The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

And the Seas Turned to Blood: 20 Years to Biblical Apocalypse?

And the second angel poured out his bowl into the sea, and it turned to blood like that of the dead, and every living thing in the sea died.

— Revelation, 16:3

And so the wise men did proclaim…

The apocalypse has a new date: 2048.

That’s when the world’s oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause? The disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

Already, 29 percent of edible fish and seafood species have declined by 90 percent–a drop that means the collapse of these fisheries.

But the issue isn’t just having seafood on our plates. Ocean species filter toxins from the water. They protect shorelines. And they reduce the risks of algae blooms such as the red tide.

And yet the children of man did not listen. From the Seas they took all they could. From the land they reaped all nature had, and more.

Deliberately, yea, they chose that all that they built should soon break, that it must be replaced. By this “planned obsolescence” they made of the world a desert.

One-third of all food, they threw out, while criminalizing feeding the hungry.

In the great Hegemon of the age, bloated America, there were five empty homes for every homeless person, and the rich feasted, then threw the food away, denying it to the hungry.

Houses were bought, while people died on the street, and deliberately kept empty.

The law of the day was greed. Selfishness was exalted as the greatest virtue. The sophists of the era said that all good things came from the rich. The word of the Son of God was used to promote the idea that God made those he loved wealthy and the eye of the needle was forgotten.

Truly, not even seven men still followed the Son.

Just then, a man came up to Jesus and inquired, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to obtain eternal life?”

“Why do you ask Me about what is good?” Jesus replied, “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.”

“Which ones?” the man asked.

Jesus answered, “‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, 19honor your father and mother, and love your neighbor as yourself.’d

“All these I have kept,” said the young man. “What do I still lack?”

Jesus told him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.”

When the young man heard this, he went away in sorrow, because he had great wealth.

Then Jesus said to His disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

These men and women had chosen hell. Hell now, hell in the future, hell for their children. All of them had forgotten the most fundamental of the Son’s teachings:

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

For I was hungry, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

I don’t follow the Son of God, and I think that a Christian religion worth following would not include the Old Testament, or any part of the Bible that is not about Jesus’s words (including Revelations).

But I respect Jesus, just not most Christians.

And The Bible was right: Humanity shall reap as we have sowed.


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56 Comments

  1. Alex V

    The study referenced is from 2006… Have the authors updated their findings since then? The realist in me guesses things have only gotten worse in the meantime, but the hopeful in me says maybe things aren’t quite as dire?

  2. Ian Welsh

    Good catch, and my bad for not doing so.

    However… I know of no actions taken, or data since then that would suggest a better outcome…

  3. Alex V

    The author is still at it… haven’t had time to dig into this yet:

    http://wormlab.biology.dal.ca/

  4. When I escaped the borg twelve twelve years ago and opened up my own shop, subtitled the place “A Chronicle of the End Times.” That brought traffic I didn’t want.

  5. Dale

    Poor Ian, the evangelicals will have their knives out for you now. Never quote scripture to those who profess to believe but only cherry pick what they want and leave the rest behind. Virtue and truth have disappeared. Time to get out my Jefferson Bible.

  6. Ian is also arguing for cherry-picking however; there’s lots of theological argument about how without the Old Testament, the New falls apart.

  7. atcooper

    I fear you are right about leaving out the Old Testament. It has lessons to impart insomuch as a contrast to the new and implying what has changed in fundamentals, but that stuff is maybe too hard for modern people to work through anymore.

    Hopefully the best parts of Christianity are saved somewhere else because it sorely lacks unto itself nowadays, and it’s professed believers, on the whole, are deeply corrupt. I think I’d hoped for a long time there was a way to reform it, but am coming around to the notion it might be beyond saving now.

  8. Willy

    Maybe God the ever-bored omnipotent artist, made Satan just a bit too powerful this universal go-round. And now Satan has him locked up in some kind of metaphysical box so he could pose as the real god to do all kinds of irrational mischief to us poor hapless meek sheep. That would explain the evangelicals.

  9. nihil obstet

    Any faith system that’s been around for very long answers some spiritual needs and, also, is subject to enough corruption to keep the protection of the powerful. It was Christian faith communities that drove the civil rights movement and the improved programs for the poor in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. It was other Christian faith communities that organized for the opposite. When the U.S. right wing decided to gin up the culture wars by narrowing God’s interest to prurient sex and God’s action to punishing our enemies and making us rich, American oligarchs couldn’t have been happier or more supportive with propaganda about values and morality.

    Lots of very good people find Christian churches a support for their spiritual concerns and practices. Churches are about the only voluntary associations that we still have. I don’t think it’s a waste to speak occasionally in their terms, especially since a majority of Americans still have problems figuring out how to deal with their spiritual and communitarian needs outside organized religion.

