Category: Christianity

It is perhaps some congenital defect in us, or perhaps just a byproduct of our Western affluence — having lived all our lives in a land where true hardship is virtually unheard of — that we forget the important things. Every year, at about the same time, we obsess over idiocies ranging from stupid judge tricks to immaculate lizard conceptions. 🙄 How all this tomfoolery came about in the first place is anyone’s guess; and it really doesn’t matter anyway.  What does matter is the real “reason for the season” and so, this being Christmas Eve and all, here it is:

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. So all went to be enrolled, each to his own town.

And Joseph too went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David that is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.

While they were there, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

Now there were shepherds in that region living in the fields and keeping the night watch over their flock. The angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were struck with great fear.

The angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For today in the city of David a savior has been born for you who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”

And suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel, praising God and saying: “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

When the angels went away from them to heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go, then, to Bethlehem to see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”

So they went in haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known the message that had been told them about this child. All who heard it were amazed by what had been told them by the shepherds. And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart. Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, just as it had been told to them. When eight days were completed for his circumcision, he was named Jesus, the name given him by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

Merry Christmas, everyone; and God bless.

I don’t care how many times I see this, it still puts me in a good mood…

A merry and joyous Christmas to you and all of yours, no matter who you are nor where you may be, as we gather to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

May the new year bring you peace and His blessings…

An absolutely huge tip o’ the old toque to Dr. Roy for putting this where I could see it so that I can, in turn, pass it along to the rest of you (couldn’t have done it without ya, mate).

I wasn’t going to post anything at all today due to my temp hitting 102 — that’s 38.8, for those of you that have been fully metricwashed — and generally feeling like a can of smashed arseholes.

Thanks again, Doc. Just when I thought the day was a wash… 😀 The original townhall.com article is here (along with plenty of other good stuff, so take the time to check it out).

How to Shut Up an Atheist if You Must
By Doug Giles
Saturday, October 20, 2007

The atheist’s days of running circles around the Christian with their darling questions are drawing to a close. Yes, the fat lady just wrenched herself off her humongous backside, has cleared her throat and now is fixin’ to sing the finale on the atheist’s ability to have fun with their specious little fairy tales at the Christians’ expense.

That is if the Christian will buy, devour, commit to memory and stand up and challenge the pouty anti-God cabal with the atheist-slaying facts found in two new books from Regnery namely, What’s So Great about Christianity and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible.

Authors Dinesh D’Souza and Robert Hutchinson skillfully answer, once again, the atheist’s pet questions about the existence (or non-existence) of God and how Christianity has allegedly made the world suck. Suck, for you thick atheists, is a slang word which means to make or to be really, really crappy (kind of like how our culture becomes anytime you guys mess with it).

These books will be especially beneficial for high school and college students to draw upon when their secular anti-God fuming delirious instructors start railing against God and Christianity.

For instance:

1. When the prissy anti-Christs tell you the Bible stands in the way of science, inform them that the greatest scientific geniuses in history were devout Christians – and scientists from Newton to Einstein insisted that biblical religion provided the key ideas from which experimental science could develop.
2. When the pissy God haters tell you the Bible condones slavery, you can remind them that slavery was abolished only when devout Christians, inspired by the Bible, launched a campaign in the early 1800s to abolish the slave trade.
3. When the screechin’ teachers tell you the Bible has been proven false by archaeology, hark back and show them that each year a new archaeological discovery substantiates the existence of people, places and events we once knew solely from biblical sources, including the discovery of the Moabite stone in 1868, which mentions numerous places in the Bible, and the discovery of an inscription in 1961 that proves the existence of the biblical figure Pontius Pilate, just to name a few.
4. When they get sweaty and tell you that the Bible breeds intolerance, refresh their memory with the fact that only those societies influenced by biblical teachings (in North and South America, Europe, and Australia) today guarantee freedom of speech and religion. Period.
5. When one of them queues up and quips that the Bible opposes freedom, smack ’em with the fact that the Bible’s insistence that no one is above the law and all must answer to divine justice led to theories of universal human rights and… uh… limited government.
6. When they tell you that Christianity and the Bible justify war and genocide, unsympathetically remind them that societies which rejected biblical morality in favor of a more rational and scientific approach to politics murdered millions upon millions more than the Crusades or the Inquisition ever did. Hello. Atheist regimes have caused the greatest mass murders in history, says D’Souza. Inside D’Souza’s book you’ll find little gems like, The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Galileo affair, and witch hunts together make up less than 1% of the murders that have occurred during modern atheist regimes like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.

