The Chief Pharisee of the law, James Malm has laid down the decree about Sabbath Keeping for those living in far-flung places of the Northern or Southern pole areas are to start Sabbath at 6:00 pm regardless of whether or not the sun has actually set. Just more legalistic lunacy from the Pharisaical right of the COG.
The Weekly Sabbath begins when the sun sets locally. Persons living north or south of 55 degrees may observe the Sabbath from 18:00 hours [this is the average sunset time at Jerusalem], and all of the brethren in any such location should observe the Sabbath at the same time by common accord. When Christ comes he will decide on this matter.Malm's stance and the SDA church stance is based upon late 1700's and early 1800's information and not on a single thing from the time of the Israelites when they started keeping Sabbath AFTER their captivity. Just another reason the Sabbath command was for those ONLY in the Middle East and not anywhere else in the world.
Contrast Pharisee Malm's comment above with this truth:
CAN YOU KEEP THE SABBATH AT THE NORTH POLE?
Imagine you are trying to keep the Jewish Sabbath above the Arctic Circle! The Arctic night “Sabbath” eventually arrives. Suddenly you are not allowed to light a fire in your dwelling place because the sun went down but didn’t come back up. Your heater goes out. You honor God’s “law” by not re-lighting it. The next morning you are found frozen to death, and you go down in history as a noble Christian Jewish Sabbath-keeper who would rather die than break the Jewish Sabbath. Perhaps you miraculously survive the Polar Winter “Sabbath without a fire. You can’t work for the oil company that hired you until the sun comes up (making it “Saturday” morning) and goes back down again, creating a Saturday night. Eventually, however, the sun does come back up, stays up for a day, and goes back down. The Arctic stretch of extended non-Sabbath is finally over. You can go to work now. Sabbath-keeping is conventional for a while, but eventually the sun comes up and won’t go down! Now you have to contend with the extended Arctic stretch of non-Sabbath time. Because the sun won’t go down, Sabbath won’t “start” on Friday night. You have to go to work every day because the Sabbath won’t start since there is no sundown on Friday night.
Actually, there are more variations of this Arctic Sabbath nonsense. In the Arctic fall, If the Sun fails to set on a Friday night, you have “endless” work days. If the Sun fails to set on a Saturday night in the Arctic fall, you have an “endless” Sabbath. We will leave it up to your imagination to figure out what happens in the Arctic spring depending on which day the sun rises for the first time of the season. Please review the dual requirements of the Sabbath commandment. Both requirements apply to Jews. Christians who keep the Jewish Sabbath seem to forget the six-day requirement since it works against the ill-contrived idea that Adam and Eve qualified to rest on the 7th day of Creation along with God. God had worked for six days prior, but Adam and Eve had existed only about one day:
Exodus 20:8 (NIV): “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
If you manage to die of over-work during this stretch of non-Sabbath time, you go down in history as the Sabbath-keeping Christian who would rather die than break the Jewish Sabbath. Is it illogical to think that God would impose a moral law on His earthlings that could not be kept anywhere in the solar system. The sins of fornication and adultery can be committed on Planet Earth or in a space ship on its way to Mars, but the Sabbath can’t be kept anywhere but in a climate like Palestine in the Mid-East. The Adventist prophetess, Ellen G. White, “solves” this problem by mandating that people should not live in parts of the Earth where the Sabbath cannot be kept. Try presenting the Gospel to a Polar-living Eskimo while at the same time telling him that he has to move to a different part of the world in order to keep “God’s Law.”
"In the countries where there is no sunset for months and again no sunrise for months the period of time will be calculated by the records kept. But God has a world large enough and proper and right for the human beings He has created to inhabit it without finding homes in those lands so objectionable in very many, many ways" (Ellen G. White, Letter #167, 23 March, 1900).
For the above reference, follow this link: www.gospeloutreach.net/chap09.html
God gave the Sabbath to Israel only. The Nation of Israel is located in a mild climate where the sun does rise and set every 24 hours for the entire year and where the temperatures are moderate enough to get through a cold winter night simply by piling on the blankets.
If you lived in the Arctic Circle as so many people do now, would you be condemned to Hell and receive the Mark of the Beast because you COULD NOT keep the Sabbath right no matter how hard you tried? Would God have to give you a special dispensation to break His law so you wouldn’t end up with the Mark of the Beast?
