Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  rag בל‎ vb. be senseless, foolish (NI nb33, moa of immodesty; Ar. 03 = pe contra) be noble, distinguished, Ae; also. gracious (Frey); Aram. 233 Pa. reject, despise, v. XY Ne 3° 06149; im deriv. as NH)};- Qal Pf. 2 ms. 1P23 Pr 30" éf thou hast been foolish in lifting up thyself (opp. Di). Pf. ד‎ s. sf. consec. DN Na 3°; Impf. 31 2am) Dt 325" 2 aaame pba Je 14”; בל‎ Mi 7°;—regard or treat as a 532 (q.¥-); with contumely, c. acc.: AS 23D "ץ 11 בָּן‎ 8 treateth father as a fool (with contumely); ’ צגר‎ Dt 32” and he treated with contumely Rock ot his salvation (i.e.%; || (נטש‎ ; " su Na 3° 7 will treat thee (Nineveh) with contum (|| שַפָצִים‎ OY DOWN) ; Je 147 do not with contumely the throne of thy glory (|| 8 Te ba adj. foolish, senseless, esp. of t man who has no perception of ethical a religious claims, and with collat. idea 01 0 disgraceful ; —abs.“1 28 3°%+14 t.; mpl.B 13" Ez 13° (G Co (ְמַלְבּם‎ ; fpl. i922 Th 2" senseless, esp. of religious and moral insen bility: ג"‎ DY Dt 32° (of Isr., unappreciative 0 J.’s benefits ; opp. 037), so of heathen natior ש‎ 74" (blaspheming name of ”), “2 גי‎ Dt 32” )|| הַכּבְאִים 3“ ; (לא עֶם‎ Ez 13° (si vera 1-, v. supr elsewh. as subst. (impious and presumptuous fool, Is 32° (opp. 272 noble-minded), characte ized 88 at once irreligious and churlish, Vv’, denying God ש‎ 1 4= 53%: insulting God 74" and God’s servant 39°; Pr 177 arrogant spee becometh not the (imp.ous and presumptuous fool (whose faults it only makes the more 0 spicuous), much less do lying lips him that noble (3°93), v2! (|| 2°D3), 302 ond ל כי ישבע‎ (one of the things under which the ear trembles), P23 ‘22 Jb 30° 1.0. ignoble met 6% nya ‘22); as one who might be expectet bay to have a contumelious end, 1338 הַכָּמות 73 ימות‎ 283° was Abner (destined) to die, as a ‘3 dieth ? of the man who amasses riches unjustly ובאחריתו יהיה נבל‎ Je 17" 1.6. will prove him- self to be 3 כ'‎ ; as acting immorally (with collat. idea of disgracefully) 2 ₪ 13 5 7083 ואתה תהיה‎ הַגּבָלִים בישראל‎ (cf. 923); +. only in NNN 7272 nidaan Jb 2” (of Job’s wife). Cf Dr? 92,6.15.21; ; 457 I. ba n.pr.m. (on popular etymol. see 1$ 25” infr.); a churlish man of Carmel, whose widow David married 1 § 2 5 9779701995 (joy Adar שמו‎ Daz (כּשְמו כְִּהוּא‎ צ*+‎ 10 6 1 8 + 2 5 2? 45 G NaBar.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  If nationalism could deliver. As it turned out, questions of effectiveness, and not sentiment, caused most of my quarrels with Rafiq. Once, after a particularly thorny meeting with MET, I asked him whether he could turn out his followers if a public showdown with the city became necessary. “I don’t got time to run around passing out flyers trying to explain everything to the public,” he said. “Most of the folks out here don’t care one way or another. The ones that do are gonna be double-crossing Negroes trying to mess things up. Important thing is to get our plan tight and get the city signed on. That’s how stuff gets done—not with a big crowd and noise and all that. Once we got a done deal, then y’all announce it any way you like.” I disagreed with Rafiq’s approach; for all his professed love of black people, he seemed to distrust them an awful lot. But I also knew his approach was dictated by a lack of capacity: Neither his organization nor his mosque, I had discovered, could claim a membership of more than fifty persons. His influence arose not from any strong organizational support but from his willingness to show up at every meeting that remotely affected Roseland and shout his opponents into submission. What held true for Rafiq was true throughout the city; without the concentrating effect of Harold’s campaign, nationalism dissipated into an attitude rather than any concrete program, a collection of grievances and not an organized force, images and sounds that crowded the airwaves and conversation but without any corporeal existence. Among the handful of groups to hoist the nationalist banner, only the Nation of Islam had any significant following: Minister Farrakhan’s sharply cadenced sermons generally drew a packed house, and still more listened to his radio broadcasts. But the Nation’s active membership in Chicago was considerably smaller—several thousand, perhaps, roughly the size of one of Chicago’s biggest black congregations—a base that was rarely, if ever, mobilized around political races or in support of broad-based programs. In fact, the physical presence of the Nation in the neighborhoods was nominal, restricted mainly to the clean-cut men in suits and bow ties who stood at the intersections of major thoroughfares selling the Nation’s newspaper, The Final Call.

