Yeah, I just can't understand why everyone doesn't want that kind of peace and quiet again.......can you?
;-)
Posted on 04/20/2008 5:56:40 AM PDT by don-o
DAMASCUS, Va. – With anti-liquor signs going up and a prayer march through town last Thursday night, opposition is heating up to the liquor-by-the-drink question, which is up for a referendum vote on May 6.
"Most of the churches in the area just believe that the Bible teachers against the drinking of alcohol of any kind," said Wayne Baker, preacher at Laurel Avenue Church of Christ that put up a sign in opposition as soon as they learned of the referendum.
"It [alcohol] has always caused problems, and physical damage, but also spiritual damage. They’re relying upon the alcohol to deal with their problems instead of letting God help them."
He said there are also concerns that people who consume a mixed drink are "one drink drunker" and, if allowed in town, liquor by the drink would mean more intoxicated drivers and more people struggling with alcoholism.
The ballot question is: "Should the sale of mixed alcoholic beverages by restaurants licensed by the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board be permitted in the town of Damascus?"
Among those who signed a petition to get the question on the ballot are Mayor Creed Jones, Town Councilmen Mitchell Greer and Maurice Parris, and town council candidates Kenneth Upchurch, Tom Hayes and Don Morgan.
Baker said he won’t vote for anyone who signed the petition.
The list also includes several prominent downtown business owners.
The effort to get the question before town voters was spearheaded by Betty Miller, general manager at Damascus Old Mill.
She said she was asked by some town leaders – including town council members she would not name – to seek the change to generate more revenue for the town.
She said the Old Mill is also losing business because it cannot serve mixed drinks with meals and stressed that her establishment is not seeking to attract a bar crowd. The restaurant at the Old Mill currently serves beer and wine, but Miller said 95 percent of it is sold with meals.
"At first, everybody wanted it. And I guess somebody was upset about it and nobody knows. So we’ve done reached that point that we really don’t care," she said. "It’s pretty much a town issue now; it’s up to them [voters]. If they want to support it, fine. If they don’t want to support it, that’s fine too."
Miller said liquor by the drink and other issues will be open for discussion Tuesday at an informal town meeting to meet the candidates for office and ask questions. The meeting will begin at 6 p.m. at the Old Mill.
"They can bring up anything they want to bring up and say anything they want to say," she said.
Other churches are erecting opposition signs like the one at Laurel Avenue Church of Christ.
David Griffin, senior pastor at Faith Baptist Church, said more than 60 members of at least three congregations came together Thursday for an opposition prayer march through town.
"We’re very concerned about it because it would be detrimental to our town in our estimation because we have to deal with the people left behind by the drugs and the drinking and so forth," Griffin said. "We try to help them instead of getting them involved into it."
Griffin says while serving liquor might be good for business in the short-term, it would be costly to everyone in the long term.
"We’ve got a lot of transplants in Damascus who have just recently moved in in the last four or five years, and they’re generally the ones who are pushing this," Griffin said. "They bought businesses and they’re trying to improve their businesses, and they’re doing it at the expense of the rest of the town."
He said he doesn’t know of any church in town that’s in favor of allowing liquor to be sold in town restaurants.
Four churches contacted by the Herald Courier Friday and Saturday indicated their congregations were opposed. Officials at those churches said they know of at least five other churches that are also opposed. No opinion could be obtained for one other church in town.
Jones, who attends First Baptist Church and says he does not drink at all, clarified his position in a letter to this newspaper Friday.
"I have not abandoned the beliefs of my church nor do I intend to go to restaurants to purchase alcoholic drinks should the people pass this," Jones wrote. "But as a public official ... I do advocate that the citizens should be allowed to vote on this issue and the town officials must uphold however the vote goes."
Jones said in later interview that he won’t share what his personal vote will be on the issue.
"The people of the town will be the ones to decide," he said. "I think it’ll do one thing, I think it’ll cause us to have a bigger turnout for the election."
Chad Byron, Jones’s challenger for mayor, said he will vote against the sale of liquor by the drink.