On top of all this, Sabbath-keepers at the North Pole cannot keep the Sabbath according to a fixed calendar or the lunar calendar. During the Arctic winter, the moon’s position remains very close to the sun after it goes down. Here is what happens according to astronomer, Laura Spitler:
While the Moon does rise during the summer at the North Pole, since the Sun is always up, you generally can't see it, so I'll focus on the movement of the Moon during the winter.
The daily movement from Earth's rotation causes the Moon to circle once around the sky. If you spent the entire day staring at it, you'd have to turn around exactly once. This movement is also the same that the Sun makes during the summer . . .
The second movement caused by the Moon's orbit around the Earth is analogous to the movement of the Sun over the course of a year only it repeats over the course of a lunar month. Near the new Moon phase, the Moon is near the Sun and therefore never rises during the winter. As the Moon approaches full, it will start to pop up above the horizon. Eventually near the full Moon phase it will be high enough in the sky to stay up all day and circle like the Sun. . . The elevation of the circle will rise as the Moon becomes completely full and then start to decrease until it begins to dip below the horizon. Eventually the Moon will stop rising at all as it gets close enough to the new phase. The cycle then repeats.
Follow this link to the above reference: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=777
if that isn't the silliest junk I've ever read here, it's a very close second....lol
ReplyDeleteThese type of postings remind me of the sheer lunacy of seeing Santa and Red Nosed reindeer in the mall in San Diego or Sydney Australia during "winter time".
ReplyDeleteOr wearing dustbowl proof burqa in western nations with plenty of water and no sun.
nck
Thanks for this. I had a discussion recently with a UCG member and this was the topic. They are blind to the fact that it is impossible to keep the sabbath in these regions unless one follows man made rules. It is another fraudulent demand placed upon New Covenant Christians that is totoly unnecessary.
ReplyDeleteBack then, the earth was flat and everyone and every Kingdom of the earth was on the top side, so it was possible for everyone on earth to keep the Sabbath in the same rising and setting of the sun. Satan took Jesus to a high corner of the Temple offering him all Kingdoms of the earth for a bit of worship. Jesus did not correct Satan on the nature of the earth so the earth was flatter back then. Simple as that.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteDo you really want to live at the North Pole or at the South Pole that badly? Do you really hate God's holy Sabbath day enough to do that? Are you maybe just chronically malcontent, like all the supposedly great poets?
ReplyDeleteIs anyone going to tell the Catholics and Protestants that it is impossible for them to observe Sunday?
"There is no greater lunacy about the Sabbath than what happened to the Seventh-day Adventists of the South Pacific Islands of Western Samoa and Tokelau in 2011: On midnight on December 29, 2011, a world agreement moved the International Date Line from the American side to the Australian side for the purpose of benefiting tourism. These islands never experienced December 30th because an instant jump was made from December 29th to December 31st at 10:00 GMT. The seventh day of the week got turned into the day that was formerly Sunday. The General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists considered the matter and decided that the Adventist churches on Samoa and Tokelau were to keep the same day they had always kept, ignoring the change of the International Date Line. As a result, Adventist Sabbath-keepers on these islands began keeping Sunday with the other Christians. These other island Christians, by keeping their new “Sunday,” are expected, according to the statements of Ellen White, to receive the Mark of the Beast if they don’t start worshiping on the right day. These other Christians moved their “Sunday” to the new “Sunday,” which was the former 7th day “Sabbath,” but because they are still thinking of it as “Sunday,” they are probably doomed, according to the typical viewpoint espoused by Adventism, to end up in Hell. Now, they are worshiping on what used to be the 7th day Sabbath, which would have rescued them from Hell. But, alas, the INTENT of these other Island Christians is observe the first day of the week. Their motives are, therefore, wrong, but the motives of the Adventists are pure because they are trying to keep the actual 7th day of the week. It seems that by special dispensation of the General Conference, the Adventists, who now are keeping Sunday will be protected against receiving the dreaded Mark of the Beast. Now, if the non-Adventist Christians on these islands would become Seventh-day Adventists, they could get a special dispensation from the General Conference president to keep the “wrong” day, and both Adventists and non-Adventist Christians could be saved.
