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For such is the burning of Sodom, and that conflagration! And they know it well that have been at the place, and have seen with their eyes that scourge divinely sent, and the effect of the lightnings from above (Jude 7). Consider how great is that sin, to have forced hell to appear even before its time! For whereas many thought scorn of His words, by His deeds did God show them the image thereof in a certain novel way. For that rain was unwonted, for that the intercourse was contrary to nature, and it deluged the land, since lust had done so with their souls. Wherefore also the rain was the opposite of the customary rain. Now not only did it fail to stir up the womb of the earth to the production of fruits, but made it even useless for the reception of seed. For such was also the intercourse of the men, making a body of this sort more worthless than the very land of Sodom. And what is there more detestable than a man who hath pandered himself, or what more execrable? Oh, what madness! Oh, what distraction! Whence came this lust lewdly revelling and making man’s nature all that enemies could? or even worse than that, by as much as the soul is better than the body. Oh, ye that were more senseless than irrational creatures, and more shameless than dogs! for in no case does such intercourse take place with them, but nature acknowledgeth her own limits. But ye have even made our race dishonored below things irrational, by such indignities inflicted upon and by each other.
Several explosions were reported near the U.S. Consulate in Erbil, Iraq, an Iraqi security source told ABC News.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps quickly took responsibility for the attacks, saying it was targeting the "headquarters of spies" and "anti-Iranian terrorist gatherings in parts of the region" with ballistic missiles.
Four people were killed, and six were injured in the attack, the Kurdistan Regional Security Council said.
There were no coalition forces or American forces killed in the bombing of Erbil, the Iraqi security source told ABC News.
"It is a notable shortcoming of the literature about National Socialism that it does not know or does not want to admit to what degree all the deeds—with the sole exception of the technical process of gassing—that the National Socialists later committed had already been described in a voluminous literature of the early 1920s: mass deportations and shootings, torture, death camps, extermination of entire groups using strictly objective selection criteria, and public demands for the annihilation of millions of guiltless people who were thought to be "enemies".
It is probable that many of these reports were exaggerated. It is certain that the “White Terror” also committed terrible deeds, even though its program contained no analogy to the “extermination of the bourgeoisie”. Nonetheless, the following question must seem permissible, even unavoidable: Did the National Socialists or Hitler perhaps commit an “Asiatic” deed merely because they and their ilk considered themselves to be the potential victims of an “Asiatic” deed? Wasn’t the 'Gulag Archipelago' more original than Auschwitz? Was the Bolshevik murder of an entire class not the logical and factual prius of the "racial murder" of National Socialism? Cannot Hitler's most secret deeds be explained by the fact that he had not forgotten the rat cage? Did Auschwitz in its root causes not originate in a past that would not pass?’’
I vaguely remember when this case dropped - amazing to think he would be free. It is not even a matter of whether or not he is a threat to others, IMO, but that it seems unlikely he has paid his debt to society.
Austrian monster Josef Fritzl — who fathered seven children with his daughter while keeping her locked up as a sex slave for 24 years — could soon be released after being deemed to be n…
(MENAFN- AzerNews) Al-Ittihad forward Karim Benzema, Al-Ahly striker Roberto Firmino and Al-Ittifaq midfielder Jordan Henderson want to leave Saudi Arabia, Azernews reports.
All three players joined the Saudi club last summer. It is reported that the players are not satisfied with the climate in Saudi Arabia, the quality of the fields and the low attendance of matches.
It's interesting to see that they take the crowd aspect very serious - money just isn't enough for some of these top stars.
The park covers 47 acres and is right next to a portion of the Rio Grande River. This will give DPS officers control over the area to help stop illegals from crossing into the U.S. The take over is for an indefinite period of time with DPS having total control of the area.
“All access to the property is limited to state authority only. Border Patrol will be permitted to enter the property to remove their equipment and supplies—Agents will not have access to the area unless there is a medical emergency.” – NewsNation reporter Ali Brady said.
They're going to take strategic crossing points, declare them state property, and then arrest, punish, deport illegals for criminal trespass since they can't get them on anything else these days as the Feds don't cooperate.
It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
Lovecraft, H.P.. H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Collection (p. 999). Big Cheese Books. Kindle Edition.
St. Gregory of Nyssa very properly explains the Holy Trinity here and how it is uncreated and beyond the natural world, thus any idea that God was man in any sense, or that there is some hierarchy that divides them, is wrong:
Created intelligible nature stands on the borderline between good and the reverse, so as to be capable of either, and to incline at pleasure to the things of its choice, as we learn from Scripture; so that we can say of it that it is more or less in the heights of excellence only in proportion to its removal from the evil and its approach to the good. Whereas uncreate intelligible nature is far removed from such distinctions: it does not possess the good by acquisition, or participate only in the goodness of some good which lies above it: in its own essence it is good, and is conceived as such: it is a source of good, it is simple, uniform, incomposite, even by the confession of our adversaries. But it has distinction within itself in keeping with the majesty of its own nature, but not conceived of with regard to quantity, as Eunomius supposes: (indeed the man who introduces the notion of less of good into any of the things believed to be in the Holy Trinity must admit thereby some admixture of the opposite quality in that which fails of the good: and it is blasphemous to imagine this in the case either of the Only-begotten, or of the Holy Spirit): we regard it as consummately perfect and incomprehensibly excellent yet as containing clear distinctions within itself which reside in the peculiarities of each of the Persons: as possessing invariableness by virtue of its common attribute of uncreatedness, but differentiated by the unique character of each Person. This peculiarity contemplated in each sharply and clearly divides one from the other: the Father, for instance, is uncreate and ungenerate as well: He was never generated any more than He was created. While this uncreatedness is common to Him and the Son, and the Spirit, He is ungenerate as well as the Father. This is peculiar and uncommunicable, being not seen in the other Persons. The Son in His uncreatedness touches the Father and the Spirit, but as the Son and the Only-begotten He has a character which is not that of the Almighty or of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit by the uncreatedness of His nature has contact with the Son and Father, but is distinguished from them by His own tokens. His most peculiar characteristic is that He is neither of those things which we contemplate in the Father and the Son respectively. He is simply, neither as ungenerate , nor as only-begotten: this it is that constitutes His chief peculiarity. Joined to the Father by His uncreatedness, He is disjoined from Him again by not being 'Father.' United to the Son by the bond of uncreatedness, and of deriving His existence from the Supreme, He is parted again from Him by the characteristic of not being the Only-begotten of the Father, and of having been manifested by means of the Son Himself. Again, as the creation was effected by the Only-begotten, in order to secure that the Spirit should not be considered to have something in common with this creation because of His having been manifested by means of the Son, He is distinguished from it by His unchangeableness, and independence of all external goodness. The creation does not possess in its nature this unchangeableness, as the Scripture says in the description of the fall of the morning star, the mysteries on which subject are revealed by our Lord to His disciples: I saw Satan falling like lightning from heaven [Luke 10:18] . But the very attributes which part Him from the creation constitute His relationship to the Father and the Son. All that is incapable of degenerating has one and the same definition of unchangeable.
of Nyssa, Saint Gregory. Select Works of Gregory of Nyssa (15 Books) . Amazon.com. Kindle Edition.
I think the problem of the Ukrainains is precisely that they have built up this legend around themselves and their position in the world that they cannot negotiate. \
They believe they have some sacred calling, and they likewise feel the weight of being anointed by America as a sacred battlefield of democracy.
Moreover, all of the propaganda surrounding the Russians as orcs and, simultaneously, completely incapable in the face of Ukrainian arms, only possessing the ability to send "meat" into the grinder, so to speak, has built up an inaccurate perception of the self which threatens to boil over into more catastrophic failure.
Thus seeing Biden come out and say that he wants Ukraine to 'sharpen' their war plan... Yet, $110 billion in aid and modernized arms could not deliver any decisive defeat to Russia anywhere and, if anything, served to tighten Russia's grip on the Ukraine.
The whole thing has been an abject failure and a mess, and now both Ukraine and America are held captive by their unhelpful and unreasonable rhetoric.
Abraham, the disciple of Abba Agathon, questioned Abba Poemen saying, 'How do the demons fight against me?' Abba Poemen said to him, 'The demons fight against you? They do not fight against us at all as long as we are doing our own will. For our own wills become the demons, and it is these which attack us in order that we may fulfil them. But if you want to see who the demons really fight against, it is against Moses and those who are like him.
Abraham, the disciple of Abba Agathon, questioned Abba Poemen saying, 'How do the demons fight against me?' Abba Poemen said to him, 'The demons fight against you? They do not fight against us at all as long as we are doing our own will. For our own wills become the demons, and it is these which attack us in order that we may fulfil them. But if you want to see who the demons really fight against, it is against Moses and those who are like him.
The American government should be able to force the Israelis to pause their inhuman bombing campaign which crushes the lives of civilians to save Americans...
But there's no chance of it.
For whatever reason, the progressive, peace-oriented Democrats who hold Congress and the White House won't lift a finger.
Remember that the next time you vote blue (if you happen to be a #Democrat). These people do not share your values - they are Zionists who support terror in the name of their cause.
Yasmeen Elagha has lost more than 100 relatives in Israel’s attack on Gaza and is now part of a group of Palestinian-Americans in Chicago who are suing the Biden administration over its failure to evacuate their family members.
Yasmeen Elagha has lost more than 100 relatives in Israel’s attack on Gaza and is now part of a group of Palestinian-Americans in Chicago who are suing the Biden administration over its failure to evacuate their family members.
A crackdown on corruption in Ukraine's Defense Ministry has uncovered violations costing more than a quarter of a billion dollars, according to Kyiv.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said that an internal audit of the ministry he heads found financial violations over the last four months worth 10 billion hryvnia—in the Ukrainian currency—or $260 million, as he vowed that authorities would "respond harshly to all cases."
He said that reports about arrests and criminal charges are among changes to how the ministry operates "that will be noticed more and more frequently."
Ukraine has applied to join the European Union and is particularly sensitive to claims of corruption especially given the wrangle on both sides of the Atlantic over its allies' continued financial aid to fight Russia.
In September, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appointed Umerov following the resignation of Oleksii Reznikov after scandals involving inflated prices for food supplies and low-quality military jackets for troops fighting against Russia.
They appear to not have a government capable and competent enough to even be trusted with wealth.
Jenny Hyun, the co-songwriter behind Girls Generation’s "How Great is Your Love" and Chocolat’s "One More Day" recently sparked controversy with a slew of racist tweets.
Korea and Japan are both essentially mono-cultures, so this is a norm pretty much for the whole population and this is why I voted this down. It singles her out like she is especially evil, but in fact the whole population lacks diversity, isn't used to it, and generally doesn't tolerate it.
@Nanook I actually posted it in the sense that I thought it was this funny and even "based" moment that just came back to mind recently.
Frankly, I think it is disgusting when anyone gets canceled and ran through over some controversial opinion - even when it is as angry and vitriolic as the one expressed here.
Wow, super based Modi has his own cyber warriors to counter not just local campaigners, but international ones, and frequently attacks Soros.
The Modi government is notorious for spreading disinformation through its social media campaigns. With over 500 million active users, Whatsapp’s most significant base is India, making it a breeding ground for mis-and disinformation.
Although very little is known about BJP's Whatsapp machinery, it is well-documented that it forms an integral part of its digital campaign, often filled with propaganda to incite hate.
“Other parties in India have tried this. We've seen it in other countries like Brazil. But WhatsApp was really mastered first, and at scale, by the BJP,” Kiran Garimella, a Rutgers University professor who researched WhatsApp's role in Indian politics, told The Washington Post. “It requires resources, planning, investment, and a top-down belief in building this infrastructure. But 99 percent of what's happening in these groups is off-limits. We have no visibility at all.”
Modi government officials, experts said, act like “social media warriors.”
