Morning Coffee (143)

Good morning, Coffee Quaffers. There's nothing like waking up to 70 degrees with a slight overcast, calm seas, and dolphins playing merrily in my front yard.

I hope everyone enjoyed their celebration of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the birthday of the unconquered sun. You may be confused because I said sun and not son. Well, from about, oh, the beginning of time until about 391 CE, people practiced all sorts of different religions, sometimes even freely. Most of these religions actually borrowed ideas from one another. Oddly enough, our present day moral guide, Christianity, was no different, and it co-opted all sorts of ideas from contemporary "pagan" religions; the celebration of the birth of a god on 25 December, the winter solstice, is merely one example among many.

Sol Invictus was a Roman god who was borrowed from eastern mystery cults. The name referred to three deities at different times during the Roman Empire. Sometime around 218 CE, Emperor Varius Avitus Bassianus, primarily known as Elagabalus, replaced Jupiter as the chief deity in the Roman pantheon with a Syrian god El-Gabal, who was the patron diety of Elagabalus' home town in Syria. Elagabalus changed the god's name to Sol Invictus, merging the god with another Roman god, Sol Indiges, an agrarian god who had been worshiped since republican times. Elagabalus even had himself circumcised so that he could become the high priest of the new religion. Since Elagabalus was strange even by Roman Emperor standards, he was killed by the Praetorian Guard in 222 CE.

Mithra is another deity who has been referred to as the Unconquered Sun, and was also borrowed from the East, specifically Persia, and was probably brought to Rome in the first century CE by Roman soldiers. Mithraism is a prime example of a mystery cult, and it had a wide appeal in the Roman Empire from the first to the fourth centuries CE, especially in the Roman army. Some scholars have proposed that the worship of Mithra rivaled the worship of Christ, and might have become the dominant religion had it been more inclusive. Strangely, Mithra may have been born of a virgin.

The final god was a deity whose officially sanctioned cult was brought into being by the Emperor Aurelian in 274 CE. It was Aurelian who likely created the festival Dies Natalis Solis Invicti to celebrate Sol Invictus' birth on the winter solstice. It may be that this festival predates the nativity by 80 years. Until around 354 CE, Christ's birth date had been greatly debated. Scholars in the third century placed his birth anywhere from 20 May to 25 or 28 March, all in the spring months. Some scholars, such as Origen of Alexandria believed that "only sinners (like Pharaoh and Herod)" celebrated birthdays. As late as 303 CE, Christian writer Arnobius opined that gods don't have birthdays. But eventually, Christ got a birthday, and it happened to be 25 December.

I'm not saying that early Christians took a pagan celebration of the winter solstice and turned it into Christ's birthday , but I will say that Sol Invictus, both in stone and on third century Roman coins, has head decorations similar to this guy.

No Membership Card? Dues Not Paid? No Problem!:
In a stunning move that has angered and confused evangelicals around the world, God recently has announced an easing of His millenia-old limits on membership to the exclusive Kingdom of Heaven. He's going so far as to abolishing restrictions altogether. The move contradicts His son's/own dictum that "I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." The Morning Coffee scored an exclusive interview with the Alpha and the Omega.

MC: Once you, through your son, said, "No man cometh unto the Father, but by me." Why the change?

Deus: I took a real close look at sola fide, and you know, the concept just didn't wash anymore. I mean, you look at heaven, and you know, there are like, billions of degenerates, I mean, people who just shouldn't be there. But they got in through sola fide, which I enacted in the early days in order to increase membership. It's really outlived its usefulness. Really, if you look at the new doctrine, that being that if you live a good life, you can get into Heaven, it's really a better method anyway. It ensures that our members will be of the highest quality. Further, this completes my transformation from a tyrannical megalomaniac into a softer, kinder, gentler deity.

MC: What do you say to your critics, for example, other deities such as Allah and Jupiter Optimus Maximus, as well as evangelical Christians, who've complained that the change in rules is unfair? Both groups say they've worked hard; Allah and Jupiter in carving their own niches, however small, and evangelicals in, you know, just accepting Jesus Christ as their own personal savior. How do you respond?

Deus: Burn in Hades? Hahahahaha!! No seriously, I mean, I'm God. I pretty much make the rules. My lawyers, Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo, are presently drawing up paperwork to evict Allah and Jupiter, et al from Heaven. We're trying to do it right; trying to avoid what happened with Beelzebub. As far as the evangelicals, well, I guess they'll just have to buck up, eh? No more free passes.

There you have it, from the Man himself. (*The above is satire; a poor attempt to relieve the Blue Balls of Stiffled Creativity. Please don't issue a fatwa on me.)

While God himself might not have technically changed doctrine (how would we know?) a recent survey published by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life suggests that most Americans (70%) believed that other religions could achieve eternal life. Evangelicals weren't happy, that much of my story was true. They stated that the people surveyed couldn't possibly have understood the question. So Pew asked again. Only 65% responded said the same this time. But when asked to clarify which religions would lead to eternal salvation, the respondents said all of them. Fifty percent of the respondents said that atheists could go to heaven. More painfully, nearly the same percentage of Christians felt one could achieve salvation by being a good person as Christians who felt that you must believe in Jesus. Worse still, nearly 20% of Christians think the Bible is not the word of God, but merely a book written by men. Maybe it's time for an Inquisition.

Maybe I'm not as bad of a person (horrible atheist) in the eyes of "regular folk" as I thought.

Presidential Paparazzi:
Barack Obama is the President (elect) of the United States of America, not Brad Pitt. Leave him alone on his vacation. Actually, leave him alone, period. We do not need to see pictures of him with his shirt off. Leave that sort of gimmickry to Vladimir Putin. We do not need to see him scattering the ashes of his grandmother into the Pacific Ocean. I'm all about press scrutiny, but this paparazzi coverage is too much. In fact, it's detrimental. If this sort of coverage doesn't cease, Obama will have cause to be very closed to the press, and that isn't a good thing.

MC Administrative Issues:
One reason that I haven't been posting as much as I would have liked during the Holiday break is that I have been having computer issues as well as have been trying to get my own, no kidding web page up and running (to little success). I have purchased my own web domain, and now have a host. However, unless you do it for a living or a hobby, setting up and running your own page isn't all that easy. In fact, it's a real pain in the ass. Why would I want to get away from the current format? Well, I don't really. It'll still be a blog, but it will give me the opportunity to better control the look and feel of the site. Also, I'd like to add other things to the Morning Coffee Empire. I'll probably have a forum, maybe a place for user-submitted content. Who knows? But I'm working diligently on getting it all up and running.

A weak Brew today, I know. But I don't want to become like some other bloggers and not publish anything of substance.

Word of the Day: Ramble (verb, noun): 1. To wander about. (noun): A walk for pleasure without predetermined destination. (verb): To talk or write about one thing and then another without useful connection.

On This Day in History: Galileo observes Neptune (1612). The United States claims Midway, the first overseas territory annexed (1867). San Francisco has its first municipally owned street cars (1912). The first American test-tube baby is born in Norfolk, VA (1981). Montgomery Ward goes out of business after 128 years (2000). Jerry Orbach, who played Detective Lennie Briscoe on Law and Order, died (2004). Nepal abolishes its monarchy (2007).

"A moth ate words. I thought that was a marvelous fate, that the worm, a thief in the dark, should eat a man's words, his brilliant language and its sturdy foundation. Not a whit the wiser was he for having fattened himself on those words." - A Riddle from the Exeter Book.