In 1865, Catholic bishops in the USA asked the Vatican how they should respond to the growth of the Fenians, an Irish nationalist organisation, among Irish Americans

The Vatican's seemingly bizarre response was that the Fenians were occultists who were trafficking with Satan

/1 On the face of it, the question posed by the growth of the Fenians was straightforward: did Catholic doctrine, which permits rebellion against tyranny, allow Irish nationalists to take up arms against the British?

But Vatican officials were concerned with another issue.

/2

This image has been circulating today.

It is of interest to me as a specialist in religious history.

It takes us into some dark places - places which have nothing to do with supporting the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.

A thread. (Let me say at the outset that my purpose here is not to refute the claims made in the graphic. I am taking them to be obviously false. My interest is in the deeper thought structures that underlie the textual and visual rhetoric.)

Since the Reverend Father Calvin Robison is on my timeline again, here is a thread on the strange and colourful underworld of clergy that he belongs to. There is a certain kind of man - and it is almost always men who do this - who hankers after the status and trappings of a traditional clergyman but either can't persuade a normie church to ordain him or can't be bothered to study for the necessary number of years.

This post caught my attention. I was a teenager in the 90s, and I was caught up in these issues in my own life.

I generally avoid posting about this subject, but I'm going to take the risk of doing it on this occasion.

https://twitter.com/roseveniceallan/status/1775620350908228037

The trivial and obvious answer as to why there were ~0 trans kids back then is that the conceptual and practical mechanisms to transition didn't exist. I remember one magazine article about people who would now be called non-binary ("androgynous" was the term used). That was it.

Antizionism before Zionism

A thread following on from comments that I made on another thread about how conspiratorial antizionism predated the actual start of the Zionist movement. Zionism gets going in earnest in the 1880s, and Theodor Herzl publishes "Der Judenstaat" in 1896

By this time, theories of Jewish conspiracy are rife in Europe. They originate from older conspiracy theories about the Freemasons which were devised after the 1789 French Revolution

The Wisdom of Jolyon Maugham KC

A thread of quotations from Jollers' new book. The law "is the sluice gate through which the river of humanity flows".

If you are a republican, like me, why would you care about the Coronation?

If you are not religious, or not a Christian, why would you care about a church ceremony?

This is my attempt to answer these questions.

#Coronation #Coronation2023 I'm not sure that I've quite convinced myself, but maybe others will be convinced.

(If any journalists want me to write or talk about this, DM me. I wrote a dissertation on this stuff a long time ago.)

Cranks like this are the far right's best friends.

You might just as well write a cheque to Trump or DeSantis. Btw that thread contains GIFs, which serves to underline the well-known fact that only the worst people on the internet illustrate their tweets with comical GIFs to show how witty and whimsical they are. It's only one step up from writing all in lower case.

Right, you bastards, you've driven me to it.

WHY THE GREEN MAN IS NOT A PAGAN SYMBOL Lots of foliate heads survive from the Christian middle ages (esp. 1150-1500), both on physical monuments and in manuscripts. (They weren't all human - interestingly, some were feline).

A thread on esotericism and political extremism.

Inspired by the latest online occultist drama.

/1 There has been a bit of this recently.

Gordon White is as good a place as any to start.

/2

"Maybe just for once - just for once - Americans aren't going to make this current event about US racial politics."

"Oh hang on, what's this?" "The Treaty of Brest Litovsk is whiteness"

@EdwardQuine Ok. This has come up largely in two contexts - the Article 9 right to freedom of religion in the European Convention of Human Rights (which is applied in the UK through the Human Rights Act), and the Equality Act 2010. @EdwardQuine Both of those instruments protect religion as well as belief more generally - which is another hole in Dawkins' argument, because secular philosophical systems are also protected (and can become matters of deep commitment and identity, as Dick's own record demonstrates).

I missed this.

President Donald Trump issued a proclamation yesterday on the death of St Thomas Becket.

Of course he did.

whitehouse.gov/presidential-a… The President acutely notes that St Thomas was a "lion of religious liberty" even before the first amendment was added to the American Constitution.

Things that are neoliberal. An occasional series. Marijuana-flavoured bread is neoliberal.

https://twitter.com/pauloCanning/status/1340039015114924042?s=20

"Milestones" by Sayyid Qutb - A thread.

This, if you'll excuse the metaphor, is the Bible of political Islam. Originally published in 1964 as Ma'alim fi al-Tariq, it is the enduring legacy to the world of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian educationalist and a bitter

/1 enemy of the Nasser government, western democracy, secularism and female sexuality (not necessarily in that order). The late Osama bin Laden is said to have been influenced by him and apparently attended lectures given by his brother during his student days in Jeddah.

/2

Braverman was hauled over the coals for this at the Bar Council meeting yesterday.

People who aren't lawyers might not immediately realise how badly this process has been corrupted, so let me try to explain.

#Brexit

/1 If the Government wants to make use of external barristers, it has a system of "panels" (or lists) of people who are approved for this purpose.

Braverman will know this because she used to be on one, although of course she was only on one of the lower ones.

/2