@Pontifex@grok, how does the Apostle Paul define the Gospel?
How does the Roman Catholic Church define the Gospel?
Are their definitions the same?
If not, what are the soteriological implications?
The U.S. Air Force has confirmed that 8 people were on board for a test flight when the B-52 crashed on base, and the crash was not survivable. The incident is under investigation.
Seinfeld no era una serie “sobre nada”.
Era una serie sobre el futuro.
Jerry, Elaine, George y Kramer eran el prototipo del adulto moderno antes de que el adulto moderno se volviera mayoría.
Gente sola.
Sin hijos.
Sin matrimonio.
Sin religión.
Sin misión.
Sin raíces.
Sin legado.
Solo departamento, café, citas, consumo, neurosis y conversaciones infinitas sobre estupideces.
Y ahí está lo brillante: no te lo vendían como decadencia.
Te lo vendían como comedia inteligente.
Jerry hoy sería creador de contenido.
Vive de observar la realidad, convertirla en chiste y monetizar su personalidad. No tiene jefe visible, no tiene familia, no tiene hijos, no tiene misión superior. Su vida es comodidad, rutinas, cereal, tenis blancos, citas desechables y reputación.
Elaine es la mujer urbana moderna antes de Instagram.
Independiente, profesional, sexualmente libre, siempre rotando hombres, siempre encontrando defectos, siempre incapaz de cerrar con alguien. No es presentada como tragedia. Es presentada como una mujer divertida, lista y “libre”.
George es el hombre moderno promedio con ego alto y valor bajo.
Resentido, inseguro, cobarde, envidioso, poco masculino, con estándares absurdos y cero capacidad real de convertirse en el hombre que las mujeres que desea elegirían. No es exactamente un incel, porque a veces tiene suerte. Pero su mentalidad sí es la del hombre frustrado que quiere más de lo que merece.
Kramer es el adulto sin estructura.
No trabaja de forma clara, no produce de forma estable, vive entrando y saliendo de la vida de los demás, sobrevive con favores, trucos, ocurrencias y algún ingreso fantasma. Hoy podría vivir de ayudas, reventas, economía informal o cualquier sistema donde no tenga que construir nada serio.
Y lo más brutal:
Ninguno construye nada.
No hay familia.
No hay sacrificio.
No hay hijos.
No hay patrimonio emocional.
No hay comunidad real.
No hay proyecto trascendente.
Solo el yo.
Mi cita.
Mi incomodidad.
Mi departamento.
Mi café.
Mi marca favorita.
Mi problema ridículo.
Mi neurosis.
Eso no era “una serie sobre nada”.
Era una serie sobre el individuo convertido en centro absoluto de su propio universo vacío.
Y claro, estaba llena de marcas: Junior Mints, Twix, Snapple, PEZ, cereales, restaurantes, cafés, productos. Pero la propaganda real no era “compra esto”.
La propaganda real era más profunda:
consume, ríete, no te comprometas, no aprendas, no madures, no formes familia, no dejes legado.
La famosa regla de la serie era “no abrazos, no aprendizaje”.
Es decir: nadie cambia, nadie crece, nadie madura, nadie se redime.
Perfecto.
Porque ese es exactamente el adulto moderno.
Un niño de 40 años con renta, citas, opiniones, ansiedad, consumo y cero dirección.
Y aquí es donde hay que entender el contexto: Seinfeld nace desde una élite cultural urbana, neoyorquina, secular, irónica, neurótica, sofisticada. No necesitas inventarte una conspiración barata para ver el patrón.
No fue una reunión secreta para destruir la familia.
Fue algo más efectivo:
una élite cultural exportando su estilo de vida como entretenimiento masivo.
Y como nos hizo reír, bajamos la guardia.
Hollywood entendió algo antes que muchos:
si presentas la descomposición como tragedia, la gente la rechaza.
Pero si la presentas como humor inteligente, la gente la adopta.
Por eso Seinfeld sigue pareciendo actual.
Porque no predijo el futuro.
Lo ensayó.
Nos mostró al adulto urbano sin propósito antes de que ese adulto llenara las ciudades, las apps de citas, los departamentos pequeños, los antidepresivos, los podcasts, los cafés caros y las redes sociales.
Seinfeld fue el tráiler de una civilización cómoda, sola y estéril.
Y lo más cagado es que todos se reían porque pensaban que estaban viendo una comedia.
En realidad estaban viendo el manual de usuario del vacío moderno.
President Donald J. Trump has posted to Truth Social confirming that a deal has been reached with the Islamic Republic of Iran including the immediate removal of the naval blockade.