  10. Hugh

    Many evangelicals, especially older ones and virtually all their leaders are τάφοι κεκονιαμένοι, whited sepulchres (Matthew 23:27). And they are some of the most judgmental people on the face of the earth, despite the admonition: Μὴ κρίνετε, ἵνα μὴ κριθῆτε, judge not that you be not judged (Matthew 7:1). Don’t just cite Scripture at them, cite Scripture in the original koine Greek at them.

    The Old Testament is useful in understanding some aspects of the New Testament, primarily in terms of viewing the New Testament as a reaction to, and often a rejection of it. For Christians, the New Testament should trump the Old, but with evangelicals the reverse seems to be true. In principle, they espouse an expansive spiritualism, but in practice they embrace a very narrow, Old Testament legalist approach or Paul trumps Jesus one.

    I am not interested in theology. I think it is important to understand that the Old Testament is an amalgam of three separate traditions: the Exodus one, native Palestine, and Babylonian exile, and that prior to the Babylonian exile, Judaism wasn’t monotheistic, and had at the time of David, Solomon, etc. a female figure Asherah. I also think it is important to understand the different audiences to whom each of the synoptic Gospels was directed and their sourcing relative to each other (the Q source for parts of Matthew and Luke, for example).

    I do think we are facing an apocalypse/existential crisis in the form of climate change, overpopulation, and resource and environment destruction.

  11. different clue

    If one is looking for a belief-system religion to guide oneself to more “life-supporting” actions, one might look to the various Animisms and Nature Spirit Religions . . . whose practitioners generally guided themselves to habitat-maintaining or even habitat-enhancing behaviors, as witness the Amazon Indian Nations’ invention of biochar and broad-scale terraforming of the Amazon to higher levels of habitability.

    The God of Selection is a Callous God, and Its first True Prophet was Darwin.

    If Mama Corn ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

  12. “Let there be light!”

    This is O/T, but the segue is oddly appropriate. I have spent about half of the last 2 weeks learning about near infrared light treatment of many diseases. (This is distinct from mid and far infrared light.) My brother is on dialysis, and on the somewhat meager and non-specific basis of part of an interview by the wonderful Dr. Mercola, of a domain expert named Dr. Hamblin (quoted here: https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/02/26/photobiomodulation.aspx )
    I purchased a unit for my brother, whose dialysis greatly reduces the quality of his life (ignoring what lack of dialysis would lead to…) Just reducing his frequency from 3x/week to 2x/week would be a blessing.

    I purchased a Joovv, which is the same brand that Mercola purchased. It outputs in the mid 600s and mid 800s nm range, which are known to be biologically useful.

    The money quote is:
    “Kidney failure is the third leading cause of death. These are old folks who are dying from kidney failure. You can’t really give them transplants because they’re elderly. You put a near-infrared LED array where their kidneys are and it seems to work like a dream. [But] it’s hardly been studied at all,” Hamblin says.

    I know Ian was in the hospital recently. Ian, if you can get your hands on such a device, it should speed up recuperation. Because it rejuvenates mitochondria, it will probably have multiple benefits. Maybe your readers will pitch in? A low end Joovv unit, with stand, is about $750.

  13. Dan

    There’s plenty of crazy, not so good stuff from words attributed to Jesus as well. You can take whatever meaning you want, but you can’t very well pretend the texts and traditions are other than the total mess that they are. The “Old Testament” is more or less the Jewish canon as well, and the history of wanting to exclude it, demote it, or regard it negatively is tied to the history of German theology, philology, nationalism, and antisemitism.

  14. Hugh

    OT the BLS jobs report for December came out Friday. The private sector added 60,000 jobs. Job growth is next to nil in December because everybody who is going to be hired for the Christmas holidays has already been hired. Total nonfarm jobs (the private and public sectors taken together) actually lost 54,000 jobs, not the unreal seasonally adjusted 312,000 jobs’ growth reported so enthusiastically and misleadingly by the press and politicians.

    Net jobs growth for 2018 (Jan-Dec jobs growth minus the Dec 2017-Jan 2018 drop off) total nonfarm was not as good as 2015 and significantly worse than my benchmark 2014 year, but better than 2016-2017. Taking the private sector by itself, net job growth in 2018 was nearly identical to 2015, just a few thousand off while still below 2014.

    Next month we will see the size of the next December to January drop off. This corresponds to the large number of jobs that end with the holiday season. Last year, for example, the dropoff in the private sector was 2.588 million and in total nonfarm jobs, it was 3.095 million. The discrepancy between the (real) seasonally unadjusted numbers and the (unreal but official) seasonally adjusted ones is the most jarring at this point because it is not unusual for the seasonally adjusted January number to show a mythical 200,000 job increase. A kicker next month will be how the federal shutdown if it continues past the 11th could factor into the (real) seasonally unadjusted numbers.