ReplyDeleteThe ability of the General Conference to change Sunday into Saturday by dispensation appears to give it powers that rival the ecclesiastical authority falsely credited to the pope by the Catholic Church. For the whole story, see the article in Adventist Today, “Samoa, the International Dateline Shift, and the Seventh-day Sabbath,” which appeared in the publication in 2013 at the following link. Note that the author of the Adventist Today article does not discuss the Mark of the Beast problem. The authors of VERDICT are solely responsible for taking the Mark of the Beast logic to its furthest logical extent:"
http://www.atoday.org/article/1937/opinion/hanson-andy/2013/samoa-the-international-dateline-shift-and-theseventh-day-sabbath
This, and the fact that on the southern hemisphere the holy days are upside down with regard to the seasons, would seem to suggest that what some learned theologians have deduced from the Bible is true. That God gave certain oracles specifically to Israel as their national culture, applying to their region and their time in history. Even in Roman Christian times, instant or rapid communication did not exist to make it possible for the priests in Jerusalem to get the word out to the farthest reaches of the empire on first sighting of the moon, or the sprouting of various plants. There also were no time zones, and no international date line. Actually, there wasn’t even a fixed calendar. The Priests would calculate the calendar based on applying math to what they observed from nature as seen in Jerusalem. Knowing anything about the North or South Poles back them would have been akin to our emerging discoveries from space exploration. There are things which exist in the universe that mankind has just recently discovered within the last 50 years.
ReplyDeleteImagine if you get to rule a planet sometime in the hypothetical Armstrong kingdom. What will you do if your planet has multiple suns or moons? What if you get to rule a large asteroid? Relativity would be a huge influence in all matters that are related to the time-space continuum.
BB
Impossible to observe Sunday???
ReplyDeleteThe thing about mainstream Christians is that Sunday is A CALENDER DAY. You can't observe "Sunday". It's not like Sunday is like "Memorial Day" or anything like that. It is the day that people get together to worship and pray and hear a message. The importance is on the worship and the gathering, not on the calender day.
To further clarify. Many mainstream churches have worship not only on Sunday. Sunday evening services are common too (which in the winter happen AFTER sunset - which never figures into their equations.) Many have Saturday night services. Most have services on Wednesday evenings as well. Many have church services for youth on Tuesday nights. Occasionally, you'll see week-long services for refreshment and inspiration purposes in the evenings after people get home from work. And occasionally throughout the week, you'll find Bible Studies, committee meetings, small group get-togethers, and special events.
Instead of focusing on DAYS, they focus on the best opportunities to worship God. You can't "observe Sunday" because Sunday cannot be observed. What can be observed is "Holy Time" on whatever day they choose - and that's biblical. They aren't worried about days and seasons and years. And this is the thing that gets on the nerves of Sabbatarians, because that's the primary concern of Sabbatarians - days, times, seasons and years. And because they do not do it on Saturday, they believe that God is angry and upset at that fact and rejects their attempts at worship just because it is on the wrong day. It seems that Jesus' coming to Earth and everything he fulfilled wasn't enough to quell God's anger at these well-meaning believers because they are electing to worship God on the wrong day, it would seem they think.
If I was in a loving relationship, I'd want to hear from the other person at every possible available opportunity. I would never, ever take "the phone off the hook" in anger and fury because they chose to talk on Wednesday and not Friday. Scripture says we can boldly come to the throne of Grace - and that God would never leave us nor forsake us. To think that God enforces legalistic Judaism on Gentile Christianity has completely missed the concept of New Covenant Christianity, and the decisions of the Jerusalem Council as recorded in Acts 15.
I know God does not have a problem with you choosing to honor Him on Saturday. I do believe God would have a problem with your condemning everyone else because they do not doing the same thing, and for thinking you are more in God's favor then they are because you do.
"Imagine if you get to rule a planet sometime in the hypothetical Armstrong kingdom. What will you do if your planet has multiple suns or moons?"
ReplyDeleteI would have that triple tithe you're all talking about!
And yard sales every sunday, 4 times a week that is.
nck
I want a water-covered planet with a handfull of well spaced islands, and no continents. That’ll limit population, control pollution, and render war nearly impossible. Average IQ for inhabitants will be 130, and rather than having such diminishing factors as aging or disease, people will simply go to sleep at age 70 and not wake up, leaving a clean corpse.
DeleteEveryone will experience enlightenment, closing the door on the fakery and exploitation now caused by religious charlatans. Conspiracy theories will not exist. People will have emotions, but the volume will be turned way down so that they are not driven by their emotions. Badness in people will cause them to smell like raw, untreated sewer gas, so that good people will automatically avoid them.
