the bible,truth,God's kingdom,Jehovah God,New World,Jehovah's Witnesses,God's church,Christianity,apologetics,spirituality.
Saturday, 7 December 2024
Wednesday, 9 October 2024
Saturday, 5 October 2024
Thursday, 4 July 2024
Tuesday, 25 June 2024
Monday, 18 March 2024
Catholicism's civil war rages on?
How Catholics Celebrate Pride: Jesuit Pastor Defends Pride Mass Against Protests
Monday, 12 June 2023
Friday, 2 June 2023
It's finally happened
Utah district bans Bible in elementary and middle schools
Tuesday, 30 May 2023
The kingdom of which God?
New Chinese Catholic leaders say they'll follow Communist Party principles
Thursday, 13 April 2023
Wednesday, 15 March 2023
The beast stirs?
Zelenskiy: Ukraine seeks 'spiritual independence', acts against church
March 12 (Reuters) - Ukraine's punitive actions against a branch of the Orthodox church linked to Russia are part of a drive to achieve "spiritual independence," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday.
Zelenskiy and other Ukrainian leaders have accused the long-established Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) of undermining Ukrainian unity and collaborating with Moscow.
Thursday, 9 February 2023
Unthinkable no more?
Harvesting Clones to Live Forever Would Be Monstrous
Wesley J Smith
Wednesday, 8 February 2023
Monday, 6 February 2023
Well past the slippery slope?
Suicide Tourism Comes to Oregon
Assisted-suicide activists always promise that strict guidelines will protect against abuse. It’s a big con. The guidelines are not really strict. They rely primarily on self-reporting. And they are meant to be temporary: As soon as political conditions permit, the access to doctor-prescribed death expands.
Witness Oregon. When Measure 16 passed, assisted suicide was limited to state residents. That requirement was recently deemed inoperative by the state’s ever-flaccid suicide regulators after a Lawsuit was settled and is expected to soon be repealed.
Opening the Floodgate
That threatens to open a floodgate and transform Oregon into the U.S. equivalent of Switzerland, where suicide clinics flourish. Already, people from out of state who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness — something very loosely defined — are traveling to Oregon to find a death doctor willing to help make themselves dead in just over two weeks. From the daily mail story :
Oregon has become America’s first ‘death tourism’ destination, where terminally ill people from Texas and other states that have outlawed assisted suicide have started travelling to get their hands on a deadly cocktail of drugs to end their lives, DailyMail.com can reveal.
In the liberal bastion Portland, at least one clinic has started receiving out-of-staters who have less than six months to live and meet the other strict requirements of the state’s Death with Dignity (DWD) law.
Dr Nicholas Gideonse, the director of End of Life Choices Oregon, recently told a panel that he was advising terminally ill non-residents on travelling to Oregon to end their lives, despite a legal gray area.
Remember, suicidal people who qualify for assisted suicide are not usually offered prevention, meaning some suicidal people receive efforts to save their lives while others are abandoned to facilitation.
Activists also promised that assisted suicide would only occur in the context of a close doctor/patient relationship. But Oregon permits doctor-shopping. If one doctor says no, suicidal patients can merely ask an advocacy group to recommend an ideologically predisposed doctor willing to prescribe death. And suicide prescribers don’t even need to practice in the specialty that treats the patient’s underlying medical condition.
Meanwhile, in Other States
Other states are also loosening “strict guidelines.” For example, Vermont permits virtual assisted suicide, meaning the consultation can be over Zoom or Skype. California has attempted to compel doctors to participate in the assisted-suicide process — after promising MDs, in order to get the law passed, that they would not have to do any of that. The new anti-conscience law is on hold after a lawsuit. Other states where assisted suicide has been legalized have similarly loosened waiting times and procedures.
The ultimate goal — or, at least, the consequence — of allowing assisted suicide/euthanasia is death on demand. Some jurisdictions are getting there faster — Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada — and some slower, such as Oregon, Vermont, California, and Colorado. But that tide only flows in one direction.
Friday, 13 January 2023
Tuesday, 10 January 2023
Wednesday, 21 December 2022
Sons of the original firemaker? II
Neanderthals Had a Thing for Eagles — And Hyenas
Although technically a dog expert, Mark Derr has given some thought since the 1990s to Neanderthal man who seems to get smarter each time we study him:
For instance, Neanderthal appears to have mastered and used fire for a variety of purposes including cooking after their appearance in Eurasia some 300,000 or more years ago. They also made carvings into ivory, and they almost certainly communicated using speech. To show how slowly attitudes change, I have recently seen people speculate that Neanderthal may have only seasonally had fire, but in general were incapable of igniting tinder on their own. This view recently received what would appear to be a mortal blow when Ceren Kabukcu and colleagues revealed that Neanderthal not only had fire throughout the year, but also used fire to cook a wide variety of foods which they consumed.
