Neil deGrasse Tyson Trolls Christians on Christmas

[merrily]

56. The Julian calendar was a version of the Egyptian calendar that had been messed up by a Greek.

The Roman calendar was a hopeless mess, but the Egyptian calendar, based upon the position of a certain star when the Nile flooded annually, was accurate. However, a Greek attempted to reduce it to a certain number of days per year without accounting for the extra quarter of a day plus a few minutes and seconds that we adjust for with our "leap year."

The Julian calendar went into effect in the Roman empire in 45 BC, so by the time Jesus was (allegedly) born, it was probably off already. And there is no year zero. We just went from b.c. to 1 a.d., without rhyme or reason.

Oh, wait, none of that even matters because it's highly unlikely that Jesus was born on December 25 anyway, even for those who believe that Jesus was born at all.

For Christians, celebrating his birth, whenever it occurred that matters, not whether he was actually born on the day the world has, for whatever reason, chosen for the celebration.

Tyson was trying to be mildly humorous, and that is also what I suspect Ben Jacobs, the author of the OP article, was doing as well, when he claimed Tyson was leading the war against Christmas and trolling Christians.


The OP article, datelined December 25, 2014, closes with:

But, regardless of how one feels about Tyson, Newton, Christmas or Christianity, his tweet does spark one bigger concern: don’t people have something better to do on Christmas Day than complain about Twitter?

I guess the only thing lamer than people complaining about twitter on Christmas Day is writing an article on Christmas Day about people complaining about twitter on Christmas Day.