Was Christ born on Christmas Day?

Or put it this way: Is it likely that December 25 was the birthday of Jesus, putative messiah, and God of the Christians?

If you believe it is, you have at best a 1 in 365 chance of being right.

But nothing can be proved anyway.

December 25 was arbitrarily chosen for the Catholic Church as Jesus’s birthday in the 6th. Century, by a monk named Dionysius Exiguus, or Dennis the Short.

Here’s the story of how Dennis came to choose December 25, as told by James A. Veitch (writing for the Westar Institute which ‘promotes liberal Christianity’):

Dionysius Exiguus, a monk from Russia who died about 544, was asked by Pope John I to set out the dates for Easter from the years 527 to 626. It seems that the Pope was keen to produce some order in the celebration of Easter. Dionysius decided to begin with what he considered to be the year of Jesus’ birth. He chose the year in which Rome had been founded and determined that Jesus had been born 753 years later.

He was almost certainly acquainted with a suggestion by Hippolytus (170–236) that the date of Jesus’ birth was December 25, but the trouble was that Hippolytus had not backed up this claim with sound arguments. Dionysius, however, had just the argument:

His contemporaries claimed that God created the earth on March 25.

It was inconceivable that the son of God could have been in any way imperfect.

Therefore Jesus must have been conceived on March 25.

This meant that he must have been born nine months later—December 25.

(Dionysius also concluded that, as a perfect being, Jesus could not have lived an incomplete life so he must have died on March 25 as well!)

December 25 was an auspicious choice. In 274, in Rome, the Emperor Aurelian declared December 25 a civic holiday in celebration of the birth of Mithras, the sun god. By 336, in that same city, Christians countered by celebrating the birth of Jesus, the son of God, on December 25.

Christians in Antioch in 375 celebrated the birth of Jesus on January 6. Christians in Alexandria did not begin to celebrate Christmas at all until 430. So until Dionysius came along there was confusion over dates, and debates raged, even over the usefulness of celebrating the birth of Jesus at all. What had been universally important for all Christians—the pre-eminent event—was the celebration of Easter.

When, in 527, he formalized the date of Jesus’ birth, Dionysius put Christmas on the map. Jesus was born, he declared, on December 25 in the Roman year 753. Dionysius then suspended time for a few days, declaring January 1, 754 — New Year’s day in Rome — as the first year in a new era of world history….

But Dionysius made a mistake in his calculations. Perhaps he had never read the gospel account of the birth of Jesus. In Matthew Jesus is said to have been born while Herod was still King (2:1). That would translate into 4 b.c. (or even earlier) according to the calculations of Dionysius. …

Later, when Pope Gregory tidied up the calendar on 24 February 1582, the calendar lost eleven days. To synchronise the calendar of Dionysius with the movement of the sun, October 4 became October 15, and to avoid having to make further adjustments a leap year was introduced. Pope Gregory must also have known of the mistakes made by Dionysius but all he did was to confirm them, perhaps hoping that no one would notice.

There is one other problem. Bishop Ussher (1581–1656) worked out the precise year of creation as 4004 b.c. (He knew about Dionysisus getting the date of Jesus’ birth wrong.) But he also advanced the view that the earth had a total life span of six thousand years. In order to come up with this conclusion he based his calculations on all the generations mentioned in the Bible. …

In reality we do not know when Jesus was born — neither the year, the month, nor the day. …

However, we wish all our readers and commenters, atheist or Christian or anything else, hearty feasting, good cheer, and many a solid material satisfaction on Christmas Day!

Bribery has secured enough votes to pass the Senate’s unpopular health care legislation. In plain truth, the Senators who have shamelessly sold their votes to their own party are political prostitutes.

It does not matter to them that it is a bad bill. They got their price.

Among the many bad provisions there is one that may even be unconstitutional.

From Erick Erickson at REDSTATE:

[Sen. Harry] Reid has slipped a provision into the health care legislation prohibiting future Congresses from changing any regulations imposed on Americans by the Independent Medicare [note: originally referred to as “medical”] Advisory Boards, which are commonly called the “Death Panels.”…

On December 21, 2009, … Harry Reid sold out the Republic in toto. … Senators discovered section 3403 [of the health care bill]. That section changes the rules of the United States Senate.

To change the rules of the United States Senate, there must be sixty-seven votes.

