Virginia Christians prepare for 40-day spouse swap sex strike against same-sex marriage

By Mike Victor

May 1, 2014

A Virginia-based evangelical Christian group known as the Family Foundation is planning for its members to pray and abstain from sex for 40 days and 40 nights later this year in an effort to fight same-sex marriage.

According to LGBT website FrontiersLA.com, The Family Foundation announced earlier this week that members will be refusing to have sex with each other or even themselves from Aug. 27 to Oct. 4 in support of the state’s Marriage Amendment, passed in 2006, which defined marriage in Virginia as a right reserved only for heterosexual couples. The Amendment was overturned earlier this year and goes before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on May 11.

A statement on the Family Foundation’s website said, “Our state and nation are mired in a morass of confusion and post-modern thinking that does not believe in absolutes nor [sic] that any truth can even be known. Nowhere is this more evident than in the current debate raging about what constitutes marriage.  Clearly, marriage involves a woman and a man and sometimes electric toys or special lubricant, but never two members of the same sex.  Pagan philosophies, a secular humanist education establishment and an entertainment industry that is absolutely determined in pushing the envelope on decency and morality have all combined to turn this great land into a country that our forefathers could not even begin to recognize.   When Thomas Jefferson was having hot sex with his teenage slave, that was decency and morality.  Now, if Sally Hemming had been Sam, that would have been wrong.”

The Family Foundation is outraged that the values of the founders are being trampled.  "The foundation of this country, its bedrock, its core principles can be summed up in two words:  vaginal sex.  It's what Jesus would have wanted. "

The group hopes to enlist as many fellow Christians as possible in the weeks-long sex-free vigil, but so far has enlisted only two couples pictured above who, to strengthen their resolve, have engaged in an elaborate, but decidedly platonic, wife-swapping scheme.  "Sure, there are those who think it's kind of weird, spending 40 nights in the bed of another man's wife, but I figured it was the least I could do for the spirit of the Lord.  It's not like I would look forward to having a new playmate or anything, or that after 20 years of marriage it wouldn't be nice to see Miss Chastity here come dripping out of the shower and have a little towel malfunction.  But I'm a Christian, see, and so I know adultery is wrong.  That's why I know that the only way I can guarantee that I won't have sex is if I share the bedroom with another woman who I just met at this rally. "

Her husband, pictured on the far left, appeared nervous.  "It sounded kind of crazy at first, but this gentleman makes a good point.  There are many who might not trust their spouse to spend 40 days and sharing a bed with a virtual stranger, but those people aren't Christian, I guess.  You gotta have faith, know what I mean?"

When asked if they were discouraged, Chastity shrugged.  "Oh, sure, when the Supreme Court hears the case, we expect it will be like David and Goliath.  Who were both men, by the way.  Who didn't have sex with each other.  They tried to kill each other and one did, but god's cool with that.  But a kiss, a hug, maybe more, no way.

"Anyway, the federal government, news media, Hollywood, the public education system, big business, biologists, health care professionals, marriage and family counselors, and even the Lord all are on the side of same-sex marriage.  But the church we formed supports what we think Jesus would have thought of homosexuality if he ever got around to saying anything about it one way or the other.  But we have faith that just because he didn't condemn it doesn't mean we can't."  

The group is asking other men and women to vow not to touch their private parts or anyone else's until and unless same sex couples are forced to have sex outside of the sanctity of marriage.   "Sure, it's been a hard sell.  To be honest with you, not a single person has agreed to go along with us.  Especially the wife-swapping part - that kind of weirds people out, but we're used to weirding people out, being evangelicals and all."
Her husband, who only gave his first name "Bubba", nodded vigorously.  "Our religion is based on trust.  If someone asks, Are you a virgin?  and she doesn't say anything, it kind of settles it that she must be, right?    So if at the end of 40 days and nights, I ask my wife if she was touched, kissed, caressed, fondled, or stimulated to the point of orgasm by this gentleman here, if she says no, I will take her word for it."

I don't believe in [the divinity of] Jesus but I do believe in Bono...