  15. Stirling Newberry

    OT2:

    The actual question is who is adjusting the unadjusted numbers to produce the seasonally adjusted because there is a slurry of places to hide the actual job numbers this way. During W’s administration, there were many factors which did not in fact exist, and most people in the economics profession knew this. These were unwound during the Great Recession because they were trivial compared to the massive job numbers that flooded the economy. The great recession was not as bad as it seemed because things were already bad enough….

    The reason seasonably adjusted numbers need to be studied is the question that they answer: “did industries lose or people or less people than expected?” This is actually important in the macroeconomic jobs picture. It is one of the things that, for example, predicts recession.

  16. Heliopause

    @Mandos
    Yes, in fact, I would say that it’s not something that particularly even needs to be argued. Jesus is quoted several times explicitly endorsing The Law and of course many of the things that go on in the New Testament can’t be divorced from the broader religious context in which they occurred. I will also point out that Jesus is sometimes quoted expressing reactionary sentiments that are offensive to our modern sensibilities.

  17. Willy

    Genealogies vary in the Bible. I would posit this as proof of Einsteinian relativity. Maybe Luke was traveling at a different speed than Matthew was? But sadly, that argument falls apart when one realizes both gospels were written on the same planet at roughly the same time, by unknown authors probably not named Luke or Matthew. It’s always something with that damned book.

  18. different clue

    Well! . . . . . This thread has certainly strayed from the subject of mutually co-assisted mutual co-survival, hasn’t it.

  19. Hugh

    Recessions are called retrospectively by the NBER. Seasonally adjusted numbers form a trend line. That line smooths the data. It takes out hills and valleys but it also obscures the data. A trend line isn’t real. The data and hence the trend line are revisited and modified over time. It is important to understand that initially the current end point of the trend line is not an indicator upon which predictions can be made, because it is itself a kind of prediction. It is only with subsequent modification and retrospectively that you can say that it supports the call of a recession.

    Important to understand too that Jesus was speaking to a Jewish audience so he would be speaking to them in terms like the Law which they understood. His emphasis was on the observance of the spirit of that Law as opposed to a formulaic application of its letter.

  20. In a gig-economy, with a sizable population of “Independent Contractors” upon whom the onus is to report their earnings, report their “employment”, just exactly how does one measure employment?

  21. Giles

    “However… I know of no actions taken, or data since then that would suggest a better outcome…”

    Citation Patterns of a Controversial and High-Impact Paper: Worm et al. (2006) “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services”

    “In a single month, November 2006, two papers appeared that created a controversy over the influence of the journals Science and Nature on fisheries research. The first of these two papers, “Faith-based fisheries” by Ray Hilborn [1] in Fisheries, argued that a long string of papers published in Science and Nature (namely [2]–[6]) had been selected for publication not because of their scientific merit but because of their publicity value. Hilborn [1] argued that it was only because these papers focused on the decline and collapse of fisheries that they appeared in Science and Nature, and that the system of peer review had failed to detect substantial flaws in each of these papers. The second paper appeared in Science in the same month, “Impacts of biodiversity loss on ecosystem services” by Boris Worm and others [7]. Their paper demonstrated through a large body of evidence that biodiversity loss greatly reduces the ecosystem services that we obtain from the oceans, and also contained an analysis projecting “the global collapse of all taxa currently fished by the mid–21st century (based on the extrapolation of regression in Fig. 3A to 100% in the year 2048)”. This projection of global seafood collapse by 2048 was highlighted in their associated press release [8]. The press release resulted in prominent coverage of the projection in major news outlets, and provoked a reaction from some fisheries researchers [8] and 10 rebuttals [9]–[18], including three rebuttals by Ray Hilborn [10]–[12].

    At this point a remarkable turn of events occurred, as told best by Stokstad [19]. The chief protagonists Boris Worm and Ray Hilborn met for a National Public Radio interview and decided that a public controversy served the interests of neither the scientific community nor the public. They invited about 20 prominent scientists and dozens of graduate students to join in a collaborative project facilitated by the National Center for Ecological Synthesis and Analysis (NCEAS), with the aim of compiling new datasets to reach a consensus view of the state of the world’s fisheries. The resulting analysis showed that although 63% of assessed fisheries are below the biomass that would produce maximum sustainable yield, harvest rates are now at or below sustainable levels in 7 of 10 well-studied ecosystems [20]. These lower harvest rates should promote rebuilding to biomass to levels that would support maximum sustainable yield”

  22. BlizzardOfOz

    Making nonjudgemental-ness a high moral value is self-defeating. I thought this should have been obvious? — but lots of lefties still want to do it. So they end up judging Christians for being judgmental, committing the very thing they are condemning at the same instant! Very strange, but again this is a very popular stance with lefties. What does that say about them?

    A look at the context of Jesus’ speech:


    [1] Judge not, that ye be not judged.
    [2] For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
    [3] And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
    [4] Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
    [5] Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

    This is obviously not: don’t judge (blanket). But rather, be careful with your judgments, that you don’t apply different ones to others than yourself. And also, judge yourself first so that you can judge others with more clarity.

