3 There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

2     a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3     a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
4     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6     a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7     a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8     a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

With all this religious dictum in mind, we're crapping in our own goodness... There is no room for hate, war and to kill. There is no room to throw rubbish, nor to give up. This bible thingy is too stupid for its own boots, especially when it was contradicted by Jesus of Nazareth...

Demolishing? This we do all the time (see Gus' picture at top) in order to rebuild. Sometimes we preserve the past by holding on to aged buildings under "heritage acts"... May be this is where religions will find themselves, preserved in jars, under a 'heritage act" or something...

Hurricane Harvey has unleashed unprecedented destruction on Southeast Texas. But while the destruction may be unprecedented for the region, the national response is decidedly not. It’s a playbook we’ve seen many times before: hyperbole-filled 24/7 cable news coverage, countless “pray for [blank]” memes shared across social media, and a preponderance of encouragement to donate to victim-aid funds. While these aspects of the playbook are benign enough, one is decidedly not: the inevitable—and seemingly endless—politicization of disaster response.

The examples are now infamous: President George W. Bush’s widely-criticized response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and President Obama’s election year visit to Gov. Chris Christie’s New Jersey in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Of course, the political fallout of these events was impossible to ignore, suggesting that disaster response may be inherently political, rather than politicize-able. However, a mere five days after the landfall of Harvey, the wave of reactions suggest the latter politicizing instinct is the more powerful in the American psyche right now.

First, there was the Joel Osteen “did he-or-didn’t he open the church to flood victims” saga. The megachurch pastor and televangelist was taken to task in the court of public opinion for reports that his Lakewood Church had shuttered its doors to Harvey victims.  The reports turned out to be largely false, but they represent an important trend in American disaster response. Amidst all of the despair, we still endeavor to discredit an apparent charlatan whose popularity and ostentatious lifestyle has been a constant thorn in the side of the secular Left—and all this despite Osteen’s numerous departures from Christian orthodoxy.

Of course, it wouldn’t be disaster coverage without scrutinizing every move of the president. And, with an exceptionally polarizing figure occupying the Oval Office this time around, scrutiny has indeed been intense. But for all the legitimate points of analysis that could be made, the story has instead turned towards the president’s choice of headwear.  The news cycle has been abuzz about Trump’s decision to prominently display the “Official USA 45th Presidential Hat” on his tour of Texas.  The source of contention focuses on the fact that the outlandish hats (the president has sported both the red and white versions in past days) retail for $40 on the Donald Trump official campaign website. Predictably, ethics concerns have been (legitimately) raised about using a tragedy as free advertising for an overpriced hat.  But such trivial concerns hardly merit the coverage they’ve received when compared to the real plight faced by those affected by the storm—unless, of course, attacking the president is the primary objective of storm coverage.\

Meanwhile, Linda Sarsour, the Arab American progressive activist who came onto the national scene as an organizer of last January’s Women’s March on Washington, joined the legions of celebrity-activists who publicly pronounced their support for Harvey victims. She did so by encouraging her Twitter followers to donate to the “Harvey Hurricane Relief Fund.”  And of course, like many other public figures, Sarsour couldn’t resist politicizing her support: the “Harvey Hurricane Community Relief Fund” might be more accurately named “President Trump Relief Fund,” as the donations go directly towards the left-wing advocacy group Texas Organizing Project (TOP).

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/flood-of-politics-pollut...

Here's the bottom line: it's a mystery.

I don't know why God sometimes intervenes in natural disasters and sometimes doesn't. I don't know why he sometimes heals and sometimes doesn't. He tells us that "my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD" (Isaiah 55:8).

But I know that our Father redeems all he allows (Romans 8:28). I know that he suffers with us and loves us unconditionally (Romans 8:35–39). And I know that one day this broken world will be gone and we will live in "a new heaven and a new earth" (Revelation 21:1).

Until that day, I choose to trust what I don't understand to the God who does. Will you join me?

Read more of this crap:

http://www.christianpost.com/news/why-god-allowed-hurricane-harvey-4-wro...

