Bought the enslaved women ‘n’ children? You don’t pay for the spoils of war. You just carry off whatever and whomever you can.
No, the dems pushing this new ‘law’. My post was a reply to MJB.
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Ah.
(But I think my comment applies equally to that MJB’s second post above. ) 4
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Hyp, I see your point about the Christian (so called) wars but I would present the issue this way: Don’t those wars speak more about man’s failings due to original sin more so than the underlying point of Christ’s ministry?
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Christ lived as an itinerant mendicant preacher and insisted, “My kingdom is not of this world”. The Gospels have nothing to do with, and nothing to say about, temporal power. (Although Paul, writing even earlier, certainly does.)
He made a complete break with the bloody Old Testament. The OT is FULL of killing, and Yahweh does a lot of it! Is it the Sermon on the Mount which has the rhythmic Q and A: Ye have heard it said……but I say unto you…” ? Whereas Mohammed, as I said, was a general, a military and civic ruler.
But the church, by Mohamed’s lifetime, was already established along the lines of the Roman military.
And why the “so called” wars? You think the Wars of Religion weren’t real conflicts?
So no, war certainly was not the point of Jesus’ ministry. Quite the reverse. But it quickly became one of the main pastimes of the imperial religion. And, as with the rest of the OT and NT, Mohammed aped that. With spectacular success, for the first. 6 centuries.
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Measuring religious compliance in Afghanistan
Worse economic outcomes (causally) increase religious adherence.
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Stop me if you’ve heard this, but:
What do you get when you cross the Respect for Marriage Act with the Combatting International Islamophobia Act?
Will the likely passage of both of these statutes mean we CAN, still, criticize Islam’s stance on homosexuality and marriage—but ONLY that?
Or will it, logically, mean that, in the name of combatting Islamophobia, we CAN still legally criticize transgenderism, transvestitism, same sex- weddings, etc?
I’ll say again, IMHO, Islam is our baby, the bastard child of the two older Abrahamic creeds. It will, eventually, grow out of its childhood prejudices and become worldly and blasé about these perversions, But its conflicted adolescence is gonna be quite a melée of domestic violence. Witness those Muslims at the school board meetings protesting the transgender sewage their kids are being instructed to swim in.
So, dear polymaths: what do YOU think is the punchline to my riddle above?
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Christianity has gone through a number of mutations and internal struggles. The woke theocracy is in fact a mutation of Christianity. Islam is a successful relative of Christianity. Outside challenges tend to force alignment, and absence of challenges (as from 90s onwards) foster internal mutation and struggle. Policy is a result of the governing alliance.
Houellebecq’s Submission sees the unsustainable internally divided woke getting assimilated inside coherent and confident Islam.
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Compared to the woke theocracy, Islam clearly has greater momentum and vigor. But I don’t think the remaining, non-mutated Christian population of the United States would submit to Islamic rule. Moreover, there is a fertile immigrant population from South America whose traditions are incompatible with Islam.
The clash of civilizations with irreconcilable cultural values has often resulted in violence. My hope is that we avoid civil war by congregating into localized, self-governing communities with shared customs, sort of like the “burbclaves” envisioned in Snow Crash. Some friction between the presently dispersed cultural groups is inevitable as people coalesce into distinct communities.
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This is true. The Progs of the late 19th century couched their totalitarianism in Christian terms. They were the children of Puritans from New England so it stood to reason that they would claim to be doing Gods work on earth. But look how quickly they jettisoned God from their March to perfect the world.
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Gee, wouldn’t it be quite enough for the u.s. congress (sic) to concern itself with domestic “islamophobia”, rather than “international”? Are they now an arm of the UN? In an ironic coincidence - as I read the titles of these two bills - I was thinking about the First Amendment, since my wife and I watched “The People vs. Larry Flynt” last evening. This 1996 movie’s central theme was the essential importance of freedom of speech as purportedly secured by the First Amendment, with lots of traditional eloquence insisting that there was simply no public interest greater than preserving free speech, however objectionable!
And now come “hate speech”, “misinformation”, “conspiracy theories” etc. and these two bills, each aiming to do exactly this: Congress making laws specifically abridging freedom of speech - even thought.
As I watched that movie and listened to the enconia as to speech, I could hardly believe how fast we have fallen and how far. A mere 26 years ago, these bills would have been seen as the treasonous, tyrannical (un-Constitutional!! - how quaint) abominations that they are. Do we need any more evidence that the “American experiment” has run its course?
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CW I would argue that experiment was over the second that Scott Bastard argued for and won the battle for incorporating a national bank in 1792, but I take your point. The greatest evil was adopting that duplicitous parchment as the basis of our general government. Without that Satan would have certainly been thwarted.
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But it failed! As did the 2nd National Bank, thanks to Jackson. We were then without a national bank until the 16th Amendment - in, ?what, the 1920’s. That’s almost a century.
So your arguments have some holes in them.
?You are expecting it to “grow out of its childhood prejudices”. ?When, pray tell, would we expect to see this. So far - a mere 1300 years there has been no evidence of such. Quite the contrary - islam has stayed its original combat self. It fights for dominance - with C4,home-made claymores in pressure cookers, and against the weakest.