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  19 often called rulers or archons; they are evil and try to block the soul’s escape from this world after death. The soul or spirit is divine, belonging to the other world, which is why it wants to escape this world and all bodily things, where it is not really at home. Gnosticism’s disdain for the physical world is linked to a profound rejection of Judaism. The God of the Jews is the creator God, maker and ruler of this physical world, which means he is at best ignorant, and probably evil. He forbids humans to eat from the Tree of Knowledge (gnosis) because he wants them to stay ignorant and under his power. He is also described as an arrogant archon who boasts of being the only God, ignorant of the divine realm above him. The Gnostics’ view of Christ ¿ ts with their other-worldly view of divinity. The divine world or Pleroma consists of spiritual principles called “aeons.” According to some Gnostics, the physical world originates from a disruption in the Pleroma when the lowest of the aeons, Sophia or Wisdom, gets in a passion. Christ is an aeon sent into this world to bring saving knowledge of the world above, the Pleroma. Because matter is evil, he is never really embodied: Either he dwells in the man Jesus only for a time or his body is an illusion, a mere appearance (which is the view now called Docetism). The God of the Jews is not Jesus’s Father but his enemy. The “lost Gospels” in the news lately are mainly Gnostic. The most important were found in a cache of buried books in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. The Nag Hammadi library is very important for our understanding of ancient Gnosticism but, with one possible exception, is not an important source for the life of the historical Jesus. The possible exception, the Gospel of Thomas, is a “sayings Gospel.” The sayings are all attributed to Jesus, though many are actually much later. The later sayings are in a broad sense Gnostic, in that salvation consists of the soul’s awakening to the knowledge that it does not belong to this world. Among the earlier sayings, most are similar to those found in the New Testament, and some may be closer to what Jesus actually said—though Early orthodoxy was characterized by belief in the goodness of the Creator, the God of the Jews.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “Who are we meeting with again?” I had scheduled three meetings, hoping to find a job strategy that would meet the needs of people in Altgeld. For now at least a new manufacturing boom appeared out of our reach: The big manufacturers had opted for well-scrubbed suburban corridors, and not even Gandhi could have gotten them to relocate near Altgeld anytime soon. On the other hand, there did remain a part of the economy that could be called local, I thought, a second-level consumer economy—of shops, restaurants, theaters, and services—that in other areas of the city continued to function as an incubator of civic life. Places where families might invest their savings and make a go of a business, and where entry-level jobs might be had; places where the economy remained on a human scale, transparent enough for people to understand. The closest thing to a shopping district in the area was in Roseland, and so we followed the bus route up Michigan Avenue, with its wig shops and liquor stores, discount clothing stores and pizzerias, until we arrived in front of a two-story former warehouse. We entered the building through a heavy metal door and took a narrow set of stairs down into a basement filled with old furniture. In a small office sat a slight, wiry man with a goatee and a skullcap that accentuated a pair of prominent ears. “Can I help you?” I explained who we were and that we had spoken on the phone. “That’s right, that’s right.” He gestured to two large men standing on either side of his desk and they walked past us with a nod. “Listen, we’re gonna have to make this quick ’cause something’s come up. Rafiq al Shabazz.” “I know you,” Shirley said as we shook hands with Rafiq. “You’re Mrs. Thompson’s boy, Wally. How’s your momma doing?” Rafiq forced a smile and offered us all a seat. He explained that he was the president of the Roseland Unity Coalition, an organization that engaged in a range of political activities to promote the black cause and claimed considerable credit for helping Mayor Washington get elected. When we asked him how our churches could encourage local economic development, he handed us a leaflet accusing Arab stores of selling bad meat. “That’s the real deal, right here,” Rafiq said. “People from outside our community making money off us and showing our brothers and sisters disrespect. Basically what you got here is Koreans and Arabs running the stores, the Jews still owning most of the buildings. Now, in the short term, we’re here to make sure that the interests of black people are looked after, you understand. When we hear one of them Koreans is mistreating a customer, we gonna be on the case. We gonna insist that they respect us and make a contribution back to the community—fund our programs, what have you.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  But of course that wasn’t possible. We finished our sodas. Money changed hands. We left the marketplace. The moment slipped away. We turned onto Kimathi Street, named after one of the leaders of the Mau-Mau rebellion. I had read a book about Kimathi before leaving Chicago and remembered a photograph of him: one in a group of dreadlocked men who lived in the forest and spread secret oaths among the native population—the prototype guerrilla fighter. It was a clever costume he had chosen for himself (Kimathi and the other Mau-Mau leaders had served in British regiments in their previous lives), an image that played on all the fears of the colonial West, the same sort of fear that Nat Turner had once evoked in the antebellum South and coke-crazed muggers now evoked in the minds of whites in Chicago. Of course, the Mau-Mau lay in Kenya’s past. Kimathi had been captured and executed. Kenyatta had been released from prison and inaugurated Kenya’s first president. He had immediately assured whites who were busy packing their bags that businesses would not be nationalized, that landholdings would be kept intact, so long as the black man controlled the apparatus of government. Kenya became the West’s most stalwart pupil in Africa, a model of stability, a useful contrast to the chaos of Uganda, the failed socialism of Tanzania. Former freedom fighters returned to their villages or joined the civil service or ran for a seat in Parliament. Kimathi became a name on a street sign, thoroughly tamed for the tourists. I took the opportunity to study these tourists as Auma and I sat down for lunch in the outdoor café of the New Stanley Hotel. They were everywhere—Germans, Japanese, British, Americans—taking pictures, hailing taxis, fending off street peddlers, many of them dressed in safari suits like extras on a movie set. In Hawaii, when we were still kids, my friends and I had laughed at tourists like these, with their sunburns and their pale, skinny legs, basking in the glow of our obvious superiority. Here in Africa, though, the tourists didn’t seem so funny. I felt them as an encroachment, somehow; I found their innocence vaguely insulting. It occurred to me that in their utter lack of self-consciousness, they were expressing a freedom that neither Auma nor I could ever experience, a bedrock confidence in their own parochialism, a confidence reserved for those born into imperial cultures.

