#also i specifically mention history because i think knowing how israel became a nation is crucial to understanding the current situation

[meregrin]

my two cents are that people outside of finland (and even the more left-leaning circles in finland) are not really taking into account that an average person here doesn’t know jack shit about israel or palestine. the first and only time either of them got mentioned in my 12 years of schooling (i’m a few years younger than jere) was an optional history course focusing on post-ww2 history in my final year of high shcool. jere went to vocational school and they don’t teach history at all there so he’s relying on his junior high education which isn’t saying much considering he’s said multiple times he didn’t pay attention at school.

it doesn’t help that the mainstream reporting (which he’s forced to rely on since he doesn’t speak fluent enough english) about the palestinian genocide has been frustratingly neutral and both-sides-y here in finland. obviously some of that is due to journalistic ethics and responsibilities because our news medias can’t get their reporters within gaza’s borders and they can’t report on things unless the information comes from a reputable source or they can fact check them.

all this is to say that i'm willing to bet actual money he doesn’t even know the definition of genocide in finnish, not to mention IDF or zionism or even judaism. those things are simply not taught here and the idea of him being a zionist is laughable. i studied anthropology at university and the amount of times i’ve had to explain fairly simple concepts like colonialism or genocide to people, even highly-educated ones, is staggering. and i didn’t really understand those things either before i went to university. finland used to love to rave about our PISA scores but the truth is that the level of basic education here has been really poor for decades.

[orikoaurora]

Can Palestinian Lives Matter?

“Palestinians don’t exist,” they said. With time this moment would blur, but not fade, mingling with innumerable interactions in which strangers would likewise inform me of my nonexistence. In that moment, though, it was a wholly new experience. I felt the brief flicker of a laugh before the sick sense of outrage landed in my gut. Before I could find the words to respond, the accuser was gone.

How strange, to tell a living, breathing human being, to their face, that they are “unreal.” And what would be the proper defense? How does one reply to a delusion?

Because something happens at the mention of that word Palestinian. In the moment it is uttered.

Palestinians as a people, are visible but rarely seen. We do not “exist” as others do; we have neither a formal country nor any economic or military power to speak of. We have a history and culture, but these are eroded and appropriated more with every passing year. Mostly, we are collectively obscured by what people think they know, what they think we are: threats, troublemakers, terrorists.

This is how we can be in so many headlines and yet die such endless deaths. We die, in part, because that is what the world expects of us. Our name is invoked only in connection to brutality and strife, which are presented as inevitable, our natural state. Reports read like weather reports: The “climate” “heats up” then “boils over” into “another wave of violence.” Our casualties are like the seasons — a crop of dead every few years, usually in Gaza.

All this because we are among the world’s disposable people. What kills us is not only Israeli state violence but the international community’s collective failure to imagine us as human beings. It is the same failure that has allowed so many Black bodies to be murdered in the broad daylight of viral videos, with so little systemic change. As Elizabeth Alexander has written, “Black bodies in pain for public consumption have been an American national spectacle for centuries.” With such a violent collective memory, it’s no wonder white Americans have been so egregiously slow and equivocal in responding to anti-Black violence. For who is more visible in the U.S. than a Black person? Yet who is the most seldom seen?

This is the lethal contradiction that generations of Black intellectuals and activists have worked to dismantle. The “problem of the color line,” as W.E.B. DuBois called it, will only be solved when the U.S., as a whole, grasps the full humanity of Black people, who have been systematically dehumanized. There can be no going forward, in short, until the U.S. internalizes the most basic truth that Black Lives Matter.

In this way, the U.S. and Israel confront a similar moral failing: Years of intentional disenfranchisement, abuse of and theft from a people in the name of another group’s supremacy — in one case, under the banner of whiteness, and in the other, Zionism. Both have gambled on their ability to suppress these peoples’ efforts to resist their oppression, through the means of mass incarceration, state violence, and legal discrimination. And both have seen that even the most brutal crackdowns cannot squelch the human spirit forever.

Black Americans has shown us, again and again, that they will not allow themselves to be made unreal — and this last year, many more people seemed to listen. For Black Americans who routinely face state violence, the murder of George Floyd was tragically unsurprising. Yet this particular death seemed to penetrate the larger American imagination, managing, somehow, to puncture the gloss of indifference with its sheer visceral force, its specificity. Floyd was seen as an individual, a human being, and his name became a movement. “Black Lives Matter” had a resurgence, thanks in part to the sudden recognition by white Americans of a particular Black life, and death.

Palestinians were quick to respond to the George Floyd movement, protesting in solidarity, drawing parallels between their own experiences of mass incarceration, militarized law enforcement, legal discrimination, knees on civilian necks. Floyd’s face decorated stretches of the Israeli barrier wall, alongside murals of Palestinians killed by Israeli police and soldiers, including Iyad Hallaq, an unarmed man with autism, shot on his way home from school. Floyd’s death also prompted discussions in the Palestinian and wider Arab communities about their own anti-Blackness. This internationalism is not new: For years, Palestinian activists have looked to the American civil rights movement, the South African struggle against apartheid, and others for inspiration. They have also offered their solidarity and support to movements abroad, including the Standing Rock protests and other efforts for Indigenous rights.

Perhaps something, this time, will be different. With the newfound skepticism of law enforcement and incarceration wrought by the George Floyd movement, many in the “woke” world seem to have found resonance with the scenes of Palestinian civilian protests throughout the territories and Israel, launching marches of their own around the globe. Perhaps, after a year in which the words “decolonization” and “intersectionality” have become memes, in which social media has become a streamlined highway for outrage and mobilization, this “clash” will be recognized at last for what it is: a fight for the Palestinian right to be human.

Such a shift would be a breakthrough: Just as the U.S. will remain haunted until Black lives are fully, truly, and equally valued, there can be no peace in Israel-Palestine until all the lives involved are reckoned with as human. Such a reckoning is understandably terrifying for nations built on the systematic denial of certain humanities, but there is no other way. And if the last year has taught us anything, it is that no odds can outmatch the individual’s need for dignity.