Here Jim Denison tells us of four wrong answers to the way why-god-allowed-hurricane-harvey... Either way, Jim's views are as insane as the four wrong answers to a question that cannot be asked. The dynamics of the planet are scientifically well-known. NOTHING TO DO WITH GOD DOING STUFF OR STUFF UPS... It's all to do with atmospheric disturbances that have been with this planet for millions of years, with variations. Meanwhile the bush fire season started early in Sydney, while fires are burning out of control in Los Angeles and of all places in Greenland... Meanwhile god did not create the floods in Asia which have displaced several million people, submerged two-thirds of a country and killed a couple of thousands or more... 

Meanwhile, hush hush, global warming is part of this increasing troubled dynamic... A mystery? Nupe...

Science tells us that 7 billion improbably designed humans live on a ball made of iron, rocks and silicates, floating in a regular ellipse around a hot star in the middle of unimaginable infinite space. And furthermore, these humans have designed Teslas, cricket and waterboarding.

Is there a more unlikely story? Most scientific explanations for the workings of the universe are so weird, you’d have to be Douglas Adams to think them up. The most popular begins with a huge explosion out of nothingness, from which a vast infinity of objects emerge, moving away from each other for billions of years until one day the whole thing loses momentum and shifts into reverse, collapsing to the size of a raisin.

Really?

Dawkins thinks the whole idea of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden is absurd, but what sane person dreamed up the big bang theory?

At the start of every amazing story – literary or scientific – is a person with enough imagination to ask a good question. A physicist might ask: “What makes up all that empty space in the universe?” A geneticist might ask: “Is there a different way to cure cancer?” A science fiction writer might ask: “What do creatures in another galaxy look like?” You or I might ask: “Will anyone ever want to have sex with me?” or “How can I live in a world where Donald Trump is president?”

Read more of Meg Rosoff:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/15/meg-rosoff-point-of-view-fairytales

Good one.... There are several problems in Rosoff analysis of this complex problem of imagination. Imagination is good as long as it does not become a "belief" with no observable position. Everyday we are bombarded with illusions we find attractive, with science fiction we find scary or amusing, with Games of Throne fairy tales for adult — all this being a continuation of our childhood stories. All good for "entertainment". All wrong as a "belief". And this is where Rosoff loses the plot. Whether she likes it or not, the scientific calculations in regard to the big bang are phenomenally close to the mark, while Goldilocks will be eaten by the bears who don't cook porridge. The people who dream up the "Big Bang Theory" are more sane than you and me, sister. And for example, it demands a lot of imagination and years of precise work to do a simple Comprehensive Single-Cell Transcriptional Profiling of a Multicellular Organism. No belief is involved here. Just an imagination that lets you interpret what you are able to observe. And this is beyond the art of deception such as believing in Eve and Adam. This stupid biblical story does not fit the reality as observed through the many lenses of scientific rigour. But many people believes it BECAUSE IT'S EASY. This is the sad part. Sciences are hard yakka... Religious belief is a calcified art form that has turned the fairy tale into a dogma. That is what Richard Dawkins decries.

And no... The universe won't collapse to the size of a raisin... It's most likely to vanish as a puff of smoke as it stretches beyond its own acceleration... But that is another conjecture of imagination based on the universal expansion of the magic pudding. Entropy...

read from top.

In the psyche of the whole of humanity, it seems there is such a moment as the great flood. It is told in most cultures with different languages and various characters but the gist is that the event was observed. The increasing rain that was falling from the sky would have been seen as raising the level of the seas. Scientifically, we all should know about the big melt 14,000 to 10,000 years ago. This was the end of the ice age. This very recent event changed the complexion of the planet dramatically. 

As a species with both the capability of communication and of greater memory skills, humans have been able to tell and retell this story ever since, often with embellishments and flimsy attachment to morality and human behaviour. Some myths are still believed today. Amongst these we know of Noah and the wrath of god who “punished” his own creation, but the Greek legend of the same event is also telling:

The Aquarius Myth

This the story of Ganymede, a young prince, and supposedly the most beautiful young man of Troy.