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  104 Lecture 29: Deism and Liberal Protestantism God, such as Judaism based on the Torah and Talmud, Christianity based on the Bible, and Islam based on the Koran. “Natural religion” meant religious beliefs that were based on reason, which is universal and common to all humanity. The Deists regarded reason, and therefore natural religion, as the norm by which to judge revealed religions, including Christianity. Natural religion included belief in God, morality, and reward or punishment in an afterlife. Natural religion has no place for the supernatural, miracles or divine intervention in nature. Natural religion had no place for mystery, incomprehensible dogma that goes beyond natural reason (the kind of reason one ¿ nds in natural science). Natural religion has no need of priests and their dogmatic authority. Natural religion has no need for rituals and sacraments which are the object of superstitious awe and worship. Early Deists regarded Christianity as a republication of the universal truths of natural religion, with a few inessential historical additions which could be discarded. Later Deists often regarded revealed religion, and Christianity in particular, as a corruption of natural religion. Typically, however, even the later Deists admire Jesus, presenting him as a teacher of natural religion whose message was distorted by the apostles. Liberal Protestantism, in its classic 19 th -century German form, proposed to save Christian faith by ¿ nding its basis in Christian experience rather than dogma. The Liberal turn to experience begins with the Romantic movement in Germany. Friedrich Schleiermacher, the founder of Liberal theology was, in his youth a friend of founders of German Romanticism, whom he addresses in his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. His key appeal to them is that piety is a feeling that comes before dogma, ritual, and morality. It is a preconceptual or immediate sense of the in¿ nite behind the ¿ nite. Words, doctrines, rituals, morality, and other external manifestations of religion are outward expressions of this prior, inner experience. Enlightenment thinkers used the distinction between natural and revealed religion to understand the diversity of religions, especially Christianity.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The council of Arles in 314 had already decreed, in its first canon, that the Christian Passover be celebrated "uno die et uno tempore per omnem orbem," and that the bishops of Rome should fix the time. But as this order was not universally obeyed, the fathers of Nicaea proposed to settle the matter, and this was the second main object of the first ecumenical council in 325. The result of the transactions on this point, the particulars of which are not known to us, does not appear in the canons (probably out of consideration for the numerous Quartodecimanians), but is doubtless preserved in the two circular letters of the council itself and the emperor Constantine.749 The feast of the resurrection was thenceforth required to be celebrated everywhere on a Sunday, and never on the day of the Jewish passover, but always after the fourteenth of Nisan, on the Sunday after the first vernal full moon. The leading motive for this regulation was opposition to Judaism, which had dishonored the passover by the crucifixion of the Lord." We would," says the circular letter of Constantine in reference to the council of Nice, "we would have nothing in common with that most hostile people, the Jews; for we have received from the Redeemer another way of honoring God [the order of the days of the week], and harmoniously adopting this method, we would withdraw ourselves from the evil fellowship of the Jews. For what they pompously assert, is really utterly absurd: that we cannot keep this feast at all without their instruction .... It is our duty to have nothing in common with the murderers of our Lord." This bitter tone against Judaism runs through the whole letter. At Nicaea, therefore, the Roman and Alexandrian usage with respect to Easter triumphed, and the Judaizing practice of the Quartodecimanians, who always celebrated Easter on the fourteenth of Nisan, became thenceforth a heresy. Yet that practice continued in many parts of the East, and in the time of Epiphanius, about A.D. 400, there were many, Quartodecimanians, who, as he says, were orthodox, indeed, in doctrine, but in ritual were addicted to Jewish fables, and built upon the principle: "Cursed is every one who does not keep his passover on the fourteenth of Nisan."750 They kept the day with the Communion and with fasting till three o’clock. Yet they were divided into several parties among themselves. A peculiar offshoot of the Quartodecimanians was the rigidly ascetic Audians, who likewise held that the passover must be kept at the very same time (not after the same manner) with the Jews, on the fourteenth of Nisan, and for their authority appealed to their edition of the Apostolic Constitutions.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Jefferson had borrowed the image of the “wall of separation” from Roger Williams (1604–83), founder of Providence, Rhode Island, who had been expelled from New England because of his opposition to the intolerant policies of the Puritan government.46 But Williams was less concerned about the welfare of the state than that of his faith, which he believed would be contaminated by any involvement with government.47 He intended Rhode Island to be an alternative Christian community that came closer to the spirit of the gospels. Jefferson, by contrast, was more concerned to protect the state from the “loathsome combination of church and state” that had reduced human beings to “dupes and drudges.”48 He seemed to assume—quite wrongly—that there had been states in the past that had not been guilty of this “loathsome combination.” It remained to be seen whether the secularized United States would be less violent and coercive than its more religious predecessors. Whatever the Founders wanted, most Americans still took it for granted that the United States would be based on Christian principles. By 1790, some 40 percent of the new nation lived on the frontiers and were becoming increasingly resentful of the republican government that did not share their hardships but taxed them as harshly as the British had done. A new wave of revivals, known as the Second Great Awakening, represented a grassroots campaign for a more democratic and Bible-based America.49 The new revivalists were not intellectuals like Edwards but men of the people who used wild gestures, earthy humor, and slang and relied on dreams, visions, and celestial signs. During their mass rallies, they pitched huge tents outside the towns, and their gospel songs transported the crowds to ecstasy. However, these prophets were not pre-Enlightenment throwbacks. Lorenzo Dow may have looked like John the Baptist, but he quoted Jefferson and Paine and, like any Enlightenment philosophe, urged the people to think for themselves. In the Christian commonwealth the first should be last and the last first. God had sent his insights to the poor and unlettered, and Jesus and his disciples had not had college degrees.