Saturday, 15 November 2014
When was Christ ever in Christmas?
The Origins of Christmas
The History of Christmas
I.
When was Jesus born?
A.
Popular myth puts his birth on December 25th
in the year 1 C.E.
B.
The New Testament gives no date or year for Jesus’
birth. The earliest gospel – St. Mark’s, written about 65 CE – begins with the
baptism of an adult Jesus. This suggests that the earliest Christians lacked
interest in or knowledge of Jesus’ birthdate.
C.
The year of Jesus birth was determined by Dionysius
Exiguus, a Scythian monk, “abbot of a Roman monastery. His calculation went as
follows:
a.
In the Roman, pre-Christian era, years were counted from
ab urbe condita (“the founding of the City” [Rome]). Thus 1 AUC
signifies the year Rome was founded, 5 AUC signifies the 5th year of
Rome’s reign, etc.
b. Dionysius received a tradition that the Roman emperor
Augustus reigned 43 years, and was followed by the emperor Tiberius.
c.
Luke 3:1,23 indicates that when Jesus turned 30 years
old, it was the 15th year of Tiberius reign.
d.
If Jesus was 30 years old in Tiberius’ reign, then he
lived 15 years under Augustus (placing Jesus birth in Augustus’ 28th
year of reign).
e.
Augustus took power in 727 AUC. Therefore, Dionysius put
Jesus birth in 754 AUC.
f.
However, Luke 1:5 places Jesus’ birth in the days of
Herod, and Herod died in 750 AUC – four years before the year in which
Dionysius places Jesus birth.
D.
Joseph A. Fitzmyer – Professor Emeritus of Biblical
Studies at the Catholic University of America, member of the Pontifical Biblical
Commission, and former president of the Catholic Biblical Association – writing
in the Catholic Church’s official commentary on the New Testament[1],
writes about the date of Jesus’ birth, “Though the year [of Jesus birth is not
reckoned with certainty, the birth did not occur in AD 1. The Christian era,
supposed to have its starting point in the year of Jesus birth, is based on a
miscalculation introduced ca. 533 by Dionysius Exiguus.”
E.
The DePascha Computus, an anonymous document
believed to have been written in North Africa around 243 CE, placed Jesus
birth on March 28. Clement, a bishop of Alexandria (d. ca. 215 CE), thought
Jesus was born on November 18. Based on historical records, Fitzmyer guesses
that Jesus birth occurred on September 11, 3 BCE.
II.
How Did Christmas Come to Be Celebrated on
December 25?
A. Roman pagans first introduced the holiday of Saturnalia,
a week long period of lawlessness celebrated between December 17-25. During
this period, Roman courts were closed, and Roman law dictated that no one could
be punished for damaging property or injuring people during the weeklong
celebration. The festival began when Roman authorities chose “an enemy of the
Roman people” to represent the “Lord of Misrule.” Each Roman community selected
a victim whom they forced to indulge in food and other physical pleasures
throughout the week. At the festival’s conclusion, December 25th,
Roman authorities believed they were destroying the forces of darkness by
brutally murdering this innocent man or woman.
B.
The ancient Greek writer poet and historian Lucian (in
his dialogue entitled Saturnalia) describes the festival’s observance in
his time. In addition to human sacrifice, he mentions these customs: widespread
intoxication; going from house to house while singing naked; rape and other
sexual license; and consuming human-shaped biscuits (still produced in some
English and most German bakeries during the Christmas season).
C.
In the 4th century CE, Christianity imported
the Saturnalia festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with it. Christian
leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by
promising them that they could continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as
Christians.[2]
D. The problem was that there was nothing intrinsically
Christian about Saturnalia. To remedy this, these Christian leaders named
Saturnalia’s concluding day, December 25th, to be Jesus’ birthday.
E.
Christians had little success, however, refining the
practices of Saturnalia. As Stephen Nissenbaum, professor history at the
University of Massachussetts, Amherst, writes, “In return for ensuring massive
observance of the anniversary of the Savior’s birth by assigning it to this
resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be
celebrated more or less the way it had always been.” The earliest Christmas
holidays were celebrated by drinking, sexual indulgence, singing naked in the
streets (a precursor of modern caroling), etc.
F.
The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston observed in
1687 that “the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25
did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the
Heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to
have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.”[3]
Because of its known pagan origin, Christmas was banned by the Puritans and its
observance was illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.[4]
However, Christmas was and still is celebrated by most Christians.
