God has faith in You, Happy 2015.

The most popular new year resolution in the history of mankind would have been to quit smoking. But time and again we have seen that resolution alone is incapable of kicking this venomous habit since people go back to smoking after quitting for a few days. This writer once got an obliging businessman to get up and open his shop during the dark hours of night on a 1st January to buy cigarettes after crushing a few packets under his feet at midnight, just a couple of hours ago. 
Knowing that there is something new to help you in this difficult process may equip you to win the struggle against nicotine addiction which is considered more difficult to quit than heroin addiction by the scientific community

So, its time to get to know what “VAPING” is...

Britain’s Oxford University Press said that it is adding new words from "listicle and paleo diet” to “time-poor and vaping” to its online Oxford Dictionaries to reflect new trends in language. Editors for the site analyze some 150 million English words used online, in newspapers and other sources, and once every few months they decide which new words are so widely used that they merit a dictionary entry. "Vape” or "vaping" describes inhaling smokeless marijuana vapor or nicotine using vaporizors or e-cigarettes. Oxford Dictionary researchers say the usage of both “vape” and “e-cig” has increased about 10 times in the past two years. The trend of e-cigarettes has created a sort of vocabulary around it. Hence people can make use of this crutch- vaping- if they have found it difficult to quit smoking on their own, provided that they quit vaping too within a short time span.

(And how about “listicle”? It means internet article in the form of a numbered or bullet-pointed list and “live-tweet,” the act of posting comments about an event on Twitter as it is taking place. There’s also “binge-watch,” which refers to rapidly viewing multiple episodes of TV shows). Inclusion in the online dictionary does not mean the words will become permanent additions to English language. Many may not make it into the more traditional Oxford English Dictionary. “For some of these, we will say ‘What was that?’ in a decade. Others may become the next "selfie,” last year’s most popular new entry.

Now, to be on the lighter side of life, in the new year:

A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't. A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, but she does... so don't have any regrets.

Know that a woman has the last word in any argument. Anything a man says afterwards marks the beginning of a new one.

There are only two times a man doesn't understand a woman, that is,
(1) before marriage (2) after marriage.

Hence, last good night on the last day of the last week of the last month of the last year to you from me... Good bye 2014.

I wish you all a fabulous 2015 to behave like responsible adults that the previous year taught us how to... Good Bye 2014.

And, I have no yesterday, for time took it away.
Tomorrow may not be mine, but I have Today.
So I wish you now, my friends, a safe 2015.

Every night we go to bed, we have no assurance to get up alive the next morning but still we have plans for the coming day... that’s Hope !
When you are in the light everything will follow you. But when you enter darkness, even you own shadow will leave you... that's Life !!
And God gives everything to a person who has faith in Him.
But if you happen to be agnostic but still have everything, it immensely means God has faith... in You !!!

A peaceful soul, a joyful spirit, a healthy body and a heart full of love:
these are my prayers for you.

Happy 2015, folks. Tk kr.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/…/961625_10205813409…

A singular thought on Christmas

Cuba was an American neo-colony. Prior to the revolution, U.S. business owned 80% of services, 40% of the sugar industry and 50% of railroad transport in Cuba. Cuba is an anti-imperialist nation at its core, and will not give up its values and identity, despite all the propaganda. Cuba’s insistence on ending the blockade and refusing to move forward under Washington’s conditions should be seen as part of its larger, continuing struggle against imperialism. The humiliating defeat of the Americans (cf: Bay of Pigs Invasion) is known in Cuba as the first imperialist defeat.The liberation of the Cuban Five, hitherto accused as militant spies and held without proper trial in America, despite all the work that still needs to be done, represents a victory for people and groups all around the world fighting for liberation and justice which makes this Christmas all the more colourful, meaningful and blissful. Praised be thy name.

Thoughts on a Christmas Eve; Answers only to the point.

Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men:

We honour these age-old noble values in every holiday season- and some people actually work to advance them further, all year long. Other folks, by contrast, mock at these values. They spend their days chasing after ever grander stashes of personal treasure, be it gold or expensive cars. These greedy souls- politicians, social parasites, clergy and bishops, included- love the shadow-bringing tales of plutocrats young and old. 

Many folks have heard that December 25 was the birthday of Roman gods long before it was chosen to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Some people also know that our delightful mélange of Christmas festivities originated in ancient Norse, 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 answer is that 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 are surprised by his odd behavior. There is never again any mention in the New Testament about these incredible events! These stories seem to be an afterthought, written later than the rest of the gospels that carry them. To make matters more interesting, the stories themselves have inconsistencies and ambiguities- contradictory genealogy, 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 adds to the complications. If the rest of the New Testament does not refer to these stories, 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 are written in Greek.) In this tradition, when a man did something extraordinary there was the assumption that he did it because he was different, either divine or at least 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 to a god, viz., 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.

But 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 baptism, Paul suggests resurrection. 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 have learnt it.

Why didn’t the writers do a better job of cleaning the contradictions?

They did, to some extent. This is called the "orthodox corruption of scripture". But it appears that these birth stories were added toward the end, so scripture got frozen before they could get integrated.

I was raised with the belief that the bible was literally perfect, the “inerrant” word of God, essentially dictated by God to its writers. What you are saying about the Christmas story sure calls into question my conviction and that of many.

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 the issue of whether biblical reports happened in the historical, physical sense to understand what they mean spiritually and mythically.

Alright, back to Christmas. Of all the images from the Christmas story, the one that people fall in love is the 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.

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 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.

How about the 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 (better translations never say it happened 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. The star in Matthew and the angel in Luke are two variants of the same mythology.

My fundamentalist head is spinning. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

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.

Thanking you and wishing you a very happy Christmas, Alex Odikandathil.

A New Way of Protest.

Philip Dallyachan

23 hrs · 

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  Prof. Alex Odikandathil Ph.D. The situation that has sparked this write-up is Dallyachen's post on 'Street Kiss Protest' (I've already aired my take on this phenomenon) and my consequent thoughts on why fundamentalists and their evangelical heirs are skeptical of individual freedom, personal choice and all modern, progressive outlooks. The evangelicals have been waiting for the world to end for a long time: may it be by breach or sin or Christ's Second Coming. My conclusion, in a nutshell, is that the apocalyptic theology that developed in the 1880s and 1890s led radical evangelicals to believe that all nations are going to concede their power in the End Times to a totalitarian political leader who is going to be the Anti-Christ. 
  The idea that Jesus is coming back soon was a fairly radical and unconventional idea in the 19th century, but by the 20th century it used to be the air these people breathe. The most recent polls said something like 58 percent of evangelicals believe Jesus is going to return by 2050. They simply take for granted that there is going to be a Rapture and Jesus is going to come back. What is wrong in the public demonstration of affection and love? If you believe you’re living in the last days and you believe you’re moving towards that event, you’re going to be very suspicious and skeptical of anything that is out of the ordinary. It is, in modern parlance, tunnel-vision. Why is everybody running after god-men and god-women for hugs and kisses? Which Gods and Goddesses, among all the religions in the world, have not kissed? If at all there is any negative feeling connected with a hug or kiss, it happens only when done in private or under cover of secrecy. What is the history, meaning, significance and interpretation of 'Kayyasuri' within church-service and 'Kaimuthu', (imparted at any time); will the learned Dally Achen tell me? Thanks.

  1 hr · Edited · Like
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