 In a very compelling, short video, Bono, the lead vocalist of U2 talks candidly about his spiritual and religious beliefs.  
I don't believe in Jesus, but I do believe in Bono, so I found the video compelling. However, Bono is a far more brilliant musician than he is a religious historian (or even demographer of contemporary religious affiliation because far fewer than half of the planet is Christian).
Bono, like so many today, misuses the word messiah. It means anointed ones (all Jewish kings were anointed ones) and more loosely messenger, but is not at all synonymous with divinity. When Jesus was asked who he was, he repeatedly described himself as "bar nasha" (son of man).
Bono argues that because so many people cannot be so wrong for so long, modern Christians must be right. This would only be true if the popularity of an idea makes it true, or if we have few or no examples of wildly popular ideas that were later shown to be wrong. We bled people for centuries to get the bad humors out and thought the Earth was flat and a few thousand years old, but that doesn't mean these ideas were correct. Billions believe in astrology but this does not make it true.
Also, this same reasoning could be applied to the billions of people who adhere to non-Christian faiths, some far older than Christianity. Since there are far more non-Christians than Christians, does this mean that they are right and Christians are wrong (modern Christians claim exclusivity so some hybrid reality is not admissible)?
Christianity reached Europe and Ireland not so much because of its compelling narrative but because it had become the exclusive religion of the Roman Empire shortly before it collapsed. All other competitive belief systems and their followers were systematically hunted down and killed or forced to convert. We simply don't know how many people in Europe, if free to do so, would not have renounced the faith of their fathers for this Mediterranean import because they were not free to do so. Throw in a public burning or two, torture a few dissenters to death, and you have yourself a totalitarian theocracy that held huge swathes of Europe in its grip until the Enlightenment.
At any rate, Bono is assuming, as many modern Christians do, that his conception of who Jesus was and what he represents has been accurately portrayed, faithfully transmitted and translated, and that he has had an opportunity to be exposed to alternate hypotheses and seriously consider them. Bono's faith was not something that occurred to him through divine revelation but was passed along to him as an accident of geography. Were his parents Hindu or Ireland a predominantly Muslim country, I might be impressed with his reaching out and finding Christianity spontaneously and by choice, but there is a certain inevitability to what he considers a miracle. Again, it could be true that people in Western and Northern Europe and their former colonies are correct and that billions of other human beings, most people on the planet, are incorrect, but then this argues that god is not universal and transcendental but regional.
Bono has a right, as do all of us, to imagine god or gods in our own way, to choose saints or intermediaries that personalize an otherwise unapproachable, distant deity, but my point is a simpler one: Jesus never said he was divine. None of those who knew him claimed that he was divine. Paul (who never met him) did not believe he was divine. Half of the first few centuries of Christians did not believe he was divine.
It's very possible, of course, that he was divine and simply failed to mention it, but this seems a rather glaring omission for what  modern Christians especially of the evangelical variety consider a core tenet of their faith.
And by the way, even if Jesus did claim divinity (he didn't), this does not mean that he was right. It doesn't mean he was lying or even delusional either. Many men throughout history, even great teachers (which I believe he was), have simply been wrong.

Is Atheism Irrational?

February 11, 2014
This is the #1 emailed New York Times article at the moment, essentially an interview with Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a former president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American Philosophical Association, who believes in god and tries to explain why he believes the 62% of his philosopher colleagues who are atheists are not only wrong, but irrational (believing something for which they lack evidence and reason).  It's clear that philosophy has gone downhill since the time of the Enlightenment when it peeled away from science (most Enlightenment philosophers were also heavily steeped in mathematics and science, something sorely lacking from those who study humanities today, for the most part).
Speaking of science, close to 100% of physicists - arguably those closest to studying the mind of god if there is one and grappling with eschatology - are atheists.
The modern American Christian theistic argument is quite specific, quite radical, and therefore quite easy to disprove. The good philosopher interviewed here does not seem to be aware of this, or perhaps is ignorant of the principles of probability and joint probability in general.
In general, the more specific a prediction the less likely it is to be true. For example, it is far more likely that Jane will be a librarian than that Jane will be a librarian working at a university library which itself is far less likely than the prediction that Jane will be a librarian working at a university library in New York City.
The broadest theistic argument is that there is some sort of god, or higher power, or original force that created the universe. Let's call this G.
This hypothesis is far more likely than the hypothesis that there is a god and only one god (monotheism). Monotheism is up to infinitely less likely than polytheism or agnostic polytheism (the belief in one god while not making any bet about the existence of other gods). Let's call this hypothesis MG for the two conditions M (mono) and G (god).
The joint probability that there is one and only one god is equal to the probability that there is at least one god times the probability that there is only one god. Both conditions must be true for this hypothesis to be correct. We don't know the probability that there is a god but we can work out roughly the odds that the god chosen by Christians is god by dividing by the numerator of all possible gods. Since this number is theoretically infinite, or close to it, let's instead divide by only the number of gods currently believed in by anyone on the planet. This again is a huge number, and there are doubtless many deities in isolated communities unstudied by anthropologists, but let's use the Hindu number of about 330 million gods since the others are rounding errors in this estimate. So, it is at least 330 million times more likely that there is more than one god than that there is one and only one god.
Again, the Christian theistic argument adds multiple additional conditions. This single god is male. Ignoring for a moment the possibility of androgynous or sexless gods, what is the probability that god has a penis? If we were created in the image of god and 50% of us have penises, then the probability god has one too is 50%. So the condition that god exists, is alone, and has a penis is half as likely as the probability that god exists and is alone which in turn is 330 million times less likely than that god exists and is not alone.
But there is more. The Christian theistic argument states that god has a name: Yahweh and was worshiped by a single people in a single place and time between several thousand to 2,000 years ago. The math can get very complicated here, but for simplicity's sake, let's use the world's relative Jewish population today as the probability that this people and only this people had a visit from god. According to the Pew Research forum as cited in the Economist in 2012, about 2 out of every 1,000 people on earth are Jewish.
So the probability of god being a single male Jewish god is equal to the probability that
   - he is a he (50%) x
  -  probability he is single (1 / 330 million) x
  -  probability he is Jewish (2/1,000).
Let's call this hypothesis YMG and it's probability works out to 1 in 660 billion.

