More fun over at the local paper with comments open on a story about Christmas for Non-Christians. After previous stories featuring comments by people stating that everyone needs to be forced to take the day off and stay at home and celebrate the True Meaning of Christmas (r). What was that about the Devil quoting scripture? Joe Dude est moi…
JJ from NS writes: Jesus asks us however, to come to Him and to give ourselves to Him. He gave us the ultimate gift. It’s free! Oh, call on Him today! He will change you and your ‘Christmas’ forever. You’ll never be the same. It’s Christmas everyday! Praise Him! Posted 24/12/2007 at 11:47 AM
Joe Dude from Dartmouth, NS writes: Where is this polarized attitude that you are either fer us or agin us ? If someone doesn’t share your traditions or culture or religious delusions, it does not make them your enemy; just someone who doesn’t share your history.
If you celebrate Christmas as a Christian, perhaps you should give though to what it must be to walk in the steps of Christ and remove that log from thine eyes before you comment on the mote in mine.
I’m not a Christian, and I work in a non-call-centre technical field where I will be working both the 25th and the 26th. I’m not anti-Christian or anti-Christmas, and I really do enjoy peppermint and gingerbread, so it’s not all bad.
While at the office on the 25th, the banks will be closed in New York, so I’ll get to do some overdue things with rebooting and upgrading servers. While waiting for servers to reboot, I might celebrate Christmas by reading Sam Harris’ book The End of Faith
Posted 24/12/2007 at 11:48 AMJoe Dude from Dartmouth, NS writes: JJ; that’s not ALL Jesus asked of you, that you give yourselves to God…
Until Heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the law, until all is accomplished (Matthew 5:18)
Basically, that is a call to stop picking and choosing which of the biblical laws you choose to follow. I’m sure you’re familiar with Deuteronomy? Have you stoned a homosexual to death lately? Posted 24/12/2007 at 11:52 AM
Can someone Christian help me out here; do any of you actually READ The Bible anymore, or do most of you function solely with the assistance of Davey & Goliath, Veggie Tales and apologetics that are drilled into you in Sunday School? Picking and choosing the rules you can follow, including whether or not you choose to follow the rule that tells you to follow all the rules?
In looking for a freely available photo to headline this piece, I searched Image Google for bible cover. Scary scary results. The photo at the top is from Flickr by rakkar, who licensed it under the Creative Commons.
[...] great that my church can support a nice lifestyle for our minister.“ “Have you even read the Bible?” I [...]
Arrived here via the Skeptics’ Circle.
It’s handy to have an annotated reference Bible, or several, for multiple viewpoints.
Sometime near the end of Matthew’s Gospel, heaven and earth pass away. Matthew is big on talking Jesus up as the end of prophecy, so when Jesus is crucified, Matthew writes in every calamity he can think of – not least of which is that the veil in the temple in Jerusalem is torn in two, so that the “holy” who handed an innocent man over to die aren’t separate any more.
Jesus goes around in the Gospels, even in Matthew’s, breaking the Law, because the real “law” is to love God and love your neighbor. Matthew in particular writes Jesus as throwing Hosea’s “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” back at the people who get all preachy at him, and also spends time on Jesus denouncing the hypocrisy of the religious leaders.
So, Matthew 5:18 is more about Jesus defining his own role in the grand scope of things than it is an injunction to modern-day Christians to keep Leviticus literally.
I’m a Christian. But you just need to look at all the people with quotes from Leviticus scrawled on their protest signs (who have no qualms about eating a cheeseburger) to see that there’s a lot of ill-informed hypocrisy going around.
VeggieTales, Davey and Goliath, and Sunday School, are what you might call introductory courses, though of course they don’t always do the best job of things. Massless strings, point masses, frictionless pulleys – these things don’t exist at all, but they feature in every introductory physics text. I forget where I read it, but isn’t it generally true that in intro courses you lie a little, you don’t present the whole picture, just because it’s a lot to take in at once.
So of course a children’s book of bible stories isn’t going to have the same amount of cross-referencing and commentary as a modern “study Bible”. The problem is that people who’ve taken the intro course, so to speak, think they have the whole story, so they just go along with whatever’s presented as “supported by Scripture”.