On the first day of the week,
Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning,
while it was still dark,
and saw the stone removed from the tomb.
So she ran and went to Simon Peter
and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them,
“They have taken the Lord from the tomb,
and we don’t know where they put him.”
So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb.
They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter
and arrived at the tomb first;
he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in.
When Simon Peter arrived after him,
he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there,
and the cloth that had covered his head,
not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.
Then the other disciple also went in,
the one who had arrived at the tomb first,
and he saw and believed.
For they did not yet understand the Scripture
that he had to rise from the dead. – John 20:1-9
22 thoughts on “Happy Easter!”
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Happy Easter everyone. Jesus has risen and Lord knows we need Him. Is anyone watching the live coverage of Brussels? A faction on the right are protesting the insane open border policies and lack of national security and are being labeled as “extreme” and “fascist” by the leftists on MSNBC. The leftists are bemoaning the gathering and claiming that this “feeds into the narrative of ISIS” and “emboldens ISIS” and even more insane, are claiming that ISIS can not be defeated militarily but needs to be defeated by simply showing them that their “ideology is wrong”, and that we will not “overreact”.
That is the position of our Democrat party too led by tango dancer Obama who prefers to do the wave with a communist dictator than speak to the real time atrocities of a truly fascist and extreme group. I just hope Jesus forgives us for not fighting evil in our time, and preferring instead to not “overreact”.
Did you know that Cadbury has removed the word “Easter” from its description of its chocolate eggs? From an article about this “trend”…emphasis mine
”…..since the company (Cadbury) first walked onto the Easter candy scene, its founder, David Marshall said the descriptions on other company’s Easter treats have become more and more bleak.
As an example, the company mentioned Cadbury’s Easter Egg Trail Pack, whose name was changed to “Egg Hunt Pack.” In addition, this season’s label on Nestlé’s Quality Street Easter egg reads: “Large Milk Chocolate Egg.” Another Nestlé product, the Milkybar Easter Egg, now has the blunt name, “Milkybar White Chocolate Egg,” proving that Cadbury is not the only company to blame for the pull.
“It looks like there is a trend,” Marshall told Telegraph.
“A lot of businesses are not comfortable with the religious aspect of the festival,” he continued. “If they want to make their product as attractive to as many people as possible it could well be that they want to remove references to the Christian festival because that will be seen as attaching to one faith tradition.”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/03/27/when-cadbury-and-others-dropped-word-easter-from-chocolate-egg-packaging-christian-candy-company-offered-this-alternative
That took me aback. Just what “festival” IS there today, if not a religious one? Apparently the educational system in the UK is as bizarrely bad, and selective, as what we have here (the man is from Manchester) if he truly does not grasp the fact that the entire “festival” is a celebration of the Resurrection of Christ. Does he have the slightest idea of the symbolism of the egg, for this celebration? Evidently not.
He seems to think that there is just some kind of “festival” that happens to take place 40 days after Ash Wednesday (I wonder how he explains Ash Wednesday) and 3 days after Good Friday, that includes the symbolism of the egg, and then some upstart Christians latched onto it and tried to drag it into their theology by calling it “Easter”. I wonder what he considers the true origin of this “festival”.
And just what other faiths would be left out if Easter were to continue to be “…(attached) to one faith tradition”? Would using the word “Easter” offend the Jews who have their own springtime “festival” that just happens to occur 40 days after Ash Wednesday and 3 days after Good Friday? Would Muslims be outraged at having their own springtime “festival” hijacked by Christians tacking the word “Easter” onto it?
Just realized that when I excerpted part of the article I made it look like David Marshall is the founder of Cadbury’s, when he is in fact the founder of the alternative candy company featuring the word “Easter” on its labeling. Sorry about that……………
People have been frightened by the Resurrection ever since it happened – and people today are more frightened of it than ever. It scares people to think there’s a God who will actually do things, you see?
I think what scares people about God is that if there is a God then there are expectations of how to behave, and consequences. It’s not that people of faith have had more proof of the existence of God, it’s that they are not afraid of the idea.
I don’t think it is an accident that so many who do not believe in God, or who deny the existence of God, are also people who accept the tenets of Leftism, which include (whether on a conscious level or not) the belief that there are some people who, by the sheer nature of their individual wonderfulness, are above corruption and should be put in charge of the rest of us.
It’s as if the need to believe is, on some level, pretty universal, but some have the courage to accept a Supreme Being they cannot see, while others choose a secular entity in which to place their faith.
Everyone will worship something..and if it isn’t God then it will be self, or money, or power or just someone who is famous.
