Was it a year not to step on the toes?

Was it a year not to step on the toes?

Not a silent but (perhaps) less irritating year

Three years of Corona pandemic came along and except for China not many countries seem still to worry.

In Europe, something very different from a Coronavirus has caught our attention. The danger is that this virus could spread and kill many more people than Corona did.
It is about the Putin virus or Russian disease as Trump might start calling it.

Just as a lot of fake news came our way during the Trump era, a lot of work had to be done in recent years to ‘debunk’ those misleading or deceptive reports.
You might think that here on this site with the name “Stepping toes” would be the ideal place to strip such disseminated falsehoods or lie talk of credibility. People like to sell talking points, and in recent years it seemed to have become a sport to send as many falsehoods into the world as possible. But to counter the many false messages posted on social media, this site was actually not originally planned.

Last year may have reached the pinnacle of fake message spreading. It could not go on any longer. Something had to be done to restore honour to journalism and bring correct messages to the world.

Young people were increasingly reaching for their smartphones with all kinds of apps to follow Facebook and Instagram posts, as if they could get the very best news there. But correct messaging was far from there. Social media won out over the daily and weekly newspapers that lost out, raising the question of whether there was still a possibility of life for serious journalism.
While newspapers were under pressure and many wondered how to survive this resort to social media, blogs also came under fire. Google and WordPress thought no better of changing their systems. At Blogger, it made a lot of bloggers tired of the difficulties in the system and took refuge elsewhere. Thus, I too decided to take refuge in the WordPress that was familiar to me with the old editor, hoping that WordPress would not force everyone to have to use the hideous block editor (introduced in 2018) (because it is really totally impractical for free writing and design).

Converting all the Google sites to the new system took a lot of time, so there have been somewhat fewer articles on my WordPress sites over the last two years, except for this year at my newcomer.

It is for that newcomer that I would like to draw your attention today.

The format of that new WordPress site is not really new, as the newcomer is actually a continuation of the former Blogspot sites “Christadelphian World” and “Our World“. The only difference now is actually a result of an easier form of writing and shaping for publishing or publishing articles. Because this is now much easier than Blogspot, I can now provide more articles at the same time.

As the title for the site, I chose “Some View on the World” or “Enige Kijk op de Wereld” because the site wants to give a view of what is happening in the world, while also giving more clarity on certain facts.
In the first year of its new form, it has been a bit of a search to find a way to leave enough time for my other Christian websites, while still being able to provide a balanced news overview that can be relied upon to be verified reporting and thus present accurate facts to the reader.

I believe I now know roughly how to tackle it for 2023 and hope that with my outline I can attract enough readers to further follow the links provided in the articles as well.

I do hope still to provide a day-to-day events review, and do hope people will find it useful.
I shall continue to try to offer ideas and context and depth, as well as information: a combination of clarity (the facts to help you understand the world) and imagination (the ideas you need to build a better one).

This better world that needs to be worked on is extremely important. We must realise that it is not ‘five to twelve’, but that the hands have long been moving in the wrong direction and that the earth is crying out loudly for support. For far too long, we have neglected the earth and been careless with its resources. Now we have to bear the consequences. Global warming is a fact, although many still do not want to acknowledge it. On “Some View on the World” we do want to pay attention to that earth which we have been given on loan by the Creator. Indeed, it is high time we took our responsibility and took steps to address that climate change.

We don’t particularly want to tread on toes on that “new site”, but we do want to regularly draw attention to those issues that really should get our attention.

In a way, I also hope to have caught your attention and made you warm to go and take a look at that news site (or online newspaper) and (who knows) subscribe there too to be kept informed of new articles.

Be welcome to “Some View on the World”.

