Was the star of Bethlehem

[Toby109]

a UFO?

Discuss.

[Democrat Dragon]

1. Two years ago , near Chistmas time I was listening to Bernie Ward's

godtalk show on Sunday morning(yes, this is the same Bernie Ward who rants about BushCo. at 10p.m-12 a.m at KGO). Along time ago I had my alarm set to KGO becasue the was another program there that woke me up. Anyway, Bernie mentioned in an article about an astronomer who said might have been three planets(I fogrot two of them, but one of them was Venus) lined up togehter, the hypothesis was based on some kind of mathematical calculation on how the planets and stars were in a certain time in the past. The assumption was of course, that the event happened in spring instead of winter.

[kcwayne]

2. Most likely it is fiction

Is there any indication that the Chinese, Europeans, Indians, Aztecs, or North American native Americans saw the "Star of Bethlehem"? If there were such a celestial body, you would expect all cultures who were at least marginally interested in astronomy to have some reference to such a star in the time period in question. Each of these cultures were acute observers of celestial bodies, so why would they miss something as remarkable as this? Logic says they didn't miss it because it never happened.

I have not studied the issue, but my guess is that if such a correlation could be made, the fundies would be all over it as scientific proof that Jesus is lord and savior.

So it could be a UFO that was not observable on all continents. But then you have to wonder why an advanced civilization would travel so many light years to reach this planet, and not leave some attempt at communication behind. If we did the same thing, we would leave instruments behind to collect data at a minimum. It is hard to concieve of a technologically advanced life form being curious enough to wander the universe, but not curious enough to engage a rare life form that it stumbles upon in the vastness of space.

[ashmanonar]

3. maybe the extraterrestrials

saw just how much of complete warmongering assholes we are. if i were an alien, coming to earth, i'd see these warring monkeys and think "no way, we're not stopping for gas here."

[ashmanonar]

4. first of all:

the time scale (and the actual story) of the supposed birth of jesus of nazareth was way off from what the church says.
the wise men, if they truly came to jesus, came in the spring, a few years after his birth. it would take that long to find him anyways, considering herod was killing all the firstborn. (i believe that they came to him in egypt, if my memory is correct)- remember, they took refuge in egypt until herod stopped killing firstborn.

second: who do you think the wisemen were, and where did they come from? it's highly probable that at least one of the wise men was from asia (probably china, considering their technological advancement at this stage in history)...

third: around or about 2000 years ago (between bce and ce--remember, our calendar, up to a few hundred years ago, was notoriously inaccurate; so we could be years off) europe wasn't really worrying about astronomy (the romans were worried about conquest, the gauls were worried about the romans' conquest, the teutons and huns and visigoths and ostrogoths were moving around constantly and had no time for astronomy...(one exception: the celts. they were competent at astronomy, at least the druids were--and guess what, the celts were decimated by internecine warfare and roman conquest. the druids were nearly stamped out))

on to the new world: either they noticed it and didn't care, or they noticed it and their books talking about it were burned by catholic zealots in the conquest of the new world. there are only 3 known mayan codexes that survived the spanish conquest. how many were burned, and how many of those might have told of a great star in the east? (besides, they might not have seen it at all, the new world is how many thousand miles away)

the phoenicians, one group that is not mentioned, probably saw it while sailing (the phoenicians that were left, if i remember correctly carthage was destroyed) but again, they don't really exist anymore. they were assimilated into other cultures or just died out, and left little history.

the only people to have history that we actually read are the romans (transmitted through the byzantines) and some of the europeans who grew up in the aftermath of the roman fall. the byzantines kept history alive, but who knows what they changed to suit their needs? they became christian, if you'll remember, constantine apparently saw a great cross in the sky.
the chinese have some fantastically recorded history, (good luck getting at it, i doubt the chinese gov't will let you poke around in their history)...but unless you take an eastern history course, the only thing EVER taught to students now is western: starting with cradle of civilization and leading up, in broad strokes, through roman history right up to modern day.

so it's little wonder that other civilizations "didn't talk about" the star of bethelehem: it was either a local occurrence, or held to just be another astronomical event (not a rare thing, remember) oh, and history has been rewritten over and over.