If bad individuals obtain therapy and turn their lives around, they will lose the stench of badness.
BB
I was playing my favorite sport - swatting Tomorrow's World pop-ups w/ mouse - costing that cult money - when I discovered "Dr" Meredith's Sabbath booklet: Scanned thru it and never saw any reference to the Samoa/Tokelau/Dateline Sabbath Dilemma: Why didn't 'God's rep on planet earth', "Dr" Meredith, want to address/solve this dichotomy?
ReplyDeleteAlso in this Living Church of God sabbath booklet, 'genius' "Dr" Meredith quickly brushes away Col 2:16 saying 'they were being judged on how they kept feasts/sabbaths' - a tired old eisegesis trick discredited by even Adventist scholars themselves!
Connie Schmidt:
ReplyDeleteWhat about the East Pole and the West Pole??��
I'm sorry to say this is a straw man's argument. As much as your blog exposes the arrogance and sheer lunacy that can go on within COG org this post is a straw man's argument.
ReplyDeleteAn atheists straw man's argument.
I am not absolutely certain that the Armstrongist churches are a cult. I am doing more research into a relevant issue. I have always followed the Christian principle of salvation "by faith through grace not of works." This was the cornerstone of the Reformation. When applied as a litmus test to Armstrongism, Armstrongism fails.
ReplyDeleteBut now there are theologians who have challenged this principle. The whole challenge pivots on the meaning of Greek words. And I am at a loss to evaluate anything written in a classical languages. But recent theological argument goes like this:
By faith - The termed used here is "pistis" which is not just a mindset but incorporates activity. It is what we might call "living faith". But it not only is correlated to works, it incorporates good works. It is dynamic, work generating belief.
Through grace - As usual.
Not of works - Works here is "erga". Some theologians believe that this refers not to the full prescriptive content of the Torah but only to the ceremonial laws.
The rendering now would read: salvation is "by belief and its necessary works through grace and not of ceremonial activities."
The final conclusion is that one receives salvation by ones "moral standing" based on good done in this life. Grace accepts these flawed by sincere works.
I am not yet convinced of this. But I believe there are some issues that have to be seriously considered here. And if this grows as a movement in Christianity, Armstrongism could, at least on this critical point, be discovered to reside within the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy.
-- Neotherm
I enjoy hearing calendar nuts try to explain to me, from the Bible, how the International Date Line can be justified to be approximately 9 hours ahead of Jerusalem. Note that I say "approximately" because the idea of having 24 time zones is relatively recent, and Jerusalem isn't even at the midpoint of its zone. Even the Jews don't agree; there are at least four different theories as to where the International Date Line should be considered, and two of them more or less devolve to the idea that the main principle is to follow the customs of the local people, not to obsess over keeping your Sabbath at an exact seven-day interval matching what Moses kept.
ReplyDeleteA WCG minister brought up the problem of living in such a location. He offered the devised solution of using the 24 hour day based on longitude.
ReplyDeleteThere was also an issue of some Pacific islands near the International Date Line, where the day of the week was apparently considered arbitrary - that is, you could choose it to be Saturday or Sunday, etc. A Sabbatarian group apparently had Sunday as Saturday so as to "blend in", and the WCG chose to be conspicuous and using the previous day.
I read an article about a female scientist in the Australian Antarctic Territory who kept a Christian lifestyle, but it didn't mention how she dealt with the day of the week -- the focus of the article was on how she was harassed by the male scientists...
I believe these problems of determining the Saturday Sabbath day is a excellent example of God giving church leaders the power to 'bind' certain technical issues. If the duty of care was exercised, the decision will be 'bound in heaven.'
ReplyDeleteGod is a reasonable God.
So, my only question is, where does Malm think he gets the authority to make such declarations?
ReplyDeleteI mean, to listen to his inane bluster about making sure you're pleasing the gods 86,400 seconds per day, he certainly seems to be striking a tone with this one that whatever he binds on earth, the gods are somehow obliged to bind in heaven too.
For all the hot air in the past he's released into the atmosphere about "Primacy of Peter" crap, it sure seems like he thinks the keys to the kingdom are jangling in his pockets now.
The Churches of God, Pack, Flurry or Weinland never understood the Acts 15 Conference and the church never in my time in the ministry either.