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Additional reading

  1. Lots of news demanding attention
  2. Texts, writers, accesibility and willingness
  3. Thoughts tinged with triviality
  4. For those who call the Brussels Airport attacks a fake or a conspiracy of the government
  5. At the closing hours of 2016 #2 Low but also highlights
  6. International Women’s Day 2019
  7. 2021 in review #1 the most startling point
  8. Conspiracy theories in plenty-fold
  9. Entering 2022 still Aiming for a society without exploitation or oppression
  10. Putin speaks plainly – and the West is speechless
  11. Written-down thoughts
  12. Eyes on pages and messages on social media
  13. Gossip and fake news, opposite fact checking and facts presenting
  14. Study Guide: Definition of Journalism
  15. Safeguarding freedom of expression
  16. Identifying Journalism
  17. News that’s fit to print
  18. Newspapers: Dying or Changing
  19. The End of Journalism
  20. Why social media presence matters in journalism
  21. Traditional News Turns into The Journalism We Know Now
  22. The First Great Information War 
  23. Lies for Likes
  24. The Ever-Evolving Industry of Journalism: its Quest to Survive in a Digital World
  25. How to save Journalism in 2022
  26. Mississippi journalists discuss the evolution of daily newspapers
  27. Newspapers: Dying or Changing
  28. Journalism under attack
  29. What do we know about the future of journalism?
  30. Looking for Free Blogs and blogging
  31. WordPress appears to have fallen off its best horse
  32. A Classic Editor versus Block Editor
  33. From old times and sites to new linkings
  34. Joseph Pulitzer’s Retirement Speech & The Traits of Journalism
  35. Change of name
  36. New Name a fact
  37. Newly added pages to Our World
  38. Our World on Blogger coming to its end
  39. My faith and hope
  40. Presenting views from different sources
  41. Weekly World Watch (WWW) looking at a few key developments that have happened during the past week
  42. Invitation to renew connection
  43. Invitation to the news platform that brings a view of the world

Wrestling with Genesis and Revelation

The inability of Christians to grasp the meaning and message of both Genesis and Revelation create a great divide in America. Christians struggle with both the beginning and culmination of the Scriptures — the Alpha and the Omega as they might be called. Both Genesis and Revelation bring a lot of baggage with them to the American religious scene.

We have great division on end-times views stemming from misadventures into Revelation. Our confused teaching has scarred our culture and created a religious society that has wasted immense energy preparing for the end of the world. The predictions have come and gone these past decades.

A few Christians are now ready, finally — at last, to leave behind the “Left Behind” mentality. Why? There have been too many false predictions. For some of us, they are hard to forget. Things got going with The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970. They heated up in 1987, and then we found it was really going to happen in 1988. Through the 90’s and even today we hear about the Middle East in prophecy. First, it was the Soviet Union. Then it was Saddam Hussein. Is it the European Union? Or is it Islam? The hot ticket for the Antichrist keeps changing hands. And who can forget Y2K? They have all come and gone and with them goes the credibility of tens of millions of Christians in America.

Genesis has been a more dangerous venture for some. Wrongly understood, it has the potential to undermine one’s faith in the God of creation.

Martin Timothy, Vaughn Jeffrey (2007) “Beyond Creation Science: New covenant creation from Genesis to Revelation” Apocalyptic Vision Press Whitehall MT

Seems a fair point. Those loudest about how Genesis must be understood have a long history of prophetic interpretative failures (from which nothing is learnt).

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Additional reading

  1. A Book of life recording the names of true believers in God
  2. Main verses in the Bible telling us Who God is #8 Some more attributes of God
  3. Between Alpha and Omega – The plan of creation
  4. God’s Word Framing universe
  5. From waste and void coming into being by God’s Word
  6. I am the Alpha and the Omega, Revelation 1:8 – Who is Speaking?
  7. Forbidden Fruit in the Midst of the Garden 3
  8. The Song of The Lamb #3 Daniel and Revelation
  9. Matthew 16 Calvin’s view
  10. Religion and believers #8 Groups following one or another apostle
  11. Religion and believers #9 Old and new cults
  12. Much confusion about the Antichrist
  13. The Coining of the Lord Draweth Nigh
  14. Christian fundamentalists feeding Into the Toxic Partisanship and driving countries into the Dark Ages… #2
  15. Apocalyptic Extremism: No Longer a Laughing Matter
  16. Babylon is fallen
  17. 3/9/22 Adso on the Antichrist
  18. Antichrist
  19. Antichrist and The Most Hated Family in America in crisis
  20. The Most Hated Family in America
  21. For those who do everything to stop the work of Christadelphians
  22. Making the time ready for Jesus to return
  23. Last days and destruction of the flesh

