(DISCARDED DRAFT) DIARY OF A COFFIN DODGER CHAPTER B

THE HANDS (1893 - 94)

EDVARD MUNCH

ARTVEE PUBLIC DOMAIN

I stopped musing on Mary's trauma and the Jesus Crew's disembowelling of her story and resumed eating burgers and chips as sunlight poured through the window.

I had finished the cheeseburger and now munched on a Big Mac. I stuffed chips between the layers of the bun. Chip sandwiches became a favourite snack when I lived in Australia.

More chips sprawl out from a ripped second paper bag. I have covered those chips with tomato sauce from the bottle I took from the shoulder bag I carried into Maccas.

I ripped the bag open because it made eating the delicious sauce-splattered chips easier as they lay scattered across a plastic plate.

Both the plate and a cup of coffee sit on a vinyl table.

Where I sit on a bench, my belly touches the fixed table in front of me.

It must be men who jerk off over

what they would like to do with the younger women in their lives who give the OK for the interior designs of these places.

That would explain why the spaces between the fixed benches, seats and tables seem to be approved by men obsessed with the male-promoted delusion of women with eternally slim Barbie doll-like physiques.

I use a ceramic cup for my coffee. I don’t enjoy drinking coffee from plastic cups. They have those fucking awful plastic lids.

Whenever I try to pry the lid off the cup, the coffee slurps out of the cup, creating a mess over my clothes. A ready target for men's sly looks and grimaces at the disgusting, filthy coffin dodger who can't remember how to eat correctly.

I don’t fucking care. I am not interested in some bigoted arsehole’s opinion of me or the other coffin dodgers I am privileged to share time with on this planet.

I find the taste of Macca’s burgers bland. I have tried burgers from other outlets. Burgers I consider having tantalising flavours. But those burgers are more expensive than Macca’s. I like Macca’s coffee, however.

Some Maccas restaurants give me a freebie. No choice, a small flat white. I don’t mind. Free is free and flat white is my favourite. Aussies introduced me to flat whites.

I sit on the vinyl bench, enjoying the taste of a Big Mac with chips, while my shadow inches across the floor of Maccas.

I am ignored, like all coffin dodgers, unless we disturb others, like the selfie-seeking pricks' agitation at me sitting in a place they claim as a right to occupy.

I am also disregarded in another way. By male-imposed fantasies.

No matter our gender or identity, we are all eventually freed from these shackles; me included. Therefore, I am not being ogled by the eyes of men.

My gaze can roam without the hassle of meeting the hungry gaze of an intrusive, sex-obsessed male who has a delusion that I am interested in a visit from his dick.

I relax as I look along the lines of the perps of dick-worshipping ideology and other male-celebrated ways of buggering up the lives of women and girls. The twisted behaviours I reflect on and write about in this chapter. Behaviours and attitudes that are enabled and perpetrated by blokes, like the men in family groups, lining up at the counter.

Would it be two in ten? Or three in ten? Perps amongst every ten people milling around the counter. Given the number of men swarming across the internet as enablers and perpetrators of the horrific abuse of women and girls and the number of men amongst the crowd, it could be five in ten, perhaps?

Maybe you, you deceitful bastard, as you take your turn at the counter, are you a grandfather, a grandson, an uncle, a father, a brother, a husband, a son, a male partner, a nephew or a male cousin to the group that you are with? Or maybe a combination of those roles because it is a family group with whom you smile and chat as you gather at the counter.

Have any of those family members figured out who you really are??

I can’t see your eyes, but I bet the younger the woman serving you, the less likely you will talk to her face. A face like your granddaughter’s or a female cousin's or

your niece’s or your daughter’s or your daughter’s young female bestie.

Of course, you don’t care if the women and children with you notice the greedy, creepy gaze of your eyes, do you? You’ve groomed them into believing you are Mr Nice and Respectful.

Until the police knock on your door in the darker, black, like the hole in your soul where a conscience should be, hours of the morning to take you in for questioning about the child pornography on your computer. Or, for the internet date, you arranged to rape a child.

