Does John 1:1 contradict John 1:18?

ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

(In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. KJV)

Oh boy! When you get into a discussion of the Gospel of John, you dive into complexities. John was clearly influenced by the mysterious style of the gnostic writers but at the same time made sure that what he said would not mislead a careful reader. He wrote very carefully and precisely.

So after my comments about verse 18, we inevitably get back to verse 1 (above). Does it not say there that Jesus was with God in the beginning and does it not say he is God? So how does that jibe with verse 18 where Jesus is said to be a born God? He was certainly born as a man but he was also born as a god, according to verse 18.

Both those claims about verse 1 turn, once again, on what the Greek actually says rather than conventional translations of it. The issue is anarthrous predicates -- i.e. what does it mean when the definite article is omitted? It is omitted both before "theos" and before "arche".

Omitting a definite article before a Greek noun is equivalent to our usage of the indefinite article. Greek does not have an indefinite article to indicate a class of things so where that is intended, "ho" (the) is simply omitted. An omitted definite article is significant.

The implication of that is that verse 1 should be translated to read "a beginning", not "the beginning" and "was God" should be rendered as "was a god". So verse 1 is in fact entirely consistent with verse 18. John was not confused. He was very precise. Jesus was NOT there in the beginning and he was NOT God

The exegetes know all that and try to wriggle out of it by saying it was a Greek custom to omit the definite artice where the noun is part of a predicate. That may be true of some writers but it clearly was not John's usage. No sooner than verse 4 of chapter 1 do we find John using a definite article in a predicate: τὸ φῶς

ἐν αὐτῶ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων·

The light was THE light of men. So the anarthrous predicate argument just will not wash. John really did say that Jesus was a god and that he existed in a beginning, which is perfectly consistent with him being a "born god"

Chapter 14 is another occasion where John's style of writing could mislead. He speaks there of Jesus being united with God. But in verse 28 he makes sure that he is not misunderstood. He emphasizes there that he is NOT God: "My father is greater than I"

My apologies to any mainstream Christians reading this. What I have said is inconsistent with your theology. But it is not me speaking. It is the apostle John

Update note:  Both Theos and Phos are predicates after the verb to be (een) so are entirely comparable

Reparations are the new affirmative action — and even more racist and divisive

Gallup poll results this month show a significant majority — 68% — of Americans agree with the Supreme Court’s ruling to abolish affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the racial-discrimination case brought by Asian Americans.

Not only has aggregate favorability shot up since right after the summer decision, when it was 52%, but a majority of blacks now approve of SFFA; among younger blacks, the favorability is a stunning 62%, almost matching the 63% among Asian Americans!

Hispanic Americans came in even higher, 68%.

Perhaps after watching in amazement the stark contrast between how campus administrators handled recent pro-Hamas riots and how they handled non-progressive events for years, Americans of all races have awakened to the fact that much-touted campus diversity has been a total sham.

The court’s 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision said it was exactly because the “robust exchange of ideas” “diversity” brings to universities was a “compelling state interest” that affirmative action, with its inherent racial preferences, was provisionally spared from being illegal under the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which guarantee equal rights under the law regardless of race.

“Provisionally” because under Grutter, affirmative action was to be practiced under highly limiting guidelines and with specific intent to end it, perhaps in 25 years — both of which universities ignored.

The SFFA decision found this “diversity rationale” to permit a little bit of racism for a little while in the name of educational benefits was incoherent; as we saw, it was also bogus.

But worse, there’s an ascendant affirmative action that couldn’t care less about “diversity” or “educational benefits.”

This new variant is brazenly racist: Affirmative action is reparations for the so-called “legacy of slavery.”

As Thomas Sowell, Jason Riley and others have shown, the “legacy” is not of slavery but of 1960s liberalism.

Regardless, there’s money and Democratic votes in Ibram Kendi’s toxic hucksterism of “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”

So reparations commissions are sprouting in Democratic strongholds around the country — 17 and counting, with Gov. Hochul signing one into New York law just last month — and Democrats are pushing a federal commission.

In the reparations regimen, “affirmative action” is reincarnated under “integration” to justify racial quotas under the “legacy of slavery” narrative.

Thus, in the California Reparations Report’s education chapter — only the Golden State’s commission has completed its report — cognates of “integration,” “segregation” or “desegregation” occur 199 times, against seven for “diversity” and zero for “proficiency” or “excellence.”

Significantly, reparations also underlie Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting SFFA opinion.

This was intentional: Jackson was laying groundwork for a Supreme Court fight on reparations, perhaps in a future court with more justices on her side.

