Re: Holier Than Thou

by **PeterMac** 08.08.22 9:59

I loved the Hobgoblins and Foul Fiends
And fighting with Giants, obviously

by CaKeLoveR 08.08.22 10:00

That's the one. I realise now that it was probably a hymn missionaries would use. Thank you.

by CaKeLoveR 08.08.22 10:02

If you knew that hymn in your youth, did the hobgoblins, foul fiends and villainous giants inspire you to become a policeman?

by Verdi 08.08.22 12:36

CaKeLoveR wrote:If you knew that hymn in your youth, did the hobgoblins, foul fiends and villainous giants inspire you to become a policeman?

Nah, that was binging on Dixon of Dock Green big grin

by CaKeLoveR 08.08.22 12:40

Aah, dear old Dixon. He always had a word of wisdom for 'the scrotes'. laugh

by Verdi 08.08.22 12:59

'Evening all ...'

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Benz zer neez salute

by **PeterMac** 08.08.22 15:12

CaKeLoveR wrote:If you knew that hymn in your youth, did the hobgoblins, foul fiends and villainous giants inspire you to become a policeman?

Merely to research further into why otherwise apparently sensible people could spend a whole Sunday morning dressing up as women and singing songs about Goblins.

It was of course a generation or two before the definitive Goblin song
See the Little Goblin,
see his little feet.
And his little nosey-wosey,
isn’t the Goblin sweet? ( Edmund, Lord Blackadder)

But it is all we had in the 50s !

“And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.”

Nor yet the "waters that be above the Firmament", which is a bronze age, or even earlier, myth.
What is fascinating is to see 'believers' trying to interpret it (which I believe is Apostasy or heresy) by now saying it refers to Water vapour in the atmosphere
rather than "waters above the firmament", which drips through the little hole non-believers call stars and mistakenly (!) know to be myriads of suns,
many with planets of their own, contained in uncountable billions of solar systems, in uncountable galaxies, – to make it rain on the vicarage garden party.
( which can be prevented by prayer and generous donations during the collection during the week before )

by **PeterMac** 08.08.22 15:35

I went to St James' Church in Grimsby. A magnificent building, now designated Grimsby Minster, no less.
The organist, also my piano teacher, was Dennis Townhill, OBE, who went on to Edinburgh Cathedral

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Always a faint whiff of incense in Grimsby !
"Canon Gervase Markham, Pastor, Army chaplain, country squire and founder of a choral camp" . . .
His father, who later became Bishop of Grantham, was descended from a former Archbishop of York, and the clerical influence was strong, but unlike many children of the manse the young Gervase never reacted against it. . . .
was the vicar, known for impenetrable and interminable sermons, especially on the second Sunday in the month when Scouts, Cubs, Guides and Brownies had their Church Parade.
The idea of peaching down to the audience clearly beyond him. His obituary does not reflect that !

I can still recite the Order for Morning prayer by heart (brain actually, we live in the 21st C.) and loved the music.
"Eternal Father Strong to Save" with its lovely chromatic chord sequence – being a regular hymn in a fishing town and my favourite to this day

by CaKeLoveR 08.08.22 15:45

Despite being a non believer I like choral music and religious architecture. I love Edmund's Goblin Song, and his puritanical aunt, Lady Whiteadder (Miriam Margoyles). I visit churches and cathedrals whenever I can, and meet people who can't understand how anybody can admire the buildings without being religious. Strange.

by **PeterMac** 08.08.22 15:57

I also admire and am amazed at the Grand Mosque in Cordoba, which as designed by a jew, built with the help of Christians, the Pope in Constantinople sending pillars for its construction.
Then after the Reconquista the Christians plonked a cathedral in the middle of it. An act even the King deplored once he saw it.
Whilst admiring the buildings is difficult to look on the Retablo, the altar piece in Seville Cathedral, 66' high and 60' wide, of carved wood covered in beaten gold, not paint, not leaf, GOLD, without feeling slightly sick, especially when there are begging bowls for donations and you have to pay extra to see the massive candlesticks made of solid silver and silver-gilt in the treasury.

If all the effort expended on building cathedrals had been used doing something else slightly more productive, like aqueducts, canals, drains, sewage systems, housing, hospitals, poor houses, . . .perhaps the "enlightenment" might have come come centuries earlier.
(And as I write that I realise that would have been counter-productive for the Church establishment . . .)

by **Tony Bennett** 08.08.22 16:00

Verdi

We, the presumed collective we, don't know anything of the sort - only believers believe.

REPLY: I wrote: "We know what God is like because His Eternal Son came down to live with us here for 33.5 years." The Bible clearly claims that it is the very Word of God. True, we are free to believe this - or not.

There is no such things as a miracle, it defies logic and it defies science.

