[Vision2020] Mary and her Donkey

[Pat Kraut]

There is a difference between an atheist and a person with a small God put into a box of our earthly experience. Don't know nor care which you are but you have called all who do read the bible to task for having the stupidly to believe what is written in any form. You have the perfect truth of all the faults of the writing and the belief in any God but yours. So, once again we choose who we are going to follow and believe. I do not feel you are stupid nor misinformed...you just have a small God so that you can fit him/her into your information. 
I do not think Mr. Wilson has any idea who I am. I do know some people who go to his church but I have never sat in his church to learn anything. I say this just to protect him from having to justify anything I might say on this site. My walk has been diverse and singularly interesting. It comes under the heading of 'everyone has a book in their life' and I don't want Mr. Wilson nor anyone else to have to explain me. 
PK



----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Nick Gier 
  To: vision2020 at moscow.com 
  Sent: Friday, December 31, 2004 5:28 PM
  Subject: [Vision2020] Mary and her Donkey


  Dear Pat,

  There they go again: Pat & Co. assuming that any criticism of conservative Christianity must be coming from evil atheists.  For the record I am a theist, not an orthodox one, primarily because heresy is always more fun, enlightening, and usually more true.  If we do theology and don't abide by the rules of logic and the canons of evidence, then gibberish is the result.  If that means we put God in a box, then so much the better for logical boxes.  For one, it would lead to better election results.

  God did not have to put Mary on a donkey, Pat, Joseph could have easily done it himself.  But my point was that the trip was not necessary.  The Romans sent officials from village to village to make property tax assessments.  Joseph would have been required to stay in Nazareth or he would have faced severe penalties.  One in the crowd at the Feast of Tabernacles implies that Jesus cannot be the Messiah because he comes from Galilee and not Bethlehem (John 7.41), yet another Messianic expectation that Jesus did not meet. The deeper implication is that the authors of John either did not know of Luke's story or they rejected it as unhistorical.

  Even if Joseph were somehow required to return to ancestral land in Bethlehem, it was not necessary to take Mary with him.  But the whole idea is a fantastic one.  In The Rise of Christianity the former Bishop E. W. Barnes remarks:  "The Romans were a practical race, skilled in the art of government.  It is incredible that they should have taken a census according to such a fantastic system. [returning everyone to their ancestral lands] If any such census had been taken, the dislocation to which it would have led would have been world-wide.  Roman historians would not have failed to record it."

  Just another Moscow Banshee luxuriating in his little box of intelligibility,

  Nick Gier



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