So since Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t born in Bethlehem, I guess that means he’s disqualified?

The frustrating thing is the authors keep asserting “this could be real!”  

Um….no.  A world of no. 

I wish I could say I was surprised that the authors didn’t know any actual Jewish people, But they have shown that they clearly don’t know any atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, or probably even any Unitarians either.

The important fact for Christians there is that, though he resided in Nazareth for much of his life, he was by dint of coincidence and Roman bureaucracy BORN in Bethlehem.

For more information, consult 60% of all religious Christmas carols.

Ben-Judah still has half an hour or so to go before the Big Reveal at
the end of his broadcast where he shocks the world with his surprise
announcement of the identity of the Messiah. He and the authors imagine
that he’s still being coyly secretive, that no one watching the
broadcast knows what he might say next.

Do the words, “I’m taking my talents to South Beach,” ever come in to play?

I’ve never seen A Charlie Brown Christmas Carol. Until I looked up Linus’s speech just now, I was mildly wondering if Tsion was going to end his speech with “So the Great Pumpkin is the Messiah! Go ye all to your sincere pumpkin patches!”

When an animated elementary school student is capable of a more stirring and heartfelt speech about the nature of a religion than your supposed expert, you’re doing it wrong.

“Our Messiah must be born of a woman and not of a man because he must be
righteous. All other humans are born of the seed of their father, and
thus the sinful seed of Adam has been passed on to them. Not so with the
Messiah, born of a virgin.”

So…Eve’s off the hook?

 Official Bruce Barnes Death Countdown: 55 pages

Unofficially Official Double Wedding Countdown: 32 pages

Officially Unofficial Meet the Bride Countdown: 16 pages

Tsion’s speech seems a little dry for TV.  Maybe a nice PowerPoint display would help!  PowerPoint makes every presentation better!

[twinkly wipe]

“Seed”
* Isaiah 7:14
* Women
* Men!
* Provided by men for egg

Why, if he’s savvy enough to use Comic Sans, he just might convert the whole dang world.

 When an animated elementary school student is capable of a more stirring and heartfelt speech about the nature of a religion than your supposed expert, you’re doing it wrong.  

In fairness, Linus’ speech is a classic. It’s tough to compete with that. 

(No really, L&J just suck canal water.)

Nope, it’s all her fault that Adam’s seed is sinful to begin with.

And if the listeners to the broadcast were as thick as you’d have to be to believe that this is a more or less literal account of how the world will end (in the immediate future), then yeah, they’re probably still wondering what the reveal will be.

Jewish authorities have never considered Genesis 3:15 (from which Tim LaHaye derives “seed of a woman”) or Isaiah 7:14to be messianic prophecies, much less that they foretell a supernatural birth.

And so this must be a supernatural birth, as foretold in Isaiah 7:14, ‘Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.’”

Some Christian theologians claim that merely a “young woman” cannot be the translation because a woman giving birth happens all the time.  Only a singular miraculous birth can be a sign:

“God is giving us a sign – a virgin gives birth to a child. Is it a sign when a married woman gives birth? If all that God is saying is that a sexually active woman gives birth, we must ask, What kind of sign is that?”

Yet the same Hebrew word used for “sign” in Isaiah 7:14 is used in
· Genesis 9:12 to designate the rainbow as the sign of God’s covenant with Noah.
· Genesis 17:11 to designate circumcision as the sign of God’s covenant with Abraham.
· Exodus 31:17 to designate keeping the Sabbath as a sign of God’s covenant with the Israelites.
 
No one can argue that circumcision and Shabbat observance are miracles.  Clearly there is no biblical implication that the sign must be a miracle.
 
What do these things rainbow, circumcision, Shabbat observance – have in common that a woman’s virginal status does not? They are all things that can be seen.  A sign must be visible – if you can’t see it, it’s not a sign.*
 
By contrast, how could one tell if a woman in labor were a virgin?  Surely there wasn’t a guaranteed test 2000 years ago.  Thus contrary to L&J’s claims that a virgin giving birth is a supernatural sign, a virgin giving birth is no sign at all.
 
* I owe this point to Rabbi Tovia Singer of Outreach Judaism.  Signs that are not seen in a literal sense must be “visible” to the intended viewers.  For instance, a braille sign must be “visible” to the blind.

No. There was no Imperial census at the time that Jesus was born, and the Romans didn’t require people to go back to their places of birth to be counted (why would they do that? it’s completely crazy).

I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah. But I do not believe that for any of the reasons that the authors present here.

What are your reasons, have you ever posted them?

So sin is passed on through the sperm.  I had no idea.

He and the authors imagine that he’s still being coyly secretive, that no one watching the broadcast knows what he might say next. But he’s already told them that he believes the key facts are that the Messiah must be born of a virgin in Bethlehem.

Maybe he’s gonna pull a fast one and reveal that the Messiah was actually Brian.

Jeffrey Lowder’s through refutation of Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict is posted on the Secular Web:

The Jury Is In: The Ruling on McDowell’s “Evidence”

Also see Evidence That Demands a Refund, a brief response to McDowell’s updated “New Evidence”

Jesus: Messiah, Mephistopheles, or Madman?

        – Josiah Ben-Dowell

And if the listeners to the broadcast were as thick as you’d have to be to believe that this is a more or less literal account of how the world will end (in the immediate future), then yeah, they’re probably still wondering what the reveal will be.

This situation is basically a Jack Chick scenario writ large: L&J imagine that Tsion will reach the Big Reveal and millions of viewers will gasp, “Jesus??!  I never expected him!  But didn’t he die 2000 years ago?  How can this be?”

If this were reality, at this point in the speech, the producers and government sponsors would already be getting that sinking feeling, as they realize they just handed three years of research and an hour of TV time to a complete doofus.  “Please don’t say Jesus, please don’t say Jesus,” they’re muttering in the booth, facepalming with one hand and hovering over the dump button with the other.

On another note, I’m really enjoying the discussion at this stage of the story.  I was raised Lutheran and IIRC they didn’t emphasize the Messianic prophecies much in Sunday school, so much of what’s being talked about here is new to me, though I’ve often wondered about it.  We were taught that Jesus was the Messiah, but exactly what that meant wasn’t really explored — the important thing was the Resurrection, and that was enough to prove his divinity.  It felt as if Jesus’ Messiah-hood was just a secondary issue, superseded and made obsolete by the fact that he was God in person.  (Or at least that’s how I remember thinking about it, but that was three decades ago.)

No. There was no Imperial census at the time that Jesus was born, and
the Romans didn’t require people to go back to their places of birth to
be counted (why would they do that? it’s completely crazy).

I’ve been making this argument for a couple of years now.

Augustus did call a census of the Roman world in 8 or 9 BCE, which would be the most likely candidate, as Herod the Great died in 4 BCE, so that would have given Joe and Mary enough time to get over to Bethlehem, have a kid, have the Magi show up, and then end up with Herod ordering the deaths of every child under 2 before wandering off and dying however he died.

Of course, Augustus never ordered everyone to return home, as that would be extremely stupid, especially for one of the greatest rulers of one of the smartest Empires ever known, from a logistics perspective.  So this whole idea that Joseph went home at the behest of an Imperial census is dumb.

There’s also the bit where, outside of the Bible itself, we have no record Herod ever ordered the Massacre of the Innocents, which probably would have warranted mention somewhere.  Either the Romans would have recorded it for posterity or the Jews would have recorded their outrage.  It’s impossible to believe that a ruler would have ordered the death of every child in a city and that would have passed without mention anywhere but one place.

My guess is that the story of Joseph and Mary going to Bethlehem was created after the various prophetic messages were attached to Jesus in the “predicting future intent” sort of way, rather than the Jewish sense of the prophet as a voice for god’s displeasure.  Someone said, “Oh, crap, we’ve got a guy from Nazareth who had to be born in Bethlehem, then go to Egypt.  How’s that work?”  Then someone remembered that one time Augustus called a census and, voila, a terribly nonsensical story was born.

Mrs aunursa has been bugging me to get rid of a potted geranium plant that died more than a week ago.  As I took the pot out to the dumpster just now, a classic line from Tribulation Force popped into my head.  Upon my return, I reported to the boss, “The flowers are in the trash.”

This seems like a good place to ask: I’m interested in the Bible as history and literature, and a while ago I stumbled on Robert Alter’s The David Story, a translation of 1 and 2 Samuel full of annotations, explanations, and context that made everything make a wonderful amount of sense. Does anyone have recommendations for further reading in that vein, especially about Old Testament books like Judges?

While I’m at it, I might as well try a long shot. I remember hearing ages ago, probably on NPR because I am that much of a liberal stereotype, about a translation of the Bible that tried to preserve the original names instead of the Latinized ones we’re used to. Does anyone have any idea what I mean, or did my brain invent this?

I’m trying to think of a way to make this section interesting. The basic framework is that Basil Rabbi Exposition is telling us how “Oh my God, I was wrong, it was Earth, all along”, except, you know, it’s serious and trying not to be campy at all.

Part of the problem is that Dr BJ’s study exists pretty much in isolation of the rest of the plot and the entire setting.

Isreal Prime Minister: Well, we’ve got a few million laying around in the budget. What should we spend it on?

Secretary of Interior: How about we give that Rosenweg fellow more research money? He did transform our tiny nation into the breadbasket of the planet!

Secretary of Defense: Frankly, I’d like to spend some money researching just exactly how our country escaped total destruction following a full attack by a nuclear power.

Secretary of State: You know, considering that every child on the planet has vanished, maybe some research into the fertility of the remaining population. Not to mention trying to find the missing children?

Prime Minister: You know, those are all compelling arguments, but instead, why don’t we comission a scholar to look into ancient religious prophecies about the Messiah, and give him a live broadcast to talk about his findings. Surely that is the most pressing question anyone could have!

It wouldn’t be that hard to create some real tension around the big televised BJ production. You have a historical treaty-signing, which brings the leader of the world to the holy city, and a small-but-growing number of religious cultists that see all of this as fulfillment of religious prophecy.

The room was dark, but well air-conditioned. None of the oppressive heat leaked in. The deal-making was almost done, with concessions and trades offered.

Nicolae sat, unmoving, on his plane, watching the broadcast. Chaim had joked about Nicolae being the Messiah, and Nicolae nearly backhanded him for his carelessness. Only the lumbering presence of that clusmy, mouth-breathing pilot had saved him from an akward scene. Nicolae sat, rapt, waiting for the Hebrew scholar to announce to the world that it’s Messiah had arrived. It was a grand manuever, but also a small personal victory. Ben-Judah was a moral man, well aware that the very existence of his people hung in the balance. For him to lie to those who held confidence in him, for him to betray his own people’s faith, even to buy their continued survival and existence, must have been a terrible struggle for him. Nicolae savored the moments, knowing each word Ben-Judah spoke was a personal betrayal of faith. Thirty minutes remained, and afterwards the world would be in turmoil, but for now, it was time to smell the roses.

That is Augustine’s theory on how Original Sin is transmitted.  As a side note, later Catholic teaching is that God somehow blocked Original Sin from getting passed on to Mary, so that she would be the perfect, sinless vessel to carry the Messiah.

I remember when I first read the prophecy in Isaiah about the woman giving birth and thinking, “this prophecy didn’t happen for 700 years, was Isaiah aware that everyone he talked to would not be around for the prophecy to be fulfilled?”  Then I decided that, no, Isaiah was not talking about what would happen in the distant future but what would happen in the immediate future and just let it go.  Handel wrote some beautiful music based on it, though.

