Disclaimer: I am an atheist, so I am in no position to tell Christians how to run their religion.
That said, it seems pretty obvious even to me that mainstream Christianity has launched itself off the deep end and bears little resemblance to “Christianity” as it has been practiced for most of its 2000 or so years.
The thing we have now is Niceianity. Let me emphasize that “nice.” Most of the folks involved are, as far as I can tell, very kind-hearted people. Take Karen Oliveto, the first openly lesbian bishop in the United Methodist Church. Oliveto lead Glide Memorial, which I am familiar with because they serve nearly a million free meals to the homeless every year. (SF has a lot of homeless people.) That’s really nice.
Thing is, I’m not convinced that God is “nice.” The God of the Old Testament routinely acts in ways that the average modern person would probably describe as “not nice,” like killing the firstborn sons of the Egyptians or pretty much the entire Book of Job.
As a parent, I always have my kids’ best interests at heart, but I am often not “nice” from their perspective: I make them go to bed when they want to play; I make them do their homework when they want to play; I even make them go to the grocery store when they want to play, because I’m an evil person who wants to get food so I can cook dinner.
Parenting cannot be understood through a child’s understanding of “nice.”
And if there is such a thing as God, I don’t think it (he, whatever) can be understood via our particular current concept of “nice.” (Obviously I am not saying you should go out and be mean. Obey your notions of good behavior.)
One of the interesting things about Christianity is its history of schisms. For example, back in the late 1700s, the Shakers split off from the Quakers:
[Shakers] looked to women for leadership, believing that the second coming of Christ would be through a woman. In 1770, [Shaker leader] Ann Lee was revealed in “manifestation of Divine light” to be the second coming of Christ and was called Mother Ann.[6]
(More about the Shakers.)
Shakers, what with their communal lifestyle, female equality, female preachers, female incarnation of god, and near zero fertility obviously bear much in common with today’s feminists. The difference is that Shakers did not pretend to be Anglicans or Catholics or Methodists: they were just fine with being their own thing.
Let’s talk about infiltration.
According to Wikipedia:
Dr. Bella Visono Dodd (1904[1] – 29 April 1969[2]) was a member of the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) in the 1930s and 1940s who later became a vocal anti-communist. After her defection from the Communist Party in 1949, she testified that one of her jobs, as a Communist agent, was to encourage young radicals to enter Roman Catholic Seminaries.[3] …
Dodd testified before the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). She said: “In the 1930s we put eleven hundred men into the priesthood in order to destroy the Church from within. The idea was for these men to be ordained, and then climb the ladder of influence and authority as Monsignors and Bishops”
Dodd told Alice von Hildebrand that:
“When she was an active party member, she had dealt with no fewer than four cardinals within the Vatican who were working for us, [i.e. the Communist Party]”(Christian Order magazine, “The Church in Crisis”, reprinted from The Latin Mass magazine).[7]
Dodd made a public affidavit which was witnessed by a number of people, including Paul and Johnine Leininger.
In her public affidavit, among other things, Dodd stated:
“In the late 1920’s and 1930’s, directives were sent from Moscow to all Communist Party organizations. In order to destroy the [Roman] Catholic Church from within, party members were to be planted in seminaries and within diocesan organizations… I, myself, put some 1,200 men in [Roman] Catholic seminaries”.von Hildebrand confirmed that Dodd had publicly stated the same things to which she attested in her public affidavit.
(I don’t know anything about this lady. Maybe she was just a crazy person trying to get attention by crying “Communist ploooot!” But see also Operation Spectrum, Singapore.)
About a year and a half ago, I posted excerpts from an article about Stanford University’s new Dean of Religious life, Jane Shaw, who is notable for being both the first woman and the first gay person to hold the position:
“Q. At Grace Cathedral and at Oxford, you led programs far afield from what might be considered religious: Hosting forums with politicians, activists and authors; bringing in atheists and believers; and commissioning artists-in-residence to create plays and installations. What’s your guiding light?
