Cognitive Dissonance As A Campaign Strategy

May, 10, 2012 13:18 pm · 3 comments

by Propagandee

 

If cognitive dissonance didn’t exist, the Republicans would have to invent it. Otherwise, they’d have nothing in the tank to fuel their media lies and distortions.

In the clip above, Jon Stewart explores some of the latest examples of GOP reverse thought engineering, necessary to lead a significant chunk of the electorate back from reality to unreality.

While repetition and The Big Lie are the stock and trade of modern propaganda, Stewart notes a new wrinkle in Romney’s effort to get low information voters to vote against their own best interests. Instead of insisting that Obama’s real achievements, such as the killing of Usama bin Laden and the rescue of the US automotive industry were really failures– hard to do in the era of video tape and the internet– simply claim those sucessess as your own. Problem solved!

First we have Mittens’ public statements that pursuing bin Laden into Pakistan was wrong absent permission of its sovereign government, a totally self-defeating strategy given obvious Pakistani collusion in keeping bin Laden safe all these years; not to mention the fact that he claimed hunting bin Laden down cost too much.

Then we have Romney’s claim that he deserves “a lot of credit” for the salvation of the US auto industry, i.e., that Obama was simply following his advice for a managed or structured bankruptcy. This outrageous boast has been categorically refuted by both the bankruptcy judge who presided over the Chrysler bankruptcy, Arthur J. Gonzalez, and the “car czar”, Steven Rattner, who managed the difficult but  highly successful restructuring of a vital component of US manufacturing capability. As both have pointed out, Romney’s contention presumes that their was suffficent and willing private equity available to make a takeover viable. You know, like the kind of leveraged buyout that his own corporate chop shop, Bain Capital, specialized in. Was there a bid there somewhere Mitt that we missed? Care to disclose?

Romney and his ilk are obviously banking on H. L. Mencken‘s observation that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Time to prove them wrong.

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Coming To America: The Handmaid’s Tale

May, 9, 2012 10:42 am · 0 comments

by Propagandee

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In Ayatollah Santorum & The Republic(ans) Of Gilead, we noted some eerie parallels between Margaret Atwood‘s novel The Handmaid’s Tale and a resurgence of  the extreme religious right’s influence over the GOP in this presidential election year.

The issues are familiar ones: separation of church and state (a principle that Rick Santorum said made him want “to throw up”);  moralizing over the issue of human sexuality, especially gay marriage and other non-traditional cohabitation routines  enshrined in  North Carolina‘s constitution yesterday as Amendment One ; the curtailment of  women’s reproductive rights, with a powerful assist from the Catholic Church; and presently an economic agenda, the Ryan-Romney plan, that replaces the teachings of Jesus Christ with those of Ayn Rand.

Any illusions that the lurch towards the ultra-conservative would moderate somewhat now that the GOP’s its presumptive nominee are rapidly dissipating. As Rachel Maddow notes in the clip above, Speaker of the House, John Boehner, opened the doors of the Capital’s Statuary Hall yesterday to a group of politicians religious leaders who are hell bent on remaking the USA into their version of heaven on earth.

Billed as “a prayer event”,  they included  Jim Garlow of Renewing America’s Leadership, who claims that “gay marriage is part of an attack by Satan on America”;  David Barton, who never tires of reminding people that aids is God’s revenge for homosexuality;  Alveda King, director of African American outreach for the Priests for Life who believes that support for abortion rights is just like supporting terrorism and who opined on Fux News  that the murder of Trayvon Martin was somehow  “a late abortion”; and Dan Cummins, a proponent of fusing church and state, the separation of which he calls a foreign communist concept promoted by progressives who are really just commies in disguise.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, the president of the Interfaith Alliance, Rev. C Welton Gaddy, said he was simply “stunned” by the whole affair. He referred to the assembled leaders as some of the world’s foremost historical revisionists whose agenda is to turn America into “a new Israel”; to “make the nation just like them.”  To set the emotional tone of the segment titled, Separation Anxiety, Rachel begins with Lou  Engle, co-founder of The Call. Now this is a guy who really believes in the power of prayer, especially his.

From Right Wing Watch:

 Like his fellow Proposition 8 supporters Che Ahn and Jim Garlow, Lou Engle maintains that their prayers led to the reversal of marriage equality in California in 2008 and a “sovereign appointment” with former San Francisco mayor (and current Lt. Gov.) Gavin Newsom “to call him to accountability to what he was going to do in that city concerning the homosexual agenda.” While speaking today with Pat Robertson on the 700 Club to publicize the upcoming The Call: Virginia, which Robertson has endorsed, Engle said his September, 2010 prayer rally in Sacramento “removed” the state’s governor from office. However, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had already made the decision not to run for re-election in November, 2009, and Democrat Jerry Brown won the gubernatorial race later that year…

As captured in the clip above, Engle says that gay marriage “will release a spirit more demonic than Islam” prophesying that if Prop 8 failed,  “sexual insanity will be released into the earth.”  In the presence of two US senators, Jim DeMint and Sam Brownback (now governor of Kansas) Engle called on God to smite down the Affordable Care Act, as if insuring the uninsured was somehow an abomination unto the Lord.

And in a nod to the notion of American exceptionalism, RWW notes:

After the passing of Chuck Colson on Saturday, Lou Engle asked God to release “hundreds with the mantle of Chuck Colson” as part of a “new generation” of activists who will be like Elijah in fighting “Jezebel’s death culture” through a “cultural revolution” while praying over a group of young people, mostly homeschoolers, who attended the conference. Towards the end, Engle started reciting the Lord ’s Prayer but changed the last word from “heaven” to “America,” praying: “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in America.”

You might have first heard of Engle for his involvement in this:

Engle, who brought The Call prayer rally to Uganda to help rally support for the country’s proposed “kill the gays bill,” lamented that he gets “blasted” over his anti-gay work and is “haunted that God has not opened the door for me to go after this thing.” Lindevaldsen agreed that “we need a prayer movement because a spiritual battle is at the root of this.”

While I would never presume to tell anyone how to pray, I find this accounting of the evolution of prayer from The Urantia Book instructive:

Primitive forms of prayer were nothing more nor less than bargaining with the spirits, an argument with the gods. It was a kind of bartering in which pleading and persuasion were substituted for something more tangible and costly. The developing commerce of the races had inculcated the spirit of trade and had developed the shrewdness of barter; and now these traits began to appear in man’s worship methods. And as some men were better traders than others, so some were regarded as better prayers than others. The prayer of a just man was held in high esteem. A just man was one who had paid all accounts to the spirits, had fully discharged every ritual obligation to the gods.

Early prayer was hardly worship; it was a bargaining petition for health, wealth, and life. And in many respects prayers have not much changed with the passing of the ages…

Amen to that.

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Are We Insane?

May, 7, 2012 14:30 pm · 0 comments

by Propagandee

A dystopian bridge to nowhere

Is anxiety,  and even depression, a rational response to what passes for reality these days? Chris Hedges seems to think so. Here’s how he frames the issue:

Welcome to the Asylum

Posted on Apr 30, 2012

When civilizations start to die they go insane. ..Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet…

According to The Urantia Book one of the contributing the reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire was “amusement madness.”  Bread and circuses, if you will.

Hedges continues:

The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as c observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism.

On the origin of fetishism, The Uranta Book notes its capitalistic roots:

 A fetish was used to stand guard over the deposits of goods for silent barter. Such market places were secure against theft; nothing would be removed except by barter or purchase; with a fetish on guard the goods were always safe. The early traders were scrupulously honest within their own tribes but regarded it as all right to cheat distant strangers.

Don’t belong to the Insider’s Club? Then expect to be cheated of your hard earned wealth. But you already know, or more likely, have experienced that, especially if any of your assets were being managed by Wall Street these last few years, an exclusive tribe if ever there was one.

Hedges concludes:

This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.

As I wrote in Moral Insanity: Psychopaths and Sociopaths:

Sometimes I wish I believed in reincarnation. I mean, if all of history’s most prominent psychopaths had reincarnated at the same time, and through their manipulative talents came to occupy positions of power, there could hardly be a better explanation for the situation we find ourselves in today.

Red pill, blue pill– as always, the choice is ours.

[Image found here.]

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Heartland Institute Crashes Through The Overton Window

May, 5, 2012 9:48 am · 0 comments

by Propagandee

A Heartland Institute billboard along Chicago’s Eisenhower Expressway

Last October, in Twilight Zone Candidates, we noted that the then current crop of GOP presidential candidates were forced to out-crazy each other in order to secure the support of the extremist wing of the Rethuglican electorate. We agreed with the conventional wisdom that once the nomination was settled, as it is now with Mittens as the presumptive nominee, the party and its corporate sponsors would tack back towards the middle in order to appeal to the mythical middle ( i.e. undecided, low information voters).

But imagine our surprise when one of the right wing’s most supposedly prestigious  think tanks, the secretly and well-funded Heartland Institute, launched an advertising campaign designed to promote its upcoming climate change denial conference with the billboard pictured above. Think Progress describes it thus:

The UK Guardian, which broke the story this morning, calls this “possibly one of the most ill-judged poster campaigns in the history of ill-judged poster campaigns.

But let’s be clear. This is not some “oops” moment by an individual overzealous Heartland employee with catastrophically poor judgment. Quite the reverse.

This is a collective act by the Institute expressing its core worldview. A sustained billboard campaign would have to be signed off at the highest levels. Heartland displays the above image on its main website, proudly announcing its campaign and linking to its robust defense of “Our Billboards” on its conference website.

By equating the legions of respected climate scientists and world leaders who are warming about the dangers of anthropogenic climate change with the convicted eco-terrorist and murderer Ted Kaczynski, Heartland just threw a brick through The Overton Window, shattering any illusion that the right wing’s craziest inmates aren’t now in control of  the asylum.

Time again to cue the opening of Rod Serling‘s Twilight Zone, which seems to have expanded into a black hole that is now swallowing the whole conservative movement.

