First, on Tuesday 10th Dec, yours truly defended his thesis at the university. Now I can’t share the link to it yet because there are sections of it I am not very proud of and I need to correct.
And thanks to my friend Brian, here is a Christmas message we heathens can all get behind
A church in California has blasphemed the Christian message by displaying an installation showing the Holy Family as refugees. Predictably, there have been objections on the grounds that modern immigrants murder people, quite unlike the Saviour who committed genocide only in His heart. The installation is apparently based on a bizarre misreading of Matthew 25 xxxv, which finds Jesus bragging about the rewards awaiting those sheep who pay tithes to His church and the punishments awaiting those goats who do not. Far from “thank[ing] those who fed him when he was a hungry refugee fleeing Bethlehem”, Jesus preached a violently exclusionary form of fundamentalist Judaism and seems to have taken a certain pride in His Old Testament namesake’s conferring of refugee status upon the Canaanite dogs. Famously, Jesus’ earthly parents were warned to flee to Egypt in anticipation of King Herod’s precautionary massacre of Hebrew infants; in His infinite mercy, the Saviour’s Father in heaven did not see fit to warn any other parents, but sat complacently by while Herod did his worst. Possibly the Jews were being punished in advance for choosing Barabbas; or perhaps God simply had better things to do than worry about women who lacked the foresight to get themselves knocked up by the Holy Spirit.
Related to this, I recently saw a meme where a guy is asking if god could advise Joseph and clan to run away from Herod, who are you to think you can fight all battles. Sometimes you need to run away from your problems.
Random thoughts 