The #ChristmasMyths #7: Why December 25?

Part of a continuing series looking at the pagan origins of the Christmas Myths,¹ one day at a time. Today, the reason we celebrate on December 25 …

As every child knows, Christmas falls on December 25th every year. Every year.

But is it because it says so in the Bible? Hell no!

The early Christian churches who did observe the Nativity² celebrated it sometimes in May, sometimes in April, occasionally in January. So clearly they had no clue when legend had it their Saviour was born.

Nor did they know even which year he was supposed to have been born, the celebrated census causing the one-off visit to Bethlehem being a fabrication of census found nowhere else in the historical literature. So not a great way to start a calendar then.

The authors of both Matthew and Luke suggest these events happened in the days of Herod, the King of Judea.³  But this Herod died in 4BC. The authors of Luke talk too about a census “made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria” (one unknown both to historians like Tacitus and Josephus, and apparently to the authors of Matthew), just to have their boy born in the City of David. But while they get him to Bethlehem in order to please their Jewish readers, they face the problem that according to Josephus, the only historian to mention anything like this, Cyrenius didn’t become governor until either 6 or 10AD.

Quite a problem.⁴

Put beside that larger problem, the problem of the month, or day, seems almost minor. But you do have to wonder what sheep and shepherds were doing out in the fields at night in midwinter where snow occasionally “blankets the region.”

Now, despite the fact that not one of them had any clue, there is in fact a very good reason that fifth-century church fathers eventually settled on a date of December 25 to celebrate when their divine boy was born, and it wasn’t because of anything they’d put in their book.⁵ It was because folk had been out in the streets for thousands of years already on December 25 celebrating the birth of many other divine boys all born the same day.

And so, rather than fighting the ages-old tradition, the church fathers of what was now a state religion enforced by military arms figured with the full might of the Roman Empire behind them they could simply usurp the heathens⁶ by main force. Usurp them by adopting their rituals, banning their heresies, burning their books--and trying to bury the memory that they had ever existed.

Which is a nasty enough story, but it still doesn’t explain why December 25 was such a crowded calendar for divine birthdays.  To a modern ear it might sound strange, but the simple explanation is that this day in December was the best day to celebrate one of the most important moments of every year: the winter solstice.

That’s why virtually every early culture in and out of Christendom celebrated it, from China to India, from Buddhist temples to Celtic dolmens, sometimes adding the legends of divine birth to allow their divinity to absorb the power of the moment.

It’s easy to forget this, living as we do in the two-hundred years out of all human history in which the industrial revolution has made it possible for billions to complain about #FirstWorldProblems, but in a pre-industrial society the annual harvest was everything—it was literally life or death.

And in pre-scientific stone-age societies, where all these myths and their rituals were born, it’s easy to forget the cause of the returning harvest was utterly unknown.

It was the result, surmised most cultures, of battles between competing gods; between gods of light (“I am the light of the world,” said Attis, Mithra, Uncle Tom Krishna and all) who every year beat back the darkness, to start the cycle of birth and rebirth again.

Since even the cause of the returning seasons was wholly unknown, making of every new solstice a divine miracle brought by Saturn, Sol Invictus or whichever Saviour figure your worshipped, little wonder that the turning of the winter solstice was a time to get happy and praise your gods – to celebrate that  your gods were beating back the darkness for another year (and remember, most people in these early times wouldn’t see but very few years in their lives, life expectancy being what it wasn’t).

Author Joseph Campbell, (Hero with a Thousand Faces and the Power of Myth) described it brilliantly when he wrote through ritual we are seeking to “feel the rapture of being alive. Rituals and ceremonies help us find the clues to this within ourselves.” Through rituals, he says, we celebrate our passage out of the darkness.  This solstice celebration is perhaps the ultimate example.

And while December 25 isn’t the winter solstice, it was the first day in the Northern Hemisphere that the day began getting noticeably longer. So, time to celebrate with all the rituals at your another victory against the forces of darkness, in the hope they will bring it in again next year.

That we still celebrate this victory today, along with all the trees and the stockings, the Santas and sleighs and mistletoe, and all the hugs and smiles and eating and drinking, and all the revelry and other Pagan trappings of being whole and being alive to celebrate another year with loved ones suggests the whole mythic celebration still has resonance today, even down here in the Southern Hemisphere summer, and even though it’s changed its form a little since the days of ancient Horus.

Just like all good myths should. That’s how they stay alive, even when buried.

So I wish you a Merry Christmas.

A Cool Yule-Feast.

A delightful Noel.

A wonderful Nolagh.

A corking Capacrayme.

A Great Triple Night.

A very happy Natalus Solis Invicti.

And a Salacious Saturnalia.

I’ll see you all in the New Year.

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth
• #2: The Star of Bethlehem
• #3:  The Song of the Heavenly Host
• #4: The Birthplace and Surroundings of the Little Baby Jesus
• #5: So, What’s With All That Frankincense?
• #6: The Slaughter of the Innocents

1. This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, and Joseph Campbell’s Occidental Mythology and  Thou Art That.
2. Until the Romans made Christianity compulsory in 391AD, at which time they decided on a collection of books for their Bible and banned and burned all the rest, early Christian church rituals would often be based around the regular reading and re-reading of one particular Gospel. So the Nativity would only have been celebrated by those who read either Matthew or Luke (since the unknown authors of neither Mark nor John had added this syncretic gloss to theirs).
3. Yet again, the authors of both the earlier Mark, on which these two are based, and the later John show no interest in the subject.
4. Just to further confound things, Josephus expressly states taht as long as Herod the Great lived the province of Judea was exempt from Roman taxation. Ergo Luke's taxation census must have occurred after Herod's death while Matthew requires it to have happened before.
So why add a census to the story?
One reason was to have their hero born in in Bethlehem, and so fulfil scriptural predictions about a Messiah coming from Bethlehem. But they might have plotted it better.
Another might have been that the taxing, for which the census was supposed to be the purpose, inspired the formation of the Zealots, or Nazarenes—with whom some authors speculate Jesus and his brother James were heavily involved. So by associating their boy with the privations involved this was a dog whistle to their colleagues.
5. “…they put into their book.” The Gospels themselves were being subtracted from and added to by copyists virtually all the way up to the fourth century, when Emperor Consantine ordered Christians to stop squabbling and ordered the production of fifty copies of what has become the canonical Bibles, based on the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus.
6. It started gently. Writing in about 390AD, John Chrysostom refers to the massive public Roman celebrations for Sol Invictus, and says, “On this day, also, the Birth of Christ was lately fixed at Rome, in order that whilst the heathen were busy with their profane ceremonies, the Christians might perform their holy rites undisturbed.” Within a century, the public and even private celebrations for Sol Invictus were banned, barred and buried from sight, with the new state religion taking over.

