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The Country Where Hello Means Hello and Goodbye

7/31/2025

Aside from discussing Hungarian painters, I haven't spent much time on this blog commenting on Hungarian culture, which is somewhat odd considering that I have spent a decade living here as a somewhat foreigner.

Somewhat foreigner because although I have Hungarian roots (go back far enough, they become Germanic), speak the language, and married a Hungarian, I spent the bulk of my life—more than forty years—in Anglo countries.

Hungarian culture is not a big topic on this blog for one simple reason. There's not much to talk about. Since the collapse of communism in 1989, Hungary has gradually and then suddenly morphed into “every other place in the West.”

Except for the turbulent transition decades of the 90s and early 2000s, Hungarian culture has become as bland as unflavored yoghurt.

The people here are pretty much the same as the people everywhere else in the West. The prevailing public political milieu leans more toward petit bourgeois conservatism, but the overall motivations remain intensely material in scope and nature.

If I were to write about Hungarian culture today, I would fill this blog with posts about Hungarians diving headfirst into deep consumer debt to purchase things they don’t need, dreaming about their next vacation to whatever hotspot the television celebrities are pushing, and getting tattoos. Lots and lots of tattoos.

And that pretty much sums it up.

About the only interesting thing in Hungary today is the incorporation of the word “hello” into the Magyar language.

Like Anglos, Hungarians employ the word as an initial greeting. Unlike Anglos, Hungarians also use the word when they say farewell.

So, you say hello when you meet someone on the street in Hungary, and when you are ready to leave, you also say hello.

Thus, hello serves as a sort of bookend greeting here. Coming or going? Doesn’t matter. Hello does the trick either way.

And that’s about the most interesting aspect of Hungarian culture at the moment.

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Why Has Nobody Figured Out How to Make Fiberglass Insulation Less Itchy?

7/29/2025

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I spent the day hauling rolls of old, dusty, debris-filled fiberglass insulation I bundled up a couple of weeks ago down from the attic to clean up the space after the recent roof renovation and make room for a fresh layer of insulation.

I plan to reuse the old fiberglass to line the edges of the attic after the new insulation is in place. In the meantime, I am storing the used insulation in an empty storage room attached to the house.

The job would not have been a big deal if the material had been wood, steel, concrete, or even cannonballs made of lead; however, the job required working with fiberglass, which is never pleasant, as anyone who has worked with the awful stuff knows full well.

After having spent the day inhaling what seemed a lifetime’s worth of glass fibers and dust (despite the respirator strapped to my face), I began to wonder what sort of characters invented this most ungodly of construction materials. My curiosity led me to a blog page called The History of Fiberglass.

I quickly learned that the creation of delicate glass fibers dates back to the ancients (think Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Greeks); however, the world had to wait until 1880 for the first fiberglass production patent, issued to a Mr. Hermann Hammesfahr—a terrifyingly Teutonic name if there ever was one! Herr Hammesfahr created cloth woven from glass fibers and silk, but the innovation stagnated.

The sort of glass fibers that eventually made their way into insulation did not appear until a half-century later. As is the case with many inventions, fiberglass was an accidental discovery rather than a targeted innovation, as The History of Fiberglass explains:

Games Slayter, an engineer at the company, was working on ways to produce glass fibers as a strategy for finding new markets for glass.

Another employee at Owens-Illinois, Dale Kleist, was experimenting with fusing glass blocks using molten glass sprayed out of a gun originally designed for spraying molten bronze. When he attempted to spray the glass, however, the gun emitted instead a shower of fine glass strands. Slayter immediately saw the potential of this accidental discovery and honed the process of producing large quantities of glass fiber efficiently and cheaply, which was patented in 1933.

The first product Slayter made with these new glass fibers was an air filter, which went on the market in 1932. This was to be the first commercially successful product made of glass fiber.

At the same time, Corning Glass of New York was also working on methods of producing glass fibers. The company approached Owens-Illinois to collaborate on research. In 1938, these companies formed the Owens-Corning Fiberglas Company (their name for the product had only one ‘s’), which continued to perfect techniques of industrial glass fiber production.

And here we are, nearly a century later, still waiting for someone to discover how to make fiberglass insulation a more pleasant material to work with!

