I used to be a Protestant and think all I needed was my Bible.
But… then I started asking the question no one wanted to answer: Who actually has the authority to interpret Scripture?
That question came from my study of the theological heresy of dispensationalism.
What I found shocked me. I learned, it isn’t ancient Christianity. It didn’t come from the Apostles. It didn’t come from the Church Fathers. It began in the 1800s with John Nelson Darby. A brand new theological system; a heresy which has created confusion among Christian’s.
It divided Israel and the Church into two separate peoples of God. It created two covenants. It pushed fulfillment into the future. It taught that prophecy still depends on a geopolitical nation-state called “Israel” which was founded by atheists in 1948.
I looked deeper and asked…what does that ultimately lead to? I was shocked to discover their belief of a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem. The one the Lord predicted would be destroyed in Matthew and it was in 70AD.
“Jesus left the temple area and was going away, when his disciples approached him to point out the temple buildings. He said to them in reply, ‘You see all these things, do you not? Amen, I say to you, there will not be left here a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down.'” Matthew 24:1-2
This all happened. Jesus predicted it and it was fulfilled.
In 70 AD the Temple was destroyed. The altar was gone. The Levitical priesthood stopped functioning. The animal sacrifices ended.
That is not a minor detail.
The Mosaic covenant was inseparable from Temple sacrifice. Without the Temple, the sacrificial system of the Old Covenant could not continue.
In its place, rabbinic Judaism emerged. No longer centered on Temple sacrifice, but on Torah study and synagogue life.
The sacrificial order did not continue. It was finished.
UPDATE: I posted this video without having first watched it. I eventually watched about one-half and found it not very interesting. Maybe it gets better after that. Napolitano is usually a sharp questioner but in this video, he asks Astore too many obvious questions. I recall him introducing Astore as a weapons expert and had hoped he would pursue that line of thought. ABN
There have been several notable instances of violent conflict between Buddhist sects, primarily driven by political power struggles, competition for influence, and the close ties between religious institutions and state authority.
1. Tibet: Gelugpa Supremacy in the 17th Century
The most direct sectarian conflict occurred in Tibet when the Gelugpa sect, led by the 5th Dalai Lama and backed by Mongol military forces, consolidated power in the 17th century. This campaign involved the conquest of the Sakya sect’s political dominance and the violent suppression of the Jonang school, which was declared heretical. Jonang monasteries were forcibly converted to Gelugpa use, and their monks were exiled. While framed as a religious purification, the conflict was fundamentally about unifying Tibet under a single theocratic rule.
2. Japan: Warrior Monks and Sectarian Warfare
In feudal Japan, Buddhist sects maintained private armies of sohei (warrior monks) who engaged in armed conflict:
Mount Hiei (Tendai Sect): Monks from Enryaku-ji temple used force to influence imperial politics and attack rival temples.
Ikko-ikki Rebellions: Followers of the Jōdo Shinshū (Pure Land) sect formed armed leagues that fought against both rival Buddhist schools and samurai lords. These uprisings, lasting from the 15th to 16th centuries, were among the largest internal conflicts of the era.
The justification for violence often stemmed from the belief that defending one’s sect was a meritorious religious act, despite the Buddha’s teachings on non-violence.
3. China: Shaolin Monks and Political Alliances
The Shaolin monks, renowned for their martial arts, participated in military campaigns, such as aiding Li Shimin (later Emperor Taizong of Tang) in the 7th century and fighting Japanese pirates in the 16th century. While not a war between sects, their involvement in state conflicts illustrates how Buddhist institutions became entangled in warfare.
Key Insight
These conflicts were rarely about doctrinal differences alone. Instead, they arose from the fusion of religious and political power, where monasteries controlled land, wealth, and armies. The concept of “just war” or “defensive violence” was sometimes invoked, as seen in Buddhist texts like the Skill in Means Sutra, which praises a captain who kills one to save many.
While such actions contradict the ideal of ahimsa (non-violence), they reflect the complex reality of how religious institutions operate within political systems.