The #ChristmasMyths #6: The Slaughter of the Innocents

Part of a continuing series looking at the pagan origins of the Christmas Myths,* one day at a time. Today, the story and pagan origins of the story of King Herod’s slaughter of every child under two…

Massacre of the Innocents, Peter Paul Rubens

The story is familiar enough in the telling. The infant is put in danger by the ruler’s fear that the new baby will usurp his reign:

A heavenly voice whispered to the foster father … and told him to fly with the child across the river … which was immediately done. This was owing to the fact that the reigning monarch … sought the life of the infant Saviour, and to accomplish his purpose, he sent messengers to kill all the infants in the neighbouring places.

The story was just as familiar in the first, second and third centuries, when the authors of the Matthew gospel were pulling together their stories. It was familiar because it has been told and retold about virtually every pagan, eastern and Egyptian Saviour in mythological history.

The story told above actually describes the divine baby Crishna fleeing ahead of the messengers of King Kansa, who had heard a prophecy that his niece’s child would slay him. (I won’t give you spoilers on that one.)

In the story concocted by the authors of Matthew however (no other Biblical author wanted to put their name to this one, nor yet any historians) it was the “wise men” who dobbed in the infant to Herod when they stopped in, lost, on their way to the birthplace in Bethlehem. (None of which sounds very wise to me, really, especially since they were supposed to have been guided by a star. But then, no one ever said myth was supposed to make sense.)

Other than detail – and, to be sure, wise men appear in other versions too, only in slightly differing roles – it is the exact same story, right down to the many years spent out of the country in humble circumstances (Crishna in Mathura, where he was fostered by herdsmen; Jesus in Matarea,** near Cairo).

In fact, for the names Chrishna and Jesus, you could easily substitute all or any of the following Saviours, whose early biography is all but identical:

Salivahana,  the virgin-born Saviour who fled from the southerly part of India with a tyrant in pursuit. (This tyrant was said to have been successful.)

The Buddha’s life was in danger when the whose wise men of  King Bimbarasa told him that a youth newly-born to the north etc., whereupon messengers were sent etc.

The same story is told by the East Mongols, with the divine infant this time being pursued by a King Patsala. This boy was captured, thrown into the Ganges in a copper chest. whereupon he enjoyed a Moses-like resurrection and went back to avenge himself against the king.

In China, Hau-ki  shared a similar story.

So too does the great Egyptian god Horus, with whom Jesus also shares a birthday (but more about that tomorrow), and the great Persian monarch Cyrus, whose grandfather was warned about him by his wise men (the word “wise” being used quite profligately in those times).

The great patriarch of three religions, Abraham, shared a similar fate according to all the legends when, in Babylon, King Nimrod ordered “all women in child guarded with great care, and all children born of them put to death.” Many children were slaughtered, according to legend, but not our hero.

The chief of the religion of the Magi himself, Zoroaster, was obliged for similar reasons to fell from Persia into Egypt,where his mother was sent the message by good spirits: “Fear nothing! [The supreme god] Ormuzd will protect this infant. He has sent him as a prophet to the people.  The world is waiting for him.”

In Greek Myth, the story was shared by Perseus, son of the virgin Danae; Hercules, son of the virgin Leto; Telephos of Arcadius; the Trojan hero Paris; Jason, the hero of the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece; and Dionysus, the god of wine, who also shares a birthday with Iesus – to name just a few.

Indeed, the story of the Dangerous Child raised by outsiders who had to be killed by those he threatened was virtually universal, appearing in legends crafted around Roman emperors, Greek Saviours, Indian divinities, Chinese sages, Egyptian gods, English saints, Hebrew heroes … and anonymous Judean figures around whom later authors wove their own Christian myths.

When a marvellous occurrence is said to be have happened everywhere, we may feel sure that it never happened anywhere. Popular fancies propagate themselves indefinitely, but historical events, especially the striking and dramatic ones, are rarely repeated.

That it is only the authors of the Matthew gospel that choose to use the symbol is merely an oddity. (The authors of the only other gospel to mention the birth, those of  Luke, talk instead of a leisurely journey home “full of wonder” at the events surrounding them, with no fear of Herod, no slaughter, no mourning for children slain.)

The symbolism of pursuit and slaughter is obvious enough. The mythic metaphor is clear— the representative of the status quo, the tyrant king, refuses to open to the new generative principle of the age, which returns to overcome the tyrant’s power and to bring something new to the world – which is why it’s been so well used by storytellers through the ages.

Perhaps the most celebrated literary example is that of the Theban Oedipus, made famous by Sophocles’s famous play and now known almost as widely as the myth put together by the authors of the Matthew gospel.

In the subsequent Massacre of the Innocents motif that follows on from the Infancy story, Joseph Campbell sees “a very familiar mythological narrative”: The whole theme of persecution, pursuit, the humble hiding place, the tyrant king, and the new saviour who eventually outwits him evokes the fearsome dangers the new generative principle needs to overcome to give a new voice to the people.

Powerful stuff.

No wonder at least one of authors of the gospels decided to borrow it.

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth
• #2: The Star of Bethlehem
• #3:  The Song of the Heavenly Host
• #4: The Birthplace and Surroundings of the Little Baby Jesus
• #5: So, What’s With All That Frankincense?

Tomorrow: “Why December 25?”

* This and other posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, and Joseph Campbell’s Occidental Mythology and  Thou Art That.
** This is according to a local legend that causes them to still burn a lamp in remembrance of the visitation, and to the third-century figures Chemnitius of Stipulensis and Peter Martyr, Bishop of Alexandria, who have helped feed the Greek Orthodox belief in the legend.

Summer Reading

A few of you were distraught* that I hadn't yet posted my bookstack of holiday reading this year. So here it is, all ready for me to realise I'm going to need a bigger bag.

* Distraught, adjective, di-ˈstrawt, from the Latin distractus meaning somewhere between mildly curious and hardly caring.

Posted with Blogsy

Christmas less Christian, says survey

Gus Van Horn spotted some more interesting polling data coming out of the States, summarised by him as "Half of Americans Have Ceased Injecting Faith into Christmas":

[O]nly a little more than half [of Americans] actually regard the [Christmas] holiday primarily as a religious celebration.
More than one-third say it's more a cultural holiday, a new poll from Pew Research's Religion & Public Life Policy found.

This is great news from undeniably the most religious western country, and hopefully a growing cultural trend. As Gus says

This calls to mind Leonard Peikoff's classic essay, "Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial", which concludes:

America's tragedy is that its intellectual leaders have typically tried to replace happiness with guilt by insisting that the spiritual meaning of Christmas is religion and self-sacrifice for Tiny Tim or his equivalent. But the spiritual must start with recognizing reality. Life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate -- and really, underneath all the pretence, that is what it does celebrate. It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.