“The myths of self-defense” — Israel’s — “and both sides are becoming more and more penetrable,” Mohammed el-Kurd, whose family is facing forced displacement from their home in Sheikh Jarrah, said in a CNN interview this week. “People are being able to see through these myths and call an occupation for what it is and an aggressor for what it is.”

And perhaps, too, they will begin to see us.

[ruminativerabbi]

COVID-Diary, Week Ten

The prize for Scripture’s least celebrated rhetorical question should probably go to Zechariah ben Berechia ben Iddo, one of the three prophets who presided over the initial stages of Israel’s mid-sixth century BCE return to Zion after captivity in Babylon.

Looking out at the unfinishedness that characterized basically everything his eye could see—the so-far-only-partially-rebuilt walls of Jerusalem, the so-far-unsuccessful effort to rebuild the Temple and turn it into a functioning place of worship, the so-far-fruitless effort to place a scion of the House of David on the throne of Israel, and the so-far-failed effort to bring the descendants of the original exiles en masse back to the Jewish homeland and there to re-establish themselves, if not quite as a free people in its own place, then at least as a semi-autonomous ethnicity within the vast reaches of the Persian Empire—looking out at all that (and possibly remembering his older prophet-colleague’s promise that theirs was to be a day of “wholly new things”), the prophet acidulously asks his best question. Mi baz l’yom k’tanot? Are you really going to disrespect our moment in history as a nothing but a yom k’tanot, as “a day of small things” and negligible accomplishments?

It won’t matter in the long run, he promises, because the naysayers and scoffers will eventually all abandon their pessimism and rejoice in the nation’s future successes in all of the above undertakings. And, the prophet adds, the eyes of God are truly trained on the people at this specific juncture in their history, taking it all in and watching to see whether the people can summon up the will to do the right thing, to persevere, to keep at it…even despite the overwhelming nature of each single one of the tasks facing it. And who can say that small successes won’t turn into big ones? If I can summon up optimism in the face of the overwhelming nature of the tasks facing us all, the prophet almost says out loud, so why shouldn’t you also feel at least slightly hopeful? Is that really asking too much?

It’s one of my favorite passages in all the prophetic books, bringing together all my favorite COVID-era themes: guilt, irony, hope, resilience, and courage. And this truly is a day of small things, of small advances that feel unimportant in the larger picture. Last week, I wrote to you all about the dangers of magical thinking. This week, I’d like to write about a different danger facing us all: the danger of sinking into depression born of what we perceive to be realism, of doing precisely what the prophet forbade: being dismissive of small things because they aren’t big things, thus missing the opportunity to build on what already exists and, at least possibly, make small accomplishments into large ones.

The plague has taken a lot from each of us and some things from us all. Pleasures that once seemed have-able merely for the asking—heading out with a friend for a walk or a coffee somewhere, successfully finding an hour in an otherwise jammed week to work out at the gym, or to go for a swim, or to stop by the kids’ place to take the grandkids for an unexpected ice cream—even these simplest of life’s pleasures have all been taken from us. And yet these horrific weeks in which deaths in New York State have almost hit the 30,000 mark (of which almost 2,000 in Nassau County alone), these weeks that have taken so much from us and made us afraid to turn on the news at night lest we hear even more bad news, these weeks have also brought us small things—Zechariah’s k’tanot—to be grateful for.

There are lots of things I could mention. The curve has clearly flattened. At least some of the most dramatic efforts to deal with COVID—the transformation of the Javits Center into a US Army-run COVID hospital, for example, or the setting up of a field hospital for COVID patients in Central Park—have been abandoned as local hospitals have become more able to deal with all the COVID patients who require hospitalization. The transformation of society—something I once thought Americans, and particularly New Yorkers, would balk at taking seriously—feels almost completely successful: I went for my daily 2-mile walk yesterday and do not believe I passed a single person in the street who wasn’t wearing a protective mask. We’ve all learned how to deal with risks that must be taken—learning how to go shopping at 6 AM, for example, or how to order groceries without venturing into a grocery store—and the disruption feels, to me at least, minimal. Yes, these are all small things. Yes, well over 80,000 Americans have died in the course of the last few months. Yes, almost 1.4 million Americans have been confirmed as COVID-ill, which number is definitely far too low since, as of today, a mere 9,623,336 Americans have been tested for the virus…out of a population of over 331,000,000. Yes to all the above! But mi baz l’yom k’tanot? Are we really going to look past the successes because they are, in the end, our latter-day version of the prophet’s small things? It wasn’t a good idea in ancient times. And it’s not a good plan for today either.

I have lately sought solace in familiar places. You all know that I read a lot, that reading is my refuge from the world, my go-to place when I need to withdraw for a bit from the maelstrom and regroup internally and intellectually. It’s been that way with me my whole life, even when I was a boy and certainly when I was a teenager. And in this way too the boy became the father to the man—but it’s the direction of my reading that the age of COVID has altered. I’m usually all about new fiction. In my usual way I will share with my readers—possibly in this very space—an account of the books I have read in the past year and recommend as summer reading. And I’ve read some new authors this year that I’m eager to share with you all—American authors like Richard Morais or Madeline Miller, but also writers from more exotic climes like Cixin Liu, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, or Daniel Kehlmann. For the last few weeks, however, I’ve been finding solace and calm by returning to some familiar places and expanding those specific horizons slightly.

I somehow realized that I had read all of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels but one, so I found and read a copy of his first book, Fanshawe, a work he was later on so ashamed of that he personally bought up all the unsold copies he could find and burned them in his own oven. That led me to notice that I had read all of Herman Melville’s novels (regular readers of these letters will know how great a fan I am) except for The Confidence Man (his last novel other than the unfinished Billy Budd), so I read that too. And now I have moved on to Mark Twain.

I am among those who think of Huckleberry Finn as the single greatest American novel. Like most people my age, I first read it when I was in high school. (I’m sure I had no real idea what it was about, which was true of any number of books assigned to us back in the day.) My idea was to re-read it, possibly after re-reading Tom Sawyer. But then I began to realize just how many holes there were in my effort to read all of Twain. It turns out there are “other” Tom Sawyer novels, books I don’t recall even hearing about and am certain I never read. So I decided to read them now…and then moved on to my current plan to read or re-read all of Twain. And it’s working, too: the more I read of Twain, the more comfortable I’ve been feeling, the more grounded, the more calm, the more ready to contextualize this whole corona-thing and see it in the context of the larger pageant of life in these United States over the last century and a half.