🚨 WOW! Vice President JD Vance reveals he initially was not a Christian, but then started to realize — "If the Christians are right about the importance of virtue, and they're right about the importance of being a good father as opposed to how much money you make, and they're right about the importance of being a good husband as opposed to how prestigious your job is, then maybe they're right about these more fundamental questions!"
"I start asking, how do I be a good husband? How do I be a good provider? How do I be good at the things that actually matter? And the more that I asked those questions, the more that I felt like Christianity had the best answers. And it's interesting that that really is how it started for me."
"I didn't have a conversion on the road to Damascus. But I started to see these sort of rays of sunshine, these evidences of truth in Christian teaching."
Hebrews 10:26 isn’t talking about ordinary sins like lying, pride, lust, or anger. The context of Hebrews shows that the willful sin in view is rejecting Christ and His once for all sacrifice
Throughout the entire book, the author repeatedly emphasizes the superiority of Jesus and warns Jewish believers not to turn back to the old covenant system. That’s why he says, “if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins.”
What is “the knowledge of the truth”? Paul in Ephesians 1:13 identifies it as the gospel
“In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.”
If someone rejects the gospel after hearing it, there’s no other sacrifice available for their sins. The blood of bulls and goats could never take away sins. Only Jesus can. To reject Him is to reject the only sacrifice God has provided
An Iranian official has spoken to Reuters regarding the potential interim deal with the US, indicating some of what has been agreed to, including:
-Fully opening the Strait of Hormuz immediately
-U.S. to lift naval blockade within 30 days
-No new sanctions imposed while negotiations continue
-The U.S. will suspend current sanctions, allowing Iranian oil to be openly sold
-$25 billion in Iranian assets to be unfrozen, including direct cash transfers
-Formation of an economic development and reconstruction plan
-Iran agrees it will neither produce nor acquire nuclear weapons
-Fate of the nuclear program, including stockpile of highly enriched uranium, to be negotiated and finalized within 60 days
-Full sanctions relief following a final agreement in 60 days
A timeline is forming:
1️⃣Iran signs deal tomorrow
2️⃣Trump hosts UFC fight on the White House lawn, fresh off the announcement of the end of the war
3️⃣Trump leaves directly from UFC fight broadcast to sign final deal at G7
4️⃣Trump signs deal Monday when markets open, stock markets will surge, global energy markets will stabilize, and the price of oil will come down
5️⃣The world will celebrate the beginning of a new era of peace in the Middle East, while the World Cup is going on in the USA
Trump is in position to harness insanely good optics, while essentially the entire world is watching, and he will carry this momentum into the midterms and beyond. You are watching a master strategist at work.
It’s too perfect to be an accident.
MY REVIEW OF DISCLOSURE DAY -- A DIRECT ASSAULT ON CHRISTIANITY (AND SPIELBERG'S WORST MOVIE)
Because of how intentional I believe this film is in attempting to deconstruct Christianity, and because I want to warn people about not seeing it, this will be a very spoiler-filled review. You have been warned before proceeding further.
This review will be done in two acts: 1) the worldview of the film, 2) the quality of the film. Neither will be positive.
Disclosure Day's Worldview
This is a rather blatant attempt to evangelize into a new religion. In many respects, the transition Steven Spielberg makes from his 1970s classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to now Disclosure Day, is very similar to what you see from a lot of the prominent UFO/alien obsession proxies like Dr. Steven Greer. At first they start off in wonderment about what else is really out there in the cosmos and whether we're alone in the universe (or Close Encounters), but they always eventually end up at the aliens are really our saviors to show fallible human beings the way to salvation (or Disclosure Day).
If you only see people like Greer or Luis Elizondo on cable news networks, you'd think they're just scientifically inquisitive and want "the truth to be told." But if you watch their documentaries, as I have, it becomes increasingly obvious they are really selling a religion. Greer is basically just a wannabe prophet of the non-human intelligence phenomena as deliverers at this point, and Elizondo is on his way there by angrily dismissing the possibility this is all just a demonic spiritual deception (as he did in last year's The Age of Disclosure documentary).
Here are some examples of how this film head-on intends to deconstruct Christianity (in chronological scene order):
--The main character's love interest, who is now his admitted fornication partner, is a former nun. She specifically tells him early in the film she left the convent behind because "I lost my belief that God is divine." Hold on to that language later, because it's going to put everything else I point out next in its proper context.
--When the shadowy agency conducting the decades-long coverup attempts to use alien technology to subvert the former nun's consciousness and turn her into a traitor, she grabs her crucifix and tries to invoke its power to resist the alien tech -- to the point she essentially stigmatas herself. However, the crucifix is rendered powerless in the face of the superior alien technology and thus she is given over to it.
--The entire story is unfolding under the backdrop of pending nuclear war and planetary annihilation (between the US and Russia, of course, because apparently it's still 1985). In other words, we are in the end of days and lost as a species unable to save ourselves. We need a salvation we cannot acquire on our own.