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Key Romney Adviser Gets Etch A Sketched For Being Gay (Update)

May, 3, 2012 17:27 pm · 0 comments

by Propagandee

Stewart explains that the video of Fischer’s homophobic rant is blurry because it’s being broadcast from 50 years ago

Well, that didn’t take long. Two weeks after appointing the openly gay Richard Grenell as his foreign policy spokesman, Cowardly Lyin Willard Romney etch-a-sketched him from his staff as a result of pressure from the GOP’s extreme homophobic wing.

American Family Association‘s Bryan Fischer exulted in Grenell’s sudden “resignation” calling it “absolutely huge.” Citing the Washington Post‘s reporting on the matter, Fischer said it was “very clear[ly] because of pressure put on the Romney campaign by the pro-family community.”

Not that Romney’s throwing Grenell under the bus is out of character. Recall Rush Limpbot’s nearly career ending personal attack on Sandra Fluke, when the Gargantuan One called her a “slut” and a “prostitute. ” Romney’s courageous response? It was “…not the language I would have used.”

If Romney can’t stand up to extremist bigots like Limbaugh and Fischer, how would he as president stand up to the rest of the world’s scumbags, those with more than just the power of the media at their disposal?

The Romney Pandering Tour will continue next week when he addresses Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell‘s Liberty University. Presumably he won’t be asked to throw Mormonism under the bus, though given Willard’s track record of moving the campaign ball forward a yard or two by saying anything at anytime to anyone, you just can’t exclude the possibility.

UPDATE: 5/5/12  Bryan Fischer repeats our question, and then sticks the shiv in between the Cowardly Lyin’s ribs:

Let me ask you this question, people have raised this question, if Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, coopted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin? How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me? I don’t think Romney is realizing the doubts that this begins to raise about his leadership. I don’t think for one minute that Mitt Romney did not want this guy gone; he wanted this guy gone because there was not one word of defense, not a peep, from the Romney camp to defend him. They just went absolutely stone cold silent, they put a bag over Grenell’s head, they even asked him to organize this phone conference and they didn’t even let him speak at the conference that he organized.

Watch.

h/t RightWingWatch.org

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Admiral Murdoch: Not A Fit Person

May, 1, 2012 13:21 pm · 3 comments

by Propagandee

What draining the Swamp of Murdoch has revealed

Last year as the details of the Murdoch criminal empire were being unearthed in a formal British government investigation, we wrote:

While standard evolutionary theory has it that humans descended from warm blooded mammals, the predatory acts of the world’s most powerful media tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, suggests that somewhere along the way a mutant strain of humanity reverted to behavior more characteristic of its cold blooded ancestors further back on the evolutionary tree. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fetid swampland of British tabloid journalism, where Murdoch reigns as the biggest croc on the block.

Well, that investigation has just filed its final report.  From HuffPo:

A parliamentary committee has judged that Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person” to run a major international company such as News Corp. due to his handling of the phone hacking scandal…

The committee wrote that Murdoch “turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications,” and concluded that he “is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.”

The report is the culmination of years of investigation since the phone hacking crisis first broke in 2009. Since then, the scandal has caught everyone from journalists to police to politicians in its net, and cost Murdoch hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yet to be decided is how the entire House of Commons will vote on the committee’s findings. At the very least, the civil litigation barristers will have a field day combing through the reams of evidence that over three years of intense investigation has produced. Can you spell shareholder lawsuits?

As demands for Rupert’s resignation reach a fever pitch, it remains to be seen whether one the world’s most powerful and feared man will voluntarily go down with his ship. Given the level of denial he’s demonstrated to date, not to mention the company he keeps, we kind of doubt it.  But we’ll be mannin’ the crow’s nest, our eyes fixed firmly on the horizon, waiting to see if his flagship company, News Corp. becomes New Corpse, his rotting sack of bones lashed firmly to its mast.

Checking the charts to Davey Jones’ locker

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Nun So Brave

April, 30, 2012 16:07 pm · 0 comments

by Propagandee

The Blessed Martyrs of Nowogródek, 11 nuns killed by the Gestapo in 1943*

Picking up where we left off in Playing The Hitler Card In The War On Women: Nun Edition, two senior NY Times columnists, Nick Kristoff and Maureen Dowd, joined forces Sunday to tag team the Vatican over its treatment of the women who represent the essence of Christ’s teachings about social justice and service to the poor.

I’m speaking of course of the Church’s tireless cadre of nuns who have renounced everything for the opportunity to serve their Lord, currently being held hostage by the Church’s male elders who claim to exclusively know his will. (In contrast, of course, to those uppity women ascetics who are otherwise helpless to ascertain that will on their own.)

Underscoring the role these courageous women have played in the two millennia of Christendom, Kristoff reminds us that:

They were the first feminists, earning Ph.D.’s or working as surgeons long before it was fashionable for women to hold jobs. As managers of hospitals, schools and complex bureaucracies, they were the first female C.E.O.’s.

They are also among the bravest, toughest and most admirable people in the world. In my travels, I’ve seen heroic nuns defy warlords, pimps and bandits. Even as bishops have disgraced the church by covering up the rape of children, nuns have redeemed it with their humble work on behalf of the neediest…

In effect, the Vatican accused the nuns of worrying too much about the poor and not enough about abortion and gay marriage.

What Bible did that come from? Jesus in the Gospels repeatedly talks about poverty and social justice, yet never explicitly mentions either abortion or homosexuality. If you look at who has more closely emulated Jesus’s life, Pope Benedict or your average nun, it’s the nun hands down…

“How dare they go after 57,000 dedicated women whose median age is well over 70 and who work tirelessly for a more just world?” [Catholic theologian Mary E.] Hunt wrote. “How dare the very men who preside over a church in utter disgrace due to sexual misconduct and cover-ups by bishops try to distract from their own problems by creating new ones for women religious?”   

Sing it, Sister.

MoDo takes a similar tack:

Who thinks it’s cool to bully nuns? While continuing to heal and educate, the community of sisters is aging and dying out because few younger women are willing to make such sacrifices for a church determined to bring women to heel.

Yet the nuns must be yanked into line by the crepuscular, medieval men who run the Catholic Church.

“It’s not terribly unlike the days of yore when they singled out people in the rough days of the Inquisition,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.”

How can the church hierarchy be more offended by the nuns’ impassioned advocacy for the poor than by priests’ sordid pedophilia?

The Urantia Book weighs in on the problematic nature of social justice:

Jesus worked, lived, and traded in the world as he found it. He was not an economic reformer, although he did frequently call attention to the injustice of the unequal distribution of wealth. But he did not offer any suggestions by way of remedy. He made it plain to the three that, while his apostles were not to hold property, he was not preaching against wealth and property, merely its unequal and unfair distribution. He recognized the need for social justice and industrial fairness, but he offered no rules for their attainment.

Thus, no pre-ordained magical formulas for making social justice a reality. Only a call to action, for us fallible mortal to work out the evolutionary particulars. Methinks the Sisters have made a good start, and are for the most part, getting it right.

Kristoff sums up the political moment:  So, Pope Benedict, all I can say is: You are crazy to mess with nuns. . . .

 

And I’ll say again what I said in that earlier post: You go, Sisters. I’ve got your back.

*Painting by Adam Styka (1890-1959)

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Sunday Meditation Riff

April, 29, 2012 6:06 am · 0 comments

by Propagandee

 Tabernacle of nature

When it is not possible to worship God in the tabernacles of nature, men should do their best to provide houses of beauty, sanctuaries of appealing simplicity and artistic embellishment, so that the highest of human emotions may be aroused in association with the intellectual approach to spiritual communion with God. Truth, beauty, and holiness are powerful and effective aids to true worship. 

Winchester Cathedral

But spirit communion is not promoted by mere massive ornateness and overmuch embellishment with man’s elaborate and ostentatious art. Beauty is most religious when it is most simple and naturelike. How unfortunate that little children should have their first introduction to concepts of public worship in cold and barren rooms so devoid of the beauty appeal and so empty of all suggestion of good cheer and inspiring holiness! The child should be introduced to worship in nature’s outdoors and later accompany his parents to public houses of religious assembly which are at least as materially attractive and artistically beautiful as the home in which he is daily domiciled.  

-The Urantia Book

 Hadimba Temple, Manali, Himalayas

 

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Paul Ryan Throws Ayn Rand Under The Bus (Update)

April, 27, 2012 10:06 am · 0 comments

by Propagandee

Ghostbuster Bill Murray playing the negative reinforcement card

“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” -Rep. Paul Ryan, 2005

“I reject her philosophy. It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don’t give me Ayn Rand.” –Rep. Paul Ryan, 2012

Paste? You mean as in Mitt Romney pasting on his forehead your budget proposal that gives even greater tax privileges to the rich by taxing the poor? You mean the ‘pasting’ the Jesuits gave you at Georgetown, calling you out on your anti-Christian reading of the Gospel of Jesus?

From Atlantic.com:

Eric Cantor on Raising Taxes on the Poor: ‘You’ve Got to Discuss That’

APR 25 2012

Should we raise taxes on richer Americans? Eric Cantor has a clear answer. Absolutely, 100% no.

Should we raise taxes on poorer Americans? Eric Cantor has a different answer: “You’ve got to discuss that issue.”

Here’s the fuller quote, via Tim Noah:

Cantor: We also know that over 45 percent of the people in this country don’t pay income taxes at all, and we have to question whether that’s fair. And should we broaden the base in a way that we can lower rates for everybody that pays taxes.[...]

Q.: Just wondering, what do you do about that? Are you saying we need to have a tax increase on the 45 percent that right now pay no federal income tax?

Cantor: …those at the bottom end of the income scale want nothing more than to increase their income, to get up that ladder of success. So the goal should be, how do you do that? I’ve never believed that you go and raise taxes on those who have been successful that are paying in, taking from them, so that you just hand out and give to someone else. Those someone else[s] want hand-ups. They want the ability to get up the ladder.

It’s true that more than 45% of Americans don’t pay net positive federal income taxes. But 80% of them live in households making less than $30,000. They are automaticaly [sic]taxed at a lower rate, and they receive “refundable tax credits” that bring their tax bill past zero.