I wonder whether any family members will attend visitor's day at the prison they send you to, knowing they will spend time with the real you.

However, you might not want law enforcement taking apart the layers of your fabricated existence, revealing a stranger to your family, as you have read accounts of men like you being denied access to the internet as they serve their sentences in prison.

Therefore, as you are a gutless wonder who is thrilled by the thought of the violence, you can bring into the lives of women and girls, but you don't want to be held accountable for it (and therefore serve time), you can always go trolling. There are no laws against trolling, are there?

Thus, once you have had your family time at Maccas, you can have quality time with you and your internet buddies.

You know, in that room in the house, no one enters but you. What do you call it? A man cave? Like a tomb, isn’t it where respect for women and girls is buried?

Get rid of the family by sending them to a mall and enter the room.

Close and lock the door, and sit down at the computer. The one on a desk in the corner of the room that is hidden behind a pile of boxes (you can't risk someone inadvertently wandering into the room and accidentally discovering the portal to your favourite hobby. The delight of your life.)

Your family thinks it’s Dad’s room. You, like other blokes, are untidy. Thus, no one intentionally goes into the room and tidies up the room by removing the empty boxes. Therefore, only you remove the boxes when you need to indulge in your favourite hobby of verbally raping women and girls using a computer the family does not know about.

A use that makes women and girls shit scared to access their social media apps.

Fire up the computer. The screen shines on your face in that darkened room, as black as the deceit you practice on your young family as you prowl the internet preying on women and girls.

Women are mouthy bitches, aren’t they?

But you know how to deal with them, right?

Payback for the many, many times the snivelling bitches wouldn’t open their legs so your big beautiful cock could be rammed into their vaginas. Or the times you know they deliberately blanked you at the pub.

Why would they do that? After all, you are such a charming, respectful bloke; they must be up themselves to disrespect you like that.

Nothing at all to do with your sense of entitlement to use their holes because you are an alpha male, one of the masters of the universe, and women and girls are just stuck-up bitches if they try to stop you from practising that sense of entitlement, eh?

You’ve sent them a picture, haven’t you, of that lovely piece of meat, like a reeking fly-blown wrinkled loop of a dead animal's entrails?

Entrails that swelled when the animal was alive with shit.

Like, your thoughts of sexualised violence directed at women and girls that swell your magnificent piece of meat.

Thoughts that led to those unsolicited pictures of your unwashed, lousy shaft of meat, reeking of sperm and sweat, sent to countless numbers of women and girls, particularly young girls with tiny titties or whose physicality has yet to show those bulges which are the focus of your crude, cruel, toxic lip-smacking wet dreams.

Pictures of your dick just to let them know what they’re missing out on, you ugly, putrescent blight on all that is good in the world.

If you ate human flesh, had hairy palms and enjoyed hanging around graveyards at night, without question, people would know who you were.

It's doubtful, though, whether eating human flesh would abate your desire to emotionally and psychologically harm women and girls.

Grandfather had a similar nasty, crude streak of unkindness to yours, but he didn’t use pictures, did he?

Remember those times as a boy you stayed at your grandparent’s house? Grandad would put on an overcoat and take the dog for a walk in the evening, wouldn't he?

It puzzled you then as you watched him walk down the hallway. Where were his socks? You wondered as you saw his bare ankles peeping above his shoes as he led the dog on a leash out of the house.

Grandad was too stiff to stoop and put his socks on and too proud to let anyone help him dress. Or so your grandmother said when you asked her about Grandpa's socks.

These days, you don’t need to go outside and walk the streets at night, terrorising women and girls while a dog shits on the footpath.

You don't even have to wear an overcoat. You've changed into a grotty sweatshirt and your favourite pair of stained jocks (the aroma of lubricants masking the stench of those jocks gives your favourite undies pleasant, evocative memories) so that you will be comfortable as you sit at the keyboard sending dick-picks and other vile expressions of your real personality. An intelligent, arm-pit scratching update to what grandfather did just because you can.

