DETTERLING ASKS   ...    GENE ANSWERS

Detterling:

In what respect does Galatians 3:28 exclude homosexuals from the mercy of Christ or, as St Paul puts in "being all one in Christ Jesus" and hence being welcomed in to the kingdom of God.

Perhaps begin by demonstrating how a person who is a member of Jesus Christ ["ye are all one in Christ Jesus"] can simultaneously be excluded from the kingdom of God.

Gene:

1 Corinthians 6:9-10. Here’s the New Revised Standard Version.

Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.

Sodomites are excluded from the Kingdom of God. Got that?

You can't bluff and bluster your way out of this one Detterling.

 

LGBTQI Translation (sic) of Galatians 3:28 

Galatians 3:28 reads: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male or female, no longer straight or gay, no longer cis or trans: for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

I emailed this through to Tony of the Big Saloon explaining that Detterling had posted it on my blog.  He called me up furious, "These LGBTQI people will stop at nothing to attempt to legitimise their perversions. Fancy Detterling at his age going along with this! Silly old tosser. And the cheek of him trying to put this over on a Scripture scholar of your erudition Gene."

 

Fragment of a 1,750-year-old New Testament translation discovered

by Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften

The fragment of the Syriac translation of the New Testament under UV light Credit: Vatican Library

About 1,300 years ago a scribe in Palestine took a book of the Gospels inscribed with a Syriac text and erased it. Parchment was scarce in the desert in the Middle Ages, so manuscripts were often erased and reused.

A medievalist from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) has now been able to make legible the lost words on this layered manuscript, a so-called palimpsest: Grigory Kessel discovered one of the earliest translations of the Gospels, made in the 3rd century and copied in the 6th century, on individual surviving pages of this manuscript. The findings are published in the journal New Testament Studies.

One of the oldest fragments that testifies ancient Syrian version

"The tradition of Syriac Christianity knows several translations of the Old and New Testaments," says medievalist Grigory Kessel. "Until recently, only two manuscripts were known to contain the Old Syriac translation of the gospels." While one of these is now kept in the British Library in London, another was discovered as a palimpsest in St. Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai. The fragments from the third manuscript were recently identified in the course of the "Sinai Palimpsests Project."

The small manuscript fragment, which can now be considered as the fourth textual witness, was identified by Grigory Kessel using ultraviolet photography as the third layer of text, i.e., double palimpsest, in the Vatican Library manuscript. The fragment is so far the only known remnant of the fourth manuscript that attests to the Old Syriac version—and offers a unique gateway to the very early phase in the history of the textual transmission of the Gospels.

For example, while the original Greek of Matthew chapter 12, verse 1 says, "At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath; and his disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat," the Syriac translation says, "[...] began to pick the heads of grain, rub them in their hands, and eat them."

Claudia Rapp, director of the Institute for Medieval Research at the OeAW, says, "Grigory Kessel has made a great discovery thanks to his profound knowledge of old Syriac texts and script characteristics." The Syriac translation was written at least a century before the oldest Greek manuscripts that have survived, including the Codex Sinaiticus. The earliest surviving manuscripts with this Syriac translation date from the 6th century and are preserved in the erased layers, so-called palimpsests, of newly written parchment leaves.

"This discovery proves how productive and important the interplay between modern digital technologies and basic research can be when dealing with medieval manuscripts," Claudia Rapp says.

 

 

Using ‘he/him,’ ‘she/her’ in emails got 2 dorm directors fired at small New York Christian college

By BOBBY CAINA CALVAN yesterday

 

 

NEW YORK (AP) — Shua Wilmot and Raegan Zelaya, two former dorm directors at a small Christian university in western New York, acknowledge their names are unconventional, which explains why they attached gender identities to their work email signatures.

Wilmot uses “he/him.” Zelaya goes by “she/her.”

Their former employer, Houghton University, wanted them to drop the identifiers in line with a new policy for email formats implemented in September. Both refused and were fired.

 

“My name is Shua. It’s an unusual name. And it ends with a vowel, ‘a,’ that is traditionally feminine in many languages,” Wilmot said in a nearly one-hour video he and Zelaya posted on YouTube shortly after they were let go last month. “If you get an email from me and you don’t know who I am, you might not know how to gender me.”

