The eventual and inevitable target

It's not exactly hard to figure out who is ultimately behind the current assault on Western civilization. They dress it up in many different ways, but it all comes down to the same objective in the end.

Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down.

They are a form of white supremacy.

Always have been.

In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went?

EGYPT!

Not Denmark.

Tear them down.

The reasons given are irrelevant. By their fruits, they shall be known.

Cuck-Fil-A

You may recall that I warned you that Chick-Fil-A was converging. Now, they've converged so completely that the Babylon Bee parody article about the CEO is less ridiculous than the actual news about him:

Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy announced yesterday that his fast-food restaurant will be ending its long-standing policy on Sunday closure, but only for black people.

"We are leading the way towards racial reconciliation in this country," Cathy said. "And everyone knows the best way to achieve racial reconciliation is to segregate black people and make them feel as awkward as possible. Chick-fil-A is dedicated to providing the blacks with a safe space so that they can be properly honored."

Chick-fil-A will be providing racial justice training for all its employees. Sunday employees will all be required to wear traditional African Kente cloths as they serve food in the dining room. They will also offer to shine customer's sneakers for free as they eat. Most notably, there will also be a change to the traditional polite phrase uttered by every Chick-fil-A employee after their sacrificial acts of lovingkindness. When addressing white people, workers will still say "my pleasure!" When addressing people of color, workers will now say "my privilege!" while kneeling respectfully.

It's fascinating to see these Churchians asking people to "repent" of something that is not, has never been, and can never be a sin while they demanding that people not condemn those who actually live in sin. It's pure inversion, and you know what that signifies about the spirit driving them.

Mailvox: Churchianity means leave

And leave immediately:

Long-time reader, first-time emailing.  Have never even commented before, but visit your site 3-4 / day.

Long-time member of an LCMS church where I've taught Sunday School and Confirmation classes for the past 6 years.  Primarily to ensure Churchianity would not be taught to our middle-schoolers.

Unfortunately, during the sermon this last Sunday, our relatively new pastor (37 y/o white) decided to spend ~85% of the sermon time reading this notice from the Black Clergy Caucus regarding the death of George Floyd and the ensuing unrest. It is a short read, but awful.

I immediately decided to leave this church and my post as Christian Education volunteer.

If you're not in a position to kick out the converged and the Churchian, leave. Don't sit through sermons from the Pharisees and the Prometheans, or allow your children to be indoctrinated by the Synagogue of Satan.

No church that preaches against "racism" or about how Black Lives Matter can be considered a genuine Christian church.

Mailvox: waking up to Churchianity

A new reader discovers that Churchianity is not Christianity:

I've been a reader of yours for maybe a year now, or a little more,whereas my wife has been a long time reader, so I'm fairly new to this. I would like to briefly share a bit of info with you that you may find interesting, I'll try to keep it short.

I was browsing my local news today just to see what stories they're spinning with the protests of late and I found a picture of our previous pastors protesting in our town for George Floyd, and they're not exactly hiding.

After getting out of a bad church I spent years in, me and my wife attended the church, Life Church, for around a year and a half and stopped attending over a year ago. The virtue signaling kicked up, the pastor started cherry picking scriptures for his shallow sermons, and we got tired of being pressured to give and tithe..which his wife railed on every single service. For the sake of brevity, that's about the jist of it all.

Not just this event, but my wife and I have seen many of our "christian" friends and acquaintances reveal themselves as churchians as of late. They'd rather virtue signal and would sooner shelter a foreigner from Somalia then care after their own. Yes, we experienced this first hand. They do not serve the good, the true and the beautiful, but themselves.

Anyone who continues to support this church is either ignorant of the evil of this, or willfully conceding to this wickedness.

A converged church is a wicked church that invents and condemns "sins" that are not sins while condoning actual sin. Racism is not, and has never been, and can never be, a sin, unless God Himself can sin. To claim otherwise is pure inversion. And only the wicked deem the separation of sheep and goats, of wheat and chaff, of truth and lies, to be evil.

If your pastor or preacher or priest is preaching this Churchian wickedness, call him out. And if the congregation will not cast him out, then it is time to leave.

The Bible warns that many who profess themselves to be Christians will be deceived. Now, do you truly not see the grand deception at work here? And ask yourself this: does the world hate or does it celebrate these brave anti-racist Churchians?