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Related

  1. God’s Word, Just Nonsense, or Something Else? Pt. 2
  2. Alpha and Omega (where the aticle writer C. Newell wrongly says that Jesus Christ declared “I am the Alpha and Omega,”) It was God Who said that.
  3. Alpha and Omega
  4. “’I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God,
  5. TLIC Daily. Day 360. December 26: I am the Alpha and Omega.
  6. From Everlasting to Everlasting
  7. Guest Post: Blood and Fire (Alpha and Omega) by Kim Mullican ~ #BookTour #Excerpt
  8. Day 25: Christmas Day, Alpha and Omega
  9. “All that the prophets have spoken”
  10. …before YHVH ET (אֵת) in front of the veil
  11. Theology and the Anti-Christ
  12. AntiChrist’s Characteristics
  13. Ruler of the Nations
  14. March 25 is the Greatest of All Days in the History of the world
  15. Beyond Oblivion
  16. a sixth seal 
  17. Why Christians Must Prepare For The Metaverse – American Faith
  18. New Insight Destroys The Entire Plan Of The Antichrist. Ends Fear Mongering
  19. Russia: the Prophet Jeremiah’s Boiling Pot
  20. Recent Events In Russia And Ukraine Now Have Some Christians Asking Could Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy Be The Antichrist? Let’s Take A Look!
  21. Is Putin the Antichrist?
  22. The Final Showdown
  23. The Zionist entity🇮🇱 dreams of pushing the Arabs towards destruction in a Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict against Iran🇮🇷! Zionism was, is and will remain the main existential threat & enemy of the Arab-Muslim world
  24. Christmas, typology, and Antichrist
  25. Yeshua Will Open Our Eyes and Ears
  26. Yeshua, the Mustering Prince of His Coming Army
  27. 1 John 2:22-23
  28. Defining Anti-Messiah – Part 1
  29. Defining Anti-Messiah – Part 2
  30. Is Government the New God? The New Religion of Totalitarianism
  31. The Time Has Come
  32. Already In The World
  33. Chaos Will Introduce A New World Leader – 02.17.2022
  34. Israel Will Embrace The Anti-Christ – 02.18.2022
  35. The Church, Men in heaven and the 4 horsemen
  36. What Is the Mark of the Beast? (w/ Dr. Matthew Halsted)
  37. Christ Returns To Earth – 02.19.2022
  38. The Reality of Dajjal
  39. Personalities in the Tribulation: The Unredeemed – Part 1
  40. Personalities in the Tribulation: The Unredeemed – Part 2
  41. Personalities in the Tribulation: The Two Witnesses
  42. Personalities in the Tribulation: The 144,000 Witnesses
  43. The Endtime News
  44. Rapture and the Seven-Year Tribulation (Part 2 of 2)

Iran taunts Israel by testing missile named after medieval Jewish defeat

Iran taunts Israel by testing missile named after medieval Jewish defeat

Iran has unveiled a terrifying new missile and give it a chilling name to taunt Israel. Images showing the long-range rocket being tested were broadcast on state television earlier this week. The weapon has a range of 900 miles, according to Iran, meaning it can hit US bases in the region and reach Israel. The missile has been dubbed the ‘Khaibar-buster’ by Tehran military chiefs, a reference to a medieval Jewish castle.

In 628CE, early Muslim warriors led by Muhammad overran the fortress and won a decisive military battle, cementing the reputation of the religion’s founder. With relations between Tel Aviv and Tehran at a low ebb after decades of hostilities, the provocative move will add to tensions in the region. Iranian media claimed the missile has high accuracy, is manufactured entirely on domestic soil and can evade defence systems.

It is interesting that Iran has named their new missile the Khaibar buster. Jews lived in Khaibar which was an oasis in modern day Saudi Arabia. A war was fought against them by muslims headed up by Mohammed which history says they won. Many muslims see this war as a foretaste of what will become of Israel. However, according to Jewish legend, the Jews of Khaybar remained in their territory and lived there as a nation of mighty warriors free from Muslim rule. Their fantastic survival in the desert attracted the attention of adventurers and travellers to the Orient from the twelfth century to modern times. Whatever the truth of that is we know with Bible in hand that the Jews will survive and Iran will never destroy Israel. In fact we are told that the pricking briers around Israel will be completely removed. All nations will one day worship at Jerusalem….