After suffering comes justification for reparations’ central demand, that of forever-legacy, but since facts and logic don’t support that, she resorts to dreamy storytelling: “History speaks. In some form, it can be heard forever. The race-based gaps that first developed centuries ago are echoes from the past that still exist today.”

She concludes with a recitation of black ills straight from the reparations narrative, with its usual inaccuracies and fallacies, including the confusion of correlation vs. causation, that wherever ills are observed, the “legacy of slavery” is the cause.

Jackson’s dissent is all reparations, only reparations.

In a lawsuit about discrimination against Asian-American applicants, she mentions them only once — just to recap a lower-court ruling.

Jackson blustered similarly elsewhere that despite explicitly guaranteeing universal equal rights in the unmistakable language of European Enlightenment, the 14th Amendment really meant for blacks to be more equal than others: whites, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, native Americans.

Democrats in power, with their proliferating state commissions, congressional bills and pseudo-legal rhetoric, are gearing up for the far bigger and toxic battle over reparations; to win, they are ready to dangle trillions of taxpayer dollars before black Americans.

Or is America’s future our founding ideal of “e pluribus unum” — out of many, one — with its promise of oneness under the law regardless of differences that made America the beacon of freedom to the world?

You decide.

https://nypost.com/2024/01/28/opinion/reparations-are-the-new-affirmative-action-and-even-more-racist-and-divisive/

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The Trick That Dropped Atlanta Crime

You have undoubtedly heard that crime is down in a lot of places. One trick often employed in places like San Francisco is not to report crimes. Shoplifting is no longer pursued, and employees of businesses can be fired for preventing shoplifting. So property theft crimes drop not because theft is no longer happening but because it is no longer treated as a crime.

Atlanta, Georgia, has seen a 21% drop in year-over-year crime. The Mayor of Atlanta, Andre Dickens, faced with a secession effort in the northern wards of his city due to crime and violent protests from the far left over a police training facility, has deployed a novel trick in The City Too Busy to Hate. He actually pushed law enforcement to enforce the law.

Under Dickens and Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum, the city began aggressively cracking down on gun crimes and gang violence. Buckhead, the financial center of the South and Atlanta’s northern ward, began agitating for secession after crime spiked during COVID lockdowns. Random suburbanites were shot while jogging, home break-ins increased, carjackings increased; violence was on the rise after the former Mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, decided to side with rioters against the police.

Then-Mayor Bottoms and the former Fulton County District Attorney, in a series of high-profile cases, prosecuted police officers for policing. They targeted one officer for shooting a man who had attacked an officer, fled and attempted to tase the pursuing officer. That officer shot and killed the man and got prosecuted. After Dickens’ election, the charges were dropped. Other officers were disciplined for trying to get college students to stop their car during a riot. The result was a collapse of police morale, police leaving the force and difficulty recruiting.

Dickens, upon taking office, had to do two things. First, he needed to calm Buckhead’s nerves. Its departure would have dramatically cut tax revenue for the city. Second, he needed to ameliorate police morale. He did both by letting the police actually police.

The results speak for themselves. Hotels in Buckhead no longer warn visitors not to go out past dark. It feels safe to go out, and the mass of people in Buckhead after dark suggests the feeling is reality. People are returning to malls and restaurants. Businesses are no longer loudly screaming for change, and much of the Buckhead secession movement has dissipated.

That’s not to say there are no problems. Drug problems remain. Homelessness and related crime are a problem. But the violence the city had seen has diminished as police have cracked down on unlawful gun possessions, gun crimes and gang violence. Buckhead has breathed a sigh of relief. People are more prone to walk down Peachtree Street after dark. People have returned to Piedmont Park. The police are visible.

Atlanta stands in stark contrast to cities like Washington, D.C., where the Mayor and City Council have hindered the police and sent mixed signals about crime control. In New York, Mayor Eric Adams has sent police back into the streets deploying variations of “stop and frisk.” It has both cut crime and inspired progressives, including the local district attorney, to campaign against the efforts to reduce crime. Progressive prosecutors in New York, not the Mayor or police, are causing the problems. In West Coast cities, law enforcement has largely given up, and crime reductions are often because police and victims have given up reporting the crimes.

Walk into a CVS in New York City or San Francisco and you will find most of the products behind glass. You will have to wait for an attendant with a key to unlock the windows. Walk into the CVS in Midtown Atlanta and few products are locked behind glass. Go up to Buckhead and even fewer are locked up.

Atlanta has had both leadership at the top and community buy-in from residents who feel safer and trust the police. The police have been engaged in the community and are both visible and available to residents. It has worked, and the results speak for themselves. It really should not be amazing to learn, but getting tough on crime reduces crime. Other metropolitan areas could learn from Atlanta’s Mayor Dickens.

