This is the time of year when we put our hands together and pray from the depths of our wallet that Baby Jesus will bless us with the lottery numbers. Here's the dark side' tribute to Christmas and Prayer, and let me say that I fundamentally and legally and philosophically disagree with that rascal brother Benson on the scientific values of Prayer (on the grounds that my lottery numbers romp home this weekend) ... I knew him, Horacio ... grumbling old men over lunch, drinks and the 1980s/1990s privatisation of the health service ...

Enjoy.

Wise men present gifts: We are three wise men.
Mandy Cohen: What?
Wise men: We are three wise men.
Mandy Cohen: Well what are doing creeping around in this house at two o’clock in the morning? That doesn’t sound very wise to me. Monty Python’s Life of Brian 1979

We just ask that they be covered with the blood of Jesus. Jesus Camp 2006, Pastor Becky Fischer, Fischer’s preparatory prayer over empty meeting hall

After months of liquid research in the lounge bar Oracle of the Dog & Duck the author can chip in to the furnace of debate that the fishy carpenter Jesus was definitely not a lizard-man. But Pastor Becky Fischer from Jesus Camp is probably a lizard-lady. And Ted Haggard has lizardy tendencies. The latest sign we’ve been flashed that Jesus is the son of God can be revealed as Ted Haggard getting caught with his trousers down for homosexual tendencies, porky-pieing his ass off, getting sacked as Numero Big Knobio Uno of the National Association of Evangelicals, walking the streets exposed to the real world as an insurance salesman and selling jack-zip. Ahaha-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah! Lard, let us for ever luxuriate in thy justice and lance the boil of his cowardly attack on featherweight (though handy with a jaw-bone) Richard Dawkins:

You do understand that this issue right here of intellectual arrogance is the reason why people like you have a difficult problem with people of faith. I don’t communicate an air of superiority over the people because I know so much more. And if you only read the books I know. And if you only knew the scientists I knew, you would be great like me ... Please, don’t be arrogant. Ted Haggard, interviewed by Professor Richard Dawkins

Let us pray. Dear baby Jesus, please can you arrange for Richard Dawkins to reap revenge on Ted Haggard in a special edition of Celebrity Death Match with hedge-trimmers, chainsaw and baptism of fire. Thank you, Lard. Amen. P S apropos my bank account ...
Who first assumed God was omnipotent? So God decides after 13.5 billion years to intervene in human evolution by branding our misdemeanours as sins and by sacrificing Her blue-eyed favourite as celestial compensation. Is God bound by a universal Law of Sin? As Einstein asked — did God have a choice?

God had a son, and he said, ‘Jesus, I’m sending you on a suicide mission. But don’t worry. They can’t kill you ’cause you’re really me.’ Bill Maher, ABC television

The trouble with sins is that sins are transitory. Collecting sticks on the Sabbath back in the circumcismal day was worthy of death but is now regarded as essential to the building of a bonfire so that one can burn a witch. Who pays tithing these days except Mormons wishing to qualify for the proxy dunking of the dead in their temples?

Why didn’t He just forgive them? Why was it necessary to have a human sacrifice? To have His son tortured and executed in order that the sins of mankind should be absolved? Is that not the most disgusting idea you ever heard? Professor Richard Dawkins, interview Nicky Campbell, Big Questions: Is the Bible Still Relevant Today?

Jesus asserts he is the fulfilment of Mosaic law. Except he isn’t. Why would an unchanging God bother with differing sets of laws and customs? Hitchens objects from the prosecution bench that, ‘If the New Testament is supposed to vindicate Moses, why are the gruesome laws of the Pentateuch to be undermined?’
Jesus dispenses the forgiveness of sins arbitrarily, and such behaviour smacking of favouritism is odd.

Now, unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic ... This makes sense only if he really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply that I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history. C S Lewis, Mere Christianity

Jesus dispenses the healing of body parts arbitrarily, and such behaviour smacking of favouritism is odd.

If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness? Christopher Hitchens

Blessed are the meek. What on Earth is blessed? The meek shall inherit the Earth. Except they won’t. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God’ (Matthew 5:8). The pure in heart, whatever that means, do not see God. This weak wielding of philosophy is a poor substitute for strong scientific advice, and how to avoid and treat disease is more useful than the healing of the odd bystander (except for the bystander). But the Sermon on the Mount is an example of preaching promises and principles that are plain wrong:

Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom. (Matthew 16:28)

Resurrection, the casting out of devils (a dying art), walking on water, denying the presence of your parents, the cursing of fig trees, camping in the desert, pulling motes from your brothers’ eyes, speaking in parables, the raising of the dead and dining with prostitutes were once minority sports but have since fallen out of favour. Pity. The turning of water into wine is a promising talent with modern marketing potential, and sure to impress your friends.

