Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: July 2026

Thursday, July 30, 2026

From Phil Stilwells Assessment of Me

Lundahl makes his most defensible concession when he says:

“As to the area where I really am subjective, perhaps it is one in which objectivity is not attainable.”

... But this concession changes the conclusion. If objectivity is unavailable, Lundahl cannot use private discernment as objective evidence that the Holy Spirit spoke.

It doesn't change my conclusion in the least.

I was not claiming to publically demonstrate the Holy Spirit spoke to me. If the Holy Spirit prompts me to give 50 c. to a fellow beggar, what I need in order to do that is to have the 50 c., not to convince Parish Priest, Bishop, Pope, Secular Authorities that I absolutely could do nothing better with 50 c. and even so needed a specific permission from the Holy Spirit to actually give the 50 c. AND then got it.

There are callings where someone has to assess if someone else is prompted by the Holy Spirit or just being a dumbass about himself. I am not pursuing any of these callings. I'm not standing before a monastery in order to become a novice, and I'm not standing before the gates of a seminary in order to study for the priesthood.

His interest seems too heavily similar to that of a shrink who wanted to poke into what he thinks I have decided or failed to decide.

What I have decided is to write, and both talent with words and knowledge of subjects are such that this decision is not totally whacky unless backed up by the supernatural.

What I've failed to decide is what I have left others to decide, namely when they will start treating me as an actual writer instead of attributing to me claims of prophecy or higher than usual Catholic callings.

If I claimed to be a monk, I would indeed be doing such a claim, but I am not claiming to be a monk.

If I claimed I absolutely wanted to become a monk ... which I probably haven't stated since last year in High School ... (I'm 57 now), I would again be close enough to doing such a claim, and I would need someone to verify the calling with. That someone is not Phil Stilwell.

I did a check on that, in early 2000, the monastery answered in the negative. I have since then been abiding by that decision, tried to get a wife and an income from writing, and I have been blocked by liars who mis-label my work as prophecy, unless it's demonic, prophecy, unless it's psychosis, and so on. As I am not claiming prophecy, I'm not obliged to tell the Blessed Virgin that the Parish Priest requested roses in winter to prove She was She. My name is not Bernadette Soubirous. And what I claim to do is not similar to what she claimed to receive.

If someone wants to be heard over seeing the Blessed Virgin, she had obviously better provide objective and miraculous evidence. Often it's girls not boys.

Meanwhile, I claim that theologically speaking Young Earth Creationism is a necessity. Gap theory and Day Age theory are not obviously heretical, but that's on the condition that they leave the creation of Adam as directly from the dust and the timeline from Adam to Jesus at least roughly speaking similar to Luke 3. One is not a heretic for preferring the Vulgate reading of Genesis 11 which has no second Cainan. But it should roughly speaking be similar to Luke 3. Which, since carbon 14 dating, a theory of an old universe and especially an old earth with an old atmosphere will not. So, when it comes to combining Day Age with a Biblical chronology from Adam on, that's theologically licit, it is actually done by the Watchtower Sect, often decent people by the way, but it is scientifically impossible.

If the atmosphere was billions of years old when Noah left the Ark in 2957 or 2347 BC, two dates in conventional Biblical chronologies, that of the Roman Martyrology and that of Ussher, that atmosphere could not leave organic material dating to 39 000 BP. It would most probably have dated to third millennium BC. And very certainly not older than fourth millennium. Human remains exist on either side of the carbon date 39 000 BC. To me, as a Young Earth Creationist, this means they were prior and subsequent to most probably 2957 BC. The Biblical timeline is intact at a point where no person is dying unless it's in the Flood (and if so the dating method will probably be Potassium Argon and give a much older date than carbon) and the persons alive being limited to Noah, his wife, Shem, Ham and Japheth and their wives (OK some may say Ham's wife was already pregnant). I have no problem with the conventional carbon dates given according to that convention, since I as a Young Earth Creationist belong to a school of thought according to which these can be reinterpreted variously to "much younger" or to my own more precise attempts of calibration, using Biblical events with archaeological traces as anchor points. But the moment you think the atmosphere has been around 100 pmC well before any of this and remained so with minor vaccillations, the moment you say the Neanderthal nicknamed Thorin really died 42 000 years ago, you have loads of skeleta you can't deny humanity to, and you would either have to stretch the timeline after Adam to 40 000 + years or you would have to pretend these skeleta belonged to actual human creatures before Adam. The one is inconsistent with the claims the Catholic Church traditionally makes for the Bible. The other is a heresy which the Church condemned by placing Isaac La Peyrère's book on the index.

I am very far from being a prophet, I'm a theologically concerned layman, and an amateur sleuth into questions that would "question" the Biblical narrative. And I have no duty to show anyone that the Holy Spirit prompted me to this position or to this activity.

Why do I bring this up in the context? Because in another place, and I don't care to cite, Phil Stilwell is half and half suggesting that I might have taken up the existence of a missionary because of what I took as a prompting of the Holy Spirit. Nonsense, if I live a less laidback life than I'd like it is not that I am sacrificing it to be a missionary, it's that people are sacrificing it to challenge me if my supposed decision to be a missionary wasn't stupid. It's pretty stupid to take me for a missionary in the first place.

And what I want to prove that my tables work is not show either an atheist or a priest that I'm led by promptings of the Holy Spirit, what I want to prove that is simply win an argument whether it solves a problem for Young Earth Creationism.

And if on some stretch of the Biblical and archaeological timelines they don't work, what I want to conclude isn't "perhaps it wasn't the Holy Spirit after all" but rather to rework the tables. From 2020 to 2024, I have been using a set of tables which in French are called: Tables de carbone 14 sur les bases révisées (I - VI) / Tables continuées (VI - IX) and which in English are called New Tables. Since Christmas 2024, I have tables I made even newer than that, so they are called Newer Tables: Preliminaries · Flood to Joseph in Egypt · Joseph in Egypt to Fall of Troy. But when in 2020 I called those tables "New" I implied they were newer than something else which I had previously elaborated and tested against archaeological items and the Biblical timeline. The weak spot of New Tables is the date of the corpses in the Mladec cave. In that now previous calibration, they were too many dead too soon after the Flood. I patched it with appealing to the reservoir effect, which is still an option, I have since remade the calibration in Newer Tables.

And I am sick and tired of people who do not share my polemic interest but also do not want to leave it alone, but make it a thing for them to worry about. Like worry about mental disease if you have Commie or Swedish Social Democrat inclinations to making Science your religion. Like worry about prelest as the Orthodox tend to illicitly do with the children of Fatima. Like worry about pastoral focus, since there are so many other topics I could preach about if I insisted on being a priest or similar. But I don't insist on it, I insist on not being it. I insist I'm not a seer. I insist being Young Earth Creationist is very far from a mental disease. If anything it's the Atheist who's delusional if he thinks his mind is a by product of matter via very complicated biology.

But let's give Phil Stilwell the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was not an umpteenth in between for some shrink trying to assess me without putting himself or his personnel at risk, perhaps he genuinely was just interested in the general question. Well, if so, there are other people than I who also would prefer to be left alone on such items. His original question never was one I intended to answer to the full, and I'm worried other Christians could be trapped into someone sidelining what in some sense promised to be a decent chat about the epistemology for accepting Catholicism at every step into "how are you making your decisions?" ... when it's none of his business nor of the kind of people I feel he reminds me of.

Hans Georg Lundahl
ut supra (vel infra ut in bloggo)

Continuing to Answer Stilwell's Paper [1 through halfway through 5]

the practical point of the individual evaluating whether to follow an inspiration
the point of the hierarchy when on behalf of the Church evaluating whether an individual was a saint
the question of the Church and Her divine origin.

1. The Question That Never Received an Answer

As mentioned in my answer to the abstract, I don't think his question really needs one.

The two questions "what do I do know" and "am I right in what I'm habitually convinced of" are distinct.

No reasonable man usually fuses them.

2.1 Absolute certainty is too much to demand

The serious question is therefore not:

Can the believer prove the Holy Spirit’s involvement with absolute certainty?

It is:

Does the proposed method make correct source attributions reliably enough to justify conﬁdence, and how would we know?

A medical test need not be perfect to be useful. But we need some idea of its sensitivity, its false-positive rate, and the population in which it was tested.

A parallel insanity is proposed in:

3. The Logic of Discrimination

... No mathematical precision is required to see the problem. Lundahl supplies no defensible values, ranges, or even comparative arguments for the likelihoods.

Totally superflous, as already stated. Except perhaps internally for the Church. Which would not use Bayesian logic in mathematical form to make assessments of moral probability anyway.

The method the Church uses is, did this method of discernment make saints.

This leaves us with the external question whether we have reasons to believe the Church.

2.2 Historical inquiry is not identical to experimental prediction

...

This concession does not rescue Lundahl. It removes an easy escape. ...

I briefly halt here to note he claims the paper format is meant to reduce rhetoric that could be too vague, to logic barebones. (See: why answer in a paper).