This cult is NOT new

Not being a Christian, the Z-Man doesn't recognize the nature or the source of what he otherwise quite correctly perceives as a new cult of inclusion and social justice:

This cult we are seeing evolve in the empire is much more like the Cult of Reason, in that it has no gods and elevates abstract concepts like inclusion, diversity, cooperation and openness. When activist chant demands for justice, for example, they are not talking about legal justice or even moral justice. Justice is one of the many words to signify this collection of concepts at the center of the cult.... To the insider, a cult is a world where the internal rules and beliefs of the cult perfectly explain the world. To the outsider, the rules and beliefs of the cult seem amusing, bizarre or possibly dangerous. That’s what is happening in the empire. Most of us are outside this ruling class cult, so their chants, declarations and actions strike as strange and crazy. The destruction of the cities makes no sense. For the cult, these riots are purifying rituals. To outsiders, they are wanton destruction.

This may also explain the bizarre behavior over the Covid virus. It was obvious a long time ago that something other than science and a concern for public health was driving public officials to stoke the panic. The elaborate game of make believe has now been made plain. People are barred from Christian services, but BLM protests and homosexual parades are now permitted. The destruction of civil society from the top down was the elite’s version of the urban street riots.

What we may be seeing is this weird religion of inclusion and cooperation quickly morph into a suicide cult that seeks to level existing society. First the elites try to destroy society with the lock downs and elimination of personal freedom. Now the rank and file are doing their part by devastating the cities. The new faith will not rest until every trace of the old has been erased. That includes the people. Those who represent the old, with their white habits and white ideas must be destroyed.

Like those medieval peasants who woke up one day to learn their king was part of a strange new cult brought in by a couple of bald guys in dresses, normal people in the empire are seeing the mass conversion of their rulers. Just as Christianity could only tolerate the old ways for so long, this new faith is increasing intolerant of the old normal ways of American society. It now exists to expunge every trace of civil life. This cult has declared total war on the rest of us.

This cult is not new. It is a very old religion which has taken different names and forms over the centuries. It is the temple of social justice, it is the church of antiracism, it is the syncretic heresy of churchianity, holocaustianity, and judeochristianity. It is the cult of Babel, it is the religion of the Pharisees, of the Gnostics, and of the Prometheans. Jesus Christ called it the synagogue of Satan. And it all harkens back to the old promise of the snake in the Garden of Eden.

That is the very ancient lie that men will be as gods if they will only submit to the god of this world and worship him in the place of their Creator.

Taking the ticket

PewDiePie serves as the latest demonstration of how those who are not dedicated to God will tend to succumb to the lures of the wicked sooner or later:

Gaming star PewDiePie has signed an exclusive deal to live-stream on YouTube, after switching to a rival platform in 2019. PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, is YouTube's biggest independent video-maker with more than 104 million subscribers.

But he signed an exclusive deal with rival platform Dlive in 2019.

Mr Kjellberg said returning to YouTube was a "natural fit" as he looked for new ways to connect with fans.

While there is nothing wrong with a video streamer signing a deal with YouTube, this shows that if you hunger after the lollipops and fancy pants, they'll usually find a way to lure you in to accepting their control, one way or another. Notice that PDP is even flashing the one-eye symbol; he is almost certainly under the impression that it's just a harmless gesture, even a funny one making fun of celebrities, not unlike the black actor putting on a dress for comedic effect. But what he's publicly demonstrating is submission to the god of this world.

Always keep both eyes open.

It's interesting to see that both David Chapelle and PewDiePie have recently succumbed after years of stubbornly going against the stream and maintaining their independence. And it will be even more interesting to see how long it will take before PewDiePie revolts against the SJWs policing his every stream.

I can't honestly criticize

China is cracking down on Roman Catholics:

China will enforce new restrictions on religious groups, organizations, meetings, and other related events starting on Feb 1. The country’s state-controlled media announced the new policy on Dec. 30, after Chinese authorities moved to further suppress Catholics in the Archdiocese of Fuzhou who are refusing to join the state-run Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

According to UCA News, the new “Administrative Measures for Religious Groups,” which consists of six sections and 41 articles, will control every aspect of religious activity within China, and will mandate that all religions and believers in China comply with regulations issued by the Chinese Communist Party, which must be acknowledged as the higher authority.

I don't know that one can consider this a persecution of actual Christians, though. At this point, anyone who swears allegiance to the so-called Pope Francis is pretty damn suspect in my opinion. Whatever god it is that cult of grotesqueries worships, I'm fairly confident it isn't God the Father, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, or even anything related to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Where is the Inquisition when you need it?