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I tend to think of all the Abrahamics as sects of the same religion, which is probably not a good use of the word sect except insofar as it focuses attention on the history and common aspects of these religions. The images above provide Catholic views on Zionism. Like everyone else in the world, Buddhists too have fought wars. Right now, and for many centuries in some cases, the Western elite appears to be entirely controlled by Jewish Supremists, a sect within the sect of Judaism itself. Many Western elites are atheists and not religious at all. Christian Zionists who support Israeli wars based on provably fraudulent insertions in the Bible seem to me to be either elite false shepherds, who know they are lying, or more often pious ordinary Christians, who have been duped by their elite false shepherds and Jewish Supremists, a good many of whom have infiltrated Christianity. ABN
This is a very good overview of how AI works today, and how it doesn’t work. Sort of relatedly, we humans are ourselves trapped in internal idiosyncratic language systems. Even when you reach out of yours, you will be reaching into someone else’s. ABN
Part Two reportedly has a couple of AI images, so the entire vid is banned in some countries. I have no way to assess this series and do not know who the speaker is, but information provided is interesting and seems well thought out. ABN
If true, and it probably is, this video describes a doozy. The most dangerous elite gang in USA and the West is Jewish Supremists. They are trained to lie and cheat and will stop at nothing to grow their power. Many today can see the general outline of their savagery, but few know about the covert violence they do against young people they identify as potential rivals. The violence is a covert military strategy, a sort of silent terrorism designed to destroy individuals and the communities they belong to. It is directed especially against boys and young men. Any JS who is envious of any non-Jew can place them on their JS destroy list to be poisoned, lobotomized, or otherwise maimed and disabled. It does not matter to them if the person they attack is innocent because by striking down promising young people, entire communities are demoralized. The more they do that, the more demoralized the West becomes. Many women today wonder, where are the men? Why have they stopped protecting us? A major reason is JS covert military attacks have taken them out. It is important to understand that these kinds of attacks, even when done on a large scale, are extremely difficult to prove or even to notice. Alert readers, please use your brains. Think like a warrior to understand what is happening. Here’s an example of what they do — drug someone, usually a boy or young man; then inject a dose of pure ethanol into their forebrain. That is a chemical lobotomy. It takes just minutes to perform. We all know many women and men are raped after being drugged. The JS lobotomy attack is the same except for the details of what is done. As the West wastes away, somebody in power must understand this or we are doomed. And chemical lobotomy is but one of their many tactics. ABN
Our perception is continuously biased toward the past to help stabilize the chaotic world we live in.
Watch the video below (1 min, 32 sec) to see this illusion in real-time:
This video illustrates how our brains ignore change or incorporate it into our perceptions somewhat slowly through a “continuity field,” as described below:
Our brains are constantly uploading rich, visual stimuli. But instead of seeing the latest image in real time, we actually see earlier versions because our brain’s refresh time is about 15 seconds, according to new UC Berkeley research.
The findings, appearing in the journal Science Advances, add to a growing body of research about the mechanism behind the “continuity field,” a function of perception in which our brain merges what we see on a constant basis to give us a sense of visual stability.
“If our brains were always updating in real time, the world would be a jittery place with constant fluctuations in shadow, light and movement, and we’d feel like we were hallucinating all the time,” said study senior author David Whitney, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology, neuroscience and vision science.
Despite a noisy and ever-changing visual world, our perceptual experience seems stable over time. How does our visual system achieve this apparent stability? Here, we introduce a previously unknown visual illusion that shows direct evidence for a mechanism continuously smoothing our percepts over time.
As a result, a continuously seen physically changing object can be misperceived as unchanging.
In the video above, you can notice two things: 1) the slowness and blurriness of our perceptual change as we watch the video, and 2) that we can and do accept that change the moment it is shown to us in comparative stills.
If vision behaves this way, it is fair to assume our psychologies or, more precisely, our psychological memories do something similar on both points.
I was intrigued to see that the authors of the study calculated a time-span of 15 seconds:
We find that online object appearance is captured by past visual experience up to 15 seconds ago.
This is roughly the ‘speed’ or duration of our working memories.
FIML works most of all with the working memory because when we correct a mistake in our working memory or upgrade the data in our working memory while it is still present, we are able to make large changes in our psychologies almost effortlessly.
FIML leverages the working memory to make large changes in our whole brain memories.
It works well because changing your working memory to fit the obvious reality staring you in the face is easy.
In contrast changing whole brain memories and psychologies through rumination and recollection typically only entrenches them further and deeper.