Earlier in the piece, Peikoff reminds us that Christmas actually originated as a celebration of the winter solstice, with Christians reluctantly taking it over when it proved impossible to kill off.

That’s been the point of my #ChristmasMyths series, really. Pointing out the origins, allowing non-religious types to bask shamelessly in the celebration bequeathed to us by our pagan heritage.

The #ChristmasMyths #5: So, What’s With All That Frankincense?

Part of a continuing series looking at the pagan origins of the Christmas Myths,* one day at a time. Today, the story and pagan origins of the Divine Child being recognised and presented with gifts…

So the Magi arrive at the house (if you’re reading Luke’s story of the Nativity) – or the shepherds arrive at the stable (if you’re Matthew’s story of the Nativity) – or no one arrives anywhere at all (if you’re reading Mark or John’s story of the Nativity, because they didn’t see or hear or dream up of any events they considered important enough to write down) – so they arrive at this place, wherever it is and whoever they are,  and they start giving gifts.

Why?

The story of the shepherds is unique in the canonical gospels to the narration in Luke, in which neither hide nor hair is seen of wise men or any other from the east.

The authors of Luke seem to have borrowed their story from The Gospel of the Egyptians, from eastern religions and myths, and from a panoply of pagan sources in which sheep, shepherds, gifts and baby feature highly.

The legends of Crishna’s birth see him cradled among shepherds, the first to hear of his wondrous birth. The shepherd Nanda recognises Crishna as the promised Saviour, and he and his companions prostrate themselves before the divine child. The Indian prophet Nared examines the stars and he too declares his divinity, and his companions present the child with gifts. These gifts are aromatic: “sandalwood and perfumes.” ( So at least Luke’s authors used some imagination in their version of the story.)

The Chinese “Son of Heaven” How-tseih was delivered unto the world in miraculous fashion was laid in a narrow lane, whereupon sheep and oxen “protected him with loving care.”

The virgin-born saviour Aesculapius enjoyed protection from goatherds, who knew instantly of his divinity and left proclaiming it far and wide.

Other legendary divinities to enjoy being either fostered or worshipped by shepherds at their birth include Dionysus (who also shares a birthday with Jesus); Romulus the co-founder of Rome; Paris, son of Priam of Troy; and the Mycenaean Aegisthus—who, like Maui, was exposed by his mother and raised by the peasants who found him.

The story told by Matthew’s authors has Magi, not shepherds (the original word here is “magoi,” from which comes our word “magician”) who visit the house in which the divine baby is laid and give him great gifts. (Sorry, no shepherds in this one. Or little drummer boys.)

So too does the story of the Buddha, at whose birth (right) he was visited by wise men who , by day’s end, had proclaimed him “god of gods,” and were giving him things to unwrap. Mostly “costly jewels and precious substances”—so here too, our authors have at least given some vent to their own creativity.

Rama—the seventh incarnation of Vishnu—received at his birth a visitation of “aged saints.”

When Confucius was born, “"Five celestial sages [or wise men] from a distance came to the house, celestial music was heard in the skies, and angels attended the scene."

And in the stories of the birth of the Roman/Persian god Mithras, who was sent as “mediator between god and man” and whose worshippers were the Christian’s chief competition, he was visited by “wise men” called Magi at the time of his birth, and presented with … wait for it … gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Well, that’s torn it then, hasn’t it. (Mithras’ birthday, by the way was also celebrated around December 25.)

But it doesn’t stop there.

According to Plato, when Socrates was born there came three Magi from the east to acclaim him. He too was, by legend, given gold, frankincense and myrrh.

And Magi also appear at the births of the Egyptian Osiris and Persian Zoroaster, as do all the now familiar elements of angels, shepherds, and gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

So rather than the Nativity being a uniquely Christian story, it seems clear enough that in formulating their own myths about their new divinity, the authors of Luke and Matthew were drawing on mythic sources going back (in the case of the oldest of these, Osiris) several thousand years.

Perhaps that is why they continue to resonate, because they have mythic if not historical truth.

All these stories have great metaphorical power, and (it’s now forgotten) were told and re-told across the great trading routes of the ancient world. That they would become associated with a new world-historical saviour figure is not surprising, says Joseph Campbell. There is, he says

a certain basic saviour mythos that is in the atmosphere of human history making. This mythos is drawn on in all such cases … It becomes attached to the personality of the saviour-hero in the way legends become attached to great figures [or those whose biographers would make great]. To take an example, consider Abraham Lincoln, who was known as a great joke teller. Within two or three decades after his death, anybody who had a good joke to tell attributed it to Abe Lincoln.  So too the many anecdotes about George Washington’s honesty. [Was there ever really a cherry tree and an axe?] 
    They stand as a cloud of [mythic] witnesses to the greatness of the man [in the eyes of his admirers]. Their historical accuracy is unimportant.

And untrue.

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth
• #2: The Star of Bethlehem
• #3:  The Song of the Heavenly Host
• #4: The Birthplace and Surroundings of the Little Baby Jesus

Tomorrow: “The Slaughter of the Innocents”

* This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, and Joseph Campbell’s Occidental Mythology and  Thou Art That.

The #ChristmasMyths #4: The Birthplace and Surroundings of the Little Baby Jesus

Part of a continuing series looking at the pagan origins of the Christmas Myths, one day at a time.* Today, the story and pagan origins of where Jesus was said to be born…

Jesus was born in a manger and visited by shepherds, say the authors of Luke.** No, say the authors of Matthew, he was born in a house in which he and Mary were visited by an unconfirmed number of Magi from the East (three being a later gloss).

There were no little drummer boys.

The authors of Mark and John don’t bother with any of this carry on. To them, it clearly doesn’t matter a hoot who visited where or when how or in what he was born, and didn’t consider the events important enough to either document or dream up. Justin Martyr in 150AD or so, reckons “the actual place of Jesus’ birth was a cave.” Agreeing with him is Eusebius, the first true ecclesiastical historian, writing at the council of Nice in 327AD and clearly wholly unaware of the stories yet to be grafted to the narrations that appear in Luke and Matthew:  Jesus was born in a cave, agreed Eusebius.

Tertullian, Jerome and other early Christian Fathers agreed (as much they could every agree on anything). That Christian ceremonies have been celebrated for centuries in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, in a cave, support this idea.

So, where was he born? Well, who knows, frankly. So let’s check out  the pagan and eastern myths associated with the birth of gods—since it was these myths our authors were responding to, borrowing from, and hoping their man to receive credit thereby.

The idea of there being “no room at the inn” or being born as an outsider is virtually a cliché—the idea in myth that the Hero’s journey begins with him being an outsider, who eventually takes over. Who could resist that drama.

