Made "by" or "through"?

Maybe Iam flogging a dead horse but there are still a couple of translation issues in John 1 that I think deserve comment.

Verse 2 of John 1:

οὖτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν.

(The same was in the beginning with God)

This verse makes the meaning of verse 1 crystal clear. The "theos' of verse 1 is said here to be a beginning with THE God -- "ton theon". So John makes a sharp distinction between "theos" Jesus and THE God ("ton theon")

Being aware of Greek usage of the definite article really helps us to get clear what John was saying. He was in fact contrasting Jesus with the supreme God

Verse 3 of John 1

πάντα δι᾽ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν

(All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.)

The older Bible translations (e.g. KJV and Douay) render "di" above as "by". But "dia" is the normal Greek word for "through" and most modern versions (including the NKJV) render it correctly as "through". So all things were done "through" Christ rather than "by" him. So Jesus was a conduit of the supreme God's will. He did not do things on his own initiative. Once again his separateness from the supreme God is emphasized by John

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Leftists Protest the Stores They Put Out of Business

When a store closes in your neighborhood, you might express sympathy for the owner and the workers. In Roxbury, a section of Boston where a Walgreens closed Wednesday, they protested.

Demonstrators chanted “Hell no, Walgreens!” and criticized the business for putting “profits over people.”

The pharmacy stayed open an additional two weeks but the signs and chants otherwise made no difference. The closure marked the fourth Walgreens shuttering in Boston in the last two years.

“When a Walgreens leaves a neighborhood, they disrupt the entire community and they take with them baby formula, diapers, asthma inhalers, life-saving medications, and, of course, jobs,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley said on the floor of the House. “These closures are not arbitrary and they are not innocent. They are life-threatening acts of racial and economic discrimination.”

Pressley’s contention that Walgreens closed not because it wanted to stop losing money but because of its deep hatred of racial minorities and poor people suggests not only a profound misunderstanding of how businesses work but reflexive thinking, which is no thinking at all. Discrimination as the default criticism and protest as the default response shows the degree to which ideology puts brains on autopilot.

One reason Walgreens and other stores close in high-crime areas involves retail theft. Walgreens reported theft losses at 2.5 percent of sales in 2023’s fourth quarter, a number actually heading in the right downward direction but still crippling when one considers the fine line between profits and losses.

At a Walgreen’s in San Francisco, they chained up the freezer and placed gum, toothbrushes, and nuts behind a plexiglass protector. In Chicago, a store unveiled a new layout with two display aisles and kiosks to order products fulfilled by workers in a backroom that keeps all the goods away from all the customers, paying and otherwise.

Why did it so recently devolve to where stores lock up not just high-priced items such as razors and Red Bull but toothbrushes?

It turns out the people pointing the biggest fingers at Walgreens bear a massive share of the blame.

Take Ayanna Pressley. Even prior to the summer of George Floyd, she came out with something called the People’s Justice Guarantee, which posited that “the American legal system duplicates and maintains systems of oppression that can be traced back to slavery.” Her solution, outlined in a congressional resolution containing 62 whereases, involved ending bail, mandatory minimums, truth-in-sentencing laws, and “dramatically increasing diversion opportunities, community service, restorative justice programming, and treatment options that minimize court involvement and result in no prison time for most offenses where the person does not cause or intend to cause harm.”

Stores abandon urban areas not because their owners hate people of color or poor people but because many cities embrace the basic tenets expressed in Pressley’s People’s Justice Guarantee. By not prosecuting so-called petty crimes, ending bail for most offenses, and putting habitual offenders on the streets and not in a cell, criminal justice systems in many cities incentivize theft.

Just as Pressley fails to grasp that economic incentives and not protests dictate whether stores stay in business, she does not understand the predictable consequences of removing consequences for shoplifting. The same activists who pushed for the abolition of bail and not punishing violators of certain offenses should protest themselves instead of the stores they helped put out of business.

