In response to Francis Berger's comment on Word Spells in Christian theology

Maybe it's like this...

If someone becomes convinced by the usual-mainstream-modern assumption that truth is objectively located in the external world ("truth is out-there"), and our job is just to perceive and recognize this external ...

Eternal does not and cannot mean "unchanging" because nothing in existence, not even God, has ever been unchanging.

I don't care how anyone explains it to me otherwise, a quick look around at the universe is all it takes to demonstrate that it is a place of endless change.

Nothing in existence is static. Placing ...

When "explanations" get complex or highly abstract, they become Word Spells, and people think a question has been answered when they have actually just been lulled to sleep.

This is perhaps why questions asked of witnesses in court, and their answers, need to be short and simple.

(But this is misleading if the ...

In past comments on this blog, Bill has associated me with the character Vizzini from The Princess Bride (starring, incidentally, Cary Elwes), with particular reference to the famous scene where he has to guess which of two drinks is poisoned, not knowing that in fact both are poisoned. Bill also connected The ...

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Jung in his shirmer phase - beside his mistress/ extra-wife Toni

Regular readers will know that I regard Christianity to be, in essence, Jesus's offer of resurrected eternal Heavenly life to those who follow him. Yet this is very far from being regarded as the core of Christianity. Indeed most ...

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trusting chance and randomness is trusting in more wills than just your own. flipping a coin is often better than careful consideration. throw those lots. Matthias was a good choice for last apostle, Barsabbas had better things to do.

bears repeating, badgers repeatedly, bugs repetition

walk the walk, not just ...

License plates are bargain-basement syncs, and at first I wasn’t going to bother posting this one. Last night, I stopped at a red light behind a black BMW sedan with the license plate AMU 6666.

Repeating digits always feel significant, but they aren’t really in this case. Series of sixes or eights are considered ...

Christianity is, or should be, a transformative religion, in the late 14th-century sense of the word, transformen—that is, to alter or change the form of supernaturally. The Latin root trans signifies across or beyond, while formare remains innately comprehensible in the modern use form.

What Jesus offers is ...

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Let me explain what's really going-on...

There has been, I notice, another and severe outbreak of 4-dimensional chess attribution among political commentary in relation to the current US President's foreign policy.

I would suggest that politics when it is Good is actually very simple.

Whenever ...

Earlier today I posted “Riff Raff the Rapper’s intellectual property,” reporting what I called a “fly-on-the-wall dream” about a litigious artist called Riff Raff the Rapper. The expression refers to the idea that a fly on the wall would be able to observe everything without being noticed.

Tonight I read ...

I woke up from a catnap on the couch with my phone in my hand, open to the YouTube Music app, “1979 (Smashing Pumpkins cover)” — not playing, but all ready for me to tap the play button. I thought, “What’s that? I don’t want that!” and closed the app. I went back to sleep and had the dream I posted about ...

If once a person becomes convinced that a church (i.e. his church) is ultimately not an institution but also a divine entity; then there is a faith in the church which, in principle, cannot be refuted by any possible experience or action.

With faith; the divine nature of a church is irrefutable.

And if such a faith ...

Last night I had a fly-on-the-wall dream, in which I watched the goings-on but was not myself one of the characters,

A lawyer, who looked a bit like Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion), was sitting in his office, where his secretary, a young woman, was trying to convince him to take on the case of a recording artist whose ...

I haven't felt all that motivated to post consistently over the past two months, but the winds have changed.

Daily (or close to daily) blogging resumes tomorrow.

I checked the Duckstack today and read the latest, "Comb Tomb." One bit is about crime:

Most nonviolent crime is a crime of opportunity. Anything happening in the ghetto is just some teenage hooligan jiggling car doors as he passes to see if any are unlocked. Then they ransack the car as fast as they can and leave ...

I am currently reading Charles Williams's 1931 novel, in which there is a very early discussion of the possibility of a "time loop".

In his biography of Charles Williams, Grevel Lindop suggests that this novel contains the first discussion of temporal paradoxes in any fiction, since the subject was first broached by ...

