Christmas kitties

Here are the results of my appeal yesterday for holiday-themed cat photos. I’ll still accept photos today, but will be checking the Web only sporadically. We have about 20 entries, which is few compared to previous years; more evidence that this site is moribund.

From Divy:

I couldn’t find the photo of Jango under the Christmas tree, but here is one of him wearing a Santa Claus suit. The suit is obviously not made for a cat, but for a little dog. He did not like it

From Chadwick Jones:

This is Bert—the kiddo named him after Albert Einstein.

From Terry:

An easy spot the cat for the Christmas cats collection.

From Bruce:

Good morning Jerry – per your request, here is a somewhat Christmas-y photo of three of our cats –  DSH Daisy, along with Burmese Rommel and Mothra.  When we built this mantle, my wife envisioned all sorts of decorations on it.  Thirteen years and many cats later, this is what we’re reduced to.

From Robert:

This is Oliver in 2018. He died of kidney failure a year later.

A bit more about Oliver:

I maybe should have added a little more about Oliver. The attached is from the local no-kill shelter, telling the story of how Oliver got to them, and from there how he became mine. He was a really sweet kitty, except that he terrorized my other cat, Lucy. He was constantly finding places from which he could wait to ambush her when she walked by, which understandably ended up making her kind of paranoid. I was very sad when he died, but Lucy was delighted to be my one and only again.

Our sweet and shy Violet is watching the door, guarding the gifts and listening for the sound of the can opener.

Her staff,

Robin Branch, Boca Raton FL

From Naama Pat-El:

This is Maryam, a Christmas gift from my husband. She joins three other cats and three human kittens, none of whom was a Christmas gift.

From Don Macdougall:

Ten year old Molly has her own Christmas tree that she is allowed to terrorize.

From Claudia Baker:

Here is my contribution to your request for Christmas Cats. His name is Bodie, my gorgeous beige tabby. He lived with me for 18 years, and sadly, I lost him last year on Dec. 15th.x

He was the best boy – always sweet with all people.  Gentle and loving. However, he intensely disliked dogs!

He had taken over my kindling basket as his favourite place to nap.
I tried putting an elf hat on him for a Christmas picture, but he would have none of it, and preferred to snuggle and sleep on it in “his” basket instead.

From Maya Markova in Bulgaria:

I am sending a photo of our cat researching the Christmas tree. She is 2 years old, named Pippy. She is seeing a true Christmas tree for the first time, because she used to be an office cat before we adopted her last spring.

From Stephen Caldwell:

Here is a picture of my two cats, Pepper and Picasso, under our Christmas tree.

From Leo Glenn:

This is Arty. He showed up at our house in the fall of 2019, at death’s door. He was emaciated and had severe upper respiratory issues. I had serious doubts about his chances. We thought he was a kitten because he was so small, but the vet said he was between 5-7 years old. It took months to nurse him back to some semblance of health. Unfortunately, he still has many serious health issues, including severe asthma and FVR, but he’s a tough little guy. He recently had some booster shots, which sent him into another downward spiral. He had a bad 24 hours, but he’s doing better now. This is his fifth Christmas with us now. We’re hoping for many more.

From Debra Coplan:

This is Peaches Claus looking merry and bright in her Ms. Claus hat.
(She actually tolerated the hat for about 3 seconds. Bah humbug was more like it.)

She was rescued as an older cat about 3 years ago after her owner died. We love her dearly!  Jerry helped named her. [JAC: I forgot this]

From Katherine Rennegarbe:

Rascal was stuck in a tree for 18 hours. We got him down by rigging a laundry basket with ropes and hoisting it up. Rascal then jumped in and was lowered to the ground. He rewarded his rescuers by biting their Christmas presents.

From Keith Cook:

Izzy, the now=deceased cat of our daughter. 

We (Izzy & I) had an interesting relationship, she has a lovely burial
site in a small hobby orchard overlooking our small harbourside bay.

From Beth and Ron Mrtinez:

This is our cat Lulu who we found sneezing and very sick in our parking lot right before the holidays. We have nursed her back to health and she is very convinced this is a cat tree that we keep putting toys on. She’s successfully knocked down all but a few ornaments near the top but is currently working hard to reach those!