Ayanna Pressley might ponder what Walt Kelly’s Pogo once noted: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

https://spectator.org/leftists-protest-the-stores-they-put-out-of-business/

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Christian, Jewish Leaders Condemn Ongoing Political and Spiritual ‘Persecution’ of Paivi Rasanen

Finland is a very Left-leaning place so intolerance in the name of tolerance is to be expected of them. They see nothing paradoxical in being intolerant of intolerance. They should look in the mirror more. They are in fact more intolerant than those they criticize. They condemn as "hate" simple disagreement with them. So who are the real haters?

An interfaith coalition has offered prayers of solidarity to two evangelical Christians facing their third trial for declaring that homosexuality violates the Bible, a position prosecutors call “war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Despite two unanimous acquittals, Finland’s state prosecutor has taken an elderly member of Parliament and a Lutheran bishop before the Supreme Court to answer for their traditional Christian beliefs on sexuality.

Dr. Päivi Räsänen, who has served in Parliament for 29 years, and Bishop Juhana Pohjola of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, are facing “spiritual persecution” for upholding the Scripture, said a letter signed by dozens of Christian and Jewish leaders.

“Once again, you face unjust charges. For almost half a decade, you have confronted targeted legal harassment for simply living out your Christian faith, the direct result of not just political persecution but also spiritual persecution,” says the letter, which was led by Advancing American Freedom and released today.

“Now, despite twice being unanimously declared not guilty at the Helsinki District Court and the Helsinki Court of Appeals, the prosecutor has filed another appeal, potentially forcing a third trial at Finland’s Supreme Court.”

Authorities have centered their legal case on a 5-year-old social media post made by the member of Parliament, a member of the Christian Democrats Party, asking why her Lutheran church body would take part in an LGBT “Pride 2019” event. The post on X, formerly Twitter, included a photo of Romans 1:24-27, which clarifies that homosexual behavior is sinful.

Two years later, in April 2021, prosecutors charged Räsänen and Pohjola with “agitation against a minority” under the nation’s law against “war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Police arrested Räsänen and subjected her to 13 hours of police interrogation before her trial. Prosecutors dubbed the Bible verses in her tweet, a booklet the two wrote in 2004 expounding on biblical doctrine titled “Male and Female He Created Them: Homosexual Relations Challenge the Christian Concept of Humanity,” as well as comments Räsänen made on the radio in December 2019 as “hate speech.”

Räsänen and Pohjola were first acquitted by the Helsinki District Court on March 30, 2022. The three-judge panel ruled that prosecutors had violated the Christians’ right to freedom of expression contained in Section 12 of the Finnish Constitution, as well as noting the thorny legal questions posed if secular judges begin ruling on matters of religious doctrine.

“It is not for the district court to interpret biblical concepts,” the court declared.

But within days, then-Prosecutor General Raija Toiviainen appealed the charges. Räsänen then faced a two-day trial last Aug. 31-Sept. 1. The Court of Appeals unanimously acquitted Räsänen and Pohjola on Nov. 14. Under the law, social media posts must be intended to offend, and “there must be an overriding social reason for interfering with and restricting freedom of expression,” it ruled. The judges ordered the state to pay both defendants’ legal fees.

Finland’s current state prosecutor appealed the dismissal once again earlier this month.

“It is shocking that the Finnish state prosecutor has decided to target MP Räsänen for a third time, because she politely expressed her religious beliefs in public,” Arielle Del Turco, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council—and who signed the letter—told The Washington Stand. “So far, the Finnish courts have been clear in affirming Räsänen’s right to express her religious beliefs. However, the process of being dragged through court is often the punishment itself.”

The effort to continually prosecute the grandmother of 10 exposes the government’s intolerance and malice toward traditional Christian viewpoints, said Paul Coleman, executive director of ADF International, which is supporting Räsänen’s legal defense. “Dragging people through the courts for years, subjecting them to hourlong police interrogations, and wasting taxpayer money to police people’s deeply held beliefs has no place in a democratic society,” said Coleman. “As is so often the case in ‘hate speech’ trials, the process has become the punishment.”

