and to all some good cheer!
And happy Hanukkah, or whatever holidays you happen to practice.
Anyone have some Christmas stories they want to share?
Merry Christmas to all....
(33 posts) (7 voices)-
Merry Christmas to you all too. :) Only one of heartbreak involving some uggs :(
Tue Dec 22 2009 4:09 am # -
I would join you, but I got plans.
Tue Dec 22 2009 5:38 am # -
johnosevens
MemberA1Nut - The only place near me that stocks it regularly is Whole Foods. In their 'Eco Friendly Wine' section they carry Honeyrun in four or five flavors. I prefer the Ragnar's Reserve and the Elderberry, but that's just me.
Brock - You don't necessarily have to be a practitioner of any faith to drink to the holidays. It's the solstice, man. I mean, the whole reason it became a holiday is because it's something worth observing. Winter is at its very deepest. We've survived. The longest nights are behind us now and the future literally only gets brighter from now until summer. Then again, if you were a practitioner of any faith, you could claim a 'religious observance' exemption from your local drinking laws. =^_^=
Also, everyone please keep my girlfriend and I close at heart tomorrow as we undertake a long journey. Five hours of driving is never fun, but Christmas in Vermont is worth it. I know we have many prayerful types around, so, lend me some positive energy. My car and my eyeballs will need it.
Wed Dec 23 2009 5:13 am # -
Ah, but the Solstice was actually Monday at 12:47 in the afternoon this year. We did wish each other a pleasant solstice, a bit belatedly because I forgot.
I have my computer back, but it's way late and I've much to do tomorrow, too, so I'm going to have to try to catch up on everything as time permits--which might not be this week, but we'll see.
Holiday greetings of every sort, but particularly a merry Christmas, because I'm allowed to be prejudiced in that regard.
--M. J. Young
Wed Dec 23 2009 8:35 am # -
JohnA1nut
MemberJust an amusing Christmas anecdote. I was walking around a shopping mall, and Silent Night or some other religious Christmas song came on over the PA system. I heard a guy say "Ain't it a shame how these damn religious fanatics gotta bring God into everything, EVEN CHRISTMAS?!?!" I wanted to punch the guy in the face.
Wed Dec 23 2009 4:36 pm # -
I heard a guy say "Ain't it a shame how these damn religious fanatics gotta bring God into everything, EVEN CHRISTMAS?!?!" I wanted to punch the guy in the face.
What do you call the kind of laughter you have when something is really sad but funny at the same time? Well, I'm laughing, and almost in tears.
--M. J. Young
Wed Dec 23 2009 10:06 pm # -
JohnA1nut
MemberWhat do you call the kind of laughter you have when something is really sad but funny at the same time? Well, I'm laughing, and almost in tears.
I don't know. I've laughed so hard I was crying, and I've been so happy I was crying. Brock is right though.
(Doing Therapy)
Thu Dec 24 2009 6:31 am # -
....Wow, just wow...
Thu Dec 24 2009 7:02 pm # -
JohnA1nut
Member(X is the event that you are celebrating.)
From Roman mythology. X is the symbol for Christ, making it both accurate and reverent. A lot of people think it means "X-ing out Christ." I used to think the X was a cross, and it meant "Merry Crossmas" which would be close in pronunciation, and the cross being the obvious symbol for Christ.
Thu Dec 24 2009 7:31 pm # -
It's amazing what people don't know about their own religion, in sociology class I got into an argument with a girl whether or not our non updated version of the bibles said that when she's caryying a baby and on her cycles she's impure and everything she touches is impure and needs to be purified. I finally got fed up and looked it up and found it in liviticus.
Thu Dec 24 2009 9:04 pm # -
JohnA1nut
MemberYa know, you are so right Ahmetia. (I think your name is beautiful, BTW) People twist the Bible to mean all kinds of different things. I heard a guy say, with a straight face, that the Golden Rule justifies sexual assault. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." So, if I want a woman to rip my clothes off, throw me down on a bed and have violent sex with me, then I should do it to her, because I'm doing to her what I want her to do to me. Perhaps an extreme example of how the Bible can be taken out of context.
