"Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities says local archeologists have unearthed the mummy of an unusually large animal, most likely a lion or lioness." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"The ministry said on Monday the mummy was excavated in Saqqara, a town south of Cairo that was a vast necropolis in antiquity and is home to the famed Step Pyramid."
"In ancient Egypt, sacred ibises were collected from their natural habitats to be ritually sacrificed, according to a new study." Source: Science Daily.
"Egyptian catacombs are famously filled with the mummified bodies of Sacred Ibises. Between around 664BC and 250AD, it was common practice for the birds to be sacrificed, or much more rarely worshipped in ritual service to the god Thoth, and subsequently mummified. In ancient sites across Egypt, these mummified birds are stacked floor to ceiling along kilometers of catacombs, totaling many millions of birds. But how the Egyptians got access to so many birds has been a mystery; some ancient texts indicate that long-term farming and domestication may have been employed."
Note: The sacred ibis has long since evolved into the sacred bin chicken.
Notes: The quote above is misleading because it makes it sound like these mummified animals were discovered under the famous Step Pyramid. In reality, the Catacombs of Anubis aka the Dog Catacombs are located under the desert to the northeast of the pyramid.
"The Dog Catacombs, as they are known, date to 747-730 B.C., and are dedicated to Anubis, the Egyptians' jackal-headed god of the dead," according to Live Science (2011). "They were first documented in the 19th century; however, they were never fully excavated."
"According to a new research study, a 5,000 square foot network of underground tunnels are stuffed full of linen-wrapped dogs, along with a few foxes and cats laid to rest thousands of years ago by the cult following of a canine-like deity [Anubis] who Egyptians believed would usher them into the afterlife." (Daily Beast)
"A few of these animals presumably lived in the Anubieion temple at Saqqara, revered as living representatives of the god ... Their mummies might be categorized as those of 'sacred animals' ... who were worshipped during their lifetimes as manifestations of the god, and then mummified and buried with great pomp after their death." -- Killing Man's Best Friend?, Archaeological Review From Cambridge, 2013.
"A scanning project [of Egyptian animal mummies] at Manchester Museum and the University of Manchester has revealed that about a third of the bundles of cloth are empty inside." Source: BBC (2015).
"Researchers believe there was a huge appetite for these religious offerings, and demand for the mummies may have outstripped supply."
Note: Animal mummies were used as votive offerings in ancient Egypt, where many of the gods were represented in animal forms:
"Animal mummies were votive gifts. Today you'd have a candle in a cathedral; in Egyptian times you would have an animal mummy." (BBC)
"You would go to a special site, buy an animal mummy, using a system of barter. You'd then give it to a priest, who would collect a group of animal mummies and bury them."
Unfortunately, it looks like many of the ordinary people who wanted to show their devotion fell victim to a swindle operated by the embalmers. Many of these "mummies" contained no animal parts at all. Instead, they were stuffed with "organic material such as mud, sticks and reeds, that would have been lying around the embalmers' workshops, and also things like eggshells and feathers, which were associated with the animals, but aren't the animals themselves."
Pagan or Christian, religion in general has always been rife with fraud.
"A tiny, 2,100-year-old mummy from ancient Egypt had long been thought to contain the remains of a treasured bird - which would make sense, considering the hawk-themed decorations and small size." Source: Science Alert (2018).
"But researchers conducting a CT scan have found something else entirely - the remains of a severely malformed human foetus, stillborn at no later than 28 weeks."
"Tensions are high in the reconstruction project for France’s Notre Dame cathedral after an Army general appointed by President Emmanuel Macron has told an architect fighting for the original spire design to 'shut his mouth.'" Source: RT.
"It’s not a fight you expect to see very often, but the reconstruction of the fire-gutted Notre Dame cathedral has led to a showdown between the chief architect and General Jean-Louis Georgelin, appointed by French President Emmanuel Macron to pilot the restoration project."
Report from June 2019.
