Having been led by hate mail to look at Origen's refutation Celsus' writing, of one of the earliest pagan intellectual's slander against Christians and Christianity, it was striking how just about every single thing that was claimed against Christanity is the same as is used by the would-be wise-guys, sci-rangers and intellectual today.
And just as Origen had refutations against what was said then, Christian apologetics has answered them ever since. The matter of whether or not you believe one side or the other is obviously not dependent on the validity of what is said or the support that is given to it but is dependent on the choices of those who choose up sides. I don't find, especially, the earliest apologists to be any less intellectually capable or rigorous than the opponents. I certainly think today's theologians who I respect are, in almost every case, more prepared, better prepared, more rigorous in their methodology, more controlled in their presentation of those arguments they oppose, admitting to strong arguments they oppose and the difficulties in the arguments they are making than I find is common among the opponents of the core of Christian belief.
Where Christianity is most vulnerable is in the defense of the add-ons, I mentioned the medieval, I'd say often politically motivated or secular cultural baggage that was accepted along the way. I've had a lot of that junk thrown at me as if the generally college-credentialed idiots expected me to defend it, alleged Marian apparitions, images of Jesus in baked goods. Most hilarious, considering my identity as an Irish Catholic, they expect me to defend the worst of Protestantism, fundamentalism, "White evangelicalism," the gawdy, trashy, even irreligous excesses of Pentacostalism (and I don't mean the early Amuza Street variety, though a lot of that went way over the top, too). Not to mention the worst of all, the Hollywood, show-biz ersatz version that the followers of Trump assert, the night-club, variety-show, churches of the prosperity "gospel", etc. Traditional mainstream Christianity could often be faulted for having religion last for an hour or so in a pretty, often segregated church for one hour on Sunday. The prelude to what Garrison Keillor called "the church of the brunch." Where they may hear some of the Gospel and other Scriptures with a sincere sermon given by a competent and honest minister or priest. But for such "Christians" as believe in Trump it doesn't even mean that much, it's a show. For them the Bible is for thumping and holding upside down for the camera and for finding passages to bash the queers with or to uphold wealth inequality of racial exclusion, though they don't even much bother to do more than lie - a lot of it is lies made up on the fly with a few images and allusions to previous crap.
Clearly that's nothing I think is good and much that I think is evil. So don't bother me with your trash talk, I'm not posting it anymore even if I choose to answer it.
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It would seem that for Celsus one of the proofs against the Virgin Birth of Jesus was that Mary was a Jewish woman from a poor family - he said she was a spinner by trade - and on that count, alone, no sensible person would believe she could have been chosen by a god to bear their son. Celsus is clearly an intellectual and class, not to mention ethnic snob appealing to the same in his audience if not those who would like to be mistaken as one, having aspirations to become the same. While the present day scoffers might not want to make the same arguments, outright, a lot of what they say amounts to the same thing accusing the believes of ignorance and superstition - quite often, these days, the young TV and pop-culture idiots accuse these late iron age people of being "bronze age goat herders." Celsus, it seems, can be translated by dynamic equivalence, too, and as ignorantly as anything else can. I doubt one in a hundred thousand of them have ever heard of Celsus or the other line of his copy-cats any earlier than the last quarter of the 20th century.
I am dwelling on this because today is the Third Sunday of Advent, "Rose Sunday" when you light a pink candle if you do the Advent wreath thing, "Gaudate Sunday," and in place of the typical Psalm reading verses from the Magnificat found in Luke's Gospel are read. I did a long Advent series of posting more than one musical setting of the Magnificat a few years ago, along with readings about it, most of them taken from various liberation theologians, concentrating on the verses in which it is asserted by this low-born Jewish girl of no wealth and no standing and about whom vicious gossip was being spread (according to her detractors) that God was going to cast the rich and proud down and elevate the destitute, to fill the hungry with good things and send away the rich empty.
Christianity is that or it is nothing, it is the central importance of the nativity story, the meaning of it, which, given that no one but Mary would have known if it were true, she is the only one who could have known if she were, as said, a virgin when Jesus was conceived. Even if, as Celsus accuses, she had had sex with "Panthera" a Roman soldier, even wouldn't know if the rest of it, the angel, the message, the conception, was true. Some scholars, by the way, think "Panthera" is a lewd pun on the Greek word for "virgin," I don't know if that's plausible or not.
I doubt that for those idiots who pretend to support Trump out of "christianity" would have anything but contempt for an assertion that what Mary said in the Magnificat, according to Luke the first commentary in what would become Christianity. They certainly hate the poor, the destitute, the lowly, the powerless, the other. They have as much contempt for them as Celsus did in his polemic against Christianity. I doubt they'd be anything but furious if an accurate depiction of what the described birth-place was and the people involved if that was presented to them. Soren Kierkegaard may have recognized them as the "baptized heathen" that he bemoaned comprised the majority of nominal Christians he was aware of.
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