I began with The Prince and the Pauper, yet another of Twain’s books I somehow never actually read. Does reading the Classic Comics version count? Probably not. Nor should it matter that I remember watching the book’s three-part adaptation on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color with my parents in 1962. Nor that I loved the 1977 movie version featuring Rex Harrison, Charlton Heston, Ernest Borgnine, George C. Scott, Oliver Reed, and Raquel Welch, which was for some reason distributed in the U.S. under the title, Crossed Swords. Twain didn’t write any of the above: he wrote a novel, published it in 1882 (just after the birth of one of my grandmothers and just before the other’s), and that is what I set myself to read.

On the surface, it’s a funny story about two eight-year-old boys, one the crown prince of England and the other an impoverished beggar living with a violent, angry father, and about how they manage (almost believably) to trade places and try on each other’s life for size. It’s well done, too—lots of surprise plot twists and a very engaging style that held my interest for as long as I was reading even despite the fact that I knew how it ended. But on a deeper level, it’s about something else entirely—about the nature of identity, about the question of whether you are how you perceive yourself  or how others perceive you, about the fragility of individuality, and about the fluidity of the sense of self we all take for granted when we look in the mirror and, seeing ourselves looking back, take that experience as reflective of immutable reality.

And, for readers in the age of COVID, it’s also about finding a way to retain our sense of ourselves as unique beings when the entire world changes on a dime, when the palace vanishes and you find yourself suddenly on your own in a world you barely recognize, when you wake up one morning and—for reasons even you yourself can’t really fathom—nothing is as it was and your sole choice is between negotiating a brand new normal or being left behind as the universe moves forward. It’s a clever book about the nature of self-awareness, about the durable nature of personality, about the ability of the background to alter the foreground—but also about the limits that inhere in that ability when the people standing at the front of the stage insist on maintaining their allegiance to their own personalities even under the most peculiar and unforeseen circumstances.

If you’ve never read it, I recommend Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper as a good place to re-introduce yourself to one of our greatest authors. I plan to keep reading too, and I’ll report back to you as I make progress. When summer comes, I’ll share with you my recommendations for summer reading as I always do. But in the meantime, it’s just me and Sam Clemens on my back porch when the afternoon coffee is ready and I find the courage to turn my phone off for forty or fifty minutes and step into the world of a great man’s imagination. Within the context of appropriate social distancing, I invite you all to join me!

[whetstonefires]

sometimes i think about christianity and jesus and what the hell he would have made of his religion and the way it developed.

not for any of the big, ethical or cosmological issues because frankly on most of those either i have no idea or i’m absolutely certain he would have flipped tables.

no, it’s the politics of it.

it’s the fact that Mark was writing in a time when the major uprising had been crushed and the Temple had been sacked, and everyone in what had been the kingdoms of Israel was choosing sides in an effort to survive being colonized, physically and emotionally and spiritually.

the fact that in a milieu where the available political positions ranged from ‘patriotic terrorist living in a cave’ to ‘imperial administrator’ and the iron fist was coming down hard, he chose to write a story of his sect’s hero being executed for sedition by Rome and cast it as almost entirely an act of his own people.

something done by all the groups he personally had beef with all those decades later, which afaik at that point was most Jews, because Christian Jews with all their heresy were getting more and more edged out of Jewish spaces by the mainstream--particularly the core rabbinical movement that was helping everyone cope with the loss of the Temple, aka the Pharisees.

(which, you know, explains a lot.)

it’s the fact that choosing that Gospel of all the ones floating around, along with two others heavily based on it, was a choice made under the physical eye of Emperor Constantine of fucking Rome, who sat his personal ass at the Council of Nicea in 325 when the canon was selected, when he chose to rebuild the Roman religio around this deeply inspirational cult in hopes of restoring imperial morale, and called the Elders of the Church together to standardize the theology for government use.

it’s the fact that so many of the nations worshiping in the name of jesus have also considered themselves the rightful inheritors of Rome.

and i’m not talking about the Catholic Church here specifically, because it’s all of them, including the eventual ones who sliced major functioning chunks out of their practical theology in the attempt to de-Romanize; the entire structure of so-called Western Civ is built on the twin pillars of Jesus and Rome and just.

can we all stop a little more often and think about how fucking weird that is. how utterly, if-i-put-this-in-a-fantasy-novel-people-would-scoff ridiculous. because when i see the christians-versus-romans thing it’s always the lions, being eaten by fucking lions, the ‘persecution by the pagans’ thing, okay, we don’t...nobody talks about how, a while after it stopped being illegal, the Romans became the Christians. Largely because this one dude’s mom got really into it and that dude was in the running for Emperor.

(i’m not touching whether he really got an omen or if he just saw an opportunity okay, he definitely saw an opportunity and Helena definitely deserves credit, which she got, in her lifetime, so bully for her. and her sainthood.)

Constantine made his move and it was done; just decades later Julian tried to take it back and everybody was like ‘lol no, the old gods are dead’ and he went down in history as Julian the Apostate. so christianity and empire became so deeply intertwined there’s no untangling them, because Constantine baked it right into the text.

and it’s weird! did i mention?

it’s so fuckening weird, sure Jesus was into a little light multiculturalism and not washing his hands before he ate like a savage, but assuming he did not know the entire future at all times (which is a thing i 100% assume) there is no way he would have called that, ever.

and i don’t think he’d have been happy either?!?

sure we’ve got ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’ but even assuming that’s an accurate report (frankly unlikely imo) and he wasn’t that stripe of political firebrand and in fact actively opposed going to war and getting squashed (much more likely), Herod was a Roman appointee. (and also died before Jesus was born but never mind lmao.) Jesus was i think not fond of his nation having been subjugated.

he grew up in backwater lack-water mountains that hadn’t even been assimilated! he recognizably derives from a rich tradition of Jewish holy figures cussing their people out for losing track of the correct way to do Judaism! which you don’t do when you think the current situation is desirable!