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The Second Coming Induces This-Worldly Hopes of Helping Jesus Unify Heaven and Earth

7/22/2025

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In a recent post, Dr. Charlton outlined the hedonic-therapeutic, right-left axis of morality in the following manner:

And this is why the Left sees itself as a higher morality than the Right - in that therapeutic alleviation of suffering is seen as more sophisticated, altruistic, compassionate etc - than trying to create as much positive emotionality as possible.

The Right sees our finite life as something we should make the most of (for ourselves and - some- others; the Left as something we should get through with the least misery (for ourselves perhaps, but mainly justified in terms of therapy for others).

In a comment on that post, I applied the right-left axis to organized Christianity:

…I sense that it has tended more toward the therapeutic side of things, much to the chagrin of traditionally-minded Christians (who want to get back to some church-centered form of society in the hope that it will solve “modernity”).

Whether right or left, one thing is certain—organized Christianity is focused primarily on this-worldly motivations and aims. I have often wondered why that is so. One possible explanation for such an obsessive focus on this world may lie in the doctrine of the Second Coming, the culmination of God’s purposes in Creation and ultimate plans for humanity.

A quick and easy way to think about the Second Coming is to consider it as a mass restoration and resurrection event in which Jesus returns to earth from heaven with the express mission to unify heaven and earth.

One problem with the Second Coming doctrine is that it essentially diminishes Jesus’s time on earth, to say nothing of his creation of heaven and subsequent offer of everlasting life to those who choose to believe in him and follow him.

The Second Coming implies that Jesus did not accomplish all he had set out to accomplish during his First Coming. It also dilutes the intensely personal nature of choosing to follow Jesus and turns it into a mass resurrection event in which all will be judged and dealt with accordingly during the End Times.

The Second Coming also lessens the next-worldly, life-after-death aspect of Jesus’s offer of everlasting life in heaven because in the future Jesus will incorporate this world with the next one to establish his eternal kingdom. Thus, the Second Coming “creation” of a unified earth-heaven is superior to Jesus’s First Coming creation of heaven separated from the earth.

Anyway, returning to the point I wanted to make, organized Christianity, whether right or left in morals, is predominantly this-worldly focused, and the this-worldly focus may have much to do with the doctrine of the Second Coming.

The underlying thinking seems to be centered on the idea that Jesus will return and set everything right, once and for all, by unifying heaven and earth. In the meantime, we should do everything we can to help expedite the inevitable by making the earth as heavenly as we can.

For Christians on the right end of the axis, this involves making the most of this world by reinstituting old-time religion with its emphasis on re-establishing a theocratic social order complete with rigid doctrines, authority, and hierarchy. Such a social order/world would, ultimately, make everyone better.

Left-axis Christians, on the other hand, see the alleviation of suffering and negative experiences as the means through which to make the world more heavenly.

N.T. Wright consistently provides a vivid example of this sort of left-axis therapeutic strain and how the Second Coming influences it. In an article published during the height of the birdemic, Wright proposed the following (bold and underlining added):

The point of new creation, after all, isn’t about ‘life after death’ in the normal sense. We are promised that when God creates the final new heavens and new earth, all his people will be raised from the dead to share in it (after an interim period, about which the first Christians weren’t particularly interested). But the new creation launched at Easter was about the present this-worldly reality.

So here’s the difference.

If you promise the post-pandemic world a ‘spiritual’ experience of Jesus here and now, or a heavenly life after death, most people will shrug their shoulders. That’s not going to help rebuild the economy. It won’t provide jobs for the millions now out of work.

It will be cold comfort for those who have lost loved ones. We would be at the same place as Martha when Jesus challenged her about the resurrection (John 11:23-25): Yes, she says, I know my brother will rise at the last day. Jesus’ response is what we need to hear right now: “I am the resurrection and the life!”

Resurrection isn’t just a long-distance, far-off hope. (Nor is it about “going to heaven”!) It is a person. And it – he – has come forward from God’s ultimate future to burst into the present with new life and new hope. That was, and is, the message the world needs.