We’re experiencing one of the nicest Easters in recent memory, 70 degrees and sunny, wild flowers popping out of the ground, and everything beginning to come back to life. I have this nagging feeling that it’s the calm before the storm, but thank God to be alive, walking upright and able to enjoy it all.
We had a gorgeous day here, too, and it looks like good weather for the next couple of weeks—some rain, but at least it is not supposed to be snow. I made a lot of progress on getting my seed starting area put together, and should get them under lights tomorrow. Here we don’t plant outside till after Mother’s Day so I have six weeks to get my seeds started. A serous case of spring fever had me on the internet late one night during a blizzard, when I bought a LOT of seeds and plants, so I have myself pretty boxed in for the summer.
Wonderful weather here, as well…though a massive cold front is about to put us in the deep freeze…by Tuesday, we’ll be lucky to see 65 degrees!
A very good commentary on Town Hall: emphasis mine
http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2016/03/28/for-america-the-fall-of-the-roman-empire-is-the-best-case-scenario-n2139579
“Here at home, the left has tossed out our own American mos maiorum, with Obama leading the charge to disregard the norms and customs that he finds far too constricting. Obama is the poster child for the ruling class’s decline. He is poorly educated – internalizing your commie prof’s clichés and lies does not make you educated even if your degree says “Harvard” – and utterly without any personal investment through service to his country (Obama in the military? That’s a laugh. Do they make camo mom pants?). Of course he has no respect for our norms and customs – he does not know anything about them and he has no personal investment in them. He has no business running anything, as he has amply demonstrated during perhaps the most damaging presidency since James Buchannan’s.
Led by pedestrian street agitators like Obama and his equally undistinguished cohort of leftist allies, the left has gleefully chipped at the foundations of our American Republic, not understanding that our society is not static. They cannot disregard the rules and expect the rest of us to keep obeying them. Oh, some try – the GOP establishment’s supine response to Obama can be understood as a desperate gambit to try and preserve the old ways. They hope – without basis – that Obama is merely a blip and that after he flies off into his narcissistic sunset in a gas-guzzling jet things will go back to normal. Their strategy is passive. They want to wait him out.
But the rest of us don’t want to wait and see if that happens. We want to respond. And that’s why we have two very different candidates promoting two very different responses. We have Ted Cruz, who is promoting radical action to return to the American Republic, with a focus on the Constitution. He is the true American mos maiorum candidate.
And then we have Donald Trump, who cares nothing for norms and customs and embraces raw power much as Obama and the left do, only he promises to protect the interests of a different constituency. He’s a would-be Caesarean strongman/savior, though to analogize him further to Julius Caesar is to insult the concept of analogies. Trump is a vulgar fool milking phony populism for power, best understood as a particularly tacky Graachi. Unlike them, Trump is both ignorant and a coward, but like them, if he does get elected president, he will be cut off at the knees by the patricians of the establishment.
Hillary Clinton is an even more anti-Republic candidate. Like Trump and Obama, she cares nothing for anything but power. Another sub-par mind trading off her degrees from a half century ago, this unaccomplished, bitter harridan lacks the wisdom to chart a course that avoids aggravating our society’s already gaping wounds. Instead, she’ll pour salt into them for no reason other than her own delight at asserting power, gleefully poking at normals with initiatives like forcing women to accept men into their bathrooms and trying to disarm the law-abiding. Inevitably, she will be stunned when she finds her actions greeted by a reaction she cannot control, and the American Republic will disappear as her rule by power is replaced by her opponents’ rule by power. Oh, we may get a good emperor or two along the way, but history tells us how this story ends.”/i>
Dang it! I was just about to write that article! I mean, seriously, as I was checking over my normal “sign on” stuff it occurred to me that Obama going to Cuba isn’t some move to free the world from past hatreds…it is just what Obama’s college Profs told him would be a cool thing to do because it would really stick it to those “bitter clingers” who stand in the way of credentialed fools (like Obama) from running the show…
I heard an excellent, one-sentence description of the difference between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump over the weekend.
Ted Cruz is a decent, honorable man; Donald Trump is not.
Yep – All of us, I think, had different choices than Cruz for President early on…but he is the only shot we have of decent, Conservative government in 2016.