Aren’t you the most loving, wonderful man every woman aspires to be with?

Your daughter is so proud of you.

As a spineless creep, you never told her about the times when grandfather did not wear his socks when he took the dog for a walk in the evening air.

You are also probably not wearing socks (keeping up the family traditions, eh?) when you sit at the computer disregarding a woman or girl's right to live a life free from male violence.

And, of course, the feelings as you undertake your manly tasks would be like your grandfather's when he opened up his overcoat at a passing woman or girl as the sunset.

Though he was thrilled (as you are when you send dick pics) as he revealed his shrunken piece of meat, girls and women were undoubtedly shaken by this gross attack on their right to travel unharmed.

Do you think he took a handkerchief with him in case he had a squirting section? After all, he was not wearing trousers or jocks.

Like your grandfather (you wondered why he smiled and chuckled when he entered the house after his walks), as you mind-fuck women and girls, you know well that feeling of exhilaration, like the grand final night when your team romped home at the disturbance you create in the minds and lives of women and girls.

A wretched disturbance that will have them shivering in fright when they go out at night, double locking their doors before going to bed, jumping at shadows and waking up in the wee small hours of the morning with screaming nightmares.

Your grandfather, though, only had his neighbourhood in which to harm women and girls, while you have a global reach.

How proud you must feel as you use a sex toy (hairless, like the vulvas of the young girls you fantasise about) to spice up your perverted imagination.

Aren't you the man?

To do all this damage to the lives of women and girls from the warmth, comfort, and security of your man cave.

The place where you can tell those mouthy bitches to shut the fuck up.

You need less exertion to tell them to shut their traps by displaying your keyboard skills than by giving them a well-deserved smack on the chops.

Chuckle, as you join the internet pack and mercilessly attack a woman or a girl's life as you use those keyboard skills.

Follow your internet buddies' verbal templates for the cruel, depraved invective you spew over a woman’s (or is it a girl's?) social media accounts as you spell out what you intend to do to her, or her kids, her partner, or pets.

Smirk and glow with pride at the thought of the woman collapsing into a sobbing, emotional wreck onto the floor of the place where she lives after she reads your posting.

Beers all around, isn't it, boys, when a woman kills herself because of the trolling you cheerfully take part in?

Who gets to shout the bar when the woman is a girl like your niece, granddaughter, female cousin, daughter, or daughter's BFF, I wonder?

If your imagination falters as you tap away at the keyboard, get creative and horny with the sexual imagery.

Check out porn sites to feed your creative juices.

You know, those your family doesn't know you subscribe to.

It's thrilling, isn't it, to enter the 'Daddy and Daughter' trash section? You spend hours on that site, don't you, at night when the family is sleeping in their beds? After all those hours, if you can still get it up, you can have a good wank, sitting at your computer scrolling through that trash site, as you imagine you and your daughter putting into practice the parts in the script played by the actors and actresses.

It is inspiring stuff.

That your cunt-obsessed mind, smooth baby-like vulvas, of course, not the flabby hairy caterpillars of your nightmares, vomits onto the computer screen.

Hard-ons are easy when your wife wants to be intimate with you as you picture your daughter’s tits (didn’t you take a sneaky-sneaky peek through a crack in the bathroom door the other morning as your daughter undressed before showering?).

Or her BFF's tits when you squeezed them during the tickling game you imposed on her when the BFF spent the night on a sleepover.

Express frustrated rage at not having the guts to do to those young girls’ tits what the Daddy and Daughter porno sites say is your right as an alpha male to do to all women’s tits at the woman or girl you are trolling by telling them what you want to do to theirs.

Then show the other blighted, bitter men in your verbal gang-banging team how creative you are by telling the woman or girl what you would like to do to her with shafts of timber that would make the Romans wince.

Switch off the computer after spending quality time with your trolling buddies, feeling invigorated and refreshed.

