Faith Heeling

Where we are now:

Many common social-justice phrases have echoes of a catechism: announcing your pronouns or performing a land acknowledgment shows allegiance to a common belief, reassuring a group that everyone present shares the same values. But treating politics like a religion also makes it more emotionally volatile, more tribal (because differences of opinion become matters of good and evil) and more prone to outbreaks of moralizing and piety. “I was thinking about that Marx quote that religion is the opium of the people,” Elizabeth Oldfield, the former director of the Christian think tank Theos, told me. “I think what we’ve got now is [that] politics is the amphetamines of the people.”

Writing for the Atlantic (via MSN), Helen Lewis also noticed something else:

I asked Alex Clare-Young, a nonbinary minister in the United Reformed Church, whether their faith or their gender was more surprising to Generation Z acquaintances. “I think probably being religious,” Clare-Young responded. “I know a lot of LGBTQ+ young people who say it’s harder to come out as Christian in an LGBT space than LGBT in a Christian space.”

Of course it is. In our world, the wrath of the mob is more fearsome than the wrath of God. And you’re more likely to get instant karma if you don’t bow to conventional wisdom. If you see a sign in someone’s yard, proclaiming “In This House We Believe [select platitudes here]”, it’s almost certainly a leftist. I suppose it’s good when they self-identify. But as the old saw goes, the devil is in the details.

44 thoughts on “Faith Heeling

  1. I was in MN some weeks ago for a thing. Took the opportunity to drive by my last house up there. Looks pretty much the same, except there was an “in this house” sign on the lawn.

    Reminded me to post my land when I got home.

  2. Of course it is. In our world, the wrath of the mob is more fearsome than the wrath of God.

    I don’t know D. Weather Denying is a religion, it passes all smell tastes. All leftists are blind acolytes of this religion, so I would not call it the wrath of mob but the wrath of righteous. In a lot of ways, Weather Denier crusade is much more brutal and destructive than Crusades for Christ of old. And then there is a religion of Commiesoci@ism – another destructive religion. Maybe we should just change definition of the word “religion”?

  3. I don’t think we disagree, jpa. In the main, climatistas are modern-day pagans and their priests wear lab coats as vestments.

  4. used to be to free the holy land you walk there and swing a sword to smite infidel now you just tweet lies to destroy enemies so easy can do it from moms basement

  5. Science can’t give an “ought.” You may want to combat global warming because you want the world of your grandchildren to be pleasant, but that want is sentimental, not scientific.
    The idea of science, as defined by Francis Bacon, is to remove the human personality from the observation of nature. The idea of modern science is to put the human personality back into the observation of nature.
    And scientific institutions today are completely dedicated to this idea. The idea that “science is improved if scientists bring their view point to the job” is ridiculous, and it is even more ridiculous when that view point is attached to an ethnic or gender identity.

  6. Hey SCOTUS, remember this?

    “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

  7. And yet religion of climate change is being shoved down our throats. Laws? What laws?

  8. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 08.19.22 : The Other McCain

  9. I don’t have any problem with the vision of justice and mercy explored here.

    But I am wary of it being so associated with religion in this iteration, given the way religion has been used far more often to dehumanize than re-humanize.

    There may be some utility in treating racism or inequality as sin, but only if it is recognized that the sin is structural, not just a result of individual behaviors. And it should also be recognized that far too often religion has been part of that structure.

    2000 years of Christianity brought us where we are today. We really are in a New Age, and religion is part of the old. The failure of religion is what needs to be discussed.

  10. 2000 years of Christianity brought us where we are today. We really are in a New Age, and religion is part of the old. The failure of religion is what needs to be discussed.

    Meet the New Age. Same as the Old Age. In the New Age, every internet troll is a philosopher-king.

    And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
    When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
    As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
    The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

    You’ll recognize their work when you see the impeccable penmanship on the warrant.

  11. You have an awfully hard time justifying the political equality of all human individuals and equal treatment under the law without Christianity. I’ve never seen it doem well, and this is because empirical evidence, the evidence of the senses so prized by materialists, teaches the opposite.
    Materialism is a reversion to paganism: “the strong do what they will, the weak endure what they must.”

