Coming up: One red heifer, without blemish or spot? (No, on either story or cows)

Per the old bible verse of Numbers 19:2, Texas Monthly reports on the efforts of rancher Jerome Urbanosky and businessman Byron Stinson to raise just such animals. (Another rancher, Ty Davenport, eventually has his ranch looped in by Stinson, too.)

Stinson is a Christian Zionist wingnut. Urbanosky raises Santa Gertrudis, which caught his eye. The story says Stinson also looked at Red Angus.

The entire red heifer and purification water ceremony is in Numbers 19. Not all Christian Zionists, nor all religiously Orthodox Jewish Zionists, believe the red heifer is necessary to build a new Jewish temple, but many do. Ultra-Orthodox Jews are generally non-Zionist to outrightly anti-Zionist; their stances on temple rebuilding in general as well as the need for a red heifer can vary. Within Christianity, amillennial Christians reject the entire temple rebuilding nuttery as being necessary to bring on the apocalypse. On paper, this is the official stance of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and all mainline Protestant churches. In reality, it's not so clearcut among the laity. Outside of this, postmillennialists also generally reject this.

Shockingly, the Monthly gets several things wrong.

First, technically, it's to enter the tabernacle, not the temple. TM quotes Numbers 19 as saying "temple"; it does not.

Second, as with much of Numbers, there's no indication on how much this was ideal and aspirational vs being real, per Yonathan Adler's book.

Third, it was for general purification as much as anything. 

Fourth, there's no indication in either the Tanakh or the New Testament that it was specifically necessary for temple rebuilding. (The Monthly does note that Orthodox Judaism sees a temple already ready to come down from heaven; see also Revelation.)

Yitshak Mamo, Stinson's partner, is an ultra-Zionist Israel settler colonialist nutter. 

Related to that, the Monthly does tell you this:

Urbanosky told me he knew “doodley-squat” about the significance of a perfect red heifer. “You’re Christian, and they’re Jews,” Urbanosky said to Stinson. “So when the Temple gets built, who’s coming back, Jesus or the Jewish messiah?”

There you go. Millennialist Christian Zionist and Zionist Jews figure that, like other things, they'll fight it out after they kill the last Palestinian and finish making Eretz Israel Arab-rein. 

Cut to the chase: Five heifers eventually got sent to Israel in 2022. (The Monthly and other sites have reported on this before.) Hamas noticed and mentioned this in early 2024, after the start of the current intifada; and the Israeli rabbi who will have the last word on making the purity call says they're not.)

According to [Rabbi Joshua] Wander, Rabbi Azria Ariel, of the Temple Institute, is the world’s foremost authority on the red heifer and perhaps the only figure with the clout to compel the necessary consensus to move forward. Ariel wasn’t satisfied with the candidates. “At this moment, it is unclear whether we have in our possession in Israel a red heifer that is verifiably kosher and suited for the ceremony,” Ariel announced in March 2025. One of the five heifers had sprouted white hairs; another grew warts on the side of its neck.

There you are. Perhaps it's a stall tactic, too. 

It gets nuttier from there, with Stinson eventually finding some Israeli Jews, including an alleged priest raised for this moment, to do a practice red heifer ceremony. From there, Stinson goes MAHA with the ashes.

The author does note that the claims of Stinson and his ilk are rejected by mainstream scholars, but not until the last paragraph, and without any of the details I note. Never let a "good" story stand in the way of (or demote) the truth, Texas Monthly.

Bobby Kennedy, Edith Hamilton and Aeschylus — wrongness compounded

Bobby Kennedy's quotation of Aeschylus on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death is probably one of his greatest known moments. It has flickered in and out of my mind through the years, and came to my starker attention recently. On the divine? It's bullshit, really, whether classical Greece's panoply or Aeschylus going henotheistic, on one hand, or Kennedy's Christian god on the other. 

Anyway, here it is:

"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

First, per several sites, the Edith Hamilton translation is "despite," not "despair." Aeschylus is slightly less bullshitting than RFK with "despite." The original idea doubles down on "against our will." Bobby's sounds more poignant.

But, neither is true. In the Christian dual-omni god world of Bobby, this runs straight on into the problem of evil, Aeschylus' original or his misremembered version equally so. A god who can't teach wisdom outside of suicides or homicides is either less than omnipotent or less than omnibenevolent. If one wants to go Calvinist and call this part of double predestination, which RFK wouldn't, of course, that is only more hideous yet.

That said, of course, Hamilton herself mistranslated the last word. In Aeschylus, it's, to give the whole phrase, "the awful grace of the gods." 

On that, yes, the Olympians were capricious, and while Aeschylus is treating them (and the Fates and others as well, surely) as a group, they were individually capricious, battling each other, even.