From Joseph Shen:

Please accept this slightly blurry photo of Scooter for your upcoming post. He never sits still when there are treats, but sometimes I get lucky. If you need a caption, I would suggest “Scooter begrudgingly accepts a photo-op with a pie in exchange for BONKERS”. Happy holidays, and I hope you continue to enjoy sharing your insights with us readers through your website.

From Roz:

Please find two holiday pix of my Devon Rex kitties, Mendel (born March 04, 2023) and the Yodapink (born September 20, 2023), both posing in front of festively red projector lights. While I tried to be Christmassy, the lighting does strike me as perhaps more like Festivus from Seinfeld, a nod to the show’s anti-holiday. But we tried.

You can clearly see the impact of their mutations in a keratin gene, right? Their fur is truncated and wavy. In addition, they are dilute, which means they’d be orange without the dilute mutation. Or so I gather from Basepaws, which gave me Mendel’s genetics. Still waiting for the Yodapink’s to come back. They are half brothers. I love my “apricot” babies.

From Sebastian:

I might be too late, but here is a picture of my cat Hadès (French spelling of Hades) which I took in 2015 to print as Christmas cards.  Unfortunately he’s no longer around – he was overweight and loved food, and when we put him on a diet he started staying away from home longer and longer until we didn’t see him again.

From Sue Wearn: Murphy, all tricked out with a Christmas bow and jingle bells:

Murphy is the neighbor’s cat and he visits regularly. He’s maybe 4. We’ve had our own cats for years, but are on a cat-share for now. Murphy got a new Temptations treat dispenser for Christmas!

From Jake:

Here is Jimmy, our tuxedo cat, about to take down his prey.  (Moments later he did, some ornaments did not survive, but his cuteness got him out of trouble):

From Merilee:

Carmen Dingle supervising the Xmas table setting.

From Peter Lindsay:

Here he is – or was; my most esteemed bengal Taz, napping in a holiday wreath. He moved on to the great letterbox in the sky several years ago, The wreath is placed on the table every year hoping for his return. Nothing yet, but the experiment will continue to run.

From Susan Harrison:

Boris and Natasha are too mellow to climb the tree or break ornaments, but will always hop up on the couch when promised treats…

From Reese:

This is Tibby, my granddaughter’s other cat besides the demon cat Woodford. When Tibby was adopted from the shelter she was the only kitten left in the kitty pen, perhaps because of her bad eye. Now she is eight years old. She has always been shy, and gets along with Eddie the d*g, but does not like Woodford

Last one from Steven Eakman:

Sorry, I suspect this is too late, but fwiw here is Nigel in his Christmas house:

Note, The contest is now CLOSED.  Save your pics for next year (if we’re still here). Thanks to all the participants for sending in their photos!

“Nutcracker” drones set two Guinness world records

Here’s something to get you in the mood while you leave milk and cookies for Santa (no wonder he’s so fat!).  This video, showing a Christmas-themed drone show, was posted only five days ago, but has already accumulated 3.4 million views.

The YouTube notes:

This Christmas season, Sky Elements attempted two GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS™ titles with ur 1,500 drone Nutcracker Christmas show. Will it be enough to set the new records for Largest Aerial Image and Largest Fictional Character (Nutcracker)? All while telling the story of the famous Nutcracker ballet? This record-breaking Christmas drone show is one you don’t want to miss. The show features a beautiful Christmas tree and lights, as well as the famous battle between the Nutcracker and the Rat King. Finally, there is an appearance from the lovely Sugar Plum Fairy, and the jolly Santa Claus.

Fireworks are now obsolete when you can do something like this.

Send in your Christmas Cat photos

If you have a picture of your cat with a Christmas or holiday theme, send it to me with a few words about the cat (including its name), and, if I get a decent number I’ll post them either tomorrow or on Boxing Day.  If you don’t know where to send photos, go here.

One photo per reader, and please try to get it to me today.

Thanks, and happy holidays!

Happy New Year. . .

Now I know why cops and army are all over Jerusalem.  First, there was a bomb explosion in a Tel Aviv Park, and later Israeli security caught three Palestinians planning a serious bomb attack, but thwarted them (they could have been responsible for the first explosion). The terrorists love to attack during Jewish holidays.

More:

Hostile forces were gathering at the Gaza Strip’s border with Israel, as violent riots were anticipated later on Friday, with Palestinian terror groups releasing images of several improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

Palestinian reports indicated that incendiary balloons were being launched, for the first time in two years, and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were firing crowd dispersal shots.