  12. Unfortunately, much of American Christianity is focused on the individual’s personal relationship with God and not on the covenantal relationship of the community with God and one another. Racism is a sin, but it is a communal sin as well as a personal one. Frankly, I am not sure, as a culture, we have it in us to repent and reconcile on a communal level.

  13. Say rAT? There’s a bunch of Pentecostals up in Tigerville SC handling copperhead and rattlesnakes. They need your wisdom and guidance, right away.

    Go down there and tell them how ignorant they are: tell about your FaBUloUS LaKEfrONt EsTAte and your SKi ShAK…it will be great.

    Just don’t be eyeballing their kids…they have cable news.

  14. If you don’t believe in God, there are no sins. You are a silly person, Emery.
    There is no repentance without sin. Reconciliation with other human beings is sentimental nonsense without religion.
    Emry’s notions about religion are based on the same ignorance and bigotry as his notions on every other topic he comments about.

  15. “Unfortunately, much of American Christianity is focused on the individual’s personal relationship with God and not on the covenantal relationship of the community with God and one another. Racism is a sin, but it is a communal sin as well as a personal one.” Emery squeaked.

    This nonsense; that faith is collective not individual in nature, is the the identical claptrap the KGB was pushing in Central & South America in the 50s & 60s under the brand Liberation Theology™. It is not surprising that Emery finds the rational compelling despite all New Testament evidence to the contrary.

  16. Even read from a secular point of view, religion was, and is a valuable component of a healthy society.

    Religions kept early people from falling on one another in unnecessary savagery. Catholic prohibition against divorce kept men at home. Jewish and Muslim dietary laws kept food wholesome in times of no refrigeration.

    Today, people of religious faith have the happiest families, and their kids are most successful.

    We’ve seen the filthy sewers of despair dwellers rAT Emery and his ilk inhabit. They will not survive long.

  17. if you think you can repent for the sins of others then you don’t understand sin or repentance

    oh lord, please forgive emery for being such a hateful racist refusing to give his stoeln lakeshore land back to the indians and thank you for helping me not to be like all the other hateful racist lakeshore owners amen

    doesn’t sound like true repentence to me

  18. I keep looking in the NT to find where racism is said to be a sin. Can’t find it.
    Christians are instructed to “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” So maybe that is it.
    OTOH, the OT is full of references to groups of people being wicked with all members of that group being subject to the wrath of the righteous, but I don’t think that is exactly and anti-racist message.

  19. ^^ The ideas of eternal rewards (heaven) and punishments (hell) aren’t found in the Old Testament or in the teachings of Jesus either.

  20. The ideas of eternal rewards (heaven)…
    Emery, what a loser!
    The Kingdom Of God = Heaven
    In the direct teachings of Jesus please review these citations:
    Matthew 19: 23-26
    Matthew 5: 3
    John 14:6
    Luke 18: 25
    Luke 16: 19-31
    John 3: 3-5

    This is just the start, please take the time to read the NT, only this time read for content not confirmation.

    Your pathetic Ignorance brands you unmistakably.

  21. Heaven and hell are not what Jesus preached. Heaven and hell don’t go back to the earliest stages of Christianity, and they’re not in the Old Testament or in Jesus’ teachings. The view that you die and your soul goes to heaven or hell is not found anywhere in the Old Testament, and it’s not what Jesus preached.

  22. I think one of the hardest things for people to get their minds around is that ancient Israelites and then Jews and then Jesus himself and his followers have a very different understanding of what the relationship between what we call body and soul. Our view is that we — you’ve got two things going on in the human parts. So you have your body, your physical being, and you have your soul, this invisible part of you that lives on after death, that you can separate the two and they can exist — the soul can exist outside of the body. That is not a view that was held by ancient Israelites and then Jews, and it’s not even taught in the Old Testament.

