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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34725 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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Oh, not just Arianism, it's a nice mish-mash of the Greatest Hits of Christological heresies plus the late 19th/early 20th century craze for spiritualism and mysticism investigating magical, occult and Eastern traditions, topped off with the liberal Christianity of the post-Biblical Criticism era (well of course we can't believe in literal miracles anymore, now we have science and Darwin and all that!)

I think my favourite anecdote of the liberal Christian "explain it away" is the "Jesus was ice skating not walking on the water", followed by the "so the Virgin Birth wasn't but here's why those silly billies thought she was a virgin" attempt.

I honestly love the ice skating one. A very convenient, very temporary, very localised mini-ice floe on the Lake of Galilee so Jesus could appear to be walking on the water, but when Peter jumped overboard poof! gone! melted! which is why he sank in the water, plus the fishermen with him in the boat - who had all been fishing this lake their whole career - had no idea about the very convenient weather conditions to bring about mini-ice floes that (must have) regularly happened so Jesus knew there would be one so He could fake 'walking on the water'.

Dude, an actual miracle is easier to believe than this pile of wishful thinking.

Explaining away the virgin birth is fun, too. See, obviously we are all modern adults who know how sex works, so we know virgins can't get pregnant (unless they've had sex and are now ex-virgins). So why did people talk about the Virgin Mary? Well clearly she was pregnant by rape. And to avoid the stigma of her being pregnant outside marriage (because that's the one bit of the Scriptural story we can take on trust as correct), people in her village would refer to her as "Mary, the virgin who was raped". And over time, that became shortened to "Mary the virgin" and hence - ta-da! - the Virgin Mary.

Yeah, sure. Totally believable, if you turn off your brain to everything but the current Zeitgeist.

I think my favourite anecdote of the liberal Christian "explain it away" is the "Jesus was ice skating not walking on the water",

In all of the years I've spent following the mythicist discourse I have never encountered this explanation. Usually what is offered as an explanation is that it was a magic trick: walking on a submerged plank of wood (maybe a deck or something). The criticism on Peter falling is not really biting, since a single gospel has it and you wouldn't expect a detail such as that to be omitted or forgotten, if it had happened. A much better one is that they are clearly supposed to be too far from the coast for it to be a trick of that sort.

Explaining away the virgin birth is fun, too.

I've never heard this one either. To be onest they both sound like strawmen to me. Usually the explanation for the virgin birth is that it wasn't even there in Mark, the explanation for the "specialness" of Jesus was initially his Davidian genealogy and the virgin birth was developed later, when the story moved into the hellenistic world, where people didn't care about David and stories of vigin births abunded.

Oh man, you missed the best things from 2006!

"Scientists explained" the miracle, you see, that it wasn't a miracle at all. No, just freak weather conditions that happened to line up absolutely correctly for the events in the Gospels to happen like they did (the ice did not prematurely melt so Jesus fell into the water and it didn't last long enough for Peter to continue walking to shore).

Jesus may have appeared to be walking on water when he was actually floating on a thin layer of ice, formed by a rare combination of weather and water conditions on the Sea of Galilee, according to a team of US and Israeli scientists.

Their study, published by the Journal of Paleolimnology (the study of prehistoric lakes), argues that salty springs along the Galilee's western shore can stop surface water circulating at cold temperatures and there were unusually cold spells lasting up to 200 years in biblical times.

Such "unique freezing processes" would occasionally have allowed a crust of ice to form, a phenomenon the study calls "springs ice", in patches on Lake Kinneret, as the Sea of Galilee is known in Israel. One set of such springs is found near Tabgha, an ancient settlement that is traditionally the site for the New Testament's multiplication of loaves and fishes.

"The chance that there was ice on the lake is very, very high," said Doron Nof, professor of physical oceanography at Florida State University and the study's lead author. "It's almost guaranteed during those cold periods, 100 or 200 years long, that there was one such event at least, maybe four."

I do so enjoy a good "scientists explain miracles" story, they're so comforting in their naive optimism about 'we totally understand everything becasue we're so much smarter than the stupid people back then who believed their lying eyes'.

The "Mary the virgin who was raped" story came out of something way back when in the days of the Anglican wars, when discussing the liberals versus the conservatives in theology. I can't point to a particular source because it was swirling around, but the progressive Christian set do love them some "Mary was raped" tales (ironically, adopting the sceptical views of the Talmud that Jesus was really a bastard borne out of wedlock to a Roman soldier by Mary) because uh something something patriarchy colonialism feminism something something.

The re-interpretation of the scriptures that really raised my eyebrows, though, came during the reign of the first female Primate of the Episcopalian Church, the Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, who gave a sermon that, em, changed the focus of the story of St. Paul and the slave girl possessed by a spirit.

Now, the fuddy-duddy dumb old traditional interpretation of this story is that the girl was a slave whose owners made money from her being possessed, since she was able to tell fortunes, and that St. Paul set her free from being, you know, possessed by a demon and exploited as a money-making machine. Not so! says Katie, nope being possessed by a demon and exploited by your owners as a money-making machine was a beautiful instance of spiritual empowerment and Paulie was just jealous.

No, I promise, this is what she said. The original text of the sermon seems to have been scrubbed, so the only quotes are from traditionalists not too happy with this novel exegesis, but a sample of the sermon is this:

Paul is annoyed at the slave girl who keeps pursuing him, telling the world that he and his companions are slaves of God. She is quite right. She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves. But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness. Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it. It gets him thrown in prison. That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does -maybe more so!

Yes, kids, remember: if a demonic spirit wants to set up shop in your head, go right and ahead and let it do so, because that's a beautiful holy gift of spiritual awareness! Honestly, every time I look at the fruitcakes and nutjobs in my own church, something like this comes along to make me go "well at least the current pope isn't this out to lunch, thank you Holy Spirit!"

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