The Eve of the Birth of a Space Baby is nine hours away! Rejoice!

[ideologyhunter]

I'm all for ridicule. And the more detailed, the more caustic, the better. A good comic acid bath is the best antidote to flatulent, mind-dulling ideologies. That's true in the political and economic spheres & it's damn sure true in the religious sphere.
Not only more ridicule -- stronger, more pointed ridicule.
With ridicule properly aimed at the Trumpster, we may be able to whittle his numbers down to the bare one third of his truly crazed base, down to a level that will make him odious even to Sen. Graham and Mitch the Kentucky Turtle.
With ridicule we may in time devalue some of the nuttier religious movements and ideologies. Do you really want kids to grow up believing Young Earth Creationism? Or that climate science can't be trusted?
Read some Voltaire, some Ingersoll, some Twain, some Mencken. Then tell me that ridicule isn't a powerful response to ignorance and intractable human perversity.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

That is what a plain reading of the book says, that Jesus was physically lifted off the face of the planet and somewhere into the sky. A lot of historical paintings also support this reading. Since we have aircraft that frequently fly through the outer edges of the atmosphere and they have never detected heaven, it would stand to reason that heaven lies outside the atmosphere of the planet, i.e. in space, or possibly outside our known universe.

Many Christians down south read the Bible as written. Your interpretation that Jesus blinked out of existence from our "plane of reality" into some other "plane of reality" (whatever that might mean) is an interpretation that is not shared by many of the Christians I have spoken to over the past 30 years. You are attempting to add a veneer of sophistication that I don't believe was intended by the authors of the Bible.

So they believe he "flew into space". Can you document this? Who are these "many Christians down south" and why are they so secretive about their views?

You are severely muddling things by bringing up the intent of the authors. They did not know that "space", as such, existed. Stars and planets, yes, but they were visualized as being stuck into a solid "firmament" that arched over the flat face of the earth, beyond which "the heavens" were indeed to be found.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bib...e:Early_Hebrew_Conception_of_the_Universe.png

But no one today has such a cosmology, not even the flat earthers; even they describe an endless sky and celestial bodies in free movement. What the authors believed is a reflection of their time, not ours. Indeed, I strongly doubt that most modern Christians have any idea of what ancient Judaean cosmology looked like. Most "literalists" I talk to seem to assume that the Bible was written to be understood primarily in our context, not the other way around; they get pissed off at the very idea of considering the historical context of a passage.

The ancients were big on comets and celestial events. Jesus supposedly had the star thing going in the east and all that. We've all shown repeatedly about Jesus doing a Peter Pan up-up-and-away. The ancients knew what up and down were and when someone is lifted up into the clouds that's going up into the sky and into space.

You are right that anachronisms are certainly possible but the obvious is obvious. Catholics say the same thing about Jesus's human mother, that she was lifted up into the sky. They call it the Feast of the Assumption. So now she's Space Mom because she's not with us. We can call her Sky Mom if you are more comfy with that.

 

[ideologyhunter]

And I still say -- based on faith only -- that she was hit by meteor fragments on the way up.