The House Judiciary Committee revealed on Wednesday that the FBI’s Richmond Field Office had coordinated with multiple other member locations across the nation to produce its infamous memo labeling traditional Catholics as potential domestic terrorists.
The letter, sent to FBI Director Christopher Wray, said that new information produced to the committee revealed the FBI had relied on offices across the country, including a liaison contact in the Portland office and reporting from the FBI’s Los Angeles Office, to develop its assessment of traditional Catholics as potential domestic terrorists.
The letter noted that the information contradicts what Wray previously testified before the committee.
Last week, the U.N.’s Independent Expert on sexual orientation and gender identity, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, presented a report to the 53rd Session of the U.N. Human Rights Council arguing that religious freedom is “not incompatible with equality for LGBT persons.” However, by reading Madrigal-Borloz’s report, it appears that his understanding of “compatibility” means that long-held religious beliefs and traditions must be subservient to the LGBT ideology.
…In an obvious attack on religious freedom, the report openly takes aim at religious exemptions. For example, it notes that in some countries, “including the United States and Australia, government-funded foster care and adoption agencies can reject prospective families based on sexual orientation, gender identity and faith.” The report rejects the idea that religious institutions should have any autonomy regarding their internal policies, arguing that this could hinder “diversity-oriented education, comprehensive sexuality education, and gender equality.”
The report cites unspecified “obligations” under international human rights law to “ensure that LGBT consumers are not discriminated against.” It quoted the U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, who said, “[I]t is not permissible for individuals or groups to invoke ‘religious liberty’ to perpetuate discrimination against … lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex persons, when it comes to the provision of goods or services in the public sphere.” The report specifically alludes to incidents in the U.S. where wedding vendors were asked to create a unique product for same-sex marriages, which went against their religious conviction.
A former employee of a large food service corporation is suing the company in federal court after it fired her for refusing to participate in a program that discriminates against white male employees.
…participation in the program was restricted to “women and people of color.” White men were not allowed to participate and receive the associated benefits of training, mentorship, and guaranteed promotion.
By calling it “Operation Equity,” the company “used a euphemistic and false title to hide the program’s true nature.” The program would more accurately be called the “White-Men-Need-Not-Apply” program because it is an example of “‘outright racial balancing,’ which is patently unlawful,” and is the kind of program “promoted by people … who harbor racial animus against white men,” according to the legal complaint.
Ms. Rogers claims she informed management that high-level employees said of the program, “This is the direction the world is going, jump on the train or get run over,” and “We are not here to appease the old white man.”
Ms. Rogers claims she also informed management that the program was illegal and requested that she be allowed an accommodation because the program “violated her ethical beliefs.” Management assured her she would be exempted from participating in it and that she would not be retaliated against for sharing her concerns with management.
Ms. Rogers claims she was fired in November 2022 after she refused to participate in the program that discriminated on the basis of race and sex, even though she received positive performance feedback from supervisors and colleagues. The stated reason for termination was “failure to perform job duties,” the legal complaint stated.
In the lawsuit, Ms. Rogers is seeking relief for religious discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the California Fair Employment and Housing Act, as well as wrongful termination.
An attorney for Ms. Rogers, Robert Weisenburger of LiMandri and Jonna in Rancho Santa Fe, California, told The Epoch Times in an interview that his client’s personal, religious beliefs as a Christian prevented her from being part of “Operation Equity.”
Same can be said for morality and integrity. All three are often found together with spiritual realization. Christians in particular distinguished themselves during covid. Not all stood strong but those that did in USA were most often Christian. ABN
Untrue stories exist at each end of Jewish history’s three thousand years – fictional, fabricated and of immense magnitude. We may start in the tenth century BCE, where archaeologists have after diligent study found no trace of King Solomon, his Temple or his empire. Half a century of intensive excavation of the Holy Land has now reached that conclusion. The alleged mighty empire of David and Solomon, stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates – on the basis of which the modern state of Israel was formed – did not exist. Meanwhile the Bible makes no mention of the great empire of Egypt, which really did in that period stretch from the Nile to the Euphrates. These things must be relegated to storyland, like Moses parting the Red Sea. Experts were finally attaining this negative conclusion as the new millennium dawned.
