Purloined Letter Syndrome

Consider the obvious seriously, for few will see it.
--Isaac Asimov (I don't like to quote him approvingly, but if he was right, he was right.) As 2021 comes to an end, it occurs to this blogger that the time is increasingly characterized by what I call Purloined Letter Syndrome--a term I recently invented, taken from Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Purloined Letter (1844). Just as the letter in question was always in plain view, the same is true of what's going on around us now.

2021 was a year in which recent trends, including the increasing evil of politicians and public "servants," the dishonesty of mainstream media, the fraudulence and lies surrounding the Covid-19 "pandemic" and "vaccines," and cowardice of Christian leaders, became increasingly obvious, but few seem able to see it.

Biblical end-time prophecies are increasingly, and more rapidly, being fulfilled, yet there's very little preaching on prophecy--and preaching on the end times too often consists of Calvinist/preterist nonsense; for examples, there are the series of sermons on Revelation at Vernon Alliance Church's Vimeo page from January 26/27-March 30-31, 2019; the Fraser Lands Church's sermon series on Revelation from January 10-July 18, 2021; and the postmillennialism of Gateway Alliance Church lead pastor Martin Trench, as expressed in his book Victorious Eschatology and elsewhere. More than ever, it's necessary for people to be Bereans as the coming of the Lord draws ever nearer.

NASA hires theologians to prepare for the discovery of alien life

As reported by David Sidman of Israel 365 News, December 24, 2021 (link in original):

In a rather bizarre move, NASA has recruited a British priest to prepare the religious for the discovery of alien life as space agencies claim to be getting closer to discovering evidence that life exists outside of planet earth reports The Times.

Reverend Dr. Andrew Davison, a priest and theology professor at the University of Cambridge, is among 24 theologians who participated in a program sponsored by NASA at the space agency’s Center for Theological Inquiry (CTI) at Princeton University. The theologians attempted to assess how major religions would react to news of alien life being found.

The appointment comes as NASA’s $10billion James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to launch on Christmas day.

The vessel will implement cutting-edge technology to examine every phase of cosmic history inside the solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe.

The device, which features infrared capabilities, will study a wide array of scientific questions to help mankind better understand the “origins of the universe and humans’ place in it.”

A NASA expert said The Times: “We may not discover life for 100 years. Or we may discover it next week.”

Davidson seeks to answer theological questions such as whether or not God made life in other parts of the universe or if he sent a savior to die for the sins of aliens.

Another question the British priest seeks to tackle is if discovering extraterrestrial life demands religions to rewrite the entire story of creation in Genesis.

Davison applied for the role after debating these questions with his theology students.

Davison spent an academic year at Princeton University in 2016 in a $1,1 million program sponsored by Nasa, called: The Societal Implications of Astrobiology.

CTI head Will Storrar said that Nasa wanted to see “serious scholarship being published in books and journals” addressing the “profound wonder and mystery and implication of finding microbial life on another planet”.

According to Davison’s book, the world’s major religion would take the news of an alien discovery “in their stride.”

As reported by Kelly-Ann Mills of the London Daily Mirror, December 23, 2021:

...In Dr Davison's book Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine, he looks at the big questions:

Could God have created life elsewhere in the universe?

Could he have sent a saviour to die for the sins of an alien species?

Would the discovery of extraterrestrial life require religions to rewrite their creation stories? Or would it be accepted with ease by faiths?

If you believe that a God or gods created all creatures great and small, why not apply that across the universe?

The Bishop of Buckingham, the Right Rev Alan Wilson, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain of Maidenhead Synagogue and Imam Qari Asim of the Makkah Mosque in Leeds told The Times that they agreed that Christian, Jewish and Islamic teaching would be untroubled by the discovery of alien life.

Carl Pilcher, head of Nasa’s Astrobiology Institute until 2016, said NASA wanted theologians to “consider the implications of applying the tools of late 20th [and early 21st]-century science to questions that had been considered in religious traditions for hundreds or thousands of years”.

He said it was “inconceivable” that Earth is the only place in the universe to harbour life.

“That’s just inconceivable when there are over 100 billion stars in this galaxy and over 100 billion galaxies in the universe.”

I wonder who the other religious "experts" were.

10 years ago--the death of "New Atheist" Christopher Hitchens

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Psalms 14:1a (also Psalms 53:1a)

On December 15, 2011, British-born journalist Christoper Hitchens died of pneumonia at the age of 62. Mr. Hitchens was a Marxist and socialist who wrote for various magazines and newspapers in a career spanning 40 years. He moved to the United States in 1981 as part of an editor exchange program between the New Statesman and The Nation, and eventually became an American citizen in 2007. Mr. Hitchens was critical of American foreign policy in the 1980s, but broke with most leftist opinion in the 2000s when he supported the American war in Iraq. He also broke with the left when he criticized U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Hitchens was, with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, one of the "Four Horsemen" of the New Atheist movement in the mid-late 2000s, expressing his views in his book God is Not Great (2007). As early as 2008, Vox Day, blogger and author of The Irrational Atheist (2014), was writing that the New Atheist movement had already peaked. In 2010, Mr. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which likely resulted from decades of heavy smoking and drinking. He wrote essays on cancer, which were published as the book Mortality (2012) after his death.

The best comment on the death of an atheist--if one is to look at it from a purely materialistic point of view--that I've seen is from Mr. Day, on December 16, 2011:

The conglomeration of atoms that were, for a very brief moment in history, collectively known by the name Christopher Hitchens, have begun to disperse. The universe continues as before, uncaring and unaware.