genetics, and Judaism is not based on a genetically demonstrable tribal membership... what does it mean to claim that one is Jewish? It's not clear that the claim means anything at all. It would seem today's Jews are primarily made up of <a href="https://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-jews-have-been-voting-majority.html" target="_blank">21st century socialists</a> who like to LARP as a group of ancient monotheists. Some people dress up and LARP being Civil War soldiers, others LARP being Vikings. Today's "Jews" like to LARP being ancient monotheists. But they only LARP the pieces of monotheism they like, and they leave the rest out. As we have seen, most "Jews" substitute medieval commentary (rabbinical Talmudic commentary) for <a href="https://www.mayimachronim.com/will-there-be-sacrifices-in-the-third-temple/" target="_blank">the mess and fuss of animal sacrifice</a> on a bloody altar. Modern "Jews" replace rabbis with women. They replace belief in God with <a href="https://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2023/10/how-zionists-collaborated-with-nazis.html" target="_blank">national socialism</a> or <a href="https://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2023/10/why-zionism-requires-dead-jews.html" target="_blank">atheism</a>. They replace circumcision with... well... <a href="https://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2023/11/jews-and-abortion.html" target="_blank">nothingness</a>. Action, belief, genetics - every bit of turns out to be unnecessary to modern Judaism. Since at least the invention of Reform and Conservative Judaism in the late 1800s, there has been literally nothing left to distinguish a Jew from a non-Jew except an arbitrary, unprovable claim. </p><p>In this sense, modern Judaism is not very different from <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-27782244" target="_blank">Gerald Gardner's 1950's pretended "revival" of Wicca</a>. Gardner famously invented artificial liturgy and rituals to justify his lifestyle, then attributed his ritualistic inventions to an ancient religious system (Wicca) of which he had no knowledge and to which he had no real connection. A similar dynamic seems to constitute modern Judaism. Instead of a 1950's Gardner, the "Jews" have two ancient Gardner prototypes: one group <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Rabbi" target="_blank">inventing both the rabbi-Talmud system</a> in the first century or so after Christ's death, and <a href="https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/74339/jewish/Who-Invented-the-Synagogue.htm" target="_blank">the synagogue system</a> in the century or so preceding Christ's birth, while a other groups <a href="https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/karaite-women" target="_blank">invented Torah-based non-Talmudic systems like the Karaites</a>, around 500-700 AD, or the Ethiopian Jews who may have originated anywhere from the <a href="https://cnewa.org/magazine/origins-of-ethiopias-black-jews-30374/" target="_blank">time of Moses</a> to somewhere in the <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-history-of-ethiopian-jewry/" target="_blank">first century AD</a>, but who trace their Jewish lineage by the <a href="https://www.meketa.org.uk/the-jews-of-ethiopia" target="_blank">Torah-approved patrilineal descent</a>, not by the rabbi-inspired Talmudic matrilineal descent. </p><p>And this multiple splintering left no central authority, no group or person who can definitively determine who is or is not a Jew. There is no universally agreed upon test for who is or is not a Jew. Distinguishing a "Jew" from a "gentile" is apparently like distinguishing pornography from art: we are supposed <a href="https://corporate.findlaw.com/litigation-disputes/movie-day-at-the-supreme-court-or-i-know-it-when-i-see-it-a.html" target="_blank">to know it when we see it</a>. This is, perhaps, why so many Jews support the transgender movement and the LGBTQ+ system - it is similarly self-referential LARPing by people who desperately want an identity that will allow them to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world. </p><p>The irony is that, due to this complete lack of coherence, a Jew can actually profess the Shahada without fear of being cast out from "his" extremely ill-defined group. A<span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">s </span><a href="https://www.amimagazine.org/2018/02/07/gratitude-prayers-celebrating-freedom-sholom-mordechai-rubashkin-2-2-2-2-2-2/" style="background-color: white; color: #cc6611; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;" target="_blank">Rambam points out, Jews who recite</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> the </span><a href="https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/26328/jews-allowed-to-pray-and-join-muslim-congregation-in-mosques-and-experiences" style="background-color: white; color: #cc6611; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;" target="_blank">Shahada</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">, the Muslim testimony of faith, are still Jews. The Shahadah is but a meaningless phrase used by a religion (Islam) that is not considered by the Jews to be idolatrous. In comparison, most Jews tend to agree that belief in Christ is idolatrous, and therefore prohibited.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">But there's </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lRMHMYr7p0" style="background-color: white; color: #cc6611; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;" target="_blank">nothing in particular</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> in the Islamic </span><span style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="animation-name: none; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">profession of faith that violates Jewish faith. </span><a href="https://www.quora.com/Since-Islamic-Shahadah-is-the-same-as-Jewish-Shema-why-dont-Jews-proclaim-Shahada-which-makes-them-instant-Muslims-keeping-their-Jewish-traditions-folklore-and-heritage" style="background-color: white; color: #cc6611; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;" target="_blank">As one Jew stated,</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> "Personally, I am quite happy to say the shahadah in full sincerity but in the belief that prophet Muhammad was a gentile prophet and that Judaism and İslam can coexist as two approaches to the same truth. At the core, our religion is the same and I have no issue with İslamic claims to that effect."</span></p><p><a href="https://thelehrhaus.com/scholarship/a-jewish-perspective-on-gods-presence-in-islam/" style="background-color: white; color: #cc6611; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;" target="_blank">Rabbi Fayyumi</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">, who influenced Maimonedes, held a very positive opinion of the Koran: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">"He analyzes the words of the Koran carefully, to such an extent that in the second chapter of his book he finds mystical meaning in the Shahada (the Muslim declaration of faith).</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">A substantial part of the sixth chapter of Fayyumi’s book is dedicated to analysis and interpretation of the Koran. He concludes from this analysis that Islam is not directed to the Jewish people; rather, it is intended to provide religion and faith to the nations. Its purpose is not to abolish the Torah―just the opposite: the Koran confirms the obligation of the Jewish people to keep the Torah. At the same time, Fayyumi asserts that the Koran teaches that there are additional revelations to other nations, revelations that obligate them to their own religious systems."</span></blockquote><p></p><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none;"><blockquote style="color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"></div></blockquote><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Once a Jew recites the Shahadah in Arabic, his Muslim cousins will leave him alone. Islam isn't interested in a biological cleansing, Muslims just want theological agreement. Like the Protestants, such agreement can come through a simple statement. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Given these facts, it is hard not to conclude that modern Judaism is no more Jewish than modern Scandinavians living in a Viking village are Vikings. But to state this fact aloud brings only opprobrium. Like the man who hates being told that he cannot be a woman, no matter what dress he wears, the modern Jew hates being told he can recite the Shahadah. The fact that his own Hebraic self-identification system is too incoherent to render him "special" before the nations is a discovery too wrenching to be countenanced. </span></div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The little voice that nags at him, that tells him he is not actually special or specially protected by God, is silenced with fighter jets, tanks and the welcome hatred of another "special group" chosen by Allah. "If Islam hates us." the modern Jew reasons, "we must truly be special. Our suffering has special meaning. Our victimhood shows our superiority." </span></div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And so, in the final analysis, both the Jews and the Muslims take on the Christian motto of the innocent, suffering victim, albeit sans Christ. The final irony is, because they will not say the Shahadah, Jews must live a life of Christian suffering. And thus do they bring salvation to the nations, as they imitate the crucified Christ in their protestations, even if not in their violent response to the supremely violent hatred their Islamic cousins have for them.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>TLDR</b></span></div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; transition-property: none;"><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; transition-property: none;"><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Could someone please tell me who a Jew is?</span></span></div><div style="animation-name: none; text-align: left; transition-property: none;"><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">It isn't theological belief. You can be an atheist and be a Jew.</span></span></li><li><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">It isn't belief in rabbis, synagogues or the Talmud. Ethiopian Jews don't accept any of those things.</span></span></li><li><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">It isn't matrilineal descent. Ethiopian and Cochin Jews trace their own lines via patrilineal descent, not matrilineal descent. Matrilineal descent is a post-Christian invention. </span></span></li><li><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">It isn't circumcision. Reform Jews don't require circumcision in order to be a Reform Jew</span></span></li><li><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">It isn't DNA. There is no DNA test that distinguishes a Jew from a non-Jew.
</span></span></li><li><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">None of the "Jews" in the last 2000 years have offered sacrifice in the Temple.</span></span></li><li><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">No "Jew" in the last 2000 years does or believes any of the things Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did and believed.</span></span></li><li><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">There is no correspondence between modern "Jewish" belief or practice vs pre-Christian Jewish belief and practice.</span></span></li></ul></span></span><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">If there is no way to really define who a Jew is, then "anti-Semitism" is a shibboleth.</span><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-57513800851283848632023-11-03T09:50:00.015-05:002023-11-12T10:52:51.356-06:00Jews and Abortion<p>Jews predominate in America's abortion industry. The determination of whether a doctor will provide abortion can be predicted <a href="https://kffhealthnews.org/news/study-fewer-doctors-are-offering-abortions/" target="_blank"><b>based on the doctor's religious views</b></a>:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>40.2 percent of Jewish doctors say yes, compared with</li><li>1.2 percent of Evangelical Protestants</li><li>9 percent of Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox</li><li>10.1 percent of Non-Evangelical Protestants</li><li>20 percent of Hindus</li><li>26.5 percent of doctors who said they had no religious affiliation</li></ul><p></p><p>To determine how many abortionists each religious group would generate, we need to know what percentage of all doctors hold the various religious views represented above:</p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 12pt;"><b><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1490160/" target="_blank">Religious Affiliation of Physicians Compared with the U.S. Population</a></b></span></p><div class="xtable" style="box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; max-height: 80vh; overflow: auto;"><table class="rendered small default_table" frame="hsides" rules="groups" style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; border-top: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0px;"><thead style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-top: 0px; vertical-align: top;"><tr style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><th align="left" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; hyphens: manual; margin-top: 0px; padding: 0.2em 0.4em; text-align: left;">Affiliation</th><th align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; hyphens: manual; padding: 0.2em 0.4em; text-align: left;">Physicians, % (<em style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">N</em>)</th><th align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; hyphens: manual; padding: 0.2em 0.4em; text-align: left;">U.S. Population,<span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: 12px; line-height: 0; margin-top: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">*</span>% (<em style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px;">N</em>)</th><th align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; hyphens: manual; margin-bottom: 0px; padding: 0.2em 0.4em; text-align: left;"><em style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-top: 0px;">P</em> (χ<span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: 12px; line-height: 0; margin-bottom: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">2</span>)</th></tr></thead><tbody style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(136, 136, 136); border-image: initial; border-left: none; border-right: none; border-top: 1px solid rgb(136, 136, 136); box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; vertical-align: top;"><tr style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-top: 0px;"><td align="left" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">Protestant</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">38.8 (427)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">54.7 (800)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">.00</td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: inherit;"><td align="left" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">Catholic</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">21.7 (244)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">26.7 (370)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">.01</td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: inherit;"><td align="left" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">Jewish</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">14.1 (181)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">1.9 (26)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">.00</td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: inherit;"><td align="left" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">None<span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: 12px; line-height: 0; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">†</span></td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">10.6 (117)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">13.3 (198)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">.06</td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: inherit;"><td align="left" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">Hindu</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">5.3 (53)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">0.2 (1)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">.00</td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: inherit;"><td align="left" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">Muslim</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">2.7 (33)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">0.5 (5)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">.00</td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: inherit;"><td align="left" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">Orthodox</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">2.2 (22)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">0.5 (7)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">.00</td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: inherit;"><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">Mormon</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">1.7 (17)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">0.4 (6)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">.00</td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: inherit;"><td align="left" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">Buddhist</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">1.2 (13)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">0.2 (3)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">.01</td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: inherit;"><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">Other</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">1.8 (18)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">1.6 (21)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">.70</td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px;"><td align="left" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="background-color: #fffcf0; border: none; box-sizing: inherit; color: #212121; font-family: Cambria, "Cambria Math", stixgeneral, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">Total</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="background-color: #fffcf0; border: none; box-sizing: inherit; color: #212121; font-family: Cambria, "Cambria Math", stixgeneral, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">100 (1125)</td><td align="center" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="background-color: #fffcf0; border: none; box-sizing: inherit; color: #212121; font-family: Cambria, "Cambria Math", stixgeneral, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; max-width: 40em; min-width: 4em; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.2em 0.4em;">100 (1437)</td></tr></tbody></table></div><p><br /></p><p>Now, we take those numbers and multiply across to see how many abortionists each religious faith would produce. As you can see from the table below, if we had 100 doctors in front of us, only 16 of those doctors would be willing to perform an abortion at all.</p><table border="”2″;" style="background-color: lightyellow; width: 475.688px;"><tbody><tr style="height: 36px;"><td style="height: 36px; width: 142px;"><strong>Religion</strong></td><td style="height: 36px; text-align: center; width: 105px;"><strong>% of all doctors</strong></td><td style="height: 36px; text-align: center; width: 93px;"><strong>% willing to abort children</strong></td><td style="height: 36px; text-align: center; width: 143.688px;"><strong>abortionists/100</strong></td></tr><tr style="height: 18px;"><td style="height: 18px; width: 142px;">Jewish</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 105px;">14.1</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 93px;">40.2</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 143.688px;">5.7</td></tr><tr style="height: 18px;"><td style="height: 18px; width: 142px;">Protestant</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 105px;">38.8 </td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 93px;">11.3 (1.2+10.1)</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 143.688px;">4.4</td></tr><tr style="height: 14.9375px;"><td style="height: 14.9375px; width: 142px;">R. Catholic/EO</td><td style="height: 14.9375px; text-align: center; width: 105px;">23.9 (21.7+2.2)</td><td style="height: 14.9375px; text-align: center; width: 93px;">9</td><td style="height: 14.9375px; text-align: center; width: 143.688px;">2.2</td></tr><tr style="height: 18px;"><td style="height: 18px; width: 142px;">Hindu</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 105px;">5.3</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 93px;">20</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 143.688px;">1.1</td></tr><tr style="height: 18px;"><td style="height: 18px; width: 142px;">No religion</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 105px;">10.6</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 93px;">26.5</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 143.688px;">2.8</td></tr><tr style="height: 18px;"><td style="height: 18px; width: 142px;"> </td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 105px;"> </td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 93px;"> </td><td style="height: 18px; width: 143.688px;"> </td></tr><tr style="height: 18px;"><td style="height: 18px; width: 142px;">Muslim</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 105px;">2.7</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 93px;">no data</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 143.688px;">-</td></tr><tr style="height: 18px;"><td style="height: 18px; width: 142px;">Mormon</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 105px;">1.7</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 93px;">no data</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 143.688px;">-</td></tr><tr style="height: 18px;"><td style="height: 18px; width: 142px;">Buddhist</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 105px;">1.2</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 93px;">no data</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 143.688px;">-</td></tr><tr style="height: 18px;"><td style="height: 18px; width: 142px;">Other</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 105px;">1.8</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 93px;">no data</td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 143.688px;">-</td></tr><tr style="height: 18px;"><td style="height: 18px; width: 142px;"><strong>TOTAL</strong></td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 105px;"><strong>100</strong></td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 93px;"> </td><td style="height: 18px; text-align: center; width: 143.688px;"><strong>16</strong></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Of those 100 doctors, about 14 of them would be Jewish. Of those 14 Jewish doctors, between 5 and 6 of them would be willing to perform abortions. Roughly 39 of the doctors would be Protestant, between 4 and 5 of them would be willing to perform abortions. 