What would it take to force these lucky duckies to pay positive income taxes? It would mean instantly higher taxes for 70 million Americans. It would mean raising taxes on some of the poorest households by up to $4,000 a year, according to the Tax Policy Center.

[...]

If we need to fund the necessary operations of government, why go after where the money isn’t? If people naturally want to be richer, why would slightly higher tax rates on income over $330,000 change their mind? If the poor need hand-ups, why make them poorer?

It is a matter of economic dogma that taxes discourage behavior. Eric Cantor has obviously convinced himself that higher taxes on income under $30,000 will discourage poverty…

And the beatings will continue until morale improves.

One of the 99% about to be discouraged from not paying taxes

 

UPDATE: 4/28  The Center For American Progress runs the numbers on the Ryan-Romney budget, aka The Contract On American Kids.

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GOP VP Hot Potato

April, 24, 2012 21:50 pm · 0 comments

by Propagandee

Don’t be surprised to see this guy standing on a street corner near you

With today’s primaries in Pennsylvania, New York, Deleware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island packing all the dramatic punch of a Sarah Palin reality show rerun, much of the punditariat has chosen to turn their sights on the GOP Veepstakes instead.

With Willard Romney firmly in the nomination driver’s seat; Rick Santorum licking his wounds while still withholding his support for the presumptive nominee; Newt Gingrich teetering on the edge of withdrawal (nothing like coming in fourth in the majority of primaries to date to cement your image as a loser); and RonPaul playing his ongoing game of building an electoral infrastructure for his son Rand, we must now endure 3 months of boring speculation by political media junkies trying to earn their bloated paychecks.

Names being tossed out include a number of Rethugs who are already on record as saying they don’t want the ‘honor.’ They include New Jersey blowhard governor Chrisco Christie; Teabagger darling Florida Senator Marco ‘Don’t Vet Me” Rubio; another Teabagger fave South Carolina governor Nickie Haley; former Bush deficit budget director and current Indiana Governor, Mitch Daniels; former Minnesota governor Tim “Mr. Excitement” Pawlenty; former Florida governor Jeb “Don’t Call Me” Bush, and former Bush Warmonger Secretary of State, Condi Rice.

I guess we might have to count these as the relatively smart GOP pols who are keeping their powder dry for 2016. Recall last year at the CPAC convention none other than The Coltergeist predicted that if Romney is the 2012 nominee, they’ll lose. (Historical note: There hasn’t been a failed VP nominee in either party since FDR, who subsequently went on to win the presidency, And that might have been a case of divine intervention.)

Individuals who receive repeated mention and haven’t ruled themselves out include retiring Virgina governor, Bob “Vaginal Probe” McDonald; Rep. Paul “Let them Eat Cake” Ryan; Bush’s former head of the OMB, Senator “Mr. Deficit” Portman, and that always quirky media whore, Herman “Let’s Talk” Cain.

Jon “The Comedy Don” Stewart provides his usual insightful color commentary in this segment titled “Endless Suffrage 2012 – Of Vice and Men.”

Stewart calls the play by play tossing of the GOP VP hot potato.

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Playing The Hitler Card In The War On Women: Nun Edition

April, 22, 2012 14:49 pm · 0 comments

by Propagandee

Jon Stewart weighs in on vagina managers  and Fux News’ attempt to reframe the War on Women

As a recovering Cathaholic, I generally avoid Vatican pronouncements on religion, feeling quite secure in that department, thank you. (i.e., I don’t need a priestly intermediary between me and The One.)

The Catholic Church’s influence in social and planetary issues, rooted in their understanding of Christ’s teachings about social justice, is another matter. Consistent with those teachings, the Church has taken generally progressive stands on a number of issues, including the Iraq War during the Bush years; climate change and the environment; and most recently, the Paul Ryan-Mitt Romney budget plan that promises more tax cuts for bazzillionaires and austerity for everyone else.

That said, one issue the Church continues to disgrace itself over is their attitude toward women’s reproductive rights. Notwithstanding that Jesus never said anything about contraception or abortion (or homosexuality, for that matter), the Church’s all male U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which I’ve previously described as “that bastion of ecclesiastical misogyny”  tracing  their warped attitude towards women to the actual founder of Christianity, Paul of Tsarsus— well, they’re at it again.

Consider what Bishop Daniel Jenky told 500 Catholic men April 14 in Peoria, Illinois:

Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care.

In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path.

I don’t know that playing the Stalin-Hitler card is a particularly smart political move, Bishop. Not that the Church hasn’t intervened in American presidential elections before. When John Kerry was running in 2004, an influential Vatican Cardinal by the name of Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict XVI,  demanded that priests withhold from Kerry the sacrament of communion because of his stance on abortion.

By invoking Hitler and the Nazis, you’ve opened a door that I’m sure a lot of your fellow bishops, as well as the pope himself, would just as soon see stay closed. Recall the furor over Ratzinger nomination for the highest office in Christendom. First, his membership in the Hitler Youth Movement was questioned, the issue being whether he joined  voluntarily in 1941 or whether such “volunteerism” was in fact mandatory. And after that, his service in the German military as an anti-aircraft gun jockey protecting a BMW factory manned by slave labor drafted from the Dachau concentration camp. (He did desert the Army as the war was winding down in 1945.)

That he hailed from the town of Traunstein didn’t help his case.  Traunstein is described by Ratzinger biographer John L. Allen as “an over-populated lunatic asylum of hopeless inhabitants” due to its close proximity to a confluence of  ”anti-Semitic violence, displacement, deportation, death.”  The latter reference is no doubt due to its proximity to a WW1 internment camp where a young corporal named Adolph Hitler once served.

But let’s give Benedict/Ratzinger  the benefit of the doubt that he resisted, as best he could, the demands that the Nazis placed on him and his fellows. Let’s us turn now to a consideration of how those dramatic early life experiences formed his moral outlook. Austin Cline frames the issue accordingly:

It’s curious that one of the lessons which Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, draws from the experiences of German Catholics under the Nazis is that Catholics should become even more obedient to their ecclesiastical leaders rather than more free to adopt independent courses of action. Ratzinger believes that greater fidelity to Catholic doctrine, as defined by the Vatican, is necessary to counter movements like Nazism.

Case in point: the next volley in the right wing’s War Against Women is aimed at– wait for it– Catholic nuns.  Courtesy of Kaili Joy Gray from the Big Orange, citing an article from USA Today, we learn the following.

KAILI: The Catholic Church is sounding more and more like the Republican Party these days. And both are getting awfully sick of uppity sluts—including the President Slut-in-Chief Obama—and their concerns about such anti-Jesus things like health care and equality…

USA TODAY: The Vatican has launched a crackdown on the umbrella group that represents most of America’s 55,000 Catholic nuns, saying that the group was not speaking out strongly enough against gay marriage, abortion and women’s ordination.

Rome also chided the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) for sponsoring conferences that featured “a prevalence of certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” [...]

Many bishops were angered when LCWR and Network, along with the Catholic Health Association, endorsed President Obama’s health care reform over the bishops’ objections. LCWR and Network recently endorsed Obama’s compromise with the bishop over a mandate to provide insurance coverage for birth control for employees at religious institutions, even as the bishops continue to fight it[...]

I’ve no idea what they’re talking about [said Sister Simone Campbell, head of the organization]… Our role is to live the gospel with those who live on the margins of society. That’s all we do…

But Sister Campbell suggested a difficult time ahead [in dealing with their male inferiors superiors]:

It’s totally a top-down process and I don’t think the bishops have any idea of what they’re in for.

Funny, neither do we.

In honor of those nuns from the Immaculate Heart of Mary who did their best to educate me through eight trying years of primary education, including puberty, I say:

You go, Sisters. I’ve got your back.

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OVEN MITT

April, 19, 2012 15:15 pm · 0 comments

by T_P_K

Oven Mitt gets up-close and persuasive with another, far less-fortunate turkey.

LA JOLLA, CA — Three apparently poorly-vetted photos have the heat turned up in the Romney kitchen once again. The photos were distributed Wednesday by the Romney Campaign itself, explained spokesperson Bitsy Pestle, in an effort to re-frie Mitt Romney‘s flaccid ratings with America’s women after his recent attempts to introduce undignified welfare mothers to the “dignity of work“— outside their domiciles. Oh and yes, these are the “very poor” that Mitt Romney isn’t “worried about.”

A decidedly undignified candidate Oven Mitt makes breakfast at the “crack of dawn.”
Now we know where the you-grabbed-my-butt joke started.

As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, referring to young mothers, told a campaign crowd  “…Even if you have a child two years of age, you need to go to work.”  Romney wants female welfare recipients to experience the “dignity of work” by having an outside the home job in addition to the job of raising children, because parenting “does not give poor mothers ‘the dignity of work.”

Matt Yglesias at Slate:

“The phrase ‘the dignity of work’ is extremely condescending and ignores precisely the point the Romney camp was trying to make about Ann Romney—unpaid household work is still work and it’s still hard.”  

And when it suited him, as it did in 1994, Romney also pointed out that the world has changed since the 1960s: “Now mom and dad both have to work.” 

Indeed they do.  And he means mom has to work more, and specifically outside the home, if she wants real dignity.  Only, the “dignity of work” for these welfare “queens” as Reagan called them, in addition to raising children, will garner them just 77 cents on the dollar compared to men;  oh wait, that’s a different Romney gaff.

And that’s precisely why the photos of “Oven Mitt”— a term of endearment coined by one of his children after a particularly odiferous adventure on a Viking six-burner range— letting it all hang out in the kitchen have whipped up more tasty questions than they have answered.

Instantly dubbed the “Crack of Dawn Dignity” photo, hungry reporters wanted to know the whereabouts of Romney’s secret Mormon undergarments, and were quick to draw a parallel to the stereotyped image of woman as “naked, barefoot, and chained to the kitchen stove.”  A bleary-eyed, bare-assed Romney manned the stove as the sun rose, said spokesperson Pestle, not because “Oven Mitt” was suffering some kinky form of reverse discrimination, but because his alarm had not gone off before dawn, as it was just “his turn” to get up early and make Sunday breakfast for the Romney brood.