“Our Messiah must be born of a woman and not of a man because he must be
righteous. All other humans are born of the seed of their father, and
thus the sinful seed of Adam has been passed on to them. Not so with the
Messiah, born of a virgin.”

Hum? Did LaHaye and Jenkins just accidentally indicate they believe in the Immaculate Conception?

Because I’m pretty sure they don’t… (/understatement)

(And even if they did they’d be wrong about the rationale)

That would be -such- an improvement

No, no – L&J are indicating that they think _Orthodox_Jews_ believe in immaculate conception.

You’re welcome.

No, no – L&J are indicating that they think _Orthodox_Jews_ believe in immaculate conception.

You’re welcome.

Am I the only one who was expecting/hoping for a list of famous people who actually were born of young mothers in Bethlehem? Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have that article.

Am I the only one who was expecting/hoping for a list of famous people who actually were born of young mothers in Bethlehem? Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have that article.

Katherine – indeed. It came as rather a surprise to me to learn that the Immaculate Conception refers to the conception of *Mary*, not of *Jesus*.  God blocked Mary’s dad’s sperm’s sin packet, apparently. The natural question of “why couldn’t he just do that for everybody?” was one of those things that got you sent to the senior nun in catechism, so I learned not to ask.

Would it be so unusual to have Protestants believe in an immaculate conception? I know that Catholics take it as a bit of doctrine, but Protestants also seem to believe in original sin and an innocent Jesus… Maybe there’s more to the doctrine of Immaculate Conception than I understand; can anyone briefly summarize?

Just to be nitpicky, the sperm is no more analogous to a seed than an egg is.  The fertilized egg or early embryo is more like a seed, and the sperm is more similar to pollen (think about that next time your car is covered in the stuff).  This might not seem like an important point, but I did encounter a troll on another blog who was hilariously misinformed about the basics of biology and based an entire argument on it.

Would it be so unusual to have Protestants believe in an immaculate conception? I know that Catholics take it as a bit of doctrine, but Protestants also seem to believe in original sin and an innocent Jesus… Maybe there’s more to the doctrine of Immaculate Conception than I understand; can anyone briefly summarize?  

 
The doctrine of the immaculate conception is about Mary, not Jesus. She was supposedly born without original sin.  Because that was supposedly necessary to keep the sin cooties off of Jesus. This makes no sense to me on several levels, but there it is. 

Protestants don’t believe anything like the Immaculate Conception. They don’t get all worked up about Mary and the ones I know also don’t believe in original sin. (Note for example that they don’t practice infant baptism.) 

They do believe that Jesus was sinless, but they don’t attribute that in any way to the circumstances of Mary’s birth.

can anyone briefly summarize? . . . Well, let’s give this a shot (but, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, “Define briefly”).

According to a Bull from Pius IX (Ineffabilis Deus, Dec. 8, 1854): “from the first moment of her conception the Blessed Virgin Mary was, by the singular grace and privilege of Almighty God, and in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, Saviour of mankind, kept free from all stain of original sin.” 

In short, the argument for the immaculate conception of the BVM is taken from the tradition that places Mary as the ‘new Eve’ in line with Jesus being the ‘new Adam.’  If Jesus is the new, sinless Adam, then it stands to reason that Mary is the new, sinless Eve and also had to be born without the stain of original sin.

It sort of took off from there in the Western church and in the 15th Century was pretty much formalized as Catholic dogma.  (Thank you to my Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church)

That’s about as brief of a summarization of the immaculate conception as I can give.  Hope that helps.

I’ve heard that the “massacre” might have entailed just a few children, because most communities were just little villages back then.  It might have been too small to register on anyone’s radar.  However, it suspiciously similar to what happened to Moses, which leads me to think that it was added into the story later to make Jesus look more like the hero Moses.

Well Augustine not withstanding Catholics don’t believe in Traducism anyway, so we don’t believe God blocked a sperm’s sin packet. Original Sin is instead the way the brokeness of the post-fall universe manifests in people. As to why he couldn’t just do it for everyone, obviously he could have but didn’t. Now why he didn’t you’d have to ask him.

The Immaculate Conception is the Catholic Dogma that Mary was free from Original Sin from the first moment of her existence. Protestants tend to think this means she wouldn’t need saving. Catholics do not agree.

Since Jews don’t actually believe in Original Sin that would actually be true. Of course they apparently believe Jews believe in Original Sin, so hum…

Augustine and original sin?  Do a search:  First Scandal.

Well, they used to think that the sperm contained a little teeny person inside (a homunculus), so I’ll allow it on the grounds that they didn’t have better information.

Protestants don’t believe anything like the Immaculate Conception. They
don’t get all worked up about Mary and the ones I know also don’t
believe in original sin. (Note for example that they don’t practice
infant baptism.)

A lot of mainline Protestant churches do practice infant baptism. (I saw enough of them when my family was churchgoing.)

Speaking of Augustus, according to Suetonius (mostly quoting other people), his birth was also eventually covered with strange rumours. Even if they’re just the equivalent of Weekly World News clippings, they give us an idea of what the more credulous type of people were willing to believe at the time and the sort of things that were supposed to indicate the coming of great leaders. Similar portents are reported for other emperors.

An (unspecified) omen occurred, which was interpreted as meaning that a king would soon be born for the Romans, so the Senate decreed that all male children born that year would be exposed, but a pack of ambitious fathers-to-be managed to block its registration as law.

There was a story that his mother fell asleep in a temple of Apollo and was entered by a snake, an animal associated with that god.

Both of his parents and some unrelated people, including Cicero, had dreams at various times indicating that the child would enjoy divine favour and was being prepared to rule.

Given that the Gospels were written decades after the Crucifixion, perhaps in a climate when the church was expanding more among Gentiles than Jews, and the authors’ tendency to write to the prophecies they had at hand (someone pointed out something about the donkey(s) Jesus entered Jerusalem on in an earlier thread), the reported events surrounding the conception and birth of Jesus look like something of a copy-paste job to me. And to Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason, if I remember right.

I was surprised to learn of some Protestant denominations that waited until 13 or even older for baptism, so that members could make “informed consent” about the matter. Infant baptism is still very common among Protestants.

 One of my great-great-grandmothers was raised as a Seventh-Day Baptist – it’s an old church, going back well into the 17th century – and they assume that you have to be old enough for ‘informed consent’ before baptism. (There’s some logic to that view.) My understanding is that the churches practicing infant baptism expect the members to help keep kids on the right path.

. I want you to give him a live broadcast to
announce his findings. Specifically, I want you to give him a live
broadcast to announce that I am the Messiah.”

I don’t know how this conclusion was actually negotiated in the movie version, but this was clearly the scenario that Nicky Adirondacks expected to happen.

The doctrine of the immaculate conception is about Mary, not Jesus. She
was supposedly born without original sin.  Because that was supposedly
necessary to keep the sin cooties off of Jesus. This makes no sense to
me on several levels, but there it is. 

This is also where the Catholic doctrine of The Virgin Mary being a perpetual virgin comes into play.  Because the Official Church was so squicked out by women’s naughty bits and the sin-cooties they gestated in there that “Our Lord would not tolerate the womb that bore him to be so polluted” as to allow a penis to penetrate into there and “plant its sinful seed” or other (i.e. regular, sinful) children to be gestated in there. 

I forget how they explained away the part where the angel tells Joseph to “not know her” until Jesus is born, but the “brothers and sisters of Jesus” later mentioned in the Bible were of course! just cousins, or perhaps step-children from Joseph’s previous marriage.  (Joseph was later retconned into being an elderly widower by the time he became betrothed to Mary.)

The most awkward issue for the Bethlehem birth scenario is that John seems to assume that Jesus was born in Nazareth and not Bethlehem (Jn. 7:40-43) — and that it doesn’t matter. Apparently the early church didn’t even agree on the “checklist,” so it’s laughable that their entire case for Jesus is based on one of their own concoction.

All the more so that they assume Judaism has the exact same checklist. It’s the whole line of “Silly Jews, if you just read your own scriptures, you’d know Jesus was the Messiah!” That there is a bigger difference in religious understanding doesn’t cross the minds of many Christians, even in more liberal congregations like the ones I’ve always attended. You get so used to reading scripture through the lens of Jesus that you forget there are other lenses out there. Interfaith conversations can be vital for this.

Well, if he can establish this point he’s got it narrowed down to Jesus or Darth Vader.

Was the ship Darth Vader was born on called the Bethlehem?

Am I still passing on sin since my vasectomy?

You should see the look on my Catholic in-laws’ faces when I explain THAT to them.

I am wistfully thinking how prescient L & J could have been if BJ actually revealed at the end that Messiah was Rick Astley.

(of course, then he’d fall into the trap Fred Clark mentioned at the top of the post, of saying “I am familiar with all internet traditions”…)

Chris, a mere Disquis Like cannot convey how much I like this.  Thanks.

Well, my parents had me baptized in the Presbyterian Church when I was a baby. Later I was inspired by the Baptist Inspired-Christian High School I’d been sent to at age 13 (looong story there), so after some thought I got Re-Baptized at 16. Never hurts to cover both sides, as the Spirit wills.

“Protestants don’t believe anything like the Immaculate Conception.
They don’t get all worked up about Mary and the ones I know also don’t
believe in original sin. (Note for example that they don’t practice
infant baptism.)”

Depends on the Protestants, really. Some do, some don’t.

By contrast, how could one tell if a woman in labor were a virgin?  Surely there wasn’t a guaranteed test 2000 years ago.  Thus contrary to L&J’s claims that a virgin giving birth is a supernatural sign, a virgin giving birth is no sign at all.
This leads us to one of the more obscure peculiarities of Catholic doctrine: that in order to preserve Mary’s perpetual virginity, Jesus was born without exiting through the birth canal at all (i.e. born while his mother was still completely sealed shut).
Now, that would be a sight to see.  And although there is no such thing as proof of virginity–I’d grant that, if I could see it.

 
A lot of mainline Protestant churches do practice infant baptism. (I saw enough of them when my family was churchgoing.)  

Yes. That’s why I qualified it by saying that the ones the I know (was raised by and am close to) don’t do it. I know some folks that do baby blessing things, but actual baptism is not only not practiced but is considered wrong. 

My wife and I briefly attended a fundamentalist Presbyterian church nearby when we moved into our neighborhood.  At infant baptisms, the minister would talk all about how the baby was “conceived in sin”, even though the parents were fine, upstanding married couples.  Not exactly original sin, I guess, but we left the church once we got the lay of the land, so to speak.  (Oddly, on our very first visit to the church, the first question on everyone’s mind to be asked of me was “Where do you work?”  We should have caught on a lot quicker that the church was a little bit strange!)

Not exactly.  More of a retractable hymen — visualize a little pink windowshade.

The Blessed African Doctor speculated that had Eve remained unFallen, she and all her descendants would retain the feature. 
 

There are Protestants that believe in the Immaculate Conception? How does that even work?

At infant baptisms, the minister would talk all about how the baby was
“conceived in sin”, even though the parents were fine, upstanding
married couples.