While it is easy to see how this happens visually as in the video above, it may be difficult to see how to do this with our complex psychologies as they are functioning in real-time.
FIML completely solves this problem and yet it may be hard to see how and why.
It works like this:
The how is done by pausing real-life in real-time so you can compare your own mind’s percept with your partner’s percept of the same thing and make corrections as warranted.
The why is psychologically analogous to correcting the illusions produced by our brains “continuously smoothing our percepts over time.” This “continuously smoothing over time” prevents wholesome, realistic change. It lies at the heart of many psychological problems.
How maladaptive and harmful signaling within the body causes complex chronic illnesses and how to fix it
Story at a Glance:
•Cells have a variety of adaptive processes they undergo to handle stress. One of the most consequential ones is cells ceasing normal functioning via their mitochondria to enter a defensive mode (the Cell Danger Response) and then initiating a healing cycle to repair themselves.
•In health, this cycle resolves itself, but in chronic illness, the CDR becomes stuck, creating weakened tissue, inflammation, fatigue, and a variety of systemic illnesses.
•Extensive research has shown that autism results from a sustained CDR, and that when appropriate CDR blocking therapies are given, significant improvement can be observed in autistic children.
•A sustained CDR underlies many chronic illnesses, and in turn, many effective natural therapies, work, in part, by alleviating the CDR, often by creating an environment which signals safety to the body. As such, understanding the CDR is necessary to understand a myriad of chronic illnesses.
•This article will discuss the treatments that have been discovered to treat the CDR, detail how we use them in practice to ensure they benefit patients, and highlight many of the different types of illness (e.g., fatigue, hair loss, COVID spike protein injuries, autism, Alzheimer’s, the inability to exert oneself with age or injured tissues that refuse to heal) which respond to appropriate CDR treatments.
[The anonymous comment I am posting below is better than anything you will read in any newspaper. It’s from 2017 but is even more relevant today. Almost all of us hope X, and other platforms, are training their algorithms to align with the ideas below. ABN]
Having browsed more than enough Chan board content in the last few months as a companion to t_d, the problem of Judaism is similar yet different than Islam. Some people of both religions have done really shitty things to other races and cultures by infiltrating them and undermining the host nation / ethnicity (using justification from the Talmud or Koran) while using similar victimhood claims to deflect blame and shame critics. Neither religious community stops it or does anything significant to warn of it, thus becoming guilty by association in the eyes of the victim nation/culture/ethnicity.
In my opinion, open criticism of every religion and their community should be allowed otherwise you give them absolute power of zero responsibility via blocking criticism and identification of wronghood. Censorship forces critics into more extreme stances, if you criticize Jews or Judaism you’re automatically a Nazi and persecuted as one, if you do the same for Muslims or Islam you’re an Islamophobe and persecuted as one. If you’re facing similar punishment for moderate and extreme criticisms* you’ll tend to take the more extreme stance as it awards more protection against what you’re worrying about with zero increase in social backlash. And that’s how you get moderate critics of Islam/Muslims and Jews/Judaism turning to extreme opinions on the solution to the problems they see.
(ex. “Some Jews like Soros need to be arrested” vs “Deport all the Jews! Ban Judaism!” And “Some Muslims like the Swedish rapists or Linda Sarsour need to be deported” vs “Deport all the Muslims! Ban Islam!”)
This is why I’m concerned about rule 3 of T_D: “No anti-semitism”. Normally you’d think that means “No saying gas the Jews”, which is reasonable, but in effect I’ve seen the mods enforce “No criticism of Jews or Judaism or even pointing out facts”. Criticism of Christianity and Islam is allowed, and we’re moderate and reasonable. Ban criticism of Judaism and youll just send more moderates to the extremist Jewish conspiracy theory sites like Stormfront. At the end of the day we’re fighting radicalism and best way to do that is allow all speech below the bar of advocating genocide or violence against anyone. This leads to moderate and reasonable discussion with reasonable decided solutions. Every religion has extremist douchebags with their own favourite methods of fighting everyone else while covering up their actions, we need freedom of criticism to figure out who that is so we can give them the boot or handcuffs, whichever is deemed appropriate by the justice system. Then all the moderates can go on living peacefully together.
Annnnnd if still reading this, thanks. I hoped this made sense. (Source)
(Archived link if original source is censored, which would prove the commenter’s point)
American Buddhist Net 