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Wolf’s Notes

… about faith, life, technology, etc.

Donald Trump’s Pro-Life Ploy is History

2024-07-17 Wolf Paul

Here is Catholic World Report on the fact that the Republican Party platform has been stripped to a large extent[1], at Donald Trump’s insistence, of the pro-life position which was part of it for fifty years: They pat themselves on the back for having returned abortion law to the States, and say they oppose late-term abortion. They have removed the support for the traditional family and inserted a paragrap about gender ideology, stopping short of condemning hormones and surgery for minors.

I have said all along that Donald Trump’s pro-life stance was merely a tactic, a clever ploy to win the support of gullible (sorry!) religious folks, and I have been dissed for this view by my American Evangelical friends.

And while the “pro-life” justices Trump has installed in the Supreme Court have overturned Roe v. Wade they have also just given him carte blanche to effectively become an unaccountable, absolutist king.

Congratulations, my friends.

«Nor do most observers seriously believe that abortion (much less the defense of traditional marriage) are issues that Trump is personally much concerned about, given his notorious personal life and the pro-choice and otherwise socially liberal views he expressed for decades before running for president in 2016. The most plausible reading of Trump’s record is that he was willing to further the agenda of social conservatives when doing so was in his political interests, but no inclination to do so any longer now that their support has been secured and their views have become a political liability.»

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  1. I just looked at the 2016 GOP and Democratic platforms, and here is how they differ on abortion and marriage:

    GOP 2016 on abortion:
    “We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution.”
    “We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortion or fund
    organizations like Planned Parenthood, so long as they provide or refer for elective abortions…We will not fund or subsidize healthcare that includes abortion coverage.”

    GOP 2016 on marriage:
    “Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values.”
    “We do not accept the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal, whether through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment returning control over marriage to the states. We oppose government discrimination against businesses or entities which decline to sell items or services to individuals for activities that go against their religious views about such activities.”

    GOP 2016 on Gender Ideology:
    Nothing. That wasn’t a hot-button issue yet.

    And here is what’s changed:

    GOP 2024 on abortion:
    We proudly stand for families and Life. We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights. After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People. We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).

    GOP 2024 on marriage:
    Nothing.

    GOP on Gender Ideology:
    We will keep men out of women’s sports, ban Taxpayer funding for sex change surgeries, and stop Taxpayer-funded Schools from promoting gender transition, reverse Biden’s radical rewrite of Title IX Education Regulations, and restore protections for women and girls.

    Here is the GOP 2016 platform, and here the GOP 2024 platform.[↩]

Status Update

Wolf Paul

Recently someone on Facebook asked about my health status, so here is a quick update:

In April of 2022 I had surgery for an abscess on my right inside thigh, and was laid up for several months with a “vacuum-assisted closure” device. When that was removed after about three months I found my leg muscles had atrophied to the point where I could no longer get up or even lift my butt off the bed.

After a lot of work, by October 2023 I was almost back to being able to get up with the aid of a heavy-duty walker when I was laid up for two weeks in the hospital with pneumonia. When I got out I was back at ground zero, and it’s been very slow going since then.

Thanks to my Kindle, Youtube, and live streamed church services in the wake of Covid, as well as occasional visits and regular phone calls from friends I have kept my sanity while being confined to the 2 square meters of my bed.

I owe a debt of gratitude to my wife Geraldine who faithfully took care of me throughout this time.

Pastoring with a millstone around the neck?

2024-07-16 Wolf Paul

It has become an almost weekly occurrence: Another long-time pastor of an evangelical church has been arrested in the US on child sex abuse charges.
 
I don’t want to speculate on whether this is a peculiarly American problem; I suspect not, as we’ve had the massive R.C. clergy child abuse scandal [1] over here a few years ago. If we hear less of such scandals in the evangelical camp over here it probably is for sociological reasons such as the comparative size of the movement and its minority status in most of Europe, not because the European church is holier than the American church.
 
Nor do I want to point the finger at these men; we all have our temptations and if mine are not as abhorrent as theirs it is purely by the grace of God.
 
But I want to comment on something I cannot get my head around, not in a judgmental way but because I am mystified by it.
 