The U.S. letter offers “prayers and encouragement” to the embattled pair “on behalf of the millions of Americans who support freedom of speech and freedom of religion.”

The letter assures them that “you do not stand alone,” because “each one of us stands alongside you,” note its writers. “We are watching, and we are praying for you. The world is watching, and the world is praying for you.”

The signatories hope their fellow believers, and all those who value freedom of conscience and expression, will make that promise real as the West falls progressively under the sway of illiberal secular repression.

“Christians around the world should continue to pray for and voice their support for MP Räsänen,” said Del Turco.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/29/christian-jewish-leaders-condemn-political-spiritual-persecution-paivi-rasanen

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New Research on ‘Conversion Therapy’ Turns LGBTQ Narrative on Its Head

Twenty-seven states and Washington, D.C., have banned efforts to change sexual orientation, commonly but mistakenly referred to as “conversion therapy,” for minors on the premise that therapies seeking to mitigate or resolve unwanted same-sex attraction are inherently harmful and increase the risk of suicide.

Father Paul Sullins, a Roman Catholic priest, senior research associate at The Ruth Institute, and former sociology professor at Catholic University, found that the opposite is true, however.

Not only is there no evidence that efforts to change sexual orientation, which Sullins refers to by the acronym SOCE, increase the risk of suicide among those who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. There also is evidence that such efforts actually decrease the risk of suicide or thoughts of suicide among them.

“What we’re left with is a situation where we’re being fed a lie that somehow attempting to change sexual orientation is going to fail all the time and it’s going to cause harm, and the truth is just the opposite,” Sullins tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.”

Sullins analyzed the data from a study conducted in 2020 by University of Southern California health researcher John Blosnich. The study, “Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and Suicide Ideation and Attempt Among Sexual Minority Adults, United States, 2016–2018,” published in the American Journal of Public Health, used data collected by the Gallup Organization.

Gallup called over 330,000 Americans to screen about 3,000 who identified as LGB and then collected 1,500 interviews on the issue, yielding what Sullins described as “very precise data on this particular question.”

“With that data, they correlated the amount of suicide ideation—thinking about suicide and other suicidal behaviors,” such as making a plan to commit suicide or suicide attempts, Sullins explains. “They correlated those with whether a person had ever been to SOCE and found that person who had been to SOCE had over twice the rate of suicidal thoughts and were 1 .7 times as likely to attempt suicide.”

“On the basis of this, calls for banning SOCE were moved forward, and we got into the situation we’re in today,” the sociologist explains.

Yet it seems the researchers made an elementary mistake in analyzing the data; Sullins caught the mistake because Blosnich and his colleagues published the interviews along with the study.

“I got the data and looked at it and I found that they had ignored one very crucial question, which was, ‘When did you think about suicide?'” Sullins recalls.

When he read the interviews, he looked to see “whether the suicide activity happened before or after the person went to SOCE, and what I found, somewhat to my surprise, was that most of the suicidal behavior happened before the person ever went to SOCE. Two-thirds of the thoughts of suicide happened before they ever went to SOCE.”

“Now, you know, it’s logical that if someone engages in a behavior and then goes through an experience, later, that that experience could not have caused that preexisting behavior,” Sullins explains. “Things don’t work backward in the space-time continuum.”

“So I published a firm rebuttal to that study finding not only that did SOCE not increase suicidal behavior, it decreased it,” he says.

Critics attempted to silence his study’s findings.

“Even if my study was true, they claimed it was unethical to publish it because it implied that somehow people needed to be fixed, and it would impede the cause of gay rights,” Sullins says.