Fri Dec 25 2009 1:46 am # -
I think you'd enjoy this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkXPyY9Wo_A
Me and my family just finished watching a french film about during WWI there was a cease fire for Christmas between the Scots, the French, and the Germans. LMAO A cat getting arrested fire high treason was funny. And then there's the homicidal egotistical catholic priest who clearly has no idea what he's saying and if he dose then he's just spreading propaganda. Yeah, I am so sure that Jesus wanted us to go to war and kill all the Germans and everything. And by all Germans, I mean ALL GERMANS, woman and children and all.
Fri Dec 25 2009 3:17 am # -
JohnA1nut
MemberI did like that song. Most interesting. The thing that really irks me is I recently read an edict from a Catholic priest who said that "There is no Heaven for gays or transgendered people." He showed passages in the Bible which supported this. What he DID NOT show was the part where it had his name written as the person who made those decisions. Regardless of what the Bible says or doesn't say, it DOES NOT have the name of any Catholic priest or any other human written as the person who decides things like that. What right does that priest have to make such a claim? What right does ANYONE have to make a claim like that?
Fri Dec 25 2009 3:30 am # -
Nope, that's one reason why I don't like Christianity, mostly because of the sect. I highly doubt all powerful deities are anal about small details. Symbols I get, whether or not to take off you're hat is a bit obnoxious.
Fri Dec 25 2009 3:34 am # -
JohnA1nut
MemberI believe that God speaks to me when I'm doing my psychosis therapy. I also accept that I am heavily intoxicated and in a psychotic state at the time, so feel free to draw your own conclusions. The impression that I get from my talks with God are that He has an extremely good sense of humor, and is far more benevolent than sometimes portrayed in the Bible. Or it could all be a psychotic hallucination. Your call.
Fri Dec 25 2009 3:50 am # -
Nah, I think the christian god is at worse a tough love father. Again, I just doubt he's anal about little details like that, the minute meaningless things.
Fri Dec 25 2009 3:58 am # -
JohnA1nut
MemberRight. I had a 3 year old Jewish girl tell me that I was going to hell because I ate bacon for breakfast. The fact that she was only 3 years old automatically lets her off the hook for the offense, but she had to get the idea from SOMEONE. Probably her parents. Maybe she misunderstood something, but still, that's not raising your child to be a servant of God, that's brainwashing.
The other impression that I get from my psychotic talks with God are that He doesn't really care how you talk to him, just as long as you remember who you are talking to. Get angry and yell if it makes you feel better, just remember that you're talking to the one who created the universe. A tough love father would kind of go back to that. I've been chastised more than once in my talks with God, for forgetting who I was talking to. We usually have a good laugh over it.
For the record, this is my own personal thoughts and opinions. They should not be taken as any kind of gospel. All I know for sure is that I feel as though I am in the presence of something awesome, and that I feel a kind of love like I have never felt, coming to me. If it's a delusion, I don't think it can really be a bad one.
(Doing Therapy)
Fri Dec 25 2009 4:17 am # -
Well, the reason why Muslims and Jewish don't eat pork is because pigs will eat anything, corpses, each other, their own shit. So it's going back to that symbolism thing.
But yeah, it's the way my religion works too when addressing the deities. Course, some are harder to talk to then others, oh, if you piss off a norse god. I think a god would know if you're saying something to be an ass or if you're saying something because you're upset or don't understand.
Fri Dec 25 2009 4:27 am # -
I don't even know where to begin to explain.
But then, if you wanted my opinion, you could get it easily by reading my web pages and Bible study posts. So I can only assume that you don't want to know what I think on the subject, and all I'll say here is if you are speaking from ignorance, at least have the sense to acknowledge that you don't know anything about the subject on which you are pontificating. I have degrees in the field and years of study and work; I think I have a decent knowledge of what Christianity actually is and teaches, and why. I don't see much of that in this thread.