  23. Willy

    BOO, I learned my skills in judgementalism during my many years as a conservative Christian. But as a lefty one gets to use curse words as well.

    However, as far as “mutually co-assisted mutual co-survival” goes, I’d probably ally with a survivalist evangelical group. During frisking, if your knapsack held a Bible, guns, drugs and some pornography you’d pretty much be in. Of course if it was a family unit you’d probably have to give up the porn.

  24. Donna Curtis

    @Blizzard

    As a leftist Atheist I can judge the entire christian faith devoid of value without being hypocritical because I am not bound by christian doctrine.

    Personally, I don’t find the entire christian faith as being utterly worthless but as a woman I find most mainstream religious faiths misogynistic.

  25. A dead ocean ranks right up there at the top of the list of things we should be talking about, that should “go viral”. I’ve been so angry of late I’ve lapsed on my planetary postings and have been looking for the right something to queue back into it. Thanks Ian, for the muse. To quote an old blog-friend and occasional commenter here: it’s in the pipeline, there’s no changing it. All of the rest of this is nothing. We are planet lice. Cam’t hurt this ball of rock but it can sure as hell hurt us.

  26. Hugh

    Ten Bears, employment is measured in the household survey, the smaller of the BLS’ two surveys (the Current Population Survey or CPS). Jobs are measured in the much larger business or establishment survey (Current Employment Statistics or CES). Different surveys covering different populations. The Establishment survey uses payroll data from the week containing the 12th of the month from thousands of companies and uses a corrective business birth/death estimation to capture jobs gained and lost each month. So the joke goes to be employed is not the same as having a job.

    And there is no distinction between jobs. A job is a job is a job. Whether you make a billion dollars a year as a hedge fund manager looting the country or work a few hours a week at minimum wage.

    Blizzard does not seem able to distinguish between making a judgment and being judgmental. A lot of evangelicals can’t either, apparently. Or as it appears in John 7:24:

    24 μη κρινετε κατ οψιν αλλα την δικαιαν κρισιν κρινετε.

    ” Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.”

  27. Hugh is bringing back memories of Greek class *nostalge*

  28. I also echo Dan’s comments: you can’t jettison the Old Testament without arguing that you should jettison Judaism itself, and for that matter Islam (since in overall traditional content Islam is way more directly similar to Judaism than Christianity is to Judaism). The OT and the traditions based on it (Judaic, Christian in certain varieties, Islamic) are part of the human legacy and important values are encoded in it. I get that there is a desire to completely supplant the “hard” monotheism for an inward-looking, “cultivated” spiritualism or to label the demanding, visibility-focused rules-based religious systems as regressive impediments to human progress. To me, these are based on a shallow understanding of these traditions and represent an impulse that will eventually backfire on the “elevated” spiritualisms (which often depend themselves on unspoken/submerged “exclusivisms” of their own).

  29. Willy

    So maybe it’s wishful thinking. Maybe Jesus wasn’t always a progressive. And maybe I grew up in an unusual salt-of-the-earth bubble where Christians tried to sin less than the rest (or maybe they sinned more and I was just too young to notice).

    I’d also erroneously believed the famous “Onward Christian Soldiers” song was about heroically recapturing and reforming the Holy Land. But I found it was meant to give kids walking to Horbury chapel something to do. Good thing. One can only try to romanticize the sacking of Constantinople and the selling of children soldiers into slavery, so much.

    And speaking of reforming Christianity, my childhood hero Martin Luther certainly did his part. But sadly, with age he turned anti-semite. And in a nasty Nazi sorta way too. I’d offer that as evidence that faith-based reasoning eventually causes insanity, but we may have figured that out by now.

  30. Jonathan

    Short lesson in Protestantism

    Roughly speaking, the Reformation had three wings. The Left included the followers of Menno Simon / Mennonites, etc. They were the first Christians calling for the Abolition of Slavery (1534) and have always been pacifists. The Center were the followers of Luther who sought a reliable social order while glorifying the people who do the community’s necessary work on the socio-economic bottom. The Nordic countries are the cultural remnants of these teachings and include sophisticated social-welfare schemes while championing almost corruption-free and competent governments. And on the Right were the Calvinists. They taught that God’s grace was demonstrated by making some rich—and it didn’t much matter HOW one got rich. They completely overturned the Biblical teachings and 15 centuries of Christian tradition on usury. They truly believe that so long as someone is uptight about sex, they are probably virtuous people.

    Christianity in USA is dominated by cultural Calvinists. From the Prosperity-Gospel televangelists to the hallowed halls of Harvard and Yale, the extreme Puritanism of John Calvin rules so many political and cultural discussions that we barely notice where they come from. In fact, the only reason I understand this is because I was raised in a Swedish-Lutheran Parsonage and was sent K-6 to a Mennonite parochial school. The Christianity I see on TV is like a foreign language.

