Tag: Christianity

The question of the nature of God’s knowledge came up in a recent Darkstream. So as not to repeat myself unnecessarily, I will simply post this selection from The Irrational Atheist which still represents my thoughts on the matter. I make no pretense of being a theologian, nor do I claim that I must be correct on the matter, they are simply my thoughts and conclusions concerning the concepts of divine omnipotence and divine omniscience.

MASTER OF PUPPETS OR GAME DESIGNER?
“She was an atheist, but she was a Lutheran atheist, so she knew exactly what God she didn’t believe in.”
– Garrison Keillor, Wobegon Boy

Doubts about the existence of God, particularly the existence of a good and loving God, often stem from great emotional pain. While doubts are naturally bound to occur to any rational individual in moments of somber reflection, it is particularly hard to imagine that a loving God who loves us would choose to intentionally inflict pain upon us, especially if He is all-powerful. When one surveys the long list of horrors that have engulfed countless men, women and children throughout the course of history, the vast majority of them innocent and undeserving of such evil fates, one finds it easy to sympathize with the individual who concludes that God, if He exists and is paying attention to humanity, must be some sort of divine sadist.

Because doubts are reasonable, normal and inevitable, they should never be brushed aside, belittled or answered with a glib phrase, for not only does decency demand that they receive a sensitive hearing, but also because they can have powerful ramifications that resonate long after the doubter himself has had them resolved one way or another. Randal Keynes, a descendant and biographer of Charles Darwin, asserts that it was the death of Darwin’s beloved daughter Annie, at the age of ten after a long illness that convicted the great evolutionist of his dangerous idea that neither divine intervention nor morality had anything to do with the operation of the natural laws. And if this tragic loss was not the only element involved in Darwin’s transition from an accomplished student of theology to the inventor of what today is the primary driving force behind the anti-theist New Atheism, it is widely considered to have been the final step that pushed him over the edge.

One would not be human if one could not sympathize with Darwin’s anguished rejection of the notion that there was any justice or even a silver lining to be found in the death of his beautiful little girl. And perhaps there was some consolation, if any consolation was to be found, in viewing his terrible loss as taking place within the context of a mechanistic universe, wherein one was not subject to the ineffable caprice of an unpredictable deity, but to the predictable operation of natural laws which one could at least hope to understand and attempt to utilize.

But if God exists, it is a basic theological error to attempt to place the blame for earthly tragedies on Him. In fact, it is not only a theological error, but also a fundamental error of logic to conclude that God, even an all-powerful God, must be to blame for every evil, accident or tragedy that befalls us.

The Contradiction of Divine Characteristics
In a chapter considering the arguments for God’s existence, Richard Dawkins muses briefly upon what he considers to be a logical contradiction. He writes:

Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.

As Dawkins surely knows, this is a silly and superficial argument, indeed, he follows it up with a little piece of doggerel by Karen Owens before promptly abandoning the line of reasoning in favor of a return to his attack upon Thomas Aquinas. While the argument appears to make sense at first glance, it’s merely a variation on the deeply philosophical question that troubles so many children and atheists, of whether God can create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it.

First, it is important to note that the Christian God, the god towards whom Dawkins directs the great majority of his attacks, makes no broad claims to omniscience. Although there are 87 references to the specific things that the Biblical God knows, only a single example could even potentially be interpreted as a universal claim to complete knowledge. Among the things that God claims to know are the following:

He knows the way to wisdom and where it dwells, he knows the day of the wicked is coming, he knows the secrets of men’s hearts, he knows the thoughts of men and their futility. He knows the proud from afar, he knows what lies in darkness, and he knows what you need before you ask him. He knows the Son, he knows the day and the hour that the heavens and the earth shall pass away, he knows the mind of the Spirit and that the Apostle Paul loved the Corinthians. He knows who are his, he knows how to rescue godly men from trials, and perhaps most importantly, he knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.

The only straightforward claim to omniscience is made on God’s behalf by the apostle John, who clearly states “he knows everything”. However, the context in which the statement is made also indicates that this particular “everything” is not intended to encompass Life and The Universe, but rather everything about human hearts. Not only does this interpretation make more sense in light of the verse than with an inexplicable revelation of a divine quality that appears nowhere else in the Bible, but it is also in keeping with many previous statements made about God’s knowledge.