Also.

Rome killed him. Crucifixion is a very signature Roman way of killing people! people they didn’t respect! it’s like a goddamn Imperial calling card. after the Spartacus War they lined a major highway with rebel slaves on crosses.

(that was. the late republic technically. but you don’t need an emperor to have an empire.)

honestly the fact that Mark managed to elide that association as far as he did in favor of accentuating in-fighting is astonishing, and probably owes a lot to the fact that by the time he was writing Judea had been Roman for a century and that was just how executions happened. but SERIOUSLY.

The historical Pontius Pilate is indicated by all surviving contemporary documents to have been a shitty abusive colonial administrator who would absolutely have executed a dude for having a cult even if he wasn’t preaching incendiary material and attacking people in public.

being crucified by Rome is like being hauled up in front of a firing squad, or hanged, only slower.

(i feel like it’s oddly not that widely known considering the prevalence of Stigmata Dude that the point of doing the feet was to make it much much slower, because if they left you hanging from just your arms you’d suffocate horribly in relatively short order but if they do the feet too you get to die of thirst. longinus is for this reason a really interesting figure.)

anyway as a student of western mythology the aftershocks of the incredibly improbable cultural appropriation of the Anointed One cult by the Empire never cease to leave me shook.

[heartforchrist]

The Great Falling Away... Welcoming The Signs Of The End Times

Falling Away....

The Bible indicates that there will be a great apostasy during the end times. The “great apostasy” is mentioned in 2 Thessalonians 2:3 The KJV calls it the “falling away,” while the NIV and ESV call it “the rebellion.” And that’s what an apostasy is: a rebellion, an abandonment of the truth. The end times will include a wholesale rejection of God’s revelation, a further “falling away” of an already fallen world.

Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first. 2 Thessalonians 2:3. The Apostle did not want the brethren to confuse the Rapture of the Church with the Revelation of Jesus Christ when He comes to set up His kingdom. God’s Word tells us that certain events will transpire before Christ establishes His kingdom on earth. “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day [the day of Christ] shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition” (2 Thessalonians 2:3). Here the Bible tells of the sign of the coming of the Antichrist—apostasy. As we look at Christendom today, we see in many circles a departure from the faith, people turning away from God and holiness, often “having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof” (2 Timothy 3:5). The falling away includes many who deny the virgin birth of Jesus Christ and deny that He is the divine Son of God. Some professing Christians have grown lukewarm, linking hands with the world. However, the Word says, “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). This “mystery of iniquity” (2 Thessalonians 2:7) was already working in the days of the Apostles, but there was, and is, a hindering power—the Holy Spirit in His present office as the reprover of the world and gatherer of the Church. When this restraining One is taken from the world at the Rapture of the Church, then the Antichrist will be revealed.

Referring to the false teaching he mentioned in verse 2, Paul tells the Thessalonians not to allow anyone to deceive them concerning the day of the Lord. Obviously, some of the Christians at Thessalonica had fallen victim to an erroneous teaching: that the day of the Lord was already in progress. Paul explains in this verse that it will not begin until two events transpire.

First, there will be "the rebellion." This likely means an overt and extreme revolt against truth. The word translated "rebellion" can also be translated, "the falling away," "the apostasy," or "the departure." The use of a definite article—"the" in English, from hē in Greek—attached to the word for "rebellion" indicates a specific event previously mentioned in the passage. It may refer to Israel's revolt against Old Testament teaching when the nation turns to idolatry. Perhaps it refers to the state of the world following the departure of the church due to the rapture. It is noteworthy that Paul describes the rapture in verse 1 as "the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathering together to him."

The second event Paul mentions in verse 3 is the appearance of "the man of lawlessness," "the son of destruction." God will punish the man of lawlessness by consigning him to eternal punishment in the lake of fire (Revelation 19:20–21).

