They met in Brooklyn

They met in Brooklyn

In 1929 Jeanette Wilkes Greenwood came to New York from her native Scotland at the time she was just 20 years of age. She came with her two cousins Isabella Nolan who was 18 years of age nicknamed Isa and Margaret Nolan who was 21 years of age nicknamed Maggie. They were sponsored by their Aunt Elizabeth Wilkes (Richards) who they called Aunt Lizzie. She gave them each fifty dollars so they didn’t have to go though Elis Island. They all got jobs as Maids living with rich families in Brooklyn. Jeanette’s friend Betty who also just came from Scotland herself arranged a blind date for Jeanette at Brooklyn’s Coney Island. Jeanette brought herself a new dress with the first wages she earned in America. Once she met this guy who’s name was Hugh Wallace Boyle (he called himself Wallace Boyle) She fell in love a first or maybe second site with the guy. So when her cousin got home sick and went back to Scotland, Jeanette stayed and after dating just a short while marred Wallace in June of 1931. They went on to have three children Wallace Jr, Jeanette Wilkes and finally me, Richard. My mother said if she hadn’t met my father she would have gone back to Scotland with her cousins. So if it wasn’t for that date I would have been born in Scotland and had a very different life.

If Jesus was Just a Man

The message that Jesus and others tried to get across is the same even if he was a man and not a god or a son of god. The existences of god can not the proven or disproved that is up to each person to decide for themselves. Jesus did more than be born then died his message is in what he said in between. The Bible is full of errors both accidental and on purpose, the Bible as we know it comes the 15th century with the coming of the printing press. You can read about this subject in the many books by authors a lot more learned than myself. The thing is what would you change about yourself if there was no God and Jesus was just a very good man. What I hear from a lot of so called Christians is “Jesus is the way to Salvation” which Jesus (if he is a god) would hear as “Me, Me, and Me” The central Message sent down from Generations that came before us is to look after each other no matter how poor or rich or what race or ethic group they may come from. (Do on the others as you would like them to do on to you)

Ancient Mythic Origins of the Christmas Story

Ancient Mythic Origins of the Christmas Story

Valerie Tarico interviews Dr. Tony Nugent, scholar of world religions. Dr. Nugent is a symbologist, an expert in ancient symbols. He taught at Seattle University for fifteen years in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and is an ordained Presbyterian minister.

Most Americans know how Christmas came to be celebrated on December 25: The Emperor Constantine chose the date because it was winter solstice in the Julian Calendar, the birthday of dying and rising gods like Mithra and Sol. Some people also know that our delightful mélange of Christmas festivities originated in ancient Norse, Sumerian, Roman and Druid traditions - or, in the case of Rudolph, on Madison Avenue.

But where does the Christmas story itself come from: Jesus in the manger, the angels and wise men?

The familiar Christmas story, including the virgin conception and birth of Jesus, is found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Scholars have pointed out that these stories are somewhat disconnected from other parts of these Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. In fact, by the time he is a young boy in the temple, Jesus's parents seem to have forgotten the virgin birth. They act surprised by his odd behavior. There is never any other mention in the New Testament of these incredible events! These stories seem to be an afterthought, written later than the rest of the gospels that contain them.

To make matters more interesting, the stories themselves have inconsistencies and ambiguities - contradictory genealogies, for example. Our Christmas story (singular) is actually a composite.

Or consider the idea that Mary is a virgin. The Greek writer of Matthew quotes Isaiah as saying: "a parthenos shall conceive and bear a child." The Hebrew word in Isaiah is "almah," which means simply "young woman." But the Greek word parthenos can mean either a virgin or a young woman, and it got translated as "virgin." Modern Bible translations have corrected this, but it is a central part of the Christmas story.

That's a lot of added complications. If the rest of the New Testament doesn't refer to these stories or need them, then how did we end up with them? Where do they come from?