In all fairness, that’s a fairly standard (although probably misguided) reference to Psalm 51.5

I had to Google “Traducism” and ended up reading a long discussion about when the soul enters the fertilized-egg/fetus/baby on a Catholic blog.  The commenters were very serious people and felt strongly about what being a true Catholic is.  (My father was Catholic, but I guess he wasn’t a “true” Catholic because he also had strong background in history, including that of the Church, so things like the infallibility of the Pope were not of serious concern to him.  Not so for the commenters on this Catholic blog.)  I’ve been hanging around open-minded discussions on blogs like Slacktivist too much; I need to get out a little bit more.

So much of Jesus’ story matches the Hero Archetype that it is hard to figure out what might be the actual story and what might be stuff included later to add verisimilitude.

“So…Eve’s off the hook?”

I suspect that the originators of this concept didn’t understand that women contribute genetic material to a child–the idea was not established until fairly recently, medically speaking. They see Mary as a vessel, not a contributor of DNA.

No, no – L&J are indicating that they think _Orthodox_Jews_ believe in immaculate conception.

Since Orthodox Jews don’t even believe in original sin, believing in the immaculate conception would be a bit of a stretch.

I was more referring to infant baptism and original sin. Although according to google, there are some Lutherans who believe in Immaculate Conception.

All very silly, but hey, the movie’s got Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee! I’d even watch an LB movie if it had them in it.

Young Christopher Lee as Nicolae, and young Peter Cushing as Bruce Barnes?  I’d watch the hell out of that movie.

It came as rather a surprise to me to learn that the Immaculate Conception refers to the conception of *Mary*, not of *Jesus*. God blocked Mary’s dad’s sperm’s sin packet, apparently. The natural question of “why couldn’t he just do that for everybody?” was one of those things that got you sent to the senior nun in catechism, so I learned not to ask.

I try to make a bit of a point of explaining this to people, since there are a lot of folks out there ranting about how sex isn’t sinful, and it’s so gross to say that Jesus’ conception was immaculate just ’cause there was no sex.

No, no, no. I’m quite sure Saints Anne and Joachim had quite a lot of good sex, at least I hope so. This ‘immaculate’ concept is a bit more abstract.

Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.’

Well then, the messiah certainly couldn’t have been some dude named “Jesus”!

I defer to the Apostle Rufus:

Mary gave birth to CHRIST without having known a man’s touch, that’s true. But she did have a husband. And do you really think he’d have stayed married to her all those years if he wasn’t getting laid? The nature of God and the Virgin Mary, those are leaps of faith. But to believe a married couple never got down? Well, that’s just plain gullibility.

Also from Rufus:

White folks only want to hear the good shit: life eternal, a place in God’s Heaven. But as soon as they hear they’re getting this good shit from a black Jesus, they freak. And that, my friends, is called hypocrisy. A black man can steal your stereo, but he can’t be your Savior.

This leads us to one of the more obscure peculiarities of Catholic doctrine: that in order to preserve Mary’s perpetual virginity, Jesus was born without exiting through the birth canal at all (i.e. born while his mother was still completely sealed shut).
Now, that would be a sight to see. And although there is no such thing as proof of virginity–I’d grant that, if I could see it.

Since this brings to my mind a hysterical Joseph trying to perform a C-section in a barn, I am going to ignore that concept completely.

(Delightful scene in a book called “Millions”, where a little boy who has visions of saints is in his school pageant, playing Joseph, and talking to Joseph between acts. “Am I making you seem too nervous?” “I was pretty nervous.”)

Not exactly.  More of a retractable hymen — visualize a little pink windowshade.

I did. Thanks so much for that mental picture. Off to find the brain bleach…

The Immaculate Conception is the Catholic Dogma that Mary was free from Original Sin from the first moment of her existence. Protestants tend to think this means she wouldn’t need saving. Catholics do not agree.

Well, the Catholic view makes sense to me (Methodist).  I mean, if it didn’t then there would never have been original sin to start off with (since Adam and Eve were free from Original Sin and we see where THAT got us….)

The Immaculate Conception is the Catholic Dogma that Mary was free from Original Sin from the first moment of her existence. Protestants tend to think this means she wouldn’t need saving. Catholics do not agree.

Well, the Catholic view makes sense to me (Methodist).  I mean, if it didn’t then there would never have been original sin to start off with (since Adam and Eve were free from Original Sin and we see where THAT got us….)

Well, they used to think that the sperm contained a little teeny person inside (a homunculus), so I’ll allow it on the grounds that they didn’t have better information.

And apparently so do LaHaye and Jenkins, if this section is to be believed. Women don’t produce ‘seed’, eh? An egg doesn’t count, I guess. It all seems rather influenced by the medieval idea that women are substance and men are form, and hence the child is really only its father’s. Good grief. 

Well, they used to think that the sperm contained a little teeny person inside (a homunculus), so I’ll allow it on the grounds that they didn’t have better information.

And apparently so do LaHaye and Jenkins, if this section is to be believed. Women don’t produce ‘seed’, eh? An egg doesn’t count, I guess. It all seems rather influenced by the medieval idea that women are substance and men are form, and hence the child is really only its father’s. Good grief. 

This is also where the Catholic doctrine of The Virgin Mary being a perpetual
virgin comes into play.  Because the Official Church was so squicked
out by women’s naughty bits and the sin-cooties they gestated in there
that “Our Lord would not tolerate the womb that bore him to be so
polluted” as to allow a penis to penetrate into there and “plant its sinful seed” or other (i.e. regular, sinful) children to be gestated in there. 

I
forget how they explained away the part where the angel tells Joseph to
“not know her” until Jesus is born, but the “brothers and sisters of
Jesus” later mentioned in the Bible were of course! just cousins,
or perhaps step-children from Joseph’s previous marriage.  (Joseph was
later retconned into being an elderly widower by the time he became
betrothed to Mary.)

Actually that’s not really why we believe in the Perpetual Virginity. In fact we kind of believe it because we believe it.

In one of his books Cardinal Suenens said that since God could have just as easily become incarnate in a child with two parents as one and since there is no sin in sex inside marriage the only reason we believe in the Virgin Birth is because the Scriptures and Sacred Tradition say so.  The perpetual virginity is much the same rational – it was unnecessary for any great mystical reason but there it is.

(As to the until it doesn’t always mean it happened after either – David didn’t have sex with one of his wives until she died. I doubt he had it afterwards either.)

Much of the really weird stuff about Mary having a retracting hymen etc is from the protoevangelium of James (I think).

Hope I don’t sound too stuffy. I don’t mind people not believing the same things I do but I tend to not like being misrepresented.

This is also where the Catholic doctrine of The Virgin Mary being a perpetual
virgin comes into play.  Because the Official Church was so squicked
out by women’s naughty bits and the sin-cooties they gestated in there
that “Our Lord would not tolerate the womb that bore him to be so
polluted” as to allow a penis to penetrate into there and “plant its sinful seed” or other (i.e. regular, sinful) children to be gestated in there. 

I
forget how they explained away the part where the angel tells Joseph to
“not know her” until Jesus is born, but the “brothers and sisters of
Jesus” later mentioned in the Bible were of course! just cousins,
or perhaps step-children from Joseph’s previous marriage.  (Joseph was
later retconned into being an elderly widower by the time he became
betrothed to Mary.)

Actually that’s not really why we believe in the Perpetual Virginity. In fact we kind of believe it because we believe it.

In one of his books Cardinal Suenens said that since God could have just as easily become incarnate in a child with two parents as one and since there is no sin in sex inside marriage the only reason we believe in the Virgin Birth is because the Scriptures and Sacred Tradition say so.  The perpetual virginity is much the same rational – it was unnecessary for any great mystical reason but there it is.

(As to the until it doesn’t always mean it happened after either – David didn’t have sex with one of his wives until she died. I doubt he had it afterwards either.)

Much of the really weird stuff about Mary having a retracting hymen etc is from the protoevangelium of James (I think).

Hope I don’t sound too stuffy. I don’t mind people not believing the same things I do but I tend to not like being misrepresented.

Sue White:
Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin
shall conceive, and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.’

Well then, the messiah certainly couldn’t have been some dude named “Jesus”!

No no no, you see, the messiah’s name is Jesus, but his name (which is Jesus) is called “Immanuel”, just to set it apart from all the other names that happen to be Jesus.

honestly, that’s the part that doesn’t weird me out as much – Jesus has established healing powers. As a newborn, it makes sense to think he can’t control them yet, and could easily just spontaneously heal whatever wounds he touched. There’s precedent for thinking of a torn hymen as a “wound”. So, baby Jesus comes through, and as he does so, heals the wound that he’s making. voila, perpetual virgin.

it helps that i’m totally cool running with the idea of healing powers and taking inspiration from Jessica from True Blood…

understood, Becka. I no longer share the faith and there’s plenty to dislike about Catholicism, but I do respect the honesty much of the Church shows about rejecting the medieval rationales for its conclusions. (That it — along with many other sects of Christianity — maintains the same conclusions in the absence of the discarded rationales is another matter.)

Wasn’t Mary supposed to have been impregnated through the ear by the Holy Spirit?

 There’s precedent for thinking of a torn hymen as a “wound”. So, baby Jesus comes through, and as he does so, heals the wound that he’s making. voila, perpetual virgin.

Any theologian who proposes fixing a torn hymen and doesn’t mention fixing the torn perineum needs a little less theology and a little more biology before they make any speculations about someone’s anatomy :p

@banancat:disqus 

The fertilized egg or early embryo is more like a seed, and the sperm is more similar to pollen (think about that next time your car is covered in the stuff).

Where I live, there are heaps of trees of a type that spew huge volumes of pollen into the air every spring time, which appears as big fluffy clouds all over the place. Always fun to watch someone figure out that the fluff is tree sperm. Ew.

Did you synchronously indulge in cookies afterward?

Obligatory reference.

If L&J believe in the immaculate conception, then I think they’re really Roman Catholic sleeper agents, trying to undermine evangelicalism from within. And they’ve let their cover slip for once.(It makes as much sense as anything else)

The perpetual virginity is much the same rational – it was unnecessary for any great mystical reason but there it is.

There it is – where?  Not in the Bible. 

With this passage, Ellanjay have outdone themselves in theological masturbation. I imagine LaHaye thinking like a cliquish eighth-grader: “Those Jews, they think they’re so smart and so special! I’ll show them!” Jenkins would be the Greek chorus, sounding like Flounder in Animal House: “Oh boy, is this great!” The sad part is neither man seems to care why they’re apparently so desperate for Jewish validation of their faith.

The perpetual virginity is much the same rational – it was unnecessary for any great mystical reason but there it is.

There it is – where?  Not in the Bible. 

Its a tradition, or an old charter or something.

No.. seriously, it is part of Tradition, which is, to Catholics, a valid source of knowledge about religious matters.

I suspect that the originators of this concept didn’t understand that women contribute genetic material to a child

I’m pretty sure you’re right about that. The idea that women are merely incubators in the birth process is a major plot point in the Eumenides of Aeschylus, and I don’t think gynaecological knowledge had progressed much between the 4th and 1st centuries.

And once again we see not only how this story could be salvaged if Ellenjay’s work was turned over to a good writer to edit and add onto as desired, but how it could benefit from using the Villain POV every so often.  Which, for those who have just started reading recently and don’t know, the authors never do.

If he could do that for Mary’s child, it makes me wonder why he wouldn’t have done that for everybody else’s child as well.  That way, nobody would be in danger of Hell and nobody would need to convert or be converted to avoid damnation.