This is just a smattering of the various 411 fun the Christian is going to get as they plow through What’s So Great about Christianity and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible.

Senior pastor, college pastor and youth pastor: do yourself and your congregants a favor and teach this stuff to your church. Equip Christians to stand against the BS (belief system) of the atheists. The culture war is heating up, therefore make sure your people don’t stand intellectually naked and neutered before these no-God numb nuts.

Lastly, comfortable and cocky atheists, you had better brace yourselves. Hundreds of thousands of Christians and authors are about to read these books and, as stated, systematically dismember your old and haggard arguments.

In addition, everywhere I go and speak – be it in conferences, on the radio, on television or in print – I’m going to encourage the tens of thousands of Christians I address that every time and everywhere they get crapped on by an atheist with unfounded arguments to open their mouths and slam dance them with facts found in these two new brilliant books from Regnery.

Doug Giles’ new book 10 Habits of Decidedly Defective People: The Successful Loser’s Guide to Life is now available. Doug’s award winning talk show and video blog can be seen and heard at www.ClashRadio.com.

I’d like to start off today by thanking both Artur Pawlowski and the Calgary Sun’s Licia Corbella for their help in putting this post together; I couldn’t have done it without ’em. I managed to speak briefly with Mr. Pawlowski from his home in Calgary and I have to tell you, he’s one of the nicest folks I’ve talked to in quite a while.

You might recall from two of my previous posts that Art is the guy who was arrested and jailed in Calgary back in August of last year for reading the Bible and praying in a public park.

Let me say that again: Arrested. And jailed. For praying. In Canada.

I Am Not Making This Upâ„¢.

I said yesterday that I was going to try to find the video footage of Art’s arrest, so I figured “who better to ask than… well, Art?” So, after getting ahold of a number for him, I gave him a call. While he didn’t have the footage in a digital format himself, he was able to direct me to the page for Paul Arthur’s show, Insight, at www.miraclechannel.ca (which you can check out yourself here) where I was able to download one of the shows that features a clip from the footage that Art’s brother shot the day he got busted. It’s a fairly long vid (about an hour) and the footage from the arrest only runs from 8:38 to 9:32 but on the whole, the whole vid is worth watching (you can download it to your hard drive here, if you like)…
(more…)

Some crap really does just boggle the hell out of the mind, doesn’t it? Take, for example, the recent colossal kerfuffle over yet another twit who thinks he’s found the tomb of Christ. 🙄

Here we have some dork — and James Cameron too, it turns out — burbling on like he’s some kind of authority when, in fact, he’s nothing more than just another media hack:

A Canadian filmmaker and author claims to have new scientific evidence that could have profound implications for Christianity.

Simcha Jacobovici, from Toronto, is expected to reveal at a news conference in New York on Monday that a tomb he explored under a Jerusalem apartment building once contained the bones of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.

Further, he suggested that the tomb, stored in a warehouse belonging to the Israel Antiquity Authority outside Jerusalem, may contain microscopic remains of the Christian saviour’s DNA.

[…]

The boxes were inscribed with the names: Jesus son of Joseph, Judah son of Jesus, Maria, Mariamne, Joseph and Matthew.

A quick peek around the net reveals that our little Mr. Jackoffski (pictured at right) is an Israeli-born Canadian, and received a B.A. with Honours in Philosophy and Political Science from McGill University. That’s right, two degrees: one in bullshitology political science and the other in bafflegab philosophy.

