WASHINGTON, DC – Walter Reed National Military Medical Center has issued a “cease and desist order” to Holy Name College, a community of Franciscan Catholic priests and brothers, who have provided pastoral care to service members and veterans at Walter Reed for nearly two decades.
The government’s cease and desist order directed the Catholic priests to cease any religious services at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. This order was issued as Catholics entered Holy Week, the most sacred of days in the Christian faith, in which they participate in liturgies remembering Jesus’ passion, and leading the Church to celebrate the Resurrection on Easter morning.
The Franciscans’ contract for Catholic Pastoral Care was terminated on March 31, 2023, and awarded to a secular defense contracting firm that cannot fulfill the statement of work in the contract. As a result, adequate pastoral care is not available for service members and veterans in the United States’ largest Defense Health Agency medical center either during Holy Week or beyond. There is one Catholic Army chaplain assigned to Walter Reed Medical Center, but he is in the process of separating from the Army.
…Bieber was a regular at a Bible study class held at the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills and in July 2017 he shared with the congregation what he described as a “horrific story” and explained why he felt he had to quit his world tour.
Describing a party – attended by the upper echelon of the music business, including executive VPs of development, producers, power agents and international financiers – Bieber said he was encouraged to sexually abuse a young child who had been bought to the party for the sexual gratification of the industry elite.
“I didn’t want to do this. I really didn’t. They said this kid was drugged, it was horrible,” Bieber said, explaining that it was made clear to him that he would gain entry to the “business side of the industry” if he “joined the club” by passing the initiation rites.
“I wouldn’t just be a performer, I’d be a mogul. That path would open up for me, like it did for Jay-Z.”
“It’s the difference between being a millionaire and being a billionaire.”
But Bieber told the congregation that he couldn’t do it.
“To join the club I’d have to do bad things to this poor kid. But then I realized that even that wasn’t enough for them. I’d also have to kill this little child.”
Bieber said he had heard rumors about this type of initiation in the music industry, but he had not been confronted with it before.
“I got told they secretly film these parties. Once they’ve got you on video doing something like that, they own you.”
Bieber said his conscience is clear because he didn’t participate, but the fate of the drugged child is haunting him.
“They said this kid was raped by a few different guys. They said he was bleeding. I got out of there but I heard he died and that haunts me.”
I just read a descriptive analysis of zoomers that seems pretty good to me. Assuming there is some truth in it, zoomers can be defined as entirely non-FIML. From a FIML point of view this constitutes unknowing abandonment of our most wonderful talents due mainly to not knowing they are possible.
Sadly, this largely defines all generations that have ever lived. Zoomers are novelties only in that they see no way out of earthly illusions including even caring about finding a way out. In some ways, it has ever been thus, Samuel Beckett on a warm beach, where the sun still shines on the nothing new.
The better way to go is bring the full power of your human voice and ears to every moment. Let nothing pass you by. Then you can do still nothing while also accomplishing something. The illusions are solipsisms and tautologies but that’s all. No reason to be cucked by them.
The core problem with GPT is it can’t be trusted. GPT is an even purer form of non-FIML than zoomers. GPT is potentially pure KOBK. Both of these fundamental problems illustrate that the most important human endeavor is morality, ethics. Systems in computers or in human brains don’t work optimally without ethics. In this discussion, that becomes abundantly clear. ABN
Education and Sharing Day is a time to pause and reflect on our personal responsibility to provide our young people with a moral education. To teach them the foundations they need to live a life of service and higher purpose.
This was a cause championed by the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the most influential rabbi in modern history. In recognition, Education and Sharing Day is observed annually on his birthday, four days before Passover.
On Tuesday, March 28 a delegation of rabbis representing the 120 Chabad Lubavitch leaders serving the Texas Jewish community throughout the state, visited the Texas Capitol as a bi-partisan group of state leaders recognized Education and Sharing Day to be observed this year on April 2, 2023.
Mencius would say this is due to rotten leadership because their bad influence affects everyone. I agree and would add isn’t it remarkable that we do not even know who is controlling the office of the president of USA? Some say it’s O’Bummer, some say Susan Rice. I say it goes higher than that and we have no idea who is at the top. Whoever it is we can be sure they do not like USA or the West; that all of their policies are bad for USA/ the West; that they probably did covid and definitely did the covid responses including vaxxes; let’s not forget their aggression in Ukraine and their ace in the hole—WW3. The most puzzling enigma of our time is who are they? ABN
About a week ago both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal devoted considerable space to the coverage of “Parade,” the revival of a 1998 Broadway musical on the 1915 killing of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, Georgia, arguably the most famous lynching in American history.
Frank had been convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl in his employ and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in an effort to save his life. After numerous legal appeals failed, the state’s governor eventually commuted Frank’s sentence and a group of outraged citizens responded by hanging Frank. The incident was portrayed in both the musical and the associated media coverage as a particularly horrifying example of American anti-Semitism.
