"Christians," Muslims, and Jews open House of One in Berlin

Can two walk together, except they be agreed? Amos 3:3

The Antichrist's agenda continues to advance on schedule; as reported by Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz of Israel365 News, June 29, 2021 (links in original):

Last month, a rabbi, imam, and priest laid the cornerstone for the House of One, a multi-faith prayer space built on top of the ruins of the 13th century Petrikirche (St. Peter’s Church) in Berlin. The original church was damaged in WWII and torn down by the Communist regime in 1964. During the ceremony, a Jewish prayer book, a piece of cloth from the Kaaba in Mecca, a miniature of the Coventry Cross of Nails (symbol of peace and reconciliation), and a copy of the document naming the provost of what was then St. Peter’s Church as the first citizen of Berlin in 1237 were placed in a copper capsule and enclosed in the cornerstone.

Ten years of planning went into the project and it is estimated that construction will require €47 million and be completed in four years. The final building will include a mosque, synagogue, and a church linked to a central meeting space. The central hall will also be used for gatherings of other faiths and atheists.

“The idea is pretty simple,” said Roland Stolte, a Christian theologian who helped start the project. “We wanted to build a house of prayer and learning, where these three religions could co-exist while each retaining their own identity.”

The three religions will be represented by Imam Kadir Sanci, Rabbi Andreas Nachama, and Father Gregor Hohberg, a Protestant priest. Rabbi Nachama, a rabbi organizing the project, said that Christians, Muslims, and Jews would worship separately, but would visit each other for religious holidays, commemorations, and celebrations.

Roland Stolte, a Christian theologian who helped start the project, noted that there were concerns from the public.

“In the first few years there were some fears that we were mixing religions or trying to create a new religion, Stolte told the Guardian.”

Despite the fears, the concept of universal prayer has its roots in the Bible and is explicitly described by the Prophet Zechariah:

And Hashem shall be king over all the earth; in that day there shall be one Hashem with one name. Zechariah 14:9

This concept of multiple religions worshipping God together is further described in prophecy as the basis for the Third Temple in Jerusalem:

I will bring them to My sacred mount And let them rejoice in My house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices Shall be welcome on My mizbayach; For My House shall be called A house of prayer for all peoples.” Isaiah 56:7

This vision is shared by Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein, founder and director of the Elijah Interfaith Institute. Rabbi Goshen-Gottstein is planning a similar project in Jerusalem named the Center for HOPE (an acronym for ‘House of Prayer and Education’). He approved of the project while noting that Jerusalem has a special role to play in this Biblical vision.

“Berlin may have some negative historical connotations for some people but as a city, it symbolizes reconciliation and becoming whole again,” the rabbi said.

“The Biblical prophecy of God’s name being one does not mean everyone converting to one religion,” the rabbi said. “It will be more like each religion going through an internal conversion that will bring us all together to serve God.”

Rabbi Goshen-Gottstein sees prayer as playing a vital role in this process.

“We want to change the image of religion from one of competition to one that brings us together with all people turning to one God,” Rabbi Goshen-Gottstein said. “It is a very simple thing. Each religion prays in the presence of the other in parallel prayer spaces, affirming the presence of the other, indicating a willingness to live together in peace.”

As reported by the English newspaper The Guardian, February 21, 2021 (link in original):

On the site of a church torn down by East Germany’s communist rulers, a new place of worship is set to rise that will bring Christians, Jews and Muslims under one roof – and it has already been dubbed a “churmosquagogue”.

The foundation stone of the House of One in Berlin will be laid at a ceremony on 27 May, marking the end of 10 years of planning and the beginning of an estimated four years of construction, and symbolising a new venture in interfaith cooperation and dialogue. The €47m building, designed by Berlin architects Kuehn Malvezzi, will incorporate a church, a mosque and a synagogue linked to a central meeting space. People of other faiths and denominations, and those of no faith, will be invited to events and discussions in the large hall.

“The idea is pretty simple,” said Roland Stolte, a Christian theologian who helped start the project. “We wanted to build a house of prayer and learning, where these three religions could co-exist while each retaining their own identity.”

Andreas Nachama, a rabbi who is turning the vision into reality in partnership with a pastor and imam, said: “There are many different ways to God, and each is a good way.” In the House of One, Christians, Muslims and Jews would worship separately, but would visit each other for religious holidays, commemorations and celebrations, he added.

“It is more than a symbol. It is the start of a new era where we show there is no hate between us.”

The House of One will be built on the site of St Peter’s church in Petriplatz, which was damaged during the second world war and demolished in 1964 by the GDR authorities. When the foundations of the church were uncovered more than a decade ago, consideration was given to a memorial or a new church on the site. “But we wanted to create a new kind of sacred building that mirrors Berlin today,” said Stolte. “The initiators are acting as placeholders. This is not a club for monotheistic religions – we want others to join us.”