    Your little sermonette today, Ian, is a damn fine takedown of Calvinist Protestantism.

  31. Hugh

    I just wanted to add that two different views on our relationship to the earth have been taken from Genesis. The first is the dominionist. It can be seen in Genesis 1: 26:

    Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

    and again in Genesis 1: 28:

    God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

    The second is stewardship as seen in Genesis 2:15:

    The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it (abad = work, serve) and keep it (shamar = keep, watch over, preserve).

    Needless to say and in keeping with Ian’s point, in Western history, it is the dominionist view which has prevailed.

  32. I was being rhetorical, Hugh, though it never hurts to repeat these things.

    Yeah, I noticed, right on time: just as soon as the 2020 Goat Rodeo kicked off our blizzard of Russian ooze shows up. Spot the bot, troll the troll.

  33. BlizzardOfOz

    Just not having any standards doesn’t make you virtuous. And I’m not sure if you guys have noticed, but progs have again become hyper-judgmental about sex over the past few years.

    “Judge with right judgement” – yes, exactly right. If Christians seem to be focused on sexual morality, it’s not because sexual sins are the worst, but because the counter-culture (which is now the mainstream culture) started asserting that sexual sins were not sins but virtue, and that the real sin was now judging people for their sexual (mis)behavior. Un-repented sin is a gateway to far worse sins of pride.

    But again, anti-Christians are very slippery on this issue. They mostly won’t come out and say they are in favor of absolute sexual license, they will just attack anyone trying to uphold standards as “judgmental”. Again, that is self-negating, because in judging other as judgmental, you are yourself being judgmental.

  34. Ian Welsh

    A religion based on the teachings of Jesus can jettison both Islam and Judaism, yes. They are free to continue, of course. They do not need other religions to agree with them.

    The Old Testament is a book about a psychopath God. A good religion can be made out of it, but it is rotten cloth and should be jettisoned so that fools can’t reach back and justify their psychopathology based on it.

  35. Ian Welsh

    And a 2016 re-analysis.

    https://www.pnas.org/content/113/18/4895

    “The analysis of Costello et al. (9) confirms that the average state of global fish stocks is poor and declining. Of 4,714 fisheries assessed in the year 2012, only 32% remained at or above the biomass target that supports maximum sustainable yield (BMSY), whereas 68% have slipped below that critical threshold. This compares to 63% of assessed stocks tracking below BMSY in 2006 (5). Even more concerning is the finding that only 35% of stocks are currently fished at a level that would allow for recovery toward the BMSY target. This means that most overfished stocks will experience further depletion, despite their compromised status. An astounding 118 fisheries were mismanaged at mortality rates more than 10-fold the sustainable target, and 3 had greater than 100-fold higher mortality. If fish stocks were financial assets, most would indeed represent a poor choice for investors.

    Feeding these data into a simple bioeconomic model unsurprisingly reveals further depletion and collapse of stocks under a business-as-usual scenario (Fig. 1).”

  36. bruce wilder

    I am convinced most people do not think any thing is quite real.

  37. Viewing the OT god in terms of modern psychological categories and thinking that Jesus’ words/acts can be cleanly separated from the legacy of Judaic religion is simply bad scriptural hermeneutics, and as Dan points out, has a problematic history and implications. That scripture can be misused by people with bad mindsets and intentions is simply the case for any cohesive body of religious/spiritual/cultural thought, see the pogroms against the Rohingya. It is not a reason to declare it a “rotten cloth”.

  38. Willy

    I think that evangelicals having been successfully herded by nefarious PTB, into their zombie army is real. I don’t know the numbers but I think without that demographic America is somewhat progressive. The worst part is that this is quite likely what’s mostly to blame for for the historic decline in Christian numbers of late. The kids, ours and theirs, are not impressed with their policies which frankly, have ruined their futures, and are seeking other communities to invest their energies in.

  39. different clue

    @Willy,

    I think your analysis is backwards. The Rapturist Armageddonites have figured out how to monopolistically empower the Likudians-and-further-rightwards in Israel in order to keep war brewing and stop any peace from ever breaking out. The Rap-Armas’ reason for doing this is to maneuver Israel and the Arab states and peoples into the Final War of Armageddon, in which all the Jewisraelis are to be exterminated and then Jesus is to return to Earth to Rule from upon His throne of blood for a thousand years.

    The Rap-Armas may know how to manipulate the “correlation of forces” within Israel. I have read somewhere that the Rap-Armas give money to the Outlaw Squattlers in their Squattlements in the Occupied West Bank and Illegally Annexed East Jerusalem. I don’t know how much money the Rap-Armas give to the Squattlers. But the Rap-Armas could afford to give enough money to keep a half a million Squattlers living well in the West Bank even after the IsraelGov were to defund them entirely.

