Do you know the story of Urbain Grandier, the priest of Loudun accused by the Ursuline nuns of cavorting with them sexually and with the Devil?
I had seen the film that came out in 1974. It is worth seeing because it graphically depicts all the elements of an Inquisition: the envy and resentment, justified or not, underlying a patently false accusation; the absurd and unscientific evidence to support it; the unnecessary cruelty of the punishment and the actual enjoyment that the perpetrators feel; the hysteria of unbalanced people, in this case, the nuns, who become co-inquisitors.
Urbain Grandeur was an excellent speaker. Note what the author of the book, The Devils of Loudun, Aldous Huxley, says about rhetoric and what it is really about.
The Good Fairy, who visits the cradles of the privileged, is often the Bad Fairy in a luminous disguise. She comes loaded with presents; but her bounty, all too often, is fatal. To Urbain Grandier, for example, the Good Fairy had brought, along with solid talents, the most dazzling of all gifts, and the most dangerous—eloquence.
Spoken by a good actor—and every great preacher, every successful advocate and politician is, among other things, a consummate actor—words can exercise an almost magical power over their hearers. Because of the essential irrationality of this power, even the best-intentioned of public speakers probably do more harm than good.
When an orator, by the mere magic of words and a golden voice, persuades his audience of the Tightness of a bad cause, we are very properly shocked. We ought to feel the same dismay whenever we find the same irrelevant tricks being used to persuade people of the Tightness of a good cause.
The belief engendered may be desirable, but the grounds for it are intrinsically wrong, and those who use the devices of oratory for instilling even right beliefs are guilty of pandering to the least creditable elements in human nature.
By exercising their disastrous gift of the gab, they deepen the quasi-hypnotic trance in which most human beings live and from which it is the aim and purpose of all true philosophy, all genuinely spiritual religion to deliver them. Moreover, there cannot be effective oratory without oversimplification. But you cannot oversimplify without distorting the facts. Even when he is doing his best to tell the truth, the successful orator is ipso facto a liar.
And most successful orators, it is hardly necessary to add, are not even trying to tell the truth; they are trying to evoke sympathy for their friends and antipathy for their opponents. Grandier, alas, was one of the majority.
Sunday after Sunday, in the pulpit of St. Peter's, he gave his celebrated imitations of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, of Demosthenes, of Savonarola, even of Rabelais—for he was as good at derision as at righteous indignation, at irony as at apocalyptic thunder.
Nature abhors a vacuum, even in the mind. Today the aching void of boredom is filled and perpetually renewed by movies and radio, television and the comic strips.
More fortunate than we, or else less fortunate (who knows?), our ancestors depended, for the assuagement of their ennui, on the weekly performances of their parish priest, supplemented from time to time by the discourses of visiting Capuchins or traveling Jesuits.
Preaching is an art, and in this, as in all other arts, the bad performers far outnumber the good. The parishioners of St. Peter's in the Market could congratulate themselves on possessing, in the Reverend Grandier, a superb virtuoso, ready and able to improvise entertainingly on the sub-limest Christian mystery as well as on the most touchy, the most delicate and scabrous of parochial issues. How roundly he denounced abuses, how fearlessly he reproved even those in high places! The chronically bored majority were delighted. Their applause merely served to increase the fury of those who had been made the victims of the parson's eloquence.
____________________ "The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
Strike any chords, that quote above? And how about this one on partisanship?
Have any of you read Brave New World?
Huxley got it that there was a non-1984 version of communal life based on the pleasure principle and anti-soul. That was Brave New World..
Partisan loyalty is socially disastrous; but for individuals it can be richly rewarding—more rewarding, in many ways, than even concupiscence or avarice. Whore-mongers and money-grubbers find it hard to feel very proud of their activities.
But partisanship is a complex passion which permits those who indulge in it to make the best of both worlds. Because they do these things for the sake of a group which is, by definition, good and even sacred, they can admire themselves and loathe their neighbors, they can seek power and money, can enjoy the pleasures of aggression and cruelty, notmerely without feeling guilty, but with a positive glow of conscious virtue.