After all, when Hercule Poirot confronts the murderer in an Agatha Christie novel and informs the killer that he knows everything, the educated reader does not usually interpret this as a statement that the Belgian detective is confessing that he is the physical manifestation of Hermes Trismegistus, but rather that he knows everything about the crime he has been detecting.

In keeping with this interpretation, Dr. Greg Boyd, the pastor at Woodland Hills Church and the author of Letters to a Skeptic, has written a book laying out a convincing case for the Open View of God, which among other things chronicles the many Biblical examples of God being surprised, changing His mind and even being thwarted. Moreover, it would be very, very strange for a presumably intelligent being such as Satan to place a bet with God if he believed that God knew with certainty what Job’s reaction to his torments would be.

But in addition to the fact that it is based on a false assumption, the problem with the Contradiction of Divine Characteristics, as we shall henceforth refer to the logical conundrum posed by Dawkins, is that omniscience, or the quality of knowing everything, is the description of a capacity, it is not an action. Likewise, omnipotence, being all-powerful, is a similar description, which is why these nouns are most often used in their adjectival forms modifying other nouns, for example, an omniscient god is a god who knows everything, i.e. possesses all knowledge. But capacity does not necessarily indicate full utilization and possession does not dictate use; for example, by this point it should be clear that an intelligent scientist is nevertheless perfectly capable of writing something that is not intelligent at all.

Lest you think that this distinction between capacity and action is somehow tantamount to avoiding the question, note that Dawkins himself refers to God “using his omnipotence” in constructing the supposed contradiction.

Now, as I write this sentence, I am holding the book entitled The God Delusion in my hand. I paid cash for it at the bookstore prior to reading it through in its entirety, so I now possess the book in a very real and legally binding sense, and I feel sure that the reader will readily acknowledge that I therefore possess all of the knowledge contained within it in every relevant meaning of the term. But can I tell you the precise wording of the first sentence on the seventh page? Well, no, not without taking the action required to actually look at it.

This illustrates the difference between capacity and action, and the distinction is a vital one. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but it is not synonymous with use. Unless one clings stubbornly to an overly pedantic definition of both omniscience and omnipotence, an inherent incompatibility simply doesn’t exist between the two concepts. Indeed, if Daniel Dennett is correct and “knowledge really is power”, then logic not only dictates the compatibility of all-knowledge with all-power, but requires that the two superficially distinct concepts are actually one and the same. In this case, there not only is no contradiction between God’s omniscience and omnipotence, there is not even the theoretical possibility of a contradiction.

Regardless, a God who stands outside of space and time and who possesses all knowledge as well as all power is not bound to make use of his full capacities, indeed, who is going to shake their finger at him for failing to live up to his potential? Only the likes of Dawkins and Owens, one presumes, as their ability to logically disprove God’s existence by this method depends upon His abiding by their rigid definitions of His qualities… at least one of which He does not even claim in His Word.

When considered in this light, the Contradiction of Divine Characteristics can’t help but bring to mind a scene from the novel Catch-22, in which Joseph Heller wrote of an aptly named atheist called Frau Scheisskopf.

“’I don’t believe, ‘ she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. ‘But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be.’”

Furthermore, there is no theological significance whatsoever to a reduced form of omniscience and omnipotence that would satisfy even the most pedantic critical application of the logic. If one accepts the hypothesis that God is bound by logic and thereby imagines a God possessing qualities of tantiscience and tantipotence equating to omniscience and omnipotence minus the amount of knowledge and power required to avoid conflicting with the logical incompatibility, one is still left with a God whose theoretical capabilities are sufficient to fulfill all of the various claims about His knowledge and power made in His Word. Morever, from the human perspective, this logically acceptable tantiscient God would be completely indistinguishable from the omniscient one.

When it’s time to feed my Viszla, I don’t magically summon food from the mysterious bag of plenty. But my dog doesn’t know that. From his perspective, there’s no difference between my buying it at the store or my summoning it into material existence by the magic force of my divine will. Likewise, we are incapable of perceiving the difference between a god who knows everything and a god who merely knows a whole lot more than we do, moreover, the latter is the god that more closely fits the description of the Biblical God.