But Christians don't stop there. They layer in more conditions to this already astronomically unlikely prediction. Their god has another name because their god Yahweh impregnated a Palestinian teenager named Mary and had a son who had both godlike and human properties. His name was Jesus, and he lived almost exactly 2,000 years ago, mostly in Palestine. This complicates things quite a bit. We have to ignore the probability of an angel impregnating a teenage girl, something that no one has witnessed before or since (in fact, we are very much left to a single biblical author translated from the Septuagint was by Christians to their advantage in the last decade of the 1st century during the Synod of Jamnia (Jabneh),in Palestine,changing the Hebrew word Aalma (young woman) to the Greek word parthenos (virgin) which changed chapter 7, verse 14 of Isaiah to

  Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel

Ignoring the probability of a chain of authors all copying and translating with true fidelity, or the probability that Isaiah would have agreed, had he been asked, that Jesus of Nazareth was what he was talking about all along, let's just get on with it, asking what the probability of any individual being a god would be, ignoring all the metaphysical leaps of faith and logic that would get us to an immanuel (literally "god in man").
About 200 million people were alive in Biblical times, so the probability that any one of them was a god would be 1 in 200 million. Multiplying this by 1 in 660 billion gives us the odds of god being a single Jewish male named Jesus of  
   1 in 132 thousand million billion or
   1 in 132,000,000,000,000,000,000
   1 in 1.32 x 1020.

There are other specific claims made by Christianity, but these are the main ones. Each additional condition's probability must be multiplied by the probability of the Jesus Hypothesis (JYMG), reducing it further.
So how likely is this?  Consider that the odds of winning a typical 6/49 lottery where 6 numbers are chosen from a range of 49 is 1 in 13,983,816. So you are roughly 10 trillion times as likely to win the lottery as you are to correctly bet on a single god named Jesus spawned from a male god named Yahweh (who in some sort of circular way was both father and son, but I digress). You may like those odds; I don't.
If you point out that   1 in 132,000,000,000,000,000,000 is not technically zero, so I still have not disproven that God exists, he is male, alone, and named Jesus, then consider this.  The next time you fly a plane, remember that the probability it will crash are about 1 in 11 million. So if you have rock solid certainty in the existence of a single male god named Jesus then you should be 8.3 trillion times as certain your plane will crash - please don't fly!
The modern Christian's insistence that we either prove the non-existence of god or embrace the existence of a male god named Jesus spawned from a Jewish god named Yahweh 2,000 years ago in Palestine through angelic insemination (as thought those are the only two options) is an absurdly high bar we apply to nothing else.
We take medications, fly planes, drive cars, cross bridges that have a far, far, far higher probability of killing us without making the ludicrously overconfident prediction that this particular flight or car trip will kill us. 
How did Mediterranean Monotheism become the default hypothesis? There may very well be some kind of overarching intelligence or force or spirit that moves the heavens in ways we can't understand, blah blah blah, but this does not mean this spirit has a penis, dresses in a toga, or takes sides in football games if called upon with just the right earnest verbal formula (best mixed with incense and candles).
 
"If You Don't Know There Are An Even Number of Stars... You Must Believe in Jesus"
OK, he didn't quite say it that way.   This is what Mr. Plantingea said:

No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

Where to begin...
We know stars exist.  We can see them, measure them, even determine their chemical makeup.  All people in all cultures of whatever faith or none at all have seen and can count them.
We know that there are far more than one star in the sky. With the naked eye, you can see about 2,000 from anywhere you stand, about 6,000 if you bothered to travel the planet and count them in all seasons and latitudes.
We also know that all things countable fall somewhere in the set of natural numbers {1,2,3,4...} and that there is a 50% probability of any natural number being even or odd.  
We know no such thing about gods. We cannot say with certainty that there is a set of gods {Yahweh, Jesus, Zeus, Poseidon, Mars, Athena, Diana, Thor, ...} and that the disproval of one ipso facto proves the other.
What we do know is that if god exists, no two human beings have ever agreed on what he looks like, whether she has feet, is really tall, can fly, gets jealous, marries humans, starts wars, or makes volcanoes erupt. 
The biggest predictor of how you envision your god is where you live. Gravity, light, and heat don't work that way. All cultures understand that you should avoid cliffs, lightning, and fire because these are not abstract constructs unseen by any mortal.

Take It Away, Al
I close with the words of perhaps one of the smartest atheists who ever lived:

I don't try to imagine a personal god; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it... 

I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly... The idea of a personal god is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.."

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.
For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

- Albert Einstein

Was Abraham psychotic when he heard a voice telling him to murder his son?