  40. It goes beyond the warmongering to the utter disregard for the environment, to for example social inducement/encouragement to purchase gas-guzzling Cadillacs because “gas is so cheap” (CNN Business commenter yesterday). The christians are as actively involved in sabotaging the world our grandchildren are growing up in as they are peace in the middle east. Destroying the world and committing billions to mean brutish death to induce their invisible sky god to float down out of the sky and carry them all away to paradise. How is that any different than the Aztecs (reputedly) cutting the hearts out of tens of thousands of living slaves to induce their invisible sky god to float down out of the sky and carry them all away to paradise?

    Far the more likely thousands upon thousands of cavernous spacecraft, vast slaughter-houses piloted by ravenous vaguely reptilian creatures, replete with horns and folked tail, intent not as benevolent overseers of the demise of this world and our current iteration in human evolution and our children’s evolution onto the next iteration of humanity but as ravenous reptilian creatures… you know, hungry lizards. We did, afterall, invite them to “Come Eat!”

    Animals, insufficiently evolved, less than human, bow down to gods. Human Beings, do not.

  41. realitychecker

    Seems like a pointless conversation to me.

    The major religions being discussed are nothing more than superstitious nonsense, expressions of humanity\’s futile fantasy wish to have an omniscient parent figure to take care of them throughout their lives. A con game that benefits the priests.

    It\’s all made up, folks. Like the Tooth Fairy. Like Santa Claus.

    Reality check. In your face.

    Try thinking in terms of cause and effect, rather than a Magical Sky Daddy (or Mommy).

    Reality works, if you work it.

    Back to lurking now.

  42. I attended a fundamentalist Pentecostal church, for about a year, when I lived in the Bible Belt. There was the occasional unhinged type, such as the clueless man who started yelling at me, from 1 foot behind me, “SUBMIT TO THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD!!”, hurting my eardrums in the process. As I subsequently joked, a miracle occurred that day, because I DIDN’T turn around and break that man’s jaw.

    There were a couple people there who I considered saintly, based solely on my intuition of what I’ll call their spiritual state. Their beautiful, even luminous “auras” (at least when they were in a spiritually elevated state) made it difficult for me to focus on their physical bodies. You just don’t WANT to distract yourself by observing their earthly selves when they’re infused with such supernatural beauty. And there were more than a handful of others of whom I sensed great inner beauty, even if they never appeared luminous.

    I used to tell people to not pay attention to the pastor, who used to say some really horrible – dare I say, God-awful – things. He seemed to hate homosexuals, despise Catholicism, and was sort of angry at Baptists. (This last struck me as very strange, as I was raised in a “smells and bells” Greek Orthodox church, and Baptists and Pentecostals were basically the same thing, to us.) Yes, he’d probably give you the shirt off his back if he could save your soul, but still….

    But then I realized, that most of the time when I received a benediction (benediction in the sense of receiving a blessing, or uplifting of consciousness; not in the sense of the pastor saying words of benediction) was when the pastor was preaching or talking. So I stopped telling people not to listen to the pastor. Not because his hard edges all of a sudden became palatable (or his tales of 7 day creations became more believable…)but rather because “God works in strange ways”, and that was abundantly in evidence in this particular church. And receiving a benediction (same sense as before) was more important than being critical of the accoutrements of those blessings. Furthermore, there was far more benedictions received in this church in one year than all my years previously (or since, as it’s turned out).

    I feel sorry for atheists and/or people whose consciousness is limited to their intellects, because they are closed off from deeper realities (or experiences, if you find the term “realities” too offensive). The best I can do for them, I suppose, is quote “the Brothers”, who Swami Omananda Puri wrote about. “Experience which is not your own is valueless” (so whether or not you believe my experiences, much less beliefs, is irrelevant, anyway), “intuition is the brain of the soul” and “it is YOU who are so ignorant”.

  43. alyosha

    I don’t follow the Son of God, and I think that a Christian religion worth following would not include the Old Testament, or any part of the Bible that is not about Jesus’s words (including Revelations.)

    I do follow Jesus, but don’t focus much on works outside of the gospels, although there are prophecies in the OT about Jesus.

    It took me decades to separate three things: Jesus, the (historical) church that grew up around him, the (contemporary) churches that are around me in my country.

    Churches are wrappers, packaging around the central spiritual figure, whoever that person is. They necessarily are the product of people whose consciousness is nowhere as advanced as the master. To the extent that they faithfully promote the master’s teaching, and particularly to the extent that they engender love from the disciple toward the master – they’re good, otherwise they’re a lot of corrupt nonsense.

  44. Back to scientific miracles. There’s additional information about using photobiomodulation to get people off of dialysis and/or cutting down their dialysis frequency; as well as extending the lives of kidney-failed cats from a typical few months to many years, in the Mercola interview of the James Carroll. See 18:24 of the 2nd video @ https://blog.thorlaser.com/dr-mercola-interviews-james-carroll-on-the-benefits-of-photobiomodulation/?fbclid=IwAR3uIMR38qJdQr6JYB7hMOLyZz3dqrDYKKRlcBWGXenh_UXjBfM1b6L0HNo .