Dawkins, of course, knows that it is as pointless to logically consider the potential contradiction between two arbitrarily defined concepts as it is to argue over the score of the 1994 World Series; would that his acolytes understood as much themselves.

Omniderigence
DERIGO -rigere -rexi -rectum [to set straight, direct]; of placing [to order, dispose]; milit. [to draw up]; Transf., [to direct, aim, guide]
– Latin Dictionary and Grammar Aid, The University of Notre Dame.

Though it may at first seem to be a waste of time to analyze an argument that Dawkins himself doesn’t assign much value, it is important to remember that all things, even specious and superficial arguments for His nonexistence, may prove useful in serving the greater glory of God. That’s true in this case, for in considering the Contradiction of Divine Characteristics argument, we were forced to draw a distinct line between capacity and action, the confusion of which is also the root of a much more serious theological error. Interestingly, this theological error is committed by Christians as readily as atheists, perhaps even more often, as they trust in God’s plan for their lives instead of making use of their God-given intelligence and free will.

There are a variety of phrases which contain the same inherent implication about a certain view of God. Many evangelical Christians often refer to “God’s perfect plan” for their lives. This concept is reinforced with children’s songs such as “He’s got the whole world in his hands” and echoed by sports stars who compete in the assurance that their victory has been divinely secured ahead of time. It is held by American Exceptionalists who believe that God has uniquely blessed the United States of America and has authored a Manifest Destiny for it, and by Christian Zionists who see a divine hand in every violent twist and turn of the Mideast Peace Process.

These various evangelicals have an unexpected ally in Sam Harris, who declares it to be an obvious truth that “if God exists, he is the most prolific abortionist of all” due to the fact that 20 percent of all known pregnancies miscarry, and then asserts that those who believe in God should be obliged to present evidence for his existence in light of “the relentless destruction of innocent human beings that we witness in the world each day.”

What the evangelical and the atheist have in common here is a belief that because God is omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate, he is somehow responsible for these events, although Harris would qualify that with the necessary “if he exists”. And in fairness, it must be pointed out that when Harris cites Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Asian tsunami as God’s failure to protect humanity, he is really doing rather better than the “perfect plan” evangelical who would assert that these tragedies were sent by God for some ineffable higher purpose intended to benefit humanity.

This belief in an all-acting God, who not only guides the grand course of events but actually micromanages them, is the result of the same confusion between capacity and action that we saw in the Contradiction of Divine Characteristics. When God asserts that He cares about the sparrows and knows when one falls from its branch, this is very different from an assertion that He only happens to know about it because He personally struck the sparrow down. An omniscient God knows the numbers of hairs on your head and an omnipotent God is capable of changing their color, but it requires an active Master Puppeteer to personally pluck them, one by one, from your balding head, in the desired order.

Sadly, the English language appears to lack a word describing such a god, even though this is the way that many individuals, even those who do not believe in Him, believe God behaves. So, as Richard Dawkins coined the very useful word “meme”, it appears to have fallen to me to invent a word that is, despite its undeniable utility, rather less likely to be dropped into conversations at coffeehouses for sheer effect.

Hence the term “omniderigence”, which I define as: ‘making infinite use of unlimited or universal power, authority, or force; all-controlling; all-dictating.” Less formally, one can think of it as uber control-freakdom or ultimate puppet-mastery.

In Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris shows how this mistaken belief in God’s omniderigence is part and parcel of the atheist case against God.

Contrary to the heretical and deceptive universalist teachings of Churchians and globalist gnostics alike, the entire Bible points to the Christian virtue of nationalism:

Was there a viable alternative to universal empire? The ancient Near East had much experience with localized political power in the form of city-states. But for the most part, these were helpless before imperial armies and the ideology of universal empire that motivated them. It is in the Bible that we find the first sustained presentation of a different possibility: a political order based on the independence of a nation living within limited borders alongside other independent nations.