One day Ganymede was off tending to his father’s sheep in a grassy area on Mount Ida when he was spotted by Zeus (now tell me, why would a Prince be looking after sheep, one could wonder — the same theme is told in Christianity of god and his flock of sheep, including black ones).

Back in ancient Greece (bugger, we ain’t invented nofin’), it was the social norm for an older man to take a “young boy” (from 12 years old) as a lover. In Ganymede’s case, he was probably around 15. The considerably older Zeus found him irresistibly beautiful and decided that he wanted him for himself. 

Zeus transformed himself into a giant eagle and swooped down from Mount Olympus. He grabbed Ganymede and carried him back to Mount Olympus where Aquarius became his young lover and servant. Zeus decides that Ganymede would also be his personal cup-bearer, bringing him drinks as he wished. Zeus gave Ganymede’s father a herd of fine horses as compensation for taking his son away. One day, Ganymede had enough, and he decides to pour out all of the wine and water of the gods, refusing to be Zeus’s lover any more. All the water fell to Earth, causing inundating rains for days upon days, which created a massive flood that flooded the entire world...

Zeus wanted to punish Ganymede, but in a moment of self-reflection, Zeus realized that he has been a bit unkind to the boy, so he made him immortal as the constellation Aquarius.

The Aborigines of Australia recorded the changes of fish and other animals that invaded the newly formed estuaries in very striking rock paintings, in Arnhem Land. Same time, no defined legend with morality or gods but a very specific record. 

So where do we stand? Scientifically, we know exactly what happened.

So why do some people, young and old, especially those attached to evangelical churches still don’t see “the light”. What is “the light”? The light is the very pedestrian and painstakingly accurate understanding that sciences place on this event. It’s clear and void of godly influences. It’s part of the planet cycles which had already happened three times for the last 500,000 years — actually 476,234 years to be exact (if I read the brochure correctly). 14,000-10,000 years ago was the fourth time the planet was warming up away from an ice age in 500,000 years. Scientifically, we know there has been more of such fluctuations before. 

We should get out of jail easily, but the human concept of “sin” attached to bad behaviour has interfaced with natural calamities. What can science do about this stupid mix? Nothing much. Sciences do not indulge in such disastrous mix of legends, meanings and purposes — with observations. 

But the evangelicals do not want to know sciences. They will use all the technology available but won’t accept that this technology was invented by humans without the grace of god. They won’t accept the theory of evolution, yet in front of their own eyes, evolution of genetics and technology tells them the truth about the changing planet we live on. Some changes are not for the better, but changes there are.

So we get well-intented stupid discussions and articles, even in the New York Times, about this crap. Beliefs are crap, even if they sustain a lot of humanity in moral corn flakes. Now, as this crap is used to measure politics and the value of one US President against another, one can only despair.

-----------

Here comes a young-ish evangelical:

The question is whether this resilience [that of the evangelicals] will survive the age of Trump. Some evangelical voices think not: Whether the subject is the debauched pagan in the White House, the mall-haunted candidacy of Roy Moore or the larger question of how to engage with secular culture, there is talk of an intergenerational crisis within evangelical churches, a widening disillusionment with a Trump-endorsing old guard, a feeling that a crackup must loom ahead.

In a recent cri de coeur on the influential Gospel Coalition site, Jared Wilson described younger evangelicals as “basically a bunch of theological orphans,” betrayed by older pastors who insisted on the importance of moral character and then abandoned these preachments for the sake of partisanship — revealing their own commitments as essentially idolatrous, and leaving the next generation no choice but to invent evangelicalism anew.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/opinion/sunday/trump-evangelical-crisis.html?rref=

Hullo? Anyone there? Reinvent the square wheel? Hey, the old evangelical guys lied to you... So Jared Wison tells us:

A new poll in fact shows that white evangelicals are now the most likely constituency to believe “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” This is up from 30 percent in 2011 to a whopping 72 percent this year. And this is not because evangelicals suddenly decided to show some grace to politicians, because you don’t see this kind of consideration given to political opponents. There is really only one main explanation for this sizable jump in 2017 in the ability to look the other way. Ethics kinda seem situational all of a sudden.

