expostulation and reply

"I understand Ireland has to change but I don't understand why they have to hate what came before," expostulated Bill Baines.
I lowered my coffee cup portentously.
"You're a bit of an innocent Bill," I said. "Chairman Mao killed massive amounts of people before he took power. But he killed a hundred million after he took power when there was no longer any need to kill anyone."
"What has that to do with Ireland?" asked Bill.
"This," said I. "The whole vision of the Varadkar/Zappone government, the media and ruling pseudo elites in Ireland is like the vision of Chairman Mao in China. It's based on hate. Like Chairman Mao, even in victory they can't switch it off. Hate is their only fuel. They couldn't have legalised abortion in Ireland, without hating the unborn. They couldn't have told children that they might be one of 57 different genders and signed them up for  mutilating sex change operations at the age of 15 which don't work, without hating children. They couldn't seek to legalise drug use on behalf of the IRA and associated mafias, without hating humanity, freedom and the dignity of the person. They couldn't tell adults that mutual masturbation by people of the same gender amounts to a marriage, without hating marriage. They couldn't seek to legalise assisted suicide without hating life. They couldn't seek to legalise euthanasia, without hating the elderly. They couldn't seek to conceal the vast rate of suicide in Ireland by removing the concept of suicide from Irish law, without hating the people and indeed life itself. They couldn't have facilitated the creation of life in test tubes, without hating the act of love. They couldn't have facilitated the destruction of life in test tubes (they kill nine for every one they allow to live) without hating the human soul. They couldn't have sought to slander the Catholic Church out of existence, without hating God. They want you to hate the past because they hate the past. But acquiescing to their hatred, their murders, their slanders and their lies will not stop them hating or murdering or slandering or lying. Hate is all they know. Hate is all they are. Hate is all they have to offer. Their only love is the lie."

towards a grand theory of everything

A bolt from the blue.
Sudden clarity.
The vapid erotomania and sensualised violence of the James Bond films is not a realistic depiction of reality.
More importantly the depiction of women in James Bond films is not accurate.
I have entered adult life burdened by a basic misconception about the feminine mystique.
In real life there are no Bond girls.
There are no girls sidling around suggestively with names like Pussy Galore, Honeychile Ryder or Doctor Holly Goodhead.
Even the Irish Bond girl Givvus Akiss is not real.
These people do not exist.
Women are not like this.
Those James Bond films have a lot to answer for.
My social awkwardness is now understandable.
Like the conformist skangs blaming the Catholic Church for their lack of happiness, I have at last found an excuse.
It's all James Bond's fault.
I wonder could I sue Cubby Broccoli's estate.
Broccoli always was my least favourite vegetable.

are certain specificities in the bible confirmed by modern scholarship

There are some eye catching discoveries of the present era which dovetail rather neatly with writings in the Bible.
Increasingly it seems we are, as predicted by Malcolm Muggeridge in the 1960's, obtaining corroborated ontological evidence that there is more proven and demonstrable truth in the Book of Genesis than in the twin mathematical fantasies of Quantum and Relativity theory which have hilariously, and emperors new clothesily, become the foundational lode stones of modern science. (Quantum and Relativity are mutually incompatible by the way, they contradict each other, so one is false, and both may be.)
But is there specific truth in the Bible?
Consider the following.
In Chapter 2 of the Book of Genesis we hear of the first humans, the parents of all mankind, who are named Adam and Eve.
Current studies emanating from the University of Basel in Switzerland and the Rockefeller University in the USA assert on genetic grounds that a single male and female couple are the ancestors of all mankind.
Interesting, what!
In Chapter 7 of the Book of Genesis we hear of a a world wide flood sent by God to punish humanity.
Anthropologists of the present era note that flood myths containing identical salient details to the account of Noah and the Ark exist in cultures scattered all over the globe.
Even sceptical and atheistic scholars now accept, arising from multiple cross cultural attestations, that the flood in Genesis was a real event. Some scholars still insist it was localised to Mesopotamia or Turkey, and not world wide.
Really?
Would none of the ancient tribes who left a record of this event, have noticed it had boundaries?
Were there no tribes located at the boundaries to leave us a flood myth where it's big but not world wide?
Bogus dudes.
Nor are the sceptics and atheists in this instance able to explain why Australian aborigines, South American Indians, Chinese tribes, Africans, Greeks, Summerians, and Europeans would have flood legends agreeing on so many major points, ie that God punished all mankind with a flood, that a chosen man was warned to build a boat in order to survive, and that the same man was told to bring males and females of the animal kingdom onto the boat so that the earth would be replenished with animal as well as human life when the waters subsided.
The detail included in many of the dispersed cultural accounts that most gets my attention is when the man sends out a dove to check if the waters are receding.
When I read that detail in the different versions, I feel I'm hearing about the same event or different versions of the same originating story.
In Chapter 11 of the Book of Genesis, it is recorded that at one time the whole earth had a single language but that God scrambled it into different languages as a rebuke to humanity for its arrogance,
There is significant linguistic evidence in the present era that every language on earth descends from a single language. This evidence includes identical vocabularies existing in widely dispersed languages whose antecedents had no known historical contact with each other when the vocabularies arose. My own statement of the case is somewhere on this website..
Finally in considering whether the Bible contains truth of this extraordinary nature, let us recall the words of Nobel Prize winning scientist Arno Penzias whose discovery of back ground radiation in the night sky led him to affirm the postulation that the observable universe began from a single point:
"The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole."

the story of my quarrel with mark zuckerberg

Today they said...

