The Lord's Day

I would.say it is mostly the trappings that are used to draw folks.in...the extra parts that commercial enterpris.(and churches) capitalize on to increase revenue.

So we have Christmas! The big one...the date (not his birthday) selected to male people choose between bachanalian fests or the church...of course for most lay folk.christmas has returned to the party, eggnog for all!

Then of course yule logs, christmas.trees, Santa clause, flying reindeer delivering gifts

Easter another one eh? Fertility, spring, eggs, bunnies, and astrology?

For many the only 2 days they go to church....and if you wiped out the pagan trappings...you would lose easily 50% of them and 50% of the non church going believers....and so many kids...and we know for a fact if you don't plant the seed young ya barely have a chance.

Again...this stuff is like CRT to me. If you aren't willing to discuss without raising your blood pressure it is evidence it needs to be discussed openly.

Without the pagan rituals that they lay people love....you are gonna lose a lot of them.

Then of course when Christianity entered other areas of the world the missionaries accepted a little mixing of voodoo or whatever...as long as they accepted Jesus n Mary too...

It's all a mixed blessing...more "believers" by upping acceptable fun rituals....and watering down the message...but here we are.

Me? I sort of drive around on the side road of most of these religious hiways, I am sure I have a lot wrong and missed a lot more...but you get the jist....it's the marketing material, not the core.
Study the history of Carnival and how it ties into Lent and Easter. It's disturbing.
 
Actually the Guatemalan government, until recently, was trying to extinguish the Mayan people. Mass graves have been found of thousands of Mayans, men women and children who the government executed. This went on from 1960 to 1996. How comfortable are you about the Guatemalan government not impeding the Mayans?
I did not know.
 
Seriously, before Luther protested...what church had protestant stance?

A.name, a link, to what you refer would be helpful
There were some who tried...all were executed. I think John Hus is one of the more noted early protesters.

Foxe's Book of Martyrs covers this subject quite well, but I don't have it committed to memory.

What helped save Luther's bacon was the printing press, that and Frederick III kidnapping him and hiding him away in Wartburg Castle under the nose of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. None of those before Luther had these protections.
 
Looks like John Wycliffe is another, seems according to Wiki the Church actually exhumed his body after death to remove it from hallowed ground, burned the corpse to ashes then scattered them in the river.

Among Wycliffe's early works includes his effort to translate the Vulgate Bible into English, one of the earliest.

In keeping with Wycliffe's belief that scripture was the only authoritative reliable guide to the truth about God, he became involved in efforts to translate the Bible into English. While Wycliffe is credited, it is not possible exactly to define his part in the translation, which was based on the Vulgate.[35]
 
Jan Hus / John Hus:

A century after the Hussite Wars began, as many as 90% of inhabitants of the Czech lands were Hussites (although in the Utraquist tradition following a joint Utraquist—Catholic victory in the Hussite Wars).[53] Bohemia was the site of one of the most significant pre-reformation movements,[54] and there are still Protestant adherents remaining in modern times;[55][56] though they no longer comprise the majority mainly due to historical reasons such as persecution of Protestants by the Catholic Habsburgs,[57] particularly after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620; restrictions during the Communist rule; and also the ongoing secularization.[54]

Jan Hus was a key contributor to Protestantism, whose teachings had a strong influence on the states of Europe and on Martin Luther.[58] The Hussite Wars resulted in the Basel Compacts which allowed for a reformed Church in the Kingdom of Bohemia—almost a century before such developments would take place in the Lutheran Reformation. The Unitas Fratrum (or Moravian Church) is the modern day home of Hus's followers.[59] Hus's extensive writings earned him a prominent place in Czech literary history.

and

Before his execution, Hus is said to have declared, "You may kill a weak goose [Hus is Czech for "goose"], but more powerful birds, eagles and falcons, will come after me." Luther modified the statement and reported that Hus had said that they might have roasted a goose, but that in a hundred years a swan would sing to whom they be forced to listen. In 1546, in his funeral sermon for Luther, Johannes Bugenhagen gave a further twist to Hus's declaration: "You may burn a goose, but in a hundred years will come a swan you will not be able to burn." Twenty years later, in 1566, Johannes Mathesius, Luther's first biographer, found Hus's prophecy to be evidence of Luther's divine inspiration.[45]

This is just two of those in the Book of Martyrs (a title John Foxe objected to) that I recall. My little paperback edition entered my library probably 30 years ago and I haven't read it again in about as long, so I've forgotten more than I remember.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that objections from within the Catholic Church were not unique to Luther, but those voices who followed their conscience paid a dear price.
 