Thus saith the LORD of hosts; In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you. (Zechariah 8:23)

Andy Walton

Find this week’s Weekly World Watch to download > Weekly World Watch

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Preceding

Israel featured twice on list of potential 2022 conflicts

Iran nuclear talks on brink of collapse, diplomats warn

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Additional reading

  1. Coming weeks are decisive for Iran nuclear deal, Merkel says
  2. Israel ready for war
  3. First joint naval exercise by Israel and Gulf states signals Iran worries
  4. Israeli prime minister makes historic UAE visit, stressing ‘new reality’ for region
  5. Iran’s days of setting Middle East on fire are over
  6. Trilateral naval drills between China, Russia and Iran started on Friday
  7. Iran could build nuclear bomb ‘within months’
  8. Iranian nuclear programme geared towards creating a bomb
  9. Iran shows off rocket launch to raise pressure in nuclear deal talks
  10. Iranian mouthpiece threatens Israel with map of targets
  11. The world on the very brink of conflict
  12. A Brief Look at NATO and Russia’s Push to Reform the Old Soviet Union
  13. A war in Ukraine could have global consequences

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Related

  1. Iran Says Parties “Closer Than Ever” To Nuclear Deal In Vienna
  2. Foreign Affairs: Iran’s Hollow Victory – The High Price of Regional Dominance
  3. Rai al-Youm: The Ukraine crisis and the Middle East – Iran has most to gain, Israel most to lose, from rising US-Russia tensions
  4. A New Iran Deal Means Old Chaos
  5. 02/16/22 Antiwar: Iran Says Nuclear Deal ‘Closer Than Ever,’ But US Must Be ‘Realistic’
  6. 02/16/22 Antiwar: Israel Attacks Syrian Army Base Near Damascus
  7. Iran needs nuclear energy, not nuclear bomb: Khamenei
  8. The Biden Administration is Detached From Reality
  9. Iran nuclear deal draft puts prisoners, enrichment, cash first; oil comes later – diplomats
  10. On the way to a new nuclear agreement: A draft agreement with Iran has been formed all the details

Times of overcorrections

This century may go into the history books by its aim to overcorrect.

Today we are not any more allowed to use lots of words which were quiet normal and not offensive in the previous century.

Today one has to be very careful how one wants to express oneself. Today several youngsters consider it transphobic if someone acknowledges biological sex.

A medical student revealed that she and her fellow trainee medics had access to an online forum where students can correct their professors for using gender-specific terms such as “male”, “female”, or “breastfeed” instead of gender-neutral terms like “chestfeed.”

The online forum allows students to “lodge their complaints in real time during lectures.”

The student recalled how one time a professor started crying because she “upset by students calling her out for using ‘male’ and ‘female’.”

“Wrongspeak” seems the word of the new wave where people find that everything should be considered as normal and possible. So when you are a man you may become pregnant as well and it would be considered sexist when one says only a woman can have a baby.
According to petitions in several countries included use of the pronouns “she” and “her” or the terms “father” and “son” are not acceptable and are “Wrongspeak”.

In several countries we also see people pulling down statues of very well known political and historical figures. But because they did something wrong it is considered not appropriate anymore that they would have a statute to honour them.

One is also not to speak about an Eskimo, Indian, hut, etc.. But the strangest might be the sex which may not be mentioned any more.

Katie Herzog, believes that our publishing houses, our universities, our schools, our non-profits, our tech companies — have embraced a Manichean ideology that divides people by identity and punishes anyone that doesn’t adhere to every aspect of that orthodoxy. In some of the top medical schools and hospitals in her country Katie Herzog found that there was a sort of revolution taking place. She thinks an ideological ‘purge’ is underway in American medicine.

“Wokeness,”

as one doctor put it,

“feels like an existential threat.”

Katie’s latest reporting illustrates some of the most urgent elements of that threat. It focuses on how biological sex is being denied by professors fearful of being smeared by their students as transphobic. And it shows how the true victims of that denial are not sensitive medical students but patients, perhaps most importantly, transgender ones.

Teachers now have to be very careful not to offend some one with saying “he” or “she”

During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he’d said at the beginning of class.

His offense: using the term

“pregnant women.”

“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’

which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”

In the context of their medical school

“acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”

 

Please do find more about it by reading:

  1. Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex
  2. Common Sense Has Left the Building

Dividing walls of “race”

Dividing walls of “race”

All human beings are created in the image of God. This makes that we are or should be, all accepting the other as being allowed to be here by God and to be co-images of God and ourselves.

The Divine Creator, Jehovah, the God above all gods, did not create more than one race. Of the kind that now usually walks on two legs, God created only one kind: a man taken from the red earth, hence his name “A·dham“.

