And the Seas Turned to Blood: 20 Years to Biblical Apocalypse?

When I escaped the borg twelve twelve years ago and opened up my own shop, subtitled the place “A Chronicle of the End Times.” That brought traffic I didn’t want.

Ian is also arguing for cherry-picking however; there’s lots of theological argument about how without the Old Testament, the New falls apart.

Maybe God the ever-bored omnipotent artist, made Satan just a bit too powerful this universal go-round. And now Satan has him locked up in some kind of metaphysical box so he could pose as the real god to do all kinds of irrational mischief to us poor hapless meek sheep. That would explain the evangelicals.

Many evangelicals, especially older ones and virtually all their leaders are τάφοι κεκονιαμένοι, whited sepulchres (Matthew 23:27). And they are some of the most judgmental people on the face of the earth, despite the admonition: Μὴ κρίνετε, ἵνα μὴ κριθῆτε, judge not that you be not judged (Matthew 7:1). Don’t just cite Scripture at them, cite Scripture in the original koine Greek at them.

The Old Testament is useful in understanding some aspects of the New Testament, primarily in terms of viewing the New Testament as a reaction to, and often a rejection of it. For Christians, the New Testament should trump the Old, but with evangelicals the reverse seems to be true. In principle, they espouse an expansive spiritualism, but in practice they embrace a very narrow, Old Testament legalist approach or Paul trumps Jesus one.

I am not interested in theology. I think it is important to understand that the Old Testament is an amalgam of three separate traditions: the Exodus one, native Palestine, and Babylonian exile, and that prior to the Babylonian exile, Judaism wasn’t monotheistic, and had at the time of David, Solomon, etc. a female figure Asherah. I also think it is important to understand the different audiences to whom each of the synoptic Gospels was directed and their sourcing relative to each other (the Q source for parts of Matthew and Luke, for example).

I do think we are facing an apocalypse/existential crisis in the form of climate change, overpopulation, and resource and environment destruction.

“Let there be light!”

This is O/T, but the segue is oddly appropriate. I have spent about half of the last 2 weeks learning about near infrared light treatment of many diseases. (This is distinct from mid and far infrared light.) My brother is on dialysis, and on the somewhat meager and non-specific basis of part of an interview by the wonderful Dr. Mercola, of a domain expert named Dr. Hamblin (quoted here: https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/02/26/photobiomodulation.aspx )
I purchased a unit for my brother, whose dialysis greatly reduces the quality of his life (ignoring what lack of dialysis would lead to…) Just reducing his frequency from 3x/week to 2x/week would be a blessing.

I purchased a Joovv, which is the same brand that Mercola purchased. It outputs in the mid 600s and mid 800s nm range, which are known to be biologically useful.

The money quote is:
“Kidney failure is the third leading cause of death. These are old folks who are dying from kidney failure. You can’t really give them transplants because they’re elderly. You put a near-infrared LED array where their kidneys are and it seems to work like a dream. [But] it’s hardly been studied at all,” Hamblin says.

I know Ian was in the hospital recently. Ian, if you can get your hands on such a device, it should speed up recuperation. Because it rejuvenates mitochondria, it will probably have multiple benefits. Maybe your readers will pitch in? A low end Joovv unit, with stand, is about $750.

OT the BLS jobs report for December came out Friday. The private sector added 60,000 jobs. Job growth is next to nil in December because everybody who is going to be hired for the Christmas holidays has already been hired. Total nonfarm jobs (the private and public sectors taken together) actually lost 54,000 jobs, not the unreal seasonally adjusted 312,000 jobs’ growth reported so enthusiastically and misleadingly by the press and politicians.

Net jobs growth for 2018 (Jan-Dec jobs growth minus the Dec 2017-Jan 2018 drop off) total nonfarm was not as good as 2015 and significantly worse than my benchmark 2014 year, but better than 2016-2017. Taking the private sector by itself, net job growth in 2018 was nearly identical to 2015, just a few thousand off while still below 2014.

Next month we will see the size of the next December to January drop off. This corresponds to the large number of jobs that end with the holiday season. Last year, for example, the dropoff in the private sector was 2.588 million and in total nonfarm jobs, it was 3.095 million. The discrepancy between the (real) seasonally unadjusted numbers and the (unreal but official) seasonally adjusted ones is the most jarring at this point because it is not unusual for the seasonally adjusted January number to show a mythical 200,000 job increase. A kicker next month will be how the federal shutdown if it continues past the 11th could factor into the (real) seasonally unadjusted numbers.