Comment: This is part of an ongoing fight over how the cathedral should be rebuilt. The jackass Macron and the general he put in charge of the reconstruction project want to give the structure "a more contemporary look," i.e. they want to turn it into some of kind of postmodern monstrosity. Meanwhile, Philippe Villeneuve, the chief architect, wants to rebuild the cathedral as it was before the fire, or as close to the way it was as possible. In other words, he wants to restore the cathedral, not destroy it.
RT doesn't get into the specifics about what they were arguing about, but it appears that the general thinks that the architect should just shut up and do what he's told:
"Asked about Villeneuve's point of view, the general said: 'As for the chief architect, I have already explained that he should shut his mouth.' He added that all involved with the project need to 'move ahead in wisdom so that we can serenely make the best choice for Notre Dame, for Paris, for the world.'"
What a pompous ass. Note that the general seems to think that the decision about how to restore the cathedral is still a matter of debate even though that question was supposedly decided months ago:
"What is strange about the whole debate is that it is happening at all. When a 'contemporary' redesign was first mentioned, there was a major public outcry. The French Senate even voted that the cathedral must be restored to its original glory."
In other words, the senate vote meant nothing at all. Big surprise.
The fight over the reconstruction of the cathedral is one skirmish in the larger war between the forces of tradition and cultural disintegration which is occurring all over the West. If Macron and his pet general get their way, they're liable to turn Notre Dame Cathedral into a public greenhouse or something even worse. If that happens it would have been better if the cathedral had just burned to the ground.
As for the fire itself, we still don't know what caused it. The French government announced almost immediately that no foul play was involved and stories surfaced a few days later that the blaze was probably electrical in origin. Or maybe it was caused by a cigarette butt. Nobody seemed to know at the time and we haven't heard anything since. The fire was international news for a week, maybe, then it just vanished from the media as if it had never happened.
Ten-to-one it was arson, but I'm not holding my breath for the Macron regime to admit it.
Note: General Georgelin received a public reprimand for his comments. That's probably just as meaningless as the French senate's vote, but it's something, I guess.
"Melted scaffolding atop fire-ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral will be removed “in the coming weeks” to allow restoration work to begin next year, France’s culture minister said Tuesday." Source: France 24 (Oct. 2019).
"It’s been six months since an April 15 fire gutted the medieval Paris structure, which was under renovation at the time and crisscrossed with scaffolding where its spire once stood."
A Catholic perspective on the decline of Christianity in the US.
"The religious landscape of the United States continues to change at a rapid clip. In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or 'nothing in particular,' now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009." Source: Pew Research Center.(Oct. 2019)
A Southern Baptist evangelical perspective.
Comment: The decline of Christianity in the U.S. is probably a lot more dramatic than these latest statistics would lead you to believe. For one thing, there's still a stigma attached to being an atheist or irreligious, so a lot of people are probably reluctant to admit to a pollster that they're not Christians. In other words, the polls are probably under-reporting the loss of faith because people aren't honest about what they really believe.
For another thing, the percentage of Americans who are religious has always, I think, been wildly exaggerated. I've never believed the claim that the vast majority of people in this country are Christians. They say they are, or at least they used to in the past, but I'm guessing that the number of real Christians who actually take their religion seriously has never been higher than twenty or thirty percent of the overall population. Even if I'm wrong about that, however, there's no doubt that Christians are becoming a minority in the First World.
The decline in traditional religious belief in the U.S. is real and the situation is even worse (or better, depending on your point of view) in Europe. We're not seeing the death of Christianity, however, but it's transformation from a First World into a Third World religion. Christianity is still the world's largest religion, but that's rapidly changing as well:
"Muslims are projected to be the world’s fastest-growing major religious group in the decades ahead, as Pew Research Center has explained, and signs of this rapid growth already are visible. In the period between 2010 and 2015, births to Muslims made up an estimated 31% of all babies born around the world – far exceeding the Muslim share of people of all ages in 2015 (24%)." Source: Pew Research Center (2017).
