On June 25, I posted "Another book called the Tree of Life," the titular book being one by Israel Regardie. I quoted a Wikipedia reference to two of his books, though: "he wrote two books on the Qabalah, A Garden of Pomegranates and The Tree of Life."

Despite having read rather broadly in the "magical" literature of ...

Here is the first speech of Alma the Younger after his conversion.

And it came to pass after they had fasted and prayed for the space of two days and two nights, [that] the limbs of Alma received their strength, and he stood up and began to speak unto them, bidding them to be of good comfort:

For,

said he,

I have ...

you can't step into the same river twice.

you don't know me.

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an old arab was taken to mecca by plane. when he got there he was unimpressed. when asked why he said his spirit was still walking.

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lately i feel like Thomas Paine, of all people, and wish to reduce all my theology to:

i believe in God and hope ...

One of the most misleading aspects of hearing tell of high the experience of spiritual exaltation, is that such high states have been paid-for by servitude: to experience the kind of powerful enchantment that gets written about, extracts a cost in exacerbated mundane living.

Consider a successful pilgrimage - long ...

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The Voyage of St Brandon - by Edward Reginald Frampton

Over at the Notion Club Papers blog, I argue that The Sea Bell poem is Not autobiographical for JRR Tolkien but instead for Frodo in-universe; however, The Death of St Brendan ("Imram") poem is expressive of Tolkien's own experience and ...

In his essay On Fairy Stories; JRR Tolkien influentially invented the word eucatastrophe - i.e. a good-catastrophe:

The

eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good

catastrophe, the sudden ...

Today I discovered that if you search Google for chicxulub impact crater, as I just did, an asteroid will fly across the screen diagonally, making the window shake when it hits the bottom.

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No other asteroid- or crater-related search strings seem to trigger the animation. The key word is chicxulub ...

Traditional Christian theologies rest on the assertion that God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent.

Despite this, the same theologies also posit free will and absolve God from the presence of evil in Creation.

The contradiction inherent between these two poles of belief is readily apparent ...

I recently read Shelby Van Pelt's novel Remarkably Bright Creatures. Despite the fact that there are no owls at all in this novel, the Acknowledgments at the end begin thus:

My grandmother collected owls. The china cabinet on the red shag carpet in her dining room was crammed full of them. As a kid, I spent a lot of ...

It is remarkable how few people nowadays can bring themselves to acknowledge the reality of supernatural evil. Could the reason be that if they did, they would have to admit the possibility of supernatural good and therefore of God? Do people not admit the reality of evil because then they would have to confess their ...

For the handful of interested readers; I have just posted a new tranche of posts on the blog Bruce Charlton on Music.

I am still emerging, slowly, from some kind of Upper Respiratory Tract illness I picked up when visiting Suffolk recently, and which has demotivated me from musical exploration.

All that I have ...

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Dylan Thomas

I was introduced to the work of Dylan Thomas at exactly the right moment - which was that post-Lord of the Rings era, after I first had felt the impact of major literary greatness, and began to seek more.

The medium was a one-man-show in Bristol by David Ponting, a dental patient of ...

This showed up on my YouTube feed.

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The video title is "Did Joseph Smith Steal Christian Theology and Repackage It As a New Religion?"

We should keep in mind that this is just an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory at this point, but what if it turns out to be true? Can you imagine the chutzpah of ...

When I was a kid, there were two initialisms used in my circle that were always pronounced as if they were French: HPA ("osh-pay-ah") and LPF ("el-pay-eff"). For the former, there was a brief period where the Portuguese pronunciation replaced the French, so the H was said as "aga."

HPA came from News Norm, the ...

people tell me that my theology mumbling is profound. and even when they don’t tell me, the results speak for themselves. those are generally the texts that get the most reactions. maybe it’s my nature to be immediately suspicious of stuff like this. but maybe not, because i know i used to think so as ...

People are always trying to explain "the problem" of Christian churches (and indeed all types of church) in terms of some specific malign influence.

This specific problem varies (to the point of being opposite) among analysers.

One pundit says his church's problem is infiltration by modern/ trendy pressures from ...

I ran across a reference to one Christopher Blythe, a Mormon "content creator" I hadn't heard of, so I looked him up. Not a great first impression, physiognomy-wise. Dude lowkey looks like a professional quote maker. I mean, seriously, this is a guy who owns a katana.

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I found his YouTube channel, ...

My conclusion is that benefits of Not getting what we want, only happen if we are capable of learning from our life experience.

The trouble is that some people are not capable of learning.

These are the type who spend their years eaten up with "if only" regrets, concerning their failure to achieve this or that ...

In yesterday's "Mud huts, Communion, and the Tree of Life," I read a reference to the Zulu holy man Credo Mutwa, looked him up on Wikipedia, and discovered that he had written a graphic novel called The Tree of Life Trilogy.

Today I happened to hear someone on a podcast pronounce Sedona, the city in Arizona, as ...

This afternoon I received this message out of the blue from one of the preschool teachers saying, "William, do you have the storybook 'Pete the Cat: Rocking in My School Shoes'?"

We've never discussed that book before, and there's no reason at all for her to think I might have it, aside from the fact that I own a ...

the following came about as part of a comment to (and then a bit of back and forth with) Bruce. it’s an attempt to put some of the ideas together into a more coherent whole in order to save it, instead of it being scattered in email replies (this is an important theme for the discussion, incidentally). ...

Because of the development of human consciousness, there is necessarily a generational effect in terms of the nature and possibilities when it comes to ideology - and also to spirituality.

Biological generations used to be 25 years, but are now more like 30 years; since reproduction became increasingly delayed - and ...

On June 20, I posted "The Tree of Life and the flesh and blood of Jesus," which deals with the possible meaning of eating Jesus' flesh and drinking his blood. The next day, June 21, I posted the "earthen dwelling" meme in "Ethically modified schematic reconstruction of a meme"; and then, on June 23, in "Plus ça ...

Last night, I listened to a Captain Mormon video called "Why the birdemic broke so many Mormons."

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He quotes the infamous 2021 press release, focusing on a specific phrase it used. (I commented on the same thing in my January 2021 post "File under 'Shocked but not surprised'.") Captain Mormon ...

Yesterday, a manager at an auto parts manufacturing company asked me about the meaning of the English term science fiction. After I'd explained, he asked if Back to the Future was considered science fiction. I don't think he was even born yet when that movie was released.

Less than an hour later, in one of my adult ...

I often hear that we are free because God created us from nothing as actual beings. Since we are created, actual beings, we must act. Our actuality dictates it.

Yet before we act, we must choose between good and evil (the Free Will Doctrine).

I also frequently hear that the only way a perfect omnigod could create ...

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On June 10, I posted "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world," which included this image of a modern variant on the Hermit card of the Tarot:

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A hermit is a solitary, and so most decks show the hermit walking alone, the main "canonical" exception being Oswald Wirth's design, in which the ...

I knew about the trafficking rings, the incarcerations, the men in white coats and their experiments, from the very few that were able to escape them. But they never did so unharmed. The ones who did return were mere shells of their former selves, and were only let out after their lust for life was gone, their spirits ...

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Britain Burning Now! - spontaneous fires break-out across the nation

The CO2 "Global Warmist" Climate agenda may be a dubious, indeed nonsensical exploded scam for the majority of the UK population; but for the managerial-intellectual class it is a profound spiritual issue - sometimes The most ...

For Bruce: That's a common French expression. It means, "The more it's ethically modified, the more of a meme it is."

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