Yesterday about 70 Christians were killed in Pakistan which is receiving little mention in the media, and then I just found this report:
The Indian Catholic priest kidnapped by ISIS-linked terrorists in Yemen earlier this month was crucified on Good Friday, it has been claimed. Father Thomas Uzhunnalil, 56, was taken by Islamist gunmen, reportedly linked to ISIS, who attacked an old people’s home in Aden, southern Yemen, killing at least 15 people, on March 4. The terrorists reportedly carried out the heinous murder on Good Friday, after threatening to do so earlier in the week, according to the Archbishop of Vienna
I am now waiting for the moderate Muslims to condemn these actions.
I’m still hoping it isn’t true – of course, for the priest, himself, such a death, while terrible, is to be gratefully accepted for Our Lord…but I still hope we’re getting false or exaggerated claims.
So are you thinking that the crucifixion may be a little too extreme for a group that just bombed a park full of women and children? For a group that has drowned and burnt alive Coptic Christians in cages? And for a group that has beheaded Yazidi children? I don’t think there are any boundaries too extreme for this barbaric group.
No. But I just hope and pray it isn’t true…
Well, burning people alive while they were locked in cages didn’t get a reaction. That followed videos of decapitation, which didn’t seem to upset our government.
They are taunting us. Why? If they just want to show the West as spineless cowards, I suppose this would work. Maybe they are trying to get us to attack them, but I’m not sure what their end game is with that. I doubt that they are capable of setting a trap so immense and deadly that it would wipe us out if we were to walk into it. It may very well be that they want a more aggressive stance, so they can portray themselves as victims and also as fully justified in whatever they do, once they can claim we are the aggressors.
But who knows? It is always hard to figure out insanity. I do know that they are enjoying the spectacle of an inept and impotent United States, after showing the same of Europe.
What is so incredibly disheartening to me is the lack of outrage among the civilized world and the lack of will to do anything about it among leaders of free nations. It is also disappointing that we seem to be more concerned with collateral damage amongst Muslims than we are with innocent Christians and other Muslims being butchered. I know many wont like this response, but personally I don’t care how many Muslim women and children would die in the conflict as that responsibility is with ISIS not us. If I were in charge, I would use every single weapon at my disposal and would show absolutely no mercy in destroying their strongholds and their fanaticism. It would be quick and decisive.
I think one of the obstacles to a full-out attack on Islamic terrorism is the mistaken idea that Islam is primarily a religion. I think it is a political ideology with elements of spiritualism that cloak it in the disguise of being merely a religion.
As long as Islam can continue to be treated as just a religion, with some elements of nastiness, we won’t be able to deal with Islamic terrorism. I think we need to look at defining Islam as two different entities—a religion, which consists of the elements that address the spiritual, address salvation of the soul, and a political movement, which is based on conquest, dominance and control of others.
Given the escalation of horrors exhibited by the ideological arm of Islam, I think we might be closer to doing that. Some troll once bleated, in response to this idea put out a few months ago that Muslims would simply lie if asked to state that their allegiance is to the religious side of Islam, and to renounce its violent and political aspects. Sure, some would. But there is still an element of hesitation in doing this. If one truly believes in the religion of Islam and hates the violence and concept of forcing it upon others, on pain of death to those who resist, there should be no problem in making the choice. And even if the person lies, his true allegiance would then have to go underground, would be illegal, could be monitored, and would be under a lot more pressure than it is now when we are not even allowed to do surveillance on mosques.
It’s not as if something like this has never happened—we have gone from Christianity being defined as Catholicism to having something like 1600 Protestant Christian belief systems in addition to Catholicism. We have Orthodox Jews and Reform Jews, and so on.
This would not be a finger-snap kind of thing, which would immediately solve the problem. But it would have, I think, an effect on Islam. It would, for example, offer a choice to Muslims who claim they have a religion of peace, who say they are “moderate” Muslims who decry the terrorism of the radicals. We all know that most of these moderates, while paying lip service to the spiritual side of Islam, also admit to thinking suicide bombings are OK and Israel should be eliminated. But given a choice of a form of Islam which is acceptable, and accepted, which condemns violence against non-Muslims, which is a statement to others that they are decent and law-abiding people, I think many would approve. And just as important, the very act of refusing to approve would draw a line. If one does not agree that he or she chooses to be a member of what we can call, for purposes of this suggestion, Reformed Islam, the he or she also agrees that he or she has chosen the political aspect of the movement, which carries with it the removal of the protections religions should get, as well as assuming the identity of the violent aspect of Islam, It would remove the grey area now used by those who want it both ways.
