Unlike most blogs, this tags page displays pages in forward order, as many of the posts that I make are cumulative and it is better to start at the beginning.
I’m going to engage in a bit of speculative theology in this post. Revelation 14:11:
And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.
I’m going to overinterpret the last clause as as a claim that anyone who receives the mark will become unsavable.
I’ve been listening to Mark Winger’s series on Women in Ministry, and Egalitarianism vs. Complementarianism in general. I think he does a great job of exploring carefully and thoroughly why egalitarianism is a factually and logically incorrect position as drawn from the Bible, and recommend it if you have the time and interest.
A note on a common aspect of theodicy (the problem of evil) and/or free will: It is commonly supposed that free will is in conflict with God knowing the outcome of our free choices, and that free will1 must somehow entail God not knowing and not being able to know what we will choose.
God says that he is Good, that he created Good things in creation, that he intended Good things for Man, and that falling for the temptation of Satan was a bad thing for Man.
These chapters consist on several ruminations of the power the people of Rome had, especially against their nobility, and the utility of that to the Republic.
In Chapter 7, Machiavelli discusses the utility of the ability to do what both translations call “accuse”; I think in modern terms that might be better rendered as “bring a lawsuit”.
Machiavelli gives his chapter 9 the subtitle “That to give new Institutions to a Commonwealth, or to reconstruct old Institutions on an entirely new basis, must be the work of one Man.
The next several chapters continue to examine the question of what religion does in a polity. Many of these chapters break cleanly into an examination of how Rome treated religion, followed by Machiavelli’s examination of the Christianity/Catholicism of his day, dominated by Rome.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had vivid and complicated dreams. Not just “I ran into my dad at school and he was playing basketball with my old swimming coach and then I noticed that the gym had no roof and I was wearing no pants; how random!
One of the perennial arguments of the conspiratorially-minded is who is on top. Is it the Freemasons? Jesuits? Catholic clergy? Illuminati? The Khazarian Mafia? Any of several variety of aliens?
Last night the kids wanted to watch the ball drop. I figured, why not. But we were also watching the college football game and it ran right up to the wire.
Spoiler: My answer is, I don’t know. My goal here is to attempt to convince you that you may not know as well as you think you do either.
In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes famously posits that the peoples of the ancient world were not just metaphorically writing about hearing gods, but that their brains were actually divided into a portion of the mind which “spoke” to the portion of the brain that then acted.