Posted on 12/26/2005 8:14:44 AM PST by Conservatrix
BETHEL — While controversy swirls over a substitute teacher who told first-graders that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, a local dairy farmer and church deacon has put the same message in a very public place. By erecting a sign along the eastbound side of I-78, between the Bethel and Grimes exits, Leonard H. Martin has taken it upon himself to shatter the myth of Santa Claus for any youngster able to read the message from the back seat of a car as their parents drive by.
It marks the second consecutive year that Martin has posted what he termed a spiritual message on his land adjacent to I-78.
Last year, the sign stated, “Santa is a myth, lying to our children brings moral decay.”
For this season, Martin toned it down slightly. The sign now reads, “Worship God, who is all knowing & all seeing, Santa is a Myth.”
Martin, who operates a dairy farm at 250 Legion Drive, Bethel Township, is also a deacon with Harmony Christian Fellowship.
“We wanted to bring out the point that (Americans) are making Santa out to be what God actually is,” Martin said Tuesday. “We’re making Santa a god. I believe that is idol worship.”
(Excerpt) Read more at ldnews.com ...
You do not know the man, so reserve your judgment.
Some people would be glad to be pointed out thge error of their ways!
This guy is your husband I'm guessing. Just a WILD guess, mind you...
You see Santa Clause, I see St. Nicholas.
Commandment #1: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
This guy is your husband I'm guessing. Just a WILD guess, mind you...
No, not at all. He is a deacon in a church I attended some years ago.
Santa Claus is a myth, so much for truth... and Saint Nicholas is dead.
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...and morality.
Morality and all of its associated concepts are based on the belief that some higher power is defining the correctness of human behavior.
Today, "morals" are defined by a quasi-religious pagan philosophy based on esoteric hobgoblins. A greater number of "atheists" and "pagans" adopt the same hackneyed tenets of a false Judaic-Christian ideal (golden calf). They also subscribe to the Judaic fetishism of "sin," but will fight to their death in denial of it. Most of them are so wrapped up in their own polemics that they have become nothing more than pathetic anti-Christians with the same false hypocritical philosophy. They just slap a new label on it hoping nobody will notice - - they replace the idea of "avoiding sin" with "morals."
(Pssst... I'm not an orthodox or ecumenical atheist, there are no such things.)
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He seems to be arrogant enough to feel he has the right to trump...
How dare he use the First Amendment! Do you consider arrogance to be a "sin" of some sort?
So what your saying is, he puts up the billboard to pick on kids once a year, but doesn't want to take on adults on their issues the rest of the year?
I never heard of anyone who thought that Santa Claus was God. It's certainly not a widespread problem.
No one has. It's the voices in their heads.
I see no evidence that Santa is being made into a god any more than the Easter Bunny. Methinks anyone who believes we are is a bit over the top, and should enjoy a nice cocktail.
That poster is spreading that crap all over the forum today.
I think they got coal in their stocking! :-)
Stockings??? Are you KIDDING? Kids might believe Stockings are God's socks or something!! lol
And you also know the substitute teacher who told all the little kids Santa isn't real. What are you, part of some Santa hating cult?
[10] Another relic of Gentilism is the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. And this is the reason why St. Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing": not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing; but that the thing which they honored or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. And the worship of these with divine honour is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God. For God being King of the Jews, and His lieutenant being first Moses, and afterward the high priest, if the people had been permitted to worship and pray to images (which are representations of their own fancies), they had had no further dependence on the true God, of whom there can be no similitude; nor on His prime ministers, Moses and the high priests; but every man had governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter eversion of the Commonwealth, and their own destruction for want of union. And therefore the first law of God was: they should not take for gods, alienos deos, that is, the gods of other nations, but that only true God, who vouchsafed to commune with Moses, and by him to give them laws and directions for their peace, and for their salvation from their enemies. And the second was that they should not make to themselves any image to worship, of their own invention. For it is the same deposing of a king to submit to another king, whether he be set up by a neighbour nation or by ourselves.
