How the World Is Marking the 500th Birthday of Protestantismhttps://www.yahoo.com/news/world-marking-500th-birthday-protestantism-130053118.html (https://www.yahoo.com/news/world-marking-500th-birthday-protestantism-130053118.html)
Time
Billy Perrigo October 27, 2017
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Many will mark the 500th anniversary of Oct. 31, 1517, when Martin Luther started a revolution by posting his complaints about the Church
Five hundred years ago, an unknown monk named Martin Luther marched up to the church in Wittenberg, a small town in what is now Germany, and nailed a list of criticisms of the Catholic church to its door.
The date was Oct. 31, 1517, and Luther had just lit the fuse of what would become the Protestant Reformation. His list of criticisms, known as the 95 theses, would reverberate across world history. The Church would split, wars would be fought and people would be burned at the stake. It was the birth of Protestant Christianity.
Religiously speaking, the Reformation led to the translation of the Bible into languages other than Latin, allowing many people to engage with scripture for the first time. It also brought an end to the controversial sale of indulgences payments the Church said reduced punishment for sins after death, which Luther regarded as corrupt.
More generally, the Reformation contributed to the expansion of literacy, with people no longer needing to rely on priests to read and interpret the Bible. Luther promoted universal education for girls and boys at a time when education was reserved for the wealthy, and believed in the connection between literacy and empowerment, both spiritually and socially.
Luther's act is taught as one of the cornerstones of world history, even though most historians now agree that it was a relatively unremarkable event which was canonized at a later date for political ends. Nevertheless, it remains a lasting symbol of resistance 500 years later.
So how is an anniversary of that magnitude being celebrated?
The hub of anniversary celebrations will be Luther's homeland, Germany, where "Reformation Day" has long been celebrated as a holiday in certain states. This year, it's set to be a full-blown national holiday. Chancellor Angela Merkel, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, has encouraged German churches to promote a narrative of unity over division in their celebrations.
That's a line that the Catholic Church and some of the biggest protestant denominations are also keen to stress. On last year's 499th anniversary, Pope Francis joined leaders of the Lutheran World Federation in Sweden (where Lutheranism is the dominant religion) to hold a joint commemorative service. In his address, Francis said: "We have the opportunity to mend a critical moment of our history by moving beyond the controversies and disagreements that have often prevented us from understanding one another."
Not long after Francis' address, the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury in England expressed remorse for the violence committed there in the name of the Reformation. Hundreds of churches and monasteries were demolished in the 1500s, and many people gruesomely killed, during England's pained transition from Catholicism to Protestantism.
After 500 years of division, there seems to be a consensus from the top that this anniversary will be one of reconciliation.
But official church celebrations aren't the only ways in which the milestone is being marked.
In popular celebrations Germany also leads the way, and for proof you need look only as far as its toy economy. In 2015, a commemorative Martin Luther figurine from Playmobil became the German company's fastest-selling product ever. It took just 72 hours for the initial run of 34,000 to sell out, leading the company to rush another batch into production. A spokesperson labeled the demand a "big mystery."
Americans are also doing their bit. A musical entitled Luther: The Rock Opera premiered in Wittenberg earlier this year. The North Dakota pastor responsible for the two-and-a-half hour production describes it as "Hamilton meets Jesus Christ Superstar meets Monty Python." Performances in Berlin and Wittenberg will mark the anniversary.
And, as the anniversary falls each year on the same day as Halloween, around the world people are taking inspiration from Luther for their costumes. On Reddit's Christianity subreddit, a post asked whether it would be sinful to dress up as Martin Luther for Halloween. On Twitter, others had no qualms about their plans to do the same, whilst on Amazon, a search for "Martin Luther Costume" turns out enough results to dress a small congregation.
Back in Germany, the broadcaster ZDF is airing a two-part serial entitled "Reformation" commissioned especially for the anniversary, starring Maximilian Brackner as Martin Luther. It is also airing in the U.K. on the BBC, and both channels have also commissioned special documentaries to mark the occasion.
The town of Wittenberg itself is understandably excited; in fact it's already in the tenth year of a "Luther decade" it proclaimed in 2008. On the anniversary, a "Reformation festival" will see "jugglers, musicians, hosts, craftsmen and people from the Middle Ages"gather in the town center, before the church opens for a commemorative concert in the evening.
For some people, this anniversary may be the first they've heard of Luther and the Reformation. But the wide range of celebrations, exhibits, documentaries and even commemorative toys mean that it'll be hard to escape its legacy, 500 years on.
So, for example, when Jesus says things like "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, you have no life in you," obviously Jesus is being metaphorical
Well, about all I know about you is that Halloween is your religion, so I'm going to guess some kind of paganism variant?