  23. ^^Ah! The village atheist speaks!
    The history of Christianity is complex, not simple. The best minds have been wrestling with its demands and its questions for literally two thousand years.
    One of the best explanations of Christian doctrine and dogma is Dante’s The Divine Comedy. It was written in the 1320s, at the high water mark of European Christendom, long before the Reformation.
    Dante tells us that Hell is as much of a creation of a loving God as Heaven.
    The souls suffering in Hell are identified as specific historical individuals, unlike the souls in the Purgatorio or the Paradiso. In the Purgatorio and Paradiso, souls are generalized types, when they are identified as being individual, the individual is a mythic type and not a historical figure.
    All the souls in Hell are there as a result of choices that they made. While living they were believing Christians. They all knew, with certainty, that their actions would deliver them to Hell.
    There is one exception where a pope thought he could cheat God by sinning in such a way that technically it would not be a sin. It did not work. You cannot be absolved from a sin you have not yet committed.
    The tormented souls complain to the Traveler and to Virgil about the torments they endure, but none expresses remorse. None wish that they had done otherwise. None longs to have chosen the path to the Purgatorio or Paradiso rather than Hell. They are their sins. If the damned could feel remorse for their sins, they would not be in Hell. They damned themselves.

  24. Plagiarism is a form of theft, and lying.

    What does the Bible say about vainglorious liars and thieves, rAT?

  25. All questions about Christianity lead you, inevitably, to the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ. All Christian belief relies on this historical truth and ultimately speculation about what it means for Christ to have conquered death. Without the death on the cross and the resurrection, you might as well put your faith in the Rotarians.

  26. Also, we’d be remiss not to observe the target of rAT’s plunder this time is a noted atheist. That wouldn’t matter to rAT though. He steals to sow hatred and discontent, not to further a discussion.

  27. My problem with the Time article is that it is centered too much on the text of the OT and the gospels. It seems to a primer for arguing with Christians who haven’t been in a church since they were in Sunday school, and, unfortunately, there are many of those.
    Nowhere, for example, does Jesus say that his followers are not Jews and do not need to keep the Jewish dietary laws.
    You also have a problem with using the words of Jesus to attack the beliefs of Christians because what do you do with the words spoken by Jesus after the resurrection? It doesn’t really make sense to say “after Jesus came back from the dead, He never claimed that He had been in Heaven or in Hell!”

  28. libs treat politics like religion which makes disputes more vicious because different opinion is not tolerated its heresy which must be punished and purged

    thats why its hard to come out as christian in lgbt space because lgbt is the one true way and all other relgions are infidel

    fine be that way i dont care what i hate is going to the eye doctor for annual checkup and having to wear the branch covidians article of faith mask

  29. “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
    An evil soul producing holy witness
    Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
    A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
    O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”

    Shakespeare anticipated internet trolling.

  30. libs treat politics like religion which makes disputes more vicious because different opinion is not tolerated its heresy which must be punished and purged

    Yep.

  31. Emery, I apologize.

    Among your other deficits, I had forgot that your are a thief(plagiarist for the weak-kneed), a serial thief in fact, who only comes by any thing of value, or indicative of some small intelligence, by theft. I will make sure to keep that in mind when reading your future posts.

    I do suggest, however, that you take the time to read the New Testament yourself rather than wait for some materialist to spoon feed their predigested analyses to you. You could become a better person.

  32. Mac, it never occurs to rAT Emery that every time he attempts to project an aire of intelligence, we all immediately know he’s stealing from someone else, as a matter of course. And always from the first lowbrow degenerate propaganda mill he finds at hand.

    Someone of even modest intelligence who values their self respect would burn with shame being thus identified.

    Even Peevee knows enough to couch his lies in a cloud of inchoate blather, and to slither back into the muck when he’s caught lying. rAT Emery has no such problem. It’s on from one lie to the next…

  33. Fuck you rAT.

    UMMP nailed it down. We know who you stole your comment from. The cheese got snatched away again, and now you’re going g to try and lie your way out of it; of course you are.

    At long last rAT: have you no shame?

