recoiling in horror

There’s an interesting story circulating on the Internet today. It seems that a teacher assigned some 8-year-old kids to draw a picture of something that reminded them of Christmas. One kid drew a picture of a crucifix. The teacher was so horrified that the kid got send home from school and had to undergo a psychological evaluation.

So the teacher saw a crucifix and…recoiled in horror.

Hmm.

This reminds me of something. Something else that recoils in horror at the sight of a crucifix. What is it, what is it…

Ah! Here we go:

Of course! Public school teachers are actually vampires!

This explains so much.

-JM

The Super Secret Pagan Origins Of Christmas And Other Historical Fallacies

Christmas is just around the corner, which means it’s time for another Christmas tradition: articles start appearing on the Internet explaining how 1.) Jesus wasn’t actually born on December 25th, 2.) December 25th was actually the time of some pagan holidays, which means that the Christians picked the 25th to suborn paganism and 3.) this is some sort of earth-shattering revelation that disproves Christianity.

Two sorts of people seem to write these articles. One, of course, is your garden-variety Angry Internet Atheist, one much the same as the other. The other sort, oddly enough, is a Christian, though of a more Calvinistic strain, the “comfortable clothing is of the devil” school.

“Do you know,” they’ll say, solemnly, “that the word ‘Christmas’ never appears in the Bible?”

“Yeah,” I’ll say, “but technically there are no English words in the Bible. So why aren’t you talking at me in koine Greek?”

Anyway. Here is a point by point reasoning for why Christmas isn’t just a Christian rebranding of the Roman Festival of Sol Invictus or something like that:

“1.) Jesus wasn’t actually born on December 25th.”

No one actually knows when Jesus was born. The ancient Romans had a mania for order, but even they did not keep records on the scale of a modern bureaucracy, and certainly they didn’t bother to record the births of provincials. So if you want to celebrate Christ’s birth, you’re basically going to have to pick a day for it.

Now, why did the ancient Christians pick December 25th? It turns out that the ancient Christians were much more interested in the date of Jesus’s death than his birth, since the Resurrection was a bigger deal than the Nativity. Eventually, they settled on March 25th on the date of the Crucifixion.

(An aside: that’s the reason J.R.R. Tolkien picked March 25th as the day of the destruction of the Ring and the defeat of Sauron in “The Lord of the Rings”.)

A second tradition came into play. Ancient Judaism had this idea of the “integral age” of their prophets, that a Jewish prophet always died on the same day of his conception. So, if you assume that the date of Jesus’s conception and death were both March 25th, and you add nine months to that…ta-da! You’ve got December 25th.

(In Eastern Christianity, the tradition held that Jesus died on April 6th, which is why Eastern churches usually celebrate the Nativity on January 6th/7th.)

“2.) December 25th was actually the time of some pagan holidays, which means that the Christians picked the 25th to suborn paganism.”

Actually, it’s funny. It turns out the reverse is true.

A guy named Aurelian was Roman Emperor from 270-275, and he was a seriously competent general; he hammered the Roman Empire back into once piece after it split into three fragments during the preceding fifteen years of civil war, and curbstomped a barbarian invasion that almost got to Rome itself. However, the Roman Empire was still a wreck, and Aurelian really did not like Christians. So in 274 he instituted the cult of Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, as the state cult, in hopes of giving the Empire something to rally around. Just as the sun would rise from the winter solstice, so too would the Empire arise anew out of its present troubles, or so Aurelian hoped. Aurelian probably picked December 25th to suborn the Christians (who he did not like, remember) who were already celebrating December 25th as the birth of Christ.

And how do we know that the Western Christians had already chosen December 25th? By the life of Tertullian, Western Christians had concluded that Jesus died on March 25th, 29 AD, and Tertullian died fifty years before Aurelian even became Emperor.

Another common trope is that December 25th was originally the birth of the pagan god Mithras, who like Jesus was allegedly born of a virgin. However, there is not a lick of evidence that December 25th was a big deal for Mithraism. For that matter, Mithras was not born of a virgin. According to his cult, he sprang full-grown out of a rock, like Athena bursting full-grown (and armed to the teeth) from the brow of Zeus. There’s bit of a difference between some full-grown dude stepping out of a rock and a woman who has never had sexual intercourse giving birth to an infant son.