For more on that, and other problems with Hamilton's translation, go here. I quote author Tara Wanda Milligan:

Even more than this, it is perhaps Hamilton’s reconstruction of Athenian tragedy, Americanized to focus on individual “poetically transmuted pain,” that appealed to Robert F. Kennedy. Hallett says that tragedy as conceived by Hamilton, a school headmistress with a master’s degree in classics but no further training, “focused intensely on individual suffering, democratic to the extent that it equalizes, and minimizes differences among, individuals who suffer and exult in their suffering.” A man of forty-two who had witnessed both his elder brothers die unexpectedly (Joe Jr. died while fighting in World War II), Kennedy needed solace and founded it in Hamilton’s writing. “Reading the Greeks was Jackie’s idea but something Bobby was ready for,” writes biographer Evan Thomas, adding that Aeschylus’s words “seemed to be speaking directly to Bobby.”

Going past that, the author notes that Hamilton misconstrues Hellenic Greek tragedy in general. Indeed, the Americanization is tragedy as individualized pathos.  

While that's not "the problem of evil," per se, and it's not "theodicy," it is A problem of evil of sorts.

Go back to World War II, where African-American combat deaths, or service short of death, received less valourous recognition than that of Whites. Or look at "Drunken" Ira Hayes. 

That then said, going beyond Milligan, Aeschylus appears to be talking about what is at the heart of Greek tragedy: hubris. The "despite" plus "against our will" is basically about stiff-necked humans getting taught a divine lesson through pain and tragedy.

Of course, that ties back to something like the book of Job, where Yahweh eventually says, in essence: "I'm the boss and you're not. Shut up and stop second-guessing me." 

Often, though, it goes beyond that to something deeper. 

I mean, this is the heart of many multigenerational, familial Greek legends such as the fall of the house of Atreus, tainted, tainted, tainted. (And, none of that is worse than what you'll find in portions of Genesis and Judges.) Usually, this hubris is about offending the gods, violating divinely-backed social or cultural precepts and so forth. In many cases, it's compounded when one precept collides with another, or a precept collides with humaneness.

In this case, it's how original familial sin, slightly parallel to original sin of Augustine, or more parallel to the "third and fourth generation" of the Ten Divarim, puts people in "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations. 

In other words, from a secularist point of view, Aeschylus is still wrong, but not in the way Edith Hamilton and Robert F. Kennedy make him to be. 

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and Matt Harrison have big-ass shit on their hands

 Rev. Michael William Mohr, president of the Central Illinois District of the denomination, was arrested last month on a child porn charge. Details of the allegations behind the original charge indicate a wanton, ongoing problem.

More here, on the DOJ's news release. I quote this part in backup of the original: 

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and the Department of Justice Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims.

LCMS President Matthew Harrison whipped out the old "rule of law," in the "innocent until proven guilty" division, in his response. 

Gee, let's just sound like the Vatican and its various dioceses and archdioceses.  Or people who allegedly originally investigated Jeffrey Epstein.

I note this at the end:

Updated on Jan. 30, 2026, at the request of authorities.

Oh, that looks good. You're so anti-proactive the cops have to tell you? 

The stupidities of Tim O'Neill

 Regular readers here know I love bagging on "History for Atheists" blogger O'Neill, especially his handwaving lies about how Catholic in general, and papal in particular, antisemitism didn't exist in post-Renaissance times, despite David Kertzer repeatedly showing him wrong. (O'Neill, last time I checked his site, had never read a single book by Kertzer and only mentioned his name once or twice.)

Well, I decided to look at some of his Goodreads reviews and bag on him more.

Bart Ehrman's "The Triumph of Christianity"? He calls it five stars, ignoring the many errors, many of them out of historical ignorance, that actually make it two stars. 

"The Bright Ages"? O'Neill thinks that this one-star dreck, with various amounts of strawmanning, cherry-picking, lies by omission and historical inaccuracies, is worth four stars. I've long considered O'Neill to belong to the "Catholicist" subset of Samuel Huntington type cultural Christianism, and I think that's why he rates this dreck that high. 

And, due to a response to me elsewhere? On Twitter, he thinks Kertzer "has an agenda." On one other Tweet, he comes close to dipping his toes in something that isn't anti-Zionism but ... 

==

His wrongness isn't limited to theology and religion, though. He gives the David Graeber/David Wengrow "The Dawn of Everything" five stars, when, from the title itself onward, it's only two.  

Top blogging of 2025 on religion, critical thinking and more

 Again, as with my quarterly posts, not all of these were from 2025, but they were the 10 most read in 2025.

I'll note "evergreen" posts by when they were first written.

No. 10? From last spring, I offered up "ethical and pontifical thoughts on the death of Pope Francis." 