And the stable is mentioned nowhere at all (other than by implication as being where you might find a trough), and neither are the animals supposedly milling around, but the humble origins associated with birth in either a cave or stable or other humble circumstances is associated with other great virgin-born gods in the great myths, from Zeus to Chrishna to Abraham to Mithra to Apollo to Hermes to Dionysus.

So there’s nothing new here in the use of the myth, simply the association with great gods--and the symbols, associated especially with the cave, of being a scene of initiation; of an association with the winter solstice, and (in the first three centuries of the Common Era), with the god Mithra, Christianity’s great competitor in the marketplace, who was also, coincidentally, born on December 25.

Perhaps the greatest symbolic association with the cave is as a place in which the emergence of light happens, a powerful theme with which to associate this new sect’s great man, and a theme that still appears in virtually every Christmas card depiction of the Nativity.

Early second century carvings and reliefs, indicating how early Christians were already reworking their stories to fit the market, show a child in a crib with an ass, an ox and the Magi – which, by their headdress, are clearly priests of the Lord Mithra. In marketing terms, that’s like showing Pepsi bending the knee to Coke.

A similar message is given by the use of the ox and ass, who appear nowhere in the Christian account. Where they come from is Egypt: the ass is associated with the god Set, and the ox with the god Osiris (for whom Mozart wrote some pretty gorgeous music).

Now as everyone in the Middle East knew back then, Set and Osiris were at war with each other. Always, So to see them reconciled at the birth of this infant, and bending their knees as well, was a powerful hint that these Gods (representing a union of light and dark) were handing over their powers to him too.

So in that little Christmas scene, Osiris and his brother Set, as well as Mithra, are recognising Christ.

Not a bad way to use the symbolism of myth to introduce your own man as the new power.  (Set, by the way, was eventually crucified in the Egyptian myths. Just thought you’d like to know.)

Carefully done, because as Joseph Campbell points out,

In that very earliest depiction, we already find the Catholic idea that the older myth are prefigurements of the new. That particular arrangement [of ox and ass and Magi huddled around the Christ figure] could not in the second and third centuries have been mistaken by anybody as meaning anything else.”

This does myth become propaganda. But the original metaphors behind the myths remain.

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth
• #2: The Star of Bethlehem
• #3:  The Song of the Heavenly Host

Tomorrow: “The Divine Child Recognised & Presented With Gifts.”

* This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, and Joseph Campbell’s Occidental Mythology and  Thou Art That.
** Note that Luke has the shepherds visit, but only mentions a manger — not a stable or animals. The entire setting for the manger, a trough or open box, is inserted into the story not because of anything in the gospels but because of a loaded passage from Isaiah (1:3), and the marketing gimmick alluded to above. The trough itself could have been anywhere, of course, from a stable to a house to an inn to (as Justin Martyr and the the so-called Infancy Gospel ascribed to Jesus’ brother James assert) a cave outside Bethlehem.

Content is copyright PC.BlogSpot.Com © Please contact author for permission to republish: (organon at ihug.co.nz)

What Your Beer Says About You

So, turns out I’m a direct, aggressive reader of Nietzsche who embraces change, has a drunk mother-in-law, and hides a heart of gold behind my thick skin.

Or something.

What does your beer supposedly say about you?

PS: What do New Zealand’s ten best beers for 2013 say about us as a culture? (And I say that as someone who in no way truly gives a shit.)

The #ChristmasMyths #3: The Song of the Heavenly Host

Part of a continuing series* looking at the pagan origins of the Christmas Myths, one day at a time. Today, the story of the Heavenly Host singing carols to lonely shepherds…

So there you are, out abiding in your fields, a shepherd watching over your flocks at night, and all of a sudden an angel shows up—and then another—and then another—until out there in your back paddock you’ve got the whole Heavenly Host flying about just above the campfire.

And then they all start singing.

And let’s be honest, over the years human beings have put some pretty damned heavenly music to the words they are supposed to have sung.

But if the story all sounds a little far-fetched, perhaps that’s why only one of the Gospels’ authors chose to add it to their tall tales of Jesus’ adventures. Only Luke. (Mark and John don’t bother with any of this Nativity stuff. And Matthew couldn’t have shepherds cluttering up his story, could he, it was already full of Magi.)

And where did Luke get this part of his story from?  Easy. Once again, he just lifted it from those old myths of the pagans and from the east, in which the the birth of every world-historic leader was marked by the sound of heavenly singing—or at least a loud heavenly voice making a joyful noise.

It happened when the virgin Devaki bore Chrishna, when “the quarters of the horizon were irradiate with joy,” or so the legends tell us, “as if moonlight were over the whole earth.” Not to mention all the spirits and nymphs dancing and singing, and the very clouds emitting “low pleasing sounds” and “pouring down a rain of flowers.”

The Buddha’s birth—“born for the good of men, to dispel the darkness of their ignorance”--brought forth a similar celestial celebration: great light, flowers, music heard all over the land, all beings everywhere full of joy, all the gods of the thirty-three heavens singing ding-dong merrily on high.

Kind of makes a few angels in a field look just a little bit sad, don’t you think?

Crikey, even Confucius himself couldn’t get himself born without the appearance of celestial music.

Nor could the Egyptian Osiris, at whose birth a loud voice was heard proclaiming, “The Ruler of all the Earth is born.” (And so, if you were Egyptian, he was.)

The divine Apollo entered the world in Delos to the joy of all the gods in Olympus, “and the Earth itself laughed beneath the smile of Heaven.”

Hercules’s father Zeus yelled down from heaven to proclaim the birth of his son—by all accounts not very tunefully, but the trend at least is clear.

The “heavenly Apollonius” went one better than just having a tune at his birth: not only did music attend his birth, but a flock of swans appeared, surrounding his mother, clapping their wings in rhythm, singing in unison and fanning the air with a gentle breeze.

Lovely. Who needs angels when you’ve got the whole corps of Swan Lake up there in the sky.

So you can see there is nothing unique or odd in stories with a heavenly host proclaiming a momentous birth.

What is unique or odd however is that only one of the Gospels bothers to make mention of this portentous event at all. Which, if it were more than just a good story to tell around a campfire, is passing strange don’t you think?

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth
• #2: The Star of Bethlehem

Tomorrow: “The Divine Child Recognised & Presented With Gifts.”

* This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions. Unless otherwise attributed, all quotes are sourced from there.

Religious numbers declining in the US

If you live in the US, or want to, there’s a good argument for living in these places…

California’s Alpine County, Hawaii’s Kalawao County, Nevada’s Esmeralda County, New York’s Bronx and Richmond counties, Michigan’s Macomb County and Nevada’s Clark County.

Why?

Because they are the parts of America with the lowest religious participation per capita.