The good guys

I have to admit, I really don’t quite know where to start with the “hurr durr Vox thinks China are the good guys” crowd.

Let’s start with observing that the very formulation contains a category error. Nations and governments are not people. Therefore, they do not have friends, only interests. Nations and governments are also not moral agents. Therefore, they cannot be “good guys”, or, for that matter, “bad guys”.

This is why I detest the inevitably disastrous attempts of my intellectual inferiors to summarize my thinking.

Let me be perfectly clear: I do not think China are "the good guys". I am aware that it is a nation ruled by the Communist Party. I am familiar with Chinese history and I am cognizant of the fact that its current rulers are persecuting Christians.

You may recall, that I picked up an East Asian Studies major to go with my Economics degree while I was at university.

However, unlike my critics, I am also aware that the Chinese governments persecutes Christians with considerably less vigor than it persecutes Tibetans, Uighurs, and corrupt government officials. In fact, it is only ranked 23rd on the list of religious persecution, and is not known to have executed a single Christian in 2020. This hardly ranks with Diocletian or North Korea.

Furthermore, who could honestly condemn a nationalist government that persecutes Christians, at least so-called Christians of the sort who are actively aiding and abetting the ongoing invasion of the West? I'd very much like to see a dedicated persecution of those Churchians myself.

Finally, I invite my critics to contemplate this conundrum: a socialist system based upon a planned economy does not work because it is unable to allocate resources effectively due to the lack of price signals, as per Mises and The Contradictions of Socialist Economies. The Chinese economy features both price signals and effective resource allocation, as well as considerable economic growth.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

The Gates of Hell will not triumph

But he's certainly going to try to impose The Mark of the Beast on a fallen world. And no one can reasonably claim they didn't know:

You have GOT to be kidding me, chapter 837: The enzyme that is used in the Quantum Dot ID that Bill Gates will use for the Mark of the Beast fake vaccine is called… wait for it… Luciferase.

If, at this point, you're not a Christian, you're either devoted to evil, blinded by evil, or you're simply not paying any attention at all. This level of purposeful revolt against God and His Creation, the intensity of this war against the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, simply cannot be mere happenstance.

The logic defies disbelief.

"Hurting your witness"

Any self-professed Christian who uses the term "hurting your witness" in an attempt to police the behavior of Christians is almost certainly worshipping something that is not Jesus Christ.

Sadly, Christians seem to be disproportionately fooled by conspiracy theories. I’ve also said before that when Christians spread lies, they need to repent of those lies. Sharing fake news makes us look foolish and harms our witness.

We saw this in the last election when some of the troll factories focused on conservative, evangelical Christians. Here we go again.

What now?

First, we need to speak up— particularly to those fooled yet again— and lovingly say, "You need to go to trusted sources." Social media news feeds are not a trusted source. That's why we created coronavirusandthechurch.com, to provide credible information for pastors. But, there are plenty of credible news sources— generally from outlets that do not have a track record of conspiracy peddling.

Second, God has not called us to be easily fooled. Gullibility is not a Christian virtue. Believing and sharing conspiracies does not honor the Lord. It may make you feel better, like you are in the know, but it can end up harming others and it can hurt your witness. 

I'm not saying this guy actually has small bodies buried in his garden or has visited Epstein's island, but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to learn that he is a massive fan of Star Trek. Christians are supposed to follow the truth, and if there is one thing that we have learned over the years, it is that the truth is one thing in which "credible news sources" absolutely do not traffic. They are, in fact,  the primary factories of fake news.

You can always tell the Churchian because his primary concern is to avoid looking foolish in the eyes of the world.

He is not here

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”

So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples.  Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
- Matthew 28: 1-10

He is risen. Have a Happy Easter.

A ferocity and intensity

This crisis is not primarily one of disease. There is a very good reason why the spiritually sensitive around the world have been reporting an increase in demonic activity worldwide:

“A great heaviness has entered into my priesthood. This time has been the biggest test of my priesthood, and I guess of my life,” said the priest, known for his cheerfulness, work ethic and devotion to Our Lady. “I do think the Evil One is hitting the priests hardest now. His number one tool is his spirit of discouragement. His M.O. is to make it seem like we’re accomplishing nothing as a priest. Why pray? Why sit by the window [for outdoor confessions] when no one comes. Why make another [senseless] video on the need for prayer during COVID-19 when no one watches? It’s like his voice says, ‘You’re worthless now as a priest - you’re detached from your people, and they aren’t praying or paying attention anyway’....