@Mandos
Yes, in fact, I would say that it’s not something that particularly even needs to be argued. Jesus is quoted several times explicitly endorsing The Law and of course many of the things that go on in the New Testament can’t be divorced from the broader religious context in which they occurred. I will also point out that Jesus is sometimes quoted expressing reactionary sentiments that are offensive to our modern sensibilities.

Well! . . . . . This thread has certainly strayed from the subject of mutually co-assisted mutual co-survival, hasn’t it.

In a gig-economy, with a sizable population of “Independent Contractors” upon whom the onus is to report their earnings, report their “employment”, just exactly how does one measure employment?

Making nonjudgemental-ness a high moral value is self-defeating. I thought this should have been obvious? — but lots of lefties still want to do it. So they end up judging Christians for being judgmental, committing the very thing they are condemning at the same instant! Very strange, but again this is a very popular stance with lefties. What does that say about them?

A look at the context of Jesus’ speech:

[1] Judge not, that ye be not judged.
[2] For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
[3] And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
[4] Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
[5] Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

This is obviously not: don’t judge (blanket). But rather, be careful with your judgments, that you don’t apply different ones to others than yourself. And also, judge yourself first so that you can judge others with more clarity.

@Blizzard

As a leftist Atheist I can judge the entire christian faith devoid of value without being hypocritical because I am not bound by christian doctrine.

Personally, I don’t find the entire christian faith as being utterly worthless but as a woman I find most mainstream religious faiths misogynistic.

Ten Bears, employment is measured in the household survey, the smaller of the BLS’ two surveys (the Current Population Survey or CPS). Jobs are measured in the much larger business or establishment survey (Current Employment Statistics or CES). Different surveys covering different populations. The Establishment survey uses payroll data from the week containing the 12th of the month from thousands of companies and uses a corrective business birth/death estimation to capture jobs gained and lost each month. So the joke goes to be employed is not the same as having a job.

And there is no distinction between jobs. A job is a job is a job. Whether you make a billion dollars a year as a hedge fund manager looting the country or work a few hours a week at minimum wage.

Blizzard does not seem able to distinguish between making a judgment and being judgmental. A lot of evangelicals can’t either, apparently. Or as it appears in John 7:24:

24 μη κρινετε κατ οψιν αλλα την δικαιαν κρισιν κρινετε.

” Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.”

I also echo Dan’s comments: you can’t jettison the Old Testament without arguing that you should jettison Judaism itself, and for that matter Islam (since in overall traditional content Islam is way more directly similar to Judaism than Christianity is to Judaism). The OT and the traditions based on it (Judaic, Christian in certain varieties, Islamic) are part of the human legacy and important values are encoded in it. I get that there is a desire to completely supplant the “hard” monotheism for an inward-looking, “cultivated” spiritualism or to label the demanding, visibility-focused rules-based religious systems as regressive impediments to human progress. To me, these are based on a shallow understanding of these traditions and represent an impulse that will eventually backfire on the “elevated” spiritualisms (which often depend themselves on unspoken/submerged “exclusivisms” of their own).

Short lesson in Protestantism

Roughly speaking, the Reformation had three wings. The Left included the followers of Menno Simon / Mennonites, etc. They were the first Christians calling for the Abolition of Slavery (1534) and have always been pacifists. The Center were the followers of Luther who sought a reliable social order while glorifying the people who do the community’s necessary work on the socio-economic bottom. The Nordic countries are the cultural remnants of these teachings and include sophisticated social-welfare schemes while championing almost corruption-free and competent governments. And on the Right were the Calvinists. They taught that God’s grace was demonstrated by making some rich—and it didn’t much matter HOW one got rich. They completely overturned the Biblical teachings and 15 centuries of Christian tradition on usury. They truly believe that so long as someone is uptight about sex, they are probably virtuous people.

Christianity in USA is dominated by cultural Calvinists. From the Prosperity-Gospel televangelists to the hallowed halls of Harvard and Yale, the extreme Puritanism of John Calvin rules so many political and cultural discussions that we barely notice where they come from. In fact, the only reason I understand this is because I was raised in a Swedish-Lutheran Parsonage and was sent K-6 to a Mennonite parochial school. The Christianity I see on TV is like a foreign language.

Your little sermonette today, Ian, is a damn fine takedown of Calvinist Protestantism.

I was being rhetorical, Hugh, though it never hurts to repeat these things.