    I can’t tell whether or not Mercola is letting his enthusiasm get the better of him, in describing what Hamblin told him during his interview. AFAIK, Hamblin only uses the word “dream” during his interview – which may or may not imply getting completely off of dialysis. Perhaps he was more specific offline, after the interview.

  45. Willy

    @ different clue,
    I’m not talking about cyberspace theory. I’m speaking from personal meatspace experience. My own very large extended family and other relations were once mostly legacy Christians of peace from long established denominational churches. Many of those have turned to this new Mammon breed operating out of evangelical megachurches which are sucking those little neighborhood churches dry. None speak of rapturing. The turned ones appear to have been brainwashed. Where they once took time to carefully discuss, they now bark out cultural strictures.

  46. Hugh

    “But again, anti-Christians are very slippery on this issue. They mostly won’t come out and say they are in favor of absolute sexual license, they will just attack anyone trying to uphold standards as “judgmental”. ”

    Just two words show the complete emptiness of Blizzard’s statement: DONALD TRUMP. Evangelicals metaphorically suck Donald Trump’s cock every damn day. You know a guy who has defined sexual license all his adult life, who bones a porn star just after his wife gives birth to their son, who tells said porn star before he bones her that she reminds him of his daughter, who brags about grabbing women’s pussies, who used to walk unannounced into the dressing rooms of the beauty contests he ran to assess the talent, who compared his efforts to avoid STDs to soldiers in combat in Vietnam. And these are just a few of the more salient instances we know about. If evangelicals’ embrace and full throated defense of Trump are examples of their “standards,” they can have them.

  47. Donna Curtis

    metamars wrote “I feel sorry for atheists and/or people whose consciousness is limited to their intellects, because they are closed off from deeper realities (or experiences, if you find the term “realities” too offensive). The best I can do for them, I suppose, is quote “the Brothers”, who Swami Omananda Puri wrote about. “Experience which is not your own is valueless” (so whether or not you believe my experiences, much less beliefs, is irrelevant, anyway), “intuition is the brain of the soul” and “it is YOU who are so ignorant”.

    You know nothing about atheists. I’ve been one since I was 7 years old and I am more than just intellect. I find peace and calm with meditation. Before I became disabled I was a part time dance instructor. I started dancing when I was three. It was my passion… a joy I can’t even describe properly. Being alone in nature – on a mountain, on a beach, in a park or even a quiet cemetery – those are perfect moments in time. There is wonder and a night sky full of awe. All of these beautiful indescribable moments and feelings require no god.

  48. realitychecker

    The atheists I\’ve known (I am an agnostic) behave themselves very nicely, without the fear of losing God\’s favor to motivate them. Just because it is a good and reasonable way to live.

    Many of us experience spirituality without reference to a fantasy figure. Meditation can get you there. So can just sitting quietly in the woods for a few hours.

    One can recognize the existence of wondrous energies in the universe without conjuring up a God figure. People created God(s); there is no evidence that \”God\” created people.

    It is arrogance to call that ignorance. IMNSHO. But, as in everything else, do what thou shalt do to find your bliss, so long as you do not hurt others. We are all responsible for gathering our own smiles. And in the end, very soon, we will all wind up in the same place, no matter what our beliefs. Enjoy the ride! :-0

  49. different clue

    @Willy,

    I am ready to accept that the whole world of Evangelical Mass Churches is bigger than the subworld of Armageddon Rapturite churches and movements. But the subworld of Armageddon Rapturites is still multi-millions-of-members big.

    I remember myself seeing Pat Robertson on TV explaining about how Ariel Sharon’s post-surgical cranial-bleed stroke was God’s Punishment for Ariel Sharon having dared to Divide the Land ( de-occupying Gaza). Because “Dividing the Land” could delay God’s Countdown to Armageddon. There is nothing cyberspace theoretical about that.

    I believe the comment that I wrote is factually and analytically correct and not just in the metaphorical sense. If I am wrong, then I am factually and analytically wrong. But I don’t think I am.

  50. Willy

    Okay, I never watched Pat Robertson. I must’ve come from a rapture-naive family. Was never discussed. Most of what I know about The Rapture I learned from the “This Is The End” movie. Plus what I could overhear from four office wackadoodles in the cubicle next to mine. Seemed most of them had “dabbled in witchcraft” before being born again. What’s up with that with these people?

    Maybe today’s kids are less susceptible to dabbling in witchcraft, rapturology, pareidolia, conservatism, or whatever the hell other quirks work best for a successful religious conversion. I’d prefer to believe they’re not interested because a once great religion is turning batshit. They hear that God is in total control one day, but lets Pat Robertson dictate things the next, with the ultimate goal of hastening some Rapture by ruining their kids future. Not the best marketing scheme.

