Brown skinned, brown eyed, with long and curly dark hair

Take a look at the art below:

Source

A mother who has the Hindu "dot" on her forehead, with wavy hair and holding a child.

But then there is something that is off, right?  She is not dressed in the traditional sari.  Hindu women in history were not portrayed with pearl necklaces, but with gold and silver and precious stones.

So, you want to guess again on what that image is about?

If I had been asked to guess, which I was not because I read about it instead, I would never have imagined that it is a representation of Mary holding baby Jesus!

Here's the image in full:

The Holy Family, is how it is titled.

The note there is even more head-spinning: "c.1620s Northern India, Mughal court, early 17th century"

An artist in the Mughal court created this "Indian"-looking image of Mary holding Jesus, and making sure that the baby--whose hands are around a beautiful vase--does not knock the vase over.

Is this watercolor art work in India then?

Nope.

It is in Cleveland.

Yes, the Cleveland that every comedian jokes about.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art.

How did it get there?

Gift in honor of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection

How did these people get their hands on a Mughal court art from 400 years ago?  Stolen merchandise that has passed through many hands, and now in a museum half way around the world from where it was created!

As Ricky Ricardo often told Lucy, "you have some 'splaining to do!"

How did I get to viewing that piece of art?

I jumped off a hyperlink in this piece on how in art depictions Jesus started resembling white Europeans, even though Jesus was born in the Middle East.

The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee, a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime

Academics have talked about Jesus' "whiteness" a lot, and how it is highly likely that he was nothing like the northern European depictions.  Will the Black Lives Matter movement of today, and the challenge to the white narratives, dethrone the image of the white savior with blue eyes and blond hair?

I like this description:

Jesus was a man of color who was murdered by law enforcement and state-sanctioned violence for insurrection against the Roman Empire.

That is one powerful image!

So, ... brown skinned, brown eyed, with long and curly dark hair.  Jesus probably looked like me when I had lots of hair on my head!

Me at 27

Jesus looked like this? Source

Bridge of faith

I was almost done with walking the full clockwise loop by the river.

Starting on one side near my home, I walk for a while to a bridge that gets me to the other side.  And then towards the end of the loop, another bridge to re-cross the river.

It was on that second bridge that I spotted two older people and their bikes.  The man seemed to be getting ready to leave, and the woman appeared to have decided that the bench where she was sitting would be her spot for a while.

I neared them.  They both looked 70-plus.  She had an accordion resting across her chest and abdomen.

The woman waved her hand.

I looked at her and waved out as I continued walking.

"Jesus loves you," she said.

"Thanks."

To believers, Jesus rose from the dead.  Not right away, but more than two days after he died.

To have that kind of unshakable belief is something.  Of course, every religion has something comparable that is the foundation of the faith that their followers have.

The faithful's claims about Jesus are extraordinary claims.

The principle of proportionality demands extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. Of the approximately 100 billion people who have lived before us, all have died and none have returned, so the claim that one (or more) of them rose from the dead is about as extraordinary as one will ever find. Is the evidence commensurate with the conviction? 

The extraordinary evidence is not there.  It is the same case with other religions too.

"In science, we need external validation." There is no other way.  One might choose to believe in whatever, but that belief by itself does not make it a truth.

Is science itself a "faith" as much as the resurrection of Jesus is a faith?

Nope.

The fact that you are reading this is evidence that science and the scientific method are no "beliefs" or "faiths."  Here is Richard Dawkins explaining that:

Jesus said, "get the fuck out of here!"

President tRump, whose strongest supporters are white evangelical Christians, knows how Jesus would treat the homeless.  tRump expressed that very, very clearly:

He expressed sympathy for real estate investors here and other Californians whose property values or quality of life are threatened.
“In many cases, they came from other countries and they moved to Los Angeles or they moved to San Francisco because of the prestige of the city, and all of a sudden they have tents,” Trump said. “Hundreds and hundreds of tents and people living at the entrance to their office building. And they want to leave.”
In Los Angeles and San Francisco, Trump said, people are living on the “best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings . . . where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige.” ...
Trump has characterized the homeless problem in California and other places as a “disgrace,” saying this July: “We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up. It’s inappropriate.” He more recently directed aides to figure out “how the hell we can get these people off the streets,” one senior administration official said.

As always, tRump offers a clear response to What Would Jesus Do?

Of course, I am not the only one who is angry at this President's inhumane approach to homelessness, and to the hypocrisy of his bible-thumping supporters.  This columnist, for instance, offers to rewrite a King tRump version of the bible, and suggests many sarcastic interpretations of Jesus' thoughts, like this one:

“A righteous man rounds up the poor and puts them someplace where people don’t have to see how gross they are; a wicked man allows people who pay tremendous taxes to be inconvenienced.”

This is how you make god great again!

Here is one exhibit that tRump and his supporters wouldn't even care about.  A local story of a homeless woman who was run over by a garbage truck.  She was once the kid on the right in this photo:

Much later, she was the mother in this photo:

She was 57 years old and homeless when she died.

Annette Lorraine Montero, unhoused and apparently suffering from mental illness, was run over and killed by a garbage truck as she slept in a parking lot near downtown Eugene.

Here's another exhibit, from Los Angeles.  The homeless man in the photo below was not born homeless. "He was a Yale graduate, Wall Street banker and entrepreneur."

Homelessness is a complex human problem.  This horrible human being in the Oval Office doesn't have an iota of empathy in him to begin to understand is not a surprise.  What excuse do the followers of Jesus have?

And if we cannot empathize with a fellow human right in front of our eyes, how are we going to even begin to understand the plight of humans far away, like the refugees fleeing wars?

