The French Revolution and the Jesuits

The Jesuits and their friends ascribe the French Revolution to their suppression.

Steinmetz, Andrew, History of the Jesuits, 2 vols., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Lea and Blanchard, 1848, vol. 2, p. 471.

Samuel Morse on the Jesuits

And who are these agents? They are, for the most part Jesuits, an ecclesiastical order, proverbial through the world for cunning, duplicity, and total want of moral principle; an order so skilled in all the arts of deception that even in Catholic countries, in Italy itself, it became intolerable, and the people required its suppression.

Morse, Samuel, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, New York: Leavitt, Lord and Co., 1835, p. 47.

Dinosaurs in Cameroon

The Jago-Nini they say is still in the swamps and rivers. Giant diver it means. Comes out of the water and devours people. Old men'll tell you what their grandfathers saw, but they still believe it's there. Same as the Amali I've always taken it to be. I've seen the Amali's footprint. About the size of a good frying pan in circumference and three claws instead o' five. There are some very big lakes behind the Cameroons. Used to be full of nice seal at one time. Manga, they call it. But the Jago-Nini's wiped 'em almost out, the old natives say. [...]

"What but some great creature like the Amali could account for the broken ivories we used to come across in the so-called elephant cemeteries? Fine old green ivory that's valuable for inlaying wood. Snapped right across in the thickest part and left in splinters.[...]

"That amali. I told you I've seen a drawing of him in those Bushman caves. I chiseled one out whole once and gave it to President Grant for a souvenir.

Horn, Alfred Aloysius, Trader Horn, ed. Ethelreda Lewis, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1927, pp. 257-258.

Shun Sacrifices to Shang Ti

Thereafter, he [Shun] sacrificed specially, but with the ordinary forms, to God [Shang Di]; [...]

The Shoo King, The Books of Yu, The Canon of Shun, 3.

(Legge, James, The Chinese Classics, 7 vols, London: Trubner & Co., 1865, vol. 3, pt. 1, pp. 33-34.)

The Barcode of Life: another glimpse of Creation

Why so much resistance?

Dr. Hebert: Well, there is a typological ring to barcoding. If it were really and truly the case that each species was indelibly barcoded with an invariant DNA marker, that would have some very drastic consequences for theories of the origin of life. If there was only significant variation between species - and none within species - that could imply creationism.
[...]
Let's return to creationism again. You said that one of the surprising things is that there is so little difference between individuals in a species.
Dr. Hebert: The explanation, when this lack of mitochondrial diversity showed up in humans, was a population bottleneck - the collapse of our species to perhaps 1,000 individuals about 150,000 years ago in Africa and out of that bottleneck modern humans emerged, stripped of mitochondrial diversity. But am I supposed to believe that every aphid species on the planet, every water flea, every fish went through a similar bottleneck at the same time? That is impossible. Honestly, I sometimes wake up at night and think, "If I was a creationist, this would be my proudest moment."
Since you are not a creationist, what do you think is happening?
Dr. Hebert: I think that it can be explained scientifically by there being a scouring mechanism that cleanses mitochondrial genomes of their diversity on a regular basis.

Strauss, Stephen, The Barcode of Life Takes Flight, University Affairs, vol. 47, no. 4, April 2006, pp. 11-15.

Confucius (551–479 BC) Predicts a Coming Saint (2)

According to a Tradition, universally received among the Chinese, he was often heard to repeat these Words: Si fang yeou ching gin, the meaning of which is, That in the West the most Holy was to be found. They were ignorant concerning the Person he spoke of; but it is very certain that fixty-five Years after the Birth of Christ, Ming ti the fifteenth Emperor of the Family of Han, equally struck with the Words of the Philosopher, and the Image of a Man who appeared to him in his sleep, as coming from the West, sent two Grandees of the Empire called, Tsai tsing and Tsin king, into those Parts, with Orders not to return till they had found this Holy Person, whom Heaven had given him some Knowledge of, and till they had learn'd the Doctrine which he taught.

But the Messengers, terrified with the Dangers and Fatigues of the Journey, stop'd in some part of the Indies, but what Place is uncertain, where they found the Idol of a Man called Fo, who had infected the Indies with his monstrous Doctrine about five hundred Years before the Birth of Confucius [that should read Christ not Confucius; Confucius and Buddha are contemporaries]: They were instructed in the Superstitions of this Country, and when they returned to China they propagated the Idolatry.

Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste, The General History of China, 3rd ed., 4 vols., trans. Richard Brookes, London: printed for J. Watts, 1741, vol. 3, pp. 300-301.

The Ten Barbarian Nations of the Divided Roman Empire

The historian Machiavel, without the slightest reference to this prophecy [that of Daniel 7], gives the following list of the nations which occupied the territory of the Western Empire at the time of the fall of Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor of Rome.

The Lombards, the Franks, the Burgundians, the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Heruli, the Sueves, the Huns, and the Saxons; ten in all. 

Guinness, Henry Grattan, The Divine Programme of the World's History, London: Harley House, 1892, p. 318.