Ever since the eighteenth century, the Western world has done its best to squash the rumour of Jesus’ resurrection. That’s hardly surprising. The gospel stories are about the climax of world history and the birth of God’s new creation. But the so-called Enlightenment believed that history reached its climax, not with Jesus, but with the European and American culture of the time, and that its own science, philosophy, and democracy had produced the real new world. There cannot, after all, be two climaxes to history.

The church, tragically, has gone along for the ride. We decided to leave the practical work of new creation to the “secular” authorities and content ourselves with – guess what – cultivating personal experience and other-worldly hope. As Nietzsche saw, the church has offered a form of Platonism with someone called “Jesus” loosely attached. That’s a comfortable place to be. No secular empires are challenged in the making of that movie.

But the church is supposed to be offering comfort to others, not seeking it for itself. The post-pandemic world needs the real Easter message: the message of a new creation which began when Jesus was raised from the dead. A new heaven-and-earth reality, energized by God’s powerful new breath surging through Jesus’ followers, turning them (to their own surprise, and in some cases alarm) into a multi-cultural, outward-facing community, determined to be the good news the world so obviously needed.

Paul’s great vision in Ephesians was of God summing up everything in heaven and earth in the Messiah (1:10), a reality anticipated in the coming together of Jew and Gentile into a single family (2:11-22), sending a signal to the powers of the world that God is God and Jesus is Lord (3:1-13). When Paul said that we are “created in the Messiah for good works”, he didn’t mean “so that we could behave ourselves properly”, though that’s obviously implied too.

“Good works” in Paul’s world meant people making a positive difference in their wider communities. The church has no business outsourcing its heaven-on-earth mission of hope to secular agencies. We should be upstaging them.

Fortunately, this is already happening all over the place. The Holy Spirit is often way ahead of the church’s teaching and preaching. In my country, Christian groups have led the way in initiatives like food banks. The use of Cathedrals as vaccination centres (not, of course, as an alternative to worship, but as its natural outflow) has sent a powerful signal: the church is there for the healing of the community. Again and again, the church in practice has been what St Paul said it should be: people of prayer and hope at the places where the world is in pain.

But this cheerful, outward-facing life is easily blown off course or diverted into the wrong channels. To avoid that, the real resurrection message needs to be grasped, preached, and lived. The world changed when Jesus of Nazareth came out of the tomb on Easter morning. It takes precisely the same faith to believe that truth as it takes to roll up your sleeves and go to where help is most needed – from the soup kitchen in the below-the-tracks parish, all the way to the World Economic Forum.

After all, the Easter stories in the gospels do not end up with people saying, “He lives within my heart”. Nor do people say, in those first stories, “Ah, that’s all right, so we can go to heaven after all.” They end up with people saying, “Jesus is raised – therefore new creation has begun, and we have a job to do.”

There is a straight line from the heaven-on-earth reality of Jesus’ resurrection to the heaven-on-earth vocation of his followers. By his Spirit, we can be the difference the world needs. We can make the difference the world needs.

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Five Chicks . . . So Far

7/21/2025

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Last year I had my first experience with a broody hen hatching chicks. Of the five eggs the hen incubated, three hatched. Unfortunately, one of the hatchlings died with a few days, leaving me with two healthy chicks that grew up to be sturdy, boisterous rooster that I eventually had to give away to save my run from turning into a neverending Brazilian soap opera.

I have had another broody this year. Her clutch numbered six eggs, and she hatched five chicks; three yellow ones and two black ones. They are now over a week old and appear fit and healthy. I only hope I don't end up with five roosters!

On a side note, I've noticed that the chicks grow up to be white or speckled black. They sometimes resemble my rooster, Richie, a Barred Plymouth Rock. However, none resemble the hens, which are Cinnamon Queens, a hybrid bird bred primarily for superior egg-laying.

Cinnamon Queens are a mix of light-to-rusty brown and white, yet the chicks they produce that don't resemble the proud dad are nearly all white and, at best, contain only a few light brown specks or smatterings. It seems the offspring's genes revert back more to the white side of the hybrid hen's make-up when the rooster's genes aren't dominant.

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The End of One of the West’s Grand Narratives

7/19/2025

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The capstone of Western civilization? I don’t know. Perhaps high literacy rates and education levels. If that is the case, then that capstone now also serves as the tombstone of Western civilization.