24 would label themselves Catholic, but only 2 of them would murder a child in the womb. </p><p>Jews only make up 2% of the population, but of the 16 abortionists produced in our cozy little group of 100 doctors, roughly 35% of the abortionists would be Jewish. <br /><br />On the other hand, Protestants make up 55% of the population, but supply just 27% of the abortionists. Catholics and Eastern Orthodox together make up roughly 27% of the population but only make up 13% of the abortionists. </p><p>TLDR: Christians are 80% of the population, and supply 40% of the abortionists. Jews are 2% of the population and supply 35% of the abortionists. Their 2% of the population supplies nearly as many abortionists as the Christian 80%.</p><p>So, let's stop pretending there is such a thing as "Judeo-Christian" morality. "Judeo-Christian morality" is a chimera, a fantasy, a unicorn, it is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Christian" target="_blank">a Protestant idea that is less than two centuries old</a>. There is no such thing. It doesn't exist. </p><p><b>Update:</b></p><p>Israeli Jews also have no problem with involuntarily sterilizing minority populations they don't like. <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/most-israeli-jews-agree-africans-are-a-cancer/" target="_blank">52% of Israeli Jews see African migrants</a> as a cancer on their nation, and Israel was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/28/ethiopian-women-given-contraceptives-israel" target="_blank">involuntarily sterilizing Ethiopian Jews</a> for years.</p><p>Now, this is what Israeli Jews do to their fellow Jews who happen to be the wrong color skin. What do you think they might do to the non-Jews that live among them?</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-12368892314468825332023-10-31T14:13:00.000-05:002023-10-31T14:13:07.737-05:00Columbus Discovered America<div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">It is possible that Africans discovered South America before Columbus. It is certain the Viking discovered North America before Columbus. But only Columbus truly discovered the New World.</span></p></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">None of the Vikings, none of the Africans, not a single person prior to Columbus, successfully incorporated the knowledge of the Americas into the culture from which they came.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">If you stumble over a chair in the dark, you haven't discovered a chair. You just figured out a new way to stub your <span style="font-family: inherit;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit;" tabindex="-1"></a></span>toe.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Columbus stumbled over the chair in the dark, figured out that it was a chair, communicated to the rest of the world that chairs existed, and then incorporated into his own culture a new culture that used chairs as a matter of course. Columbus discovered the New World. Everyone else just stubbed their toes in the dark.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-16827117402477404122023-10-30T15:17:00.001-05:002023-10-30T15:17:14.425-05:00Best Evidence for Historical Jesus<p> This is a <a href="https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-evidence-for-a-historical-Jesus" target="_blank">very good answer</a><br /><br /></p><div class="q-flex" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282829; display: flex; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><div class="q-box qu-mb--small" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 8px; width: 632px;" width="100%"><div class="q-box spacing_log_answer_header" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="q-box" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="q-flex qu-alignItems--flex-start" style="align-items: flex-start; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; width: 632px;" width="100%"><div class="q-box qu-flex--auto" style="box-sizing: border-box; flex: 1 1 auto; margin-top: -1px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><div class="q-box" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="q-box" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="q-text qu-dynamicFontSize--small qu-bold qu-color--gray_dark qu-passColorToLinks" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: calc(13px * var(--dynamic-font-scale, 1)) !important; font-weight: bold;"><div class="q-inlineFlex qu-alignItems--center" style="align-items: center; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-flex;"><div class="q-box qu-display--inline" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline; z-index: 0;"><div class="q-box qu-display--inline" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline;"><div class="q-relative qu-display--inline puppeteer_popper_reference" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline; position: relative;"><div aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="dialog" class="q-click-wrapper qu-display--inline qu-tapHighlight--white qu-cursor--pointer ClickWrapper___StyledClickWrapperBox-zoqi4f-0 iyYUZT" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.6); box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font: inherit; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit;" tabindex="0"><a class="q-box Link___StyledBox-t2xg9c-0 dFkjrQ puppeteer_test_link qu-color--gray_dark qu-cursor--pointer qu-hover--textDecoration--underline" href="https://www.quora.com/profile/Matthew-Hogan-10" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.6); background-color: transparent; border-radius: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><div class="q-inlineFlex qu-alignItems--center qu-wordBreak--break-word" style="align-items: center; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-flex; word-break: break-word;">Matthew Hogan</div></a></div></div></div></div></div></span></span></div><div class="q-text qu-dynamicFontSize--small qu-color--gray qu-passColorToLinks qu-truncateLines--3" style="-webkit-box-orient: vertical; -webkit-line-clamp: 3; box-sizing: border-box; color: #636466; display: -webkit-box; font-size: calc(13px * var(--dynamic-font-scale, 1)) !important; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis;"><span class="CssComponent-sc-1oskqb9-0 AbstractSeparatedItems___StyledCssComponent-sc-46kfvf-0 kBzlwk">Author has <span class="q-text qu-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bold;">333</span> answers and <span class="q-text qu-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bold;">1.1M</span> answer views</span><span class="CssComponent-sc-1oskqb9-0 AbstractSeparatedItems___StyledCssComponent-sc-46kfvf-0 ytbFj"><span class="q-text qu-whiteSpace--nowrap" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-wrap: nowrap;"><span class="q-box" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-right: auto; pointer-events: auto;"><a class="q-box Link___StyledBox-t2xg9c-0 dFkjrQ answer_timestamp qu-cursor--pointer qu-hover--textDecoration--underline" href="https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-evidence-for-a-historical-Jesus/answer/Matthew-Hogan-10" rel="nofollow" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.6); background-color: transparent; border-radius: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Updated Aug 5</a></span></span></span></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="q-box spacing_log_answer_content puppeteer_test_answer_content" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282829; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><div class="q-text" style="box-sizing: border-box; max-width: 100%;"><span class="CssComponent__CssInlineComponent-sc-1oskqb9-1 UserSelectableText___StyledCssInlineComponent-lsmoq4-0"><span class="q-box qu-userSelect--text" style="box-sizing: border-box; user-select: text;"><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">Probably the best </span><span style="background: none; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">single-piece </span><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">of evidence is the work of the Roman Emperor Julian</span><span style="background: none;">, aka Julian the Apostate (b. 330 C.E. -- d. 363 C.E.) and the logical inferences one can derive from his argumentation.</span></p><div class="q-box" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: -12px; margin-right: -12px;"><div class="CssComponent-sc-1oskqb9-0 QTextImage___StyledCssComponent-sc-1yi3aau-0 cfUEeh"><div class="q-box unzoomed" style="box-sizing: border-box; cursor: -webkit-zoom-in; filter: blur(0px); margin-bottom: 1em;" tabindex="-1"><img class="q-image qu-display--block" height="451.5" src="https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-085d139eb3258080e079aa6c61e66bb9-lq" style="border-style: none; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 100%;" width="602" /></div></div></div><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">Flavius Claudius Iulianus (aka “Julian the Apostate”), reigned 361–363 C.E.[A.D.]</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">While there is a lot of other very very good multiple sets of evidence and sources and logical deductions for the life of a religious figure Jesus of Nazareth circa 30 C.E., </span><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">Julian may have put forth the best single go-to item of evidence for there having been an actual historic Jesus of Nazareth</span><span style="background: none;">.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">Here’s why.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">Julian as Emperor rejected the newly dominant religion of Christianity and fiercely sought to discredit and to reverse its influence. </span><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">So he wrote and/or commissioned in his own name an entire treatise rather savagely disparaging Christianity and its founder Jesus, with intent to discredit the religion, using the extant historic record from the first century to his time.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">But in doing so </span><span style="background: none; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">he never disputed Jesus’ historical existence and even somewhat separately offered to prove it.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">Julian wrote a book (</span><span style="background: none; font-style: italic;">Contra Galileos</span><span style="background: none;">) which is not challenged as to its authenticity though it only survives in quotings and copies of major portions of it by Christian adversaries, as well as smaller fragments.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">In the book, he ridicules Christian believers and the alleged miracles, divine status, and wisdom of Jesus that are claimed for him by Christians. But there is no assertion or even hint made by Julian that Jesus the individual never was.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">Why is that important & powerful evidence?</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">SLIGHT EDIT: Because he was a lot closer in time to the time of Jesus than today, living before the barbarian ravagings of Rome and the final collapse of the western empire, and he had access to and power over all the still extant rumors, hard record-keeping, and broad literature of the Roman Empire in which Jesus was said to have lived and die under,</span><span style="background: none; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"> including all the earlier texts often cited separately and together by all sides of the debate on Jesus’ existence today</span><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">. And he had every motive to use any evidence or even credible speculation he could find that was or had been going around in the few centuries during and after Jesus’ alleged lifetime, and which would throw doubt on the real existence of a Jesus of Nazareth.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">All he had to do, if non-existence of the man was indeed the case, was to assert the absence of likely official records or accounts or reports about Jesus. Or just cite the presence of significant contemporary arguments, “buzz’ and primary reports questioning Jesus’s existence, or even pass along viable credible rumors. Such steps would fire a powerful solid direct arrow of doubt at the new religion whose discrediting was a major, even central, issue for him.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">And he had the resources to do that effort. He was, after all, the Emperor of a still-unified Roman Empire which had not yet seen the heavy destructions of later centuries. He had access to imperial documentation, archives, great ancient libraries and so forth.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">But when addressing and challenging his own Christian contemporaries, he ridicules Jesus as a charlatan and as someone of little greatness or worth or note,</span><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;"> but he doesn’t even remotely question Jesus’ factual existence.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">At one point, this ancient Roman anti-Christian researcher-writer even offers to independently prove the opposite: that Jesus was real</span><span style="background: none; font-style: italic;">:</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-style: italic;">Even Jesus, who was proclaimed among you, was one of Caesar's subjects. And if you do not believe me I will prove it a little later, or rather let me simply assert it now. However, you admit that with his father and mother he registered his name in the governorship of Cyrenius.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">….</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">Further, he ridicules Jesus and Paul for being insignificant, and rather dishonest, preachers, and </span><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">Julian then explicitly employs and endorses the process of critically reviewing and assessing contemporary documentary evidence specifically in order to ascertain the status and impact of Jesus and early followers. </span><span style="background: none;">That indicates he was conscious of, and favorable towards, using methods of contemporary document research in disputes about Jesus. And that is precisely what modern skeptics argue as the vital methodology to use for analysis today —though with less documentation available to today’s disputants.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">But when doing this method, Julian doesn’t at all conclude or contend from it that Jesus or Paul was fictional</span><span style="background: none;">: he merely says the two were just fools from the backwater misleading other ignorant lower-class fools and of course— as he expresses further down below in the spirit of 4th century patriarchy — those gullible womenfolk.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-style: italic;">Yet Jesus, who won over the least worthy of you, has been known by name for but little more than three hundred years: and during his lifetime he accomplished nothing worth hearing of, unless anyone thinks that to heal crooked and blind men and to exorcise those who were possessed by evil demons in the villages of Bethsaida and Bethany can be classed as a mighty achievement.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">Julian thus argues that Jesus and Paul were obscure and of very low impact, and not likely to have created much of a buzz in their day. But he does not contend even slightly that they were imaginary.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-style: italic;">As for purity of life you do not know whether he so much as mentioned it; but you [Christians of Julian’s era] emulate the rages and the bitterness of the Jews [towards idols], overturning temples and altars,</span><span style="background: none;"> </span><span style="background: none; font-style: italic;">in the same fashion as yourselves. But these are rather your own doings; for nowhere did either Jesus or Paul hand down to you such commands.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">Julian thus argues here that they (Jesus and Paul) were actual independent people distinct even from their own movement and who may have spoken differently from their followers.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">In short, they were real people. The movement didn’t invent them or their original ideas. They had agency, as it is termed today.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">Julian:</span><span style="background: none; font-style: italic;"> The reason for this is that they never even hoped that you would one day attain to such power as you have; for they were content if they could delude maidservants and slaves, and through them the women, and men like Cornelius and Sergius. But if you can show me that one of these men is mentioned by the well-known writers of that time, – these events happened in the reign of Tiberius or Claudius, – then you may consider that I speak falsely about all matters.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">Notice here that to discredit Jesus and Paul, he is again </span><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">not </span><span style="background: none;">questioning they existed (“these events happened” not “were alleged to have happened”}. And it clearly would have been to his advantage to make such an argument if it had any credible legs to stand on from the Roman documentation available to an emperor or even just by general logic.)</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">Instead, in terms of Jesus (and Paul’s) presence in history, Julian is just arguing that they were no big deal and wouldn’t rate, didn’t rate, and shouldn’t have rated any contemporary first-century chatter.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">The fact that he confidently challenges his rival Christians regarding the literature of Jesus’ time suggests a solid broad familiarity with the documentation about Jesus from Jesus’ day. And Julian had far more primary literature and records available to him then than we do now. Someone would not make such a dare unless he’d done heavy homework in the documentation and literature of Jesus’ time.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">Julian’s work is therefore a hostile, informed, ancient authority supporting the argument that a mere lack of very much immediate contemporary biographical evidence - a big obsessional point made by modern “skeptics”/”mythicists” - is not likely to be proof of non-existence.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">Rather it is just strong proof or evidence of the relative obscurity of the historic Jesus (and Paul) in their original time.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">Now, there are elsewhere in the fuller record of history, outside and before Julian, heaps and piles of corroborating primary and secondary evidence over time and/or supportive logic about the existence of a historical figure named Jesus (see some other Quora answers on this, for starters).</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">But perhaps the “best evidence”, meaning evidence found conveniently in one place, may simply be that </span><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">the guy who had:</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">a) full access to the best independent primary record evidence of and argumentation about Jesus, and</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">b) full access to the same ancient sources that are kicked around in modern day debate (with far more material and information still extant in his day), and</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">c) every motivation to use against Christianity and its founder(s) whatever facts and arguments he could find in all that,</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">nevertheless he — the very capable and very anti-Christian Emperor Julian —</span><span style="background: none; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"> never once</span><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">, as far as we can tell, </span><span style="background: none; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">brought up the question of whether the historical figure Jesus of Nazareth existed at all.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">Further, he even somewhat offers at one point to </span><span style="background: none; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">independently prove that Jesus DID exist historically</span><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">, and in a specific personal legal status as a subject of Caesar.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">Julian’s work is </span><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">one-stop shopping </span><span style="background: none;">for the entire historical Jesus evidence debate. His commentary and analysis is from someone who had access to far far more primary and contemporary reams of data and stacks of argumentation than we have today.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none;">And who had the motive to use any and all credible negative arguments he could find there about Jesus of Nazareth.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">If anyone would have had knowledge of any coherent total or partial usable or valid evidence, or even valid speculation, of Jesus of Nazareth’s historical non-existence in the ancient Roman world, and would have the overriding interest and broad resources to broadcast that fact loud and clear in a published work, it would have been Emperor Julian.</span></p><p class="q-text qu-display--block qu-wordBreak--break-word qu-textAlign--start" style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: anywhere; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background: none; font-weight: bold;">But he never went there.</span></p></span></span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-29150254722762842472023-10-30T14:05:00.001-05:002023-10-30T14:05:09.812-05:00When Jews Helped Kill Christians<p>The status of <a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/213391733.pdf" target="_blank">Jews in the Roman Empire</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote>The Theodosian Code shows us that those immunities which
had been granted to the Jews by the pagan emperors, and which had
made them a privileged class dwelling within the Roman world, were
continued by the Christian emperors.5
At the opening of the fourth
century Jews were classed as Roman citizens and enjoyed all the advantages of civic status. They were in every economic stratum of the
empire; many were rich, many were poor. Some were merchants,
others artisans, and still others farmers. They had their own cult
organizations called synagogues. If any Jew did not belong to such an
organization he had to pay the Roman government poll tax and sacrifice to the Roman gods. Only a Jew within the synagogal organizations could escape these munera (civic duties).... The main Jewish privilege was that Jews could not be forced
to perform any task which violated their religious convictions. This
meant that they were exempt from the crushing burden of the decurionate, that responsibility for the collection of imperial taxes which
was gradually impoverishing the middle class of the Roman world.