The decline of Christianity is only one part of a much larger story -- the decline and fall of the West.
1,707 years after Galerius's Edict of Toleration ended the persecution of Christians which started under Diocletian, the religion that once exercised absolute dominion over the West is rapidly disappearing from Europe. That's not very surprising, though. Even the United States is becoming less religious and Christianity as an institution has been in decline for a very long time now.
(1) Early Christianity wasn't a single movement with a unified belief system, but this gradually changed after Catholicism became the official religion of Rome and the church began its centuries-long process of stamping out "heretical movements." Very roughly speaking, and taking into consideration the fact that the eastern and western churches of the time had distinct differences, Christianity survived as a near-monolithic religious institution for about a thousand years before it started to fall apart.
Video from 2016.
The rise of science and the spread of secularism accelerated the decline of Christianity in the West. Some denominations have attempted to "adapt to the times" by dropping or "interpreting" their mythology and transforming themselves into little more than progressive social-work institutions, but these congregations are in rapid decline. Conservative churches which preach a defiant fundamentalism are thriving in the United States and Christianity is apparently exploding in the Third World.
According to Chuck Colson, "the percentage of the world's population that is, at least by name [emphasis added], Christian will be roughly the same in 2050 as it was in 1900. By the middle of this century, there will be three billion Christians in the world -- one and a half times the number of Muslims. In fact, by 2050 there will be nearly as many Pentecostal Christians in the world as there are Muslims today.
"But at that point, only one-fifth of the worlds Christians will be non-Hispanic whites. The typical Christian will be a woman living in a Nigerian village or in a Brazilian shantytown."
After almost 2,000 years, the historical trajectory of the rise and fall of Christianity is becoming clear. The religion originated in the Near East, spread into the Roman empire, rose to the height of its power in medieval Europe, then began to fragment and decline. This decline has been a long, complex process that started centuries ago and it has accelerated dramatically during the last hundred years or so in the western, developed world:
"The decline of Christianity is a widespread, ongoing phenomenon that has affected the Western world, developed countries and denominations in the post-World War II era, which have shifted towards a post-Christian, secular, globalized, multicultural, and multireligious society. Infant baptism has declined in many nations. Thousands of churches have had to close or merge and mainline Protestant denominations in the United States lost many members of their congregations." (Wikipedia)
Christianity has been struggling to survive the transition to the so-called postmodern world, itself a symptom of the overall decline of the West. The religion has been under attack for a long time now, but the biggest problem is that religion in general is no longer believable to most educated people. In Europe, even the church's own leaders don't seem to believe its teachings anymore, a sure sign that the religion is in its last stages in countries like Britain, where many churches are being closed, turned into historical museums or converted into mosques. As a result, Christianity is dying off in the West and thriving in the Third World. It will survive in the form of die-hard fundamentalist sects and the various syncretic mixtures of Christianity and native religions now spreading through places like South America, Asia and Africa.
Video from 2010.
Christianity is finished in Europe and declining in the United States, but it will continue to thrive in its original form as a prescientific, preliterate religion in the Third World. "In 1900, 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe and North America. In 2000, 60 percent lived in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with many in developing countries." (Facts and Details) By 2050, if present trends continue, "four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa" and "the number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world." (Pew Research Center (2015))
"Tradition has it that the so-called ‘Villa of Augustus’, also known as the Dionysiac Villa in Somma Vesuviana, near Nola (an ancient Campanian town in Naples) was the place where Emperor Augustus breathed his last, circa 14 AD. Now while from the scholarly perspective this claim is debatable, there is no doubt about the archaeological eminence of the site. Pertaining to the latter, Altair4 Multimedia has virtually reconstructed the ‘Villa of Augustus’, based upon the extant remnants of the substantially large structure. And the end result [see below] is glorious to behold, standing as a testament to ancient Roman art and architecture." Source: Realm of History (2016).
Note: "Although the findings to date from the excavation do not validate the hypothesis that this villa belonged to the Emperor Augustus, it nevertheless provides ample evidence to understand late antique Campania." Source: Apolline Project.