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Determined to achieve sole supremacy, he campaigned against his coemperor Maxentius. On the night before their final battle at the Milvian Bridge near Rome in 312, Constantine had a vision of a flaming cross in the sky embellished with the motto: “In this conquer!” A dreamer and visionary, Constantine also saw himself as a “friend of God” and would always attribute his subsequent victory to this miraculous omen. That year he declared Christianity to be religio licita. Constantine employed the philosopher Lucius Caecilius Lactantius (c. 260–325) as a tutor for his son Crispus. Lactantius had been converted to Christianity by the courage of the martyrs who had suffered under Maximianus Daia. The state was, he believed, inherently aggressive and predatory. Romans might talk loftily about virtue and respect for humanity but did not practice what they preached. The goals of any political power, Rome included, were always “to extend the boundaries which are violently taken from others, to increase the power of the state, to improve the revenues,” and this could only be achieved by latrocinium, “violence and robbery.” 145 There was no such thing as a “just” war, because it was never permissible to take human life. 146 If Romans really wanted to be virtuous, Lactantius concluded, they should “restore the possessions of others” and abandon their wealth and power. 147 That might have been what Jesus would have done, but it was not likely to happen in Christian Rome. 6 Byzantium: The Tragedy of Empire In 323 Constantine defeated Licinius, emperor of the eastern provinces, and became sole ruler of the Roman Empire. His ultimate ambition, however, was to command the civilized world from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Iranian Plateau, as Cyrus had done. 1 As a first step, he moved his capital from Rome to the city of Byzantium at the Bosporus, the juncture of Europe and Asia, which he renamed Constantinople. Here he was greeted by Eusebius (c. 264–340), the bishop of Caesarea: “Let the friend of the All-Ruling God be proclaimed our sole sovereign ... who has modeled himself after the archetypal form of the Supreme Sovereign, whose thoughts mirror the virtuous rays by which he has been made perfectly wise, good, just, pious, courageous and God-loving.” 2 This was a far cry from Jesus’s criticism of such worldly authority, but in antiquity, the rhetoric of kingship had always been virtually interchangeable with the language of divinity. 3 Eusebius regarded monarchy, the rule of “one” (monos), as a natural consequence of monotheism.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  These agree in all the principal facts, even to unimportant details, but differ entirely in spirit and in judgment; Julian himself exhibiting the vanity of self-praise, Libanius and Zosimus the extreme of passionate admiration, Gregory and Cyril the opposite extreme of hatred and abhorrence, Ammianus Marcellinus a mixture of praise and censure. 1. Heathen sources: Juliani imperatoris Opera, quae supersunt omnia, ed. by Petavius, Par. 1583; and more completely by Ezech. Spanhemius, Lips. 1696, 2 vols. fol. in one (Spanheim gives the Greek original with a good Latin version, and the Ten Books of Cyril of Alex. against Julian). We have from Julian: Misopogon (Misopwvgon, the Beard-hater, a defence of himself against the accusations of the Antiochians); Caesares (two satires on his predecessors); eight Orationes; sixty-five Epistolae (the latter separately and most completely edited, with shorter fragments, by Heyler, Mog. 1828); and Fragments of his three or seven Books kata; Cristianw'n in the Reply of Cyril. Libanius: jEpitavfio" ejp j jIoulianw'/ , in Lib. Opp. ed. Reiske, Altenb. 1791–97. 4 vols. Mamertinus: Gratiarum actio Juliano. The relevant passages in the heathen historians Ammianus Marcellinus (I.c. lib. xxi-xxv. 3), Zosimus and Eunapius. 2. Christian Sources (all in Greek): the early church historians, Socrates (l. iii.), Sozomen (I. v. and vi.), Theodoret (I. iii.). Gregory Naz.: Orationes invectivae in Jul. duae, written some six months after the death of Julian (Opp. tom. i.). Cyril of Alex.: Contra impium Jul. libri x. (in the Opp. Cyr., ed. J. Aubert, Par. 1638, tom. vi., and in Spanheim’s ed. of the works of Julian). LITERATURE. Tillemont: Memoires, etc., vol. vii. p. 322–423 (Venice ed.), and Histoire des empereurs Rom. Par. 1690 sqq., vol. iv. 483–576. Abbé De la Bleterie: Vie de l’empereur Julien. Amst. 1735. 2 vols. The same in English, Lond. 1746. W. Warburton: Julian. Lond. 3d ed. 1763. Nath. Lardner: Works, ed. Dr. Kippis, vol. vii. p. 581 sqq. Gibbon: l.c. ch. xxii.–xxiv., particularly xxiii. Neander: Julian u. sein Zeitalter. Leipz. 1812 (his first historical production), and Allg. K. G., iii. (2d ed. 1846), p. 76–148. English ed. Torrey, ii. 37–67. Jondot (R.C.): Histoire de l’empereur Julien. 1817, 2 vols. C. H. Van Herwerden: De Juliano imper. religionis Christ. hoste, eodemque vindice. Lugd. Bat. 1827. G. F. Wiggers: Jul. der Abtrünnige. Leipz. 1837 (in Illgen’s Zeitschr. f. Hist. Theol.). H. Schulze: De philos. et moribus Jul. Strals. 1839. D. Fr. Strauss (author of the mythological "Leben Jesu"): Der Romantiker auf dem Thron der Caesaren, oder Julian der Abtr. Manh. 1847 (containing a clear survey of the various opinions concerning Julian from Libanius and Gregory to Gibbon, Schlosser, Neander, and Ullmann, but hiding a political aim against King Frederick William IV. of Prussia). J. E. Auer (R.C.): Kaiser Jul. der Abtr. im Kampf mit den Kirchenvaetern seiner Zeit. Wien, 1855. W. Mangold: Jul. der Abtr. Stuttg. 1862. C. Semisch: Jul. der Abtr. Bresl. 1862. F. Lübker: Julians Kampf u. Ende. Hamb. 1864.