I phoned an exorcist in Washington D.C. I asked if demonic activity had increased since the Eucharist had been held back and many church doors had been locked.

“Exorcists and those gifted individuals with insights into the spiritual realm have seen more intense demonic activity now. There has been a definite uptick,” he said, “Satan’s taken advantage of this crisis to meet his own ends, It seems demons have been given a free hand now.”

I called a layperson active in the deliverance ministry, who wished to remain anonymous.

“The intensity of the suffering has increased. It’s the spirit and voice of condescension that speaks loudly now,” the individual said. “At the same time, the call to prayer is like a tsunami now. I feel like I don’t need to sleep. I just want to pray throughout the night - this seems to be the same experience of the priests I’ve been working with. There is a ferocity and intensity about what they are seeing now in the spiritual realm.”

But there is no need for despair. Is it not conflict that confirms our purpose? The more the face of evil is revealed, the more it underlines the reality, indeed, the absolute necessity, for our faith in Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

It is not those who are devoted to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True who are breaking down and crying on air. It is not those who worship at the Cross who are cracking under the strain. The demons are raging because they, their master, and his human slaves are all being defeated.

Projections of infinity

Tom Wolfe anticipated the failure of modern neuroscientists to discover the soul in his 1996 essay "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died".

If I were a college student today, I don't think I could resist going into neuroscience. Here we have the two most fascinating riddles of the twenty–first century: the riddle of the human mind and the riddle of what happens to the human mind when it comes to know itself absolutely. In any case, we live in an age in which it is impossible and pointless to avert your eyes from the truth.

Ironically, said Nietzsche, this unflinching eye for truth, this zest for skepticism, is the legacy of Christianity (for complicated reasons that needn't detain us here). Then he added one final and perhaps ultimate piece of irony in a fragmentary passage in a notebook shortly before he lost his mind (to the late–nineteenth–century's great venereal scourge, syphilis). He predicted that eventually modern science would turn its juggernaut of skepticism upon itself, question the validity of its own foundations, tear them apart, and self–destruct. I thought about that in the summer of 1994 when a group of mathematicians and computer scientists held a conference at the Santa Fe Institute on "Limits to Scientific Knowledge." The consensus was that since the human mind is, after all, an entirely physical apparatus, a form of computer, the product of a particular genetic history, it is finite in its capabilities. Being finite, hardwired, it will probably never have the power to comprehend human existence in any complete way. It would be as if a group of dogs were to call a conference to try to understand The Dog. They could try as hard as they wanted, but they wouldn't get very far. Dogs can communicate only about forty notions, all of them primitive, and they can't record anything. The project would be doomed from the start. The human brain is far superior to the dog's, but it is limited nonetheless. So any hope of human beings arriving at some final, complete, self–enclosed theory of human existence is doomed, too.

This, science's Ultimate Skepticism, has been spreading ever since then. Over the past two years even Darwinism, a sacred tenet among American scientists for the past seventy years, has been beset by...doubts. Scientists—not religiosi—notably the mathematician David Berlinski ("The Deniable Darwin," Commentary, June 1996) and the biochemist Michael Behe (Darwin's Black Box, 1996), have begun attacking Darwinism as a mere theory, not a scientific discovery, a theory woefully unsupported by fossil evidence and featuring, at the core of its logic, sheer mush. (Dennett and Dawkins, for whom Darwin is the Only Begotten, the Messiah, are already screaming. They're beside themselves, utterly apoplectic. Wilson, the giant, keeping his cool, has remained above the battle.) By 1990 the physicist Petr Beckmann of the University of Colorado had already begun going after Einstein. He greatly admired Einstein for his famous equation of matter and energy, E=mc2, but called his theory of relativity mostly absurd and grotesquely untestable. Beckmann died in 1993. His Fool Killer's cudgel has been taken up by Howard Hayden of the University of Connecticut, who has many admirers among the upcoming generation of Ultimately Skeptical young physicists. The scorn the new breed heaps upon quantum mechanics ("has no real–world applications"..."depends entirely on fairies sprinkling goofball equations in your eyes"), Unified Field Theory ("Nobel worm bait"), and the Big Bang Theory ("creationism for nerds") has become withering. If only Nietzsche were alive! He would have relished every minute of it!

