There’s an old-new strip up at Jesus & Mo. Apparently True Meanings ™ are time-specific. The trick is knowing which True Meaning is the Real True Meaning. I suspect this can be deduced by means of Sophisticated Theology (also ™ ).
(Readers in Pakistan and other comic-censoring countries may be able to view the strip by using this link http://jandmo.nfshost.com)
Shades of Emo Phillips….
b&
Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Council of 1898? Or Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Council of 1915?
Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Council of 1915.
Die, heretic!
Funny. 😎
Keep Eostre in Easter
I’m allergic to sea food.
I’m sorry; that attitude is just shellfish.
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I’ve always used Easter as a tradeoff for Christmas. If they wanted to use my name, I was willing to use theirs.
I’m still attempting to determine the relationship between eggs and rabbits. It’s like the chicken was thrown under the bus.
They’re not eggs, they’re holy hand grenades …
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How’d you like to find a rabbit brooding on one of these eggs?
b&
In the days of Jesus the priests used to sell rabbits in the Temple for the purpose of sacrifice. The rabbits got so scared that they laid eggs,
Jesus didn’t like this because rabbits are cute you know so he made the Temple priest stop. However the rabbit sacrifice was taken over by the Xtians and modified . The Xtians needed the eggs so they only frightened the rabbits until them laid eggs and then let them go. This was met with the approval of Jesus.
Today we can buy chocolate rabbits and eggs, in supermarkets, to commemorate the freeing of the rabbits by Jaysus. In the Eastern Orthodox Church eating chocolate rabbits at Easter is still a sacrament
We all need the eggs.
Rabbits are known for their fecundity in reproduction, and it is easier to find and hold eggs than embryos. So you get bizarre creatures that look like placental mammals but lay eggs like monotremes.
It is all part of the symbology of mythology and Ostrara.
Nightgaunt49–good to see you here! I love the way you pwn the right-wing nut jobs over at gocomics.
Of course, you’ve probably been here a while, but it’s the first time I’ve noticed.
Keep up the good work, bro!
Regarding fecundity, eggs & rabbits, it was of course the goddess Eostre who gave her name to those important hormones that are known as eostrogens.
What has always puzzled me is that the crucifixion and resurrection have moveable dates. How does that work? Is it the multiple universe thingy? Or the date includes error bars?
For what it’s worth…those dates are based on a quasi-lunar calendar loosely based off the old Jewish calendar. But, of course, once you understand why no calendar, not even the one we have today, is “correct” over sufficient periods of time…you then realize that there’re all these other stars and what-not out there…and the concept of anniversaries becomes pretty obviously a social construct with damned little to do with our geometrical relation to the rest of the Cosmos….
b&
Check out the Computus on Wikipedia if you want to be seriously confused.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus
Modern government bureaucracy can cook up some crazy nonsense but doesn’t come close to ancient church bureaucracy.
What’s most confusing is that so many people can put so much effort into something like that…and not an one of them ever stepped back and questioned the blithering fucking insanity of the entire enterprise.
…and that would include the Wikipedia page about the insanity, of course….
b&
I recall as a kid in elementary school in Utah, a teacher telling us that because she was born on February 29 she was only 7 years old — because that particular date had only come around 7 more times since her birth. Even back then I knew that was pretty stupid. The specific anniversary date of her birth may have only come around 7 times but she was still somewhere between 28 and 31 years old. Then there are those dunderheads who insist the world itself is only about 6,000 years old. If there’s any truth at all to their idiotic beliefs, the rapture couldn’t come soon enough to at least get rid of them, but if Jesus had any intelligence at all he wouldn’t like their company either.
Reading the procedures for the no choice apocalypse, and the first and second Resurrections with the thousand year Reich to come between them, with the Final Judgment makes you wonder why anyone would believe the idea of “free will” in religion.
Oh, that’s simple.
“Free will” in the context of religion is the excuse the religious give to the gods for the existence evil by shifting the blame to us poor wretches.
It doesn’t have to actually be coherent. It just has to convince the marks that they’re poor wretches and have no business challenging either the gods or (especially) their official representatives.
b&
As with so many things, it depends on the definitions. But if one is going to define age as a timespan, as would be most reasonable, then it’s a total of however many ticks of whatever clock you’re using, with a convenient-for-humans conversion into so many groupings of timespans (years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, and so on).
If it’s crossing of a calendar boundary — and that really is used in some significant software settings that might surprise you — then she’s actually right.
…computer programmers get paid to worry about these sorts of things, you see….
b&
On the other hand, my sister in grade 3 was miffed when she was asked on an aptitude test “What day is the first day of the week?” and got “Tuesday” marked wrong – she (in my view correctly) considered it arbitrary. If nothing else, the question is culturally relative, even in Quebec.
You should refer her to this reference page:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181598.aspx
b&
What happened to pesach? The damned christians are always conflating religious holidays. I wonder if there are any regulations on the shape of matzohs – I wouldn’t mind bunny-shaped ones.
I haven’t heard of matzohs coming in different shapes, but I know that chocolate-covered matzohs is a “thing.”
Not a “thing” that I get, mind you. Store-bought matzohs, in my experience, are barely distinguishable from the boxes they’re packaged in. Homemade matzohs can be very tasty, as good as any other cracker…but not something I’d pair with chocolate.
b&
“Easter” as the name of the festival that celebrates the death and alleged resurrection of Jesus is an Anglo-Saxon/Northern European thing. In most European countries, particularly those whose languages are significantly influenced by Latin, this festival has a name that derives from Pesach. In French, there is Pâques. In Italian, Pasqua. In Spanish, Pascua.
There’s also the word “Pascal” as in Pascal lamb and Pascal candle – same root.
When English speaking atheists say that the Christians nicked the festival from pagans citing the name “Easter”, they are not really thinking it through. The events that Easter celebrates are set at the beginning of the Jewish Pesach festival (hence the daft (to modern eyes not used to lunar calendars) scheduling).
In fact, John almost explicitly links the crucifixion to Pesach by casting Jesus as the lamb traditionally sacrificed and then eaten for the Passover meal.
The word Passover, incidentally, was coined by Tyndale when he wanted a translation of “Pesach” for his Bible i.e. the English name for the important Jewish festival was invented by a Christian.