A. I don’t think I am a very churchy person, if that makes sense. I have always been interested in how you engage people in discussing questions of ultimate meaning, really—values, ethics, spirituality, all that stuff. …
Q. What new directions will you bring to Stanford?
A. …It is certainly my desire to make sure that Memorial Church is a place for extremely lively intellectual engagement, a place where possibly difficult issues can be discussed, a place where ethical and spiritual issues can be discussed. I am hoping we’ll have different sorts of people preaching here as guest preachers, not just clergy.”
That same issue of Stanford Magazine had another article focused on insulting people who believe in Hell. As I concluded back then:
According to Stanford, a gay woman who isn’t very “churchy” but likes discussing ethics is one of the country’s best religious leaders, and the 60% of Americans who believe in Hell are literally insane and make trouble for everyone else. …
Now, let’s try to imagine a contemporary article from any sort of respectable college or university… that conveys the inverse: respect for people who believe in hell; disrespect for gays, women, and people whose faith isn’t based on Biblical inerrancy.
Can you? Maybe Harvard? Yale? Oberlin? CalTech? Reed? Fine, how about BYU? No, probably not even them.
I can’t imagine it. A hundred years ago, maybe. Today, no. Such notions are completely incompatible with the beliefs of modern, upper-class people.
I know many perfectly decent folks who believe in hell, and think they should be respected, but “be decent to people who hold denigrated religious beliefs” is not actually my point. My point is that the American upper class, academia, and the people with a great deal of power and influence over the beliefs of others clearly agrees with Pastor Shaw’s religious beliefs (when it is not outright atheist). Upper-class liberals in America are their own ethnic group with their own religion, culture, morality, and endogamous breeding habits. Conservatives are the out-group, their religious views openly mocked by the upper class and banned from the halls of academic thought.
Wikipedia has an article on R. Guy Erwin:
R. Guy Erwin is a U.S. Lutheran clergyman. … He is also the first openly-gay bishop in the ELCA, and has lived in a committed same-sex relationship for 20 years. He and Rob Flynn were married in August, 2013.[2]
Bishop Erwin received the B.A.degree from Harvard College in 1980. He holds the M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University. From 1993–1999 he was Lecturer in Church History in the Yale Divinity School (YDS) where he taught History of Western Christianity as well as courses on Martin Luther, the Pietists and other specialities. During the 2006–2007 academic year he was Visiting Professor at YDS while on sabbatical from California Lutheran University where he has taught since 2000.[3]
Note: I don’t actually think there is anything “wrong” with being gay–there might be, there might not be, I am agnostic on the issue. I favor letting gay people get married and am pissed that we’ve spent so many decades fighting over the issue when we could be dealing with real problems, like the heroin epidemic.
But I also respect the rights of religious people to think homosexuality is a sin to believe what they believe without me interfering or telling them not to.
500 Clergy support gay United Methodist Clergy who Came Out:
A letter from 500 openly LGBTQ clergy, future pastors and faith leader in a number of different denominations offered “much love and light” to the 111 United Methodist clergy and candidates who came out as gay on May 9.
“Though we come from different traditions, you are our family in Christ and our siblings in the common struggle to live fully and authentically into our God-given identities and callings,” states the letter posted on the website Believe Out Loud, an online community that empowers Christians to work for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or questioning (LGBTQ) equality. …
“We are here because God has called us to serve in this denomination, and our souls are fed by the theology in which we’ve been raised,” the 111 United Methodists write in what they call “A Love Letter to Our Church.” The signers come from across the United States, and one signer is from the Philippines. They identify themselves as “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer/Questioning, and Intersex” in the letter. …
[Matt Berryman] is the executive director of Reconciling Ministries Network, an unofficial United Methodist group that advocates for the church to be more inclusive. The network has coordinated publicity of this and other challenges to church law as part of the group’s “It’s Time” campaign.