And Jews were neither compelled to celebrate state worship nor
forced to attend pagan temples</blockquote><p></p><p>The Jewish Chronicle notes this about the <a href="https://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/so-what-did-the-muslims-do-for-the-jews-1.33597" target="_blank">Muslim invasion of Spain:</a></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: "pt serif", serif; font-size: 18px;"></span></p><p></p><blockquote>"Within a century of the death of Mohammad, in 632, Muslim armies had conquered almost the whole of the world where Jews lived, from Spain eastward across North Africa and the Middle East as far as the eastern frontier of Iran and beyond. Almost all the Jews in the world were now ruled by Islam. This new situation transformed Jewish existence. Their fortunes changed in legal, demographic, social, religious, political, geographical, economic, linguistic and cultural terms - all for the better."</blockquote><p></p><p>The <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/stalin-killed-more-ukrainians-than-hitler-killed-jews-says-congressman/" target="_blank">Times of Israel</a> notes this about the Holodomor, Stalin's starvation of the Ukraine:</p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: "pt serif", serif; font-size: 18px;"></span></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><blockquote>In 2009, Ukraine’s security service released a document naming those who it alleged to have been responsible for the Holodomor. Most of the names on the list were Jewish.</blockquote><p>Christians in Israel claim <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-palestinians-christians-attacks-holy-land-jewish-extremists-rcna80441" target="_blank">attacks by Jews go unpunished</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p> Christians in the Holy Land say they’re under attack as Israeli-Palestinian violence soars</p><p>Church officials and Christian leaders in Israel blame a minority of Jewish extremists for the attacks. They say Israel’s far-right government has fostered a culture of impunity.</p></blockquote><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-73221586290525793032023-10-29T11:10:00.008-05:002023-11-05T16:31:55.295-06:00Why Zionism Requires Dead Jews<p> <span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In the Muslim-Israeli conflict, both sides want a war of annihilation, but not for the reason you think. </span></p><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Israel was <a href="https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9807/aronson.html" target="_blank">created based on the existence of a mountain of Jewish corpses</a>. The rational for the secular state of Israel has ALWAYS been that it will provide sanctuary for the world's Jews, providing a place of protection against the ceaseless persecution Jews face.</span><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
</span><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
</span><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">From Israel's point of view, the worst possible thing the world could do is to STOP persecuting Jews. If no one paid any attention to Jews, if there was no persecution, Israel would not need to exist. It would have no purpose. Jews could live anywhere, they wouldn't have to live in Israel. And let's face it, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2016/10/18/middle-easts-migrant-population-more-than-doubles-since-2005/" target="_blank">most people don't really want to live in a desert.</a> It's not like the Middle East has a lot of creature comforts. </span><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
</span><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
</span><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So, Israel is necessarily the Al Sharpton of nations. It REQUIRES persecution in order to justify its position on the political stage. If there is no persecution, then <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/05/209194252/15-years-later-tawana-brawley-has-paid-1-percent-of-penalty" target="_blank">Tawana Brawley</a>-like persecution must be manufactured. If Hamas and Hezbollah did not exist, Israel's government would have to create it, or Israel's politicians would not get paid. Other nations, like the US, are fine with this set-up, because every money transfer is an opportunity for graft. As long as someone is getting "aid" from another country, that country's politicians get paid. War in the Middle East is a win-win for everyone involved. </span><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
</span><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
</span><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The Tree of Israel must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of dead Jews. </span><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
</span><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In his heart, every Zionist knows this is true. And this isn't the first time this has happened. As <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/25/russia.books" target="_blank">Solzhenitzyn noted</a>, this is a constant in Jewish history:</span><div><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><blockquote>Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, spent much of his life in Soviet prison camps, enduring persecution when he wrote about his experiences. He is currently in frail health, but in an interview given last month he said that Russia must come to terms with the Stalinist and revolutionary genocides - and that its Jewish population should be as offended at their own role in the purges as they are at the Soviet power that also persecuted them.
"My book was directed to empathise with the thoughts, feelings and the psychology of the Jews - their spiritual component," he said. "I have never made general conclusions about a people. I will always differentiate between layers of Jews. One layer rushed headfirst to the revolution. Another, to the contrary, was trying to stand back. The Jewish subject for a long time was considered prohibited. Zhabotinsky [a Jewish writer] once said that the best service our Russian friends give to us is never to speak aloud about us."</blockquote><p><a href="https://quotefancy.com/quote/2518826/Alexander-Solschenizyn-We-cannot-state-that-all-Jews-are-Bolsheviks-But-without-Jews" target="_blank">Solzhenitsyn also noted</a>: </p><p></p><blockquote>“We cannot state that all Jews are Bolsheviks. But – without Jews there would never have been Bolshevism. For a Jew nothing is more insulting than the truth. The blood-maddened Jewish terrorists had murdered 66,000,000 in Russia from 1918 – 1957.” </blockquote><p></p><p>This is why Netanyahu deliberately funded Hamas</p></span></div><div><div><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><blockquote><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/netanyahu-israel-gaza-hamas-1.7010035" target="_blank">The accusations aimed at Netanyahu</a> go beyond merely failing to foresee or prevent the Hamas attack of October 7, however. Many accuse him of deliberately empowering the group for decades as part of a strategy to sabotage a two-state solution based on the principle of land for peace.
"There's been a lot of criticism of Netanyahu in Israel for instating a policy for many years of strengthening Hamas and keeping Gaza on the brink while weakening the Palestinian Authority," said Mairav Zonszein of the International Crisis Group. "And we've seen that happening very clearly on the ground."</blockquote></span></div><div><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">This is why Israel's response to the Hamas attack was non-existent for several hours:</span></div><div><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/10/24/hamas-attack-on-israel-what-us-intelligence-services-told-their-european-counterparts_6199648_4.html" target="_blank"></a><blockquote><a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/10/24/hamas-attack-on-israel-what-us-intelligence-services-told-their-european-counterparts_6199648_4.html" target="_blank">According to US intelligence</a>, Hamas was surprised by the slowness of the Israeli security forces's response to the offensive by its armed commandos.
</blockquote></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Just as the demand for racists far exceeds the supply, the demand for anti-Semites is insatiable. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">It may be worthwhile to note that for years, </span><a href="https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/israel-helped-funnel-qatar-money-to-fund-hamas-netanyahu-palestinian-state-gaza-war-2456157-2023-11-01" style="font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;" target="_blank">Netanyahu actually funded Hamas</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">. And after all of that funding, isn't it amazing that </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/12/israel-hamas-war-egypt-warned-foreign-affairs-gaza" target="_blank">Egyptian</a>, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/13/politics/us-intelligence-warnings-potential-gaza-clash-days-before-attack/index.html" target="_blank">US</a> and <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/24/amos-yaldin-israeli-military-intelligence-netanyahu-qa-00123099" target="_blank">Israeli intelligence</a> all warned the Netanyahu government about an impending Hamas attack, yet not only was nothing done, the Israeli military didn't respond for several hours? </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> Israel needs persecution, conflict, and most of all, dead Jews. It cannot long survive without them. </span></div><div><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
</span></div><div><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Every politician in the world wants his cut of the graft that this principle creates. There's a reason <a href="https://www.zerohedge.com/political/kamala-harris-stepdaughter-helps-raise-8m-gaza-while-moms-admin-puses-billions-israel" target="_blank">Kamala Harris' daughter raises money for Hamas while Kamala herself campaigns to</a> send US taxpayer money to Israel.</span></div><div><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
</span><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">That's why Trump's "no war" policies were literally considered criminal in international circles. By not encouraging war, by not participating in military action, Trump stole income from thousands of politicians world-wide and from the corporations that profit from conflict. Trump MUST go to jail for this unconscionable crime against humanity, humanity being defined as "those who profit from international money transfers."
</span><div><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></div><div><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Israel needs dead Jews. The world's politicians and corporations need war. </span></div><div><span face=""Source Sans Pro", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Who can deny them what they need? </span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-82439954783296240452023-10-26T16:54:00.018-05:002023-11-17T09:28:21.217-06:00Palestine or Israel?<p> We know from Herodotus the term "Palestine" first appeared in the 5th century BC in his history. </p><p>In the early 2nd century AD, the term "Syria Palaestina" (literally, "Palestinian Syria") was given to the Roman province of Judaea around the time the Romans crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 AD. By 390 AD, during the Byzantine period, the imperial province of Syria Palaestina was then reorganized into Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Salutaris. The Muslims continued to use those names for the regions through the Ottoman Empire and its demise. </p><p>The idea that this area should be called "Israel" is a post-WW II conceit. It has not been called that for over 2000 years, as this graphic from a 1947 issue of National Geographic shows:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg92aWdK66MQijXn9gn73E3EQbvxR4tyecvc1Tki99Q2QQ1KQbNssMf0bevPT91ttY1OJwSI_5196GIUaAMgNby6ERmgcZ5Em-o34-iJUkybk-GgG8JfHGwgi7a3AiBlzB7Z_Eb3v285XuXQ_tVq9HthGa_D_huj-1s-cPCbgWeL-_qfu2wN4gkvg/s1024/Palestine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="865" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg92aWdK66MQijXn9gn73E3EQbvxR4tyecvc1Tki99Q2QQ1KQbNssMf0bevPT91ttY1OJwSI_5196GIUaAMgNby6ERmgcZ5Em-o34-iJUkybk-GgG8JfHGwgi7a3AiBlzB7Z_Eb3v285XuXQ_tVq9HthGa_D_huj-1s-cPCbgWeL-_qfu2wN4gkvg/s320/Palestine.jpg" width="270" /></a></div><br /><p>So, the idea that the area should be called "Israel" instead of "Palestine" is very much like the Protestant idea that Protestant theology can be traced all the way back to Christ's time - it's absurd on its face, but that doesn't keep people from trying to defend it and promote it.</p><p>As for Judaism somehow being unique, there is no evidence of that. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/story/which-religion-is-the-oldest" target="_blank">Hinduism is older than Judaism</a> and can lay claim to being BETTER and more obviously chosen by God precisely because they prospered. Zoroastrianism is <a href="https://www.livius.org/sources/content/oriental-varia/religious-persecution-under-alexander-the-great/" target="_blank">older</a> than Judaism and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/story/how-have-zoroastrians-been-treated-in-muslim-iran" target="_blank">much more deeply persecuted</a> than the Jews ever were, so if <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2011/11/14/opinion/choksy-iran-zoroastrian/index.html" target="_blank">persecution</a> is the standard, then <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/religion/zoroastrianism" target="_blank">Zoroastrianism</a> <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/14/2/210" target="_blank">wins</a>. Parsis can also be viewed <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214540021000335#:~:text=Our%20phylogenetic%20analysis%20confirmed%20that,et%20al.%2C%201993)." target="_blank">as a distinct tribe</a>.</p><p>Judaism isn't unique, it's prosaic. In fact, it isn't even properly Judaism anymore. Temple sacrifice was wiped out two millennia ago. The rabbi-synagogue system is essentially a new religion pasted into history under the old name, but with no real connection to any of the original faith system. There is no way to look at Reform, Conservative, Orthodox or even Haredi or Karaite and claim that they are practicing a theology anything like Isaac's sons practiced.</p><p>As for "tribe", there is literally <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2014.00462/full" target="_blank">no way to differentiate a Jew</a> from <a href="https://momentmag.com/the-biggest-jewish-genetic-myths-of-all-time/" target="_blank">a non-Jew</a>. There are no distinct genetic markers, no real indications of a tribe, no physical test that differentiates a non-Jew from a Jew. One could make the <a href="https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2021/Q1/new-study-ties-indias-genetic-diversity-to-language,-not-geography.html" target="_blank">tribal claim for Hindus</a> as easily as one can for Jews. In terms of belief, the claims for what constitutes Judaism are so wide and varied that there is essentially no common ground left. It's all a chimera, a fantasy.</p><p>It's like saying a visit to the Germany pavilion at Epcot Center, Disneyland is identical to being a German living in Munich. At this point, Judaism is nothing but absurd play-acting. Judaism is just a bunch of modern leftists LARPing as ancient monotheists, and doing a piss-poor job of it.</p><p><b>Update:</b><br />We should also keep in mind that our idea of what constitutes Israel is not the same as the <a href="https://www.ahavat-israel.com/eretz/future" target="_blank">Jewish idea of what constitutes Israel</a>. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.ahavat-israel.com/eretz/eimages/future-map4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="326" data-original-width="405" height="326" src="https://www.ahavat-israel.com/eretz/eimages/future-map4.jpg" width="405" /></a></div><br /><p>Similarly, we should remember that just as the Koran requires the Muslims to commit genocide against the Jews, the <a href="https://www.unz.com/article/the-gospel-of-gaza/" target="_blank">Torah requires the Jews to commit genocide</a> as well:</p><blockquote><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">"...listen to </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX20CbMvF24" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #035da6; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: bold; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;" title="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX20CbMvF24">this lecture by Rabbi Eliyahu Kin</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">, delivered in 2009, on the question: “Why must Jews destroy Amalek?” Let me summarize it for you. The Amalekites deserved their fate because they opposed the will of God. The will of God is good, and opposing the will of God is evil. So exterminating Amalek is good, while saving just one Amalekite, as Saul did, is evil. In fact, since God is good, exterminating Amalek is the expression of his goodness. And since “the best way to love what Hashem (God) loves is to hate what Hashem hates,” hating Amalek is loving God. The reason why the Amalekites hate the Jews is not because the Jews want to exterminate them. “What bothers Amalek is that the Jew believes in </span><i style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">mussar</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">, morality, ethics, being good, being nice.” The Amalekites are also evil because they oppose the Torah — in which God orders them to be exterminated. Ultimately, Rabbi Kin summarizes, “we are cruel to Amalek because we need to be. Because that is exactly what they would do to us if they had the chance.” Why? Because Amalek “is a concentration of hatred.” And Jews must hate hatred — except the hatred of God for Amalek, which they must love as an expression of God’s love. "</span></div></blockquote><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 16px;"></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-56508872083647751342023-10-24T14:19:00.016-05:002023-10-26T18:05:02.841-05:00How Zionists Collaborated With Nazis<p> Even the Jews know it is true.</p><p><a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-11-14/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/the-zionists-who-worked-with-nazis-and-were-executed-by-partisans/0000017f-deee-d3ff-a7ff-ffeef5090000" target="_blank">Haaretz reports</a>:</p><p>"The Zionist Activists Who Collaborated With Nazis, and Were Executed by Jewish Partisans</p><p>The Betar movement has ignored a melancholy chapter of its history that occurred in the Vilna ghetto during the Holocaust: the execution by Jews of other Jews who collaborated with the Nazis"</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2536016" target="_blank">A JStor paper</a></p><p>The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941 (Klaus Polkehn)</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230622-israels-state-archive-exposes-zionist-efforts-to-enlist-nazis-against-britain/" target="_blank">Middle East Monitor</a></p><p>Israel’s state archive exposes Zionist efforts to enlist Nazis against Britain (June 22, 2023)</p><p>Efforts by Zionist militias to recruit Nazi Germany in the fight against the British Mandate authorities in Palestine have been revealed in newly-released transcripts in the Israel State Archive. The documents, which were released to the public last month, include information on what Haaretz has called the “dark chapter” of Zionist militias’ ties with Nazi Germany. Reporting on the revelations, the Israeli newspaper uncovered shocking details which not only debunk the Zionist propaganda that Palestinians had cooperated with Nazi Germany, but also confirm that some of the founders of Israel believed that it was essential for Zionists to do so.</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/livingstone-doubles-down-on-claim-that-nazis-and-zionists-collaborated-3-5-2017" target="_blank">England's Labour Party Leader</a></p><p>Livingstone said: “I simply said, back in 1933 Hitler’s government signed a deal with the Zionist movement, which would mean that Germany’s Jewish community were moved to what is now Israel.</p><p>Livingstone is referring to the Haavarah Agreement. Everything Livingstone claims is verifiable fact. Every bit of it happened. Read <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/hannah-arendt-and-the-origins-of-israelophobia" target="_blank">Hannah Arendt</a>. </p><p>“When the Zionist movement asked the Nazi Government, would they stop the rabbis doing their sermons in Yiddish and make them do it in Hebrew, he [Hitler] agreed to that. He also passed a law that said only the Zionist flag and the Swastika were the only flags that could be flown in Germany. The SS set up training camps so that German Jews who were going to go there could be trained to cope with a very different sort of country when they got there,” Livingstone claimed.</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://labourbriefing.org/blog/2019/7/30/six-holocaust-survivors-compare-zionist-policy-to-that-of-the-nazis" target="_blank">Testimony of Holocaust Survivors</a></p><p>Here we publish extracts from Holocaust survivors who oppose historical and recent Israeli policies, in some cases connecting them with those of the Nazis. In one case, the author – again a Holocaust survivor (Rudolf Vrba, pictured above) – compares key policies of the wartime Zionist movement to those of the Nazis.</p><p><br /></p><p>The <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/on-quest-to-clear-kasztner-historian-shocked-to-prove-nazi-collaboration/" target="_blank">Times of Israel</a></p><p>On quest to clear Kasztner, historian ‘shocked’ to prove Nazi collaboration. By JENNI FRAZER (15 November 2016)</p><p>Paul Bogdanor has set out the case against the Hungarian Jew who negotiated with Eichmann, an affair that sparked a deadly scandal in Israel, though that wasn’t his original plan. But for British Jewish historian Paul Bogdanor, his ambition to find material defending the controversial wartime Zionist leader, Rudolf Kasztner, was cruelly thwarted.</p><p>Bogdanor was “extremely shocked” to find that everything pointed towards Kasztner’s having been “a collaborator” with the Nazis, and a “betrayer of the Zionist movement and the Jewish people.”</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24304" target="_blank">Zionism and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany</a> (Cambridge University Press, 2008)</p><p>In his latest book, Francis R. Nicosia returns to and explores in greater detail one of the major topics of his important earlier book, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (1985): the complex and sometimes symbiotic relationship between German Zionists and the National Socialists...Both Zionists and antisemites rejected the liberal Enlightenment ideal of full Jewish assimilation in their host societies as free and equal citizens, but they did so for very different reasons. However, their differing motives and mutual hostility to each other did not prevent Nazis and Zionists from temporarily collaborating to achieve their respective ends.</p><p>Most of Nicosia's thoroughly researched book is devoted to examining how German Zionists tried to gain Nazi cooperation in the Zionist project and how the Nazis tried to use the Zionist movement to achieve their primary aim of creating a judenrein German Reich</p><p>...On the basis of copious research in more than two dozen German, Israeli, British, and North American archives, Nicosia confirms the current historical consensus that the Nazis had no plan for systematic genocide before 1941... a scrupulous work of history, not politics, and Nicosia makes no references to the present, except to point out the irony that while anti-Zionism or criticism of the state of Israel in Europe or the United States today is often equated with antisemitism (or viewed as motivated by antisemitism), before 1933 antisemites were more likely to support Zionist aims than to oppose them. </p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://merip.org/1985/01/brenner-zionism-in-the-age-of-the-dictators/" target="_blank"> Zionism in the Age of the Dictators</a>, Lenni Brenner (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1983)</p><p>...It takes only a small step to move from this kind of thinking to Haganah agent Feivel Polkes’ spying in 1937 for Adolf Eichmann, in the hope of getting the Nazis to further “the realisation of Zionism.”</p><p>For the major Zionist organization, the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine overwhelmed all other considerations, including the rescue of Europe’s Jews. After Kristallnacht (November 1938), when the British government proposed that thousands of Jewish children be brought to Great Britain from the continent, David Ben- Gurion told a meeting of Labor Zionists:</p><p></p><blockquote>If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative, (p. 149)</blockquote><p></p><p>In 1943, while the Jews of Europe were being slaughtered, the US Congress finally got around to proposing a rescue commission. Rabbi Stephen Wise, one of American Zionism’s most important spokesmen, “came to Washington to testify against the rescue bill because it did not mention Palestine.” (p. 242) </p><p>Brenner’s final chapter is about the Stern Gang, a terrorist group that splintered from Begin’s Irgun. In 1941, while still considering themselves part of the Irgun, the Sternists sent a proposal of alliance to the Nazis. “The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich,” the Stern document read, “offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side.” It adds that “the NMO [Irgun] is closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe in its ideology and structure.” (pp. 267-268)</p><p>... Yitzhak Shamir, one of the Stern Gang’s leaders, recently served as Israel’s prime minister. Begin honored Stern by putting his portrait on a postage stamp.</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/arabstudquar.45.1.0008" target="_blank">Germany’s Never-Ending Guilt Trip</a></p><p>Nazi Germany and the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the future government of Israel and the official representative of the Zionist Organization (ZO), entered a contractual transactional relationship from 1933 to 1939. In 1952 the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the State of Israel, on behalf of all Jews, signed an agreement that paved the way for Germany’s unconditional support for Israel. No suggestion is being made here that Nazi Germany and the FRG are the same; the FRG assumed responsibilities for the crimes of the Holocaust.</p><p>However, both contractual transactional relationships between both countries from 1933 to the present have initiated policies and programs that contributed significantly to the deterioration of German Jewish living conditions in Germany, the transfer of thousands of German Jewish citizens and their assets out of Germany to colonize Palestine, the establishment of Israel in historic Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, the allocation of a significant portion of German reparation money for the benefit of Israel instead of the victims of the Holocaust, the strengthening of the Israeli economy and industrial base, and providing Israel with German military technology and equipment to wage wars in the region.</p><p>In this article, I will examine and analyze the special, often secret, relationship between Germany and the Zionist mechanization to colonize Palestine, the establishment of Israel in 1948, and the arming of the state with modern weapon platforms that can carry and deliver nuclear weapons. This secret relationship is in clear violation of German law, made possible by creating a universal guilt feeling among Germans for the crime of the Holocaust, and associated with a deliberate lack of public debate and accountability.</p><p>If <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/hannah-arendt-and-the-origins-of-israelophobia" target="_blank">Jews were willing to support FDR</a>, even though they KNEW he was allowing Jews to be murdered, why would their attitude towards the Nazis have been any different?</p><p></p><blockquote><p>This deliberate inattention was a stunning confirmation of the low value that the democracies placed on Jewish lives in Nazi-occupied Europe. Both newspapers, though owned by Jews, took their cues from the Roosevelt administration, which deliberately downplayed the announcement of Hitler’s Final Solution by handing it to Rabbi Wise rather than an administration official. For the duration of the war, the government, believing that “rescue through victory” was the only reasonable policy, tried to head off public agitation for special efforts to rescue European Jewry. And for the duration of the war, both newspapers cooperated by burying details of the Holocaust.</p><p>Wise, sometimes called the “King of the Jews” because of his leadership of an incredible array of Jewish organizations and umbrella groups, might have been expected to press for rescue efforts and for lifting immigration restrictions on Jewish refugees. But Wise had a close personal relationship with the president (whom he called “boss”) and never attained the independence of judgment to recognize that his hero, despite public expressions of friendship for Jews in general, was acquiescing in the murder of the European Jews. Only a popular grassroots campaign, bypassing the official Jewish leadership, might have overcome the administration’s hostility and the indifference of the mainstream media.</p></blockquote><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-27692629554639019772023-10-22T23:19:00.024-05:002024-01-13T13:26:11.886-06:00Improving Heart Health<p style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">For those of you who may have concerns about heart health, and may consequently be on statins, blood-thinners or similar medications, some research on diet supplements that you may find interesting:</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Statins often deplete the body of <b>Co-Q10</b>. <a href="https://www.clevelandheartlab.com/blog/horizons-coq10-what-are-the-heart-health-benefits/" target="_blank">Ubiquinol is the most active form of Co-Q10</a>. Studies show it helps heart health and decreases the muscle pain associated with statin use. </span></li><li><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;"><b><a href="https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/supplement/vitamin-c-ascorbic-acid#:~:text=Results%20of%20scientific%20studies%20on,help%20protect%20arteries%20against%20damage." target="_blank">Vitamin C</a>
and <a href="https://www.abbott.com/corpnewsroom/healthy-heart/vitamin-d-and-heart-health.html#:~:text=Turns%20out%2C%20though%2C%20paying%20attention,with%20more%20negative%20health%20outcomes." target="_blank">D</a></b> are both good for <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4572086/" target="_blank">general immune system support</a>. It is possible high doses
of Vitamin C may reduce arterial plaque and slow down progression of atherosclerosis. </span></li><li><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;">Low levels of <b><a href="https://www.abbott.com/corpnewsroom/healthy-heart/vitamin-d-and-heart-health.html#:~:text=Turns%20out%2C%20though%2C%20paying%20attention,with%20more%20negative%20health%20outcomes." target="_blank">Vitamin D</a></b> are correlated to higher rates of congestive heart failure. </span></li><li><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;"><b>Vitamin K2</b>
is reported to prevent arterial calcification. It has different forms. The s</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;">erum
half-life of MK-4 variant of K2 is a few hours while the MK-7 variant can last up to 3+ days. Click <a href="https://openheart.bmj.com/content/8/2/e001715" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7238900/" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://melioguide.com/osteoporosis-nutrition/vitamin-k2-for-osteoporosis/" target="_blank">here</a> for more information.</span></li><li><a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24229674/" style="font-size: 12pt;" target="_blank"><b>Lumbrokinase</b></a><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;">
is a blood thinner that reduces fibrin clots and may also reduce arterial
plaque</span></li><li><a href="https://www.webmd.com/diet/health-benefits-nattokinase" style="font-size: 12pt;" target="_blank"><b>Nattokinase</b></a><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;">
dissolves clots and <a href="https://www.earthclinic.com/cures/high-dose-nattokinase-for-atherosclerosis.html" target="_blank">arterial plaque</a>, while lowering blood pressure. It operates via a different mode than lumbrokinase. In addition to taking nattokinase
pill supplements, you may also consider eating natto (fermented soybeans) for breakfast. It is available through Asian grocery
stores like 99 Ranch, in the frozen food section. </span></li><li><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3942300/" style="font-size: 12pt;" target="_blank"><b>Pantethine</b></a><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;">
(this is NOT B5, it is a derivative) l</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;">owers
cholesterol effectively</span></li><li><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3529416/" style="font-size: 12pt;" target="_blank"><b>Bromelain</b></a><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;">
prevents or minimizes the severity of angina pectoris and transient ischemic
attack (TIA). It is useful in the prevention and treatment of thrombophlebitis.