"I don’t think it’s going to be the best thing for the town," Byron said. "I think it’s an idea that stems from one or two specific business owners in town wanting to put a couple of extra bucks in their pocket."
Meanwhile, Wayne Guynn, pastor of First Baptist Church Damascus, said more could happen in opposition to the liquor issue.
"We really haven’t gotten together – yet, anyway – to have a coalition of churches or try to oppose it in that sense," Guynn said. "It was just as it came up ... our individual churches that were against it just spoke out against it."
He said the churches oppose the sale of liquor in town for Biblical reasons and also because of alcohol’s cost to society in the form of traffic crashes, domestic abuse and alcoholism.
He said while Jesus’ first miracle was turning water into wine, the wine consumed in Jesus’ time was diluted with water – and probably had an alcohol content of less than 2.5 percent.
While it made wine a safer beverage than water, he said it would have taken vast quantities of ancient wine to reach a state of drunkenness. He said as far as he knows, there were no distilled spirits at that time.
"We’re not against tourism. We’re not against people having a good time in town," Guynn said. "We want them to have that without having to drink alcohol."
Ginger Holmes a member of the church, said she and others in the congregation support their pastor. She said while many people who call Damascus home are just outside town limits and can’t vote, many who oppose liquor also live in town – and she thinks the proposal will be defeated.
"It’s gonna be interesting," Holmes said Saturday, in between a potluck supper and a church service, "but I think the Lord’s on our side."
What about the Eucharist?
He said while Jesus’ first miracle was turning water into wine, the wine consumed in Jesus’ time was diluted with water – and probably had an alcohol content of less than 2.5 percent.............................I wonder how he came up with that conclusion?
Teetotaller churches use grape juice for their services. And they do not call it Eucharist and have a different understanding of the Sacrament than the Catholic and Orthodox
No idea. It's a standard argument for the "drys".
Yep. Prohibition was a quiet, blissful time that everyone looks back on with sentimental longing.
It’s not Prohibition at all. It’s legislating how a legal product may be dispensed within a municipality. It will be decided by popular vote.
What’s wrong with that?
“Neutral and Positive References to Alcoholic Beverages in the Bible
At the same time, there are several neutral, almost casual references to alcoholic beverages. Genesis 14:18 refers to Melchizedek, a type of Christ, as offering wine to Abram; Nehemiah 2:1 refers to the king drinking wine (Nehemiah was required to taste it first to make sure it was not poisoned); Esther 5:6; 7:1-2 speaks of wine that Esther (the godly Jewess) drank with the king; Job 1:13 refers to righteous Job’s family drinking wine; Daniel 10:3 speaks of drinking wine as a blessing after a time of fasting. Some of Jesus’ parables are about wine, wineskins, vineyards (cf. Matt 9:17; 21:33; even John 15 speaks of God the Father as the vinedresser!). Paul tells Timothy to drink some wine for his stomach’s sake and not just water (1 Tim 5:23). The same Greek and Hebrew terms that were used to speak of the abuses of wine are used in these passages. One cannot argue, therefore, that alcoholic beverages are in themselves proscribed, while grape juice is permitted. The lexical data cannot be so twisted.
There are, as well, positive statements about alcoholic beverages: Deut 14:26 implies that it is a good thing to drink wine and strong drink to the Lord: “And you may spend the money for whatever your heart desires, for oxen, or sheep, or wine, or strong drink, or whatever your heart desires; and there you shall eat in the presence of the LORD your God and rejoice, you and your household” (NASB). Psalm 4:7 compares joy in the Lord to the abundance of wine; Psalm 104:14-15 credits God as the creator of wine that “makes a man’s heart glad” (cf. also Hos 2:8); honoring the Lord with one’s wealth is rewarded with the blessings of abundant stores of wine (Prov 3:10); love is compared to wine repeatedly in the Song of Songs, as though good wine were similarly sweet (1:2, 4; 4:10; 7:9). The Lord prepares a banquet with “well-aged wines... and fine, well-aged wines” for his people (Isa 25:6) [obviously this cannot be grape juice, for aging does nothing but ferment it!].