G. Some of the most depraved customs of the Saturnalia
carnival were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope
Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked
through the streets of the city. An eyewitness account reports, “Before they
were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for
them and at the same time more amusing for spectators. They ran… amid
Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon
a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.”[5]
H.
As part of the Saturnalia carnival throughout the 18th
and 19th centuries CE, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were
forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers
of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community of Rome
sent a petition in1836 to Pope Gregory XVI begging him to stop the annual
Saturnalia abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, “It is not opportune to
make any innovation.”[6]
On December 25, 1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into
Antisemitic frenzies that led to riots across the country. In Warsaw 12 Jews
were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped.
Two million rubles worth of property was destroyed.
III.
The Origins of Christmas Customs
A.
The Origin of Christmas Tree
Just as early Christians recruited Roman pagans by associating Christmas with
the Saturnalia, so too worshippers of the Asheira cult and its offshoots were
recruited by the Church sanctioning “Christmas Trees”.[7]
Pagans had long worshipped trees in the forest, or brought them into their homes
and decorated them, and this observance was adopted and painted with a Christian
veneer by the Church.
B.
The Origin of Mistletoe
Norse mythology recounts how the god Balder was killed using a mistletoe arrow
by his rival god Hoder while fighting for the female Nanna. Druid rituals use
mistletoe to poison their human sacrificial victim.[8]
The Christian custom of “kissing under the mistletoe” is a later synthesis of
the sexual license of Saturnalia with the Druidic sacrificial cult.[9]
C.
The Origin of Christmas Presents
In pre-Christian Rome, the emperors compelled their most despised
citizens to bring offerings and gifts during the Saturnalia (in December) and
Kalends (in January). Later, this ritual expanded to include gift-giving among
the general populace. The Catholic Church gave this custom a Christian flavor
by re-rooting it in the supposed gift-giving of Saint Nicholas (see below).[10]
D.
The Origin of Santa Claus
a.
Nicholas was born in Parara, Turkey in 270 CE and
later became Bishop of Myra. He died in 345 CE on December 6th. He
was only named a saint in the 19th century.
b.
Nicholas was among the most senior bishops who convened
the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and created the New Testament. The text they
produced portrayed Jews as “the children of the devil”[11]
who sentenced Jesus to death.
c.
In 1087, a group of sailors who idolized Nicholas moved
his bones from Turkey to a sanctuary in Bari, Italy. There Nicholas
supplanted a female boon-giving deity called The Grandmother, or Pasqua
Epiphania, who used to fill the children's stockings with her gifts. The
Grandmother was ousted from her shrine at Bari, which became the center of the
Nicholas cult. Members of this group gave each other gifts during a pageant
they conducted annually on the anniversary of Nicholas’ death, December 6.
d.
The Nicholas cult spread north until it was adopted by
German and Celtic pagans. These groups worshipped a pantheon led by Woden
–their chief god and the father of Thor, Balder, and Tiw. Woden had a long,
white beard and rode a horse through the heavens one evening each Autumn. When
Nicholas merged with Woden, he shed his Mediterranean appearance, grew a beard,
mounted a flying horse, rescheduled his flight for December, and donned heavy winter clothing.
e.
In a bid for pagan adherents in Northern Europe,
the Catholic Church adopted the Nicholas cult and taught that he did (and they
should) distribute gifts on December 25th instead of December 6th.
f.
In 1809, the novelist Washington Irving (most famous his
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle) wrote a satire of
Dutch culture entitled Knickerbocker History. The satire refers several
times to the white bearded, flying-horse riding Saint Nicholas using his Dutch
name, Santa Claus.
g.
Dr. Clement Moore, a professor at Union Seminary, read
Knickerbocker History, and in 1822 he published a poem based on the
character Santa Claus: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the
house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung
by the chimney with care, in the hope that Saint Nicholas soon would be there…”
Moore innovated by portraying a Santa with eight reindeer who descended
through chimneys.
h.
The Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast almost completed the
modern picture of Santa Claus. From 1862 through 1886, based on Moore’s
poem, Nast drew more than 2,200 cartoon images of Santa for Harper’s Weekly.
Before Nast, Saint Nicholas had been pictured as everything from a stern looking
bishop to a gnome-like figure in a frock. Nast also gave Santa a home at the
North Pole, his workshop filled with elves, and his list of the good and bad
children of the world. All Santa was missing was his red outfit.
i.