Throughout history there have been many times when more people chose wickedness than righteousness. When this happens, people often live without prophets or priesthood authority for a time. The Great Apostasy happened after people rejected and tried to change the pure truths and organization of the Church established by the Savior. The first to speak of apostasy in the end times was the Lord Jesus Himself. He prophesied that in a coming time of tribulation this would be seen in a particular way, “At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people” (Matt 24:10-11). The same word is used in the parable of the sower and the four soils. From the seed that falls in stony places, it says: “But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away” (Matt 13:21). Although the Word of God has had some effect on them, they fall away as soon as there are problems. The Lord Jesus called deception one of the most important end-time signs before His coming in glory. It is the only sign that is repeated three times in Matthew 24 (verses 4-5, 11, 23-26). And, although the culmination of the seduction will come in the last great tribulation period, we already see the harbingers of it. Elsewhere Paul says, “Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils” (1 Tim 4:1). Or, “Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God” (Heb 3:12). And, in 2 Timothy 4:4, in the context of warnings about the end times, Paul declares: “And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.” Christianity as a whole not only includes the true believers in Jesus Christ, but also all those who call themselves Christians culturally, but do not believe in their hearts. The whole West and many other parts of the world were influenced by Christianity and the Bible. We see this in history, literature, laws, habits, education, values and traditions, art, and in many other things…even in the division of our era into BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, “in the year of our Lord”). It is frightening to see just how much has been lost in the last decades. Christian values are becoming a “scandal,” a motivation for mockery, contempt, and even persecution. Unfortunately, even true believers can be influenced by these worldly tendencies. In the context of 2 Timothy, Paul warns against a very dangerous time. If we now want to know whether the coming of the Lord is near, all we have to do is read the last words of the apostle Paul. In the second letter to Timothy, which could also be described as his will, the apostle shows the qualities that will characterize people in the end times. He introduces the subject with a grave warning: “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come” (2 Tim 3:1). The qualities the apostle now begins to mention are not much different from those in Romans 1, where people are generally described who want to know nothing of God. Why, then, this serious warning? Not because the danger of the “last days” originates with people who are far from God, but because these evil qualities are visible where many consider (or considered) themselves Christians. The sexual and feminist revolution made fornication and infidelity something worth striving for, an expression of supposed authenticity and true love. The deliberate rejection of Christian thought exploded: on the one hand, more and more people turned to Eastern and demonic religions in their search for meaning; and on the other hand, the theory of evolution increasingly received the status of religious dogma. The decline in ethical reasoning has developed far-reaching consequences in the moral behavior of many. Drug use grew out of control. Open Satanism became “cool” (with the threadbare justification, “We don’t really believe in the devil”). All of this perverted so-called Christianity as never before. Some of the effects of this large-scale apostasy can be seen in 2 Timothy 3. When Paul speaks of the “last days,” he already means the time of Timothy (v. 5). But it is evident that the falling away has reached an unprecedented peak today. Paul starts with “lovers of their own selves.” The people of the end times are egocentric, selfish, and boastful. That is the essence of sin. The center of these self-loving people is themselves. It is the realm of the ego. And when the ego rules, there is no room for others. We see this today in many ways. Everything is about oneself, about self-discovery, about “my identity.” “I believe,” “I think,” “I want” is more important than the will of God. For self-loving people, there is no time for God and His interests. At most, He gets what still remains after the ego has been fulfilled. A profane proof of this development is self-portrayal online. We’ve become a selfie-society, where the big ego always appears first in the picture. This self-love is also expressed in an oversized love for one’s own body. Anyone today who doesn’t feel comfortable with it at best covers it with tattoos, undergoes cosmetic surgery, or, in the worst case, changes their sex. This self-love, in which man stands alone in the center and thinks himself the highest authority in heaven and earth, has long since infiltrated the churches. The feel-good theology of our time says, “God wants you to feel good. So only do what makes you feel good. It has to be right for you.” It gives license to do everything that brings fun, pleasure, or enjoyment. Whether it agrees with God’s Word is no longer important. Biblical principles such as devotion, being living sacrifices (Rom 12:2), or abstinence (Gal 5:24) are no longer modern and are barely heard from the pulpits. A steep falling away is occurring. Roman Catholics are now led by a Pope who denies cardinal doctrines and demonstrates his love for creation above the Creator. Protestants are led by mostly non-educated, self-centered, money-hungry false prophets whose only good use is to provide fodder for the Babylon Bee. Meanwhile, people in the pews are checking out, and this will only increase in the wake of the coronavirus. The mainstream media, once they start paying attention to the weakness of the modern church, will mount an all out attack. It is already beginning: "Some experts think the coronavirus could reshape the country's religious landscape and wipe out many small houses of worship." -- Washington Post, 04/24/20 This they said, I think, with glee. In spite of the fact that the Pope and the megachurch pastors get most of the religious press coverage in the world, the most common expression of the visible church is the small church, with 50-100 in regular attendance. If these can be wiped out, Christianity will be wiped out. But we will not fall or fail. The gates of Hell, the power of politics, and the mainstream media cannot stand against us. The best and strongest example of real, biblical Christianity will always be found in the small, Reformed, church. It is here that the Pastors and Elders and Deacons and Members know one another, love one another, help one another, and hold one another accountable. It is here that the Five Solas and the Doctrines of Grace provide a sure and solid theological foundation. It is here where the best defenses exist against the world, the flesh, and the devil. When it is time to come back to church, look for a small church sign in your community. It is a sign of the times. It is here you can find God, and find grace, to sustain you until the day you die, or until Christ comes again, whichever comes first.

[asecondspinonpolitics]

Why has there been silence on the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa?

There is one issue on which conservatives have largely won on the side of recognizing and addressing injustice. Which injustice? The persecution of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa.

I think this addresses what, I think, can at times be three of some of the common Achilles’ heels of modern progressivism:

1) Viewing groups from the angle of oppressed vs non-oppressed, even when an “oppressed” class actually does not have the moral high ground in terms of actions. Or viewing issues in terms of where it is easier to feel sympathy. A few ways this has manifested before:

a) In the shooting of Michael Brown, in all likelihood the officer seemed to have taken justifiable action in self-defense. Liberals seemed to largely ignore the fact that Michael Brown grabbed a weapon from a police officer…largely a threat on his own life. What other reason would there be for taking such an action? Such an action is clearly grounds for someone’s life to be in jeopardy.

While the officers actions may not have been perfect (and I will leave that open for debate), in terms of moral high ground, Michael Brown arguably committed a much worse offense.

However, Michael Brown was an African-American (a group that truthfully, is often targeted if not intentionally by law enforcement), and unarmed. Darren Wilson was armed, Caucasian, and an officer. It was a situation of police confrontation in which African-Americans are often the victims of unfair bias at a critical time.

Not in this case, though.

The facts were often overlooked because one party to the situation appeared to belong to a group often oppressed or appeared to have less power in the situation.

b) The aftermath of this and many other confrontations. After rioting happened, the reaction was often “we shouldn’t be concerned that riots happened, we should be asking why these people feel pushed to commit the acts they did (rioters)”. Specifically, that African-Americans have felt pushed to commit acts of vandalism due to their oppressed treatment. I even saw one article entitled “Why I don’t condemn rioting, burning, and looting: I understand black rage”.

Frankly, I think it’s insulting to people to suggest they can’t be held accountable to their actions. It’s basically saying, “they didn’t know any better”.

It was seeing this through the lens of oppression, even when the rioters were actually the oppressors in that case.

c) The 2014 conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. With the exception of Fox News, most news media would show footage of Palestinians deaths by Israeli airstrikes but with limited, or no, discussion of either the reason why Israel was instigating airstrikes at all - the initial threats against Israel-or the tactics often used by Hamas, that of the use of human shields, which was much more to blame for the deaths of Palestinians themselves than actions by Israel.

Rarely was Hamas’ attempts at indiscriminate slaughter of civilians brought up (as opposed to Israeli’s attempts to avoid civilians), or the facts that it uses its own citizens as human shields to both gather support and make attacking their targets more difficult for Israel with civilians in the way.

When footage was shown of a school, or hospital, being hit, yes, it was heart-breaking. However, should it be asked why Israel was striking schools and hospitals?

Hamas purposely stores weapons near civilian schools, hospitals, etc, so that Israel will either hit these places, killing civilians and garnering bad press, or avoid hitting them. Either way, it clearly places civilians in harms way, unnecessarily.

