The Miracle of Christmas Wouldn't Happen Today If The Liberals Had Any Say In It.

This is obviously just my personal opinion but I think your reference to St. Joseph as an "old lech" not only is harsh, but may not be correct. The information in the Bible is sparse to say the least. And "old" in biblical terms may not mean the same as "old" in current times.

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DesertRat has no knowledge of what was written in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke . Both Books plainly said the Holy Spirit came over Mary , and the power of God overshadowed her , and Mary became pregnant with Jesus . Joseph had nothing to do with Mary
getting pregnant . Mary was a teenager . Joseph was probably also a teenager , older than Mary , or just in his very early 20's . People got married early in life back then because most people did not live to be that old . Remember Mary was only 48 to 52 when Jesus was crucified at age 33 .

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We don't know anything about Mary's family or community of origin. How did they support her as an unwed mother? Did their "family values" support or discriminate against, isolate or castigate Mary, her loyal boyfriend and her newborn child, regardless of what would become their historical status? Three wise men brought them gifts from the East. Did their local community help to provide shelter, medical care, food and the essentials which a vulnerable parent and child need to survive? Or how about education, activities and job training youth need to not just survive but to prosper and contribute to society?

And how would a Jesus born to an unwed mother fare today in YOUR extended family, faith or local community? How do your values and politics align to do so?

Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

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Thank goodness someone like Margret Sanger never had any influence on Blessed Mary. Here was a young, pregnant, unmarried girl who was still in her teens and betrothed to an old lech. Today Planned Parenthood woud be all over this girl telling her not to ruin the rest of her life because of this one misdeed and she should choose to have an abortion. What would the world have lost? Just the Savior of the world, the Son of God.Today PP is hard at work ridding the world of these, perhaps unplanned and unwanted, pregnancies. What is the world still losing. Perhaps another savior! A savior who may save the world from some sicknesses or diseases. A savior who will benefit human kind through mathematics, physics, chemistry or other sciences. Who knows, maybe this person will just be a great Mom or Dad, like my Mom and Dad, and raise some great kids.If the likes of Ms. Sanger had their way, we wouldn't be able to say: MERRY CHRISTMAS!December 2020.

Time for a little history lesson. Abortion was practiced in Judea long before the Birth of Christ, Rabbi Danya Rutenberg has done extensive research in Talmud, Torah, Maimonides through the Sulchan Aruch and then later scholars repeatedly uphold the practice especially where the life of the mother is threatened and when it is deemed the child will be born extremely disabled and suffer greatly. Roman surgeons were better at all gynecology than what most US states had up to after the 1950's, the speculum, the ceasarian section (usually to save a baby whose mother was either dying or dead, but Maimonides says it was done successfully on women who lived, and the discovery of the surgical instruments and the pharmacopia available to Roman surgeons suggests a far more sophisticated and modern surgical pratice than we imagined in the 19th and early 20th centuries, in part because our own medical science and the art of surgery emerges in the wake of WWI as a necessity, out of WWII as a fully formed feild of practice distinct from the past iterations, with antibiotics and anaesthetics as well as precision instruments made of surgical grade steel, operating theaters designed to stay sterile and a rigorous medical practice couched in standard medical schooling as well as the increased role and professionalism of nurses, Romans had epidurals, induced labour, sutures, antiseptic procedures and sutures, painkillers (papaver somniferum among others and clotting and clamping agents and tools to stop bleeding and stabilize a patient after any number of lesser surgical interventions that most patients then survived. But all that is immaterial. The Bible tells you why she didn't take an abortifactent (at the time, being unwed and pregnant would have possibly meant stoning to death, a fate that women in the region, Iran in particular have suffered well into the late 20th century). This is why she is visited by Archangel Gabriel, and we have two accounts, Luke, and Matthew. Luke's version of the annunciation (her pregnancy is announced...keep in mind, this is not only to her, and Joseph, but the whole neighborhood. An archangel does not arrive from on high on the Lord's business and "announce" a miracle that only one person sees, the archangel is there to bless and to make known the child is of the holy spirit, which is important, for the reason we just went over, the neighbors aren't going to believe a woman who says, the angel did it, but if they see and hear the angel (who can speak directly into your mind, remember), then they are not going to mess with the woman or child.

In Matthew, this line stands out "Whereupon Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing publicly to expose her, was minded to put her away privately"... This is saying "hey, normal Jewish fathers to be", if your wife gets pregnant without you, the normal reaction is to "put her away privately". This doesn't mean for a period of time. It means wherever and however that she can be made invisible and not be discovered to have conceived out of wedlock or with a man other than her husband. It will not be her family nor his, nor anyone of Nazareth, or of his tribe... which leaves selling into bondage, in a pit or exposed in the desert, unless there is wealth enough to hide the woman among her servants of which one is also pregnant. This version has the angel come to Joseph privately in a dream, to explain it to him before the prophet announces Emmanuel shortly thereafter. This much more Jewish version of the story saves face for Joseph, no one questions that an angel would reveal to him the words of the coming prophecy as the father so that he would not be shocked nor emasculated but be foretold, but neither would be burdened with being the messenger.