By nation, I mean a number of tribes with a common cultural inheritance, especially a language or religion, and a past history of acting as a body for the common defense and other large-scale enterprises. The Bible systematically promotes the idea that the members of a nation should regard one another as “brothers,” and Mosaic law offered the Israelites a constitution that would bring them together in what would today be called a national state.

The king of such a state would be drawn “from among your brothers.” Its prophets, too, would be “from among you, from among your brothers.” And so would its priests, appointed to guard the traditional laws of the nation and teach them to the king “so that his thoughts should not be lifted above his brothers.” Moreover, Moses sets boundaries for Israel, instructing his people to keep their hands off the lands of neighboring kingdoms like Moav, Edom, and Ammon, which deserve their own independence. As he tells them in God’s name:

Take good heed of yourselves therefore. Meddle not with [the children of Esau], for I will not give you of their land. No, not so much a foot’s breadth. Because I have given Mt. Seir to Esau for a possession. . . . Do not harass Moav, nor contend with them in battle, for I will not give you of their land for a possession, because I have given Ar to the children of Lot for a possession. . . . And when you come near, opposite the children of Ammon, harass them not, nor contend with them, for I will not give you of the land of the children of Ammon any possession, for I have given it to the children of Lot for a possession.

Nor are these passages unique. Throughout the Bible, we find that the political aspiration of the prophets of Israel is not empire but a free and unified nation living in justice and peace amid other free nations.

The Bible thus puts a new political conception on the table: a state of a single nation that is united, self-governing, and uninterested in bringing its neighbors under its rule. This state is governed not by foreigners responsible to a ruler in a distant land but by kings and governors, priests and prophets drawn from the ranks of the nation itself—individuals who are, for just this reason, thought to be better able to stay in touch with the needs of their own people, their “brothers,” including the less fortunate among them.

As one Christian theologian has observed, the Bible mentions all the nations of the world coming together in unity precisely three times. And on each of those three occasions, they are coming together in united opposition to God.

On his recent appearance on Dave Rubin’s show, Jordan Peterson signaled that the globalists are going to attempt to rebrand themselves as universalists. But whether the forces of Babel see their rule over Man as being planetary, galactic, or universal in nature, the important thing is that it is instrinsically opposed to the Will of God as expressed in the Bible, and therefore inherently evil.

Remember, the Kingdom of God is not of the fallen world. Any political ideology that is universalist or imperialist cannot be compatible with that divine Kingdom.

And they abandoned the Word of God. It should be no surprise to learn that the people abandoned them:

America is littered with thousands upon thousands of church buildings that aren’t being used anymore. As you will see below, between 6,000 and 10,000 churches are dying in the United States every single year, and that means that more than 100 will die this week alone.  And of course thousands of others are on life support.  All over the country this weekend, small handfuls of people will gather in huge buildings which once boasted very large congregations.

Good riddance. Many, many more churches need to die. They are not Christian churches, they are Churchian organizations that have been converged and are following the lead of the world into total irrelevance and eventual extinction. When evil men like Fake Pope Francis and feckless frauds like Russell Moore are preaching the Fake News of racism, badthink, and cringing accommodation with a fallen world, there should be no surprise whatsoever when the Holy Spirit leaves the building and the congregation dies.

If your church is preaching against manufactured non-sins such as racism and sexism, it will die. If your church permits women to speak from the pulpit, it will die. If your church is preaching that Jesus requires you to welcome refugees, it will die. If your church is preaching that homosexuality is not sin, it will die. If your church preaches racial equality, it will die.

There is no room for compromise on these issues. None whatsoever. The evidence is conclusive and the science is settled.

A new book by Michael Hudson puts an intriguing economic spin on the Lord’s Prayer, according to a review by Jon Siman:

So let us reconsider Hudson’s fundamental insight in more vivid terms. In ancient Mesopotamian societies it was understood that freedom was preserved by protecting debtors. In what we call Western Civilization, that is, in the plethora of societies that have followed the flowering of the Greek poleis beginning in the eighth century B.C., just the opposite, with only one major exception (Hudson describes the tenth-century A.D. Byzantine Empire of Romanos Lecapenus), has been the case: For us freedom has been understood to sanction the ability of creditors to demand payment from debtors without restraint or oversight. This is the freedom to cannibalize society. This is the freedom to enslave. This is, in the end, the freedom proclaimed by the Chicago School and the mainstream of American economists. And so Hudson emphasizes that our Western notion of freedom has been, for some twenty-eight centuries now, Orwellian in the most literal sense of the word: War is Peace • Freedom is Slavery • Ignorance is Strength. He writes: “A constant dynamic of history has been the drive by financial elites to centralize control in their own hands and manage the economy in predatory, extractive ways. Their ostensible freedom is at the expense of the governing authority and the economy at large. As such, it is the opposite of liberty as conceived in Sumerian times” (p. 266).

