Never frown

And a classic from Bill Watterson:

No mercy for sin

For years and years I wandered this earth

Until I died and went to hell

But my despair had ascended to heaven

That's how I finally got rid of it

-- They Might Be Giants, "Hopeless Bleak Despair"

For it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

-- Matthew 5:29, 30

For he said unto him that the Lord surely should come to redeem his people, but that he should not come to redeem them in their sins, but to redeem them from their sins.

-- Helaman 5:10

Then cried they all again, saying, "Not this man, but Barabbas." Now Barabbas was a robber.

-- John 18:40

Well I do believe in miracles

And I want to save my soul

And I know that I'm a sinner

I'm gonna die here in the cold . . .

You'll never make a saint of me

-- The Rolling Stones, "Saint of Me"

A man died and was brought before St. Peter at the pearly gates.

"Let me say in all sincerity that I would like very much to let you in," said St. Peter. "However, you lived a life full of sin, and your heart is full of sin even now. No unclean thing can enter Heaven but must be cast into the fire. That is the law, and there are no exceptions."

"I know it, I know it," said the man -- and, weeping and wailing and gnashing his teeth, he was cast down into hell.

A few days later, another man died and was brought before St. Peter at the pearly gates.

"Let me say in all sincerity that I would like very much to let you in," said St. Peter. "However, you lived a life full of sin, and your heart is full of sin even now. No unclean thing can enter Heaven but must be cast down into hell. That is the law, and there are no exceptions."

"Oh, thank God, thank God!" cried the man through tears of joy -- and his sin was cast into the fire, and he ascended, clean.

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The flesh cannot be expected to be other than weak, but the spirit must be willing. That is why it is so important to the devils that people identify with sin -- embrace it as a central part of their identity -- and why there has been such a push for moral inversion -- for people to internalize the idea that evil is good and good, evil.

A particularly crystal-clear display of value inversion

According to Jewish atheist Philip Zuckerman, "Staunch atheists show higher morals than the proudly pious, from the pandemic to climate change." In this self-parodying Salon article -- click the link, it's real, I didn't make it up! -- we learn that practicing Christians are less moral than atheists because:

• 45% of white (white? yes, white!) Evangelicals said they would definitely not get pecked, compared to 10% of (any-color) atheists.
• Only 33% of white Evangelicals "accept the evidence that human activity is causing climate change," compared to 80% of "secular Americans" of any or no color.
• Only 45% of white Evangelicals want to ban assault rifles, compared to 77% of atheists.

Those are this three main points. (And let me just point out in passing how totally racist it is for Mr. Zuckerman to equate piety with being white.) The next set of points are from a paragraph full of hyperlinked buzzwords like "death with dignity" and "animal rights." I clicked them all so that you don't have to. Here are the findings:

• Evangelicals (any color this time!) are the group least likely to think the US has a responsibility to accept refugees.
• White Evangelicals (there they are again!) are less likely than white non-Evangelicals to support Obamacare.
• Theism correlates with supporting "sex education" that stresses abstinence rather than contraception.
• Those who believe in life after death tend to have less positive views of "voluntary euthanasia."
• Religiously affiliated people are less likely to say that "homosexuality should be accepted by society."
• Christians are more likely than non-Christians to say that "gender is determined at birth" and that "society has gone too far in accepting transgender people."
• Religious people and those who reject Darwinism are less likely to have considered vegetarianism, more likely to say that medical research on animals is sometimes "necessary and valid," more likely (obviously!) to agree that "God put animals on Earth for man to use," and less likely to agree that (not making this up!) "it is wrong to wear leather jackets and pants."
• The religious are more likely to support "military action" (no further details available without paying for the article).
• The religious are more likely to believe that "the use of torture against suspected terrorists can sometimes be justified."
• White Evangelicals (our old friends!) are more likely than atheists to support the death penalty.
• "Parents who attend religious groups used corporal punishment more frequently than parents who did not attend religious groups" (but "there were no effects for religious participation on physical abuse").
• Those with "absolute views of religious truth" (a category that surely includes many atheists!) are more likely to be judged "authoritarian" by a psychological questionnaire.
• Watching a "compassion-inducing video had a big effect on [the] generosity" of non-religious people but "did not significantly change the generosity of more religious participants." Takeaway: "Highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than are non-believers."

And that's it! Not a single data point addressing uncontroversially immoral behaviors such as lying, stealing, or committing violent crimes. Again I remind you that the three "moral" issues highlighted by the article were: getting the peck, believing in anthropogenic global warming, and agreeing that a particular sort of weapon ought to be illegal. That is the article's definition of "higher morals"!

The paragraph about abortion is worth quoting in full.

But wait — what about the rights of the unborn? While many people oppose abortion on decidedly moral grounds, it is also the case that many others support the right of women to maintain autonomy over their own reproductive capacities, on equally moral grounds. Hence, the deep intractability of the debate. And yet, most Americans — both religious and non-religious — do not see the abortion of a non-viable fetus as being akin to the murder of a living human being. And let's be frank: It is impossible to square the assertion that the strongly religious are "pro-life" while they simultaneously refuse to get vaccinated, to wear a mask, to fight climate change, to support universal healthcare, or to support sane gun legislation. To characterize such an agenda as "pro-life" renders the label rather insincere, at best.

Abortion, you see, is different, because both sides hold the view they do on "moral grounds." Implicitly, this is not true of any of the other controversies listed, where one side is assumed without argument to be the moral one. People who support killing babies in the womb for convenience should not be judged immoral, because they are motivated by a concern for "reproductive autonomy." Those who support torturing suspected terrorists, on the other hand -- well, what possible motives could they have, other than a callous unconcern for human suffering?

One more bit I just have to quote -- and I assure you once again that this is not a satire and I am not making any of it up. Philip Zuckerman is a real person, not a character in a Nathan Roth novel.

[M]embers of religious congregations tend to donate more money to charity, on average, than the unaffiliated. And of course, the 20th century has witnessed the immoral, bloody brutality of numerous atheist dictatorships, such as those of the former USSR and Cambodia.

However, despite such complexities, the overall pattern remains clear: When it comes to the most pressing moral issues of the day, hard-core secularists exhibit much more empathy, compassion, and care for the well-being of others than the most ardently God-worshipping.

That's right. On the one hand, atheism brought us Stalin and Pol Pot -- but on the other, more atheists believe in global warming! One thing we can all agree on: despite such complexities, the overall pattern remains clear.

The faith of Moses

But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

-- 1 Cor. 2:9

And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.

--Exodus 20:21

God promised Moses, and Moses promised the people, no afterlife -- no Heaven, certainly, nor even a simple material paradise like those of Pindar and Virgil and Muhammad. No ocean breezes and flowers of blazing gold, no mossy beds by crystal streams that murmur through the meads, no gardens of palm and vine beneath which the rivers flow. Perhaps Moses thought at first that the voice from the burning bush was promising some such familiar Elysium -- the promised "land flowing with milk and honey" would fit right into many a pagan poem -- but then the voice continued, clarifying that the land referred to was "the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites." On earth. And then they would die, and of what came after that nothing was said.

For us, what follows naturally from "imagine there's no heaven" is "imagine all the people living for today." Whence then the heroism of Moses?  What motivated him? "Because there were no graves in Egypt," complained the people, "hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?" -- and didn't they have a point? Almost all of them did die in the wilderness; of the 600,000 who came out of Egypt, only two -- Moses himself not among them -- lived to enter the promised land. And even those lucky two -- well, they lived for a few more years, in a land rather more notable for its Canaanites and Hittites and Amorites than for its rivers of milk and honey, and then they died, too. So much for that.

And this is why I think there must be something authentically Mosaic in the Book of Deuternomy. Moses must have known something beyond the Lord of "core Torah" -- that barely-contained volcanic force, always on the verge of bursting forth and destroying any who got too close. He must have known that God loved him, and that must have been enough. He may not have had any clear understanding of the point of what he was doing, or of his ultimate destiny, but he had enough to go on. One of the Book of Mormon prophets says of God, "I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things" -- and some such childlike trust must have underlain the awful courage of Moses.

The deceivableness of unrighteousness

And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

-- 2 Thessalonians 2:10

This passage was brought to my attention when it was quoted in a review of That Hideous Strength at Bennett's Phylactery. Most English Bibles have deception or deceiptfulness, but deceivableness is also a possible reading of the Greek, and I think this is a case in which the King James translators were clearly inspired. What do we see all around us in 2020-21 but the deceivableness of unrighteousness, because they received not the love of the truth?

Francis Berger makes the same point in a comment on his post "The Unapologetic Cruelty of None Are Safe Until All Are Safe."

The masses may indeed be under some sort of spell, but this does not absolve them of personal responsibility. They chose to fall under the spell and continue to choose to remain under that spell. The masses are not passive victims, and we should not make excuses for them.

Only God searcheth all hearts, but it is my considered opinion that there are very few, if indeed any, innocent victims of the birdemic scam and the other Big Lies of our time. The deceived are complicit in their own deception. To quote the Bennett's Phylactery article I linked, "Everyone involved knows on some level that they are being lied to -- and they not only assent to the lie, but workshop it, and refine it, and pass it along."

There's an obvious paradox involved in knowingly being deceived -- Carlyle's "sincere cant," Twain's "believing what you know ain't so." To know that you are being deceived, you must know that what you believe is a lie -- but if you know it's a lie, in what sense do you believe it? I think that's an extremely important philosophical and psychological question that deserves careful reflection, and I've been nibbling away at it over the years. On rough-and-ready terms, though, everyone knows what "on some level" means and knows -- firsthand -- what it means to be guilty of sincere cant. These things are always easier to recognize in others, though, and the world of 2020-21 has given us all ample opportunity for that!

Do I do memes now? Yes, I guess I do.

Last year, when I thought Joe Biden was irrelevant and had zero chance of returning to the White House, the synchronicity fairies kept bringing him to my attention anyway. Now they've switched to Kamala Harris. Make of that what you will.

Actually, I guess she was prominently featured from the beginning.

Listening for a signal in the noise

Last night I was teaching an online English class, and one of the students twice made the mistake of referring to the time using an ordinal number -- of saying, for example, "I usually get up at seven fifteenth." The first time, I just corrected it without further comment, but after she'd made the same mistake twice I decided I'd better explain in more detail. I explained that we use ordinal numbers for the date, not for the time. "For example, we would say that today is" -- I glanced down at the corner of my screen to check -- "August twenty-sixth, but if we want to talk about the time, we'd say that it's" -- I glanced down again and saw exactly the same numbers -- "eight twenty-six."

Quite the coincidence, right? The whole point I was making was that the same series of digits would be read differently depending on whether it was a date or a time, and I just happened to make that point at a moment when the time and the date were perfectly aligned. I thought, "He's got a watch with a minute hand / Millennium hand and an eon hand / And when they meet, it's a happy land."

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This morning, I checked my email before leaving for work and found that someone had sent me this image from, apparently, Kamala Harris's Twitter.

When you want to do "Abbey Road" but don't have three friends

The email said simply, "Also saw this image & I know you’ve seen some Tarot connections. Notice any Tarot / Masonic symbolism?"

Well, yes, the Masonic symbolism rather hits you over the head -- but I wouldn't have looked at this photo and thought Tarot without some prompting from my friend. I thought of my Inauguration Day reading, identifying Harris with a woman between the two Masonic pillars Jachin and Boaz. The chessboard-tile floor does not appear on the card but is certainly implied by the context. One also sees an obvious visual allusion to the two pillars in the photo above. The angle of her legs even suggests a Masonic compass.

This photo also made me think of the AC/DC song "Highway to Hell" -- I think for no other reason than that it features the word "stride." Hey, Satan, paid my dues . . . . Another line from that song -- "Going down, party time" -- made me think of the chorus of the old Neil Sedaka song "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" -- "Kama kama down doobie doo down down."

I visited Harris's Twitter, wondering if the image was a recent one. (Apparently it's not.)

So the photo she chooses for the header is one of her -- cackling? Also, "Momala"? Doesn't she/her realize the preferred term is "birthing personala"? Momala ties back in with "Highway to Hell":

Hey, Satan, paid my dues

Playing in a rocking band

Hey, Momma, look at me

I'm on my way to the promised land

I'm on the highway to hell

(Don't stop me)

And I'm going down, all the way down

Momala + Joe = Mamalujo. Finnegans Woke!

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Later, on the road, I was thinking about the 826 coincidence of the night before when I noticed that string of numbers on the license plate ahead of me: MML 8268. Right next to it was another license plate that read NNJ 0315. This second plate caught my attention, because NNJ is ninja and 0315 is the Ides of March. This made me think of the Arizona audit, by a group called Cyber Ninjas, with (we hope) the ultimate result of striking down Caesar.

My recent post "Copper Queen" connected the Empress card of the Tarot with both Kamala Harris and the state of Arizona. Writing that post made me think (because of the phonetic similarity to empress) of the TMBG song "I'm Impressed," so immediately after posting it, I looked it up on YouTube. The video ends with a cartoon robot version of the assassination of Caesar on the Ides of March.

At first I didn't think much of the MML 8268 plate, except to note that it included 826. Now, though, I realize that MML is Momala, and that 268 is the gematria value of my full name. (Back in July, I posted about seeing 286 on a license plate and mistakenly thinking that was the gematria value of my name!) Oh, and the Ides of March is my birthday.

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A few days ago, on August 19, I received an email with the subject line "License Plate Synchronicity."

I was driving today and saw a car license plate that said D & C 1 38.  This drew my attention because I have seen very few references to the Old or New Testaments on license plates and don't remember seeing any other that refer to Mormon writings.  

The reference is to Doctrine and Covenants 1:38.

What I the Lord have spoken, I have spoken, and I excuse not myself; and though the heavens and the earth pass away, my word shall not pass away, but shall all be fulfilled, whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same.

On a hunch, I looked up D&C 8:2-6.

Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart.

Now, behold, this is the spirit of revelation; behold, this is the spirit by which Moses brought the children of Israel through the Red Sea on dry ground.

Therefore this is thy gift; apply unto it, and blessed art thou, for it shall deliver you out of the hands of your enemies, when, if it were not so, they would slay you and bring your soul to destruction.

Oh, remember these words, and keep my commandments. Remember, this is your gift.

Now this is not all thy gift; for you have another gift, which is the gift of Aaron; behold, it has told you many things.

Instead of "the gift of Aaron," the earliest manuscript has "the gift of working with the sprout," amended by Sidney Rigdon to "rod."

This is generally taken as a reference to a divining rod, later biblicized by connecting it with Aaron's rod that budded and blossomed and yielded almonds.

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As I post this, it's still 8/26 in Arizona. Not that I'm expecting anything to happen in the next two and a half hours, but you never know.

Not my typo