Tuesday, October 29th 2024
During the visit of the resurrected Jesus to the people at Bountiful, he recites part of the Book of Malachi to them, citing it by name:
And it came to pass that he commanded them that they should write the words which the Father had given unto Malachi, which he should tell unto them. And it came to pass that after ...
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An "alien" disguising itself as various faeries
Many have noticed that there is a generic similarity between reports of sightings and contact with faeries and with Extra-terrestrials (ETs) - and this has been variously explained in Jungian terms, either with or without some objectively real +/- ...
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We recently visited Carterhaugh and "Tamlane's Well" in Eskdale, in the Scottish Borders west of Selkirk - which is the location for one of the most famous of the supernatural ballads: Tam Lin.
(Note - the above are not my ...
Monday, October 28th 2024
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a seasoned observer always adds a grain of salt
two wrongs make a right, and a left.
the one true church is like the holy roman empire: not one, not true, not a church.
my fiction is about ideas that are of interest mostly to people who don't read fiction. a bad marketing strategy.
wit is a quality that appears ...
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Not by Vermeer
I recently attended a lecture on frauds in the world of fine art, especially painting - the more notorious examples of those who pass-off their own work as that of famous, prestigious, expensive painters from the past.
My take-home message was that the world of fine arts is rife ...
Friday, October 25th 2024
I have been relentlessly plugging away at my home renovation projects before the weather worsens. I have nothing against winter; however, it is the least conducive to outdoor work around the house. Autumn is probably best, weather-wise, but the increasingly shorter days cut into how much I can accomplish in an ...
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Doesn't anyone remember a little worldwide totalitarian coup a few years back, in which the United States certainly took part, or who was president at the time?
Just how high is the bar for "being Hitler," anyway? Do we only count people who actually grow a mustache, invade Poland, and turn Jews ...
Thursday, October 24th 2024
Another good one from Carus, especially as All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day draw closer.
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Carl Gustav Carus - Cemetery in the Moonlight - 1822
So many aspects of Christian theology seem to take it for granted that Jesus made a better world. That the world after Jesus was better than the world before Jesus.
If this was truly so, then the world should have undergone a very obvious transformation in or around 33AD.
One would expect massive disagreement as ...
Wednesday, October 23rd 2024
I have a low opinion of clergymen; however, I developed a fair degree of respect for the discernment Bishop Carlo Maria Viganó demonstrated during the birdemic years.
Well, that discernment appears to have faltered bigly as the good bishop is now harping on about the moral obligation of voting for a particular ...
Just because some of Them hate a thing or a person, does not mean that the thing or person is Good; because the totalitarian Establishment is increasingly divided into warring factions.
(Tow wrongs don't make a right; a double-negative is not a positive; when somebody-you-hate hates a person - that doesn't imply ...
Undaunted by the reluctance of my previous books to enter the bestseller lists, I am currently working on a new one. The subject will be the end times which most readers of this blog will agree is the period we find ourselves in now. The provisional title is A Manual for the End Times though that may change as it is ...
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remember what they gave from you
marital arts require no belts
i'm not just full of myself, i'm full of other people too. and gods. and yes, yes, i'm also full of shit.
go with the flow, if it's a river. get out of the flow, if it's a sewer.
so far, so god
i'm in finity
never do something every day. ...
Socio-political optimism is merely an estimate of probabilities - not a virtue.
The Christian virtue of hope is properly "not of this world". It is directed beyond death, beyond resurrection - towards Heaven.
So, an optimistic estimate of this-worldly (including socio-political) probabilities may be honest or ...
During my work years (and looking back a few of decades) I saw a great change in the conceptualization of a doctor.
The original idea was a scheme by which a doctor was "made" by transforming a suitable young Man via early apprenticeship (at medical school) that implicitly led to initiation as A Doctor. One the ...
Tuesday, October 22nd 2024
this is a slightly modified version of a comment on this post by Bruce Charlton. the main question posed by the post was if human consciousness is primarily determined by universality, group participation or individuality.
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my own assumption is that all three are true and valid on their own level, but i assign them ...
Edited from this post and its comments:
...‘wrt. the evolution of consciousness’ and "final participation"...
The first bit that seems important to me is that [modern consciousness] is not a general state, by which I mean, it’s not defined by the age but it depends on the people. Not every human alive ...
Since I regard God the Creator as dyadic, our Heavenly Parents, Father and Mother (actual, and presumably eternally incarnate, persons)...
And since I regard Jesus Christ's marriage to Mary of Bethany (Mary Magdalene) as a vital and transformative aspect of His work of the Second Creation...
Then it seems to follow ...
When consciousness is different; when people do the same things, they get different outcomes.
That is pretty obvious in some contexts - but not in others. It's pretty obvious that when some people read Lord of the Rings they experience a very different "outcome" than do others; and the same replies to other works of ...
Monday, October 21st 2024
On October 19, Bruce Charlton posted "Americans are *mental*, when it comes to politics," in which he for some reason repeatedly referred to Donald Trump as "DF." When I asked in a comment why he was calling him that (and guessed that it might be some kind of "Literally Hitler" joke), Bruce didn't explain, but just ...
The first time he left his body he was in elementary school. Before that he had spent his days in his grandmother’s house. There was a garden and the neighborhood was safe, there were kids his age or thereabouts, there was a television and toys, there was a dog and a cat, there were parks and gardens and even an ...
Of course this world is - well, at least on the face of it - a mixture of things going wrong (degeneration, disease, death and destruction), and things going right.
There are many ways in which people try to make sense of this.
Should we be most amazed when things go wrong and life is bad; or is it more accurate ...
When was the last time you ran across a reference to someone’s heart being on the right side rather than the left? Not every day, right?
Yesterday I happened to check Arts & Letters Daily, which I haven’t really followed since the 2010 death of its founder (and an occasional email correspondent of mine), ...
Sunday, October 20th 2024
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Carl Gustav Carus - Tintern Abbey - Unknown date Carl Gustav Carus's Tintern Abbey provides a good visual representation of the current state of Christianity's externals.
More precisely, external, conventional, everyday Christianity is breaking up . . . has broken up. All of us are the ...
I was in my study reading a commentary on the Book of Job when the name Seymour Glass (a J. D. Salinger character) suddenly popped into my head, seemingly out of nowhere. Try as I might, I couldn’t trace its origin in my train of thought. I got to thinking about the name and connected it with Gotthard Glas, the ...
I dreamed I was taking my sister to a restaurant in Taiwan. Before entering the restaurant proper, there was a small stone building you had to pass through first. I went into this building through an open arch, and my sister waited outside. I got a piece of chalk and wrote on the stone wall, inside but where she could ...
Little Miss upon a stool(Possibly a tuft of grass)Sat and ate her dairy gruelTill disaster came to pass.Up beside her crept a spider,And when Little Miss espied her,Just imagine, if you can,How she dropped her whey and ran!
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I have used the Texas Sharpshooter idea to describe how modern pseudo-science does research that it gets paid for, then uses Public Relations and advertising to convince people that whatever-is-discovered is actually just whatever people most want and need.
This applies to public policy, in its ...
At six things do I stand in awe;Yea, seven are beyond my grasp:The starry sky, the moral law,The weaving worm, the leaping asp,The growth of seeds, the flight of birds,And clear-eyed Homer’s wingèd words.