Part of thing about Catholicism is a lot of that weird shit hangs around because nobody cares about it. The Church is almost 2000 years old and has always been larger than any country in Europe. It’d be the study of a couple lifetimes just to list all the random little shit, figure out why they believed it and then whether it should be ejected/modified/kept. As a result most

Catholics I’ve know just sort of lump all the little picture stuff into box and shove it in the mental attic, but just like stuff in the attic everyone forgets it’s there until your kids are rooting around in in it and go “Ew mom look at this dress what were you thinking?” so there’s never a serious push to curate any of it.

(Well except for the Jesuits but they’ve don’t have the pull they should)

Part of thing about Catholicism is a lot of that weird shit hangs around because nobody cares about it. The Church is almost 2000 years old and has always been larger than any country in Europe. It’d be the study of a couple lifetimes just to list all the random little shit, figure out why they believed it and then whether it should be ejected/modified/kept. As a result most

Catholics I’ve know just sort of lump all the little picture stuff into box and shove it in the mental attic, but just like stuff in the attic everyone forgets it’s there until your kids are rooting around in in it and go “Ew mom look at this dress what were you thinking?” so there’s never a serious push to curate any of it.

(Well except for the Jesuits but they’ve don’t have the pull they should)

I only read these books once, years ago, but I remember Tsion describing how for his research he bought a Bible and some Christian apologetics, which was apparently an incredibly embarrassing thing to do in Israel.

Seriously, he speaks as if he was describing a trip to a pornography store, being caught right outside by his neighbor or boss.

Did Fred just skip over that, or is it still coming up?

I only read these books once, years ago, but I remember Tsion describing how for his research he bought a Bible and some Christian apologetics, which was apparently an incredibly embarrassing thing to do in Israel.

Seriously, he speaks as if he was describing a trip to a pornography store, being caught right outside by his neighbor or boss.

Did Fred just skip over that, or is it still coming up?

*Boggles, jaw drops, eyes pop out of head*

*Boggles, jaw drops, eyes pop out of head*

Now, I have to link to this.  The only way it’s related to this discussion is that it concerns the Rapture, but I know that we have at least two fans of MLP:FiM here (not including myself), so I wanted to share this with them:

http://www.equestriadaily.com/2011/05/greetings-to-all-of-my-faithful.html

[blockquote]And so this must be a supernatural birth, as foretold in Isaiah 7:14,
‘Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin
shall conceive, and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.’”

Some
Christian theologians claim that merely a “young woman” cannot be the
translation because a woman giving birth happens all the time.  Only a
singular miraculous birth can be a sign:

God is
giving us a sign – a virgin gives birth to a child. Is it a sign when a
married woman gives birth? If all that God is saying is that a sexually
active woman gives birth, we must ask, What kind of sign is that?”

Yet the same Hebrew word used for “sign” in Isaiah 7:14 is used in
· Genesis 9:12 to designate the rainbow as the sign of God’s covenant with Noah.
· Genesis 17:11 to designate circumcision as the sign of God’s covenant with Abraham.
· Exodus 31:17 to designate keeping the Sabbath as a sign of God’s covenant with the Israelites.
 
No
one can argue that circumcision and Shabbat observance are supernatural
miracles.  Clearly there is no biblical implication that the sign must
be a miracle. [/blockquote]

I’d always just assumed that this particular bit of Isaiah was rhetoric along the lines of “two hundred and two years ago, a woman in a log cabin in Kentucky gave birth to a baby boy who she named Abraham.” Most if not all of my readers would get the reference to Abraham Lincoln, and take the reference to his mother as florid writing rather than some indication that the birth of the 16th President of the United States was somehow supernatural.

“So, baby Jesus comes through, and as he does so, heals the wound that he’s making. voila, perpetual virgin.

it helps that i’m totally cool running with the idea of healing powers and taking inspiration from Jessica from True Blood…”

Yeah, that squicked me with Jessica, too… …. bleah…. 

… nope, still squicked… 

(I apparently had no or only a partial hymen, because I never had that whole bleeding sex thing… mostly I end up thinking of those tissue sashes they put over toilets in some hotels, “Sanitized for your protection…”  GAAAH.  Still squicked….)

I for one would prefer Princess Celestia to TurboJesus. At least Celestia has a sense of humor about things. She’d probably just send Nicky to the moon for a few centuries and everything would be fine.

Yeah, about tree sperm – the most annoying part of it is that all these trees go on to have sex in my nose.

I only read these books once, years ago, but I remember Tsion describing how for his research he bought a Bible and some Christian apologetics, which was apparently an incredibly embarrassing thing to do in Israel.

I don’t recall that.  It’s possible that you are remembering something that isn’t there.  As far as I know, these are the only references by Tsion to his study of the New Testament…

“Mr. Williams,” Rabbi Ben-Judah interrupted, “do not mistake me for a scholar of only the Torah. You must realize that my study has included the sacred works of all the major religions of the world.”
“But what do you make of it, then, if you know the New Testament?”
“Well, first of all, you may be overstating it to say that I ‘know’ the New Testament. I cannot claim to know it the way I know my own Bible, having become steeped in the New Testament mostly only within the last three years.”
Tribulation Force, p 333

“Let me close by saying that the three years I have invested in searching the sacred writings of Moses and the prophets have been the most rewarding of my life. I expanded my study to books of history and other sacred writings, including the New Testament of the Gentiles, combing every record I could find to see if anyone has ever lived up to the messianic qualifications. Was there one born in Bethlehem of a virgin, a descendent of King David, traced back to our father Abraham, who was taken to Egypt, called back to minister in Galilee … buried with the rich and resurrected?”

Tribulation Force, p ~395

Thanks for the clarifications on Immaculate Conception – I didn’t realize it was more about Mary than about Jesus.

This might not seem like an important point

It’s actually quite an important point, given L&J’s fixation with the English word “seed” and their skewed idea of what “we know now.”  Men never possess “seed”; only pregnant women do.  So (given this confused and anachronistic method of interpretation) that passage is just saying that Jesus had a mom, like the rest of us.

Or maybe he was born of a plant seed that some woman owned, ala Momotaro.

This might not seem like an important point

It’s actually quite an important point, given L&J’s fixation with the English word “seed” and their skewed idea of what “we know now.”  Men never possess “seed”; only pregnant women do.  So (given this confused and anachronistic method of interpretation) that passage is just saying that Jesus had a mom, like the rest of us.

Or maybe he was born of a plant seed that some woman owned, ala Momotaro.

The Immaculate Conception and the attendant mythology of Mary are a large part of the reason I’m not Catholic. I never understood their utility, they’re not in the Bible (the proto-evangelium of James is rather dodgy), and there’s the whole Augustinian view of original sin that ties the spiritual to the physical way too tightly, as Fred mentioned. Basically I feel very uncomfortable about accepting anything under the “potuit, decuit ergo fecit” rubric.

The Apocalypse is late every year!  If only we had a pony with some organizational skills, we could wrap up the planet on time for a change!

This might not seem like an important point, but I did encounter a troll
on another blog who was hilariously misinformed about the basics of
biology and based an entire argument on it.

Wow.

Wish I’d seen that.

In short, the argument for the immaculate conception of the BVM is taken
from the tradition that places Mary as the ‘new Eve’ in line with Jesus
being the ‘new Adam.’

…  Ew.

Ugh, I can’t let these two passages go without comment.

“Well, first of all, you may be overstating it to say that I ‘know’ the New Testament. I cannot claim to know it the way I know my own Bible, having become steeped in the New Testament mostly only within the last three years.”

“What do I look like, a religious scholar or something?”  Tsion goes from boasting in one breath to desperate backpedaling in the next, in response to what appears a very mild query from Buck.  He’s that one nerd who tries to dominate the conversation by going on about what a big Lord of the Rings fan he is; then somebody asks, “Oh, which passage was your favorite?” and he’s forced to admit that he hasn’t actually read the books, but he did see the Rankin-Bass cartoons when he was a kid, and really, he’s not that big a fan anyway because Robert Jordan is a totally better writer…

I don’t imagine L&J were trying to make Tsion come off this way; it’s just how this snippet reads to me, due to the bumpy and poorly-edited writing style that characterizes the rest of the books.

I expanded my study to books of history and other sacred writings, including the New Testament of the Gentiles, combing every record I could find to see if anyone has ever lived up to the messianic qualifications. Was there one born in Bethlehem of a virgin, a descendent of King David, traced back to our father Abraham, who was taken to Egypt, called back to minister in Galilee … buried with the rich and resurrected?”

Ha!  I love that Tsion is so literal-minded that he apparently did check to see if there were any other famous people born of virgins in Bethlehem.  Because what if there was one everybody missed?  I picture him working through the wee hours of the morning, going through the Bethlehem phone book from 4 AD, checking everyone in alphabetical order just to be sure.  After all, without that level of rigorous scrutiny, you might as well be throwing all that grant money down a hole.

Thanks to all for the kind words. I don’t think these books fail just because of bad writing (OK, yeah, that’s there) but more for the painful absence of a decent editor.

It’s almost as though no one involved in the process ever re-read a section and asked “does this make sense?” Dr. BJ’s televised preach-o-rama simply doesn’t make sense. It barely makes sense in our world, let alone the setting of these novels.

We actually don’t need a villian POV scene. (though they are such fun to write!) If we even just had Tsion telling CallMeBuck that he was being pressured by his own government to proclaim Nicolae as the Messiah, that would work.

CallMeBuck: “You’re not going to tell the world that Nicolae is the Messiah!”
Dr BJ: “Without this treaty, Isreal is without allies. She has always been surrounded by enemies. There are over six million Jews in the Holy Land. If I did not agree to this, I would be condeming them all to death. I will not have my name tied to such a holocaust.”
CallMeBuck: “So instead you’re going to tell the whole world that the Anti-Christ is their Lord and Savior?!”
Dr BJ: “The treaty must be signed. Once my people are safe…”
CallMeBuck: “Once your people are safe, then what?”
Dr BJ: “My personal pledge helped buy this treaty. Perhaps beyond the honor of men, I might find absolution.”

The key questions are “Why does anyone care about Dr BJ’s televised lecture?”, “Why would Dr BJ say that Jesus is the Messiah?”, and “Why would the lecture be shown on the same day as the treaty signing?”

If Nicolae wanted to be proclaimed Messiah, then we have a plausible answer for #1 & #3. If DR BJ was so horrified by the demand that he reconsidered his views, we can even work in #2. (heck, if Tsion really did believe Nicolae was pure evil for wanting to be proclaimed the Messiah, then the kind of embarassingly non-Jewish arguments he’s making might almost fit for a man scared and desperate for an alternative)

The problem with these books is that no one ever asked those kinds of questions.

Another thing about the Virgin Birth of Jesus is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a virgin birth.  According to Luke, Gabriel appeared to Mary, a virgin, engaged to Joseph and said, “You will conceive in your womb, and you will bear a son . . .” 

“How can this be, since I am a virgin?”

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy . . .”

One of my commentaries points out that the text never actually says that Mary will be impregnated and remain a virgin.  The author points out that Mary will be “overshadowed,” and that word “overshadow” has the same usage/implication as when Jesus, Moses, Elijah and the disciples were overshadowed on the mountain during the Transfiguration, as well as when Peter’s shadow falls on people and heals them over in Acts.  The argument, then, is that overshadowing doesn’t imply impregnation but to the divine presence and power of God.  So Mary could have become pregnant in the usual way with the benefit of God’s divine presence infused within the child.