And our Orwellian, our neoliberal notion of unrestricted freedom for the creditor dooms us at the very outset of any quest we undertake for a just economic order. Any and every revolution that we wage, no matter how righteous in its conception, is destined to fail.

And we are so doomed, Hudson says, because we have been morally blinded by twenty-eight centuries of deracinated, or as he says, decontextualized history. The true roots of Western Civilization lie not in the Greek poleis that lacked royal oversight to cancel debts, but in the Bronze Age Mesopotamian societies that understood how life, liberty and land would be cyclically restored to debtors again and again. But, in the eighth century B.C., along with the alphabet coming from the Near East to the Greeks, so came the concept of calculating interest on loans. This concept of exponentially-increasing interest was adopted by the Greeks — and subsequently by the Romans — without the balancing concept of Clean Slate amnesty….

After all these centuries, we remain ignorant of the fact that deep in the roots of our civilization is contained the corrective model of cyclical return – what Dominique Charpin calls the “restoration of order” (p. xix). We continue to inundate ourselves with a billion variations of the sales pitch to borrow and borrow, the exhortation to put more and more on credit, because, you know, the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.

Nowhere, Hudson shows, is it more evident that we are blinded by a deracinated, by a decontextualized understanding of our history than in our ignorance of the career of Jesus. Hence the title of the book: And Forgive Them Their Debts and the cover illustration of Jesus flogging the moneylenders — the creditors who do not forgive debts — in the Temple. For centuries English-speakers have recited the Lord’s Prayer with the assumption that they were merely asking for the forgiveness of their trespasses, their theological sins: “… and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us….” is the translation presented in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. What is lost in translation is the fact that Jesus came “to preach the gospel to the poor … to preach the acceptable Year of the Lord”: He came, that is, to proclaim a Jubilee Year, a restoration of deror for debtors: He came to institute a Clean Slate Amnesty (which is what Hebrew דְּרוֹר connotes in this context).

So consider the passage from the Lord’s Prayer literally: … καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν: “… and send away (ἄφες) for us our debts (ὀφειλήματα).” The Latin translation is not only grammatically identical to the Greek, but also shows the Greek word ὀφειλήματα revealingly translated as debita: … et dimitte nobis debita nostra: “… and discharge (dimitte) for us our debts (debita).” There was consequently, on the part of the creditor class, a most pressing and practical reason to have Jesus put to death: He was demanding that they restore the property they had rapaciously taken from their debtors. And after His death there was likewise a most pressing and practical reason to have His Jubilee proclamation of a Clean Slate Amnesty made toothless, that is to say, made merely theological: So the rich could continue to oppress the poor, forever and ever. Amen.

I definitely have to read this book, especially in light of Rothbard’s economic history that essentially reduces the development of modern economics to the gradual relaxations of Christian society’s ban on usury over the centuries. As crazy as it sounds, it is entirely possible that what we think of as a necessity for economic growth is, to the contrary, an integral factor in reestablishing large-scale human slavery.

To paraphrase Philip K. Dick, Jesus Christ’s war against the moneylenders never ended.

Just because some people are inclined to binary-thinking, allow me to be very clear and state that I do not think this literal interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer negates or adulterates in any way the metaphorical debt of sin to which Jesus Christ was without question referring. But given what we know of these matters after centuries of additional evidence concerning the matter, it is the exact opposite of far-fetched to imagine that the literal context is also relevant.

Abuse children and the Roman Catholic Church will protect you for decades. But burn a gay pride logo and the full wrath of the so-called church bureaucracy will promptly descend upon you, as one priest recently learned.