Hide the computer behind the boxes and leave the room (making sure the room is locked. You don’t want your daughter to discover the world’s number one dad's secret computer).

After a shower and getting changed (make sure the jocks are hidden), join your family at the mall.

It’s probably time for another burger. Phone your family and say you will meet them in the food hall.

When you see your daughter, don't think about her titties. If your wife sees the bulge of a hard-on in your jeans, she may think you want to have sex with her. Try not to throw up at that thought.

Distract your mind by buying your daughter a slushy. She’ll be delighted.

After all, she tells her friends you are the world's best dad.

She’ll throw her arms around you and hug you.

A spontaneous, loving gesture on her part.

For you, it’s a socially acceptable way of feeling an illicit tingle in your loins as her tiny titties press into you.

Do you know if she wears a training bra? How old is she? Eleven, twelve, thirteen?

What’s that team sport she plays? You know, the one where you stand on the sidelines with the other dads watching the girls play.

Isn't it marvellous that the girls, all about the same age as your daughter, wear short skirts, not shorts? It allows the young vixens to flash their panties at you as they run and jump around the playing area to show they are ready.

You must desperately refocus your mind while standing with the other dads on the sidelines. It wouldn’t do to show the bulge of a hard-on in your jeans or trousers. The other blokes might think you are a perv and stop having beers with you.

Don’t forget, during the week, when is it? Thursday? Friday night?

Anyway, one of those nights which interrupts a beer night with your mates, you are attending a candlelight vigil with your missus for some woman who was murdered in what the news media calls a ‘domestic violence incident.’

When you attend the vigil, don’t forget to buy one of those coloured ribbons to pin on your shirt to show you are taking a stand against domestic violence.

Your missus will hug you as you burnish your ego with the purchase. Violence against women and girls is the physical biffo, the stuff you would never do, not the trolling you do on the internet, isn't that so?

In that wee section of most men’s minds that slumbers an understanding of women and girls’ view of the world, this is the absolute outer limit of men’s comprehension of their violence, which zoom’s in on women and girls. It is only physical.

The stuff Herod allegedly unleashed on two-year-old and younger male children.

But then again, this wasn’t violence targeting women and girls. Herod didn’t set out to harm girls and women physically, did he? So runs the spiel of that wondrous beast called male rationality.

The Jesus Crew label this incident allegedly involving Herod the 'Massacre of the Innocents.'

It is another reworking and censoring

of the texts originally written by women and girls but now edited by the Jesus Crew to put their spin on the birth of Jesus and its supposed outcome as told in the bastardised texts found in the Gospels of Mathew and Luke.

Again, there are no known contemporaneous accounts of such a horrific event.

Neither has there yet been a discovery of a mass grave in Palestine containing children’s bones that can be dated to the time of Herod.

The women and girls who narrated and wrote the original story had a clear purpose in mind when they created a tale of a king who ordered the murder of children.

A king who is unnamed in the original narrative because that would have created a distracting element in that story.

The king is told (the original narrative's account of how he was told has been edited out) that a woman is to give birth to a child who will challenge the king's hold on his throne.

Again, a picture is drawn in the original narrative of a man, in this case, a king, who feels threatened by this action of a woman—a story written by those who know male violence intimately: women and girls.

The purpose of that narrative is to contrast the king’s reaction to Joseph's when Joseph felt threatened by Mary.

To show the God of Jechocobeh, Miriam, Rahab, Deborah, Tamar, Eliyahu, Amos, Nathan, David, Jesus, Joseph, Elizabeth, Mary, the women and girls who narrated and wrote the original narrative, the pub owner’s missus, the God of Ananias of Damascus, Peter and Paul, transforming Joseph’s life and opening a new chapter in men’s relationships with women.

Light years away from the well-trodden path of a violence-soaked lashing out.

In the women's story, the number of kids, hundreds of children caught up in the king’s maelstrom of violence, were overemphasised to make an emphatic point. When men feel threatened by a woman or a girl, men’s default position is to rampage along that well-trodden path of ugliness, brutality, maliciousness and murder.