REPLY: The ‘logic’ to believing in the miracles of Christ - and those other miracles that were performed by the Apostles in the decades after His resurrection (and those performed by e.g. Moses, Elijah and Elisha in the Old Testament) - is this. First, one must actually read the accounts of all the miracles, including of course the four Gospel accounts of the miracle of the resurrection. Then one must consider what one has read, and try to explain them. Is there some sort of ‘scientific’ explanation for them? Probably not, as the miracles defy the normal operation of physical processes. So, if they are true, they were ‘supernatural’. Alternatively, were they all invented? For anyone who has thoroughly read e.g. all the four Gospel accounts, it is a stretch, to say the least, that the Apostles, Matthew and John, the qualified doctor, Luke, and the disciple, Mark, made up every single miracle. Having myself avoided reading them for a long time, a careful reading of them led me to the rational conclusion that the Gospel writers - and Christ Himself - were telling the truth.

The bible is a story book.

REPLY: One of the key reasons I eventually believed the Bible is because, wherever it makes a factual statement that can be proved, it has been proved time and again to be 100% accurate. In the nineteenth century, when the Bible was attacked by the geologist Charles Lyell - with claims that the earth and the universe were very old - and Darwin came up with the claim that we evolved from inanimate blobs, countless archaeologists tried to prove the Bible was full of inaccuracies because its record of historical of events was supposedly inaccurate, or wrongly dated, or both. Today the Bible is regarded by secular archaeologists as so accurate that they use it for dating purposes: David Rohl’s ‘A Test of Time’ being one such example. Whole books of history and archaeology were written in order to prove the Bible wrong, yet not one person, ever, has proved a verifiable fact in the Bible to be incorrect. And there are thousands of such verifiable facts in the Bible. Our own British Museum has dozens of artefacts verifying in great detail many Bible accounts:

With such an accurate, unchallenged account of real history, now confirmed by archaeology, why do we not read it?

That aside to get back on topic, a true all-forgiving god wouldn't allow bad things to happen and that includes so called acts of god - in reality acts of nature.

REPLY: God gave our ancestors, Adam and Eve, the benefit of a beautiful, settled place where there was everything they needed. It was accompanied by one very simple, easy-to-obey instruction: “...of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it…” God had warned them of the consequences of disobedience. He gave them ‘free will’, which we are still blessed with today. God did not make us automatons or zombies. He gave us autonomy, but warned Adam and Eve of the consequences of choosing to go their way instead of God’s way. Today we live with the consequences in the natural world; earthquakes, volcanoes, floods etc. - which arise after God punished the world for its great wickedness, by sending a world-wide Flood, which accounts for the world’s sedimentary rocks and fossils. But He provided the safety of an Ark for the only eight people left on the earth who still believed in God. The Ark saved those eight people. The Bible tells us that, today, Jesus Christ offers that same safety, in this life and the next, for those who trust in Him.

Bad things do happen to the best of us, why would that be if a god is up there protecting us all from evil?

REPLY: God’s protection is offered to those who repent of their sins and follow God’s rules for living.

The church hides bad things, is that the will of god or the will of bad people hiding behind the sanctums of religious order?

REPLY: The Roman Catholic Church especially, but some individuals in other churches, have certainly done many very bad things. So, being a member of, or attending, a church, of itself, counts for nothing in the eyes of God. Why, the Pharisees who all prevailed on Pontius Pilate shouting: ‘Crucify Him, Crucify Him’, even though they knew he was innocent, were all senior members of their synagogues.

Do we have to sign up and give ourselves over body and soul to the will of some imaginary being in order to be safe from evil?

REPLY: Jesus Christ was not imaginary. He claimed - repeatedly - to be God, the Eternal Son of the Father. There are only three realistic possibilities for why He claimed to be God: (a) He was bad - He pretended to be God for wicked purposes; (b) He was deluded and mad, or (c) He was telling the God’s honest truth.

Even the most devout are prone to bad things happening to them, why would that be if body and soul should submit to god to be protected from evil?

REPLY: God does not promise that no bad things will happen to a believer. In fact, He specifically warns the believer that he may face hardship, persecution, or even martyrdom for his/her beliefs. Jesus tells would-be disciples to ‘count the cost’ before making that decision to follow Him. In the reign of Bloody Queen Mary (1553-8), 287 Bible-believers - all Protestants - were burnt at the stake. Their offences were mainly of disagreeing with non-Biblical Roman Catholic doctrines, or, in some cases, merely possessing an English language Bible, because in those days, the Roman Catholic services were conducted in Latin and its members were actively discouraged from reading or owning Bibles – because, ‘only the priests can interpret it correctly’. Those 287 believers loved God, and Christ, and loved His Word. They were falsely imprisoned, sometimes tortured, and all burnt at the stake.Yet as their lives were taken, they sang Psalms and praised God, knowing for certain that shortly they would be with their Saviour, Christ - for ever.

The McCanns were said to be devout, or at least believers to an extent - why did god allow tragedy to befall?

REPLY: There were said to be devout but were not devout.

I don't fault anyone for having a belief, their life their choice, but I do not accept believers pushing their belief and bigotry on those who choose to think differently.

REPLY: In a free country, all are free to publish their beliefs, so long as they don’t provoke violence or hatred. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘bigoted’ as: “A person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices, especially one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance”. I am not sure that holding a religious belief necessarily means that one is ‘bigoted’.