"Each and every BJP volunteer who has a mobile is a social media warrior," Ajith Kumar Ullal, 59, the BJP's social media head in the port city of Mangaluru, told The Washington Post.
Mangaluru, situated in the southern state of Karnataka, falls under what is often called the “Hindutva lab.”
Ullal, who is also a member of some 200 Whatsapp groups, “operates out of a ‘war room’ in the BJP's gleaming downtown office, commanding a social media ‘cell’ of nine volunteers responsible for an area in coastal Karnataka inhabited by 1.5 million people,” The Washington Post reported.
Several BJP groups held their national social media workshops in recent months as the Hindu Party streamlines its social media strategy ahead of the general elections in 2024.
“An important source of BJP said that work of the Narendra Modi-led government of 9 years have to reach the public...through social media and conveying the message to the public through digital means," Asian News International reported. “Social media teams will be made at various levels including district, state and divisional. A team of five to six people will be formed at all fronts with one social media coordinator and two co-coordinators.”
Many campaigns are geared toward improving BJP's image at home and abroad. One such campaign is the “Disinfo Lab,” which claims to be "investigating Info-warfare & Psy-war" and has systematically been targeting the Modi government's critics in the U.S.
In April, the Disinfo Lab published a report criticizing the New York-based Hindus for Human Rights Founder, Sunita Viswanath, a human rights group critical of Modi's Hindutva policies.
The report linked Viswanath to Soros's Open Society Foundations for receiving funding for a nonprofit she launched to help female Afghan refugees.
Amit Malviya, the head of the BJP's social media team, posted on X: “Who is she exactly? She is nothing but a proxy of George Soros, who has committed $1 billion to meddle in India's internal affairs, through a network of opposition leaders, think tanks, journalists, lawyers and activists.”
“In 28 reports it has published so far, the organization has often painted a picture of an India under attack by a sprawling "nexus" of conspirators funded by Pakistani intelligence, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Soros," The Washington Post reported in its recent investigation on lab.
The Disinfo Lab also insinuated that Rep. Pramila Jayapal, an Indian-American Democrat from Washington State who is critical of Modi, received funds via this “nexus.”
The Disinfo Lab has gone after the Indian-American activists who criticized the Modi government for discrimination against Muslims and Dalits, members of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedoms (USCIRF), a bipartisan organization that recommended the state department assign India a “country of particular concern” on account of how the religious minorities are being treated in the country under Modi.
I do not agree with a lot of his domestic policy but the guy sure is not going to take anything lying down in cyberspace.
South Korea is expecting to see record-low numbers of first graders entering elementary school this year due to knock-on effects from the country's falling birth rate.
Hasan, who previously worked for Qatari propaganda network Al Jazeera, has compared non-Muslims to “animals” and homosexuals to “pedophiles.” Hasan has also repeatedly defended notorious anti-Semites like Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
Daily Wire just feels so confident branding people anti-Semites.
These are conventionally liberal people who parrot conventionally liberal talking points. We can speculate that they, in their personal lives, harbor dark, anti-Semitic thoughts, but this is overly judgmental... Particularly when a far more obvious answer seems to present itself everywhere: these are naive leftist women.
Their saving grace is that they are generally right about Palestine.
Far-left host Mehdi Hasan announced on Sunday night that his time at the network is over after it was announced late last year that his show and his streaming series were being canned.
Pope Francis on Monday condemned the practice of using a surrogate mother to birth a child and called for a global ban on the practice.
The pope called surrogacy “despicable” during an annual foreign policy address to ambassadors of 184 countries.
“I consider despicable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child,” Francis said.
Absolutely the Pope has a point here and I wish him success in his endeavors.
Pope Francis on Monday condemned the practice of using a surrogate mother to birth a child and called for a global ban on the practice. The pope called surrogacy “despicable” during an annual foreign policy address to ambassadors of 184 countries.
Ver. 28. "As concerning the Gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers' sakes."
That the Gentile then might not be puffed up, and say, "I am standing, do not tell me of what would have been, but what has been," he uses this consideration to bring him down, and says, "As concerning the Gospel, they are enemies for your sakes." For when you were called they became more captious. Nevertheless God hath not even now cut short the calling of you, but He waiteth for all the Gentiles that are to believe to come in, and then they also shall come. Then he does them another kind favor, by saying, "As touching election, they are beloved for the fathers sakes." And what is this? for wherein they are enemies, punishment is theirs: but wherein they are beloved, the virtue of their ancestors has no influence on them, if they do not believe. Nevertheless, as I said, he ceaseth not to solace them with words, that he may bring them over. Wherefore by way of fresh proof for his former assertion, he says,
Ver. 30-32. "For as ye in times past have not believed God, yet have now obtained mercy through their unbelief; even so have these also now not believed, that through your mercy they may also obtain mercy. For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that He might have mercy upon all."
He shows here that those of the Gentiles were called first. Then, as they would not come, the Jews were elected, and the same result occurred again. For when the Jews would not believe, again the Gentiles were brought over. And he does not stop here, nor does he draw the whole to a conclusion at their rejection, but at their having mercy shown them again. See how much he gives to those of the Gentiles, as much as he did to the Jews before. For when ye, he would say, "in times past did not obey," being of the Gentiles, then the Jews came in. Again, when these did not obey, ye have come. However, they will not perish forever. "For God hath concluded them all in unbelief," that is, hath convinced them, hath shown them disobedient; not that they may remain in disobedience, but that He may save the one by the captiousness of the other, these by those and those by these. Now consider; ye were disobedient, and they were saved. Again, they have been disobedient, and ye have been saved. Yet ye have not been so saved as to be put away again, as the Jews were, but so as to draw them over through jealousy while ye abide.
Very fair assessment from Andrew Anglin, of all people:
“Islamic terrorist organization” not only means that they are philosophically opposed to raping prisoners of war, but it also means that the organization contains a very strict hierarchical structure, which means members engaged in violations of the religious structure – such as men engaging in rape – would suffer the weight of Islamic law.
For the record, I don’t think Hamas is actually an Islamic terrorist organization, or even an “Islamic group” in the sense that the term is used in the West. The concept is that the group is motivated by Islam. In fact, Hamas is motivated by the fact that Jews stole their land and forced them into an open-air concentration camp. If Jews had done this to Christians, Buddhists, or Hindus, there would be a group identical to Hamas opposing them and using the corresponding religious regalia.
Hamas didn’t rape her. However, the guilt of the rape remains, because in another dimension, where circumstances were different, Hamas would have raped her. This is my favorite news story now.
As many as 10 patients at an Oregon hospital may have died after a nurse allegedly swapped out fentanyl in IVs for tap water, prompting an investigation of the theft of medication.
Officials at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center in Medford say they alerted police early last month that they believed a former employee had stolen medication.
Some sources at the hospital told local NBC affiliate KOBI that nine people had died from infections, while other sources said there were 10 deaths in total.
Multiple sources also told the outlet the nurse injected the patients with non-sterile tap water to cover up their misuse of the hospital’s supply of pain medication, namely fentanyl.
Officials at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center in Oregon say they alerted police early last month that they believed a former employee had stolen medication.
How was fentynal, deadly at just 1.5mg less deadly than tap water? I seem to be missing something here. Are we talking Flint Michigan tap water? Else I can't make sense of this.
@Nanook Fentanyl has some medical applications - apparently for the treatment of severe and chronic pain - so I am guessing that there were some saline solutions or some other bottled medicine with extremely diluted fent being used...
Those responsible for stealing this stuff may have actually not made any money because such diluted fent would be worthless. Unless, of course, they were able to reconcentrate it.
They’re going to be, anyhow. The #youth have clearly grasped that the #older #generations are not going to #defend them or their #nations, and that the #burden of #action is going to fall upon them. And they’ve also observed that #vigilante #justice is the only justice that exists any more.
No doubt the #wicked #Swedish #government that failed to protect this #girl and refused to punish her #rapist will throw its full weight against these young vigilantes. But the #massive #hypocrisy this entails will only accomplish the precise #opposite of its objectives and encourage a wave of similar, but more #silent #reprisals.
I’ve always said that the wars that will bring about the #end of the #UnitedStates would begin when someone from the wrong #family is victimized by one group of #invaders or another. Apparently this may hold true for less heterogeneous polities as well. It will be interesting to learn if this girl is actually Swedish or if she’s also a #foreigner. If she is actually a daughter of the #vikings, it won’t be surprising if one day, after the end of the #mass #repatriations, there are #statues built to #honor her. These are precisely the sort of acts that become #myths and #legends over time.
It’s already beginning in #LatinAmerica too. I won’t link to the report, since it’s worse than the average #horror movie, but a young #African #woman recently learned the very hard way that it’s a #fatal #mistake to physically attack the #daughter of a #cartel #lord.
All across the #West, #people have #lost #faith in their #government to maintain #order. And now they are beginning to realize that there is no cavalry, and that if anyone is going to protect their family, if anyone is going to #protect their #nation, it’s going to have to be themselves.
They’re going to be, anyhow. The youth have clearly grasped that the older generations are not going to defend them or their nations, and that the burden of action is going to fall upon them.
When law enforcement won't provide Justice then it is left to us. Sweden, like the US, has made a serious mistake allowing all of the undocumented foreigners into their land.
Apparently, Russia is probing the ground, preparing to campaign for Odessa.
The analysis is also spot on in terms of this:
According to Johnson, the Russian Armed Forces are in a much more favourable position than the Ukrainian formations, as they have a sufficient number of soldiers. In addition, all of them undergo the necessary training, while in Ukraine they grab people right on the street and immediately send them to the front.
Former CIA officer Larry Johnson believes that the Russian army is capable of liberating Odessa if necessary. “Yes, they may actually try, they have already started, they are now probing the ground,” he said.
Admittedly I did not feel any animus towards Duterte's all out war on drugs but this isn't a good look.
The Philippine government estimates that more than 6,252 people have been gunned down by the police and "unknown assailants" since former President Rodrigo Duterte declared a "war on drugs" in 2016, when he won the election. Rights groups say the numbers could actually run into the tens of thousands.
Police say the victims were drug lords or peddlers, who they often killed in "self defence" during shoot-outs. But many families claim their sons, brothers or husbands were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
You can almost guarantee that it was not abnormal at all for personal scores to be settled like this and for loads of innocents to be caught in the crossfire.
It's really fabulous that we are reading this in the Biden era:
Trump businesses received millions in foreign payments while he was in office Countries including China and Saudi Arabia spent $7.8m, ‘often lavishly’, at Trump properties, report by House Democrats finds
Donald Trump “repeatedly and willfully” violated the US constitution by “allowing his businesses to accept millions of dollars from some of the most corrupt nations on Earth”, prominently including China, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee charged on Thursday, unveiling a 156-page report on the matter.
What's also funny about this is that his businesses were in a trust so... what's he even on about?
PALM BEACH, Florida — Former President Donald Trump thinks Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “walks like a duck” when he’s wearing high heel lifts inside his cowboy boots, and that a “really good debater” could force DeSantis to take off his shoes on live te…
@Otto Pureblood I'd love to hear more about the insurance deal - just a cursory search, though, I am not quite seeing it, but I have seen some stuff, like:
The law change gave insurance companies the right to demand shingle roofs be replaced every 15-20 years or they can cancel home owner's insurance.
There is a provision at 15 years for the home owners to have their roof inspected and certified to get them to 20 years, but when I was still doing roofing most roofers claimed they couldn't make the certification.
I didn't know about the change to CPIC... Explains why my insurance went up so much.
I'm not sure how the proposed tax bill is going to work since we don't have income tax here in Florida... But my property tax has increased every year since I bought 10 years ago.
This is really a huge oversight fom the coach - and I take no pride in saying this. I respect #17, but this is pretty bad...