The narrative also shows how men's authentic selves emerge.

The masks slip away, and their public personas are discarded when men show they are not prepared to put any limits on the violence targeting women and girls that men initiate, enable and implement.

A shocking, sickening refusal to place any limits on that violence when women and girls challenge the way men demand the world be ordered according to men's needs, fantasies or desires.

No limits, as shown by the story of a king (used in the Jesus Crew's editing) who ordered the murder of countless children, sending women and girls who cherished those children wailing and screaming into the night.

No limits when a woman or girl's right to stride through the world on her terms is denied to her through the murderous violence of a so-called honour killing.

No limits, either, when faith-based organisations blight the prerogative of women and girls to exercise their fertility rights as they see fit to do or prevent them from expressing their spiritual gifts in all positions within those organisations.

No limits when a man refuses a woman's right to exclude him from her life and takes her out of this world.

No limits when politicians shower communities with baby bonuses. Coercive pregnancies then boost the birth rate while men pocket the bonus.

No limits as men mock, humiliate, whip, beat, torture, mutilate, jail without a trial or judicially execute women and girls who speak out or exercise their right to express their identity outside of male-centric dress codes or take part in educational, employment, sporting and recreational opportunities, as well as other activities beyond male-imposed shackles, designed to straight jacket the lives of girls and women.

No limits when leave entitlements, pay scales, employment, educational and sporting opportunities preference men over women and girls because the work girls and women do is unrecognised and unrewarded.

No limits when leaders in faith-based organisations, worshippers, parishioners, law enforcement officers, health workers, educators, public servants, lawyers and legal officials, bankers and financiers, CEOs and shareholders, activist groups and politicians, influencers and advertisers, men and women in the street and workplace, shrug their shoulders and say:

'I’ve bought a block of land; I need to go and check it out…;,'

‘I already contribute to…;’,    ‘I don’t have time because…;,’

‘I am too busy what with…;,’    ‘the priority has to be…;,’

‘I’ve got something else on, however…;,’    ‘…say’s we can’t…because…;,’

‘I’ve bought five bits of machinery for the farm, a tractor, a harvester, a truck, an ute, a trailer,…I need to give them a test run…;,’

‘That's not what…wants us to do;,’    ‘there’s just too much else happening…;,’

‘it’s not my concern at the…;,’    ‘after…I’ll look into the matter…;,’

‘Look! I just cannot at this moment…;,’

‘We don’t have the…to address the issue adequately;,’

‘I’ve just got married…you know how it is…;,’

An endless chilling carnival of morally corrupt weasel words and half-baked excuses, grave markers of people’s refusal to stop men’s violence against women and girls. Signifiers of the dimming lamps of light and joy, love and hope that once glowed in the eyes of a girl or a woman.

A carnival that distracts from the sounds of men’s fists smashing into the faces of girls and women as the light wavers. Grave markers on the countless numbers of places where the violence of men snuffs out that light in the eyes of women and girls.

There’s a carnival of sorts as well in the Jesus Crew's continuation of errors make in bastardising the original narrative.

This time, the error relates to the Jesus Crew’s desire to include Herod in their version of Jesus’ birth.

Rather than leave the king unnamed as in the original narrative, the Jesus Crew make a classic error when men, feasting on a strong sense of self-righteousness, make allegations of wrongdoing that completely miss the boat. Too frequently, they don’t check the facts.

The torturing and murdering of women and girls as alleged witches centuries after the Jesus Crew inflicted their harm on women is a classic, horrific outcome of this trait.

Too often, villagers were willing to out women as alleged witches who were considered beyond their child-bearing years to Christian church authorities.

These women were regarded as useless bitches that, despite their alleged uselessness, needed to be clothed, housed and fed from scarce village resources.

Unbiased fact-checking on these allegations' legal and ethical strengths and weaknesses did not occur until centuries after those heinous abuses of women and girls ended. Let alone the ages of the women and girls accused.