The metaphors like "rescue" and "escape" and qualifiers "not" and "remove" are rhetorically calculated to give the impression I'm the person divagating, the one who needs some kind of schooling in logic. But does he back this up?

The problem is not that Acts fails a laboratory test.

A laboratory test is not applicable in the first place. As a rhetorical flourish, this sentence is of course OK. But as a serious objection, no.

The problem is that Lundahl treats the claims inside one religious narrative as if they independently conﬁrmed one another,

Well, depends on what you mean by "independent". If you certainly want "independent" sources, it's not just the Christian account, but loads of others, that lack comparable outside confirmation. No one will say that Acts confirms that Caesar made or destroyed a bridge over the Rhine. Perhaps Livy will confirm it, but Livy is as little independent of Caesar's tradition (not necessarily limited to the text in Bellum Gallicum itself) as an early Church Father is independent of Acts and related oral tradition.

For the Battle of the Somme, we can have an account independent of French sources in English or German ones, but if we treat the West as one community, which it is, what would you answer a Japanese if he were to ask "are there any Indian or Chinese confirming sources?"

Communities are not lab teams that have agreed to double check on each other. If you want to establish that colchicine is good against gout, it may obviously help if both French and American doctors report it (however, they differ on posology recommended). Because American and French doctors are members of an international "meta-team" where national medical corps are treated as "local teams" ... that have since long ago agreed to check on each other's results. And usually to do so in open scientific polemic.

The epistemically correct "independent confirmation" in history is usually the independence of observations resumed in one source. If I knew nothing from the things Jesus said apart from His obviously being the one telling the disciples of the temptation by Satan, I would be reasonable to doubt it. But there are claims that are far easier to check than that, to the first Christians, because different people actually all saw them. If the story is true, which shouldn't be the first go to main issue.

The "religious narrative" is a resumé of the independent sources that were available to those formulating it, that is mainly to Luke and prior to him those whom he spoke to.

The fact that the narrative is religious doesn't warrant it a treatment of higher and all the way up to disingenuous suspicion nor exempt it from being the story of a community's immediate origin. And for non-religious origin stories, Stilwell will not put up this doubt. I have never heard him put any scepticism on the United States correctly remembering to have started out as thirteen colonies of the United Kingdom which then at a certain date broke off connections in a war. I have never heard him pretend George Washington didn't exist or that his actual role was very different.

then asks his critic to explain every missing stage of an alternative history.

If I pretended that George Washington was a British governour and obtained independence by first petitioning and then calling a referendum, I assume that Stilwell would want me to explain why a War of Independence and a second War of 1813 was inserted into the narrative. Stilwell might pretend we could easily solve the problem in another way, by appealing to British records. That's beside the point. I could push disingenuous even further and say British records were faked later on. I suppose that at least at this point Stilwell would require a coherent, if not the one accurate, at least a coherent and possible history of how the non-event in the series of events became an event in remembered history.

I am applying exactly that same test. I am being perfectly consistent about my criteria. I am just not treating "religious narratives" as a specially suspect category, but instead "immediate origin stories of actually existing communities" (and to a weaker degree "stories of the community's past, even outside the crucial point of immediate origin as the community started) as a specially robust one. Amnesia plus false memory is curious even in one person, and even more so collectively. A claim that a community first knew it's origin to be A, then forgot A and replaced it with B to the point of referencing B as knowledge of their origin is a remarkable claim which would require quite some evidence. I ask my critic to produce it. Or at least an explanation, if not evidence for it. Even that is apparently too much, and warrants irony in a paper pretending to use the objectivity standards of the paper format/

And by the way, I would have a coherent scenario of why Jewish sources don't confirm the Christian ones. Stilwell himself has called the general mechanism I'm speaking of "villain-driven irrationality" in a different paper. That Jews to this day have a very clear tendency to cast Jesus for a villain, though non-religious versions have weakened it, and some Jews even religious ones, living among Christians, have dropped it, can be seen in some of the comments by Tovia Singer.

4. Satan Makes the Proposed Test Harder, Not Easier

Even if a healing were genuine, a language genuinely unlearned, or a vision genuinely external to the recipient’s imagination, a second question would remain: Which supernatural agent was responsible?

For healings, we assume Satan cannot imitate a totally sudden healing. God has put limits on his power.

For a person's good or bad inspirations, we assume, if he didn't repent of them and if he was a saint, they came from the Holy Spirit. And guess what the one most crucial test for him being a saint is? Healing miracles. Which brings us back to God having put limits on Satan's power, some types of sudden never ever having been within angelic power, fallen or unfallen, and some powers Satan would actually have in his nature being made inavailable to him if it were about deceiving ... so much that when Biblical prophecy talks about the Antichrist doing "signs and wonders" some say they won't even include miraculous healings and others that he'd need real relics from real saints.

Lundahl says that good moral direction points to God and the wrong moral direction points away from the Devil. But this assumes that a deceptive agent must display his ﬁnal aim in every local act.

A Christian praying to God for direction, if he were in good faith following a deceptive but apparently morally good inspiration from the Devil, would thereby merit God's protection from deception when it became crucially bad. This is to some degree also true of as yet non-Christians. And this is part of the reason why someone outside the Church if genuinely a Christian would come into Her.

If Satan can imitate signs of goodness, then orthodoxy, charity, success, and even wonders do not reliably identify the Holy Spirit. If Satan cannot imitate them, Lundahl needs to explain why the deception hypothesis appeared in his own account of imagination in the ﬁrst place.

Has Stilwell heard of consistently and all the way versus not all the way and finally with some glaring inconsistency? When the Church evaluates if someone became a saint, the Church has some real clues on what went "all the way" (not saying this has been the case with the Vatican II sect accepting John Paul II as a Pope, but that's a different discussion). For the individual decision maker or decision accepter, again, the person doesn't quite as much need an epistemic as a moral guide. Though obviously being acquainted with the truths of the faith clearly helps in detecting fraud.

5. The Church Does Not End the Regress

[diagramm notation could not be replicated here]

In ordinary language: the authority is legitimate because the Church is protected; protection is known through a tradition certiﬁed by the Church; and miracles read through that tradition are then used to conﬁrm the Church.

You forget that the tradition is not just "certified by the Church" (as by an institution) but is actually the memory of the community. The Church is not a parallel to FBI, not even to Supreme Court, the Church is a parallel to the United States. Stilwell has probably confused the two related concepts "the Catholic Church" and "the hierarchy of the Catholic Church" ... which in some contexts is actually called "the Catholic Church". The United States does not recall being founded by Kemal Atatürk and arguably never will.

The historical existence of an institution is independent evidence that the institution existed. It is not independent evidence that the institution possesses supernatural protection.

Granted, but irrelevant.

We independently know that Mormonism exists. That fact does not verify Joseph Smith’s plates.

It may verify the existence of the plates, which I could explain as demonic, or it may not verify it. Depends on the detail. For instance, could the people attesting the plates have been in on a con game? And THAT depends on the detail of the story.

While we are at con game, before you ask "why not the reports of Jesus' Resurrection" con men don't volunteer to risk martyrdom. And if you pretend that the one doing the con game and the ones being martyred are different persons, how do you account for the top tier of the hierarchy being the ones martyred? The criterium is consistent, it involves "con game is a possible explanation, except when it's impossible" ... and it sometimes is for an obvious reason.

We independently know that Islam exists. That fact does not verify Muhammad’s revelations.

It arguably verifies he had or claimed to have revelations. If he was sincere, there is a certain problem of discernment that is not solved by the Catholic Church canonising him, because the Catholic Church hasn't canonised him.

The continued existence of the Catholic Church establishes continuity of a community, not the divine truth of the community’s account of itself.

How about starting with the human truth of the community's account of itself? I don't appeal to divine protection of the US when saying I trust the US on George Washington. I appeal to the improbability of a real origin A being completely forgotten and replaced by a fake origin B taken by all as if the real one. Already a very problematic and improbable claim about individual memories, but pretty absurd on the account of the community.

Now, the Mormon account of the plates is on several levels perfectly compatible with human fraud.

Few people present when the plates were given
plates often in a closed chest
plates absent when Joseph Smith produced translation with use of two or one seer stone (depending on stages)
plates returned, so not kept as relics by the Mormon Church.

I'd like you to construct one level where the account isn't so compatible on principles perfectly consistent with those (oh, never mind, I forgot whom I was asking, but still) I'm using to exclude fraud within the Church's account of Herself.

And similarily, the single person who could verify that Mohammed had revelations from Allah was Mohammed.

In this context, I'm reminding that Islam makes claims about only five miracles for the founding of its Ummah:

the Quran (good style vs illiteracy of Mohammed, scientific knowledge beyond the period have featured)
the split Moon
the expansion in military action with victory after victory
the spider weaving very quickly a web before the cave
the night journey.

The two last of these, like receiving ayah after ayah supernaturally, depend entirely on Mohammed's claim about his own experience. The split moon can be explained by social conformity within the Ummah and social and military pressure for the king in India who confirmed it (in the 13th C).