Gaza and the West Bank have been closed (except for humanitarian exceptions) over the three-day holiday, and every synagogue in Jerusalem is to have an armd guard.

Shana tova! (That’s the traditional Rosh Hashanah greeting. Ten to one there will be at least one terror attack when I’m asleep tonight.

It’s one thing to read about it in the U.S., but another to see the climate of fear and defense pervading this country. All because of a holiday!

Maher on Halloween costumes

Reader Divy sent me this nine-minute clip from Bill Maher’s latest “Real Time” show. The YouTube notes say this:

Halloween is supposed to be outrageous, yet every year there’s a new list of offensive things we shouldn’t do.

Maher takes on the “offensive costume lists” that proliferate at this time of year, including Jeffrey Dahmer costumes, Queen Elizabeth costumes, Elvis costumes (he was accused of pedophilia), no Handmaid’s Tale costumes (too timely), no zombie costumes of dead celebrities, no hobos (homeless people), no cross-dressing as the other sex, no Putin costumes, no Trump costumes, no costumes related to covid or vaccines. There goes all the fun!

At the end, Maher puts on his own choice of costume: the “uber-Woke, overly anxious, perpetually offended twenty-something” outfit.  It’s a good one, but watch for yourself.

Here’s one of the lists that Maher mocks, from BuzzFeed (click to see which costumes are verboten):

Here’s one you shouldn’t wear. WHY NOT?

And another. Why can’t you be a cop? Because, of course, ACAB!

Black Cat Appreciation Day

As I announced yesterday, today is Black Cat Appreciation Day. Readers were invited to send in photos of their black cats, and here they are, complete with captions (indented).  Note that in 2015 I had a similar request to celebrate Halloween, and got 72 photos, which you can see here.

From Keira: her late beloved cat Plushie:

Here is her as felis aqua binlidis – she loved sitting in the upturned lids of the water bins. Plushie was such a rare cat; I still miss her terribly.

From Reese:

Woodford Reserve White (his litter was named after bourbons) assists with the NYT Spelling Bee.

From Mark Kautzmann:

For Black Cat Appreciation Day, here’s this:

Noodles never did understand that the printer on my computer does not make a copy of her.

From Laurie and Gethyn:

The sisters: Alcestis Jerry (named for her noted uncle JAC) and Octavia Sadie.

From James:

This is Mia, a Bombay rescue I’ve had for just over a year. She’s a bundle of energy and wants to play all the time, much to my discomfiture.  I even have to remind her to eat.

“What’s that smell?”

From Beth:

Hillary Rotten Kitten (DemoCAT) thinks of herself as the dark load. (She’s all black but sports lighter fur for a while after a shave.)

From Reese:

Woodford (black cat): Has an affectionate relationship with an 80 lb. d*g.

From Erik, an unnamed rescue cat (Erik calls it “Porch Panther”). Erik sent several photos, but I’ll post only one.

The background. I guess this is my black cat now, as he is now living on my porch and his previous people– not owners, as he is rather feral– left him when they moved. I understand why, as taking a feral cat from the northeast down to Florida is probably not best for the cat, but I ended up being his caretaker as no other arrangement was made.He really is a handsome boy, though he also has a persistent upper respiratory infection, so he has constant sneezing and discharge.

He has become comfortable enough to lay on the chair near me. His sense of betrayal only lasted a day or so after the vet.

In the cool grass in back, where you can see the one white spot he has:

From Irene:

Here is a picture of my black cat, Londo.

My husband was actually on his way to feed our friend’s dogs when he nearly hit Londo as Londo was crossing the road. He picked up Londo, who fit in the palm of my hand, and brought him home. His eyes were covered in goo, which was conjunctivitis. We believed he was probably abandoned either by his mom or another human and accepted we might have a blind cat joining our family. We took Londo to the vet, who cleaned his eyes and gave us some eye drops. The vet estimated he was six to eight weeks old. He’s now four years old. Londo joined our house, which already had one black cat, a flame-point Siamese and a blue-point Siamese. Londo loves to play fetch and follows me everywhere around the house. If we cook bacon, he always steals a slice to eat for himself. He will only sit on my husband’s lap and hates blankets. We suspect this is because I had him wrapped in a blanket to hold him while we gave him his eye drops.

Andrée sends us a photo of the late Zorro:

He’s no longer with us but led an exciting life: mouser (there is a mouse in the thatch), Vermont tree panther, and philosopher.