  34. It is important, when reading texts from what are now known as the Old and New Testaments, to understand what the people who were active when those texts were written would have understood them to mean.
    Like Paul and John and Luke?
    Paul wrote, in 1 Corinthians, “For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!” You claim to be quite the scholar of the Bible, Emery. What do you think that Paul understood what he wrote to mean?

  35. I will give Emery this much — the idea that Christians, when they die, go to some aethereal realm where they are given wings and a harp and spend an eternity singing the praises of God is folk lore, meaning it is both ridiculous and communicates an important Truth.
    The verse in Acts (thought to be written by Luke) that describes the ascension of the risen to Christ to Heaven is not especially descriptive:
    After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
    They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

    Maybe Emery can tell us what Ehrman thinks of this? After all, Ehrman wrote a book on “Heaven and Hell” and Emery claims to have read it.

  36. Sorry for the threadjack…

    “to understand what the people who were active when those texts were written would have understood them to mean.”

    I found this ironic as it pertains to Em’s comments about certain of our Constitutional rights.

  37. “I asked Alex Clare-Young, a nonbinary minister in the United Reformed Church, whether their faith or their gender was more surprising to Generation Z acquaintances. ‘I think probably being religious,’ Clare-Young responded. ‘I know a lot of LGBTQ+ young people who say it’s harder to come out as Christian in an LGBT space than LGBT in a Christian space.’ ”

    I know plenty of people that wouldn’t consider the United Reformed Church to be Christian. That’s a good thing for the young LGBTQRSTUV&#! They can easily respond to their bigoted, anti-christian, woke acquaintances that “I’m not Christian. I’m a member of a Woke church.”

  38. BTW, the Greek word used by Luke in Acts to describe where Christ went during the Ascension is transliterated as “ouronon,” and it means “the sky” and “the abode of infinite things beyond the sky.” Since Emery claims that he has read the Ehrman book, maybe he can tell us what Ehrman believed Luke’s contemporaries believed that “ouranon” meant?

  39. One of the things that is interesting about Luke is that he was not a Jew, but an educated Greek (he is identified as a physician by Paul). So Luke likely had Aristotelian ideas about the structure of the universe. In Aristotle’s universe, there was the earth at the center, and in concentric shells around the Earth, first the moon, then the various planets (which were each identified with a classical god), and beyond the planets the sphere that contained the unmoving stars. The actual celestial sphere does move over centuries as the Earth’s pole wanders, and the stars upon it move, very slowly, with what astronomers call “proper motion,” but Aristotle did not know this. The domain of the stars, according to Aristotle, was the domain of perfection because it never changed. In Aristotle’s vision of the world, only the imperfect changed because it was not yet what it was meant to be.
    All fine and good, but it is still difficult to make out exactly what happened during the Ascension. The resurrected Christ was a physical human being. Luke makes this very clear in Acts. Christ is described as moving upward, until he is hidden by a cloud.
    So in the Ascension, you have things of incompatible types merging. Christ, the physical human being, is lifted up into eternal perfection in front of witnesses, who watch the process as it occurs.
    It is so strange. Maybe biblical scholar Emery will share his thoughts about where Christ went at the Ascension? Did his physical body become a metaphor for perfection? How does that work? It’s not like this is a thing that happens every day.

  40. Emery, before you opine that Jesus didn’t talk about Heaven and Hell, maybe…try reading the New Testament first? If He didn’t talk about Heaven and Hell, why does He tell the thief on the cross that he’d be with Jesus that day in Paradise? Why did He tell the disciples that it would have been better if he had never been born? Why does He tell the Pharisees that the Ninevites and Queen of the South would be judging them?

    What you’re doing is reading modern liberal theologians, who by and large argue sans evidence that there were some proto-texts that were adapted into their current form. It’s the theological equivalent, really, of Roe v. Wade, finding penumbras of meaning in the fog.

  41. I keep waiting for Emery to pop up here and give us his opinion on the meaning and factual basis of the Ascension & various other Biblical topics, especially contemporary concepts of Heaven, about which he is an expert.
    We know, after all, that he reads books of Biblical commentary as a sort of past time. Why is Emery hiding his wisdom from us?

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