Mark Zuckerberg: "We want parents to feel safe when their children use Facebook."

James Healy: "In that case tell the Irish police who murdered Darren Gibson and Nicole Fenton."

does god executive produce movies

Nora quaffed a cup of tea in my kitchen and proposed the following.
"I suppose you look down on other religions. On other denominations of Christianity even. I don't mean to be critical. But you'd think they were wrong wouldn't you?"
I was taken aback.
"All I said was that I believe Jesus Christ is real and that he commissioned the Catholic Church to serve himself in human history. I've said nothing about other denominations or faith traditions or perspectives. Why on earth would you think I had any thing against them?"
"It's just the way you talk."
"Well here are some things I have said. My favourite writer for a long time was the Lutheran Pastor Richard Wurmbrand. I was once thinking to myself that I'd like to meet him but that he was probably long dead and then I had an intimation: You will know when he dies. That's how it happened. I mean, so it transpired. I never met him but one day I picked up a copy of the Guardian newspaper in a cafe, a paper that had been left on a table, and one I rarely if ever bought. And there was Wurmbrand's obituary. A full article memorialising his life. It was as though I was being told. The exact same thing happened when his wife Sabine died. I found a copy of the Guardian by chance not having touched a Guardian in the previous year for fear of catching rabies, and her obituary was in it. Another of my favourite writers is CS Lewis whom I have stated will one day be the first non Catholic to be declared a Doctor of the Catholic Church. This is an honorific peculiar to our church reserved for those who have contributed rich insights to our understanding of the faith. CS Lewis was an Anglican all his life. Read The Great Divorce by the way. Best book ever. And The Screwtape Letters. Same again, best book ever. Never mind the Narnia rubbish. Remember now. The Great Divorce. Terrible title. Best book ever. Yet another of my favourite writers is the Jewish poet Franz Wurfel who was being pursued by the Nazis and got trapped in Lourdes, France in 1939 and the French wouldn't let him escape over the border into Spain. Wurfel claimed he prayed: Lord if you get me out of this, I will sing a song for Bernadette. He escaped to America. By 1941 he had written The Song Of Bernadette and it had already run into several editions including printings in Dublin Ireland. This with World War Two going on. That's a really efficient work ethic or providence. Which do you think it was? Honest to goodness read it. Before you give up on life, read it. Before you poison your body with anti depressants, read it. Before you despair of the holiness of God, read it. The liberating truth of the universe is here. By 1943 The Song Of Bernadette was a Hollywood movie and the film too is a mystic rarity. Like the book there's something providential about it. How it got made. The actors in it all giving career best performances unrelated to anything else they ever did. You wonder how can it be so good. As good as the book but distinct from it, I'm saying. A movie that somehow holds its power even with all the dated conventions of black and white 1940s Hollywood acting. Vincent Price does a turn in it and he's better than in anything else he ever did. You'll be thinking: Price is acting like he was born to do this. Maybe he was. Oh. Never mind my delight to see God speaking to humanity through Lutherans, Anglicans and the Holy People the Jews. In the 1960s the atheist Robert Bolt wrote a play about Saint Thomas Moore called A Man For All Seasons. Robert Bolt never admitted to being anything but an atheist. Yet here we have the most extraordinary evocation of a Catholic Saint. The film of A Man For All Seasons is even better than the stage version in part because Robert Bolt was retained to adopt the script and cut out some of the intrusive artsy theatrical flourishes. I'm telling you, when you see that film, you'll ask yourself: Did God executive produce this thing? One more. The Von Trapp family. They were Catholics and the Sound Of Music is based on their real experiences. Their real life experiences were grim enough but the movie is a veritable hymn to innocence and joy. See it. Feel the joy in it. At certain levels it doesn't at first seem as profound as The Song Of Bernadette and A Man For All Seasons. Yet the joy is profound. So the Von Trapps were Catholic. But scriptwriter Ernie Lehman, actress Julie Andrews, and Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves don't have much reputation as Catholics. Except dear lady in the sense, as I suggest, that when the boss himself is putting together a movie that will having enduring mystical qualities transcending time and place, it seems these are the ones he sends for."