High literacy levels and the subsequent surge in university degrees have created societies that have largely abandoned authentic thinking and creativity.

Only a fraction of people in the West could read and write a mere five or six centuries ago. Some historians put it at about 15 to 20%. One or two in ten.

That is where one of the West’s narratives starts. The drive to educate the masses. Gutenberg’s printing press. Bibles printed in the vernacular. The gradual affordability of books and the development of education as a systemized industry. Mass enculturation. The nurturing and refinement of the unwashed, coupled with the enhancement and polishing of the immaculately bathed. Noble sentiments propelling it all.

Literacy rates were above 90% in most Western countries by the 19th century and reached “full” literacy by the 20th century. The Grand Narrative bore much fruit in the form of inventions, developments, innovations, growth, expansion, ideas, research, and geniuses. So many geniuses.

Written knowledge used to be so scarce, inaccessible, and unaffordable. The Grand Literacy Narrative chronicles precisely that historical scarcity, inaccessibility, and unaffordability. When knowledge is ubiquitous, accessible, and affordable, civilization will flourish. And it did. For many centuries.

How odd that the Grand Narrative now appears to have run its course. How strange that a civilization brimming with readers and writers is now turning its back on reading and writing. Sure, people do still read, but what are they reading? Yes, people can still write, but what are they writing? Moreover, how many will choose to have AI write something for them rather than write it themselves? How many educated people qualify as knowledgeable? How many geniuses does the West now produce?

I suspect the motivations to expand knowledge in the various forms of secondary thinking—written, visual, symbolic—were good initially; good in the sense that they were rooted in spiritual aims. Perhaps the hope was that expanded secondary thinking would help fortify and expand primary thinking, leading to greater direct knowledge, particularly in religion, specifically, Christianity.

Maybe such hopes did manifest in specific times and places, but it would be a stretch to claim that any motivations to expand knowledge in secondary thinking are rooted in good spiritual aims today. Ironically, the expansion of secondary thinking knowledge has weakened primary thinking and all but obliterated direct knowledge.

The Grand Narrative continues, but as a civilization, the West appears to have lost the plot...completely.

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The Second Coming Essentially Renders the First Nugatory

7/16/2025

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When you ask: "So why would an omni-everything God who created ex nihilo just create the world in that way? Why all the business with free will, evil, the Fall, hell, and all the rest of it? Why not just create God-aligned beings from the get-go—God-aligned beings who are free of the temptation to choose evil over good?"

This is - for me - a very significant question. It is part of a variety of questions that arise from attributing great powers to God of the "doing Good" kind - I mean, the idea of God imposing Good. If God can do such things, why hasn't He done them?

The one that I have been brooding on lately, is the whole second coming/ millennialism tradition - which assumes that God/ Jesus *can* make Men good, and earth into Heaven; God Will do this at some point In The Future.

Which always leads on to the question - "why are we waiting?"; why hasn't this already happened; or, as you say, why didn't it happen in the first place? Because if Men and Earth really Can be re-made Good (top-down, by divine intervention and/or creation), then why wasn't this done in the first place? Why make an interim/ temporary/ imperfect Mankind/ earth - a planet full of death and wickedness and populated by people who mostly incline to oppose God and divine creation - at least for much of the time?

The above comes from an excellent comment Dr. Charlton left on this post.

Personally, I regard Jesus's incarnation on earth, his life and death here, his subsequent resurrection, his creation of heaven, and the offer of everlasting life to those who follow him to be of immense, if not ultimate, cosmological and spiritual significance.

Jesus did not just alter the fabric of Creation forever—he introduced something new and wonderful into it. Something that had not been there before. Something that could never have manifested had it not been for his alignment and co-creation with the Divine. Something God the Father could not have introduced on his own. Something that provided a meaningful solution to an ongoing problem inherent in the First Creation.

I believe Jesus completed his mission on earth during his time here. He accomplished what he aimed to accomplish. Like Bruce, I do not believe in Jesus's prophesied return; in his so-called Second Coming.

I reject the Second Coming for the simple reason that it renders the First nugatory.

Jesus returning and restoring the whole of Creation by essentially creating heaven on earth makes his Second Creation of Heaven rather inconsequential.