MARK DERR, “NEW VIEWS OF NEANDERTHAL ARE RESHAPING PREHISTORY” AT PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (DECEMBER 11, 2022)
He raises the fact that Neanderthals had an interesting relationship with raptors and hyenas.
Elsewhere, we have learned that Neanderthal captured golden eagles and other raptors, presumably to take their talons and feathers for use in various rituals and decorative objects. According to Stewart Finlayson et al., the Neanderthals “selectively took the largest raptors at their disposal within Eurasia,” which turned out to be the golden eagle, with regional and local exceptions. Whether they hunted with golden eagles is not known, but given the time and effort they spent collecting them, it is not unimaginable that they did not at least make an attempt to tame them.
MARK DERR, “NEW VIEWS OF NEANDERTHAL ARE RESHAPING PREHISTORY” AT PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (DECEMBER 11, 2022)
While we don’t know if Neanderthals tried falconry, as it is called, it’s well established that they used the eagles’ feathers and talons “perhaps as religious totems, perhaps as icons of personal strength.” (Audubon News, June 21, 2019) Researchers think that Neanderthal use of raptor emblems in this way is an instance of symbolic expression, implying an intellectual life. (PLOS, March 5, 2012) Neanderthals also incorporated corvids (crows, for example) into their symbolic life. The crow, like the eagle, is rich in symbolism in many human cultures.
What About the Hyenas?
There’s a story in that: Neanderthals are not thought, based on current evidence, to have had much interest in dogs, Mietje Germonpré, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences told Derr: “archeological evidence suggests that modern humans had a special interest in canids, while such an interest seems absent in Neanderthals.”
But they had a special regard for the hyena, the most dog-like of felines. Neanderthal and hyena remains have been discovered together in caves:
Hyenas and Neanderthals appear to have had an especially extensive relationship, the boundaries of which are unknown. One might ask whether hyenas were Neanderthals’ “dogs.” Upper Paleolithic sites reveal, in contrast with Middle Paleolithic sites, large quantities of personal objects made from canid teeth, especially from foxes, wolves, and bears.
MARK DERR, “NEW VIEWS OF NEANDERTHAL ARE RESHAPING PREHISTORY” AT PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (DECEMBER 11, 2022)
Well, there is only one way to find out: Keep digging.
You may also wish to read: Our ancestors were cooking much earlier than thought. The more we learn about early humans, the more sophisticated we find their culture to be. The basics of human culture seem to undergo less development than we think. The culture may appear at about the same time as the humans.
Monday, 19 December 2022
Hope has fallen?
Bioethicist: Having Children Is Bad
Wesley J. Smith
This is the world of bioethics, the “experts” whom we are supposed to trust to guide public policy on a range of issues, from medical policy to environmental law.
We should not listen to a word the mainstreamers have to say — as this article telling us not to have children makes clear. From “Science Proves Kids are Bad for the Earth,” by Travis Reider, published at NBC Think:
A startling and honestly distressing view is beginning to receive serious consideration in both academic and popular discussions of climate change ethics. According to this view, having a child is a major contributor to climate change. The logical takeaway here is that everyone on Earth ought to consider having fewer children.
The Chinese Model
Talk about shades of China family-planning theory. We must destroy much of what makes life worth living in order save the planet!
The argument that having a child adds to one’s carbon footprint depends on the view that each of us has a personal carbon ledger for which we are responsible. Furthermore, some amount of an offspring’s emissions count towards the parents’ ledger.
Whatcrap. We do not have to feel guilty for being alive. Moreover, children bring great joy into the world. They are the posterity to whom the future will belong and depend. They are the hope of the world, not environmental disasters.
The Most Important Endeavor
If I release a murderer from prison, knowing full well that he intends to kill innocent people, then I bear some responsibility for those deaths — even though the killer is also fully responsible. My having released him doesn’t make him less responsible (he did it!). But his doing it doesn’t eliminate my responsibility either.
Something similar is true, I think, when it comes to having children: Once my daughter is an autonomous agent, she will be responsible for her emissions. But that doesn’t negate my responsibility. Moral responsibility simply isn’t mathematical. . . .
Having a child imposes high emissions on the world, while the parents get the benefit. So like with any high-cost luxury, we should limit our indulgence.