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  His apostasy from Christianity, to which he was probably never at heart committed, Julian himself dates as early as his twentieth year, A.D. 351. But while Constantius lived, he concealed his pagan sympathies with consummate hypocrisy, publicly observed Christian ceremonies, while secretly sacrificing to Jupiter and Helios, kept the feast of Epiphany in the church at Vienne so late as January, 361, and praised the emperor in the most extravagant style, though he thoroughly hated him, and after his death all the more bitterly mocked him.63 For ten years he kept the mask. After December, 355, the student of books astonished the world with brilliant military and executive powers as Caesar in Gaul, which was at that time heavily threatened by the German barbarians; he won the enthusiastic love of the soldiers, and received from them the dignity of Augustus. Then he raised the standard of rebellion against his suspicious and envious imperial cousin and brother-in-law, and in 361 openly declared himself a friend of the gods. By the sudden death of Constantius in the same year he became sole head of the Roman empire, and in December, as the only remaining heir of the house of Constantine,64 made his entry into Constantinople amidst universal applause and rejoicing over escape from civil war.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The ruling passion of Julian, and the soul of his short but most active, remarkable, and in its negative results instructive reign, was fanatical love of the pagan religion and bitter hatred of the Christian, at a time when the former had already forever given up to the latter the reins of government in the world. He considered it the great mission of his life to restore the worship of the gods, and to reduce the religion of Jesus first to a contemptible sect, and at last, if possible, to utter extinction from the earth. To this he believed himself called by the gods themselves, and in this faith he was confirmed by theurgic arts, visions, and dreams. To this end all the means, which talent, zeal, and power could command, were applied; and the failure must be attributed solely to the intrinsic folly and impracticability of the end itself. I. To look, first, at the positive side of his plan, the restoration and reformation of heathenism: He reinstated, in its ancient splendor, the worship of the gods at the public expense; called forth hosts of priests from concealment; conferred upon them all their former privileges, and showed them every honor; enjoined upon the soldiers and civil officers attendance at the forsaken temples and altars; forgot no god or goddess, though himself specially devoted to the worship of Apollo, or the sun; and notwithstanding his parsimony in other respects, caused the rarest birds and whole herds of bulls and lambs to be sacrificed, until the continuance of the species became a subject of concern.66 He removed the cross and the monogram of Christ from the coins and standards, and replaced the former pagan symbols. He surrounded the statues and portraits of the emperors with the signs of idolatry, that every one might be compelled to bow before the gods, who would pay the emperors due respect. He advocated images of the gods on the same grounds on which afterwards the Christian iconolaters defended the images of the saints. If you love the emperor, if you love your father, says he, you like to see his portrait; so the friend of the gods loves to look upon their images, by which he is pervaded with reverence for the invisible gods, who are looking down upon him.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Swiss had in this controversy the best of the argument and showed a more Christian spirit. The result was disastrous to Lutheranism. The Palatinate, in part also Hesse, Bremen, Anhalt, and, at a later period, the reigning dynasty of Prussia, passed over into the Reformed Church. Hereafter there were two distinct and separate Confessions in Protestant Germany, the Lutheran and the Reformed, which in the Westphalia Treaty were formally recog-nized on a basis of legal equality. The Lutheran Church might have sustained still greater loss if Melanchthon had openly professed his essential agreement with Calvin. But the magnetic power of Luther’s name and personality, and of his great work saved his doctrine of the Eucharist and the ubiquity of Christ’s body, which was finally formulated and fixed in the Formula of Concord (1577). Joachim Westphal (1510–1574), a rigid Lutheran minister and afterwards superintendent at Hamburg, who inherited the intolerance and violent temper, but none of the genius and generosity of Luther, wrote, without provocation, a tract against the "Zürich Consensus," and against Calvin and Peter Martyr, in 1552. He aimed indirectly at the Philippists (Melanchthonians), who agreed with the Calvinistic theory of the Eucharist without openly confessing it, and who for this reason were afterwards called Crypto-Calvinists. He had previously attacked Melanchthon, his teacher and benefactor, and compared his conduct in the Interim controversy with Aaron’s worship of the golden calf.959 He taught that the very body of Christ was in the bread substantially, that it was ubiquitous, though illocal (extra locum), and that it was partaken by Judas no less than by Peter. He made no distinction between Calvin and Zwingli. He treats as "sacramentarians" and heretics all those who denied the corporal presence, the oral manducation, and the literal eating of Christ’s body with the teeth, even by unbelievers. He charges them with holding no less than twenty-eight conflicting opinions on the words of institution, quoting extracts from Carlstadt, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Bucer, à Lasco, Bullinger, Peter Martyr, Schwenkfeld, and chiefly from Calvin. But nearly all these opinions are essentially the same, and that of Carlstadt was never adopted by any Church or any Reformed theologian.960 He speaks of their godless perversion of the Scriptures, and even their "satanic blasphemies." He declared that they ought to be refuted by the rod of the magistrates rather than by the pen.961 As his first attack was ignored by the Swiss, he wrote another and larger tract in 1553, in which he proved the Lutheran view chiefly from 1 Cor. 11:29, 30, and urged the Lutherans to resist the progress of the Zwinglian or, as it was now called, Calvinistic heresy.962 The style and taste of his polemic may be inferred from his calling Bullinger "the bull of Zürich," Calvin "the calf of Geneva," and à Lasco "the Polish bear."