In 1931, the Coca Cola Corporation contracted the
Swedish commercial artist Haddon Sundblom to create a coke-drinking
Santa. Sundblom
modeled his Santa on his friend Lou Prentice, chosen for his cheerful,
chubby
face. The corporation insisted that Santa’s fur-trimmed suit be bright,
Coca
Cola red. And Santa was born – a blend of Christian crusader, pagan
god, and
commercial idol.
IV. The Christmas Challenge
·
Christmas has always been a holiday celebrated
carelessly. For millennia, pagans, Christians, and even Jews have been swept
away in the season’s festivities, and very few people ever pause to consider the
celebration’s intrinsic meaning, history, or origins.
· Christmas celebrates the birth of the Christian
god who came to rescue mankind from the “curse of the Torah.” It is a 24-hour
declaration that Judaism is no longer valid.
·
Christmas is a lie. There is no Christian church
with a tradition that Jesus was really born on December 25th.
·
December 25 is a day on which Jews have been
shamed, tortured, and murdered.
·
Many of the most popular Christmas customs –
including Christmas trees, mistletoe, Christmas presents, and Santa Claus – are
modern incarnations of the most depraved pagan rituals ever practiced on earth.
Many who are excitedly preparing
for their Christmas celebrations would prefer not knowing about the holiday’s
real significance. If they do know the history, they often object that their
celebration has nothing to do with the holiday’s monstrous history and meaning.
“We are just having fun.”
Imagine that between 1933-45, the Nazi regime celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday
– April 20 – as a holiday. Imagine that they named the day, “Hitlerday,” and
observed the day with feasting, drunkenness, gift-giving, and various pagan
practices. Imagine that on that day, Jews were historically subject to perverse
tortures and abuse, and that this continued for centuries.
Now, imagine that your great-great-great-grandchildren were about to celebrate
Hitlerday. April 20th arrived. They had long forgotten about
Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. They had never heard of gas chambers or death
marches. They had purchased champagne and caviar, and were about to begin the
party, when someone reminded them of the day’s real history and their ancestors’
agony. Imagine that they initially objected, “We aren’t celebrating the
Holocaust; we’re just having a little Hitlerday party.” If you could travel
forward in time and meet them; if you could say a few words to them, what would
you advise them to do on Hitlerday?
On December 25, 1941, Julius
Streicher, one of the most vicious of Hitler’s assistants, celebrated Christmas
by penning the following editorial in his rabidly Antisemitic newspaper, Der
Stuermer:
If one really wants to put an
end to the continued prospering of this curse from heaven that is the Jewish
blood, there is only one way to do it: to eradicate this people, this Satan’s
son, root and branch.
It was an appropriate thought for
the day. This Christmas, how will we celebrate?
Ps.
- John Bugge (1975) Early Christians,” notes The World Book Encyclopedia, “considered the celebration of anyone’s birth to be a pagan custom.” The ancient Greeks, for instance, believed that each person had a protective spirit that attended the person’s birth and thereafter watched over him. That spirit “had a mystic relation with the god on whose birthday the individual was born,” says the book The Lore of Birthdays. Birthdays also have a long-standing and an intimate link with astrology and the horoscope. 11 Besides rejecting birthday customs on account of pagan and spiritistic roots, God’s servants of old likely rejected them on principle as well. Why? These were humble, modest men and women who did not view their arrival in the world as so important that it should be celebrated. (Micah 6:8; Luke 9:48) Rather, they glorified Jehovah and thanked him for the precious gift of life.—Psalm 8:3, 4; 36:9; Revelation 4:11. Virginitas: an essay in the history of a medieval ideal, Springer ISBN 9024716950, p. 69
Friday, 14 November 2014
Materialists go aspirational on A.I yet again.
Yes, "We've Been Wrong About Robots Before," and We Still Are
Erik J. Larson November 12, 2014 5:55 AM
More hype on artificial intelligence, now from Bloomberg News ("Robot Brains Catch Humans in 25 Years, Then Speed Right On By") and promoted by Drudge:
This sort of thing aggravates me to no end. I've read most of Bostrom's book. "Superintelligence" and the supposed "dangers" it poses to humanity are about where the global-warming scare was circa 2005. It seems like every decade or so media and academia have to whip up some pseudo-scientific issue to terrify the unknowing public, while also promising them that a few elite thinkers using money-making "science" can figure out our path forward.
Nothing has happened with IBM's "supercomputer" Watson(pictured above) other than the probabilistic scoring of questions to answers using Big Data, with minimal actual natural language understanding. No surprise there: language understanding frustrates computation and has embarrassed AI since its inception. Outside of playing Jeopardy -- in an extremely circumscribed only-the-game-of-Jeopardy fashion -- the IBM system is completely, perfectly worthless.