One part of the answer comes from Hellenistic culture. (It is no accident all New Testament books written in Greek.) In this tradition, when a man did something extraordinary there was the assumption that he did this because he was different, either divine or semi-divine. They would make up a story about how he came to be divine. Almost all Greek heroes were said to be born of a human woman and a god--even Alexander the Great, Augustus and Pythagoras.
The father typically was Zeus or Apollo. The god would come and sleep with the woman, pretending to be the husband or as a bolt of lightning, or some such. Greek mythology also shows up in the book of Genesis: the gods lusting after the women and coming down and mating with them.

Why were they added to the Christian story?

Jewish Christians - the first Christians didn't believe in the virgin birth. They believed that Joseph was the biological father of Jesus. Part of their Christology was "adoptionism"--they thought Jesus was adopted as the unique son of God at some time later in life. There were disagreements about when - Mark suggests the baptism, Paul suggests the resurrection.

Over time, gentile Christianity replaced Jewish Christianity. There were Jewish-Roman Wars. The Jewish Christians were marginalized and oppressed. The Gentile branch became dominant. Eventually we get the gospel of John which pushes the sonship of Jesus back to the beginning of time. This writer is at the other end of the spectrum from the Jewish Christians.
But Matthew and Luke think that the Sonship of Jesus began at birth. And they want to tell a story that reinforces this point. Matthew and Luke are the source of the Christmas story as most of us learned it.

Why didn't the writers do a better job of cleaning the contradictions? They did, some. This is called the "orthodox corruption of scripture." (Bart Ehrman article , book) . But it appears that these birth stories were added toward the end, so scripture got frozen before they could get integrated.

I was raised that the bible was the literally perfect, "inerrant" word of God, essentially dictated by God to the writers. What you are saying about the Christmas story sure calls into question this point of view.

Which Bible?! There are thousands of manuscript variations.
Most biblical stories are probably fiction, not non-fiction. They are mythology in the deepest sense of the word. But we need to get beyond issue of whether biblical reports happened in the historical, physical sense to understand what they mean spiritually and mythically.

Ok. Back to Christmas. Of all the images from the Christmas story, the one that people fall in love with most is angels. The Christmas story is full of angels, beings of light. Is this because of the solstice tradition?

Actually it comes from the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish scriptures that were eventually adopted into the Christian Bible as the Old Testament. It also comes from the Jewish literature written between the Old and New Testaments that didn't get into the biblical canon. Some of these are even quoted in the New Testament, for example Enoch, from the 2nd Century BC. It's all about angels.

What are angels in these stories? Who are they?

The Bible calls them the sons of God, the Divine Council. The word used for God in parts of the Hebrew Bible, Elohim, is plural implying a family of deities. Angels are the lesser gods of the deposed pantheon of ancient Israel. They are under the rulership of Yahweh. Together with Yahweh they are part of Elohim, a plural word that we translate "God" in the book of Genesis. Elohim/God says "Let us make humans in our image." Christians understand this to refer to the trinity, but that is a later interpretation. These angels came from the ancient pantheons of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Many of these gods come from stars. There is a strong astral dimension. "Heavenly Hosts" are stars.

The Luke story focuses on one angel specifically: Gabriel. Is he the archangel?
Gabriel is the Angel of the Lord. He is one of two angels who are named in the Jewish canon and the Christian canon outside of the apocrypha: Gabriel and Michael. They are the angels of mercy and judgment. Gabriel means "Strong One of El." He is first named in Daniel.

If you go into an Eastern Orthodox church you have two icons on the north and south. Michael is on the North to fight with Satan who lives there. Gabriel is on the south. He is more like what the angels originally were, which is messengers of the gods. That is what angel means. The idea that God has a special messenger is exactly what we read about in the Middle Eastern mythologies. Each of the earlier gods has his own special messenger. Enki, who becomes Yaweh, has Isimud. The goddess Inana has Ninshubur. Each high god will have an envoy or assistant, who is a lesser god. The angel of the lord is the same thing. The distinction between angels and gods came later.

Is he a star person? Or one of those semi-divine descendents of gods and women?

He is one of the gods who would come down to earth.

Why do you say that?