Mohammed was no “general” - he was a common caravan raider, someone who seized the moment when he saw it, like any common predator. That includes his position on women. Islam is no different today than it was at its inception. No Christian of any ilk would condone the burning of “witches” at the stake - that’s a purely Puritanical aspect of Massachusetts, the originators of our War of Revolution. ?Did Lord Howe attempt to raid the powder stores of any other state - but Massachusetts. ?Were there widespread raids like Lexington and Concorde in any other state. And today much of our “intolerance” comes from - Massachusetts and its close, and culturally attached, neighbors.
We certainly have a problem in this nation today, but it’s from a distinct segment of the country - New England. Wokism, Leftism, progressivism, totalitarianism - all originate from that region. ?So if we can’t commit to our basic principles at Founding a mere 250 or so years ago, what in the world makes you think islam will “mutate” into anything but the brutish walking felony it has been 1400 years.
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No the issues isn’t whether the bank worked or not. The issue is where does it say congress has the power to incorporate entities? It’s not there. Congress doesn’t have that power. Well along comes that Scott Bastard with his “necessary and proper” theory which posited that Congress has the power to do whatever it wants to facilitate other powers that it has (in this case the power to borrow indicated that there was the power to incorporate a bank from which to borrow). Now ask any honest person who has gone through law school and ask them how that is taught in law school? Now after that ask yourself if it is really surprising that we have a government that thinks it can stamp out any and all “misinformation”? This government was abusing its power in the crib and it is there that I wish this government had been left lifeless.
The greatest act of any US VP was putting that arrogant SOB in the ground.
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The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act, which was deemed not to require a constitutional amendment to enact. The 16th Amendment, which was passed by congress in 1909 and ratified in 1913, enabled the federal income tax, but was unrelated to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.
Here, from the Federal Reserve’s own FRED database, is the purchasing power of the “dollar” since they took over its management in 1913.
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Coupla things: Salem was nothing compared to what was going on in Europe in the same period in terms of witchcraft persecutions. Yes, among the Christian nations, And even worse after the Reformation. I would need to check again, but I’m PRET-Ty sure it’s over 60.000 people killed in horrible ways for witchcraft . So that’s only 500 years ago. And the fact that everybody thinks of Salem as the primary example in world history of witchcraft persecutions is like the thing with African slavery.”Salem” took place over a coupla of summer months in 1692, twenty-five (25) people total were killed, (20 by execution, 5 dying in prison) and when it was over, reparations were promptly made. Just as with African slavery: in terms of duration, intensity of ill treatment, and sheer numbers, our country is not the most culpable among the nations; we are, by any measure, the LEAST culpable.
Judaism “mutated”. Christianity “mutated”, quite a few times: first, from the world-denying ideology of Jesus, where nothing mattered but the soul and the next life, into the Christian soldiers of the heirs of the Roman Empire, , and now, to the point where the Cross is draped in the rainbow flag. So yuh, I do think there will be more to come from Islam, the youngest of the Abrahamic creeds.
I felt, back in the 70s-80s, that Islam was just waking up from a centuries long nap. Natcherly, they were…cranky. And there may be worse to come. But eventually, they’ll probably reach the world-accommodating stage the two older creeds have reached.
“When, pray tell?” You ask? Golly, I don’t know. But it is my humble opinion that it will.
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Indeed…. Here is the original transcript of the trial in 1629 (August 25–26) of Margueron Jacquet of my village of LIgnières. (Click image to enlarge.)
I photographed this original document in November 2001 in the archives of the
Société Jurasienne d’Emulation. Here is a transcript of the proceedings, translated to modern French, by that organisation.
The transcript says, (my translation), “Condemned to be burned alive, the head cut off, and her property confiscated. Executed 12 September 1629.” In fact, according to independent records at LIgnières, the unfortunate Margueron Jacquet was executed by hanging at a location about ten minutes’ walk from my house which is still called «Le Gibet» today.
The hysteria, extracted confessions, and denunciation of other “accomplices” will be familiar to those acquainted with Soviet show trials of the 1930s or the woke mobs of academia and social media today. The punishment (form of “cancellation”) is less severe—for the moment.
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One more interstin’ thing I learned in connection with researching my article on Pa’s criminalization of occult practices: people think it was always the village wise woman, some defenseless old crone, who got the chop (or the rope, the flame, the “peine forte et dur”) but actually, in Europe, a slight majority of the unfortunate were men.
Okay and only one MORE 
thing: our Pa statute forbids charging money for telling people where to dig for buried treasure. When I was writing my article I didnt pay too much attention to that cuz I didn’t have a mental hook to hang it on. But later I read that was one of the main activities of sorcerers in Europe. Of course in Europe, there were caches of Roman coins and maybe plate and other valuable artifacts in the ground. ( And I read that a windfall like finding gold was one of the only circumstances in which wealth wasn’t automatically stigmatized as theft, since they saw economics as a zero-sum game,). But the practice persisted in the New World, apparently , where there wouldn’t have been any such valuable remains.
My article was called “Fines and Portents” . It’s a lot about the Pa German white magic, the Braucherei, or Pow Wow. If anybody wants to read it, let me know!
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On this note, I’d recommend this film as a way to familiarize ourselves with the internal selection process that Catholicism used to navigate all sorts of mutations that happened through the medieval period - those were the heresies:
What’s particularly entertaining is the following:
When Italy attempted to ban the film, it was the Catholic Church that came to its defense, and that should say something.
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