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View Poll Results: Do you believe the Christmas Tree is a form of Idolatry? | |
Yes.
|     | 13 | 16.88% | |
No.
|    | 64 | 83.12% |
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27th October 2009, 08:25 AM
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Reps: 239,739,413,609,998 (power: 0) | | Originally Posted by Eph4:26  How does one suffer for His sake, tell your friends and family that Christmas is pagan, they'll want to crucify you for it. When you do that, they will want to separate from you (Luke 6:22) for calling out their traditions, then you are honoring God.
If you think being crucified with Christ means telling your friends that Christmas is pagan, and being laughed at, then you have a lot to learn.
I might choose to find your comment offensive to all those Christians actually suffering real persecution for our faith on a daily basis, but quite frankly, that would be giving you far too much credit for knowing what you are saying, when in fact I think you don't have a clue. |
27th October 2009, 10:19 AM
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Reps: 1,726,403,466,190 (power: 1,726,403,468) | | Originally Posted by Catherineanne If you think . . .
In the interest of staying on topic, I'll pass on chomping down on your bait.
The point of the post you are referencing to is that the Gifts of God is not a valid reason to do the Christ Mass. |
27th October 2009, 12:03 PM
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Reps: 239,739,413,609,998 (power: 0) | | Originally Posted by Eph4:26 In the interest of staying on topic, I'll pass on chomping down on your bait.
Projection.
The point of the post you are referencing to is that the Gifts of God is not a valid reason to do the Christ Mass.
I am heartened to find that you believe your post to have a point. However, as this 'point' constitutes personal opinion, you are most welcome to it; much good may it do you.
You are not, however, welcome to extrapolate from your opinion into judging other people, and their own personal choices of how to celebrate Christmas. Putting it at its most simple, if Christmas is a holy and blessed time for me, as indeed it is, tree and presents and all, then no amount of huffing and puffing from you about 'being crucified with Christ', is going to change that by even the smallest amount.
In short; such an attitude is humbug. Pure, unadulterated humbug.
Last edited by Catherineanne; 27th October 2009 at 12:11 PM.
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4th November 2009, 07:08 AM
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Reps: 1,726,403,466,190 (power: 1,726,403,468) | | Pure, unadulterated humbug
Evoking the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge reminds me of the fact that 'The Christmas Story' was written by a secular humanistic. |
4th November 2009, 02:31 PM
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Reps: 9,866,279,538,750 (power: 9,866,279,540) | | Originally Posted by Eph4:26 Evoking the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge reminds me of the fact that 'The Christmas Story' was written by a secular humanistic.
The book was titled "A Christmas Carol", was written by Charles Dickens who was a Brother.
In 1843, while he was most active at Little Portland Street chapel, Dickens created the first and greatest of his Christmas books, A Christmas Carol. Around this time Christmas Day was again beginning to be celebrated and the holiday transformed. The story and its characters—Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Crachit and Tiny Tim—defined the holiday's meaning for the English-speaking world as the regenerative spirit of generosity, or what Dickens called his "Carol philosophy." The heart of Dickens's social criticism and his religious message is found in A Christmas Carol, his four other Christmas books, and his many seasonal stories.
I find it hard to believe that a baptized born again believer would be called a secular humanist simply because we do not agree with the supposition that parables are still being used to teach universal truths brought by Christ. In his literary work, Dickens used the characters of the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present, and Future as a representation of the work of the Holy Spirit who instructs us what sin is, how it looks like in action, and the consequences of it in our life. Dickens novel was about social injustice of the uncaring heart towards mankind, social justice is something that Christians should pursue in all places.
Just so you know, Jeremiah 10:3 + 4 refers to idols crafted from wood, this evidence is clearly in the words "A tree from the forest is cut down and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman." We do not craft a tree, God does that, not to mention that God decorates creation with brilliant works of beauty.
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5th November 2009, 07:10 AM
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Reps: 239,739,413,609,998 (power: 0) | | Originally Posted by Eph4:26 Evoking the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge reminds me of the fact that 'The Christmas Story' was written by a secular humanistic.