“Since 2012, we’ve decided we would be the church no matter what,” Berryman told United Methodist News Service. The majority of delegates at the 2012 General Conference voted against a proposal to say United Methodists disagree whether homosexuality is against God’s will.
“Jesus came preaching a way that is narrow, and the way we live out that narrow way is to disrupt systemic injustice.”
Basically, official Methodist doctrine teaches that homosexuality is a sin. Disagree? Join a church that doesn’t tech that. For goodness’s sake, there are about 2,000 different Christian denominations. Surely you can find one that agrees with you. Or start your own church, and invite all of the gay people to come and worship with you.
But don’t go infiltrating a church whose doctrines you explicitly disagree with.
As Justin Martyr wrote in his First Apology: “No one is allowed to partake (of the Eucharist) but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true, and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins, and unto regeneration, and who is so living as Christ has enjoined.”
Meanwhile the United Church of Canada is actually struggling to remove a pastor who has outright declared herself an atheist:
One Sunday in 2001, she stood up in front of her congregation, as usual. But instead of a normal sermon, she declared that she no longer believed in God. …
Much to her surprise, neither the congregation nor the church board were bothered by this. Many even confessed that they, too, had their doubts. And so they carried on, without God.
But now, the church’s top brass say they’ve received too many complaints about Vosper and have launched an unprecedented investigation to determine whether she’s fit to keep her job. …
“I won’t bow out. Because if I leave, that ruling stands and my colleagues are at risk. It’s like I’d be running to safety, and everyone else gets blown up,” she said.
Vosper’s saga couldn’t have come at a worse time for the United Church, which is already hemorrhaging devotees. Its membership has shrunk more than 60 percent since 1965, when it included more than one million.
Maybe there’s some kind of connection here between your church being run by atheists and hemorrhaging members?
More liberal Christian groups are hemorrhaging faster than the more conservative groups. Mainline Protestants, like Methodists, have lost half their members from the Silent Generation to Millenials.
Why exactly so many people are becoming atheists remains a mystery to me–I tend to blame it on electricity, but maybe I’m reaching. At any rate, I think that if you’re going to be religious, there has to be something that you actually believe. A doctrine. A theology. Just saying something like, “I believe in my heart in believiness and love and unicorns,” doesn’t seem to work.
In my personal experience, a lot of churches over the past few decades have been trying to take the Kumbaya approach, by which I mean stripping out all of the unpleasant-seeming parts of religion in order to attract new members. Latin mass? Gone! Fasting? Not necessary! Penitence? Hey, let’s sing about Jesus instead!
Ironically, I loved Sunday School as a kid, but was pretty meh on Youth Group. Sunday School was appropriately geared to a 5 yr old kid who found “Jesus Loves Me” comforting. Youth Group was an intellectual, moral, and religious wasteland. I wanted to read the Bible and discuss theology. Instead, we listened to “Christian rock” and ate pizza. There’s nothing wrong with pizza or Christian rock, but they alone don’t lead to god.
Had I received something resembling an intellectual religious guidance, I might have kept believing.
Anyway, back to schisming vs. combining, according to Wikipedia, the following groups of churches have arrangements for:
- mutual recognition of members
- joint celebration of the Lord’s Supper/Holy Communion/Eucharist (these churches practice open communion)
- mutual recognition of ordained ministers
- mutual recognition of sacraments
- a common commitment to mission.
- The Anglican Communion, the Old Catholic Church, the Mar Thoma Syrian Church of India, and the Philippine Independent Church.[23]
- The Churches of the Porvoo Communion.[25]
- The Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada[23]
- The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and each of the following: the member churches of the Lutheran World Federation, the Episcopal Church in the United States of America,[23] the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Reformed Church in America, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church[26] and the Moravian Church in America.