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Jerome wrote, about 383, with indignation and bitterness against Helvidius and Jovinian, who, citing Scripture passages and earlier church teachers, like Tertullian, maintained that Mary bore children to Joseph after the birth of Christ. He saw in this doctrine a desecration of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and he even compares Helvidius to Erostratus, the destroyer of the temple at Ephesus.784 The bishop Bonosus of Sardica was condemned for the same view by the Illyrican bishops, and the Roman bishop Siricius approved the sentence, A.D. 392. Augustine went a step farther. In an incidental remark against Pelagius, he agreed with him in excepting Mary, "propter honorem Domini," from actual (but not from original) sin.785 This exception he is willing to make from the sinfulness of the race, but no other. He taught the sinless birth and life of Mary, but not her immaculate conception. He no doubt assumed, as afterward Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas, a sanctificatio in utero, like that of Jeremiah (Jer. i. 5) and John the Baptist (Luke i. 15), whereby, as those two men were fitted for their prophetic office, she in a still higher degree was sanctified by a special operation of the Holy Ghost before her birth, and prepared to be a pure receptacle for the divine Logos. The reasoning of Augustine backward from the holiness of Christ to the holiness of His mother was an important turn, which was afterward pursued to further results. The same reasoning leads as easily to the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary, though also, just as well, to a sinless mother of Mary herself, and thus upward to the beginning, of the race, to another Eve who never fell. Augustine’s opponent, Pelagius, with his monastic, ascetic idea of holiness and his superficial doctrine of sin, remarkably outstripped him on this point, ascribing to Mary perfect sinlessness. But, it should be remembered, that his denial of original sin to all men, and his excepting of sundry saints of the Old Testament besides Mary, such as Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Melchizedek, Samuel,

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The beginnings of the Donatist schism appear in the Dioclesian persecution, which revived that controversy concerning church discipline and martyrdom. The rigoristic party, favored by Secundus of Tigisis, at that time primate of Numidia, and led by the bishop Donatus of Casae Nigrae, rushed to the martyr’s crown with fanatical contempt of death, and saw in flight from danger, or in the delivering up of the sacred books, only cowardice and treachery, which should forever exclude from the fellowship of the church. The moderate party, at whose head stood the bishop Mensurius and his archdeacon and successor Caecilian, advocated the claims of prudence and discretion, and cast suspicion on the motives of the forward confessors and martyrs. So early as the year 305 a schism was imminent, in the matter of an episcopal election for the city of Cita. But no formal outbreak occurred until after the cessation of the persecution in 311; and then the difficulty arose in connection with the hasty election of Caecilian to the bishopric of Carthage. The Donatists refused to acknowledge him, because in his ordination the Numidian bishops were slighted, and the service was performed by the bishop Felix of Aptungis, or Aptunga, whom they declared to be a traditor, that is, one who had delivered up the sacred writings to the heathen persecutors. In Carthage itself he had many opponents, among whom were the elders of the congregation (seniores plebis), and particularly a wealthy and superstitious widow, Lucilla, who was accustomed to kiss certain relics before her daily communion, and seemed to prefer them to the spiritual power of the sacrament. Secundus of Tigisis and seventy Numidian bishops, mostly of the rigoristic school, assembled at Carthage deposed and excommunicated Caecilian, who refused to appear, and elected the lector Majorinus, a favorite of Lucilla, in his place. After his death, in 315, Majorinus was succeeded by Donatus, a gifted man, of fiery energy and eloquence, revered by his admirers as a wonder worker, and styled The Great. From this man, and not from the Donatus mentioned above, the name of the party was derived.660

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The cycle of drug-related stigma reinforces stereotypes and labels, which in turn reinforce stigma, which sets expectations about roles. These expectations lead to limited opportunities based on what people think a drug user is capable of doing, which in turn leads to internalized/reinforced expectations. It’s a series of diminishing returns that make it difficult for drug users—or really any marginalized community—to break free. It’s become easier to judge people who use drugs instead of seeing them as human beings who deserve love. For many, it’s easier to impose simplistic, moralistic expectations instead of asking ourselves, what if? What if someone is using as an attempt to mitigate the stress and impact of previous or concomitant trauma or mental health issues? What if someone comes from a community of people who use, and thus drug use is a cultural “norm?” What if drug use is part of a spiritual practice? What if drug use is a way to tap into an inner, creative self? What if a person uses drugs because they get great pleasure in doing so? What if people who use drugs are people first—people who are more than the sum total of their drug use? In most cultures, we judge a person who “loses control” over their substance use. They become “other,” a scourge reflecting the worst of humanity. We revile and even terrorize people who use drugs. Harm reduction is a way to change that narrative. The late Don McVinney, one of the “first wave” of harm reductionists in the States, often spoke about the American moral perspective on drug use, which at its core locates the problem in the person.73 According to Don, harm reduction “locates the problem [if there is one] in the relationship between the person and drug, because lots of people use substances and don’t do so problematically.” There are six basic principles of harm reduction—all centered around people who use drugs: Health and dignity—the right to be well and seen as a whole person Participant-centered services—meeting people where they are rather than where we want them to be Meaningful involvement of people who use drugs—both in the design of services and the ability to participate in the public policy dialogue Autonomy—the right and ability to make your own choices Socio-cultural competency—interacting with people in a way that values their customs, beliefs, practices, and experiences Pragmatism—not ignoring or minimizing the very real and potentially tragic harms associated with some behaviors These sensible and humane principles ground our work and are based in the realities of what people who use drugs experience on a daily basis: stigma, trauma, poverty, classism, race- sex- and gender-based discrimination, social isolation, and other social inequities that affect people’s vulnerability to, and capacity for, effectively dealing with harm.