[kcwayne]

5. In "Comet" by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

there is a very interesting section postulating why the swastika symbol is found in the ancient cultures of India, China, American Southwest, Mayan Mexico, Brazil, Britain, and Turkey among others.

Here is a quote from page 181:

In the two deepest and therefore oldest levels in Troy-dating back to 3000 B.C. in the early Bronze Age, no signs of swastikas are found; but beginning with what he called the third or burnt city, dating back to the beginning of the second millennium B.C., Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, found them everywhere. Hundreds of recovered artifacts, especially spindles operated in rotary motion, were festooned with swastikas. In Tang Dynasty China, public misuse of this important symbol had reached such a state that an imperial decree had to be issued forbidding the imprinting of swastikas on silk fabrics.

The chapter goes on to discuss the appearance of the swastika in various other culture and continents.

Sagan and Druyan suggest, with circumstantial data and historical drawings, that the cause of the symbol was a comet that had four jets and was spinning on a trajectory perpendicular to earth, and the jets streaming behind the rotating comet created the visual effect of a swastika in the night sky.

So the idea that something seen by all the population is somehow lost because books are burned, or a culture forgets about it, or was not interested in the night sky doesn't really hold water when you consider the number of artifacts that have been found with the swastika symbol on it. This glorious celestial event was recorded on pots, spoons, arrow heads, as well as many other artifacts preserved through time.

It strikes me as virtually impossible that an equally stunning visual display in the heavens such as the supposed Star of Bethlehem would have been treated any differently, unless something very odd happened to human behavior between 3000 and 0.

[ashmanonar]

6. i'd like to know just how "stunning" a display it was

just bc some people think an astronomical event is gigantic or bright doesn't mean that everybody would. some people might attach an excess brilliance to it bc of its religious implications, too.

besides: "many people around the world saw it" and "many people around the world wrote a lasting history about it" are two entirely different things. i'm sure there was some notice of a strange astronomical occurrence; but does that mean that the people who wound up writing history wanted to talk about it? (or that their account survived to present day?)

i'll give you europe: it's close enough to the middle-east that it was most likely seen. and i'll give you the east; the chinese were very attentive when it came to astronomical events.

but i think it's stretching things to ask if the mayans or aztecs saw this occurrence, on the other side of the world. the mayans paid more attention to venus as a part of their calendar; and the aztecs were probably too busy ripping people's hearts out as part of worship. anyways, the empires of the mayans and aztecs basically fell apart at the spanish conquest, and very little remains besides archeological sites from those peoples. (3 surviving mayan codexes...the rest were burned as "the devil's work" by an extremely overzealous spanish monk)

besides: i'd have to check to be certain, bc dates escape me at the moment; but i don't think the aztecs were really a "culture" at that point. i believe they came to power later.

[kcwayne]

8. How could it possibly be a stretch to think that North and South American

indiginous people, whether they be Aztec, Mayan, Carribbean, Eskimos, or whatever have not noticed something in the sky that was ostensibly seen from the Orient, when they did exactly that in regards to the swastika comet?

Unless you believe the world is flat and does not rotate on its axis, being on the "other side of the world" is a complete misunderstanding of the spatial orientation of objects in space. In layman's terms, the earth rotates so that the celestial bodies at some point in the day are cross the horizon. You know, kind of like, the sun, that rises in the east, and sets in the west. Everyone sees it.

Of course there is another explanation. The Star of Bethlehem was an apparition of God. And this God chose to reveal himself just to the people that lived in modern day Israel. And that God has a really wicked sense of humor because he told those people they are the chosen ones because only those that believe in him will have eternal life. And so he left the responsibility of revealing the true God to the entire rest of the world, which he cleverly decided not to show himself to like it did with the Israelites. And because it is an omnipotent, wise, and caring God, it left the responsibility for the wonderful revelation to a group of illiterate bedoins who had no means of sailing oceans, traveling over land in distances greater than a few hundred miles, or communicating with 90% of the world's population. So while these technologically primitive people took 1600 years to make their very first crossing of an ocean, and 1900 years to reach all areas of it, all of those unfortunate natives never have the true God revealed to them, so they die and burn in hell for eternity. And I am just covering the North and South Americans. It is a similar story for Africa, India, Asia, the Pacific Rim, and Australia. Yeah, that makes sense.