It's worthlessness as a model of human intelligence is obvious from the fact that we clearly don't have a "play Jeopardy" program running inside us, but rather a general intelligence giving us a qualitatively different facility for general language understanding. IBM, by the way, has a penchant for upping their market cap by coming out with a supercomputer that can perform a carefully circumscribed task with superfast computing techniques. Take Deep Blue beating Kasparov at chess in 1997. Deep Blue, like Watson, is useless outside of the task it was designed for, and so it too told us nothing about human intelligence -- or, really, "intelligence" at all, in the sense of a scientific theory or an insight into general thinking
Self-driving cars are another source of confusion. Heralded as evidence of a coming human-like intelligence, they're actually made possible by brute-force data: full-scale replicas of street grids using massive volumes of location data. The roof-mounted laser (which costs $80,000 a unit, so don't expect self-driving cars on the market anytime soon) as well as onboard GPS and cameras fix the location of the vehicle on the "game" grid using the real-time GPS coordinates and images from the cameras. The car is then driven around in the physical world, and the navigation is improved by using (what else?) machine learning from data on prior runs until it can get around in the area Google has plotted for it.
Computers are fast and have large memory for Big Data. Got it. But, again, this has nothing to do with human-intelligence. The hallmark of human intelligence is general thinking about different tasks, not brute-force computation of circumscribed tasks. But even this observation gives too much away to superintelligence enthusiasts.
For many commonsense "tasks" remain black boxes to computation, using Google's Big Data or not. Interestingly, where brute computation and big data fail is in surprisingly routine situations that give humans no difficulty at all. Take this statement, originally from computer scientist Hector Levesque (it also appears in Nicholas Carr's 2014 book about the dangers of automation, The Glass Cage):
Watson would not perform well in answering this question, nor would Deep Blue. In fact there are no extant AI systems that have a shot at getting the right answer here, because it requires a tiny slice of knowledge about the actual world. Not "data" about word frequencies in languages or GPS coordinates or probability scoring of next-best chess moves or canned questions to canned answers in Jeopardy. It requires what AI researches call "world knowledge" or "common sense knowledge."
The problem of commonsense knowledge -- having actual, not "simulated" knowledge about the real world -- is a thorny issue that has relegated dreams of true, real AI to the stone ages so far.
When we look closely at real intelligence, things get even gloomier (or more embarrassing) for superintelligence enthusiasts, trumpeting endlessly these days about the coming rise of smart robots. It is, indeed, much like the way scientists, politicians, and celebrities reached a fever pitch about imminent global catastrophe from climate change a decade ago.
(Admittedly the analogy falls short in one respect. Superintelligence enthusiasts like Bostrom warn us about smart robots, while others such as Ray Kurzweil assure us about the coming Golden Age. Take your pick -- it's either the Apocalypse as robots outsmart and eliminate humans like pests, or we merge with them and create a new heaven on Earth.)
The commonsense knowledge problem, too, is letting superintelligence enthusiasts off easy, as the task of picking out relevant pieces of world knowledge is even trickier. Having real knowledge about the world and bringing it to bear on our everyday cognitive problems is the hallmark of human intelligence, but it's a mystery to AI scientists, and has been for decades.
The issue here is not one of degree, where the problem of general intelligence is slowly yielding to increased knowledge about machine intelligence, but rather one of kind. General human intelligence -- as opposed to automated techniques for circumscribed tasks -- is of a qualitatively different sort. There aren't any engineered systems that understand basic language, from Google or IBM or anyone else. The prospect isn't imminent either. There aren't even any good theories pointing in promising directions. It's simply one of life's mysteries, and perhaps a fundamental limitation of the underlying theory -- the theory of computation, the theory of Turing machines, that is. Depressingly, too, the current fad touting a coming superintelligence is in fact obscuring this mystery, rather than illuminating it as good science should.
Can an alligator run a steeplechase? As Levesque has pointed out, Big Data can't "crack" the answer here, because the syntactic terms "alligator" and "steeplechase" aren't likely to occur together anywhere else or with enough frequency to exploit shallow techniques.
Given that minds produce language, and that there are effectively infinite things we can say and talk about and do with language, our robots will seem very, very stupid about commonsense things for a very long time. Maybe forever.
File under "Really?"
From the Annals of Science: Chimp Cultures Are Less Complex than Human Cultures
Monday, 10 November 2014
It's so hard to find good help these days.
Uncooperative Fruit Flies Refuse to Speciate in Laboratory Experiments
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