Loyalty to their group transforms these pleasant vices acts of heroism. Partisans are aware of themselves, not as sinners or criminals, but as altruists and idealists. And with certain qualifications, this is in fact what they are. The only trouble is that their altruism is merely egotism at one remove, and that the ideal, for which they are ready in many cases to lay down their lives, is nothing but the rationalization of corporate interests and party passions.
____________________ "The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
Great example of deRodes quote of 2 Timothy 3:1-5. I have to wonder if the secular Church of Obama will suffer a kind of anti-revival blow-back. Between Iran, Israel, and Afghanistan he will have to have a very cogent calculus, but the gospel of the American Left is wholly dysfunctional in both the physical and spiritual world! On top of this his laity nuns are insane ( such as Woopi Goldberg). I suppose that from a macro or metaphysical view point what we see happening is the epic disintegration that preceeds rebirth. Obama and his parishioners are promoting the process of disintegration through their delusional ideologies put into actions.
____________________ Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
Wow, Phil! A real coup of a phrase: "laity nuns" such as Whoopy.
And Nancy Pelosi:
Nancy Pelosi's selective memory was on display just recently as many of you well remember. What the younger readers and writers here won't remember so well as some people who lived through the era are the many acts of violence by the left in that decade. Dan White's was the exception to the rule that violence in the Bay Area came from the left.
Leftist political radicals killed literally hundreds, and some otherwise fine people that I admired were complicit. There is an article below that did a very good job on the presentation of the facts. Jim Jones' abuse at his People's Temple (second video) was covered up by an editor at the San Francisco Examiner when the story was about to break.
Jones was an ally of Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk, and the editor of the Examiner wanted to protect Jones and the People's Temple and Moscone as well. Stopped, censored, the article came out in a magazine that the Hearst Corp. didn't control. Essentially exposed as a criminal abuser running an organization that physically, sexually and psychologically abused its members, Jones then left town.
Jones was responsible for the death of hundreds in Guyana, forcing his followers to drink cyanide-laced Kool Aid after the massacre at the airport where Jones' henchmen killed California congressman Ryan and the members of his party who had come to investigate the cult and help those who wanted to leave to get out.
I remember during one of the trials of the Black Panther leader, Huey P. Newton, how witnesses died night after night before testifying. This was before the witness protection program we have today was set up.
The Symbionese Liberation Army, a group of total left-wing psychopaths, killed the superintendent of the Oakland School System, shooting him with cyanide-laced bullets for the "crime" of starting a student identification system to keep gang members from roaming the halls of schools they didn't go to and causing havoc. That was before the more infamous kidnapping of Patty Hearst, heir of the Hearst family, owners of Hearst Corp and their chain of newspapers. That lead to more violence and death.
Nancy Pelosi is not the only one with a selective memory. The entire media establishment is in denial about the left's propensity for violence even as the anarchist protesters at the G20 do their habitual "thing".
This capacity to be in denial is part of a mechanism called "projection", whereby the evil you fail to acknowledge in yourself and your group gets assigned to your opponents, rivals and enemies. All of that insures that we turn in circles when it comes to social and spiritual progress.
____________________ "The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
For one, brief shining moment last week, I thought Nancy Pelosi must be the
bravest American politician of the century, standing up to her own nutball constituency in the interest of American political politesse. After all, when she tearfully told a press conference that the partisan bombast should be dialed down several notches lest it turn bloody -- ``I saw this myself in the late '70s in San Francisco, this kind of rhetoric . . . it created an environment in which violence took place'' -- she had to be talking about left-wing violence, right?
Because when you talk about political murder and mayhem in San Francisco 30 years ago, the trigger was almost always pulled or the cyanide Kool-Aid poured by a leftist. There were the revolutionary nihilists of the Symbionese Liberation Army, assassinating an Oakland school superintendent, kidnapping Patty Hearst and finally shotgunning an innocent bystander during a bank robbery.