From Nama:

Attached is a pic of Alice the majestic.

From Jacques:

Well, here is Domino, who doesn’t answer his name, but does along with either “Monsieur chat” or, more frequently “Couillon” (because he was deprived of this important part of his anatomy in his early youth). 17 years old, but still in good shape. I do not know why, where and how he lost his upper right canine. iPhone photo taken by my daughter.

From Susannah:

We love black cats.  This is Mason; he is 7 years old and joined our family 5 years ago.  He is a character and loves playing with the boys, stealing legos and puzzle pieces.  And he also likes to give himself NSFW baths while Jake is on a zoom meeting.

From JC in Taos, New Mexico:

Per your request,  an image of Pilgrim, our beefiest moggy. While not uniformly black, he was a representative of the shelter’s “Black Cat Discount” program in 2010, arriving at our house the day before Thanksgiving in this white-trimmed garb,  hence his name. We had no idea he’d get so large and obstreperous.

Hope the white trim doesn’t disqualify him.

From Don:

Sheba, petite and playful, was a fine cat, shy of strangers but always content with her long life indoors, even in rural Vermont.  She was a shoulder cat, preferring to recline draped across a shoulder rather than to be cradled or curled in a lap.

Happy Black Cat Day!  (Also, as it happens, my birthday).

From Stephen:

She is called Moonlight. I know it doesn’t make sense, but my daughter Charlotte liked the name, associated with a white cat in a children’s story.

From Alister:

Our much loved black boy, Toby, age 4yo.  He’s awesome, strolls around like a total dude. A miniture black panther.

From Ursula we have black cat Boris. I allowed two photos because we have him as a kitten and an adult:

From David:

Jasper.  He used to live in Toronto, but has now retired to Nova Scotia.

From a reader who posts as “Quadrival”:

This is my cat George, reclining in his usual elegant posture.

From Tanya:

The attached photo is of our beloved little black kitty, Fledermaus, which means ‘bat’ in German. He was named by our 12-year-old daughter, who takes German in school, and appreciated his resemblance to the caricature of the flying mammal. Fledermaus is a delightfully playful and curious boy, unhampered by his knobby, kinked tail (present at adoption). He’s known for jumping at moving objects on the TV, climbing our window screens, and leaving us dead rodent gifts when he has the chance.

From Elizabeth:

This is Samantha. Photo is from 1998. It’s the only one I have.

From Stephen:

Here is a photo of my black cat Pepper.

From Bruce:

Per your request, here’s a photo, taken in 2020, of three Burmese cats.  Left to right – the late Java Cat (she left us about six months after this was taken), Rommel, and Mothra.

From Jeffrey:

Here’s my favorite animal in the world, Binx!

From Jeremy:

 In honor of black cat appreciation day, I have included pictures of our two black cats, Bella and Baloo. Baloo is sitting in a halloween candy bowl, while Bella is lying nervously on the couch.

From Ruth:

In response to your request for black cat photos, please meet Lizzie. She came to us on Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee ten years ago, so she is named after her. Like all black cats she is also, of course, immensely regal in her own right. She lives in Glossop in the Peak District in England, with her two humans, her brother Pip (named for the late Prince Philip), and three other female cats. She is a lovely softie to us but is an Old Meanie to the other girls, and sulks for exactly nine months when a new cat is introduced to the household.

From reader James in the UK:

This is our cat Hixxy (and his brother Dougal). He is a rescue cat and we appreciate him very much.

A few weeks ago, out of the blue, he started having seizures. Turns out he has a very large brain tumour on the right side of his brain. So large, it is apparently squeezing his brain down and out of his neck. He’s been in surgery today and just an hour ago we heard from the surgeon saying she was very pleased about how the surgery went, as she managed to get the whole tumour out and there was no bleeding at all. We’re now waiting for him to come around. Fingers crossed he pulls through. Relatedly, medical science and its practitioners are fuxxing awesome.

Good luck, Hixxy!

From Lance:

Here is C.K. Dexter Haven (Dexter), our current, lone rescue kitty who has taken charge of the house. Did you know it’s tough to get a good picture of a black cat?

From Heather:

Here is Shadow. She loves her heated bed even in the summer.

From Mike:

Bugsy is a feral cat who adopted our dog (she ate his food and slept with him). She eats bugs and this influenced her name. She likes to pet people by rubbing your legs. Her favorite holiday is Halloween and she greets Trick or Tweeters indiscriminately.

