h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Miriam.

*looks around* Hmm - so this would be the dog house?

Like I say, folk wisdom. Which folk? I've seen it in a novel, a column in the Daily Telegraph ("Sacred and Profane", written by a CofE priest of some kind), and my Uncle mentioned it in the "friend of a friend of a theologer" context. Like I said, "probably equally inaccurate", though plausable to a complete non-specialist like myself, which is how such folk wisdom gets spread.

Don't tell me you don't have such pieces of nonsense in your non-specialty...

One thing you have just learnt about me is my complete inability to deal with names and namings. So let's try and clarify some stuff.

Tree of Life / Tree of Knowledge. You're entirely correct: I'd forgotten that they were two different trees. Ho hum: colour me ignorant.

Roman Pantheon == Greek Pantheon. Yep, it's a huge oversimplification, and I'm sure I have the respective priesthoods rolling in their pyrami^H^H^H^H graves every time I mention Aphrodite and Bacchus in the same sentence, but it makes life so much easier. So yes, Apollo == Zeus. I'm sure there were vast differences in worship and emphasis, but the mythology is the same.

Even worse, I do the YHWH == Jehovah == Yahweh == The Father == The Lord == g-d thing too. Doesn't matter really - no matter what I call that bundle of semi-related entities, someone will correct me: the beliefs about the correct name of God are varied to the point of utter confusion to me.

Right, that's some of my stupidities made more obvious, let's see what I can do from here... *prepares to dig herself further into her hole*

> "No one, including a Greek Pagan infidel Gentile so-and-so, would put one of their ridiculous little petty gods up where they could compare him/her to the Jewish G-D."

Except the christians, who, as I believe has been mentioned, have been incorporating other rites and deities left right and center since formation. And unless I'm much mistaken, that includes saying in a brazen voice {Zeus/Apollo is the same person as YHWH/The Lord, so look guys, you're already worshiping my God! Now hold still while I sprinkle this water over you}...

Now, during this apparent process of blatant fudging of boundaries, the claim is that someone was looking for an equivalent to Prometheus to convince a particularly irritating infidel, notes the similarity of the story with that of the serpent in Genesis, and happened upon Lucifer in Isiah. Aha, thinks our converter-wannabe, this'll get him hooked - and sets Serpent == Lucifer == Prometheus. Bingo!

The further part of the claim is that the reason that the reason the serpent story and the prometheus story have similarities is that they evolved from the same root myth sometime before either religion was crystalised.

> "Prometheus made the Olympiad angry by giving the gift of Fire, which theretofore had belonged to the Gods exclusively, to humans, thereby elevating human status to the point where the Olympiad became extremely insecure."

[quotes from KJV - mistranslations will apply]

And the serpent {later identified with Lucifer, according to the claim}, said "ye shall be as gods" to Eve. And God got into a temper, and did the heavy cursing thing left right and center. He also commented "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever", and did the banning thing. Which sounds to my occidentally [love that word] biased ears as major league insecurity...

The fall thing would be the punishment of the serpent, related to the punishment of Prometheus. Hmm, something of a mistake to use the word "fall". Probably a mistake to say "Supreme God" rather than just "God(s)", too. You pays your money...

Anywho, the executive summary appears to be that it's a load of rubbish. Though it does explain why christians associate Lucifer with the devil, despite the complete lack of Biblical or other evidence to that effect. A subtelty is that if Lucifer is a Latinisation of the original, then it could well have been mistransliterated to sound more appropiate to someone who was going to be taking the place of Prometheus.

MyRedDice - just learnt the meaning of "kvetch" - every day is a school day...

Look, Leah, a new Cause! Down with Phlogiston. End Phlogistonianism. Phlogistonists are Part of the Problem; Be Part of the Solution. Add mass. Gain mass. Go to Mass. Go to Mass..

Cut it out, Arpeggio -- Leah, (wearily)

How else, since that's what 'Leah' means?

Ooo. MyRedDice just a iddle baby. I best not be too mean to him, as this body was 18 in 1979.