Israel’s actions were also in the defensive.

Why was this so? It may have been because of the fact that Israel was the successor in the attack, that that those actually killed were generally Palestinians. Palestine is also a largely poor, and (truthfully) oft-discriminated against territory.

It became easier to focus on which side had had more damage done to it, than which side had committed a higher moral transgression. Even though there were many Palestinian victims by Israeli strikes, it was worth nothing that Hamas was the truly culpable party

Having compassion is important, but moral discernment and correct analysis and verdict of the situation was necessary as well.

2) An sometimes unwillingness to discuss difficult topics to avoid offense.

3) An unconscious prejudice revealed through having a lower expectation of certain people

Think of it this way. When we are not critical of drop-out rates in an inner city high school, is it possible that subtly, and often unconsciously, we may be saying we don’t expect better of the poor? That they don’t know any better?

The Israeli-Palestinian standoff of 2014 may have also shown this too. Could it be that we don’t expect better of people from developing countries, so we don’t react when we see them committing terrorist acts? We hold a developed, Western country, to higher standards because as such we expect of it.

How does this apply to persecution of Christians in the Middle East?

1) When we think of Christians, we think of wealthy, Western people, that constitute a majority. When we think of Muslims, we tend to think of a poor, oppressed, minority group. This is really unintentional, but our intuition is powerful. Thus, we become accustomed to thinking of Muslims as belonging to an oppressed class (which we should not anyway, as people should not be placed n groups anyway). Due to our unconscious categorizations, we generally think of one group as the traditionally oppressed group, and one as the group that is less oppressed, or even sometimes oppresses themselves. When we view a group as the oppressed on, we do not criticize it as much or see it as capable of being the oppressors themselves.

We’re also used to associating the religion of Christianity with persecution and intolerance itself, be it the Crusades, burnings at the stake, or the Salem Witch Trials. This is the intuitive thinking we have, and so when it is reversed, when Christians are instead being persecuted, it seems counterintuitive.

2) In order to state that it is specifically Christians being killed, it has to be argued that there is a reason having to do with their Christian belief that they are being killed. Why is Christian belief being opposed? What motivates opposition to it?

In order to be able to identify exactly what is happening, the motives of those doing the persecution have to be identified. What are their motives?

Aside from whether it is justifiable based on the texts of the Quran or the rationalization of a few, this is what the motives of those attacking Christians are.

Christians are, by those seeking to persecute them, being labelled as unbelievers, or apostates, those who have left the faith, if they were once practitioners of Islam. In fact, it is not only Christians experiencing this, but other religious minorities as well, such as those of the Bahá'í faith. Christians happen to be the largest group experiencing this in that part of the world.

The appearance (even if not actually stating so) of implying Islam as being an inspiration towards violence, opening the door to speaking about Muslims as a group or anti-Muslim prejudice, is something progressives want to avoid. Yet it is necessary to state that, if not necessarily correct Islamic belief, that the interpretation of Islam used by those committing these actions is the reason why this is occurring, and would not be occurring to Christians specifically otherwise.

It is true that the Bible was used to justify the Salem Witch Trials, whether or not this could be considered accurate interpretation of the faith. For a history book to not include this would left out a basic explanation of why those executed were accused of witchcraft.

As a side note, only to mention this in context, I consider myself to be a Christian, and would still want the Salem Witch Trials to be fully explained by history books.

3) Do we have a subtle prejudice against people of poorer, non-Western, less educated nations? That we don’t see them being as advanced as us, so we don’t expect advanced behavior of them (even though we should)?

If we see people as being like us, we told them to the same standards we do. We would expect them to act the way we would act, and hold them accountable when they don’t.

Do we not see peoples of developing nations as being like us? As such, do we not have as high expectations of their behavior?

Is this a failure for us to hold the Middle Eastern, and North African world, accountable? Is this a result of our own prejudices? That we expect incivility from these nations, and so don’t react when it occurs there?

We should expect the same civility we would expect of other Western nations.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what motivates our behavior, when its based largely on intuitive and unconscious thinking. These are helpful places to start, however.

[realeyesrealizerealtruth-blog]

God, Science, Deception and Truth

Personally, I don’t understand how science is even in opposition to Faith/God, but it’s should not EVER be separated from anything, especially science. That’s why it’s Satan’s biggest, or one of anyway, deceptions. I live, study, and love to study psychology. I find it to be useful and obviously it is being used very much. Unfortunately, for all the wrong ways. It’s pretty much being studied to manipulate pretty much everyone who cannot reference Truth from anything and everything they read, watch, do, or believe they’re doing as a choice they’re making on their own.

Its’ basis and entire issue once again, as always, is pride. Science refuses to give up the idea that they cannot know everything unless God allows them to. So, the amount of money (billions) we’re spending in space exploration is staggering. But, in doing so, science is finding only more proof that science keeps failing itself but I still realize the field isn’t entirely useless or that studies and ways to do so are possible and good but only if God’s values and morals are applied to such studies.

In order to know anything or know what reality is sometimes, we have to have a starting point. For science to think they have an ability to base all life, existence and things on empirical evidence, as they call it, is nonsense. In reality, they know that theories are not facts. But first, scientists and inventors alike have to have a basis for their ideas. Usually, it begins with the fact that humans are prone to want to reason. I believe this is what gets us into trouble.

I am aware that I was told a lot of things as a child and then learned things were not even real history at the high school level that I was being taught these things. Good thing I decided (or did I?) to stop paying attention to the teachers in pretty much all the classes I took in high school. I studied hard from age 7 or 8 to get into the G.A.T.E. Program to then already be at college reading level in the 7th grade, which, in hindsight as all things in my life are, it may not be the wisest decision to give children depressing reads at that age and not explain much at all to the children, which by the way, I’m unsure if they all really even realize this today but, the majority of the kids in the G.A.T.E. class were dealing with issues they are clueless were even issues altogether and sadly, I won’t know why until age 40 of all ages (but know why 40 is a specifically perfect age and amount of years) to have The Holy Spirit living in me, which I’m aware is The Holy Spirit that I learned of but never understood or truly experienced until then and I had very limited understanding as well until then of the Bible and things of God, told me all about my life and not only did He but within a blink of an eye did He awaken my sleeping mind or blinded eyes.