Yeah, I noticed, right on time: just as soon as the 2020 Goat Rodeo kicked off our blizzard of Russian ooze shows up. Spot the bot, troll the troll.

I am convinced most people do not think any thing is quite real.

I think that evangelicals having been successfully herded by nefarious PTB, into their zombie army is real. I don’t know the numbers but I think without that demographic America is somewhat progressive. The worst part is that this is quite likely what’s mostly to blame for for the historic decline in Christian numbers of late. The kids, ours and theirs, are not impressed with their policies which frankly, have ruined their futures, and are seeking other communities to invest their energies in.

It goes beyond the warmongering to the utter disregard for the environment, to for example social inducement/encouragement to purchase gas-guzzling Cadillacs because “gas is so cheap” (CNN Business commenter yesterday). The christians are as actively involved in sabotaging the world our grandchildren are growing up in as they are peace in the middle east. Destroying the world and committing billions to mean brutish death to induce their invisible sky god to float down out of the sky and carry them all away to paradise. How is that any different than the Aztecs (reputedly) cutting the hearts out of tens of thousands of living slaves to induce their invisible sky god to float down out of the sky and carry them all away to paradise?

Far the more likely thousands upon thousands of cavernous spacecraft, vast slaughter-houses piloted by ravenous vaguely reptilian creatures, replete with horns and folked tail, intent not as benevolent overseers of the demise of this world and our current iteration in human evolution and our children’s evolution onto the next iteration of humanity but as ravenous reptilian creatures… you know, hungry lizards. We did, afterall, invite them to “Come Eat!”

Animals, insufficiently evolved, less than human, bow down to gods. Human Beings, do not.

I attended a fundamentalist Pentecostal church, for about a year, when I lived in the Bible Belt. There was the occasional unhinged type, such as the clueless man who started yelling at me, from 1 foot behind me, “SUBMIT TO THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD!!”, hurting my eardrums in the process. As I subsequently joked, a miracle occurred that day, because I DIDN’T turn around and break that man’s jaw.

There were a couple people there who I considered saintly, based solely on my intuition of what I’ll call their spiritual state. Their beautiful, even luminous “auras” (at least when they were in a spiritually elevated state) made it difficult for me to focus on their physical bodies. You just don’t WANT to distract yourself by observing their earthly selves when they’re infused with such supernatural beauty. And there were more than a handful of others of whom I sensed great inner beauty, even if they never appeared luminous.

I used to tell people to not pay attention to the pastor, who used to say some really horrible – dare I say, God-awful – things. He seemed to hate homosexuals, despise Catholicism, and was sort of angry at Baptists. (This last struck me as very strange, as I was raised in a “smells and bells” Greek Orthodox church, and Baptists and Pentecostals were basically the same thing, to us.) Yes, he’d probably give you the shirt off his back if he could save your soul, but still….

But then I realized, that most of the time when I received a benediction (benediction in the sense of receiving a blessing, or uplifting of consciousness; not in the sense of the pastor saying words of benediction) was when the pastor was preaching or talking. So I stopped telling people not to listen to the pastor. Not because his hard edges all of a sudden became palatable (or his tales of 7 day creations became more believable…)but rather because “God works in strange ways”, and that was abundantly in evidence in this particular church. And receiving a benediction (same sense as before) was more important than being critical of the accoutrements of those blessings. Furthermore, there was far more benedictions received in this church in one year than all my years previously (or since, as it’s turned out).

I feel sorry for atheists and/or people whose consciousness is limited to their intellects, because they are closed off from deeper realities (or experiences, if you find the term “realities” too offensive). The best I can do for them, I suppose, is quote “the Brothers”, who Swami Omananda Puri wrote about. “Experience which is not your own is valueless” (so whether or not you believe my experiences, much less beliefs, is irrelevant, anyway), “intuition is the brain of the soul” and “it is YOU who are so ignorant”.

Back to scientific miracles. There’s additional information about using photobiomodulation to get people off of dialysis and/or cutting down their dialysis frequency; as well as extending the lives of kidney-failed cats from a typical few months to many years, in the Mercola interview of the James Carroll. See 18:24 of the 2nd video @ https://blog.thorlaser.com/dr-mercola-interviews-james-carroll-on-the-benefits-of-photobiomodulation/?fbclid=IwAR3uIMR38qJdQr6JYB7hMOLyZz3dqrDYKKRlcBWGXenh_UXjBfM1b6L0HNo .