Dr. George Gallant says

Racism, implies that our Creator made more then one race of people. There is but one race the human race. Get use to it people and stop using the word Racism. One Blood, One People, One set of Parents, Adam and Eve.

He has good reason to call for stopping to divide people in races or a sort of brands. We all come from the same original human beings, who probably were not white at all. The first man and mannin Adam and Eve (Chavah or Isha) got children and their children got again children and in the end we come from those children their children.

William D Tillman says

the majority of people have bought into the false construct of color/ethnicity equals – species (sic race). This is really a question of supremacywhite supremacy in particular. The dividing walls of “race” were erected to not only keep “the races pure” but to subjugate all to so-called white people. My real concern is how silent the church is on this.

“let no man think more highly of himself than he ought to think…”

is a principle that is espoused but today’s rhetoric indicates it’s one that rather needs to be lived. The statement,

“I don’t see race”

is another method to dismiss the systematic denigration and disenfranchisement of a whole sector of the population because it places the blame of perception of the suffering and relieves the “race-blind” of the guilt of apathy.

We always should remember we could be born in another region, another culture, or we could have been born with either lighter or darker skin, God chose what we are on the outside but the inside is the same. The inside is the most important factor of our being.

In the life and teaching of Jesus we nowhere can find that he had a particular predilection for a sort human being. The places he went to had Hebrew, Palestinian, Arab and other Eastern people walking around and also listening to him. Never gave he a sign to have a certain preference for or over one or the other person. In Jesus’ teaching is no such thing as racial preference. He teaches that all people are the same. Also for God everybody is equal and shall be equally judged.

As followers of Christ or Christians, we all should be like brothers and sisters and share that brotherly love with each other.

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Find also to read:

  1. How did the original readers understand Gen 1:1?
  2. A dark skinned Jesus
  3. Why I’m Angry
  4. What is Racism??
  5. A last note concerning civil rights
  6. Even in the so-called freeworld countries racism exist
  7. Where It All Needs to Start
  8. Need to reject an archaic, racist inspired interpretation of the Bible and animosity against other believers
  9. Speciesism and racism
  10. Martin Luther King’s Dream Today
  11. Apartheid or Apartness #1 Suppression and Apartness
  12. Institutional Racism
  13. Immigration consternation
  14. Migrants to the West #1
  15. 150 Years after the 13th Amendment
  16. Forms of slavery, human trafficking and disrespectful attitude to creation to be changed
  17. Walls,colours, multiculturalism, money to flow, Carson, Trump and consorts
  18. Looking at an American nightmare
  19. At the closing hours of 2016 #2 Low but also highlights
  20. Rome mobilisation to say no to fascism and racism
  21. American social perception, classes and fear mongering
  22. A president daring to use the Bible for underlining his hate speech
  23. Trump going over the top bringing a blasphemous act
  24. Apocalyptic Extremism: No Longer a Laughing Matter
  25. It’s Time real lovers of God to Stand and Speak Out!
  26. My Multi-Cultural Childhood Could be the Answer to Racism & Xenophobia

Book: How Jewish terrorism created Israel

British author Thomas Suarez in his 2016 book, State of Terror: How Terrorism created modern Israel, has claimed that World Zionist movement lied about the true agenda of British notorious Belfour Declaration (1917), and used fellow Jews as canon-folder to achieve its dream of Greater Israel over not only historic Palestine but also parts of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

Much of the sufferings we witness today can be explained by, and connected to, this formative period covered thoroughly in this book,”

said Israeli historian and professor IIan Pappe.

Zionism started with the kind of aims of with which Adolf Hitler started,”

Robert Waley Cohen, a non-Zionist British Jew industrialist said.

On December 21, 2016, Thomas Suarez delivered a speech (here, here) at British House of Lords at the invitation of Baroness Tonge.

I thought I knew a fair bit about the Middle East after all the years I have been involved in its politics but this book came as an eye opener. I realized how ignorant I was, not of the events since the establishment of Israel but of the Jewish terror campaign that led up to it. Everyone who has ever accepted Israel’s own account of its history should read this book. It should change them forever,”

said Baroness Tonge.

In this fresh and compelling new book, Suarez cut through the lies that shields Israel at America’s expense, exposing the reality of the conflict through simple act of documenting why a tolerant, multicultural Palestine became the battleground what it’s today,”

reacted Cynthia McKinney, six-term member of the United States House of Representatives, and 2008 Presidential candidate of the Green Party.