…Christians need to apprehend that it is not a virtue to believe in that which never existed. That won’t save your soul. At both ends of the amazing three-thousand years of Jewish history are tremendous phantoms, imaginations which we the Goyim have been led to believe. That which never was, which never had existence is inscribed as fact in books the whole world over. We need a collective therapy experience of discussing What Really Happened. Only the power of Truth can save us now. Are we capable of that?
Judaism we may conclude must inevitably self-terminate in this 21st century, simply because of the intellectual power of modern Jews, who cannot hope to avoid seeing how their identity-defining narratives have disintegrated. They were tremendous stories, but were never true.
I am reminded by this that the power of Buddhism lies in its philosophy, methods and their results. Buddhism provides an extensive vocabulary of concepts and insights that are dynamic and adaptive, accepting of all truths new or old. Buddhism has many stories but the tradition does not rely on them for its fundamental claims. Buddhism provides a coherent and practical view of human life without demanding belief or loyalty to it. Buddhism connects us to the past and to many varieties of human experience through its long evolution in many parts of the world. ABN
Both papers are worth reading, but Thomson’s is the better place to start for most people. Here is a sample:
Rather than asking whether a monolithic factor like parental control is primarily responsible for non-shared (unique) effects, it might be necessary to consider many seemingly inconsequential experiences that are tipping points in children’s lives. The gloomy prospect is that these could be idiosyncratic stochastic experiences. However, the basic finding that most environmental effects are not shared by children growing up in the same family remains one of the most far-reaching findings from behavioral genetics. It is important to reiterate that the message is not that family experiences are unimportant, but rather that the salient experiences that affect children’s development are specific to each child in the family, not general to all children in the family.
Here is another:
More than 100 twin studies have addressed the key question of co-morbidity in psychopathology (having more than one diagnosed disorder), and this body of research also consistently shows substantial genetic overlap between common disorders in children and in adults. For example, a review of 23 twin studies and 12 family studies confirmed that anxiety and depression are correlated entirely for genetic reasons. In other words, the same genes affect both disorders, meaning that from a genetic perspective they are the same disorder.
To add a Buddhist point of view to this, we must bring in karma, rebirth, and our earthly lineages. All three are deep and ultimate factors in determining our conditions and how we deal with them. Years ago a Chinese friend’s father invited me to watch him burn incense at his family altar in their home in Taipei. As I saw it, his was an act of ancestor reverence more than worship, though either term is fine. The act recalls a deep and ultimate side of Chinese culture that reaches above and below Western psychology and genetic research. Thich Nhat Hanh spoke and wrote about our ancestral lineages and their importance in how our karma and conditions resolve and are understood. These factors are deep in that they ground our psychologies and affect how we comprehend life; and they are ultimate in that they also hinge on the highest and most transcendent aspects of all conscious life.
I respect Western psychology and also find much of it cramped and vulgar due to its intense focus on the single life (no rebirth or lineage) and a select number of factors that can be abstracted from that or from dubious data based on aggregates of many single lives similarly conceived. Due to this sciencey focus most Westerners are trapped in a middle or mundane layer of spiritual understanding, self-isolated between the deep and the ultimate. The usual Western way out of this entrapment is through stories, which are raised to heights they do not deserve and which reduce Westerners to childlike listeners confined to stock responses. The Western cartography of the pathological mind is very good though and greatly enriches Eastern thought. A healthy personality is as much a part of spiritual growth as is lineage and karma. ABN
I quite liked this one at the time and still do. Besides recalling frontier spirit, this meme also alludes to the spirited side of Buddhism, or any religion that counsels at least adopting an analytical distance from society if not leaving it for good. The Middle Path generally means removal far enough to maintain a perspective conducive to enlightenment. ABN
