Merry Christmas!!

[Limnor]

When the Second Temple was destroyed, the entire Temple-centered way of realizing God’s presence ceased to exist. The sacrificial system, with its Aaronic priesthood and dwelling place for God were suddenly impossible to realize. Every Jewish movement had to answer the same question: Where does God dwell now?

For early Christians, the answer was already forming in Paul’s theology. In letters written before 70 AD, Paul repeatedly steers “temple” language away from stone and sacrifice and into individuals and the “body of Christ,” with statements like “You are God’s temple, and God’s Spirit dwells in you” (1 Cor 3), “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 6), and “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1). After 70 AD, this language begins to make sense as a necessary function.

[Marcus]

A merry Christmas. A greeting and wish that can mean something to all sorts of believers atheists included. But if you are MG you get pushback for posting the wish.

Letting that pass I wish all of you a merry Christmas...

You are making assumptions about a situation and stating a conclusion that I think is extremely incorrect. MG will take advantage of your lenience, however, and use it to state some additional rude thing about people he stereotypes, which is an unfortunate consequence.

in my opinion, if you are MG you get pushback for posting passive aggressive insults about a group of people he regularly, erroneously and unkindly stereotypes. Giving him a pass every time he does it contributes to the problem. He's a troll.

Without letting that pass, because I consider you a friend I wish you a merry Christmas.

[Jesse Pinkman]

I hope everyone has a great holiday season. Here is some humor to lighten the thread. We all need a laugh this week:

https://youtube.com/shorts/6SR4pEedny8? ... jn4RTDhhbh

[I Have Questions]

A merry Christmas. A greeting and wish that can mean something to all sorts of believers atheists included. But if you are MG you get pushback for posting the wish.

That’s a very cheap and misleading retort huckelberry. If you look back I’ve explained exactly what I’m pushing back on with regards to the OP. At least put the effort in to read my explanation, and at least consider for a second or two that other people may read MG more accurately than you do.

[bill4long]

Isn't this a more appropriate thread for April 6?

Absolutely. Christmas in December is actually disrespecting the birth of Jesus by trying to hijack Hanukkah instead of celebrating the birth of Jesus on his birthday.

The evidence in the Gospels with regards to the timing of the priestly service of John the Baptist's father, when the mother got knocked up and gave birth, indicates that Jesus would have been born in the Autumn, September/October during the Feast of Tabernacles. Among other things.

[Chap]

The evidence in the Gospels with regards to the timing of the priestly service of John the Baptist's father, when the mother got knocked up and gave birth, indicates that Jesus would have been born in the Autumn, September/October during the Feast of Tabernacles. Among other things.

The value as historical evidence of the accounts of Jesus's three years of public ministry given by the Four Gospels (in their present forms written decades after the end of his earthly life) is, at least, open to serious discussion. But the accounts given at the beginnings of Matthew and Luke of events that happened thirty years earlier are hardly to be taken seriously on such matters as at what time of the year he was born.

[Shulem]

When the Second Temple was destroyed, the entire Temple-centered way of realizing God’s presence ceased to exist. The sacrificial system, with its Aaronic priesthood and dwelling place for God were suddenly impossible to realize. Every Jewish movement had to answer the same question: Where does God dwell now?

For early Christians, the answer was already forming in Paul’s theology. In letters written before 70 AD, Paul repeatedly steers “temple” language away from stone and sacrifice and into individuals and the “body of Christ,” with statements like “You are God’s temple, and God’s Spirit dwells in you” (1 Cor 3), “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 6), and “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1). After 70 AD, this language begins to make sense as a necessary function.

That is really spot on, Limnor. The physical temple being constructed of stone wherein rituals are performed was done away in Christ and a spiritual temple later evolved with Christianity in the making. The true temple is in the heart. I know that to be so.

The Mormons have enslaved their people through temple service and the temples have become a kind of jail wherein brainwashed members check in for more conditioning which takes place with constant repetition and nonsense rituals designed to enslave.

Freedom from religion is truly a great escape!

I'm free!

[Morley]

Felicem Natalem Christi!

I am a big fan of Christmas, and I think it appropriate to remind us all that the proximate origins of Christmas are not to be found in the New Testament but instead in Charles Dickens' famous novella/ghost story, A Christmas Carol, written in 1843. Seizing upon the commercial possibilities, American merchants catapulted Christmas into the Titan of a holiday it is today. Macy's first in-store visit by Santa occurred in 1962 and, in 1870, Christmas was declared a federal holiday in the United States.

We should all easily acquiesce to the celebration of Christmas and the greeting of "Merry Christmas," because, well, its significance as a modern cultural phenomenon surpasses its distant origins in the celebration of one mass. There is so much about Christmas that only glances off of the veneer of institutional Christianity, and this is why Christians around the world feel so tender about the whole thing. They need to remind themselves of "the real reason for the season," as the baroque collection of tales and rituals that have developed around their own foundation myth is so diffuse and, indeed, confusing, not to mention plain old fun, that they must pull themselves back from the precipice of pagan joy by putting on their hair shirts again.

Never fear, though. Never fear. Christianity is a Roman religion. The New Testament is written in Greek, and the whole ball of wax would have long ago melted and slipped into the sewer of history had it not been for the fact that Romans finally yielded to the new god man in their midst. Why Severus Alexander made room for Jesus right alongside Orpheus and Moses in his personal sanctuary. Sure, this one may have been a Jewish teacher whom they had once crucified for causing a public disturbance, but he was no less credible or interesting than Mithras, after all.

