Merry Christmas!!

[malkie]

It's been an interesting Christmas, that's for sure. We got the inside decorated but didn't make it to the outside. First time.

Regards,
MG

Fibber,

My condolences. It truly is a bittersweet moment. But on the bright side, you’ve now lost your favorite alibi for not obeying the leaders and serving that mission. With your mother-in-law now in Spirit Paradise, the only thing standing between you and your mission is, well... you.

I'm disappointed, Everybody Wang Chung, that you'd use MG's situation to score a cheap point. Not that my opinion is likely to matter to you, of course, but I think it's pretty low.

[I Have Questions]

Ok, so I guess as a Christmas offering to show solidarity (maybe?), MG has graciously placed Paula Fredriksen on the table, like a figgy pudding, and then… wandered off. Sitting at the table, it is unclear whether we’re meant to eat it or wonder if there is a point somewhere in there about the Great Apostasy. This is an example of the type of move that might end up with a poster being labeled a troll, just so it’s clear.

The Fredriksen pudding, when spooned out in delicate bite-sized goodness, reminds us that Christians thought the world was ending any minute. They still thought of themselves as Jews, so long as you don’t include the gentile converts, and were unaware and uninterested in founding a new religion, let alone establishing a long-term authority structure. She also treats us to the delicious news that the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD was a moment that changed everything, and forced all Jewish movements to adapt.

All of which is interesting, but it’s still not very clear what we are supposed to do with this information. Does this support restorationism, refute it, or just offer that the original members didn’t plan on a long-term ecclesiastical structure?

My mother-in-law passed away on Christmas. We spent a lot of time with her in the previous weeks before her death. Skilled nursing, hospital, at home. My wife was in a major auto accident on the I-15 on Dec. 6th. I spend a lot of time taking care of her. Your "wandered off' is a bit disingenuous and judgmental, not knowing the facts of the matter.

I pop in here when I have some free time with nothing else pressing.

Your posting frequency on the 6th of December and days following, suggests you may have your dates wrong, or that you weren’t really spending “a lot of time” focussing on your wife. Which is it?

[Physics Guy]

Looking after a convalescent can easily leave enough free time to make a few posts. If my wife were uncomfortable but safely getting better, yet I was still stressed, I might well post here as a respite.

[I Have Questions]

Looking after a convalescent can easily leave enough free time to make a few posts. If my wife were uncomfortable but safely getting better, yet I was still stressed, I might well post here as a respite.

That’s true. But it’s not what MG said. He said he “spent a lot of time” looking after his mother in law, and “spent a lot of time” looking after his wife, as a reason for not posting much and specifically not responding to a post by Limnor. He can’t have it both ways. Either he was too busy to post, or he wasn’t. He claims he was too busy to post, his posting record shows he wasn’t.

MG also said, as a reason for not posting (even though he continued to post during the period) was that he and his wife spent a lot of time caring for his Mother in Law in the weeks preceding Christmas. Which is odd given that his wife had just been in a major car accident that left her needing to receive significant care from MG. Was his wife convalescing under MG’s attentive care, or was she spending significant time caring for her own mother? Both?

MG’s personal “martyr syndrome” anecdotes are usually full of plot holes. I just can’t help pointing them out.

[I Have Questions]

Fibber,

My condolences. It truly is a bittersweet moment. But on the bright side, you’ve now lost your favorite alibi for not obeying the leaders and serving that mission. With your mother-in-law now in Spirit Paradise, the only thing standing between you and your mission is, well... you.

I'm disappointed, Everybody Wang Chung, that you'd use MG's situation to score a cheap point. Not that my opinion is likely to matter to you, of course, but I think it's pretty low.

I’m disappointed that MG chose to introduce the situation as an excuse for not having the time to respond to Limnor’s response to his baseless assertions, even though his posting record shows he had plenty of time to respond. And, as I’ve pointed out, MG’s story doesn’t quite add up. Again. I make no apology for doing that. If someone introduces a personal subject to a thread as an excuse for not responding, then that anecdote is fair game for scrutiny. He could have just privately DM’d Limnor to explain why he hadn’t responded. But he didn’t. He chose to go for the full board’s attention.

[Chap]

I think you will find that dates like that are usually based on the attempt to find some record of an unusual astronomical event and fit it into the story of the Magi [astrologers] who Matthew says turned up at some time after Jesus' birth. But the star Matthew describes is clearly intended to be a miraculous one, that somehow led the Magi to Bethlehem, something no real astronomical event could have done.

Believers might do better to note that for Mark and John it is Jesus' three-years ministry that they think it worthwhile to write about; his infancy concerns them not at all.