Father Paul Kalchik is no longer the acting pastor of Resurrection Parish following the controversial decision to burn a rainbow flag last week. According to witnesses at the parish, Cardinal Cupich sent two priests, Fr. Dennis Lyle and Fr. Jeremy Thomas, from the Vicar for Priests Office to the church right before 6 p.m. mass on Saturday asking to meet with Fr. Kalchik in private. Fr. Kalchik refused and asked for witnesses to the exchange. What was reported to have happened after that is chilling.

According to sources at the parish as reported by Church Militant, “Lyle and Thomas made clear they were there on order of Cdl. Cupich, who insisted that Kalchik be sent to St. Luke Institute for his ‘psychiatric issues.’ Both vicars for priests had also only days before threatened that Kalchik could have his faculties removed if he failed to comply with Cupich’s orders.” Those threats led to the revoking of a transfer that would have allowed Fr. Kalchik to be close to his aging parents.

Two witnesses, Miriam and Wayne Smith, said that when Fr. Kalchik refused to go with them, the priests became threatening and at one point the cardinal’s men referenced Fr. Kalchik dying. “Fr. Kalchik told those two enforcers that he had Mass to celebrate in the morning and that he was needed in the parish,” the Smiths said. “The response from the two was to ask him, ‘What would happen if you were dead?’ They could have asked, ‘What would happen if you were sick or injured?’ but they asked him what would happen if he was dead.” The Smiths continued, “Based on that it is clear that if any harm came to Fr. Kalchik it would be on the orders of Cdl. Cupich.”

When Fr. Kalchik refused to comply, the Smiths said the cardinal’s emissaries “continued to bully and verbally insult and attack Fr. Kalchik until it was clear that he was not going to do as they demanded because he had done nothing wrong. They left the rectory and everybody was very shaken up because they never expected that kind of behavior from the representative of Cdl. Cupich.”

A staff member who did not want to be named said: “His options were to leave on his own or be taken out forcibly by the police.”

Dear Catholics who are still genuine Christians,

Please bring back the Inquisitions. We are truly sorry for propagating the Black Legend.

Love,

Protestant Christianity

Fake Pope Francine isn’t actually joking:

Greeting journalists Saturday en route to Lithuania, Francis was given a book about the former pope by Polish photographer Grzegorz Galazka. Receiving the large book with a beaming John Paul on the cover, Francis quipped: “(Pope John Paul II) was a saint, I am the devil.”

The servitors of evil just love telling everyone the plain truth in public. It’s as if they’re under a compulsion to do so. And you can’t later claim you weren’t warned.

I think an Inquisition is in order, but a resignation by the so-called “Pope Francis” would certainly be a good start:

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who served at the papal nuncio (that is, Vatican ambassador) to the United States from 2011-2016, has dropped an atomic bomb on Francis’s papacy, charging that “corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy.”

At the Angelus on Sunday, August 12, 2018 Pope Francis said these words: “Everyone is guilty for the good he could have done and did not do … If we do not oppose evil, we tacitly feed it. We need to intervene where evil is spreading; for evil spreads where daring Christians who oppose evil with good are lacking.”

If this is rightly to be considered a serious moral responsibility for every believer, how much graver is it for the Church’s supreme pastor, who in the case of McCarrick not only did not oppose evil but associated himself in doing evil with someone he knew to be deeply corrupt. He followed the advice of someone he knew well to be a pervert, thus multiplying exponentially with his supreme authority the evil done by McCarrick. And how many other evil pastors is Francis still continuing to prop up in their active destruction of the Church!

Francis is abdicating the mandate which Christ gave to Peter to confirm the brethren. Indeed, by his action he has divided them, led them into error, and encouraged the wolves to continue to tear apart the sheep of Christ’s flock.

In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with all of them.

Read the whole thing there. It’s conclusive evidence that the Fake Pope is in league with the lavender mafia. Can anyone here say they are even a little bit surprised? I tend to doubt Bergoglio will resign no matter what further evidence of his corruption becomes known to the public, because the stink of sulfur all but emanates from the man.