And I think one can agree after seing long term English misrule in Ireland, including a genocidal application of tenant's contracts in 1847 to 1853, military conquest doesn't prove divine protection from error. From our own Bible, we have an even more direct confirmation thereof:

And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them. And power was given him over every tribe, and people, and tongue, and nation
[Apocalypse (Revelation) 13:7]

Whether you believe the prophecy or not, I think you can at least relate to the principle. Vanquishing someone doesn't prove him wrong and doesn't prove oneself right.

Any more parallels? I'll give one about Rome. I'm accepting Rome was founded by Romulus in 753 BC, I'm just not accepting he was son of Mars or that Jupiter Capitolinus as his granddaddy promised prosperity to Rome forever.

The Church’s existence, age, inﬂuence, and selfunderstanding are all compatible with a successful human institution. None discriminates divine protection from institutional durability. The regress stops only because Catholic authority is declared a stopping point. Declaring the stop is not validating it.

The account of the initial miracles, primarily the Resurrection, leaves no reasonable room for deliberate fraud, for honest misunderstanding or for hallucinations, which do not exist as collective phenomena. Several people in the same hospital may hallucinate due to ergotine poisoning, but the ergotine poisoning won't make their hallucinations agree. Radical restructuring of what was initially reported and taught need substantiation. Dating of Gospels and then pretending they were the only reports available for the community and then selectively presenting cases for initial absence of claims of physical resurrection are clearly prima facie absurd solutions, would not have occurred to Stilwell to do with the United States, would therefore require at the minimum a model.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Ruffinus of Assisi, Martyr
30.VII.2026

Assisii, in Umbria, sancti Rufini Martyris.

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

Dan Makes my Point Again

He Thought He Has Refuted YEC, Well, Not My Version · Dan Makes my Point Again

Directly Observed Mutation Rates Disprove Young Earth Creationism
Creation Myths | 29.VII.2026 (US TZ)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i4eIQvNueM

Thank you again for making my point.

At some point in the past, for young earth creationism to work, we need to have had more mutations per generation and less weeding out.

Why is the time after the Flood ideal?

1) We see lowering life spans, suggesting degraded genome or mutations, as well as carbon 14 buildup and on my view even the Ice Age which I set earlier, all three of which hang together with more radiation.
2) Just after the Flood, mankind had pretty few mutations (though the Neanderthal inherited ones are from pre-Flood times), and therefore the arriving mutations were far less likely to do harm.

Noting: that my answers keep disappearing. On the next day, the objections except that of John still stand, but my answers to them are gone. Someone deleted. Not me. Last of July, I email Dan, first of August, they are not restored.
fol alibi
@folalibi2743: Poe's Law in action... :)
Hans-Georg Lundahl
@hglundahl: @folalibi2743 I had to look it up.*

No, my intent wasn't ironic, I'm a Young Earth Creationist, I'm also at loggerheads with CMI over a few things like whether Neanderthals were pre- or post-Flood.

And they have not been eager to look at my tables for carbon 14 build-up either.
* footnote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's law
Winnetouch
@noWinneTouching: Out of all the ancient human skeletons and fossil remains ever unearthed, why haven’t we found a single skeleton with the biological age of a 500 year old human? High radiation leaves clear pathological markers on bone tissue, yet ancient skeletons look biologically identical to modern ones dying in their 60s, 70s, or 80s. Taking patriarchal lifespans directly from bronze age mythic genealogies doesn't magically create the forensic evidence to back it up.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @noWinneTouching My point is, the genetics was such that a man of 100 or 200 back then would be biologically like modern 30 or 40.

Mutations changed that.

I'm not sure what levels of radiation you think of.

In my case, it's like maybe 10 to 20 times the modern background radiation.
fol alibi: (Since this doesn't seem to be a parody...) How were Neanderthal mutations inherited from pre-Flood? Through a ghost lineage that was not on the Ark? Or was Japhet's wife a Neanderthal and Seth's a Denisovan? Oh, and there's even less time before the Flood (6000-4350=1650 years) to have accumulated these mutations, especially since people in those times supposedly lived to hundreds of years old.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @folalibi2743 "How were Neanderthal mutations inherited from pre-Flood?"

Example, if one or more of Noah's daughters in law had a Neanderthal daddy, or if Noah had a Neanderthal mother. Or if his wife was half or full Neanderthal (but if so daughters in law of the sapiens type to account for genomic dominance over the residual Neanderthal genome).

"Or was Japhet's wife a Neanderthal and Seth's a Denisovan?"

Neither of them had non-sapiens mitochondriae, and Denisovan DNA is in a smaller proportion, so probably further off in the ancestry.

"Oh, and there's even less time before the Flood (6000-4350=1650 years)"

Let's speak in BC terms, 5200 - 2957 = 2242 years and probably that involves a misreading about Mathuselah and should be 2262 years.

Less time, but ….

"to have accumulated these mutations,"

Supposing they were only accumulated by natural process rather than accelerated by preternatural ones, involving at some level the Nephelim.

"especially since people in those times supposedly lived to hundreds of years old."

An old daddy obviously legates more mutations to his children than a young one
qiexia
@muskyoxes: Aren't you arguing the wrong way? If mutations are slower and generations are longer, we need a lot more time to account for the observed genomic differences
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @muskyoxes Lifespans were longer, generations maybe not quite as much (except the lineage in the Bible).

After the Flood, previously accumulated mutations were fewer, but the new rate of mutations was not just faster than before but significantly faster than now.
John
@John.0z: How widespread is this flood that you are talking about?

Does it perhaps extend far enough back to encompass the First Australian people... with their 40,000+ uninterrupted culture, without recording new arrivals, and that does not mention a flood at all? What is recorded in Queensland is the retreat on land from a rising sea level that drowned the earlier reef (about 30,000 years ago) and saw the growth of the Great Barrier Reef we now see offshore.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @John.0z I highly doubt that their own records can be ascribed a totally fault free chronology.

The 40 000 years date is from thermoluminiscence in sand, which I don't know how to calibrate, but I suppose it disfigures real dates more than carbon dates do.

Lake Mungo 3 (I recall) has a carbon date of c. 20 000 BP, which would be during the post-Flood Ice age or midway in Noah's post-Flood remaining lifespan.

Some time between 2725 BC and 2712 BC. Which are respectively carbon dated (usually) as 18,786 BC and as 17,081 BC, while the carbon 14 level in the atmosphere was rising from 14.329 pmC to 17.585 pmC. Yes, carbon 14 was, on my theory, produced faster than now, and significantly so.

The 30 000 years date would be 28 050 BC, between 2892 BC and 2870 BC, if obtained by carbon dates. Between 65 and 87 years after the Flood.

Phil Stilwell Responded with a Paper. Answering the Abstract

Assorted Retorts: Phil Stilwell Gets Remedial Philosophy (quora) · In Answer to Phil Stilwell / Tokyo Taboo · Phil Stilwell Responded with a Paper. Answering the Abstract · Continuing to Answer Stilwell's Paper [1 through halfway through 5] · From Phil Stilwells Assessment of Me · New blog on the kid: This is Not a Response To Phil Stilwell, It's a Denunciation

Here is it, the paper, starting with the abstract:

The Spirit in the Closed Circuit: Why Catholic Authority Does Not Solve the Problem of Discernment
By Phil Stilwell | Published 2026
https://www.academia.edu/170883041/_The_Spirit_in_the_Closed_Circuit_Why_Catholic_Authority_Does_Not_Solve_the_Problem_of_Discernment

How can a person tell whether an inner prompting comes from the Holy Spirit, a deceptive spirit, or ordinary human imagination? Hans-Georg Lundahl answers by recommending prayer, conformity to Catholic teaching, submission to Catholic authority, attention to moral fruits, and, in exceptional cases, later miracles. These practices may help a Catholic decide whether an impression is safe to act on. They do not identify the impression’s source. A thought produced by religious training can agree with Catholic teaching. An institution can approve a mistake. A decision can turn out well by coincidence, competence, or selective reporting. Even an event that remains medically or historically unexplained would not, by that fact alone, identify the Holy Spirit rather than some other supernatural or unknown cause.

Phil Stilwell seems bent on mixing two problems that have nothing to do with each other.

How do I know?

This is usually not what I or any Catholic of typical Catholic culture (though it wouldn't be heretical) would try to solve with attending to personal promptings of the Holy Spirit.

Nor are such promptings anything like why I converted to Catholicism.

What should I do?

Obviously a Catholic who already accepts the authority of the Catholic Church will not take practical decisions as occasions to put it in doubt.

I can come to doubt whether this or that version of the Catholic Church is the correct one if it's making it harder for me to get a correct decision started.

I have ditched more than one for this reason.

So, I kindly suggest to the author of the paper

to admit fairly and squarely these are separate problems.

And, when it comes to the practical one:

it doesn't even closely matter to you if we can in a given situation know with full certainty or moral certainty that the Holy Spirit actually was behind a prompting.

