Posted on 10/31/2008 9:49:19 AM PDT by NYer
If any children show up dressed with Hussein stickers we can redistribute their candy to someone else.That would be a good lesson in socialism. Cut through all the utopian propaganda that they're being force-fed, and show them what it's really about.
Charity requires me to at least consider the sincerity and love of Christ in everyone who calls himself a Christian. I just wish others would offer the same courtesy, regardless of church membership.
Fair enough.
I am an Evangelical believer and I have the greatest respect for the Catholic Church and devoted Catholics. I see them as brothers and sisters in Christ and, therefore, family. I also see it as possibly the greatest source of good in human history. I thank God for the Catholic Church.
I came to this point of view gradually (long story, if you are interested I'll freepmail the details).
Anyway, it hurts me as a Christian to read the kind of fratricidal stuff that is so often posted here by both sides. We are not enemies. We have a common enemy.
You are in er. I we will have to just disagree about that.
I hope you had a good laugh. Enjoy the chains.
That is a myth promoted by atheist anthropologists.
Lupercalia may have coincidentally fallen on the Ides of February in the Roman calendar, but Christians do not hold naked races and whip each other with goatskin thongs on St. Valentine's Day.
Samhain technically would have fallen on October 21st not 31st, and was celebrated by feasting, sport and lighting bonfires. In other words, Homecoming Day bears a much closer resemblance in timing and in activity to Samhain than traditional Christian Hallowe'en practices.
Saturnalia was traditionally celebrated on the winter equinox, or December 21st - not December 25th - and was characterized not principally by feasting but by gambling and role-playing. If any modern holiday resembles Saturnalia it is Boxing Day, and that is likely by design.
The Sol Invictus reference is completely anacnronistic. We know that the Church in North Africa observed the Nativity on December 25th as early as 225, and we also know that the feast of Sol Invictus was a novelty introduced to the Roman world by Aurelian in 274. The only previous sun-god feast in Rome began in 222 - but that was the summer solstice feast of Heliogabalus.
The Church had its own calendar from the beginning, based on Sunday worship and on dating yearly events from the feasts of the Resurrection and Pentecost - in other words, the Church year is derivative of Shabbat, Pesach and Shavuos and not from pagan feasts.
To this day, almost every Sunday of the Church year is counted either in terms of its proximity to Pentecost or the Resurrection.
Thanks!!!
That's not really accurate. You worded your response in a way that implies that the traditional churches calendar is somehow based on God's calendar in the bible. That's not really true.
Look under this heading for computus
This is the way that the modern church computes Easter.
They've been using this method since 1582 (not since the beginning). Here is how they say Easter is computed:
"Easter Sunday is the Sunday following the Paschal Full Moon date."
Sounds good, doesn't it? Paschal = Passover...right? Not quite.
"The Paschal Full Moon date is the Ecclesiastical Full Moon date following 20 March and can be found in this table":
Whoops. So it has nothing to do with the Passover of THE BIBLE. It has to do with a computation agreed upon by men.
To find this date, you take the current year and divide it by 19. You then take the remainder and use the chart to determine the date.
For example, 2008 (this year) divided by 19 = 105 with a remainder of 13. The 13 remainder corresponds to the 22nd of March on the chart.
So you say? So it has nothing to do with the Passover of God, the Paschal of the Lord.
The bible is clear on when Passover is:
Lev 23:5 On the fourteenth day of the first month at twilight is the LORD's Passover.
This corresponds to Nisan 14 on the Hebrew calendar which in 2008 fell on April 19. That's nearly a whole month of difference.
The notion that the modern church is basing it's calendar on God's calendar in scripture is a tough one to believe when you actually look at the date calculations.
Here's the bottom line: God. Jesus Christ. The Lord. Told us what holy days to observe. Jesus Christ created them. They are his. He actually took the time to have them written down and preserved in scripture.
Lev 23:2 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, Concerning the feasts of the LORD, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are my feasts.
He, the Lord, Christ who became Jesus, then lists his holy days. His feasts.
Christians, for the most part, have turned their back on these holy days of Christ and have instituted their own calendar, their own feast days, and have incorporated the customs and trappings of pagan days into these observances.
