…present religious authorities exalt to the highest esteem and respect an enclosure as the site of the Temple that was in Jesus’ day the chief architectural symbol of Rome’s claim to imperial world power. … Even the worshippers at the “Wailing Wall” are directing their present devotions and venerations to a Roman edifice that their ancestors in Herod’s time held in utter contempt.[9]
In 70 AD, Herod’s Temple was leveled to the ground by the Romans, fulfilling Jesus’s prediction for this “den of thieves” (Mark 11:17): “There will not be one stone left upon another that will not be thrown down” (Mark 13:2). Whether Jesus really said that, or the prophecy was attributed to him in hindsight, the person who included it in his gospel in the early 70s AD would not have put it in those terms if it had been proven false.
The utter destruction of the temple is confirmed by another eyewitness, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. The words he ascribes to Eleazar, the Jewish commander at Masada, around 73 AD, make clear that nothing was left of the city but the Roman fort:
Where is this city that was believed to have God himself inhabiting therein? It is now demolished to the very foundations, and it has nothing left but that monument of it preserved, I mean the camp of those [the Romans] that hath destroyed it. (Jewish War, VII, 8, 379)
According to Josephus, every stone of the Temple was overturned because it contained huge amounts of gold, which melted during the fire and descended into the cracks of the stone foundations. The Tenth Legion had the Jewish captives dig up every stone to recover the gold (Jewish War, VI, 6, 1). All the gold recovered from the Temple and from various hiding places (64 according to the Copper Scroll), was instrumental to the ascension of Vespasian and Titus on the imperial throne.
This is how they convinced themselves that killing all of Ukraine’s young men was justified. Next, the campaign donations and lucrative no-show jobs will roll in from the investment funds that bought Ukrainian farmland the dead soldiers will no longer be able to cultivate. They also were able to kill a lot of Russians and destroy evidence the biolabs ever existed. According to them, they are heroes for standing with Ukraine. Not to mention, Zelensky is not even Ukrainian as are none of Ukraine’s oligarchs, save one. ABN
A Uyghur militant group that helped to topple Bashar-al Assad has vowed to take the fight to China.
The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) threatened Beijing in a video released on Dec 8, the day the Syrian regime collapsed, showing its fighters holding machine guns and wearing military fatigues.
“Now here in Syria, in all the cities here, we fight for Allah, and we will continue to do this in our Urumchi, Aqsu and Kashgar in the future,” said one masked man, listing cities in China’s Xinjiang region, from where the Uyghurs hail. “We will chase the Chinese infidels away.”
Using the Uyghurs’ preferred name for their homeland, he added: “We have fought in Homs, in Idlib and we will continue the fight in East Turkistan.
Samādhi (Pali and Sanskrit: समाधि), in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and yogic schools, is a state of meditative consciousness. In many Indian religious traditions, the cultivation of Samādhi through various meditation methods is essential for the attainment of spiritual liberation (known variously as nirvana, moksha).[1]
In the oldest Buddhist sutras, on which several contemporary western Theravada teachers rely, it refers to the development of an investigative and luminous mind which is equanimous and mindful. In the yogic traditions, and the Buddhist commentarial tradition on which the Burmese Vipassana movement and the Thai Forest tradition rely, it is interpreted as a meditative absorption or trance, attained by the practice of dhyāna.[5]
With so much now depending on what Christians, Jews and Muslims think and do and how they interact so poorly with each other and any one else and how their beliefs are based on old stories and not much else, this may be a good time to remind or inform anyone who wants to listen that there are much older and deeper traditions of the mind including how individuals should conduct themselves morally, ethically, spiritually. Samadhi states are but one aspect of ancient traditions that vastly predate Judaism and Christianity and also provide much deeper insights into the workings of the human mind and how to deal with the ever-changing conditions of life. The way the Abrahamic religions are behaving today is an embarrassment to all of humanity. ABN
This was never supposed to be anything other than a localized attack in the vicinity of Aleppo.
But when the HTS fighters encountered no resistance, they pushed on.
Everything that unfolded from that point appears to be opportunistic exploitation of the unexplained, and unexplainable, collapse of the Syrian nation.
As Syria collapsed, those nations that had been conspiring against Syria have pounced on the rubble of that nation and declared victory.
Those nations that supported Syria are left to gaze in bewilderment at the evaporation of everything they had worked to achieve over the past decade.
But none of this was planned.
Everyone is reacting.
Which means there is no guaranteed outcome.
Things look good at the moment for Israel and Turkey.
And things certainly look bad for Russia and Iran.
But there are many unknowns lying in ambush for all parties involved.
American Buddhist Net 