Although Sullins is Roman Catholic and believes same-sex activity to be sinful, he says he doesn’t encourage lesbians, gays, or bisexuals to try to change their sexual orientation unless they feel uncomfortable about that orientation. He says that sexual orientation change efforts don’t always work, but his studies find that they do succeed, to some degree.

“I’ve done other studies that show that when people attempt to change sexual orientation, it is fully successful in my studies about 17 to 20% of the time,” he recalls. “Most persons who undergo it, meaning about 60 to 65%, report that they are less caught up in homosexual attractions and behaviors and activity.”

Sullins noted that about 30% of the 1,500 lesbians, gays, and bisexuals in Blosnich’s study said that they have tried to change their sexual orientation, and about 10% said, “If I could be completely heterosexual, I would want to do that.”

“So there is a minority of the gay population who wants to change, is not happy with living the way that they’re living, however you want to say that, and wants to change,” Sullins notes. “Those are the ones who ought to have the option for counseling and therapy if they want it.”

The sociologist also says that his studies show sexual attraction is variable and complex.

“If you measure those things separately, you’ll find that across the range of humans, variation, there are a number of people who have moderate to high levels of same-sex attraction and moderate to high levels of opposite-sex attraction that coexist,” he explains.

“What often happens when persons go through SOCE or attempt to what we call change their sexual orientation is that—not so much that the same sex attractions diminish, that can happen—but it’s much more common that those don’t diminish or diminish very much, but the opposite-sex attractions become more salient and a person is able then to live more out of their opposite-sex-attracted side, we might say, than the same-sex-attracted side,” Sullins says.

The sociologist goes on to describe how some in the scientific community have attempted to stifle his research.

“In a way, I find it an encouragement and a compliment when a study of mine is being suppressed,” he says. “Because if they had an argument against what I was publishing, if they found a flaw in it, they would make that note. But the fact [is] that they don’t do that, instead they want to suppress citations, as you can do in the scholarly world, or they want to make sure it doesn’t get published in journals that are read more widely.”

Sullins also describes having a venue cancel a presentation on his research.

“When they canceled like that, it says to me that they don’t really have an argument on the other side,” he says. “They want to control us by censorship and by controlling the way that we think. Well, as an American, I don’t take well to that kind of control.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/31/new-research-conversion-therapy-turns-lgbtq-narrative-head

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Go woke, go broke

The furore over certain organisations trying to ignore Australia Day is just part of a major trend in developed countries where time and again very smart, driven executives of major companies have fallen for the trap of thinking that the vast bulk of consumers of their company’s products share the concerns of tiny but extremely noisy groups with woke agendas.

Perhaps the least costly of these many errors is that of senior executives at bodies as diverse as Woolworths, Cricket Australia and the Australian Open trying to avoid mentioning Australia Day or acknowledge the national holiday celebrations, only to be forcefully reminded that the vast bulk of consumers and sports-watchers are quite happy with the day as it is. They do not want it ignored or re-labelled ‘invasion day’ or ‘oppression day’ as activists have demanded.

After receiving three thousand emails and having opposition leader Peter Dutton call for a boycott against his supermarket chain, Woolworths chief executive Brad Banducci admitted he had misread the political climate over his decision to drop Australia Day merchandise. He also insisted that his decision was due only to last year’s poor sales of such merchandise and that he would celebrate the day himself.

The Australia Day furore, however, is just a bad day at the barbecue compared to the errors costing billions committed by executives of major companies overseas, including those in charge of the iconic US magazine Sports Illustrated. Like all magazines, Sports Illustrated has been struggling to find its place in the digital age, with online sites eating into its core readership, but attempts to reverse this by applying woke obsessions made things far worse.

Sports Illustrated featured articles on subjects such as the lack of ethnic diversity in major sports – an issue in which the vast bulk of its readers had no interest – and even attempted to block advertisers who did not demonstrate a commitment to female equality. But most ludicrous of all was a woke revamp of the magazine’s annual swimsuit issue, a major seller with the publication’s overwhelmingly hetero, male readership.

