RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her “: Jesus Book of John 8:7

In the rubric above, Jesus is not denying the value of criticism; he is noting that mob-like attacks on an accused should be tempered by the realization we all have faults. He was not condoning the woman but urging the scribes and the Pharisees to maintain perspective. It was a subject covered by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter. What we are witnessing today in Virginia is similar to the attack on Judge Kavanaugh. Each accuser became more vitriolic, while claiming the high moral ground. If youth were more exposed to the Bible and classical literature, understanding and forgiveness would be more forthcoming.

This is written not to excuse or take lightly the mocking of others, based on race, religion, gender or for any reason, but to place the Governor’s silly behavior of thirty-five years ago within context of its time and to highlight the hypocrisy of those who follow one another, in lemming-like fashion, down the path of self-righteous indignation. This is not written with the understanding we have achieved color-blind goals, though we have made strides. It is written in the belief that people change, and that we should not be judged solely on our behavior when young, especially when that past is more than a generation ago.

Governor Northram is accused of having posed for a photograph in 1984, which he admitted doing, dressed either as a black-face or as a member of the KKK. He didn’t recall which. The next day he denied being in the photograph, though he did admit to having dressed once as Michael Jackson. While his denial was disturbing – I have a problem with those who deliberately lie – the fact that he performed college-boy antics when he was a student was neither unusual nor – necessarily – racist. (There is, however, irony in the fact that the weapon of racism he used to defeat Ed Gillespie in 2017 is the one being used against him today.)

https://newswithviews.com/suicidal-jews/

When individuals kill themselves, we look for answers in their DNA, their environments, their personal reactions to feelings of impotent rage, rejection, disappointment, heartbreak.

But how to explain group suicide? Wikipedia lists numerous cases, starting in 206 B.C., and these relatively recent cases:

● In 1943, in the final phase of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, many of the Jewish fighters besieged in the “bunker” at Miła 18 committed mass suicide by ingesting poison rather than surrender to the Nazis.
● In 1945, about 1,000 residents of Demmin, Germany, committed mass suicide after the Red Army had sacked the town.
● In 1978, 918 Americans––including 276 children––died of cyanide poisoning in the Peoples Temple led by Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana.
● In 1997, 39 followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California died in a mass suicide, believing they would travel on a spaceship that followed comet Hale–Bopp.

Clearly, some groups took their lives en masse for ideological reasons, while others––particularly vulnerable people in dire need of a “leader”––simply followed orders.

In all the mass suicides in recorded history, dozens, hundreds, and up to one-thousand people took their own lives.

But today, when looking at suicidal Jews, the numbers could be in the millions!

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/06/the-return-of-ancient

In the latter half of the 19th century and early in the 20th century, as Catholic immigrants poured in from Ireland and eastern Europe, an anti-Catholic wave spread over a mostly Protestant United States. The majority slur then was that Catholic newcomers’ first loyalty would be to “Rome,” not the U.S.

Anti-Semitism grew even more deeply rooted, marked by Ivy League quotas on Jewish applicants and exclusionary clauses against Jews in clubs and neighborhoods. It was no accident that the Ku Klux Klan often targeted Catholics and Jews as well as African-Americans.

In the late 19th century, with the influx of Japanese and Chinese immigrants arose the “yellow peril” scare, a racist distrust of supposedly workaholic automatons and unassimilable immigrants whose first loyalty was to their close-knit Asian communities and homelands, not the U.S.

Most of these injustices grew from both original prejudices (as evidenced by slavery) and fears of demographic change. An original population that was mostly British, Protestant and white gradually was augmented by people who were not northern European, often Catholic and increasingly non-white.

The stereotyped hatreds were battled by the melting-pot forces of assimilation, integration and intermarriage. Civil rights legislation and broad education programs gradually convinced the country to judge all Americans on the content of their characters rather than the color of their skins or their religious beliefs. And over the last half-century, the effort to end institutional bias against African-Americans largely succeeded.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272764/moral-idiocy-our-times-bruce-thornton

One of the foundational myths of modernity holds that the progress of scientific knowledge and technology has been accompanied by moral progress. As wealth and knowledge increase, the old impediments to moral improvement such as poverty, religious superstition, and ignorance are being swept away, resulting in a kinder, gentler, and more pacific human nature.

Last week we were presented with evidence that this argument is woefully mistaken. In New York a bill was passed that removed restrictions on late-term abortions, allowing infants viable outside the womb to be killed “at any time” to protect the mother’s life or “health.” Worse yet, this regression into primitive custom was met with celebratory cheers and a standing ovation by the “lawmakers” who had approved it. In Virginia a similar law was proposed but rejected. It had been defended by Del. Kathy Tran and Gov. Ralph Northam (pictured above). They admitted that a baby could be killed even after the mother went into labor, or after delivery. Tran, by the way, on the same day as she introduced the bill to liberalize late-term abortions, also introduced a bill to protect gypsy moths and cankerworms.

In other words, infanticide, once a practice of savage and barbaric cultures like cannibalism, incest, and human sacrifice, has now been legalized by the culture that boasts of its moral progress and superiority. But this legislation is not just a return to ancient brutality, but a species of moral idiocy much worse than the savagery of the past.