I know. I wasn't meaning to imply otherwise. But there's a point at issue which Philo-Junius seesm to understand very well, but which I have found a very difficult point to make with most Catholics.
The Hebrew Bible sets up a whole table of holidays. According to the Catholic Church, these were then abolished. Then the Church turned to paganism to come up with a whole table of holidays of its own. (And for Philo-Junius, consider that Jewish chr*stians were forced to abandon Jewish holidays and begin celebrating pagan-originated ones--a situation that exists to this day, and to which the alternative is still considered "Judaizing").
Catholics seem to have trouble understanding the notion of Biblical sentimentalism--that either all holidays and rituals were abolished (as no longer necessary) or else the Biblical rituals and holidays still retained their "mojo."
Catholicism (and all the other ancient liturgical churches) simply don't seem to understand that from the philo-Semitic Fundamentalist Protestant POV they are arguing against themselves. If J*sus made tefillin and Pesach superfluous, then he must have also made rosary beads and chr*stmas superfluous. But if "faith without works is dead," then it is precisely the "works" of the Bible (Biblial rituals and holidays) that should be most meritorious.
Catholicism seems to preach Protestantism to the Jews and Judaism to the Protestants. Does anyone understand this?
As for the winter solstice, that date (and the dates of the other seasons) have drifted due to a flaw in the Julian Calendar. When the Julian Calendar was first instituted, the vernal equinox fell on 3/25. By 325 (the year of the First Nicene Council), it had moved up to 3/21. And by the time of the Gregorian Reform in 1582 it had moved up to 3/11 (which is why ten days were removed from the calendar that year). The vernal equinox currently falls on 3/8 of the Julian Calendar, which is why that calendar is thirteen days behind. Thus, the winter solstice could very well have been on 12/25 when the Julian Calendar was first adopted.
(1) Jews and Christians both employ a computus to determine the date of Passover and of Easter, respectively.
(2) The Jews and Christians both adopted their computi at some point during the 300s AD.
(3) Before the adoption of computi, the combination lunar/solar calendars of both Judaism and Christianity were based on personal observation of the lunar cycle and ad hoc methods of calculating intercalary months.
(4) There is no reason whatever that Christians should consider the same computus used by the Jews as the "true" computus. It was formulated by Jewish scholars long after the Apostolic age.
(5) The latest version of the Christian computus may date from the Gregorian reform, but it follows the same principles as the Church used for more than a millenium, the only difference being the degree of consistency that the Gregorian reform introduced.
(6) The Jewish computus underwent modification since the original computus - the current Jewish computus is the one prescribed by Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah from 1178, and even this computus was slightly modified by the Shulchan Aruch of Yosef Karo from the 1520s.
The notion, which your post was attempting to insinuate, that the Jewish calculation of Passover used today is a pure formula unchanged since the days of Moses and David is a fiction.
The parallel notion, that the computus used by the Church for calculating the Feast of the Resurrection is a corrupt and recent formulation, is also a fiction.
(7) The Apostolic Church of the fourth century, not the rabbinate of the fourth century, possessed the authority to calculate the day of the Feast of the Resurrection for its flock.
A ridiculous claim.
There are basically fourteen great and ancient feasts of the Latin Church, categorized under the old system of feast days as "Doubles of the First Class" or the holiest days of the year.
There are more than fourteen, but a number of them are quite recent, such as the feast of the Kingship of Jesus Christ which is less than 100 years old.
Of the twelve ancient feasts, five are moveables: the Resurrection, the Ascension, Pentecost, Corpus Christi, and the Blood of Christ.
All of them are timed in conjunction with the Jewish Passover.
Then there are the feasts of the Dormition of Mary, of St. John the Baptist, of St. Joseph, of Peter And Paul, of All Saints and of Michael the Archangel.
Of these six, St. Michael falls a week after the autumnal equinox and All Saints falls a week after the Celtic festival of Samhain.
The remaining feasts are Christmas, the Circumcision and Epiphany.
Epiphany and Circumcision are timed specifically to Christmas and Christimas falls several days after the winter solstice or Saturnalia.