--M. J. Young
Fri Dec 25 2009 6:40 am # -
JohnA1nut
MemberI'm not certain that I really consider myself a Christian anymore. More like a follower of the God that created the universe. A fine line perhaps, but one I make.
MJ, if you think you don't see Christianity in the thread, are you saying you don't believe God has a sense of humor? Take one look at a platypus. That should change your mind. Are you saying God isn't benevolent? We're still alive aren't we? Are you saying you believe God doesn't speak to us? What part of this doesn't fall into Christianity?
Also, as I said earlier, show me where it has the name Mark Joseph Young listed in the Bible as the person who decides things like that. Not to be rude, but that is one of my biggest pet peeves with highly educated Christians.
(Doing Therapy)
Fri Dec 25 2009 7:15 am # -
And where does it say John A1 nut in the Bible? You know, you say that we're free to draw our conclusions from what you're saying here, but if we do that, you talk down on us. I'm behind Mark on this one. I do not see anything that resembles true knowledge of God here. I do not say that I have it, but I have a bit of it.
And seeing this being a Christmas thread, I haven't seen much about Christmas in here. So I'll add a poem/song that Robert Southwell wrote in the 17th Century.
This little Babe so few days old
is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at His presence quake,
though He himself for cold does shake;
For in this weak unarmèd wise,
the gates of hell He will surprise.With tears He fights and wins the field,
His naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries,
His arrows look of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns: cold and need,
and feeble flesh His warrior’s steed.His camp is pitchèd in a stall,
His bulwark but a broken wall;
The crib His trench, haystacks His stakes;
of shepherds He His muster makes;
And thus, as sure His foe to wound,
the angels’ trump alarum sound.My soul, with Christ join thou in fight,
stick to the tents that He hath pight.
Within His crib is surest ward,
this little Babe will be thy guard.
If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,
then flit not from this heavenly Boy.Sat Dec 26 2009 11:54 pm # -
John, I certainly would not say that there is nothing Christian in this thread. Yes, God is benevolent and has a sense of humor. I simply meant that there are a lot of confusions in this thread about what Christianity is. I remember that somewhere C. S. Lewis (who not only gave us the Chronicles of Narnia but also is the reason that the work of his friend J. R. R. Tolkien was published) wrote that no one has ever raised a cogent argument against Christianity. What they have done was create a strawman, describing what they believed Christianity to be, and then knocked it down. And in the same way that you are upset when people make uneducated and uninformed comments about psychosis, I am disturbed by uninformed and uneducated comments about Christianity.
It is also popular among a certain group of mostly ultra-conservative Christians to bad-mouth education. This is residual from the late nineteenth century, when there was a movement in some colleges and universities to remove the supernatural elements from Christianity, and a lot of statements were made about the Bible and the origins of the Christian faith that in essence meant that ordinary believers had it all wrong. Those claims were all disproved in the twentieth century, but the arrogance with which they were made became a defense against the proofs: men like F. F. Bruce and Bruce Metzger and J. Gresham Machen who were among the best in their fields were considered incompetent not because they did not demonstrate the abilities needed to reach their conclusions but because they reached the "wrong" conclusions. Thus the "educated" Christian got a bad name among many less-educated Christians, including many pastors, because so many pretended to know the "real" history of Christianity and promulgated versions that would not have stood the scrutiny even of an amateur historian.
I think that having an education in the field ought to qualify me for some sort of credibility in the matter. After all, I started reading the Bible in elementary school (and Bible stories before that), and by this point have lost track of the number of times I have read the entire text--including having read the New Testament once completely in the original Greek. My education means that I have been exposed to the opinions and conclusions of others of many persuasions and backgrounds, including the Church Fathers who wrote in the first five centuries of the church, the Reformers who splintered the Protestant movement into so many groups, the Modernists who developed alternate theories about how the Bible came to be and what it all means, the Heretics who gave us everything from first century Gnosticism to twentieth century Scientology, and more.