As the day wore on, it was Romney himself who shed more light upon the family’s too racy for prime time “dinner table event” banter:


“Dinner table event” pranks that can’t be repeated on the air??  Tell me more, man who lives for laughter…
•
A slightly uncoiffed, red-faced, and possibly teary-eyed Mitt has a spatula in a death grip and glares menacingly off-camera— Is this a Mitt-Fit after a prank gone bad?  Freewheeling Food Fight?  Seamus acting out?
Does anyone give a shit?
•
But it’s this photo that’s really got the press stewing in teh au jus— what in hell is happening there?  Nobody’s telling.  Yet.
The real question Americans want answered is not whether these antics will continue at their various dinner tables— the one at the big house with a car elevator in La Jolla, the two big ones in the Boston area, the ski lodge in Utah, and a couple of lakeside residences in New Hampshire.  It’s not whether Anne Romney actually takes care of all of them by herself, now that Mitt is running for office and “can’t have illegals.”  No, the real question is whether or not the “dinner table events” at a Romney White House will be filled with unrepeatable, undignified pranks.
If we’re really lucky, we will never have to find out.

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DEAD NUGENT

April, 18, 2012 11:39 am · 4 comments

by T_P_K

 “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”
—Ted Nugent

“If you gotta problem with Ted Nugent, you’re an IDIOT!”
—Ted Nugent

“With the Mao Zedong fan club in the White House, a clueless, rookie president hellbent on spending like a maniac as unprecedented debt piles up all around him, and every other imaginable indicator of an America turned upside-down, it comes as no surprise that this insane level of madness has metastasized into a Supreme Court where the Bill of Rights is being trashed by clueless, dangerously insulated old people intentionally disconnected from the real world, where the possession of a firearm often means the difference between life and death for good, innocent Americans every day of the year.”
—Ted Nugent

“Obama, he’s a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun.”
—Ted Nugent

“The war is coming to the streets of America and if you are not keeping and bearing and practicing with your arms then you will be helpless and you will be the victim of evil.”
—Ted Nugent

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Penguin Survives Biting The Newt!

April, 16, 2012 10:53 am · 0 comments

by Propagandee

We’ve always known that there was something fishy about The Newtster. So we weren’t surprised to hear that a penguin at the St. Louis Zoo took a bite out of him over the weekend. Fortunately for the little water fowl, she was current on all her shots and is expected to survive her bout with reverse rabies.

MSNBC’s First Read has the scoop:

“GREENSBORO, N.C. – The day after Newt Gingrich was bit by a penguin at a zoo, he acknowledged he is “the underdog” and said his campaign began renting their donor list because they needed money…

Following a tour of the NASCAR museum, Gingrich said he spoke with Santorum in St. Louis, Mo. but only briefly. (This was the same day the Speaker visited the St. Louis Zoo, was nipped by a penguin and met a tiger named Callista – just like his wife, he joked to reporters.)

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.

[Image found here.]

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McConnell In Wonderland: Episode Two

April, 12, 2012 15:26 pm · 0 comments

by Propagandee

The question is,” said Mitch McDumpty, “which is is to be master—that’s all.

Most of this year’s election coverage has been focused on the GOP presidential primaries. Now that The Frothy One has dropped out, making Willard Romney the presumptive nominee, the media will move its focus on the general election and the battle between him and President Obama.

But it may be control of the Senate that will determine the course the country takes beyond the next four year term of the presidency. Nothing that passes in the House has a chance of becoming law without the Senate’s approval. And the Senate’s effective veto power over judicial nominees at both the district and supreme court levels constrains any president’s choice in making the third branch of government reflective of his own judicial philosophy.

Ergo, pronouncements from the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, must be given due consideration. In our original post on the subject, McConnell In Wonderland, we likened his denial of the GOP’s War On Women to a hallucination worthy of Lewis Carroll’s hookah smoking caterpillar. We concluded with a preview, casting “McCatterpillar” in a new Wonderland role, that of Humpty Dumpty, or Mitch McDumpty, if you will. We quoted the Carroll character as follows:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.”

Just whom “is to be master”  is the primary goal of the GOP and the billionaires who love and finance them, the rest of the country be damned. This was made perfectly clear in the infamous interview by author Ron Suskind of someone described as “a senior Bush official aide”, widely believed to be Karl Rove:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,”  which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.“[2]

– October 17, 2004, The New York Times Magazine

Six years later, on the eve of the 2010 election,  Mitch McDumpty seconded the emotion, announcing that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Again, the rest of the country be damned. Every rise in the unemployment number, every home foreclosure, every set-back in the economy was cheered as proof that the Obama Administration was an abject failure; that only the GOP  (the very people who did so much to crash the economy) was capable of restoring it.

With the country’s largest cable network, Fux News,  and the 90% of the talk radio market dominated by right wing radicals like Rush Limbaugh weaving an ant-Obama narrative 24/7, the danger to the Rethugs is that they are starting to believe their own fictions. They’ve been smelling their own toxic emissions for so long  they think they’re perfume.

Take their attitude towards legislation designed to limit women’s access to preventative healthcare. Over 1100 bills have been presented  or passed in various state legislatures, including the US Congress, over the last two years. The spin meisters reject the conclusion that this amounts to a War on Women. Instead, they are attempting to reframe the issue as an economic one; that women are more concerned about economic issues than they are their own health and freedom to determine just when, where, and how they exercise their reproductive options. A false dichotomy if ever there was one.

Their desperate attempt to reframe the issue in way that supports their overarching campaign narrative of superior economic leadership is risible on its face. The Rethugs opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 in droves; only three House and five Senate Republicans voted in favor, including Alan Spector, who switched parties shortly thereafter.  And it was less than a week ago that Wisconsin Governor, Scott Walker, repealed the state’s 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act.

Perhaps it is because we have become so accustomed to their  false dichotomies and framing fictions that the Rethugs have taken the next logical step, outright lying. Consider the following article from

Kentucky Dem Broadsides Mitch McConnell For ‘Dishonesty’ On Obamacare

[...]

Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY) laid in to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a letter delivered last week for misleading their mutual constituents about the facts and benefits of President Obama’s health care law.

And in a follow-up interview, Yarmuth again attacked McConnell, his former ally, for putting partisan politics before representing the people of his state.

“I’ve known Mitch for 40 years,” said Yarmuth. “We were political allies at one point. I was a Republican ‘til 1985. In recent years, as I’ve said publicly before, he has a considerable knack for being scrupulously accurate and rarely honest.”

In this instance Yarmuth is referring to an op-ed McConnell wrote in the Louisville Courier-Journal. In his letter, Yarmuth calls into question five claims McConnell made in the op-ed. And he wants McConnell to address his concerns.

[...]

“He’s just become such a total reflexive partisan politician, he’s playing a different role, and it’s not necessarily being a senator from Kentucky,” Yarmuth said. “He’s become totally detached from any obligation to be remotely fair and honest.”

Color me shocked. As The Urantia Book says:

 It sounds well always to claim success, but the end results are appalling. Such a technique leads directly to the creation of a world of unreality and to the inevitable crash of ultimate disillusionment.

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Enter The Willard

April, 11, 2012 17:22 pm · 0 comments

by T_P_K

Oh yezz.  The Severely CONservative Gover-nerd.  

And when I think no way will the American people ever vote for this weaselly, transparent power whore, I remember that enough of them voted to enable the severely conservative SCOTUS to hand us eight disastrous years of George Walker fucking Bush.  Well hold on. You won’t want to miss this bloody clusterphuque.

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McConnell In Wonderland

April, 10, 2012 9:41 am · 0 comments

by Propagandee

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

Who are YOU?’ said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I–I hardly know, sir, just at present– at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’  

– Lewis Carroll,  Alice in Wonderland

Mitch McCaterpillar must be hitting his hookah a bit hard of late.

How else to explain his hallucination that  the GOP’s War on Women is no more real than their War on Caterpillars, citing as proof positions taken by three prominent women senators in his own caucus?  (Ugh– can I have a re-write on that last phrase, please?)

Think Progress reports:

Confused McConnell Thinks Female GOP Senators Agree With Him That There Is No ‘War On Women’

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is either confused about what’s going on in his caucus, or in denial.

On a local Kentucky radio show today, the Senate minority leader argued that the female members in his caucus agree with him that the GOP’s “war on women” is just “a manufactured issue”:

MCCONNELL: There is no issue. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe from Maine I think would be the first to say — and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska — ‘we don’t see any evidence of this.’

Except that they do. Three of the four women McConnell names have already come out against the GOP’s war on women — Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).

In fact, Murkowski specifically pushed back on claims like McConnell’s, saying, “If you don’t feel this is an attack, you need to go home and talk to your wife and your daughters.” Maybe McConnell should take her advice.

Don’t bet on it.  McCaterpillar and his party have fallen so far down the rabbit hole that they’re losing  track of reality, of where their “manufactured issues”  begin and end.

—

In the next episode of  McConnell in Wonderland,  Mitch will take on the role of Humpty Dumpty. A preview:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – - that’s all.”

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Burial And Resurrection On The World Of The Cross

April, 8, 2012 6:06 am · 1 comment

by Michael Hart

All five of the women then sat down on the stone near the entrance and talked over the situation. It had not yet occurred to them that Jesus had been resurrected. They had been by themselves over the Sabbath, and they conjectured that the body had been moved to another resting place.  But when they pondered such a solution of their dilemma, they were at a loss to account for the orderly arrangement of the grave cloths; how could the body have been removed since the very bandages in which it was wrapped were left in position and apparently intact on the burial shelf ?


One of the most inspiring accounts in The Urantia Papers is the detailed explanation of what actually occurred in the final days of Jesus of Nazareth;  especially the events in, and around his burial tomb on Good Friday, and beyond.  The Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus has been based on the fact of the “empty tomb.”  But this is not the truth of the resurrection.  Anyone who has sought understanding of the empty tomb and Christianity’s subsequent attempts to explain it, will find great comfort in reading the full account.  We hope to whet your appetite for the adventure with the following excerpts.