I can’t tell whether or not Mercola is letting his enthusiasm get the better of him, in describing what Hamblin told him during his interview. AFAIK, Hamblin only uses the word “dream” during his interview – which may or may not imply getting completely off of dialysis. Perhaps he was more specific offline, after the interview.

“But again, anti-Christians are very slippery on this issue. They mostly won’t come out and say they are in favor of absolute sexual license, they will just attack anyone trying to uphold standards as “judgmental”. ”

Just two words show the complete emptiness of Blizzard’s statement: DONALD TRUMP. Evangelicals metaphorically suck Donald Trump’s cock every damn day. You know a guy who has defined sexual license all his adult life, who bones a porn star just after his wife gives birth to their son, who tells said porn star before he bones her that she reminds him of his daughter, who brags about grabbing women’s pussies, who used to walk unannounced into the dressing rooms of the beauty contests he ran to assess the talent, who compared his efforts to avoid STDs to soldiers in combat in Vietnam. And these are just a few of the more salient instances we know about. If evangelicals’ embrace and full throated defense of Trump are examples of their “standards,” they can have them.

The atheists I\’ve known (I am an agnostic) behave themselves very nicely, without the fear of losing God\’s favor to motivate them. Just because it is a good and reasonable way to live.

Many of us experience spirituality without reference to a fantasy figure. Meditation can get you there. So can just sitting quietly in the woods for a few hours.

One can recognize the existence of wondrous energies in the universe without conjuring up a God figure. People created God(s); there is no evidence that \”God\” created people.

It is arrogance to call that ignorance. IMNSHO. But, as in everything else, do what thou shalt do to find your bliss, so long as you do not hurt others. We are all responsible for gathering our own smiles. And in the end, very soon, we will all wind up in the same place, no matter what our beliefs. Enjoy the ride! :-0

Okay, I never watched Pat Robertson. I must’ve come from a rapture-naive family. Was never discussed. Most of what I know about The Rapture I learned from the “This Is The End” movie. Plus what I could overhear from four office wackadoodles in the cubicle next to mine. Seemed most of them had “dabbled in witchcraft” before being born again. What’s up with that with these people?

Maybe today’s kids are less susceptible to dabbling in witchcraft, rapturology, pareidolia, conservatism, or whatever the hell other quirks work best for a successful religious conversion. I’d prefer to believe they’re not interested because a once great religion is turning batshit. They hear that God is in total control one day, but lets Pat Robertson dictate things the next, with the ultimate goal of hastening some Rapture by ruining their kids future. Not the best marketing scheme.

It makes good horse sense that nothing ruins spirituality more than materialism (beyond subsistence). I don’t think Christians from more progressive eras would have embraced today’s ‘Christian’ conservative pundit-activists like Dennis Prager or Charlie Kirk, with their significant donor cash from various plutocrats. Cries of “But Soros!” seems a rationalistic dodge by comparison.

I once tried to combine anti-materialism with physical laws like special relativity as a discussion starting point, to explore things like the Trinity, a spiritual component inherent to all life, Jesus cultural teachings, etc… at a popular Catholic blog. The only person who took me up on such a discussion, admitted he was an underemployed agnostic whiling away his night shift boredom. I tried again with ministers, christian friends and families and few showed much more than cursory interest. These ‘anointed’ preferred to discuss politics, materialistic miracles, and that God made Russell Wilson throw the perfect football pass. Apparently spirituality is losing to materialism.

Damn DC, I want some of whatever it is you’re smokin’!

That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you write.

Atheism qua atheism simply means not having a deity. The term was invented by theists to describe people who had the temerity to not believe in the commonly accepted deities of the time. By that understanding of the term, if you do not have a deity that you supplicate then you are an atheist.

Since the term has always been something of a pejorative many people who don’t have a deity decline to refer to themselves by it. Some adhere to a belief system that is nontheistic but decline to call themselves atheists. Some will call themselves other terms, such as agnostic, though in the most basic sense of the term “atheist” most agnostics are in fact also atheists. All of that is fine, the language is complicated and nuanced and exists for the purpose of making these distinctions.

Atheists aren’t necessarily materialist, though my suspicion is that self-described atheists are more likely to be so. Atheists aren’t necessarily nonspiritual, whatever that may mean, though my suspicion is that self-described atheists are more likely to be so. And so on.

Being individual human beings atheists have the full range of individual approaches to their atheism. Some are fairly aggressively anti-religion and some are not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, individuals who are straightforward about expressing their worldviews, whatever they may be, are the ones who tend to attract the most attention, and the ones who tend to solidify popular stereotypes about classes of people.