From a Buddhist point of view, you do not need an identity. You can walk around all day long without ever invoking any identity. An identity is a habit, a learned reference, a psycholinguistic category, one way of understanding your own name or words addressed to you, a psychological ball and chain. You do not need any of that. Your brain, life, and mind will work perfectly well with no identity at all. In fact, one of the goals of Buddhist practice is to be free of identity. Try it—walk around with no identity. You won’t fall down and will be able to get wherever you were going just fine. ABN
The results, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide the most advanced picture yet of the human brain on psychedelics. The recordings show how the brain’s normal hierarchical organisation breaks down, electrical activity becomes anarchic, and connectivity between regions soars, particularly those handling “higher level” functions such as imagination, which evolved most recently in humans. “The stronger the intensity of the experience, the more hyperconnected were those brain areas,” said Timmermann.
“At the dose we use, it is incredibly potent,” said Robin Carhart-Harris, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. “People describe leaving this world and breaking through into another that is incredibly immersive and richly complex, sometimes being populated by other beings that they feel might hold special power over them, like gods.”
He added: “What we have seen is that DMT breaks down the basic networks of the brain, causing them to become less distinct from each other. We also see the major rhythms of the brain – that serve a largely inhibitory, constraining function – break down, and in concert, brain activity becomes more entropic or information-rich.”
Reposting Ed Harris’ answer since it is considered quora + & requires a subscription.
Yes, the incident of Jimmy Carter crying after being briefed about classified information regarding UFO’s is largely believed to be true by the serious researchers on the subject. As a forewarning, the following information is very unsettling and will explain why Carter never “kept his promise” of revealing classified UFO information to the public.
According to the story that was corroborated by more than one witness, U.S. presidents are only given a cursory overview of the subject. Apparently, the CIA runs the program, only provide information to the President on a need to know basis, and do not consider presidential curiosity as sufficient need to know. This was implemented after Kennedy, and all presidents after him have been given only summary briefings (some presidents for unknown reasons were given more than others).
Okay on to your question. President Carter is a deeply religious man who had also witnessed a UFO with 6 other people. Everyone thought that he would be the one to finally release UFO info to the public but as the story goes, he was repeatedly stonewalled. Eventually, the CIA had “the talk” with him, and afterward it was reported that he sunk his head in his hands and not only began to deeply sob, but was visibly disturbed for some weeks afterward.
What was he told and shown?
He was told that the major religions including Christianity were programs created by extraterrestrials to prevent us from destroying ourselves while they ran their experiments on us – and that they made us. At this moment it became clear to Carter that such information could cause tremendous economic and social upheaval. I should add that I am not only a Christian but a clergyman, so I am in no way attempting to promote atheism here. In fact, how God fits into this might be an interesting separate post. Nevertheless, these are the facts as I know them to be.
You feel exactly like a Roman Pagan did 1700 years ago
Christianity was the woke movement of Rome
And this is it’s bizarre story
Christianity was an urban bureaucrat movement
It seized control of the late empires bloated institutions and used them to impose their ideology
This is just like the Woke activists in your government
And just like you – the wholesome rural Roman people did NOT want this
[This is a good thread but the images do not unroll well. I added one editorial comment in the text near the end. This tale is stated simply but the analogy is highly appropriate. ABN]
When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation by Paula Fredriksen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 272 pp.
BY NATURAL DISPOSITION, I am inclined to follow the (now not so) New Criticism, but Paula Fredriksen has written a book that begs for a good old-fashioned Freudian reading: When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation. The title hides an autobiographical interest, for Fredriksen is herself a Jew who was a Christian. Still more: she is a former-Catholic Jewish historian of early Jewish Christians, who on her last page rejects her own catchy title as a distorting anachronism. “Christians” did not yet exist in that far-away first generation, she confesses, only misguided Jews who thought that they would be history’s last. In the meantime, of course, when the world did not end, these misguided Jews somehow turned into misguided Christians, and the book ends as an ethical thrust aimed at “one of the West’s most sustained fonts of anti-Judaism” (183), namely Christianity, a faith built on layer upon layer of illusion. Lamentable as Christian anti-Judaism surely is, one wonders if a moralizing font of vulgarized ex-Christian “Jewish” anti-Christianism, dispensing seductively packaged speculative historical reconstructions, is what better Christian–Jewish relations really needed.
Paula Fredriksen: “Judaizing the Gentiles: The Ritual Demands of Paul’s Gospel”
UPDATE: I had originally posted this talk in five short excerpts. When I had time, I found the full lecture which is the video above. It’s a very good talk for anyone interested in history, history of religion, Judaism, or Christianity. Provides an excellent context for understanding how Christianity was born out of Judaism. ABN
The Ukrainian government inherited ownership of the Kiev Caves Lavra from the Soviet Union, and the “National Reserve,” as the state calls is, is divided into the Upper and Lower Lavra. The Church was already kicked out of the Upper Lavra, which includes the Holy Dormition Cathedral and the Sts. Anthony and Theodosius Trapeza Church, at the end of last year.
The Orthodox Church held its last service in the Upper Lavra on New Year’s Eve. Despite the persecution, the faithful people of Kiev maintained their faith, joyfully singing “Christ is Risen!” the last service.
The brotherhood has pled with the state to stop the persecution of the monastery and the UOC, but to no avail.
Many signs point to Zelensky’s policies as being acts of de-Ukrainianization of Ukraine, including massacring Ukrainian men by sending them into hopeless battles while also causing much of the rest of the country to flee. Zelensky, who is not a Ukrainian, does not act like a Ukrainian but rather as a puppet of NATO/neocons who seem to be bent on seizing depopulated Ukrainian territory for reasons not yet fully known. ABN
American Buddhist Net 