In the Jesus Crew’s self-righteous rush to name and finger Herod as the murderer of children, they failed to show how the ages of the children allegedly slaughtered by Herod's soldiers were ascertained.

Given the lack of birth certificates or entries in Cradle Rolls, how could children aged two years or younger be identified? Would mothers readily answer a soldier’s question about which of her children were two years or younger?

When the soldiers burst into a house, would the soldiers be able to tell if a child was three or two years old or six months old or two years and two days old?

Did the soldiers strip the children naked to check their cis-gendered identity before murdering them?

Because the soldiers did not have any means of fact-checking the age or gender of children, the Jesus Crew has again been caught out.

The soldiers performed their alleged murderous duties centuries before the Nazis used their primitive computer systems (compared to the systems in use today.)

If the technology had been available, the soldiers could have used it to check the age and gender of the children and where they lived.

Systems the Nazis used to determine where Jewish people lived in the towns the German Army occupied.

Though, like the Nazis, the soldiers would have had the help of hundreds of local villagers (the Holocaust of Bullets) to carry out the slaughter if the Jesus Crew’s claim of the numbers of kids that were slaughtered, let alone the authenticity of their account of this blood-soaked narrative, had any connection to reality.

However, unlike the brutal, sickening mass murder the Nazis unleashed on Jewish people (the Shoah), and others, the so-called Massacre of the Innocents did not happen.

The scale of its alleged occurrence made it impractical to carry out when the Jesus Crew claimed it did, and there was no contemporaneous account of such a slaughter.

It is another fabrication.

However, in keeping the original story of a king murdering children, claiming it happened and ensuring Herod was named as the perpetrator, the Jesus Crew had to keep buggering up the original narrative.

They did this with a time-honoured trick indulged in by men whose fabrications can be exposed for what they are.

The Jesus Crew had downplayed the in-breaking of the God with no name into the life of Joseph because they wanted to promote their narrative of Jesus’ birth (as opposed to John the Baptists) and remove the agency of a woman of flesh and blood from their version.

Therefore, the Jesus Crew resorted to gaslighting, supported by a male imprimatur of authority on the cut and pasting they did on texts from what the Christians call the Old Testament.

Some men see things that are and say, ‘Why?’

The Jesus Crew said, ‘We see things that never were, but with a bit of cut and pasting, we say, why not?’

Hence, we have a story of three blokes following a star.

Astronomers, allegedly, who could read the signs, such as the stars. To give them a bit of status, the Jesus Crew called them ‘kings.’

Now, given these blokes alleged wealth (they did not need Frequent Flyer Points to defray the cost of their arduous, weeks-long journey) and the lifestyle that went with that wealth, they were the sort of blokes who never washed their own undies, let alone ironed their own handkerchiefs or cooked their own meals.

If the journey as described by the Jesus Crew took place, to meet the lifestyle demands of these kings, there would have been a vast retinue of enslaved people and servants, chefs and kitchen hands, sommeliers and bottle washers, prostitutes and God-botherers, influencers and PR hacks, laundry maids, footmen, butlers, butchers, herds of meat on the hoof, pack animals and security guards, accompanying those three blokes.

How this vast mob would have found accommodation in a town that the Jesus Crew claimed was pretty limited (did Mary and Joseph sleep out the back of the pub under a tarpaulin?) beggars belief. Maybe this mob took over the local showground.

But yet again, when men fabricate, though it may take a while, gaps of rationality will appear in their gaslighting because the Jesus Crew's narrative runs bang smack into the nonsense of a census.

Where did the kings go to be registered? Did they pass through their various places of birth to visit Mary? What additional costs did this add to their journey? Where did the various members of the retinue go to be registered? Was the trip delayed while these people cleared off and returned as they fulfilled their duty as dictated to by Rome?

The more the census is looked at, the dodgier it becomes.