- The Leuenberg Agreement, concluded in 1973 and adopted by 105 European Protestant churches, since renamed the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe.[27]
- The Moravian Church and each of the following: the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Episcopal Church USA.[23]
- The United Methodist Church with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the African Union Methodist Protestant Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Northern and Southern Provinces of the Moravian Church.
- The United Church of Christ and each of the following: the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Reformed Church in America.
- The United Episcopal Church of North America and each of the following: the Anglican Catholic Church, the Anglican Province of Christ the King, and the Diocese of the Great Lakes.
- The Anglican Province of America has intercommunion with the Reformed Episcopal Church and the Church of Nigeria.
- The Church of Ireland and the Methodist Church in Ireland have established full communion and are working toward interchangeability of ministry.[28]
Meanwhile most American Christians are, by their own admission, heretics:
Seven out of ten respondents in LifeWay’s survey affirmed the doctrine of the Trinity—that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three Persons but one God, and six in ten agreed that Jesus is both human and divine. Their orthodoxy—and consistency—ended there. More than half went on to indicate that Jesus is “the first and greatest being created by God,” a heresy known as Arianism, which the Council of Nicaea condemned in 325 A.D. …
Rather, bizarre contradictions like this illustrate how many Americans don’t understand or even care what the Trinity means (although they say they believe in it, likely out of habits learned growing up in church).
The responses to other questions were no less heterodox or headache-inducing. Seventy percent of participants—who ranged across socioeconomic and racial backgrounds—agreed there’s only one true God. Yet sixty-four percent also thought this God accepts the worship of all religions, including those that believe in many gods. …
Over half said it’s fair for God to exercise his wrath against sin, but seemed to waffle about which sins deserved wrath (not theirs!). Seventy-four percent said the “smallest sins” don’t warrant eternal damnation, in contrast to Jesus’ brother, who when writing at the Holy Spirit’s inspiration taught that even one infraction of God’s law is enough to sink someone. But really, what did he know?
A full 60 percent agreed that “everyone eventually goes to heaven,” but half of those surveyed also checked the box saying that “only those who believe in Jesus will be saved.” So either these folks are saying everyone will eventually believe in Jesus, or they hired a monkey to take the survey for them.
13 Religious Women to watch in 2012 –most of these women are notable only for their secular endeavors (some of which are significant,) not for their theological, religious, or otherwise doctrinal work.
In many ways, I think Niceanity has been a central part of Christianity from the beginning. It is a reasonable interpretation of Christian theology (I am not really in a position to declare any Christian a heretic–that’s God’s job.) But I can’t escape the sense that mainstream Christianity is trying to shed entirely the notion of a Biblical God, of any kind of doctrine or belief beyond a vague belief that belief is good. And even if they’re right, I just don’t think religion works that way.
evolutionistx 
The RCC has been a driving engine of progressive politics for generations now
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I understand why reactionaries love the idea of Catholicism, but the contradiction between everything the RCC is doing now and everything they love about it seems problematic. I don’t know how they’re going to work that out, but maybe it’s a personal faith thing.
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I think Catholic reactionaries love the RCC
The rest of us know better. All nominally Catholic nations I aware of went way left before Protestant america. Like Ireland giving women the vote.
On top of that, they Catholic vote was esstinal for progressive electoral success in the usa
Most people, including reactionaries operate emotional vs rationally
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I’ve also spent years in central and South America.
Which does not tend to leave one with a positive out look on Catholicism as a building block for culture, society and healthy families
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As a practicing traditional Catholic reactionary, the basic answer is faith.
We were told by Christ and by Tradition in no uncertain terms that the Church is the lifeboat and that jumping out is only a way to drown.
Further, historically speaking the Church has been a very good, very reactionary civilizing organization. Throw out the Church, and you throw out Western Civilization entirely. You cannot have the latter without the former.