I do still have stuff to say/react, just not so much with the feeling like saying it the last few days...
Oh, uh, I don't actually have a strong opinion about Protestantism. Personally, the various schisms that befall religions are kind of baffling to me. I guess it comes down to me not understanding how conflict arises from varying interpretations of a text. I mean, I've been in a fair number of arguments about the meaning or message of some (stupid, unimportant SF) story, but it's kind of always seemed obvious to me that we're arguing about our personal preferences rather than the literal truth of the text. Our experiences always inform how we interpret a text, and when we will never have direct access to what the text is about, that's the best we can do. So maybe try to convince people that your particular preferences are better (and such preferences will lead to a particular reading of a text), but don't try to convince people of what the text actually says.
Oops. Uh, I guess I went for a PoMo argument rather than a transhuman argument. That probably won't come off very well.
Oh, uh, I don't actually have a strong opinion about Protestantism. Personally, the various schisms that befall religions are kind of baffling to me. I guess it comes down to me not understanding how conflict arises from varying interpretations of a text. I mean, I've been in a fair number of arguments about the meaning or message of some (stupid, unimportant SF) story, but it's kind of always seemed obvious to me that we're arguing about our personal preferences rather than the literal truth of the text. Our experiences always inform how we interpret a text, and when we will never have direct access to what the text is about, that's the best we can do. So maybe try to convince people that your particular preferences are better (and such preferences will lead to a particular reading of a text), but don't try to convince people of what the text actually says.
;-p Oh, uh, I don't actually have a strong opinion about Science. Personally, the various schisms that befall sciences are kind of baffling to me. I guess it comes down to me not understanding how conflict arises from varying interpretations of data.. Our experiences always inform how we interpret data and observations, and when we will never have direct access to the original experiment, that's the best we can do. So maybe try to convince people that your particular preferences and methods are better (and such preferences will lead to a particular reading of a set of data), but don't try to convince people of what the experiment actually proves.
;-p Oh, uh, I don't actually have a strong opinion about Science. Personally, the various schisms that befall sciences are kind of baffling to me. I guess it comes down to me not understanding how conflict arises from varying interpretations of data.. Our experiences always inform how we interpret data and observations, and when we will never have direct access to the original experiment, that's the best we can do. So maybe try to convince people that your particular preferences and methods are better (and such preferences will lead to a particular reading of a set of data), but don't try to convince people of what the experiment actually proves.
Oh man, it was totally not my intention to get into a science vs. religion debate. But if you want to go down that route, the difference is that in science, reality can (does not always, but can) tell you when you're wrong. Either your law of gravity will get your rocket to the moon or it won't. Either your theory of germs will cure that disease or it won't.
In debates about texts, there is often no fact of the matter, no actual objective truth to be found. This is not me saying that science is better than religion or that religious people have to take things on faith, just that any particular text is a finite source of information.
Like, say, look at debates about whether a character in a novel is gay. Unless the character says, "Hi, I am a gay person," or you have a reliable, omniscient narrator who says "so and so was gay" or you see said character engaging in gay sex, then there might simply be no fact of the matter about whether that character is gay. Each side can argue for one particular interpretation of the text or another, but there is literally no truth about it, only better or worse, or more or less interesting, ways of reading the text. This doesn't make fiction worse than science, but different.
I see no reason why the same is not true of religious texts.
The Vatican Bans Sales of Saints' Body Parts in Updated Relic Ruleshttps://www.yahoo.com/news/vatican-bans-sales-saints-apos-163735371.html (https://www.yahoo.com/news/vatican-bans-sales-saints-apos-163735371.html)
Time
Nicole Winfield / AP •December 16, 2017
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The new rules govern how body parts and cremated remains are to be handled
(VATICAN CITY) — The Vatican’s saint-making office has updated its rules governing the use of relics for would-be saints, issuing detailed new guidelines Saturday that govern how body parts and cremated remains are to be obtained, transferred and protected for eventual veneration.
The instructions explicitly rule out selling the hair strands, hands, teeth and other body parts of saints that often fetch high prices in online auctions. They also prohibit the use of relics in sacrilegious rituals and warn that the church may have to obtain consent from surviving family members before unearthing the remains of candidates for sainthood.
Officials said the guidelines were necessary given some obstacles that had emerged since the rules were last revised in 2007, particularly when surviving relatives and church officials disagreed. One current case before a U.S. appeals court concerns a battle over the remains of Fulton Sheen, an American archbishop known for his revolutionary radio and television preaching in the 1950s and 1960s.
Sheen’s niece went to court to force the archdiocese of New York to transfer Sheen’s body from under the altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to Peoria, Illinois, where Sheen was born, ordained a priest and where his sainthood cause has been launched by Peoria’s bishop.