We’ve been abandoned by our teachers. Our guides have left us without fathers. The men and women we looked up to have gone against everything they told us to believe in. We wonder if they ever really believed it themselves.

Some of this orphaned generation will fall in line, because they were discipled according to the moralistic therapeutic deism fueling the evangelical zeitgeist. But some of this generation will refuse to do so. Because they learned to do as you say, not as you do.

The evangelical generations are divided. That much is clear. It is a sad situation to see so many orphans. They’re reading all the old dead guys, because they can see how those guys finished. They can see who held the line all the way and who didn’t. They are listening to more non-white evangelicals, because those folks have learned how to persevere from the margins for centuries. And the upside to all of this is that the orphan will come home. These youngsters who have rejected your idolatrous politics, your nationalistic faith, your moral subjectivity, your fear of the alien and the stranger, your gospel neglect will finally do you proud when they inherit your churches. If they can keep their heads on straight.

Godspeed, you theological orphans. Do not take your eyes off the gospel. The church’s absentee landlords have their reward. But yours is the kingdom of heaven.

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/jared-c-wilson/theologically-orphaned-generation/

Hullo? Anyone there? Reinvent the triangular wheel?

"Who are we to judge? Look, God can use anybody. Think of King David. He was an adulterer too.

Aaaaand scene."

... “the moralistic therapeutic deism fueling the evangelical zeitgeist?”....

Hullo? Anyone there? These are old legends and silly ideas full of words that have lost their meanings long ago, even for those who want your money and your support through the habit... Your are not hooked on cocaine, you are hooked on belief. Same dosage. 

Evangelical are desperately in need to believe in god. They have been told about heaven and redemption when they were kids and still believe that these exist. They are under the spell of crap. They do not have the ability to think. 

Orphaned generations? Blimey... Do we have to? In the New York Times?

GL

your local atheist.

Read from top and other articles on this site about the same subject...

Wesley Hill, Associate Professor of New Testament at Trinity School of Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, tells us:

Tucked away near the end of the book Atheist Delusions, David Bentley Hart’s 2009 broadside against Christianity’s cultured despisers, is a sort of spiritual meditation on what Hart calls one of the most “remarkable moment[s] in the whole of scripture.”

The moment in question is, at first blush, a minor one related in all four of the New Testament Gospels: the moment of Peter’s tears upon hearing the cock crow at the culminating moment of his denial of Jesus.

As Hart’s new translation of the New Testament renders it, “Peter remembered the phrase as Jesus had spoken it to him: ‘Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times’; and, cowling himself, he wept” (Mark 14:72).

It is surprising that Hart would linger on this moment because, to most modern readers, little is unusual or unexpected about it: Peter has sunk to his lowest point of loyalty and affection for his friend Jesus, and his tears are simply the most natural thing for a narrator to record at this juncture. But that, says Hart, is exactly the point.

...

I will spare you the boring dull monotonous lifeless dumb drudging vapid erroneous rest of Wesley Hill’s laugh-a-minute diatribe about a "traitor's moment" which was about two notches below a "Judas' moment" of treachery, except the conclusion after this plodding reminder:

In his provocative book, Atheist Delusions, David Bentley Hart, one of the most “brilliant” scholars of religion dismantles distorted religious “histories” offered up by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other contemporary critics of religion and advocates of atheism. 

David Bentley Hart provides a bold correction of the New Atheists’s misrepresentations of the Christian past, countering their polemics with a “brilliant” account of Christianity and its message of human charity as the most revolutionary movement in all of Western history.

Hart outlines how Christianity transformed the ancient world in ways we may have forgotten: bringing liberation from fatalism, conferring great dignity on human beings, subverting the cruelest aspects of pagan society, and elevating charity above all virtues. He then argues that what we term the “Age of Reason” was in fact the beginning of the eclipse of reason’s authority as a cultural value. Hart closes the book in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual values.