And, yes, I know that goes against Church tradition and the Creeds, but I also don’t think that the Virgin Birth is critical to my faith or my salvation.

My apologies, Becka.  I’m not dissing Catholics at all (I came close to becoming a Catholic, myself, and still follow some of the practices).  But the “unpolluted womb” bit from Mary’s Perpetual Virginity is something I remembered reading years ago, when I was reading some  history of the Christian Church and the evolution of doctrine.  The book was written pretty straightforward, but the debates about the Doctrines of Mary’s Private Parts (i.e. Mary’s physical virginity being preserved even during the birth of Jesus, whether Joseph and Mary had sex after Jesus was born, and the minutae of the condition of mary’s hymen, vaginal canal, and uterus) just struck me as being obsessively… well, obsessed.  And the Estimable Church Leaders transferred their obsessive squickiness about sexually active women and the penii that penetrate them over to become God’s (and Jesus’) squickiness about them as well. 

I love that Tsion is so literal-minded that he apparently did check to see if there were any other famous people born of virgins in Bethlehem.  Because what if there was one everybody missed?  I picture him working through the wee hours of the morning, going through the Bethlehem phone book from 4 AD, checking everyone in alphabetical order just to be sure.

I pictured him stepping out of a Chick tract.  Hey look, here’s one:

Tourist #1: “Wasn’t Jesus only a man?”
Guide: “No! … Jesus Christ is God almighty!  It was only His precious blood that could wash away our sins.”
Tourist #1: “That’s amazing!”
Tourist #2: “I never heard that before!”

Take that, reverse it. The “Heroic Archetype” was developed in the 20th century by looking at Jesus’ life and those of other heroic figures around the world, then generalizing the heck out of them until they all look alike and reading your pre-assumed psychoanalytical interpretation into them.

Oh yes. I have contempt for Joseph Campbell.

I always find it “hilarious” that EVERYONE in the Chick tracts is white. Even the explicitly Arab people. And really, Jack, you think that Middle Eastern conflict is because of Ishmael? Talk about theological contortionism…

I always find it “hilarious” that EVERYONE in the Chick tracts is white. Even the explicitly Arab people. And really, Jack, you think that Middle Eastern conflict is because of Ishmael? Talk about theological contortionism…

To be fair, the insistence on Mary’s *perpetual* virginity has a lot to do with showing how we know, for absolutely certain, that Jesus’s conception didn’t occur through more ordinary means.

To be fair, the insistence on Mary’s *perpetual* virginity has a lot to do with showing how we know, for absolutely certain, that Jesus’s conception didn’t occur through more ordinary means.

Not true … Chick is an equal-opportunity offender…

Black Tract Series

Buddhism

Native Americans

How do we know about the virgin birth? It’s specified in Matthew chapter 1. This is the same level of certainty we have about a lot of other bits of Christianity, so adding an additional doctrine so we can “know for absolutely certain” seems like overkill. Maybe I’m missing something?

Sorry, I was unclear there. My point was more that even though the caricatures of his tracts (I refuse to call them characters) have “ethnic traits” (big noses on Jews, curly black hair on black people, thick, wavy hair on Arabs, eye shape for Asians, etc.) they are still virtually always white. The Buddhist one has one darker skinned person, and the black ones have a number of them, but they’re still usually white (the Native Americans were white with…dirt? sores? excrement? something all over them that was magically removed when they bowed down to the cross).

Also, this one, Free At Last! really has my blood boiling. It basically says that black people were enslaved because of Satan but they’re free now thanks to white Jesus. Nope, slaves were never taught Christianity to try to make them more docile, nosiree.

The sad thing is that so many RTCs I’ve conversed with really expect the conversation to go that way and end right there, and it really gets their backs up when it doesn’t.

How the RTCs Think It Will Go

RTC: Jesus is the Son of God!
Non-Christian: How do you know?
RTC: It says so in the Bible!
Non-Christian: Then it must be true!

How It Actually Goes

RTC: Jesus is the Son of God!
Non-Christian: Yeah? I don’t believe that.
RTC: But it says so in the Bible!
Non-Christian: So?
RTC: The Bible is the Word of God!
Non-Christian: Says you.
RTC: Says the Bible!
Non-Christian: Uh-huh…I have an appointment.

Or…

How They Think It Will Go

RTC: Jesus is the Son of God!
Non-RTC: As a Catholic, I agree!
RTC: Catholics worship the Pope!
Non-RTC: That’s true!
RTC: The Bible says you should worship God!
Non-RTC: I had no idea!

How It Actually Goes

RTC: Jesus is the Son of God!
Non-RTC: As a Catholic, I agree.
RTC: Catholics worship the Pope!
Non-RTC: Wut. No.
RTC: Catholics worship Mary!
Non-RTC: Again, no.
RTC: Do too!
Non-RTC: Can I explain what we really…?
RTC: Do too! Do too! Do too!
Non-RTC: I don’t why, but I could really go for some Lou Reed about now…

Wow. I especially like it that they’re a couple of American tourists in Israel who have never heard of Christianity before.

Oh yes. I have contempt for Joseph Campbell.

I’m with you there. There was a while there in my mid-20s when a string of unconnected people told me I should follow my bliss (PBS must have been rerunning “The Power of Myth” that week), and I asked, “With what resources? With whose help? What if my bliss isn’t marketable, or what if I have too many blisses to follow through on any one of them? Do you have any concrete advise or, gods forbid, actual assistant to offer?” At which point they turned into Nike commercials.

Ironically, I should have just done it back when I had no possessions, responsibilities, or commitments…but not before telling them to fuck off if all they had to offer me was someone else’s easy answers.

Oh yes. I have contempt for Joseph Campbell.

I’m with you there. There was a while there in my mid-20s when a string of unconnected people told me I should follow my bliss (PBS must have been rerunning “The Power of Myth” that week), and I asked, “With what resources? With whose help? What if my bliss isn’t marketable, or what if I have too many blisses to follow through on any one of them? Do you have any concrete advise or, gods forbid, actual assistant to offer?” At which point they turned into Nike commercials.

Ironically, I should have just done it back when I had no possessions, responsibilities, or commitments…but not before telling them to fuck off if all they had to offer me was someone else’s easy answers.

That’s something that scares me a lot. Considering how enormously popular these books are already…

what if they were also good? I think we dodged a bullet by LH&J not having an editor.

That’s something that scares me a lot. Considering how enormously popular these books are already…

what if they were also good? I think we dodged a bullet by LH&J not having an editor.

To be fair, I could easily buy American tourists not having read the Bible, particularly not the portions being discussed (In the 4 years I was subjected to various churches, most of Genesis and Exodus were simply not discussed; just the standard Creation & fall, Cain and Abel, the Flood, and the story of Moses; it wasn’t until I did my own studying that I discovered the tale of Abraham beyond snippets discussing the sacrifice of Isaac). I could also VERY easily see a couple of American tourists getting down on the ground and rededicating themselves to Christ while being tourists at what looks like the Western Wall. I agree the whole, “I HAD NO IDEA!” to the suggestion that Jesus was the Messiah was excessive. Massively.

Or what if one is not physically capable of following one’s bliss?

That reminds me of when I learned that I could not follow mine.  A friend of the family, who is also a pastor, decided that he had to say something pastorly.  What he came up with was “It must not be God’s plan for you.”  Nevermind that prior to my learning about my limitations he was thoroughly convinced it was God’s path for me as it was both my passion and something for which I was quite qualified.  He then told me that I was always setting my goals too high and so I would always be disappointed…and that I shouldn’t try so hard for what I wanted but should submit to God’s will.

Yeah.

This guy is usually pretty smart so I have no idea what was going through his head.  All I can say was that it did not make me feel better and, in fact, made me feel a hell of a lot worse.  The memory of that conversation still hurts.  I also decided that his God is not worth my attention. 

The sad thing is that so many RTCs I’ve conversed with really expect the conversation to go that way and end right there, and it really gets their backs up when it doesn’t.Reminds me of one time when a Jewish convert to Christianity posed the question to an interfaith forum: Whom do YOU say Jesus is?  I’m sure he anticipated the actual responses from Protestants and Catholics and Muslims.  He probably expected the Jews to say either… 

(a) Jesus was the founder of Christianity.
(b) Jesus was a Jewish teacher — maybe even a rabbi – but not the Messiah.
(c) Jesus was a false god who deceived many and deserved to be cruicified.

But of all the responses he received, mine was the one that caught him completely by surprise.  It was the one response that infuriated him.
.
.
.
.
.
I told him that from a Jewish perspective, Jesus is irrelevant. 

The sad thing is that so many RTCs I’ve conversed with really expect the conversation to go that way and end right there, and it really gets their backs up when it doesn’t.Reminds me of one time when a Jewish convert to Christianity posed the question to an interfaith forum: Whom do YOU say Jesus is?  I’m sure he anticipated the actual responses from Protestants and Catholics and Muslims.  He probably expected the Jews to say either… 

(a) Jesus was the founder of Christianity.
(b) Jesus was a Jewish teacher — maybe even a rabbi – but not the Messiah.
(c) Jesus was a false god who deceived many and deserved to be cruicified.

But of all the responses he received, mine was the one that caught him completely by surprise.  It was the one response that infuriated him.
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.
.
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I told him that from a Jewish perspective, Jesus is irrelevant. 

I only read these books once, years ago, but I remember Tsion describing how for his research he bought a Bible and some Christian apologetics, which was apparently an incredibly embarrassing thing to do in Israel.

Seriously, he speaks as if he was describing a trip to a pornography store, being caught right outside by his neighbor or boss.

You can get all of that at any Israeli university with a theology department. And if he wanted his own to mark up, I believe Israel has mail-order from academic presses, same as anywhere else.

,blockquote>Ha! I love that Tsion is so literal-minded that he apparently did check to see if there were any other famous people born of virgins in Bethlehem. Because what if there was one everybody missed? I picture him working through the wee hours of the morning, going through the Bethlehem phone book from 4 AD, checking everyone in alphabetical order just to be sure. After all, without that level of rigorous scrutiny, you might as well be throwing all that grant money down a hole.

Talk about reverse engineering.

Anyway, what about Brian?

I told him that from a Jewish perspective, Jesus is irrelevant.

I can’t not hear this spoken in a Dalek voice.

Ha! I love that Tsion is so literal-minded that he apparently did check
to see if there were any other famous people born of virgins in
Bethlehem. Because what if there was one everybody missed?

For some reason, this reminded me of the old joke about the monk who was transcribing an old text and came to a spot he couldn’t make out.  He took it to his superior who took it to his superior who took it to the head abbot who went and looked up the original that was locked away in a vault.  The elderly prior comes back totally distraught.

“What’s wrong?” they ask.

“The word is . . . CELEBRATE!”

And Vincent Price as Buck?

Probably virgin birth. It’s rather unconfirmed.

“Well, if it’s not a personal question, are you a virgin?”
“Of COURSE it’s a personal question!”
*muttering* “She’s a virgin all right.”

I think that LHJcould also use a good grammar lesson.

Hope I don’t sound too stuffy. I don’t mind people not believing the
same things I do but I tend to not like being misrepresented.