As to what the Church is up to these days, frankly, I completely agree that she is (and has been, for a good long while) a driver of Progress. The question becomes how to cut out the poison and re-grow the root, but even there I think we Catholics have a leg up on other reactionaries. Again, we’re explicitly told that the Holy Spirit will guide the Church – not that she won’t go astray (as she has in the past, though not as badly as at present) but that a correction will come, and all we have to do is remain truly faithful and truly prayerful.
That might not sound like much of a plan to you, but it’s the best one I’ve heard from any reactionary circles to date.
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As a Christian, I can say without any hesitation whatsoever that the Church is the most thoroughly cucked institution in Western society. It’s why I rarely attend church anymore. All denominations– and I mean all– in the US actively work to being Moslems into the US (and they receive federal money for it).
With each “reform” beginning with Vatican 2, the Church has lost membership.
Unless we uncuck the Church, we are doomed.
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Was discussing this with a relative. Their response was that any institution can be infiltrated by evil and therefore Christianity should not build institutions, but just spread among people.
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Legit to both of y’all.
I am not sure these mainstream churches with their complex organizational hierarchies are Bibiblical any which way.
The church seems to grow best where it is oppressed and churches are ran out of people’s homes
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The Church cannot be infiltrated; or, rather, once the infiltrators go public with their hostility, they automatically cease being members of the Church, since the clear teaching of the Church (i.e., the Catholic Church, which I confess to be the one and only, true Church) is that those who publicly fail to adhere to the magisterial teaching and Holy Tradition, on defined doctrines, are automatically excommunicated by Divine Law, whether Canon Law gets around to making this “legal” or not. But, the problem, is that they then take the institutions with them. In the case of the Catholic Church, the antiquity and venerability of the institutions are so great, that the faithful themselves have been unable to come to grips with this truth, and many even of the Traditional Catholics (i.e., the actual Catholics) will fight against the Church’s own teaching on this matter, bending over backwards to recognize persons whom Catholic doctrine requires them to eschew and avoid.
It’s not just Bella Dodd, who admitted the institutions were being infiltrated. Gramschi called openly for this. The Supreme Pontiffs in the century prior to the victory of the infiltrators, warned that the infiltration was in progress; they took pains to clarify the Church’s teaching on what to do with heretics and heretical claimants to the Holy See (i.e., anti-popes), with the doctrine of St. Bellarmine being advanced by pope Leo XIII “by a special counsel of divine providence.” St. Robert Bellarmine’s teaching on the papacy was cited as the reason for the proclamation that he is a Doctor of the Church. The teaching of St. Robert was developed during the Protestant apostasy, to find the Tradition’s answer to the question: “what if the Church is infiltrated by Protestants, and the papacy in particular?” Numerous supernatural apparitions, visions and celestial warnings, chiefly from the Blessed Virgin, beginning about 50 years before it happened, explicitly foretold this infiltration and a massive defection of the clergy in company with a major apostasy throughout the world. It is no surprise that it has happened, then; nor is it any surprise that the people infiltrating the Church seem to have the same MO as the people infiltrating all other institutions: sacrilege and sexual degeneracy, initially as a form of blackmail and bonding, now as a shared identity.
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Thanks for your perspective and thoughtful comment.
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[…] Source: Evolutionist X […]
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In the area around here, I see a lot of formerly mainline protestant churches which are now, primarily, immigrant evangelical churches. Sometimes I wonder if there could be a way to keep the socially useful parts of religion without the obviously-false stuff… of course, I suppose there’s the idea that if you don’t have something obviously false, there’s no really good test for who’s a true believer… but, you know, something that would encourage people to be useful, productive members of society, and to settle down, get married, and have kids… would such a thing, long-term, be possible without the crazy-belief baggage? (I’m looking at you, Book of Mormon)
Speaking of actual beliefs these days, google suggested this article for me today: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/28/alt-right-online-poison-racist-bigot-sam-harris-milo-yiannopoulos-islamophobia
I can’t help but think it has something of the feel of “Reefer Madness” or the old Chick Track type plots… I guess warning kids against heroin these days is just too depressing?
