Monty by Jim Meddick for December 23, 2023

It’s a Festivus miracle!

Well, to be fair: MOST spiritual people have been programmed

You explain everything else to it like it’s human.

Being spiritual won’t get you into heaven, though. You gotta accept Jesus as the way.

EB does have a lot of human behaviors. He eats sandwiches and drinks beverages. He even had a crush on the vacuum cleaner for awhile.

so am I

Robots have no doubts at all about their having a creator.

God didn’t program us (humans) to believe in Him.

Douglas Adams wrote of a far future where people designed robots to do their believing for them.

You and Bucky Kat.

EB believes! :)

Christmas has been commercial for decades. Look at Rudolph. He was created by a department store in 1939.

It’s a shame it has strayed so far from its original meaning. Most people now days are barely aware of the Winter Solstice.

The original meaning of the holiday season (which Christians grafted theirs on top of) was that the good ol’ Sun was gonna be coming back again for another year. Astronomers refer to that occasion as the solstice (sun standing still before reversing direction), but it was known to the Greeks as the birthday of the savior Dionysus, to the Romans as the Saturnalia festival, and to the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples as Yule. (They’re the ones who celebrated the evergreen tree as a symbol of enduring life thruout the season when everything else was dying off or holing up.)

If you check out the story of Jesus’s birth in the Gospel of Luke, you’ll run across the allusion to shepherds watching their flocks by night. That was only necessary during lambing season in the early spring, around April. Ah, details, details. Not a big deal to early Christians. Since they were unpopular in Rome (too pushy about their god being the only one), they started celebrating the birth of their version of a savior under cover of the Saturnalia festivities.

Oh little ye of faith!

Why would anyone decide to program a robot in that way?

E.B. is a lot more spiritual than many people are!

Well, spiritual or not, Christendom didn’t get around to thinking much about the birth of Christ (which shows up in just two of the 27 books of the NT) until the 4th cent. By which time whatever tradition (a.k.a. myth) had been forgotten—the chronology in Matthew is quite bogus. 25 December was hit upon for the very pagan reason that it was the Winter Solstice (in the Julian Calendar, which had “slipped” four days by the 4th cent).