Unintended consequences of Lutheranism: An unhinged band of female lunatics decorates the tree year round, but for things other than Christmas

Go Ahead, Leave Christmas Tree Up -- Decor Turns Year-Round...

 

 

Always deny there's any evidence to the contrary when promoting the virgin birth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 As does Walter Russell Mead, who says Christmas is a feminist holiday lol, here:

The early church wasn’t facing a sea of rumors about Mary’s prenuptial behavior, and if it had been, there are more convincing ways of scotching rumors than proclaiming a miraculous virgin birth. 

 Meanwhile . . .

I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father. They answered and said unto him, Abraham is our father. Jesus saith unto them, If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham. Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God. 

-- John 8:38ff.

Samuel Johnson was evidently a January 6th kind of Twelfth Nighter, not a January 5th

 

 

Twelfth Night, or What You Will (to give the play its full title) was probably commissioned for performance as part of the Twelfth Night celebrations held by Queen Elizabeth I at Whitehall Palace on 6 January 1601 to mark the end of the embassy of the Italian diplomat, the Duke of Orsino. It was again performed at Court on Easter Monday in 1618 and on Candlemas night in 1623.     

More.

And more.

At Christmas thoughts do not naturally turn to Mary's crazy, problem child of the Gospel of Mark

Bart Ehrman, December 2014, here:

Mark does not narrate an account of Jesus’ birth. Mark never says a word about Jesus’ mother being a virgin. Mark does not presuppose that Jesus had an unusual birth of any kind. And in Mark (you don’t find this story in Matthew and Luke!!), Jesus’ mother does not seem to know that he is a divinely born son of God. On the contrary, she thinks he has gone out of his mind. Mark not only lacks a virgin birth story; it seems to presuppose that they [sic] never could have been a virgin birth. Or Mary would understand who Jesus is. But she does not.

It’s no wonder that when Matthew and Luke took over so many of the stories of Mark, they decided, both of them, *not* to take over Mark 3:20-21. They had completely different view of Jesus’ mother and his birth.

Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas!

 Doubtless the pleasure is as great

Of being cheated, as to cheat;

As lookers on feel most delight,

That least perceive the juggler's sleight.

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

The kingdom of God is at hand: Repent and believe

Atheist, feminist from a Texas family full of Trump supporters says Trump has ruined Christmas and turned it ugly

Here:

He ruins everything he touches. ... Now [Christmas] has morphed into something even uglier.

So it was already ugly, right?

But Ms. Amanda Marcotte obviously hasn't seen the big, ugly above-ground pool my new liberal neighbors installed next to my rear lot line. They are big Rachel Madcow fans and proponents of gun control who chose to live out here in rural America where gunfire is something of an evening ritual. Nor has the Salon writer heard the loud, drunken parties until the wee hours of the morning these liberals have brought with them, disturbing the peace. And now we've got a big ole SUV in the front yard with the hood up for at least the last month! Who leaves their hood up in the rain and the snow? It's a $330,000 house on two acres, quickly turning into White Trash America.

I sure do miss those Calvinists who used to own the property, even if they didn't think too much of me because I wasn't Dutch. At least they were tidy and quiet. And they had a beautiful lawn, too, underneath that pool.

Donald Trump has no corner on ugly.   

They tell me 'tis my birthday

 

 

They tell me 'tis my birthday, and I'll keep it

with double pomp of sadness;

'Tis what the day deserves,

which gave me breath.

-- John Dryden

No offence meant to the holy incarnate Logos, but the baby Jesus didn't have a clue that there was no room for him at The Inn

Christopher Caldwell thinks Christmas' excess is German-Americans' last stand

Why are Americans so unhinged about Christmas?:

The most obnoxious advert on American television this Christmas season features a thirtyish man telling his wife he ‘got us a little something’ at a holiday sale. ...

[W]e are talking about $135,000 worth of truck and — even if you get it on sale — about a man giving a Christmas gift to himself that is worth more than the annual income of the median American family. ... 

Today there are articles in women’s magazines and on gossipy websites with titles like ‘How Not to Go Bankrupt This Christmas’. ...

Nothing is ever enough. Radio stations, in the age before the internet, used to play Christmas carols now and then. Some would play carols nonstop after 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Today, the streaming wireless network Sirius XM Radio has 16 whole channels dedicated to different sub-genres of holiday-season music, and they run all month long. ...