Growing up in a Tory family under Ole Iron-Knickers Thatcher... Is that anything like growing up in a Right-Wing family under Generalissimo Francisco Franco? Never mind, I know it is.

Me baby wannabe flower child. Have one . Ooo I was so cross when I wanted to go to the demo, and when they said 'NO', and I said 'Why-yy?', they said 'Because you're seven.' Like, was there a sequitur there that I missed, or something?

Noo, don't agree that the squares prove that 'relativity' had not become part of the collective unconscious. *They* were born in the '20s and '30s, so it could not be expected to affect them the same way, unless they were remarkably hip people, like Lord Bertrand Russell ( -- designer of the Peace sign -- betcha didn't know that!). The effect of the existence of a moral grey area, where there had been none, made the 'generation gap' of that time a positive schism. Parents and children simply did not have the same, ok, here it is, 'paradigm', so there *could not* be any communication.

The threadbare (because accurate) analogy of explaining colour to a person who has been blind from birth applies. Can't be done. NO FRAME OF REFERENCE.

So, what ultimately resolved out of the messy moral grey area that came into existence with post-Second-War babies was they became (now it's the 1970s, so you're not an itch in your daddy's britches yet) polarised on how to deal with this grey area Thing. Out came rubbish from relativist extremists, like 'Situation Ethics', which I wouldn't give to a dog, to pee on. It's a sort of Ethics by and for Sociopaths/Moral Anarchism thing.

The other side did Denial. Grey area? What grey area? I don't see any grey area. They wrote elaborate texts meant to re-realise Reality, and came off equally badly. Take the US Fundy Christian Right (out to the middle of the Pacific, please ), who do not *like* relativism, o no they don't. I couldn't list the number of Fundy books I've read which go, earnestly and with vigour, at the concept: 'The Bible is not subject to interpretation; the preceding was not an interpretive statement, but a universal Truth; that there is Univeral Truth is not an interpretive statement; we know this because it says so where God wrote it, in the Bible.' They keep *trying* to meet the critiques of a relativist world, but in order to stick to what they say they believe, they have to have a self-contradictory, and self-referential foundation-statement.

Read Kuhn. It'll do you no end of good. Your friend is quite right.

Gor... I'm old enough to be its Ma...

Arpeggio pushing 40, but it pushes back, and it's going to win.

*rapidly apologises for use of Tetragrammaton*

Sorry - I'll try and avoid that in future - I thought that particular injunction was history, rather than in current use.

The bible thing: Isaiah 14:12 - "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!" - that's in the King James Version - almost certainly not in the original, as you say...

Tetragrammaton not history. Nope. Go to any serious Jewish People Web Site (I don't care if it's about cookery), and if they talk about G-D, they do that thing. As for the other, the letters, we're going to write an article, today, really!

Arp-

We thought you were a boy??

This would be the dog-house. (Miriam, spell that the way you say it - Arp) Okay, so dawg-house. (I'm from Brooklyn, N'Yawk.)

Sure, I've heard plenty of Urban-Legends. I guess I'm too old, and approach *everything* with too much of a hermeneutic of suspicion to be easily impressed with any assertion. As an old academic, I want sources, primary.

Which you got. Your KJV quotation about the 'they shall be as Gods' was dead awn target. So yes, possible (though still uncertain because mostly of timing) that there was a basic myth that led to both stories, though very culturally altered.

Could be the KJV has 'Tree of Life' for awll I know. It's really supposed to be the 'Tree of Wisdom', later cawlled the 'Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil'.

Your family are Tories. To these people, you listen? Weird.

Yes Roman Pantheon approximately equivalent to Greek Pantheon. As it so happens, though, and just to set the record totally straight here, Zeus and Apollo are both Greek. In Roman gods, they translate to Jupiter and... Apollo. Zeus is the god of sky.Apollo is the Sun god.(gods, plural, who aren't Our G-D, aren't capitalised and don't have to be not-written-out, because we're better than those wimpy Greeks, and those gods are dead and ours is not ! So there!)