From Paul:

This is Apollo.   He is a 7 year-old rescue cat who is very friendly and gets along great with our greyhound.

From Rachel:

Thank you for the reminder/extension, Professor Ceiling Cat! I’m attaching a photo of my Lloyd. This is from Halloween a couple of years ago. Lloyd is 15, but still spry. He loves treats, snuggles, and interrupting Zoom meetings.

From Erin:

This is Friday. He was adopted on the day after Thanksgiving and is a bundle of mischief, as you can see here.

From Greg:

This is Chester settling in for his first nap of the day right after breakfast #1.

From Charles:

The black cat (Spot) and his brother, the dark tabby (Timmy), with the polydactyl newcomer (Paws).

From Douglas:

Jasper, the black cat.

From Merilee:

Freddy accompanied by a tiny bit of pooch tush

From biologist John Losos, a photo of his sister’s black cat, Allie:

From Rik:

This is my Mom’s cat Bella, and she lives in St. Germain, Wisconsin. She must be seven or eight years old by now and she’s always been a mellow little cat. I’m looking forward to visiting her. next week!

From Mike:

Ma’ii is not really black, he has a small white spot on his shoulder and random white hairs elsewhere. He has lost those three white whiskers since this picture was taken. He and his fellow terrorist rule the house of course.

From Peter:

Can a tuxedo cat be an honorary honoree on Black Cat Appreciation Day? This is dear, departed Augustus (Gus to his friends) (1999-2017), who was my loyal companion and best friend, and who has been seen on these pages.

From “J”:

Her name is Pumpkin, and she is among her fellow pumpkins.  She enjoys eating, sleeping, playing, and waking me up at the buttcrack of dawn.

From Joe:

Here is my granddaughter’s black cat, inexplicably named “Ginger”.  Her favorite toys are plastic soda straws.

From Suzanna:

This is my son’s cat, Lance. Adopted as a kitten from a shelter, now about 3 years old but still likes to hang out in places he used to fit as a kitten!

From Janis:

OTHELLO:  Nearly 12 years old now…and 24 lbs of affectionate laziness.  He’s part-Siamese and smart as a whip.  He’s our best cat. (Shhhhhh….don’t tell the others I said that!)

From Lou:

My cat is Martin Brisby (from the “Secret Of NIMH”), his friend is Ricky, who he pays no attention to. Happy Black Cat Day!

From Stephanie, we have Lulu:

I have a cat who is mostly black.  Don’t know if she counts but she does to me!

From Patrick:

This has a messy background, but it’s still one of my favorite pictures of Kiki, who crossed the rainbow bridge last year at the age of 19.

From Kira:

Cat Gitel and her henchdog in Chaos Corridor

From John:

The photo is of “Babs”. She is my daughter’s cat. This photo shows off the typical deep yellow eyes of black cats, which is due to the excess of melanin pigment, which also accounts for the blackness of their fur. I’m sure there is some interesting genetics here, but I just haven’t looked it up.

From Sebastian:

Hope it’s not too late to send in my Perseus. I’ve included a couple different shots to choose from.

I chose one in which Perseus was wearing cat earmuffs.

From Jon:

This is my Lucy, pensive. She very nearly almost entirely black!

From Linda:

The first picture of Billy and Jose is as young adults, and the second is from shortly after we got them, at about ten weeks old.

From Arantxa:

I attach one photo of my dearest black cat named TIZÓN.

From Rico:

This is Clark. He’s 9 yrs old and the youngest of three cats here at home.

From Ginger:

Attached are some photos of my late, beloved twin girls Lucy and Daphne. They were littermates. I rescued them from death row at my local pound in 2002 along with a tuxedo long-hair, Timmy. I hope you can use a few pics.

Daphne died on August 31, 2017, at age 15, probably from thyroid disease. She was a tiny, shy, sneaky little girl, but very sweet and affectionate with a very loud, deep purr. She liked to sit in her carrier.

Lucy died on May 4, 2019, from lymphoma at age 17. A chonker, Lucy was the sweetest, gentlest, most affectionate kitteh EVAH! She was a people kitteh who loved belly rubs and sitting on laps. For some reason, she liked to sit on my bad and face the wall.

Sometimes I had difficulty telling the girls apart. They were very close sisters and spent a lot of time together. I miss them very much.