If I had even once committed, and especially if I were continuously committing, such acts I could not stand in front of the church on Sunday morning, preach the Gospel, and lead the congregation in worship. I would consider myself disqualified, constantly aware of and pulled down by the millstone hanging around my neck that Jesus talks about (Matthew 18:6)[2]. In fact, I have always considered myself disqualified from preaching and been reluctant to lead worship because of my own struggles with humanly speaking minor and more socially acceptable temptations and my failures to resist them.
 
In 1 Timothy 4:1-2 Paul talks about “hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron,” and perhaps that explains it.  And everyone of us whose conscience has not been seared, or at least not to that extent, should thank God for His gracious preservation.
 
There is a quote attributed to the English Reformer and martyr John Bradford who lived in the 16th century. While watching criminals being led to their execution Bradford is said to have exclaimed, “There but for the grace of God go I!”
 
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  1. This rash of abusive pastors should also give pause to those who blame the R.C. scandal on the celibacy requirement for Roman Catholic clergy — all these evangelical pastors are married.[↩]
  2. The passage talks about giving offense to children, and the most recent case I was referring to is about child abuse, but I do not want to in any way imply that the abuse of adolescents or adults is any less abhorrent[↩]

Sex vs Gender?

2024-07-03 Wolf Paul

German Evangelical magazine idea (Nr. 27.2024, p. 7) quotes from a taz interview with Alexander Korte, a German specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry and psychotherapy, who comments on the statement that gender identity is innate:

“That’s absurd. Neurobiological research definitely owes proof that gender identity could be genetically determined. Even from a developmental psychology perspective, it is absurd to assume that identity is something one is born with. From my point of view, identity is always the result of an individual’s bonding and relationship history – and also physical history.” [1]

Politically speaking, I agree with this statement but consider it irrelevant to most of the controversial gender debate. That debate is not primarily about identity, but about biology. Separate sporting events for women and men are justified by the biological differences between (biological) women and men; the same applies to gender-segregated toilets, showers, changing rooms, etc. All of this has nothing to do with identity.

And frankly: it is also absurd to assume that perceived gender identity should take precedence over biological sex in every respect and in all situations. That is postmodern, post-scientific nonsense, and where, for example, the rights of the small but very vocal number of “trans people” are supposed to trump the rights of the large majority of “cis people,”[2] it is profoundly undemocratic.

Also, for the assessment of this issue in traditional Christian theology[3] this question is not particularly relevant: the theological evaluation of societal phenomena and human behaviors is not based on genetics or whether something is innate, but on what God’s Word, the Bible, says. After all, the Bible clearly states that we all have an innate inclination to sin (Romans 3:10-18: [4], which manifests differently in different people. Nevertheless, sin is never justified.

Whether and to what extent the Bible represents an identity differing from biological sex as a result of fallen and therefore sinful nature can certainly be discussed. It is clear that the Bible does refer to men in women’s clothing (and vice versa) as “an abomination” (Deuteronomy 22:5[5], but spends far more time and has far more condemnation for other behaviors and attitudes, calling them sin, “abomination,” and “wickedness.” And how did Jesus put it? “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.”

(The cover picture of this post is a screenshot from Merriam-Webster‘s entry for “transgender”.)

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  1. Dr. Korte is indeed critical of gender ideology, as a quick Google search clearly shows.[↩]
  2. The term trans-(men, women, people) refers to individuals whose perceived gender identity does not align with their biological sex, in contrast to cis-(men, women, people), whose gender identity and biological sex match. Additionally, there are the adjectives transgender and cisgender. All of these are neologisms (late 20th century) based on the Latin words trans (beyond) and cis (on this side of) as well as the originally grammatically term gender.[↩]
  3. i.e. a theology which starts from the premise that the Bible is God’s revelation of and about Himself, that it doesn’t and shouldn’t be changed, and that it is still the standard for Christian faith and theology today.[↩]
  4. “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of God before their eyes.” Paul quotes here various passages from the Hebrew Bible (“Old Testament”) which describe the innate inclination of humans towards sin.[↩]
  5. “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.”[↩]

Proxmox on a Raspberry Pi 5

2024-06-24 Wolf Paul

Until I retired four years ago I used to run a Lenovo Thinkcenter as a kind of universal server, using Proxmox as the  virtualization solution.