Interesting article in today's New York Times ("The Politics of the Binding of Isaac" by Omri Boehm) but written from the point of view of someone who takes seriously this story, what is popularly but incorrectly believed to be the only instance of god-mandated infanticide in the Bible, but sadly is one of many. Isaac was spared after being traumatized by a false execution. Others such as Jephthah's daughter (murdered after her father promised god he would kill the first person who greeted him on his return if he could just crush the dastardly Ammonites (Judges 11:3-39) and Jesus (killed according to Christians willingly in accordance with the plan of an all-knowing, all-powerful god who some early Christians and most modern Christians believe is god himself, hence the infanticide) were not as lucky.
At any rate, as Richard Dawkins points out, the absurdity and gratuitous cruelty of the story should not distract us from its profound immorality: what sort of a god would ask a man to murder his own son just to see if he really would go through with it? He is god; doesn't he know everything, including the obedience and submissiveness of Abraham? And is this god good? Worthy of worship?
Of course, the biblical authors were writing these stories more along the lines of Aesop's fables - we need not believe in talking grasshoppers and ants to infer moral lessons about work and sloth anymore than we need to believe literally in Abraham wanting to kill his son to infer a moral lesson about absolute, blind obedience (a defense summarized at Nuremburg as "Befehl is Befehl!" (an order's an order!). But if there is a shred of truth to this god-whispering business, as a psychiatrist I can attest that I have treated hundreds if not thousands of Abrahams, absolutely convincing in their charismatic insistence that the voice of god told them to do such-and-such (gouge out their eye, kill their neighbor, move all their possessions to the basement where they should eagerly await the return of Jesus), but it's amazing how these hallucinations and delusions resolve with the right medication, therapy, reality-testing, and tincture of time. In other words, there is no reason to believe that Abraham was not psychotic or manic at the time he reported his auditory hallucinations and luckily had corrective visual and auditory hallucinations (something not all of those suffering psychosis experience unfortunately). The burden of proof is on those who claim otherwise, especially since messianic, grandiose, religious-themed delusions and hallucinations are among the most common (the part of our brain in charge of religious belief seems to become especially active during psychosis or mania).
I don't envy those who feel compelled to force this rambling collection of stories, some overtly psychotic, others simply wrong, many plainly immoral, to make sense or give us something meaningful to learn. My question is why one would even try. A child (especially a child) could tell you that murdering your child is wrong. Every culture has a taboo against such behavior and we are hard-wired to fight like hell, sacrificing our own lives if necessary, to protect our offspring, carriers of our selfish genes into the next generation and beyond. We don't need an Aesop's fable to tell us this, nor should we even consider murdering our own children if a voice told us to (we should get help immediately).

Was GOP Senator Ted Cruz Heckled by Jesus?

Republican Party

Was GOP Senator Ted Cruz Heckled by Jesus?

By Mike Victor Oct. 11, 2013   33 Comments    

Sen. Ted Cruz R-Texas pauses while heckled by a man identified only as JC while speaking at the Values Voter Summit, held by the Family Research Council Action, Friday, Oct. 11, 2013.

A Friday morning summit of religious conservatives in Washington took a bizarre twist when a tall, bearded, Palestinian man dressed in a white robe and a yamaka, later identified only by his initials "JC" with which he used to sign into the event, repeatedly stood and heckled Sen.Ted Cruz (R-Texas) as the Senator tried to deliver red-meat lines to the right wing faithful about the horribleness of the Affordable Care Act (which he repeatedly referred to as "Oblamacare").   When Cruz called Obamacare a “disaster” and a “trainwreck” that violates the Constitution, JC stood and said in what others described as a clear, calm, commanding voice:

Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.

Some of those in attendance immediately recognized the line as Matthew 5:25 and felt the heckler was part of the presentation, advocating the delivery of their "adversary" (President Obama) to the "judge" so actually applauded.  

Not sure how to respond himself, Cruz laughed, nervously, muttered "that's right - I think" then continued his diatribe against the president and healthcare reform.  He said he agreed with radio talk show host Mark Levin who called the law a “direct assault on religious liberties” as well as a massive expenditure which would threaten the wealth of those in the room, to which JC rose and said,

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.

His last words were drowned out by chants of "USA! USA! USA!" and when security approached the heckler he was able to still them by simply raising a finger.

Cruz engaged the heckler, as he had dozens of others.  "Buddy, I appreciate your memorization of some random biblical passages.  That's especially impressive if you work for President Obama who we all know owns only a Quran."

The stranger said over raucous laughter:  

   

Bear not false witness even against thine enemy.

To which the audience booed loudly and the security again tried to lay hands on him.  

”Is anybody left at the Organizing for America headquarters?” Cruz jokingly asked.  "You do a very good Jesus impersonation, but you came to the wrong convention.  We are here to talk about Christian values:  shrinking government by cutting off unnecessary, wasteful nutrition assistance to poor mothers and children, sealing our borders so illegals can't use our schools and hospitals, and making sure tough sentencing mandates keep our prisons full and our streets safe."

To which the stranger replied:

Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.  I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink.  I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.  Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.