And these are the same people who believe that I am going to hell because I am an atheist who does not believe in Jesus?  If only they understood that it is we humans who create hell right here on earth.  Why don't they want us to work together in order to create a heaven right here on earth!

Finding meaning in meaninglessness

tRump is a RINO.  No, not that one.  But, this: He is religious in name only.

The "Two Corinthians" man is far from being a true Christian, as much as he is far from being a patriot when he makes out with the American flag.  Not for a moment does any sane person ever imagine tRump getting high on religion, like some of the uber-religious do.  In a marvelous autobiographical essay, the author writes: "I have confused religion with drugs, drugs with music, music with religion. I can’t tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe in God, or if it was only because of that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all."  Maybe if tRump had tasted alcohol, his life--and ours--would have been different.  But then we also had a disastrous Republican President who had not only binged on alcohol but had even done cocaine, but found god after all that!

Anyway, the demagogue knows that bringing Jesus into political rhetoric is important in this country that was founded by fanatics who fled England: "the impulse to purify the group through separation from mainstream society, now regarded as the signature of a cult, could not be more fundamental to the nation’s history.”

And here I am, an atheist, who has never been anywhere near even pot, and I have no idea how the more potent drugs are.  Alcohol is rarer in my life than animal protein is.  I don't need religion or drugs to be ecstatic about life!

God and religion are not going to die anytime soon.  At a dinner a month ago at a meeting, an older man engaged me in a conversation about yoga and more.  The more included woo-woo talk. And then he made the mistake of asking me for my opinions.  I told him, in a matter of fact tone, that all our angst seems to be because we humans can't seem to figure out how to deal with two definitive aspects: We are here because our parents had sex, and we are going to die.  I suppose now he knows better to avoid me the next time he sees me ;)

With time, I have come to understand that life is what it is.  And life ends. Dogs die. Trees die. We humans also die.  Perhaps we are the only living beings who are fully aware that death awaits us, and I am thankful for that:  "we need death, as a blessing; eternity is at best incoherent or meaningless, and at worst terrifying; and we should trust in ourselves rather than put our faith in some kind of transcendent rescue from the joy and pain of life."

In my transition from a believer, I thought I had to beat up on religion, on faith.  I wanted to argue that there is no god.  But, I care not anymore.  Have not cared about those for a long while.  My atheism does not depend on beating up on god or religion.  Like the review essay notes, such a framework also "releases atheism from its ancient curse: its sticky intimacy with theism."

Instead, religious practice could be seen as valuable and even cherishable, once it is understood to be a natural human quest for meaning. Everything flows from the double assumption that only finitude makes for ultimate meaning and that most religious values are unconsciously secular. We are meaning-haunted creatures.

We are meaning-haunted creatures.  What a lovely phrasing!

Some day in the future, I hope, we will have a political system in which politicians do not have to fake their ways with religion and god.

We still haven’t seen that system, and it’s hard to imagine it, but someone went up the mountain and looked out, and saw the promised land. And that land is in this life, not in another one.

Silent Night

About a refugee and migrant camp in Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos:

If we want to imagine the Nativity, we needn’t go farther than the tent of Alaa Adin from Syria, who left his home just days after he married. Now his wife is pregnant, and when I met them they were living in a tent outside of Moria, because there was no room for them inside.
If we want to see today’s flight to Egypt, we needn’t look far: Nearly every refugee I’ve ever met has a story about escaping in the middle of the night.
If we want to understand a life upended for a census, we need only ask those refugees whose futures are uncertain until their asylum requests are processed, their entire lives now held hostage to bureaucracy.
If we want a miracle, I’d suggest looking at Anwar, who despite crying while recounting the destruction of Mosul, still paused in the middle and offered me a clementine.
As we live through the largest migration in modern history, Christmas invites us to recognize our story in the millions who have been displaced by tyrants, war and poverty and to see their stories in ours.

Pope Francis delivers a message in his address:

Using the example of the holy family to emphasize the “dangers that attend those who have to leave their home behind,” Francis noted that in Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary found a city “that had no room or place for the stranger from afar,” and which “seemed to want to build itself up by turning its back on others.” Instead, the pope said, Jesus “comes to give all of us our document of citizenship.” ...
On Christmas Eve, he recalled the famous appeal of John Paul II to opponents of Communism, that they should “Be not afraid,” “open wide the doors” and have confidence that their cause was just and would prevail.
Francis repurposed the message as an appeal for hospitality to the world’s forsaken. “Christmas is a time for turning the power of fear into the power of charity,” he said.

Peace!

Caption at the source:
A Syrian boy outside his family’s tent near the Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece.

Obama invokes Jesus more than Bush

As president, Barack Obama has mentioned Jesus Christ in a number of high-profile public speeches — something his predecessor George W. Bush rarely did in such settings, even though Bush’s Christian faith was at the core of his political identity.

Obama’s invocation of the Christian Messiah is more overt than Americans heard in the public rhetoric of Bush in his time in the White House — even though Bush’s victories were powered in part by evangelical voters. ...

“I don’t recall a single example of Bush as president ever saying, ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ,’” said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Christian group Family Research Council. “This is different.”

To Perkins, Obama’s overtly Christian rhetoric is a welcome development from an administration that he largely disagrees with on the issues, though Perkins sees a political motive behind it, as well.

“I applaud that. It gives people a sense of comfort,” Perkins said. “But I think it’s a veneer, a facade that covers over a lot of policies that are anti-Christian.” That includes, in his view, Obama’s stance in favor of abortion rights.

The Rev. Barry Lynn, the executive director of the group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, doesn’t like the trend with Obama: “I don’t need to hear politicians tell me how religious they are,” Lynn said. “Obama in a very overt way does what Bush tended to do in a more covert way.”

I wonder how the secular and atheistic supporters of Obama will respond to this report from Politico .....