As near as I can tell, you want to say that God told your church to believe this in some unspecified way (through tradition). But people not already inclined to believe this — non-Catholics, in other words — will see a belief that your church either adopted randomly and used as a shibboleth-mark to distinguish themselves from others, or more likely, adopted for some reason that you simply don’t know. This actually supports the anti-sex interpretation. Though it allows for a version in which Roman women (or self-hating Roman men, perhaps) saw some form of nun-hood as a way to avoid subordination to a man not of their choosing, and attributed this to Mary in an attempt to compliment her. I forget if that has any historical plausibility.

Infant baptism vs adult baptism was denomination-making – the Baptists take their name from their belief in “believer’s baptism”.  Meanwhile Quakers and the Salvation Army don’t practice baptism at all. 

What do these things — rainbow, circumcision, Shabbat observance –- have in common that a woman’s virginal status does not? They are all things that can be seen.  A sign must be visible – if you can’t see it, it’s not a sign.*

Slightly off-topic here:  I once heard a minister tell a story about how he asked a Biblical scholar how anyone would know if a man was circumcised or not before letting him into the temple.  The scholars pointed him to a scripture that mentioned “a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord,” and said that the doorkeeper’s job was to, um, check.

Anyone know if this is true or not?

(Forgive me if someone already answered this): Protestant rejection the Immaculate Conception idea because they think it’s part of Catholic “idolatry” of Mary. 

That’s odd.  I guess they can explain kids who look like their Mom as having been influenced while growing in the womb, but how do they explain kids who may not resemble mom but still take after maternal relatives?

Try Richard Friedman’s “The Hidden Book in the Bible” and “Who Wrote the Bible.”

Mary could have lost her hymen earlier in life and still have been a virgin.  It does happen, you know.  My mother tells me I lost mine at about age 4 on a swing.  I don’t remember that, of course.

Always fun to watch someone figure out that the fluff is tree sperm. Ew.

My 6-year-old already knows that honey is bee vomit and soil is worm poop.  I don’t think she’ll be shocked when she learns about pollen!

I’ve seen a Jack Chick tract in which a mammy-ish black woman in a nurse in a nursing home, and she converts a bunch of skeptical old white guys.

You know, if it was the end of the world and all I could almost see this. Well respected academic dealing with the world as a rational place for his entire life, studying, understanding, and all of a sudden it turns out that reality is cheaper that the scenery at a high school play.

Nukes don’t mean anything, children can just be snatched away, nothing works, nothing stays.

I can see, if he had some previously booked airtime, this academic wandering up on stage, hasn’t groomed himself or changed cloths since the event, and instead of his standard, well thought out lecture, he begins babbling, showing powerpoint slides that make no sense, doing anything he can to try to make the world seem right again, make the world have rules again.

I’m not sure if that’s what L&J are going for, though.

Are you sure you’re not thinking of this one?

Yup, that’s the one.

Wait, Jesus made prophecies about gay men controlling politicians…? Does he mean Matt. 10:15, where Jesus is quoted saying “it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment” than for a town that is unwelcoming to his disciples? Because as near as I can find that is the only time Jesus ever mentions Sodom and Gomorrah and he doesn’t say anything about why they are being judged — though by analogy wouldn’t it be because they were unwelcoming as well, only to angels?

Who are, by the way, the “strange flesh” (literally “other flesh,” as in the Greek heteros) the Sodomites lusted after.

I swear, Jack Chick may be amusing but I cannot follow the logic of his Biblical interpretation.

I have only my church Christmas pageant to blame for this one, I guess.  That’s the only source I have to go on here and if I felt like researching it, clearly I would have before posting in the first place.

Another version of reality:

RTC: Jesus is the Son of God!
Non-RTC: I’m a Druid. So?

Jewish tradition identifies the sin of Sodom as hostility and lack of charity to the stranger and the poor. I have to assume that this is what Jesus is referencing because a. it would have made sense to him and his followers, and b. in both cases the reference is to failing in hospitality.

Well, it’s her own damn fault; Celestia had a pony with excellent organizational skills in Canterlot, but she sent her away.  And her little dragon, too.

Yeah, I don’t think that anybody could be worse than TurboJesus.  And even the fans who write Celestia as a tyrant acknowledge that she gave her sister a second chance, which is more than TJ would do with Nicolae or anybody else.

Or…

How It Actually Goes

RTC: Jesus is the Son of God!
Non-Christian: How do you know there’s a God to begin with?
RTC: It says so in the Bible!
Non-Christian: But how do you know the Bible’s true?
RTC: The Bible is the Word of God!
Non-Christian: But how can you be sure?
RTC: (I don’t actually know what they’d say here, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t leave the Non-Christian thinking “Holy crap, I never looked at it that way before!  Everything in the Bible is exactly right!!!”)

Well, maybe, maybe not.  I’m thinking that somebody who would make the books good would perhaps make TurboJesus into somebody more Jesus-like and forgiving…would make Rayford and Buck into better human beings…would make Nicolae somewhat sympathetic or at least understandable instead of just this evil guy who’s evil for no reason, and maybe even somebody who could be redeemed (which would be a very good Christian message, because if there’s hope for the Antichrist then there’s hope for anybody), and so on.

So if the message of these books was changed in the process of rewriting them, the books might actually be a good influence on people instead of a bad one.

What you are missing is that for a thousand odd years, the intellectual and academic cream of much of Europe had very little to do but deal with increasingly fine points of dogma and Catholic theology.

What you are missing is that for a thousand odd years, the intellectual and academic cream of much of Europe had very little to do but deal with increasingly fine points of dogma and Catholic theology.

Well, I tend to think that good writing requires empathy.  The most ghastly thing about these books is also the most ghastly thing about L&J’s theology: it’s cruel.  If the books were written better, they would almost have to be kinder . . .

. . . or so I would like to believe, anyway.

You know that all of the best written books are mostly about death and love.

left behind is interesting because the authors fear death and don’t love.

That explains why it is so badly written because they don’t dare to go the extra mile when they are writing.

And really, Jack, you think that Middle Eastern conflict is because of Ishmael? Talk about theological contortionism…

Oh, it’s even better than that.  It’s all the fault of THE WOMAN, according to Jack.  Just think — if it wasn’t for Sarah pimping off her maid to Abraham, there would be Peace In The Middle East right now. “His wife came up with a solution that has caused us problemsM/i> for 4000 years.  She gave her Egyptian servant, Hagar, to Abraham, so they could have a son.  This incident created the mess the world is in today.”  (emphases in the original

Oh crap.  OK, I screwed up the italics closing tag.  The emphases in the original is for the italicized bolding, not the run-on italics.  (At least Disqus doesn’t allow Perpetual Italics Run-on, past the offending post!  *whew*)

Oh oh, I know how this one goes:

That last statement just goes back up to It Says So In the Bible – see… it’s a circular logic loop: Jesus is the Messiah because it says so in the Bible, and the Bible is true because it’s the word of God, and God exists because it says so in the Bible, and the Bible is accurate because it’s the word of God.

If you try to break the loop either it’ll reinforce itself or result in angry swearing (or a very RTC approximation there of… usually ending in “I’ll pray for you.” in an incredibly threatening tone.)

<– Had this argument on both sides before.

Heck, there's a similar loop for just about every article of faith among RTCs, including things that are easily provable (separation of church and state for instance.)

Oh yeah, I’ve had that argument before too. They like their little mobius loop, and really really hate it when someone points out that the loop goes nowhere.

Not exactly. Expecting people outside my faith to believe that would be silly – if they believed the same things I believe they’d probably be in my religion too.

I know it looks strange from the outside. I just wanted to clarify that we really aren’t all that obsessed with it.

On another note according to a footnote in my New Jerusalem Bible Isaiah 7:14 possibly refers to the birth of Hezekiah (this makes a great deal of sense because it seems to be referring to some specific young woman who’s already pregnant). It also notes that only the Greek says Virgin and then Matt applied it to Mary.

For the Bethlehem/Nazareth controversy it seems Matthew assumed the family originated in Bethlehem and moved to Nazareth after the Egyptian Sojourn, Luke assumed they were from Nazareth but went to Bethlehem for some reason, and John assumed he was born in Nazareth. There’s definitely some confusion here – which is interesting in itself.

Currently waiting for it to finish downloading…I’ve heard it’s 7 levels of awesome, but every time I mention it to my friends, I get laughed at. >.>

I have another how it actually goes:

RTC to random classmate in high school: Would you like to come to church with me to find about about Jesus?
non-RTC classmate: Thanks for inviting me, but I will be busy on Sunday going to my own church, and I have already heard about Jesus.

This scenario played out often in my high school when I was part of a Christian Club.  I was only in the club because of peer pressure, and it was sort of hilarious in a sad way that none of the other members realized that basically every other student in our school was also Christian.  About 3/4 of U.S.-Americans identify as Christian, and it was probably closer to 90% in our suburb, but for some reason all the RTCs thought they were some kind of persecuted minority.  So they tried to convert the “wrong” types of Christians into RTCs, and our club adviser scolded us at every weekly meeting because the club was supposed to double in size every week (sort of like vampires), and that didn’t happen.  They all had this pompous vision of being the keepers of some amazing Truth, and they would heroically spread it to all these poor heathens who had never heard this Truth, and the Truth would be so amazing that they would instantly convert and take up the torch.  The Truth would spread like wildfire and the few RTCs in the club could bask in the glory of having started the amazing Truth flame.  Reality wasn’t so cooperative though and it’s awkward to convert someone to what they already are.

RTC: Did you know Jesus is the Son of God?
Jewish Person: Of course! All Jews are the sons and daughters of God!

Yup. Having been baptized and raised Catholic, I was that non-RTC classmate and had that conversation several times. One girl—a Lutheran and a senior in high school—was flabbergasted that Catholics knew about Jesus and the Bible, therefore making us, apparently, Christians too. (To her credit, she make that final logical connection herself.)

So they tried to convert the “wrong” types of Christians into RTCs, and our club adviser scolded us at every weekly meeting because the club was supposed to double in size every week (sort of like vampires), and that didn’t happen.

What, that was seriously the plan?  That’s a goal that’s going to get real unreachable real fast.  They must have been consulting the same mathematicians Tsion did.

bananacat: I’ve heard that the “massacre” might have entailed just a few children,
because most communities were just little villages back then.  It might
have been too small to register on anyone’s radar.  However, it
suspiciously similar to what happened to Moses, which leads me to think
that it was added into the story later to make Jesus look more like the
hero Moses.

It’s possible that Roman sources wouldn’t have mentioned it due to tininess, but I have a hard time believing that some sort of Jewish source wouldn’t have tossed it out there.  I mean, “Herod kills babies,” is kind of a big deal…

But, yeah, the latter explanation is actually quite a bit more likely.  Many of the Jesus stories make sense in the context of someone trying to connect Jesus with previous Jewish tradition.  I actually think that Augustus’s census was supposed to connect to King David’s earlier census, which got YHWH pissed and resulted in him saying, “You can’t build the Temple, that will fall to your successor.”

winter: Speaking of Augustus, according to Suetonius (mostly quoting other
people), his birth was also eventually covered with strange rumours.
Even if they’re just the equivalent of Weekly World News clippings, they
give us an idea of what the more credulous type of people were willing
to believe at the time and the sort of things that were supposed to
indicate the coming of great leaders. Similar portents are reported for
other emperors.