The country gets more Christmassy even as it gets less Christian. That is probably not an accident. Most of America’s Christmas traditions — with trees, stockings, fires, carols — were imported with the German immigration of the 19th century. Germans remain the largest ethnic group in the United States. After the German language and most of its folkways were driven out of American life during the first world war, Christmas became the main avenue through which German-American culture lived on. Its pleasures, as Americans understand them, are hard to distinguish from those of today’s faddish Teutonic concept, hygge: cosiness, family and making the best of bad weather. Christmas now seems like the opposite of the American way of life, as hygge seems a dangerous kind of anti-Americanism. For as long as the season lasts, Christmas supplies what Americans don’t have enough of in their lives. It is a counterculture.

The great American Christmas songs — ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’, ‘White Christmas’, ‘Winter Wonderland’ — are about the warmth of family, the solidity of small-town life, the building of human relations on a bedrock of decency, and above all the love of tradition. If Americans are devoted to Christmas more zealously, fanatically, excessively than ever, it may be because the destruction of familiar traditions has ceased to be an unfortunate side-effect of American culture and started being its raison d’être.

 

"Merry Christmas!": The mocking shout of the drunken anti-Puritans

Discussed here:

For most of its history, the Christian church regarded Christmas as a small event on its calendar not requiring much observation. Puritans in England and later the American colonies went one step further, banning the holiday altogether since they could find no biblical support for celebrating the day. As the historian Stephen Nissenbaum has explained, the Puritans imposed fines on anyone caught celebrating and designated Christmas as a working day. These strict rules were necessary since so many men and women engaged in the drunken carousing that accompanied winter solstice festivities, an ancient tradition that the church had failed to stamp out when it appropriated Dec. 25 as a Christian holiday.

In this setting, “Merry Christmas” was born. The greeting was an act of revelry and religious rebellion, something the uncouth masses shouted as they traveled in drunken mobs. Troubled by such behavior, the New Haven Gazette in 1786 decried the “common salutation” of “Merry Christmas.” “So merry at Christmas are some,” the paper lamented, “they destroy their health by disease, and by trouble their joy.”

Another Christmas, and the same old story of the rich suckering the poor

 

 

It is no news for the weak and poor to be a prey to the strong and rich.

-- Roger L'Estrange (1616-1704)

Did you hear the one about the dyslexic Satanist?

He sold his soul to Santa, ha ha!

God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.

Merry Christmas!

Maybe Christmas observance is on the wane because we have become the rich it offends

Madonna of the Magnificat by Jean-baptiste Jouvenet

He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

-- Luke 1:53

'Hallmark is offering 376 Christmas cards this year. By my count, only five are religious: three featuring Mary and Joseph in the stable and two Madonnas with child. Admittedly, Hallmark’s best-seller is called “little angels”, but they are simpering cherubs in a picture that carries no reference to the Christian story.

'In November, the peak time for buying Advent calendars, I checked the stock on Amazon. Once again, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and wise men had disappeared to the margins. There were more Star Wars than religious calendars – apparently, the Force is more powerful than the Holy Spirit today. If you were prepared to spend hundreds of pounds, you could buy calendars with doors which open to reveal gin miniatures, jewellery, make-up, sex toys … Everything and anything except a nativity scene.'

Read the rest here.

Joel Osteen in Houston is having quite the little PR problem

From the story here:

“Do you think Joel Osteen realizes he is basically the innkeeper in the Christmas story right now,” one Twitter user quipped. “Joel Osteen doesn’t want all those wet, homeless Houstonians destroying the upholstery in his fake Christian grift church scheme,” chimed in another.

A stupid delusion I heard over the holiday, attributed by the person to the movie Schindler's List

The delusion: While the Nazis attacked Jews on Kristallnacht the German Christians were in their churches singing Christmas carols, so they couldn't have been genuinely Christian. 

The fact: Kristallnacht occurred in the middle of the night on November 9-10, 1938 while most people were asleep in their beds, and weeks before the beginning of Advent that year. No one was in church singing anything, let alone Christmas carols. The enraged events of that night occurred just hours after the elaborate commemoration in Munich of the 15th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, and after the news of the death of a German diplomat shot in Paris had reached Hitler.  

The unpleasant truth: Christians in the United States, traditional or otherwise, continue to go about their own merry lives and have since 1973 while tens of millions of the American unborn have been slaughtered in the womb and continue to be until this very day right under their very own noses, but they do nothing about it.

Yet somehow it's the German Christians who are the hypocrites.

N. T. Wrong strikes again, denies the Synoptic Jesus who teaches a revolution in the creation, not a reaffirmation of it

It makes you wonder if N. T. Wright, here, would consign the whole triple tradition to "incipient gnosticism", which would be quite the leap:

Second, John's prologue by its structure reaffirms the order of Creation at the point where it is being challenged today. John consciously echoes the first chapter of Genesis: "In the beginning God made heaven and earth; in the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1). When the Word becomes flesh, heaven and earth are joined together at last, as God always intended.

