Day Bidet #18

by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet

Seven days, seven links:

  1. Did the Egyptians “oppress the Israelites in order to keep them from becoming a powerful ally to the Hyksos”?
  2. “There’s no reason to fear nitrates and nitrites in food.”
  3. Is Darius the Mede Cyaxares II?
  4. “It’s almost as if the media’s 2020 Hate Whitey campaign is getting white people murdered.” (Related. Related. Related. Related. Related.)
  5. “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked.”
  6. “And the Days Are Not Full Enough”
  7. “No one knows what is true anymore. No one can agree on what is true anymore. We are bewitched. We are Théoden.”

More:

Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World.

“What other reason than truth, and truth remembered by one in a position to know, could there be for telling us en passant that Jesus nicknamed James and John Boanerges, the sons of thunder?”

“We are in the midst of an ongoing uprising.”

“Assyrian records affirm the historicity of King Jehu, and confirm that he was the successor to King Omri’s dynasty.”

“[W]ho fact-checks the fact-checkers?”

“You must sing for me the song that you sang before God’s Throne on high, before your fall.”

Day Bidet #17

by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet
You will ‘fall’ in love with Vermont.

Seven days, seven links:

  1. “[O]ur external evidence about the authorship of the gospels all points one way and only one way.” (Related. Related.)
  2. Feminism is cancer. (Related.)
  3. “[T]he summons to flee from the city is used symbolically, with the city referring to the demonic social and political power structure that constituted the Roman empire.”
  4. “Concerns about long-term social/emotional effects of acceleration for high-potential students appear to be unwarranted.” (And likely concerns about the long-term social/emotional effects of homeschooling are similarly unwarranted.)
  5. “It is very probable that the ‘Erastus’ mentioned in Romans is the very same person who is mentioned in this inscription.”
  6. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.
  7. “And the Dwarf, hearing the names given in his own ancient tongue, looked up and met her eyes; and it seemed to him that he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and saw there love and understanding. Wonder came into his face, and then he smiled in answer.”

More:

“In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was ‘a big problem,’ according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.” (Related.)

“Deuteronomy 4:29 should be translated with a sense of certainty, not conditionality.”

Against rebellious daughters in Disney movies.

“[P]eople are starting to accept absurdity as normal.”

“Southern Poverty Law Center Admits They Have No Idea How Dannon Yogurt Company Got on Annual List of Hate Groups”

“[T]o read the Psalms is like thinking Jesus’s thoughts after him.”

Day Bidet #16

by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet
Image
Matthew Fall McKenzie, “Christ in the Desert”

Fourteen days, fourteen links:

  1. “[Y]oung people are not abandoning religion but reinventing it to suit their own lifestyles.”
  2. Clown World and Demon World—always both.
  3. “The Spirit comes gently and makes himself known by his fragrance.”
  4. Carnivore success story. (Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related.)
  5. “Either John was an historical witness with the intention of being historically accurate ‘on the ground level of reporting’ or he was a highly creative liar.”
  6. Heroes.
  7. “Paul’s theology will always be objectionable to those who consider any kind of hierarchical power in principle wrong. … Paul’s views … clash with the modern consensus that freedom is an intrinsic good, and that slavery is wrong not only for the abuses associated with it, but because it deprives slaves of their fundamental human rights. Paul, we should acknowledge, does not hold to this modern conviction, even if there is some overlap in his language regarding the value of freedom.”
  8. Related: “While it can be an inhospitable place for many women, contemporary evangelical church life is nonetheless chiefly ordered around the women at its heart. The good man in such a context must greatly tone down his manliness.” (Related. Related. Related.)
  9. “These people lie. About everything. All the time.” (Related. Related.)
  10. “Thus far there has been no satisfactory explanation of the name.”
  11. They told us only conspiracy theorists would worry about this.
  12. “[T]he methods of physics don’t capture the intrinsic nature of phenomena, but only those relations between phenomena susceptible of mathematically precise description.”
  13. “All leftism is incomplete leftism.”
  14. Pray for the persecuted Church.

More:

“Nursing, on the other hand, has always been useful.”

“[I]f Acts 1:18 is ascribed by Luke to Peter, and Peter is only reminding the crowd that Judas, as God’s punishment, did indeed ‘get a field’ as his reward—a field infamously associated with him, his blood money, and his ignominious death—then it is not the case that the verse in Acts is ‘scarcely reconcilable’ with Matthew.”

“The effort to close off and erase these sites is part of China’s broader campaign to turn the region’s Uighurs, Kazakhs and members of other Central Asian ethnic groups into loyal followers of the Communist Party.” (Thankfully, no such politically motivated campaign to erase historical sites exists in the United States.)

“Artistic activity reflects God’s creative activity, and God is the ultimate good. Given theism it is not surprising that the arts are of great value. There is something divine about them.”

“If you’re looking for a place to get rich while decrying the very system that’s allowing you to get rich, America is the place to be.” (Related.)

“[S]ince most exorcists employed magic spells or stinky roots to seek to expel demons, Jesus’ driving them out ‘by his word’ was impressive.”

In a Chatter of Laughter

by WFTD, posted in faith, Literature

This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.

CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength

Los Lonely Seniors

by WFTD, posted in politics

Robin Hanson:

In the United States, a million and a half adults are under the care of guardians, either family members or professionals, who control some two hundred and seventy-three billion dollars in assets.… [A] quarter of guardianship petitions in New York were brought by nursing homes and hospitals, sometimes as a means of collecting on overdue bills.

More childless, unmarried, and debt-ridden young people today means even more seniors tomorrow who are not just residents but wards of nursing homes and other facilities. (How many family-less Millennials will have enough savings to fork out $90,000 a year for a nursing home?)