Suarez wrote:

Both before and after 1948, hundreds of thousands of people in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East became fair game for Zionist violence because they were Jewish, since Zionism depended not just on the transfer of non-Jewish Palestinians out of Palestine, but also on the transfer of Jews into Palestine. Anti-Jewish tactics included manipulating the Displaced Persons (DC) camps, thwarting safe haven opportunities in countries other than Palestine, kidnapping Jewish orphans, persuading Jewish children of non-Zionist Jews to betray their parents, and after 1948, destroying Jewish communities in North Africa and the Middle East through propaganda and false-flag ‘Arab’ terrorism — all to ship ‘ethnically correct’ people to Palestine in the service of the settler state.”

In November 2016, while speaking at the SOAS University, London, Thomas Suarez described the creation of Israel as a ‘racist’, ‘fascist’ endeavor, and linked the ‘cult’ of Zionism to the Nazis.

Zionist Jewish terrorists didn’t spare even their British benefactors. They kidnapped and murdered hundreds of British civil servants and soldiers in the British mandate Palestine before 1948.

Bruce Hoffman in 2015 book, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947, whitewashes Jewish terrorism by claiming that terrorism was an effective weapon for the Zionist cause  against the British mandate authorities.

Israel-born professor Ami Pedahzur (University of Texas) in 2009 book, Jewish Terrorism in Israel, is worth studying to understand Israeli addiction to murder of Palestinian civilians. Author claims that in the 20th century, to facilitate their escape from centuries-old antisemitism in Europe, European Jews committed acts of terror against British soldiers and Palestinian civilians. More recently, Yigal Amir, a member of Jewish terrorist cell, assassinated country’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, a terrorist himself in the past, to express his opposition to the so-called Oslo Peace Accords which benefits the Zionist entity the most.

On June 2, 1980, Jewish terrorists tried to kill three Palestinian mayors of West Bank cities. The cars of Karim Khalaf of Ramallah and Bassam Shakaa of Nablus were blown up by bombs hidden on them. Khalaf lost a foot and Shakaa both legs. A third bomb planted in the car of El Bireh Mayor Ibrahim Tawil was discovered before it could go off. The terrorists wreaked havoc among the Palestinian community for the next four years before they were arrested (here).

by Rehmat

 

Apollonia of Alexandria springing into the fire of her own accord

About her it is said she was born to a mother who was barren as long as she prayed to her heathen gods, but conceived when she resorted to Christian intercession.

Around ad 249, during the reign of Emperor Philip “The Arabian,” Roman citizens throughout the empire celebrated the first 1,000 years of the existence of the city-state. (Tradition says Rome was founded around 750 BC.) As part of the big bash, the people offered sacrifices to their pagan gods.

Apollonia of Alexandria had become a Christian as a teen and eventually a deaconess in the church of Alexandria. After Metras, Quinta and Serapion were killed after cruel tortures she went to comfort other Christians who were in prison, reminding them that suffering here is temporary, but the joy of living with Christ is eternal. Her courage cost her her bodily life. According to tradition, Apollonia was seized by the mob on this day, February 9, 249.

First she was beaten on the jaw so hard all of her teeth were broken. Then a large bonfire was built and she was threatened to be burned alive unless she renounced Christ and repeated blasphemous words after them. Perhaps Apollonia pretended to think it over. She asked them to loose her for a moment and they did. Rather than risk betraying Christ, she immediately sprang into the fire of her own accord.

Those who saw this were astonished. How could faith give her such courage in the face of so cruel a death?
Some became Christians. The early church respected her faith and courage, but a few wondered if her action were not a form of suicide. Eventually, Augustine of Hippo decided that her death was no more to be questioned than Samson’s when he pulled down a pagan temple on himself to kill his enemies with strength God had restored to him in answer to prayer.

Kler the Polish Spotlight on Poland’s Clergy Sexual Abuse

The oh so Catholic Poland now begins for many years later than our country to feel the consequences of the wrong attitude of the Catholic Church towards priests who abused young people.

New research shows that church attendance starts going down very quickly now. The Polish church also for the first time has to pay compensation to a victim of abuse.