--We learn the aliens specifically chose a male and a female to be the "vessels" at the vanguard of this next step of our evolution. Which the aliens are here to guide for us, of course. It is eventually revealed the male is given mathematic revelation (or logic) and the female empathy (or nurturing) -- with the female's gift depicted as superior in its intensity. Or a divine feminine.
--The climax of the disclosure broadcast occurs when the largest of the aliens is brought in by several humans in what is basically a gestatorial chair, which he emerges from to pronounce blessings upon the new Adam and Eve with a priestly whisper in his native tongue of clicks and tones (I guess Latin would've been too on the nose). The whisper is translated for all of humanity into the final line of the film: "Listen." Some might say sort of like, "Let those with ears to hear let them hear."
--Though the film makes it clear the climactic day of disclosure is being felt globally, the only religion wrestling with it is Christianity. At the convent we see several of the nuns desperately clinging to their Rosaries looking for guidance, while the Mother Superior lets out a wry smile in approval of the coming syncretism. No other religion is even depicted, let alone shown to have to grasp with the significance of all this. Why is that? All the potential answers to this question are bad. Though I'd love that to be the case, Christianity is not the only global religion on this planet. Furthermore, the only Christianity depicted in the movie is Catholicism.
--Now, back to the smiling Mother Superior at the end of the movie, and the former nun saying she lost her belief that God is divine in its opening act. The movie says this at the same time it makes it clear humanity needs saving, and the former nun also makes the case that even though she doesn't believe in God anymore the world needs that belief to maintain any form of order. Enter the aliens, who check all the boxes of what is required. They are sinless, while we are not. They have knowledge kept secret, that we do not. They are the only ones who can share such revelation with us, we can't acquire it ourselves. And by embracing this singular truth mankind can be saved, because we can't save ourselves.
If all that's not a religion, I don't know what is. If all that's not a direct attempt to redirect Christianity, I don't know what is. Marcion, Arius, and Pelagius were more subtle.
Quality of Disclosure Day Itself
Thankfully, this movie is also not very good. Had it been executed better, we might really be in trouble as a people here. It's the worst movie Spielberg has ever done.
The film doesn't really have a plot, but is just one long chase scene of not believable things. Like we are supposed to believe a nerd who admits he was never in the field before this, is now able to suddenly drive cars at high speed through houses and evade the world's most effective private security firm that has successfully protected this secret for over 75 years. We are supposed to believe if you hide behind rocks just five feet from that same organization's operatives they won't look for you there, or hear you running away in the woods as you step on branches. In another scene the "good guys" use the alien's invisibility technology to escape, but for whatever reasons turn on the sirens of the firetruck they're in so now "the bad guys" know they're there. Finally, we are supposed to believe that same shadowy organization ejects and just angrily gives up at the end without a fight to permit disclosure day to happen, even though they could've just pulled out their guns and shot everybody there before the cameras went live.
You make these kinds of continuity and believability errors when you're more about the message than the movie. I recognize it, because it's why Christian movies were so bad for so long. More concerned with checking ideological boxes and shoehorning in favored tropes over telling the best possible story. Spielberg made mistakes with this film he would've never made before as possibly the greatest director ever. And we see a lot of left-wing Hollywood making this mistake nowadays. The industry has lost patience with subverting us with good stories over time, and it's now just knocking on doors and putting their pitch right in your face like the evangelists they are.
Consider it a blessing that America's greatest director cast his pearls unto swine by shrouding all this deconstruction and deception within a hot mess of a film -- otherwise we might've had a real birth of a dangerous cult on our hands. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
BREAKING: The New York Times reports that senior Iranian military officials, along with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, have reviewed the final memorandum of understanding draft and are reportedly comfortable with its contents.
If accurate, the report would suggest the proposed agreement has cleared some of the most important decision makers within Iran’s political and security establishment.
This Indian man named "Dulal Giri Ji Maharaj" dropped out of university and embrace a religious life, vowing to stand forever.
According to his belief, this path of religious practice is meant to eventually lead him to encounter the Hindu god, Mahadev.
This is exactly what Jesus Christ came to offer us, freedom from being burdened by religious works and striving. Christianity is not about “do this and you will earn that.” Jesus calls us into grace, not performance.
He made it clear that His yoke is easy and His burden is light. What is required of us is faith in Him and surrender to His finished work.
Disclosure Day was hyped as this movie that would profoundly change Western culture.
I saw it tonight.
It was okay. Kinda boring actually and definitely not going to shake anyone's faith. If it does, their faith was remarkably weak to begin with.