If Jesus can restore the whole of Creation to its pre-fall condition (free of death, sin, and evil), then why did he not do so during his First Coming?

Freedom sheds some light on the question above. More on that in a future post.

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Random Summer Stuff

7/15/2025

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I have always been averse to taking out a mortgage for a house, which helps explain why I didn't own a home until I moved to Hungary a decade ago. For me, a mortgage translates into a house owning you rather than you owning the house. A big incentive for my move to Hungary centered on the possibility of purchasing a mortgage-free house and becoming a real homeowner, so to speak.

I became one nine years ago after I bought an old house in a small village near Sopron, but the property required many renovations. I have been doggedly renovating ever since and am happy to report that I am nearing the end of that journey. Although my house is paid for, I have realized that it still ended up owning me to some degree.
Fixing up an old house is not for the faint of heart. Although it has been a labor of love these past nine years, I am eagerly looking forward to ditching the labor part and relishing the love.

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I have only watched three sunsets this summer. Unacceptable!
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My family recently adopted a stray cat—a young, rake-thin male with slate gray fur. He began hanging around the house a few weeks ago to garner the romantic attention of my neutered female cat, who treated him with the same sort of disdain I used to receive from girls I had hopeless crushes on in high school.

I felt sorry for the dejected, emaciated little Romeo and began to feed him. My wife started calling him Maci (pronounced Mah-tsee), the Hungarian equivalent of "teddy" from teddy bear. He is now more-or-less family, with the caveat that he will remain an outdoor family member because my female cat—a spoiled, anti-social grump-puss who gives off the air of a stale, middle-aged Victorian-era spinster— adamantly refuses to entertain any notions of sharing the house with the likes of a drifter like Maci.
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Long-term investments—spans of five years or longer—tend to work out for me, but my track record as a speculator is abysmal. I suppose that helps explain why I disliked my only trip to Las Vegas so much.
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I was waiting in line at the supermarket checkout the other day, and an old man standing behind me began grumbling about the weather.

“It was 36 degrees Celsius yesterday. Today it’s only 21.”

“Yes,” I said in agreement. “It is 21 degrees today.”

“It’s not normal,” he continued.

“What? It being 21 degrees?”

“No. The temperature change. 36 to 21? That’s . . .that’s . . .” He paused for a moment to do the math in his head. “That’s a 15-degree difference!”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

“That’s not normal. It didn’t happen in the past.”

I have lived in Hungary for about ten years. Fifteen-degree differences in temperature from one day to the next are quite common. I have experienced dozens of temperature changes like that since moving here. And I experienced dozens more in my childhood whenever I visited my extended family. I wanted to point this out to the old timer, but I thought better of it.

“It’s climate change,” the old man added. “It was over 40 degrees in Paris last week. The heatwave ended up killing about a thousand senior citizens. It’s not normal. That didn’t happen a century ago.”

“Did Paris even have a thousand senior citizens a century ago?” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing. I suppose somebody should do something about it. The climate change, I mean.”

“Well, they better,” the old man said bitterly. “Otherwise, we’ll all be dead.”

I left the store thinking that there was no point in engaging with media directly these days. Talk to a fellow citizen for five minutes and you’ll get all the media you need.

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The Doctrine of Free Will (The Ability to Choose Evil) is a Very Low Form of Freedom

7/13/2025

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The so-called doctrine of free will has very little to do with authentic freedom. On this, I side with Berdyaev, who identified the free will doctrine as a means through which to make man accountable for evil in the world: “that doctrine was invented to find a culprit, someone who could be held responsible and so vindicate the idea of punishment in this life and in eternity.”

The doctrine of free will posits that God could not have made men free unless he granted them the freedom to choose evil over good. Put another way, man cannot be free unless he is allowed to choose God’s way or the highway.

The core problem in this concept lies in God’s granting of free will. If free will is from God—that is, created by God from nothing, or some Platonic idea in his mind that he shares with created-from-nothing creatures—then it is only fair to say that God is the ultimate source of free will.

Theologians and philosophers tend to agree on this point, but most are also quick to point out that though free will comes from God, the evil choices man makes are not. Good choices? Sure, because of grace and all that, but evil choices? No way! God has nothing at all to do with that.