Seriously, before Luther protested...what church had protestant stance?
I guess you want to get literal here. What did Luther bring about? It was what the Bible taught. So you believe that there was no one before Luther that believed a person was saved by Faith alone? So for @1500 years no one was saved? Joseph Smith would have us believe that no one had the truth for @1800 years. I was using the term that applies to anyone not being a Catholic. The true church never had a “Pope”. Should not have used the word, just thought that everyone understood Protestant meant Saved by Faith alone.
 
Seriously, before Luther protested...what church had protestant stance?

A.name, a link, to what you refer would be helpful
Jan Hus, as others have mentioned, and the Moravian church would be a contemporary descendant of that movement.
Also, didn't both the Culdees and the Merovingians have some dustups with Rome as well?
Oh, and the Cathars later on.
 
Once again a Catholic teaching. It seems that everyone who dislikes Christianity really only dislikes the Catholic Church, which I consider a cult.
Most people couldn't read until Luther and the printing press. Monks transcribed the Bible as a sacred duty. Without Catholic Christianity there could never have been Protestant Christianity. It's not a cult.
Yes, I dislike the Catholic church or should I say the Roman Catholic Church. Too much evil came out of that man made movement.
Yawn .,..

A lot of good does too.

The world’s biggest charity
The Catholic Church is the biggest non-gov charity on earth, and has missionaries working with lepers and aids patients in the most difficult and dangerous places in the world
https://catholicherald.co.uk/a-worldwide-force-for-good/

"Stalin famously said of the Church, “The Pope! How many divisions has he?” Less well known is Churchill’s response that Stalin “might have mentioned a number of legions not always visible on parade”. Indeed, the reach and influence of the Church are not easily described by statistics alone, yet the raw statistics are staggering enough.

The Church operates more than 140,000 schools, 10,000 orphanages, 5,000 hospitals and some 16,000 other health clinics. Caritas, the umbrella organisation for Catholic aid agencies, estimates that spending by its affiliates totals between £2 billion and £4 billion, making it one of the biggest aid agencies in the world.

Even these numbers only tell half the tale. Caritas does not include development spending by a host of religious orders and other Catholic charities, while most of the 200,000 Catholic parishes around the world operate their own small-scale charitable projects which are never picked up in official figures. Establishing like-for-like comparisons is hard, but there can be little doubt that in pretty much every field of social action, from education to health to social care, the Church is the largest and most significant non-state organisation in the world.

A sceptic might point out that that influence can be both positive and negative. So, for example, it might be queried whether the Church’s work in education or health would be more effective if control was switched to the state. In some ways, this is the wrong question – in much of the developing world, if the Church was not involved, the services would not be provided at all. But there is a good deal of research which has attempted to compare the performance of Catholic provision of education or health with that of other providers and, in general, Catholic institutions come out rather well.

The health analyst Kenneth White, of Virginia Commonwealth University, found Catholic hospitals in the US to be on average more efficient than equivalent secular hospitals. This was a particularly remarkable finding given that he also discovered evidence that Catholic hospitals, reflecting their mission to reach out to disadvantaged communities, were providing more compassionate care and stigmatised services (to groups that often face discrimination) than other providers.

In Africa, a recent research review found not only that maternal care at Church-run mission hospitals was of the same or better quality than at public facilities, but that Church hospitals were also more likely to offer services accessible to the poor.

Looking at education, although it is well established that Catholic schools perform exceptionally well on standard academic criteria …"
read full article



QNLF3129.jpg

https://www.johnbradburne.com/leprosy/

You may believe that, But there was a protestant church that was always around. Why do you think people were killed by the Catholic Church.
Protestants never killed anybody?

Protestants burned thousands of witches. Protestant kings and queens killed Catholics.

