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Fascism is back

Christianity appropriated a number of existing beliefs and re-painted them as “Christian”. If you accept that the backstory of travelling to Bethlehem for a census count, then Jesus was most likely born in Summer or Autumn, not Winter. But, as the Winter solstice was already a time of celebration for the “pagan” Romans, Saturnalia was re-branded as the celebration of Jesus’s birth.

So those Nativity-scene Christmas cards with snow on the stable roof are inaccurate, but not for the reason you’d think: A former colleague who used to live there informs me that Bethlehem does actually get snow, but only in Winter.
 
KrisW said:
Christianity appropriated a number of existing beliefs and re-painted them as “Christian”. If you accept that the backstory of travelling to Bethlehem for a census count, then Jesus was most likely born in Summer or Autumn, not Winter. But, as the Winter solstice was already a time of celebration for the “pagan” Romans, Saturnalia was re-branded as the celebration of Jesus’s birth.

So those Nativity-scene Christmas cards with snow on the stable roof are inaccurate, but not for the reason you’d think: A former colleague who used to live there informs me that Bethlehem does actually get snow, but only in Winter.
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Bethlehem does get some snow, but not every winter and usually just a sprinkle that lasts a few hours. I wonder if the snow stuff did not originate in northern Europe; in the traditional "Cribs" with the cow and the donkey used in Italy I don't remember seeing any snow. On the other hand some say that the climate was cooler and wetter 2,000 years ago.
For me the benchmark of Biblical reality is Charleton Heston.
 
AmadeusMozart said:
I grew up in the Netherlands - the northern part is protestant, the southern is catholic. I worked in the Phillipines, devout catholic, same as Middle and South America. I cannot help it but whenever the catholic church encountered a different thinker then they got put on the rack or quartered. The end result was a lot of catholics are not able to think for themselves and eventually you see that the catholic parts of the world turning appear to be the poorest lot.

Much the same is happening in certain factions of the Muslim world - unable to think for themselves and jealous of those who have got something more than them through sheer hard work. And with video calling the great difference between the have's and have nots has become very noticeable.
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On the other hand, many officially Catholic parts of Germany like Bavaria and Baden-W. seem to be doing better these days than some of the more Protestant bits, but some of these differences can be explained by historical (ex DDR) or geographical factors.
 
PaulMB said:
Bethlehem does get some snow, but not every winter and usually just a sprinkle that lasts a few hours. I wonder if the snow stuff did not originate in northern Europe; in the traditional "Cribs" with the cow and the donkey used in Italy I don't remember seeing any snow. On the other hand some say that the climate was cooler and wetter 2,000 years ago.
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I've been there in February, and I can assure it wasn't just a light sprinkling: the scenery was white and it was bitterly cold for several days. Seen the same around 'Amman and in the more mountainous bits of Sinai. Jerusalem is actually quite high up (700m) and it does get pretty cold in winter. But the historic evidence is that if somebody like Jesus did exist, he was born in summer, so all those cute Christmas card scenes must be bogus.
 
Surah Maryam, the chapter in the Quran entirely about Mary, has a totally different story.
No Bethlehem or cave
 
So, a thread about fascism gets to talking about Christianity instead. That’s some serious heavyweight thread drift right there.
 
Enfield boy said:
Wasn't Pius XII a Nazi sympathiser?
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Yes and no. He was the Vatican's ambassador to Germany before the war and before he became pope, and was an admirer of German culture, and one can hardly blame him. He also feared Communism more than Nazism. So far, so good. What he is mainly accused of is not having spoken out against the deportation and extermination of Europe's Jews, of which he cannot have been unaware.
But he did not like Nazism in itself, since it was a kind of pagan religion in conflict with Christianity.
That's in a nutshell.
 
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