Section 3403 of Senator Harry Reid’s amendment requires that “it shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.” The good news is that this only applies to one section of the Obamacare legislation. The bad news is that it applies to regulations imposed on doctors and patients by the Independent Medicare Advisory Boards a/k/a the Death Panels. …

Senator Jim DeMint confronted the Democrats over Reid’s language. In the past, the Senate Parliamentarian has repeatedly determined that any legislation that also changes the internal standing rules of the Senate must have a two-thirds vote to pass because to change Senate rules, a two-thirds vote is required. Today, the Senate President, acting on the advice of the Senate Parliamentarian, ruled that these rules changes are actually just procedural changes and, despite what the actual words of the legislation say, are not rules changes. Therefore, a two-thirds vote is not needed in contravention to longstanding Senate precedent.

How is that constitutional?

The Senate Democrats are ignoring the constitution, the law, and their own rules to pass Obamacare….

Erickson goes on to consider the case for secession – or is he suggesting a dissolution of the union?

To quote the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is one of those causes. When the men and women who run this nation, which is supposedly a nation of laws not men, choose to ignore the laws and bribe the men, the people cannot be blamed for wanting to dissolve political bands connecting them to that government.

From the constitution of Texas, Article 1 Section 4:

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.”

This means that no atheist may be elected or appointed to any office or fill any post of public trust.

Texas has a fine spirit of independence. Its governor, Rick Perry, even dared mention the possibility of secession at a Tea Party rally last April. But we condemn this constitutionally entrenched discrimination, arising from sheer bigotry.

Visit this site:

www.atheists.org/Texas_State_Page

There’s talk in the ether that Obama has decided to allow Iran yet another year to ‘unclench its fist’ and stop enriching uranium for nuclear bombs. If so, this will be – what? the sixth or seventh extension of time that Obama has given the grim mullahs and the poisonous Ahmadinejad. The answer is always the same ‘No!’  Before Obama came along, Europe had persisted for about eight years with hinting to the Iranians that they should really try to play nice. ‘If you don’t stop’, they warned, ‘we’ll have to ask you again!’ Ignoring that withering threat, and scorning Obama’s ‘deadlines’ which they were confident would always be extended, the Iranians advanced steadily and vigorously towards becoming a nuclear-armed power.

It is also being said (less believably, we think) that Prime Minister Netanyahu has agreed to wait yet again, but only for another six months before he will use force to stop Iran getting the bomb.

Meanwhile certain Arab states which quietly hoped that either the US or Israel, or preferably both together, would act against Iran, may be running out of hope and patience. Now something dramatic seems to be developing.

Here is a mixture of fact and surmise from DEBKAfile:

The powerful Iranian speaker of parliament, Ali Larijani, arrived [last Sunday, December 20] in Cairo and was received at once by Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak for a conversation lasting two hours.

DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources report that the Iranian visitor carried with him a wide-ranging proposal to ease the strained relations between Tehran and the moderate Arab governments.

Without wasting a moment, the next day, the Egyptian president flew to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Arab emirates to discuss the momentous turn of events.

The octogenarian Mubarak travels very infrequently these days because of his failing health except in extraordinary circumstances. He was galvanized this time by the message Larijani brought from Tehran containing the offer of “a new Iranian approach to resolving outstanding issues.” Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has already offered to open an embassy in Cairo for the first time since ties were broken off after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

Aware that any breakthrough with the Arab governments was contingent on allaying their fears of its nuclear drive, Iran’s offer of a new beginning is reported by our sources as including a form of Iranian-Arab nuclear cooperation. Its immediate objective is to close ranks with the Arab nations in order to outmaneuver the US-Israeli campaign against its nuclear drive, thereby derailing the US president Barack Obama’s plans for … sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

The expeditiousness of Mubarak response to Tehran’s overture and the promptness of his Gulf consultations indicated that the bloc of Arab nations, which he and Saudi king Abdullah lead, has given up on effective action by America or Israel, including force, for throwing Iran off its current nuclear course.

Within the region today, coexistence with Iran looks like a safer bet.

If this burgeoning realignment of Middle East partnerships goes forward, the region’s strategic balance will be pulled out of shape, Washington’s influence heavily downgraded and Israel isolated.

And Obama’s pacifist policy towards Iran will have increased the probability of war.

Earth’s climate has been changing throughout the billions of years of its existence. If it’s changing now more quickly, the human race will quickly adapt to the changes. We are a highly adaptable species.

The eminently sensible Nigel Lawson, who was Mrs Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, writes this (in part):

The time has come to abandon the Kyoto-style folly that reached its apotheosis in Copenhagen last week, and move to plan B.

And the outlines of a credible plan B are clear. First and foremost, we must do what mankind has always done, and adapt to whatever changes in temperature may in the future arise.