So, out of fourteen feasts, three fall on days which are roughly the same time as some pagan festival or other.
In the case of All Saints, the celebrations associated with Samhain are completely different from the cultural practices associated with All Saints. Moreover, the feast dates from the specific dedication of a church of All Saints in Rome in the 600s - it had no relation with Celtic festivals.
The feast of St. Michael a week after the autumnal equinox coincides with no European pagan holiday of any kind. There is a Persian holiday on the autumnal equinox, but it's difficult to see any influence.
The supposed relationship of Christmas and Saturnalia is one I've already gone over.
Of all the major Christian feasts, not one can be credibly linked to pagan festivals.
The fact that you have to scrape up extremely minor holidays like St. Valentine's Day, which was never a major feast, is instructive.
The Christian calendar is based on two sources: (1) Passover and (2) historical events in the Christian Church - like the beheading of John the Baptist, the crucifixions of Peter and Paul, etc.
Honestly, all in all, it doesn’t mean a thing to me if people danced in the woods or sacrificed children on the same days as Catholics celebrate Holy Days.
This is where intent comes in. I have statues in my church but I don’t pray to statues. Personally, I don’t care if others think I do. My intent is not to do that.
And if one of my Feast Days falls on a made up Wiccan holiday or a pagan holiday, who cares? It’s not about them.
Christ came to replace all the silly worship of pond scum and such. So He did.
“.....that the Catholic Church battled against the true faith....”
So does the catholic empire not have a history of oppressing other faiths, those that run contrary to their doctrine?
The events commemorated by the latter feasts are not observed on the actual anniversaries (since these are not known) but ultimately on a didactic use made of the yearly cycle. Eg, no one believes that J*sus was actually born on 12/25. This time of year was chosen, if not as an inculturation of earlier pagan holidays, because of the didactic value of celebrating light coming into the world on the darkest night of the year. The Jewish holidays, on the other hand, occur on the actual anniversaries of the events commemorated.
As to the computation of the Jewish calendar, it is true that the current method of using a fixed calendar dates back to Hillel II and that prior to that time the new moon was determined by two witnesses, in the following manner: On the thirtieth day of each month if two witnesses testified to the Beit Din that they had seen the new moon, then that day was declared the first day of the new month. If no such witnesses appeared the following day automatically became the first day of the new month. (Note that the new moon sacrifices were offered on the morning of the thirtieth since there was always the possibility that it would be the new moon. When it was not they were offered again the next morning.)
The actual molad (instant of the "birth" of the moon) was actually known beforehand based on mathematical principals. However, this was not used; the witnesses were used instead. So the molad itself (the method for finding which is encoded in the opening passage of the Torah) is not the product of recent computations. With some modifications, this it what is used today (modifications were required to prevent Yom Kippur from falling on the day before or after Shabbat or Hosha`-na' Rabba' from falling on Shabbat; this means the new year cannot begin on the first, fourth, or sixth day of the week).
But more important than all this is that the lunisolar Jewish calendar dates literally back to the creation of the world. The Greco-Roman church merely adapted the pagan Roman solar calendar (other churches, such as the Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syrian churches, use different calendars).
It isn't.
Just because the Christian calendar follows the seasons in some respects doesn't mean that it is pagan: the Jewish calendar follows the seasons and no one describes it as pagan.
The slander about the calendar is part of a deliberate strategy of denigrating the apostolic faith.
It doesn’t matter what secular or catholic history says about landmarkism. It doesn’t matter what Trail of Blood says. Jesus said He’d preserve His church and the catholic “church” is not it. So there had to be some church working and planting new churches throughout the ages. It wasn’t a Presbyterian, Methodist, or Lutheran. Those started in the reformation.
Landmarkism didn’t start by historical scholarship, it was started by people reading the Bible.
No amount of popish thuggery could destroy the true churches. Not through murder and torture and not through scholarly manipulation.
That is true!
I think Marcion was the one who started that false rumor.
It didn't work out too well for him, either.
Not through murder and torture
I agree. Murderers and torturers like Calvin and Cromwell and Cranmer were extremely deceived in theological matters.
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