CMOMM is not a platform for promoting religious beliefs - even worse when that belief is biased in support of a particular doctrine.

REPLY: Agreed, but we are having a discussion, a debate.

Petermac

We are all here because we are NOT satisfied with what we have been told...

As a cub-scout in the 50s having to sing the Benedicite I was not satisfied with the verse
"O ye Waters that be above the Firmament, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever." Even then I KNEW it was unscientific mediaeval superstitious nonsense. And I was 8!
...the "Te Deum" is sung at the end of Matins on all days when the Gloria is said at Mass; those days are all Sundays outside Advent, Septuagesima, Lent, and Passiontide; on all feasts (except the Triduum) and on all ferias during Eastertide...
we were indoctrinated with the highly suspicious idea of the Nine Orders of Angels,
some of whom apparently act as administrators for those under them: “To thee all Angels cry aloud the Heavens, and all the Powers therein. To thee Cherubin and Seraphin continually do cry".

REPLY: I do not defend in any way the elaborate rituals of the Roman Catholic Church, which are not in the Bible. The ‘Benedicitie’ about the firmament is not a quote from the Bible. However, the ‘firmament’ is mentioned in the Bible and I believe there to be one.

The “firmament” (from the Latin firmamentum, meaning “sky” or “expanse”) is mentioned 17 times in the King James Version of the Bible and refers to the expanse of the heavens above the earth.

Nine of the occurrences of firmament are in the first chapter of the Bible as part of the Creation account. Genesis 1:6-8 says, “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.” The “firmament” is called “heaven”; i.e., it is what people see when they stand outside and look up. It is the space which includes the earth’s atmosphere, beyond which we see the celestial realm of the sun, moon, and stars; in modern translations the firmament is often called the “expanse” or the “sky.”

Genesis says that the firmament “separated the water under the expanse from the water above it” (Genesis 1:7). Originally, God created the earth with water “under” the sky (terrestrial and subterranean water) and water “above” the sky - possibly a canopy of water vapour which enwrapped the earth in a protective layer - before the Flood. Many secular scientists accept that the way the atmosphere is constructed does indeed constitute a layer which protects us from the sun and yet helps to keep us warm.

Before the Flood, there was no rain, and no rainbow, only a ‘mist that rose up from the earth’ and fed the streams and rivers. When God judged the world for its wickedness, He broke the firmament, causing 40 days and nights of rain, and also released underground waters, causing the world, for a period, to be overtopped with water, and vast swathes of sediment to cover the earth. Following this, we had the world’s first-ever rainbow of 7 colours, the one which the LGBT movement openly mocks with its 6 colours, the number 7 being God’s signature, and, as the Bible itself says, 6 being ‘the number of man’.

We find the word “firmament” used again in Psalms: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork” (Psalm 19:1). Also, in Psalm 150:1, “Praise ye the LORD...Praise him in the firmament of his power.”

Firmament is used in two other books of the Bible: Ezekiel (five times) and Daniel (once). In Ezekiel, each occurrence takes place within a vision. For example, “Then I looked, and, behold, in the firmament that was above the head of the cherubims there appeared over them as it were a sapphire stone, as the appearance of the likeness of a throne” (Ezekiel 10:1).

So, yes, there are cherubs and seraphs in Heaven as well as the angels.

Daniel 12:3 says, “And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.”

-----------

When He was on our earth, Jesus Christ said a number of times that every word of the Old Testament was true, and that the signs,symbols, ceremonies and prophecies in it pointed to Him as the coming Redeemer and Saviour.

I believe Him.

Around 85 Old Testament prophecies spoke of Him. One, in the Book of Micah, prophesied 700 years before Christ that He would be born in the village of Bethlehem. Anyone can look up all the other amazingly fulfilled prophecies with a simple search on the internet.

by **PeterMac** 08.08.22 21:09

Tony,
Thank for that detailed exegesis.
You are clearly satisfied with what you have been told.
I am not.
You are a believer.
I am not.
and as we have discussed publicly and privately before, over our many years of friendship, it is unlikely that either of us will
be persuaded by the other, because we argue from completely different premises.

by crusader 09.08.22 0:05

In my humble opinion there is nothing wrong in being a believer in Jesus, or Buddha or any other teacher who walked the earth doing good and getting people to follow their teachings.

There is nothing wrong with trying to be a good person and meeting people with the same mindset.

Jesus walked the earth but was he the son of God? I don't believe he was.

Some of the miracles he performed can be explained logically.

The Adam and Eve story is somewhat contradictory, God told them they must not eat from a certain tree, when they did eat from this tree, they were banished from heaven.

God gave them free will, but when they used their free will to eat the apple, they were punished.

It sounds like free will is only free if God agrees with your choice.

by Verdi 09.08.22 1:10

Meanwhile, the believer sits in judgement of the non believer with little or no consideration for the believable.

Just like the devout McCanns [sic] who sat in judgement of the man who was assigned to investigate their missing three year old daughter, Madeleine.

The subject of this thread ....