At this point security managed to grab the man's garments and pull him from the room, more for his protection than to stop his heckling.  The crowd was turning ugly, especially the Southern Baptists who had been acting strangely disinhibited after the sparkling water they had ordered for the event had earlier been turned into some sort of alcoholic beverage, a sweet wine that no vendors were able to identify.

Civil rights and LGBT rights groups who had bashed the conference for being “anti-gay” witnessed JC offering no resistance as he was pulled from the room.  When one of the group started to shout "FASCISTS!  FASCISTS!  FASCISTS!" JC silenced them by raising his hand and saying:

           Forgive them for they know not what they do.

Security released the stranger after he promised not to re-enter the hall.  However, several minutes after Cruz continued, his talk was interrupted again by sounds from the lobby:  shouts and the sound of glass shattering and something heavy hitting the ground.   Witnesses later said that the stranger had at first kept his promise to remain calm, talking quietly among the protesters, but then grew furious when he saw a table full of books by Pat Robertson entitled Pray and Grow Rich with an image of a Nordic-looking Jesus on the cover.   He overturned the table and many others, saying they were defiling this place.

When the owner of a stand selling pamphlets on how to survive the End Times pulled a concealed handgun, JC calmed visibly, put his hand on the man and - with the gun pressed against his chest - said,

Put up again thy gun into its place: for all they that take the gun shall perish with the gun.  

"He was so calm," the vendor said.  "It almost hypnotic.  I mean, he touched me and all my rage just sort of disappeared.   I put the gun away and started cleaning up my stuff.  Then I felt silly and just threw it all away.  I don't know if I will come to these things again.  It's just getting too weird for me."  

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who was crossing the lobby in time to see the stranger turning over the tables, shouted out at him to stop.   When the stranger disappeared - literally according to several witnesses - Paul swept his hands over the scattered DVDs and books comparing Obama's Dreams of My Father to Hitler's Mein Kampf and said this just showed you how far the left would go on its “war on Christianity.  Some people just really want to get attention, I guess," he said, stepping past a dozen posters of President Obama with a Hitler moustache now sprawled over the lobby floor.  "It's getting harder and harder to be a true Christian these days."  

Although most of the attendees were convinced that JC was some liberal imposter, a few were not so sure.  "I think it might have been Jesus," said a conference attendee who asked not to be identified.  "Stranger things have happened.  Bleeding paintings.  Clouds.  Grilled cheese sandwiches.  It's not how I imagined the guy, but who knows?"

Cruz was not available for an interview, leaving immediately after his speech to make sure the government stayed shut down. 

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Jesus shared at most 1 in 67 million genes to 1 in 1.1 trillion genes with David

The Lineage of Joseph (and by extension, Jesus)

              The first 16 versus (1.5%) of Matthew addressed the lineage of Jesus, or more specifically of Joseph.  It is quite clear that the authors of this text are responding to an argument, namely that Jesus of Nazareth was not the Messiah predicted by earlier Jewish prophets. Although it seems somewhat awkward to a modern reader, it was important enough for them to devote, in painstaking detail, the first 1.5% of their text to this point, one that seems to be of questionable significance, since elsewhere in the text we are told that Joseph was not the father of Jesus, that his teenage wife was made pregnant by an angel.  If Jesus has no DNA from Joseph, it seems unclear as to why Joseph's lineage should matter.  David lived nearly a thousand years before Joseph, so it is likely that many Jews alive at the time would have descended from him anyway. 

              This is the first problem with Matthew.  The lineage is moot, but it is also contradicted by the other Gospel that addresses Joseph's lineage in pain-staking detail.   Matthew described 26 generations between Jesus; Luke describes 40.  Assuming 25 years per generation, this implies an error of 350 years!   More disturbingly, for those who would like to take these logical accounts literally, is that not a single name on the David-Joseph lineage of Matthew overlaps with the David-Joseph lineage of Luke.   Clearly, they cannot both be right in the way we use the word right today. 

    Another problem with this lineage is that even if Joseph were Jesus's biological father, with 26 generations, Jesus would only have a relatedness of 0.00000149% to David.   

Relatedness is an interesting concept that quantifies the probability of a given gene in one person being shared by another.  Our relatedness to our parents is ½, meaning that there is a 50% probability of a given gene in our parents being in us.  Put another way, half of either parent's genes, on average, are in us.  Our relatedness to our siblings is also ½, by the way.   At each generation, our relatedness is halved, so that our grandchildren will have a relatedness of ⅛ to us, and our great grandchildren 1/16 relatedness.  Given the number of generations n that separate two people in a direct line of descent, our relatedness is 1 divided by 2 to the power of n.  In only a few generations, our relatedness to a given ancestor quickly approaches that of our relatedness to anyone else in the human gene pool.  If you are interested in more detail including an excellent excerpt from Richard Dawkin's classic The Selfish Gene, click here.