But there are other parts of the US with low participation, as you can see on this map here from the Washington Post(more red equals more religious participation, the paler it is, the less interest there is):

It’s a map that has some folk running scared. It “shows how washed out and feeble Catholicism and mainline Protestantism have become,” says one. “They may occupy the same territory that they did 50 years ago, but the … map [above]tells a dismal story.”

Sad, isn’t it.

And it’s not just religious participation that’s declining. American atheism is on the rise. It’s still only one in five, but it is “the fastest growing ‘religious’ group in America.” So a trend is evident.

The job remaining is to offer those increasing numbers shunning religion something better to replace it than just sheer nihilism. That’s where a rational philosophy comes in.

[Hat tip Stephen Hicks]

The #ChristmasMyths, #2: The Star of Bethlehem

Part of a continuing series looking at the pagan origins of the Christmas Myths, one day at a time…

Long before the Bethlehem Star went into print, Jesus was born under a star that guided three wise men to his stable door, stopping at Herod’s palace to ask the way. So goes the myth.

The real story is marginally more interesting—especially its real origins. 

The story of stars and wise men and Jesus only appears in Matthew. And you may consider it passing strange for a few reasons:

• why this one author chose to add it, when the Bible was so equivocal on what amounts to astrology;
• why the authors of the other Gospels choose to ignore the embroidery altogether;
• why for example the author(s) of Mark, the earliest Gospel from whom the author(s) of Matthew borrowed most of his, didn’t bother to include any of it;
• why the three men who we’re told are so wise, and despite being led by this star, lost their way so badly they ended up in Jerusalem instead of Bethlehem, where they very unwisely dobbed in the new baby to King Herod as a budding revolutionary, causing the King to “slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof,from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.”

If this sounds wise, or even literarily or historically correct, then I have some gold, and frankincense and myrrh to sell you.

Of course, it’s not intend to be either literarily or historically correct. It was written as myth, based on other myths, to appeal  to a credulous audience .

The Roman historian Tacitus tells us that at a crucial moment in the reign of the Emperor Nero,

A comet having appeared at this juncture, the phenomenon, according to popular opinion, according to the popular opinion, announced that governments were to be changed, and kings dethroned.  In the imaginations of men, Nero was already dethroned, and who should be his successor was the question.

Indeed, brilliant stars were also supposed to have been seen at the birth of every Caesar, Canon Farrar declaring in his own Life of Christ, “the Greeks and Romans had always considered that the births and deaths of great men were symbolised by the appearance and disappearance of heavenly bodies…” Frankly, the credulous Roman people were prepared to accept a sign from the sky would indicate coming revolution.

This was the audience to whom Matthew was talking—one to whom it would have been passing strange if his story of this new Messiah didn’t contain some sort of cosmic sign.

So why did he need to add the Three Magi from the East asking so unwisely about “his star”? Perhaps because it was from “The East” that this tradition of the cosmic herald derived.

The birth of the Buddha, says  was supposed have been announced in the heavens by what was called a “Messianic star” rising on the horizon. “Wise men,” known as “Holy Rishis,” were informed by this that their Messiah was born.

The Indian Nakshatias divided the astrological field into 27 constellations, any one of which could direct your life—any unfavourable signs needing to be assuaged by a ceremonial S’Anti. When Crishna was born, “his stars” were said to be seen in the heavens.

In China too, the same astrological influences predominated, and the birth of Yu the legendary founder of China’s first dynasty, was said to have been accompanied by a star, as was the birth of the Taoist sage Laotse.

In the Muslim world, a star and several other celestial signs were supposed to have appeared at the birth of Ali, Muhammad's great disciple.

According to Hebrew legends, and “brilliant star” was supposed to have shone at the birth of Abraham, and the star at Moses’s birth was so bright it was supposed to have been seen and reported by Egyptian Magi to their king.

In Egypt too, tables were kept with tables of the constellations and their movements for every hour of every month of the year—all of which were supposed to have influence on human beings, and to herald forthcoming events—not least the birth of a Pharoah.

All these appearances on cue would have demanded many more “special stars” and astrological events than even the ancient heavens could have provided.

For his story, Matthew chose to hook directly into the Persian tradition of strangeness in the heavens, where from ancient times they looked to the heavens for guidance, and to the stars for divination. Astrologers were said to have “swarmed throughout the country.” And according to Matthew’s addition to the Gospels it fell to what seems to be three Persian Magi, the Zoriastrian priesthood who followed the god Ormuzd, to distinguish “his star” and announce to the world—or at least to Herod—that the newborn had been granted divine sanction thereby.

A strange tale indeed.

But if you want to sell your man as a Messiah to an uncritical world ready to believe the great men of myth and history already had stars to their name, then evidently that’s a tale a budding Gospel writer decides he has to write.

Well, one of them at least.

READ THE WHOLE #CHRISTMAS MYTHS SERIES HERE:

• #1: Introduction, and The Miraculous Birth

Tomorrow: “The Song of the Heavenly Host.”

* * * *

* This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions. Unless otherwise attributed, all quotes are sourced from there.

Summer Reading: What’s yours?

Around this time every year, I generally post a pile of summer reading I’m trying to stuff into my pack. I’ll probably do that in a few days, but in the meantime, what books are you stuffing into your pack or eBook reader this summer?

And what books would you recommend to others?

The #ChristmasMyths, #1: The Myth of the Miraculous Birth

Christians claim the miraculous Christmas story of the Nativity and all its trappings as unique to their own particular heresy, apparently as unaware of the story’s origins as they are of its paucity of even Biblical support—failing to notice that that there is nothing at all miraculous in Paul’s two quite minor references to Jesus’ birth (the earliest written reference),  nothing at all in Mark (the earliest Gospel), two quite different and incompatible versions of the birth written later and attributed to Matthew and Luke (prompting many historians to contemplate how much of these Nativity stories was manufactured), and nothing at all in John—the last of the four Gospels to be written (around 100AD) suggesting perhaps that not even this gospel’s authors were prepared to take Matthew and Luke’s manufactured mythology seriously.

Between them, Matthew and Luke made up a beautiful story:

• a miraculous birth,
• in a humble place,
• of a youngster of impressive genealogy,
• accompanied by a tremendous star
• and (in Luke) a heavenly choir,
• recognition of the divine child by passing vagrants wise men
• and their presentation of gifts, 
• and the slaughter of innocents by a king fearing the child might displace his crown.

But their story wasn’t made up out of whole cloth. It was put together from earlier myths and legends, and the stories of other religions, with many which they and their readers would have been familiar (Q: What’s mythology? A: Someone else’s religion), either because the early Christian authors thought if their godchild were to be taken seriously in a world of competing gods needed the sort of of stories about his birth that other gods had, because they thought these were cool stories—or because they lacked the imagination to make up their own.