Ongoing culture wars in the U.S. over sexual preferences, gender IDs and transgender rights have engulfed politics, school campuses and many other facets of public and private life. At least 17 Republican-led states have severely restricted gender affirming care. Debates continue to rage in some communities about school curricula mentioning sexual orientation or gender identity. And pickets have sprung up outside public libraries hosting “drag story hours.”

Meanwhile, controversies swirl at campuses with religious affiliations. The recent firings prompted more than 700 Houghton alumni to sign a petition in protest.

In the Northwest, 16 plaintiffs are suing Seattle Pacific University, a Christian liberal arts college, to challenge the school’s employment policy barring people in same-sex relationships from full-time jobs.

In New York City, LGBTQ students are challenging Yeshiva University’s decision to bar their student-run club from campus.

Paul Southwick, director of the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, a 2-year-old advocacy group for LGBTQ students at publicly funded religious colleges and universities, said actions such as these are cause for despair.

 “There’s a backlash against the rise of LGBTQ rights,” he said, and not just with “white evangelical Christianity in the South ... but in places like New York and Oregon that we wouldn’t think would be experiencing this backlash.”

Earlier this year, a federal judge in Oregon dismissed a lawsuit that LGBTQ students filed against the U.S. Department of Education claiming it didn’t protect them against discrimination at religiously affiliated universities receiving federal money.

Houghton University, an 800-student campus 60 miles (96 kilometers) southeast of Buffalo, says it offers a “Christ-centered education in the liberal arts and sciences.”

In a statement emailed to The Associated Press on Saturday, the university said it could not speak publicly about personnel matters, but it “has never terminated an employment relationship based solely on the use of pronouns in staff email signatures.”

The university said it had previously asked employees to remove “anything extraneous,” including Bible quotes, from email signatures.

The university also shared with the AP an email outlining its new policy sent to staff. The memo cautioned employees against using politically divisive and inflammatory speech in communications bearing the Houghton name. It also directed them to use standardized signature styles and forbade the use of pronouns.

Also attached to the statement was a copy of a letter university President Wayne D. Lewis Jr. sent to students.

“I would never ask you to agree with or support every decision I make,” Lewis wrote. “But I do humbly ask that you resist the temptation to reduce Houghton’s decision making to the simple and convenient political narratives of our time.”

Zelaya said she received an email in the fall from administrators saying the school was mandating changes in colors, fonts and other aspects of email to help the school maintain branding consistency.

She complied, she said, but retained her pronouns on her signature, calling it a “standard industry practice” to do so.

In the dismissal letters hand-delivered to Wilmot and Raegan Zelaya, copies of which they shared on social media, the university wrote that the firings were “a result of your refusal to remove pronouns in your email signatures in violation of institutional policy.”

In a video posted on Facebook, Zelaya said she already has another job lined up. In their joint YouTube video, she and Wilmot urged their supporters to push for change in policies, but constructively and with civility.

“As a result of this whole controversy, as a result of having my pronouns in my email signature,” Wilmot said, “it’s given me the opportunity to educate people on this topic.”

 

 SAINT PAUL SOCKS IT TO THE ARSENOKOITAI...

SAINT PAUL

I often wonder why we in the Christian faith have any disagreements about homosexual acts. St Paul succinctly and forthrightly makes the position clear:

Let’s have a look at 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. 

Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites (the arsenokoitai), thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.

 

Stolen Innocence: The Exploitation of Our Children in Public Schools (USA Public Schools) and What to Do About It

JACK RIGERT

Why Is The Sexual Exploitation Of Children So Important To The Godless?

Jesus answered, “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female…what therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” (Matt 19:4)

From the beginning. There is a Cosmic explosion of Trinitarian Love. The Garden of Eden has been prepared for a wedding feast. Then God said: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. God created man in his image: in the divine image he created them; male and female he created them.” Smiling upon the newly married couple, God blessed them, saying to them: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth” (Gen 1:26-28), bring forth children for they are very good!