All these god-words are related. There was the I-E root 'deiw-' which meant 'to shine'. By extension, you get sky, moon, heaven, and god. Zeus = Greek god of the sky, thunder, lighting. Jupiter (same root) Roman equivalent. Diana = Roman Moon goddess. Deva, Devi= respectively male and female gods, Sanskrit. Deus=Latin for 'god', Theos=Greek for 'god', so theology. Divus=Latin for 'divine' ultimately gets us everything from opera 'diva' to 'devil'. Dies= Latin for 'day' gives us 'diary' and such. Via a consonant shift also jour= French for 'day' and so journal, journey, etc. Jove is *not* as many people think a gloss for the Jewish name of G-D, but rather an alternate form of Jupiter (Jovian, of or having to do with Jupiter) gets us the name Julius, and the word jovial.

I-E languages are not related to and had no significant impact upon OLD Semitic languages. Syriac, spoken at the time of Jesus, yeah. But the Tetragrammaton has zilch to do with the Roman or other names for god.

Why did I say all that? Well, when it comes to names, some details are useful/important. You can mess up pretty badly if you confuse a minor deity with a major one. The G-D figure of the three Religions of the Book is basically, I think most Jews, Christians, and Muslims agree, supposedly the same Entity. Don't quote me to a fundy of any of those religions. They have other problems.

Since you went and quoted us at us, I have to agree with you, don't I? Either that, or pick an argument with Sara, which I am not suicidal today thankyou.

Yes indeedy, when the Christians wanted converts, they went out and did just that very little thing, knowing smugly all alawng that their G-D was really THE G-D, and the silly deities the Greeks and Romans had been worshipping didn't compare, *really*. That's manipulation in a nutshell.

I ask you, what does the birth of Jesus have to do with fir trees? Or strings of lights? What does anyone know from what time of year he was born? What does the Ascention have to do with duckies, eggs, bunnies, chickies, and candy? The Pagans all (at any distance from the equator) had and still have Midwinter Sunreturn festivals. The evergreen, which never dies, is the symbol of continued life. lights, on the longest night of the year, is a no-brainer. These customs were in place, and there was no shifting them. So the crafty SalesChristians said, yeah, yeah, we love what you're doing here to Celebrate the Birth of your Savior! Let's have a sing-alawng.

Spring: lambs, baby animals, fertility. Awlso Passover, at which it just so happens the story says Jesus' 'friends' turned awn him. So now there's Holy Week, and the most Holy day in the Christian Calendar is FUN!! But getting the Pagans to give up their fertility rites, especially in warmer, agricultural settings, was about as likely as getting Nordic Pagans to quit celebrating Sunreturn.

I'm saying you're right, awn this one. It was the path of least resistance. No way were a bunch of austere Jewish heretics going to get Pagans to go alawng with Kosher, so Paul said 'never mind that part, pass the ham and cheese'.

I'll buy that argument about the conflation of the serpent, Lucifer, Satan, and Prometheus -- there's that theos word again. It makes sense. It certainly could have happened, and I have no way of knowing that it didn't.

You did good, it makes sense to me. Thanks. I learned something. That is fun.

Reb. Miriam of and fawr (y'happy now, Arpeggio?) LeKZ

Starhawk.

Heard her give a speech once.

I am quite radical in terms of my own feminism. I support women exploring women's ways of knowing, doing, finding out for ourselves.

I am, however, an academic. I distinguish between reasonable reframing of the Same Old Patriarchy, done by women who make sense, and women deciding said Same Old Patriarchy and their values should be by-passed completely, in favour of whatever their particular flavour of womynist thinking is.

If women are going to deliver stream-of-consciousness, unsubstantiatated and unsubstantiable 'intuition' that implausibly revise the whole of human history, I'm with the Patriarchs.

What's the old feminist slogan? Women have to work twice as hard as men to receive half as much credit; fortunately, that is not too difficult. Then there are the women who decide not to try at all, and call it 'reinventing academia in a feminist framework.'