I’m going to look at the pagan origin each of these Myths one day at a time*.

Today, the Myth of the Miraculous Birth:

The Virgin Birth Myth appears everywhere: in American Indian mythologies, in Greek, Roman, Norse, Indian, Asian and even New Zealand mythology. It’s ubiquitous—and not just because everyone copied.

It appears in Indian myth in the form of Heri Chrishna, or Crishna the Saviour, born of the chaste virgin Devaki, selected on account of her purity, begotten by the deity Vishnu, and said to be “the very person of Vishnu himself in human form.”

Thai mythology has a virgin-born god and saviour called Codon, his mother, a beautiful young virgin, was “impregnated with sunbeams” while out praying one day.

In Buddhist mythology, The Buddha was born of the Virgin Maya, or Mary, after the divine power called “The Holy Ghost” was said to have descended on her in the form of a white elephant! (A little like the session with a white bull enjoyed by Pasiphae, the mother of the Minotaur, but with seemingly more pleasant results.) Like someone else we could mention, it was said of the Buddha“He in mercy left paradise, and came down to earth because he was filled with compassion for the sins and miseries of mankind.”  From the time of his birth however, Maya’s womb was sealed up “like a casket in which a relic is placed” and she lived thereafter as a perpetual virgin. So it didn’t all end well for her.

The Hindus have a Lord and Saviour call Salivahana, a “divine child born of a Virgin, in face an incarnation of the Supreme Vishnu.”

China too has the demi-god Fo-hi, conceived when a virgin tasted the divine lotus, and at whose birth a rainbow appeared.

Laotse too, the founder of Taoism, was said to have been “a divine emanation incarnate in human form,” born of a virgin out of his mother’s side. The sages Yu, Hau-ki, Xaca, Confucius were also said to all be god-begotten and virgin-born.

Stop me if any of this is sounding familiar.

Now it might be argued that all this was a bit distant to early Middle Eastern authors. Maybe. But the Middle East of the time was one vast trade route. In any case, there was plenty of virgin-born action closer to home.

In Egypt there was the Saviour Horus, god of vengeance, sky and protection and the second emanation of Ammon, conceived in bizarre fashion out of the virgin Isis and said to be born on December 25; the god Ra, “born from the side of his mother, but was not engendered,” and the sons he himself divinely “engendered”; the god-king Menes likewise.

By the rivers of Babylon they told stories of how their god-king Nebuchadnezzar was created by the god Bel, engendered by the god Marduk, “and deposited himself the germ of [his] life in the womb of [his] mother.”

Zoroaster in Persia too—who Plato says the Persians considered to be the son of the Supreme God Orasmasdes--was “born in innocence, of an immaculate conception, of a ray of the Divine Reason.”

As was the Indian/Persian angelic divinity Mithras, said to have enjoyed a virgin birth, 12 companions and an ascension into heaven, and around whom the Romans built a religion that at the time of the Gospels’ creation was among the most popular going around—the Pagan Christ—the sun-god ‘Sol Invictus Mithras’ said to be the “favourite deity” of Asia Minor whose “mysteries” had “permeated the Roman Empire and extended from India to Scotland”—and whose birthday just happened to be on December 25.

If they were to be successful, this was the religion the early Christians either had to knock off, usurp, or absorb. 

Christian writer Justin Martyr relied on all this and more when he wrote to Emperor Adrian arguing the just-written story of Jesus’ divine birth “says no more that what you Pagans say of those whom you style the sons of Jove.” True enough. Jove aka Jupiter aka Zeus was, if you recall your cursing properly (“By Jove!), was “omnipotent; the first and the last; the head and the midst; the giver of all things; the foundation of the earth, and the starry heavens.”

So he was a divine and all-powerful fellow.

Among the divine sons of Jove and Zeus we can find Hercules, the son of Jupiter by a mortal mother Alcmene; Bacchus (aka Dionysus), delivered by the mortal mother Semele “by a lightning-bearing flame” (which must have hurt the poor woman); Amphion, by the mortal mother Antoiope; Prometheus, the deliverer of fire to humans, and a deity uniting divine and human nature; Perseus, by the mortal virgin Danae; Mercury, by the mortal mother Maia; Aeolus, by the mortal mother Acasta; Apollo, delivered under a tree to the mortal mother Latona; Aethlius, by the mortal mother Protogenia; Arcas, by a mortal mother; Aroclus, by another mortal mother.

It seems if a Messiah were to be taken at all seriously around these parts, he needed a god for a father and a bit of virgin-birthing to kick his story off.

Roman and Greek rulers were not immune to having their stories so embroidered. The legendary founder of Rome Romulus was said to have been the son of God by the pure virgin Rhea-Sylvia. Julius Caesar was supposed to have a God for a father, as was Augustus.

Alexander the Great was said to have been the son of either Jupiter/Zeus or Ammon (depending on who was telling the story) by the mortal mother Olympias, who was impregnated by a divine snake, all of which no doubt amused his warrior father Philip. His general and partial successor Ptolemy Soter (Ptolemy Saviour) was also said to carry the divine afflatus, as was Cyrus, King of Persia.

Plato was believed by many to have been the son of God by the pure virgin Perictione, and his father Aris was said to have been admonished in a dream to leave her bits alone because she was pregnant to a god. Plato’s story, and Aris’s, is shared by the mother of Apollonius, and the father of Pythagoras.

Aesculapius, “the great performer of miracles, was supposed to be the son of a god and the worldly mother Coronis.” She supposedly -gave birth on a mountain (it’s a long story), with the help of a passing goat-herd, to a child whose head was “encircled with fiery rays.”

Even closer to home was Simon Magus, a Hebrew hero contemporary with Jesus who performed miracles and was believed to be the son of a god.

And that’s not to mention the various offspring of Odin (said himself, because of his predilection for wandering the skies delivering gifts, to be one of the forebears of the Santa story), including Baldur and Thor; or the various virgin-born gods in the ancient South America that helped the Spanish so much in selling their own version of the virgin-born story to a fearful population—god-king-saviours like the Mexican Quetzalcoatl, the Mayan Zama, Bochica of Colombia, Manco Capac (offspring of of the god Peru), Votan of Guatemala, and Zome of Brazil. Meanwhile, North American Indians celebrated the divine birth of Wasi, if you were Cherokee; of Qaagagp if you were an Edue of California; of Tarengawagan if you were Iroquois; and Michabou if you were Algonquin.

Not to forget the miraculous birth of the trickster and miracle-worker Maui, conceived here in New Zealand to the divine Tama-nui-te-ra and the mortal mother Taranga.

Now, none of these stories relate actual historical events. In each of them, the story is intended either to be taken as the sort of exaggerated boasting Arabs still enjoy today, or to be taken as a metaphor—a symbol in the most basic sense, according to mythologist Joseph Campbell, of “the birth of spiritual man out of animal man.”