Recently I happened to be talking to a prominent California geologist, and she told me: "When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers aren't even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles, on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst today, one after the other."

I suddenly had a picture of the entire astonishing edifice collapsing and modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He's floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can't see it, but he's much impressed. He names it God.

It's one of his better essays. Read the whole thing. What it eventually comes down to is the obvious and incontrovertible fact that science cannot explain that which falls outside its conceptual limits. As human souls, we are projections of the infinite into material reality, which is why both physics and neuroscience have been unable to quantify, or even meaningfully describe, the phenomena of life and consciousness. Scientists will only ever be able to wrestle with the materially observable effects of those phenomena, because they lack the ability to directly observe the infinite.

And one of the primary goals of the Deceiver is to convince those projections that they have no connection to the infinite, and by doing so, eliminate it.

The ticket sale

Tanith Lee, the late, great dark fantasy writer, rather succinctly describes the putative appeal of the ticket to those who take it in Le Livre Safran:

“It is Lucifer, Lord Satan, who rules the world,” said the priest. “To survive here, we’re bound to worship him.”

He showed them a drawing on parchment, a rose transfixed by a dagger.

“Remember this sign. We meet here, under the old church. You will be obliged to render passwords. In time, who knows what riches and power we shall accumulate, through the favour of our Master. I myself,” he said, “survived the plague. That was his sign to me. God smote me, but Satan raised me to do his work and glorify him. You’re an artist of the City. Who spoke to you of this secret society?”

“Several,” said the young man. “But Motius the Artisan was once my tutor.”

“The magician? Yes. His house was burned up and flaming fiends carried him to Hell. You understand, there’s no escape at last. It ends in fire.”

“Hah. Yes.” The young man smiled.

“But meanwhile, a life of wishes fulfilled. His servants he never cheats. All the joys of the flesh, full dominion over others. The end is horror, but you may have three hundred years of pleasures before that payment comes due.”

Of course, even when the prince of this world purports to be telling the truth, he deceives. He ALWAYS cheats his servants; indeed, they are the only souls over whom he has total power to use and abuse as he sees fit. And when a servant ceases to be useful, he is, like Hawkins in The Dark is Rising or Harvey Weinstein in Hollywood, hurled from the Black Rider's high horse to break upon the ground.

This is the primary danger of atheism and nihilism. These false philosophies render one susceptible to the illusion that one trades nothing for something of value when one is offered the ticket. But the reverse is considerably more close to being true.

Of Boomers and Bergamo

In Bergamo, an elderly priest gave up the respirator his parishioners bought for him in order to save the lives of younger victims.

A 72-year-old priest who gave his respirator to a younger Covid-19 patient he did not know has died from coronavirus. Father Giuseppe Berardelli, the main priest in the town of Casnigo, refused a respirator which had been bought for him by his parishioners and instead gave it to a younger patient.

He died last week in Lovere, Bergamo - one of the worst-hit cities in Italy’s ongoing coronavirus crisis.

“He was a simple, straightforward person, with a great kindness and helpfulness towards everyone, believers and non-believers,” Giuseppe Imberti, the mayor of Casnigo, said in a statement, according to the Italian news website Araberara.

Although there was no funeral for the priest, residents of the town reportedly applauded from their balconies as his coffin was taken for burial.

Meanwhile, a reader writes from Florida:

Grocery stores in Florida have enacted a special early shopping time for "elderly" shoppers. Of course elderly is now considered 65 and up. Boomers line up in the hundreds, ignoring social distancing, and go through the store like a plague of locusts. Forget women and children, gotta give the Boomers first dibs.

Typical. All too typical. Because God hates the wicked, it is good to hate the Boomer. As with Father Giuseppe, there can be little doubt about what god they serve. The contrast demonstrates that being a Boomer is more than just a range of temporal mileage, it is, more importantly, a state of soul.

These are NOT the end times

All End Times preaching is nothing more than narcisissm + false prophecy.  A reader writes:

A preacher that I know, who has preached the end of the world for 40 years, and has been wrong for 40 years, when asked about this current situation, said assuredly that this was not the end! He has always been wrong, so either it is the end, or, and this is my prediction, he will change his mind and start declaring it the end, or the beginning of the end. He, to a certain extent, and I dare say all end times preachers, are false prophets. That may be harsh, but if what they say does not come true are they not false? Would not my Dad, Uncles, Aunts, Grandparents, and Cousins been better served by a different message before they died. Were they living in the end times?

