The Brownie pack that my two went to involved jumping over a toadstool in their initiations.

Thinking about it now, was that the Brownies or that druid cult that used the back room of the village hall on the same night, can't recall now, maybe we sent them into the wrong room.

Yes but society has moved on.
Whilst the basic tenets of the morality and philosophy apparently preached by Jesus are generally accepted nowadays (by some because of their religion but by many more via their own conscience) the superstition and belief in a deity are no longer mandatory and the Guides have changed the oath accordingly without making it in any way unchristian.
They are to ba applauded for that.

On this basis, these islands, pre-Christianity, must have never seen any 'ethical' or 'moral' behaviour. Altruism will not have existed either, since as the chief rabbi claims, that is a result of religion.

Or were the pre-Christian religions that existed across Europe, which had a very, very different ethos from the Judeo-Christian tradition that some people tend to imagine is the only one that has existed in Europe or the only religious culture that has ever existed alongside something that could be viewed as 'civilisation'.



Out of curiosity, then, what theological/religious beliefs do you hold personally, and how often do you attend a place of worship?

Maybe but I think totalitarian regimes suppress religion largely because religion is a power base.

It's worth noting that some totalitarian regimes have supported and been supported by organised religion.

It could also be said that some religions at least push behaviours and attitudes that most people in modern, civilised nations consider backward at best and reprehensible and utterly immoral at worst.

If you want to acknowledge that as an influence, then you must also accept that Christianity is itself a conglomeration of influences from prior religions and cults in terms of ethics, morals, rituals and myths adapted to suit the Christian story.
The old testament (much of which Jesus preached against, hence the antagonism from and fear of power-base-shift by the established order at the time but which still seems to form part of Christian belief), Dionysus (virgin birth on Dec 25th, changing water into wine, a divine saviour who was the son of God, resurrection and ascension into heaven after 3 days), paganism in Europe (Easter, mistletoe etc)

Just add in the monotheism ... and there's Christianity.

... the entirely deliberate decision by the Catholic church to increase the importance of Mary as a way of 'replacing' the goddesses of pagan religions.

One could almost suggest that the Trinity does something similar, creating something closer to a pantheon of gods – and then there are all the saints.

There's a considerable way in which Catholicism in particular is not really a monotheistic religion.

This makes it all lovely and clear:

Indeed, so instead of, say, Zeus as top god and the others as subordinate gods, or a series of gods each of whom has designated and specific powers of effect, we have the Abrahamic God as top god and all the saints as people to whom we can pray as though they have the same powers as the top God or a subset therof.
Yes, I agree, it's polytheism with a fudging get-out clause.






Aye ... and the Trinity (which is such a central tenet) wasn't mentioned by Jesus, was debated for the first time hundreds of years after his demise (or ascension a la Dionysus) and wasn't actually agreed by the "whole" church until Constantine knocked their heads together in 300-odd AD to get them to come up with a version they all agreed with.

I'm confused. Does this mean that Wakefield Trinity have three players in every one position, or that they don't exist?

This is from the Telegraph's comments to an article about drug companies / pharmacists allegedly ripping off the NHS:

"All the laws, regulations and rules in the world cannot replace the social and moral foundation provided by our Christian faith.

The secular myth is being exploded every day as public and private sector executives behave exactly as expected in a godless world - they look after Number One.

There will be more of this corrupt behaviour, much more, count on it. Until the public gets tired of this illogical and ridiculous experiment in secularism."

I was going to say something like this on this thread the other day.

Of course it is. That's how it spread - by adapting to local culture and trying to aborb it rather than run roughshod over it. You can see that from the Yew treees in so many old church yards and as you say utlising pre-existing festival times.

I believe, pergaps blasphemously, that the Christian message comes down to trying to follow as best we can the perfect example of Jesus Christ in our every day lives (which provides a moral frame of reference when ethics are potentially compromised). I take the Trinity as almost literal. If you are you (the father) bring your children up in a loving ("God is love"icon_wink.gif and well guided way then you have enternal life, via your children, their children, etc. In effect you pass on the spirit of righteouness through the generations, provided the would-be black sheep of the family can be kept of the straight and narrow. You see this in everyday life, where "bad" people beget "bad" children and "good" people tend to breed "good" citizens. The message of marriage fits in here - as a vehicle for ensuring stability.

Some would argue that all the above is possible without religion. I would argue that it is not and that's why religion exists in the first place.

I last attended a Christian church service yesterday.

How do we know that it's morally repugnant to force a rape victim to marry her attacker?