But the Creation story, which begins with the duality of heaven and earth, reaches its climax in the duality of male and female. When heaven and earth are joined together in Jesus Christ, the glorious intention for the whole of Creation is unveiled, reaffirming the creation of male and female in God's image. There is something about the enfleshment of the Word in John 1 that stands parallel to Genesis 1 and speaks of Creation fulfilled. We see what's going on: Jesus Christ has come as the Bridegroom, the one for whom the Bride has been waiting.

Not for nothing is Jesus's first sign to transform a wedding from disaster to triumph. Not for nothing do we find a man and a woman at the foot of the Cross. The same incipient gnosticism which says that true religion is about "discovering who we really are" is all too ready to say that who we really are may have nothing to do with being physically created as male or female. But the Christmas message is about the redemption of God's good world, his wonderful Creation, so that it can be the glorious thing it was made to be. This word is strange, even incomprehensible, in today's culture. But if you have ears to hear, then hear it.

Au contraire:

For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.

-- Matthew 22:30

For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.

-- Mark 12:25

And Jesus answering said unto them, The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: Neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.

-- Luke 20:34ff.

Democrat Socialist Harold Meyerson's empirical offenses against the Gospel of Matthew and Leviticus

Here:

'They were refugees, fleeing for their lives from one Middle Eastern country to the next. As Matthew tells the tale, Joseph, fearing that the government had marked his newborn son for death, gathered up his wife and child and stole away by night across the Judean border into Egypt. And just in time: Unsure who, exactly, to kill, that government — a king named Herod, who’d heard some kid would one day become a rival king — proceeded to slaughter every remaining child in Bethlehem under the age of 2.

'This isn’t a chapter of the Christmas story that has made it into the general celebration, but it’s there in the gospel, for those who give the gospels credence and for those who don’t. For both groups, it’s clear that the authors of the New Testament intended to recount (for the believers) or compose (for the nons) a story that echoed the Old Testament’s concern for strangers, foreigners and refugees (“The stranger among you shall be as one born among you,” says Leviticus, “and you shall love him as yourself”), that foreshadowed Jesus’ teachings to care for castaways and the least among us, and that laid the foundation for institutional Christianity’s transnationalism.'

--------------------------------------------

On Meyerson's reading, Leviticus might as well be a proto-Sermon-on-the-Mount, except that Leviticus details nearly a score of offenses for which death is prescribed, including blasphemy and not keeping the Sabbath, two key charges against Jesus of Nazareth. The Judaism of Leviticus is a religion steeped in violence by Jews against Jews, violence which is routinized against offenders against God's law, not to mention against countless animals slaughtered eventually in a Temple to appease an angry God and feed an idle clerisy.

In true liberal fashion, only the one element of this book which is convenient to the present liberal narrative is featured. All the inconvenient facts of the rest of it are omitted, the ones which cannot be pressed into the service of the liberal project, indeed which argue against it, which in this case is to shame those who reject refugees. Does it really need to be pointed out that according to Matthew Jesus and his family were rejected by the Jews, and became refugees from Judaism, not to it?

Meyerson similarly paints the Matthew story of the Slaughter of the Innocents as if it were a matter of government oppressing the people, when in fact Matthew is at pains to tell us a different story in which "all Jerusalem with him" was involved, not just Herod by himself, "troubled" as they both were by the news from the wise men about a new king "of the Jews" coming to replace Herod, and upset their profitable applecart.

'"Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him." When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.' -- Matthew 2:2f.

This is but the beginning of Matthew's message that Jerusalem was unalterably opposed to Jesus. By the end of that story Jesus himself is saying, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!" -- Matthew 23:37

Indeed, when it comes to anti-Judaism in the gospels it is most singularly expressed by Matthew, in the account of Jesus' trial before Pilate where all the Jews become willingly complicit in Jesus' death:

'Pilate saith unto them, "What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ?" They all say unto him, "Let him be crucified." ... Then answered all the people, and said, "His blood be on us, and on our children."' -- Matthew 27: 22, 25

If Harold Meyerson is seen to be a tendentious hack intentionally misrepresenting Leviticus and Matthew, in the end he does turn out to be right about one thing:

'A sharp rise in the number of adherents to alternative realities in a world otherwise governed by empiricism is not without unhappy precedent in modern history. It has sundered nations and brought fascists — with their characteristic disdain for rationalism — to power.'

In our time they all seem to type for the Democrats at The Washington Post.

Merry Apocalyptic Christmas: The chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable

"there is a fire asbestos . . ."

"His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

-- Matthew 3:12

"His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

-- Luke 3:17

Reza Aslan still misunderstands Jesus, and multiculturalism means you end up not praying to anyone

Just like Reza Aslan's family, here.

"For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household."

-- Matthew 10:35f.