The New York archdiocese refused and appealed a 2016 lower court ruling in favor of the niece. A decision from the appeals court is expected soon.
Monsignor Robert Sarno of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints said it’s impossible to know what difficulties could complicate a saint-making case or whether the new guidelines might have helped avoid the legal battle over Sheen.
But Sarno said the Vatican believed the updates were needed anyway to provide bishops around the world with a detailed, go-to guide in multiple languages to replace the Latin instructions that provided only general rules to follow.
New to the protocols is a section that makes clear that bishops must have the “consent of the heirs” in regions where the bodies of the dead legally belong to surviving family members. The revised instructions lay out in detail how a body is to be unearthed, saying it must be covered with a “decorous” cloth while a relic is being taken and then re-buried in clothes of similar style.
The guidance also explicitly allows for cremated remains to be used as relics. For most of its 2,000-year history, the Catholic Church only permitted burial, arguing that it best expressed the Christian hope for resurrection. But in 1963, the Vatican explicitly allowed cremation as long as it didn’t suggest a denial of faith about resurrection.
The new instruction also makes clear that bishops must agree in writing to any transfer of the remains, and calls for absolute secrecy when a body is unearthed and a relic taken for eventual veneration.
The document repeats church teaching that relics from candidates for sainthood can only be venerated publicly once they have been beatified, the first step to possible sainthood.
prohibit the use of relics in sacrilegious rituals
As for intercession--don't Protestants ask people to pray for them? It's not like we believe the priest is some kind of superhuman being. It's been understood since the time of Constantine (Donatist controversy) that Grace comes from God, regardless of the priest's own merits.I see I never answered this.
But you only know Jesus via those same authorities, and you're editing out the sources you know Jesus from based on inherited biases. Which is to say, you're hacking at the base of the same pillar you're standing on. If I said to you that I understood the teachings of Confucius better than the Chinese, or those of Muhammad better than the Muslims, because I'd read their respective works in translation and come to conclusions which did not fit with what people from their culture concluded, you'd laugh at me. It's immensely improbable that your superior understanding comes from actual insights rather than ignorance.Dang. Two posts down. "you're hacking at the base of the same pillar". Bumped to tackle later...
No, those are still wrong. They're just clarifying that they aren't made right by chucking St. Alban's left toe in the middle of them.
I'm still waiting on an answer to whether or not the vatican is condemning my planned Álfablót when pithenge is done. I promise not to use any saintly remains.
I'm still waiting on an answer to whether or not the vatican is condemning my planned Álfablót when pithenge is done. I promise not to use any saintly remains.
How about some not so saintly remains??
Don't feel bad, BU.
I went to a Southern Baptist academy when I was in high school. Know what it did for me?
It made me want to "assert my POV--an interpretive framework" to be that The Bible is full of [poop].
Just like The Book of Mormon, Dianetics, Quran, Book of I Ching, Buckland's Big Blue Book of Wicca, the Vitas, and a multitude of other works. These books are the Alex Jones of literature. At least Alex Jones is so full of it he is hilarious for a few minutes.... until you find out people actually believe that crap that have real money/influence.
No, it isn't.YES it is. You're telling me what I mean, and getting it wrong. Have some integrity.
We generally favor King James above other readily available English texts because it comes from the received text, and (so I read) the argument that everything has to be reinterpreted in the light of umpteen other textual variants as they're dug out of holes in the ground is, according to our theologians, crap. I haven't looked into this all that deeply, since I don't care that much.
No, it isn't.YES it is. You're telling me what I mean, and getting it wrong. Have some integrity.
We generally favor King James above other readily available English texts because it comes from the received text, and (so I read) the argument that everything has to be reinterpreted in the light of umpteen other textual variants as they're dug out of holes in the ground is, according to our theologians, crap. I haven't looked into this all that deeply, since I don't care that much.
I am curious about this attitude here, which is not uniquely yours but you're at least being explicit about it. Specifically, you not caring much about some particular way in which the Bible is presented to you. I understand willing to accept there are people who have dedicated more time and effort to various theological arguments and trusting their expertise. After all, there are a variety of very difficult mathematical derivations of physical laws I haven't looked into closely because I am confident smarter people have done them correctly.
But the parallel isn't perfect, because the Bible is the whole thing for Christians, the reason you might be a Christian in the first place. You accept that it is right about there being a god and Christ dying for your sins and all that. This is such a gigantic, life-defining piece of information that I don't understand not wanting to investigate the matter as closely as possible yourself before coming to a conclusion.
Because before you accept the validity of the Bible and place your trust in theologians who have studied it, there are a dozen different religions out there with theologians making arguments about their respective holy texts. There's every reason to believe they've put the same care and attention into their study as your theologians have, but none of that convinces you to switch religions. You are somehow convinced to be a Christian, presumably based on what the Bible says, while admitting you are not an expert on the Bible. So what parts of the Bible inspire belief but don't require theological expertise to do so?