Proxmox is based on Debian Linux and integrates QEMU/KVM for virtual machines and LXD for containers. When I first encountered it it only ran on x86_64 machines (i.e. Intel and AMD processors), but recently support for the ARM architecture (aarch64) has been added.

So I am going to begin a project of installing it on both a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Raspberry Pi 5, primarily as an experiment and to keep my mind busy and in the game.

I will be using the tutorial, “How to Install Proxmox on the Raspberry Pi” by Emmet at the PiMyLifeUp site, an Australian project and resource site for all things Raspberry Pi, Linux, Arduino, etc.

First I need to get my Raspberry Pi up and running with an M.2 SSD in an Argon One case; I find the connectors for the ribbon cable between the Pi’s SSD port and the one on the Argon board challenging, to say the least.

I will update this post as I make progress.

 

Through Theology In One Year

Wolf Paul

I am just starting to watch a video podcast series called “Through Theology In One Year“, produced and presented on YouTube by Michael Patton[1] Michael is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and presents theology from an Evangelical, Reformed perspective.

As of today there are 16 episodes online and they are presented in a YouTube playlist which would be very useful –except that the playlist is arranged with the most recent episode at the top, and so will play in reverse order, and YouTube does not offer a way to reverse the order in which playlists are presented.

Because I do not fancy having to navigate backwards so I was looking for a solution outside YouTube — and in this article I just found one: The website Playlist.Tools allows you to find a playlist URL and paste it in a text box on the site, and will then present you with the playlist in reverse order — i.e. with the first episode at the top.[2]

For my own convenience and for anyone else interested I am presenting the URL of the reversed playlist for “Through Theology In One Year” right here, hoping that it is persistent and doesn’t change over time or when new episodes are added (we might have to deal with that if it happens).

Here we go: “Through Theology In One Year” in correct viewing order.

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  1. C. Michael Patton has been in ministry for twentyfive years as a pastor, author, speaker, and blogger. Find him on Patreon. Th.M. Dallas Theological Seminary (2001), president of Credo House Ministries and Credo Courses, author of Now that I’m a Christian (Crossway, 2014) Increase My Faith (Credo House, 2011), and The Theology Program (Reclaiming the Mind Ministries, 2001-2006), host of Theology Unplugged, and primary blogger at Parchment and Pen. But, most importantly, husband to a beautiful wife and father to four awesome children. Michael is available for speaking engagements. Join his Patreon and support his ministry.[↩]
  2. I would have preferred to use a browser plugin but I could not get any of the plugins presented to work.[↩]

Bre-Entry? I don’t think so …

2024-06-22 Wolf Paul

EN / DE

According to today’s Daily Telegraph, “Labour will reverse Brexit if it wins the general election, UK Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch has warned.”[1]

As a convinced Remainer I would welcome this if it happened, but  I am not sure this is more than Kemi Badenoch‘s desparate attempt to warn voters against a Labour government.  I think that if Keir Starmer actually believes he can do it he is highly delusional.

Britain joined the EU in 1973,[2] and eventually secured several very favourable concessions, such as a major rebate on the country’s financial contribution to the Union[3]. Yet in the years since then a very vocal faction of Eurosceptics mostly in the Conservative Party has kept agitating against membership, culminating in David Cameron’s ill-advised 2016 Brexit referendum and the UK’s eventual departure from the EU at the beginning of 2020.

During the Brexit negotiations Britain very much took the attitude that the EU needed the country more than the UK needed the Union, and demanded all sorts of continued membership privileges despite wanting to leave. In the years since then the UK keeps demanding changes to the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement — with the result that many in the EU, both politicians and bureaucrats, have become sick and tired of the British and are not very keen on re-admitting them to the club.

Since re-admitting Britain to the European Union would very likely re-start all the same phenomena of the UK’s 47 years of EU membership (i.e. vocal Eurosceptic agitation, etc) and sooner or later result in Brexit 2.0, any suggestion of a Bre-Entry[4] will meet with little enthusiasm in Brussels. I am afraid it is nothing but a pipe dream.