I would be curious to meet him. To find out what really happened. Professor Richard Dawkins, BBC Radio Ulster

As every schoolchild knows, Jesus was crucified for high crimes against the Analogy (and at Christmas we celebrate the birthday of Adele). The Godfather of the Analogy — Don Jesus — found himself embroiled in a bitter war of words and bullets with the National Association of Mustard Seed Merchants, the Sand Builders Guild and the Vineyard Labourers Union. The final straw for the president of the Sand Builders Guild, Pontius Pilot, was a turf war in the Garden of Gethsemane when a disciple of Jesus removed the ear of a rozzer.

If I thought the Jews killed God, I’d worship the Jews. Bill Hicks

Cold-blooded Christians consent to a fascist regime of Heaven and Hell, and care for the fate of their own souls rather than summon the courage and solidarity for their condemned brothers and sisters.

What I said was that teaching children that they will roast in Hell could under some circumstances be worse than physical abuse, in the sense that it may last longer. Professor Richard Dawkins, In Confidence

The fear of being cast into Hell raises powerful imagery and inflames the soft brain-matter of the believer:

Not until gentle Jesus meek and mild is the concept of Hell introduced. Eternal torture, eternal punishment, for you and all your family for the smallest transgression. I have no hesitation in saying this is a wicked belief. Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens v Reverend Al Sharpton

How, then, does a Christian slip past Peter on the Pearly Gates and into the Elysian Fields of Heaven? By baptism, by belief, by having a poor spirit, by belittling oneself as a child, by poverty, by grace, by works, by works of a high standard, or by a combination of the above? You might think the answer more rock-settled:

1. Baptism: And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered him. (Matthew 3:15)

2. Belief: He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. (Mark 16:16)

3. By Having a Poor Spirit: Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:3)

4. Belittling Oneself as a Child: And said, Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:3)

5. By Poverty: Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 19:23)

6. By Grace: But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved, even as they. (Acts 15:11)

7. By Works: Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 7:21)

8. By Works of a High Standard: For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes (lawyers) and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:20)

‘Woe unto you also, ye lawyers’ (Luke 11:46) said Jesus. But a lawyer worth her or his salt would ask — what constitutes a legitimate baptism? Can you baptise yourself? Can a child give consent to be baptised? Why would Jesus be so vague? Rich lawyers who own camels and who are rude to children can book with confidence their passages up the River Styx without a paddle.
Before being baptised, before speaking in tongues, before tapping a tambourine and singing about Three Wise Men, you’ll have to win the lottery of being born at a time and a place to hear the long tall stories about baby Jesus. Here lies a common problem afflicting religious sects — a sect can only save souls on its own doorstep and not the lost souls whose only misfortune is living in the wrong time and place, and who presumably will be cast into outer darkness.
The simplest and cheapest solution for a Christian sect is to preach that those lost sheep not of this fold will be found by the good Shepherd either on the Elysian Fields of Heaven, the Half-Way House, or in the other place where you won’t have to worry about the central heating.
The Mormon solution is the most elaborate and expensive. The choicest, peachiest Mormons, the worthiest (10% tithing x minimum membership x Word of Wisdom) win the dubious privilege of attending one of the many Mormon temples and performing proxy baptisms for the dead. Now picture yourself enrobed in a white suit, as if for sacrifice: a wrinkly lizard-man in a white suit leads you by the arm to the sharp edges of a white marble ornamental tub; you step into the slimy pool of water almost to your neck; and another shrunken wrinkly lizard-man in a white suit safe behind the sanctuary of a sacrificial altar reads from a black book of the dead a roll-call of twelve names; yet another wrinkly lizard-man in a white suit, shedding lizardy skin across the scummy surface of sickly warm water, creeps at you from behind, grabs your wrist — and immerses you glugging under the event-horizon of water. Gasping for air, you emerge into a white-carpeted, white-suited Mormon world. Here resurrects the reason why Mormons are so dead-keen to investigate their ancestry and why roaming packs of Mormons harvest names from gravestones and from any available public record.