Little Daphne:

Little Lucy:

And the last submission, from Ricky:

This is Butters from Portland, OR.  She just turned 11 and is extremely vocal. She is an indoor cat but loves to hang out in the backyard most of the day when the weather’s nice.

The deadline for submission has passed. Thanks to all the readers who submitted their Midnight Moggies, and here’s a final tweet from Matthew:

'Hector' Linocut by UK contemporary artist and printmaker Vanessa Lubach #WomensArt #BlackCatAppreciationDay pic.twitter.com/StEOpMaJSW

— #WOMENSART (@womensart1) August 17, 2022

Tish Harrison Warren thinks it’s critically important that Jesus DID rise bodily from the dead

And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

—1 Corinthians 15:14 (King James version)

The quote above is one I use in Faith Versus Fact to help demonstrate that truth does matter to many believers—that factual claims of religion are often vitally important to sustaining the faith. If it were all just a made-up story, or a long metaphor, people wouldn’t be nearly as religious.  And this holds for many faiths. If John Frum didn’t exist, and his followers knew it, there wouldn’t be cargo cults.

This point is demonstrated by Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren’s new Easter column in the NYT. In fact, she takes the exact opposite stand of Tim DeRoche described in my previous post. DeRoche argued that there’s no compelling evidence that Jesus was resurrected, but it didn’t matter anyway. In contrast, as you can tell from Warren’s title, it’s crucial for Christians to believe that Jesus was bodily resurrected. Such are the conundrums in a world where science is increasingly putting the lie to religious claims.

Click to read:

Warren uses two poems to argue for the importance of Jesus’s bodily resurrection: Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” The first argues that the Resurrection really happened; the second that its truth transforms the world, offering the possibility of redemption.  And Hopkins tells us why the first is so vital for Harrison: for if Christ be not risen, then is Harrison’s preaching vain, and her faith is also vain. That is, the resurrection has to be true because if it isn’t, Harrison is wasting her life, as are the many Christians, who like her (and unlike DeRoche) depend on the literality of the Crucifixion/Resurrection tale.

Now I’m not being completely fair to Warren. She has one other reason why she thinks the Resurrection happened:

I believe, in part, because I doubt my doubts and I doubt my doubt about my doubts. I can keep going. Round and round, round and round.

But at the end of the day, there’s this unflinching claim to reality: an empty tomb, as Updike says, a stone rolled back, “not papier-mâché, not a stone in a story.” And I, like every person who encounters this claim, have to decide if Jesus’ earliest followers died for something they knew to be a lie.

The first sentence is pilpul: you don’t believe something because you doubt it and then don’t doubt it and go back and forth. That proves nothing.

But what about the second argument? After all, people wouldn’t die for something if it wasn’t true, would they? But of course Jesus’s followers could have died even if he hadn’t been Resurrected. They could have died simply because he was a charismatic leader with a message they fervently believed in. After all, Jim Jones, who was not resurrected, persuaded over 900 people to die in Jonestown.  Further, what about all those Christians who died and never saw the Resurrection, or all those Muslims or Hindus or Jews who died without believing in a Resurrection? To say that if people die for a belief then that belief must be true is the height of self-deception. And that’s all the evidence that Harrison has.

Here Harrison is accepting one of the many bogus arguments apologists make for the truth of the Resurrection story (another is that it was reported by women, and people wouldn’t believe women back then if they weren’t speaking the truth). Here’s evidence that a main reason for her self-forced belief is because it offers her what she wants:

Jesus promises a future when everything is made new. But the only real evidence that that is any more than wishful thinking is rooted in history, as solid as a stone rolled away. The Resurrection happening in truth, in real time, is the only evidence that that love in fact outlasts the grave, that what is broken can be mended, and that death and pain do not have the final word.

Not everything will be redeemed in our lifetime but, even now, we see newness breaking in, we see glimpses of the healing to come. We believe that, because “He is risen indeed,” we can know God and our lives can participate in the life of God, that our own biographies and mundane days collide with eternity.

If Jesus defeated death one morning in Jerusalem, then suddenly every revitalization, every new birth, every repaired relationship, every ascent from despair, every joy after grief, every recovery from addiction, every coral reef regeneration, every achievement of justice, every rediscovery of beauty, every miracle, every found hope becomes a sign of what Jesus did in history and of a promised future where all things will be made new.