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  1. Starmer will reverse Brexit, warns Badenoch[↩]
  2. UK Membership[↩]
  3. UK Rebate[↩]
  4. British Re-Entry to the European Union[↩]

Hostile Take-Over! My old FB account is now in enemy hands …

2024-06-12 Wolf Paul

This past Saturday I was contacted on FB Messenger by a friend in England who said she had locked herself out of her Facebook account and needed help recovering it. Could I receive an authorization code for her and forward it? Trying to be helpful I said, Sure, but tell me how we met so I know this is really you and not some hacker. Her answer was correct, so I received and forwarded the code.

HOWEVER, this wasn’t really my friend but the hacker who had hijacked her account and who had obviously done his homework so he could answer my question, and the authorization code was not for my friend’s account but for mine. The hacker immediately changed the password and removed my e-mail and phone number from the account, so I had no quick way to regain control — Facebook’s recovery tools all presuppose that you still have a way to receive a one-time code by e-mail or SMS or WhatsApp to an address or phone number linked to your account, and that was unfortunately all gone.

Now, I will admit that in a way, this was my own fault. I am supposed to be sufficiently computer and internet savvy to not all for such scams. All I can claim as extenuating circumstances is the fact that I am getting older and probably more senile, that it was late at night, and that my “friend” correctly answered my question about how we became acquainted. But other than the hacker I can only blame myself.

But I DO blame Facebook for their abysmally inadequate and ineffective support. Not only is it impossible to actually talk to a support person; when one reports such an incident nothing at all seems to happen. I reported this through their help center as well as per e-mail to security@facebookmail.com, and several of my friends also reported the account as compromised. Four days later the account is still active and being used by the hacker to try and scam my friends in the same way I was scammed, and Facebook has done absolutely nothing.

I set up a new account and created a post explaining what had happened and immediately began to receive recommendations for people and services who could recover my account. I picked one whose online presence seemed pretty professional and paid a moderate amount to have my account recovered. Well, next he needed a special piece of software costing twice what I had already paid, and then, when he claimed he had gained control of the account, he demanded a further, even higher payment before he would provide me with the necessary information to access and secure the account. This not only exceeded my budget, I also suspected that he would string me along with one payment demand after the other. So I pulled the plug, decided to write off the money I had paid  and abandon the account. As far as I am concerned the ball is now in Facebook’s court to protect their users from a scammer they have been told about.

Nevertheless I asked a friend who can still see the old account to make screen dumps of the list of “friends” and I will see how I can warn as many as possible that my old account “Wolf N. Paul” is compromised.

My new Facebook-Account is “Wolf Paul” (without the “N.”), and I am slowly rebuilding my friends list. I thought about abandoning FB altogether, but it has been so helpful in reconnecting with people I had lost touch with and I don’t want to miss that.

What did I learn from this?

  • To be extremely wary of requests to help people with authentication problems; if an authentication code is sent to you, chances are very good that it is for your account rather than for someone else’s.
  • To expect no support from Meta or it’s subsidiaries; while they are obviously making money from us in the form of an ever increasing flood of advertising, they are not charging us directly for the service and thus have no obligation toward us.
  • To never agree to designate a payment with PayPal “for Family and Friends” rather than “for Goods or Services” — for the latter one can open a dispute and get the money back if the promised service is not delivered, but the former is irretrievably lost.
  • To never store material important to you (photos, videos, texts, chats) in an online service like Facebook, WhatsApp, or any of Google’s or Microsoft’s services without having one or more backups offline or in another service.

And now we get on with life — on and offline.

The REAL Issues in the Trans Debate

2024-05-20 Wolf Paul

Nicola Sturgeon, forrmer First Minister of Scotland, in a recent interview:

Ms Sturgeon also doubled down on her view that transgender women are women, and said in the on-stage interview with trans novelist and activist Juno Dawson that “people should be able to live how they want to be”.

She warned that “it seems like everyone in society is raining down on trans people” and despite forming 0.5 per cent of the population, they were used as “a battering ram” and that gay people and other marginalised groups were becoming “collateral damage”.

In my view trans people “living how they want” is not really the issue.