Starhawk was much more disorganised in person than even her writing, which I don't like, would suggest. And people GUSHED.

Sara for LeKZ
Feminists like her, I need like I need chlorfluorocarbons.

You can explain colour to someone who's black-and-white vision only: you show them a spectrum analyser, posibly waffle about how the colour of an item is an automatically apparent feature of it like texture or shade, and they've probably got a good model of it all. Can't compare to being able to actually see colour, since the wetware's missing - but that's a problem with *brain function*. Similarly with explaining colour to someone who's been blind from birth: the problem isn't that there's no frame of reference, the problem is that all the brain function that deals with that kind of concept is completely unused.

Same thing with linguistics really: the reason that the Japanese can't tell the difference between 'r' and 'l', and that the English can't pronounce 'oui' properly {and I'm starting to pick up your write-it-as-you-say-it thing: I wrote that as 'we' first time}.

Having said that, what you say makes a lot of sense - the Universal Truth reaction of the fundies being very similar to the Creationism reaction, even though the causes were seperated in time so. And the level of self-contradiction inherent in making that effort is the same. So I think I'll agree with you on this point. It's pretty much untestable anyway, unless we invent time travel or meet some alien species...

I encountered situational ethics when I was writing a guide entry on ethics {blatant plug: http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A493607} - and I have to say it struck me as equally stupid, though I'm not sure it was explained terribly well to me. Sadly, Edited entries have to be balanced, so I couldn't just say that "situational ethics is a load of tripe". Have to leave that to the attached conversations...

To anybody else, I'd offer some trite rubbish like "you're only as old as you think you are", but that doesn't really apply to lekZ, does it?

3000-3500 BCE?!!!

I think not! They wouldn't have known about Babylon then!

Try 700 or 600 BCE. Isaiah wasn't oral; it was written pretty much from the get-go. And Lucifer's identification with Satan would have been much later, at least 500 years. AT LEAST! Likely 700 years or more.

Prometheus would have been an oral story that would have been known throughout the Greek (and, later, the Roman) world. So it's quite plausible that Prometheus evolved into Lucifer.

--Cooper

Yeah - I'm a boy physically {or a guy, and yes, I know it's hypocritical to object while calling women my own age 'girls', but I don't care }, but mentally it varies somewhat, so my pronoun use is essentially random. I go under the handle "Lucinda (AKA MyRedDice)" on h2g2 normally, but I changed it recently to advertise the petition. I'll change it back shortly.

myre - going to bed RIGHT NOW

Yeah. Mmm. I know. My bad.

I got offline and got all the chronology and it's all in a post on the Easter and Christmas thread.

So I'm publicly embarrassed. At least I quit guessing and looked some stuff up. I learned something.

Duly chastened
Miriam for LeKZ

Had to agree with Zenmond! Wicca has nothing to do with the so-called burning times, nor is it ancient. Nor soes the word wicca derive from any word meaning wise. The only known root that could be applied to the word wicca is one meaning 'to twist' but this is more coincidence than anything else!
Wicca is a religion, a modern reconstructionist religion. Witchcraft is an occult art, a Mystery Philosophy. Witchcraft is indeed as old as humanity: the earliest known writings of Sumerians talk of magic and divination. Wicca however has very little to do with that tradition. That's not to say there is anything wrong with wicca per se: just that wiccans should know and lay claim to an accurate history of their religion, and accept it.
However I did think (& was pleased to see it) that the article made it clear that not Wicca is not synonomous with Witchcraft, rather that witchcraft is an aspect of wicca, and not all witches are wiccans.
regards
Liossa

Thank you Liossa! (just when I thought this thread was terminaly off-topic)

Its a shame that some Wiccans feel the need to claim their path is ancient so as to lend legitimacy to it. It doesn't need it! Wicca is a legitimate religion even if it is only slightly older than 50 years or so. It wouldn't matter if it was invented yesterday if it works.

There's a parallel here: remember the Dark Ages - when science was apparently largely held up because people thought that the Greeks must have figured everything out already? Seems that we have the same problem with religion nowadays - perhaps generations to come will call this the "Mindlessly Stupid Ages"?