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Eighteen months after buying Skype, Andreessen and his partners sold the company to Microsoft for $8.5 billion— three times what they paid. To some, Andreessen’s role as both an eBay director and an investor acquiring an asset from eBay seemed like a problem. “Andreessen, he’s screwed more people than Casanova, for Christ’s sake, and yet he goes and takes this attitude that he’s on the high moral ground,” activist investor Carl Icahn said on CNBC. Icahn complained that eBay had sold Skype for less than what it was worth and that eBay’s investors had been shortchanged. Andreessen said Icahn was “making up a fake conspiracy theory out of thin air.” The tech press sided with Andreessen. The story went nowhere. Andreessen is relentlessly optimistic and pounds away on the same message, which is that no matter how high the valuations of start-ups might go, this all makes sense. In May 2015 Andreessen explained to Tad Friend of the New Yorker that there was nothing to worry about. Sure, things got out of hand in the first dotcom bubble, and we had a crash, and now we were on the upswing again, but that didn’t mean another crash was coming. The crash of 2000 was an “isolated event,” Andreessen said, and the economy was heading into a “sustained boom,” almost the same phrase Doerr would use in Bloomberg a month later. Andreessen Horowitz has invested in some of the Valley’s most highly valued companies, including Pinterest, Airbnb, and Box, and enlists its publicity machine (both its own internal operation and its friends in the tech press) to further its interests. In the spring of 2014, when “software as a service” (SaaS) stocks went into a slump, and when Box was still hoping to go public but had started to look wobbly, Andreessen’s content factory sprang into action. The firm produced blog posts and podcasts explaining that SaaS companies were misunderstood. Investors failed to understand how profitable these companies were going to be. The podcast was loaded up with a dizzying barrage of jargon and acronyms and metrics that SaaS companies have invented to measure their own performance. Software as a service is still something of a new business, and it is difficult if not impossible to compare the performance of any one SaaS company to the others. The bottom line from pro-SaaS believers is that because SaaS companies use a subscription model, they will eventually become enormously profitable, despite incurring big losses in their early years. Whether that theory will be proven true remains to be seen. By June, shares in SaaS companies stopped plunging and started to claw their way back up, along with the rest of the market. This was good news for HubSpot, which by the summer of 2014 was borrowing money to pay its bills.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Harris and Benioff perform a clumsy skit about how Harris has just returned from the year 2019 and brought back some software he found there, and that is what Salesforce.com will be announcing today. The truth is that Salesforce.com has little new to introduce. All of the stuff about hospitals and Haitians and Huey Lewis is meant to distract us from noticing that Benioff doesn’t really have much to talk about other than warmed-over versions of old products. The misdirection works. People whoop and clap. They nod their heads as if they totally understand phrases like the Internet of customers, where people make decisions at superhuman speeds, and companies operate at the speed of now, as well as at the speed of sales. What sales and marketing people must do, someone informs us with great urgency, is race into the future a little faster than our customers, and get to the future first, and be ready to greet them when they arrive. Before you can try to figure out what that means, Dreamforce rolls on. Over the next few days the show features some of the biggest names in tech, like Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, HP CEO Meg Whitman, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Benioff has latched on to the “Women in Tech” crusade and made it his cause célèbre. “Powerful women” is a theme of the conference—yet oddly enough only four members of Benioff’s twenty-two member management team and only one member of his board of directors are female. Salesforce.com is run almost entirely by white men. But look—over there! It’s the prime minister of Haiti! And wait, hold on—is that thunder and lightning? Indoors? Is that a Tesla? From the future? On stage? Green Day plays a concert in AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. Alec Baldwin gives a talk. Tony Bennett and Jerry Seinfeld make appearances. It’s all part of what Salesforce.com describes as “dynamic programming to exhilarate the Dreamforce community.” Cavernous halls are lined with countless booths rented out by software makers hawking programs that work with Salesforce: add-ons, plug-ins, mobile apps. There’s a “connected devices playground” and a “Dreamforce hackathon.” There are more than a thousand breakout sessions and “success clinics,” where people can learn how to sell stuff. Two people dressed up in foam balls—the Salesforce.com mascots, SaaSy and Chatty—bounce around the conference, dancing awkwardly with legions of mostly white people. The final day features a speech by Deepak Chopra, noted charlatan and quack. He and Benioff are friends. Chopra rambles on about joy and meaning and interconnectedness and the importance of loving yourself. The old W. C. Fields line “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit” seems like the motto not just for Chopra but for the entire conference.