  • The issue is ignoring the instincts and wishes of most of the 99.5% of the people by criminalizing and ostracizing the view that binary sex is immutable and gender is merely a social construct.
  • The issue is threatening people with fines, jail, or “cancelling” for seeing an important distinction between biological women and trans women, and daring to say so.
  • The issue is denying physical women the safety of biologically female-only spaces.
  • The issue is expecting biologically female athletes to compete against trans athletes with the physique of a man.
  • The issue is whether we should allow children and adolescents who are still under their parents’ care and who need parental permission or agreement for most important decisions, to make this one life-altering decision without parental consent. Even with parental consent, irreversible treatments at such a young age are problematic.
  • The issue (not only in the trans debate but in many of these hot topics) is the notion that people have the right to everyone else’s approval and affirmation and the right not to have their feelings hurt, and that people who withhold that approval and affirmation or hurt someone’s feelings should be criminally prosecuted. This makes a mockery of freedom of speech and freedom of opinion. 

And “gay people” (specifically lesbians) and also other biological women, are becoming collateral damage when forced, against their preference, to share toilets, showers, changing rooms, etc ., with biological males who have self-declared as female, and are being slandered as TERFs when they object.

Hartl on Mother’s Day

2024-05-14 Wolf Paul

Johannes Hartl from the Augsburg Prayer House writes on the occasion of this year’s Mother’s Day:[1]

Sorry if this spoils your mood, but Mother’s Day can also evoke very painful memories for some. Those who read my posts know that I hold the value of healthy parenthood extremely high. But today is about the opposite. I’m curious about your thoughts. And as always: Yes, of course, both men and women, fathers and mothers manipulate, and there is no rule without exception, and nothing and no one should be generalized. Nevertheless, the phenomenon I described exists. Or what do you think?

Mom is the be(a)st.
😳 Thoughts on momipulation:
Today is Mother’s Day, and the value of a loving, empathetic mom cannot be estimated highly enough. But what if one has experienced the opposite?
There are many forms of toxic patterns in mothers. Examples:

  • Punishment through withdrawal of love
  • Emotional coldness
  • Spoiling to the point of dependency
  • Narcissism: Self-promotion of one’s own greatness as a mother
  • Playing children against the father
  • Verbal abuse
  • The child has to take care of the mother, not the other way around

Mamipulation:

  • “Can’t you see how bad I’m feeling?
  • You have to do what I want!”
  • “You are here to comfort me.”
  • “If you really loved me, you would…”
  • “I only mean well, so do what I say, even if you are already 31.”
  • Interference in relationships
  • Having a fixed plan for your life
  • Clinging: not allowing separation
The mood of the entire family is shaped by her negative emotions and must align with her expectations.
Such behavior always stems from the mother’s own painful history. At the same time, it deeply hurts those affected.
I wish for you to be able to clarify and reconcile your relationship with your mother. But reconciliation is not the first step. The first step is to break the lie that your mom is infallible and beyond criticism. If you were hurt, you must first acknowledge it unreservedly.
If you have a mother who was good to you, you have an invaluable treasure in your life. Don’t forget that this is a privilege and many people have painfully experienced the opposite.

Source: Facebook post by Johannes Hartl; Translation Wolf Paul[2]

I am infinitely grateful to God that I had a mother, Irmtraut Paul, who was good to me (in fact, to all six of us children) because she also had a good mother and grew up in a loving family (with ten children — just like us, with six children, stereotypically Catholic 🙂 ). She passed away 13 years ago and is safe with God. In her final year she suffered from increasing dementia; this was one of the most difficult times for me and my siblings. I still miss her from time to time.

And because we don’t celebrate Father’s Day in our family[3] here is a tribute to my father, Walter Paul, who passed away 31 years ago: he was a good, though not perfect, father, an avid mountain climber even after he lost both legs below the knees, and I still miss him even after all these years.

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  1. I was going to post this on Sunday, but—understandably—obtaining permission took some time.[↩]
  2. With the aid of ChatGPT[↩]
  3. My father always thought Father’s Day was just a marketing gimmick, an opportunity to sell “manly” gifts, and I adopted his view[↩]