For example, KJ Osborn has led the league in drop rate (currently 13.2%) among wide receivers with at least 70 targets. He also has the sixth lowest contested catch rate (25%) and the third worst yards per route run. And this despite eight games without Justin Jefferson. He has the worst overall offense grade from PFF, the second-worst receiving grade, and by far the worst drop grade. His run block grade is also below average. And yet O’Connell has had nothing but compliments for Osborn and hasn’t decreased his role or snaps based on poor on-field performance. It was only due to the injury to Jefferson that we began to see more of Brandon Powell, who has performed better than Osborn but hasn’t been rewarded for it with more snaps, apart from injury to either Jefferson or Addison.
The initial tranche includes 40 previously undisclosed documents with almost 1,000 pages of depositions and statements, with the final batch expected to name prominent individuals.
This is one of those crazy things that seems to always happen - whenever Israel comes up, there's an abundance of people saying crazy shit about Islam.
This is likely because the terror state of Israel is so hard to defend on its own - you have to proactively dehumanize its opponents to give it a chance at legitimacy.
A survey released last month from the Anthropology Group on Islamic and Arab Contexts — an organisation based at the University of São Paulo — found that reports of harassment among Muslim Brazilians have been widespread since the war began.
An estimated 70 percent of respondents said they knew someone who experienced religious intolerance since October 7, when the Palestinian group Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel, killing 1,140 people.
It is not surprising. Every US administration has its share of banal bureaucrats who, in exchange for an important job with an impressive title, are willing to forfeit their integrity and jettison the truth in the “service” of country.
And so, since early October, the world has seen and heard a lot from Rumsfeld’s hideous heir, National Security Council spokesperson, John Kirby.
Like Rumsfeld, the former career naval officer speaks in a high-pitched monotone befitting his dour, monochromatic character.
Like Rumsfeld, Kirby is obliged to spout state-sanctioned bromides in defence of the wholesale destruction of innocent civilians – casualties all of America’s familiar kill-first, think-later foreign policy.
Like Rumsfeld, Kirby is the darling of Beltway pundits who, as a rule, defer to authority and genuflect before power.
On cue, the Washington Post described Kirby earlier this week as a “star” whose skill and experience have translated into “a commanding presence” during press briefings where he keeps the White House’s “messaging” on Gaza “clear”.
Kirby, the Post wrote, is “direct, plain-spoken and unmistakably supportive of the administration’s pro-Israeli policies”.
...
I thought it impossible that Kirby could outdo his doddering boss, US President Joe Biden who, memorably, trafficked in fabrications about beheaded babies, and questioned the number of killed Palestinian children, women and men.
Silly me.
...
“Look, we certainly share the concerns that so many others have … about the humanitarian situation in Gaza,” Kirby said last week from a rostrum at the White House flanked by the Stars and Stripes. “Tell me, name me, one more nation, any other nation, that is doing as much as the United States to alleviate the pain and suffering of the people of Gaza. You can’t. You just can’t.”
I should let that astonishing paragraph stand as Kirby’s sorry epitaph since it demonstrates how prepared the Biden administration and its smug surrogates are to disfigure reality to promote a revolting lie.
But Kirby’s deplorable admonition requires a reply. Decency demands it.
Much of Gaza and 18,600 Palestinians – the bulk of them children and women – have been erased and buried in mass graves with the help of America’s lethal largesse.
Thousands more have been maimed, traumatised or remain entombed beneath the pancake-like rubble – the shattered remnants of once-vibrant homes, businesses, schools, mosques and hospitals.
Ugh, I really tried to stay out of #fediverse drama but I guess I have to say a few things. Most of you know me as a #firefish core team member, so I think I owe it to the admins of almost 500 firefish servers out there and to the almost 5000 members of firefish.social.
So, yeah, if you haven't noticed, things aren't looking good for firefish. Its owner, Kainoa, has practically abandoned the project, which had its last stable release out on July. My last message to them was a week ago, and I haven't heard back since. Firefish.social, besides the other severe technical problems it's had due to mismanagement in the last few months, now also has serious federation issues. I hope Kainoa is well irl, but this is irresponsible and unacceptable.
I hear some of you saying "but you're in the core team too, don't try to put the blame elsewhere!". So I have to explain what being a core team member in firefish meant. Kainoa invited me, Namekuji and a few others to be part of the "core team", but kept all decisions and responsibilities. We didn't co-own this. We never shared donations. We were just volunteers, who were honestly trying to make it a great project. This didn't work well due to concentration of power to one person, who didn't keep their promises. I don't mean to be harsh to Kainoa, I mean we knew they were only 19 when they started the project. Still, it's a bummer to anyone who chose to trust and support Firefish. This includes myself.
I don't know if it's early to consider firefish a dead project, but it sure seems like that for a few months now. Maybe it can be resurrected, idk. It's all up to Kainoa.
In the meantime, Namekuji and I are starting #Catodon, which will have some differences with Firefish, and will include many changes I had discussed with Kainoa but were never implemented. If you decide to stick with us, we promise to be serious about this. I strongly believe in the fediverse and its potential, and I want to build a great platform for it. This was my goal when I chose to be involved in Calckey/Firefish. It's still my goal with Catodon, only this time I can stand behind it 100%, as the project will be co-managed by Namekuji and me. If Firefish left you with a bitter aftertaste, we hope we can build a better relationship and prove ourselves worthy of your trust. Catodon will go public in a matter of days, possibly even hours. We'll have more to say about its direction then.
In the meantime, I just wanted to share my apologies for any inconvenience regarding Firefish, as I'm still technically a core team member, whatever that means. But frankly, I tried so hard to make things go differently - but there's only so much you can do when it's someone else's project. I'm really sorry for how things went.
But this is not the end of the fedi journey for me. I'm super excited about the chance to do some things right this time with Catodon. Life goes on, I guess! Hope to see you soon on our #codeberg repo, so we can start a new creative adventure together =)
When Karenga was asked to distinguish Kawaida, the philosophy underlying Kwanzaa, from "classical Marxism," he essentially said that, under Kawaida, we also hate whites. (And here's something interesting: Kawaida, Kwanzaa and Kuumba are also the only three Kardashian sisters not to have their own shows on the E! network.)
One of this year’s major news stories is how Republicans, like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, are trying to BAN the teaching of history — which, as everyone knows, consists exclusively of lessons…
It's always interesting to find out who wins when the big boys clash like this.
The New York Times on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies’ artificial intelligence models infringe upon the newspaper’s intellectual property.
The complaint, viewed by VOA, argues that the AI models created by OpenAI and Microsoft used “millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles” to train chatbots that now compete with the newspaper as an information source.
The lawsuit marks the first time that a major American media outlet has sued the companies behind the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT and other AI tools. The case also underscores questions that have proliferated from news organizations over the past year over the journalistic, financial and legal implications of generative AI.
It always looks like Nigeria isn't far from anarchy.
Amnesty International criticised the government after the attacks, saying in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that “the Nigerian authorities have been failing to end frequent deadly attacks on rural communities of Plateau State”.
Shan state, known as a hub for crystal methamphetamine trafficking, is rife with other illegal activities in enclaves along the Chinese border, as criminals take advantage of ongoing civil unrest and armed conflict under the junta which seized power in a 2021 coup. Falling within neighboring China’s orbit, northern Shan state has become a focal point for Chinese scammers who target their own citizens.
From Oct. 31 to Dec. 15, nearly 12,050 Chinese citizens linked to online scam groups in the region were arrested and deported, according to a mid-December announcement by the State Administration Council, the formal name of the military junta governing Myanmar.
Most of the Chinese nationals sent back were operating in the Kokang region, whose mostly ethnic Chinese population has backed resistance to the junta.
Arrests of other Chinese nationals involved in the criminal activity have occurred in territory controlled by the United Wa State Army, or USWA, said to be the largest ethnic armed organization in Myanmar. USWA soldiers arrested more than 1,000 Chinese nationals involved in the gangs on Sept. 6-7 and immediately transferred them across the border to Chinese police.
1000만 구독자를 보유한 인기 유튜버가 술 취한 여성을 성폭행한 혐의로 구속된 채 재판을 받게 돼 관심이 쏠렸습니다.지난 25일 SBS 보도에 따르면 서울중앙지검 여성아동범죄조사 1부는 지난 21일 특수준강간 혐의로 20대 콘텐츠 크리에이터 A 씨를 구속기소 했습니다.A 씨는 지난 7월 같이 술을 마시던 여성 B 씨를 다른 남성과 함께 성폭행한 혐의를 받습니다.
(서울=뉴스1) 장아름 기자 = 걸그룹 2NE1 출신 가수 박봄의 근황이 공개됐다. 박봄은 26일 자신의 인스타그램에 여러 장의 사진들을 게재했다. 사진에서 박봄은 파란색 패딩을 입고 가방을 든 채 외출, 카메라를 바라보고 있는 모습이다. 그는 진한 메이크업으로 이목구비를 강조해 이목을 집중시킨다. 한편 박봄은 지난 11..
Thread: /x/35857332 I start breathing, and >nose blocked >try buteyko to unblock nose, pure suffering >lung pain, probably cancer >abdomen pain (when I try deep diaphragm breathing), probably inflamed organs or cancer or kidney stones or ligma >knee pain (this is getting better) >fall asleep every 15 minutes despite slept 10 hours I have to admit this shit is insanely hard than looks.
While lawmakers on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. debate sending billions more in military aid to Ukraine, an American citizen journalist, Gonzalo Lira, is languishing in a Ukrainian prison on allegations of spreading Russian propaganda, throwing into question the status of free speech in the supposed democracy the Biden administration argues is worthy of more taxpayer dollars.
The Biden administration is asking Congress to approve another $24 billion for Ukraine for now through the end of this year, which would add to the $113 billion that Congress has committed to the country since its war with Russia began in February of last year.
President Biden on Tuesday at the United Nations argued that investment in Ukraine was an investment in “the future of every country that seeks a world governed by basic rules.”
... We are funding a war that is propping up a fake democracy to take a stand against the tyranny of Russia...
... But it's all to further very questionable geopolitical goals.
This is how they like to phrase everything, right:
“I think if people are concerned about children, then they should be concerned about children’s human rights,” Devine said. “It has nothing to do with children — it’s about people’s bigotry and people’s fear. And I think it’s cowardly to suggest it’s about children.”
THEY have valid concerns about human rights and freedom, without any other agenda...
India also expelled an unnamed Canadian diplomat on Tuesday after Trudeau revealed Monday that there are “credible allegations” that agents of the Indian government were involved in Nijjar’s shooting death, and that India’s top intelligence officer in Canada was being expelled as a consequence.
Also interesting to see liberal Jagmeet Singh get in on this:
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said the allegation deserves more scrutiny, which will come through police investigations and the upcoming public inquiry. He also wrote to the judge in charge of the public inquiry, asking her to explicitly include Indian interference in her work.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy supposedly “deliberately participated” in organizing “genocide and war,” Mikhail Podoliak, an aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, claimed on Thursday. The accusation, posted on X (formerly Twitter) came after the former French leader suggested a diplomatic resolution to the conflict between Moscow and Kiev.
The Ukrainian official blasted Sarkozy’s “fantastic” and “criminal” proposal after the latter suggested resolving the conflict, ongoing for a year and a half now, through a series of referendums under “strict” international control in the four new Russian regions and Crimea. Such a move would allow the territorial disputes between the two neighbors to be settled once and for all and help Europe avoid merely freezing the conflict, he told Paris daily Le Figaro earlier this week.
Sarko proposes that disputed regions undergo referendums to end this terrible war and the Ukrainian government lashes out so brutally...
Do I sense some lack of confidence that they would even win this referendums?
The coral reef off southeast Florida is experiencing an unprecedented and potentially deadly level of bleaching this summer because of rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change, federal scientists said Thursday.