Biblical authors knew nothing about this, of course, and had the strange idea (shared by many primitive cultures) that all of a male's attributes (or right to rule) were inherited from his father's father's father's father... (with the mother a nameless breeding vehicle).  Doubtless they never would have spent so much time and energy creating these completely non-overlapping genealogies in such detail if they knew that in the end - even if true - the proportion of Jesus's genes that would be shared with David would only be 1 in 67,108,864.  Put another way, the probability that a gene of David made it through to Jesus would be less than one in 67 million.   

    Luke's 40 generation genealogy is even worse, of course:  Jesus would share only one gene in 1,099,511,627,776 with David, or 1 in 1.1 trillion.  Obviously, since we are all quite literally each other's cousins and quite a bit of interbreeding and outright incest occurs in our species, the background relatedness of any two strangers is much greater than 1 in a trillion, but the point is that by 40 generations, whatever genetic impact David would have on Jesus (or Joseph, to be more specific) would be no greater than that of anyone else on the planet.  I am as related to David as Jesus was, as are all of us.

Jesus and the 47%

And he gathered his disciples together and said, "I say unto you - well 47% of you anyway - that you have grown dependent on a handout. Verily, I say unto you, as you treat the least of these (except for the free-loading 47% - you know who you are) so do you do unto me. And those among you who are outcast, downtrodden, without taxable income - you are now uninterested in caring for yourself. And those who have much will have more as long they create jobs which they do not need to do until a Republican is president. And if you are struck on the cheek by an enemy, turn the other cheek, unless that enemy is a member of the 47%. Oh, wicked 47%ers, what profit you if you win a free meal but lose your potential for corporate personhood?

Jesus - at least the Jesus who comes to us through the oral tradition that was later written down, edited, rewritten in parts (there is no other Jesus) - was obviously speaking like someone who felt, as he put it, that the Kingdom of Heaven was nigh. His movement was essentially an apocalyptic one, predicting an end of the world as they knew it before some of his followers had tasted death, as he put it, meaning in their life times. Therefore, if your time horizon is contracted, your priorities change. You behave differently if you believe the ship is about to sink than if it will reach the port safely (and your kids' college bills are there waiting to be paid). Give everything away and get ready was essentially his message. Live as the birds in the field live, he said in Matthew, who do not (according to belief at that time anyway) gather food for the future but have faith they can find sufficient food each day. One of the essential difficulties with Christianity is that this short-term model is not viable long-term economically if taken literally, so a balance must be found, not just in my humble opinion, but in that of most of those who have identified themselves as Christians in the centuries that past after all his followers tasted death but the world was very much its old bloody, labor-demanding, investment-rewarding self.
Mitt Romney's solution to this problem seems essentially ignore it, pretending Jesus never said these things, or if he did, that he was just kidding. Hoard, invest, don't be bothered helping the poor who are, he tells us in a moment of candor, simply looking for a hand-out and will only be enabled by your helping them.
But Jesus did say these things and most of what he said had to do with such a radical view of wealth redistribution and personal material wealth (eschew it in favor of spiritual wealth) that he would never have been invited on Fox and Friends had it existed, Glenn Beck would have warned his listeners (viewers?) not to listen to his message, and O'Reilly would have devoted an entire season to bashing the War on Wealth launched by this long-haired hippie-looking Jewish teacher spreading a subversive message of class warfare.

It's amazing that certain people continue to get paid to say such stupid things:

 

Monsieur Robertson, Jesus, if he could be said to have any party affiliation, was a socialist. Religious conservatives are hostile to socialism (and have a soft spot for fascism and militarism) only because of a quirk of recent history. Marx and Engels were indifferent to religion (calling it the opiate of the masses was not a bad thing in an age in which some tincture of opium was in every active medicine) and the communists in Russia, then later China, showed overt hostility, feeling - with some justification - that religion seemed more interested in self-preservation than in progress. But this is a silly, recent quirk; Jesus and Amos and a whole host of Jewish prophets would never have been invited on Fox and Friends for the left-leaning tendencies.

Ascension: FAQ

Ascension

I received the following email from the US Mission in Geneva:

Did You Know?

In Switzerland, Ascension is celebrated on a Thursday, 40 days after Easter Sunday, though in other Roman Catholic areas, it may be celebrated the following Sunday. It commemorates the ascension of the resurrected Jesus into heaven and is a traditional feast day. Ascension is a public holiday in Switzerland and France; the U.S. Mission and many stores will be closed on Thursday, May 17.

Enjoy your Current Geneva Talks!

Thanks,

Community Liaison Office (CLO)

Although I appreciate a holiday as much as anyone, as an American I am always uncomfortable with having the state granting overtly religious holidays by law to all workers regardless of faith (the only religious holiday in the United States is Christmas).  So it got me thinking - what is this Ascension business and how did it come about?

What is Ascension?