I grew up with non-believing parents or shall I say rather, non-practicing parents and had no guidance whatsoever but had to survive from age 2001–2015 at the hands of the professionals in the psychiatric field and field of psychology and these are still the ones still claiming they are all more qualified than me based off of the obvious evidence that I do have proving otherwise, that science supposedly failed me as well as the “system” and God is still saying it’s not that science or system failed me because it’s not the field of studying things or the system itself that’s the issue. The problems with the fields of study and system is rooted in pride. Proverbs 16:18 states this: Pride goes before destruction, haughtiness before a fall. I’m not a biblical scholar, but the majority of pastors do go to Bible College and study not only the Holy Bible but other religions as well. And depending on not only the leader in each and every leadership position but also the member’s commitment to Christ and reading His Word, many believers may never truly be saved but believe that they are saved and sadly, learn all too late that it was never the case. It is not that easy for many to understand inside and outside of our churches today. Any good pastor will tell you not to believe his word or authority on anything he teaches on any given service but to search the scriptures yourself and to test the spirits and pray for discernment. But, unfortunately, it’s very much dividing the church for many years on different interpretations, things taken literally without context of the overall, whole, complete story makes for much confusion. The Bible is one and only one book that’s an entire new book each time you open it, regardless of the repeated reading of the same verses, due to the nature of the human being and our ability to read that one Book and personally feel convicted or realize that it’s talking about you or reminding you of, or revealing itself to you things that you cannot deny is Truth. Many, many people are struggling with The Word of God (The Holy Bible) and turning away from God altogether because of this truth.

Which brings me back to this deception that atheism and Christianity is a debate. Science and some of its’ theories, such as man evolving from Apes makes no rational sense considering some of the apes must’ve been denied and/or left out of the awesome evolutionary “privileges” because as we all know apes are still around…some in zoos in the Unites States as I’m certain the apes did not wander over to the zoo…in a cage by choice. But, if we meditate for just a moment on how these United States became a nation altogether, we are aware there were obvious deceptions and opportunities and advances in technology, i.e. guns, medicine, etc.) so, obviously these apes, which by their strength can tear an apart limb to limb, were “brought” over to these zoos, not to mention all the other ways we abuse technology such as weapons and medicines to harm people.

In actuality, as the pride of scientists and enemy’s deceptions have attempted to overtake me, my actual life story proves in itself that science goes hand and hand with God. God made man, woman and all things and allowed whichever scientist, who would at first be considered and still known as “mad scientist” to study and invent things as was and still is gift and blessing from God Himself. However, we give a lot of credit to inventors, scientists, etc. I’m unsure which ones gave glory to God after they proved or invented something but I am aware Thomas Edison literally had an idea (or some say it wasn’t actually Edison really but that’s moot point), and do we know how many times he attempted what he swore was going to work and fail but continue to keep trying? About 1,000 attempts and fails prior to his success. That’s beyond determination! No, really it was that prior to their existence, God was all over it!

So crazy this science vs. God issue... Also, dinosaurs were in fact discovered but we insist we’re right and God’s Word is or GOD himself is not as smart as man? Yeah, dinosaurs are what man named them after the fact. God called them by their first names. Anyway, all these debates and different religions altogether are all Satan’s deceptions. Man insists they’re smarter than God Himself but are regularly deceived by not only Satan but by their own pride, which was also the fall of Satan. But Satan knows this about man and Satan and his demons have many, many ways and tactics that God tells us how he rolls... He will deceive the remaining as the Anti-Christ but won’t actually be “Anti-Christ but will pretend TO BE Christ.

Currently, we’re in deep layers of denial about the stealth jihad occurring as we speak. And, all you gotta do is look at original and still Holy Land (lil bitty Israel) and it’s surrounding areas. Even the Muslims who will blow us up and everyone else along with themselves for their god, are scared of God’s babies and are aware even if they don’t realize they are. Same issue with constant Atheist vs. Christians (supposed) debate. Atheists still believe Christians are actually in a debate and even more unfortunate, some are! Lol. I’m aware Atheist believe in God more than their mind will allow them to accept. But you don’t often see Atheist vs. Buddhist debates. I know many Atheists who agree more with Buddhism but believe it’s a philosophy and not what it is: a religion created by Satan. They most likely don’t know that Buddhists not only believe in hell but several unthinkable, torturous levels of such hells.

In the end, we all need to drop our pride and stop running away from God but toward Him. The time is drawing near that we will be out of chances. And none of us know when our own time is up. I am speaking to myself as well. I pray that we all seek The Kingdom of God and accept the Truth. The Word of God is in fact, the ultimate authority on determining reality from delusions and Truth from lies.

[ruminativerabbi]

Great Leaps Forward

Every generation has its “you know where you were when” moments. My dad used to say that there simply weren’t any Americans his age who didn’t know where they were when they heard about Pearl Harbor or where they were and what they were doing when they heard that FDR had died. In a different age, that same comment would have been true with respect to Fort Sumter and Lincoln. But for people of my generation, the two “where you were and what you were doing” moments are definitely the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the precise moment Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

I was ten years old when President Kennedy was assassinated. It was half past noon in Dallas when the shots rang out, so still early afternoon in New York. I was in Mrs. D’Antona’s fifth grade classroom on the second floor of P.S. 196 when our principal, Mr. Tauschner, came into our classroom and whispered the bad news to our teacher, who promptly burst into tears. Having no choice, the principal himself told us what had happened. And then someone brought a television into our classroom and we were allowed to spend the rest of the school day watching the news.

