tearknee

Let us look at the question: when was Jesus born? The narrative in the Christian Gospels give us two clues. In the Gospel of Matthew we read that Herod, King of Judaea, when he learned (from the Three Wise Men) that the "King of the Jews" had been born in Bethlehem, ordered that all male children in Bethlehem aged under two be put to death, to remove this possible threat to his throne. This is called the "Massacre of the Innocents." The Catholic Church regards these children as the first Christian martyrs (although they were in fact Jews), and they have a feast day on 28 December. In the Gospel of Luke we learn that Jesus was born in Bethlehem because his parents (Joseph and Mary) had travelled there from Nazareth. They did this because Caesar had ordered a census, and everyone had to return to their place of origin to be counted. Since Joseph was (allegedly) of the House of David (that is, a descendant of David, King of ancient Israel) he had to be counted in David's city of Bethlehem. These two stories cannot both be true. King Herod died in 4BCE. So if the first story is true, Jesus was born sometime between 6BCE and 4BCE. But the reason there was a census in Judaea was that following Herod's death the Romans annexed Judaea to the province of Syria, and the Governor of Syria (not Caesar Augustus) ordered a tax census of his new territory. We know from Roman records that the census took place in 6CE, nine years after Herod's death. So, if there was a Massacre of the Innocents, there was no nativity in Bethlehem. And if there was a nativity in Bethlehem, there was no Massacre of the Innocents. In fact, there is no mention of the Massacre outside the Gospel of Matthew. The Jewish historian Josephus, who was well-informed and hated Herod, would surely have mentioned such a horrific crime. So, it seems certain that the Massacre of the Innocents was invented by whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew. But what of the census? Yes, there was a census. But it was a census of Judaea, not the whole Roman Empire. Nazareth is not in Judaea, it's in Galilee, which in 6CE was under the rule of the Roman client king Herod Antipas. So, there was no census in Nazareth, and Joseph had no need to go to Bethlehem. There was in any case no law, in Judaea or anywhere else, saying that people had to return to their place of origin to be counted. Such a law would have made no administrative sense and would have caused chaos. Furthermore, King David reigned around 1000BCE, and there was no way a carpenter in Nazareth a thousand years later could have knowingly been a descendant of the House of David. (The Gospels give two different genealogies showing Joseph's alleged descent from David, and again, they can't both be right.) Can the "average person" name an ancestor who lived in the year 1020CE? So, in fact, neither of the narratives which might enable the date of Jesus's birth to be determined can be true. And this is hardly surprising. The Gospels were written between 70 and 100CE - between 35 and 65 years after the death of Jesus. The ministry, trial and death of Jesus were public events, and it's plausible that the Gospel authors had access to eyewitness or (more likely) second-hand accounts of these events (although they never say what their sources are). But the birth of Jesus was not a public event. It was a private event which took place at least 70 years before the Gospels were written. The Gospel writers cannot have had any real knowledge of the circumstances of Jesus's birth. So why the invention of elaborate (and conflicting) narratives around the birth of Jesus? To answer that we need to understand why the Gospels were written. Jesus died in around 35CE. After his (alleged) resurrection, he appeared to his disciples, and then rose into Heaven, assuring them that he would be back soon. It's quite clear from the Letters of Paul (which are older than the Gospels), and from Acts, that they understood this to mean that the Second Coming would be in their lifetimes. But by 70CE, 35 years later, Jesus had not returned. This was also the year the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and expelled the Jews from Judaea. The surviving followers of Jesus were small groups scattered around the Roman Empire. No doubt many had become disillusioned and had returned to orthodox Judaism. The work of compiling the Gospels began at this time for two reasons. The first was to preserve the narrative of the life and death of Jesus after the last eyewitnesses had died. The second was to reassure the remaining members of the Jesus sect that Jesus had indeed been the promised Messiah, despite his disappointing non-return. To do this the Gospel authors ransacked the Hebrew scriptures looking for alleged prophecies about the Messiah, which they could argue the career of Jesus had fulfilled. They found several prophecies (in the Books of Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Micah) that the Messiah would be of the House of David and would be born in Bethlehem, the birthplace of David. This explains the need to claim that Joseph was of the House of David and that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. The Gospel authors used their (faulty) memory of the census of 6CE as a device to achieve this. But the Gospel authors then confused their own narrative by claiming that Mary was a virgin. If Joseph was not the father of Jesus, then Jesus was not of the House of David. This forced later Christians to claim that Mary too was a descendant of David, although this claim does not appear in the Gospels. Of course, they need not have bothered, because the claim that Mary was a virgin is based on a mistranslation. The Gospels were written in Greek by Greek-speaking Jews, and they used a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint, as their source. In the Book of Isaiah they read: "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign: the virgin is with child, and she will bear a son and will call his name Immanuel." This is the sole warrant for the belief that Mary was a virgin, a matter about which the Gospel writers cannot possibly have had any actual knowledge. But where the Greek text uses the word "parthenos", a virgin, the Hebrew text uses the word "almah", a young woman. Of course, at that time it was expected that young women would be virgins (which may explain the mistranslation), but the fact remains that Hebrew scriptures do not prophesy that the Messiah would be born of a virgin. So, sorry, Catholics: your 2,000 years of Mariolatry is based on a clerical error. And sorry, Christians of all stripes, your narrative of the birth of Jesus is a fable, in fact at least two conflicting fables, which can only be believed by a leap of faith without any foundation of evidence. Of course, I accept that all religious belief is based on faith and not on historical evidence. Everything I've said here has been known for centuries, yet it has had no effect whatever on the willingness of Christians to believe these stories. And to be fair, it's not necessary to believe any of the stories about the birth of Jesus to be a Christian. What you do have to believe, however, is that Jesus rose from the dead. It's the Resurrection, not the Virgin Birth or the Three Wise Men, which is the central event in the Christian narrative. Christianity (though perhaps not the Catholic Church) can survive the dethroning of the Blessed Virgin. It can't survive the debunking of the Resurrection. Fortunately for Christians, all that we secularists can say about the Resurrection after 2,000 years is that it's impossible. To which Christians can always reply, yes, of course it is, that's why it's a miracle.

