This is John Lennox. Northern Irish mathematician. Emeritus professor at Oxford. A group theorist who has spent decades across the table from the New Atheists. Dawkins. Hitchens. Singer. I have never once seen him rattled. They push, and he smiles, and he lowers his voice instead of raising it. Lennox came to God by reason. Sit with that, because it matters more than people think. A man who spent his life inside logic and proof and order followed the evidence and arrived at God. Not despite his mind. Through it. Here is what most people, including most Catholics, do not know. The Church teaches that this road is open. Vatican I defined it. The one true God can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason. It is Paul in Romans 1, the invisible things of God understood through the things He made. So when a mathematician who loves order reasons his way to God, he is not embarrassing the faith. He is walking a road the Church marked as real. The man who loves the Logos found the Logos. Of course he did. Reason is His. There is an old improv rule I cannot shake. If this is true, what else is true. If reason reaches God, the road keeps going. Two questions, not one. Is there a God. Reason can answer that. Is Jesus God. Reason can carry you to the edge of that, and then there is a leap. Lennox drew the leap himself, better than I could. Can he prove, after 58 years, that his wife loves him? No. But the evidence runs one way, and only a fool bets against it. That is not blind faith. It is reasonable faith. The evidence for the risen Christ is the same kind, and at some point an honest person stops hedging and steps. I cannot read his heart. But what I can see is a man who found God and will not let go. And here is the part I love. The Church meets him as a brother. Not an outsider arguing at the gate. By his baptism she already calls him a Christian, in real communion, a separated brother. Not yet the full table. Already family. So I will not tell John Lennox he is wrong. I will tell him the road he is already on has more road. The Logos he reasoned his way to has a face, and a mother, and a table set. Now enjoy watching a rigorous mind reason its way to God because I wrote the engineer’s version. Sin Takes the Form of Gradient Descent. The same move Lennox makes with mathematics, run through the math of how a machine learns. Sin in the language I use at work. Bookmark this for later, because the link is in the first reply and the feed won’t bring it back around.

Our Lady of the Rosary pray for us open.substack.com/pub/theres…

Ordaining woman Female Priest Call it what it is: Priestess Ludicrous

In 1917 the editor of Portugal’s most anticlerical newspaper went to Fatima to mock the peasants who said the sun would move. He stood in the field and watched it happen. Then he printed it. A dancing sun does not prove the Catholic Church. But the man who came to laugh could not explain what he saw. What it actually points to, below.

This is John Lennox. Northern Irish mathematician. Emeritus professor at Oxford. A group theorist who has spent decades across the table from the New Atheists. Dawkins. Hitchens. Singer. I have never once seen him rattled. They push, and he smiles, and he lowers his voice instead of raising it. Lennox came to God by reason. Sit with that, because it matters more than people think. A man who spent his life inside logic and proof and order followed the evidence and arrived at God. Not despite his mind. Through it. Here is what most people, including most Catholics, do not know. The Church teaches that this road is open. Vatican I defined it. The one true God can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason. It is Paul in Romans 1, the invisible things of God understood through the things He made. So when a mathematician who loves order reasons his way to God, he is not embarrassing the faith. He is walking a road the Church marked as real. The man who loves the Logos found the Logos. Of course he did. Reason is His. There is an old improv rule I cannot shake. If this is true, what else is true. If reason reaches God, the road keeps going. Two questions, not one. Is there a God. Reason can answer that. Is Jesus God. Reason can carry you to the edge of that, and then there is a leap. Lennox drew the leap himself, better than I could. Can he prove, after 58 years, that his wife loves him? No. But the evidence runs one way, and only a fool bets against it. That is not blind faith. It is reasonable faith. The evidence for the risen Christ is the same kind, and at some point an honest person stops hedging and steps. I cannot read his heart. But what I can see is a man who found God and will not let go. And here is the part I love. The Church meets him as a brother. Not an outsider arguing at the gate. By his baptism she already calls him a Christian, in real communion, a separated brother. Not yet the full table. Already family. So I will not tell John Lennox he is wrong. I will tell him the road he is already on has more road. The Logos he reasoned his way to has a face, and a mother, and a table set. Now enjoy watching a rigorous mind reason its way to God because I wrote the engineer’s version. Sin Takes the Form of Gradient Descent. The same move Lennox makes with mathematics, run through the math of how a machine learns. Sin in the language I use at work. Bookmark this for later, because the link is in the first reply and the feed won’t bring it back around.