Christians used to resolve this problem by saying that Jesus descended into hell after his crucifixion, where it is thought that he saved or converted the dead ... The Mormons have improved on this rather backdated solution with something very liberal-minded. They have assembled a gigantic genealogical database at a huge repository in Utah, and are busy filling it with the names of all people whose births, marriages, and deaths have been tabulated since records began ... This retrospective baptism of the dead seems harmless enough to me, but the American Jewish Committee became incensed when it was discovered that the Mormons had acquired the records of the Nazi “final solution”, and were industriously baptizing what for once could truly be called a “lost tribe”: the murdered Jews of Europe. For all its touching inefficacy, this exercise seemed in poor taste. I sympathize with the American Jewish Committee, but I nonetheless think that the followers of Mr Smith should be congratulated for hitting upon even the most simpleminded technological solution to a problem that has defied solution ever since man first invented religion. Christopher Hitches, God is Not Great p168

Hot raving enemy camps of opinion, like two vast tribes of Israel, go to war on the Bosworth Fields of the Internet to argue with passion whether a real flesh-and-blood Jesus performed for the masses on the stage of the Holy Land. Fish, anyone?

The gospel story is an artificial, non-historical work. It has been fabricated from source materials that can be identified and traced to their incorporation into the Gospels. There is not a particle of hard evidence that ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ ever existed. Harold Leidner, The Fabrication of the Christ Myth

cf.

There is a remarkable amount of documents and corroboration. Professor Craig Evans, Acadia Divinity College

It’s Jesus, Jim, but not as we know him. But this mind-sapping minority sport is but the latest manifestation of opinion running back hundreds of years:
— In 1906 Albert Schweitzer published Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (History of Life of Jesus Research) in which he traced the evolution of the modern image of Jesus to reflect the zeitgeist of authors. So which way did the swotty Schweitzer swing?

The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth and died to give his work final consecration never existed. The Quest of the Historical Jesus p478

Christians stand all amazed at the spectre of their religion plagiarised from the body of pagan beliefs. Wisely we reserve a helping of Albert Schweitzer’s Nobel-prize-winning humanity for the heart-shocked Christians who discover a hidden history founded in the fables, faith and fantasies of the forerunners of Jesus. One football commentator of the first century had this to stay of the promising star striker:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18:3:3

The Founding Fathers of God’s mother country were not so airy-fairy and fable-fancying as the feel-good Flavius Josephus:

If we could believe that he [Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanisms which his biographers father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and the fanatics of the latter, ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor. Thomas Jefferson

Fuck. Jefferson jettisons justification to jerk-off the jumped-up Jesus junkies. Jeepers.
The Roman festival of December 25th called Deus Natalis Solis Invicti celebrated the birthday of the unconquered Sun. A pretty picture in prose to compare Jesus and the Sun was painted by Thomas Paine:

The Christian religion and Masonry have one and the same common origin: both are derived from the worship of the Sun. The difference between their origin is, that the Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun. Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

Dr Robert Beckford’s excellent television investigation — The Hidden Story of Jesus — reveals comparisons between Krishna and Buddha and Jesus:

The story of Jesus wasn’t quite as unique as you might have thought. That the Hindu God Krishna also had a miraculous birth and was also attended by angels and shepherds. And that like Jesus, the Buddha also performed miracles, walking on water and feeding the five-hundred ... Krishna: there is also an immaculate conception and the birth is heralded by angels ... According to tradition his [Buddha] mother Maya gave birth to him miraculously. Like Jesus he was also predicted to be a great man from birth, and wise men travelled to see him ... Like Jesus he was also tempted by a devil figure but resisted ... In their teachings both Jesus and Buddha provide a very practical guide to personal transformation that is remarkably similar ... The similarities between the teachings of Jesus and Buddha are remarkable. ibid.

Comparisons, comparisons everywhere, nor any stop to think:

The rise of Mithras almost exactly parallels the rise of Jesus ... A saviour God who offered his followers a life after death - did Christianity steal these ideals? ... One tradition claims Mithras even had a virgin birth ... They chose December 25th, the winter solstice, which also happens to be the birthday of Mithras ... The Roman god Mithras and the ancient Egyptian cult of Osiris are just too close to home to be dismissed so easily. ibid.

