Toward an orthodox king of Britain

To continue Charles Coulombe's musings on how Catholics should recognise the Saxe-Coburgs:

Charles Coulombe lists some GermanEnglish monarchs who may have converted to Catholicism on their deathbed. Charles II springs to mind but he may always have been a closet case, like Sepharad-born minister Ben Disraeli the Marrano; anyway Coulomb is concerned with postStuarts. Coulomb claims Victoria wavered - but, truly wavered; she didn't take the leap, nor was she holding to the santa fé in private like the former Charles.

Her son Edward VII however might have taken that leap. Additional speculation swirls around George V.

The above stated, our Charles III - reports Coulombe - had his chrism blessed in Orthodoxy. That is not the same as Catholicism; but Orthodoxy is taken seriously in OnePeterFive, where we consider Anglicanism a LARP, which it is.

It may be that Charles and Prince William are tacking toward the Antiochene communion. They'll still not be Catholics, but they'll at least not be a joke.

The Jacobites no longer exist

With due respect to Curtis Yarvin over the late 2000s, the Stuart claim on the English throne is the Norman claim: conditional on its loyalty to the Altar and on some credible ability to assume the Throne. For us said Altar, since Charles II's (probable) cryptoCatholicism and of course James II's overt Catholicism, is Saint Peter's. OnePeterFive ain't the best Catholic site at present but on this much, Charles Coulombe seems to know what he's on about.

In 1766, Pope Clement XIII recognised, on the death of James III, George III as King. There remained outside Britain a Jacobite Pretender; but, in 1807, that one up and died. The line can go through females among Stuarts same as for Saxe-Coburgs like Georgie over here. I mean, heck; Queen Anne was a Stuart, just an unlucky one (and Protestant). To this day, via various female Pretenders, the Stuarts may boast a male - in the House of Wittelsbach. Problem: this one is trying to marry another man. That blasphemes a Sacrament before the Altar therefore blasphemes the Altar itself.

Yorks also survive. Simon Michael Abney-Hastings Earl Loudoun is living an 'umble life downunder, and is a Catholic to boot. Coulombe isn't concerned with them.

Sample Size Compensation

The Fatima apparition spawned a heresy against the Dormition, unfortunately rife in the Western Church which - ironically - had earlier raised the Dormition to canon. (Its consecration of nonCatholic Russia is further an insult to the Orthodoxy of Russia, but I don't care about that, except inasmuch as it has erected yet another barrier to the reunification of the bishops.) Now Richard Hanania is explaining why it didn't happen.

What's lately happened is that Scott Alexander has been arguing for that apparition. Why? I dunno. Attention probably. It may take an attention-hound to fight an attention-hound.

Hanania is arguing similar to the "Big Data Fallacy", which he acknowledges, but says is different. What we skeptics notice in Biblical apologetics is how the apologists point to the fat stack of Byzantine bibles and cite it as proof of a Majority-Text. Well, no; it just points to the history of Christian takeovers of the scriptoria. To get to the text you have to go to the 100s and 200s AD, not the 600s. Fatima is actually different since the mass apparition is claimed to 70000 at the same time. So, more like the appearance of Christ noted by Paul, which "Saint" Luke perverted into the Spirit at Pentecost / Simchat-Torah.

Note how in "Pentecost" too we can see how an original mass apparition can be recast as something else and then canonised...

What Hanania is saying is that the peer pressure will be stronger in a crowd of 70000 from the same families, than in a small group of about a dozen. Also, the "Skeptics!!1" in the crowd told everyone they were skeptics BEFORE but now, after the fact: BELIEVE, BABY. They did not evince a paper trail of skepticism before the event.

Given the trajectory of the Papacy since the Fatima apparition, it may well be that it was at Fatima that the devil entered the congregation.

The myconid conquest

Two articles on the emergence of life before animals. Continent Nuna of the Boring Billion 1800-800 Mya is surveyed. The life on land, from 1400-900 Mya, spanning Nuna's breakup, would be fungi.

Earth had surface oxygen by then; thanks to the algae and cyano, but their home was water. The plants could make no foothold on land. Until fungi allowed for symbiosis with lichen.

Lichen isn't preserved well; but we have a few additional tools from genomics of fungi and plants today. They're talking about horizonal gene transfer, like when retroviri burrow into animal genomes. These events can be used as before/after date-markers. And then, I guess, related to what events we can know about, like the timeline of a supercontinent connecting all the shoreland.

When Christ nearly died

Checking back in on Richard Carrier, we can sum up three theses. 1. Six of Paul's letters are indeed Paul's. 1. Besides those six: 1 Clement and Hebrews also come from the first century. 3. Papias was kind of a moron.

Ignatius of Antioch by contrast was no moron. So why does Ignatius' Christology look so much like Antiochene Orthodoxy today, and so little like Paul?

That - says Carrier, rather said it in 2017 - is because Christianity suffered a terminal-Permian blow. Among the gentiles Pliny the Younger couldn't find many acting Christians in Bithynia, which is northern Anatolia not too far from whither Paul was sending these letters or even his successors, like whoever did Colossians on his behalf. With a collapse in Christian membership, became possible for men like Ignatius to promote an alternative Christianity based on the Gospels; or, at least, whatever Gospels that Ignatius could find. (I suspect he had the Gospel of Peter, rather than something good like Mark.)

BACKDATE 10/29

Charlie Kirk's Quaker nationalism

Daniel McClellan is critiquing the late Charlie Kirk - unfairly. I may as well take this space to explain how to do it fairly.

Charlie Kirk was one who thought on his feet - and then spoke from his hip, if I may. He does not always say everything properly. That said, I think I can explain what he's talking about in the video which McClellan is calling "lies".

Kirk brings the "Liberty Bell", which McClellan points out was not called that until 1830 when it had the crack, from its origins as a Leviticus 25:10 bell, which even then "proclaimed liberty throughout the land". For the Holiness Code, libertas was Sumerian amargi: relief from grain debts and freedom for the debt-bonded. In 1830, the people associated libertas with, well, freedom: from oppressive governments. Inasmuch as Philadelphia was founded by Quakers, they intended the same.

This was not an "Enlightenment" slogan but a Christian one. The Quakers who struck the clapper on that bell for the first time were ringing out their Christianity.

In that respect, Kirk is reading the same targum upon וַיִּקְרָא as the Quakers had done. As for "The Founders": although the Declaration might be Jeffersonian, Deist, Enlightened and generally Left; since the Constitution and the First Amendment, the Union Of States was decidedly more conservative in its stance. I do not believe it is an accident that this Government was then assembled in Philadelphia. (It had to move later because of the yellow fever but - let's not get too far in the bullrushes here.)

Kirk perhaps worded his argument poorly, and the Quaker reading was at base flawed. Neither of them are coming off as poorly, however, as McClellan; who is simply slandering the man.

BACKDATE 10/28

Cretaceous Park

Geologically 70 Mya wasn't that long ago and ... we got an egg. NYPost thinks there may survive DNA.

That won't be the last egg we'll find. Elsewhere we're hearing that dinos were doing fine here in Parias until their asteroid-intercept system blinked out. This blog's readers will recall hadrosaurs were out-n'-about the whole time. To the extent fossils haven't been found, much of that is because our continent remains lush.

It would be a supreme irony if the Americas were an outlier; with dinos doing more poorly in the Old World, whence the most successful placental mammals spread out. Because of course the Chicxulub target-site was right across Our Gulf.