That was pretty common throughout the Greek and Roman and, well, ancient world.  Augustus had a good story, but the best known was probably Alexander the Great, who was the child of Zeus and there was lightning at his birth or conception or something and it was crazy times (I forget the story and I’m too lazy to look it up, since the particulars don’t actually matter in this case).  The whole, “The new king is the son of a god,” motif was huge and has survived in one form or another in to the modern day (the bit where you can’t touch the Queen of England is actually a holdover from the idea that kings were gods on Earth filtered through a whole bunch of other stuff.  Assuming that’s still in effect).

It’s actually quite interesting that if you look at Mark — the oldest of the canonical Gospels and the one most directed at a Jewish audience — it starts basically with Jesus’ ministry.  The whole virgin birth/kingship of Jesus thing wasn’t even remotely a motif.  It’s almost like the later Gospel writers were like, “Oh, crap, we have to make this appeal to people who believe that their actual kings were actual sons of gods.  Now what do we do?”

I also love that Hagar, after finally working up the courage to run away from an abusive household, is basically told by Mr. All-loving, “Go back to that house so you can be beaten some more. But don’t worry, I promise that you’ll have a son and everyone will hate him and try to kill him.” And she apparently says, “Sounds good!” and goes back without a fuss.

My personal favorite of the RTC trying to convert non-RTC

RTC: Jesus is God!
non-RTC: How do you know?
RTC: The Bible tells us!
non-RTC: And how do you know the Bible is true?
RTC: Because the Jews celebrate Passover!
non-RTC: *baffled*

I’ve actually gotten that one before. Granted, I was 9 years old at the time, so maybe person in question thought I hadn’t developed enough intellectual rigour to see through pleading a religion with another religion that uses some of the same source-material. RTC is question usually isn’t that RTC-ish, at least these days (the Bible may be true, but if science contradicts something in the Bible, science is the higher authority, meaning that either you’re reading the Bible incorrectly, or whoever put it into the Bible screwed up and it shouldn’t have been there).

@Vermic either he was expecting it to spread beyond the school, or would have been satisfied by a 90-95% join rate (the rest of them are obviously heathens who know it’s true but refuse to submit to God).

We know now that women do not possess ’seed.’ The man provides the seed for the women’s egg.

We know what now? I’m pretty sure egg and sperm each contribute half of the genetic material. How is one of them a “seed” and the other not?

I’m sorry, I know that isn’t the point of the post, but I screeched to a halt right there and had trouble concentrating on the rest.

Sooooo true.  Last year I had this same type of encounter… in a grocery store after midnight.*  He comes up to me and asks the question, I say not interested… and he follows me for a good 5 minutes pestering me.  I came up with every relatively polite way to say “no, not interested” I could think of, before I finally rolled my eyes and just started ignoring him.

Since that’s the way I grew up, I am sympathetic to the compulsion, but… crimeny folks >< Saying "no" doesn't mean "if you keep pestering me I'll eventually cave" – and even if it did that would not be a good way to win converts in any lasting fashion.

*sigh*

*I have some anxiety issues, so usually I go to the grocery store after 8pm, sometimes around 3-4am even; being one of the only shoppers helps a ton.

As a result of this, I went to look up “hymens” on the Interwebs and met the famed Mac virus everyone has been talking about.  At least, I think so.  It insisted I was infected and–even though I refused to click on anything after that point–I finally had to do a hard shutdown to get away from that think.  Not that this is relevant at all.  I just wanted to share that apparently looking for lady parts is EXTREME HAZARD.  How do porn surfers survive?

It’s possible that Roman sources wouldn’t have mentioned it due to tininess, but I have a hard time believing that some sort of Jewish source wouldn’t have tossed it out there.  I mean, “Herod kills babies,” is kind of a big deal…

But the thing is, Herod killed a lot of people. Him killing a few babies in a small town really isn’t going to be that big of an attention getter compared to other things he did. Factor that in to just how few records survive from that time anyway, and I don’t find it unreasonable that outside of Matthew, there aren’t any other surviving documentations of him committing such an act if he had done so.

As for the whole Josh McDowell thing from the original post, while I do find him lacking in his skills as an apologist, I don’t think he’s quite as bad as he’s made out to be.

By finding a number of “safe” sites, keeping a good antivirus program like MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, and knowing how to manually remove the registry entries and files, even write-protected ones. Or so I’ve been told. [TVTROPES WARNING]

keeping a good antivirus program like MalwareBytes Anti-Malware.

You really should do that even if you only visit child friendly sites and gmail. Especially if you use a PC.

Good Lord, never thought of that. I don’t know if you had to lift skirt to get in–I suspect that people went with people from their villages, and you got vouched for.

Of course, later, when the Romans renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina, they wouldn’t let anyone in who WAS circumcised. I think in that case, though, it was just, ‘if we catch you, your foreskin ain’t all you’ll be missing’.

That’s odd. I guess they can explain kids who look like their Mom as having been influenced while growing in the womb, but how do they explain kids who may not resemble mom but still take after maternal relatives?

There’s a delightful book called “How To Do It: Guides To Good Living For Renaissance Italians” that covers some of that. The child’s appearance can be influenced by what the mother sees during her pregnancy, and even what and who she thinks about. There is even one ‘expert’ who solemnly explains that if the child is a different race from the parents, that isn’t proof of adultery, because if, say, a white woman saw a black man riding in a military parade, and thought of how brave and virtuous he was, and wished for her child to be like him, the child might resemble him physically as well as morally.

My first reaction to this is to chuckle and say that sounds like a mighty convenient story, but given the complex racial history of southern Italy, it also occurs to me that you might get a lot of children with odd bits of the gene pool suddenly surfacing, and the child might not look so much like Mom’s secret lover as great-great-great Grandpa Ibrahim. Best for a culture to have some explanation that works for them.

Mary could have lost her hymen earlier in life and still have been a virgin. It does happen, you know. My mother tells me I lost mine at about age 4 on a swing. I don’t remember that, of course.

I haven’t a clue what happened to mine.

Oh, it’s even better than that. It’s all the fault of THE WOMAN, according to Jack. Just think — if it wasn’t for Sarah pimping off her maid to Abraham, there would be Peace In The Middle East right now. “His wife came up with a solution that has caused us problemsM/i> for 4000 years. She gave her Egyptian servant, Hagar, to Abraham, so they could have a son. This incident created the mess the world is in today.” (emphases in the original

Oh, for goodness sakes. First, ‘the mess the world is in today’ is hardly due to the state of the Middle East, and the state of the Middle East, contrary to much wishful thinking, is not about Abraham’s family dynamics.

Secondly, Sarah did what was correct for a woman of her era who found herself barren to do when she offered Hagar to her husband. And if we’re going to blame her for the family not quite working out,I think we need to also blame God–who told Abraham to do everything his wife told him to do.

Some high school friends and I were once approached by a woman who wanted to tell us about Jesus. One of my friends–the sweetest young woman I ever met–told her off in no uncertain terms. Three blocks later she was still muttering, “Gonna tell ME about Jesus? Huh? Gonna tell me about JESUS!” 

Being Jewish, I just figured this was a routine thing, but it seriously annoyed her. On account of her being a Christian.

Some high school friends and I were once approached by a woman who wanted to tell us about Jesus. One of my friends–the sweetest young woman I ever met–told her off in no uncertain terms. Three blocks later she was still muttering, “Gonna tell ME about Jesus? Huh? Gonna tell me about JESUS!” 

Being Jewish, I just figured this was a routine thing, but it seriously annoyed her. On account of her being a Christian.

As for the whole Josh McDowell thing from the original post, while I do find him lacking in his skills as an apologist, I don’t think he’s quite as bad as he’s made out to be.

Which recognized Christian apologist would you rank lower?  Alternately, which of McDowell’s arguments do you find compelling?

I haven’t a clue what happened to mine

Of course if you made a habit of riding around on rough roads astride a donkey, that would probably do the trick.

One thing that has helped me with surfing in-general (I haven’t had a virus since I started using it) -

Get a script blocker.  I use one for Firefox called NoScript that blocks everything that tries to come up until I specifically give the Okay, it can be a bit aggravating given that you constantly have to give temporary permissions… but it’s pretty safe, and on sites you trust you can give permanent permissions.

Obviously it’s not foolproof, and some might find it more trouble than it’s worth; but I like it.  It also blocks ads, (I do purposely allow them on most sites; but on sites that I’m visiting for essentially opposition research purposes… well why give them ad revenue? >.<  So that's a plus too imo.)

It’s also extremely useful to use Firefox and get Add-block plus.  I kept getting viruses on my home computer even though I went to maybe a dozen different sites, none of them porn, and I never opened any attachments from e-mail.  It turns out that the ads on a game wiki were giving me viruses.  Now I just don’t deal with ads at all.  I used to feel bad about blocking ads because that’s how people make money from me getting something for free, but when they start giving me viruses I have to protect myself.

All very silly, but hey, the movie’s got Peter Cushing and Christopher
Lee! I’d even watch an LB movie if it had them in it.

Well, Dracula, Saruman and Count Dooku _are_ all, in their own way, anti-Christs. They all could had been heroes, but chose to follow the Dark Side instead. And they all ended up paying for that.

Computer security is all sorts of fun!

The first thing is to always be up-to-date on patching everything! Especially your OS, your web browser, anything Adobe has so much as looked at (Flash, in particular, is a security nightmare), and your anti-virus (of which you should have at least one anti-virus and one anti-malware program, from two different developers, at least one of which should do real-time protection).

Next, noScript can be good (setting it up right is a pain, as it’ll default to breaking 90% of the internet until you selectively allow stuff) and adBlock Plus is excellent (just remember to allow websites you like to display ads, otherwise they lose revenue). So definitely install stuff like that. It used to be that Internet Explorer had no security to speak of, in the present day it’s roughly as secure as Firefox or Chrome, so feel free to use it if you wish, just keep in mind that it’s still the most-targeted browser, so if the current release has a security hole it will be found, while, say, Opera, can occasionally get by on security through obscurity.

However, no matter how up-to-date your OS and browser(s) are, the truth is that over half of all malware comes from attack vectors that those don’t cover. E-mail, flash, and infected file downloads account for something like 55% of computer viruses, so never, ever, download a file from a website you don’t trust, and avoid p2p networks like the plague, unless you enjoy Russian Roulette. Likewise, avoid opening e-mails from senders you don’t know. This isn’t as big of a problem (especially if you access your email through a web browser, such as with GMail or Hotmail), but is still a good idea.

If you’re using a modern version of Windows then don’t use an administrator account unless you have software that won’t run otherwise (Alas, many developers still assume that all accounts are full admin ones, which is stupid). If you must use an admin account then leave User Account Control on (those pop-up windows asking if you really want to do x when you run some programs). It’s not annoying after a few days, and it’ll warn you if a virus tries to alter something important. If you’re just browsing the internet and a UAC popup appears, odds are you should say “no” and then immediately run a virus scan.

So, that’s the basic stuff, on to security software:
Step one: Never, ever, use Norton or McAffee. There was a time, over a decade ago, when they made decent products. Now they don’t. They score poorly on virus-detection, cost more than they should, interfere with the normal running of your computer needlessly, consume RAM, CPU, and HDD access worse than some high-end games, and are impossible to uninstall properly (Unless you don’t mind manually editing config files, registry hives, and file tables). If you don’t trust free AV software then NOD32 by ESET wins on pretty much every criteria.