It may also break down cholesterol plaques and exerts a potent fibrinolytic
activity.</span></li><li><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;"><b>Find fish oil</b>
with the <a href="https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/supplement/eicosapentaenoic-acid-epa#:~:text=Getting%20more%20EPA%20in%20your,fatty%20acids%20in%20their%20diet." target="_blank">highest concentration of EPA</a> you can identify.</span></li><li><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;"><b>Taurine</b> </span><span style="background: rgb(254, 254, 254); color: #0a0a0a; font-size: 12pt;">may help reduce the risk of heart disease, thanks to its ability to
decrease blood pressure and inflammation. In a review
published in <em><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Amino
Acids, </span></em>animal models </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><a><span style="background: rgb(254, 254, 254);">suggest</span></a></span><span style="background: rgb(254, 254, 254); color: #0a0a0a; font-size: 12pt;"> that a
higher intake could help protect against heart disease and prevent fatty plaque
build-up in the arteries. Click <a href="https://draxe.com/nutrition/what-is-taurine/" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/what-is-taurine#benefits" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://clinmedjournals.org/articles/ijcc/international-journal-of-clinical-cardiology-ijcc-8-246.php?jid=ijcc" target="_blank">here</a> for more information.</span></li><li><b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5871262/" target="_blank">Berberine</a></span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #202124; font-size: 12pt;">alone and in combination with other supplements provided an average LDL
percent reduction of 20–30%. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Oral dose from 150 mg to 1000 mg/day (also see <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5643735/" target="_blank">here</a>)</span></li><li><b style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6497409/" target="_blank">Citrus Bergamot Extract</a> </span></b><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">studies <a href="https://www.weeklycitizen.com/story/news/columns/2023/04/25/citrus-bergamot-lowers-cholesterol-in-medical-studies/70125777007/#:~:text=In%20a%20review%20of%2012,was%20as%20much%20as%2041%25." target="_blank">showed</a> a significant
decrease in total cholesterol, triglycerides and LDLc. The decrease in total
cholesterol varied from 12.3% to 31.3%, from 7.6% to 40.8% in LDLc and from
11.5% to 39.5% in triglycerides.</span></li><li><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><a href="https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/2009/10/23/look-into-eyes-to-assess-risk-of-heart-attack" target="_blank"><b>Lysine</b></a>, according to Linus Pauling's research, provides essential cellular building blocks for repair of arteries. </span></li></ul><div><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><b><a href="https://www.townsendletter.com/article/437-mens-heart-health-kahn/" target="_blank">Men's Heart Health:</a></b> best cholesterol tests</span></div><div><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"><b><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8042107/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">What the results should look like</span></a></b>: "Our meta-analysis suggests that not only should LDL be reduced to a target level of < 80 mg/dL, but HDL should be increased to a target level of > 45 mg/dL to regress coronary plaques."</span></div><p></p>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-12887967600657964932023-10-22T22:36:00.017-05:002023-11-07T15:50:06.528-06:00Socialism and the Jews<p></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">The Jews have been <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-voting-record-in-u-s-presidential-elections" target="_blank">voting majority Democrat since 1916</a>, when Woodrow Wilson got 55% of the Jewish vote. The 1920 election was the first and only time the Jewish vote went plurality Republican to Harding at 43%, but that was largely because 38% went to Eugene V. Debs,<span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"> the Socialist candidate for president,</span><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"> while 19% of the Jewish vote went to Cox, the Democrat candidate. In 1920, the Socialist and Democrat tickets split the Jewish ticket. Once that is taken into account, the 1920 aberration is explained: the majority of Jews still voted for the semi-socialist and socialist candidates. </span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;">Why does this matter?</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">Because once is bad luck.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Twice is coincidence.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Three times is enemy action.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://constitutingamerica.org/friday-may-31-essay-75-woodrow-wilson-socialism-and-democracy-guest-essayist-tony-williams-program-director-of-the-washington-jefferson-madison-institute-in-charlottesvil/" target="_blank">Woodrow Wilson was notorious for growing the socialist</a> tendencies of the US government, that is, the Democrats have been strongly socialist since at least 1916. But the Jews have been strongly socialist since socialism was invented in the early 1800s. That's why the Democrats have been capturing the Jewish vote for well over a century. Jews have always been socialists. When we see them vote for Democrats today, we aren't seeing an aberration, we are seeing bedrock cultural principles in action. Jews vote their principles. They are pro-baby-murder (abortion), pro-alphabet nonsense, pro-socialism. They always have been.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/11/04/david-ben-gurion-obstinate-little-man/" target="_blank">David Ben-Gurion</a>, the founder of Israel, explicitly styled himself as a Zionist Lenin. Israel was founded on socialist principles, the <a href="https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/course/Abramitzky_book_presentation.pdf" target="_blank">kibbutz was seen as a necessary instrument in a socialist paradise</a>. <a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/how-joseph-stalin-helped-create-the-state-of-israel/" target="_blank">Joseph Stalin helped create</a> the modern state of Israel. The reasons are easy to understand. As the Jewish Virtual Library points out:</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"></span></span></p><blockquote><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"><a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/socialism" target="_blank">The forerunners of modern socialism</a> were two Frenchmen, Count Henry Claude de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon (1760–1825; see Saint-Simonism) and Charles Fourier (1772–1837). Saint-Simon was impressed by Jewish messianic ideals and, referring to the persecution of the Jews, wrote that he looked forward to the time when all men would be brothers. Two of his followers, Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864) and Armand Bazard (1791–1832), considered the emancipation of the Jews as being one of the preconditions for the liberation of humanity....</span></blockquote><blockquote><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;">In Germany, many of the pioneers of socialism were Jewish. Among them was Moses Hess, whose study Die Philosophic der Tat (“The Philosophy of Action”), linked the ideas of the German philosophical school with the concept of historical materialism on which communism was based. </span></blockquote><p></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">And therein lies the problem. Socialists have a strong tendency to kill each other. In the years leading up to the Soviet Revolution, <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/who-were-the-mensheviks-and-bolsheviks-1221813" target="_blank">Menshevik socialists and Bolshevik socialists</a> fought each other in the streets of Moscow. In the decade following, <a href="https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/violence-streets" target="_blank">Germany's National Socialists fought the International Socialists</a> in the streets of Berlin. At the time of <a href="https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/93" target="_blank">Hitler's Barbarossa invasion</a> of the USSR, Stalin was still feeding Germany huge amounts of resources, such as oil. Once the invasion started, Stalin privately confessed to a colleague that it was not truly unexpected: if Hitler hadn't broken their secret peace agreement, Stalin had intended to break his peace treaty with Hitler and invade Germany at the first opportunity. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/story/the-assassination-of-leon-trotsky" target="_blank">Stalin had Trotsky assassinated</a> with an ice-pick to the forehead. This is the history of socialism. It has always involved violent, deadly in-fighting. And Jews <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-gangsters-in-america" target="_blank">don't mind that level of violence</a>, as long as they are handing it out, and not on the receiving end. </p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">For the last century, many Muslims have seen <a href="https://hoodcommunist.org/2023/05/04/islamic-socialist-figures-to-remember/" target="_blank">Islam</a> as being <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/socialism-islamic" target="_blank">completely consistent</a> <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1478-1913.1966.tb01208.x" target="_blank">with</a> <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/abs/panislam-and-the-making-of-the-early-indian-muslim-socialists/B9C6C0F0CBDA08CCF9DB21D72C9955AB" target="_blank">socialism</a>. Given that both Jews and Muslims have always found socialism attractive, it is no surprise to see the traditional socialist infighting and back-stabbing continue. Today, instead of Mensheviks vs. Bolsheviks or Nazis vs. communists, we have Jewish socialists versus Islamic socialists. </p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">America's Jewish socialists vote for and fund the <a href="https://www.wispolitics.com/2023/wisgop-wisdems-socialist-caucus-refuses-to-condemn-hamas-terrorism/" target="_blank">socialist Democrat Party</a>, which in turn funds <a href="https://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2023/10/comparing-hamas-and-nazis.html" target="_blank">socialist Hamas</a> and <a href="https://isreview.org/issue/110/myths-and-facts-about-hezbollah/index.html" target="_blank">socialist Hezbollah</a>, who in turn, kill Israeli Jewish socialists. <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-democrats-lash-socialist-organization-for-backing-rally-supporting-hamas-attack/" target="_blank">Socialist Hamas</a> invades and kills socialist Jews. This should be no surprise. Socialists kill each other. It is what they do.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">So watching Jews vote for Democrats, who then fund the terrorists that slaughter Jews, isn't some kind of "mistake" on anyone's part. It is socialists acting as socialists have always acted. When America's Jewish community calls for support against Hamas, it is no different than the Mensheviks calling for support against the Bolsheviks. This is a socialist <a href="https://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2023/10/on-existence-of-israel.html" target="_blank">civil war</a>, a war between cousins, a war between ideological brothers, a war between two groups of monotheists who both deny the Trinity. </p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">The black sub-culture in America has a 70% illegitimacy rate. It makes up 13% of the population, but causes, and is the victim of, over 50% of the murders. It votes in excess of 80% Democrat.</span></span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"> </span></span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Any sub-culture that produces 70% socialists and Democrats is just as jacked up. </span></span><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e; font-size: 15px;">I'm glad that Milton Friedman lived. He was a Jew, a conservative, a capitalist and a genius. </span><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e; font-size: 15px;">I'm glad my sons all read Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams - these men are both geniuses, and I hope my sons emulate these men and any man like them. </span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">But <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAxjWorde-4" target="_blank">Thomas Sowell understands the culture he came from is very screwed up</a>. He quotes James Flynn, who noted that the post-WW II children of both black and white GIs grew up with exactly the same IQ. Flynn's conclusion was that America's black sub-culture is what destroys the black community. Following on that example, we can make the same argument about the world's Jewish sub-culture. It creates toxic socialists; world-wide Jewish sub-culture produces socialists. We can conclude that the Jewish sub-culture is at least as toxic as America's black sub-culture. </span></span></p><p></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: #2a2e2e; font-size: 15px;">Thomas admits the problem is America's black culture. Why don't America's conservative, capitalist Jews understand or admit that Jewish theology is absurd, that Jewish culture is toxic? Why don't we have a Jewish voice that is as clear, consistent, logical and brilliant as Thomas Sowell or Walter E. Williams speaking out about the failures of Jewish culture? We need these men to step forward. </span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-72785967311596808262023-10-22T10:37:00.010-05:002023-10-27T11:39:35.920-05:00Maurice Samuel and You Gentiles<p> A Jewish intellectual and writer, Maurice Samuel was known for his role as a polemicist and campaigner against anti-Semitism. Most of his work concerns itself with Judaism or the Jew's role in history and modern society, but he also wrote more conventional fiction, such as The Web of Lucifer, which takes place during the Borgias' rule of Renaissance Italy, and the fantasy science-fiction novel The Devil that Failed. Samuel also wrote the nonfiction King Mob under the pseudonym "Frank K. Notch". </p><p><a href="https://collections.americanjewisharchives.org/ms/ms0089/ms0089.html" target="_blank">He and his work received acclaim</a> within the Jewish community during his lifetime, including the 1944 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his non-fiction work, The World of Sholom Aleichem. He received the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature posthumously in 1972. Samuel died in New York City in 1972 at the age of 77.</p><p>Samuel's awards:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>the 1943 Anisfield-Wolf Award for The World of Sholom Aleichem;</li><li>the 1944 Saturday Review of Literature Award; </li><li>the 1956 Stephen S. Wise Award; </li><li>the 1967 B'nai B'rith Jewish Heritage Award. </li><li>In 1964 Brandeis University awarded Samuel an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters. </li><li>On the day of his death, in 1972, Samuel was to have been in Israel to receive the Manger Prize for Yiddish Literature, for which he had been nominated by Israeli President Zalman Shazar. The prize was awarded posthumously in June, 1972.</li></ul><p></p><p>Here are some excerpts from his book, "<a href="https://archive.org/stream/yougentiles00samurich/yougentiles00samurich_djvu.txt" target="_blank">You Gentiles</a>" (1924):</p><p></p><blockquote><p>There are two life-forces in the world I know: Jewish and gentile, ours and yours...I do not believe that this primal difference between gentile and Jew is reconcilable. You and we may come to an understanding, never to a reconciliation. There will be irritation between us as long as we are in intimate contact. For nature and constitution and vision divide us from all of you forever.</p><p>A century of partial tolerance gave us Jews access to your world. In that period the great attempt was made, by advance guards of reconciliation, to bring our two worlds together. It was a century of failure. We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands. We will forever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build.... The wretched fate which scattered us through your midst has thrust this unwelcome role upon us.</p><div>We Jews are accused of being destroyers: whatever you put up, we tear down. It is true only in a relative sense. We are not iconoclasts deliberately: we are not enemies of your institutions simply because of the dislike between us. We are a homeless mass seeking satisfaction for our constructive instincts. And in your institutions we cannot find satisfaction.</div><p>When Germany and England and America will long have lost their present identity or purpose, we shall still be strong in ours.</p><p>Jew and Gentile are two worlds, between you Gentiles and us Jews there lies an unbridgeable gulf...There are two life forces in the world Jewish and Gentile...I do not believe that this primal difference between Gentile and Jew is reconcilable...The difference between us is abysmal...You might say: 'Well, let us exist side by side and tolerate each other. We will not attack your morality, nor you ours.' But the misfortune is that the two are not merely different; they are opposed in mortal enmity. No man can accept both, or, accepting either, do otherwise than despise the other.</p><p>Our Jewishness is not a creed, it is ourself, our totality. Indeed, it may be fairly said that the surest evidence of your lack of seriousness in religion is the fact that your religions are not national, that you are not compromised and dedicated, en masse, to the faith.</p><p>Years of observation and thought have given increasing strength to the belief that we Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts; that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divided all of you from us.</p><p>In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew. Is your God an Englishman or an American?</p><p>We belong to the One mastering God: you belong to the republic of playful gods.</p><p>You have your way of life, we ours. In your system of life we are essentially without 'honor.' In our system of life you are essentially without morality. In your system of life we must forever appear graceless; to us you must forever appear godless.</p><p>To say that a schlemiel is a luckless person is to touch only the negative side. It is the schlemiel's avocation and profession to miss out on things, to muff opportunities, to be persistently, organically, preposterously and ingeniously out of place. A hungry schlemiel dreams of a plate of hot soup, and hasn't a spoon.</p></blockquote><p>If this sounds obscene, it isn't. You must remember that Jewish moral theology is NOT Christian moral theology. Despite what Christians assert, the two moral systems actually share very little in common.</p><p></p><blockquote> <span face="Lato, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://www.jackmoline.com/on-being-a-rabbi/two-men-in-the-desert-with-one-bottle-of-water" target="_blank">The Talmud discusses the dilemma</a> of two men stranded in the desert, one with just enough water to survive and the other with none. What should they do? If one drinks, the other dies. If both drink, both certainly die. The conclusion, taught by the pre-eminent rabbi of all time, Akiva, is that the person with the water must drink and survive. Tragic though it may seem, he may not forfeit his life for another, and he may not forfeit both lives for the sake of principle. His claim on life in a time of scarce resources is non-transferable.</span></blockquote><span face="Lato, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify;"></span><p></p><div>Here's <a href="https://www.etzion.org.il/en/philosophy/issues-jewish-thought/issues-mussar-and-faith/ve-ahavta-le-reiakha-kamokha-ii-putting" target="_blank">another discussion that quotes the same conclusion</a>. In fact, doing your laundry takes precedence over other people's lives:<br /><p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="background-color: white; color: #272828; font-family: Calibri, "sans-serif"; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 26px 36pt; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span andiallelmwithtext="16" face="Arial, "sans-serif"" style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tuafontsizes="16"><a href="https://www.etzion.org.il/en/philosophy/issues-jewish-thought/issues-mussar-and-faith/ve-ahavta-le-reiakha-kamokha-ii-putting" target="_blank">If they must choose between their own animals</a> and the animals of others, their own animals come first, before the animals of others.<span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span><o:p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="background-color: white; color: #272828; font-family: Calibri, "sans-serif"; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 26px 36pt; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span andiallelmwithtext="16" face="Arial, "sans-serif"" style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tuafontsizes="16">If they must choose between their own laundering and the laundering of others, their own laundering comes first, before the laundering of others<o:p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="background-color: white; color: #272828; font-family: Calibri, "sans-serif"; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 26px 36pt; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span andiallelmwithtext="16" face="Arial, "sans-serif"" style="font-size: 12pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tuafontsizes="16">If, however, they must choose between the lives of others and their own laundering, the lives of others come first, before their own laundering.<span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span>However, Rabbi Yosei says that their own laundering comes first, before the lives of others.</span></p></div><div>Keep in mind that "Judeo-Christian morality" is a nonsense phrase. Jews consider Christians to be heretics. From the Jewish point of view, that phrase sounds like "Judeo-Heretical morality". Consider, for instance, how easily a Jew can accept abortion:</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><blockquote><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2582082" target="_blank">While the Talmud gives the full status of humanness to a child at birth</a>, the rabbinical writings have partially extended the acquisition of humanness to the 13th postnatal day of life for full-term infants. The Babylonian Talmud Yevamot 69b states that: “the embryo is considered to be mere water until the fortieth day.” Afterwards, it is considered subhuman until it is born. ...After the forehead has emerged from the birth canal, the fetus is regarded as a person....</blockquote><blockquote>While the Talmud gives the full status of humanness to a child at birth, the rabbinical writings have partially extended the acquisition of humanness to the thirteenth postnatal day of life for full-term infants. This designation is based on the viability of the infant, so the acquisition of humanness occurs later for premature infants, because the viability of premature infants is still questionable after thirteen days.