Some sites around the Florida Keys are being exposed to twice the amount of heat stress that causes corals to die, and earlier in the year than ever before, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a telephone news conference. They said the phenomenon is likely to affect the Caribbean very soon and a global bleaching event could be just around the corner.
“We are quite concerned and worried and stressed about this event,” said Ian Enochs, a research ecologist at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory. “It’s not a normal thing.”
It's definitely not good that things like this are happening.
Experts say Florida's coral reef is suffering an unprecedented and potentially deadly level of severe bleaching because of rising sea temperatures sparked by climate change.
It's already been proven that it's over fishing and not temperature that caused the bleaching, the fish eat something that attacks the coral and cause the bleaching, if the fish population is adequate to control this parasite then the coral are healthy even in warmer temperatures. And global warming only affects ocean temperatures very near the surface anyway.
The new Argentine candidate for the far right is an absolute firecracker. I don't agree with him on everything but just watching a guy go off like that is amazing.
I don't know if he can win but these numbers do change how I feel about Argentines and the possibilities of demagogues taking over.
Quebec is on track to finish the year with seven per cent of all deaths recorded as doctor-assisted, Bureau said. "That's more than anywhere else in the world: 4.5 times more than Switzerland, three times more than Belgium, more than the Netherlands. It's two times more than Ontario."
I find this an interesting move from China overall:
TOKYO -- While China-Australia relations seem to be thawing, Beijing is slowly but surely moving to cut its dependence on Australian iron ore. Last Friday, mining giant Rio Tinto and a consortium of Chinese state-owned enterprises announced that they had concluded key agreements with the government of Guinea to build a trans-Guinean railway capable of carrying iron ore from the west African nation's inland to the coast. Over 600 kilometers of rail together with port facilities will "unlock" the potential of the Simandou mountain range, "the world's largest known undeveloped supply of high-grade, low-impurity iron ore," said Bold Baatar, the Rio Tinto executive committee's lead for Guinea and copper, in a press release. Rather than cutting through nearby Liberia or Sierra Leone, the plan is to travel through Guinea, which has a tradition of being independent and friendly to China. That means snaking through mountainous Guinean terrain to a deep sea port that will also be built. The plan envisions the construction of 235 bridges, while the longest tunnel will be over 11 km.
Fairly remarkable in the sense that we are literally seeing this in a courtroom, but absolutely unsurprising that it is in Portland:
During closing statements, defense lawyer Michelle Burrows told the jurors that not only does she self-identify as a progressive and “anti-fascist,” she is going to make herself an “I am Antifa” t-shirt to wear after the trial. She told the jury that the negative reputation surrounding Antifa is false and painted the organized militant group as activists that fight for social justice and civil rights, despite their extensive documented history of carrying out acts of violence.
In defense of Antifa, Burrows told the jury, “Resistance in this country has never been peaceful.”
But I also like the way that she walks it back here, lol:
However, as she argued before the jurors, Ms. Burrows admitted that the “black clad people” that had physically beaten Andy Ngo were “terrorists.”
OK... So you want to make a tee shirt that represents your affiliation with a group of people who engage in terrorism..?
The defense attorney went on to claim that journalist Andy Ngo does not have clean hands. She implied that Ngo is also a “doxxer” because he posts publicly available mugshots of the crimes that Antifa-affiliated individuals have committed on his Twitter account, in which he has more than one million followers.
Seeing that the lawyer calculated that, to some degree, people naturally dislike doxing is also something that I find encouraging. Doxing as a tactic may be quite limited as a tactic - eventually there will be enough of a consensus to outright illegalize the process, as is already the case to some degree in California.
Niger's coup leaders have closed the country's airspace until further notice, citing the threat of military intervention.
Flight tracking website Flightradar24 is showing that there are currently no aircraft in Niger's skies.
The West African group of countries, Ecowas, had earlier warned it could use force if President Mohamed Bazoum was not reinstated by 23:00 GMT on Sunday.
A junta spokesman says Niger's armed forces are ready to defend the country.
Mr Bazoum was detained on 26 July, and Gen Abdourahmane Tchiani, commander of the presidential guard, later proclaimed himself the new leader.
The military takeover has been internationally condemned, including by former colonial power France and the rest of the European Union, as well as the United Nations and the United States.
It seems to be kicking off over in Africa to some degree, at least.
We will see if bellicose NATO will tell their colonies to calm down.
There have been no victories—not even bloody and debilitating wins like in the Fourth Battle of Karkhov—for nearly a year. Western leaders still profess that their support will continue. Yet the Western Alliance now admits it didn’t give Ukrainians nearly enough good stuff for even modest tactical gains in their ongoing, sacrificial offensive—and knew it going in. And increasingly, Ukrainian unit-level commanders are accusing higher leaders of simply using them as cannon-fodder to satisfy NATO overlords. Not just platoons, but larger units are surrendering to Russian forces. Morale is cratering.
This is attrition coming to fruition. The fallen empires of 1918—Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottomans—needed four years to reach that point. In a third of that time, Ukraine has lost 2.5 percent of its population. This reckoning amounts to what Soviet historians called “irreplaceable losses”—meaning, all soldiers who would never, ever return to the ranks.
Indeed, the real Ukrainian losses may well be higher.
A defeated army and a broken one are two different things. An army merely defeated in battle can often make successful withdrawals, reform itself, and recon ...
So they dribbled in just enough 'support' to keep the war going, but not so they could end it. The US needs to get out of NATO, and NATO needs to be ended.
What's so striking about all of this is that the very top of US intelligence should have been aware that there just wasn't much of a chance.
It shows that we are deficient concerning our intelligence on Russian capabilities.
Or, more disturbingly, it shows that the information that we fed to the decision makers did not deter them in any way - they were determined to have this miserable conflict.
Some more interesting content - from St. Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth century Saint, concerning how to interpret difficult passages:
By all these diff erent modes of speech and names for intellectual discernment, the apostle is pointing us to a single form of instruction: one ought not in every instance to remain with the letter (since the obvious sense of the words oft en does us harm when it comes to the virtuous life), but one ought to shift to an understanding that concerns the immaterial and intelligible, so that corporeal ideas may be transposed into intellect and thought when the fl eshly sense of the | words has been shaken off like dust (cf. Matt 10:14) Th is moreover is why he says, “Th e letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6), for frequently the narrative, if we stop short at the mere events, does not furnish us with models of the good life. How does it profi t the cause of a virtuous life to hear that the prophet Hosea got himself a child by sexual malfeasance (Hos 1:2) and that Isaiah went in to the prophetess (Isa 8:3),if one stops short at the literal sense? Or what do the stories about David, in which adultery and murder have agreed together in a single crime (cf. 2 Kgdms 11), contribute to the virtuous life? But if an account is found that gives an incontestable indication of how these events fi t into the history of salvation, then the word of the apostle will be shown to be true: “Th e letter kills” (for it contains examples of evildoing), “but the Spirit gives life” (for it transposes a meaning that is incongruous and discordant into a more divine sense). We know too that when, in the likeness and form of a human being (Phil 2:7), the Word who is worshiped by the whole creation transmitted the divine mysteries through the medium of fl esh, it was in the following manner | that he unveiled for us the thoughts contained in the law. He says that he and his Father are the two witnesses whose testimony is true (John 8:18; cf. Deut 19:15), and the brazen serpent that was lift ed up high and was the people’s remedy against deadly stings he refers to the dispensation that took place for our sake on the cross (John 3:14). Also he exercises the wits of his own holy disciples by the veiled and hidden things he speaks in parables, in similitudes, in dark sayings, in aphorisms—things set forth in the form of enigmatic statements.4 In private, he would give interpretations of these and explain to them what was obscure, but on occasion, when they did not grasp the meaning of his words, he would blame them for being slow to understand and slack in intelligence. For when he commanded them to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, and they in their small-minded way looked to their food pouches, in which they had failed to bring a supply of bread, he reprimanded them for failing to grasp that | the word “leaven” is a reference to teaching (Matt 16:5–12). Again, when the disciples were setting a meal before him, he responded, “I have food to eat of which you do not know” (John 4:32), and since they supposed that he was speaking of corporeal food that had been brought him from elsewhere, he explained his statement by saying that the food that is proper and appropriate for him is to fulfi ll the salutary [divine] will
Terrific reddit post from an amateur explaining some of the early Church father's positions on some of the elements in the Old Testament:
The conquest passages are the passages that speak about the Israelites conquering the land. Many of these war narratives cause ethical and moral controversy for obvious reasons. In the Christian spiritual tradition these narratives are read symbolically. Similar to the Muslim traditions view that the concept of Jihad is an internal struggle, the conquest passages are read symbolically as a struggle to conquer sin and wickedness. These are examples.
(i)The destruction of the 7 nations
In Deuteronomy 7 and 20 it states there are 7 nations in the land. You are to go and put "the ban" on those 7 nations. Meaning you are to "destroy" or "annihilate" them.
St John Cassian one of the Church Fathers in his work called the "Conferences"(Conference 5) he views the 7 nations as symbolising the deadly sins. The goal of the of the spiritual life is to conquer these vices and temptation. Murder is a deadly sin. We have to conquer the vice and temptation to murder. Greed and covetousness is a deadly sin. We have to conquer those vices as well.
(ii)The Midianite War(Numbers 31)
In Numbers 31 it speaks of how Moses went to war against Midian and in the aftermath the Israelites took many spoils and captives after their military campaign. Origen of Alexandria in his commentaries on the Old Testament read the taking of spoils and captives in a symbolic light
In his Homilies on the Book of Numbers Origen reads the Midianite war as symbolising the spiritual struggle. In Church doctrine Christians are part of what's called the "church militant"(soldiers of Christ). Our job to to engage in spiritual warfare for the sake of righteousness. How do we do that? Origen states "But they fight by means of prayers and fasts, justice and piety, gentleness, chastity and all the virtues of self-control, as if they were armed with the weapons of war."(Homily 25).
When people see us struggling for righteousness through the weapons of justice and piety they become "captives" and "prisoners" to the Gospel and the Word of God because they are "captivated" by the example of Christians who live a life dedicated to justice and righteousness. These people that are "captivated" by these virtues are the "spoils" of those who struggle for virtue and justice in this life.
(iii)Joshua's conquest
Just like other passages Origen of Alexandria read the conquest accounts in Joshua symbolically, and you see this particularly in his homilies on the Battle of Jericho. The walls of Jericho for Origen symbolised the walls of hatred in the human heart, and the city itself symbolised malice. So the destruction of Jericho symbolises the destruction of malice and hatred in the human heart.
Taking this one step further, Christ stated in the New Testament Jesus says the "kingdom of God is inside of you"(Luke 17:21). For Origen, Israel's conquest of Jericho symbolise the sovereignty of sin being replaced with the sovereignty of the Kingdom of God in the human heart.
(iv)The destruction of the "child and the infant".
In the conquest accounts this language is often times used and it generates a lot of controversy. St Gregory of Nyssa in work "The Life of Moses" when commenting on the Ten plagues states "The infant lifts his eyes only to see his mother, and tears are the sole perceptible sign of his sadness. And if he obtains anything which his nature desires he signifies his pleasure by smiling. If such a one now pays the penalty of his father's wickedness, where is justice? Where is piety? Where is holiness?_Life of Moses(Book II, par. 91).
Gregory answering this question he posses reads this symbolically stating "The teaching is this: When through virtue one comes to grips with any evil, he must completely destroy the first beginning of evil. For when he slays the beginning, he destroys at the same time what follows after it. The Lord teaches the same thing in the Gospel, all but explictly calling on us to kill the firstborn of the Egyptian evils when he commands us to abolish lust and anger and to have no more fear of the stain of adultery or the guilt of murder. Neither of these things would develop itself, but anger produces murder and lust produces adultery. Since the producer of evil gives birth to lust before adultery and anger before murder, in destroying the firstborn he certainly kills along with it the offspring which follows"_Life of Moses(Book II, par. 92-94)
What Gregory is saying here is that is that a sin like anger(in it's malicious form) is essentially murder in it's infancy, so we have to destroy the temptation towards murderous intent while it's still in its infancy before it grows or gives birth to something else. And this applies to all sins and wickedness on both a personal and social level. So Nazism was one of the worst forms wickedness in the world, but when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in 1923 it was still in it's infancy. If the world had destroyed the ideology of Nazism in it's infancy there would be no WWII and Holocaust.