Philosophy, of course, is a Greek word that means “why do something about it when you can drone on endlessly about it with needlessly big words” that was best described by Ambrose Bierce as “a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.” Let’s face it, kids; the only thing you can really do with a degree in philosophy is teach philosophy. And I think everybody here already knows what I think about a degree in polisci…

But enough about what he’s got. Let’s see what he hasn’t got. I wonder if he has any degrees in…

Archaeology? Nope.
Anthropology? Nope.
Theology? Nope.
Okay, how about codicology or philology? Nope.
Damn. The guy’s gotta at least have one in history, right?? Nope.

The article could just as easily — and just as accurately — be headlined: “Dude With Camcorder Says Outrageous Shit.” But you just know that the MSM and all the usual loopy Lefty suspects are going to be all over this like maggots on Saddam Hussein. Okay, tell ya what we’re gonna do…

Just for the moment, we’re going to forget that I’m Christian and therefore already know that Christ’s tomb is empty and this dolt is just yapping out of his arse. Let’s just examine his excuse for methodology for a few seconds, shall we?

University of Toronto mathematician Dr. Andrey Feuerverger calculated the odds at one in 600; while Dr. James Tabor, chair of the department of religion at the University of North Carolina, placed the odds at one in 42 million.

“If you took the entire population of Jerusalem at the time and put it in a stadium, and asked everyone named Jesus to stand up, you’d have about 2,700 men,” Tabor said. “Then you’d ask only those with a father named Joseph and a mother named Mary to remain standing. And then those with a brother named Yose and a brother named James. Statistically, you end up with one person.”

So here we are, over two thousand years later, and some twit finds a tomb with the name tags of “Jesus son of Joseph, Judah son of Jesus, Maria, Mariamne, Joseph and Matthew.” All of these were common names at the time. It’s like finding the tomb of “Jim son of John, Rob son of Jim, Linda, Jenny, John and Mike.” It means virtually nothing. The most important thing though, is that this whole theory hinges on one grasping compulsion: if this is, in fact, a tomb containing the remains of Jesus, Mary and Joseph themselves, then the mitochondrial DNA from the “Jesus” remains absolutely must be consistent with mtDNA from the “Mary” remains. There is no way around this whatsoever; NONE.

So, without further ado, allow me to throw in the monkey wrench (from the same article, no less)…

According to Jewish custom, the bones have long since been reburied in unmarked graves in Israel. But tests conducted at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., on DNA obtained from the Jesus and Mary tomb and show that the two individuals were not maternally related.

Not… Maternally… Related… How’s that for lowering the boom? Ah, but what’s a little snag like that when your head’s so far up your ass you chew your food twice? You don’t really think that you let inconvenient little things like a few piddling facts get in your way when you’re a card-carrying kook, now, do you? Hell no; you just decide to pull a Homer Simpson and pull your arms out of the tar with your face. Undaunted by having his little attention-whore balloon popped, he promptly shifted gears and fell back on the same old, tired, predictable, discredited, Gnostic bullshit…

“Perhaps Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married as the DNA results from the Talpiot ossuaries suggest and perhaps their union was kept secret to protect a potential dynasty – a secret hidden through the ages,” narrator Ron White says in the documentary.

“A secret we just may be able to uncover in the holy family tomb.”

Gimme a friggin’ break. Okay… Let’s assume for a minute that “Mary” isn’t genetically related to anybody else in the tomb; marriage would be a reasonable hypothesis to explain her presence. But married to whom? There are four sets of male remains in that tomb, folks, and nary a marriage certificate to be found. It’s an assumption perched on a presupposition built on a conceit. All in all, a pretty rickety affair.

On the bright side though, for a change, the gobsmacking of this idiocy isn’t confined to just folks like me. For example…

“It was an ordinary middle-class Jerusalem burial cave,” Kloner said. “The names on the caskets are the most common names found among Jews at the time.”

Archaeologists also balk at the filmmaker’s claim that the James Ossuary – the center of a famous antiquities fraud in Israel – might have originated from the same cave. In 2005, Israel charged five suspects with forgery in connection with the infamous bone box.

“I don’t think the James Ossuary came from the same cave,” said Dan Bahat, an archaeologist at Bar-Ilan University. “If it were found there, the man who made the forgery would have taken something better. He would have taken Jesus.”

Nice to see scientists being scientists for a change.