You are right and the PP is wrong. It's like the silly notion that girls can't be Jacks or Ralphs or Piggys when placed in a Lord of the Flies scenario.

McCormick, Plumb and Ferdin are top on my list of 1960s/70s kid actors I cannot stand. Ferdin as an adult is also on the humans i cannot stand list (blaming a mom and dad after their daughter was killed by a coyote). (And Anissa Jones deserved a life untouched by Hollywood or her asshole mom).

Although Mac Carey still does the "like sands through the hourglass..." 30 years after he went to meet his maker (and they don't use the second half where he gave his name).

I think deeper and longer-term forces at work. The most important of these is the decline of class-based voting, and its replacement by values-based voting. For well over a century, the UK and most European countries have had class-based political systems. There has been a party or parties representing, broadly, the upper and middle classes, and advocating the retention of the capitalist system, and there has been a party or parties representing, broadly, the working class, and advocating some variety of socialism or social democracy. It's important to realize, however, that class is not the only axis around which democratic politics can be organized. In the US and Canada, political behavior correlates only weakly with class. White Southerners vote overwhelmingly Republican, regardless of class. New Yorkers vote overwhelmingly Democratic, regardless of class. Every seat in Toronto elects a Liberal MP, regardless of class. In most Asian democracies, voting has no correlation with class at all. People vote according to region, ethnicity, language, religion or caste - because these things are the focus of most people's loyalties, rather than economic class. Over the past 20 to 30 years, we have seen a consistent drift away from class-based voting in many democracies, including the UK. Increasingly, affluent, urban, highly educated people vote for parties of the left, while poorer and less well-educated people vote for parties of the right. There is also a strong generational divide: since young people tend to be more affluent, better educated and more "values-motivated" than older people, there is a widening generational gap in voting behavior. This change has been slow and incremental in most countries most of the time, but sometimes an issue arises which precipitates rapid change. In Britain, it has obviously been Brexit. Millions of working-class voters have abandoned Labour in the past two of three elections, because Brexit's appeal to English patriotism and anti-immigration sentiment has overwhelmed their previous sense of class solidarity. Simultaneously, in Scotland, the working-class voters of Glasgow and the "Red Clyde" have abandoned almost overnight a century of class loyalty and embraced Scottish nationalism. One striking feature of the 2019 British election was the Tories' abrupt abandonment of Thatcherism. Johnson campaigned on a platform of higher government spending on state services, increases in pensions, state intervention to support failing industries, and a strict timetable for achieving carbon neutrality. This partly reflected Johnson's lack of core belief about anything except his destiny to be PM, but it was also a calculated and successful Tory strategy. These progressive-sounding policies were bait for working-class voters to come over to the dark side. Johnson recognized one of the fundamental new rules of this emerging political era – that it is easier for the right to move left on economics than it is for the left to move right on questions of identity and culture. This is an important insight. Most Tories were happy to jettison 40 years of Thatcherite ideology in order to get back into power, because Tories are by nature cynics whose main concern is power. But the British Labour Party cannot act with the same cynicism. If it defies its supporters' key values, they will abandon it, and the party will split. I fear that the logical consequence of these trends is that social democratic parties in the western democracies are doomed. Progressive politics will have to find new forms if it is to survive at all, let alone defeat the forces of reactionary nationalism and popularism which are now asserting themselves so strongly.

and have the characters do sexual things that would get the whole production team arrested if they were actual teens. At least where Hollywood is.

"With cults, you have more entertainment as a follower but you make more money as a leader"

I right clicked during these issues and the Yahoo ads were giving a 400 error.

"Hey, what gives? I thought you had a satellite dish". -- "Sure didilly do. Over 230 channels locked out". https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/TheSimpsonsS5E16HomerLovesFlanders

progressives tend to still be going on about collectivism etc. - they should stop living in the world as it used to be and work with the world as it is now. JMO and YMMV.

Most people go by emotion, not intellect. They always will. I consider myself a hard-boiled pragmatist because of some really horrible things no child and no teenager or young adult need go through. Because of my brain damage (and autism on top of it) I became well read after years of struggle to become even that - to protect myself - although it was informal - still without a formal degree now - and because of my ABI/autism i don't see the psychological masks people use - the mask of sanity is just the most well-known but there are others.

Smugness and quite bluntly here, arrogance by the intellectual elite* only worsens their trouble convincing ordinary people of possible merits. Which is a problem when there are no votes to throw away. *You don't need to be monied to be part of an elite. Pretending only "MAGA" thinks that way (as Amanda Marcotte did over on Salon not that long ago) is a foolish mistake and led to BREXIT and "both Trumps".

My point was that - Hillary Clinton did call some Trump voters "deplorables", though the full context shows she was being more nuanced. But (nuance-shmuance) the word was used against her to great effect - and the result, as we know, was the disaster of Trump.