The elections are all through. Right now, the Democrats are the party of destiny. Every 20-40 years, the time is simply right for one or another party. In the 1930s, it was time for the Democrats, in the 1970s, it was time for the Republicans. I just hope that I don't become so dogmatic that I lose sight of when to become a Republican again.

A thread on Fark that I didn't get a chance to reply to was very interesting. Apparently, the camp that was featured in the movie Jesus Camp was closed down and will be used for some other purpose. A few of the repliers decided to challenge not only the divinity of Jesus, but the very existence of a Rabbi named Jesus that flourished around 30 AD.

I'd like to think that the existence of Jesus is fairly well-documented. While the Josephus references are attributed as forgeries, we are assured of the existence of a missionary named Paul that in the 50s and 60s wrote several epistles to Christian churches around the Roman Empire. In these letters, he quotes Christ extensively.

By 64 AD, the Christian church had become important enough to warrant the first of several persecutions (although it didn't really get serious until 250 AD, when Decius decided the church was an existential threat to the Roman Empire.)

64 AD is fairly soon after Christ's probable crucifixion (which was between 30 and 35 AD). So soon, in fact, that the Apostles and Christ could easily be remembered by many Christians at that time; in fact, the Apostle John is said to have lived well past 90 AD. Mythical-historical figures (think of Jimmu Tenno) usually become mythical-historical with several centuries of intervening time between their actual existence and their emergence at the beginning of that culture's story.

We must also consider the relatively early existence of the Gospels. Most scholars argue that they were completed by 70-75 AD; again, Christ's ministry was within the memory of a few of the oldest Christians at that time. The Gospels were probably based on earlier oral tradition -- again, this tradtion probably began circulating at some point during the 50s, when the Christian church stopped being of a size where "everyone knew eveyone else" and such storytelling became a necessity.

Then, of course, the obvious question is this -- if not Jesus, who was the founder of the Christian Church? Paul of Tarsus? It seems odd that Paul would not have sanitized his early life, or have otherwise seen to it that his unsavory actions in Acts were not cleaned up. Likewise, Paul bases his own authority on the earlier authority of Jesus.

Now, with this said, why didn't anyone mention Jesus while he was alive? Simply put, he was not important enough to care about in 35 AD. Cults came and went in large numbers -- this is references in the passage in Acts where the Sanhedrin initially agreed to leave the Christians alone. By the time anyone really cared about Christianity, the only witnesses of Christ's life and time were other Christians.

I haven't even gotten into the Dominionist debate. Are they are fringe group or are they a serious aspect of the Christian Right? I'm inclined to think they are the former, although International ANSWER is disproportionately strong within the anti-war left.

Of course, the final question is why am I blogging at 5am?

There was a planned power outage this afternoon. I came in at about 6:15pm yesterday and was hoping to be back at a reasonable hour. We had two servers that just wouldn't come up and a crucial database server that had a disk go bad. We had a bad clock board on another server, a tape drive go bad on our VAX and there was an error of some sort on an external disk array but we couldn't trace what it was. Right now I'm hoping to get a restore kicked off.