These are all examples of how the passages speaking about the Biblical conquest are read symbolically. Now why does the symbolic and allegorical reading of the text have any validity in a Christian context? The reasons are the following:
1)Reading the Bible allegorically is a Biblical tradition.
The allegorical interpretation of the text isn't a modern development. It isn't something newly developed by the whims of people in 2020 reading the Bible however they want. This is something a part of the tradition of the Church that goes back to the Bible itself.
St Paul the Apostle in his letter to the Galatians uses the stories of Hagar and Sarah. In Galatians 4 he reads the narrative allegorically as a distinction between the heavenly and earthly Jerusalem as well as symbolising the two covenants
Jesus in his dispute with the religious authorities over the Resurrection reads the verse from the Hebrew Bible that says "God of the living not the dead" symbolically as an argument for the Resurrection(Mark 12:27)
St Paul the Apostle in 2 Corinthians speaks about the difference between the "spirit" and "letter" of the text(2 Corinthians 3:6). Origen read that as an injunction that the spirit of the text is much more important than the letter of the text.
2)The Church tradition authorises an allegorical reading.
As I presented in my arguments the Church Fathers read these conquest accounts symbolically. You see it in the writings of Origen of Alexandria(Homilies on Numbers and Joshua). You see it with St Gregory of Nyssa in his commentary on the Life of Moses. St John Cassian as well. St Isidore of Seville also presents this interpretation as well as Pope St Gregory the Great in his commentary on the Book of Job.
The authority of the Church to interpret the text and Christian doctrine goes back to the Bible itself. St Paul states that the Church is the "pillar and foundation of the truth"(1 Timothy 3:15). He also states we are to "hold fast to the traditions that you were taught whether by word of mouth or by letter"(2 Thessalonians 2:15). Jesus himself recognises this authority stating "whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven"(Matthew 18:18) and we see the Church excercising it's authority on scriptural interpretation when it came to the question of circumcision(Acts 15).
The Church Fathers and Church leaders are the ones who canonised the text in the first place, so the interpretation of those who canonised the text has massive weight. Add to that the fact that for those that come out of a High Church tradition(Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican) the sacred text and sacred tradition have the same weight of authority when it comes to revelation.
3)It is consistent with Christian spirituality
This reading of understanding the conquest as representing the struggle against sin and temptation is consistent with the Biblical understanding of doing battle against sin. The Apostle Paul speaks about how we are to "put to death" passions like fornication, evil desire, greed, etc(Colossians 3:5)
St Paul also uses military rhetoric in a symbolic manner when speaking of the struggle against wickedness. He speaks of how our sword is the word and our helmet is salvation(Ephesians 6:11-18) and how "faith and love" are our weapons(1 Thessalonians 5:8). This symbolic use of military metaphors would be expand by thinkers like Origen when it comes to the allegorical reading of the conquest
So for all of the reasons above I believe that the conquest passages are meant to be read symbolically and that the symbolic interpretation makes sense.
Anglicanpolitics123's post can be found at the link below.
I discovered this while searching for more resources on St. Gregory of Nyssa's rejection of the story of the Midianite genocide.
Despite that, the Harvard Law grad who is married to a white banker has blamed all her problems on white people.
“I’m getting used to dealing with problems that are expensive, disruptive and white,” Wu had sneered at the Saint Patrick’s Day Breakfast while surrounded by the old Irish guard that used to define Boston. Sitting and smiling next to her was Senator Elizabeth Warren, a fellow “woman of color” and her old Harvard Law professor, who had given Wu her start in politics.
On Saturday, the newly named ‘Blood Tribe,’ a self-declared Neo-Nazi group, made a bold show of force with rifles and swastika flags at an LGBT ‘Pride in the Park’ event in Watertown, Wisconsin.
The story of Ish-bosheth also teaches us not to be over-anxious about bodily things, and not to rely on the senses to protect us. He was a king who went to rest in his chamber, leaving a woman as door-keeper. When the men of Rechab came, they found her dozing off as she was winnowing wheat; so, escaping her notice, they slipped in and slew Ish-bosheth while he was asleep (cf 2 Sam. 4:5-8). Now when bodily concerns predominate, everything in man is asleep: the intellect, the soul and the senses. For the woman at the door winnowing wheat indicates the state of one whose reason is closely absorbed in physical things and trying with persistent efforts to purify them. It is clear that this story in Scripture should not be taken literally. For how could a king have a woman as doorkeeper, when he ought properly to be guarded by a troop of soldiers, and to have round him a large body of attendants? Or how could he be so poor as to use her to winnow the wheat? But improbable details are often included in a story because of the deeper truth they signify. Thus the intellect in each of us resides within like a king, while the reason acts as door-keeper of the senses. When the reason occupies itself with bodily things - and to winnow wheat is something bodily - the enemy without difficulty slips past unnoticed and slays the intellect. This is why Abraham did not entrust the guarding of the door to a woman, knowing that the senses are easily deceived; for they take pleasure in the sight of sensory things, and so divide the intellect and persuade it to share in sensual delights, although this is clearly dangerous. But Abraham himself sat by the door (cf. Gen. 18:1), allowing free entry to divine thoughts, while barring the way to worldly cares.
On the weather maps shown in the media, the areas with temperatures above 35 degrees centigrade are colored blood red. Only a few years ago, those same temperatures would be indicated by shades of green, or at most yellow. No mention is made of snow falling in the Alps at altitudes above 1,800 meters (a rarity in summer). Nor has there been any mention in the media of snow falling in Johannesburg just a few weeks ago. Apparently, this is a rare occurrence even in the Southern Hemisphere winter there. Meanwhile, recent research on Antarctica has shown that during the 2009-2019 decade its ice cap has had a net growth of more than five thousand square kilometers.
This is absolutely the first time I've heard of any of this.
And this is the sort of quips you always like to see even if it comes off as not necessarily related to climate change:
The EU is no more than the political branch of NATO, and NATO is to the US what the Attic League was to Athens: an imperial control mechanism dressed up as a voluntary alliance.
All state and corporate media in the EU have been yelling and shouting about the hot weather in Europe. It is infernal, they say. Never been so hot, they want us to believe.
Leftists even talk of non-White immigrants rebuilding Britain after the Second World War, thus giving them a permanent stake in the country. This is usually in reference to events in 1948, when 1027 passengers were carried from Jamaica to London on the HMS Windrush, a voyage that has become symbolic of Britain’s transformation to a multicultural country. There is often a sense that after this Britain embraced multiculturalism and entered an inexorable path to its current state, but this is quite far from the truth.
...
In a British government meeting in 1955, proposals were debated for the creation of “an independent committee of enquiry into coloured migration”, noting that “the first purpose of an enquiry should be to ensure that the public … were made aware of the nature and extent of the problem: until this was more widely appreciated the need for restrictive legislation would not be recognised”.
In 1962, the public had indeed grown more hostile to the problem, and the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which, for the first time, legally curtailed free movement for citizens of Commonwealth countries. Everyone born outside with UK or without a UK passport was now subject to stricter immigration controls. Up to this time, there was an ambiguity in British law that allowed any citizen of a commonwealth country to immigrate to Britain. By this time, the government favoured the entry of Irish and other White immigrants to the UK, but wished to restrict the entry of others. The result was a voucher system which was seen as discriminating on the basis of race.
Many would be interesting to see that happenign right after WWII.
The nail in the coffin:
Without question, the majority of blame for the UK’s rapid demographic transformation rests at the feet of New Labour. As late as 1991, the UK was still 95% White. When New Labour took government in 1997, net migration to the UK was typically about 50,000 per year, a figure Labour and Conservatives had tacitly agreed to. By Labour’s second term from 2005-2010, this had quintupled to 250,000 per year. By the time they left office, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Labour had added 2.7 million new arrivals to the UK workforce.
When I look at the condition of west Europe now after 70 years of American vassalage I don’t see sovereign countries, I see places where the population has by force been replaced to such an extent that a young German is now a minority in his own age group in his own country. The Soviets were chimp brutal oppressors, looted, shot, did many bad things. But look at East Europe now – they didn’t replace the people. The people in west Europe were replaced. And it’s not just about the white race, because the same is happening to South Korea: it is simply the most cruel method of rule by the gang that has overthrown America, where they are using it on their own people–to replace nations in their own lands, to introduce tribalism, racial hatred, in the mistaken belief they will profit off of this. To these methods have been added now another still more cruel, of the transsexual movement which is quickly heading to where the state is able to claim ownership of children and castrate boys without consent of parents, which has already begun to happen in certain few places, but will only accelerate.
These two methods are the most brutal used by the most brutal Oriental despotisms and tyrannies, and they were not and are not being used by the Russians. We know Putler is corrupt and self-interested, but as long as he’s the only one giving resistance to this cabal that has overthrown the western governments, we will support him. In the case of Ukraine, this place is being used as a base of great value to this cabal: they are able to launder money to themselves, intelligence, and use it as a staging ground for operations like the Russia Hoax and the January 6 false flag attack on congress. They must be deprived of this base. Putin seems to have neither the intentions nor the ability to occupy Ukraine: his aims are ours, to deprive the cabal of this base.
When I look at the condition of west Europe now after 70 years of American vassalage I don't see sovereign countries, I see places where the population has by force been replaced to such an extent that a young German is now a minority in his own age …
Ukraine cannot protect all of its main cities from Russian missile threats without a significant increase in the provision of air defence systems, according to a key adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Mykhailo Podolyak said the strikes on Odesa over the past week had shown clearly that the Russian strategy was to bombard Ukrainian cities, with the aim of overwhelming air defence systems.
“Russia’s tactics are clear: they use massive drone attacks to overload our anti-aircraft systems and then in parallel they have a window of opportunity to use ballistic missiles to target infrastructure,” he told the Guardian, in an interview at the presidential administration in Kyiv.
Honestly, there is probably not enough that can even be given over to them to make the sort of difference that is required.
This combined with the various other setbacks that the Ukraine faces, it does not make sense to not be actively pursuing a peace deal.
They should have been working on cutting their losses a long time ago, but for whatever reason, Zelenskyy thinks that NATO is fully capable of giving them the instantaneous and infinite supplies necessary to potentially win the war...
All while he runs out of manpower.
It's a mess of a situation and allowing the war to go on like this is a human rights violation.
It might actually be the case that this is a relatively unimportant charge that just isn't being substantiated with enough evidence and they are unbothered due to the largesse of the remaining cases against him but it still makes me uneasy.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) informed a federal judge late Wednesday it did “not intend to proceed” with a campaign finance charge against disgraced FTX founder and Democrat super donor Sam Bankman-Fried.
Consultation with the Bahamas on the campaign finance charges in Bankman-Fried’s original extradition document last year were behind the decision as part of an effort to adhere to the legal obligations therein, Forbes reports.
The campaign finance violation charge was among eight counts present in the DOJ’s original indictment—which also includes wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering—in December.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) informed a federal judge late Wednesday it did “not intend to proceed” with a campaign finance charge against disgraced FTX founder and Democrat super donor Sam Bankman-Fried.
Honestly this is a bit hard to read, but I share it - it concerns the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, famous for the transgender terrorist entering and killing the Principal and some students.