Enter the tempter, the Mysterium Iniquitatis, a Latin phrase, which means the mystery of evil. Satan does not have his own clay. He can only twist, distort and seek to destroy the Imago Dei, the sign that God created good.

Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals that the Lord God had made. The serpent asked the woman, “Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?” The woman answered the serpent: “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat of it or even touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman: “You certainly will not die! No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil” (Gen 3:1-5).

My heart goes out to young people who are being pulverized by a twisted, distorted and very toxic culture. They have been repeatedly lied to about the very basics concerning the meaning of marriage, the family, authentic love, the true meaning of sex and sexuality, and more. Particularly disturbing is the sexual indoctrination, exploitation and grooming of children taking place on a mass scale in the public school system. That is why I present “Stolen Innocence,” a community awareness event, along with crime investigator Thomas Hampson, on what is really happening to our children in the public school system.

A common question during the Q&A that follows is Why? Why does an institution that is tasked with educating our nation’s children instead focus on sexually grooming and exploiting the children in their care? The answer in short is the Mysterium Iniquitatis. Have we forgotten that we live in a fallen world? Have we forgotten that evil, and its consequences, sin and death, entered the world after the fall? Have we also forgotten that God provided the solution and conquered sin and death in the Mysterium Pietatis, the mystery of the Incarnation, Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ? No, we have not forgotten. It is that modern man has once more stood before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and has freely chosen to reject God. “Stolen Innocence” is a consequence of that choice.

In his 1932 book Toward Soviet America, William Z Foster, the national chairman of the American Communist party, left little doubt of the party’s goal for American Education. “Among the elementary measures the American Soviet will adopt to further the cultural revolution are …a National Dept of Education…the studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic, and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught the basics of Marxism and materialism (Awake, Not Woke, by Noelle Mering, Pg 173).

Around the same time, John Dewey, perhaps the most influential figure in modern American education, moved the Frankfurt School, founded by Marxists, to Columbia University. Dewey was a socialist and staunch atheist and spent time in the Soviet Union and upon his return to the States he wrote a book of his admiration for and desire to replicate the way in which their system was used as a political tool. How they were able to so quickly embed a collectivist mindset into children and how they began to dismantle the need for a family unit. “Our special concern here is with the role of the schools in building up forces and factors whose natural effect is to undermine the importance and uniqueness of family life” (cf. Awake, Not Woke, pg. 174).

Dewey eventually came to be known as the Father of Progressive Education. His lack of understanding of the dignity of the human person, and his disdain for religion, animated and informed his view of education. Dewey believed that — more than an emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic – education should be a tool for social engineering and the raising of the consciousness of children toward activism. He taught the philosophy of education at the Teacher’s College at Columbia where he was able to have a vast and profound impact. By 1950, already a third of principals and superintendents of large school districts across the country had been trained there and returned to their districts to spread these theories throughout the nation (cf. Awake, pg. 174).

This sentiment was echoed by Chester M Pierce, a notable professor of education and psychiatry at Harvard and consultant for such children’s educational shows such as Sesame Street, “Every child in America entering schools at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain alliances to our Founding Fathers, toward our elected officials, towards his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity,” Pierce argued. “It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well—by creating the international child of the future” (Awake, pg. 177).

The National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers’ union in the nation, grew under the thumb of Marxist and communist organizers in its commitment to override the influence of parents over their children. (cf. Awake, pgs. 177-78)

Here we have our answer to WHY. Enter the tempter, the Mysterium Iniquitatis. Satan does not have his own clay. He, along with men and women who have rejected God, can only twist, distort and seek to destroy the Imago Dei, the sign of Trinitarian Love – marriage and the family – that God created very good.   That which is most profaned by Satan is that which is most holy.  What better way to erase God than to defile the beautiful innocence of children through the “comprehensive sex education” and other perversions that have been thrust upon them?

How ironic in our so-called modern age, that we have fallen once again for that very old lie, “you can be like gods.” It seems that the words of Aldous Huxley ring true once again, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” For without the Creator the creature would disappear…When God is forgotten, however, the creature itself grows unintelligible (Gaudium et spes, No. 36).

