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See my post at 52!

God would not have been so unjust and Clarke distorts the Biblical record. Read Luke chapter 2. The “star” was a fairly local phenomena and not some nova that would have burned a noble civilization to a a crisp unjustly. We know need not mention what God can do to unjust and sin filled cities and towns should he choose as in Sodom!!

There were several “Herods” in a span of about a 100 years from about 30 bc to 40 ad or so depending on what sources you read and they were all fairly wicked men but the records on them especially the one in charge 2 years or so after one of the great “census’s” with accompanying per head taxes of Augustus is fragmentary; especially since Augustus decreed several such “taxings”some greater or some “minor” over his reign so the info in our contemporary records of the times is incomplete.

I read that story first as a teen-ager and it impacted me hard at first...tugging at my emotions and triggering my inner “Christian” born sense of injustice almost against the one who informs my conscience as to what constitutes injustice. I took a second look at the story and realized what a shyster Arthur C Clarke truly was. How he sets up the notion of a Godless or at best a remote agnostic notion of a material universe and of a man religiously trained being kindly joshed about his faith until they encounter a burned up race, by all accounts a noble human like race whose sun went supernova. The calculations suggested that this was the Nova that formed the star of Bethlehem that men in their fertile imaginations created the entire mythos of Christ from.

Clarke proceeds from a vicious antichristian Masonic prebiased animus and not from truly objective scientific reason in setting up the strawmen and then knocking them down. The Jesuit in the short story ends up with a broken faith having to deal with an even more hostile and atheistic crew all incensed at the injustice of a Godless universe and all of them incensed at the cruel irony of a falsely founded religious faith that will crumble on earth once Earth learned “the truth”!

Wow...what a way to attack impressionable minds who wish to reconcile faith with reason. Clarke attacks the faith while raping and pimping reason with prebiased antichristian animus, trying to goad the halfway convinced into one camp or the other...the faith of the living God or the golden calf of science!

It does show that Clarke does seem to reject the ‘2 or 3 planet conjunction theory and anyway planetary conjunctions don’t stay conjoined for 2 years.(the age that Herod chose as the cut off for the killing of males 2 years and under in that region)

For that matter Supernova don’t stay very bright for long but will slowly fade. They will also shift position in the skies as the Earth moves about in its orbit thru the seasons and will change positions (rising or setting) as the Earth spins on its access.

I’m convinced of the truth of the Bible and that the magi saw an apparently fixed object that stood in it’s position relative to where the magi were located. As and when the Magi finally decided to investigate it had already been in place for at least 2 years never moving thru the night and never changing its position relative to the Earth’s orbit. There’s your science and the Magi were probably very intelligent and spiritual men with access to astronomical records going back 20 centuries or so with the ability to do math and they probably believed as the the Learned Greeks did that the Earth was a sphere!

As the Magi moved toward Israel...the fixed object...perhaps 200 miles or so above Bethlehem would have appeared to slowly rise in apparent angular elevation until it was overhead. I don’t think it was very bright but it was visible if you knew where things should be and where they shouldn’t be as the magi would have known.