[ashmanonar]

9. wow...cuz that TOTALLY makes sense...

O.o

those "unfortunate natives" were destroyed, physically and mentally, when the spaniards invaded. they were taught that all their old stories were wrong, and that unless they converted to christianity they would go to hell (also be killed by the spaniards)...

my question isn't "how didn't they see it" it's "how were their stories of the past supposed to be transmitted if their cultures were destroyed by christians?"

and you still haven't addressed the question of how bright this "star" was, whether it really was "bright" or it people's faith makes them claim "oh, it was huge" when it might have been little brighter and bigger than, say, polaris: just enough brighter to follow without losing it.

i misspoke before when i said that they would not see it. (there is the issue of where latitudinally they were, though: people farther north might not see it for reasons of the curvature of the earth, and people farther south would have the same problem)

[kcwayne]

12. The Spaniards did not destroy every pot, ornament, architectural edifice,

or cave drawing that has the swastika symbol on it. As far as I know, we don't have an oral history of the "swastika miracle in the sky" handed down from the bronze age. But we do have physical artifacts on which people drew or carved their impression of that event.

So it stands to reason that if a similarly outstanding event occurred in the sky, that there would be similar renditions of it across cultures, regardless of whether an oral history survived or not.

and you still haven't addressed the question of how bright this "star" was

There is no way to know how bright the "star" was lacking any evidence that it existed. Your point that it may have not been that remarkable, such that other people across the earth did not attach significance to it is a good one. Who knows how many "wise men" struck out across the desert on a vision quest? Then three guys come across some schmuck in a barn who's convinced that his pregnant wife is proof of a prophecy because he never had sex with her, and viola, instant miracle. Just sprinkle in a few thousand middle ages scribes who are free to invent, embellish, and twist any semblance of truth to package it into a message acceptable to the religious leaders that are collating a holy text.

For me, the fact that no agreement on what this thing looked like makes the whole idea very suspect. There is no account of where it was exactly in the sky per the precision afforded to the technology of the times, which was quite good at tracking other celestial bodies. You would think that something as important as a heavenly symbol announcing God on earth would have been written about, used innumerably in expressive and decorative art, and emblazoned everywhere that Christians were. I would be more convinced that there was some real event tied to the Christian myth if there were widespread artifacts that depict it. I know of none, whether they be from the Middle East where the event presumably took place, or from any other part of the world.

We know more about who Roman emperors were buggering than we do about this miracle that heralded the arrival of eternal salvation for all mankind. Maybe it can be attributed to attention deficit disorder, or some defect in the ability to prioritize that was common among people that lived 2000 years ago. (Kind of like right wingers today, they get all dis-discombobulated about sex, and don't pay attention to the really big things, like getting sent to endless wars and having their economic viability taken from them by laughing hyenas)

[ashmanonar]

16. i've never read the book about the comet.

so i can't say anything either way to the swastikas in art/architecture.

otherwise, i think you're right about the romans (they were honestly more worried about the politics of the time and the wars they were fighting than they were about some "star" in the sky.)

maybe it really WAS a ufo! :D

[Radical Activist]

7. Maybe the star of Bethlehem

wasn't a star at all.
Also, ain't it hard when you wake up in the morning and you find out that those other days are gone?

[Stop_the_War]

10. Absolutely...

and Jesus was a half-alien.


:P

[AllegroRondo]

11. another theory

is that it was a conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn

[Richardo]

13. Supernova: Read Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star"

Beautiful, poignant story.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

14. Ooooooo about the priest in the exploring ship? That's a gem! (nt)

[Richardo]

15. You got it.

I haven't read that story in probably 30 years, but I think of quite often. THAT'S good writing.

:thumbsup: