Steve Lumbley

Husband, Father, Grandfather, Founder of Apostasywatch Ministry. Reformed, Post-Mill. Native Texan by God's grace. Texas Tech Red Raider by choice.

[Townhall.com @townhallcom]

HIDDEN CAMERA: Pastor at James Talarico's home church ADMITS that members of the church wish Trump had been assassinated.

“We still have people in this church who wish that the young man had not just nicked his ear, but had been more successful."

“If you polled our members, and asked them if they were Christian, agnostic, or atheist, the vast majority would say agnostic or atheist because they don’t buy the religion that we got from the Puritans.”

[Steve Lumbley @SteveLumbley]

@PamelaHensley22 How does she have 'standing' to sue over this?

[Steve Lumbley @SteveLumbley]

@felipe4prez Packers

[Sean Davis @seanmdav]

I hate gambling and oppose it in all its forms and would love for all of it to be illegal, but corrupt conferences hiring refs to rig games using secret clocks and then paying off their victims to keep quiet is a much bigger threat to the integrity of athletics than a player betting on outcomes he had no control over. That’s exactly what happened last night in Ann Arbor, and everyone knows it.

The Big 10 tried to destroy Texas Tech for the crime of supporting a player who never played a single snap for the school and whose transgressions all started when he played in the Big 10.

Brendan Sorsby is banned from the NCAA, but every single Big 10 referee involved in rigging that game for Michigan will be officiating games next week.

Brendan Sorsby can’t play college football, but the Big 10 employees who used a secret clock to rig a game and then lie about it will all continue to get paid to do the same thing the next time a non-conference opponent threatens a Big 10 playoff bid.

The Big 10 threatened to ban its members from playing Texas Tech because of one player who gambled while he played in the Big 10. Is anyone going to refuse to play Michigan, or play the Big 10, as a result of Big 10 referees blatantly rigging games for Big 10 schools? No? Isn’t that interesting.

Unless and until every school and conference that had a meltdown over Texas Tech officially boycotts Michigan and the Big 10, we’ll know that the entire Texas Tech uproar was fake. It was never about the integrity of the game. It was never about the sanctity of the sport.

What they were actually mad about was a new world in which their ability to illegally pay players under the table no longer mattered, and they hated the new guy who was now eating their lunch.

When every school and conference which cried about Texas Tech directs the exact same threats at Michigan and the Big 10 for what happened yesterday, we can take them seriously.

I’m not holding my breath.

[Steve Lumbley @SteveLumbley]

@PamelaHensley22 No, it's time for the citizens of Danbury to intervene. And if they don't, the deserve what's coming.

[Steve Lumbley @SteveLumbley]

@OldRowGunsUp I say we refuse to schedule Michigan in any sport. We must uphold the integrity of the game, or something.

[L A R R Y @LarryOConnor]

Bishop Fulton Sheen, half a century ago:

"Just think, my dear ladies, of how many mentally disturbed women we are going to have in the United States in the next 10 or 15 years when the guilt of abortion begins to attack the mind and soul.". 🤯

[Ryan Denton @TexasPreacher]

One of the more persistent but easily debunked myths about the Puritans is that they were a bunch of dour, stiff, anti-pleasure prudes, suspicious of anything that might make a man smile.

No, no, friends. That caricature comes from Mencken's famed slander, that Puritanism was "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

This tells you more about Mencken than it does the Puritans. Read the men themselves, and/or even the scholarship, and you find the exact opposite.

Take sex, since that is usually where the charge of Puritan prudishness begins. I saw someone point out on X that William Gouge in Of Domesticall Duties (1622) commends the 3 F's of the marriage bed, frequent, fervent, and freely. That means exactly what you'd think it means. (Gouge's own phrasing is readily, willingly, and cheerfully.)

Scholar Edmund Morgan worked through the old New England records & found cases that corroborate this. The First Church of Boston excommunicated James Mattock for refusing the marriage bed to his wife for two years. Puritan ministers warned husbands and wives against depriving one another of the comfort and relief God intended the marriage bed to provide.

Leland Ryken spent an entire book, Worldly Saints, trying to correct this nonsensical stereotype. On marriage and sex especially he points out that the Puritan view was not merely that marital intimacy was permissible. It was "meant to be exuberant."

Same thing with alcohol. The Puritans weren't prohibitionists. They drank. The Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic with thousands of gallons aboard. Wine and other drink appeared at meals, funerals, ordinations, and other occasions. Increase Mather preached an entire sermon against drunkenness, which is needful, and still called drink a good creature of God. The wine is from God; the drunkard is from the devil.

Even C.S. Lewis described the sixteenth-century Puritans as "young, fierce, progressive intellectuals, very fashionable and up-to-date."

My point in all this is that the Puritans weren't suspicious of God's creational gifts. They weren't the gray-faced killjoys we've been taught to imagine. They had an enormous doctrine of creation. God made the world. God made food. God made wine. God made marriage. God made the marriage bed. God made laughter and friendship and feasting and children and fields and homes and all the ordinary pleasures of creaturely life.

The answer to Rome's ascetic tendencies was to receive the creature and creation as being from the good hand of God, and to receive it with thanksgiving, while at the same time refusing to make an idol of it.

The Puritan was at war with disordered pleasure, yes, but never pleasure itself. Wine is good. Drunkenness is wicked. The marriage bed is good. Fornication is wicked. Food is good. Gluttony is wicked. Rest is good. Sloth is wicked. Money is useful. Covetousness is wicked. The creature is good. Worshiping and abusing the creature is wicked.

And frankly, isn't this far healthier than our present arrangement, where we congratulate ourselves for having escaped "Puritanism" while being enslaved to pornography, alcohol, food, entertainment, screens, sloth, and every appetite that promises five minutes of pleasure, which is a tendency both inside the church and outside of it.

So when someone tells you the Puritans were stiff, prudish, miserable people who couldn't stand the thought of anybody enjoying himself, you can generally assume one thing:

He's read Nathaniel Hawthorne. He has read some Mencken. Perhaps he may have read somebody spewing about the Puritans on social media. But he hasn't read the Puritans, and he hasn't read the scholarship on the Puritans.

So be a friend and patiently help him see that there's much more here than what he's been told, and even more thrillingly, there's a whole universe of 17th century treasure that he can now set forth to mine.

[Steve Lumbley @SteveLumbley]

@tanyaelisabethh I've served on 3 different juries. Two criminal and one civil. Women on juries are always a problem

[Steve Lumbley @SteveLumbley]

@MyUnveiledTruth Had a similar experience with an Indian Dr. lying to me.

[Steve Lumbley @SteveLumbley]

@MattWalshBlog Too many women on this jury.

[Protestia @Protestia]

Paula White's National Faith Advisory Board is promoting a new paid program by prominent 'Christian' psychiatrist Dr. Amen, whom White describes as having changed her life.

Here, he explains the value of Kirtan Kriya meditation, which is a Kundalini yoga meditation.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr @RobertKennedyJr]

At his press conference today, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro accused me of promoting conspiracy theories because I told him, during an earlier telephone conversation, that some Americans had religious objections to the MMR vaccine because it contained fetal tissue. “There is no fetal tissue in the MMR,” he told me.

This is a segment from a videotaped deposition of Stanley Plotkin, the inventor of the MMR vaccine. Plotkin admits to butchering 76 aborted normally developing fetuses, all over three months old, in just one of the many studies that led to the development of his vaccine.

The rubella virus used in MMR-II is grown on the cultured cell line composed of lung tissue from an aborted three-month-old female embryo and listed as “WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts” in the ingredients of MMR-II as portions of these cells end up in each vial of MMR II.

During Dr. Plotkin’s deposition, Attorney Aaron Siri asked: “Isn’t it true that MMR II contains approximately 150 nanograms cells substrate double-strand DNA and single-strand DNA per dose purposefully fragmented to approximately 215 base pairs in length?” Dr. Plotkin answered: “Yeah, that’s probably correct, yes.”

This equals approximately 646 billion pieces of human DNA from an aborted fetal cell line in each vial of MMR-II.

In addition to the human DNA, there is also an unspecified amount of human cellular debris in each dose of MMR-II.

During our phone conversation, Governor Shapiro also accused me of promoting vaccine misinformation. When I asked him for an example, he was unable to provide one, but this did not deter him from publicly repeating that accusation during his press event. As I told him, HHS does not tolerate misinformation by any employee. I offered to point to hundreds of instances of vaccine misinformation by the Biden administration about which I had never heard him complain.

Governor Shapiro also faulted me for the decline in Pennsylvania vaccination rates from 97% - 93.2%. When I pushed back on this assertion, he acknowledged that most of the decline occurred during the Biden administration. It’s unfortunately true that the government lockdowns, deceptions, manipulation, and overreach during Covid severely damaged public faith in the vaccine program.

Governor Shapiro’s press conference was an example of the same species of gaslighting.

The Trump administration is working to restore public trust not by gaslighting or manipulating, but by being truthful, at last, with the public.

[Steve Lumbley @SteveLumbley]

@lsferguson 650 per week ain't nearly enough.

[JD™ @LostMyHats]

This is at the grave of the Chabad Messiah, Rebbe Schneerson. Many of the Chabad believe he was transported to Heaven, like Elijah, or will raise again from the dead. To enter the Oleh, you must first knock. There, you read a prayer written to Schneerson and ask for his blessing and intercession, then tear it up and leave it at his coffin. Leaving, you walk backwards so he doesn’t see your backside. And this Jew has been praised with presidential decrees every year on his birthday since 1978, and by the U.S. Congress since 1984.

He raised no one from the dead. He performed no miracles. But he was really good at making up new rules, taught that Gentiles are inferior and have animal souls, and discouraged them from converting to Judaism because they aren’t good enough. And yet, he’s got Gentiles praying to his corpse. Trump visited to ask blessings in each campaign. Mike Huckabee’s longtime mentor and Mark Levin’s personal rabbi are both Chabad.

Every observant Jew is Messianic. It’s just that sometimes their messiah is lame and stupid.

[Steve Lumbley @SteveLumbley]

@miles_commodore I was trying to hit my sister in the face with that ball.

[Flopping Aces @FloppingAces]

These unelected career officials decided they were better judges of what the President of the United States should know than the president himself.

That is the command-chain scandal buried inside John Solomon’s reporting.

According to Solomon, intelligence officers were not simply sitting on inconvenient information. He says officials discussed withholding election-related intelligence from Trump and Congress, and one memo referred to “massaging the PDB” ... shaping what made it into the Presidential Daily Brief. One person allegedly talked about a “shadow government.” Others reportedly wrote that keeping the president in the dark “boggles the mind.”

Who the fuck gave them that authority?

The intelligence community exists to collect, assess, and brief. It does not get to insert itself like a parasite between the intelligence and the commander in chief because career officials think their political judgment outranks his constitutional authority.

A GS-15 does not outrank an election.

An analyst does not get to decide which threats the president is mature enough to see.

A clearance is not a fucking veto over the chain of command.

And Solomon says the information being filtered involved real security concerns: election-machine vulnerabilities, Chinese collection of massive amounts of voter-registration data, and other threats officials were tracking internally while the president, Congress, and the public were allegedly kept in the dark.

That is the rot.

Not bureaucratic caution. Not healthy dissent. Not “protecting institutions.”

It is unelected officials allegedly deciding what reality the elected president was permitted to receive.

Solomon calls the broader pattern “wash, rinse, repeat.”

Crossfire Hurricane. Round River. Plasmic Echo. Arctic Frost.

Different operations. Same arrogant belief that the bureaucracy gets the final word.

Until that stops, every future president is just another mark waiting to be managed.
(article below)

[JD™ @LostMyHats]

Dinesh, I'm not sure where to start, but your grasp of soteriology is about as bad as your grasp of eschatology. But here goes:

First, it's not the "Calvinist doctrine of predestination," as though Calvin invented it or something. The term and concept are taught explicitly in Romans 8:29-30, Ephesians 1:5 & 11, 1 Corinthians 2:7, Acts 4:28, etc. And the term predestination or predestine means the same thing in Greek as it does in English. It means "to determine ahead of time." It's not complicated.

When the Bible says things like, “Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified...” that means it's a thing. It's in the Bible. You should believe the things in the Bible. So, literally everyone is supposed to believe in predestination. You're acting like it's a novel concept thought up in the basement of a 19th-century Irish schismatic sect. But that's your eschatology.