Replying to Sara (mostly):

The programme I watched linked ergot poisoning (specifically in gorwth on rye in swampy country) to rashes of 'witch fever', rather than to the totality of witch-hunts and the like. There was a case in France in the last century where a contaminated rye batch got to the local bakery and a whole town went down with hallucinations and what-not.

For not conquering other Christians, this applies principaly to the Conversion Period (my speciality). It was considered pretty sharp practice to join the Orthodox Church to avoid the sword and franciscas of turf-hungry Christians. Later of course, it all went to pot when the Churches got big enough to start throwing their weight around at heretics on the scale of the Aryan Church, the Insular Church, and eventually even the Orthodox Churches.

Mind you, the sack of Constantinople in the Second (is that right? Second?) Crusade was a matter of cash for sackings. The Venicians refused to send the boats and the money because they were a little short on account of the trade successes of the Byzantines, but if the Crusaders camped at the Golden Horn wouldn't mind just sacking that there city...

Not the last Christian city to go that way either.

Hekate sometimes has a dog's head(s), a little liek Scylla. It was a bad pun.

I don't know much more about pseudo-Dionysius but the name and the hierarchy (three triads of three choirs each - seraphim, cherubim, thrones; dominations/dominions, powers, virtues; principalities/ princedoms, archangels, angels). The system was favoured by Thmas Aquinas and used by the Cathoic Church. A lot of Protestants rejected it, and Barrett - in The Magus - added an extra triad.

Oh, and rather than knowing my stuff well, I just say it with confidence. I could be the Boss-Hog in the world of cult archaeology were I so inclined.
Some stuff I know well (and I'm pretty good with angels), but I often state somthign autoritatively, only to have to admit that I got carried away and gave out something I'd either: Misunderstood; got wrong, or; read in a novel/comic/cult archaeology text.

Cherubim are Akkadian and Assyrian in creation, the name meaning to pray or to bless they were intercessory spirits (not guardians as I believe I earlier said; see what I mean?). They were sometimes seen as monstrous beast spirits before being made the second highest order of angels.

I have no real idea _how_ Apocryphal the Book of Enoch is, but it's certainly as good a read as Revelations (and covers some similar ground). According to scholar of the wierd Kenneth Hite, the first traces of it date to c.3rd century BC (and see below), and it is referenced approvingly in the NT Book of Jude (not one I'm familiar with).

OK; my Brewer's tells me that 'mare' in nightmare is from the OE mare, by way of Norse mara, meaning incubus. Also, that the incubus (lies upon) is associated with smothering dreams as well as 'unexpected' pregnancy.

Mara - or Mora - is in fact a Polish-Serbian strangler/vampire demoness (see, there I go again; it's because I have all my books at home and I'm usually typing at work). As a smotherer of course, she once again is more akin to an incubus than a succubus, and this ties her to the 'mara' of nightmare.

Lilith is associated by some with Empusa, a witch who seduced sleeping men by 'straddling them' (according to my Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern Mythology and Religion), a forerunner of the Succubus. I concede that 'lies beneath' is a pretty poor description of Lilith. She's also given to killing small children in their
sleep.

I'll accept your version of the origins of impregnating demons, with the corollary that a cynic might suggest that you didn;t necessarily have to blame the _devil_.

As for the monks, I'm surprised I didn't mention them.

And as far as I know the Bible doesn't have much to say on the subject of ejaculation outside of procreation. All we have is Onan smote for 'spilling his seed', which was more because he declined to let said seed enter his oft-widowed former-sister-in-law and now wife when Big G had told him specifically to do so.

I'd be better at this if I could be bothered to read through my copy of the KJV for quotes, but it's tiny and Ihave a headache.

I think there's a lot of incest wrangling in the OT. Lot and his daughters, some king's children. Ugh. I can't remember.