But as with any fog of gaslighting, the Jesus Crew’s three-card-trick hoped the fabrication would be laced with so many seemingly plausible tales (hence the cut and pasting) that the gaslighting would evade scrutiny.

As countless women and girls know, gaslighting dims a person’s rational grasp on a situation or creates doubt in their sanity unless they accept the underlying myths of the particular incident of gaslighting.

The census, therefore, does not look good when considered within the light of reason.

Mary and Joseph did not have birth certificates, passports, Facebook pages or Twitter accounts.

How were the Romans meant to verify that Mary and Joseph were born in the town they said they did?

What steps did the Romans take to prevent double counting? For example, with Mary and Joseph? Put an elephant stamp on the back of their hands?

And so it goes on. Removing the fog of gaslighting is tiresome and exhausting. But the reward comes in sorting out fact from fiction and, with the Jesus Crew's mangling of the original narrative, considering other ways by which the God with no name interacts with people.

Such as that narrative’s story of the in-breaking of God’s kindness into the life of Joseph and the promise the God of no name offers to all men.

They, like Joseph, can discover that by heeding God’s call, though, like Joseph, they will journey into a place they do not want to be, the promise is that they too can then live a life with women transformed by respect and support for the lives of women and girls in the world independent of any male ideas how the lives of girls and women are to be lived.

A journey that meant freedom. Freedom to be the person God wanted Joseph to become.

Freedom for men to journey, as Joseph did, away from conformity into a world where their relationships with women and girls are transformed by the freely given love of the God of Jesus Christ, the God of no name.

As the gaslighting dissipates, the narrative returns to the mystery of why Mary and Joseph undertook the journey when they did.

If the journey of Mary and Joseph as described by the Jesus Crew occurred and Mary gave birth in some town away from where Joseph had his business, then what would be the gender of the baby?

The Jesus Crew, as far as we know, did not have access to ultrasound images of the child Mary was carrying. How did they know this child, conceived when Mary was raped, would be male?

We have no record of a Gender Reveal party held by Mary or Joseph.

We only have the Jesus Crew’s word that a boy was born. It could have been a girl, it could have been twins, Mary could have miscarried. Mary, Joseph, and the infant (if Mary did not miscarry) are the only people who could have answered those questions with certainty.

Jesus may have been born nine months after Joseph consummated the marriage.

Or even later, after the other children were born. Who knows?

Because Jesus did not have a birth certificate, like Mary and Joseph, and, despite the alleged census, no contemporaneous Roman records have yet been found recording the birth of Jesus. Nor a parish register.

There is a further horror to be considered by the editing of the texts undertaken by the Jesus Crew.

If the journey of Mary and Joseph took place as the Jesus Crew described, who else but men could have thought it was OK to write into their narrative of Mary, heavily pregnant, likely to give birth at any minute, setting off on a journey with no support from midwives and no means of accessing such support.

An account that shows men’s inability to listen and pay heed to women's voices.

Here, men, with a cold, callous, cruel indifference towards the lives of women and girls, wrote an account of a heavily pregnant woman setting out on a hazardous journey.

Further, given what is known of the adult life of Jesus, his compassion, his kindness and his humanity, as well as his appreciation of women’s lives and his respect for them,

it is doubtful he would have considered those editors' attitudes towards a woman acceptable.

Uncaring attitudes of male editors, who did not know and showed no inclination to know women, as those editors strode along a well-worn road of male violence towards women and girls.

Violence that is shown in this case by the editors' indifference to girls and women’s entitlements to live their lives outside men’s needs, fantasies and desires.

As well as their delight at pulling the wool over people's eyes with their yarn about an impractical census and an emotive tall-tale about the murder of children, the Jesus Crew also soberly spruiked a potentially lethal claim.

They did this to support their assertion that their man was the one promised by the God of the Christians. In putting their weight behind this declaration, these blokes wrote a narrative that lauded a frightening account of Mary's life-threatening journey simply to advance a brutal male-centric claim that their Jesus was the Messiah.

****************************