No. 9? From 2023, based on the work of up and coming Tanakh scholar Idan Dershowitz, namely an advance monograph proposing a proto-Deuteronomy, and that this was what Moses Wilhelm Shapira found, and religion researcher friend Paul Davidson speculating on who Josiah really was, I stood traditional ideas of both Josiah and Deuteronomy on their heads. 

No. 8? Way back in 2012, I laughed at a paleogeologist who claimed he had proven via geology that Jesus was crucified on April 3, 33 CE. 

No. 7? Even older, but it continues to trend because I continue to share it. "Paul, Passover, Jesus, Gnosticism" ties those four items together in a bow, starting with biblical criticism of the "Words of Institution" of the Eucharist in I Corinthians 15.

No. 6? From 2020, "A Lutheran College Myth Bites the Dust." (The college in question was my undergraduate alma mater.) 

No. 5? The oldest yet, from 2005. "Genesis 6 Retold" engages in a skeptical poetic retelling of the story of the Nephilim, Ham's would-be castration of Noah (yes) and more. 

No. 4? From 2023, yes, there is fascism of a sort, punningly labeled by others as "Lutefash," in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the largest denomination in the conservative wing of Lutheranism and my childhood religious alma mater. Although Matthew Harrison, the then and now president of the denomination, pruned the visibly worst flowers, he deliberately left the roots untouched, and since Trump's re-election and definitely since the killing of Charlie Kirk, has fertilized the soil for some version of this to arise again. Here's my take. (Rachel Good, killed by ICE in Minneapolis, was reportedly a member of an LCMS church, and at least semi-active. Yes, even with a lesbian wife.)

No. 3? "The great ahistoricity of Acts and radical thoughts on Paul's demise" is from 2022. The "great" ahistoricity, beyond Acts' relative ahistoricity in general, picks up steam with Acts 21, when Paul allegedly hauled a goy into inner courts of the Jerusalem temple. I thoroughly deconstruct that and everything that follows, while at the same time wondering if maybe he DID haul Trophimus or some other Gentile into the temple inner courts.

No. 2? "Ezra, Meet Snopes" also goes back to 2005. It offers brief overview-level speculation on how Ezra might have edited the Torah together. 

No. 1? From 2007, "More proof the Buddha was no Buddha" is one of my top posts all time on the site, and a direct rebuke to Robert Wright, and even more to those who think even less critically about Buddhism than him. 

We're not teaching Plato at Texas A&M

Plato is off the philosophy course list for one class, at least, at Texas A&M because he somehow might say something anti-wingnut about race or gender:

Professor Martin Peterson submitted his syllabus for PHIL 111, Contemporary Moral Issues, for review Dec. 22. On Tuesday, his department head told him he had two options: remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, including readings from Plato, or be reassigned to teach a noncore philosophy course. The email, obtained by the Tribune, gave Peterson until the close of business Wednesday to decide. Peterson responded that he would revise the syllabus, saying he plans to replace the Plato readings with lectures on free speech and academic freedom.

Then, A&M regents came up with this spin:

In a statement to the Tribune, A&M said the decision did not amount to a ban on teaching Plato and that other sections of the same course that include Plato – but do not include modules on race and gender ideology – had been approved.

Sure now. 

As many may recognize, per Literary Hub, "The Symposium," with its multiple sexes (not genders, LitHub, see Wikipedia) as far of its human origin story is the trouble spot. Its relatively open celebration of pederasty is also surely an issue.  

Top posts, 3rd quarter of 2025

 Similar to my main site, but on a quarterly not monthly basis, once again, here's a roundup of the most-read items of the last three months of 2025. Not all are FROM that time period; "evergreen" items will be marked.

No 10: Did Leon Festinger commit some sort of research fraud? It looks that way. While this won't demolish the idea of cognitive dissonance, it certainly leaves some of its stronger claims on weaker ground. 

No. 9 was my snarking on Bart Ehrman's retirement announcement; the retirement lecture referenced there is here, talking about "our flawed manuscripts."

No. 8? My brief, and latest, callout of r/AcademicBiblical moronity, focused on James McGrath.

No. 7? From 2022, my in-depth discussion of the great ahistoricity of the book of Acts.

No. 6 is my discussion of my Goodreads review system. 

No. 5 is definitely evergreen, from 2009: "Paul, Passover, Jesus, Gnosticism." 

No. 4? Did Josephus actually write the Testimonium Flavianum? Contra a crudely apologetic book, he most certainly did not; in fact, the author's effort backfired. 

No. 3 was my callout of Massimo Pigliucci both for his top 10 existential questions and his use of AI to help formulate them. 

No. 2, from way back in 2007: "More proof the Buddha was no Buddha." 

No 1, I wrote about the non-immigration portions of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' November statement, and how it reflects convergence of lay Catholics and lay Protestants along religious lines.