Far from being a philosophy paper asking a reasonable question, it would then become a kind of psychology paper, or worse, an undercover psychological examination of the one you are dealing with. I have more than enough of that rabble.

Also, you don't start questioning your presuppositions every time you take a decision, so why should I?

Now, let's go to "How do I know" ...

Lundahl tries to close these gaps by appealing to Christ’s promise to the Church, the Church’s preservation of the Gospel accounts, the prima facie credibility of tradition, the growth of early Christianity, and the beneﬁcial eﬀects of Catholicism. But these claims form a closed evidential circuit. The institution certiﬁes the texts, the texts certify the institution, traditions and miracle reports certify both, and the institution’s alleged divine protection supplies the favored interpretation of those reports. Evidence that is genuinely independent—the mere historical existence of the Church, for example—does not establish the supernatural authority attributed to it.

Analysing an argument correctly is a good starting point before trying to answer it.

Stilwell tries to construct a circulus vitiosus in probando.

The institution certiﬁes the texts, the texts certify the institution,

More like, every community that ever existed usually knows how it started. The opposite would be more improbable. The US is not likely to forget about George Washington and Lafayette and replace them with Kemal Atatürk. It is also not likely to forget the actual process and substitute sth like Moses parting the Red Sea or Seven day trumpet blows making Jericho's walls tumble down.

Therefore, it is a priori probable that the texts of an institution that's a community (which the Catholic Church is) and not just sponges of one (like the FBI on the US, I get the impression, when FBI targets Latin Mass Catholics as a security threat) actually do fairly historically accurately reflect the actual process by which the community came to be.

This paper reconstructs Lundahl’s position in its strongest form, then shows why it fails.

Stilwell is hardly likely to be able to do that if he:

conflates two positions on two subjects with one single position
generously pretends detecting circuli vitiosi in probando just for ease of refuting, which to me seems more like strawmanning than steelmanning.

It also reﬁnes the original challenge. Absolute certainty is unnecessary, and historical claims are not tested exactly like laboratory hypotheses.

Thank you.

The proper demand is more modest: a method must discriminate among the proposed causes better than chance, bias, and hindsight. Lundahl provides no such method.

I did not propose promptings of the Holy Spirit as the best way to evidence Catholicism. If Stilwell wants to evaluate what I'm doing when discerning anything, as if it were a medical cure, no thanks.

Doctors need to be able to verify the kind of medical cures they prescribe to others. People are very much entitled to try and persist in their home cures for coughs, colds, diabetes and whatever without continuously being poked by doctors trying to validate or invalidate their methodology.

If anyone wants to take away that right from me, I take that as a very inimical action. Sufficiently grave, as being a kind of slave hunt, to merit death penalty in a court and therefore sufficiently grave to merit a self defense that could be lethal.

So, I'll suppose we'll be dealing with evidence for Catholicism.

He oﬀers an internally Catholic policy for managing impressions, not a publicly reliable way to discover who—or what—produced them.

Impressions are not public busines, and an internally Catholic policy is good enough for a Catholic.

On top of that, he insinuates that "public" and "Catholic" shouldn't go together, ideally obviously they should.

A dedicated objections section answers the strongest replies in his own words. A veriﬁcation roadmap then identiﬁes the conditions, possible falsiﬁers, and prospective tests Lundahl would need to establish his claims,

I hope this deals with "How do I know" in the credal sense. That's all that such verification roadmaps should deal with.

while two appendices supply a formal argument audit

Not sure what that even is. And given certain propensities for overdiagnosing circulus vitiosus, I'm not sure Stillwell is capable of doing one correctly.

and a practical discernment matrix.

This one on the other hand should be on "what should I do" ... thankfully the two appendices are separate items.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Olaf
29.VII.2026

In Norvegia sancti Olavi, Regis et Martyris.

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

Biblical Prophecy, a Mormon Called Up Joe Heschmeyer, and Then I Comment (Daniel 2)

A Reflection by Mother Miriam (Who I Think Has the Wrong Pope) · A Novus Ordo Gave Advice · FSSPX Does Not Equal Sedevacantism or Conclavism, There is a Difference of Approach · Biblical Prophecy, a Mormon Called Up Joe Heschmeyer, and Then I Comment (Daniel 2)

I'm Not Catholic Because I'm Mormon...
Catholic Answers Live Clips | 20 July 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgFlbDzW4wo

Just out of curiosity, has the Catholic Church condemned the Book of Mormon?

I am totally on board with Mormons usually being outside the Church (possible individual exceptions of the type Dimond brothers dispute and even then, they are outside Her in the external forum).

But it was founded in the early 1800's, like sometime after 1838 or sth. Book of Mormon is as far off a prequel to that Church as Book of Acts are, according to their claim. They can show no more direct unbroken unity with Nephite believers than with 1st C AD Jewish and Greek ones.

That said, I don't believe that book to be true, but what if it had been? Obviously, if it clearly teaches a theology like that of Joseph Smith, it's out.

6:16 While not disputing this, I'd say they also are the main rulers over another Eretz, the one divided from Sea in Genesis 1.

Rome is (to the exclusion of Genghis Khan) ruling in great shape in the treaty of Tordesillas.

When somewhat later one Tatar type kingdom actually does become important on the world wide scene, it claims to be Third Rome. I'm speaking of Muscovy. The only Tatar kingdom that came to rule one of the Four corners.

So, currently, the four corners are still in a sense ruled by Rome.

Alaska and Tasmania by post-Roman Britain's successor and Charlemagne's ally Alfred's successor. Cape Horn by a successor of Spain, which was once ruled by a Roman Emperor, Charles V. And Siberia by Third Rome.

But, the katekhon, as such, the dignity of Roman Emperor concretely on a human person was taken out of the way c. 100 years ago, when Nicholas II and Charles the Last were so.

One could say, the Holy Roman Empire got carved up into ten kingdoms, not counting Liechtenstein or Luxemburg.

1648, Austria lost Switzerland. 1864, the German parts of HRE apart from Habsburg lands (Erbländer), and after WW-I, it was divided into 8 regions. 1 + 1 + 8 = 10. St. Hippolytus thinks of the ten toes as democracies ... which all of the ten regions currently are.

11:12 "There isn't a clear day, when the great apostasy happened."

For an end times only great apostasy, this doesn't work.

I am open to Vatican II and even Assisi 86 being kind of false alarms, and the great apostasy happening when Wojtyla holds a speech in 1992 that mentions Galileo of Pisa. And by then an emergency conclave had already happened, so, the papacy was not seriously interrupted by Wojtyla losing it.

However, Popes Michael I and II have so far held already Vatican II and Novus Ordo were marks of The Great Apostasy.

As you might know, these never quite flew with all Catholics. Which means the Great Apostasy would even so not have been a Universal one, sth excluded by Matthew 28:16--20.

Cuando las reformas del Concilio Vaticano II comenzaron a implementarse en Norteamérica, fue Sáenz quien lideró la lucha contra ellas. Su tradicionalismo intransigente condujo a un rechazo de la nueva Iglesia Conciliar, y fue uno de los primeros en proponer la conclusión teológica del sedevacantismo, que sostiene que, desde la muerte del Papa Pío XII, ha habido un estado de sede vacante en Roma porque los siguientes llamados papas abrazaron las enseñanzas heréticas del falso Concilio Vaticano II.*

I think this means, Joaquín was still on board with Vatican II until it got practical consequences.

Even earlier? Well, in 1958, Duarte Costa and Michel Colin, though illegitimately so on other grounds, were refusing obedience to Roncalli.

12:52 I hadn't understood the dynastic part.

If I'd give an alternative interpretation ... ethnicities getting drawn into Rome and Germanic and Slavic people are still not Romance, or even Munich is under iron in 1864 and under clay in 1870, Austria is divided into iron of Austrofascism and clay of Social Democrats and Nazis in the 1930's. BUT they are still ethnically the same.

For my interpretation, we have St. Hippolytus.

Or against it. To him, the democracies are the toes.

But the mixing begins before the toes, so ...

* https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquín_Sáenz_y_Arriaga

A Side Note

Creation vs. Evolution: Green Arabia · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: A Side Note

Suzanne Martser's Self Defense Course, Episode 1: Does God Tempt?
TektonTV Redivivus | 28 July 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvb_6GOymm0

Plus, after Abraham inadvertently nearly killed Ishmael by sending him out into the Arabian Desert, c. 30 years after Green Arabia ended, his nearly killing Isaac was arguably a move on God's part to prevent Ishmael from actually killing Isaac in sheer frustration.

