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Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Astrology & Christianity

Via the Conclave:

...tonight, I had the pleasure to catch a few minutes of the local Christian programming on television. That stuff really confuses me, I’ll tell you what. It’s not just that I don’t agree with it, or think that it’s a totally whacked-out bullshit version of Christianity, it’s that it doesn’t even hold together. It’s not even consistent with itself.

They were talking about a bunch of things. But the really weird one was astrology... [then they] brought up the passage in Deuteronomy that forbids divination. Aside from the whole thing argument about how Jesus was the Fulfillment of the Law and made it so Christians didn’t have to follow the intricacies of the Hebrew law, there’s a much better argument in favor of astrology right in the Bible. Anybody remember what it is?

All I can say is: three - fucking - wisemen. Check it out in Matthew 2

Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, ‘Go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.’ After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him.


Wait, wait, these guys followed a star and the star lead them to Jesus? SO… THEY WERE ASTROLOGERS! And there’s nothing crazy about this, either. Astrology wasn’t some kind of evil bugaboo for most of history.

...Incidentally, I was just looking at a page about the Bible’s references to occultic activity, especially in the Old Testament. Not surprisingly, there are many instances of occult techniques used with no problem. But then in Deuteronomy 18 you have that big list that outlaws everything. Actually, have a look at the list. This one includes the original Hebrew words:

1. yid’oni - Making contact with spirits (not of God).
2. sho’el ‘ov - Making contact with the dead .
3. qosem q’samim - Foretelling the future by using lots or a similar system.
4. m’onen - Predicting the future by interpreting signs in nature.
5. m’nachesh - Enchanting (perhaps related to nachash, a snake).
6. chover chavar - Casting spells by magical knot tying.
7. m’khaseph - evil sorcery; using spoken spells to harm other people.
8. doresh ‘el hametim - “One who asks the dead”, probably via another method than sho’el ‘ov


Now that I look at it arranged like that, I realize what it is that they were really trying to outlaw here: shamanism.

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