Every single person who states a firm opinion about any time being the end times is a false prophet and a liar. Every single one. I've been hearing Boomers pontificate about this since the end of the 1970s. I still remember the idiotic pamphlet "88 Reasons for 1988". Even at the time, I knew it was complete idiocy, given specious illogic like "1988 is the 100th U.S. Congress. Water boils at 100 degrees. Therefore, the world will end in 1988!"

In fact, Boomer eschatologists who breathlessly followed Hal Lindsay were one reason I rejected Christianity as a teenager. It was patently obvious even at the time that there was absolutely no truth in them, as events have subsequently confirmed. That being said, the one thing I will say for Mr. Lindsay is that he correctly predicted the rise of global Islam at a time when absolutely no one else did, and he did so on the basis of logic derived from the Bible.

Jesus made it very clear that even he didn't know the hour. So you don't either, and don't start appealing to how you're certain that it is "the season" either. Evil men that people were identifying as potential Antichrist candidates in 999 AD have been completely forgotten by history, and there isn't even a moderately plausible candidate today. So get over yourselves, forget the idiotic and entirely non-Biblical rapture nonsense, and deal with the fact that you're almost certainly going to have to deal with the fallen world as it is for the rest of your life.

Live, love, and leave off waiting for a deus ex machina.

"Easter" means "Resurrection"

A poster asked about Easter on SocialGalactic:

Why do churches say Easter? Isn’t Easter a pagan holiday? I’ve started to say Resurrection Sunday at church and ppl ignore me.

Easter is not a pagan holiday. That’s atheist nonsense that requires an almost-complete ignorance of literally every foreign language but one. While there is a possible etymological link to the name of an Anglo-Saxon goddess named Eostre for whom there is absolutely no evidence outside of the writings of the venerable, but inventive Bede, but since the Germans use "Easter" too and English is partially derived from German, the word is much more likely linked to the old German word for resurrection, which is Erstehen.

One of the earliest appearances of "Easter" in English is in the Tyndale Bible, which actually refers to Ester. Remember, the conventional accusation about Easter being a pagan holiday concerned Ishtar, an Akkadian goddess of love and war, but that was never a viable explanation because none of the other European languages have any possible etymological link to a pagan holiday. Their Paschae, Pasqua, Pâques, Pascua, etc. all trace back to Passover.

So, the usual suspects dug around the history books and came up with Eostre, who was not a German goddess and for whom there is no evidence in the German linguistic record. But they did posit - or to put more clearly, made up - a nonexistent precursor goddess to a probably-invented goddess, whose nonexistent holiday could theoretically have been coopted by English and German Christians in the Sixteenth Century while celebrating the Erstehen on Paschae.

Needless to say, this makes absolutely no sense to anyone who is capable of understanding the conventional ordering of cause and effect. Note in particular that the first and only known reference to Eostre is in 725 AD, and the first known references to Ester and Passover, both of which are English neologisms popularized, if not necessarily coined by Tyndale, were in 1526 AD, centuries after Paskha (πάσχα) was first celebrated by Christians.

From Infogalactic's Eostre page: a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn is supported both by the evidence of cognate names and the similarity of mythic representation of the dawn goddess among various Indo-European groups... all of this evidence permits us to posit a Proto-Indo-European *haéusōs 'goddess of dawn' who was characterized as a "reluctant" bringer of light for which she is punished.

Since Easter most likely means Resurrection, it is unnecessary, redundant, and more than a little spergish to make a point of trying to force "Resurrection Sunday" on others.

Why Christianity is vital to civilization

The Z-man inadvertantly explains the central importance of Christianity to Western civilization and Western societies:

Stupidity has a cost. Every society, even small ones, pay a stupid tax, a price for believing and repeating things that are false. Inevitably, all facts result in some action, so the falsehood, assumed to be fact, will lead to an action. That action, based in an untruth, will come with a price. Maybe the price will be small, like women wasting money on tarot card readers. Maybe it will be high, like putting women into positions of authority based on the lunacy of feminism.

Further, the stupidity of false notions is not universal. Dumb people believe in ghosts and magic, while smart people fall for things like libertarianism. Belief in ghosts may be silly, but it is generally harmless. Crackpot ideas like communism and libertarianism, on the other hand, are very dangerous. It turns out that who is passing around the counterfeit idea counts for as much as the idea itself. Smart people falling for dumb ideas is far more dangerous than dumb people being dumb.