I don't particularly wish to be resepected in religious history circles. CE and BCE both appear at times in archaeology as well, but I've never used them. Partly I just feel that AD and BC are widely recognised and therefore useful dating conventions, and second I don't see CE and BCE being any better in terms of respect. They maintain the same calendar, but imply a unversality rather than identifying the nature of their arbitrary centrepoint. If you like that kind of thing.

Moreover, I'm not writing Anno Domini or Before Christ, I'm writing AD and BC, which are just letters. Nothing more. It's a useful, well-recognised convention that I apply to because the majority of people reading it will know what it means, which is not the case with CE and BCE.

Likewise I always use 'he' as a general pronoun, because that's the simple convention. Alternating 'he' and 'she' is needlessly pedantic, (s)he looks wrong, and he/she/it is unwieldy. in the specific, since I'm talking about someone else's deity, whom I don't remotely believe in, the biblical 'He' seems as appropriate as anything.

As for ommitting the 'o', I don't think I will, because I'm not taking the name in vain. This has become in part a discussion about God. I'm not using the name as a swear word, or as part of a swearword; it isn't a forbidden name, in fact, it isn't even a name, and I really don't see what anyone has to get offended about.

And yes, I realise that religious conservatives may well be offended by things that I would never consider offensive, but then religious conservatives have done a fair number of things that offend me in their time.

The Prophet.

Zenmondo,

Agreed. Wicca is, for all its flaws, quite popular. This suggests it meets people's spiritual needs. That, as you say, is legitimating in and of itself.

My hunch, based on the substantial body of Wiccan literature which attempts to speciously historicise Wicca, is that people tend to call New Religious Movements 'cults'. There are very specific sociological definitions for what makes a 'cult', and Wicca does not meet all the criteria, or even most. (I'll list if someone asks.) Most people, however, do not use these sociological criteria, and tend to lump all New Religious Movements together, and load the word 'cult' with unnecessary and negative value-judgements.

In an effort to escape the 'cult' label, not only Wiccans have attempted to falsely historicise themselves. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of 1960s and '70s fame (and/or notoriety) did the same in tracing all the (quite modern) precepts of Transcendental Meditation to ancient Hinduism. There are many other New Religious Movements that have felt the need to do likewise. (Again, I shall provide examples if asked.) People in general seem to choose to understand the word 'religion' to mean 'old'.

Note to MyRedDice: enter Darwin...

It is unfortunate that so many Wiccans fall into this conceptual trap. They end up emphasising all the wrong things about their religion/s (not all Wiccans believe alike -- it is too soon to tell whether these differeces are going to create rifts, and separate branches of Wicca, or not) and thereby reducing their credibility as Religious Movements of today. The less credible a group, the more they *will* be perceived as a 'cult'.

As a growing Religious Movement, worldwide, Wicca has to find ways to establish itself within the context of other World Religions. In my personal opinion, it is a large scale mistake, to adopt the historical persecution of 'witches' as part of their heritage. While it provides a dramatic martyred backdrop (stage scenery reference intentional) to Wicca, it strikes me as rather self-disempowering and disenabling to *intentionally* try to claim a history of persecution.

Finally, and I am not sure how relevant this will seem to Western eyes, but it is very visible to mine: Wicca is fundamentally not only a Western, but also an educated/economically advantaged/caucasian people's phenomenon. There are covens in the States, the UK, all over Europe, etc. I have yet to meet an African-American, or Latina Wiccan. (I have met African-American, and Latina witches, whose craft came respectively from the Caribbean Islands, and the indigenous Nations of Latin America.) I suspect in the UK there is a shortage of Pakistani Wiccans. Labourers are much less attracted to Wicca than are, say, university students. I am not drawing any conclusions here; it is just an observation about *who* this New World Religion seems to attract most. I could do some sociological conjecture, but *that* seems a bit irrelevant to me.

Arpeggio for LeKZ

Arpeggio / LeKZ,

A very well put post! I had not considered the posibility of new religions being considerd cults. I suppose this is something to be contended with. I suppose a religion needs to have some age behind it before it is considered legitimate by the population at large. Faking a lineage is one way of artificially aging any tradition it would seem. Then once the lineage is in place the path could be "revealed", the story being that it was hidden for reason "x", but now is ready to be made public.