And thus when someone writes,
From Roman mythology. X is the symbol for Christ,
, and I know that it has nothing to do with Roman mythology, but is actually because the word "Christ" which we created by transliteration from the Greek ???????? (which we transliterate to "Christos" because we have no equivalent of the guttural "Chi" of the Greek alphabet, but once represented something like that sound with a "ch"), begins with a letter "Chi" which looks just like our "X"; it is, in a sense, his initial--when things like that are written, I cringe because not only do I know better, but if I comment I'll be perceived as offending the one who made the statement, and putting on airs as if I were more intelligent or more important than that person, and also because I know that another error is being promoted as if it were truth.And that particular one is really inconsequential, because the history of the use of the symbol is far less important than what it communicates to the average person today. I have no problem with it as shorthand--my college notes included such symbols as ? for Christ, ?n for Christian, ?y for Christianity, ? for God, ?y for theology, and others. I don't consider shorthand irreverent; after all, the written words are themselves symbols for the spoken ones, which are in turn symbols for the ideas they express, and we cannot put the ideas on paper without translating them to symbols. My only concern with ?-mas is that in the minds of some it is part of an overall secularization of an essentially religious celebration.
Yes, I am aware that Christmas is itself the Christianization of an ancient Pagan feast, connected to the solstice and the new year; but given that our celebration falls between the solstice and the new year, I think those wishing to celebrate those non-Christian (the latter entirely secular, the former potentially religious) events ought to do so on the appropriate days, and not turn Christmas into a political event.
In fact, do you know why Christmas is a "bank holiday"? It's really kind of silly. Early in the twentieth century when government was starting to burgeon into many administrative services, it became apparent to the heads of the various administrative agencies that the vast majority of government workers were Christians, and being Christians were going to go to church on Christmas Day, and so were going to call out of work. Enough people did so year after year that those who came to work did not constitute sufficient staff to accomplish anything. Thus the government decided that there was no point in paying the few people who did come to work to sit and do nothing at work, and instead decided to pay all employees for a day off--the first Federal holiday, created not for religious reasons but for the entirely pragmatic one that you couldn't run the government if the workers were absent in such great numbers. That meant that the Federal Reserve Bank was closed, and thus that local banks could not really do business on that day. The logic of that, though, means that if large numbers of religious people are not going to take off the religious holiday for religious reasons, the government ought not make it a holiday anymore--its basis for doing so is entirely pragmatic, not religious at all.
Getting back to the point, if you want to reject Christianity without knowing what it actually is, there's not much I can do about that; if you want to reject Christianity because you don't know what it really is and you want to pretend that no one else could possibly know, either, there's not much I can do about that, either. But there is a core of Christian belief that has remained constant through centuries and across denominations, and most educated Christians, at least, have a pretty good grasp of what it is, and would be glad to explain it to you if you care to listen.
In one sense, that's not why I am here; I am here as part of my job as Vice President for Development of Valdron Inc, for the promotion and explanation of the Multiverser game system. In another sense, this is why I am anywhere that I ever am, because Jesus gives some people as teachers (check Ephesians 4:11, where it clearly says that Jesus gives some people to the church to be each of five ministries), and I am one of them. That does not mean that I have it all right, nor even that I think I have it all right. I have often said that I know I am wrong about something, because I've corrected my own errors in the past and would be a fool to think that I now had found and fixed all of them. But I suspect I am a lot closer to being right than a lot of people who either have never bothered to try to learn about Christianity (I have two undergraduate degrees in the field, and years of education before and since--my aforementioned teaching list has several pastors reading it daily, at least one of whom is saving my posts to build a commentary from them) or who have taken what they were taught by one specific Christian group as the complete and correct truth.
So no, I am not listed by name in the Bible as the one person who makes those decisions; but I am mentioned in the Bible, in that it specifically says that God gave teachers to the church for the equipping of the saints and the building up of the church into Christ.