I am currently reading Charles Williams's 1931 novel, in which there is a very early discussion of the notion of "temporal paradoxes" - in particular a "time loop":

Supposing you willed to return a year, and to be again in those exact conditions, interior and exterior, in which you had been a year ago—why then, ...

Back on May 1, I posted "Gross Gaur," recounting a dream about a man who called himself that. In that post, I noted that a gaur is a type of wild ox and tied this in with "the Buffalo/Cowtown sync thread," in which Buffalo and Cowtown referred to Atlantis or Númenor.

There's a blog called Face to Face, formerly Dusk ...

i was already avant garde

during the belle epoque

and art nouveau

was for me deja vu

i was a bon vivant

sometimes risqué

that i was bourgeois and passé,

was a canard and a cliché

enthralled by every femme fatale

my coup de grâce

was la petite mort

very fin de siècle

i was an ...

Bill has been talking a lot in the comments about the Book of Mormon prophecy that the Gentiles will receive a version of the Book of the Lamb of God which has been corrupted by the Great and Abominable Church. Many “plain and precious” parts of the book have been removed, distorting its overall message.

I ...

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He may not be real, but he's already invading my dreams. Last night I dreamt that Roy Jay, complete with vintage prison uniform, white gloves, and eyeliner, was doing a routine where there weren't any jokes -- no, not even any "jokes." He just did his weird jazz-hands walk around the stage and ...

Genius is much commoner in men than women.

Indeed, in Charles Murray's historical survey of Human Accomplishment; English literature was the only one of the subjects surveyed in which women made a strong showing.

And, even there, women did not feature among the very highest literary geniuses such as Homer, Virgil, ...

If I were the devil what sin would I most try to stimulate? What sin would be most spiritually corrupting for those who succumbed to it, and most damaging for the integrity of any culture in which it took hold amongst a sufficient number of the people?

Resentment is the perfect sin from the demonic point of view ...

It suddenly seems obvious that God has always worked primarily with and by individual persons; and that the historical necessity by which Men came to regard divine providence and plans in terms of tribes and nations and churches was partly a spiritual fact and partly a psychological constraint.

In other words, Men ...

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if you give in to them, they'll take it out on you

i've heard people say that we live in times of unprecedented peace and prosperity, and that dooming is just a false perception. and some of these people are religious, supposedly. all it proves to me is that being religious means absolutely nothing. they can be ...

We live in a world of systems - of interlinked formal institutions, organizations, corporations etc - so this is a fact of life... "inevitable", at least at present.

But these modern systems - or indeed the overall System - is scientistic, physicalist, materialist in its assumptions; and leaves-out the reality of ...

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That video ends with questioning the validity of our childhood memories. I then checked my subscriptions and found a new short from Whit called "A Childhood Memory" -- a memory of floating over the neighborhood in a blue life raft with other children and LBFs.

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What follows is either a deep archetypal insight, or more likely just my headcanon, concerning some subjects I have spent an inordinate amount of time reading and thinking-about.

While I love the Big Picture; I have always had some reservations about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table - perhaps because ...

Beginning with the Fire Nation conflict, and now in the Middle East, it has become An OK Thing for Western Forces deliberately to try and contaminate the environment with gamma/ alpha/ beta-emitting substances.

There have already (seemingly) been Western-forces launching multiple and sustained missile (and other ...

A recent mention of the New Jerusalem in the comments brought back a random memory. Many years ago — very unsure of the date, maybe mid-2000s — I had a dream in which I heard a woman’s voice saying (to someone else, I thought, not to me), “This is the real deal, Neil: the New Jeru!” I understood this to be a ...

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'AIs' are not sentient. but they do have souls. yours. you gave it to them.

last night i prayed to the Earth Mother and the Sky Father for rain and fresh air, a respite from the heat, and the gods delivered.

everything never does not happen

i need to be more pessimistic. trust less. assume the worst more ...

There are always defaults in (what pretends to be) "reasoning" - and defaults are assumptions, not necessities.

Currently, the default assumption is that individual human beings are accidents of causality and randomness, products of physical processes and biology, motivated by evolved instinct...

And, as a product ...