The lack of wine is viewed as a judgment from God (Jer 48:33; Lam 2:12; Hos 2:9; Joel 1:10; Hag 2:16); and, conversely, its provision is viewed as a blessing from the Lord (cf. Gen 27:28; Deut 7:13; 11:14; Joel 2:19, 24; 3:18; Amos 9:13-14). Cf. also Isa 55:1; Jer 31:12; Zech 9:17.
Indeed, there was even the Passover tradition that went beyond the biblical teaching: by the time of the first century, every adult was obliged to have four glasses of wine during the Passover celebration. Jesus and his disciples did this in the Last Supper.6 The fact that the wine of the Passover was a symbol the Lord used for his blood and for the new covenant implicitly shows that our Lord’s view of wine was quite different from that of many modern Christians.
What is truly remarkable here are the many positive statements made about wine and alcoholic beverages in the Bible.7 Wine is so often connected with the blessings of God that we are hard-pressed to figure out why so many modern Christians view drink as the worst of all evils. Why, if one didn’t know better, he might think that God actually wanted us to enjoy life! Unfortunately, the only Bible most of our pagan friends will read is the one written on our lives and spoken from our lips. The Bible they know is a book of ‘Thou shalt nots,’ and the God they know is a cosmic killjoy.
I think the best balance on this issue can be see in Luke 7:33-34: John the Baptist abstained from drinking wine; Jesus did not abstain [indeed, people called him a drunkard! Although certainly not true, it would be difficult for this charge to have been made had Jesus only drunk grape juice]. Both respected one another and both recognized that their individual lifestyles were not universal principles. One man may choose not to drink; another may choose to drink. We ought not condemn another servant of the Lord for his choice.
As well, Romans 14 is a key passage for gleaning principles about how we ought to conduct ourselves in relation to one another on this issue: weaker brothers ought not to judge those whose freedom in Christ allows them to enjoy alcoholic beverages; stronger brothers ought not to disdain weaker brothers for their stance. Whether we drink or not, let us do all things to the glory of God.”
http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=988
Good post and an, uh, interesting screen name.
Welcome to Free Republic.
Wine was a standard drink for all of the people in the time before the birth and after the birth, it had been so for thousands of years. In places where wine or beer is a normal drink with meals there are few drunks as can been seen in those countries that drink wine and been on a daily basis with their meals.
Wine was made by the maker as was everything else on this earth. Use it in moderation as with all other things made and given to man.
How do they reconcile the Bible’s specific statement that wine was drunk at the Last Supper, that Holy Communion should be observed using wine, and a literal interpretation of the Bible with the substitution of grape juice for wine?
It's exactly Prohibition-- albeit on a smaller scale.
He said the churches oppose the sale of liquor in town for Biblical reasons and also because of alcohol’s cost to society in the form of traffic crashes, domestic abuse and alcoholism.
I'm not sure I understand how you can argue that it's anything other than Prohibition. The only reason it will work at all is that people can just drive to the next town-- which they will.
It’s legislating how a legal product may be dispensed within a municipality. It will be decided by popular vote. What's wrong with that?
Not a thing, described like that.
It's actually legislating that a legal product may not be dispensed within a municipality. Let's not try to spin it into something it isn't.
Proverbs 31:6
6 Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.
I got kicked out of a Sunday School class for asking questions like that. We were told that the “wine” mentioned in the bible was just grape juice. I asked how they kept it from fermenting and was sent out to sit in the hall.
Thanks for your great post!
Hilarious! I don't like discovering that I've been lied to.
Oh please.
More theocracy from the fundies. Don’t drink if you don’t want to, but keep your veneration of the Volstead Act away from those who do.
In case no one’s mentioned it...prohibition always fails.
“A fundamentalist is some sour-pussed chap with no sense of humor who secretly fears that someone somewhere just might be enjoying himself.”
-H.L. Mencken
Probably from the same place where they get that “The Earth is only 6,000 years old” horse manure.
It shouldn’t be up to a vote. Its a legal product, period.
Drinking is a personal choice, not a legislated one.
You people are no different than the anti-smoking tobacco nazis.
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