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The powers that be don’t care if people die of heroin; dead people can’t disrupt the power structure. Dead people can just be replaced with more workers. The “alt-right” and things like it are actually threatening to the power structure.
The alt-right itself, of course, is this tiny little thing on the internet. I don’t know if I’m even part of it. As SSC points out, it’s small. But it’s the media’s way of scaremongering, “if you believe any of this Trump/Brexit stuff, you’re a literal Nazi! Like these internet trolls!”
Refer madness indeed.
Atheism is such a recent thing, I don’t think humanity has learned to process it yet.
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To begin with, I want to thank you for such an insightful post, which I completely agree. I will use this post for a future reference with other people.
But I disagree with the following sentence:
“Atheism is such a recent thing, ”
I don’t think this is accurate. For example, we have some atheist comments in Egyptian texts. Some schools of traditional Indian philosophy are atheist. Some branches of Buddhism are hard to distinguish from atheism. Also some Greek philosophers were atheist.
Psalm 14:1 says “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.'” So, whether one agrees or not, it is obvious that there were atheists back then. And these are only the examples that come to my mind while I am packaging to travel. With time, I could find many more examples. Nothing is new under the sun.
“I don’t think humanity has learned to process it yet.”
Well, maybe it cannot be processed by majorities because it is untrue or it is impossible to process (minorities have been able to process it in all ages). So far, the evidence is against the possibility of processing it by majorities (even the majority of non-religious people are not atheist, see surveys). So, IMHO, the hope of majorities processing it in the future can be labelled as “blind faith”.
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Thank you; I’m glad you found it useful.
You make a good point about historical atheism. It is not atheism itself that is novel, only its the high number of people now professing it. (Especially in the US, which has had higher rates of religiosity than Europe for a while now.)
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Either you’ve been reading my comments on other blogs, or we’ve reached many of the same conclusions independently. The parts that are missing are easier to identify if you commit yourself to a religion. My family have become orthodox Jewish over the last two years, and it’s been enlightening. Feel free to drop me an email if you’re interested.
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*thinks hard* It’s entirely possible I’ve been reading your comments but have forgotten them. Either way, we live in the same universe and see the same things.
How is Orthodox Judaism? I mean, obviously reading websites and wikipedia pages is kind of like trying to figure out what “red” is by being told that it’s a wavelength of electromagnetic energy. True, but doesn’t quite convey the whole picture.
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I tapped out a long reply, but the basic innovation that rabbinic Judaism is that it provides a status outlet for men, even if they cannot hold down a job, thereby allowing nearly 100% of its adherents to marry and reproduce.
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It’s obviously more than that…it’s theology is considerably more balanced than Christian and Islamic theologies (which are both monopolar). It has a significant feminism resistance adaptation. Most of its flaws are actually a result of many generations being raised in the bubble of its strengths, along with some vulnerabilities that its centralization adaptations brought along for the ride.
I’m not convinced that it will survive two more generations of modernity without some significant restoration of first principals and an improvement in its leadership, but it has a much stronger foundation than the alternatives, and remains the only religion to incorporate modernity to a significant extent without fertility rates declining precipitously.
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“Parenting cannot be understood through a child’s understanding of “nice.””
I had to re-boot my idea of love after this experience. Maybe this woman (me) really was saved through childbearing. Perhaps low fertility rates mean most people stick with the child-like idea of love. Hmm.
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Hey :) Welcome back.
Great insight.
I think parenthood is transformative in so many ways–experience, hormones, logic–and the lack of children is a big part of why modern society is so weird. Many people are simply missing out on a big piece of the transformation into a full adult.