Rashi, the great twelfth century commentator on the Bible and Talmud, states clearly of the fetus ‘lav nefesh hu—It is not a person.’</blockquote></span>Even a born child is not considered viable until the 30th day of life:</div><div><span style="color: #737a7f; font-family: arial; font-size: 14px;"><blockquote><a href="https://archive.jewishagency.org/life-cycle/content/24262/" target="_blank">Since an infant</a> is not considered viable until after his thirtieth day of life, the redemption ceremony must take place thirty-one days after birth.</blockquote></span><br /><br /><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-42653229433263621792023-10-16T13:32:00.004-05:002023-10-22T10:29:40.625-05:00Comparing Hamas and the Nazis<p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">The two philosophies share some similarities, but are actually quite, quite different. Hamas has entirely different intention than the Waffen SS.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">Prior to WW II, Hitler had actually planned on shipping all of <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-madagascar-plan-2" target="_blank">Germany's Jews to Madagascar</a>.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">When the Jews came up with the <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203231.pdf" target="_blank">Haavara agreement</a>, in which all of Germany's Jews would instead be shipped to British Palestine, the Nazis enthusiastically signed on. From that point forward, the Zionist flag was permitted to fly alongside the Nazi swastika, and any Jew emigrating to British Palestine could take ALL of their possessions with no penalties.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">In addition, any Jew who remained in Germany would NOT be shipped to the camps as long as he could <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/sterilization-in-nazi-germany-1779677" target="_blank">prove he had been sterilized</a>. Sterile Jews were not a blood threat to the regime's future.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">Hamas, on the other hand, kills Jews because Allah commands it. Part of the Islamic end-times involves all the Jews either dying or converting, to the point that even the stones and trees will cry out "Come, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him!" Nazis never said anything like that.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The two philosophies are entirely different, although the end result does share some similarities.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Meanwhile, we have ample evidence that Zionists worked hand in glove with the Nazis:</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e; font-size: 15px;"></span></p><blockquote><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e; font-size: 15px;"><a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230622-israels-state-archive-exposes-zionist-efforts-to-enlist-nazis-against-britain/" target="_blank">"</a></span><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230622-israels-state-archive-exposes-zionist-efforts-to-enlist-nazis-against-britain/" target="_blank">Documents released by the Israel State Archive </a>include transcripts from the interrogation of Efraim Zetler, a member of the Zionist paramilitary group, Lehi. Zetler was interrogated by Haganah fighters in 1942 about his activities in Lehi, which is regarded as being more extreme than the Haganah Zionist paramilitary group. Lehi was responsible for several atrocities, including the massacre at Deir Yassin. Haganah, however, was no moderate group, and is thought to have carried out the terrorist bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946.</span></span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">The transcript of Zetler’s interrogation revealed Lehi’s ties with the Nazis. “We will communicate with any military power ready to help with the establishment of the kingdom of Israel, even if it’s Germany,” Zetler is reported to have told the astonished interrogators. “The only condition is that we get weapons, so we can rebel against the English,” he added. “If Germany agrees to help us fight enemy number 1, the English, we’ll team up with it.” Zetler went on to say that Germany is “not an enemy of the Jews in Israel” and that Lehi would cooperate with the Nazis if it helped the underground “get this land,” meaning Palestine."</span></span></p></blockquote><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"></span></span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">"<a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-11-14/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/the-zionists-who-worked-with-nazis-and-were-executed-by-partisans/0000017f-deee-d3ff-a7ff-ffeef5090000" target="_blank">The Zionist Activists Who Collaborated With Nazis</a>"</span></span><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><br /></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">"<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2536016" target="_blank">The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941</a>"<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><br /></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">"<a href="https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/hlps.2015.0123" target="_blank">Zionist-Nazi Collaboration</a>"</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J8L_Xzrgzg" target="_blank">George Galloway: Zionism and Nazism cooperated</a></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1J8L_Xzrgzg" width="320" youtube-src-id="1J8L_Xzrgzg"></iframe></div><br /><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-30445877659851271892023-10-09T14:20:00.027-05:002023-11-07T12:50:01.499-06:00On the Existence of Israel<p>First, neither Israel nor any other nation has a "right to exist." The<a href="https://theconversation.com/israel-has-no-right-to-exist-and-neither-does-any-other-state-1668" target="_blank"> right to exist</a> belongs to persons, not to corporations, nations, glee clubs, secret societies, governments, unions, bowling leagues, or any other group of human beings. It is an individual personal right, not an aggregate right. While Judaism has had a <a href="https://www.jewishideasdaily.com/4489/features/jews-curse-christians/" target="_blank">long history of hatred for Christians</a>, and nearly as long a history of <a href="https://twitter.com/realstewpeters/status/1710829348503093696" target="_blank">hatred for Islam</a>, the faith system itself has been <a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/6978/chapter-abstract/151269965?redirectedFrom=fulltext" target="_blank">steadily declining</a> for <a href="https://www.aitzhayim.org/jewish-life-in-the-late-roman-empire/" target="_blank">two millennia</a>.</p><p>Historically, European Jews have not been particularly favorable to Zionism:</p><p></p><blockquote><a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/assimilation" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 12px;">In fin-de-siècle </span><span style="color: #3a66a2; font-family: Verdana, Arial;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12px; outline-color: initial; outline-width: initial;">Budapest</span></span></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 12px;">, for example, where Zionism made few inroads, assimilationist spokespersons lashed out at the new movement as incompatible with the patriotism of Magyars of the Mosaic faith. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 12px;"><a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/assimilation" target="_blank">Márton Schweiger,</a> president of the </span><span caption="Appellation used for Hungarian Progressive communities in the late nineteenth century. Commonly referred to as Reform, Neologs are roughly the equivalent of followers of present-day Conservative Judaism. [&lt;i&gt;See&lt;/i&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;article.aspx/Hungary&quot; class=&quot;&quot;&gt;Hungary&lt;/a&gt; &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;article.aspx/Reform_Religious&quot; class=&quot;&quot;&gt;Reform, Religious&lt;/a&gt;.]" class="term" style="background-color: white; color: #9a5743; cursor: pointer; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15px;">Neolog</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 12px;"> (Reform) community, declared: “Every endeavor of Hungarian Jewry is diametrically opposed to the trends of Zionism. It does not dream of a Jewish kingdom but wants to merge with Magyardom while maintaining intact its ancestral religion.” </span><a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Kohn_Samuel" style="background-color: white; color: #3a66a2; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 12px; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Sámuel Kohn</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 12px;">, chief rabbi of the Neolog congregation in Pest, considered Zionism “sheer folly, a dangerous craze,” predicting it would attract few followers in </span><a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Hungary" style="background-color: white; color: #3a66a2; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 12px; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Hungary</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 12px;">, since it aimed to make a nation out of a religious denomination....</span></blockquote><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 12px;"></span></p><blockquote>As was true of their nineteenth-century predecessors, [Polish Jews] blamed Jewish cultural distinctiveness for Polish antagonism. They were particularly troubled by the gains made by the Zionist movement in the years immediately after the war, both on the international diplomatic scene and in the Jewish street. They condemned Zionism and, indeed, any effort or measure to treat the Jews as a distinctive national group, including the Minorities Treaty of 1919....</blockquote><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 12px;"><p></p><blockquote>From the late nineteenth century, more than 90 percent of Budapest Jews were associated with Neolog Judaism, the Hungarian variety of <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Reform_Religious" style="color: #3a66a2; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;" title="Reform, Religious">Reform Judaism</a>, which defined Jewishness as a religious identity alone. The obverse of this was the absence of support for Zionism, which attracted a smaller percentage of the Jewish population than elsewhere in East Central and Eastern Europe. Only in provincial towns, where Magyarization was less prevalent than in Budapest, was Zionism attractive to more than a handful of Jews ... Most, especially the communal leaders, continued to think of themselves as Hungarians of the Mosaic faith, denounced Zionism as a reckless folly, and minimized the scope of antisemitism.</blockquote><p></p></span> As for modern Israel itself, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/21/u-s-jews-have-widely-differing-views-on-israel/" target="_blank">the demographics are pretty clear</a> on how this plays out.<blockquote><p>More than half of all U.S. Jews belong to the two long-dominant branches of American Judaism: 37% identify as Reform and 17% as Conservative. Roughly one-in-ten (9%) describe themselves as Orthodox. Other branches, such as the Reconstructionist movement and Humanistic Judaism, total about 4%, and due to small sample sizes cannot be analyzed separately. One-third of Jewish adults (32%) do not identify with any particular stream or institutional branch of Judaism.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Notice two things: (1) Orthodox Jews represent less than 10% of the total, and (2) non-affiliated Jews (32%) plus Reform Jews (37%) make up over two-thirds of all Jews. So, the opinions of Orthodox Jews don't actually count for much. </p><p>Younger Jews don't give a crap about Israel.</p><blockquote><p>Another way of examining differences among Jewish Americans is to look at age gaps. While Orthodox Jews tend to be relatively young and feel a strong attachment to Israel, younger Jews – as a whole – are less attached to Israel than their older counterparts. Two-thirds of Jews ages 65 and older say that they are very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel, compared with 48% of those ages 18 to 29.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Neither do <a href="https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/haredi-jews-unfurl-palestinian-flag-to-protest-zionism/2210635" target="_blank">Ultra-Orthodox Jews</a>, who <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/neturei-karta" target="_blank">make</a> up <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/more-of-israel-ultra-orthodox-youth-abandoning-religious-lifestyle/6986580.html#:~:text=In%20Israel%2C%20the%20ultra%2DOrthodox,due%20to%20a%20high%20birthrate." target="_blank">over 13% of Israel's population</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote>Ultra-Orthodox Jews, or Haredis, burned Israeli flags Thursday while unfurling the Palestinian flag to protest the establishment of Israel. </blockquote><blockquote>Gathering in the Mea She’arim neighborhood of Jerusalem, a group of Haredi Jews carried Palestinian flags while chanting "Zionism does not represent the Jews.”</blockquote><blockquote>Later, the group, including members of the anti-Zionist Jewish group Neturei Karta, burned Israeli flags on the streets of Mea She’arim.</blockquote><blockquote>The protest came amid celebrations of the 73rd anniversary of Israel's establishment.</blockquote><p></p><p>Orthodox Jews do give a crap about Israel's existence, but they make up less than 10% of the Jews in the world. While they <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2022-05-03/ty-article/.premium/nearly-one-in-four-jews-will-be-ultra-orthodox-by-2040-new-study-says/00000180-98a2-dab4-a187-9babda7e0000" target="_blank">have a positive TFR</a>, they hemorrhage followers because Orthodox Judaism is <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/science-free-schooling-israel-s-ultra-orthodox-draws-fire" target="_blank">mostly pure bull</a>. The <a href="https://international.la-croix.com/news/politics/israel-funds-ultra-orthodox-jews-to-study-instead-of-work/17899" target="_blank">only</a> <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-passes-national-budget-increase-funds-ultra-orthodox" target="_blank">reason</a> Orthodox Judaism <a href="https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-722709" target="_blank">survives</a> is due to<a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/oecd-calls-on-israel-to-cut-subsidies-for-yeshiva-students-boost-employment/" target="_blank"> the subsidies it gets from the Israeli government</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Since Israel’s founding, the ultra-Orthodox – also called the Haredim – have been exempted from military service, which is mandatory for all Jewish Israeli school leavers. The various ultra-Orthodox sects see it as a religious commandment to only study Jewish texts and separate themselves from modern society. They consequently receive government subsidies to study rather than work, along with general social services and benefits relating to unemployment, poverty and their large numbers of children.</p><p>Today the ultra-Orthodox, an umbrella term for different sects and communities, are 10% of Israel’s population of more than 8.5 million – and are growing fast.</p><p>They have strategically cultivated a role as kingmakers in Israeli politics, making or breaking coalitions based on which politicians best support their interests.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Sure, Jews over 65 identify strongly with Israel, but they will all be dead in 30 years. Meanwhile <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/945008/mena-rate-of-female-fertility-by-country/" target="_blank">the Arab TFR is at least as high</a> as the Orthodox Jewish TFR. At some point, the non-Jews will be majority in the Knesset, and then the whole game changes.</p><p></p><blockquote><p><a href="https://forward.com/opinion/422636/how-can-you-ask-us-to-be-zionists-when-israel-rejects-us-as-jews/" target="_blank">It’s true that Israel accepts patrilineal Jews</a> and non-Orthodox converts as citizens, despite rejecting their status as Jews. But what is this really worth? It means that these “non-kosher” Jews won’t be allowed to get married to other Jews in Israel. They are essentially second class citizens. How exactly is that meant to comfort potential Jewish escapees of anti-Semitism? You have an escape hatch, but the escape hatch will both deny your identity, and forbid you from establishing a family.