In 1980, more than half of Poles regularly went to church, in 1986 it had dropped to a third. Nowhere in the world is church attendance decreasing so massive, the Pew Research Center concludes.

Karol Wojtyla, alias pope John-Paul II, may still be the most popular figure, but the Catholic Church not any more.

From the 28th of September the film “Kler” from the director Wojciech Smarzowski entered in cinemas. He says

I’m just a director. But I would like the church financing system to be open, paedophile priests to be sent to prison and that the Polish Church should finally take responsibility for the victims.

Wojciech Smarzowski – born in 1963. Director of the films ‘Wesele’, ‘Dom zły’, ‘Róża’, ‘Drogówka’, ‘Pod Mocnym Aniołem’. His previous film, “Wołyń” (2016), the president of TVP Jacek Kurski, awarded a special prize at the Gdynia festival.

Tadeusz Sobolewski thinks:

“Kler” will be the Polish “Spotlight“?

Spotlight (film) poster.jpgThe Oscar-winning biographical drama film directed by Tom McCarthy and written by McCarthy and Josh Singer follows The Boston Globe‘s “Spotlight” team, the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative journalist unit in the United States and its investigation into cases of widespread and systemic child sex abuse in the Boston area by numerous Roman Catholic priests.

Initially the team believed that they were following the story of one priest who was moved around several times, but soon they came to understand it was a systematic system of the church hierarchy to cover up several sexual abuses of children by Catholic priests in Massachusetts.

For Poland Wojciech Smarzowski believes:

It’s a different situation. It must be remembered that in no country has the Church itself purified itself of the fault. There had to be state help, secular institutions. Anyway, “Kler” is not just a movie about paedophilia. It was important for me to make a movie about people who only distinguish themselves by wearing cassocks. There are three vectors that drive this story: the lust for money – greed, lust for power, and sexual desire.

And since we’ve started from it, let’s take care of this sin. Studies in Germany, which were carried out by secular commissions commissioned by the episcopate, showed that there are 4 percent of priests. paedophiles. But the episcopate provided archives to the commissions. In Australia, the episcopate made available all church archives and it turned out that it was 7 percent. Of course, we did not have any research, but even if only – as in 2014, Pope Francis said – 2 percent. all priests are paedophiles, and so more or less 600 pedophiles in cassocks walk each day between our children.

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A few years ago, three Catholic priests’ fates were joined together by a tragic event. Their lives were miraculously saved. Now, on every anniversary the clergymen meet to celebrate their survival. Each took a different path.
Lisowski is moving up the ladder in the church administration in a big city, dreaming about the Vatican. Standing in his way is the Archbishop, a luxury-loving dignitary who uses political influence to build the largest sanctuary in Poland…
The second priest, Trybus is a rural pastor. Serving in a place full of poverty, he slowly succumbs to human weaknesses.
Kukula is not very successful, either, and despite his fervent faith, loses the trust of his parishioners overnight.
Soon, the clergymen’s paths will cross again, and the events that will take place will have an impact on the life of each of them.

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  5. Oakland Diocese To Release Names Of Clergy Accused Of Abuse
  6. File it under “It’s About Time” – Catholic Church to disclose names of all clergy accused of child abuse
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  9. Prosecutor: Catholic priests ‘weaponised’ faith to sexually abuse children – Mark Scolforo
  10. Pope John Paul II and the Vatican sex scandal cover-up – Saxasalt
  11. Righteous anger
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  13. ‘So many I’m sorry’s’: Why some survivors of sexual abuse won’t or can’t go to

Yehowah in the Leningrad Codex

Since my childhood in the Old Roman Catholic Church I had been brought up with the Holy Name of God, though two versions of His Name were used: Jehovah (at that time written Yehowah or YHWH, later Jehovah and still later Jehovah or JHWH) and Yahweh (also later receiving the J for the Y and becoming Jahweh).

In the 1960ies the Jehovah’s Witnesses gaining more foot on the ground and the Catholic church starting loosing people to other faith groups and even having people (like me) totally abandoning the Holy Trinity, they started to create a hate against the Name Jehovah.