When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, I was sixteen. I was lying on my back on a blanket on the lawn behind the dorm at the University of Vermont in Burlington in which they housed participants in the special music program for high school students they used to run there each summer. Lying at right angles to my head was Lily Goodman, normally of Wilmington, Delaware, but that summer also spending her summer on the UVM campus in the same program I was in (and being much more talented a singer than I was a pianist). Between our heads lay my red transistor radio tuned to some local news station with the volume up as loud as it could go. We listened patiently to endless replays of the great man’s words of earlier that day: “Houston, Tranquility Base here; the Eagle has landed.” And then, just few minutes before eleven PM, we heard the man, now speaking from the lunar surface, say that he was taking one single step as a man, but that that step was simultaneously a giant leap forward for all mankind. And it was my memory of that specific experience that came right back to me last week when I read that Beresheet, a 1290-pound spacecraft owned and operated by Israel Aerospace Industries, had successfully lifted off on its lunar mission last Friday atop a Falcon 9 rocket owned and operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. The plan is for Beresheet (appropriately, “Genesis”) to orbit the earth for a while, then to depart for the moon under its own steam and then, after a journey of about seven weeks, to touch down on the moon on April 11.

It’s a pretty exclusive club, the one to which belong nations who have done this: only Russia, China, and our own country have managed successfully to land spacecrafts on the moon. But the club is expanding: India is expected to become its fifth member later this spring, as is Japan within a couple of years. Still, it won’t be that big a club even after India and Japan join. And Beresheet’s, once it lands on the lunar surface, has another distinction worth mentioning because it will be the first private-sector landing on the lunar surface in history.

It’s not hard to understand why this club has so few members. For one thing, it’s a really long ways off—the moon is about 239,000 miles away from the earth. And it’s a journey fraught with dangers and difficulties. And it costs a fortune to undertake a project like this—the price tag for the Beresheet mission is a cool $100 million, and that is the least amount ever spent to send a landing craft to the moon. (Could that detail be related to the fact that this will be the first lunar landing not paid for by a government spending money it prints up itself? I wonder!) Of special interest to me personally, though, is the list of digitized items Beresheet is going to leave on the moon for future visitors—perhaps even some eventually not from Earth—to ponder: details about the spacecraft and the crew that built it, an Israeli flag, a copy of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, dictionaries in 27 languages and all of Wikipedia, the memoirs of a Shoah survivor, a Hebrew-language Bible, recordings of the most popular Israeli songs, and some children’s drawings inspired by the mission. Just thinking about someone from a distant galaxy coming across this one day and trying to puzzle through all that data is intoxicating!

Things seem to be going well; the spacecraft sent home its first selfie just the other day, looking over its own shoulder at itself and the earth behind it from a distance of about 37,600 miles. (If you look carefully, you can see the outlines of South America and Australia.)

But all of this excitement regarding Beresheet has awakened another set of emotions in me as well. This summer will be the fiftieth anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. Last December marked the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 8, in the course of which the first picture of “earthrise” was snapped when Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first human beings to leave low earth orbit, reach the moon, orbit it, and then return to earth safely. There’s a “Beresheet” moment in this story as well: Apollo 8 orbited the moon ten times, in the course of which they made their memorable recording of the first verses in Genesis and Astronaut Anders took his now famous picture of the earth rising out of the black of space.

What happened to our need to discover? The incredible successes of the mid-twentieth century, which included Project Mercury, which sent the first American into space; Project Gemini, which first brought astronauts into space for an extended period of time; the Apollo program, which brought astronauts to the moon and back; the Skylab program, which put our nation’s first space station into orbit; the Space Shuttle program, which endured two terrible tragedies but nonetheless succeeded in bringing reusable spacecrafts into the picture—all of these were enormous scientific, intellectual, and cultural achievements. But somewhere along the way, we seem to have to lose our way.

NASA still exists, of course. We continue to play a leadership role in the International Space Station, although our astronauts travel there and back on Russian Soyuz spacecraft. There are all sorts of research missions underway to Mars and beyond. But the idea of human-led exploration itself—the principled willingness to send people to go where no one has ever gone and to do things that no one has ever done, thus to make more great leaps forward for humankind in the Armstrongian sense—that feels as though it has somehow vanished from the American psyche. The last American to stand on the moon, Eugene A. Cernan, was mission commander of Apollo 17, which went to the moon and returned in 1972. Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were cancelled due to budget cuts.

Mentioning the Space Shuttle program makes me rethink my comment above about the “where we were and what we were doing” moments in our lives, because I remember—and clearly—where I was in and what I was doing in 1986 when Challenger broke apart just seconds after take-off and all seven crew members died and where I was on February 1, 2003, when Columbia disintegrated upon re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, which disaster took the life of all seven of its crew members as well. (There’s an Israel connection there too, of course, because the sole non-American on board was Colonel Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut.)

But those disasters only made us more eager to succeed and, indeed the Space Shuttle program continued until 2011, by the end flying off on 133 successful missions involving 833 crew members (including the fourteen who died on the Challenger and the Columbia). And then we lost interest. Or it feels as though we have. And that is why the launch of Beresheet, for all it excites me, also unnerves me a bit by forcing me to wonder where our American sense of pioneering, of derring-do, of courage in the face of incredible obstacles, of exploration of the unknown, where all that went to? I suppose lots of people can think of lots of better uses for all that money—and the expenses involved were, to use the term literally for once, astronomical. But what price tag can or should we put on the sense that we are actively engaged in setting out on new paths, including ones on which no human being has ever travelled? Or that we are not wrapping up the search for knowledge in the universe, but only beginning to fathom what it is we don’t know about…everything? Underlying the need to explore, after all, is a foundation of humility born of the conviction that knowing how little we know can and should energize us to step further into the seductive unknown rather than retreat into blissful unknowing like timid children.

On one of the Saturday nights after the appearance of the new moon in the nighttime sky each month, we at Shelter Rock gather outside to recite the ancient prayer called Kiddush Levanah, the Sanctification of the Moon. Taking the moon as the embodiment of the unattainable, we use the sight of its return to the nighttime sky as an opportunity to renew our commitment to seeking to know the Creator through the contemplation of Creation. As I look up at the sliver of moon in the dark, I occasionally think of that night long ago in Vermont when I lay on a blanket and looked up at the moon as the first man in history took some first tentative steps onto its surface. It’s that precise sense of courage mixed with awe and, yes, humility, that I wish we could summon up again in our American psyche to remind us that there really is no upper limit to what we can dream of doing.