This, of course, is “brilliant” bullshit. There was no human dignity in being a slave under Christendom. Religious fatalism is split in half, by the delusion of hope in reaching an eternal heaven or falling into the eternal damnation of hell — and that’s it, according to criteria of behaviour and repentance. Quite irrationally lenient on the forgiveness side of things. Fatalism is not as bad as it looks considering it does not mean prediterminism, though the study of genetics tends to show our medical trends could send us to being rejected for insurance purposes. The dignity of human beings referred to is akin to that of sheep (often referred to in the bible) white and black (as long as you come back to the flock) — and Christianity, alongside with Islam, became one of the cruellest controllers of human lives — with the help of the “state”, be it king, queen or emperor. The “age of reason” emerged with Aristotle, while the age of “enlightenment” came with the emergence of proper scientific observations in which god had no need to exist and was recognised as a human invention to plug gaps in understanding. The idea of god was a misunderstanding. Observations showed that things were not as written in the good books nor correlated with the Aristotelian “age of reason” that, decidedly, did not accept observations nor understood sciences. Reason was an a-priori state of mind. Scientific rigour changed all this delusion.

So both David Bentley Hart and Wesley Hill are talking about points that are totally irrelevant to reality. But Wesley Hill is having a fake (pseudo) argument about David Bentley Hart’s views about this or that, especially Peter, in order to keep his narrative within the narrow confine of religious delusion with “brilliant” beauty to boot... Here comes Hill’s silly conclusion:

“There are many places” in the New Testament, writes N.T. Wright, “whose fragile beauty has been trampled by heavy-footed exegetes [interpreters of the “scriptures”] in search of a Greek root, a quick sermon, or a political slogan.” And insofar as Hart’s resolutely non-doctrinal translation helps highlight afresh some of that trampled beauty, it will be read with profit, my criticisms above notwithstanding. “And yet,” Wright continues, “it has remained a powerful and evocative book, full of delicacy and majesty, tears and laughter.”

Delicacy? Majesty? Bullshit galore... Let me spew...

In the moments when Hart’s translation uncovers some of the revolutionary force of those tears (like Peter’s) and laughter (like humanity’s, when the New Jerusalem descends, finally, like a bride from the sky) - in the (many) places where it freshens and lightens the New Testament’s delicacy and majesty - it will help the church appreciate anew just why and how the New Testament changed the world.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/10/23/4754124.htm

Wesley Hill brings tears to my eyes. I am rolling in the aisles... despite the jokes being that of an insider imbued with the arcane knowledge of the “brilliant” Jerusalemic bullshit like a sweet balsamic vinegar to a salad. The New Testament only changed the world because emperors and kings could use it as a WEAPON, like a chinese DF-21D could be used against an American aircraft carrier — and as negotiating (brainwashing) tool with the dumb masses. If you can make people believe in “brilliant” easy religious bullshit, you have an army of dedicated soldiers ready to do shit for you — including dying laughing while praying to godot.

Sciences are so much harder to learn, because there is so much to learn and so much intellectual precision is necessary to make sure sciences do not veer into the dogma-shit that religions have wadding in for centuries, while selling “brilliant” porkies.

If you are still religious after this exposure of the silliness of Wesley Hill, throw your cell-phone in the dunny, shut your tablets, pray that the atomic bomb will never be used again and believe that god is made in your image — or was it the reverse?

Read from top...

Bill Lenz, a Wisconsin pastor who dedicated much of his life to suicide prevention, stunned family and friends Monday when he tragically took his own life after a months-long struggle with depression. He was 60.

"With heavy hearts, we must share some devastating news. Our beloved Senior Pastor, Bill Lenz, passed away on the afternoon of Dec. 4. Bill had been suffering from depression for the last three months. He was seeing a counselor and doctor, and reaching out to friends for help in walking through this, but depression eventually claimed his life on Earth," Christ the Rock Community Church in Menasha announced in a Facebook post Tuesday.