I agree but for different reasons.

The concept of free will boils down to the matter of making man accountable for his choices, yet this kind of free-will choosing has little to do with authentic freedom. If authentic freedom amounts to little more than free will choosing, then it is not very authentic at all.

On the contrary, it becomes a form of necessity or slavery with man perpetually being forced to recognize evil choices and reject them in favor of choices for good.

Repentance can free a person from evil choices, but it does not alleviate the crushing need to make choices repeatedly, which brings us to the crux of the matter when it comes to free will and choosing. Being constantly required to choose between this or that is ultimately an extremely low form of freedom because it rarely, if ever, liberates man from the need to choose.

The doctrine of free will asserts that man is only authentically free if the choice for evil remains open to him; that if that choice were denied, he would be nothing more than a pre-programmed robot or automaton.

I suppose there’s some coherence in that, but only within the framework of an omni-everything Creator who created everything from nothing. Yet that framework immediately draws into question why such an omni-everything, ex nihilo creator would do things that way.

It also draws God’s nature into question. If God is wholly good and incapable of choosing evil, then is God just an automaton or a robot? No, God is free because the choice for evil does not occur to him.

Yet man is somehow unfree if that choice is denied.

Would man not be freer if he were created without free will? Without the incessant need to choose good or evil? Would he not be freer if he did not choose evil for the simple reason that the choice would never occur to him? Instead of wrangling over good choices and evil choices, man would be free to focus his energies entirely on the good. Instead of agonizing over evil temptations and choices, he would be free to do good because the evil choices would simply not register. In this sense, he would be freed from the necessity of choosing good over evil. He would not have to choose. He would simply be good in being and wholly aligned with God’s purposes.

So why would an omni-everything God who created ex nihilo just create the world in that way? Why all the business with free will, evil, the Fall, hell, and all the rest of it? Why not just create God-aligned beings from the get-go—God-aligned beings who are free of the temptation to choose evil over good?

There are many abstract solutions to this problem, but few incorporate the reality of heaven in their lines of thinking. Evil does not and cannot exist in heaven, which implies that free will choosing does not and cannot exist in heaven. Heaven could not be heaven if the choice for evil over good remained.

Does this imply that heaven is unfree and populated by automatons incapable of choosing evil? Pre-programmed robots who have no choice but to be good? It must be because if free will choosing is removed from a being, then that being ceases to be free. Right?

I do not see it that way. I see heaven as a place of total and authentic freedom precisely because the need to choose good over evil has been overcome and eradicated. Those in heaven do not choose. Beings in heaven are so aligned with God and his purposes that evil choices never enter their consciousnesses. They are freed from evil. They are free to be good, all the time, eternally.

Returning to the matter of free will choosing in this world, I think it is unavoidable and inevitable, but it is errant to believe that such free will choosing represents some sort of hallmark of freedom or to regard it as some blessed gift from God.

When I consider God’s purposes in Creation, I think of it as the honing or perfecting of freedom in love—freedom that is uncreated and inherent in all beings, all of whom pre-existed Creation.

God made Creation in the hope that this honing and perfecting could be accomplished therein. In this sense, God’s motivation and act of Creation—ongoing, continuous—is wholly good, yet the beings from which God creates are not.

Some can align their freedom with God’s purposes in Creation; others are hostile to such alignment. Those who seek to align their freedom with God and his purposes must not only contend with their own freedom to do otherwise but also with the freedom of other beings who have little or no intention of aligning their freedom with God. In this, free will is a lower emanation of the inherent, uncreated freedom that beings bring into Creation.

Higher emanations of freedom may occur occasionally in Creation, but they are usually unsustainable, temporary, or affect only one or two aspects of being. Try as they might, virtually no being can align itself with God in Creation. Virtually no being can escape the snare of free will choosing.

Free will choosing can only be overcome in heaven, which is why Jesus and his creation of heaven are necessary. It is only in heaven that beings can be free of all evil and the need to choose.

It is only in heaven that beings can be authentically free -- free with God.

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Love and Worldly Power Go Hand in Hand

7/12/2025

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The Romantic Christians stress the importance of family and love. But on the other hand, they negate all parental instincts to protect and secure worldly happiness for children. And then they claim God is a parent. Seems incoherent to me.