The Jews did not really bury their dead; they actually embalmed them. Joseph and Nicodemus had brought with them large quantities of myrrh and aloes, and they now wrapped the body with bandages[¹] saturated with these solutions. When the embalming was completed, they tied a napkin about the face, wrapped the body in a linen sheet, and reverently placed it on a shelf in the tomb.

After placing the body in the tomb, the centurion signaled for his soldiers to help roll the doorstone up before the entrance to the tomb. The soldiers then departed for Gehenna with the bodies of the thieves while the others returned to Jerusalem, in sorrow, to observe the Passover feast according to the laws of Moses.

There was considerable hurry and haste about the burial of Jesus because this was preparation day and the Sabbath was drawing on apace. The men hurried back to the city, but the women lingered near the tomb until it was very dark.

While all this was going on, the women were hiding near at hand so that they saw it all and observed where the Master had been laid. They thus secreted themselves because it was not permissible for women to associate with men at such a time. These women did not think Jesus had been properly prepared for burial, and they agreed among themselves to go back to the home of Joseph, rest over the Sabbath, make ready spices and ointments, and return on Sunday morning properly to prepare the Master’s body for the death rest. The women who thus tarried by the tomb on this Friday evening were: Mary Magdalene, Mary the wife of Clopas, Martha another sister of Jesus’ mother, and Rebecca of Sepphoris.

Aside from David Zebedee and Joseph of Arimathea, very few of Jesus’ disciples really believed or understood that he was due to arise from the tomb on the third day.

. . .

At two forty-five Sunday morning, the Paradise incarnation commission, consisting of seven unidentified Paradise personalities, arrived on the scene and immediately deployed themselves about the tomb. At ten minutes before three, intense vibrations of commingled material and morontia³ activities began to issue from Joseph’s new tomb, and at two minutes past three o’clock, this Sunday morning, April 9, A.D. 30, the resurrected morontia form and personality of Jesus of Nazareth came forth from the tomb.

After the resurrected Jesus emerged from his burial tomb, the body of flesh in which he had lived and wrought on earth for almost thirty-six years was still lying there in the sepulchre niche, undisturbed and wrapped in the linen sheet, just as it had been laid to rest by Joseph and his associates on Friday afternoon. Neither was the stone before the entrance of the tomb in any way disturbed; the seal of Pilate was still unbroken; the soldiers were still on guard. The temple guards had been on continuous duty; the Roman guard had been changed at midnight. None of these watchers suspected that the object of their vigil had risen to a new and higher form of existence, and that the body which they were guarding was now a discarded outer covering which had no further connection with the delivered and resurrected morontia personality of Jesus.

Mankind is slow to perceive that, in all that is personal, matter is the skeleton of morontia, and that both are the reflected shadow of enduring spirit reality.  How long before you will regard time as the moving image of eternity and space as the fleeting shadow of Paradise realities?

As far as we can judge, no creature of this universe nor any personality from another universe had anything to do with this morontia resurrection of Jesus ofNazareth. On Friday he laid down his life as a mortal of the realm; on Sunday morning he took it up again as a morontia being of the system of Satania in Norlatiadek. There is much about the resurrection of Jesus which we do not understand. But we know that it occurred as we have stated and at about the time indicated. We can also record that all known phenomena associated with this mortal transit, or morontia resurrection, occurred right there in Joseph’s new tomb, where the mortal material remains of Jesus lay wrapped in burial cloths.

We know that no creature of the local universe participated in this morontia awakening. We perceived the seven personalities of Paradise surround the tomb, but we did not see them do anything in connection with the Master’s awakening.  Just as soon as Jesus appeared beside Gabriel, just above the tomb, the seven personalities from Paradise signalized their intention of immediate departure for Uversa.
Let us forever clarify the concept of the resurrection of Jesus by making the following statements:

1. His material or physical body was not a part of the resurrected personality.  When Jesus came forth from the tomb, his body of flesh remained undisturbed  in the sepulchre. He emerged from the burial tomb without moving the stones before the entrance and without disturbing the seals of Pilate.

2. He did not emerge from the tomb as a spirit nor as Michael of Nebadon;  he did not appear in the form of the Creator Sovereign, such as he had had before his incarnation in the likeness of mortal flesh on Urantia.

3. He did come forth from this tomb of Joseph in the very likeness of the morontia personalities of those who, as resurrected morontia ascendant beings, emerge from the resurrection halls of the first mansion world of this local system of Satania. And the presence of the Michael memorial in the center of the vast court of the resurrection halls of mansonia number one leads us to conjecture that the Master’s resurrection on Urantia was in some way fostered on this, the first of the system mansion worlds.

The first act of Jesus on arising from the tomb was to greet Gabriel and instruct him to continue in executive charge of universe affairs under Immanuel, and then he directed the chief of the Melchizedeks to convey his brotherly greetings to Immanuel. He thereupon asked the Most High of Edentia for the certification of the Ancients of Days as to his mortal transit; and turning to the assembled morontia groups of the seven mansion worlds, here gathered together to greet and welcome their Creator as a creature of their order, Jesus spoke the first words of the postmortal career. Said the morontia Jesus: “Having finished my life in the flesh, I would tarry here for a short time in transition form that I may more fully know the life of my ascendant creatures and further reveal the will of my Father in Paradise.”

After Jesus had spoken, he signaled to the Personalized Adjuster, and all universe intelligences who had been assembled on Urantia to witness the resurrection were immediately dispatched to their respective universe assignments. Jesus now began the contacts of the morontia level, being introduced, as a creature, to the requirements of the life he had chosen to live for a short time on Urantia. This initiation into the morontia world required more than an hour of earth time and was twice interrupted by his desire to communicate with his former associates in the flesh as they came out from Jerusalem wonderingly to peer into the empty tomb to discover what they considered evidence of his resurrection.

Now is the mortal transit of Jesus— the morontia resurrection of the Son of Man–completed. The transitory experience of the Master as a personality midway between the material and the spiritual has begun. And he has done all this through power inherent within himself; no personality has rendered him any assistance. He now lives as Jesus of morontia, and as he begins this morontia life, the material body of his flesh lies there undisturbed in the tomb. The soldiers are still on guard, and the seal of the governor about the rocks has not yet been broken.

THE MATERIAL BODY OF JESUS
At ten minutes past three o’clock, as the resurrected Jesus fraternized with the assembled morontia personalities from the seven mansion worlds of Satania, the chief of archangels the angels of the resurrection approached Gabriel and asked for the mortal body of Jesus. Said the chief of the archangels: “We may not participate in the morontia resurrection of the bestowal experience of Michael our sovereign, but we would have his mortal remains put in our custody for immediate  dissolution. We do not propose to employ our technique of dematerialization; we merely wish to invoke the process of accelerated time. It is enough that we have seen the Sovereign live and die on Urantia; the hosts of heaven would be spared the memory of enduring the sight of the slow decay of the human form of the Creator and Upholder of a universe. In the name of the celestial  intelligences of all Nebadon, I ask for a mandate giving me the custody of the mortal body of Jesus of Nazareth and empowering us to proceed with its immediate dissolution.”

And when Gabriel had conferred with the senior Most High of Edentia, the archangel spokesman for the celestial hosts was given permission to make such disposition of the physical remains of Jesus as he might determine.  After the chief of archangels had been granted this request, he summoned to his assistance many of his fellows, together with a numerous host of the representatives of all orders of celestial personalities, and then, with the aid of the Urantia midwayers, proceeded to take possession of Jesus’ physical body.

This body of death was a purely material creation; it was physical and literal;  it could not be removed from the tomb as the morontia form of the resurrection had been able to escape the sealed sepulchre. By the aid of certain morontia auxiliary personalities, the morontia form can be made at one time as of the spirit so that it can become indifferent to ordinary matter, while at another time it can become discernible and contactable to material beings, such as the mortals of the realm.

As they made ready to remove the body of Jesus from the tomb preparatory to according it the dignified and reverent disposal of near-instantaneous dissolution, it was assigned the secondary Urantia midwayers to roll away the stones from the entrance of the tomb. The larger of these two stones was a huge circular affair, much like a millstone, and it moved in a groove chiseled out of the rock, so that it could be rolled back and forth to open or close the tomb. When the watching Jewish guards and the Roman soldiers, in the dim light of the morning, saw this huge stone begin to roll away from the entrance of the tomb, apparently of its own accord–without any visible means to account for such motion— they were seized with fear and panic, and they fled in haste from the scene. The Jews fled to their homes, afterward going back to report these doings to their captain at the temple.  The Romans fled to the fortress of Antonia and reported what they had seen to the centurion as soon as he arrived on duty.

The Jewish leaders began the sordid business of supposedly getting rid of Jesus by offering bribes to the traitorous Judas, and now, when confronted with this embarrassing situation, instead of thinking of punishing the guards who deserted their post, they resorted to bribing these guards and the Roman soldiers.

They paid each of these twenty men a sum of money and instructed them to say to all: “While we slept during the nighttime, his disciples came upon us and took away the body.” And the Jewish leaders made solemn promises to the soldiers to defend them before Pilate in case it should ever come to the governor’s knowledge that they had accepted a bribe.

The Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus has been based on the fact of the “empty tomb.” It was indeed a fact that the tomb was empty, but this is not the truth of the resurrection. The tomb was truly empty when the first believers arrived, and this fact, associated with that of the undoubted resurrection of the Master, led to the formulation of a belief which was not true: the teaching that the material and mortal body of Jesus was raised from the grave. Truth having to do with spiritual realities and eternal values cannot always be built up by a combination of apparent facts. Although individual facts may be materially true, it does not follow that the association of a group of facts must necessarily lead to truthful spiritual conclusions.

The tomb of Joseph was empty, not because the body of Jesus had been rehabilitated or resurrected, but because the celestial hosts had been granted their request to afford it a special and unique dissolution, a return of the “dust to dust,” without the intervention of the delays of time and without the operation of the ordinary and visible processes of mortal decay and material corruption.