This relates strongly to the Hero Myth, universal in so many cultures, in which the son is born to a father who is, let’s say, a hero warrior gone off to the wars after conception never to return.  The son’s first quest as a man—his first spiritual journey-is the quest to find his father. In other words, to find himself.

There is then [says Campbell] a whole tradition of mythologies involving the spiritual begetter and the son who must go in quest of his father. This is not always a Virgin Birth in the physical sense…

No surprise that his parents fail to understand him when, in the story, the twelve-tear-old Jesus tells his parents “he must be about his Father’s business.”

And note that even in the Synoptic Gospels themselves, we never find Jesus from his own mouth declaring himself to be either a god or God, or to be worshipped as one.** So if you take these as Gospel, then you’d have to believe him.

Understanding the myths is far more interesting than arguing for them being literal or historical fact.

Isn’t it odd that instead of enjoying the metaphorical meaning of these myths and stories, so many folk get hung up instead on the literal fiction.

* * * *

* This and later posts in the series rely heavily on Thomas William Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions. Unless otherwise attributed, all quotes are sourced from there.
** “If we seek in the first three Gospels to know what his [later] biographers thought of Jesus, we find his true humanity plainly stated, and if we possessed only the Gospel of Mark, and the discourses of the Apostles in Acts, the whole Christology of the New Testament  would be reduced to this: that Jesus of Nazareth of was ‘a prophet mighty in deeds and in words, made by God Christ and Lord.’ ” – Albert Réville

Quote of the Day: On Women

“If women ran the world we'd still live in
caves, but with really fancy curtains.”
- Kate at Small Dead Animals

The reason for the season?

It’s the Christmas season. Yuletide. The festive season. And the reason for the season is …. not what you think it is.

Let’s start with a Christmas joke:

Q: "What's the difference between God and Santa Claus?"
A: "There is no God."

Ha ha ha.  The fact is, dear readers, at least Santa—well, Saint Nicholas at least—was a real figure, if not a real bloke, even if the other inspirations for the Santa Claus character were not.

And the harsh fact is, I’m sorry to have to tell you, Christ himself was never even in Christmas --except in fiction and by order of the first Popes.

[The New Testament itself gives two different and incompatible stories of the birth of Jesus.] None of the four gospels gives any notion of what time of year (let alone in what year) the supposed Nativity occurred. Only two gospels mention the virginity of Mary and only one has any mention of a "manger" [i.e., a trough]. Nowhere is there any record of a "stable." Wise men and shepherds are likewise very unevenly distributed throughout the discrepant accounts. So that the placement of a creche surrounded by a motley crew of humans and animals has no more Scriptural warrant than does The Life of Brian. Moreover, the erection of this exhibit near the turn of the year is actually a placation of the old Norse gods of the winter solstice - or "Yule" as the pre-Christians sometimes called it.
    I myself [says Christopher Hitchens] repose no faith in any man-made text or made-man redeemer, so when it's Christmas I say "Merry Christmas" with a clear conscience, as I respect Ramadan and Passover, and also because "Happy Holidays" is so thin and insipid. I don't mind if Christians honor the moment by displaying, and singing about, reindeer (a hard species to find in the greater Jerusalem/Bethlehem area). Same for the pine and fir trees that also don't grow in Palestine. I wish everybody joy of it.

And so do I. I just wish the Christians would leave off bashing us over the head with their myth—and their values.

Jesus wasn't even born in December, let alone at Christmas time: he was born in July* -- which makes him a cancer**.  Just like religion itself.

And God doesn’t even like Christmas trees, for Chrissake!

Historians themselves know the "reason for the season," and it's not because of anything that happened away in a stable at a time of a non-existent census.  Even the Archbishop of Canterbury knows the truth, conceding a few Christmasses ago that the Christmas story and the Three Wise Men -- the whole Nativity thing itself --  is all just "a legend." Legends borrowed in whole cloth from other times and other places, and usurped by the Christian church.

Speaking for myself,  I really like myths and legends.

I’m even happier when we remember they’re stories, not historical accounts.

Fact is, 'Christmas' itself was originally not even a Christian festival at all.  The celebration we now all enjoy was originally the lusty pagan festival to celebrate the winter solstice, the festival that eventually became the Roman Saturnalia (right). This time of year in the northern hemisphere (from whence these traditions started) is when days stopped getting darker and darker, and started once again to lengthen. 

This was a time of the year for optimism.  The end of the hardest part of the year was in sight (particularly important up in Lapland, the pagan home of the Norsemen where all-day darkness was the winter rule), and food stocks would soon be replenished.

All this was something worth celebrating with enthusiasm, with gusto and with plenty of food and drink and pleasures of the flesh -- and if those Norse sagas tell us anything, they tell us those pagans knew a thing or two about that sort of celebration!  They celebrated a truly Salacious Saturnalia.

One popular celebration involved having a chap put on the horns and skin of the dead animal being roasted in the fire (worn with the fur side inside and the blood-red side outside ), and giving out gifts of food to revellers.  This guy represented Satan, or at least some species of evil-doer, and the revellers celebrated beating him back for another year by making him a figure of fun (I swear, I'm not making this up). 

Observant readers will spot that the gift-giving and the fur-lined red outfit (and even the name, almost) are still with us in the form of Santa.  So Happy Satanmas, Santa!

SUCH WERE THE celebrations of the past.  But the Dark Age Christian do-gooders didn’t like the pagan revels.  Instead of bacchanalia, these ghouls of the graveyard wanted instead to talk about suffering and their sores, and to spread the misery of their religion worldwide; instead of throwing themselves into such lewd and lusty revels, they thought everyone should be sitting at home mortifying their flesh  – and  very soon they hit upon a solution: first they stole the festivals, and then they sanitised them.  Instead of lusty revels with Satan and mistletoe, we got insipid nonsense around a manger along with Magi, stars and shepherds.  (Just think, the first 'Grinch' who stole Christmas was really a Pope!)

So given this actual history, it's somewhat churlish of today's sanitised saints of sobriety to be complaining now about history reasserting itself and folk claiming Christmas back for their revels.

BECAUSE THE VERY BEST OF Christmas is still very much pagan, thank Odin. The mistletoe, the trees, and the presents; the drinking and eating and all the red-blooded celebrations; the gift-giving, the trees and the decorations; the eating and the singing; the whole full-blooded, rip-roaring, free-wheeling, overwhelming, benevolent materialism of the holiday -- all of it all fun, and all of it fully, one-hundred percent pagan. Says Leonard Peikoff in 'Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial', the festival is "an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life." I'll drink to all that, and then I'll come back right back up again for seconds.