So Abraham rose up in the morning, and taking bread and a bottle of water, put it upon her shoulder, and delivered the boy, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Bersabee And when the water in the bottle was spent, she cast the boy under one of the trees that were there And she went her way, and sat over against him a great way off as far as a bow can carry, for she said: I will not see the boy die: and sitting over against, she lifted up her voice and wept And God heard the voice of the boy: and an angel of God called to Agar from heaven, saying: What art thou doing, Agar? fear not: for God hath heard the voice of the boy, from the place wherein he is Arise, take up the boy, and hold him by the hand: for I will make him a great nation And God opened her eyes: and she saw a well of water, and went and filled the bottle, and gave the boy to drink
[Genesis 21:14-19]

I just need to find a source for Negev having a similar green period, since I didn't read the reference to Beersheba, but cited from memory when commenting on my calculations.

FOUND

From 1987 to 1989, excavations at Shiqmim revealed the longest chronostratigraphic séquence for a late hfth to early fourth millennium site in westem Palestine. The séquence extends >5 m in depth and spans >800 radiocarbon years of occupation (4500 to 3700 BC)

.

Source:

https://www.academia.edu/47953461/Subterranean_Negev_Settlement_Subterranean_Settlement_in_the_Negev_D%C3%A9sert_ca_4500_3700_B_C

2097 BC: 74.949 pmC, dated as 4481 BC*
1982 BC: 80.546 pmC, dated as 3770 BC
1965 BC: Serug died
1959 BC: 81.656 pmC, dated as 3634 BC
Let's count: (1982 + 1959) / 2 = 1970.5 BC; (80.546 + 81.656) / 2 = 81.101 pmC; 5730 * log(0.81101) / log(0.5) + 1970.5 = 3702 BC
1970 BC: 81.101 pmC, dated as 3702 BC
1936 BC: 82.763 pmC, dated as 3500 BC
1930: Ishmael born
1916 BC
Isaac born.: 83.166 pmC, dated as 3440 BC

So, the Shiqmim habitation was still going on near Beersheba to five years before Serug died.

Meaning Shiqmim had been inhabited for over 120 years, from 2097 to 1970 BC, then empty for c. 50 years, 54~55 years to when Ishmael was going that way.

And needed an angel to find water.

As Genesis 21 is the first time Bersheeba is mentioned in Genesis, we can surmise, Abraham may have been unfamiliar with the exact circumstances.

When Abraham and Abimelech and Phicol met, in Bersheeba, they may have been looking for Shiqmim./HGL

* The tables cited are quoted from Newer Tables, Flood to Joseph in Egypt, also true for the other post. Years obtained by calculation and not in original tables are marked in italics.

Monilia and manes don't prove Roman ladies wore beads to remember the exact number of prayers

Q Why do definitions and the historical context of words matter when discussing social constructs, like those in dictionaries or legal texts?
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-definitions-and-the-historical-context-of-words-matter-when-discussing-social-constructs-like-those-in-dictionaries-or-legal-texts/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl-2

Hans-Georg Lundahl: amateur linguist
28.VII.2026: I have as a favourite Matthew 6:7.

Some Protestants translate “battologein” as “repeat oneself” where a more reasonable translation is “speak with a stutter”. But they will point to next words “as the heathen do” and say “look, Hindus and Muslims are heathens, and so are Buddhists, and they have repetitive prayers”.

The thing is, while Hindus and Buddhists weren’t totally unknown in the Roman Empire, they were very marginal. Muslims didn’t even exist yet.

So this means “as the heathen do” should refer to something else than repetition in praying. Unless Greeks and Romans in their paganism did so, and they didn’t.

Look up Velleius Paterculus, Roman History, book II, last chapter.

Another favourite is this verse:

For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable.

It’s Romans 1:20. Certainly, it points to God being provable from observations. But also, the observations are there to the naked eye, to people who have no microscope or telescope. Not saying these can’t bring additional proof, but the thing is, first we need to know what St. Paul was directly talking about.

I’d say, prove God from Geocentrism, like Aristotle did. The intellectual framework was certainly there in St. Paul’s day, and Geocentrism can be evidenced by the naked eye. Unlike the things that are supposed to prove Big Bang.

Obviously, it is also possible for someone’s erroneous definition to matter in the wrong way, like if he were saying Romans and Greeks were doing repetitive prayer since Nimrod in Babylon, as I think … well, I actually know now:

Every one knows how thoroughly Romanist is the use of the rosary; and how the devotees of Rome mechanically tell their prayers upon their beads. The rosary, however, is no invention of the Papacy. It is of the highest antiquity, and almost universally found among Pagan nations. The rosary was used as a sacred instrument among the ancient Mexicans. It is commonly employed among the Brahmins of Hindustan; and in the Hindoo sacred books reference is made to it again and again. Thus, in an account of the death of Sati, the wife of Shiva, we find the rosary introduced: “On hearing of this event, Shiva fainted from grief; then, having recovered, he hastened to the banks of the river of heaven, where he beheld lying the body of his beloved Sati, arrayed in white garments, holding a rosary in her hand, and glowing with splendour, bright as burnished gold.” In Thibet it has been used from time immemorial, and among all the millions in the East that adhere to the Buddhist faith. The following, from Sir John F. Davis, will show how it is employed in China: “From the Tartar religion of the Lamas, the rosary of 108 beads has become a part of the ceremonial dress attached to the nine grades of official rank. It consists of a necklace of stones and coral, nearly as large as a pigeon’s egg, descending to the waist, and distinguished by various beads, according to the quality of the wearer. There is a small rosary of eighteen beads, of inferior size, with which the bonzes count their prayers and ejaculations exactly as in the Romish ritual. The laity in China sometimes wear this at the wrist, perfumed with musk, and give it the name of Heang-choo, or fragrant beads.” In Asiatic Greece the rosary was commonly used, as may be seen from the image of the Ephesian Diana.

So, the one indication that Greeks used rosaries in Asia is the status of the Ephesian Diana according to Hislop. I checked it, and nothing looking like a rosary is there. And Rome?

The necklaces which the Roman ladies wore were not merely ornamental bands about the neck, but hung down the breast, just as the modern rosaries do; and the name by which they were called indicates the use to which they were applied. “Monile,” the ordinary word for a necklace, can have no other meaning than that of a “Remembrancer.” Now, whatever might be the pretence, in the first instance, for the introduction of such “Rosaries” or “Remembrancers,” the very idea of such a thing is thoroughly Pagan. It supposes that a certain number of prayers must be regularly gone over; it overlooks the grand demand which God makes for the heart, and leads those who use them to believe that form and routine are everything, and that “they must be heard for their much speaking.”

He fails to prove that Remembrancer can have no other meaning than “remember to say this prayer” … and also fails to check Velleius Paterculus about what “heard for their much speaking” really looks like. Why should I believe the theology of someone who so grossly bungles basic philology?

As to monile, he thought it had to mean something like “remembrancer” from the verb monere. But here is a different etymology:

Connected to Old English mene (necklace/collar), Sanskrit maṇí (jewel/necklace), and Old Irish muin (neck).]3, 2, 1

monile - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monile#Latin

A lion’s mane has the same etymology, it would seem.

Monday, July 27, 2026

FSSPX Does Not Equal Sedevacantism or Conclavism, There is a Difference of Approach

A Reflection by Mother Miriam (Who I Think Has the Wrong Pope) · A Novus Ordo Gave Advice · FSSPX Does Not Equal Sedevacantism or Conclavism, There is a Difference of Approach · Biblical Prophecy, a Mormon Called Up Joe Heschmeyer, and Then I Comment (Daniel 2)

The German Bishops & Whataboutism
Christine Niles | 27 July 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJjS8sqjLnc

1:02 Nuance.*

If you can be legally deposed in due form in theory, and the guy who can do it (a k a the Pope) is in contact with you, like modern communications allow, at least since the telephone, well, you do not lose your office automatically for promoting heresy. This is the case at least since the 1917 code, which on this point a certain Fr. Paul Natterer, back then FSSPX, quoted on a four part Lenten sermons series entitled "Wie müssen wir zum Pabst stehen".

Why? Because the Pope can supply the jurisdiction that ontologically would be missing from your own person, if you are outside the Church, and therefore, the automatic deposition is suspended, so to say, until you are legally deposed, and then he steps in and sees that none of your nominations to a parish, none of your admissions to matrimony, are disasters due to your heresy.

Or dito if you're just a parish priest and your superior who can depose you is the bishop or his superior an archbishop.

This is not the text itself in the canon, but it is my theological analysis of it given, as per St. Robert Bellarmine and Pope St. Coelestine I in 430, that a man cannot be head of what he is not even a member of.

However, this practical solution doesn't work in case of a person assuming and assumed to hold Papacy, if he's promoting heresy. Therefore this, as it really is, exception, is inapplicable.

3:09 "Because they think that the Roman Pontiff has lost the faith"

Wojtyla, Ratzinger, Bergoglio and so far Prevost has not clearly broken the trend, they have put up a very good show of losing the faith since 1992.

For Assisi 86, that could be a one time thing. But the 1992 speech was immediately backed up with § 283 of the CCC. It remains in the second edition. 2002.

His successors have not taken a distance from that.

Therefore, the huge doctrinal weakness of SSPX is believing, like Salza, promoting heresy does not lose you your office. Like ever, even outside circumstances when a superior could in theory easily step in.