‘What are you left with?’ asks Dr Beckford despairingly. ‘Jesus the Jew.’ The reader’s investigation into the Meaning of Life needs must follow the trail of evidence no matter where that trail may lead. For our furry-bottomed Jesus friends the allegations of fraud are far from flushed through the toilet-cistern of evidence:

He [Horus] was all that was good and righteous and holy. And he had his adversary — his name was Set. Sound a little bit familiar? Like with Jesus of Nazareth, who had his adversary, Satan? Horus-Set = Jesus-Satan. In fact the resemblances between Jesus and Ah-men-Ra or Horus and all of the other saviours of mankind are just too many. They go on and on and on ... Horus baptised with water by Arup; Jesus baptised with water by John ... Horus born in Annu, the place of bread; Jesus born in Bethlehem, the house of bread. Horus the good shepherd with the crook upon his shoulders; Jesus the good shepherd with the lamb or kid upon his shoulder. The seven on board the boat with Horus; the seven fishers on board the boat with Jesus. Horus as the Lamb; Jesus as the Lamb. Horus as the Lion; Jesus as the Lion. Horus as the black child; Jesus as the little black bambino. Horus identified with Tat or Cross; Jesus identified with the Cross. Horus of twelve years; Jesus of twelve years. Horus made a man of thirty with his baptism; Jesus made a man of thirty years with his baptism. Horus the Krst; Jesus the Christ. Horus the manifesting son of God = Jesus the manifesting son of God. Derek Partridge, The Naked Truth

The British Museum’s bad boy, the exotically named Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge, may have handled a few dodgy Egyptian stolen goods on behalf of the British museum, but he also wrote extensively on the comparative origins of Belief:

The Egyptians of every period in which they are known to us believed that Osiris was of divine origin, that he suffered death and mutilation at the hands of the powers of Evil, that after a great struggle with these powers he rose again, that he became henceforth the King of the underworld, and judge of the dead, and that because he had conquered Death the righteous also might conquer Death ... In Osiris, the Christian Egyptians found the prototype of Christ, and in the pictures and statues of Isis suckling her son Horus, they perceived the prototypes of the Virgin Mary and her child. E A Wallis Budge, Egyptian Religion

Here we draw a line in the Egyptian sand despite further comparisons between Jesus and Antigonus, Cyrus, Prometheus, Heracles, Babylonian kings, pagan mythology and my old geography teacher. The comparisons have lingered longer than a limp, rambling parable with a lesson to employers that the Lard approves of the payment of a sparrow’s allowance.

Jesus is called the Lamb of God. The Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world. Now, you talk about an old concept and an old motif — that certainly is. Virtually all the ancient religions in the world had a Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world. Jordan Maxwell, The Naked Truth

Modern scholarship is scathing and sceptical about the scarcely reliability Gospels — multiple scallywags manipulating scabrous manuscripts donkey’s years after any manifestation of Jesus. Mark was considered the first — scorified as fiction. (How did Mark know what Jesus said in the Garden of Gethsemane if everybody was asleep?) Next to the scaffold scampers the scoundrel Matthew with a scandal sheet that includes underscoring Mark with a schedule of scrambled and scraggy detail:

Their multiple authors — none of whom published anything until many decades after the Crucifixion — cannot agree on anything of importance. Matthew and Luke cannot concur on the Virgin Birth or the genealogy of Jesus ... they disagree wildly about the Sermon on the Mount, the anointing of Jesus, the treachery of Judas, and Peter’s haunting “denial”. Most astonishingly, they cannot converge on a common account of the Crucifixion or the Resurrection. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great pp111-112

The unstable history of the Gospels renders any psychoanalysis of Jesus a straw man. The Christmas story is a mulled mix of balmy imagery (the Star of Bethlehem) and baleful commentary. The dearth of dependable detail provides no evidence of Jesus’ Life or Death. The audacious authors of the Gospels assumed the need to continue a stale fascist tradition:

Why would Christians want to portray Jesus as violent, as someone who killed people, who withered people? And I’m not sure that there’s a good answer to it. Professor Bart Ehrman

Heaven knows the blood-soaked pages of the Christian Bible do not confer glory to a beloving God. Cursing fig trees is not figurative of a fruit-fancying son of God but the fragmentary figment of a fanciful imagination. Down the rabbit hole of evidence falls Corpus Christi with a cunning plan. Take the red pill.

I read all about the scourging and the crowning with thorns. I could vide myself helping in and even taking charge of the toll-chocking and the nailing in. Being dressed in the height of Roman fashion. I didn’t so much like the latter part of the Book, which is all like preachy-talking rather than fighting and the old in-out. I like the parts where these old yahoodies toll-chock each other. Then drink their Hebrew vino. Getting onto the bed with their wives’ handmaidens. That kept me going. Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange 1971, Alex’s prison vision of Bible

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