What we’re seeing is a widespread recognition that the naive efforts to integrate China into the western “rules-based order” have utterly failed which has precipitated a dramatic reversal in policy that is steadily gaining momentum and ferocity. China has demonstrated that it will never become a vassal state in Uncle Sam’s sprawling empire. The Chinese have remained stubbornly independent throughout, initiating only those reforms that fit within their political orientation while rejecting any changes that might challenge the party leadership.
The United States has settled on a multi-pronged strategy to thwart China’s economic development and preserve America’s premier position in the global order.
While Spanish news outlet Ultima Hora reported that the 21- to 23-year-old suspects were of Turkish origin, much of the Spanish press was fixated on the “German” aspect of the crime, which the men allegedly filmed on their smartphones. Even the German press was quick to claim the men were Germans with no context, with Welt, one of the most popular conservative papers in the country, running the headline “Five German vacationers on Mallorca have to be remanded in custody.” At no point in the piece does Welt mention the migration background of the suspects.
Over the weekend, after the international media loudly trumpeted that five German men were arrested for raping an 18-year-old Spanish girl, it was quickly revealed that all of the men have a “migration background.
Imagine one of your friends tells you that the governor of your state was caught on video robbing a liquor store. Not only that, his brother pistol-whipped the clerk during the commission of the crime. Most likely, you would want proof. Your friend then sends you a link to a Twitter thread on the subject. Knowing the volume of nonsense on Twitter, you then go to mainstream news sites looking for something on this incredible story, but everywhere you look you find nothing but silence.
This would present a dilemma. On the one hand, you trust your friend and the story does seem legitimate. Upon further inquiry you find some stories tucked away here and there that confirm the tweet. Independent news sites are howling about the crime and the refusal of the mainstream media to notice it. The dilemma is not about believing the story is true but about trusting your own judgement. If all of the serious people are ignoring this story, why should you be outraged by it?
If this sounds familiar, it should. This is daily life in America. Events that should warrant national coverage go unmentioned, while trivial nonsense gets wall-to-wall coverage from all of the regime media organs. Compounding it is the fact that the stuff getting covered comes with truckloads of official lies and narratives designed to trick the audience into viewing the facts presented in a way that leads to an inaccurate understanding of the event in question.
We are in one of those moments today. Hunter Biden, the crackhead son of Joe Biden, is due in court to plead guilty to some minor crimes. Not happy with a sweetheart deal that is an affront to the idea of the rule of law, one of his lawyers called the court yesterday, pretending to be a lawyer for the Republicans, who had filed a brief with the court contesting the sweetheart deal. This fake lawyer successfully convinced the court clerk to withdraw the Republican filing.
This is not a small thing. The massive corruption involved in this plea deal should warrant Watergate level coverage. Instead, regime media and the volunteer army of online toadies pretend it is normal. Putting that aside, no one would know about this outlandish effort to mislead the court if not for people on Twitter. The Drudge Report has no mention of it. Memorandum, the news aggregator popular with media content creators, has no mention of this event.
There are different stories about the people of the Ditch. One of them is a hadith (Arabic: حَـدِيـث, 'account', 'narration' or 'report') about a Malik (Arabic: مَـلِـك, King) that had a sahir (Arabic: سَـاحِـر, magician) in the days before Muhammad. As the magician grew old and his lifetime was nearly over, he asked the King to choose a smart boy to learn sihr (Arabic: سِـحْـر, magic) from him. However, as the boy was training in magic, he met a monk everyday on the way to the magic class, and finally became a true believer in God. As a result, he could save people and treat sick people in unusual ways. When the King learned of this, he commanded the boy to abandon his faith in God. The boy rejected the King's command, so he was killed. The King also burned those who followed the boy's deen (Arabic: ديـن, religion), in one or more ditches.[7][8]
[9]Ibn Ishaq-Guillaume interpreted this passage to be an allusion to the killing of the Christians of Najran by order of the King Dhu Nuwas. According to Christian sources, this event took place around 523 C.E. Dhu Nuwas converted to Judaism and chose Joseph as his new name. He went to Najran to force the Christian people there to convert to Judaism. When they refused, the King threw them alive into one or more burning ditches. [5]
What unities and distinguishes the right, is not caution, not timidity, not "conservatism", not even religiosity, or loyalty... but a conviction and belief in quality. That some things are better than others, that excellence is worth striving for, whether in fitness, business, martial prowess, religious conviction, or household horticulture. The ownership of results and belief in distinction... from the most modest of domestic endeavors to the grandest of the economic and political... that is what distinguishes the right, and that is where intra-right conflicts originate: from rivaled ideals of quality...
The believers in exceptional industry, exceptional social-cultural commitments, exceptional stewardship of the land, and exceptional faith often fall into conflict...
Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak The key difference between Left and Right is that the Left believes in Equality whereas the Right believes in Quality. This sounds like a Glib joke until you remember the ancient meaning of "Quality"...
Important find for Biblical archaeology - Mazar's work is often disputed but this is wild:
A 3,000-year-old defensive wall possibly built by King Solomon has been unearthed in Jerusalem, according to the Israeli archaeologist who led the excavation. The discovery appears to validate a Bible passage, she says.
The tenth-century B.C. wall is 230 feet (70 meters) long and about 6 meters (20 feet) tall. It stands along what was then the edge of Jerusalem—between the Temple Mount, still Jerusalem's paramount landmark, and the ancient City of David, today a modern-day Arab neighborhood called Silwan.
The stone barrier is part of a defensive complex that includes a gatehouse, an adjacent building, and a guard tower, which has been only partially excavated, according to Eilat Mazar, who led the dig for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Over the years, the structures have been partially demolished—their building materials scavenged for later structures—and what remained was buried under rubble, Mazar said.
Cardiac arrest occurs when electrical disturbances cause the heart to suddenly stop beating. It may be fatal if not immediately treated, but it can be reversed by CPR and shocks from a defibrillator, according to the American Heart Association.
Sudden cardiac arrest among young athletes is rare but not unheard of. An examination of NCAA student-athlete sudden deaths between 2004 and 2008 found cardiovascular-related sudden death was the leading cause of death in 45 cases, or about 9 each year, according to a 2011 study.
One of the most well-known cases was Hank Gathers, a star forward for Loyola Marymount University who collapsed and died during a conference tournament game in 1990.
These relatively rare events in the past will be used to cover up the increased cardiac episodes that we will see from the vaccines.
Exactly; they will use whatever it takes to cover it up, make it normal, make light of it. They blur things until people just give up or get bored with the dance.
Elsewhere I was challenged on the topic of how to defend the canonicity of the Bible - my response was this:
The Gospels & Epistles were orally preserved initially, and they are subsequently backed up by fragments that can date as far back as the 1st century AD. Probably at the churches of Jerusalem and other major centers of Christianity like Antioch, they already had the full Gospels and many epistles.
Because Christianity began spreading immediately from the time of Christ's death, with all of the Apostles dispersing throughout the region and far beyond, and St. Paul shortly thereafter doing his great trips through Asia minor, Greece, and Rome, we also run into the great defense against the heretics: heresies are localized distortions of Christian concepts with the exception of gnostics which were widespread since their context was often more from a theological big picture than some specific text disputing the Gospels.
So it was easy to recognize which texts were too localized; also the texts which have strange content that doesn't jive with the message at all are dismissable... As far as the canonized Old Testament goes, there are rich disputes about how they should be structured, how they should be approached and interpreted, and I do not even think it is 100% essential to view these things as inerrant, but rather to believe them as God breathed and then recorded by man...
I read Israel Finklestein's Bile Unearthed, which was the big, scary text which proposed a radical new interpretation where the Old City of David couldn't have existed that early based on archaeological evidence.. . Finklestein does a great job outlining how much of the Old Testament narrative is demonstratably true, so much so that it is quite anomalous as far as ancient texts go which are often full of lies and embellishment. He suggested the only embellishment is really the timeline, and talked about how there is no evidence for Jerusalem having been a major city as far back as we have to put King David. Yet, in 2010, Eilat Mazar famously found what has been identified as a thousand year old, large wall that completely changes the concept that Jeruaslem was some unremarkable hill town and not an important place as the Bible says it is....
Basketball star LeBron James' son, 18-year-old Bronny James, went into cardiac arrest during basketball practice on Monday, according to TMZ, CBS News and ESPN.
It's absolutely the case that "science" has now been equated with a series of ossified western academic institutions that are also in the service of the managerial state.
Announcement Next week I am on vacation as I prepare for the Cultural Event of the year. There will be no new posts: there may be classic reposts. Last week I was invited to a National Association …
Finally, human individuality finds its greatest support and its highest appreciation in religion. Only as a personality can man turn to God and only through this dialogue does he realize himself as a person commensurate with the person of God. It is for this very reason that socialist ideology and religion are mutually exclusive. (Of course, if either of these world views is underdeveloped, they can coexist for a certain time.) It is natural to see here the cause of that hatred for religion which is typical of the overwhelming majority of socialist doctrines and states.
Ihor Shafarevich in the Socialist Phenomenon, p. 267
A couple in Marion County, Florida, was arrested and charged with human trafficking after they allegedly bonded three women out of jail and gave them housing but forced them into prostitution.
Joselito Martinez and Tanya Wurster are charged in connection with the human trafficking of three women between 2019 and 2021 at various locations throughout Central Florida, the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation said in a press release, according to Fox 35.
After the couple bonded the women out of jail and provided them a place to live, the women were allegedly forced to engage in "commercial sex acts with customers," which helped the pair rake in more than $300,000 from the victims over the course of two years.
According to investigators, Martinez used "narcotics, threats of violence, and humiliating acts such as shaving the victim's head to control the victim." Deputies said he also forced two women to receive tattoos to brand them as his property.
The child Martinez and Wurster share together was also in the home where the alleged prostitution had occurred.
This is why you have to be actively policing the streets - to discover this garbage.
A Florida couple was charged with human trafficking after they allegedly bonded three women out of jail and forced them into prostitution, officials said.
Oklahoma Investigators have identified the woman believed to have killed her three children and then herself after an hourslong standoff with police in Verdigris on Thursday.
Brandy McCaslin, 39, shot and killed her children before shooting herself, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) said.
The triple murder-suicide happened in the small town just northeast of Tulsa. At around 4 p.m. on Thursday, police officers on patrol noticed fireworks erupting outside a home near East Dogwood Court and Cypress Street, according to OSBI.
The officers went to investigate and discovered an armed and barricaded woman in the residence.
An Oklahoma mother, Brandy McCaslin, 39, killed her three children in a triple murder-suicide after a three-hour standoff with police, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Texas on Monday over the state's decision to curb illegal immigration with a floating buoy border barrier on the Rio Grande.
The DOJ first announced their intention to sue last week in a letter to Governor Greg Abbott. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in the Western District of Texas on Monday afternoon.
In the lawsuit, the DOJ claimed that the barrier obstructs "the navigable capacity of waters of the United States." The department noted that Texas officials installed the barrier without permission from the federal government over whether it was safe for the public and the environment.
"The State of Texas’s actions violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties," the DOJ previously said in the letter, according to the Houston Chronicle.
You aren't allowed to do anything to stop illegals without dotting your t's and crossing your i's.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is suing Texas over its use of a floating buoy border barrier to curb illegal immigration, arguing that the state was not authorized to install it.
According to Wrigley, Barakat likely planned a mass shooting event in downtown Fargo, as a forensic search of his computer showed he last searched for “mass casualty events” and an article about thousands attending the city’s downtown street fair.
A Syrian refugee who killed Fargo, North Dakota, Police Officer Jake Wallin, 23 years old, and critically injured two other officers and a bystander this month had plotted a mass shooting in the city’s downtown, law enforcement officials revealed.
“I think the issues are now coming up are worrying enough that we really need a real investigation of what happened,” Kennedy said. “I mean, these revelations about the, where you had Burisma, which is, you know, a notoriously corrupt company that paid out, apparently, $10 million to Hunter and his dad. If that’s true, then it is really troubling.”