There were the cop-killing drug dealers of the Black Panthers, who began murdering their own sympathizers to keep them quiet. And of course the Black Liberation Army, a Panther offshoot that bombed a church where a policeman's funeral was being held. We think it was the BLA, anyway; in San Francisco those days, you couldn't tell your bombers without a scorecard. The Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front, the Revolutionary Army, they were all blowing something up on practically a weekly basis.
And who can forget Jim Jones and his communal cult that ended in an orgy of murder and mass suicide in 1978? Well, most Democrats can; otherwise, they have to explain why people like Rosalynn Carter, Walter Mondale and Jerry Brown were such enthusiastic supporters of Jones until his infamous Kool-Aid party.
But no, Pelosi wasn't thinking of any of those examples. Shortly after she quelled her theatrical sniffles, her spinmasters clarified that she was referring only to the 1978 murders of liberal politicians George Moscone and Harvey Milk by a conservative rival, Dan White, dramatized in last year's film Milk.
Now that's the Pelosi I know: conveniently ignoring the corpses of literally hundreds of victims of organized left-wing violence while using two murders committed by an unbalanced (and, to be sure, evil) individual to make it sound like the San Francisco of the 1970s was a hellhole of right-wing terrorism. How silly of me to think she might, however briefly, have lapsed into intellectual honesty.
Unfortunately, Pelosi is alone in neither her equation of conservative politics with bloodlust nor her willingness to shade the truth to make her case. Lately, the favorite talking point of America's chattering classes has been that to oppose President Obama's economic policies is to court presidential assassination. MSNBC's Chris Matthews and the New York Times' Frank Rich have even gone so far as to say that it's happened before.
Rich compared the anti-Obama tea-party rallies to ``the walk-up to the Kennedy assassination, [when] there was all this hate talk about Kennedy.'' Matthews chimed in that ``the mood we're in right now'' reminded of him of when ``Jack Kennedy was killed in an open car in Dallas.''
Neither Rich nor Matthews offered a plausible explanation of how right-wing hate could have triggered the death of Kennedy, killed by a Marxist who six weeks before the assassination was begging for visas from Cuba and the Soviet Union. There's no need. The idea that conservatives (especially Christian conservatives) are a homicidal mob eternally poised on the verge of bloodshed is an article of faith on the left.
Rich in particular has practically made a career of predicting mass murder by the right. He wrote column after column warning that Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of The Christ would touch off worldwide slaughter: ``Its real tinder-box effect could be abroad, where anti-Semitism has metastasized since 9/11.''
Five years later, we're still waiting for the first riot, just as we're still looking for the anti-Asian bloodshed that was certain to follow the 2001 film Pearl Harbor, which indelicately suggested the guys dropping the bombs that day were Japanese. Or the angry white male who was, we were repeatedly assured, behind the Washington Beltway sniper murders of 2002. (Actual killers: a pair of black Muslims.)
The unavoidable fact is that there is a rich history of violence on the fringes of both sides of the American political spectrum. The right, as liberals are fond of pointing out, has Timothy McVeigh and James Earl Ray. The left has the Puerto Rican nationalists who opened fire on the floor of Congress, animal-rights nuts and eco-terrorists. If Nancy Pelosi really sees trouble coming, she needs to look in both directions.
____________________ "The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
The best way to find any projections and remove them is to spend a lot of time in person eye-to-eye with the projection target(s). I suspect that would be politically incorrect and inconvenient for Pelosi. She just wants to surround herself with her San Francisco Leftist acolytes and money contributors, telling herself this is mainstream America and everyone else is fanatic nazi hillbillies.
____________________ Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
She, and anyone else that far along the road of self-deception, would have to undergo what amounted to an exorcism, primal therapy, for example.
The only way that would happen is if she crashed, hit rock bottom, as they say in AA. Otherwise, her defense system will keep her going.
Now, I am a firm believer that life is a School for the Spirit. Sooner or later, in this life or another, she will undergo that crash and that exorcism.
Otherwise you end up in hell, eternally, that is, over and over from the blind commitment to one-sidedness and the defense of your incomplete ego structure and your lack of soul.