[14] An image, in the most strict signification of the word, is the resemblance of something visible: in which sense the fantastical forms, apparitions, or seemings of visible bodies to the sight, are only images; such as are the show of a man or other thing in the water, by reflection or refraction; or of the sun or stars by direct vision in the air; which are nothing real in the things seen, nor in the place where they seem to be; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object, but changeable, by the variation of the organs of sight, or by glasses; and are present oftentimes in our imagination, and in our dreams, when the object is absent; or changed into other colours, and shapes, as things that depend only upon the fancy. And these are the images which are originally and most properly called ideas and idols, and derived from the language of the Grecians, with whom the word eido signifieth to see. They are also called phantasms, which is in the same language, apparitions. And from these images it is that one of the faculties of man's nature is called the imagination. And from hence it is manifest that there neither is, nor can be, any image made of a thing invisible.
[15] It is also evident that there can be no image of a thing infinite: for all the images and phantasms that are made by the impression of things visible are figured. But figure is quantity every way determined, and therefore there can be no image of God, nor of the soul of man, nor of spirits; but only of bodies visible, that is, bodies that have light in themselves, or are by such enlightened.
[16] And whereas a man can fancy shapes he never saw, making up a figure out of the parts of divers creatures, as the poets make their centaurs, chimeras and other monsters never seen, so can he also give matter to those shapes, and make them in wood, clay or metal. And these are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker. But in these idols, as they are originally in the brain, and as they are painted, carved moulded or molten in matter, there is a similitude of one to the other, for which the material body made by art may be said to be the image of the fantastical idol made by nature.
Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness
[1] Besides these sovereign powers, divine and human, of which I have hitherto discoursed, there is mention in Scripture of another power, namely, that of "the rulers of the darkness of this world," [Ephesians, 6. 12] "the kingdom of Satan," [Matthew, 12. 26] and "the principality of Beelzebub over demons," [Ibid., 9. 34] that is to say, over phantasms that appear in the air: for which cause Satan is also called "the prince of the power of the air"; [Ephesians, 2. 2] and, because he ruleth in the darkness of this world, "the prince of this world":[John, 16. 11] and in consequence hereunto, they who are under his dominion, in opposition to the faithful, who are the "children of the light," are called the "children of darkness." For seeing Beelzebub is prince of phantasms, inhabitants of his dominion of air and darkness, the children of darkness, and these demons, phantasms, or spirits of illusion, signify allegorically the same thing. This considered, the kingdom of darkness, as it is set forth in these and other places of the Scripture, is nothing else but a confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by dark and erroneous doctrines, to extinguish in them the light, both of nature and of the gospel; and so to disprepare them for the kingdom of God to come.
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-contents.html
As an atheist, it may well be within my rights to put up a sign saying religion is a lie, but I don't because I respect my neighbors' beliefs. And I sure wouldn't be mean enough to hurt children, as his substitute teacher pal did.
Neither have I. Santa is a phantasm... no more real than the things that stand before us in a dream... Who is ‘prince of phantasms’ in the Bible???
Bla bla bla bla bla, Allah Akbar!
Lies don't hurt children?
No, being a jerk is going about it the wrong way. This man is anything but humble. No one but small children believe in Santa and you can believe in Santa as a child and still be taught the lessons of Jesus that will last your whole life. To stick up for this guy is wrong-headed, let children believe in the "magic" of Santa Claus for a few years of their life. Relax
You appear to be unskilled in anything other than what has been called, "trailer park biblical scholarship" - and worse yet, also seem totally unaware of it.
".... For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we (the regenerate) have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Spirit teaches; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned. ...But we have the mind of Christ." 1Cr 2:9-12
The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God" - (Romans 8:15-16).
"..Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his." - Romans 8:9 and THE PICTURE IS HIDDEN
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