Like money, there are at least two qualities popular nonsense. One is the volume of it in circulation and the other is its velocity. The volume seems pretty obvious. At the extreme, if everything people think is true is actually false, they will not be around very long before they act in such a way that ends their existence. An example would be the Xhosa cattle-killing movement and famine of 1856. There is an absolute limit to the amount of stupid any people can indulge.

The less a society is devoted to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, the more it will subject itself to the inevitable and unavoidable costs of stupidity. The reason that the wicked always stumble in the end is that their rejection of the True is applied stupidity, and the acceptance of their self-serving falsehoods relies upon the very stupidity of the masses that prevents societies from functioning.

Mailvox: maybe I do have a point

A critic apologizes for assuming my nonexistent heresy:

I wrote you a letter concerning the trinity of God and I want to apologize for scolding you. I have come to understand the revelation of The Bible better these past few days and I admit I jumped the gun in criticizing your argument about the trinity. There are apparent contradictions between The Bible and the teaching about The Trinity like many believe it. I think this stems from the wrong interpretation that the catholic church presents about God. I also went over your argument again and admit that there is a contradiction between The Word of God and this belief in The Trinity as it is many times taught in different circles.

Accepted. As I frequently point out, any time an argument is reliant upon an observable falsehood or deception, it is usually being made in defense of a false position. The mere fact that I am frequently and erroneously criticized for not subscribing to "the Nicene Creed" when I am in fact the one subscribing to the actual Nicene Creed of 325 as opposed to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 that most Christians wrongly believe to be "the Nicene Creed" should be sufficient to give the average critic pause.

It is also worth noting that the third Ecumenical Council of 431 reaffirmed the original 325 version of the Nicene Creed and rejected the later pseudo-Nicene version. And finally, you may wish to consider the fact that Sir Isaac Newton independently came to the same conclusion that I did. As for me, I could not care less if all the modern theologians from all the modern sects and churches and denominations declare otherwise. Given their assertions on various other theological matters, I tend to rather like our odds of being the party more in line with the truth.

No worries, it was destined to be

The following exchange with my old friend Jamsco amused me. Mostly because I was pretty sure we'd been over this before. Keep in mind we've known each other since we were children and he is one of the two early Selenoth readers, so we are pretty straightforward with each other.

VD: It's always easy to detect the inversionists. They cannot tell the truth because, knowingly or not, they serve the Father of Lies. Piper's words directly belie the words of Jesus Christ himself. That tells you everything you need to know about the man and his teachings.

JS: I suspect, Vox, that if you actually read Piper's devotional you'd (1) agree with 85% of it, and (2) see that the above description is whole inaccurate and deceptive.

VD: Every single thing of Piper's I've read to date has not only been materially wrong, but egregiously so to the point of being insulting to the intelligence. I still haven't forgotten how tornadoes are the murderous fingers of the Jesus Christ as he slays the innocent and the wicked alike as per God's perfect plan.

JS: I see you haven't forgotten it, nor did you learn it from him. He said nothing of the sort. Read it again. Confirmation bias is real.

VD: You claimed that Piper "said nothing of the sort", Jamsco. That may or may not be true. But he certainly WROTE it.

"Why would God reach down his hand and drag his fierce fingers across rural America, killing at least 38 people with 90 tornadoes in 12 states, and leaving some small towns with scarcely a building standing, including churches?

"God alone has the last say in where and how the wind blows. If a tornado twists at 175 miles an hour and stays on the ground like a massive lawnmower for 50 miles, God gave the command.

"Jesus rules the wind. The tornadoes were his.

"But before Jesus took any life in rural America, he gave his own on the rugged cross."

JS: I didn't know he'd written this. Obviously I agree with what he says here (and I think it's biblical), but you're correct - he wrote it.

Just to be fair to Jamsco, I will point out that the fact that I previously posted on the subject doesn't mean that he read that post. Also, I have not read the referenced devotional, and so it is possible that the description to which I reacted is inaccurate and deceptive. I tend to doubt it on the basis of every previous reading of his writings, but I admit that it is possible.

And no, I'm not going to bother to check, because I was neither created nor destined to take the man seriously. I am content to leave it up to you, gentle readers, to adjudicate the truth of the matter.