____________________ "The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
Yeah, Pelosi is pretty far gone. As you know she claims she is Catholic. When the Pope paid her a visit, afterwards she said she showed him pictures of her family, small talk. He recalled a different conversation concerning her aberrant policies. In any case no one mentioned evoking spiritual powers. If I had been Pelosi I would have asked the Pope to lead a prayer with me that I get, for example, guidance from God for what is the right thing to do. I am sure the Pope was very disappointed in Pelosi's spiritual condition. She didn't even ask for a prayer! Bad sign, very bad.
There are supernatural entities and powers that can help us in the School for the Spirit and help us help others!
____________________ Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
The Qu'ran (Koran), the Talmud (Pharisees), and the Catholic church have much in common. All three have their roots in Babylon. The Talmud is the oldest and, if you change 'Pharisee' to Zionist, you can grasp the connection in today's world.
At Matthew 21:33-44, Jesus' parable describes the wicked husbandmen, wherein the KJV says of the parable: "Teaching the rejection of the Jews, and our rejection if we do not receive Christ and his messengers." At the end of that parable, the Pharisees (Zionist) perceive Jesus is referring to them and they start plotting against Him.
This Talmud or 'book of laws' is the most vile, blasphemous and egotistical thing every written. Do you wonder why Jesus found them to be so contemptible? Why He called them satanic?
Speculation on my part is that, Muhammad initially read the Torah (Tenach/Old Testament) and wanted acceptance from the Jews. But he was rebuked as not being 'good enough' by the Pharisees and sent away. He probably got a copy of the Talmud, read it, and decided vengeance would be his. He invented another god/religion using representatives of the worst from both books. The Qu'ran, however, is more merciful of our Lord than the Talmud. It describes Him merely as a prophet and not the Son of God.
Will Peter Schaefer's new book, Jesus in the Talmud (Mar.), be controversial? "I'm afraid so," Schaefer told RBL. "That's why I'm nervous."
excerpt:
What exactly is so scandalous? How about Jesus punished in Hell for eternity by being made to sit in a cauldron of boiling excrement? That image appears in early manuscripts of the Babylonian Talmud, as does a brief account of Jesus' trial and execution—not by the Romans but by the Jewish high court, the Sanhedrin. The Jewish community, to the extent Jews were even aware of these excised texts, has been content to let them remain obscure and unknown.
Catholicism, somewhere in between the two, re-introduces paganism into Christianity; changes the Sabbath day to Sunday, Passover to Easter, and the 'birth of the sun' worship to Christ's birthday, etc.
The first two religions are a violent threat to Christians and each other! Catholicism is more subtle but it, too, is against Christians. Why? Because it denies the truth of God's word.
____________________ Politicians and diapers should be changed often - for the same reason!
_________________
Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit. Proverbs 18:21
Be careful with the isms, the Evil One is in them and that includes denominationalism. Stay true to your faith and Honor everyone regardless of their ism and then by your faith you can defeat the Enemy.
____________________ Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
"Be careful with the isms, the Evil One is in them and that includes denominationalism. Stay true to your faith and Honor everyone regardless of their ism and then by your faith you can defeat the Enemy."
I have a BIG problem with honoring anyone who blasphemes my Lord!
excerpt:
Asked about his feelings concerning Christians today who support Israel his answer is equally unforgiving–‘The Christian Zionists are deluded. They’re stupid and don’t know the bible. They take a few passages out of context such as ‘bless those who bless thee, etc and twist it into something not real…The bible is very clear on this–The seed of Abraham are the Christians, not the Jews. The true Israel of God are the Christians and those who look forward to the coming of the Messiah. The Jews are looking for the coming of the Messiah, but it is a completely different idea of Messiah, the difference between Cain and Abel. They are waiting for someone to make them powerful and justify their wickedness. Our message as Christians is clear–Don’t bless those who are the enemies of Christ, and the false prophets such as John Hagee and Pat Robertson who say we must are as much enemies to Jesus as the Jews themselves are.’