* 0:55 to 1:02 "someone doesn't lose his office or his jurisdiction, even if he's publically promoting heresy, as the German bishops are."

A Novus Ordo Gave Advice

"What these groups failed to realize is that the change they envision can be accomplished from within the church. Just look at the Second Vatican Council. The preparatory documents entering the council were fairly traditional and upheld the status quo."

The problem from Pulvermacher's pov, just as from that of Pope Michael I or his now successor Michael II, is, it didn't stay that way.

The problem is this:

"But when a group of motivated modernists got together during the deliberations, they were able to usher in many changes to the Catholic Church. They couldn't have done that outside of communion."

Pulvermacher shares the exact same pov on this as the also late Mgr Lefebvre. Or SSPX. This pov being, a communion with modernists is tainted.

But there is a huge problem when you concentrate on Pulvermacher who's already died, RIP, while ignoring the guy he plagiarised, Michael I, who died somewhat later, but got a successor within a year, Michael II. And especially as Pulvermacher was just Michael I ter.

So, far from the success story of the modernists being a reason to stay in communion with that Vatican (Michael I called his seminar and site The Vatican in Exile), it is instead a reason to get out of her.

Again, Pulvermacher was the second* guy to plagiarise Pope Michael I.

* "Pope Michael bis" was Linus II, who stepped back, "Pope Michael ter" then Pulvermacher / Pius XIII.

A Reflection by Mother Miriam (Who I Think Has the Wrong Pope)

⚡️tonitrua⚡️
@tonitrua4711: 😂
Hans-Georg Lundahl
@hglundahl: @tonitrua4711 You can find that version in St. Clement's Stromata.
⚡️tonitrua⚡️: It is deeply ironic to see you champion the concept of 'Authority' and 'Tradition' only to discard them when they do not suit your personal narrative. You are leaning on a single, isolated remark from Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata—a fringe opinion never adopted by the Church—and using it to bypass the overwhelming consensus of the Church’s greatest intellects, including St. Thomas Aquinas.

St. Thomas Aquinas, the Doctor Angelicus, explicitly states in his Commentary on Galatians: 'James and Cephas, i.e., Peter.' He does not entertain the idea of two different people; he recognizes the historical reality.

By dismissing the unanimous testimony of the Church Fathers and the Scholastic tradition simply because it contradicts your preferred theory, are you not engaging in the very 'private judgment' you usually criticize? If you are willing to discard the authority of Aquinas to protect your own hypothesis, my question to you is this: When you reject the giants of the Church to favor a historical anomaly, on whose authority exactly do you stand—the Church's, or your own?
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @tonitrua4711 Since St. Clement is a Father, the sentence of St. Thomas is not "the unanimous" one.
⚡️tonitrua⚡️: Being a Church Father doesn’t make every private thought a binding dogma. If this were truly 'Tradition,' there would be a consensus throughout history.

Here is the challenge: Name just one Pope or one Church Father, from the 3rd century to the present day, who supports Clement's isolated view.

If you cannot, then you aren't defending Tradition; you are simply cherry-picking a rejected historical outlier to shield your personal opinion.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @tonitrua4711 Given it is in a publically known work, the Stromata is not a private thought.

There are simply subjects on which tradition is not unified. NEITHER St. Thomas NOR St. Clement represent all of tradition, the Church has not infallibly decided between them.

However, no, it is not isolated to St. Clement, first because he is still read, but second, because Eastern Orthodox and presumably also Byzantine Catholics agree with St. Clement and even give an account of who this other Cephas is.
⚡️tonitrua⚡️: @hglundahl still “stromata” , book II

“But the knowledge of those who think themselves wise, whether the barbarian sects or the philosophers among the Greeks, according to the apostle, “puffeth up.” But that knowledge, which is the scientific demonstration of what is delivered according to the true philosophy, is founded on faith. Now, we may say that it is that process of reason which, from what is admitted, procures faith in what is disputed. Now, faith being twofold—the faith of knowledge and that of opinion—nothing prevents us from calling demonstration twofold, the one resting on knowledge, the other on opinion; since also knowledge and foreknowledge are designated as twofold, that which is essentially accurate, that which is defective. And is not the demonstration, which we possess, that alone which is true, as being supplied out of the divine Scriptures, the sacred writings, and out of the “God-taught wisdom,” according to the apostle?”

Does the Church teach that Scripture is the sole authority?
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @tonitrua4711 He didn't even say that the "God taught wisdom" was only in the Scriptures.

He did say that the supernatural faith (Scripture plus God taught wisdom) was the sole certain demonstration.
⚡️tonitrua⚡️: “THAT ALONE WHICH IS TRUE”

Not clear for you ?
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @tonitrua4711 Yes, he excluded rational demonstration from it, but did not limit it to Scripture alone.

You seem to think that "alone" and "Scripture" appearing at a distance in the same sentence allows you to diagnose "Scripture alone" ... which by the way is a formulation that the Catholic Church has never condemned and some Church Fathers (St. Augustine, but I think St. Thomas too) have used.
⚡️tonitrua⚡️: @hglundahl It is deeply ironic that you use Stromata to support your view, because Clement wrote it specifically to combat the Gnostics. The Gnostics were the very people who claimed to possess 'secret revelations' or 'extra-biblical knowledge' to bypass the public Apostolic Tradition of the Church.

By claiming that there is 'revelation outside the Bible' which gives you the authority to contradict the consistent consensus of the Church on Galatians 2, you are doing exactly what the Gnostics did—which is the very thing Clement fought against. You are behaving like a Gnostic while trying to cite a Father who died fighting Gnosticism.

The reality is that you clearly do not understand the historical background or the purpose for which Stromata was written; you are simply cherry-picking quotes to suit your narrative
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @tonitrua4711 There certainly is simply NOT a consistent consensus of the Church on Galatians 2, since St. Clement is outside it.

It has nothing to do with Gnosticism to say that people in the area recalled, and could name the Church where that Cephas was later a decent bishop, that Mark who knew Peter could transmit to Clement that Peter was not that culprit.

You are dreaming that your own simplified Reader's Digest summary of Tradition is equal to The Tradition.

And on top of that, you hide behind a very anonymised account. No, I'm not behaving like a Gnostic, you are behaving like a nervous hysteric and on top of that, against me, as a scoundrel. Because I can't tell my readers where the finger you try to point at me is pointing back to you, because you gave no name.

Or if you like, you named yourself Baal Hadad ... Satan.*
* footnote: My take on Mark 3:17 is "Boanerges since Sons of Thunder" implies their relative had played the role of Thor up in Sweden (or Swabia) and that is a very bad one. The teasing on this issue provoked moans like those of oxen, hence Boan- (moan like an oxen) -erges (doers)

Sunday, July 26, 2026

In Answer to Phil Stilwell / Tokyo Taboo

In the previous post, namely:

Phil Stilwell Gets Remedial Philosophy (quora)
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2017/09/phil-stilwell-gets-remedial-philosophy.html

... from nine years ago, I took a debate from Quora with one Phil Stilwell onto this blog.

Recently, eleven days ago, he has found this post and graciously instead of protesting about copyright commented to continue the argument.

It so happens that this library doesn't allow me to comment under blogger blog posts, which means I couldn't answer him properly below his comment, elsewhere I will therefore link here, but probably not today. Meanwhile, I'm answering (selectively) in a post here:

"Your argument currently has this structure:"

Let's see how he analyses me.

"1. You assume that Catholicism is divinely protected.
"2. You treat Catholic traditions and miracle reports as confirmation of that protection.
"3. You then use the alleged divine protection of Catholicism to certify those same traditions and miracle reports."

No.

Tradition by itself even non-Catholic, even not divinely protected, is a prima facie argument. It could be overridden, but it is not to be dismissed just because it is tradition.

Dito for miracle reports.

"You may continue calling Pentecost 'objective history,' but repeating that label does not produce independent corroboration."

A) Such things (independent corroboration) are a bonus, not a necessity. Not outside periods that are both welldocumented enough and wellpreserved enough for the absence to be conspicuous.
B) There actually is independent corroboration of the Church existing, which leaves the question since when and how, and leaves the Church's tradition about it a prima facie evidence about its origins. As with any other community.

Before you try pretending I need remedial logic from the likes of you, try learning sufficient logic to not misanalyse how my argument stands.

"You accuse me of “atheistic prejudice” because I do not accept miracle stories at face value."

We should take any story at face value unless a factor overrides it. In many cases that factor can be, it's a joke. In your case, it's atheistic prejudice. I e, you hold a world view excluding miracles and that fudges your demands on how much confirmation it needs.

For a miracle, the procedure is not "how many other sources that don't believe the miraculous report the miracle" (at many times that would be zero, since none at the time systematically disbelieved miracles, plus, if it reported the miracle, it would presumably believe the miracle and therefore not count on your view), the procedure is: apart from the purported miracle, what else can it be, and can that be excluded, reasonably?