Chap, I have been puzzled by people looking for an astronomical event. A star would provide no direction to follow.i could imagine a light in the atmosphere moving to direct. Pure storytelling might be a simpler explanation. Those are the two options I see.

Matthew’s star behaves less like an astronomical object, like PG and Chap describe, and more like the visionary objects in the sky we see in Jewish scripture—closer to Ezekiel’s wheel than to something meant to be plotted in the sky. I’m not sure the magi knew what it was either.

I also realize this probably sounds a bit like Mormon apologetics, but I’m not defending a tradition here—just trying to read the text on its own terms.

I agree with both these points about attempts to identify Matthew's star in a narrative probably written in the second half of the first century AD with an actual astronomical event in the late first century BC. And I am sure Limnor is doing exactly the right thing by asking "what was the author of this ancient text trying to do in his own cultural terms?" before making any attempt to extract objective data from the text in question.

[malkie]

I'm disappointed, Everybody Wang Chung, that you'd use MG's situation to score a cheap point. Not that my opinion is likely to matter to you, of course, but I think it's pretty low.

I’m disappointed that MG chose to introduce the situation as an excuse for not having the time to respond to Limnor’s response to his baseless assertions, even though his posting record shows he had plenty of time to respond. And, as I’ve pointed out, MG’s story doesn’t quite add up. Again. I make no apology for doing that. If someone introduces a personal subject to a thread as an excuse for not responding, then that anecdote is fair game for scrutiny. He could have just privately DM’d Limnor to explain why he hadn’t responded. But he didn’t. He chose to go for the full board’s attention.

I can just about see your point, IHQ. However, I still feel the same about Everybody Wang Chung's comment.

[Shulem]

After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was.

This verse has never made sense. It seems to describe a star behaving as a flying light like a UFO that can hover over an identifiable spot on the ground.

It shouldn’t take any modern astrophysics to know that this wouldn’t work with any normal star. An ancient writer might suppose that a special star could move separately from the others, standing still in the sky while all the others moved past, but ancient people who lived under starry skies without city lights should only have known better than modern people that you can’t pick out a single house as lying directly under a star. They’re too far away. The same star will appear straight overhead from everywhere within many miles.

So it seems to me that this writer must either never have looked much at stars, or else have assumed that stars were all just little lights in the sky and so a special one might fly much lower. As Chap says, though, no such low-flying lights are going to correspond to any astronomical events. So the guidance star of Matthew 2:9 can’t be used to date Jesus’s birth from astronomy even if it somehow did happen.

One might decide that Matthew garbled the Bethlehem guidance star, at least getting it wrong when he said it was the same star that had signaled the birth of the king of the Jews, but that ancient astrologers really did travel to Jerusalem in response to an astronomical event that we can try to identify. Or at least that something had happened in the sky at close enough to the right time that Matthew’s story of the Magi would have seemed plausible enough to write more than thirty years later.

It’s still pretty speculative, when the text in Matthew really just doesn’t fit any possible astronomical scenario. If the text is accurate then the “star” was a miraculous flying light that modern astronomers won’t be able to date; if the text has to be read loosely, on the other hand, then it becomes hard to make it pin down anything precisely enough to date the event.

You might like to make a separate thread and explore this in greater depth. Let it be your thread! Take into consideration the miraculous astrological content explained in chapters Helaman 14 and 3 Nephi 1. It's all so incredibly ridiculous. Joseph Smith making crap up to the extreme which is what he was always wont to do.

[malkie]

I’m disappointed that MG chose to introduce the situation as an excuse for not having the time to respond to Limnor’s response to his baseless assertions, even though his posting record shows he had plenty of time to respond. And, as I’ve pointed out, MG’s story doesn’t quite add up. Again. I make no apology for doing that. If someone introduces a personal subject to a thread as an excuse for not responding, then that anecdote is fair game for scrutiny. He could have just privately DM’d Limnor to explain why he hadn’t responded. But he didn’t. He chose to go for the full board’s attention.

I can just about see your point, IHQ. However, I still feel the same about Everybody Wang Chung's comment.

Clarification:

My comment was not intended as a defence of MG, or his posting style, frequency, timing, etc.

I've seen and applied more condemnation than I care to, so it was not intended as an indication that I feel justified in judging and condemning Everybody Wang Chung or anyone else. I said what I meant - I was disappointed - and I meant what I said. (past and future potential condemnatory comments are excluded from this statement)

[Limnor]

I’m sympathetic to life issues when they arise, and empathize especially when those issues happen over the holidays.

Can we reset and address the post as presented? I wasn’t sure what work Frederiksen was meant to be doing. Is there a particular claim of hers that you’d like to explore, MG?