The church's Executive Pastor Curt Drexler said in an interview with The Christian Post Tuesday that Lenz was sent on sabbatical after he revealed to elders and other ministry leaders that he had begun experiencing sudden panic attacks.

"Over the last three months, he had what he would have just called anxiety. He would have bouts where he would be close to panic attacks or he would have panic attacks. And it was just so mysterious for him because he had never dealt with anything related to that at all," Drexler said. "It was troubling to him. 'Like where did this come from.'"

Read more:

https://www.christianpost.com/news/bill-lenz-pastor-who-dedicated-minist...

If you feel the pangs of depresion, please read: 

Oliver O'Donovan is a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh.

History is not a seamless whole, extending from past to future; it is open to account only after, not before, it has happened.

The particular contribution to history that each moral actor makes - the unique role that he or she has to play and, above all, what will count as the "success" of the action at the end of the day - is, at the moment of decision and commitment, an object of hope, not open to historical verification before the event.

The actor cannot confront the future as though it were the past extended forward, like a historian with eyes in the back of his head.

The only way to confront the future is in freedom, prepared to determine the indeterminate.

One of the possible ways of sinning against the contingent nature of temporal experience is that form of anxiety which retreats from discerning God's call in the immediate horizon of the future-present, and turns instead to a reading of present experience which we hope may deliver the future up to clear and masterful anticipation. We look for "the way things are going" - the direction that can be read off the present.

Let us call this the sin of historicism, with a reasonable confidence that our use is close enough to the centre of gravity of a rather wide usage of that term.

READ MORE:

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2018/01/15/4790396.htm

Magnificent bullshit from a religious man who despite being a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor Emeritus has not understood a single thing about life. There is no such thing as "Christian (or religious) ethics". Ethics is a name reserved for secular ideals. And sin does not exist. We may do bad "deeds" deliberately or accidentally, but none of these represent a "sin", which is the delusion of having acted bad towards god's will, while fucking up someone else's life... (as well as fucking up our own life). God does not exist. From here on, this Fellow of the British Academy and Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh is telling academia flavoured fibs with not a single ethical value in them. Morality is not ethics. 

The bullshit continues:

If "new every morning" is the tempo of divine grace and the tempo of our personal responsibilities, it is because the morning is a time when one can look back intelligently and look forward hopefully. It is the tempo of practical reason. The media's "new every morning" (quickly becoming "new every moment") is, one may dare to say, in flat contradiction to that daily offer of grace. It serves rather to fix our perception upon the momentary now, preventing retrospection, discouraging deliberation, holding us spellbound in a suppositious world of the present which, like hell itself, has lost its future and its past.

----------------------

Looking at history, mistakes have been made, are being made and will be made, many of them in the recording of it and in the interpretations of it.  The media's "new every morning" ??? The media is not the voice of history but that of propaganda. Sure propaganda influences history, but this is not the main game here. Here we have to understand history in its full context, not just of the survivors but of those who perished because we loaded history in our favour. That we loaded Christianity in our propaganda favour does not make it ethical nor right. Hell cannot loose its future nor its past, because HELL DOES NOT EXIST. 

Read from top...

Dismissing believers as simply deluded could therefore itself be a way for us atheists to deal with our own dissonance between the belief that Easter is palpable nonsense, and the awareness that seemingly intelligent people believe in it. If we really do find implausible beliefs offensive, we ought at least to have more plausible explanations for why others have them.

Read all:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/01/atheists-logic-eas...

This guy, the writer, Julian Baggini, is tiring me... He is an atheist who "philosophically" apologises for being an atheist. Hello, there are explanations for why SOME people have beliefs. Read from top. Beliefs, in summary, are a lot easier and ARE A LAZIER OPTION to accept than HARD SCIENTIFIC knowledge — a true knowledge which tells us that the world we live in IS COMPLEX and that our consciousness is DNA induced. Believers ARE THE LAZY ONES.

READ FROM TOP.