And the answer to very many miracles is, yes, it can be reasonably excluded. That's when a miracle is accepted.

"You have only demonstrated how thoroughly your prior commitment determines what you count as verification."

I have a prior commitment to believing any story unless there is a specific reason to disbelieve it. You have one to disbelieving specifically stories of miracles, unless there is on the spot presented an overwhelming amount of evidence, from other sources, even if that was not where you were pulling the debate. And even if all the other sources would be discounted as routinely as soon as they indisputably were reporting a miracle.

"You then demand that I reconstruct, step by step, exactly how the Pentecost story developed. That reverses the burden of proof. I do not need to produce the complete historical genealogy of a story before declining to believe its supernatural elements."

I was not asking "complete" and at that accurate. I was asking a reasonable alternative to the miracle.

For instance, a non-miraculus example, the German legend of the Rabenschlacht features Theoderic beating Ermaneric at Ravenna.

A reasonably alternative to this, and preferred for chronological reasons, is, first Ermaneric beat someone other than Theoderic, then Theoderic beat someone other than Ermaneric, both times at Ravenna, then the two battles became confused, only each winner was remembered and because Theoderic came to power after it, he was considered as the winner between the two. I do not know if this was the exact procedure or the sole factor, and given it is in and of itself reasonable, and Ermaneric meeting Theoderic would require a time machine, according to other sources, I'm satisfied that the story is so explainable.

For other instance, the miracle discussed, if the Apostles had been speaking so no one could understand anything, that would have reasonably excluded divine origin.

If they could speak so different people heard their own languages (verified as these converted hearing that preaching, and that in thousands) that would reasonably indicate at least some kind of supernatural origin.

If the story were made up later, you need to answer when.

Say "AD 50" and you need to account for how the community still holding people knowing the real story came to accept this instead. Say "AD 150" and you need to account how the community came to forget whatever story they had previously accepted.

"your dismissal of Islam exposes the special pleading. You readily devise natural explanations for Muslim miracle reports—social pressure, propaganda, retrospective invention and forced testimony—but resist applying those same categories to Christian reports."

The one Islamic miracle report I would do this for (and actually did this for in the discussion nine years ago) is the one Islam makes from its beginning: the split Moon.

IF the Moon split, it would have been seen over the world. The two testimonies we have are one from the original community and one from India. And the former one is dubious given how late the testimony is. And given the Indian king was submitting to conquerors.

A Muslim claiming supernatural healing, I would usually accept the supernatural healing and explain it as God granting him some reward for the basic goodwill of praying, even if he was wrong about whom to pray to. It didn't happen by Mohammed while he was active, not even claimed to, unlike supernatural healings in the career of Moses (taking away the leprosy given as punishment) and of Jesus (taking away many leprosies and other ailments, including death for some added time).

Your standard is: “Natural explanations are acceptable for rival religions but presumptively inadequate for mine.”

No. Natural explanations are acceptable when available. For many of the miracles in mine they aren't. If you want a natural explanation for Lourdes healings of Tuberculous peritonitis back before they were routinely cured by antibiotics, check out how much blue cheese and goat cheese was served in Lourdes, since these cheeses have molds that are of the penicillus genus. Like the one that's used to produce penicilline. It would still have been providential that so many came to Lourdes and ate goat cheese and blue cheese because of an apparition which presumably didn't come from someone who knew penicilline in advance and planned it ... unless that someone were God.

"Secular institutions, rival religions and political movements have also produced education, medicine, charity and social reform."

Like the one in National Socialist Germany which from 1933 was pushing loafers and vagabonds into camps like the one in Charlottenburg or the one in Oranienburg.

Islam as one rival religion has produced persecution of alcohol (and skyrocketting diabetis). Anglicanism as one rival religion has produced compulsory work houses after taking away monasteries that were voluntary ones. Judaism has produced pornography. Calvinism has produced Totalitarianism since Geneva and Cromwell. As have Anglicanism and Lutheranism since Gustaf Wasa and Henry VIII.

"Conversely, Catholic history contains violence, persecution, coercion"

Comparable to any of above named rivals.

"and credulous superstition."

Like not an objective fact prior to deciding the question we debate, but rather totally dependent on how it is answered.

Your argument is like complaining about non-Socialism allowing private property before the debate between private property and Marxism is closed.

Saturday, July 25, 2026

Exorcist on Mark of the Beast

Exorcist Warns of Possible Signs of the Mark of the Beast
Shawn Ryan Clips | 6 March 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs_1fvkTnOk

4:46 Just in case anyone thinks I might be Elias or Henoch, nope.

I don't recall a childhood where people got to 8 feet tall or twice normal muscular breadth and ate other people, while a genius of metallurgy was fooling around with demons.
I don't recall a childhood under, say Nadab, Baasa or Amri (I looked up the predecessors of Ahab) I don't speek Hebrew and I don't read even part of the ancient Hebrew script.

I do recall a childhood in Vienna, on and off, as well as Sweden, Germany, vacations in US, UK and earlier on Romania, ending when in 1980 I had to move to Sweden at age 11, not the first time.

But, also, I never, ever claimed to be either of them.

9:16 What about a shot where the disactivated pathogen has been cultivated on cells from an aborted human fetus?

That's been seen during the first years since 2020.

The vaccinations and masks are currently no longer obligatory in France, but they are still sold.

The constraints could easily be turned on again

9:51 Is obeying someone who swore by Apollo over obeying a conscience that says no to abortion based vaccines religious?

Abolition of Man, Long form Essay by C. S. Lewis

There is also a standalone, the shorter essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" ...

CS Lewis Tried to Warn Us
Brian Holdsworth | 25 July 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULPJMOBb1v0

2:34 I'm also in favour of retributive justice.

I have been in prison, on a deed I still judge as legitimate defense, but the thing is, I have already served prison for it.

3 and 1/2 years (a pretty apocalyptic timespan) served two thirds before getting out, last third is reserved in case I should reoffend, so as to make a possible future punishment heavier.

On the theory of retributive justice, this is exactly what I would owe the Swedish justice had my act actually been culpable.

On the theory of humanitarian penalties, since my views haven't changed, I can still be interfered with to change me, and too bad if the legal system didn't allow for punishing me past last of June 2000, that's just something to get around.

I'm afraid certain evil men in your Catholic Church (I'm Catholic too, I just quoted Lateran IV against an Amish denying the identity of the risen bodies) have come out on the side of humanitarian justice. Continue to interfere with me, as long as I don't repent as if of a violent crime.

I'm not the least disputing that my act would have been one if unprovoked. A violent crime, that is. I'm just saying shrinks (and their "Catholic" hangers on) have proven me right that shrinks back on that day actually were in the act of destroying my life, so I actually did have a right to defend myself.

Recall, one part of what CSL said was, humanitarian penal theory was preferred as (back then) giving less likelihood of dangerous criminals getting back in the streets.

Oh, just in case you should change your mind, since 2000 I have been in garde à vue or otherwise in police custody more than one hour exactly twice. In 2006 or sth, a somewhat drunk girl went into a Restaurant to pee. She was thrown out, and someone not the owner followed her and manhandled her. He was not in uniform. I tried to step between and got beaten down to the street by him and also arrested over night, since apparently he was a policeman.

The other time was about a week starting with Wednesday August 15. In a library guards were standing over a girl who was lying down. I tried to step between, not by actual physical action, but shouting to people to defend her. I was told she was not being forcefully medicated, she had "tétanie" and I thought the French for tetanus was "tétanos" and didn't believe, and I was taken first to a mental evaluation, then to the psychiatric police cells and to a mental hospital. Within a week I was out.

Other than that, I have not been arrested though at times questioned, notably when sleeping in hallways. I have been mistreated in ways that make me dream of violent revenge, and I have not taken it.

Any "Catholic" who pretends I'm dangerous and should be observed and hampered the rest of my life is a crook of exactly the kind that C. S. Lewis warned against.

Mental hospitals were originally made for people who are suicidaln wantonly violent or in states where they obviously don't understand simple hygiene, like not deciding to lower pants when they have to shit (and have a place where they decently can lower their pants, bush or toilet). Part of my prison time I was in transfer to forensic psychiatry. One man I briefly saw had been there on false confessions to shrinks in cases of cannibalism (I didn't speak with him). He would not have been falsely condemned if not handled by shrinks and a cannibal is anyway not someone who psychiatry is made for. The people I regularly saw there and the people I had seen before the date when I defended myself convinced me, not one in ten, perhaps one in twenty of those who were being held were actually meant to be their. Diagnostics and preliminary diagnostics are so overdone that the patient corps becomes 10 to 20 times as big as it should be, meaning shrinks and their personnel get more jobs, if not more pay per hour.

The reason psychiatry is no longer functioning to keep a man like Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr. out of the streets is, partly, perhaps it was not for him in the first place, and partly, it is overloaded and it is no longer sustainable. And the reason he hadn't stood trial on any of 14 previous occasions could either be he was being harrassed by police (and he came to think of himself as in a race war) or, if they were warranted, psychiatry had prevented him standing trial.