The mortal remains of Jesus underwent the same natural process of elemental disintegration as characterizes all human bodies on earth except that, in point of time, this natural mode of dissolution was greatly accelerated, hastened to that point where it became well-nigh instantaneous.

The true evidences of the resurrection of Michael are spiritual in nature, albeit this teaching is corroborated by the testimony of many mortals of the realm who met, recognized, and communed with the resurrected morontia Master. He became a part of the personal experience of almost one thousand human beings before he finally took leave of Urantia.

We are not able fully to explain just what happened to Jesus of Nazareth during this period of a day and a half when he was supposed to be resting in Joseph’s new tomb.  Apparently he died the same natural death on the cross as would any other mortal in the same circumstances.  We heard him say, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”  We do not fully understand the meaning of such a statement inasmuch as his Thought Adjuster² had long since been personalized and so maintained an existence apart from Jesus’ mortal being.

. . .
In the vast court of the resurrection halls of the first mansion world of Satania, there may now be observed a magnificent material-morontia structure known as the “Michael Memorial,” now bearing the seal of Gabriel. This memorial was created shortly after Michael departed from this world, and it bears this inscription: “In commemoration of the mortal transit of Jesus of Nazareth on Urantia.”
And there is much other evidence which suggests that not all of the personality of Jesus was asleep and unconscious during this time of apparent physical death.

Ernest students of The Urantia Papers quickly learn that we mortals are but taking the first step on the eternal journey, and that we must advance a long way before we will progress by “sight” and “material” assurance;  for worlds to come we will be dependent upon faith and revelation in dealing with the many mysteries that stretch out before us now, and remain to be discovered in the eternal future.  On this day of celebration of one of the greatest of those mysteries, we wish you a foretaste of the joy which passes all understanding.

•  •  •

¹Greek othonion (diminutive of othone) refers to a linen cloth or bandage used in preparing a corpse for burial (John 19:40; 20:5-7).

According to biblical and shroud scholar Kim Dreisbach:  In Jn. 19:40, the Fourth Gospeller uses the word othonia [Gk.] (plural) to describe the linen cloths used in the Burial. Othonia, a word of uncertain meaning, but probably best translated as a generic plural for grave clothes. The same word is used by Luke or his scribe in Lk.24:12 what had previously been described as the sindon in Lk. 23:53. Note: vs. l2 (But Peter rose and ran to the tomb, stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths (plural) by themselves; and he went home wondering what happened.) does not appear in the most ancient manuscripts, but is added by later ancient authorities.

²The Thought Adjuster is a term The Urantia Papers use to describe the Indwelling Spirit of God in man:

It is a mystery that God is a highly personal self-conscious being with residential headquarters, and at the same time personally present in such a vast universe and personally in contact with such a well-nigh infinite number of beings.  That such a phenomenon is a mystery beyond human comprehension should not in the least lessen your faith.  Do not allow the magnitude of the infinity, the immensity of the eternity, and the grandeur and glory of the matchless character of God to overawe, stagger, or discourage you;  for the Father is not very far from any one of you;  he dwells within you, and in him do we all literally move, actually live, and veritably have our being.

³ The term “morontia” is unique to The Urantia Papers, referring to universe reality between the material and the spiritual. It may refer to ascendant mortal creatures or the transition worlds immediately following the material life in the flesh.

 

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The Crucifixion Of Jesus Christ

April, 6, 2012 14:07 pm · 2 comments

by T_P_K

NOTE: “Urantians”— people who have read, and believe The Urantia Book— are aware of the actual date of the Crucifixion as Friday, April 7, 30 A.D.  Historians too, are largely in agreement that the crucifixion of Jesus probably occurred on Nisan 14, (April 7), according to the Gospel of John.  The Urantia Book reveals unprecedented detail of the events which unfolded during those momentous days, giving amazing new depth and dimension to the timeless story of how our backward planet dealt death to the Creator of our Universe.


JESUS ARRESTED IN GETHSEMANE PARK
Things began unfolding around eleven PM at Gethsemane Park where Jesus had been praying with three of his apostles, when Judas Iscariot lead a group of an estimated sixty persons with torches and lanterns into the garden.   The group included a contingent of Roman soldiers under orders of Procurator Pontius Pilate from the fortress of Antonia.  Iscariot was “well out in front” of the soldiers;  we are informed Iscariot was in the process of betraying Jesus, and this distance was intended to give the impression to his recently deserted fellow-followers that he was not connected with the armed guards which followed so closely on his heels.

Sources close to Jesus have confirmed that as recently as March 29th he had again pronounced to his apostles that he was completely aware of plans to deliver him into the hands of the chief priests and religious rulers, who would in turn deliver him into the hands of the gentiles, who would then “deliver him up to death.”

It had been widely reported for several weeks the Sadducees, who control and dominate the Sanhedrin, have publicly dared to condemn Jesus in advance of a trial, and Herod is said to have become so frightened by the confirmed resurrection of Lazarus that he intended to kill Jesus, or at the very least drive him from the territory.

Betrayed by a kissWould you even betray the Son of Man with a kiss?

As Iscariot approached Jesus, the prophet stepped aside and addressed the approaching captain of the Roman guards saying, “Whom do you seek?” The captain answered, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus calmly stepped directly in front of the officer saying, “I am he.”  The front ranks fell suddenly backward, overcome with surprise at his boldness.

As the guards rallied from their initial faltering, Judas stepped up to Jesus and, kissing the prophet on the brow, said, “Hail Master and Teacher.” Jesus said, “Friend, is it not enough to do this!  Would you even betray the Son of Man with a kiss?”   Jesus then repeated his question to the Roman captain, got the same answer, and said, “I have told you that I am he.  If, therefore, you seek me, let these others go their way.  I am ready to go with you.”

Before they could depart, however, the Syrian bodyguard of the high priest, Malchus, attempted to bind Jesus’ hands behind his back, which caused the associates of Jesus to immediately rush forward with at least one sword drawn.

But even before the soldiers could come to the defense of the high priest’s servant, Jesus raised a forbidding hand and, speaking sternly, said: “Peter, put up your sword.  They who take the sword shall perish by the sword.  Do you not understand that it is the Father’s will that I drink this cup?  And do you not further know that I could even now command more than twelve legions of angels and their associates, who would deliver me from the hands of these few men?”

By this time the captain was extremely alarmed, and immediately had Jesus bound and gave orders that the others should be seized too— but they slipped into the surrounding darkness and eluded their captors.  Jesus was then taken to the home of Annas, the former high priest, and father-in-law of Caiaphas, the acting high priest.

AT THE PALACE OF ANNAS
Roman law allows that any prisoner may have at least one friend to stand with him before the judgment bar, and John Zebedee was selected to stand with Jesus.  The Roman captain said, “Go along with this prisoner and see that these Jews do not kill him without Pilate’s consent.  Watch that they do not assassinate him, and see that his friend, the Galilean, is permitted to stand by and observe all that goes on.”

The reason for detaining Jesus for several hours at the palace of Annas was to allow time for legally calling together the Sanhedrin court, as it is not lawful to convene the Sanhedrin court before the time of the three o’clock offering of the morning sacrifice in the temple.  Murdering a prophet?  The Son of God?  Well. That’s another matter.

2007-03-02t22_43_43-08_00.jpgCaiaphas, the acting high priest, gets in Jesus’ face.

Jesus was detained about three hours at the Mount Olivet palace of Annas, which is but a short distance from Gethsemane Park. Annas had Jesus brought before him in his spacious audience chamber, where he spent several minutes trying to get Jesus to respond to his questions, when, quite visibly disturbed by his silence, said, “Do you have no care as to whether I am friendly to you or not? Do you have no regard for the power I have in determining the issues of your coming trial?” When Jesus heard this, he said:  “Annas, you know that you could have no power over me unless it were permitted by my Father. Some would destroy the Son of Man because they are ignorant;  they know no better, but you, friend, know what you are doing.  How can you, therefore, reject the light of God?”

Annas appeared bewildered by the kindly manner in which Jesus spoke to him.  He asked: “Just what is it you are trying to teach the people?  What do you claim to be?” Jesus answered: “You know full well that I have spoken openly to the world.  I have taught in the synagogues and many times in the temple, where all the Jews and many of the gentiles have heard me. In secret I have spoken nothing; why, then, do you ask me about my teaching?  Why do you not summon those who have heard me and inquire of them?  Behold, all Jerusalem has heard that which I have spoken even if you have not yourself heard these teachings.”

But before Annas could make reply, his chief steward, who was standing near, struck Jesus in the face with his hand, saying, “How dare you answer the high priest with such words?”  Annas said nothing to his steward, but Jesus said, “My friend, if I have spoken evil, bear witness against the evil;  but if I have spoken the truth, why, then, should you smite me?”

Annas appeared too proud to take notice of the matter, but in his confusion went into another room, leaving Jesus alone with the household attendants and the temple guards for almost an hour.  Since it was nearing the break of day, Annas sent Jesus bound and in the custody of the temple guards to Caiaphas, and followed after them shortly.

A PARADE OF PERJURERS
About half past three o’clock this morning the chief priest, Caiaphas, called the Sanhedrist court of inquiry to order, a special trial court of some thirty Sanhedrists, convened in the palace of the high priest. John Zebedee was still present with Jesus throughout this so-called trial.  Jesus appeared clothed in his usual garments, and with his hands still bound behind his back. The entire court appeared startled and somewhat confused by his majestic appearance; never had they witnessed such composure in a man on trial for his life.

More than twenty witnesses were on hand to testify against Jesus, but their testimony was so contradictory, and so evidently trumped up that even the Sanhedrists themselves appeared very much ashamed of the performance.  Jesus stood looking down benignly upon one perjurer after another, but throughout all this false testimony he never said a word.

Finally the high priest shouted at Jesus, “Do you not answer any of these charges!?” But he did not respond.