Step two: Your anti-virus software should find viruses, your anti-malware software should find everything else. If one of them claims to do both then that’s a nice bonus, but don’t trust it to do anything but its primary job.

Step three: Your AV/AM software is useless if you don’t update it at least once a week, and even if it can do active protection of your system you’ll want to run scans at least that often as well.

Good, free, anti-virus largely comes down to about four choices for Windows (I know nothing about Mac AV software, I’m afraid):
Avast!, AVG, Malware Bytes, and Microsoft Security Essentials.

Right now I’d recommend Avast! or MSE, since they’ve very little overhead, are very easy to use, and have >97% virus detection rates. MSE in particular is virtually invisible, I’ve had it run scans while I’m doing other stuff and never noticed.

For more general anti-malware I’m a bit out of date, but tend to recommend Spybot: Search and Destroy, for being lightweight but also very good.

Finally: Despite all of the above, you’ll still be vulnerable to new viruses. Fortunately, the vast majority (>99% by a fair margin) of viruses use security holes that patches have been released for and are detectable by up-to-date AV software. However, the remaining ones use holes that aren’t/can’t be patched, and are sufficiently new (or adaptable*) that AV software won’t know about them yet. So always back up your important stuff. I recommend to two different places, alternating between them. That way even if a virus contaminates one backup it might not get the other. Still, if two places isn’t an option then even one is significantly better than none.

*Take, for example, the conficker worm, a bit of malware that installs itself on a user’s computer and then takes commands from Command-and-Control servers. Usually what it does is use your computer to send spam e-mails (without your knowledge) but it also sometimes does nastier things. One reason this virus has spread as far as it has is because it uses a half-dozen different security holes in different programs (all of them had been patched, but the wide spread of software it can exploit means that most users don’tt have all the holes blocked) and it can receive updates from the CnC servers to take advantage of new holes and to stop trying sufficiently old ones. These updates also allow it to change where it infects computers and what it looks like, making it incredibly difficult for anti-virus software to reliably detect it. Fortunately conficker is the exception, not the rule, and while it manages to infect millions of computers few other viruses can claim anywhere near that level of success.

I’ve had pretty good luck with Kaspersky’s Internet security package. It’s possible to block ad sites while still allowing some ads to show, and it updates frequently.

I’ve had pretty good luck with Kaspersky’s Internet security package. It’s possible to block ad sites while still allowing some ads to show, and it updates frequently.

As a result of this, I went to look up “hymens” on the Interwebs and met
the famed Mac virus everyone has been talking about.  At least, I think
so.  It insisted I was infected and–even though I refused to click on
anything after that point–I finally had to do a hard shutdown to get
away from that think.  Not that this is relevant at all.  I just wanted
to share that apparently looking for lady parts is EXTREME HAZARD.  How
do porn surfers survive?

Well, I don’t think most porn surfers are looking for hymens. That may be your problem.

The first question is easy to answer: Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron.

I’d also add Avira to the list which I have on good authority is another extremely high quality AV program on par with Avast. I’ve found MalwareBytes products to have the absolute best detection rates, but real-time protection is not available with a free license, and it does not include a “background mode.” What I’ve heard about Microsoft Security Essentials is that it has high detection rates (not quite on par with Avira or Avast but still pretty good), but the real draw of that program is the extremely low rate of false positives. AVG used to be among the best, but it has declining detection rates, and the program itself has been getting more and more system intensive.

For generic malware, Spybot:S&D is good, but Lavasoft’s AdAware is also a good choice.

“It used to be that Internet Explorer had no security to speak of, in the present day it’s roughly as secure as Firefox or Chrome”
LIES! It is better than it used to be, but that’s damned by faint praise.

The most anti-Christly role the man ever played, however, was almost certainly Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man.  A false prophet of a religion made up out of scraps of older religions to serve his own ends, and one that he practices even to the point of human sacrifice, knowing full well that it’s false.

Sergeant Howie was a massive self-righteous tool, but his courage and his conviction and his willingness to take action all made him a much better protagonists than the ones we have here as well.

The Wicker Man, when you get right down to it, isn’t just a better story, it’s a better Christian story as well.

I’ve been out the last couple of days, but I’m so glad that I decided to catch up on the discussion. High on my list of things to do today is “chose a new anti-virus program to replace AVG”. I’ve done very well with AVG for years but it’s now become such a resource hog that it has to go.

My other complaint–flash. Oh how I hate it. My computer is old and flash just kills it. 

I hate to block ads on sites that I want to support. However, there are some sites where I have to do it because the ads crash my browser every. dang. time. In my current financial state there’s no new computer in my foreseeable future, so I just have to block the ads and ignore my guilt. 

“Speaking of Augustus, according to Suetonius (mostly quoting other
people), his birth was also eventually covered with strange rumours.
Even if they’re just the equivalent of Weekly World News clippings, they
give us an idea of what the more credulous type of people were willing
to believe at the time and the sort of things that were supposed to
indicate the coming of great leaders. Similar portents are reported for
other emperors.”
A modern example is KimJong-Il of North Korea.  His official biography has it that he was born in 1942 – a lucky year in Korean culture – on the slopes of Korea’s most sacred mountain, that his birth was heralded by swallows and that rainbows shone everywhere.  He was actually born across the border in Russia, in 1941.

His official biography has it that he was born in 1942 – a lucky year in Korean culture – on the slopes of Korea’s most sacred mountain, that his birth was heralded by swallows and that rainbows shone everywhere.  He was actually born across the border in Russia, in 1941.

Still more believable than his claims about his golf scores.

The result, almost always, is something wincingly awful and embarrassing for all concerned. The speaker usually sounds like a tourist trying to pretend to be a native speaker while relying on a guidebook of common phrases from 1953. His every over-earnest attempt to convey the idea “I’m one of you” winds up, instead, screaming “I have no idea who you are.”

That situation is normally done as painful comedy, from Monty Python’s Phrase Book to that early Doonesbury DEA agent trying to go undercover with Fifties Hipster Slang:

“Hey, Daddy-O, what’s it like being a reefer in this burg?”
“Not bad.  What’s it like being a DEA Agent?”

It’s probably worse than that, actually. The reader gets the impression that LaHaye and Jenkins have never met or spoken to or even seen anyone who was actually Jewish. Ben-Judah doesn’t speak or think like any actual Jew who ever actually walked the face of the actual earth.

Let me guess:  Fluent Christianese, straight out of The Four Spiritual Laws?

Ben-Judah still has half an hour or so to go before the Big Reveal at the end of his broadcast where he shocks the world with his surprise announcement of the identity of the Messiah.

And how many more pages do we have to go before This Is Over?

He and the authors imagine that he’s still being coyly secretive, that no one watching the broadcast knows what he might say next. But he’s already told them that he believes the key facts are that the Messiah must be born of a virgin in Bethlehem.

This is another of Jerry Jenkins’ trademark “See How Clever I Am? See? See? See?” moments.

The website Heathen Critique is doing to another Jenkins Novel (“Soon”, a Near Future Persecution Dystopia with End Time Prophecy tie-in) what Slack is doing to LB.  They’ve also done the GCAAT’s “Babylon Rising”.  Both contain ALL the bad writing tropes Slack has been dissecting since he started this project.  ALL of them, including character names even worse than in the 16 Volumes Which Shall Not Be Named.

Jerry Jenkins, GCAAT, has really got to work hard to be that BAD a Celebrity Hack.

Are you sure you’re not thinking of this one?

Man oh man, does that induce rage.  And I didn’t even get through it.

It’s like rage pills.  Wanna get angry?  Read that tract.

I think I’m going to take a walk and calm down.

I haven’t a clue what happened to mine.

Have you looked under the couch cushions?  :D

The website Heathen Critique is doing to another Jenkins Novel (“Soon”, a
Near Future Persecution Dystopia with End Time Prophecy tie-in) what
Slack is doing to LB.  They’ve also done the GCAAT’s “Babylon Rising”.

Is anyone mocking Jenkins’ cop novel, The Brotherhood? My local library has it, but I’ve been too afraid to pick it up because I need my skull to remain unexploded.

And how many more pages do we have to go before This Is Over?

11 more volumes.

Thanks for this.  I’ve got Norton, but will add Malware and SB:S&D

For comprehensive computer protection, I’ve yet to find something better than the “Security Tango.”

http://securitytango.com/

It’s a combination of several programs (which you can get free) plus the technique to use them – update everything, empty your recycle bin and temp files, then reboot your computer in “safe” mode, then run the programs.

The rebooting in safe mode means that nothing will be running in your RAM as the programs scan your ROM, and when I’ve had a virus infection, that’s made quite a difference in clearing things out.  

The people who run the “Security Tango” website are a computer service company in my hometown (Rochester, NY), and the fellow in charge ran a computer-focused television program on the local cable network for quite a few years.  

The Security Tango has several variations – the Windows Waltz, the Linux Lambada, the Android Allemande and the Macarena…

The trouble with these books is twofold, first literary, second theological. They fail on both counts. A novelist should be very careful in his research when he is depicting a real religious group, especially if he has to state what they believe. Since the ‘Left Behind’ series are, when all is said and done, potboilers (I think they’ve been released in 4 volumes now, which rather indicates how excessive it was issuing them in 16 to begin with!), they do not contain serious research. It’s rather like the pastor in Mel Gibson’s ‘The Patriot’ talking about praying for the souls of the murdered men. They got the New England meeting-house right, the interior, the pastor’s wig and clothing – but the most important thing, his beliefs, they completely failed to get! Gibson, as a Catholic, assumed that all Christians pray for the souls of the dead. They don’t. Now, in ‘The Patriot’ that was one line, in one scene. But in the Left behind series the beliefs of the Jews are important. The authors needed to find out what Jews today actually believe about Messiah, not just what Second Temple Judaism believed (which they got wrong too). It takes more than a read of the Bible to know what Jews believe. 

You can get away with poor research if it’s a throwaway line. But a whole speech is different. And we find that LaHaye and Jenkins actually have no idea  what modern-day Jews believe. They can’t help themselves, he starts with a Christian book, and surprise, ends with a Christian conclusion. But then they have no idea how such a research project would work in the first place, so I am not in the least bit surprised!

1) Thanks for talking about the Augustine sin-centric view of theology. It irritates me to no end.

2) Thanks also for showing how silly the “prophetic” view of proof-of-Jesus’-Messiahship is.

3) Unrelatedly, I noticed you’ve got Jon Trott’s Blue Christian on a Red Background on your blogroll. He’s moved to a new location: http://www.wilsonstation.com/?cat=35 . Wilson Station is kind of a new Cornerstone Mag, though largely done by Jon. 

The biggest problem is that LaHaye has assumed that Jews believe that all the passages Christians apply to Jesus (and the New Testament applies to him) are Messianic. They’re not. The New Testament theology is more sophisticated than that, representing Jesus as recapitulating in some sense the history of Israel – “Out of Egypt I have called my Son” comes to mind at once. LaHaye and Jenkins are sadly unreflective Dispensationalists, people who profess a great love for Israel (usually understood as the present secular state of that name) and often accuse those who do not share that enthusiasm of anti-semitism, but who actually have no clue what Jews believe apart from the fact that they don’t think Jesus is Messiah – just as Mel Gibson has no clue what Protestants believe. The result in Gibson’s film is that he has a Protestant pastor in the 18th century praying for souls, and that in LaHaye and Jenkins’ book we have a Jewish Rabbi talking like a Fundamentalist.