This enables us to pocket the benefits of any warming (and there are many) while reducing the costs. None of the projected costs are new phenomena, but the possible exacerbation of problems our climate already throws at us. Addressing these problems directly is many times more cost-effective than anything discussed at Copenhagen. And adaptation does not require a global agreement …

Beyond adaptation, plan B should involve a relatively modest, increased government investment in technological research and development—in energy, in adaptation and in geoengineering.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the Copenhagen debacle, it is not going to be easy to get our leaders to move to plan B. There is no doubt that calling a halt to the high-profile climate-change traveling circus risks causing a severe conference-deprivation trauma among the participants. If there has to be a small public investment in counseling, it would be money well spent.

We don’t like his idea of government investment in research, since anything  government does it does badly, and anything it interferes with it spoils. If geoengineering is necessary, private enterprise will do it, and do it well.

But we delight in his drily ironic suggestion of  a ‘small public investment in counseling’ for the participants who suffer ‘conference-deprivation trauma’. Here failure wouldn’t matter.

Here, from the Wall Street Journal, is an article endorsing the idea quoted in the post below (Have they won?), that the states should curb the powers of the federal government; but setting out a more reasoned argument for how it might be done, by constitutional amendment.

For nearly a hundred years, federal power has expanded at the expense of the states—to a point where the even the wages and hours of state employees are subject to federal control. Basic health and safety regulations that were long exercised by states under their “police power” are now dominated by Washington.

The courts have similarly distorted the Constitution by inventing new constitutional rights and failing to limit governmental power as provided for in the document. The aggrandizement of judicial power has been a particularly vexing challenge, since it is inherently incapable of correction through the normal political channels.

There is a way to deter further constitutional mischief from Congress and the federal courts, and restore some semblance of the proper federal-state balance. That is to give to states—and through them the people—a greater role in the constitutional amendment process. 

The idea is simple, and is already being mooted in conservative legal circles. Today, only Congress can propose constitutional amendments—and Congress of course has little interest in proposing limits on its own power. Since the mid-19th century, no amendment has actually limited federal authority.

But what if a number of states, acting together, also could propose amendments? That has the potential to reinvigorate the states as a check on federal power. It could also return states to a more central policy-making role. …

The answer is to amend the Constitution to permit two-thirds of the states to propose amendments directly. To do so, of course, means that the states would have to first call for a constitutional convention—at which they could propose such a change.

What about the risk of a runaway convention? We think that risk is very small. In the first place, the Constitution is not the Articles of Confederation, which were ratified only six years before they were replaced.

By contrast, the American people are profoundly attached to the Constitution. It cannot and will not be replaced by an amending convention. In any event, nothing proposed at such a convention—including a change to the current amendment process—could be adopted without three-fourths of the state legislatures agreeing. …

The Framers of the U.S. Constitution never thought the balance of powers between states and the federal government would ever get so profoundly distorted. James Madison dismissed claims that the new federal government could displace the states as “chimerical fears,” assuring his readers in The Federalist Papers that “[t]he powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite.” Indeed, the Framers considered a “vertical” separation of powers—between federal and state authority—just as important as guaranteeing the success of liberty as the “horizontal” separation of powers between the president, Congress and the courts.

True enough, re-establishing a proper balance—where, as Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, Washington is responsible “principally [for] external objects” and the states for “all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people”—will not be easy.

The gain will be substantial. Although it seems that permitting the states to propose amendments is a small thing, especially because ratification would still require three-fourths of the states to agree, it would shift the power calculus—and create a potential for action that the president, Congress and courts could never ignore as they consider the proper boundaries of their own authority.

Moreover, the effort to enable the states to check Washington’s power would provide a constructive outlet for much of the growing anger—specially evident in phenomena such as the “tea party” movement—toward the political elites of both parties. It is not a partisan proposal and is difficult to oppose. The purpose is to move significant authority closer to the electorate, but in a measured, “conservative” manner that is in no sense “populist.”

Opponents would have no fig leaf. They would have to openly argue that any effort to limit Washington’s reach is a bad thing. And that is an argument they are likely to lose.

Read it all here.

With the federal government taking control of one sixth of the economy by means of ‘health care reform’, America is on the road to socialism and consequent decline, and it’s hard to see how the damage can be undone. Once entitlements are granted in law it becomes well nigh impossible to take them away again, as Europe has learnt the hard way.

Has America gone over the ‘precipice’, to use Obama’s word for this change? (We suspect he didn’t know what the word means, but it’s more apt than he could have intended.)