I watched about half of this and was struck by the strong personification inherent in Christianity and Christian thought, which comes out conspicuously in the dialog. My comment arises out of the terrible energy of child slavery and how it is being understood in this talk. I do not meant to detract from the important work these men are doing. I think my partner brought up the personification within Christianity this morning and we wandered into the topic from there. The Buddha was self-effacing about his person, existence, and even how he should be remembered. He famously did not even want images of him to be made. Buddhism as a tradition contains many ideas and entities similar to Christianity—demons, but not Satan; salvation but not through another person or entity; suffering but not as a path to enlightenment, just an integral part of this realm. Of course, there is also personification in Buddhism and it can be central to some forms of Buddhist practice, but above all it is the practitioner’s thoughts and actions which bring enlightenment or salvation. Much more can be said on this topic. For now, let me say that both traditions recoil at the idea of child abuse and sex slavery and deplore it strongly. ABN
…It was at that post-war time that the communists sought to strip the Church of the influence that it exercised over the nation, so they restricted the clergy as much as they could, prompting the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński,[6] to stand up to the authorities with the by now famous vociferous protest addressed to the government, ending with the words: “We [the Church] must not sacrifice the divine sacrum on the profane altar of Caesar [the state]. Non possumus [we cannot]”
Rather than being killed like his spiritual predecessor Bishop Stanislaus, Cardinal Wyszyński was imprisoned for a few years. It was at that time that the Polish Catholic Church, absent the Polish nobility and gentry who had disappeared as a class and whose members had either fled the country in fear of communists or who been deprived of their economic and political leverage, assumed the role of the Polish nobility, the Polish aristocracy, the Polish gentry. And what an irony of history it was! The priests were for the most part recruited from the peasantry, i.e., the social class that according to Marxist tenets was to be liberated from the influence of the “opium of the people” and at the same time the social class that for centuries had been thought of by the nobility of not being capable of sustaining nationhood!
At that post-war time, irrespective of whether you were a believer or not, so long as you were anti-communist (and most were), you naturally supported the Church, identified with the Church, and used the Church in your resistance against Marxism-Leninism, against atheists in the positions of power, against the party comrades imposed by Moscow, many of whom were Jewish. Religious instruction was banned from schools but was carried out by parishes. The voluntary attendance was nearly 100%; not because all parents were ardent believers: it was a form of protest, a form of expressing national identity, a sign of resistance — a pronounced, if silent, statement of non possumus. (By comparison, in today’s Poland, attendance at religious instruction, which meanwhile has been reintroduced in schools, has significantly dropped and continues to drop.)
…The northern territory between Poland and Rus’ was occupied by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a pagan political entity, that ruled over vast lands of otherwise Christian Rus’ after the latter had been partly destroyed, partly subjugated by many Tartar invasions. Lithuanian pagan dukes — mainly through dynastic marriages — managed to bring under their control what we know today as Belarus, almost all of Ukraine and huge chunks of today’s Russia. Lithuanian rulers were heathen almost till the end of the 14th century. As such, they were the target of religious-cum-ideological military raids carried out by the Teutonic Knights (a German military order), who had settled on a northern piece of Polish territory at the invitation of a Polish prince and had subjugated Old Baltic Prussians in the land that is today part of north-eastern Poland and makes up the whole of Russia’s Kaliningrad Region.
The Lithuanian rulers also got caught in the ideological-cum-religious cross-hairs of the Polish Kingdom. Since the Teutonic Knights threatened both Poland and Lithuania, it was a good idea to combine the forces of the two states (along with all those vast Rus’ territories under Lithuanian rule!) to fend off the German assaults. By mutual consent, the grand duke of Lithuania became king of Poland (1386) on condition, of course, that he and his heathen subjects let themselves be baptized. A new body politic emerged, powerful enough to defeat the Teutonic Knights in a series of wars, of which the Battle of Grunwald (1410) described by Henryk Sienkiewicz in the novel The Teutonic Knights/Krzyżacy and skilfully shown in the movie under the same title became part of the nation’s collective psyche as iconic.