Twaddle.
A Christmas Carol in prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas was written by Charles Dickens, who may have been many things but was most certainly not a secular humanist.
Last edited by Catherineanne; 5th November 2009 at 07:17 AM.
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5th November 2009, 07:16 AM
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Reps: 239,739,413,609,998 (power: 0) | | Originally Posted by rcorlew In his literary work, Dickens used the characters of the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present, and Future as a representation of the work of the Holy Spirit who instructs us what sin is, how it looks like in action, and the consequences of it in our life. Dickens novel was about social injustice of the uncaring heart towards mankind, social justice is something that Christians should pursue in all places.
I think it is safer if we allow Mr Dickens to speak for himself on this one.
"My chief purpose was, in a whimsical kind of masque which the good humour of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land."
Charles Dickens. Preface to Christmas Books. |
5th November 2009, 08:49 AM
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Reps: 4,209,945,331,156 (power: 4,209,945,335) | | Originally Posted by Eph4:26 I first heard your glib answer when I was eight years old attending a Catholic Catechism Class.
Perhaps you should revisit you class - you have something to learn.
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5th November 2009, 09:33 AM
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Reps: 1,726,403,466,190 (power: 1,726,403,468) | | Originally Posted by rcorlew The book was titled "A Christmas Carol", was written by Charles Dickens . . .
I stand corrected, thank you.
With respects to Charles Dickens . . .
THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS
How Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits
By Les Standiford
241 pp. Crown Publishers. $19.95
From the NYT's Book Review:
“The Man Who Invented Christmas” is a good title, too catchy to resist, perhaps, as Standiford admits that the public’s extraor[wash my mouth]dinary and lasting embrace of Dickens’s short novel is but one evidence of the 19th century’s changing attitude toward Christmas. In 1819, Washington Irving’s immensely popular “Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent” had “glorified” the “social rites”of the season. Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “The Night Before Christmas” introduced a fat and jolly St. Nick whose obvious attractions eclipsed what had been a “foreboding figure of judgment” as likely to distribute canings as gifts. Queen Victoria and her Bavarian husband, Albert, “great boosters of the season,” had installed a Christmas tree in Windsor Castle each year since 1840, encouraging a fad that spread overseas to America by 1848. In “The Descent of Man” (1871), Charles Darwin announced that celebrants of the season had a more tangible relationship to apes than to annunciations, further secularizing what the Christian church hadn’t conceived but poached (along with Yule logs and stockings to stuff) from German pagan practices.
What is true is that Christmas, more than any other holiday, offered a means for the adult Dickens to redeem the despair and terrors of his childhood.
The months leading up to the publication of “A Christmas Carol” in December 1843 were not happy ones for Dickens. The most popular writer in England — in the world — was falling further into debt as he struggled to support a large family that included his spendthrift father.
Standiford, the author of four other non[wash my mouth]fiction books, tidily explains the appeal of “A Christmas Carol,” its readership “said at the turn of the 20th century to be second only to the Bible’s.” Replacing the slippery Holy Ghost with anthropomorphized spirits, the infant Christ with a crippled child whose salvation waits on man’s — not God’s — generosity, Dickens laid claim to a religious festival, handing it over to the gathering forces of secular humanism. If a single night’s crash course in man’s power to redress his mistakes and redeem his future without appealing to an invisible and silent deity could rehabilitate even so apparently lost a cause as Ebenezer Scrooge, imagine what it might do for the rest of us!
The popularity of “A Christmas Carol” inspired Dickens to commit himself to writing another and another holiday book, but “The Chimes,” “The Cricket on the Hearth” and “The Battle of Life” couldn’t reproduce the alchemy of their prototype.  |
12th November 2009, 07:42 AM
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Reps: 1,726,403,466,190 (power: 1,726,403,468) | | Originally Posted by cwolf20 . . . At least according to several stories about the true "Saint Nick" who lived, then died eventually, . . . .
. . . . and is resurrected every Saturnalia season.
That's called necromancy.
It's evil because it takes the glory away from Christ. | | |
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