Full piece here: therestoration.substack.com/…

Protestant man angry Youversion allows heretical Bibles, like KJV, that are not Catholic Church approved

All Mormons Believe in a False Gospel. As a Catholic, I Don’t Believe That Damns Them. That sentence is built to make two different people angry, and I mean both halves of it. The Mormon hears “false gospel” and braces for the usual contempt. The hardline Christian hears “I don’t believe that damns them” and reaches for a verse. Hold on. Both halves are true at the same time, and the Church has taught them together for centuries. Let me show you how they fit, because almost everyone has only ever heard one half. The gospel really is different, and nobody on either side denies it Start with the part that isn’t even in dispute. The Mormon gospel and the Christian gospel are not the same gospel. No serious Latter-day Saint claims otherwise. The entire premise of the Restoration is that the historic Church lost the original gospel and Joseph Smith brought it back. The difference is the point. It is the foundation, not an accident at the edges. And the Church says it just as plainly. In 2001 Rome ruled that Mormon baptism is invalid. Not irregular. Invalid. The words sound right. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” But the God those words name is not the God a Catholic names when he says them. In Mormon teaching the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three gods who together form one divinity, and the Father himself is an exalted man who was once mortal. That is not the Trinity. It is a different account of God at the root of everything. So a Mormon who becomes Catholic is not simply received. He is baptized, because by the Church’s reckoning the first one never happened. Different God. Different gospel. That is the Church’s own judgment, not mine. The claim is false. The person is not the claim. Now the part the hardliner forgets. A false gospel is a claim. The man holding it is a person. The Church has never treated those as the same thing, and neither will I. A man born into Mormonism, raised in it, who has loved Christ as he was taught to understand him and sought God with the heart he was given, is not condemned for failing to find what he was never shown. The Church calls this invincible ignorance, and it is not a loophole. It is justice. God judges a man by the light he was given, not the light he never saw. Most Mormons I have met are sincere. They seek God. They will be judged, as I will be, by the One who reads the heart and not the doctrinal map. But charity has a spine Here is where the easy version gets it wrong, and where this stops being soft. The man born into Mormonism and the man who left the Catholic Church to join it do not stand in the same place. One never had the gospel. The other had it and walked. The Church does not call those the same thing. The first is ignorance. The second is what the Church names apostasy or heresy, and no amount of warmth dissolves the difference, because the two men are answering for two different things. A man is judged by what he was given. They were not given the same thing. I do not say this to consign anyone. The Church declares saints. It has never once declared a single soul in hell. I say it because the truth has edges, and pretending it doesn’t is not charity. It is cowardice wearing charity’s coat. Both, at once So I will not measure a Mormon and find him wanting. I hold the claim and the person apart, all the way apart. The claim is false. The God is not the same God, and the gospel is not the same gospel. And the person across from me may be seeking God more honestly than I do on my best day, and may stand closer to him than I do. Both. At once. That is not a Catholic ducking the hard thing. Holding both is the hard thing. Anyone can pick a side and feel clean by sundown. The Church asks you to carry the whole weight at the same time, the false gospel and the sincere seeker, the one who walked away and the one who never knew, and to leave the sorting to the God it belongs to.

The screenshot that started this, Pratt at zero votes in one batch, was a one-minute lag in an automated feed. Trump’s own U.S. Attorney pulled the county records and said it plainly. Every candidate got votes in every update. So the stolen-count story does not hold. Not on that. And the country still feels rigged. Hold onto that feeling. It is true. It is aimed at the wrong target. Here is the real tell. Voter ID polls around 84 percent. Two-thirds of Democrats want it. Supermajorities in both parties want it. It still cannot pass. Sit with that. A reform almost everyone agrees on, dead for years. That is not a stolen count. That is a machine that no longer turns the will of the people into law. The study the press called the oligarchy study found the same thing from the other side. On most issues, what ordinary people want has little independent pull on what passes. The size of the effect is debated. The direction is not. A republic is a machine for converting the consent of the governed into law. When the supermajority wants a thing for twenty years and never gets it, the machine is not being stolen. It is being starved. Adams told us what it runs on. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Read the line before it and you see why. We have no government armed with power to contend with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice and ambition break the cords of a constitution like a whale goes through a net. A free republic keeps the external chains light on purpose. The restraint was built to live inside the citizen. Pull the virtue out and the structure does not collapse. It keeps its shape and loses its function. The forms stay. The elections happen. The votes get counted. And the thing almost everyone wants still never arrives. That is what decay looks like. It does not announce itself. It wears the face of incompetence and plausible deniability. It looks the same in every age, because man is the same in every age. The fix is not procedural. You cannot pass a law that manufactures the fuel the law was built to burn. It is anthropological. Change the people and the machine runs again. Refuse, and no reform survives the men who administer it. The founders grounded the whole thing in what man is. Rights, duties, the lot. Lose that ground and you keep the words and lose the thing they named. We stopped making the fuel. Then we called the stall a conspiracy. The corruption is real. It is not first in the count. It is in us. Start there. @BasedMikeLee

Stephen Meyer says Darwinian evolution is already dead. His claim is narrow and worth hearing. The mechanism explains small-scale variation, finches’ beaks, fine. What it lacks, in his words, is a “theory of the generative,” the creative power to build large-scale novelty, new body plans, new information. He’s not alone. He points to a 2004 MIT Press book by two evolutionary biologists making the same point, and to Gerd Müller opening the 2016 Royal Society conference by listing the explanatory deficits of the standard model. You don’t have to agree he’s right about design. But “the mechanism is fully settled” isn’t what the field’s own leaders are saying. What do you think?