  51. @Donna Curtis

    Ah, actually I dated an atheist. I was surprised to find out that she had no problem believing in ESP. She was also a musician. I was also surprised to find out that a very smart lefty guy I ‘met’, online, also believed in ESP. I found that out when we met, in person, as it turned out we lived in adjacent towns. I also worked with a couple of atheists, who I liked OK.

    I still tend to think of atheists as generally materialists, and hence you get pig-headed guys like Richard Dawkins, who is an eloquent and polite expositor of his beliefs, but who nevertheless dishonestly interacted with Rupert Sheldrake, who would have been happy to show him his EVIDENCE for human/pet ESP, when he came a-calling.

    But clearly, not ALL atheists are materialists. And some are a lot more fun than extreme religious types.

    And some are more spiritual than religious types, which shouldn’t surprise even religious people as being possible, since a core belief is that we are most fundamentally spiritual beings, and not the minds and bodies through which we experience consciousness.

    Even so, if atheists can’t say anything worthwhile about things they have no experience of and/or are in total denial of, I would still call them ignorant. Maybe philosophically, they can, but then we’re in the realm of intellect.

    In spite of having been blessed many times, especially during 1 amazing year of my otherwise somewhat dull and unsuccessful life, I also put myself in the “largely (but not completely) ignorant” category, in the following sense. Despite having meditated, off and on, since my teenage years, I have yet to be fully conscious in the astral plane, nor conscious at all in the etheric plane, much less in any of the planes above that, which are said to be purely spiritual, and in which one has no body of any type, at all. Until I have actual consciousness of something, it remains in the unsatisfactory category of mere belief; or perhaps of “vague intuition”. “For now we see through a glass, darkly”, said Saint Paul.

    I suppose I could have have phrased things better. Dora Kunz, who was a very gifted psychic, and former head of the Theosophical Society, was raised to meditate from a young age, but, IIRC, had no conventional religious training, at all. Whatever her conception of God was, I’m very sure it wasn’t that of a petty, jealous, vindictive Old Testament type of God, but rather something akin to what is described in the New Testament, viz., Love. Amongst at least some of us metaphysically minded people, this is understood as “the oneness of all being”.

  52. Willy

    It makes good horse sense that nothing ruins spirituality more than materialism (beyond subsistence). I don’t think Christians from more progressive eras would have embraced today’s ‘Christian’ conservative pundit-activists like Dennis Prager or Charlie Kirk, with their significant donor cash from various plutocrats. Cries of “But Soros!” seems a rationalistic dodge by comparison.

    I once tried to combine anti-materialism with physical laws like special relativity as a discussion starting point, to explore things like the Trinity, a spiritual component inherent to all life, Jesus cultural teachings, etc… at a popular Catholic blog. The only person who took me up on such a discussion, admitted he was an underemployed agnostic whiling away his night shift boredom. I tried again with ministers, christian friends and families and few showed much more than cursory interest. These ‘anointed’ preferred to discuss politics, materialistic miracles, and that God made Russell Wilson throw the perfect football pass. Apparently spirituality is losing to materialism.

  53. different clue

    Atheism is a religion. Atheism is the Faith-Belief in the non-existence of God or god or gods.
    And militant Atheist Fundamentalists are religious missionaries . . . . Missionistically proselytizing for converts to their Faith in no god or gods. Richard Dawkins is an Atheist Fundamentalist Believer.

  54. Damn DC, I want some of whatever it is you’re smokin’!

    That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you write.

  55. different clue

    I knew I’d get a nibble if I dropped a hook’n kibble.

    (I could of been a poet, an I want you all to noet).

  56. Heliopause

    Atheism qua atheism simply means not having a deity. The term was invented by theists to describe people who had the temerity to not believe in the commonly accepted deities of the time. By that understanding of the term, if you do not have a deity that you supplicate then you are an atheist.

    Since the term has always been something of a pejorative many people who don’t have a deity decline to refer to themselves by it. Some adhere to a belief system that is nontheistic but decline to call themselves atheists. Some will call themselves other terms, such as agnostic, though in the most basic sense of the term “atheist” most agnostics are in fact also atheists. All of that is fine, the language is complicated and nuanced and exists for the purpose of making these distinctions.

    Atheists aren’t necessarily materialist, though my suspicion is that self-described atheists are more likely to be so. Atheists aren’t necessarily nonspiritual, whatever that may mean, though my suspicion is that self-described atheists are more likely to be so. And so on.

    Being individual human beings atheists have the full range of individual approaches to their atheism. Some are fairly aggressively anti-religion and some are not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, individuals who are straightforward about expressing their worldviews, whatever they may be, are the ones who tend to attract the most attention, and the ones who tend to solidify popular stereotypes about classes of people.

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