The only question is *why* God predestines us. The Arminian says it's because God is psychic and knows things about us ahead of time, based upon a condition that we must meet; our amenability to the gospel, our forthcoming faith, our shining personalities, or something residing in us.

The Calvinist, on the other hand, believes that God predestines us based upon no condition that we ourselves meet, but upon nothing but His grace, unmerited and undeserved.

No Calvinist would suggest "an atheist is right for not believing in God," because most Calvinists are Scripturally literate and understand that atheists don't really exist according to the Bible. Everyone believes there's a God, but they suppress that truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18-20). The things that can be known about God have been made known by the things that God has made (same passage). So no one rejects God because God has rejected them. They reject God because their deeds are evil (1 John 3:19-20). They don't believe in God because they are evil, not because they can't believe in God.

At the center of all this appears to be your misunderstanding about the Doctrine of Regeneration. The reason why Regeneration is a thing is that it's a necessity on account of our sinful nature. We are born at enmity with God (Romans 8:7-8), conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity (Psalm 51:5). This is why Jesus told Nicodemus he must be born again (John 3). That's everybody except Jesus, who thanks to His virgin birth, didn't have this malfunction.

What regeneration accomplishes in the sinner is giving them eyes to see (2 Corinthians 4:6), ears to hear (Matthew 11:15), and hearts to understand (Ezekiel 36:26). This is why spiritual things are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:14). This is what John means in John 10, “You do not believe because you are not my sheep,” indeed you CANNOT (John 12:39).

But your BIGGEST malfunction is your presumption that someone deserves hell/damnation because they reject God or don't believe. That's inaccurate. We deserve hell and damnation because we have sinned (Romans 6:23). Unbelief is one of any number of sins that make you deserving of eternal, conscious torment. And so, every single person who goes to hell will fully deserve it, whether or not God has given them faith to believe.

No sinner can pout like a crybaby and say, "God didn't give me faith." Why? Because they chose to sin. The punishment is eternal death. They deserve hell, irrespective of whether or not God gives them the faith to believe. In fact, this very thing is said in Romans 9 when Paul gives the potter-and-clay metaphor and says, "Who are ye, o man, to answer back to God and say, 'Why have you made me thus" (Romans 9:20). If you sin, you've got no business demanding who God does and does not give faith.

It's simple. If faith is a gift of God (and it is), and if not everyone has been given faith to believe (they haven't), then salvation is entirely of the Lord, grace is free, and what you call "Calvinism" is true.

If you are right, then at the end of the day, the reason why you go to heaven and other people don't, is not God's grace. It's tied to the merit of your own choices and decisions. In the end, salvation is not of God; it's in your decision to use your own "free will" to believe. Congrats, now go sing some praise songs to yourself on Sunday.

To put it another way, free will has never saved a man. God's grace does that. But free will has sent many a man to hell. That's why it's not about free will. It's about God's grace to send His Son to die for you (Matthew 1:21), then His grace to give you faith to make you born again so you can see Who it is you're believing in, the grace for you to see the severity of your sin and need of saving, and the grace to "work in you both to will and do" (Philippians 2:13) to call upon God for salvation.

And if all of that is over your head, or too complicated to understand, it doesn't really matter. The Bible very clearly says predestination is a thing, so let God's Word be true though every man a liar (Romans 3:4).

[Steve Lumbley @SteveLumbley]

@GuntherEagleman New trial is still highly unlikely

[Andrew Kolvet @AndrewKolvet]

This is a pretty important story from Axios on how US Central Command has quietly established a shipping cooridor through the Strait of Hormuz averaging ~10 million barrels of oil a day, half of the pre-war level, injected into the global energy markets.

Key quote: "We have been controlling the southern lane of the Strait of Hormuz for two months now. The IRGC can be a nuisance, but they don't control the strait. We do."

The US military did this through a multi-week campaign to "blind" Iranian radar surveillance capabilities so they can't detect shipping vessels traveling in single file lines near the Oman coast.

US Airforce assets have also been deployed, shooting down eight Iranian drones and two cruise missiles.

Meanwhile, Sec. Scott Bessent says resources are surging to the region to construct overland oil pipelines to diminish the importance of of the Strait over time.