Lastnight we watched "The most reluctant convert" a short (90 minute) movie about CS Lewis's life and conversion - written-by and starring the excellent Bible Gateway performer Max McLean.

It is a meaty and uncompromising piece, which managed to interest me and hold my attention; even though I have read the ...

I have quite often tried to describe what I call Direct Knowing, which I regard as the most fundamental form of understanding, the bottom line, the ultimate (and divine) way of knowing.

Yesterday I found a passage of writing which seems to describe how Direct Knowing feels and operates, written in the 1930s by Dion ...

An important post by Dr. Charlton on the problem of Omni-god and free agency prompted an insightful comment exchange between Bruce and blogger Derek Ramsey:

Derek:

In the Bible Satan seems to act as if were possible for God to be defeated. This isn't to say it was probable, but his rebellion in heaven makes no ...

The only way to talk with the subconscious mind is through the pictorial imagination, because it has a very archaic mode of mentation that developed before speech had been thought of. It is unresponsive to logic, or argument, or appeals to its better nature. But show it a picture, and it understands and is only too ...

The problem for traditional, orthodox mainstream Christian Churches is that they make a very Big Thing about the creator deity being Omni-God - but when it comes to the free will of Men... Well, freedom is accorded much, much less significance.

On the one hand; Omni-God is absolutely mandatory - the church member ...

This is a chapter from my book about the End Times It is not just in the great myths and religions of the world that the end times are foretold. The Fox’s Prophecy is an English poem written in about 1870 by a Mr D.W. Nash about whom not much seems to be known. The scene is set on a beautiful crisp November morning ...

Edited from a sharply-insightful Comment by NLR at Francis Berger's blog:

A common claim is that (So-called) "AI will usher in an endless frontier of creativity".

There's plenty of reasons to disagree with this, but I want to discuss the assumptions associated with this view of creativity. The core distinction is ...

I had a dream last night which I hadn’t planned on posting about, but the sync fairies had other ideas.

In the dream, I had been attacked by an unseen aircraft while parasailing over a lake on “the eleventh” (the date was mentioned several times) and had gone back to the lake the next day (which would be the ...

In ancient times, it seems that power was regarded as A Good Thing - the only problem was getting it! The assumption was that gaining power simply enabled good people to do good things.

Power was wanted for Us, and Our power was good. The evil of power was when They had it, and exercised it on Us.

When someone ...

🎞️

The night before last, as related in "Inanities with Elon," I dreamed about having to do a bizarre "worksheet" with Elon Musk and some of his employees, which combined extremely easy exercises with extremely confusing ones.

The very next night, I had another dream that took that theme to another level. I was in a ...

It is surely pleasanter to expect things to get better in the future, than to expect the opposite.

Yet, if we are honest, such predictions ought to be rooted in honest realism rather than what happens to make us feel more cheerful at the moment.

But aside from this, optimism is often tainted by Boosterism - which ...

A few years ago, nearly everyone was manipulated into fear. Now, at least a portion of the West is being manipulated into optimism, which informs me that very few people learned anything from the campaign of manipulated fear.

Some of the most egregious examples of recent and ongoing optimism manipulation: The lack ...

I admire Böhme, Schelling, and Berdyaev because they understood the inherent contradictions in traditional Christian theology concerning freedom and evil. If nothing can be prior to our outside of God, then, as stated in Acts 17:28, in God, we live and move and have our being. The same applies to everything in ...

I have often discussed the change in human consciousness by which our original state of near-complete (albeit largely unconscious and spontaneous) immersion in a group identity; has transformed to the modern experience of - on the one hand - alienation, cut offness from community and indeed the world; and - on the ...

It strikes me that the way in which (what I might call) mainstream/ orthodox/ traditional Christian theology tries to explain its inbuilt contradictions, is by the assertion of contraries, in a paradoxical and mystical way.

The contradictions arise from monism - by which I mean that the starting assumption is of the ...

Joseph Smith spoke with God face to face.

Brigham Young didn't know him from Adam.

I dreamed that I was for some reason spending the day with Elon Musk. We stopped by a field where ridiculously low-tech “rockets” were being tested, and my impression was that all of his employees were weird, grossly incompetent, and just not very smart. Elon went to elaborate lengths to play not-very-funny ...

In 1998, a mysterious stranger with no name (though there are some who call him Tim) told Whitley Strieber that the man who “would have unlocked the secret of gravity” was never born because the couple who would have been his parents were murdered by the Nazis. I posted about this three years ago on my Strieber ...

So apparently the sync fairies are doing their own version of this meme now:

🖼️

The other day I ran across a post on 4chan somewhere that said something like “YouTube is allowing straight-up softcore pr0n now. Just put in [this search term], and you’ll see.”

Wait, so you mean if you search for ...

The two men retired to the library, leaving the women to the smoking room and the staff to the dishes. Now, my dear friend, come take a look at this, A beautiful bottle, and no doubt the contents are of even superior quality, Yet you will not drink it, Not at this time, no, Precisely, and that is part of the reason ...

From Jerry Pinkney's illustrations for Aesop's fable of the Lion and the Mouse:

🖼️

From a children's book I found today, telling the story of the Chinese zodiac:

🖼️

Are lions and cats really interchangeable, though? As it happens, I also ran across this meme ...

A drawing Carus completed the same year he died.

🖼️

Carl Gustav Carus (1789 - 1869) - Ruine einer gotischen Kirche im Wald - 1869

There was a letter in the mailbox. An actual letter, not a bank statement or a bill. It was personally handwritten and placed inside a particular envelope, chosen with care, light green in color. It was addressed to Ferdinand, which was not his real name, but rather the name with which he signed his life’s work, ...

I dreamed that I was temporarily living in a large house owned by someone else, who also lived there. One day I came downstairs and found a box of hand-painted 15th-century Italian Tarot cards sitting on the kitchen counter. It looked exactly like a box of such cards I owned and kept in a room on the fifth floor, so I ...

I had missed this very interesting post by William James Tychonievich - Visions as irruptions of dreaming consciousness into waking life - when it came-out some six months ago.

I agree with his remark that dreaming goes on all the time, but only sometimes emerges into awareness; and some of these times may include ...

​I recently reflected on an ultimately pointless discussion I was involved in not too long ago, and it occurred to me that the vast majority of arguments some people tout as coherent and ironclad are actually flawed and deceptive.

The biggest doozies among these have to be the arguments marinated in things ...

Q: Is it possible for be A Christian, and to practice another religion?

A: Yes it is possible, here-and-now....

But it was not always possible.

In the past (and even today, in other places) someone who recited a creed would believe that creed. More exactly, he could not say it unless he believed it; because ...

In Zooey by JD Salinger, which is one of my favourite stories - reinforced by the preceding and following stories of Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, and Seymour: an introduction - the young adult protagonists (Franny and Zooey Glass) are acutely motivated by a hatred of egotism: in themselves, as well as in ...

My prediction: Before this April (i.e. within less than a month of the new DT administration) there will be a massive Fake Pennant atrocity to justify massive Western intervention in the Middle East - de facto in support of CHOAM.

There will be some kind of state of National Emergency in the major Western military ...

the first instalment of the new series. the content will be much the same: random nonsense. the name was chosen, ultimately, by my wife. i think she means it to refer, not to the quips, but to the quipper*

you don't hear much of anything anymore

artistic dynasties are very rare, and probably rarer now than ever. the ...

This image was briefly shown in a Michelle Stone podcast, in a context that made it clear it was the interior of a Mormon temple:

🖼️

Since I had just posted on two lions in a library, and Leo had followed up with a post of his own on the same topic, this got my attention.

What temple is that, ...