Musings from an Atheist Theologian

A certain tradition holds that on one's way from Tzfat in upper Galilee toward the North to the village of Ein al-Zeitun, passing a carob tree, you will find buried a Jewish rabbi, under a pile of stones pointing toward Jerusalem. I like to think that the oldest of his brothers, who went on to lead his followers, followed him to the bitter end, bore witness to his execution, and was then faced with a quandary when a wealthy follower unexpectedly procured the body. He doesn't belong in the family tomb... he doesn't belong to one  family anymore. But neither does the body belong in a stone monument like that of other rabbis... he was never supposed to die. "...behold, he goeth before you into Galilee..." Yes -- he'd want to be in his special place of refuge in the mountains back home, the place he would go alone to pray. Those who love him will remember where he is laid. Another tradition places this same body under a burial mound, topped with a cross, in the vi

NOTE:  This Interlude, previously sitting in my drafts, was intended to be posted to coincide with the holiday season. I apologize for its belatedness, and can assure you that this will not affect the release schedule outlined in "New Year, New Plans." Oh, Christmastide. There are a lot of images that each of us associates with this magical time of the year. Mine are grounded in growing up in New England and what I would see during winter as I did: ice skating. Trees. Filthy snow. Cold wet feet. Shoppers. Lovers. Assholes. Most Christians, be they fundamentalist or mainstream, naturally come with a Sunday school-appropriate image of the holiday's origins. Elizabeth Cunningham aptly summarizes it in the opening lines of her magnificent  Daughter of the Shining Isles  (sorry, Monkfish Book Publishing, this will always be the title of The Maeve Chronicles ' first installment for me): You have all heard of his birth in Bethlehem in a stable [...] You know the story of the

Hello, readers! (And by readers, I mean, like, maybe two or three people, tops.) As of last week, we have entered the Year of Your Lord 2023, and this is typically a time when people write about all the big stuff they're gonna do in the future. "New year, new me" is the most popular turn of phrase related to this phenomenon. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word "future" (apparently a noun, according to the confusing rules of the English language) in several ways. The blanket definition basically says that the future is the indefinite time yet to come or something that will happen during that time. Your humble author has had plans for the future many times in his life. Each time, they were different. Some goals were loftier than others, and some were just plain unrealistic. To him, and no doubt to many, the future is a constantly changing animal. There's always hope that there will be mostly good things and fewer bad things, but that's the ot

Welcome to the debut of another new series on the blog, the first of course being "Jesus Theories." As you may have guessed from the title, this series is called "Interludes." What purpose will it serve? Keep your shirt on, I was just getting to that! When George Carlin, who was (for my money) the greatest comedian ever, wrote books of his material, he included sections called "Short Takes" which consisted of quick, snappy jokes and one-liners, not married to bigger routines, that served as a palate cleanser, a break from the long-form stuff.  By the same token, I'm not always going to have a veritable wealth of information to share about a specific topic. So, with that (and my readers' attention spans) in mind, I will occasionally post "Interludes" about things I have the itch to talk about but which don't need many words written about them. Today, I will share a few resources that I think are essential to approaching this topic from

First of all, a quick refresher from the end of Part 1: If the story of the birth of Jesus has any truth to it, and if he really was the result of Mary getting pregnant without Joseph's help, then it stands to reason that somebody had to be the daddy. Being an atheist, I rule out the presence of God, so the question is obvious: is there another candidate? It turns out that the answer is not uncomplicated, but there is a clear possibility. More than that, we may even have an artifact of the gentleman in question.  But as we did before, we must establish some points of fact upfront related to this post's topic. Sex outside of marriage was frowned upon even more strongly than in today's fundamentalist Christianity.  To be blunt in my choice of examples, women were called whores just for getting divorced. (An echo of this exists even in Jesus' own Sermon on the Mount, where divorce for any reason other than marital unfaithfulness is considered blameworthy.) This was a pat

"Let's start at the very beginning, a fine place to start," to paraphrase  The Sound of Music : the so-called virgin birth. To be more specific, we must establish some points of fact upfront that are related to the topic of this post. Isaiah's prophecy was never about a virgin birth.  The whole thing came from a snafu when the Hebrew Old Testament was translated into Greek (the famous Septuagint, so called either because 70 scholars participated in its translation or the work only took 70 days from start to finish -- pick the tradition you like) for the benefit of the large Jewish population in Egypt, then the intellectual center of the known world, who no longer spoke or read Hebrew. The passage we now know as Isaiah 7:14, with the three verses following, is entirely symbolic and intended as a prophecy of Israel's future. But leaving aside its actual meaning to its intended audience as opposed to the Christian interpretation, there's another little problem. G