Have you ever noticed that when a lot of people convert to Christianity, or convert to a different denomination or church within Christianity, they cease to become interesting or "real".

That person may have been interesting while he was seeking and exploring, because he was engaged in working to gratify the deep ...

Whenever I interact with the mainstream of institutional life, I am aware that the totalitarian omni-surveillance agenda continues, and continues... And seems even to have stepped-up in the past few years with the phenomenon self-described as "AI".

Whenever "systems" or procedures are revised, whenever I purchase ...

1. To know and desire resurrected eternal life in Heaven, after death.

This, with pre-mortal spirit life, is the frame for purpose in mortal life.

2. The quest or destined-task for our life - this typically varies with age and situation.

This is the positive purpose of mortal life; what we are trying to do. ...

To continue the theme of the last post, the sad reality is that certain factions of Western men are complicit, either knowingly or unknowingly, in destroying their own group. Putting it in political terms, you have elements of both left and right piling up the logs for the funeral pyre. Mass immigration is the most ...

I have often discussed God as a dyad - conceptualized as Father and Mother, or God and Goddess - which, for me, goes with my understanding of divine creation as the manifestation of love. In a nutshell, I regard creation as inextricably an aspect of love, and love as a dynamic relationship of beings.

For me, this is ...

I have often been puzzled why it is that the mass media Always lies about the people it is witch-hunting.

If you know anything of the reality of what lies behind these witch hunts, you will know that extra and lying accusations are Always smuggled into the charge-sheet, or even made central.

This addition of false ...

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We had a very enjoyable visit to Carlisle Cathedral recently, not my first, or second - but I still feel there is a great deal more to discover about this marvellous building.

There were only three cathedrals in the whole North of England in Medieval Times, after the Normans had wiped-out or ...

In the past it was natural and spontaneous for people to trust institutions more than themselves - including churches, and especially churches.

People trusted their church more than any other authority - to the point of leaving home, moving house, losing livelihood - and even unto death.

Nowadays this does not ...

How should we read The Bible?

All possible answers to that question are necessarily based upon non-Biblical (extra-Scriptural) assumptions - and yet how* we read the Bible tends to determine, or at least substantially shape, the nature of a person's Christianity.

(*And there are many ways of reading The Bible - ...

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Is this the fundamental nature of inter-personal communication?

It seems evident that people in the past knew, or at least all assumed, that an individual person's mind was, or could be, connected with some larger group mind.

The exact group mind to which an individual was connected seems to ...

It certainly seems that way. In almost every situation nowadays the white male is seen as the villain, and has been for at least 20 years. This is despite the undeniable fact that the white male is responsible for almost all modern advances, and that's using modern in its widest sense, going back several hundred ...

before the self hating jew, there was the self hating portuguese. we did it first. where's our royalty check. wait. oh no.

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once i gave up all the esoteric and theological and symbolism mumbo jumbo i had a period of writing in which i tried to talk about how and why it was mumbo jumbo. i can't even do that anymore. ...

I have been in my current position at a university for just over a decade. Every year the institution hints that it may close the department I work in.

The reactions of the department heads for whom I have worked over the years have been uniform and predictable—general panic followed by the vigorous need to ...

It seems a clear lesson of the past century that it is possible, it may even become normal (and "official" to live a human lifespan without any belief in a creator God: to live, that is, in a reality that is "accidental" and has no ultimate purpose - hence no meaning.

This is something new as an accepted, assumed ...

Given that the modern West is evidently both collapsing and being actively destroyed; it is natural to seek for another political-social-cultural form that is known to be sustainable. And the only known Western society that actually was sustained over centuries was Catholic monarchy (whether Western-Roman Catholic, or ...

I really don't know we should make of the silly paranormal events of everyday life.

I had an extreme, and extremely trivial, example a couple of days ago; one of those "lost then found" things, when an object disappears then reappears.

This time it was a pair of shoes, and my wife had helped me search for them in ...

I spent most of my formative years and early adulthood in Canada, a country in which I never really felt "at home" nor particularly liked all that much.

Of course this had nothing to do with my being born in the United States, where I also lived and worked for nearly a decade as an adult. Although I preferred America ...

Every virtue has a complementary virtue which stops the excesses of the first virtue turning into a vice. Mercy and justice is one obvious example. Tolerance and adherence to truth is another while humility and strength is a third pairing of virtues with one filling in the gaps of the other and curbing its tendency ...

News-watchers get terribly excited about reports of declining branches of the global totalitarian System.

For example, there is currently Less top-down rhetorical emphasis on the CO2 climate agenda, although all the vast legislation is still in place.

But this is just Office Politics, the kind of stuff that happens ...

The accelerating national and global success of the ("Sorathic") Agents of Chaos is being misinterpreted as progress for the sociopolitical agenda of the (church-rooted) Religious Right -- much as I predicted would happen some six years ago during the chaotic " summer of antiracism" that followed after the global ...

One of the spiritual tests of "AI" is that it offers un-personal pandering, like a "benign" bureaucracy. That is what most people physically want, but it is not what they spiritually need. Indeed by addictive distraction "AI" usage blocks awareness of the need: and by its effect on thinking, the interaction renders ...

Many people are resistant to the notion of end times. For some it's just defeatist pessimism that serves no use other than to encourage negativity and despair. Others reject it because the idea is Christian even though it is universal in one form or another. Then there are the people who say that the world has always ...

if you need supervision you're a child. but if you have super vision you're a god. language huh.

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espresso pods offend my lusitianian sensibilities in terms of taste, and my kaczynskian sensibilities in terms of waste

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smoke goes in, books come out. simple really.

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all in for the odd one out.

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when you ...

There is a line of thinking that posits that society and the world in general were far superior when people feared the eternal punishment for transgressing God’s laws. The prospect of eternal roasting in hellfire not only kept most individuals in check but also served as the glue that held society together ...

From time to time, something relatively minor happens that nonetheless strikes me as indicating an inflexion point in the accelerating dysfunctionality of the UK.

One was on the first day of 2000, when there were some hours of delay in opening the Blair government flagship project of the Millennium Dome - much hyped ...

It is common to regard the suffering (and death) of "innocents" such as young children, babies, unborn babies; as especially difficult for Christianity to explain or justify. This derives from the assumption that the suffering and death of the wicked is justified, in proportion to the degree of wickedness.

But, at ...

There is a very great deal of importuning God, or Jesus, to have mercy on us, or other people - I have done great deal of such importuning myself, such as the Jesus Prayer.

But I've come to believe that this is a bad idea, because it tends to fix a habit of supposing that God and Jesus are Not merciful, but need to ...

Evil is specific, but Goodness is affiliation with God's creative purpose, a positive affiliation rooted in love.

When a group is good, the members need to share this positive motive and also be affiliated with each other.

Love of God and neighbour, in other words.

For some months, this was the situation in ...