The Virgin and the Almah

If there is one thing I am convinced of, it is the idea that people who truly believe in their religion are either not very well informed about it, or, if well-informed, are deliberately shamming "belief" for other reasons. Most of the time there's no difficulty in divining the "other reasons" as well.

It's a matter of fact that most religions actually discourage thinking by their adherents and research into the truths or otherwise of the claims they make.

For example...

Christiantiy, in all its forms, makes the point that it is not an idolatrous religion and it's a monotheistic one. But, at the same time, the largest and most influential branches, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, make a fetish of the "Virgin" Mary and the saints...to the point where they pary to the saints and to the "Virgin" Mary for intercession with "god".

Some monotheism.

In fact, the whole idea of the "blessedness" of Miriam (Mary) rests on the idea that she gave birth while still virgin. Catholics would also deny that she ever had sex, even afterwards, even though Biblical accounts would seem to allot Jesus four brothers (including "James the Just", first Bishop of Jerusalem) and at least two sisters.

Well.

Wherefore comes the idea that she was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus? This idea that non-Christians often mock by claiming Jesus was illegitimate?

Answer: from the mistranslation of a single word. Let's see what Isaiah 7:14 has to say:

The Lord himself, therefore,
Will give you a sign.
It is this: the almah is with child
and will soon give birth to a son
Whom she will call Immanuel.

Now there we have the word: almah. It is a Hebrew word. It can mean one of three things:
First, a young woman, recently married or unmarried.
Second, handmaiden or female servant
and, third, "concubine", which word automatically excludes virginity (this particular usage of almah - among other places - is found in Genesis 20:17, 21:12 and Exodus 23:12).

The Old Testament, where Isaiah's words appear, was translated into Greek and "almah" became "Parthenos", which means "girl", usually but not compulsorily unmarried (with no mention of virginity at all). It was only much later that Christian theology retroactively made "parthenos" mean "virgin". Mariolatry, the worship of Mary/Miriam, in fact, is an invention of the Middle Ages.

Take the "virginity" away from Mary, and what we have is a woman who happened to give birth to a prophet. No more special a woman than the mother of John the Baptist or any of a dozen other Jewish prophets, if at all any of them had any real existence that is.

I wonder, while I am on the topic, just why the Church was so all fired eager to make a demi-goddess of Mary? Are humans naturally polytheistic? Why do Muslims of the Sufi persuasion pray, not to god/khuda/allah, but to "pirs" (mystical Muslim "holy men")? Why did Buddhism, which was silent on the existence of god, convert Buddha himself into a deity and then - in the lamaist perversion of the religion in Tibet - acquire a plethora of "reincarnated" god-kings? Why do polytheistic religions survive?

Questions for another day.

Incidentally, if you read the Bible, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Jesus himself disliked Mary. He was rude to her in public ("Woman, why turn to me? My time has not yet come", Mark 3:31-35; Matthew 12:46 and Luke 8:19); and when told that his mother and brothers were waiting for him, said "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?" - surely a rejection. Also, nowhere does the Bible say he ever met her again after his attempt to preach in Nazareth ended in disaster. And is it credible that any mother, anywhere on earth, can attend her son's execution? Was Mary a psychopath? Did she have no maternal instincts? Or is it that the writers of the New Testament really did not know how women behave?

Of course, there is no actual evidence that Jesus even existed. So, I'll just close with an apposite comment I read on the net:

"Being the virgin mother of a nonexistent son would seem to be within the capacity of any woman!"

Why did Kamikaze Pilots Wear Helmets?