No. Choosing to bring new life is not an environmental wrong. It is the best that life has to offer.
This is why I call it global-warming hysteria. And it’s an example of why I think most bioethics discourse pushes us away from policies and actions that make for a healthy and vibrant society.
Ps. Luke23:29NIV"For the time will come when you will say, ‘Blessed are the childless women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’"
For the record I believe that both the author and the mainstream bioethicists he vehemently opposes mean well but they both attacking the symptoms and not the disease.
Wednesday, 14 December 2022
The ministry of truth is real?
How Media and the Medical Establishment Suppressed COVID Heterodoxy
Peter Biles
Last month, the peer-reviewed journal Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning, and Policy published an important article on COVID-related censorship. I’ve written about it already here. The researchers introduced their article by defining some terms, recalling certain COVID controversies, and noting how multiple respected medical professionals were hurt in the fallout of the pandemic controversy.
They went on to describe the specific experiences of their study participants, including 13 established doctors, scientists, and medical professionals who were censored, suppressed, or otherwise punished for expressing dissent with regard to the prevailing COVID-19 orthodoxy. All those who participated have either an MD or PhD in their respective fields, and four have both. These are not, then, conspiracy types or Internet trolls. They are reputable minds who simply transgressed against the “consensus” view, which, as I said in my earlier article, has changed drastically since March 2020.
Standing and Credibility
The researchers kept these participants anonymous to protect them, but emphasized their standing and credibility. In interviews, they gathered firsthand quotes to show just how harsh and brazen the censorship was in some cases, listing the tactics the medical establishment and media used against them. They reported:
Tactics of censorship and suppression described by our respondents include exclusion, derogatory labelling, hostile comments and threatening statements by the media, both mainstream and social; dismissal by the respondents’ employers; official inquiries; revocation of medical licenses; lawsuits; and retraction of scientific papers after publication.
The study respondents noted that publications that formerly endorsed and published them began excluding their work and refusing to publish or interview them. One participant said,
Neither X nor Y [two major newspapers in the respondent’s country] wanted to publish my articles. Without a proper explanation. …It was quite blatant, that they stopped accepting articles expressing a different opinion from that of the Ministry of Health (MOH). The number of journalists who can really be talked to, who are willing to listen to another opinion, to publish, has been greatly reduced, and most health reporters today are very biased towards the MOH.
Beyond mere exclusion from publication privileges, respondents also experienced outright denigration. News headlines called them out for their criticisms, defaming them, harming their reputations, and distorting their views. One participant said, “I have been vilified…I’ve been called a quack…, an anti-vaxxer and a COVID denier, a conspiracy theorist.” Facing ridicule of that sort, other likeminded medical professionals understandably kept silent. So, the silencing tactic may have suppressed many more medical professionals, as the researchers note in their introduction.
Not the Only Casualties
The study also showed how reputations weren’t the only casualties. Whole careers were destroyed. Another respondent reported:
I lost my job…, I was working for the last 20 years in X [the institution’s name]… And so, the media started coming to X… there was a concerted effort to… ruin my reputation, even though, this is unbelievable, they had the lowest death rate basically in the world, and the doctor who brought it to them, gets vilified and slandered. So, I left on my own…
Other respondents described being censored by social media. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn, removed heterodox posts, and in some cases, suspended the respondent’s account. That Twitter blacklisted and “shadow-banned” prominent medical experts like Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has since been confirmed. One study participant said:
I’ve always had videos, just my teaching material I’ve been putting up on YouTube…, but I also started to put up materials around this, just sort of talking through some of the research… looking at the vaccine efficacy data… YouTube started taking it down. And so now…, I cannot post, I can’t even mention vaccines, because within seconds, as soon as I’m actually trying to upload the video, YouTube will say this video goes against our guidelines…
No Explanation or Due Process
Beyond media censorship, the medical establishment suppressed research and viewpoint diversity. Academic institutions, peer-reviewed journals, and scientific committees played a hand in excluding certain respondents and refusing to give their voices a fair hearing. One respondent said he was “stripped” from a committee and editorial position with no explanation or due process. The respondent had been on this particular committee for decades, but still was cut off without a word. In addition, the researchers noted that some respondents “recounted how their research had been retracted by the journal after publication.” During the pandemic, it became increasingly difficult for some of the respondents to publish in journals where their work had been formerly welcomed.
The study went on to document how the participants initially responded to these tactics of suppression, and the tactics they used to fight back. I’ll cover that in my next and final post in this series.