In a certain way we could see the growing hate against Jehovah, because most people, like still today, co-notate it with the faith group from the American organisation Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. In the land of the origin of that organisation we also could see a growing hate against non-trinitarians and users of God’s Name. On the other hand around the turn of the 20th to 21st century we saw also in the United States more people coming up for God’s Name, though they refused the contemporary or modern spelling which was by then also used in most other languages and as such said God His Name was not Jehovah, because a Y did not exist yet in ancient Hebrew, instead of accepting that it is exactly the same and in modern spelling it is agreed to write Jehovah, like others also write Jesus or Jeshua and not Iesus (e.g. like in the King James Bible of 1611) or Yeshua (like some also claim Christ his name to be).

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To remember

Leningrad Codex (or Codex Leningradensis) = oldest complete manuscript of Hebrew Bible using the Masoretic Text +Tiberian vocalization = oldest complete codex of the Tiberian mesorah

Masoretic vowel points in Leningrad Codex allow for pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton​ — the four Hebrew consonants making up the divine name — ​as Yeho·wah’.

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Additional reading

  1. Another way looking at a language #5 Aramic, Hebrew and Greek
  2. Een Naam voor een God #11 Y of J Kiezen
  3. Lord in place of the divine name
  4. Lord Of The Creation
  5. Anti Jehovah sites
  6. Al-Fatiha [The Opening/De Opening] Süra 1:1-3 In the name of Allah the Merciful
  7. Old and newer King James Versions and other translations #11 Muslim Idiom Translations
  8. Jehovah in the BASF
  9. Americans their stars, pretension, God, Allah and end of times signs #1 Abrahamic religions

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Related

  1. The Tetragrammaton
  2. Questions and Answers About the Name of God
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  5. Yes, Yes; No, No; Men are men; Women are Women. Numbers 30 – part 1
  6. What’s in a name?
  7. His Name Upon Us – Numbers 6:23-27
  8. Respecting God’s name
  9. Why is God called by different names in different ages? What are the significances of God’s names? |Eastern Lightning

Why are we surprised when Buddhists are violent?

Dan Arnold & Alicia Turner, New York Times, 5 March 2018

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The Nya Thar Lyaung reclining Buddha is an important religious site in the Bago region of Myanmar. Credit, Frank Bienewald/LightRocket, via Getty Images

While history suggests it is naïve to be surprised that Buddhists are as capable of inhuman cruelty as anyone else, such astonishment is nevertheless widespread — a fact that partly reflects the distinctive history of modern Buddhism. By ‘modern Buddhism,’ we mean not simply Buddhism as it happens to exist in the contemporary world but rather the distinctive new form of Buddhism that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this period, Buddhist religious leaders, often living under colonial rule in the historically Buddhist countries of Asia, together with Western enthusiasts who eagerly sought their teachings, collectively produced a newly ecumenical form of Buddhism — one that often indifferently drew from the various Buddhist traditions of countries like China, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Japan and Thailand.

This modern form of Buddhism is distinguished by a novel emphasis on meditation and by a corresponding disregard for rituals, relics, rebirth all the other peculiarly ‘religious’ dimensions of history’s many Buddhist traditions. The widespread embrace of modern Buddhism is reflected in familiar statements insisting that Buddhism is not a religion at all but rather (take your pick) a ‘way of life,’ a ‘philosophy’ or (reflecting recent enthusiasm for all things cognitive-scientific) a ‘mind science.’

Buddhism, in such a view, is not exemplified by practices like Japanese funerary rites, Thai amulet-worship or Tibetan oracular rituals but by the blandly nonreligious mindfulness meditation now becoming more ubiquitous even than yoga. To the extent that such deracinated expressions of Buddhist ideas are accepted as defining what Buddhism is, it can indeed be surprising to learn that the world’s Buddhists have, both in past and present, engaged in violence and destruction.

There is, however, no shortage of historical examples of violence in Buddhist societies. Sri Lanka’s long and tragic civil war (1983-2009), for example, involved a great deal of specifically Buddhist nationalism on the part of a Sinhalese majority resentful of the presence of Tamil Hindus in what the former took to be the last bastion of true Buddhism (the ‘island of dharma’). Political violence in modern Thailand, too, has often been inflected by Buddhist involvement, and there is a growing body of scholarly literature on the martial complicity of Buddhist institutions in World War II-era Japanese nationalism. Even the history of the Dalai Lama’s own sect of Tibetan Buddhism includes events like the razing of rival monasteries, and recent decades have seen a controversy centering on a wrathful protector deity believed by some of the Dalai Lama’s fellow religionists to heap destruction on the false teachers of rival sects.

Read the full article in the New York Times.

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