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One thing about modern (middle/upper-middle class) life that I can’t ignore is waiting to have children til, at the earliest, late 20’s (which is definitely considered early around where I live) and more commonly, mid-30’s, while, in my experience and pretty much everyone I know, the ability to stay up all night, even two nights in a row, and recover with just a bit of extra sleep later in the week, definitely peeks around age 20… I mean, even if your fertility at 38 is perfectly good, it is kind of insane to waste the ability to stay up all night on video games or partying… Heck, even using that youthful energy for studying or writing papers seems kind of weird from an evolutionary perspective. (With the exception of the seemingly currently rare notion of studying hard in order to get a good paying job to save up so that getting married, buying a house, and having kids aren’t a stretch financially or physically… and I use “currently” for at least the past two decades…)
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This is one of the reasons I decided to have kids “young.” Pulling all-nighters was bad enough in college; there was no way I wanted to be pulling all-nighters in my 40s. And the 40-somethings I’ve met with twins due to the fertility treatments… eesh!
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Admittedly, I haven’t exactly had mine young, and I’m still not sure if I’m done, but my family has a long history of having children around 40, albeit in most cases with built-in teenage babysitters at home… I tell myself that I’m guaranteeing that my kids won’t be helicoptered, because no way I have energy for that. At any rate, I figure I’m not actually hypocritical, since I’m specifically talking about voluntarily waiting to have kids, not being childless for reasons beyond one’s control or waiting because you haven’t met your husband yet. Of course, those two things in particular are a big reason I pretty much bite my tongue til it bleeds if I here young women in their 20’s talking about getting their career going first and putting off kids til at least their 30’s–even if you have no intention of putting off kids and have met The One by the time you’re 25, it’s pretty major hubris to think that everything will go according to schedule, and young women often seem to have the idea that the only way things can go off the rails is having a kid too young… (The number of people who compliment me on the spacing between my children… Like, what? It is, in fact, the spacing we hoped for, but, like, what?)
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Great points both of you. I always feel like a jerk saying stuff like “you just don’t know until you have kids” but when the don’t know-ers reach critical mass–there’s some truth to it. And e, great point about wasting the all-nighter ability on video games and partying!
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[…] Infiltration of the church. […]
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[…] forgot to add this image to Monday’s post, Infiltration of the Church? but it’s there […]
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“…Thing is, I’m not convinced that God is “nice.” The God of the Old Testament routinely acts in ways that the average modern person would probably describe as “not nice,” like killing the firstborn sons of the Egyptians or pretty much the entire Book of Job…”
Maybe the Cathars were right and the god of the old testament was really a demon pushing people to Satan. The new testament being the only valid way to God. That’s what they believed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism
The Cathars were slaughtered to the last Man, Women and child by a new group created by the Pope called the Jesuits and led by a converted Jew. How convenient. The phrase,”Kill them all God will know his own”, came from the the killing of the Cathars.
I posted about this several years ago and have noted a new site popping up in search results.
http://www.cathar.info/
I looked at the wayback machine and it has been there but I don’t remember seeing it a few years ago. ?????
https://web.archive.org/web/20091201024502/http://cathar.info/?
As for the Jewish religion. What a fine one it is where everyone not Jewish is not human, all their belongings belong to the Jews and everyone will eventually be the Jews slaves.
“…In her public affidavit, among other things, Dodd stated:
“In the late 1920’s and 1930’s, directives were sent from Moscow to all Communist Party organizations. In order to destroy the [Roman] Catholic Church from within, party members were to be planted in seminaries and within diocesan organizations… I, myself, put some 1,200 men in [Roman] Catholic seminaries”…”
Of course this proves that everyone who believes in conspiracies is a fool!
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[…] The thing we have now is Niceianity. Let me emphasize that “nice.” Most of the folks involved are, as far as I can tell, very kind-hearted people. Take Karen Oliveto, the first openly lesbian bishop in the United Methodist Church. Oliveto lead Glide Memorial, which I am familiar with because they serve nearly a million free meals to the homeless every year. (SF has a lot of homeless people.) That’s really nice. […]
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[…] were many other excellent comments, but I think I will highlight infowarrior1‘s question and follow-up (after I said it […]
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