• From The Historical Jesus (Great Courses) (2000)

  Woe to you Chorazin, woe to you Bethsaida. For if the great deeds that have been done among you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago and sat in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you. And you Capernaum, you will not be exalted up to heaven will you? No, you will descend into hell. (Luke 10:13-15; Matt. 11:20-24) 2 . Note that Jesus’ response to his own rejection is couched here in apocalyptic terms of judgment, condemnation, and destruction. D. The widespread rejection of Jesus and his message would make sense of several other early traditions associated with Jesus. 1. In Q, he laments that even though foxes and birds have places to stay, he has nowhere (Matt. 8:20; Luke 9:58). 2 . In Mark and Thomas, he intimates that the reason the kingdom has such a small and inauspicious beginning is that most of his proclamation is falling on deaf ears (for example, the parable of the sower: Mark 4: 1-9; G. Thom. 9). 3. He claims, in a completely independent source, that he is “hated by the world” (John 15:18). E. Above all, Jesus was rejected by the religious leaders of his people. ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 31 1 . At the end of his life, as we’ll see, his rejection by the aristocracy that ran the Temple — the Sadducees and the chief priests — ultimately led to his execution by the Romans. 2. During his preaching ministry in Galilee, though, Jesus had no confrontations with the powerful Jews of Jerusalem’s Temple, but only with local teachers who belonged to the Pharisees. III. During his public preaching ministry, Jesus was harshly opposed by Pharisees and experts in the Jewish law (known as scribes), who thought that his teachings were wrong, that he misunderstood what God wanted, that he and his followers profaned the law, and that as a result, his powerful deeds could not come from God but were from the devil. A. The controversies Jesus had with these other Jewish teachers were not over whether the law of God should be followed, but rather over the proper interpretation of the law. These were internal Jewish debates, no more harsh or vitriolic than those going on between other Jewish groups, for example, between the Essenes and the Pharisees. B. Some of Jesus’ disagreements with Pharisees involved moral decisions that were made difficult by the fact that the Law of Moses was incomplete and ambiguous. 1. An example is the law concerning divorce. Moses allowed a man to divorce his wife (cf. Deut. 24:1^1), but what should be the permissible legal grounds? 2. Like some Pharisees, but unlike others, Jesus himself took a fairly radical stand, that the legal grounds provided by Moses were simply a makeshift measure and that God preferred people never to divorce (Mark 10:2-9).

• From Cultish (2021)

  The fitness industry’s maximalist ethos that throwing yourself wholeheartedly into a program—that working harder and faster, never quitting, and intensely believing in yourself—will give you flat abs and inner peace is uncannily reminiscent of the prosperity gospel. This Amway-esque ambiance is subtler in some studios than it is in others, but across platforms, a single promise resonates: Your body fat percentage will drop and your gluteus will elevate, and so will your life’s value, but only through sweaty, high-priced labor. You can hear swells of New Thought in CrossFit’s unswerving more-is-more rhetoric. Capitalizing on the athletic vernacular and warlike delivery of a drill sergeant, CrossFit trainers (or “coaches,” as they’re called on the inside) bellow slogans like “Beast mode,” “No guts, no glory,” “Sweating or crying?,” “The burden of failure is far heavier than that barbell,” and “Puking is acceptable. . . . Blood is acceptable. Quitting is not.” Invoking rituals like Hero WoDs (“hero workouts of the day,” move sequences named after fallen members of the military and law enforcement), they manufacture the atmosphere of soldiers in training. CrossFit boasts a staunchly libertarian atmosphere, derived from the personal politics of its founder, Greg Glassman , who has famously uttered quotes like “Routine is the enemy” and “I don’t mind being told what to do. I just won’t do it.” It’s no coincidence, then, that the CrossFit climate is one of lawlessness, where within the anarchical universe of the box, followers are not only allowed but encouraged to work out so hard they vomit, urinate, or end up in the hospital. Jason, a cancer survivor and ex-CrossFitter who joined his local box on a quest of self-empowerment after finishing chemotherapy, was forced to quit after developing chronic shoulder pain and a knee injury so severe, it required surgery. In a 2013 Medium post about his experience, he wrote, “The first year was exhilarating. . . . I began bragging about my lifting numbers, and quickly amped up the frequency of my visits from three to four, then five days per week. Without even realizing it, I became that evangelizing asshole.” But eventually, CrossFit’s ungovernable rhetoric, which conditions members to believe that pushing their bodies to injury is inevitable and even admirable, caught up to Jason. “The messed-up part is that injuries in CrossFit are seen as badges of honor, the price of getting righteously ripped, bro,” he revealed.* So when he complained to his coaches about the shoulder and knee pain he was experiencing, they gaslit him into thinking it was all his fault. “You’re supposed to push yourself to the limit,” Jason wrote, “but when you hit the limit and pay the price, you’re the idiot who went too far.” “No guts, no glory” may be a tagline, but it’s also among the thought-terminating clichés CrossFit might use to silence your grievances.