Prophet,

I couldn't agree more about not worrying about offending religious conservatives. I, too, find them offensive. For me, it's a question of not treading on toes unnecessarily. Possibly, this has to do with the Hindu maternal parent, and hearing about British soldiers and/or civil servants desecrating Hindu temples by tromping inside, with their shoes on.

I may have opinions that are shocking to religious conservatives, and I think that's my prerogative. I do not need to go out of my way to be sacrilegious, is all I'm saying. It is no trouble for me to leave the 'o' out, when referring to the Major Deity of the Religions of the Book. If something that does me no harm might spare someone some hurt, I do it.

As far as language usage goes, to each her/his own. I am old fashioned and stodgy about language in many ways. I am also of the opinion that so long as the female human is subsumed under the normative 'he', because of an old, and not necessarily good convention, the female human has no hope of attaining equal status with male humans. When one says 'Man' to mean 'Humanity', or 'he' to mean s/he (quite customary in many academic circles, now), one makes the female human invisible. To the extent that language shapes our understanding of reality, as well as reflecting it, this is a place where our language needs to grow, to accomodate the *other* half of the human species. (It's even worse in gendered languages, like... well, all of them I have ever studied except Mandarin Chinese).

BC and AD may be widely known and recognised. I do see your point about the beginning of the Common Era being the same Christian choice for When Time Began. Again, in academic circles, 'BCE' and 'CE' are now more normative than not, at least in the States. Since so much trade, etc. with the world is done using the Gregorian calendar (as opposed to the Jewish, or Chinese, or other major calendars), it strikes me as more respectful of the diversity of our world, to move away from Christian-specific terminology. Of course, there is resistance. I remember when the Metric system was introduced in the UK. (The States still refuse to touch the Metric system; perhaps they think it's a Communist plot? )

One of these days, I'm going to do an article on the 'why' behind choosing to use nonsexist language, even if it seems clumsy at first. For now, I shall just quote a Professor of Theology, who was explaining that any papers employing exclusively masculine pronouns for G-d, would be returned for re-writes. He said, 'I have a wife and four daughters. One day, I was listening to a sermon about G-d, in which He did this, and He did that, and I started to think about how differently my wife and daughters would hear those words than I did. So I asked them, "do you feel personally identified with G-d?", and they said "no, of course not; we're female".' I cannot make you change your mind, let alone your behaviour. This is simply my reasoning: females are as entitled to identify with G-d as males.

Even if you don't agree, does what I said make sense? I'd really like to know.

Thank you,
Sara for LeKZ

I just thought of this: as far as faked lineages go, one of the Gospels in the Christian Scripture -- Mark, I *think* -- goes way out of its way to trace Joseph's ancestry back to King David? Abraham? one of those old Hebrew Bible figures, in order to make the Messianic claims about Jesus line up with the prophecies in Isaiah, which said the Messiah would be a direct lineal descendent of *whoever*. Never mind that Jesus was no blood kin (officially) of Joseph's, and simply adopted.

The legitimation of New Religions by creating specious old roots is not a new trick.

Arpeggio for LeKZ

There are two geneologies for Jesus given in the New Testament. The first one in the Gospel according to Matthew and another in the Gospel according to Luke. The geneologies differ from one another, and I think the tradition being one line belongs to Joseph, his 'legal' father, and the other line being that of Mary's. Though I don't know which is which. I think the purpose of these lineages is to show Jesus to be a descendant of king David.

Two things:

First, in the Hebrew I believe (and correct me if I'm wrong) many names of the Deity can be masculine, feminine, neuter, singular, and plural.

Second, in regards to lineage: the theory is that since Joseph was Jesus' legal father, he legally belonged to the line of David. And since inheritance/ascension is primarily a legal thing, this works. An adopted child has the same right to the throne as a natural child, which was the whole point.

--Cooper