I can’t think of another way to remove the protection of Islam now granted by its “religious” identity, and I think we will always have a problem in going after Islamic terrorists as long as this endangers “moderate” Muslims as well. So I would say to the “moderates”—Put your money where your mouth is. If you truly reject the violence and sadism of what we now see as Islam, then set it aside and become part of the Reform Movement, which is based on a Koran stripped of its injunctions to commit violent and evil acts, and its approval of such acts. If you can’t do that, you are just stuck with being lumped in with the terrorists and murderers, and you might have to pay the consequences.
At the same time I would legally identify the political aspect of Islam as anti-American and therefore illegal in this country, and act accordingly. We certainly never had an expectation that we were supposed to allow Nazis into the United States, and we should be able to continue to monitor who is and who is not allowed to come here. If we have groups of people who appear to belong to anti-America groups, we can monitor them and their activities, which in the case of what I would consider Political Muslims, surveillance of mosques, undercover infiltration of mosques, and other forms of oversight not allowed to religious groups. A claim of religion would not be enough—-if any other anti-American group just had some kind of prayer ceremony as part of its meetings, that would not protect it from surveillance, and the same should be true of this form of Islam. We now don’t have laws against being communists, but we do have laws against communist cells working to overthrow the government. If American communists were to align with international communists to start the kind of terror attacks we are seeing from Muslims, we would have no problem in going after communists anywhere we found them.
Well, a President Sanders might, but………….
For those who are concerned about the 1st Amendment regarding monitoring of actions which some might consider a form of “free speech” there is an excellent article on the subject:
An Originalist Critique of the Court’s Free Speech Tradition
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/03/16401/
From the article………..
”……modern jurisprudence asserts that the Free Speech Clause was meant to create a marketplace of ideas that develops truth by permitting autonomous individuals to express or ignore nearly any speech they want. This may sound attractive to free-speech “absolutists,” at least up to a point. What the “marketplace” and “autonomy” arguments are less up-front about is that the Court determines them both. As the Court rejects the distinction between socially valuable speech protected by the Constitution and speech without social value that may be regulated, the Court is the only body that may draw lines between permitted and prohibited speech. It thus possesses the tools to restrict even public speech—and, occasionally, it does just that.
This jurisprudence rests on principles far removed from the Free Speech Clause’s original meaning. It is detrimental to the distinct constitutional protection for socially valuable speech, the public’s understanding of that distinctiveness, and democratic authority to protect self-government from speech that undermines the search for truth. This should compel a refresher on the Clause’s original meaning.
Free Speech at the Founding
As originally understood, the Free Speech Clause ensured that Americans could debate and make determinations about matters of public life. This endeavor is consonant with the search for truth, and it follows from the Clause’s text.
The phrase “freedom of speech” is part of a broader one in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .” At the founding, these clauses guaranteed different manifestations of the same freedom: to speak or publish, as the First Continental Congress said in 1774, on “the advancement of truth, science, morality, . . . arts in general, and . . . liberal sentiments on the administration of Government.” Including this freedom within the Bill of Rights makes sense, as the enumerated rights identify those that a tyrant would probably target. A tyrant may not mind speech without social value; indeed, “bread and circuses” can complement tyranny. But speech about the truth of matters connected to the public good cannot be harmonized with tyranny.
Protecting the right of free speech does not bear upon the authority of communities to restrict speech unconnected to public life and ascertaining truth. Some sentiments may serve to corrupt the search for truth or the civic responsibility necessary for self-government’s endurance. The founders were well aware of man’s propensity to indulge evil, and the debates over ratifying the Constitution include admonitions from Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike to eschew speech that indulges man’s “passions” in favor of a thoughtful, rigorous public debate oriented toward truth.
Even as much speech regulation during the founding era came through social standards, rather than legal rules, restricting speech lacking in social value did not implicate the freedom of speech.
Even with state constitutional provisions similar to the federal Freedom of Speech Clause, several states possessed bans on pornography, blasphemy, profanity, false statements, or libel. At the national level, the founders’ distinction between speech with and without social value was made manifest in public reaction to congressional restrictions on speech.”
The article is a refreshing analysis of an amendment which has been distorted in recent years to something very different from its original meaning and intent.
That is good stuff – and in a better world, we would ban all manifestations of, for instance, National Socialist ideology – there’s nothing in there which assists a people to arrive at the best approximation of truth. It is based upon a series of lies and ignorant errors and if in any way implemented would be detrimental to human liberty and moral decency. So, of course, does Marxist ideology. But, we can’t ban such speech – not because we want it, but because we know our Progressives…and once we get into the business of banning baleful speech, it is just a day or two before the Progressives have defined all non-Progressive speech as being Nazi in content, and thus banned.