What sort of world is emerging with the connivance, or the capitulation, of the new weaker socialist America, which will no longer protect Western civilization?

Will America no longer be ‘the last best hope on earth’?

Is global government, the tyranny from which there can be no escape, inevitable?

Is there anything dissenting Americans – apparently a majority if the polls are right – can do to recover their liberty? Or is it too late to do anything?

Is there any point in looking to the Republican Party? Seems not, with its present leaders.

What if it had stronger leadership?

Here’s a suggestion by JB Williams at Canada Free Press:

This morning on Fox Sunday with Chris Wallace, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) conceded that Republican senators won’t be able to stop Democratic health care reform legislation from passing the Senate before Christmas.

“We will fight until the last vote,” McCain told Chris Wallace. “We owe that to our constituents, because we must do everything—we must look back and say we did everything to prevent this terrible mistake from taking place.”

I beg to differ with Senator John McCain… (which is nothing new) …

Another useless NAY vote is NOT everything they can do! …

McCain is right about one thing… Congressional Republicans have NO “legislative” POWER to stop the current assault on all things American taking place in Washington DC today. That’s because there is NO legitimate legislative process taking place in Washington DC today.

In the good old days, when the three administrative branches of the federal government kept independent checks upon each other, politicians were able to hide behind their NAY vote as a demonstration of opposition to anti-American and unconstitutional policies.

Those days are gone!

There is NO legitimate legislative process taking place in Washington DC today and even those who support this anti-American nonsense know it. More than 60% of American citizens strongly oppose every policy coming out of DC today – President Obama’s personal approval rating is in the toilet and still sinking, as is the approval rating of the leftist controlled congress.

Still, the left accelerates its rush into unbridled Global Marxism as if totally unconcerned with the “will of the people”, their limited constitutional authority, or the objections of Republicans in congress.

Republicans have only ONE chance left!

To save themselves from being painted with the same Marxist brush appropriate for today’s Democrats, stop the current slaughter of Americans sovereignty, security and prosperity, and unite the 60% of Americans in desperate need of leadership, congressional Republicans have ONE play remaining.

WALK OUT and STAY OUT!

Walk out of congress TODAY!

Force leftist Democrats to destroy this nation all alone!

Publicly name every vote bought off with state pork in the last ten months!

Call it what it is, a complete sham and rape of this nation!

Refuse to provide any form of cover for this sham and return home!

Once home, meet with state legislators to erect Tenth Amendment walls of defense at the state lines!

Once state defenses are erected, begin meeting with Tea Party and Town Hall patriots to begin the process of reclaiming the free republic.

Your Alternative?

Go down in flames with all other anti-American leftists in DC, currently running roughshod over the vast majority of American citizens opposed to everything going on in that sinking cesspool of political corruption called the federal government. …

Obama’s policies are set to tip these states and maybe others, over the brink in early 2010!

Trust me when I tell you, Congressional Republicans have NO other viable options.

But we have entered a new era in America… The enemies of freedom and liberty are in full control of all three branches of the federal government. There is NO legitimate constitutional process in Washington DC today. Republicans have NO “in chamber” power to stop the dismantling of America and only three defenses of the free republic remain.

Republicans MUST separate themselves from the sham immediately or go down in flames with the Democratic Socialists of America in charge!

The state legislatures MUST erect Tenth Amendment walls of defense at the state lines.

The people MUST unite in patriotic resistance, with or without Republicans!

The Republicans in Congress are very unlikely to take such bold action. So what remains? Many recognize that this is a critical moment for America and the world. Even among the well-behaved, mild-mannered Tea Party protestors there are some who talk of secession, and some even of revolution.

Many Americans are arming themselves. Is the revolution, if it comes, likely to be a violent one?

You have to admire the man!  He made gold out of hot air, and bends the world to his will, holding it in a state of terror, in the name of a superstition that dwarfs all the god-cults of history. How did he do it?

Starting off as a railway engineer in India, he rose to become Chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. From that pinnacle he directed billions of dollars into his own businesses. Then, being powerful beyond the wildest dreams of all the conquerors who have ever lived, this wizard had only to crook his little finger to bring the leaders of every country on earth, from the  richest to the poorest, from the weakest to the strongest, to gather together and strive frantically to impoverish and subjugate everyone else, and finally to establish a single dictatorial power to rule over the whole world.

From the Telegraph:

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.

He even has Barack Obama, the other would-be dictator of the world, dancing on a string!

Read the whole stunning story here.