Annas then rose and argued that the threat of Jesus to destroy the temple was sufficient to warrant the charges against him, but Caiaphas apparently could not longer endure the sight of the teacher standing there in perfect composure and unbroken silence, and rushed over to the side of Jesus and, shaking his accusing finger in his face, said:

Caiaphas

“I adjure you, in the name of the living God, that you tell us whether you are the Deliverer, the Son of God!” Jesus answered: “I am. Soon I go to the Father, and presently shall the Son of Man be clothed with power and once more reign over the hosts of heaven.”

“I adjure you, in the name of the living God, that you tell us whether you are the Deliverer, the Son of God!” Jesus answered:  “I am.  Soon I go to the Father, and presently shall the Son of Man be clothed with power and once more reign over the hosts of heaven.”

Caiaphas was exceedingly angry, and rending his outer garments, exclaimed:  “What further need have we of witnesses?  Behold, now have you all heard this man’s blasphemy.  What do you now think should be done with this law-breaker and blasphemer?”  And they all answered in unison,  “He is worthy of death;  let him be crucified!”

The high priest then stepped forward and smote Jesus in the face with his hand.  Observers were shocked as the other members of the court, in passing out of the room, spit in Jesus’ face, and many of them mockingly slapped him with the palms of their hands. And thus in disorder and unheard-of confusion this first session of the trial of Jesus ended at half past four o’clock.

Jewish law requires that, in the matter of passing the death sentence, there are two sessions of the court, the second session to be held the day following the first, and the intervening time spent in fasting and mourning by the members of the court.

But these men did not await another day for the confirmation of their decision that Jesus must die.  They waited only one hour. Jesus was left in the custody of the temple guards, who, with the servants of the high priest, amused themselves by heaping every sort of indignity upon their prisoner. They mocked him, and spit upon him;  they would strike him in the face with a rod and say, “Prophesy to us, you the Deliverer, who it was that struck you.”  And this went on for a full hour, against the unresisting man of Galilee.

During this hour before the ignorant guards and servants, John Zebedee waited in an adjoining room.  When these abuses first started, Jesus indicated by a nod of his head that his apostle should leave.  The prophet knew that if his apostle were to witness these indignities, his resentment would result in his death.

Throughout this awful hour Jesus uttered no word.

THE WAY TO CALVARY
The second session convened at five-thirty this morning, and a half-hour later, Jesus was indicted as a perverter of the Jewish nation, that he taught the people to refuse to pay tribute to Caesar, and he claimed to be a king who incited treason against the emperor.  This procedure was of course, wholly contrary to the their laws, as no two witnesses had agreed on any matter save the destruction of the temple and raising it again in three days;  even then, no witnesses spoke for the defense, and Jesus was never asked to explain his intended meaning.  By six AM, Jesus was on his way to appear before Pilate.

Pontius Pilate was up and ready to receive these early morning callers, having been informed the previous evening that Jesus would be brought before him early. The trial was to take place in front of the praetorium, an addition to the fortress of Antonia, where Pilate and his wife stayed when in Jerusalem.

All Jerusalem knows Pilate is a coward, but the events of this morning will probably lead to the undoing of his tenuous relationship with the Sanhedrin.  There was his earlier run-ins with the high priests over the use by Pilate of temple funds for a new aqueduct to provide more water for the millions of visitors to Jerusalem during the great religious feasts, and the removal of images on the Roman military banners where Pilate had his legs taken out from under him by Rome.

Pilate knew the priests had been up all night trying to convict Jesus of something, but when he surmised that the charges had to do with infringements of the Jewish ecclesiastical laws, he referred the case back to their own tribunal.  Pilate appeared to take great delight in making the priests publicly confess that they were powerless to pronounce and execute the death sentence upon one of their own race.

When they finally produced the written charges, (1, Perverting our nation and stirring up our people to rebellion, 2, Forbidding the people to pay tribute to Caesar, and 3, Calling himself the king of the Jews, and teaching the founding of a new
kingdom), Pilate insisted that they be read before Jesus, who had not yet heard them.

Jesus still made no reply.  Even when Pilate offered him a chance to answer his accusers, he remained silent.  Pilate was so astonished at the unfairness of the whole proceeding and so impressed by Jesus’ silent and masterly bearing, that he decided to take the prisoner inside the hall and examine him privately.

Pilate’s questioning of the Galilean prophet was sufficient to convince him that the prisoner had done nothing worthy of death.  One look at Jesus, face to face, was apparently enough to convince even Pilate that this gentle and weary, but majestic and upright man was no wild and dangerous revolutionary who aspired to establish himself on the temporal throne of Israel.  Pilate was thoroughly convinced that, instead of being a dangerous sedition monger, Jesus was nothing more or less than a harmless visionary, an innocent fanatic.

Pilate flails. . .Pontius Pilate:  . . .nothing worthy of death has been done by this man.  If you still think he needs to be disciplined, I am willing to chastise him before I release him.”

Pilate returned to the chief priests and said, “I have examined this man, and I find no fault in him. I do not think he is guilty of the charges you have made against him; I think he ought to be set free.”  When the Jews heard this, they were moved with great anger, so much so that they wildly shouted that Jesus should die;  and one of the Sanhedrists boldly stepped up by the side of Pilate, saying: “This man stirs up the people, beginning in Galilee and continuing throughout all Judea. He is a mischief-maker and an evildoer.  You will long regret it if you let this wicked man go free.”

Pilate thought he had at least a temporary solution:  send the prisoner to Herod!  And Jesus was dragged off to stand before Herod.  For some fifteen minutes Herod asked Jesus questions, but he would not answer.  Herod taunted and dared him to perform a miracle, but Jesus made no reply to his many inquiries or taunts.

Then Herod turned to the chief priests and the Sadducees and heard all and more than Pilate had listened to regarding the alleged evil doings of Jesus.  Finally, convinced Jesus would not perform a wonder for him, Herod, after making fun of him for a time, arrayed him in an old purple royal robe, and sent him back to Pilate.

On the steps of the praetorium, Pilate, sitting in his judgment seat, said, “You brought this man before me with charges that he perverts the people, forbids the payment of taxes, and claims to be king of the Jews. I have examined him and fail to find him guilty of these charges. In fact, I find no fault in him. Then I sent him to Herod, and the tetrarch must have reached the same conclusion since he has sent him back to us. Certainly, nothing worthy of death has been done by this man. If you still think he needs to be disciplined, I am willing to chastise him before I release him.”

At this moment, a vast crowd came marching up to the praetorium, for the purpose of asking Pilate for the release of a prisoner in honor of the Passover feast. The crowd surged up on the steps of the building, calling out the name of one Barabbas. Barabbas is a known political agitator and murderous robber despite being the son of a priest, who was recently apprehended in the act of robbery and murder on the Jericho road, and is under sentence to die as soon as the Passover festivities are over.

We note that a few days before, this multitude had stood in awe of Jesus.  But such a mob does not look up to one who, having claimed to be the Son of God, now finds himself in the custody of the chief priests and the rulers and on trial before Pilate for his life.  Jesus could be a hero in the eyes of the populace when he was driving the money-changers and the traders out of the temple, but not when he is a nonresisting prisoner in the hands of his enemies, and on trial for his life.

Pilate remonstrates“How could you choose the life of a murderer in preference to this man’s, whose worst crime is that he figuratively calls himself the king of the Jews?”

Pilate was visibly angered at the sight of the chief priests clamoring for the pardon of a notorious murderer while they shouted for the blood of Jesus. He could see their malice and hatred and perceived their prejudice and envy. Then he said: “How could you choose the life of a murderer in preference to this man’s, whose worst crime is that he figuratively calls himself the king of the Jews?”

Pilate is clueless about how deeply the priests resent the intimation that the meek-mannered teacher of strange doctrines should be referred to as “the king of the Jews.”  But how could he not know such a remark was an insult to everything they hold sacred and honorable in their national existence?

Pilate paused a moment to read a communication he had just received, a note from his wife, Claudia, beseeching him “to have nothing to do with the man called Jesus.”  According to onlookers, Pilate appeared shaken and grew pale, and asked the crowd, now thoroughly organized for Barabbas, “What shall I do with him who is called the king of the Jews?” They all shouted with one accord, “Crucify him!  Crucify him!”

Once more Pilate said:  “Why would you crucify this man?  What evil has he done?  Who will come forward to testify against him?”  But when they heard Pilate speak in defense of Jesus, they only cried out all the more, “Crucify him!  Crucify him!”

But again Pilate appealed to them regarding the release of the Passover prisoner, saying:  “Once more I ask you, which of these prisoners shall I release to you at this, your Passover time?”  And again the crowd shouted, “Give us Barabbas!”

Then Pilate said: “If I release the murderer, Barabbas, what shall I do with Jesus?”  And once more the multitude shouted in unison, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Obviously now afraid to defy the clamor of the mob who cried for the blood of Jesus, he ordered the Jewish guards and the Roman soldiers to take Jesus and scourge him.

Ecce Homo“Behold the man!

Then Pilate led forth the bleeding and lacerated prisoner, clothed in a old purple royal robe with a crown of thorns piercing his brow and, presenting him before the multitude, said: “Behold the man! Again I declare to you that I find no crime in him, and having scourged him, I would release him.”

The crowd, quickly recovering from the first shock of seeing his plight, only shouted the louder and the longer, “Crucify him! Crucify him! Crucify him!” It was finally sinking in that it was futile to appeal to their supposed feelings of pity.  Pilate stepped forward and said:  “I perceive that you are determined this man shall die— but what has he done to deserve death?  Who will declare his crime?”

Then the high priest himself stepped forward and, going up to Pilate, angrily declared: “We have a sacred law, and by that law this man ought to die because he made himself out to be the Son of God.” When Pilate heard this, he seemed visibly afraid and trembled at the thought of Jesus possibly being a divine personage.  He waved to the crowd to hold its peace while he took Jesus by the arm and again led him inside the building to further examine him. Pilate was now so confused by fear, bewildered by superstition, and harassed by the stubborn attitude of the mob, that he knew not what to do.

But apparently his last talk with Jesus really frightened him. He appeared again before the crowd, saying: “I am certain this man is only a religious offender. You should take him and judge him by your law. Why should you expect that I would consent to his death because he has clashed with your traditions?”