Look at that

I’ve only attended a baby shower What are your thoughts?

One thing I know about Hunter Biden He was saying Mother of God before the day I was born His dad did good raising him in the Catholic Church and I hear they sometimes go to mass together Are you going to mass anon?

I really like Stephen Meyer’s YouTube videos and I’m looking forward to reading his book ‘Darwin’s Doubt’. I also really like Dustin’s posts. It just seems to makes sense to repost this…

Papists only: Do you love the OG papist?

As an engineer convert to Catholicism I find this interesting

This is Stephen Meyer. Cambridge-trained philosopher of science, former geophysicist, and the man the New Atheists keep getting matched against. Not because he is loud. Because he brings numbers, and numbers are harder to wave off than vibes. His argument is narrow and it has teeth. The information inside a living cell is better explained by a mind than by chance. You would have to try hard not to feel the need to bookmark this as you read to the end. Here it is stripped to the frame. DNA is not only chemistry. It carries a code, discrete symbols in a sequence, the way letters carry a sentence. A working protein is a meaningful string in that code, one precise arrangement standing in an ocean of gibberish. So run the odds. Monkeys at typewriters never type Hamlet. Not because it is hard. Because the useless strings drown the meaningful ones so completely that the whole age of the universe, every particle, every second since the beginning, does not buy enough tries to stumble onto one short functional protein by blind chance. Put it in logarithms and the number is not small. It is effective zero. That is the argument worth answering. Not genome percentages. This. Now the part the tidy “DNA is software” slogan misses, and it makes the problem deeper, not smaller. Life is not a digital computer. It is a hybrid. The code is digital, discrete letters. But function is analogue, a three-dimensional shape folded out of that string by physics, not spelled out by the sequence alone. And the code is dead on its own. A strand of DNA means nothing without the machinery that reads it. The ribosome that translates the letters into a chain. The chaperones that fold that chain into the shape that works. No reader, no folder, no function. Here is the knot. The reader and the folder are themselves built from the code. The ribosome is made of the proteins it makes. The machine that interprets the message is written in the message it interprets. So you cannot lay down the code first and add the machine later, and you cannot build the machine first and add the code later. The message and the thing that reads the message have to arrive together, or neither one means anything. That is not one lucky molecule. It is a lottery you can only win on a machine that exists only if you already won the lottery. A mind is the better explanation. Not because the gaps are dark. Because we know, everywhere else in the world, what produces code paired with the machine to read it. We have never once seen it written by chance, but I’d really like to hear your take in the comments.

Grant the true parts first, because there are some. Sentimentality is not a virtue. Performative piety about suffering is real and worth naming. We are obliged to protect the vulnerable. And you said plainly neither abortion is justified. Good. Hold onto that. Now the line everything turns on. “There is no virtue in weakness or helplessness.” That is not a refinement of Christianity. It is its center denied. God did not maximize human potential. He emptied himself, became a helpless infant, and won by dying in weakness. My power is made perfect in weakness. The cross is the reply to that sentence. And look at who you cited. Nietzsche called the exaltation of the weak a slave-morality sickness. He was describing Christianity, accurately, and condemning it for it. You can borrow his diagnosis or you can keep the name Christian. Not both. The patient he was diagnosing is Christ. Here is the move under the noble words. You swapped the measure of a life. Christianity measures worth by the image of God, which a child with Down syndrome carries in full. Potential, strength, agency is a different ruler, and it grades lives by capacity. That is the eugenic measure with the serial numbers filed off, and it is the premise that makes killing the weak thinkable even when, like you, a person says he is against it. A child with Down syndrome is not a lesser instance of the human. He is exactly where Christ told us to look for him. Whatever you did to the least of these. Strength is a good. It was never the measure. The man on the cross had none left, and that is where the victory was.

This is true and worth saying loud. Forgiveness rests on Christ’s blood, not on the quality of your repentance. Your contrition didn’t die for you. He did. A Catholic says amen to every line of that. Here’s the question that makes it deeper. God forgave sins before the cross. David is told “the Lord has put away your sin,” centuries early. Nineveh is spared. So forgiveness was never waiting on the mechanism. God can forgive by a word, and did. Which means the cross was not God figuring out how to forgive. He didn’t need a method. He chose one. That’s the part that should stop you. The blood wasn’t necessary the way medicine is necessary for a sickness. It was fitting. God chose to forgive in the way that revealed who He is, that justice and mercy meet, that love goes all the way to death, that the price gets named instead of waved away. He could have forgiven cheaply. He chose to forgive at the cost of Himself. So you’re right, it’s Christ alone. And the wonder isn’t only that His blood is the because. It’s that He didn’t owe us the blood at all, and spent it anyway.