</p><p>It’s an unacceptable and humiliating possibility. Israel has a long track record of treating non-Jews — be they Palestinians, Filipino migrant workers, or Eritrean refugees — with hostility at best.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>In thirty years, the Holocaust will be over a century old. It will no longer elicit a knee-jerk reaction from anyone. <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/israels-culture-martyrdom/" target="_blank">Zionists have spent the last half-century</a> trying to make themselves the victims of the world, even at the expense of writing all other Jewish viewpoints out of history. </p><p></p><blockquote>As Zertal observes, the Jewish resistance was presented as having been organized and led solely by Zionist movements and their leaders, while the role of the Bundists, Beitarists and Communists was either downplayed or ignored. Marek Edelman, one of the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the deputy commander of the uprising under Mordechai Anielewicz, was not even mentioned. Edelman, who represented the Jewish Socialist Party (Bund), opposed Anielewicz’s decision to commit suicide (accompanied with the murder of one’s relatives). After the war, Edelman rejected the very idea that one could draw “lessons” from the Holocaust, as well as the notion that Zionism provided the “answer” to the Jewish question. He remained in Poland and achieved fame as a leading cardiologist and a key figure in the Solidarity labor movement of the 1980s. In 1946 he published one of the first accounts of the ghetto uprising, The Ghetto Fights, in Polish, Yiddish and English. The book was translated into Hebrew only in 2001.</blockquote><p></p><p>Right now, a plurality of Jews are secular atheists who view the whole Middle East imbroglio as an ancient land dispute of no particular importance, and that will only increase in the next 30 years.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Orthodox Jews were also more likely ... [to say] that God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people. By contrast, most Jewish Americans said they did not think that either the Israeli government or Palestinian leaders were sincerely seeking peace. And most Jewish adults took the position that God “did not literally give” the land of Israel to the Jewish people (42%) or said they do not believe in God or a higher power at all (24%).</p><p></p></blockquote><p>And this has been going downhill for the Zionists <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/04/us-jews-rift-gaza-israel-crisis" target="_blank">for a long time</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote>"Even before 7 October, support for Israel among American Jews – who constitute the world’s second largest Jewish population after Israel – was shifting. One poll showed that while most Jews see caring about Israel as important to their Jewish identity, more than half disapprove of the country’s rightwing government. Another found that a quarter of American Jews agree Israel is an “apartheid state”, and one-fifth of those under 40 do not think the Jewish state has a right to exist."</blockquote><p></p><p>As a result, Israel will functionally disappear, <a href="https://history.state.gov/countries/poland" target="_blank">just like Poland did</a>. Trying to keep it alive is just pouring money down a rat hole. The Jews themselves increasingly don't care. Religious Jews, both <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-06-12/ty-article-magazine/.premium/with-rising-extremism-more-israelis-are-leaving-orthodox-judaism/0000017f-e4c1-d38f-a57f-e6d345530000" target="_blank">in Israel</a> and <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/06/22/denominational-switching-among-u-s-jews-reform-judaism-has-gained-conservative-judaism-has-lost/" target="_blank">the US</a>, are increasingly abandoning their faith, with <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/report-low-retention-rate-for-orthodox-jews" target="_blank">more than half of children in Orthodox</a> families simply walking away. </p><p></p><blockquote>94 percent say a person is Jewish even if they work on Shabbat, 89 percent say a Jew can be strongly critical of Israel, and 68 percent say Jews don’t have to believe in God, but an astonishing 34 percent say a person is still Jewish even if they decide to believe in Jesus as the messiah.</blockquote><p>The number of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/05/11/orthodox-jews-poll-secular-trump-republican/" target="_blank">irreligious Jews is growing</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote>While the Orthodox appear to be proportionally growing, Pew found even more Jews becoming more secular and unaffiliated. “Jews of no religion” — Pew’s term for people who identify as Jews and do things they see as Jewish but do not identify with the religious parts — in 2020 made up 27 percent of all U.S. Jews, up from 22 percent in 2013.</blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>The majority of the world's <a href="https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/jewish-population-by-country" target="_blank">20 million Jews live in just two countries</a>: Israel (6.9 million) and the US (5.7 million). According to <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/21/u-s-jews-have-widely-differing-views-on-israel/" target="_blank">Pew Research</a>, the majority of US Jews under age 30 don't give a crap about Israel. Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/culture/article-726394" target="_blank">13.7% of Israel's population is ultra-Orthodox Haredi</a>, who oppose the existence of the secular state of Israel. That will rise to <a href="https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/by0apdfri" target="_blank">40% by 2065.</a> The Haredi don't serve in the military or participate in the economy in any meaningful way, <a href="https://aspeniaonline.it/israel-a-demographic-ticking-bomb-in-todays-one-state-reality" target="_blank">they just study Torah.</a> </p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #585858; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 15px;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #585858; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 15px;">Pragmatically, this will translate into at least three consequences: first, additional resources for social welfare, as demanded by the ultra-Orthodox population, whose male component contribute little to the workforce and whose large families require social support and housing....</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #585858; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 15px;">Second, an ever-worsening separation between secular and religious educational systems, which will translate into cultural battles and rising social tensions between </span><em style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #585858; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 15px;">haredim</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #585858; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 15px;"> and liberal Jews, who might be shrinking demographically, but on whose shoulders rest the burden of the country’s defense through the compulsory service in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), as well as being responsible for fiscal revenues....</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #585858; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 15px;">Third, the impact of </span><em style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #585858; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 15px;">haredi</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #585858; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 15px;"> growth within the juvenile cohorts of the population and their systematic exemption from army service is already triggering a debate within the Jewish majority about the sustainability of the IDF as a “people in arms” based on a universal draft</span></blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #585858; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 15px;"></span><p></p><p>Unless someone can drum up a 21st century Holocaust to generate interest, the secular state of Israel is in serious trouble by 2050, and probably toast before we enter the 22nd century.</p><p><b>UPDATE:</b></p><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">The elimination of the secular state of Israel wouldn't necessarily cause the death of a single Jew. Jews could emigrate from the region, or, as <a href="https://www.amimagazine.org/2018/02/07/gratitude-prayers-celebrating-freedom-sholom-mordechai-rubashkin-2-2-2-2-2-2/" target="_blank">Rambam points out, they could simply recite</a> the <a href="https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/26328/jews-allowed-to-pray-and-join-muslim-congregation-in-mosques-and-experiences" target="_blank">Shahada</a>, the Muslim testimony of faith.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">From a rabbinic point of view, Judaism is passed on through the mother, not through belief. Even an atheist can be a Jew. There's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lRMHMYr7p0" target="_blank">nothing in particular</a> in the Islamic <span style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><a style="animation-name: none; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;" tabindex="-1"></a></span>profession of faith that violates Jewish faith. <a href="https://www.quora.com/Since-Islamic-Shahadah-is-the-same-as-Jewish-Shema-why-dont-Jews-proclaim-Shahada-which-makes-them-instant-Muslims-keeping-their-Jewish-traditions-folklore-and-heritage" target="_blank">As one Jew stated,</a> "Personally, I am quite happy to say the shahadah in full sincerity but in the belief that prophet Muhammad was a gentile prophet and that Judaism and İslam can coexist as two approaches to the same truth. At the core, our religion is the same and I have no issue with İslamic claims to that effect."</div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><a href="https://thelehrhaus.com/scholarship/a-jewish-perspective-on-gods-presence-in-islam/" target="_blank">Rabbi Fayyumi</a>, who influenced Maimonedes, held a very positive opinion of the Koran: </div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"></div><blockquote><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">"He analyzes the words of the Koran carefully, to such an extent that in the second chapter of his book he finds mystical meaning in the Shahada (the Muslim declaration of faith).
A substantial part of the sixth chapter of Fayyumi’s book is dedicated to analysis and interpretation of the Koran. He concludes from this analysis that Islam is not directed to the Jewish people; rather, it is intended to provide religion and faith to the nations. Its purpose is not to abolish the Torah―just the opposite: the Koran confirms the obligation of the Jewish people to keep the Torah. At the same time, Fayyumi asserts that the Koran teaches that there are additional revelations to other nations, revelations that obligate them to their own religious systems."</div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"></div></blockquote><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Once a Jew recites the Shahadah in Arabic, his Muslim brothers will leave him alone. Islam isn't interested in a biological cleansing, just theological agreement.</span></div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">There is no actual need for the state of Israel to exist. Jews can continue to live there as quasi-Muslims or move somewhere else and live quite happily.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-62633313816721767972023-09-28T11:22:00.022-05:002023-11-21T14:15:01.974-06:00Does AI Infringe Copyright?<p><span style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">That </span><a href="https://bleedingcool.com/comics/authors-discover-pirated-versions-of-their-books-used-to-train-meta-ai/" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;" target="_blank">argument is being made</a><span style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">. It's hard to see how it will succeed. Given the</span><a href="https://full-stack-search-prod.vercel.app/" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;" target="_blank"> vast input</a><span style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> an AI LLM needs to do it's job, it would be REALLY hard to argue that the AI use of anyone's text is copyright infringement, especially given the proprietary algorithms required to produce the output. If anything qualifies for </span><a href="https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;" target="_blank">"fair use"</a><span style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">, certainly using 500 pages as part of a 20 million page data set would qualify. Not only do the proprietary statistical algorithms add value, and differentiate the output, but even the original word-to-number conversion that preps the sentences for statistical analysis is proprietary.</span></p><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The conversion of the words of the original work into numbers is already a differentiation, a transformation of the original. It is an add-on value given to the work by the people who assign the numbers, the weightings and the numerical categorizations to the words. Arguably, the number string thereby derived from a given work is its own entity, unique in value from the original work, and that's BEFORE it is fed into the algorithms. This manipulation all happens BEFORE the number string is used as input. At that point, the original author of the original work arguably no longer has a copyright claim.</div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">To put it more succinctly, presenting a diagram of a sentence is not plagiarism. To prep a sentence for generative AI LLM input, the sentence has to be essentially "diagrammed". If diagramming a sentence is fair use, then diagramming hundreds of sentences is also fair use. The process of diagramming the sentence adds value and serves a different purpose than the original sentence served. All AI input has to be diagrammed before it can be used. That's what produces the propriety number string for input.
This proprietary number string, with its unique weightings and categorizations, is then fed through proprietary statistical algorithms. The output is a unique result of the algorithms, the weighting and the original number conversion. So, what's left to copyright? The output stream? How?
What people don't realize is that we cannot apply copyright to a stream of numbers output from a statistical algorithm. It's like trying to copyright the sequence of digits that make up pi. That's all generative AI does - it washes categorized, weighted numbers through a set of algorithms, and spits out more numbers.
The fact that the output numbers can then be converted back into words that make sense to us is more an example of anthropomorphism than anything else. Can anthropomorphism be copyrighted? That's one hell of a stretch. Courts have always ruled that machine output cannot be copyrighted. AI won't change that. </div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">There is nothing in the generative AI process that infringes copyright. </div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><b>Addendum</b></div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">If <a href="https://www.phil-lockwood.com/paintings/latestTown/office.htm" target="_blank"><b>this</b></a> "Office at Night" Phil Lockwood homage to Edward Hopper isn't copyright infringement, neither is AI. Every window in Lockwood's painting is a replica of an Edward Hopper painting. </div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Similarly, AI detection tools use the same LLM model that the generative AI itself uses. So, if generative AI violates copyright by collecting the work of many authors, then whenever an instructor submits a student essay to an AI detection tool, <b><i>that instructor violates the student's copyright</i></b>. The student's paper will become part of the AI detection tool's data set. Ironically, the very instructors who are concerned about AI violating copyright will happily violate student copyright in order to accomplish their own goals in reference to grading their students.</div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Teachers can violate a student's copyright but students get punished for using AI?
