Letters to the editor — Tuesday (8-12-14)

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Fibrant puts city ahead of curve
It is absurd to lump Fibrant anywhere near Salisbury Mall in your discussion. The mall is a symbol of past poor planning.
Fibrant is forward-looking. Cities everywhere in the country are scrambling to update such services.
Before Fibrant I was frequently calling my cable company with problems related to their outdated and unmaintained infrastructure. With Fibrant I have fast and trouble-free service at home and away.
Too bad that cable failed to serve existing customers by updates and maintenance and instead supported legislation to block competition from municipalities. Happily, municipalities are appealing to the FCC to be allowed to compete. Competition is fundamental.
We need to be glad that Salisbury is ahead of the curve. Surrounding communities should be allowed to come on board.
— Karen C. Young
Salisbury
Jesus’ family
I scanned Doug Creamer’s homey familial musings Saturday (“Imagine what it was like in Jesus’ family”) on the present and on New Testament Joseph’s Nazareth family.
There was one really glaring sentence: “We know that Jesus was the oldest and that he had brothers and sisters.”
Wrong, wrong and wrong. Sorry.
Mr. C, you’ve missed Jesus’ own doctrinally correct church, so you lack accuracy regarding Joseph (and his Mary and so on).
Jesus was an only child, God’s only biological child — not Joseph’s, as you may or may not imply.
Jesus also therefore had no brothers or sisters — not even “halves.” Cousins, yes. So to speak, loosely. (The Aramaic language has only an all-inclusive term: “brethren.”)
These were Joseph’s older children from his widowed former family. Possibly.
And Jesus was circumstantially the youngest — and a really unrelated child.
The others weren’t at Bethlehem or the temple or Egypt — or even Nazareth, seemingly. They were obliquely mentioned once or so about 32 years later. Joseph’s early offspring could have been at times with the family in Nazareth to share and regale, as you muse.
— Donald P. Heidt
Salisbury