I don't mean to be rude, John, but you're wrong: there are such people. I don't think that any one or any small group has a monopoly on the understanding, but that does not mean that all opinions are equal, even those which are ill-informed.
--M. J. Young
Sun Dec 27 2009 12:16 am # -
JohnA1nut
MemberAnd you are both absolutely right.
Nikolaj said
And where does it say John A1 nut in the Bible? You know, you say that we're free to draw our conclusions from what you're saying here, but if we do that, you talk down on us.
Yeah, you have the right to express your own opinion, so long as it totally agrees with mine. (That's said with a great deal of sarcasm) Sorry about that. I didn't realize I was doing that.
And in the same way that you are upset when people make uneducated and uninformed comments about psychosis, I am disturbed by uninformed and uneducated comments about Christianity.
Point made, and well taken. Oh and about the X being Roman, it was the pastor of my church who told me that. I guess he must have been wrong.
(Doing Therapy)
Sun Dec 27 2009 12:31 am # -
JohnA1nut
MemberTwo Posts
MJ, some people believe that "Hell" as most people understand it (place of fire and torment) is the refiner's fire (Burns off the chaff and stubble, leaving the gold and gems behind.) I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. What do you think of that? I've even heard it said that everyone will go through it, regardless of their faith. It's a cleansing fire, not a tormenting fire. What do you think?
(Doing Therapy)
Sun Dec 27 2009 1:03 am # -
Nikolaj, thanks for that poem. I was familiar with it from Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols; it's my favorite piece from that and one of my favorite bits of Christmas music (although if memory serves Britten omits the penultimate verse). I did not know its origin.
John--
First, I think that the Bible uses many metaphors in speaking of the afterlife, and we don't always understand them. For example, Jesus spoke of Gehenna as the place where the worm never dies and the fire is never extinguished. "Gehenna" was a specific place in His day. It was the name of the place previously known as the Valley of Hinnom, a place where children had been forced to walk through fire and lascivious rituals were conducted in the names of certain "foreign" (to Israel) gods. It had fallen into such disrepute that it had by Jesus' time become the garbage dump for the entire city of Jerusalem--and thus there were constantly worms consuming the decaying garbage and fires spreading through the trash. His metaphor, then, is that failing to become part of what God is doing in the world is like being thrown in the trash.
There is a lake of fire in the book we call Revelation or Apocalypse; but that book is a string of metaphors and images, and other than that it speaks of the total destruction of the devil and his angels not much can be concluded from it.
What I think is that heaven is entirely about being in eternal loving relationship with God and other people, and that this is open to anyone who comes to God in love and trust during life. Jesus made that possible and clarified that it was the purpose of our existence. I also think that if you miss that, there is no metaphor terrible enough for the incomparable loss that comes from not ever becoming the child of God whom God intended you to be. It would be like eternal torture in comparison. I do not know and cannot say that it would be eternal torture; after all, if you never know what you missed, you would not suffer so much as you would if you knew and lost it. But the joy of that fellowship with God for eternity is so far beyond anything imaginable here and now (even when we have had a taste of it) that to miss it would be the worst imaginable horror, and no metaphor of horror can do justice to that.
So I do not believe that those who have already begun that relationship with God now will go through any kind "hell" to cleanse them. There is a statement that those who have used their time worthlessly will find that the worthless things they have built in life are destroyed as if by fire, but it's not about torture or refining so much as that there are some things that have eternal value and others that do not. I'm certainly guilty of that myself--I'll watch shows like NCIS and CSI and Law & Order CI because I enjoy them, but I really can't say that apart from allowing me to relax and stretch my mind a bit they contribute anything of eternal value to my life or that of anyone I know. I hope that I have done something that has eternal value, and I think probably I have, but I also know that some of what I have done in life is going to be gone as if burned away, because it contributed nothing eternal.
--M. J. Young
Sun Dec 27 2009 3:41 am #
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