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@Thinking required
I think most of this anti-Catholic stuff has already been covered in detail earlier in this thread?
 
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So we have Christmas ...
First off – the December 25th thing.

It was common to assume Christians co-opted this date from elsewhere. I reject that theory, despite its popularity, but will probably address it in its own thread, as it has a lot of supporters.

As for the trappings ... largely superficial and the most popular relatively late. Christmas trees – 16th century – the practice of decorating trees goes back longer, but the Christmas tree gained traction in North Europe and spread from there.

The more useful question with any pagan practice is, what is its basis? is it harmful?

If not, then what's the fuss?

Take the Gnostic accounts of the crucifixion, for example. He was taken off the cross unconscious. He was an angel on the cross, not a man. It was not Him, it was another ... these I consider harmful in that they detract from the message.

The shepherds at the nativity ... the Three Wise Men ... without them, the basic message is unaltered. Luke, to be fair, would have to work a bit harder, his shepherds were part of his social justice theology, but nevertheless.

The celebration of the Winter Solstice or the Vernal Equinox is regard as 'universal' and belongs to the world rather than the property of pagans. The basis is not invented, they're astronomical observations.

Spring is to do with birth because when else, naturally, would you locate it? The Passover is determined as Spring, probably for the same reason.

There are Christian mystical understandings from the very early era that date the birth of Jesus to winter, because that's nine months from His conception, in the Spring, which can be dated, I think, based on Biblical evidence, but I rather read it as God works in and through the word, 'spring' is symbolically the 'right time' ... all the 'rebirth' stuff is not grafted onto Spring, rather, it's intrinsic to it. It's what Spring is.

That Jesus died at the same time He was conceived fitted Judeo-Christian mystical speculation.

I understand that reasoning is perhaps a bit deep and Hermetic for most, but it's sufficient for me. I've always said my Christianity is the 'mystical manifest in the mundane'.

Without the pagan rituals that they lay people love....you are gonna lose a lot of them.
OK. I think you're making rather huge assumptions there, but no matter ... Yes, the Church is full at Easter/Christmas, I've taken non-Christians to Midnight Mass ...

Then of course when Christianity entered other areas of the world the missionaries accepted a little mixing of voodoo or whatever...as long as they accepted Jesus n Mary too...
Did they?

I don't hold such a tight distinction between 'the natural' and 'the supernatural' – I think they infuse each other. If someone sees through the veil of the image, that's fine by me.

... and watering down the message ...
Did we? LOL, you, accuse us ... of watering down the message?
 
Concrete? Your definition of concrete changes drastically based on if you agree with it or not. But here are some examples:

Christmas

In the Catholic Encyclopedia, 1911 edition ...
Why are you referencing such old materials? Suffice to say scholarship has moved along since.

Easter
“The word Easter, which comes from the Anglo-Saxon, is a term derived from the pagan goddess of the dawn” (The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1987, p. 177).
“Etym. Anglo-Saxon Eastre, Teutonic goddess of dawn and spring” (Modern Catholic Dictionary, 1980, p. 175).
Yes ... we speak English over here.

“The word Easter is of Saxon origin, Eastra, the goddess of spring, ...
That's the English/German term, not applicable to the Romance languages ...

The Eastra connection is from the Venerable Bede in the 8th century. Given the determination with which Christians combated all foreign deities as 'pagan', Bede's opinion is dismissed by modern scholars.

It's more likely the term derives from the Latin alba ('dawn') and became eostarum in Old High German.
 
Speaking of concrete, still looking for that verse where the apostles or Jesus decreed that Sunday was now the Lord's Day. You would think it would have caused quite a stir amongst the Jews. Breaking bread on a Sunday doesn't make a day into a holy day.
Well Jesus decreed He was Lord of the Sabbath, so any celebration of 'his' day is, technically, a Sabbath ... and as Scripture speaks of a New Covenant, and 'a new creation' – so it's a case of whether one has to be told, or thinks for themselves ...
 
Having researched the Christmas thing ... I find my idea that it's based on Judeo-Christian mystical speculation doubtful, so that's kicked that one into touch. :(


However, the research also kicks the Roman/Sol Invictus thing into the long grass too ... 🙂
 
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