Ayn Rand sums it up for mine, rather more benevolently than my brief introduction might have led you to expect:

“The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: ‘Merry Christmas’—not ‘Weep and Repent.’ And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance....
    “The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying is good for business and good for the country’s economy; but, more importantly in this context, it stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decoration put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.

And so say all of us.  I wish you all, wherever you are a  Cool Yule, a Salacious Saturnalia, and a very Happy Christmas.

And while I’ll be posting occasionally between now and next year, maybe about some of the neat myths stolen by the Christians, possibly even this afternoon, it might be a good time now to say formally, as far as this year goes, So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehn. Goodbye.***

Be as good as you’d like to be over the break.

PS: Here’s some related Hot Facts from the Hot Facts Girl. Concentrate as well as you can…

* Yes, this is simply a rhetorical flourish. Jesus' birth may have happened in March. Or in September -- or not at all -- but it certainly did not happen in December. More on that here.

** "A cancer. Like religion." Think that's harsh? You should try Landover Baptist's Bible Quizzes. Or Sam Harris's 'Atheist Manifesto.' Ouch! [Hat tip for both, good old Stephen Hicks] And, I confess, I pinched the quip from Australian comedy team The Doug Anthony All Stars.

*** Panic not, I won’t be away long.  I’ll be posting occasionally over the summer break, and be back for good around the second week in January. Or so.  Enjoy your holidays. I will be.

Why Len Brown should stay on

The popular argument against Len Brown staying on as Mayor amounts to saying that he has lost the respect of so many people, he is now unable to do his job.

On the second point at least, I don’t entirely disagree with that. I only wish that it were  true.

Because from my point of view, given that Len Brown sees his job as pushing Aucklanders around and building multi-billion-dollar monuments, I do not want Len Brown doing his job.

Or any mayor, for that matter, with that as their ambition. So offer me a lame-duck, disrespected, abjectly ineffective occupant of the mayoral office, and I’m going to take your arm off.

So on that score, if the popular argument is right and it costs another $100,000 to keep Len disrespected, that seems like money well spent.

#SurveillanceState: They're Hoping You're Not Paying Attention

The Obama Adminstration is trying to spin the story of the #SurveillanceState, in the hope, as Scott Shackford says at 'Hit and Run,’ they can persuade the populace the problem is due to poor “messaging,” not due to any actual legitimate concerns about the state’s indiscriminate high-tech spying.

The latest assault on reason was “a 20-minute blowjob [that 60 Minutes] correspondent John Miller performed Sunday evening on Gen. Keith Alexander and other National Security Agency leaders…”

For those who missed it …[the U.S.] 60 Minutes ran not one, but two full segments about the NSA’s data collection and Edward Snowden scandals, told entirely from the NSA’s perspective and with absolutely no critical voices.
    Some lowlights:

• The poor “We are not reading your e-mails/listening to your phone calls” straw man is set on fire yet again. The guy is just ash by now. The explanation of the “metadata” the NSA collects is purposefully vague, giving viewers the very false impression that the only information the NSA gets is just literal phone numbers and call durations.
• Miller brings up the Foreign Information Surveillance Court rulings indicating that the NSA has in the past overstepped its boundaries and collected data it shouldn’t collect. Gen. Alexander deflects the question by stating that these were mistakes and were not “willful.” No mention is made of other privacy violations by NSA agents that were indeed willful.
• NSA officials seem to believe that they have stopped China from destroying the world’s computers with a virus, thereby preventing widespread economic chaos. While the Chinese government and military are no doubt engaging in all sorts of cyber-espionage, there’s no explanation as to why exactly China — a leading exporter — of all countries would try to destroy the world’s economy.
• Edward Snowden is dismissed as some sort of weirdo. NSA’s investigation of him after the fact determined that he cheated (via hacking) to pass the test to get his contractor position, which you’d think was something that should mark him as an up-and-comer, given the agency. He also covered up his computer at home so his girlfriend couldn’t see what he was working on, which everybody on camera seems to think is crazypants and not something a person whose job involves looking at classified data might do.
• At the outset Miller discloses that he used to work for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA. Disclosing past relationships is good, but recognizing when such relationships absolutely ruin the possibility of your objectivity and therefore stepping back, is even better. But then, would 60 Minuteshave gotten this scoop without Miller? It was the NSA who approached 60 Minutes to do this story, not the other way around. Miller is also rumored to be leaving the network soon to go work for the NYPD.

The 60 Minutes reports can be viewed here. The entire charade smacks yet again of the administration thinking that all of its problems are due to poor “messaging,” not due to any actual legitimate concerns by the populace. More criticism of the segments may be found here and here.

This was not a one-off TV appearance. It is part of a concerted propaganda effort to dissuade the populace from demanding the spooks be shackled.  Jeffrey Tucker at ‘Laissez Faire Today’ explains:

Six months ago, whistle-blower Edward Snowden revealed to you and the rest of the country just how far down the NSA rabbit hole goes. He pulled back the curtain on all the shady surveillance programs the government has in place for its own citizens. Half a year ago, one guy forced the people in D.C. to acknowledge they have a spying problem.
    And now the White House thinks that six months is the right amount of time before they sweep everything under the rug.
    Let us explain.
    When the country realized that practically everything done on the Internet was recorded and stored on government databases, the White House came forward and tried to make amends. The president said he was shocked things were this bad. He even saw a silver lining in the whole debacle.
    He actually "welcomes debate" when it comes to striking the right balance between your privacy and national security.
    In fact, the White House set up a review panel to go over the NSA programs already in place and find ways to ensure Americans' privacy and rights are respected. Finally, we have a third party that's willing to curtail government overreach and respect the rights of citizens.
    At least, you probably hoped that would be the case.
    In a leaked report delivered to the government yesterday, the review panel recommended only modest changes in the way the agency does its business.
    Like we said, it's been months since Edward Snowden spilled the beans. Now they're hoping you don't care as much and they can sneak these "reforms" through without much fanfare.
    Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute, had this to say about the report:

        "The review group was searching for ways to make the most modest pivot necessary to continue business
    as usual. ... [the report] does nothing to alter the lack of trust the global populace has for what the U.S. is
    doing, and nothing to restore our reputation as an ethical Internet steward."

In other words, it does just enough so those in charge can say they did something, but not enough to actually do anything meaningful.
    Either the president really has no ability to change the policy and procedures of the spy agencies under his command or he really supports them but is trying to preserve his public image. Regardless, you're screwed in the end.
Meinrath said it best when asked about the modest proposed changes:

        "I think what [the administration is] going to find is when the initial dust settles from this attempt to spin the
    story is that people are going to be quick to realize this is not meaningful reform, this is not a bold new direction,
    and it is not going to do much to rein in a surveillance regime run amok."

Maybe that will keep this story in the headlines for another six months.