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Can't say I've ever heard that phrase used figuratively. Is it used to express astonishment, like "I'll be damned!" or "Cover me with mustard and call me a hot dog!" or "Slap my ass and call me Sally!"?
So, you mean you have heard it used figuratively??? Literally would be as it was used in Bad Santa. Anyone who's seen that movie has heard it used literally, at least in a movie.
How many others have you asked? Maybe the Christians you know don't read the Bible much. The phrase "son of David" is used several times in the New Testament to address Jesus; I didn't just make it up.
As for the Christians I know, they've all made grandiose claims about how often they go to church, but no claims over how dedicated they are to reading the bible.
I've read the bible myself, thank you, for various reasons (research for a couple of rock operas I worked on during my musical theatre days, then research when I started reading Peter Danielson's Children of the Lion series; I wanted to know exactly which characters and scenes were based on the Old Testament and which ones the author made up).
Can't say I've ever heard that phrase used figuratively. Is it used to express astonishment, like "I'll be damned!" or "Cover me with mustard and call me a hot dog!" or "Slap my ass and call me Sally!"?
Then I guess you never saw Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves? Christian Slater's character says it when Robin and Morgan Freeman's character use a catapult to get into the castle:
When the movie is shown on TV, the "fuck me" part is altered to "bless me".
My guess is that they assumed there was a gap of several decades between the BC and AD calendars -- that AD is dated from the end of Jesus's life rather than (what Dionysius Exiguus erroneously calculated to be) its beginning.
My guess is that they assumed there was a gap of several decades between the BC and AD calendars -- that AD is dated from the end of Jesus's life rather than (what Dionysius Exiguus erroneously calculated to be) its beginning.
I can see where that would trip up someone who didn't give much thought. That's one reason why I prefer BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) instead.
I remember an awkward moment in high school (late 1970s), when a female teacher asked what AD stood for, and some girl said "After death." The teacher sharply scolded the girl, as if this bit of ignorance was a big moral offense. Public school, too. Funny the things you remember.
Some people do prefer to go by their middle name - were we ever told McCoy's middle name, other than it starts with "H"? That would be a fun exercise to come up with ideas as to what it could be. I can't think of any "H" names that would roll off the tongue in combination with the rest of his name.
How this all happened was that back in the late '80s, I asked a couple of friends if they'd like to see Patrick Stewart "in a Roman miniskirt, and hair."
Their response:
So I set about arranging a weekend's viewing of my I, Claudius VHS tapes (Stewart played Lucius Aelius Sejanus, a thorough villain who's a really nasty piece of work; his goal was to marry into the Imperial family, kill Tiberius, and take over the Empire).
And then I realized that neither of them knew much about Roman history and wouldn't be able to follow the story. So I wrote up a brief summary of each episode, explaining in general what was going on, who the main characters were, how they were related, and what their motives were for doing whatever they did.
Whereupon one friend (the church-goer) said, "This doesn't make sense."
I asked her what didn't make sense. She said, "Well, you said here that Augustus won the war with Cleopatra in 31 BC and died in 14 AD. What about the years between 1 BC and 1 AD?"
I said, "There weren't any years between 1 BC and 1 AD. 1 AD followed 1 BC because at that time there wasn't any idea of a "year 0"."
She insisted that there HAD to be 33 years between 1 BC (Before Christ) and 1 AD (After Death). She was highly doubtful when I told her the Crucifixion happened during the reign of Tiberius, well after Augustus' death.
(note that I said nothing about the claimed divine aspects of it, since crucifixion was a common Roman execution method and they were hardly the first to use it)
I guess her pastor never explained what "Anno Domini" means. It should have been an easy concept, since we both belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronism, which reckons time from the Society's founding, the official date of which is July 1, 1966. Since the SCA is still going, the current year is A.S. LVII (Anno Societatis LVII, or Fifty-Seven for those who don't read Roman numerals).
There's a comic strip panel in one of my old print fanzines, in which McCoy is engaged in a very energetic phaser fight with someone. Kirk and Spock are looking on, and Kirk is nonplussed at McCoy's fierce determination and angry expression, and wonders who the stranger is.
Spock explains it: "I believe, Captain, that his name is 'Hatfield.'"
Deforest Kelley wanted McCoy's father to be David, to honor his own father. I think that from a writing standpoint, a casual, low-brow sounding name, like Son of Frank or Son of Ralph, would have made a better contrast with all that Vulcan profundity. McCoy was supposed to be a fish out of water, not a fellow high-brow with a "son of king" sounding name.
Can't say I've ever heard that phrase used figuratively. Is it used to express astonishment, like "I'll be damned!" or "Cover me with mustard and call me a hot dog!" or "Slap my ass and call me Sally!"?
“To label things, my father was most certainly a Humanist,” Rod Roddenbery said of his late father in his Facebook post, embedded above. “I can tell you for certain that my father was as close to a true Atheist towards the end of his life as could be considered.”
"Over the years, some Star Trek insiders have made their personal feelings on religion clear. For example, producer and writer Brannon Braga worked on multiple Trek series and some of the Star Trek feature films. He also spoke at the International Atheists Conference in 2006. In his speech, Braga told the assembled group that Star Trek is “a vision of a world where religion has been vanquished and reason drives our hearts to explore ourselves more deeply. It is a template for a world that every single one of us in this room longs for. And in that regard, it is an atheistic mythology.”
As I said, stories about heroes overthrowing false gods are a widespread adventure-fiction trope, by no means exclusive to Trek. Not everything in Trek is about making a philosophical point. A lot of it is just reusing established fiction tropes.
We'll agree to disagree. Given that Gene's son tells us that Gene was an atheist, given that Braga tells us that Star Trek is "atheistic mythology", given the number of series episodes and movie that I mentioned earlier (and Gene's plans for The God Thing that I didn't mention earlier), I think I have a strong foundation to say that the idea of humanity ridding itself of religion in order to better ourselves is indeed an underlying premise of Star Trek just as Braga says it is and those episodes about overthrowing tyrannical gods are not just random because it's a popular trope in science fiction. There's more to see there than that.