Instead of using the mainstays of previous years such as a busty Kate Upton, svelte Canadian model Kate Bock or the full-figured girl-next-door-type Myla Dalbesio with a strategically cut t-shirt, the magazine featured transgender men in bikinis and fat women. To the surprise of no one but hard core activists this did not work and the company producing the magazine has all but closed the title, laying off the bulk of the staff. As the magazine rights are owned by another company, Sport Illustrated may yet reappear in another form but at the time of writing nothing has been announced.

The layoffs at Sports Illustrated are, in turn, part of a string of mass sackings at other iconic publications. In January the Los Angeles Times newsrooms announced that it would layoff at least 115 people or about one-quarter of its journalist staff less than a year after a round of major redundancies. Billionaire owner Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong declared that the paper could not continue to lose $US30-40 million ($A46-61 million) a year without increasing revenue and readership. The New York Times and the Washington Post have also announced major lay-offs.

All sorts of reasons can be found for the shake-out at these major newspapers, with the Covid pandemic and the long-running actors strike undoubtedly affecting the LA Times. But online media commentators, openly gloating over the problems of their print competitors, also pointed to the apparent obsession the traditional media has with subjects such as gender and identity politics and climate, as well as its marked cheer-leading for the left. The journalists on those publications, commentators say, have completely lost touch with the concerns of the bulk of their readers.

Even the Disney Corporation usually closely attuned to what its consumers want has been fooled by woke concerns into making what can only be described as strange decisions, notably over the Star Wars franchise which the corporation acquired along with Lucas Films more than a decade ago. Films in this franchise regularly earn more than $US1 billion in ticket sales. But after producing a series of other films that flopped at the box office, Disney decided to revamp the corny space opera and adventure brand by introducing woke themes such as female empowerment.

However, the corporation’s decision to hire a Canadian-Pakistani director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy to direct the next Star Wars film, a political activist known for her work in films that highlight gender inequality, resulted in an enormous backlash from fans.

The fans were, in part, reacting to a comment made by Obaid-Chinoy many years ago that she ‘liked to make men feel uncomfortable’ that resurfaced around the beginning of the year. However, online comments indicate those fans see Obaid-Chinoy’s appointment as further evidence of the general decline in the brand since Disney took it over, and that they anticipate that the new film scheduled for release in 2025 will be a ‘woke disaster’. They also point out that Princess Leia was taking on bad guys and fending off Hans Solo back in the 1970s, so why does the brand have to be made more female now?

Another woke disaster was an attempt by fashion brand Victoria’s Secret to atone for past sins, including an unfortunate connection with serial abuser Geoffrey Epstein, by dumping its usual catwalk show of supermodels parading in the brand’s signature Angel’s Wings, including South African Candice Swanepoel and Australia’s own Miranda Kerr, for models who were plus- sized, transgender and disabled.

The result was a £1.1 billion (A$2.13 billion) fall in sales between 2020 and 2023, with the fashion brand announcing at the end of 2023 that it would, as various commentators noted, ‘bring sexy back’.

Fashion is, well, subject to changing fashions, but even hard-headed car industry executives have swallowed woke/climate nonsense, including activist assurances that electric cars will dominate the car market. As noted in this publication (‘EV Speed Bump’, 2 December) car makers such as General Motors and Ford are discovering for themselves after spending billions what non-activist commentators have been telling them all along, that the broad middle class of consumers owning just one cheap car that they need to get to work or take the kids to school have little interest in expensive electric vehicles.

Every week there’s a fresh disaster. This week, Aussie surf brand Rip Curl was forced into damage control after using a transgender surfer to replace a woman. But the real question is why smart, experienced executives let themselves be fooled into spending billions to please perhaps one per cent of the public, who might not even buy their company’s products, while ignoring or alienating almost all their customer base.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/model-business

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

<> http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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