Rod Dreher notes: “Vigano’s testimony gives weight to the theory that Benedict XVI resigned because he knew the lavender mafia in the Curia held all the cards, and that he couldn’t do anything.”

Either reverse Vatican II and clear out the Satanists and the homosexuals or shut the whole damn thing down. The Catholic Church, as an institution, has been given over to evil:

The long-awaited state grand jury report into sexual abuse in six Pennsylvania dioceses, including Pittsburgh and Greensburg, has finally been released.

The 884-page document, two years in the making, shines a light into the dark corners of these dioceses going back seven decades, exposing the predators and the efforts of their bishops to protect them.

“Today, the most comprehensive report on child sexual abuse within the church ever produced in our country was released,” Attorney General Josh Shapiro said. “Pennsylvanians can finally learn the extent of sexual abuse in these dioceses. For the first time, we can all begin to understand the systematic cover up by church leaders that followed. The abuse scarred every diocese. The cover up was sophisticated. The church protected the institution at all costs.”

The report begins with the following statement:

“We, the members of this grand jury, need you to hear this. We know some of you have head some of it before. There have been other reports about child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. But never on this scale. For many of us, those earlier stories happened someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: it happened everywhere.”

The report cites 301 priests, clergy and lay teachers with credible allegations against them. There are 99 in the Diocese of Pittsburgh alone.

I’m not a Catholic, but if I was, I would have left some time ago. Jesus Christ is not a Man-made institution and any so-called “church” that hides the truth in order to “protect the institution” does not have the Truth in it. Indeed, now that we know that globalism is neo-Babelism and we can identify the fruits of Vatican II, the idea that the current Vatican is the Whore of Babylon is considerably more credible than it was back in the days of the Know-Nothings.

And yes, any Protestant church or denomination or institution that is institutionally guilty of the same sins should be burned down too.

If you’re a Roman Catholic member of Vatican 2.0, don’t try to defend this massive and cancerous evil in your midst. Either fix it with Vatican 3.0 or leave. If you try to defend the institution, then you are doing no better than the church leaders who are guilty of this systematic cover up. Don’t be a part of the evil.

“For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”
– Matthew 18:20

Neon Revolt helpfully breaks down the significance of Q and what it all means:

The world has long been held hostage by a group of power-brokers I have collectively labelled “The Cabal.” They sit in seats of power around the world, making sure they control governments, wars, money flow, and even now the lives of individuals like you and me. They see us as disposable pawns, a sort of natural resource they can spend at will, and this Cabal seeks to grow and expand its power every single day, through all sorts of subversive action, be it class strife, fomenting economic instability, or sending us to die in foreign lands under the guise of patriotism and duty.

The Cabal is not entirely monolithic, but features many different branches. Despite this, they work together and their goals are much the same: the destruction of the West by any and all means, and the creation of a global mega-state.

A large portion of The Cabal are members of a Secret Society that is little more than a Neo-Babylonian Death Cult, and the higher you advance in the cult, the more mutual blackmail is required of you. You see, the higher ranking members want the ability to destroy the lower ranking members at any time. This is achieved through several means, but recording individuals in honeypots, pedophilic acts, and participation human sacrifice are the primary ways in which this is achieved.

That’s not to say this is done against the will of the individuals being blackmailed. Often, they are willing participants in all this, and enjoy performing these kinds of evil deeds. Such is the face of depravity.

Hillary and Obama are two such members of this Cabal, and though they were high ranking, they are not top dogs (and certainly not since HRC’s failed presidential run in 2016). That day cost them so much power and influence, they didn’t even know what to do. Remember – Hillary didn’t even give a concession speech that night. That was because they never expected her to lose.

Together, as we’ve since learned from the Q drops, they were plotting the complete destruction of the USA (and Russia). And I don’t mean that in some esoteric sense of empires collapsing and coalescing into new empires across time, like the murmurations of flocks birds across the sky. No, I quite literally mean nuclear war, mass drought, disease, and food shortages. I’m talking roving death squads in the streets. The goal was to wipe out two of the biggest threats to the Cabal by making them fight each other, and rule over a fragmented, atomized, neo-Fascist global mega-state, made up of whatever was left over (mostly Europe, Africa, parts of Asia, South America, and Australia).