SERIOUSLY? </div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">OpenAI has initiated <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/06/openai-promises-to-defend-business-customers-against-copyright-claims/" target="_blank"><b>Copyright Shield</b></a> to protect its users from copyright claims.</div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Tech Companies generate <a href="https://www.barrons.com/news/how-big-tech-generated-billions-in-fines-then-didn-t-pay-them-ab5d0a77" target="_blank"><b>BILLIONS in government fines.</b></a>.. they just don't pay them. </div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><b><a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bad-news-lazy-girl-employees-120501230.html" target="_blank">Boss axed 90% of staff and replaced them with AI</a></b></div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-89252583878549185942023-09-26T11:49:00.009-05:002023-09-26T12:39:28.122-05:00Virgin Births in Modern Times<p>When looking at the virgin birth of Christ, a few disturbing historical facts can be noted. First, due to a dramatically different understanding of how conception takes place, people in ancient times may have been more prone to accept virgin births than those living in the modern era. We have, for example, this case from the late medieval period:</p><p><a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-strange-science-behind-virgin-births" target="_blank"></a></p><blockquote><p><a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-strange-science-behind-virgin-births" target="_blank">In 1637 in Grenoble, France</a>, the aristocrat Madeleine d’Auvermont was put on trial for adultery. Despite the fact that her husband had left France four years earlier, Madeleine had recently given birth to a healthy baby boy. In the face of what seemed like damning evidence she protested her innocence, claiming that she had thought—ahem—intensely about her husband at night and had conceived through the power of imagination.</p><p>Various physicians and theologians were consulted on the case and declared that this was theoretically possible. (You’d think that the theologians maybe spoke a little more forcefully than the physicians.) The child was named the legal offspring of her husband and heir to the de Montleon fortune.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>But, the acceptance of a virgin birth is not limited to medieval culture. Even today, it is not uncommon for women to claim that they became pregnant without benefit of sexual intercourse:</p><p><span face="interfaceregular, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 16px;"><a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f7102" target="_blank"></a></span></p><blockquote><span face="interfaceregular, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 16px;"><a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f7102" target="_blank">Of 7870 eligible women</a>, 5340 reported a pregnancy, of whom 45 (0.8% of pregnant women) reported a virgin pregnancy (table 1)</span><a 15.5="" abstinence="" associated="" but="" chastity="" class="xref-down-link" have="" href="https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f7102#T1" id="xref-table-wrap-1-1" importance="" likely="" more="" non-virgins="" not="" of="" or="" other="" p="0.007).</span" perceived="" pledged="" pledges="" pregnancies="" pregnancy.="" prevalence="" religion="" reported="" than="" the="" to="" virgin="" virginity="" virgins="" was="" were="" who="" with=""></a></blockquote><p>Is there any medical evidence that such parthenogenesis could take place? While most sources would say "no", there was at least one study done in the 1950s that was a little, shall we say, unsettling: </p><span face="interfaceregular, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 16px;"></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/thoc/virginbirth.html" target="_blank"></a></span></p><blockquote><a href="https://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/thoc/virginbirth.html" target="_blank">The remaining eight pairs were examined</a> by Balfour-Lynn (1956), who blood typed mothers and daughters and found antigens present in six daughters that were absent in their mothers, clear evidence of genetic differences. In another pair, the mother had blue eyes and the daughter brown eyes, indicating genetic differences. In the single remaining case, "Mrs. Alpha and daughter," there was apparent genetic identity in blood groups and several other genetically determined traits including electrophoretic analysis of serum. The probability of such a close match between a mother and daughter produced by heterosexual reproduction was less than one chance in a hundred (P < .01).</blockquote><p></p><p><span>But, of course, if parthenogenesis happened, the child would be female, like her mother. Jesus was male, therefore not the product of parthenogenesis. True, offspring of the same sex would be necessary for typical parthenogenesis, but what if the offspring were of a true hermaphrodite? We have a 2016 study that used true hermaphroditic rabbits as the test cases:</span></p><p></p><blockquote>In the literature, pregnancy cases that developed through self-fertilization were not reported
in humans. However, autofertilization was detected in mammalian hermaphrodites such as
domestic rabbit... <a href="https://acikerisim.medipol.edu.tr/xmlui/bitstream/handle/20.500.12511/5585/Bayraktar%2C%20Zeki-2017.pdf" target="_blank">The number of hermaphrodite pregnants</a> (sic) with ovotestis reported in the literature is 14 while the number of
pregnancies in these cases is 26 [7–20]. In these pregnancies, there were one premature, one immature,
one stillborn and one abortion performed due to
unwanted pregnancy. One baby died 2 h after the
birth. There was also an ongoing pregnancy during
the publication of the relevant literature. All of the
babies born apart from these were healthy. All of the
babies (fetuses) whose gender was reported were
male (Table 1).</blockquote><p></p><p>Hermaphrodites could exhibit female mothers with male offspring. That is a little unexpected. This report from 2009 confirms the findings:</p><p><strong class="sub-title" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #212121; font-family: BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"></strong></p><blockquote><strong class="sub-title" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #212121; font-family: BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">Background: </strong><span face="BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-size: 16px;"><a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19155947/" target="_blank">There are 11 reported cases of pregnancy</a> in true hermaphrodites, but none with advanced genetic testing. All known fetuses have been male.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #212121; font-family: BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 1.2rem 0px;"><strong class="sub-title" style="box-sizing: inherit;"></strong></p><p></p><blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #212121; font-family: BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin: 1.2rem 0px;"><strong class="sub-title" style="box-sizing: inherit;">Case: </strong>A true hermaphrodite with a spontaneous pregnancy prenatally known to have a remaining portion of a right ovotestis, delivered a male neonate. The mother has a 46, XX karyotype with polymerase chain reaction demonstrating low levels of the Yq12 sequence. Postpartum androgen levels were normal.</p><p></p><p></p><p><strong class="sub-title" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #212121; font-family: BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">Conclusion: </strong><span face="BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-size: 16px;">Partial removal of testicular tissue may enhance fertility in hermaphrodites, and there may be a genetic basis for the progeny to be male.</span> </p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><p></p><span face="BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-size: 16px;"></span><p></p><p></p><p>For the last century or so, Christians have had a propensity to explain the reported astronomical or meteorological phenomenon around the Gospel stories (the star of Bethlehem, the darkness at the Crucifixion, etc.) as simply a divine intervention that exhibited as a natural phenomenon. That is, the Star of Bethlehem was really a <a href="https://www.astronomy.com/science/the-star-of-bethlehem-can-science-explain-what-it-really-was/" target="_blank">great conjunction of planets</a> while the darkness at the Crucifixion <a href="https://www.ncregister.com/blog/darkness-at-the-crucifixion-sandstorm" target="_blank">may have been caused by a sandstorm.</a> This propensity was not restricted to modern Christians. <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-augustine-reined-in-science" target="_blank">Even Augustine</a> shared this propensity: </p><h1 class="quoteText" style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote><blockquote><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/737513-usually-even-a-non-christian-knows-something-about-the-earth-the" target="_blank">“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something</a> about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].” ― <span class="authorOrTitle" face="Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #333333; font-weight: bold;">Augustine of Hippo, </span><span id="quote_book_link_3640241"><a class="authorOrTitle" href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3683129" style="color: #333333; font-family: Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; text-decoration-line: none;">The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Vol 2</a></span></blockquote></blockquote></h1><p>Even in the Old Testament, physical reality was used to prove contact with the divine. <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges%206%3A36-40&version=NIV" target="_blank">Gideon's fleece</a>, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel%201-6&version=NIV" target="_blank">Daniel's vegetarian diet</a> and the<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2018%3A22&version=NIV" target="_blank"> Deuteronomic warning against false prophets</a> all use physical reality as the final test. Reality trumps human eyewitness testimony. </p><p>Christians do not use divine revelation to confirm experimental science, that is, we do not say, "well the experimental results must be accepted as correct because experiment conforms with what God says." Similarly, only the most fundamentalist of Christians say, "We reject any experimental result which does not conform with Biblical revelation." Rather, we use experimental science as the norm which serves to confirm divine revelation: "this event could have happened as the Bible reported, because we have experimental evidence which supports the possibility that the divinely inspired eyewitness testimony could be true." </p><p>The physical world is the norm which norms the Bible. Even the Bible, both <a href="https://bestcatholicposters.square.site/product/OldTestamentScience/11?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=false&category_id=2" target="_blank">Old Testament</a> and <a href="https://bestcatholicposters.square.site/product/NewTestamentScience/8?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=false&category_id=2" target="_blank">New Testament</a>, attests that this is the appropriate way to approach the Divine Word. </p><p>But, while the biological phenomenon of virgin birth can now potentially be explained via experimental science, it is doubtful that Christianity will allow biology to explain the miracle. </p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-38677725940886220132023-09-25T13:31:00.003-05:002023-09-25T13:31:39.391-05:00Why Atheists Should Become Christians<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Christianity has been doing a deep-dive study of personal relationships for 2000 years. In fact, Christianity was the formal logical system which first invented the term "person."</span></p><span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Even if you don't believe Jesus is God, the results of a long-term study performed across multiple cultures for two thousand years is going to be a bit more reliable than something some yahoo just thought up last week while reading Kerouac.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The beauty of Christian teaching isn't the Christ-elements, so much as it is the consistency of the personal relationship teachings. Any teaching which hasn't changed for 2000 years is probably something we need to keep, at least until we fully understand everything it is doing in the culture. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-17218605733950458082023-09-22T11:10:00.004-05:002023-10-01T11:53:42.292-05:00Jesus Christ on Families<p>You know, when you think about it, it is really hard to come up with a quote from Jesus in the Gospels in which He praises families.</p><p>He just doesn't do it. He tells people, in multiple places, that they should abandon their families, and that families are sources of strife and division. But, apart from mentioning - in the context of divorce - that a man and woman will leave their families to cleave together, He just doesn't seem very interested in families or kids. </p><p>Nor was He that big of a fan of heterosexual marriage. When<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2019&version=NIV" target="_blank"> He gave the teaching on divorce</a>, the disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”</p><p>Now, Jesus does not use this opportunity to go into a panegyric on marriage and how wonderful it is. Instead, he starts praising celibacy:</p><p></p><blockquote>11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 12 For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”</blockquote><p></p><p>That is pretty weak sauce on heterosexual marriage. He upholds the Old Testament teaching that heterosexual marriage is acceptable, and parents should be honored, but I cannot think of a passage where He praises marriage, or even praises motherhood or fatherhood.</p><p>When He wants to say something nice about mothers, He doesn't talk about human mothers. He talks <a href="https://www.bible.com/bible/111/LUK.13.34.NIV" target="_blank">about chickens</a>. When a mother asks Him to cast demons out of her daughter, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%207%3A24-30&version=NIV" target="_blank">Jesus essentially calls her a bitch</a>. </p><p>The epistles are really not any better. The best Paul can say is to honor the marriage bed, and get married if you aren't good enough to be celibate and you don't want to burn (in hell), but there really isn't much support for family formation in the epistles either. Paul explicitly says that family formation is an impediment to holiness. That's as positive as he gets about it.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>TLDR</b></p><div class="xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Jesus only talks about works as a means of salvation, He never mentions grace at all, much less grace as a means of salvation.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Jesus' parables about wedding feasts always involve torture, punishment and death. Apart from a reference to honoring one's mother and father, he has nothing kind to say about marriage or parenthood.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">In <span style="font-family: inherit;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit;" tabindex="-1"></a></span>addition to his decidedly negative attitude towards marriage, Jesus never praises the begetting of children or the work of family formation. Instead, his references to family again primarily describe family as a place of combat and violence.</div></div><div class="x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">For Jesus and Paul, celibacy is the highest good. If the world had been successfully evangelized, and all Christians had followed this highest path to holiness, the human race would have disappeared from the planet by 150 AD.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-78692988500942438372023-09-19T14:50:00.003-05:002023-09-19T14:50:23.867-05:00Are Animals Rational?<p>Do animals have the use of reason? </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111; font-family: "Source Sans Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 1em 0px;"></p><blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111; font-family: "Source Sans Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 1em 0px;"><a href="https://www.uh.edu/news-events/stories/2017/november/11012017Buckner-Animal-Cognition.php" target="_blank">research has shown</a> that animals can remember specific events, use tools and solve problems. But exactly what that means – whether they are making rational decisions or simply reacting to their environment through mindless reflex – remains a matter of scientific dispute.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111; font-family: "Source Sans Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 1em 0px;">Cameron Buckner, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, argues in an <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phpr.12455/abstract" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c8102e; font-weight: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; touch-action: manipulation; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s;">article</a> published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research that a wide range of animal species exhibit so-called “executive control” when it comes to making decisions, consciously considering their goals and ways to satisfy those goals before acting.</p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111; font-family: "Source Sans Pro", sans-serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 1em 0px;"></p><p>There are <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognition-animal/" target="_blank">many examples of animals</a> using what appears to be rational decision-making:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Jacob Beck (2012) relies on pigeons’ abilities to compare quantities to argue for nonconceptual content; Sidney Carls-Diamante (forthcoming) appeals to octopus behavior and physiology to defend embodied cognition; Richard Moore (2016a) refers to ape gestural communication to rethink the requirements for intentional communication; Andrew Barron and Colin Klein (2016) appeal to insect cognition research to defend new theories of consciousness; Sarah Vincent, Rebecca Ring, and Kristin Andrews (2019) cite dolphins’ social practices to argue for the existence of norms that do not require metacognition.</p><p>In addition, philosophers of animal cognition can examine the epistemology and methods used to justify the claims that arise from the science. Research into animal cognition has resulted in surprising claims about animal capacities, such as sociality in garter snakes (Skinner & Miller 2020), tool-use in ants (Maák et al. 2017), mirror self-recognition in fish (Kohda et al. 2019), empathy in rats (Bartal et al. 2011), social learning in fruit flies (Danchin et al. 2018), episodic memory in dogs (Fugazza et al. 2020), addition and subtraction in bees (Howard et al. 2019). How should we evaluate such claims?</p></blockquote><p></p><p>If animals have the use of reason, as <a href="https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1692&context=bts" target="_blank">St. Thomas</a> avers, then Catholic theology has a problem. Catholic theology specifically says only human beings, angels and God have the use of reason. Because humans have the use of reason, the fall of humanity requires sacraments be applied to human beings for their salvation.</p><p>But, if animals can reason, then the brokenness of reality means animals are in peril of hell via their immortal rational souls. That is, if animals have immortal rational souls, animals can go to hell (yes, even dogs can go to hell). So animals ALSO need sacraments. But no liturgical Christian denomination has ever applied sacraments to animals. From the non-liturgical, Protestant perspective, animals cannot read, they cannot proclaim with their mouths that Jesus is Lord, they cannot know Jesus through Scripture, and thus they cannot fulfill the conditions necessary for Protestant salvation either. </p><p>If animals can reason, if animals have rational souls, then all animals go to hell.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5774317.post-21017948552909281532023-08-29T10:51:00.009-05:002024-02-17T12:16:52.448-06:00Christian Colleges Can't Be Woke<p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">Over 40% of the colleges <a href="https://campusreform.org/article?id=23847" target="_blank">closed since Covid are Christian</a>. The reason is straightforward.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;"><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e; font-size: 15px;">Most college students are female, most college administrators are female. </span><span face="Roboto, sans-serif" style="color: #2a2e2e; font-size: 15px;"><a href="https://quillette.com/2022/10/08/sex-and-the-academy/" target="_blank">Women value relationships over truth</a>. That's why most colleges are going woke - women always worry about building family relationships. Colleges aren't designed to be about families, they are designed to seek out the truth.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">But, as women dominate the college experience, they have to go woke, because ... female. Inclusion. Equity. That's purely a female perspective on the world. Colleges turn into matriarchal, mother-child relationship models. In the whole history of the world, <a href="https://medium.com/inside-of-elle-beau/theres-never-been-a-matriarchy-edbd758c36e4" target="_blank">there has never been a successful matriarchal society</a>.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">Woke is not compatible with Christian. The two world-views don't mesh. Ironically, even though Christianity is dominated by women believers, Christianity is male-centered, it is dominated by a search for truth.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px;">Christianity is a Father-Son relationship, not a mother-child relationship. Male-centered Christianity is inimical to woke. A father scourges his child, intentionally exposing children to certain levels of danger to harden them for life and help them gain experience in dealing with life's difficulties, while mothers coddle children. Endlessly coddling a child ultimately destroys the child. Jordan Peterson talks about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzrIV8yhKpE" target="_blank">the devouring mother</a> as a Jungian archetype. There's a reason the Hindu deity of death and destruction is Kali, a goddess, a female.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2a2e2e; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">So, Christian college enrolment is necessarily going to drop because there's no way to square those two competing world-views. You cannot have women run an institution designed to be run by men. It doesn't work.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0