What both versions reveal is that there is extra care taken to demonstrate why this pregnancy is not a mark of egregious sin, why it HAD to be carried to term, and why the local Nazarenes had to accept it. But it was the census that took Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem... a Roman intrigue and that is what alerts Herod (the Roman client king) that the King of Israel is to be born (the time was full of messianic cults, and a messiah to be surfaced regularly, but this baby had visitors from afar, following a star which also followed him and his family and the angel warned at least Mary and Joseph, who would have talked about the dream on their way, and that would have been exactly the kind of gossip someone would have sold to Herod, as inkeepers, stablehands, and merchants, soldiers and spies would do... this is why he calls for the wise men and instructs them to find and reveal the baby to him.

This isn't accidental, the story is taking the usual punishment for adultery (death), declaring a holy miracle of her conception, having the much hated king take it up as truth, consulting wise men from other nations and... reacting wrongly by thinking the throne of christ is an earthly thing and what Herod was worried to lose. No self respecting Jew would want to be like Herod in this. He was reviled for not following the traditions and the ways of the tribes of Israel. So, not only does Mary live in a time where abortion is common, sanctioned in many cases by Jewish authority and practiced far more widely, she lives in a time where this pregnancy would be fatal almost always if it were not the work of God. The gospels go to great lengths to push both possibilities as far away from Mary and her baby as possible. What is also important to recognize is that Joseph, Mary and Jesus are all very much liberal Jews. Joseph lets her ride on the donkey. He cares for her and her comfort and takes an interest in his child, trains him as a carpenter despite knowing he is the Son of God, and this is nothing short of revolutionary for a Jewish patriarch. Compare him to Moses, Abraham, even David... this is not a conservative Jewish man, and his son is certainly not either... his best female friend is a former prostitute and he throws people out of the temple, among other things (suffer the little children and let them come to me" is RADICAL. They didn't cruxify him and his disicples afterwards for being traditional conservative down the line Jews... his ministry is by definition, liberal. There is nothing about loving other people in the Laws of Moses, just God. That's deliberate and after the Calf incident, how Israel separates itself from its neighbors, all of whom have anthropomorphic gods... adoration of idols of man made and fashioned in his image. But Jesus brings the love of humanity back into the word and laws of God, but he's clever, because it isn't unidirectional like a supplicant unto an idol, but dialogical, a covenant, to love the other as the self... which is so far away from what Jewish theology was at the time (the love of God and of the laws and of the patriarchs and of being God's chosen people makes good men and women rules separate for each and different by miles). Christ includes women as equal to men in his "most important of God's commandments". That's one of the reasons he ran afoul of the law.

But it's absolutely pointless to try and inscribe what US partisan political ideology dictates is conservative or liberal on ancient Judea from either side of the spectrum, left and right refers to the sides of the tennis court where the first revolutionary assembly was held after the French Revolution and those more conservative of the monarchy were on the right and the hard line revolutionaries were on the left of center court. Tennis had been recently made popular by the now headless King and they refused to meet in a palace or a church but that left very few venues large enough to hold everyone and....the tennis court was it. But perhaps the most ironic thing is that Margaret Sanger and Mother Theresa (imagine they're just regular Jewish women, one very pious and conservative of the old ways the other with her own hair, dressing like a Greek and going about without her husband more often than not (this is exactly what was happening at this time as well)... even if Maggie knew Mary and got her to abort, Anjez Bojaxhiu (Mother Theresa's Albanian name, because we can't make her Catholic in 1 AD two centuries and some before the Council of Nicea) would have been there to throw the first stone at her head and they buried them up to the shoulders for this which would have killed the baby and deliberately so as well. Remember Jesus stops people from doing this later on, so it's not remotely improbable... adultery demanded death and women were handed to the mob when convicted.

Also, the idea that miracles of God can be overturned by mortals is...you want to check on that with your pastor, its...blashpemous just a touch ain't it? We have the son, the father the spirit and an archangel on this miracle as well as 2000 years of prophecy... even Obama's tan suit can't stop the Lord. ;)

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Sorry you misinterpreted my reference to St. Joseph as an old lech. This is the type of term the people at Planned Parenthood would have used to describe the man who impregnated this young girl when trying to convince her to abort the child. Of course they would have assumed that some man had to be the father. Thus accusing and vilifying St. Joseph. We all know that this is not the case and he was not the father. Even today, do you believe those godless creeps at Planned Parenthood would believe the Biblical account of how Mary became the Mother of God? To them, nothing is sacred. Not even human life.

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