The offspring of the gods mating with women are called Gaborim--from the same root as Gabriel. In the second century, Gabriel appears in the Epistula Apostolorum. It talks about Jesus and these secret teachings that he gave to his apostles after the resurrection. One of the secrets is that he is actually Gabriel. After Gabriel took on flesh and united with Mary, then he becomes Jesus. The idea that Christ was an angel was extremely popular in the early church. Later we find this really strict separation between humans and angels; between gods and angels. (more)

We have time for just one more favorite Christmas story: The Star of Bethlehem and the Magi.

The Magi are astrologers. They are Zoroastrian priests. Just to the east of the Roman Empire was the Persian Empire, which was Zoroastrian. They see this star at its rising (the better translations don't say in the East). The astrologers paid a lot of attention to this. It is likely that what this refers to was a heliacal rising, which is the first time that a star appears over the horizon during the course of a year. They thought this was a sign of the Jewish messiah. Scholars speculate that they would have been living in Babylon, where there were lots of Jewish merchants. The Jews had been there from the time of the Jewish exile from Babylonia. We have cuneiform records from them.

Are you assuming that this story is historical?

Think of it as a frog and pond. The pond is real, the frog is not. They are fictional stories in a real setting. They don't always get the details of the setting right, but they are fictional characters in real places. The Magi follow their star from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. The author has in mind a real star that would be in front of you in this situation. It would have to be a star in the far southern sky. Remember what I said about the Heavenly Host being stars? The star in Matthew and the angel in Luke are two variants of the same mythology.

My former fundamentalist head is spinning. Is there anything else you'd like to say in closing?

We need to be able to appreciate these stories as myths, rather than literal histories. When you understand where they come from, then you can understand their spiritual significance for the writers and for us.

John McCain a Hero?

In contrast to Ayers, whose acts were at worst tactically misguided, John McCain did engage in terrorist acts, war crimes that in all likelihood killed hundreds if not thousands of poor people in Vietnam. He committed these atrocities in the most cowardly fashion, dropping bombs from a plane thousands of feet above the ground, using the most advanced military technology to slaughter people in an impoverished peasant country. To those who would offer some banality about McCain just being a soldier or serving his country, such defenses are neither true nor legally relevant. McCain volunteered enthusiastically to commit these atrocities, and even if he hadn't the Nuremberg principles had decades before put to rest the excuse that one was just following orders. Indeed, as Robert Richter has reported, General Telford Taylor, American prosecutor at Nuremberg, even offered to help prosecute McCain and other captured pilots for war crimes.

Mr. Ayers would be quite justified in being disappointed with Barack Obama for his cowardice in this whole affair. In keeping with his characteristic unprincipled opportunism, Obama repeatedly called a friend who had helped him in the past "despicable" while characterizing McCain as a "hero" for the infinitely more monstrous crimes he committed. If his old friend, or just acquaintance if that's what he really is, had any sense of decency, Ayers would not be in this position of having to defend himself now.

It's also hard not to see a connection between all of this and the Iraq War. The media and McCain campaign attack Ayers and hold up McCain as a hero in order to further try to rehabilitate the Vietnam War and the American government's murder of several million people in Southeast Asia while also discrediting and ridiculing anti-war opposition. It is greatly to his credit that Ayers defends the anti-war movement in such strong terms in this piece. That Obama went along with trashing Ayers and glorifying McCain is a dark sign about his real position on the Iraq War, a subject on which he has already flip-flopped and proven totally insincere and uncommitted to the anti-war position that won him such enthusiasm among millions of American young people.

There was an unrepentant terrorist in this presidential campaign. Indeed, one who has built an entire career, and a lucrative one at that, solely on the basis of boasting about his terrorist acts. His name is John McCain, and it is time the media stopped treating him as a hero.

— DA, Cambridge, MA

The Real Bill Ayers

The Real Bill Ayers
IN the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.
Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”
Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.
I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.
With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.
Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:
I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.
The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.
Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.
I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.
I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.
The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.
We — the broad “we” — wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.
The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.
President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better.
Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.
William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of “Fugitive Days” and a co-author of the forthcoming “Race Course.”