The federal government and the state of Berlin have between them contributed €30m to the cost of the project, with another €9m coming from donations and fundraising. A new drive for contributions, launched in December, is expected to fill the gap of nearly €8m.

The project has been generally supported by faith communities and the public, said Stolte, although “in the first few years there were some fears that we were mixing religions or trying to create a new religion”.

The inclusion in the planning of people of no faith was a very important aspect of the House of One project, he said. “East Berlin is a very secular place. Religious institutions have to find new language and ways to be relevant, and to make connections.”

The leaders of the House of One aren't even united on who God is, and they're deceived if they think this edifice is anything other than an abomination to the God of the Bible. The rabbis quoted in the above articles are especially deceived; like those in the time of Jesus, they don't know the scriptures. The complete text of Isaiah 56:7 reads:

Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer: their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar; for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.

The phrase "holy mountain," which appears seven times in the book of Isaiah and several times elsewhere in the Old Testament, always refers to Jerusalem. This is particularly clear in Isaiah 66:20:

And they shall bring all your brethren for an offering unto the Lord out of all nations upon horses, and in chariots, and in litters, and upon mules, and upon swift beasts, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, saith the Lord, as the children of Israel bring an offering in a clean vessel into the house of the Lord.

New Homo species discovered in Israel

The perceptive reader will notice at least a couple of things: every time a discovery such as that mentioned below takes place, the scientists have to revise all of their theories; and how little fossil evidence there is on which the theories and revisions are based. As reported by Judy Siegel-Itzkovich of Israel365 News, June 24, 2021:

Ramla, a mixed city of 80,000 people (three-quarters of them Jewish) near Ben-Gurion Airport, in the central district of Israel, is not known for making much news. Founded in the early 8th century CE by the Umayyad prince Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik as the capital of Jund Filastin, the district he governed becoming caliph in 715, did have strategic and economic value because of its location at an intersection connecting Cairo with Damascus and the road connecting the Mediterranean port of Jaffa with Jerusalem. And it did suffer severe damage from earthquakes in 1033, 1068, 1070, 1546 and 1927.

But now Ramle is now definitely making the headlines because the bones of an early human (hominid) – until now unknown to science that lived in the Levant at least until 130,000 years ago – were discovered in excavations at the Nesher Ramla site, near the city. According to common practice, the new Homo fossil was named after the site where it was discovered – the Nesher Ramla Homo type. The find is considered one of the most important anthropological discoveries in the past century. Human evolution, the researchers said, is much more complicated than believed until now.

Recognizing similarity to other archaic Homo specimens from 400,000 years ago that were found in Israel and Eurasia, researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) reached the conclusion that the Nesher Ramla fossils represent a unique Middle Pleistocene population that has now been identified for the first time.

According to the researchers, the morphology (form and structure) of the Nesher Ramla humans shares features with both Neanderthals (especially the teeth and jaws) and archaic Homo (specifically the skull). At the same time, this type of Homo is very unlike modern humans – displaying a completely different skull structure, no chin and very large teeth.

The teams shared their find with a team of dating specialists from France (CNRS, Université Bordeaux Montaigne, National Museum of Natural History in Paris and Université Paris-Saclay) who dated them to 120,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were the only known human species roaming about Africa, Europe and the Near East.

The discovery of a new Homo group in this region, which resembles pre-Neanderthal populations in Europe, challenges the prevailing hypothesis that Neanderthals originated from Europe. This suggests that at least some of the Neanderthals’ ancestors actually came from the Levant.

Following the study’s findings, researchers believe that the Nesher Ramla Homo type is the ‘source’ population from which most humans of the Middle Pleistocene developed. In addition, they suggest that this group is the so-called ‘missing’ population that mated with Homo sapiens who arrived in the region around 200,000 years ago – about whom we know from a recent study on fossils found in the Misliya cave.

The new finding indicates that two types of Homo groups lived side by side in the Levant for more than 100,000 years (200,000 to 100,000 years ago), sharing knowledge and tool technologies. These were the Nesher Ramla people who lived in the region from around 400,000 years ago and the Homo sapiens who arrived later, some 200,000 years ago.

The researchers claim that at least some of the later Homo fossils found previously in Israel, like those unearthed in the Skhul and Qafzeh caves, do not belong to archaic (early) Homo sapiens, but rather to groups of mixed Homo sapiens and Nesher Ramla lineage...

...The TAU anthropology team was headed by Prof. Israel Hershkovitz, Dr. Hila May and Dr. Rachel Sarig from the Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Dan David Center for Human Evolution and Biohistory Research and the Shmunis Family Anthropology Institute, situated in TAU’s Steinhardt Museum. An archaeological team at HUJI was led by Dr. Yossi Zaidner from its Institute of Archaeology...

