Recent content by breepf

Hunter Biden.

As far as I can tell, the bulk of scholars consider the episode to be an interpolation and, for that matter, don't consider that position controversial. Wikipedia has an overview: Jesus and the woman taken in adultery - Wikipedia I stumbled across the interpolation argument in Raymond Brown's...

With sola scriptura, and a supposed aversion to hundreds of years of Church guidance, Protestantism severely restricted what legitimately counted as an interpretive resource for Christians because Luther had no use for (some) figurative and/or allegorical readings. What Protestantism thus...

I don't think ancient Israelites and/or Judeans felt the same pressure as modern-day Christians to regard the text of the bible as literally true and actionable. Not to mention: the actual contents of the Hebrew Bible were the purview of a small fraction of literate urban scribes. The hoi polloi...

Well, there's the law of Moses, and then there's the law of Moses. Inasmuch as he walks and talks like a Pharisee, Jesus was another participant in the constant renegotiation and reappraisal of the Mosaic law. Of course, you're still welcome to pass on it, but Jesus did not have some literalist...

Why blame Paul? The gospels aren't exemplary exercises in moral virtue, at least not if you eschatologically frame what Jesus says and does. Plus, the scenes with Pontius Pilate make it clear that they are already trying to pass the buck: on the one hand, Christ-confessors are not the same as...

I understand the attractiveness of this quote, which charges Christians with hypocrisy, in particular the shitty British ones. They have failed to properly imitate Jesus, though they're doing a bang-up job, as I mentioned previously, of imitating the church's move to gain state power. But...

I do not get this perspective. Christianity has been trying to wed itself to state power since the first fucking century.

https://archive.org/stream/jeffrey-epstein-lawsuit-docs-signed/jeffrey-epstein-lawsuit-docs-signed_djvu.txt Not true--the Katie Johnson (Jane Doe) case.

It's absolutely insane to me that evangelicals weened on A Thief in the Night are willing to support a gay billionaire who infuses himself with the blood of young people and wants to bring a computer god to pass. Do these people have no shame?

I recall listening to a podcast that discussed the Left Behind series vis-a-vis The Turner Diaries. The latter is, of course, an exceedingly influential far right-wing novel about the New World Order and the like. It inspired Timothy McVeigh, who was hawking copies of it at the Branch Davidian...

Duh: calories are a gateway drug to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

Well, what I wrote was my best attempt to summarize the challenge that, I think, McCarthy has assigned to himself. To read a McCarthy novel is then, by my reckoning, to assent that this is generic contract to which I've agreed as a reader: he's going to depict a world that is, in large part...

This. I usually think about McCarthy’s novels as attempts to surmount the following challenge: can he write so beautifully as to overcome the depravity and suffering of the world he is depicting? To that end, my example at hand would be the simile in The Road that compares a lit match to a...

I don't follow SCOTUS very closely, or know much about the law, but I can't imagine it's a coincidence that the court lets Trump fuck with labor but not with banking.