It is the day 40 days following the death of Jesus that "Christ was raised up by his own powers" bodily into Heaven.  When I asked what he was doing the 40 days prior, I got a shrug or a sympathetic tongue clucking from my more religiously-oriented friends.
The Encyclopedia Britannica describes it thus:  

In Christian belief, the ascent of Jesus Christ into heaven on the 40th day after his Resurrection (Easter being reckoned as the first day). According to the first chapter of The Acts of the Apostles, after appearing to the Apostles on various occasions during a period of 40 days, Jesus was taken up in their presence and was then hidden from them by a cloud, a frequent biblical image signifying the presence of God. Although belief in the Ascension is apparent in other books of the New Testament, the emphasis and the imagery differ. In The Gospel According to John, the glorification described by the Ascension story seems to have taken place immediately after the Resurrection. The imagery of the account in The Gospel According to Luke is similar to that of Acts, but there is no mention of a period of 40 days.

The meaning of the Ascension for Christians is derived from their belief in the glorification and exaltation of Jesus following his death and Resurrection, as well as from the theme of his return to the Father. Thus, The Gospel According to John uses both the sayings of Jesus and his post-Resurrection appearances to indicate a new relationship between Jesus and his Father and between him and his followers, rather than a simple physical relocation from earth to heaven.

… Christ “was lifted up into heaven so that he might make us partakers of his Godhead.”

If Ascension is so important, it must be mentioned in multiple places in the Bible, right?

Not really.  Acts, which was believed to be written by Luke in 70-90 of the Common Era, is the main source of this feast and its dating.  (John describes the ascension as occurring as part of the resurrection).   Acts is a rather odd work in a strange collection of works, but it raises more questions than it answers for a modern skeptic.  To wit,
    Acts 2:31 implies that Jesus was in hell.  

2:31 He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.

Whatever for?  He was supposedly a perfect human being and according to Christians (but not, notably, by Jesus himself) the only son of Yahweh.  Why would a father allow his son not just to be tortured to death for a crime he didn't commit, but then do nothing post-mortem while he was in hell?  And how can the resurrection which occurred the Sunday following a Friday execution be so glorious if after all, Jesus did not actually rise into heaven for another 40 days (the Christians actually don't count the days post-mortem, only the days since Easter)?  This all seems rather dragged out and anticlimactic and frankly a little weird.  What did he do all this time except appear to some of his disciples, showing them his wounds to prove it was him, then going away again?  To where exactly?   
At any rate, he was raised up:

2:32 This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses.

But the details are skimpy.  There were only 120 believers (according to Acts) until they started talking about this ascension business, and it got the crowd so worked up, they all agreed to become baptized, not in the name of Yahweh as Jesus and John the Baptizer did, but in the name now of Jesus.  This shot up their numbers by 2,500% in a day.  Being "amazed" or witness to something that could not be explained by people at the time (a burning bush comes to mind) seemed tantamount to proving that everything else you allege must be true, which is an interesting premise that any visitor to a Las Vegas magic show might understand but would have to deny. 
They went around doing magic, Peter did a little faith-healing (3:2-3:8).   Acts goes on to make some of the more virulent antisemitic charges, alleging that Pontius Pilate was determined to release Jesus (3:13) but "ye" meaning apparently the Jews "killed the Prince of Life" (3:15).   It rambles on in this way, alleging that the "prophet" whom god will make rise up among their people should be blindly obeyed or else "every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people." 
Again, Christians take the selected words and predictions of Jewish prophets and leaders who died centuries before Jesus was born and use those words - almost always so general as to be useless in terms of making concrete predictions or settling arguments that were sure to arise among later generations, often with lethal effects - to "prove" that Jesus was the messiah (messenger) predicted by Moses et al.  The only problem (for historians, not for the propagators of this new faith) is that by the time these claims were made, Moses and all the others were long dead.  Using Moses as an example, several possibilities exist: 

  - Moses as such never existed but was a mythical character, a mixture of legend, and a mix of actual Jewish leaders, so there was no actual Moses to say anything of the sort; 
  - Moses existed but was misquoted; 
  - Moses existed and was accurately quoted but was not talking about Jesus (the stance taken by the vast majority of Jews);
  - Moses existed, was somehow able to conjure up the figure of Jesus in his crystal ball, but was simply wrong.  There are plenty of well-meaning, convincing people who are wrong about predictions made for what will happen tomorrow; why should this be any less true for someone making predictions that will occur many centuries hence? 

 
The tone of Acts like that of much of the New Testament is a strange blend of apocalyptic despair tinged with hope of personal salvation if one repents and turns away from the "wicked generation" that did not properly follow Yahweh's mitzvahs.  It is no coincidence perhaps that the Republicans - who have mixed their interpretation of Christianity more nakedly and overtly with the political process - learned from this stunningly successful marketing combination:  first make them afraid, convince them of some external threat, then offer them confidently a recipe for avoiding personal annihilation or worse.   People when frightened will agree with plans they would consider absurd if they were not. 
At any rate it's quite clear that the world did not end 2,000 years ago and if a Kingdom of Heaven was ushered in by this new offshoot of Judaism, it would seem hard to convince any student of the Crusades, vicious religious wars that tore Europe apart, witch hunts, pogroms, and the Holocaust, all of which trace their roots to the idea that god took human form and came once to a particular place and time, wasn't recognized, was killed, but somehow even in being murdered was suffering so that those who recognized him (even post-mortem) would not have to suffer after they died.  