Love and worldly power go hand in hand.

The above is a comment from Christianity is Finished If It Does Not Reassert Itself as a Worldly Power, a post I wrote a couple of years ago. The post was an argument against the postulation that Christianity must reassert itself as a worldly power if it is to survive.

The comment above criticized the apparent incoherence of the Romantic Christian position in this regard. I did not respond to the comment at the time because I knew I could not offer the commenter any explanation that he would “get.”

Honestly, what can you say to Christians who doggedly believe that love and worldly power go hand in hand? If this truly is the case, then what do such Christians make of Jesus’s time on earth?

In any case, let us take a closer look at the apparent incoherence of the Romantic Christian position.

The Romantic Christians stress the importance of family and love.

Jesus stressed the importance of family and love; that is, personal relationships with concrete people nurtured and sustained by love.

But on the other hand, they negate all parental instincts to protect and secure worldly happiness for children.

Jesus did not refer to himself as a father, but he did call himself a shepherd. Yet in the end, he negated his pastoral duties to protect and secure worldly happiness for his flock.

Nevertheless, Jesus did refer to God as a parent—a loving one at that. Yet God, his father, negated his parental instincts to protect and secure worldly happiness for his son, so much so that he allowed his son to suffer public execution in one of the most excruciating and humiliating ways imaginable.

And then they (Romantic Christians) claim God is a parent.

Jesus referred to God as a parent.

Love and worldly power go hand in hand.

If this were true, then God, as a loving parent, would have prioritized securing worldly power and happiness for his son, who in turn would have exercised that worldly power to demonstrate his love for his father.

However, none of that happened, entailing that the only incoherence in the comment above lies in the commenter's insistence that love and worldly power go hand in hand.

It is well past time that Christians begin to think seriously and deeply about such matters, but that would require deep, serious Christians.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be many of those around these days.

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No Describing How Evil Masking Was

7/8/2025

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I had planned to spend the bulk of today removing fiberglass insulation from the attic, but I couldn’t find my N95 respirator. Not wanting to run out to the store to buy a new one, I decided to don an old birdemic cloth mask I happened to stumble upon in my workshed.

The N95 respirator is marketed as effective for filtering out particles when working with fiberglass; however, my past experiences with it revealed it to be only partly effective. The mask gets soggy after an hour or two, and the dust and particles eventually find a way to penetrate. Having experienced this, I knew the cloth mask would be far less effective. Still, I figured it was better than nothing.

Well, I was coughing and wheezing within five minutes, and I only lasted about an hour in the unventilated attic. When I took the cloth mask off, I noticed black and brown smudges on the interior. It was worse than completely useless. It effectively trapped dust and fiberglass particles within the mask, yet during the birdemic, it was touted as a safe and effective way to stop the dreaded birdemic virus. I chuckled after I came down from the attic.

Don’t get me wrong. I never believed any of the masking claims during the birdemic; however, reexperiencing how patently absurd and utterly ineffective masking is reminded me of just how unfathomably evil those in power were (and still are).

Anyway, just in case anyone still cares, System apparatchiks are still doing their darndest to convince us that masking during the birdemic was effective, safe, and scientifically sound (edited slightly and bold added):

A comprehensive new review published in Clinical Microbiology Reviews provides strong evidence that masks and respirators are effective in reducing the transmission of respiratory infections like BIRDEMIC-19. The review, conducted by an international team of 13 researchers, analysed over 400 studies from multiple disciplines, including epidemiology, public health, engineering, and social sciences.

'Our review confirms that masks work, with a clear dose-response effect,' said lead author Professor Trisha Greenhalgh from the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford. 'The more consistently and correctly you wear a mask, the better protected you are. Respirators, when worn continuously, provide even greater protection than ordinary masks.'

Masks, including cloth face coverings and disposable medical masks, help reduce the spread of respiratory droplets and aerosols. Respirators, such as N95 and FFP2 devices, are designed to filter out smaller airborne particles and fit more tightly to the face, providing a higher level of protection.

Cool.

All I can say is that it’s a good thing the birdemic virus isn’t made of fiberglass or dust.

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