Yet God, the Father of Mercy, wishes to be reconciled to His lost children. The history of salvation–the salvation of the whole of humanity as well as of every human being of whatever period—is the wonderful history of a reconciliation.  It is the reconciliation whereby God, as Father, in the blood and the cross of his Son made man, reconciles the world to himself and thus brings into being a new family of those who have been reconciled (Reconciliation and Penance, John Paul II, no. 4.8).

It is decision time! History teaches that, in a sense, each person stands before the timeless Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The question put to each individual of every generation is “do I use my intellect and reason to build my life and the world around me on eternal truth, on God, or do I squander my freedom and choose instead ” …to be like gods who know what is good and what is evil?” (Gen 3:5).

Jesus said to His disciples, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matt 18:5-6). Our hope for modern men and women is that they can overcome their hardened hearts, recover from their loss of the sense of sin, and once again turn to Jesus Christ and be saved.

 

Pope Benedict predicted gender ideology would be final rebellion against God

Simon Caldwell

May 18, 2023 at 10:55 am

Pope Benedict XVI predicted that gender ideology would be the next great challenge to the Church and the final rebellion against God, a US moral theologian has revealed.

Dr John Haas, a former member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said the late pope made the “unsolicited” observation during a private conversion at the Vatican in 2014, the year after Benedict relinquished his petrine office.

He said the Pope Emeritus told him that “the next great challenge the Church is going to face is gender ideology, and it will be the ultimate rebellion against God the Creator”.

Dr Haas told 114 students during his commencement address at the 2023 Christendom College graduation ceremony in Front Royal, Virginia, that he was “surprised” by Benedict’s remarks because they were so spontaneous.

But he said he could now see his words were “prophetic”.

“We have been hit with a tsunami of transgender ideology,” Dr Haas said, adding that today “Catholic health care institutions are being sued because they refuse to perform mutilating surgeries on men who want to be surgically altered to look like women or women who want to appear as men”. 

“Catholic academic institutions are also being sued and attacked as they simply try to continue to give witness to the truth of their students being either male or female,” added Dr Haas, the former president of the US National Bioethics Center.

One of the final acts of Pope Benedict’s pontificate was to speak forcefully against the emerging threat of gender ideology, which dismisses biological and scientific categories of male and female in favour of an individual constructing a “gender” of their own choosing.

In an address to the Roman Curia given at Christmas 2012, less than two months before he stepped down, the German pope noted that “the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question”. 

He said that according to the “new philosophy of sexuality”, sex is “no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society.”

He said: “The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. 

“People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. 

“According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. 

“This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. 

“Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will.

“The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. 

“Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him.”

Pope Benedict added: “When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. 

“The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.”

His successor, Pope Francis, has also repeatedly spoken against gender ideology, implicitly condemning it in paragraph 155 of Laudato Si, his 2015 papal encyclical on the environment, and describing it publicly as part of a “global war on the family”.

The Pontiff’s most recent criticisms came during a speech in Budapest, Hungary, last month when he denounced gender ideology as an examples of “ideological colonisation”.

Some senior figures within the Church believe, however, that the gravity of the threat posed by gender ideology warrants a papal encyclical to clearly elucidate Catholic teaching on the truth and meaning of human sexuality.

They include Cardinal Willem Eijk, the Archbishop of Utrecht, who specifically requested an encyclical earlier this year when he went to Rome for the four-yearly ad limina visit of the Dutch bishops.

“I have asked if it would not be good for the pope to issue an encyclical on gender thinking”, the cardinal said at a press conference afterwards.

“Gender theory is being pushed in all kinds of organisations and we as a Church have not said that much about it.”

His request was formally lodged with Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the American prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life.

Gender ideology is convulsing western societies in particular, with record numbers of young people asking for drugs or surgery that will enable them to live in the so-called gender of their choice.

Cardinal Eijk, a former hospital doctor and a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, made a similar call for an encyclical during a speech in Oxford in 2016, arguing that the Church had a duty to remind Catholics of the truth of its teaching about the human body.

“Perhaps a document only on this problem might be an urgent question,” Cardinal Eijk said. “It is spreading and spreading everywhere in the western world and we have to warn people,” he said.

“From the point of moral theology, it’s clear – you are not allowed to change your sex in this way,” he added.