...“This is an extraordinary discovery,” enthused Zaidner. “We had never imagined that alongside Homo sapiens, archaic Homo roamed the area so late in human history. The archaeological finds associated with human fossils show that “Nesher Ramla Homo” possessed advanced stone-tool production technologies and most likely interacted with the local Homo sapiens..."

... According to Dr. May, despite the absence of DNA in these fossils, the findings from Nesher Ramla offer a solution to a great mystery in the evolution of Homo: How did genes of Homo sapiens penetrate the Neanderthal population that presumably lived in Europe long before the arrival of Homo sapiens?

Geneticists who studied the DNA of European Neanderthals have previously suggested the existence of a Neanderthal-like population which they called the ‘missing population’ or the ‘X population’ that had mated with Homo sapiens more than 200,000 years ago, she said. The new Israeli anthropological paper suggests that the Nesher Ramla Homo type might represent this population, heretofore missing from the record of human fossils.

Moreover, the researchers propose that the humans from Nesher Ramla are not the only ones of their kind discovered in the region and that some human fossils found previously in Israel, which have baffled anthropologists for years – like the fossils from the Tabun cave (160,000 years ago), Zuttiyeh cave (250,000), and Qesem cave (400,000) – belong to the same new human group now called the Nesher Ramla Homo type.

“People think in paradigms,” commented Sarig. “That’s why efforts have been made to ascribe these fossils to known human groups like Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis or the Neanderthals. But now we say: No! This is a group in itself, with distinct features and characteristics. At a later stage small groups of the Nesher Ramla Homo type migrated to Europe – where they evolved into the ‘classic’ Neanderthals that we are familiar with, and also to Asia, where they became archaic populations with Neanderthal-like features. As a crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia, the Land of Israel served as a melting pot where different human populations mixed with one another, to later spread throughout the Old World. The discovery from the Nesher Ramla site writes a new and fascinating chapter in the story of humankind...”

Click on the links for the abstracts of the original articles A Middle Pleistocene Homo from Nesher Ramla, Israel by Israel Hershkovitz, Hila May, Rachel Sarig et al in Science, Volume 372, Issue 6549, pp. 1424-1428, June 25, 2021 and Middle Pleistocene Homo behavior and culture at 140,000 to 120,000 years ago and interactions with Homo sapiens by Yossi Zaidner, Laura Centi, Marion Prévost et al in the same issue, pp. 1429-1433.

60 years ago: U.S. Supreme Court sides with atheist in Maryland case

On June 19, 1961, the Supreme Court of the United States, in Torcaso v. Watkins, ruled 9-0 that states were prohibited from requiring a religious test to hold public office. The case involved Roy Torcaso, who had been appointed a notary public by Maryland Governor John Millard Tawes. The Constitution of Maryland required "a declaration of belief in the existence of God" in order for a person to hold "any office of profit or trust in this State." Mr. Torcaso was a professing atheist, refused to make such a declaration, and was denied the position.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Maryland requirement violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, and had the effect of imposing a religious test for holding office. I doubt that those who wrote those amendments had that in mind when the amendments were approved. This decision has been forgotten in the light of the subsequent U.S. Supreme Court rulings Engel v. Vitale (1962), which prohibited an official school prayer, and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), but it should be included with them as part of a series of rulings, starting with Everson v. Board of Education (1947), that increasingly ordered God out of public life.

I'm not going to talk about how five of the U.S. Supreme Court Justices in 1961--Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Associate Justices Hugo Black, Tom Clark, William O. Douglas, and Tom Clark--were known to be Freemasons. Roman Catholic journalist Paul A. Fisher, in his book Behind the Lodge Door (1988, 1989), noted that the Supreme Court's anti-religious decisions came during a three-decade period from the 1940s to the 1970s when the Court was dominated by Freemasons.

50 years ago: The death of J.I. Rodale

Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. Proverbs 27:1

I'm going to live to be 100, unless I'm run down by some sugar-crazed taxi driver. J.I. Rodale

Missed it by that much! Maxwell Smart

Jerome Irving Rodale, born Jerome Irving Cohen on August 16, 1898, co-founded the electrical equipment firm Rodale Manufacturing with his brother Joseph in 1923, and founded Rodale Press in 1930. J.I. Rodale was concerned with his health and became a health and food faddist, establishing an organic food farm, and publishing magazines such as Organic Farming and Gardening and Prevention. He was also a playwright, operating a couple of theatres to stage his works.

On June 8, 1971, Mr. Rodale was a guest on The Dick Cavett Show; the show was taped early in the evening for broadcast several hours later. During his interview, Mr. Rodale said, "I'm in such good health that I fell down a long flight of stairs yesterday and I laughed all the way;" "I've decided to live to be a hundred;" and "I never felt better in my life!" After the interview, Mr. Cavett was interviewing journalist Pete Hamill, and Mr. Rodale, who was sitting further down the couch, slumped over dead; efforts to revive him were unsuccessful. The program was never broadcast.