What's ironic about this halting attempt at establishing transubstantiation from Irenaeus is that the citations are from Irenaeus' account of the Last Supper at the moment when Jesus "confessed" unconsecrated wine to be His blood and "acknowledged" unconsecrated bread to be His body. Irenaeus focuses on the fact that it is "created" wine and "created" bread to drive home a rhetorical point: that Jesus had invested created things with symbolic value in order to counter a deeply held gnostic belief.
Irenaeus' whole 5 volume work Against Heresies was addressed to Gnostics who believed the heavenly powers cannot "come in contact with any of those things which belong to creation” (AH 2.15.1) and that there were two gods, an evil one that had created, and a holy one that had not, and therefore Jesus' Father could not be the Creator (AH 4.33.2). From this they reasoned that Jesus could not have a body, could not have suffered and died, and that there could be no resurrection of the flesh. It destroyed the Gospel.
To counter this claim, Irenaeus observes that Jesus used created things to reveal the Father: "For by means of the creation itself, the Word reveals God the Creator" (AH 4.6.6). Why? because of their rich symbolic value: "These things, then, were given for a sign; but the signs were not unsymbolical, that is, neither unmeaning nor to no purpose, inasmuch as they were given by a wise Artist; ... that is, the kingdom, was, as it were, indicated by created things;" (AH 4.16.1).
So in the next chapter, Irenaeus applies the Eucharistic liturgy of the Supper to that very purpose, showing that God continued using created things for their symbolic value. This is why he keeps coming back to the fact that Jesus had used "created" wine to indicate His blood, and "created" bread to indicate His body. He was showing how concepts and truths could be symbolically "indicated by created things", just as God had been doing since the beginning of creation.
Here are Irenaeus' accounts of the Last Supper, and note his consistent theme:
Irenæus: Jesus "took that created thing, bread, and gave thanks, and said, This is My body. And the cup likewise, which is part of that creation to which we belong, He confessed to be His blood" (AH 4.17.5)
Irenæus: Jesus "acknowledged (lit. confessed) the cup (which is a part of the creation) as His own blood ... and the bread (also a part of the creation) He has established as His own body" (AH 5.2.2).
The Catholic application of Irenaeus here glosses over the very point he was making, but don't miss it on their account. Irenaeus' sole point here is that there is no way Jesus would have called created bread and created wine His body and blood if His Father was not the Creator:
“[H]ow could the Lord, with any justice, if He belonged to another father, have acknowledged the bread to be His body, while He took it from that creation to which we belong, and affirmed the mixed cup to be His blood?” (AH 4.33.2).
As with those citations above, this again is a description of a moment when Jesus took unconsecrated created food in his hand and used it to indicate a truth, using something created for its symbolic value. What was He illustrating? That He had a body. That He had blood. "For blood can only come from veins and flesh, and whatsoever else makes up the substance of man, such as the Word of God was actually made" (AH 5.2.2). By thanking His Father for created food, He showed that there is only one God, the Creator, and that Creator is His Father. Irenaeus had demonstrated the very thing the gnostics denied, because nothing illustrates the union of flesh and spirit better than Jesus offering created food to His Father, the Creator.
Irenaeus believed that just before the Supper, Jesus had instituted a new covenant oblation of first fruits of the harvest as a thank offering, saying that He was "giving directions to His disciples to offer to God the first-fruits of His own, created things" (AH 4.17.5). Therefore in imitation of Him, Christians "are bound, therefore, to offer to God the first-fruits of His creation" as a Eucharist tithe offering (AH 4.18.1), the new covenant oblation. Because nothing announces the union of flesh and spirit like an offering of created food to the Father:
"For we offer to Him His own, announcing consistently the fellowship and union of the flesh and spirit." (AH 4.18.5)
Yes, Jesus called created bread His body and created wine His blood for their symbolic value, because the truths of the Creator God are "indicated by created things," the very point he had made in the previous chapter. Irenaeus didn't think Jesus was "confessing" that the bread was really changed into His body, or acknowledging that the wine was really changed into His blood (it hadn't even been consecrated yet), and he certainly wasn't teaching that the answer to the gnostic heresy was to offer Jesus' body and blood to the Father as the new covenant oblation. No. Irenaeus simply countered the gnostics by showing how Jesus invested bread and wine with symbolic value, indicating sacred truths with created things. Symbols.
🏴 En Inglaterra, una periodista fue a un barrio de musulmanes a decir que ellos son PACIFICOS
y al rato apareció una banda de musulmanes a decirles que se vayan porque los iban a matar☠️
País destruido por la agenda 2030.
Just got out of Disclosure Day. I’m going to write the mother of all movie reviews tomorrow, for this film intends to deconstruct Christianity, and not even subversively but straight up. I will provide specific examples in my review.
Also worst movie Spielberg has ever made.