____________________ Politicians and diapers should be changed often - for the same reason!
_________________
Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit. Proverbs 18:21
Don't confuse dominion and authority of government with that of the individual person, and the Evil One with humans. A person may be under the influence of evil. The objective is to bring the person to Salvation! If you turn your back or scorn someone who cursed God then Satan used you and won that spiritual battle.
Paul did a lot of his evangelism in synagogues. If he didn't honor them do you think they would have tolerated him in the temple for even a day? Yet he would spend weeks in them. He even converted the Chief of the Corinth Synagogue.
Romans 12
14 Bless those who persecute you. Don't curse them; pray that God will bless them.15 Be happy with those who are happy, and weep with those who weep.16 Live in harmony with each other. Don't be too proud to enjoy the company of ordinary people. And don't think you know it all! 17 Never pay back evil with more evil. Do things in such a way that everyone can see you are honorable.18 Do all that you can to live in peace with everyone. 19 Dear friends, never take revenge. Leave that to the righteous anger of God. For the Scriptures say,
"I will take revenge;
I will pay them back,"
says the LORD.
20 Instead,
"If your enemies are hungry, feed them.
If they are thirsty, give them something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap
burning coals of shame on their heads."
21 Don't let evil conquer you, but conquer evil by doing good
Matthew 5
43 "You have heard the law that says, 'Love your neighbor' and hate your enemy.44 But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you!45 In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike.46 If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much.47 If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that.48 But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.
____________________ Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
Back up to verse 9:
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with brotherly affection; outdo one another in showing honor.
When Jesus commanded the disciples to "Love one another as I have loved you" he wasn't talking to the Pharisees.
I have prayed for my enemies - that their hearts be softened and their eyes opened to the truth, but I will not honor them with tithes and offerings nor will I kneel to their idols!
Rev. 18
After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority; and the earth was made bright with his splendor. 2. And he called out with a mighty voice, "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! It has become a dwelling place of demons, a haunt of every foul spirit, a haunt of every foul and hateful bird; 3. for all nations have drunk the wine of her impure passions, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have grown rich with the wealth of her wantonness." 4. Then I heard another voice from heaven saying, "Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues; 5. for her sins are heaped high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities. 6. Render to her as she herself has rendered, and repay her double for her deeds; mix a double draught for her in the cup she mixed. 7. As she glorified herself and played the wanton, so give her a like measure of torment and mourning. Since in her heart she says, 'A queen I sit, I am no widow, mourning I shall never see,' 8. so shall her plagues come in a single day, pestilence and mourning and famine, and she shall be burned with fire; for mighty is the Lord God who judges her."
____________________ Politicians and diapers should be changed often - for the same reason!
_________________
Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit. Proverbs 18:21
For sure honoring does not mean to support the evil in someone, through words or deeds or material. I'm not going to vote for a politician who's policies are against my beliefs, so I did not vote for Obama. But if say Obama visited my home I would honor him as a fellow human and consider it a God-given opportunity for me to express, for example, the injustice I see in America and to make prayer with him in Jesus Name. Satan would hate that! I'd treat a Muslim with the same respect and ask if he/she would like to pray to God (according to how the Holy Spirit directs me. I of course in Jesus's Name as always)! I lean into my faith.
A pastor of a very large church said that in his town they have their annual Fair and parade downtown. It lasts for three days. He saw a Tarot card Fortune Teller had set up a tent. He did not want any demonic influence in his town. He did not storm in her tent confronting her because he felt that she was just a poor woman under the influence of Evil. Instead he went behind her tent and prayed to the Lord that this demonic presence be removed. She was gone the next morning.
It is one thing to say I hate Zionism and it is something completely different to say I hate a Zionist - the individual person. Hate the sin but love the sinner.
____________________ Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
Did I name names? No, I only pointed out those religions that are NOT biblical. ISMs are the harlots, Zionism is the harlot, Babylon.
I can't imagine BHO making a "visit" to your home. Seems to me he'd send his SWAT team. Speaking of which, I took my grandson to the library to return some books and there, parked across one lane of traffic, was a SWAT truck with its blue lights flashing. Signs in the street said it was "police training." Training for what? was my question.