(From May 2007)

A few days ago a friend sent me what she thought was a set of joke questions. Some of them were not actually jokes. 
For example, one was a classic "argument" used by the creationist loony fringe: "If we are evolved from apes, why are there any apes any more?"
This particular question is rather easy to answer, of course. We did not evolve from apes. If we had, then all apes may well have joined us in evolving to humans. Humans and apes evolved alongside each other, from a common ancestor, to fill different ecological niches.
The other question I bothered to answer was, "Why did Kamikaze pilots wear helmets?"
Kamikaze pilots, as seen in the upper left photo, were a creation of Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi of the Imperial Japanese Navy. As Japan was threatened with defeat in the dreadful days of 1944, its army defeated in Burma and in the island campaigns of the Pacific, its Navy decimated, the Philippines threatened by American invasion, Onishi (who wrote such poetry as "In blossom today, then scattered/ Life is so like a delicate flower/ How can one expect the fragrance/ To last for ever?", and who committed seppuku after the surrender) formulated the idea that instead of launching unguided assaults with ineffective conventional weapons, guided missiles would serve the purpose better. 
Impeccable reasoning...only, in 1944, Japan had no guided missile weaponry. Germany had, but Germany was out of reach. What Japan had was a lot of obsolescent aircraft that could no longer match up to their American and British opponents in conventional combat, and which were being shot out of the skies.
Accordingly, Onishi suggested that these aeroplanes, which would seem to be doomed in any case, might be better employed as guided missiles in ramming attacks on Allied battle groups, particularly on the aircraft carriers, as in the photo at the bottom. Since there were no automatic guidance systems available, they had to be guided to their targets by the pilots, who would take off (as in the top right photo) with bombs attached to their planes, and crash them on carrier flight decks, and, accordingly die in the course of the attack.
Such was the Kamikaze ("divine wind") tactic.
Now, of course, seen from that angle, the question is a legitimate one: Why would doomed pilots on a suicide mission wear helmets? isn't the helmet superfluous in such circumstances?
Answer: they didn't.
No World War Two pilots wore helmets. What they wore were leather flight caps (known by the misnomer "flight helmet" just as Balaclava caps are known as Balaclava helmets) with radio headphones and goggles. The flight caps were needed for the following reasons:
First, in the cockpits of those days, the canopy did not fit all that well (and many craft had open cockpits) so they needed flight caps for their heads to stay warm; not a frivolous matter in combat at several thousand metres. And since most heat loss from the human body comes from the head, a cold head could literally cause hypothermia.
Second, goggles were necessary for clear vision (unlike most Hollywood ideas, pilots of the time flew with goggles covering their eyes and not pushed up fashionably over their foreheads - just as modern pilots fly with visors down and not pushed up to show their faces for the camera), and a suicide attacker needed to see the target he was ramming;
Third, the pilots needed radio guidance; and the flight caps had the radio headphones. Despite claims that the suicide pilot took off to die, with just enough fuel to reach the enemy, here is what the Japanese standard operating instructions for Kamikaze pilots said:
Aborting your mission and returning to base: In the event of poor weather conditions when you cannot locate the target, or under other adverse circumstances, you may decide to return to base. Don't be discouraged. Do not waste your life lightly. You should not be possessed by petty emotions. Think how you can best defend the motherland. Remember what the wing commander has told you. You should return to the base jovially and without remorse.
The majority of missions were actually unsuccessful. Among possible reasons were weather conditions that made it difficult to find the enemy fleet, mechanical trouble, such intense anti-aircraft fire that any attack would obviously fail, or the aeroplane could miss the angle of approach and be unable to crash at a vital point. The pilot would then return to base.   It would be kind of difficult to return to base sometimes from far over the ocean without radio guidance, and even to find the target without radio guidance, and therefore...
In fact, the presence or absence of helmets would not make a significant difference in survivability in a crash. A crash of a military aircraft typically disintegrates the pilot's body into pieces; whether his head is encased in a helmet makes no difference to his fate. Today's pilot helmets are basically meant to carry aids like head-up displays and to protect the pilot's head and neck from injury if he has to eject. That's it.
Given that
(a)ccording to eyewitness testimony...those surviving, were almost inconsolable with depression when flying back and the only thing that could comfort them was the thought of the next mission....
if they had a better chance of dying without "helmets", they wouldn't have worn them at all.