What are some commonly confused Christian holidays?

I don't know if they are commonly confused, but I certainly find the following 3 events that all begin in A and end in -tion or -sion to be confusing.   The Assumption is only celebrated by Catholics and disputed by Protestants and Eastern Orthodox:

Annunciation

in Christianity, the announcement by the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive a Son of the Holy Spirit to be called Jesus (Luke 1:26–38); falls on March 25; the New Year was dated on this date until 1750.

Ascension  

in Christian belief, the ascent of Jesus Christ into heaven on the 40th day after his Resurrection (Easter being reckoned as the first day).

Assumption

Roman Catholic doctrine that Mary was assumed into heaven upon her death; there is

  no mention of this in the New Testament; the Assumption is

  not considered a revealed truth so is disputed by Protestants and Eastern Orthodox (the latter less so)

How did this occur?

In the West, starting around the 5th century according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Christ is shown from the side, climbing a hill, then grabbing the hand of god reaching down from a cloud to pull him up.  The apostles watch from below.
In Syria in the 6th century, they imagined it differently, showing Jesus from the front, holding a scroll and making a blessing gesture while he is lifted by angels.  They add Mary (who was not mentioned in the biblical account of this event) as well as Paul, who had never met Jesus and did not have his vision on the way to Damascus that made him flip from Christian persecutor to Christian salesman-in-chief.  
This particular depiction followed the "Roman tradition of representing the apotheosis of an emperor."  
By the 11th century, the Western artists started to imagine the event with a frontal Jesus, extending his hands to display his wounds.  Angels might or might not be present, indicating a third means of propulsion:  Jesus's own power.  
Many Renaissance and Baroque art focused on the ascension with lots of gory (and generally anatomically inaccurate) wounds.  

When was it developed?

There is no written evidence of the celebration until 4 centuries after Jesus was executed, but Augustine wrote of it in such a way that implied it went back to the early days of the Church.  It may have been celebrated in combination with Easter.  
At one point, its practice was banned; the Council of Elvira in 300 condemned the practice of feasting on the 40th day following Easter (if one neglected to keep Pentecost on the 50th day).  
Ascensio is the Latin term at the root of ascension, meaning rising.  
At any rate, there is evidence that this conception was borrowed, as were many Christian traditions, from popular pagan traditions and beliefs.  As Richard Dawkins puts it:

Matthew and Luke [are the] only two evangelists who treat the birth of Jesus at all.  Robert Gillooly shows how all the essential features of the Jesus legend, including the Star in the East, the Virgin birth, the veneration of the baby by kings, the miracles, the execution, the resurrection of the Ascension are borrowed -- every last one of them -- from other religions already in existence in the Mediterranean and near East region. ... Luke's desire to adapt Christianity for the Gentiles, and hence to press the familiar hot buttons of pagan Hellenistic religions (virgin birth, worshiped by kings, etc.)...

When is it celebrated?

Western Christianity:  
April 30-June 3 based on how Easter is calculated.  
Catholics in countries that don't observe the feast as a public holiday were given permission by the Pope to move the feast from Thursday to the following Sunday, to allow working Catholics to remain in compliance with Vatican decrees.
This switch occurred in 1992 in Australia, before 1996 in many parts of Europe, 1996 in Ireland, and before 1998 in Canada and some western United States and in England and Wales in 2007.

Eastern Christianity:
May 13- June 17 (in the Western calendar) based on how it is calculated.
They call it in Greek Analepsis, the "taking up", and also as the Episozomene, the "salvation from on high."
Since the Eastern Orthodox Church calculates Easter differently, they will usually celebrate it later than the Western church.
This is the time for the blessing of beans and grapes.

How is it celebrated?

Feasts and vigils mostly.  There might be a parade.  
The Easter Candle is extinguished.
The English used to carry a banner with a lion and a dragon, symbolizing the triumph of Jesus over "the evil one."  
Some churches had a dramatic reenactment where they would hoist a figure of Jesus above the altar and through a hole in the roof of the church.  Others added to this by having a devil guy go down at the same time.
England used to like to "beat the bounds" meaning, having parish members walk the parish boundaries, marking stones with chalk and then hitting them with sticks.  
At one time, they might have hit the young boys of the parish rather than stones.   The reason for this was that parishes had legal responsibility only for children born within the parish boundaries, and the beating was thought to be a warning to the young men of the parish to have sex with girls and women outside the parish if they were going to have sex out of wedlock, so the parish would not have the financial liability.  
In Florence a dove would slide down a string from the high altar to set off a vat of fireworks in front of the main entrance of the cathedral.  


Sources:
-  Acts, Skeptics Annotated Bible.
-  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_the_Ascension
- "Ascension." Encyclopædia Britannica. Deluxe Edition.  Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2008.
- Dawkins, Richard, God Delusion, Bantam Books, 2006.