ReplyDeleteThe question was how does a Gentile become a Christian? The answer agreed upon was "the same way a Gentile becomes a Jew", by observing the Noahide Laws which James lists and decides is just
19 “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. 20 Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. 21 For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”
The mistaken COG view is contained verse 21: For the law of Moses has been preached in every city since the earliest of times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath"
The church or ministry or HWA took that to mean "And the rest of the laws of God the Gentiles will hear and get when they go to synagogues on Sabbath and when they closed down, from attending the Jewish Christian church." In other words, James gave the Noahide Laws, and that's all and that's the answer to the question but vs 21 seems to give wiggle room for those who think the gentiles will pick up Sabbath, holydays, tithing , clean and unclean meats etc when they meet with the church. That is NOT the meaning.
The concern brought to James was that "5 Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses.” They were concerned Judaism would be lost in this controversy.
All James was saying in verse 21 about the law of Moses being preached forever and ever week was that these Jewish Christians should not worry that Judaism was going to go away. Those who felt compelled to worship and believe in the Jewish mode did not have to worry that Gentiles joining would eradicate the law of Moses or Judaism. It was everywhere and always had been and always will be. He was NOT saying the Gentiles, however, would learn the rest of what they had to do in synagogue or church from the Jewish Christians. The Laws of Moses were NEVER meant for nor required of the Gentiles coming into the church
The Noahide rules were enough. That's what Paul promoted and while we have the Laws of Moses to this day and Judaism, and some Jewish Christian types (Sabbatarians) survive and insist Gentiles do all they do to be saved, James did not follow that line of thinking.
Of course, Paul won the day and Gentile Christianity is what we have today as Mainline Christianity, and they don't go by the Noahide rules anymore either. But Paul didn't either once he left the company of James. In I Corinthians 8 and 10 he told his gentile church not to sweat meat offered to idols as the idol is nothing, but "in all men is not that knowledge"...i.e. Peter, James and John. So Paul dropped even the ruling of James rather quickly and went on his own.
The battle rages to this day between Judaisers and how do all others become Christians and receive the salvation offered by the faith.
Is this 18:00 in the local time zone, or in the Jerusalem time zone (summer time or winter time) or local solar time, or Jerusalem solar time? Maybe even UTC? Does James Malm know the difference? In Inuvik, Canada, where there used to be WCG members, 18:00 MDT (UTC-6h) is 15:00 local solar time. The sun doesn't set from about May 24 to July 20, and doesn't rise from sometime in late November to sometime in late January. I think HWA decreed to use "Jerusalem time"; AFAIK he also didn't specify which Jerusalem time. I also don't know what they were supposed to do during the times of the year when the sun *did* set.
ReplyDeleteWe wouldn't have this problem if the earth were flat.
NEO
ReplyDeleteI am not into theological debates but it looks like you are on to something.
Related to this topic of "the development of ideas" it is interesting to note a later version of "legalistic religion, being (700 ad islam). This religion claimed to the latest or last revelation of God to the world and promised to unshackle people of the earlier "jewish" and "christian" requirements. The last revelation to free all men.
Notice that a "progression in philosophy" is implied by the 700 AD revelation.
Now Islam has many "requirements". So how could they be viewed as an unshackling men from legalistic bonds?
It is through the relation with God. a) There is no central authority figure in Islam besides God b) Prayer is looked upon as "a continuous 24 hour per day walk with God" not 30 minutes set aside or a repetitive lords prayer. c) A relationship with God is defined through "The Work" or good deeds. The Zakath or gifts to the poor are JUST A REFLECTION of continal walk of good deeds or works
I have said over and over that Armstrongism akes to "early christianity" and therefore its interpretation coincides with interpretations of that time period.
To me it is no coincidence that "The Work" had such an important place in wcg. Since it is the epitimization of a reflection of "the walk with God". A continuous 24 hour prayer.
The word "submit" also prominent in wcg is actually the translation of Islam.
HWA went to extreme lenghts and made the entire NYC staff of the "human potential" resign by his insistence on having articles about the jewish - islam - christian center in the Sinai for which he/we pledged I belief a million 1980 dollars.
He/we viewed the Arabs as "Abrahamic" brothers didn't we. And their religion as a "related abrahamic faith". Therefore it would not be surprising to see similar tenets or interpretations.