Big Tech companies are deliberately manipulating the outcomes of our elections and the thinking and beliefs of our children. And they are having an enormous impact.
Consider this: The GOP currently has a slim 10-seat majority in the House of Representatives. Without Google's interference in 2022, it would likely now have a majority of more than three times that size.
If Google had not interfered in the 2022 midterm elections, the GOP would likely have ended up with a Senate majority of at least two seats.
The Big Tech companies that exploded into existence over the past 20 years – as some of their prominent insiders have stated – have undermined our democracy, indoctrinated our children, and increasingly turned our freedom into an illusion.
The techniques we have discovered – the Search Engine Manipulation Effect, the Answer Bot Effect, the Targeted Messaging Effect, and others – can easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of undecided voters by between 20% and 80% after just one manipulation. Google can also repeat these manipulations many times over a period of months prior to an election.
Assuming the effects of these techniques are additive, Google can likely produce even larger shifts in opinions and voting preferences than the ones from a single manipulation used just once.
Google also knows exactly who is vulnerable to these manipulations – who is still undecided before Election Day, for example – so they can target and bombard just the right people on a massive scale 24 hours a day.
Our research has shown repeatedly that the manipulations used can make them invisible to people, and can often produce shifts of 40% or more in the voting preferences of undecided voters without anyone having the slightest idea they have been manipulated. They feel free, even while they are being strongly controlled. As one journalist wrote, "It really is the perfect crime."
More zingers like this:
In the days leading up to the 2022 midterms, the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology... preserved overwhelming evidence of Google's manipulations on their search engine, on their video recommendations on YouTube (owned by Google), and even on their homepage on Election Day. On that day in Florida, for example, 100% of liberals received go-vote reminders on their version of Google's homepage, but only 59% of conservatives did.
If, in 2024, 158 million people cast ballots, as they did in 2020, it means Google could likely shift the votes of between 6.4 and 25.5 million people, thereby easily controlling the outcome of any election in which the projected win margin is less than 4%. No laws or regulations are in place to stop them, but our monitoring can. We are monitoring their systems and doing to them what they do to us. When the Big Tech companies know that their manipulations are being watched, they back off. It has already worked to completely shut down manipulations in one important election.
Big Tech companies are deliberately manipulating the outcomes of our elections and the thinking and beliefs of our children. And they are having an enormous impact. Consider this: The GOP currently has a slim 10-seat majority in the House of
Then you have that wonderful statement in the fourteenth chapter of Exodus, 14:14, where the Lord through Moses says to the people, “Listen, have faith, stand firm, be quiet, be still, I will fight for you. I will fight for you, and this very day, you will see the Egyptians perish before your very eyes. I will save you. I will rescue you. I will deliver you.” And in the Old Testament, that meant a violent act of salvation in, literally, killing the enemies. And God is killing the enemies all the time in the Old Testament. That’s what he’s doing day and night, so to speak, and some people are scandalized by it, but the Bible reader, in the light of Jesus Christ, would say, “What was God to do? How else was he going to proceed? He’s dealing with a violent world where people are killing each other all the time, and in the names of their gods they’re killing each other,” and so on.
Now, in the Passover exodus story, eight times you have that expression with these plagues that God says, “I am doing this that you may know that I am God, that you may know that I am your God, that the nations and the Egyptians may know that I reign over all creation, and that you may know that I am the only God that there is.” So the violence in the Old Testament and the violence of God himself against his enemies—because those people who are enemies of Israel, they are enemies of him—here we should see that the warfare in the Old Testament is not so much, so to speak, a warfare between peoples. It’s a warfare, actually, between gods. It’s the one true and living God fighting against all the false gods and all those who are evilly inspired into idolatry by those false gods, by the powers of evil, by the demons.
It is interesting to think of it in those terms, but it still has potentially the issue of using humans as pawns.
And by the way, I mentioned in a podcast before, I made a mistake; I misspoke definitely, for sure, when I claimed that however sinful people might be, the righteous of the Old Testament are considered righteous because of their faith, because they believed in God. So many of them did many immoral things. They did murder, they did adultery like David, but they never, ever apostatized against the true God. And the mistake that I made is that I included Solomon in that number. Well, Solomon is never included in that number because at the end of Solomon’s life he did apostatize. Besides having 300 wives and 700 concubines, he was also worshiping the Baalim and the Asterith, and he was worshiping the gods of all those women who led him into sexual impurity and lewdness and unchastity and just carnality. So Solomon is not among the marvels of the Old Testament, because he did not keep faith to the end. And sometimes I think we should never put a fresco of Solomon in any of our churches.
By the way, in the letter to the Hebrews, when they list those who were faithful to God in the Old Covenant, and they may have been sinful in their moral behavior, but they never apostatized against God, Solomon is never included in that number. Pay attention in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, the letter to the Hebrews; read about who are listed as righteous there. They are the ones who never apostatized.
I had no idea about this, to be honest.
So God finds people who can believe in him, and believe in him as the one, true, and only God, and he does all these violent acts that they may know, that you may know that I am God. And that is a theme that persists through the entire Hebrew Scripture. And then it even comes into the New Testament that this God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses raises his Son, Jesus, from the dead, who is the fulfillment of that entire history, that we might know that he is God. The ultimate—how can you say?—proof of God’s action, that we may know that he is God, is when he vindicates his own Son who has been rejected, killed and murdered, and has become the victim of murder, violence of all his enemies, in order to destroy his enemies by dying himself and not by killing them but by dying for them and with them.
It ultimately has to come back to this, right: God dying for all the people of all the lands, including those who had died in previous wars, going into Hades and liberating them.
He died on the cross for the very people that also had put him there.
There’s a great Protestant thinker, a theologian named Karl Bart, who said, “Until God can establish his power over the false gods, until he can show that he can kill and make alive, that the can cast down, that he can raise up, and that he is the God of gods and the Lord of lords, then that God cannot really show mercy.” Because if he would show mercy without showing his power, people would think that he didn’t have the power, and that’s certainly a teaching of the Old Testament. God has to establish his power, and the way you establish your power is by killing your enemies. Sadly, that’s the truth.
This is a very interesting observation: God in the Old Testament is proving himself to the people who are scared and fragile, just like how people are now.
Now, if that were the last word, then we would really have a scandal on our hands, but for Christianity that is not the last word, as we will see in a second and as we already know, I hope. In Jesus Christ, you do not have that any more. You have a radical reversal of God’s activity, because once he has established his power, then he can send his Son to show mercy and to show what the power of God really is, which is the power of truth, the power of righteousness, the power of love, which is absolutely, fully, completely, and totally revealed in the Cross of Christ and in the crucified Messiah.
But in the Old Testament, you have God doing these acts so that they would know that he is God. Here I would recommend to you as an exercise: read the Prophet Ezekiel. If you read the Prophet Ezekiel and all that is going on there, you will see that it says in Ezekiel over 65 times—I counted them—where God says, “I am against you and I will do these mighty acts and I will destroy not only your enemies: I will destroy you, and I will destroy Jerusalem”—how about that?—“so that you may know that I am God.”
Now here we’ve got to see something very important: that the violence of God in the Old Covenant is not just against the enemies of Israel and the enemies of God. It’s not simply against those people whose names are listed: the Canaanites, the Perusites, the Moabites, the Edomites, the Hittites, the Hagorites. There’s all these names of all these people in Canaan that God has to actually destroy so that he could keep his soteriological, his saving activities in the world alive and keep his own name holy and his own name glorified over and against all the demonic powers that are being worshiped as gods, all those idols.
So this is what you have there, but in Ezekiel and in Jeremiah, in Isaiah, you have a new thing there, God doing a new thing. What’s he doing? Well, he is saying to his own people now, “You are unrighteous. You are unfaithful. You are sinful. You are idolaters. And I’ll show you what you’re going to get, too.” And then he razes Jerusalem to the ground, and he actually calls Nebuchadnezzar… he calls him, “My christ, my anointed.” He calls Nebuchadnezzar, the most wicked king of all the earth, who comes in the year—what is it? the sixth century before Christ—586 BCE, before the Common Era, before Christ—you have the destruction of the Jerusalem temple.
And then the Persians defeat the Babylonians, Cyrus comes in, and he’s now called God’s anointed and God’s christ, to rebuilt the temple. But by the time you get to Darius, the temple’s still not rebuilt; then in the time of Haggai and Ezra and Nehemiah and Zachariah, you have the second temple being rebuilt. But then that temple itself is going to get destroyed after Jesus is crucified in the year 70, never to be rebuilt again. But the most amazing thing is that God says to his own people in the Old Testament Scripture, “I am against you. I am against you, because you are trusting in horses. You think you can manipulate me. You think that because I told you you are my people that you can do whatever you want and you can be unrighteous and sinful and break that Law and not keep the commandments and not keep the Sabbath or anything else.”
So God has to show his righteousness, and sometimes in the Bible it’s pretty awesome how he does it. There’s that terrible story of that guy, Uzzah, who—they’re carrying the Ark of the Covenant when they’re going into Cana, and he stumbles and trips and he falls against the ark and touches it, and he drops dead. Well, maybe he had a heart attack because he was so scared that he touched the holy ark, but of course in the Hebrew mind, it said: “God killed him.” Then you have that terrible story of the guy collecting sticks on the Sabbath day, and God says, “Stone him to death.” Well, God has to show that power, and that’s the kind of world he was dealing with; those are the kind of people he was dealing with, the kind of men he was dealing with, and this is not a joke.
The problem with this is that it cannot actually be very persuasive in the eyes of nonbelievers.
This is real business, and we can’t flash back our post-Christian, post-Enlightenment, humanistic, secularly humanistic ethics back into the old days. And of course, the one thing, as I mentioned already on the radio about the humanistic ethics is that they say it doesn’t really matter who God is, and there’s no worship at all. There’s no one to give thanks and glory and honor and worship to at all. You’re just supposed to be a nice person and get what you want and share the greed, and, as I said, our modern time is almost a radical opposite of the Old Testament. The Old Testament was for God to establish his divinity and to be worshiped and to receive glory and honor, because that’s where human beings find life and salvation and that’s where they are not becoming overcome by the powers of passion and sin and death and destruction itself. And of course, in the Scripture the last enemy that God has to destroy is death itself, and he does that on the Cross through the death of his Son, Jesus the Messiah.
It is absolutely the case that we take these value systems for granted.
I also like where he's going with this --
So in Isaiah, that 26th chapter where you find the canticle, you have those words there that—terrifying words—where it says: If God would show favor and kindness to wicked people, they don’t repent; they just become worse. He says if favor is shown to the wicked he does not learn righteousness. In the land of uprightness, he deals perversely. He does not recognize the majesty of the Lord. Here one of the accusations of God against his people is: they think that they can do with him whatever they want, and they think that they’re invincible, and they think that it is by their horses and their powers that they’re going to keep themselves alive, and they make deals with Egyptians and Assyrians and Persians and God-knows-what. Well, God is working with all of that, but at the same time, he keeps telling them: “I am your God. I will fight for you. Don’t put your trust in princes and sons of men. Don’t think horses are going to save you.” And then when they think it too much, he says, “Okay, I’ll show you,” and then he allows the enemies to just raze Jerusalem itself and the holy temple right to the ground, and that happens a couple of times in history. It gets razed, it gets rebuilt, and it gets razed to the ground again, never to be rebuilt again, because the raised temple of God now is the body of Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.
But it also says in that canticle in the Septuagint version—this is not in the Hebrew version—you have that line that we sing in church during Lent: [prosthes kaka] render evil unto them, O God, render evils unto them, even to the proud ones of the earth. And the Holy Fathers teach us that God’s only tool against unrighteousness are evils. God has to show punishment, God has to chastise, God has to show his anger, otherwise people don’t repent, and if they’re blessed, they think the blessings are due to them, that they have the right to them, that they’re not gifts and graces of God, which is the ultimate blasphemy against God. Who are you, creature?