I don’t see any “glimpses of the healing to come”. Do you?

In other words, If Christ be not risen, then is her preaching vain, and her faith is also vain. To make a syllogism again (I’m not good at that!), because Harrison knows that her preaching and faith are not in vain, yet they would be in vain if Christ hadn’t risen, then he must have risen.  This is what’s known as confirmation bias.

Of course the Passover story is equally bogus, and I’ll criticize that, too—when the NYT starts presenting it as if it were fact.

Peter Nothnagle’s take on the Nativity

Occasionally reader Peter Nothnagle has contributed skeptical commentaries on Christianity to this site, for example here, here, and here. And, on the day that Jesus supposedly made his exeunt from Mary, Peter has written me once again. I’m delighted to present his take on the Nativity.

First, his email:

I was writing to one of my prison pen-pals this morning. He had somewhat sarcastically suggested that the gifts of the Three Wise Men were impractical — for a young family with a newborn and living in a stable, diapers and baby formula would have been more welcome than frankincense and myrrh. In my reply I explained that the gifts, and indeed the whole Nativity story, was symbolic — because that’s the sort of correspondence we carry on.

Then I was compelled by the laws of physics to write that up a bit more formally, and I pass it on to you because you have enjoyed some of my other essays.

Without further ado:

On the Nativity

Peter Nothnagle, December 24, 2021

Here’s what you need to know about the birth of Jesus, celebrated, for various reasons, on December 25 of the modern calendar.

The capital-N Nativity is described in two of the four canonical gospels – written down perhaps a century or more after the events they describe. All other documentation and commentary is based on these two accounts. It’s noteworthy that the earliest gospel, the one attributed to Mark, doesn’t suggest there was anything at all remarkable about Jesus’ birth; and the still earlier (i.e., closer to any historical events) letters of the apostle Paul don’t even say that Jesus was “born” in the first place – the verb he uses translates to “made” or “manufactured” – it’s the same one he used to describe the creation of Adam. I am convinced, as faithful WEIT readers may recall, that the first Christians had never even heard of a human Jesus on earth, but worshiped him as a celestial archangel.

But every children’s Christmas pageant, every “living nativity scene” staged on a church lawn, every Christmas card illustration of the birth of Jesus, mashes together the contradictory birth narratives in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. In Luke, Joseph and his heavily pregnant fiancée Mary have traveled to Joseph’s ancestral home of Bethlehem to participate in an empire-wide census (which history does not record), only to find no lodging, and took shelter in a cattle shed where Mary gave birth, and choirs of angels announced it to shepherds. No wise men. But the gospel of Matthew, which was probably written earlier than Luke, has a completely different account – Joseph and Mary are married and are residents of Bethlehem, and Jesus was apparently born without fanfare in the family home, and, much later, “wise men from the east” showed up to bestow gifts of gold, incense, and myrrh. No shepherds nor angels. Their gifts are symbolic, as is the whole story – put into the story to foreshadow the rest of the arc of Jesus’ life: gold is an appropriate gift for a king; incense is a gift for a god; and myrrh is a scented ointment applied to a dead body.

These birth narratives are not historical accounts, they’re prologues to a myth – and they were intended to be read that way (by any literate person in the early 2nd century) and not simply to be believed as literally true. They weren’t even part of the first draft of the gospels! Open your Bibles to Matthew, chapter 13, verses 53-55 and you’ll see that when Jesus went back in his home town and taught in the synagogue, the locals were astonished by his wisdom, basically saying, isn’t this the village carpenter’s son? How does he know all this stuff? But what they don’t say is, isn’t this is the kid who was visited by Magi bearing royal gifts, the one the soldiers were hunting for that time they killed all the male children? What this shows us is that whoever wrote chapter 13 hadn’t read chapters 1 and 2! I think that’s because the entire birth narrative was a later addition – note that chapter 3 reads like it was originally the beginning of the gospel.

The Nativity stories in the gospels aren’t straightforward historical accounts – they’re much more interesting than that! They make for a really funny scene in The Life of Brian, though.

I’m not trying to spoil anyone’s holiday fun – I’m really not. It’s just that I like to get to the bottom of historical puzzles, and I find that the truth of any historical event is actually more interesting, and indeed, more useful, than any (commercially-inspired) traditional notions about it. I hope and trust that all readers will enjoy the seasonal holiday to the fullest and celebrate in whatever manner they wish!