But the greater cost is social and emotional, not economic. “Social isolation is a growing epidemic—one that’s increasingly recognized as having dire physical, mental and emotional consequences. Since the 1980s, the percentage of American adults who say they’re lonely has doubled from 20 percent to 40 percent.” “Childlessness has a particularly powerful effect on the probability of isolation.” Family-less seniors will be among the hardest hit. (They already are, here and elsewhere.)

In comparison with our ancestors, who overcame war, famine, and plague, we are incalculably impoverished.

Day Bidet #15

by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet
Lavertezzo, Switzerland

Seven days, seven links (ein bisschen spät!):

  1. “[L]arge gathering, big auditorium, event-driven church expressions have been revealed to be very fragile during seasons of pandemic. Consequently, one thing seems clear: we are being called to a more solitary, contemplative, and monastic journey.”
  2. I’ve updated the Health page to include this excellent list of fruits and vegetables (and fungi) by potentially harmful compound. (Related: “[A] decimal point error appears to have misled millions into believing that spinach is a good nutritional source of iron.”)
  3. “Your children don’t need to see all of the latest hit movies and TV series.” (Related: “It’s the best life imaginable.” Related: “Public schools are literal prisons for children and the only time many people will ever encounter physical violence in their lives.”)
  4. “This is decades of people correctly seeing it coming … being told all the way they were being completely paranoid.” (Language warning. Related. Related.)
  5. “[Y]oung people are not abandoning religion but reinventing it to suit their own lifestyles.”
  6. “Florida Woman Took Dishwashing Job So She Could Visit Husband with Alzheimer’s During Pandemic”
  7. “If you think of God as a great city you have to explore, it was like, every street I walked down, there was Jesus waiting for me.”

More:

You can’t trust the experts. You can’t trust the experts. You can’t trust the experts.

“It may then be easiest to understand high places not as a reference to temporal space, but to a ‘higher’ theological place.”

Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World.

“[S]cientists are often tempted to transform what is really only a useful but limited method into a complete metaphysics.” (Related.)

Self-control is highly heritable. (Related.)

“Did God play mind games with His people Israel by giving them confusing prophecies and then sending a Messiah who did not fulfill them, at least not at that time?”

Lydia McGrew on Skeptics of the Resurrection

by WFTD, posted in Apologetics, faith
Image

The strength of the evidence can often be seen by looking at the lengths to which the skeptic must go to explain away that evidence rather than taking seriously the hypothesis that springs to mind. Hence, rather than take seriously the possibility of the resurrection, the skeptic must hypothesize that the women went to the wrong tomb and the persecutor Paul had some inexplicable fit on the road to Damascus that just happened to make him think Jesus was talking to him and that the Christians were right and the eleven disciples all just happened to have a coordinated mass hallucination of Jesus eating, being tangible, and talking to all of them at once, repeatedly, over a forty day period and James just happened to have a similar hallucination and…You get the picture.

Lydia McGrew, “There are no slippery prior probabilities”

They’ll Believe Anything

by WFTD, posted in Literature, politics, worldview
Neighbors Get Anonymous "Warning" Over Yard Sign

[I]t’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.

CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength

Day Bidet #14

by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet

Seven days, seven links:

  1. “A Short Defense of the Resurrection of the Christ”
  2. “The white man will not be our equal but our slave.” (Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related.)
  3. “Knowledge of these difficulties in copying … should rule out altogether hypotheses according to which any of the synoptic authors were literally editing and grafting together earlier sources in anything like a complex literary manner.”
  4. Pro-soldier, anti-war is the way to go. (Related. Related: “Democrats are laying the groundwork for revolution right in front of our eyes.”)
  5. “[P]astors have already heard directly or indirectly from around one-fourth of the members that they do not plan to return at all.”
  6. Good music. (Related. Related.)
  7. “As the atheist, Nobel-laureate physicist Steven Weinberg said, ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.’ The scientific gaze strips the world of value.”

More:

“A Democrat operative is telling all about the massive voter fraud operation deployed to rig elections for Democrats through paying homeless voters off, taking advantage of the elderly, posing as registered voters, and printing up fake ballots.” (Related. Related.)

“Today, we are excited to announce the release of a 5-part podcast series with N.T. Wright and Michael F. Bird called The New Testament in Its World.”

“The Venn diagram of journos who bought and peddled the Iraq WMD hoax, the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax, the Russian collusion hoax, the Covington hoax, the Kavanaugh hoax, the Ukraine hoax, and the latest Atlantic hoax is a single circle. Take note of who’s inside it.” (Related. Related. Related. Related.)

“The first century BCE–CE Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria clearly notes that more than one synagogue existed in Rome during Augustus’s reign.”

“One has no choice but to rely on experts and authorities, but if the path to becoming an expert authority filters out anyone who doesn’t give full support to the consensus or mainstream view, then one has to start taking risks with outsiders with contrary views, and most of these are unreliable cranks, kooks, crackpots, etc.” (Related.)

“With [the tongue] we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not be so.”

We Can Drink Death Like Water

by WFTD, posted in faith, Literature

If He is what He claimed to be, a Savior, a Redeemer, then we have a virile Christ and a leader worth following in these terrible times; One Who will step into the breach of death, crushing sin, gloom and despair; a leader to Whom we can make totalitarian sacrifice without losing, but gaining freedom, and Whom we can love even unto death. We need a Christ today Who will make cords and drive the buyers and sellers from our new temples; Who will blast the unfruitful fig tree; Who will talk of crosses and sacrifices and Whose voice will be like the voice of the raging sea. But He will not allow us to pick and choose among His words, discarding the hard ones, and accepting the ones that please our fancy. We need a Christ Who will restore moral indignation, Who will make us hate evil with a passionate intensity, and love goodness to a point where we can drink death like water.

Fulton Sheen, Life of Christ