Remember when I said don’t be surprised if you feel incredulous when reading this?

As hard as it is to believe all of the stuff that has come out to varying degrees so far, as difficult as it is to credit, rest assured that it is Christians who are going to have the most difficult time accepting the degree to which their understanding of not only the world, but their own faith, is incorrect.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that Christianity is false. To the contrary, the more we have learned about the Cabal, its beliefs and objectives, and its methods, the more we have learned that Christianity is not only absolutely true, but absolutely vital. Jesus Christ is truly Man’s only hope in a world ruled by evils both spiritual and material.

The Storm is coming. We don’t know the day or the hour, but it is coming. And we should quite literally thank God for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, both of whom stand between us and all the raging, raving, rancid evil of the Cabal. Pray for their upcoming meeting, pray that both men be granted wisdom and courage, and pray that they are victorious over the evil that seeks to destroy Christianity, Christendom, America, and Russia.

About two-thirds of Russians believe in the existence of a shadowy world government, and most of them also believe it is hostile to their country, according to a recent survey. On Wednesday state-run Russian public opinion research agency VTSIOM released the results of a poll in which 67 percent of Russian citizens said they believe there is a secret world government. Twenty-one percent said they reject the possibility that it exists, and the rest were undecided.

It’s time Americans started to catch up to the Russians again.

Saving Eve adapted my 7 Signs of an Intellectual Charlatan and adapted them to help detect religious charlatans.

One of my favorite bloggers to follow is Vox Day.

I follow him not necessarily because I care what he is talking about. I follow him to learn how to analyze anything.

In my reckoning, the most valuable video/post Vox ever produced is called “7 Signs of an Intellectual Charlatan.” The video is well worth watching in its entirety.

Identifying charlatans is a skill that is woefully lacking among the Body of Christ today. And I am indebted to Vox for pointing out the core patterns of charlatanry. In retrospect, it seems obvious. But until it was pointed out to me, I didn’t quite know how to tell whether I was being duped or not.

So with the aim of equipping fellow believers to avoid the craftiness of false teachers, I’d like to share some observations on how Vox’s Charlatan framework applies specifically to deception in the church.

The 7 Signs of a Religious Charlatan

1. Uses imprecise biblical terms
2. Does not accurately quote the Scriptures
3. Uses theological jargon to answer simple questions
4. Uses systematic theology and catechisms to justify his answers
5. Quotes Bible teachers and theologians rather than the Scriptures
6. Ignores the context
7. Talks about the value of “theological training” instead of knowing the Scriptures

Read the rationales behind the seven signs there. But they are a few of the reasons that I don’t read or pay any attention to most theologians. Unlike Thomas Aquinas and CS Lewis, the vast majority of them are, at the very least, intellectually inconsistent, and most of them strike me as downright shady. I can reliably identify some level of obvious nonsense or bafflegarble in the first chapter of any theologian I read; in the case of some, such as John Piper, it’s usually in the first paragraph.

In my opinion, most theologians are rather like psychologists, disordered individuals who seek answers to their problems in credentials and authorities, who are inclined to rearrange the facts and ignore the logic in order to suit their preconceived notions. I can’t tell you how many times someone has recommended one theologian or another to me as “really wise” or “truly full of the Spirit”, only to see immediately in their work that they are either a) a rambling restater of the obvious or b) a spiritual con artist.

My position on matters theological is straightforward. No one knows what’s truly going on and our ability to comprehend the truth is limited. If even the Apostle Paul only saw as though through a glass, darkly, then we shouldn’t expect or claim to do any better. Also, most people are idiots, so it should not be a surprise that so much of our Sunday School theology is idiotic and incoherent.

Sunday School Teacher: God loves everyone!
The Bible: God hates the wicked with a passion. (Psalm 11:5)

Sunday School Teacher: God knows everything!
The Bible: Only the Father knows the day and the hour. (Matthew 24:36)

I mean, how logically deficient do you have to be in order to not be able to comprehend the way in which that teaching of divine omniscience necessarily and completely rules out the divinity of Jesus Christ? The theological blathering that will be generated in response to that previous sentence should suffice to explain why I pay no attention to theologians or theology enthusiasts.