What is this Babylon that will fall? What can we see? Is it here?
We need to see Revelations as metaphors reflecting a reality that either is or is to come. We don’t know the hour or day, and we have no need to know. Our duty is to stand for the truth and righteousness in this time and this generation.
We are not responsible for the generations that bore us: and we have no idea what the future will hold. I never thought my phone would be more powerful than my first computer — allowing for inflation, my TI-59 programmable calculator (I could not afford the Hewlett Packard Reverse Polish Notation one) cost about thee times as much as the Sony Xperia I have just swapped to. Which is a better camera than my first DLSR.
What we do know is that this society will be corrupt, it will be antichristian and it will enslave. It will be rich, it will persecute.
It will the engine of the world’s economy.
And it will fall in a day.
And the kings of the earth, who committed sexual immorality and lived in luxury with her, will weep and wail over her when they see the smoke of her burning. They will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say,
“Alas! Alas! You great city, you mighty city, Babylon! For in a single hour your judgment has come.”
And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore, cargo of gold, silver, jewels, pearls, fine linen, purple cloth, silk, scarlet cloth, all kinds of scented wood, all kinds of articles of ivory, all kinds of articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour, wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves, that is, human souls.
“The fruit for which your soul longed has gone from you, and all your delicacies and your splendors are lost to you, never to be found again!”
The merchants of these wares, who gained wealth from her, will stand far off, in fear of her torment, weeping and mourning aloud,
“Alas, alas, for the great city that was clothed in fine linen, in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold, with jewels, and with pearls! For in a single hour all this wealth has been laid waste.”
And all shipmasters and seafaring men, sailors and all whose trade is on the sea, stood far off and cried out as they saw the smoke of her burning,
“What city was like the great city?”
And they threw dust on their heads as they wept and mourned, crying out,
“Alas, alas, for the great city where all who had ships at sea grew rich by her wealth! For in a single hour she has been laid waste. Rejoice over her, O heaven, and you saints and apostles and prophets, for God has given judgment for you against her!”
What I see in Babylon is a total narrative of progression. All must fit. No dissent may be tolerated: such shall be shunned. If the Guardian or the New York Times say it is, it must be so: they are the modern Pravda.
[And now, an example.
What worries me is that the social sciences are now invaded by fools who push their ideology. The best example recently is a study that conflates a sticker choice task as a proxy measure for altruism with asking paretns about religion as a proxy measure for religiosity. Comparing two proxy measures is risky. Correlation is not causation.
A crap study is still a crap study even if it fits the narrative. At this point, let’s wheel out someone who understands stats and read the pile of ordure, so I did not have to .
The authors never assessed the “religiosity” of kids; they did it for the kids’ “caregivers” instead. How? The authors asked parents to name their religion. They also asked parents questions like “How often do you experience the ‘divine’ in your everyday life?” They took pseudo-quantified answers from these and combined them scientifically with a quantification of religious attendance and derived a complete scientific quantification of “religiosity.” This was assigned to each kid in the study.
After that, “Children completed a moral sensitivity task programmed in E-prime 2.0 and presented on ASUS T101MT Touchscreen computers…” My goodness! How scientific! An ASUS T101MT! Just think how dramatically the results might have changed had they used an ASUS ROG G752! Or an ACER C910-C37P!
You know what happened next. Wee p-values through the terrible abuse of regression on the pseudo-quantified answers. A picture showing one of these is at the top. Notice the wee p-values? That makes the findings scientific.
All those dots are the answers to the pseudo-quantifications for each kid. The flat surface is the regression (expressing this and nothing else: the change in the central parameter of a normal distribution representing uncertainty in “altruism”; did you think it was something different?). Notice almost none of the dots are near this flat surface? That means this model has no real predictive value.
Which, scientifically speaking, means this study is crap. And where I use “science” in the old-fashioned, pre-government-grant way.
Finally, no paper would be complete without wild, over-reaching theorizing about cause. The authors say their findings “contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others”. Idiots everywhere are taking this literally. I’m too tired to make a joke about science. You do it.
This study is so bad that it’s good. I mean, it stinks to high heaven; nearly everything is wrong with it, start to finish. Yet it’s good because it takes so much effort to dissect, and the effort reduces the critic to such a sputtering mess that the criticism is bound to sound like an old fart yelling at the kids to get off the lawn.
I am an old fart, so I’ll quote the Knight. He’s younger than me, and since he’s not raising kids, a tad more objective.
So here are my thoughts: first of all, children typically are little monsters, and they do not understand religion enough to act consistently with it until much later. So it’s a mistake to look at the religion of the parents and assume that in most cases, the children will have accepted that and be operating from that worldview. Second, if you were judging my religiosity at age 12 by talking to my parents, I would not have been considered religious at all, except I was. Third, giving stuff away to strangers is the secular left’s definition of altruism. Earning things through work and then sharing with people you actually know is what conservatives consider “altruism”. The study didn’t ask about how many stickers the religious kids shared with their friends and family when they got home. Conservatives tend to not want to hand out goodies to strangers through some unknown intermediary like big government. We prefer to give to people we know or through private organizations we know. Government is known to waste money on nonsense.
Hypocrisy on the left
There’s a lot of hypocrisy on the secular left. On the one hand, they want to give away lots of taxpayer money to the poor, on the other hand, they personally give far less in charity to the poor. I.e. – they are very generous with other people’s money – especially when they can brag about it to others to appear generous. But in their personal lives, they are often much less generous about giving away their own money. In fact, Arthur Brooks did a study of non-religious and religious people and charitable giving, and he found that the religious people gave away much more than the non-religious people.e.
You have to be suspicious at this time. Peer review is not all it is cracked up to be: most people who do it (and I’m one of them, for my sins) read the paper, look for flaws in its design, and try to ensure that the paper fits within the field. That it does not claim something extraordinary unless it is extraordinary. That there are no logical fallacies. In all, a couple of hours work.
Because we have our own things that need doing. We have grants to get, students to supervise, papers to write, and, if clinical, those duties take priority.]
The rule of Babylon is corrupt. And these systems, like that in Chicago or Detroit, can last for generations. But when they fall, they fall. Detroit is now ruins, stalked by photographers and those who predate on such a foolhardy subspecies of human.
Do not align with this elite, who want Babylon on this earth.
Do not be them, and do not be like them.
UPDATE.
The Knight edited his post. I’ve redone the quote and link.
I updated that post right after it was posted. You can update yours to quote what is there now, if you like.