“3.) This is some sort of earth-shattering revelation that disproves Christianity.”

How, precisely? The gist of Christianity is that Jesus was the Son of God who died and rose again from the dead to redeem humanity from its willfully corrupted state. The fact that we celebrate the date of his birth on December 25th out of long-standing tradition does not invalidate that, let alone disprove it.

An excellent article with far more detail on the topic can be found here.

-JM

Dave Ramsey and pointing out the obvious

An interesting article about evangelical financial guru Dave Ramsey.

When first heard of Dave Ramsey, I assumed he was your typical Prosperity Gospel-style huckster. You know what I mean: Jesus wants you to be rich, so go ahead and take out that home equity loan to buy that SUV, that kind of nonsense. Then I found one of Ramsey’s seminar workbooks lying around (it was at the doctor’s office, I think), and since I had nothing better to do, I read through it. I was surprised to find that it had a lot of solid money advice. Don’t go into debt. Don’t spend more than you make. Save as much money as you can. Pay in cash whenever possible. Cut up your credit cards. Make a budget and stick to it. I know a lot of people who could benefit from having that sort of advice read to them (like, say, the US Government), or possibly shouted through a megaphone.

This is good advice but, I thought, but it isn’t it a little obvious?

Then I realized that it might be obvious to me, but I’ve had advantages. My father is frugal, and my grandfather was cheap, and they both passed these qualities on to me, a fact for which I am grateful. Especially since most members of my generation seem to have all the financial self-control and money management of a drunk at Oktoberfest. If I hadn’t had the benefit of a good example growing up, maybe Ramsey’s advice would seem like a revelation from heaven: “Of course! It’s all so obvious? Why didn’t I ever realize this before?”

I had something similar happen to me this year. As my shocked brothers noted the other night, I’ve lost a lot of weight recently. I didn’t need to lose weight because of my thyroid, or my genetics, or high fructose corn syrup, or a sinister plot on the part of the government. No, I needed to lose weight because I ate like hell and I didn’t exercise. And lo and behold, eating better and exercising more (and doing so consistently) actually helped! Who would have thought such a thing possible?

Again, it was obvious, but I had to figure it out the hard way.

So maybe the best advice is the most obvious. Simple, and yet hard to do. Eat less and exercise more…and spend less and save more.

-JM

the valiant atheist

From an article in The Guardian:

But it seems there are places even Roland Emmerich will not go – the German film-maker has revealed he abandoned plans to obliterate Islam’s holiest site on the big screen for fear of attracting a fatwa…

“I wanted to do that, I have to admit,” Emmerich told scifiwire.com. “But my co-writer Harald [Kloser] said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie. And he was right.

…in order to highlight his opposition to organised religion, the director decided to use CGI to destroy the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro instead. For good measure, he also blew up the Sistine chapel and St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, plus, on a secular note, the White House (again).

So he’s opposed to organized religion. Except for ones that might, you know, fight back. But perhaps that is in keeping with the historical tradition; Jesus never fought back against his enemies. Muhammad killed quite a lot of his enemies, and with vigor, a tradition that many of his followers embrace enthusiastically to this day.

Added irony points! Emmerich is gay. In the United States, a predominantly Christian country, killing homosexuals is both murder and a hate crime. In Iran, homosexuals are hung in the town square before an approving crowd.

-JM

superstitions

Today, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to do something grievously out of character, and write semi-seriously for a moment.

See, all educated and intellectual people know that the years 500 AD through 1500 AD were The Dark Ages. The glorious pinnacles of Greek and Roman science came crashing down, burdened beneath ignorance and superstition. Scientific advancement shuddered to a grinding halt, as people forsook medical knowledge in exchange for pilgrimages to the yellowed bones of long-dead saints. Inquisitors prowled in every corner, preparing bonfires and witch trials for those souls brave enough to seek out scientific truth. The Pope’s iron-fisted theocracy stifled freedom and innovation everywhere. Indeed, the Church even declared that women had no souls! Western Civilization groaned under at thousand years of barbarous ignorance, until at last the Age of Reason dawned, and courageous men like Galileo dared to challenge The Infamous Thing, and at last we come to our modern scientific era, when mankind can enjoy the fruits of science in the form of canned soup, reality TV, and bountiful Internet porn.