Pilate appeared ready to release Jesus when Caiaphas approached and, shaking an avenging finger in Pilate’s face, said with angry words which the entire multitude could hear: “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend, and I will see that the emperor knows all.” This public threat was way too much for Pilate. Fear for his personal fortunes now eclipsed all other considerations, and the cowardly governor ordered Jesus brought out before the judgment seat.

As the Master stood there before them, he pointed to him and tauntingly said, “Behold your king.”

The Mob
“His blood be on us and on our children.”

And the Jews answered, “Away with him. Crucify him!”

And then Pilate said, with much irony and sarcasm, “Shall I crucify your king?”

And the Jews answered, “Yes, crucify him! We have no king but Caesar.”  And finally Pilate realized that there was no saving Jesus;  since he was clearly unwilling to defy the mob.

Pilate was now afraid of a riot.  He dared not risk having such a disturbance during Passover time in Jerusalem, due to recently receiving a reprimand from Caesar, and not wanting to risk another.  The mob cheered when he ordered the release of Barabbas.  He ordered a basin and some water, and before the multitude, he washed his hands, saying:  “I am innocent of the blood of this man.  You are determined that he shall die, but I have found no guilt in him. See you to it.  The soldiers will lead him forth.”

And the mob cheered and replied, “His blood be on us and on our children.”

Jesus Carries The Crossbeam to Golgatha

THE CRUCIFIXION

Approximately 200 onlookers, consisting mostly of enemies of Jesus, curious idlers, and a few supporters, follow along with the Roman soldiers who take Jesus up to Golgatha shortly after nine o’clock this Friday morning, April 7, 30 A.D. With the crossbeam on his shoulders according to custom, Jesus is led by the captain of the guard, who carries the white boards with the names of the criminals and the nature of their crimes. Two of the boards carry the word “brigand,” but the board for the cross of Jesus has been written by Pilate himself— in Latin, Greek, and Aramaic— and reads: “Jesus of Nazareth— the King of the Jews.”

The customary route to Golgatha is not followed, the captain instead choosing the more direct route via the Damascus gate north out of the city. Still, many women who had known of Jesus’ life of loving ministry dare to follow the procession, weeping and lamenting, in bold disregard of the law prohibiting such displays of sympathy for the condemned. Jesus takes notice of the women and speaks briefly to them saying,

“Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but rather weep for yourselves and for your children. My work is about done— soon I go to my Father— but the times of terrible trouble for Jerusalem are just beginning. Behold, the days are coming in which you shall say: Blessed are the barren and those whose breasts have never suckled their young. In those days will you pray the rocks of the hills to fall on you in order that you may be delivered from the terrors of your troubles.”

Observers marvel at the stamina of the prophet, having had no food or water— and certainly no sleep— since his arrest at Gethsemane park Thursday night. Not surprisingly, he appears near exhaustion, and shortly after passing through the Damascus gate, he falls. Despite several severe kicks to his body by the soldiers, he cannot rise; the captain seeing this, commands the soldiers to stop, and orders a passerby, one Simon from Cyrene, to assume the burden of the crossbeam.

Shortly after nine o’clock the procession reaches Golgatha, and the grim task of nailing the three to their crosses begins. Jesus is quickly garbed with the customary lion cloth provided by the Romans after his clothes are removed, accommodating our people’s great objection to public exposure of the naked human form.

The soldiers first bind the Teacher’s arms with cords to the crossbeam, then nail his hands to the wood. It is said that the ideas, motives, and longings of a lifetime are openly revealed in a crisis. As they nail him to the crossbeam, he is heard to say, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Jesus is hoisted up

When they have hoisted this crossbeam up on the post, and after they nail it securely to the upright timber of the cross, they bind and nail his feet to the wood, using one long nail which penetrates both feet. The upright timber has a large peg inserted at the proper height, which serves to support the body weight. As is customary at Golgatha, the cross is not high; the prophet’s feet are but three feet from the ground.

The Title is Nailed above his head

After the Galilean is hoisted on the cross, the captain nails the title up above his head, which reads in three languages, “Jesus of Nazareth— the King of the Jews.” Many who stand under the cross are infuriated by this perceived insult. Pilate, who surely felt he had been intimidated and humiliated, now takes this method of obtaining his petty revenge. He knows too, how the Jerusalem Jews detest the very name of Nazareth, and now he humiliates them. He knows that they will also be cut to the very quick by seeing this executed Galilean called “The King of the Jews.”

When the Jewish leaders learn how Pilate is deriding them with this inscription on the cross of Jesus, they hasten to Golgotha, but they dare not attempt to remove the board, as the Roman soldiers are standing guard. These leaders then mingled with the crowd to incite derision and ridicule, lest anyone give serious regard to the inscription.

Just as the captain is nailing the title above his head, the Apostle John, with Mary the mother of Jesus, Ruth, a sister of Jesus, and Jude, his brother, arrive. Apparently this apostle is the only one of the eleven apostles to witness the crucifixion of their “Master.” As Jesus sees his mother, with John and his brother and sister, he gives them a brief but silent smile.

Meanwhile the four soldiers, as is the custom, divide his clothes among them. One takes the sandals, one the turban, one the girdle, and the fourth his cloak. This leaves his tunic, a seamless vestment reaching down to near the knees, to be cut up into four pieces. But when the soldiers see what an unusual garment it is, they cast lots for it. Jesus looks down on them as they divided his garments, and as the crowd jeers at him.

Before eleven o’clock, upward of one thousand persons are witnessing this spectacle of the crucifixion of the so-called “Son of Man.” If we are to believe him, we are all witnessing the death of the Son of God; we must also assume that a watching universe of angels stands by in silent horror, as they witness God dying the death of the creature, even this, the most ignoble death of a condemned criminal.

The World of the Cross. . .

Many who pass by wag their heads and, railing at him, say: “You who would destroy the temple and build it again in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, why do you not come down from your cross?”

Some of the rulers of the Jews mock him, saying, “He saved others, but himself he cannot save!”

Others say, “If you are the king of the Jews, come down from the cross, and we will believe in you.” And later on, they mocked him the more, saying: “He trusted in God to deliver him. He even claimed to be the Son of God— look at him now— crucified between two thieves.” Even the two thieves rail at him and cast reproach upon him.

But Jesus makes no reply to their taunts.

By half past eleven o’clock most of the jesting and jeering crowd have gone their way; less than fifty remain on the scene as it nears noontime of this special preparation day. The soldiers now prepare to eat lunch and drink their cheap, sour wine as they settled down for the deathwatch. As they drink their wine, they derisively offer a toast to Jesus, saying, “Hail and good fortune! to the king of the Jews!” And they are astonished at his tolerant regard of their ridicule and mocking.

When Jesus sees them eat and drink, he looks down upon them and says, “I thirst.” When the captain of the guard hears Jesus say “I thirst,” he takes some of the wine from his bottle and, putting the saturated sponge stopper upon the end of a javelin, raises it to Jesus so that he can moisten his parched lips.

One of the brigands rails at Jesus: “If you are the Son of God, why do you not save yourself and us?” The other thief says to him, “Do you have no fear even of God? Do you not see that we are suffering justly for our deeds, but that this man suffers unjustly? Better that we should seek forgiveness for our sins and salvation for our souls.” When Jesus heard the thief say this, he turns his face toward him and smiles approvingly. When the thief sees the face of Jesus turned toward him, he musters up his courage and says, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And then Jesus says, “Verily, verily, I say to you today, you shall sometime be with me in Paradise.”

“It is finished.”

Shortly after twelve o’clock the sky darkens from the fine sand in the air. The people of Jerusalem know this means a hot-wind sandstorm from the Arabian desert is coming. Before one o’clock the sky is so dark the sun is hidden, and the remainder of the crowd hastens back to the city. The Teacher is near death, but seems to be uttering passages from the scriptures, which one of the women says is the twentieth, twenty-first, and twenty-second Psalm, which begins with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is to be one of his last utterances.

The sandstorm grows in intensity, and the heavens increasingly darken. The soldiers crouch near the cross, huddled together to protect themselves from the cutting sand. Others watch from a distance, where they are somewhat sheltered by an overhanging rock. When the Galilean, called “Master” unbidden by those who followed him, gives up his life shortly after this hour, less than thirty people are present; the thirteen Roman soldiers and a group of about fifteen apparent believers.

Just before three o’clock, Jesus, with a loud voice, cries out, “It is finished! Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” And when he had thus spoken, he bowed his head, and moved no more. When the Roman centurion saw how Jesus died, to our astonishment he smote his breast and said: “This was indeed a righteous man; truly he must have been a Son of God.”


THE URANTIA BOOK

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The War On Caterpillars

April, 5, 2012 20:30 pm · 0 comments

by Propagandee

Hickory Horned Devil Caterpillar

The GOP’s War On Women took a new twist today with its Chairman, Reince Priebus, dismissing the very idea, calling it a Democrat plot enabled by the librul media– “a war on caterpillars“:

[I]f the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars, and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we’d have problems with caterpillars. The fact of the matter is it’s a fiction…”

As we have documented on numerous occasions (e.g., here,  here, here, here, and here), the hundreds of bills either pending or already passed in numerous state legislatures and the US Congress designed to limit women’s access to reproductive health services within the last year alone hardly constitute “a fiction.” Rather a gut wrenching reality that assholes like Mr. Preibus, who suffer from male PMS (Prejudice, Misogyny, Sexism), can hardly imagine.

Fiction is the GOPers desperate attempt to escape the record of their words and deeds in the era of the YouTubes and social media. Their presumptive presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, has gone so far as to promise to terminate the largest deliverer of vital health services to poor and uninsured women, Planned Parenthood.

It shows in the polls. The new USA Today Gallup poll released today shows a dramatic shift in independent women’s support of President Obama. Obama now leads Romney by 14 points in that crucial voting demographic, a 11 point drop for Romney since the last such poll taken during October-December of last year.

The Rethugs have sowed the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind. Needlessly pissing off over half the electorate proves their evolutionary unfitness to lead.

[Image credit: Brian Bradley]

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