Now, mind you, I am not saying that Jesus is just a myth, or that Christianity is not its own bona fide religion with roots reaching back into Jewish writings and practices. Obviously it is all that. And yet it is even more than that. I join Pope Benedict in repudiating the sad joke of anti-hellenism in which certain desperate Protestants imagine--against all historical evidence to the contrary--that Christianity is a straightforward continuation of a Judaism that in reality did not begin to exist until a couple of centuries after Jesus was executed for causing a ruckus.

No! Christianity is a religion of the Roman Empire. The process of blending Hellenism and Judaism to create Christianity started centuries before Jesus was born, and it continued centuries after Jesus died. There is no Jesus without the Greeks and Romans. Even more than that, there is no Christianity without them. Christ is an anglicization of a latinization of a Greek term for a Hebrew word, messiah. Christianity has continued to evolve in all kinds of interesting directions, but those that are truest to its origins embrace the Greek and Roman contributions; they don't run away from them in a self-deluded act of desperate denial.

The fact that so many people around the world cling myopically to their own iteration of Christianity should be freeing to us all. What do we care when some dour nanny shakes a finger in our face lecturing us about the "real reason" for Christmas and why/how we should celebrate. To blazes with that! Celebrate Christmas as you like . . . or don't. No one will miss your non-participation in a global phenomenon of commerce, folklore, and tipsiness should you choose to ignore it! I prefer to keep my own version. And, yes, my version does include remembering the birth of Jesus, as told in the mythological prefaces to Matthew and Luke. Let us all remember the birth of God! What a story! And that is exactly what it is. That does not detract from the beauty of it, the power of the message of the myth.

Let me share with you another nativity--that of the god-man Augustus, who gave birth to our great Roman Empire, which lasted over 1500 years, and without whom there would be no Jesus and no Matthean and Lucan nativity myths:

According to Julius Marathus, a few months before Augustus was born a portent was generally observed at Rome, which gave warning that nature was pregnant with a king for the Roman people; thereupon the senate in consternation decreed that no male child born that year should be reared; but those whose wives were with child saw to it that the decree was not filed in the treasury,⁠137 since each one appropriated the prediction to his own family.

4 I have read the following story in the books of Asclepias of Mendes entitled Theologumena.⁠138 When Atia had come in the middle of the night to the solemn service of Apollo, she had her litter set down in the temple and fell asleep, while the rest of the matrons also slept. On a sudden a serpent⁠ 139 glided up to her and shortly went away. When she awoke, she purified herself,⁠140 as if after the embraces of her husband, and at once there appeared on her body a mark in colours like a serpent, and she could never get rid of it; so that presently she ceased ever to go to the public baths. In the tenth month after that Augustus was born and was therefore regarded as the son of Apollo. Atia too, before she gave him birth, dreamed that her vitals were borne up to the stars and spread over the whole extent of land and sea, while Octavius dreamed that the sun rose from Atia's womb.

5 The day he was born the conspiracy of Catiline was before the House, and Octavius came late because of his wife's confinement; then Publius Nigidius, as everyone knows, learning the reason for his tardiness and being informed also of the hour of the birth, declared that the ruler of the world had been born. Later, when Octavius was leading an army through remote parts of Thrace, and in the grove of Father Liber consulted the priests about his son with barbarian rites, they made the same prediction; since such a pillar of flame sprang forth from the wine that was poured over the altar, that it rose above the temple roof and mounted to the very sky, and such an omen had befallen no one save Alexander the Great, when he offered sacrifice at the same altar. 6 Moreover, the very next night he dreamt that his son appeared to him in a guise more majestic than that of mortal man, with the thunderbolt, sceptre, and insignia of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, wearing a crown begirt with rays and mounted upon a laurel-wreathed chariot drawn by twelve horses of surpassing whiteness. When Augustus was still an infant, as is recorded by the hand of Gaius Drusus,⁠141 he was placed by his nurse at evening in his cradle on the ground floor and the next morning had disappeared; but after long search he was at last found on a lofty tower with his face towards the rising sun.

I don't think it too bold to say that without the biographies of Alexander the Great and Augustus, there would have been no nativities in the Gospels. Matthew and Luke needed to make their crucified king the equal of these great men in their mythologizing. Otherwise, who would pay attention to Jesus? Why would he be thought important? No matter what Jesus actually did, it is his story that is crafted in those Gospel accounts that makes him worth remembering. The nativity myths must compete with the births of Alexander and Augustus to be suitable.

Outstanding! Thank you for this, Rev.

[Limnor]

The Mormons have enslaved their people through temple service and the temples have become a kind of jail wherein brainwashed members check in for more conditioning which takes place with constant repetition and nonsense rituals designed to enslave.

Freedom from religion is truly a great escape!

I'm free!

I respect how seriously you take and love truth, shulem. When people say the truth sets them free, your comments sound like what they mean, even if it leads away from institutions—and maybe everything—that once felt vital.

[bill4long]

The evidence in the Gospels with regards to the timing of the priestly service of John the Baptist's father, when the mother got knocked up and gave birth, indicates that Jesus would have been born in the Autumn, September/October during the Feast of Tabernacles. Among other things.

The value as historical evidence of the accounts of Jesus's three years of public ministry given by the Four Gospels (in their present forms written decades after the end of his earthly life) is, at least, open to serious discussion. But the accounts given at the beginnings of Matthew and Luke of events that happened thirty years earlier are hardly to be taken seriously on such matters as at what time of the year he was born.

Agreed. But it's the best anyone has. Hell, nobody can prove that Jesus existed at all. My point is, if one is going to rely on the New Testament, Jesus was not born in December. "Church Fathers" are of no help either because they lived and wrote 120+ years after the "fact."

(P.S. I'm not a believer.)