Dearie me.
Look back to the middle of Victorian times when Church attendance was far greater than now, when moralising 3rd sons of wealthy families lectured their flocks from the pulpit about rights and wrongs on a weekly basis.
Are we saying that the social and moral foundation was better back then when families were routinely split up and send to the workhouse, when girls impregnated out of wedlock could be locked up for being mentally ill, when children worked a 12 hour day, when schooling and education were out reach for many of the working classes.
Granted there were enlightened Christians running large businesses, such as Cadbury, Rowntree, Salt etc ... but they quite definitely in the minority, compare them against the now-ennobled families who made their vast fortunes on the back of slavery and unhumanity both here and abroad.

Instead of coming out with all that preachy twaddle, [iThe Telegraph[/i should look around and see that that, as Christianity has declined, man's charity to man increased, decade upon decade, until approximately 1979 ... how do they explain that?

Missing from the [iTorygraph[/i's diatribe, I note, is any blame being placed on the rules enshrined in capitalism which makes companies amoral, and exerting morality only vicariously when a) Rules are placed upon them by governments or b) The public votes with its feet.
That is where the core issue lies.

Oh, that's an easy one: punching his father in the face is enough to make even the blackest of sheep see the error of his ways, right?

I disagree.
Religion existed because people didn't know any better about how things come to be, the nature of the universe, why people got ill, why they die and found it hard to handle that one life was all you got.
Belief in God gave them a consolation against all that.

There is a part of the human psyche that expects a reason for everything.
There's nothing wrong with that, it's called curiosity, but better to say "I don't know" than invent a ridiculous and nonsensical god and then contort/twist/deny whatever else you find to make it fit your original "God"notion.

So remind us what bit of Christ's teaching on the issue you use to justify your homophobic attitudes.

This point always puts me in mind of one of my favourite ever quotes, from Neil DeGrasse Tyson:

[i"God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance."[/i

This one sentence says everything that needs to be said about religion and religious belief. It was natural, 2000+ years ago, for people to seek answers to certain profound questions, and also understandable that, in the absence of satisfactory answers, people inserted 'God' into the gaps in their knowledge.

As science has advanced over the past 100 years, and with it our understanding of the universe, 'God' has been left with very few hiding places. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that we now know so much that directly contradicts the holy texts of every major religion, that you'd have to be wilfully ignorant to believe in a 'God' of any description.

You have missed the point entirely.
I am saying that, if you want to point at Christianity as the influence behind modern moralities in the UK, you must accept that Christianity itself (apart from Jesus's own philosophy) is a mixture of unoriginal myths about the virgin birth, the death and ascension, water into wine, etc etc ... and that the gospels cannot be taken as, erm, gospel.
Which puts the whole religion on very shaky ground as most of the rest of it was invented after the fact.

To say that it absorbed rather than riding roughshod is rather glib.
It subverted existing beliefs and changed its own mythology to make it more acceptable.

I do accept that the morals that Jesus apparently preached are largely valid today ... but that does not require a belief in a deity nor does it require the panoply of superstition that comprises religion.
The Guides are quite right to focus on morals rather than God.

Oh don't ask that Minty, you'll get a load of garbage about how Jesus got cornered and had to quote the Old Testament to get out of an argument about heterosexual adultery which can obviously be extrapolated to mean gays are just plain bad ... and how St Paul said so as well, so it must be so.

God put headache tablets in birch tree bark - thats good enough proof for me.

Why he put the ingredient to cure a headache inside the bark of an anonymous tree without telling anyone is not for my concern, why Man had to cope with headaches for a couple of thousand years before someone discovered completely by accident that eating tree bark would cure headaches rather than The God typing it onto one of those tablets of stone as a PS, I don't know - "PS - Moses, I've hidden the headache tablets inside the birch tree bark".

He is a very strange God and I've spent a lifetime of eating other things just in case he's hidden anything else, so far I can report that having eaten almost every sort of tree bark and plant leaf indigenous to this island I have not yet, in 56 years caught malaria, beri-beri, dhengi fever, or become pregnant, if only I can find out which plant has cured me of these things then next year my friend I will be that millionaire.

I disagree, he recommended a diet of fish, indeed went so far as to start up his own fish wholesale business at one point in his life, as he said to Matthew in Luke verse 25, "Matthew, we're in wholesale already", and as everyone knows, fish, as food, is just dire.

Yeah, why did he call it Willow when it should have been The Acetylsalicylic Acid Tree?