This reminds me of a conversation that I had with another person concerning issues of man at his basic level... Man, at his root, is not a pure, good, undefiled being that is free from corruption. We read that into it after the fact, based on what we have in modernity, and the atheist certainly is eager to interpret man as this whenever possible because it makes God's wrath in the Old Testament unjustifiable.
But that is not how man really is - and it takes fallen times for people to learn the real identity of God.
Now, there is one other thing that should be mentioned, and that is: in the Old Testament, you also have violence and killing done as a kind of vindication by human beings against evils done to them. Like, for example here, one of the great examples I think would be, again if you just have it right in the first book of the Bible, in Genesis 34, when Simon and Levi kill Shechem and they kill all the males in the land and they plunder the whole city and they take all the women and the children and everything because Shechem has violated their sister Dinah. So when Dinah is raped and taken by Shechem and [seduced] and plundered, [her] brothers vindicate this action of Shechem by killing him, including all his people and killing all his place and plundering his city, so you have the evils that are done as vindication: evil given for evil. You return the evils by evils in order to vindicate your righteousness against the unrighteousness of those who harmed you. So you find all of this in the Scriptures, all this kind of evil and murder and going-on, and it’s there all the time.
Now, in the psalms, which are, of course, absolutely necessary to be read also… I once tried to count how many times it speaks about enemies, adversaries, and putting them to shame and overcoming them and destroying them that you find in the psalter. I had to give up, because it is so darn filled with that that you can’t even add how many times it’s there. Read the psalter. It’s all about the victory of God over his enemies. It’s always the victory of God on behalf of the poor and the needy and the lowly and the rejected. It’s all about God defending the widows and orphans by punishing and destroying and ultimately showing his power against the unrighteous, the sinful, the enemy, the idolater, the apostate.
Here in the psalms, we believers, we identify the Lord in all of the psalms with Jesus Christ himself, but we also identify all the victims in the psalms, all the poor, the needy, the righteous who are vindicated, who are the victims of violence, we also identify them with Jesus. And then we try to identify ourselves with the righteous, and we pray to be made righteous. We ask God to let us be upright, to keep the commandments. We say we want to keep those commandments, but at the same time, we know in the psalter that we are sinners ourselves, that we deserve the wrath and the anger of God upon us because of our sins.
It would be interesting to think of these calls for us to be humble and broken in spirit as also very literal calls for us to be as the widow, as the orphan, as the dejected from the earth, because these are the ones who God will fight for. Of course, it is foolish to literally throw away yourself into such a state, abandoning the comforts that you have to invite such conflict is to tempt God, so at no point are we to "assume the position" of victim. Such opportunities will present themselves naturally, with time...
But the point is to become that in spirit.
More importantly, this is absolutely an important part - the resolution of all of this is found in the Old Testament:
But now let’s end up today with the New Testament, because what does the New Testament say? What does the final covenant of God say? What does God speak through his final Word incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth? What is the word of the Cross? What is the Gospel of God in Christ Jesus? And very simply put, to sum it up simply, it is this: that we are all sinners, but God shows mercy on all. God triumphs over all his enemies, and all his enemies are sin and evil and demons and demonic people. Those are God’s enemies, and those enemies will be destroyed. In the same way that the Ark of the Covenant, when it was brought into battle, in the book of Numbers, for example, the people would sing, “Let God arise. Let his enemies be scattered. Let those who hate him flee from before his face.” That’s Numbers 11, and that’s Psalm 68. That will become, for Orthodox Christians, the Paschal Psalm. That’ll be the psalm of the Resurrection of Christ, when God finally destroys all his enemies.
Another tremendous excerpt:
But one thing is for certain: Christ sheds his blood on the Cross for Sodom and Gomorrah. Christ sheds his blood on the Cross for everyone that Yahweh killed in the Old Testament. Everyone that was killed in the Old Testament in any way, whether it was Jephthah’s daughter who had to be sacrificed because he made a vow, whether it’s that concubine who was chopped up into twelve parts and sent through Israel, whether it’s the ravishing of the young maidens outside Sodom and Gomorrah and in other places in the Bible, whether it’s Cain killing Abel, whatever it is—all those murders, all [that] violence—that is all subsumed in the flesh of Christ on the Cross, and he endures it all. And it is God Almighty that is in human flesh that’s enduring it in order to have mercy on all.
Now here I would say this very clearly: if God did not so love the world that he sent his only-begotten Son, that those who believe in him would not perish, and if he did not give the opportunity for everyone to repent, and if the final judgment, when the Lord appears in glory, is not the moment of truth when anyone can finally repent of all their ignorances and their evils, their passions and their crimes, and if God did not die for everyone and shed his blood for everyone without exception, then we would have real problems with the murders of the Old Testament. All that violence would be nothing but scandalous violence. But the scandal for Christians, the scandal of the Cross replaces, so to speak, heals all the violence of men, even the violence of God himself that he had to perpetrate in the Old Testament in order for his plan to be completed for the Messiah to come.
Another very vital piece is covered here - I actually had only previously been familiar with St. Maximus the Confessor's take on this:
And that’s how the ancient Christians read the Old Testament, and that’s why they read it often allegorically, symbolically. They saw that fighting in the Old Testament as the warfare between God’s graciousness and goodness against idolatry and fornication and [un]chastity and blasphemy and sin and evil and murder and all the violations of the commandments of God.
And here it’s very important: Christians read the psalms that way. Take, for example, the psalm that says about the Babylonians, “Blessed are they who take your little ones and smash them on the rocks.” St. Nilus of Sinai, St. Benedict of Nursia, all the holy Fathers say that we have to interpret that spiritually, allegorically. Yeah, God did say you have to bash those babies on the rocks, you have to kill the women and the children, because if they grow up and become powerful, they’re going to kill you and then it’s going to be the end of the story and evil is going to triumph, and God cannot let evil triumph, so he has to kill the evil-doers—but that’s not the final word. The final word is that he gets killed for the sake of the forgiveness of the evil-doers. That’s the Christian faith.
And the Christian transforms into something else:
So when, in the final covenant of God with his people in Christ, Christians are no longer killers, they are those who get killed—the martyr and the confessor and the meek and gentle and the non-violent and the peaceful—those are the quintessential victors in Christ. As the Apocalypse puts it, Christians fight the Lamb’s war, and the Lamb’s war is against sin, including the sin that’s in your own heart, in your own mind, in your own flesh, in your own body. That’s what Christ has to destroy ultimately, but you’ve got to get Christ into the world. You’ve got to get Mary into the world so there’s a woman capable of giving birth to God in the flesh.
This next part really brings it home as to the source of destruction:
And the only way God can do it is the way he did it, and the way he did it is recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament. The way God did it is recorded in the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, and he did it in a violent way. As Jesus said, “From the beginning until John the Baptist, the kingdom of God is taken by violence, and the violent take it by force.” But there’s some sense in which the violence of God is now the violence of the Lamb. It’s the violence of non-violence. It’s the violence of martyria, of witness. It’s the violence of suffering. We know Jesus said that. For example, when the apostles wanted to call fire down on Bethsaida, Chorazin, Capernaum, whatever, all those cities that did not accept Jesus, Jesus says, “No.” He says, “This is over now. The final new covenant is here. I’m here in order to die, not to kill.”
Now, will God kill and destroy his enemies, ultimately, in the coming kingdom? Well, the ancient Christian scriptural answer is no. He will have mercy on everybody. But still, people may not accept that mercy, and then God’s love and his truth and his righteousness and his blood will torment them, and they will be tormented forever and ever if they blaspheme the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Some people think that nobody can do that; other people—and it seems to be the scriptural teaching—no. The demons and the evil people who love the demons and hate God, they will suffer from the mercy of God forever, and that’s the fire of hell. But God is no longer destroying. God is no longer destroying. People are destroying themselves by opposing the righteousness of God.
The violence of non-violence seems like a great reference to the pacifism conundrum: [i]when we stay our hands from violence, it occasionally allows an orgy of violence, which produces its own sense of injustice.
But this is ultimately what man brings onto himself.
Let's leave the conclusion to Fr. Thomas Hopko himself:
The Christian Gospel is that God is victorious over his enemies, ultimately, finally, perfectly, totally, and once and for all, but the weapon of God is the Cross, and God is victorious by dying. He is victorious by being killed, and that’s the scandal and that’s the radical newness of Christianity. As it was said in the book of Acts, the Jews who didn’t believe in Jesus were saying about the preaching of the apostles, “These men are turning the world upside down.” And in Christ everything is turned upside down.
So we read about the violence and the murder and the killing and the violence of God and the violence of people and the sinful violence and the unrighteous violence, but then the necessary violence that is necessary for God’s plan to be completed, we read about all this in the Old Testament. We see it fulfilled in the non-violent Christ, who as a Lamb is led to the slaughter and opens not his mouth, who is denied justice, who takes upon himself the sin of the world, and who dies for all those for all those who have died in any way, and he dies even for those whom God himself has killed in the Old Testament, because the final word does not belong to death. The final word does not belong to destruction. The final word belongs to mercy and forgiveness. The final word belongs to resurrection and life. The final word belongs to the peace of God, not the violence of God.
But that peace itself is very violent for people who do not want it, it produces violence, because as Isaiah said, peace and gifts and favor and grace shown to the wicked does not always produce repentance; it could make people even worse and more violent and more hating and more crazy and more mad. Yeah, that’s possible.
And the delusions can come, as Christ said, “And the day will come when people will even be murdering each other and think they’re doing it in the name of Christ crucified.” Can you imagine that they’re doing it in the name of God? Or the time can go on as if Christ has not come, and then, of course, there can be delusion. People can kill in the name of God, but it’s not God at all that they’re killing in the name of. And in the Old Testament, those who had to kill in the name of God, it had better have been in the name of God, for the sake of God’s plan, with great sorrow and repentance on their own part, or else they were in tremendous trouble.
So this is how we understand the violence in the Bible. The Old Testament is prefigurative, preparatory, and pedagogic to Christ. It does involve violence and murder and warfare, but that warfare is a prefiguration of the ultimate warfare of God on the Cross in Christ. He is the Iēsus Christos Nika; he is the Victor. And here is the radical newness of the New Testament.
And that was so new that some people thought that the New Testament God was not even the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses; they thought it was a different God, but we Christians say, “Oh, no, no, no. It’s not; it’s the same God. It’s the same God.” It is. Moses spoke about Christ. Isaiah spoke about Christ. All the events of the Old Testament prefigure Christ. All the warfare and the victories of Yahweh over his enemies in the Old Testament prefigure the victory of Christ on the Cross. That’s how Christians read and understand the violence, the killing, the murder that we find in the Scriptures, particularly those of the Old Testament.
Now one last little thought: This goes on even in the Christian era, and the shame will be for Christians that they will kill in the name of Christ. The shame of Christians is that they will become as if they had the power to invoke God and use God for the destruction of their enemies. Even the Theotokos will be praised as a victorious leader who smashes barbarians or something. This is an apostasy in its own way, and it’s a million times worse than what we find in the Old Testament.
So let’s think about these things, but let’s know for sure that all that violence of old was necessary to produce the Christ, and then the Christ comes and takes the violence upon himself and forgives everyone everything. And that’s the teaching of the Gospel. And the victory of God ultimately is one when his Son dies the most violent, degrading, horrible death on the Cross. So for Christians, we preach Christ crucified, scandal to Jews, folly to Gentiles, but the wisdom and the power, the ultimate wisdom and the ultimate power, of God Almighty himself.
In his continuing series on the Bible, Fr. Tom addresses the problem of God's violence against people and the war and violence that is prevalent in general in the Old Testament.
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Nanook
in reply to J. Løvstuhagen • •