The only problem with this view, of course, is that is both incorrect and utterly unsupported by the facts. It is WRONG. Stupendously wrong. It is, in fact, this wrong. And it never fails to annoy me when I encounter it. Equally, I am always delighted to find something tearing down that view.

SF writer Mike Flynn has a great post eviscerating some of the more common misconceptions about the Middle Ages.

-JM

Mormon Bicycle Brigades Attack!

I get restless without exercise, so I went for a walk after supper.

Now, there’s a Mormon temple (Church? Tabernacle? I think it’s actually a “church” and not a “temple”, the way the Mormons define their terms) about a mile from my apartment, so various doorknob hangars and fliers frequently turn up on my door and in my mailbox. I mention this only to put what happens next in understandable context.

I was about a half mile from my apartment when two kids on bicycles pulled up next to me. At first I thought they were teenagers looking for trouble, (and, boy, would they have found it!) but then I realized that teenagers out looking for trouble generally do not wear suits and ties. Or bright blue bicycle helmets. Plus, they were eighteen or nineteen. I’m apparently old enough to start considering college-age men “kids”, which is really rather sobering.

Anyway, the kids.

“Sir, could I take a moment to tell you about the Book of Mormon?”

Ah. Missionaries!

“No, thanks,” I said.

“It really is a remarkable book, sir. It changed my life!”

I thought about explaining my thoughts on the LDS to him, that I really rather like most of the individual Mormons I’ve met, that Mormons in general stand out above the general moral corruption of American society, that the LDS church will outlast the collapse the United States the way the Catholic Church outlasted the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, but that I think Joseph Smith and his successors added a lot of unnecessary stuff to the authentic Christian faith, and that Mormonism might be the American version of Arianism, and for that reason I was uninterested in converting.

But the kid was RIDING HIS BIKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FREAKING STREET! And there were a lot of warehouses and such nearby. Sooner or later a semi was going to smack into him, especially if he decided to do a theological debate the middle of traffic. So I politely declined again, and he and his partner zoomed off in search other souls to save.

They seem like nice kids. But it’s the first time I’ve been evangelized from the back of a bicycle!

-JM

double predestination

Started a new story, “Double Predestination”. It’s not like anything I’ve done for a while, because everything I write almost always seems to fall into one of four categories:

1.) Chicks with knives.
2.) Guy with a sword. Now available for free!
3.) Technology-related.
4.) Weird stuff set in modern times.

I haven’t done any weird stuff set in modern times for, oh, quite some time. Since before “Demonsouled” came out, certainly. So it’s nice to come back.

The term “double predestination”, incidentally, is a Christian idea that people have been arguing about for ages. Basically, the idea is that God predestines some for salvation from all eternity. “Double” predestination is a Calvinist variant on the same idea, wherein God predestines some for salvation and others for damnation. This bothers people, since it negates free will, leaving you essentially as a preprogrammed meat robot speeding along to your inevitable fate. It also makes God seem arbitrary and cruel, since selecting people for heaven or hell before they even exist seems rather capricious.

Of course, it’s only capricious if the present cannot change the past. Or if time isn’t actually linear, but we only perceive it that way. I don’t actually buy double predestination, but I got to wondering if certain actions in the present could in fact change the past, and from that came my story idea.

-JM

remodeling

In 2003 I bought a shirt. A year later I stopped wearing it, because it had gotten too tight over my gut.

Now I’m wearing it, quite comfortably, as I type this.

A few years before I bought the shirt, I read this bit by C.S. Lewis:

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

I think, perhaps, that I am beginning to understand what that means. Or at least I hope that’s what has been happening inside my head lately.

-JM