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/103916-the-trick-that-dropped-atlanta-crime-2024-01-26

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US Should End, Not Pause, Funding for UN Aid Agency Tied to Hamas

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees has finally admitted what has been obvious for years: at least some of its employees support or are members of terrorist groups such as Hamas.

Evidence provided by the Israeli government that show the relief agency’s employees participated in the horrific Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel led the organization to “immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation.”

The evidence also forced the U.S. State Department to temporarily pause “additional funding” for the agency as well. This is largely symbolic, as current commitments will remain in effect. Moreover, simply delaying America’s generous payments to the agency will not send the strong signal needed to pressure it to reform.

There also might not be much money to pause. Knowing that the House of Representatives is skeptical of its funding and that the weight of evidence against the organization was growing, the Biden administration prioritized speeding its money out the door. Much of the money available for the relief agency is probably already in its bank accounts.

The announced pause is likely designed to mollify Congress until attention shifts elsewhere. The State Department has a long history of tolerating the U.N. agency’s malfeasance. And this administration’s track record suggests that, once the news fades, efforts to “unpause” funding will begin—even if the problems continue.

These problems are nothing new. The Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees has a history of employing individuals affiliated with Hamas. Over and over, the agency’s schools in the Middle East have used textbooks with extremist and antisemitic content. Photos and reports have repeatedly shown its classrooms displaying other materials that delegitimize Israel, denigrate Jews, and venerate martyrdom.

Such manifest bias was a key reason behind the Trump administration’s decision to suspend U.S. funding in 2018.

Notwithstanding the agency’s tolerance for extremism—and despite clear evidence that some of its employees were members of Hamas and supported its goals—one of the Biden administration’s first decisions was to restore its funding. Big time. According to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, “In 2023 alone, the United States has contributed more than $296 million to UNRWA [the agency]. And the Biden administration has contributed nearly $1 billion since 2021.”

Of course, Biden’s State Department said the renewed funding was contingent on the U.N. agency’s policing its employees and classrooms. But it did not enforce this expectation. Dollars continued to flow in the face of numerous reports of the agency’s violations by journalists, nongovernmental organizations, and even the European Union.

Last year, the Geneva-based nongovernmental organization U.N. Watch reported numerous examples of “UNRWA’s gross and systematic violations of neutrality and other U.N. rules in their hiring of teachers and in their use of curricula inside UNRWA schools that constitute incitement to hatred, antisemitism, and terrorism.”

Numerous reports over the years indicated that Hamas would place weapons and tunnels in or near agency schools and hospitals and even launch attacks from its facilities. Nonetheless, the organization would always profess surprise and condemn these revelations.

The current conflict in Gaza has revealed the extent of the relief agency’s corrupt relationship with Hamas. According to Israeli Col. Elad Shushan, “There is not a UNRWA site—school, mosque, or kindergarten—in which we didn’t find weapons. None. One hundred percent.”

There is no conceivable way that the vast majority of the agency’s employees did not know about this pervasive misuse of its schools and hospitals by Hamas. By failing to report such violations of its obligation to neutrality, these employees made the organization complicit.

During the recent conflict, advocates have excused the agency, asserting that it is the best option to support Gazan civilians harmed by the war. But there is mounting evidence that Hamas is stealing aid meant to help civilians. Moreover, the relief agency has been accused of covering it up.

And now, worst of all, its employees are accused of directly participating in the horrific terrorist attacks of Oct. 7 that murdered, raped, and tortured innocents—Americans as well as Israelis. As the recent announcement of a temporary funding pause implicitly admits, the Biden administration was wrong to resume funding. However, a temporary pause is woefully inadequate.

The agency has a long record of sympathy for Hamas; employment of Hamas members; and vulnerability to extremism, antisemitism, and politicization.

But the depth of this problem is only now becoming clear. This is not a situation of a few bad apples within the organization. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Intelligence estimates shared with the U.S. conclude that around 1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. … Two officials familiar with the intelligence said the UNRWA employees considered to have ties with militant groups were deemed to be “operatives,” indicating they took active part in the organization’s military or political framework. The report said 23% of UNRWA’s male employees had ties to Hamas, a higher percentage than the average of 15% for adult males in Gaza, indicating a higher politicization of the agency than the population at large. Nearly half of all UNRWA employees—an estimated 49%—also had close relatives who also had official ties to the militant groups, especially Hamas, the intelligence reports said.

Quite simply, this U.N. agency is fundamentally compromised and cannot be trusted to serve as a neutral humanitarian actor.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees is not part of the solution. It instead has contributed to the problem. Congress should ensure that all U.S. funding for this hopelessly compromised agency is ended immediately and permanently.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/29/us-should-end-pause-funding-aid-agency-tied-hamas/

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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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