5:39 "no punishment is present here"

In Austria, Social Democrats and Nazis were in camps for political crimes. In Germany, tramps were in camps to reform them.

Hitler in the Tirpitz speech got out on the side of the Humanitarian theory of punishment when pretending the Austrian camps served "revenge" ... (he did have a few noteworthy things to say about England, though).

That speech is online, you can check it.

Mercy apart from justice is a suffocating tyranny with no limit to its imposition because the very authorities using it don't suffer any distress in doing so because they've been able to convince themselves of their own gentle humanitarian supremacy in the process.

14:07 Yes, a bit like the Apollo priests of Delphi (and some of the experts these days are descended from priests of Apollo and Aesculapius ...)

Have you checked what the five Greek cases of Apollo add up to in the gematria of the Greek Alphabet?

Cremation is Forbidden and Not an Obstacle to Resurrection

WILL JESUS RAISE THE CREMATED? (What the Bible ACTUALLY Says)
Bible with Elias et 6 autre(s) | 23 July 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOMBfVbQBZ8

The Church, East and West, has taken cremation (outside circumstances of grave necessity) as a testimony against the faith.

Slavonic priests used to call Lithuanians "musu sovitsa" back when they were Pagans. It means "our paganism" or more literally "our burning" / "our cremation" ... just as the community of believers was a Christendom, a Christian nation, so also the community of unbelievers was a "cremation" ...

15:48 Up to here, you were pretty tolerable. Actually good even.

What is sown corruptible that is raised incorruptible. St. Paul affirms the identity of the dead and the risen body.

Not "such as" and "similar" but "what" and "that" ...

Jesus still had the wounds, and if ever you go to Heaven, ask St. Thomas Didymus about it!

Here is Lateran IV:

He descended in the soul, rose in the flesh, and ascended in both. He will come at the end of time to judge the living and the dead, to render to every person according to his works, both to the reprobate and to the elect. All of them will rise with their own bodies, which they now wear, so as to receive according to their deserts, whether these be good or bad; for the latter perpetual punishment with the devil, for the former eternal glory with Christ.

17:39 Perhaps I'll let a dead Pope (Benedict XV) tell me it is:

The old Code of Canon Law (1917) prohibited cremation and required the bodies of the faithful to be buried. Again, an exception was given in times of mass death and the threat of disease. Those individuals who had directed their bodies to be cremated were denied ecclesiastical burial. In 1963, the Church clarified this regulation, prohibiting cremation for anyone who wanted it simply as some testimony against the faith.

A person has no right to decide cremation for oneself or a loved one outside cases of emergency, whether mass death or the case of Saul.

The code was started by Pope St. Pius X and completed and promulgated by his successor Benedict XV.

Now, the Bible actually had an answer about that Roman soldier.

"Now let your God raise you"
will have a reply:
"You said it, Centurion"

Or more literally:

And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and hell gave up their dead that were in them; and they were judged every one according to their works.

Sharing:

If It’s Called the Upper Room…Then What’s Below!?
24 July 2026 | SO BE IT!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SgLTKPPm6WQ

Friday, July 24, 2026

What About "Development of Doctrine"?

Two More Reasons Wes Huff Should Be Catholic — The Mass & Development of Doctrine
Catholic Bible Highlights | 3 July 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrDHoVs4GkA

18:24 As it is carried out by some, I don't like it either.

Matthieu Lavagna described an answer to Rennes, 1830 (Dz 2272—74) as a "key moment in the development of doctrine".

It was a local decision, only later made accessible to the Church universal, as I comprehend, and the key in the question was that someone who wanted to take interest was supposed to promise to abide by a future decision by the Pope on the matter.

To Matthieu Lavagna, this means taking interest is in and of itself licit, now.

He also cited a part of the code of 1917 where those taking care of ecclesiastic property are told to place investments in low risk and licit placements. To me that doesn't sound like a bank account with interest, but as buying shares in a low risk company.

1950 has been described as a key moment in the development of doctrine as well, while Pope Pius XII simply refused to decide on whether it was licit to say Adam had biological ancestry.

Even more absurd is describing 1822 as allowing Catholics to believe Heliocentrism.

19:13 Exsurge Domine versus Dignitatis Humanae.

Probably not Wes' fav example, since he probably prefers religious freedom.

19:54 Apologia played a role in mine.

I'm glad I didn't come across Essay at this point.

As to enthusiasts for this work, I like to remind that this is not his Catholic viewpoint as already received in the Church and having received instruction, it's his motivation from an Anglican standpoint on why to quit Anglicanism for Rome.

Loads of things that are very well attested in early tradition would have been inaccessible to him at Littlemore (I think his last Anglican abode was) and so he would have made sense of them by supposing "development of doctrine" even if this was not the case.

20:16 I have since 2001 built my writing on debating, first on forums and later on quora and under youtubes, as one main staple.

You are free to respond, unless I get delays in viewing the answers, the responses and my responses to them will usually get into the blog post.

Nobody wants serious debate anymore?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE-Z9r5Fa3k

[This is the whole film My Name is Nobody, but my answer to the rhetorical question was simply the title. I very much like the film, though!]

20:48 I'll give at least one proof text of Trent disagreeing with the as yet Anglican Newman's thesis.

Furthermore, in order to restrain petulant spirits, It decrees, that no one, relying on his own skill, shall,–in matters of faith, and of morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, –wresting the sacred Scripture to his own senses, presume to interpret the said sacred Scripture contrary to that sense which holy mother Church,–whose it is to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the holy Scriptures,–hath held and doth hold; [Page 20] or even contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers; even though such interpretations were never (intended) to be at any time published. Contraveners shall be made known by their Ordinaries, and be punished with the penalties by law established.

What is key in forbidden exegesis?

Relying on his own skill?
Interpreting without asking the Church first?

No, coming to contradict:

the sense that the Church hath held and doth hold
the unanimous consent of the Fathers

This presumes that a sense that the Church doth hold normally is one She hath held and that the Fathers typically consent.

21:05 Going to Armstrong:

Did they believe that God really has a material palace in the sky and that He received His Son in a decorated state chair placed a little to the right of His own? — or did they not?

Quoted from CSL.

Very obviously, if Jesus remains true Man after the Resurrection, if it makes any sense to speak of Him having a body (which can "bilocate" — using the term losely — to altars and communicants) or Him still being the Son of Mary, as some radical Protestants deny, I've actually come across that, He is in a material place, presumably a palace with a decorated state chair.

Whether God the Father is also visible in some kind of theophany is another question.

But God the Son became Man, and therefore He is now in the kind of tabernacles He would have eaten in while walking on Earth, and not just the tabernacles in the churches (with valid apostolic succession). That means, Heaven is not another dimension.

"The Church knew the answer (that God has no body and therefore couldn’t sit in a chair) as soon as it knew the question."

False. God as God has no body, but is still capable of theophany and can therefore sit in a chair just as much as He can dine with Abraham in Mamre. God the Son as Man very clearly has a body and therefore very habitually can sit in a chair or take a walk on streets of gold.

21:23 Maybe, just maybe, St. Pius X was, like me, preferring Apologia or Arians of the IV C. over Essay?

22:46 "as Cardinal Newman formulated it"

In 1845, when writing the book, Newman was not a Cardinal, he was a celebrity convert on OCIA (or equivalent) asked to sum up why, as an up to then Anglican he had decided to Pope. (Or, if you prefer, to Cross the Tiber).

24:09 As an ex-Lutheran I find it disheartening to see Bergoglio with a chocolate statue of ML. Yes, the man from the WWW cities ...

24:29 Lutherans did kill Catholics in Sweden and Denmark (to which respectively Finland and Norway-Iceland belonged).

It was somewhat less common than in England on Tyburn, but it was not all that rare either.

24:57 I'm historically in favour of killing for obstinate heresy.

I e, I hold it was one of the ways in which "ho katekhon" did his job.

I also hold, "ho katekhon" as in the Roman Emperor was taken out of the way in 1918. In 2004, when I was on El Camino de Santiago, I was told Spain was introducing gay marriage. So much for saving a Catholic society in Spain by bringing back the Inquisition. Can't be done any more.

St. Thomas clearly stated that one main reason for killing heretics was to delay the advent of the Antichrist, his precursor was the one taking Nicolas II out of the way, i e Lenin. The Inquisition has become pointless and in 2004 I learned this was even the case in La Hispanidad.

26:01 Luther was in a hopeless muddle.

If Catholicism had no poison, why establish something outside it?
If it lacked salvific truth, where was the Church in ... 1401 (I'd have said 1516 if I didn't know Luther credited John Hus with full truth)? And if the answer was "nowhere" what did that make of Matthew 28:16—20?

He had to want to have it both ways.

26:31 "all the mainline denominations are pro-abortion"

Sadly true of CoS.

Do we see some lion mouth and leopard head, somewhere?

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere

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