This is an excellent read. It brings Poland into a new focus while also illuminating the religious and ethnic complexity of Eastern Europe. Highly recommended. Above are a couple of excerpts that can stand alone. ABN
“You went to the Muslim countries and imported the garbage that the Muslim countries wanted to put in prison or isolate away from society. Why? For cheap labor”
-Imam Tawhidi on France, the West and Islamic extremism
And also our POS elitists want chaos so they can rule over the ashes. ABN
I am sure that many readers can relate if I say that learning about Byzantium feels like discovering the sunken civilization of Atlantis. You can read a thousand books about the “Middle Ages”, even do a Ph.D. in “Medieval Studies” (as I did), and hardly ever hear about Byzantium. And then, one day, when you thought you knew your basics about the turn of the first millennium AD, you read something like this:
At the turn of the first millennium the empire of New Rome was the oldest and most dynamic state in the world and comprised the most civilized portions of the Christian world. Its borders, long defended by native frontier troops, were being expanded by the most disciplined and technologically advanced army of its time. The unity of Byzantine society was grounded in the equality of Roman law and a deep sense of a common and ancient Roman identity; cemented by the efficiency of a complex bureaucracy; nourished and strengthened by the institutions and principles of the Christian Church; sublimated by Greek rhetoric; and confirmed by the passage of ten centuries. At the end of the reign of Basileios II (976-1025), the longest in Roman history, its territory included Asia Minor and Armenia, the Balkan peninsula south of the Danube, and the southern regions of both Italy and the Crimea. Serbia, Croatia, Georgia, and some Arab emirates in Syria and Mesopotamia had accepted a dependent status.[1]
The same author informs you that, in 1018, the same Basileios (or Basil) II was “the most powerful and victorious ruler in the Christian world,”[2] reigning from a city whose walls could contain the ten biggest cities in Western Europe. Vladimir the Great (980-1015), whom the Russians consider the founder and patron saint of their nation, wedded Basil’s sister, adopted his faith, and built a Church of Hagia Sophia in Kiev. The young German emperor Otto III (996-1002), himself half-Byzantine by his mother, was about to marry Basil’s niece when he died at the age of 21. Everything in the Ottonian court was modeled after Byzantium, with their title kaiser borrowed not from the Latin caesar, but from the Greek form kaisar.
At this point you may start to wonder if you have not accidentally stumbled into an alternate history. At least you suspect that you have been missing something in your “medieval studies,” that your picture of the “Middle Ages” has a huge hole in the middle, or, rather, that it is only a fragment of a much bigger image, the larger part of which has been torn off and thrown away. You begin to look for it in the proverbial dustbin of history. Before you know it, you are on the path of “Byzantine revisionism”.
I am fairly new to the idea that Christianity was founded by Jews as a ruse to trick the Roman Empire. Also new to the idea that Judaism is largely founded on the deceit of Jacob, who tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright as firstborn son. These two ideas seem to be at the root of a lot of widely-recognized difficult Jewish behavior—often having ulterior motives, chutzpah based on that, ethnic nepotism and great skill in crime. The Old Testament explains all you need to know about Jewish vengeance. Note that I am describing bad Jewish behavior, with which I have considerable experience, not all Jewish behavior. I am quite sure the sociopathic Arenda system in Eastern Europe is a fundamental part of the long history of Jewish-Christian conflict. The system was set up by so-called ‘Polish nobles’ but run mostly by Jews who held and enforced leases. From the Jewish point of view, this system was a ‘Golden Period’ of Jewish history, when Jews acquired great wealth and saw a population increase unprecedented in human history; clear indications of good diet and leisure. From the serfs’ point of view, these same markers were clear indications of who was reaping the benefits of their slavery. (Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years by Israel Shahak has some information on the Arenda system. Most Jewish authors completely gloss over it, another trick, imo.) Our POS elitists, whoever they happen to be, have created the dystopia of diversity the West has become. And also, they do all they can to prevent our understanding what is happening, a clear throwback to the age of serfdom when a wrong word could get you killed. As we continue our descent into raw tribalism, I present these ideas and the video above for readers’ consideration. Much more on this topic can be found in the work of Laurent Guyénot, who has written extensively on these subjects. ABN
A judge in Texas has tossed out a Catholic nun’s $1 million defamation suit against the bishop who accused her of sexting with a priest, ruling that the court lacks jurisdiction in the dispute.
Mother Superior Teresa Agnes Gerlach and the Discalced Carmelite Nuns filed the suit against Fort Worth Bishop Michael Olson, who ejected her from the religious order after accusing her of breaking her vow of chastity with a priest.
In a ruling on Friday, Judge Don Cosby of Tarrant County’s 67th District Court said that the nuns’ suit was ‘dismissed for want of subject-matter jurisdiction’ after the bishop argued the bitter dispute was purely a religious matter.
Within hours of the ruling, the Arlington Police Department told DailyMail.com that it had also closed its criminal investigation into claims associated with the civil case, after finding no charges were merited.
American Buddhist Net 