Of course to know this would require intensive studies in comparative religion. I do not expect the average discussion on internet blogs to rise above the level of "how can a southern baptist be compared to a jihadist muslem nck, you are a crazy and silly person?"
But still you're posting reminded me of the roots of religion. (unfortunately rewarped into fundamentalism of any kind) I believe there is evidence that young muhammad was trained or at least had close contact with the jewish communities in Southern Arabia and perhaps some of the early christian communities that might have fled from jerusalem or elsewhere in Syria.
I recently heard that the new Saudi King communicated with the Pope and incredible as it may sound perhaps christian churches might reappear on Saudi soil, like in the past. I wonder if any of the AC professors who taught/ fled to Saudi Arabia after the AC demise might have something to do with that stance. But I guess not, it might just be part of a bigger picture that I have only sketchy thoughts about. In this bigger picture we can see that during "our years" Israel was seeking contact with Japan (GII flight path), while today it is seeking close contact with China on high technology. It is interesting to note what prominent wcg figure strategically consulted the Chinese government on high technology and Israel - Japan in the early eighties, but now I am rambling which distracts from my points on theology.
nck
NEO
ReplyDeleteYou aren't certain whether Armstrongism is a cult? In Armstrong culture, your life belongs to the church. If robbed of your rights, the religious beliefs of that group are academic. I just read Damaged Disciples by Ron and Vicky Burks which was recommended on this blog. The shepherding movement it describes is very similar to Herbs church. Shepherding treats their members like children, constantly intruding into the most intimate areas of members lives. They justify this by claiming that God the Father delegates all His authority to Christ, who in turn delegates all His authority to his ministers. So the minister has all the authority of God himself, never to be disagreed with or questioned. To disobey your minister is to disobey God.
Reading the book, I can't help wondering if Herb stole from the shepherding movement or whether the shepherding movement stole from Herb.
nck said
ReplyDelete"Of course to know this would require intensive studies in comparative religion. I do not expect the average discussion on internet blogs to rise above the level of "how can a southern baptist be compared to a jihadist muslem nck, you are a crazy and silly person?"
nck I think this is the nub of the problems in COG circles, people rarely study outside of church literature which leaves them ignorant of even basic history of the Christian religion and especially Protestantism, all the questions that are and have been in COG land have already been asked and dealt with by the various groupings over many centuries, leading as it did to torture, burnings at the stake, wars and in the case of England being hung,drawn and quartered (in Elizabeth 1st reign) Catholics fought with Lutherans and Calvinists who in turn fought with each other and Anabapists, Waldensians,Lollards etc. were killed and tortured by all of them.
WHY? over trivia such as this article above. Trinatarians killed nontrinatarians, one of the biggest doctrines over wich many died was the eucharist and whether or not it was literally the body of of Christ!!! Luther said that faith was on the Bible alone and the two Kingoms principle, when it came down to it what he meant was his reading of the book was the only right one (think HWA, DP, GF, RW JM) only he killed those who didn't agree!!
The problems I see is that every one believes in God but they have no faith IN him
IMO it's a very weak God who can't fight his own wars :-) why can't people just leave it to him??? and concentrate on the sermon on the mount perhaps!!!!!!
Perhaps Islamists could think on this as well seeing as they worship the same God.
toby
Yes Toby. Interesting. I agree. In my experience with people of all religions the better are with people with that focus and the best, with those within a context.
ReplyDeleteA monk at wadi natrun once entered into a discussion with me about the council of chalcedon, while armed muslem guards outside guarded our safety from radicals in a sea of those of the muslem faith.
The futility of it all as symbolized by those german and british protestants playing soccer at christmas during ww1 amidst a sea of dead comrads.
Still the discussion are about the. Work, Opus Dei.
The western notion of "work" is utilitarian defined as a cost incurred by those who want to consume.
The islamic or older religious notion of "work" or amal is broader and appears on 360 verses and they stress the need for action for human beings ? Translating into a religion of practice and a practice of ideology as a religious obligation.
Regarding wealth Islam forbids hoarding as wealth needs to circulate and enhance the community. Just as hwa just posessed a meager 5 million dollars while the church yearly income extended between 90 and 200 million per year and he left his estate to the church to circulate again.
Nck
Sabbaths never were practical, and they certainly aren't in a modern world where things like power plants and hospitals have to be manned by workers. Since there never was a seven day creation, the whole premise is stupid.
ReplyDelete