Christianity Is Becoming A Third-World Religion (Updated)
1,707 years after Galerius's Edict of Toleration ended the persecution of Christians which started under Diocletian, the religion that once exercised absolute dominion over the West is rapidly disappearing from Europe. That's not very surprising, though. Even the United States is becoming less religious and Christianity as an institution has been in decline for a very long time now.
The history of Christianity has been one of schisms and fragmentation, a long process of disintegration caused by theological disputes, administrative squabbles and church corruption. When the Catholic church lost its monopoly during the Protestant Reformation, Christianity as a unified institution (1) ceased to exist. Protestantism itself went through a long chain-reaction of schisms with the result that there are now hundreds of Christian denominations in the world.
(1) Early Christianity wasn't a single movement with a unified belief system, but this gradually changed after Catholicism became the official religion of Rome and the church began its centuries-long process of stamping out "heretical movements." Very roughly speaking, and taking into consideration the fact that the eastern and western churches of the time had distinct differences, Christianity survived as a near-monolithic religious institution for about a thousand years before it started to fall apart.
Video from 2016.
The rise of science and the spread of secularism accelerated the decline of Christianity in the West. Some denominations have attempted to "adapt to the times" by dropping or "interpreting" their mythology and transforming themselves into little more than progressive social-work institutions, but these congregations are in rapid decline. Conservative churches which preach a defiant fundamentalism are thriving in the United States and Christianity is apparently exploding in the Third World.
According to Chuck Colson, "the percentage of the world's population that is, at least by name [emphasis added], Christian will be roughly the same in 2050 as it was in 1900. By the middle of this century, there will be three billion Christians in the world -- one and a half times the number of Muslims. In fact, by 2050 there will be nearly as many Pentecostal Christians in the world as there are Muslims today.
"But at that point, only one-fifth of the worlds Christians will be non-Hispanic whites. The typical Christian will be a woman living in a Nigerian village or in a Brazilian shantytown."
After almost 2,000 years, the historical trajectory of the rise and fall of Christianity is becoming clear. The religion originated in the Near East, spread into the Roman empire, rose to the height of its power in medieval Europe, then began to fragment and decline. This decline has been a long, complex process that started centuries ago and it has accelerated dramatically during the last hundred years or so in the western, developed world:
"The decline of Christianity is a widespread, ongoing phenomenon that has affected the Western world, developed countries and denominations in the post-World War II era, which have shifted towards a post-Christian, secular, globalized, multicultural, and multireligious society. Infant baptism has declined in many nations. Thousands of churches have had to close or merge and mainline Protestant denominations in the United States lost many members of their congregations." (Wikipedia)
Christianity has been struggling to survive the transition to the so-called postmodern world, itself a symptom of the overall decline of the West. The religion has been under attack for a long time now, but the biggest problem is that religion in general is no longer believable to most educated people. In Europe, even the church's own leaders don't seem to believe its teachings anymore, a sure sign that the religion is in its last stages in countries like Britain, where many churches are being closed, turned into historical museums or converted into mosques. As a result, Christianity is dying off in the West and thriving in the Third World. It will survive in the form of die-hard fundamentalist sects and the various syncretic mixtures of Christianity and native religions now spreading through places like South America, Asia and Africa.
Video from 2010.
Christianity is finished in Europe and declining in the United States, but it will continue to thrive in its original form as a prescientific, preliterate religion in the Third World. "In 1900, 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe and North America. In 2000, 60 percent lived in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with many in developing countries." (Facts and Details) By 2050, if present trends continue, "four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa" and "the number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world." (Pew Research Center (2015))
Related:
Why There Is No Way Back For Religion In The West.
Is Religion Dying Out?
Where Churches Have Become Temples of Cheese, Fitness and Eroticism
Posted at 06:59 AM in Catholic Church, Christianity, Collapse, Commentary, Europe, Religion, Videos | Permalink