— Brown University junior Emma Hall
This event was no microaggression.
There was no chapel last night, so at 7:15 we had the option to go straight to bed, with or without taking a smoke break first.
Some of us stood in the smoke pit rehearsing the things we don’t like about chapel. This one newcomer said, “The Bible’s all bullshit. If you read that stuff and you can’t tell it’s all bullshit, you must be mentally retarded.”
The entry below for December 30, 2015 was the last straw, moving me to “out” this information as a post.
For some months, I have made a good faith effort to note every headline my Yahoo! News feed captured from Salon.com that touched on religion.
Salon.com holds itself forth as, in effect, the voice of progressivism.
The headlines themselves display a pronounced bias on the topic of religion. Not all, but almost all, are hostile.
Not skeptical. Not indifferent. Not equanimous.
Hostile.
I am struck that this posture cannot possibly be intellectually honest.
My neighbor Jonathan came to this country from Nigeria at least ten years ago. He obviously has never made any effort to acquire an American accent. I dread seeing him come out for smoke break after supper, as that spells a long, loud monologue most of which I’ll find unintelligible.
He’s full of fixed opinions about the Bible. These many books he dismisses as “man-made,” but other verses he holds to with fundamentalist tenacity. It makes no sense to me.
He keeps exhorting me to study the various books that did not find their way into the Protestant canon.
Ain’t gonna happen.
Adapted from a 12/03/15 e-mail to my brothers and some others.
Given instability at the shelter where I’ve been for almost five years, I decided to apply to a certain program affiliated with a major national charity and major local soup kitchen. This program is residential, has a nice facility, and (as I understood it) was geared toward taking men with histories of addiction or homelessness and rendering them self-supporting.
Since it is a residential program, I would no longer have to carry my bags everywhere I go, vastly increasing the radius within which I can look for work; and, I supposed, I would be able to work any shift. After all, unlike the shelter where I’ve been, they’ve got a big shove towards self-sufficiency.
They rejected me.
I wrote:
Baptismal grace means: when you get knocked down, you get back up.
Blog post (from October ’14, about getting back up): Life in the outer darkness
In the immediate future, I will be checking out options in transitional housing, and case management services at the clinic where I’m currently in treatment for everything I’m in treatment for.
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What happened?
Is This Stone the Clue to Why Jesus Was Killed?
Here is the latest in a flurry of rather silly articles extolling the supposed archaeological significance of the First Century synagogue at Magdala; which just happens to be located wholly within the confines of a privately-owned Christian tourist resort (hint, hint).
Conspiracies occur. In my past work as a legal secretary, I had direct contact with secret campaigns to promote certain large corporations and political movements. These included “news” articles and ghostwritten op-ed pieces planted in various major news outlets.
Some years ago, there was a tremendous scare over avian flu, which was portrayed as threatening a real plague over North America. I came to conclude that the whole thing was a PR ploy to ennoble public impressions of the pharmaceuticals industry.
The present article sets forth a fanciful notion of what the Sanhedrin may have been thinking during Jesus’ trial.
As to many New Testament stories, my position in the past has been, “This specific thing may not have happened, but something like it probably did.” There are so many problems with and discrepancies among the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ trial, however, that as a Christian I now doubt he was ever tried by the Sanhedrin at all.
By the time of his arrest, Jesus had become such an irritant to the Jewish leaders that the New Testament easily portrays them as having wanted him dead. A conspiracy of the chief priests and Pharisees (John 11:57) to that end would have been singular, as these two parties were otherwise bitter enemies. The Sanhedrin, however, was without power at the time to condemn anyone to death, for blasphemy or any other reason; so the New Testament portrays “the Jews” as having taken Jesus to Pilate to portray him as an insurrectionist, on which basis Pilate might well put him to death.
My own current belief is that Judas may never have betrayed Jesus into the hands of “the Jews” at all; he may instead have betrayed him directly to Pilate, who I believe had his own, wholly personal, reasons to want Jesus dead.
Related: The Son of the Blessed
Originally posted 2015-12-14.
1 John 1:5:
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.
1 John 4:8:
Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
The author of John appears not to have been aware of Isaiah 45:5-7:
Continue reading Bible contradictions #08: Is God love and light?
According to 2 Kings 24:3, the Babylonian Exile was God’s punishment upon the nation for the sins of Manasseh. In the thinking of ancient times, the righteousness or sin of a king was attributed also to the nation as a whole. See also 2 Kings 21:10-15 and 2 Kings 23:26-27.
Continue reading Bible contradictions #07: What caused the Babylonian exile?
Same ol’ same ol’ doesn’t deserve my attention.
Previous post: Some prayer exercises
Monday morning, Pastor asked me to pray about some anger management issues among our youth. Some have been somatizing their anger, e.g. having seizures; others have got in fights at school. Tuesday morning it came to me that I have already reported a number of techniques to use, in the previous post above. The new notions that came to me are here below.
It won’t be feasible for me to teach these to the children myself, since Youth Group meets on Sundays after the deadline for me to get back to the shelter. But some of them may be usable in Children’s Sermons.
Samuel anoints David as king over Israel in 1 Samuel 16:1-13. It is notable that this comes before David kills Goliath and before he first starts playing the lyre for Saul. In other words, David was already king over Israel before either of those other things happened.
The story of David playing the lyre for Saul comes at 1 Samuel 16:14-23. Now, it is very clear from this passage that Saul had never heard of David ever before.
Continue reading Bible contradictions #06: When did Saul first meet David?
The Homeless Blogger 