This is excellent. Thing is, while I'm saying, more or less, all the same stuff I would have when I believed, I'm just arguing the internal logic according to the rules as I see them; I threw up my hands about what the actual truth was of God, Jesus and the rest a long time ago, save concluding that Christ was indisputably a great master who had the truest of answers. -So on some level, I'm only arguing for fun, and started this thread explicitly/openly as a troll of 'Lok, who's fun to kick around when it comes to - ooh, other denominations exist. (I'm also deadly earnest, and it's complicated - but I think the proposition that it's me only goes so far when I started this joust precisely because it's in a blind spot my pal has about the reformation and everything. Maybe I'm not wrong to still see blind spot.)No, it isn't.YES it is. You're telling me what I mean, and getting it wrong. Have some integrity.
An example of critical thinking and self-awareness. I long ago came to the conclusion that Elok is an extremely reasonable guy who generally makes good, thoughtful arguments about a lot of subjects. However, on those occasions when he disagrees with me about stuff I care intensely about, I start to believe he's making bad arguments. And I think to myself, "Gosh, Elok, you usually make such good arguments! Why are you making bad ones about this one thing I happen to care about?" And then I step back and consider whether that's likely and realize that if the only variable that differs is me caring a lot, then it's probably not something Elok-related making me think his arguments are bad.
I think it would have not been the Nazi party anymore with Prudence in charge. She was a political dunce not to have had more votes lined up, but wouldn't have overlooked a lot once in charge -she was bossing six brothers, five of them older, since she was eight- and been a leader who didn't -not as secretly as he thought- hold RCs in contempt.-I'm also proud to say that Prophet was the best-received of the seven -the opening story naming the GotM I wrote the Prashanti half of to kick off the project/collaboration was no one's favorite, not even ours, but the least-well received stories, the Spartan and Hive ones, are the two I had the least input into. Like, I was definitely the junior partner, but she wasn't just carrying me - but more experienced and able to generate a volume of excellent copy that I simply did not have the experience to do.
I sense I failed to get to you - I can reread w/ a teeny bit of objectivity, nine years later, and find it effective - but even if I forgot all the background there was no room for in the narrative -And Prudence's biography would run as long as that story just to get her up to those events; she's a previous alt. Believers leader I created for Darsnan, and I once spent a couple hours extemporizing background off the top of my head- and found it effective, indeed, deem it my best fiction ever - but then I was writing to my own tastes, as one does.
Funny; writing Manuel was a kind of very-imaginative autobiography; I was writing from inside his head, while Prudence is sort of an alien by comparison, but I could tell you 10 times as much about her and her life - Ali wrote 2/3rds of the intro passage describing Manny for a Believers story I rejected as ... wildly too ecumenical a Believers faction to have a cross in the logo and had Miriam in charge, which I suppose is all one could hope for from a never-churched atheist trying to write sympathetically. I had dashed off a few passages and suggested a lot of ideas she mostly didn't use, so I made coffee about midnight, and pulled an all-nighter, starting with adding here and there to her intro passage, and writing between my own story fragments. Ali had had little confidence in her own effort, and said she loved mine, finding the voice authentic.
-Deadline the 1st of February, this was the night of the 29th. We generated all seven stories in a couple of weeks, mostly her, but not a one I didn't have a finger in, or vice-versa, and came out sinfully proud, both of us, with what we accomplished. I'm also proud to say that Prophet was the best-received
-Electricity shenanigans pending. Need to shut down and come back to this later...
(no place for it in the story, but the Cardinal and small # of temporal clergy were dedicating/blessing groundbreaking for some new structure when there was a fungal bloom, and ... the young Abbess was left in charge, there being no one else)You really want to stand behind that base assumption? -That right there's this thread all over...
(https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/misinterpretation.png)
Well, I'm trying my best here. If you'd engage more with my arguments instead of one-line criticisms, I'd have a better idea where you're coming from, and they might be less repetitive. As it is, my POV isn't going to change because you call it "groupthink" or accuse me of bad faith.Now that there's hilarious.
I've never heard of one of our churches having the staffing to remain open for visitors 24/7, but I imagine that, if you call ahead, the pastor would be happy to tell you when the church will be open, and possibly even open up the doors for you some time, depending how close he lives to the church. If he's stuck commuting from an hour and change away--which happens sometimes--he might be a bit less enthusiastic about that second option. If the church is at all healthy, it should have at least one or two weekday or weekend services, like Vespers, when the church will be open. Does it have a website?
Uh, clarify? Do you mean, is a fallible church still helpful?I mean if the Church is wrong about some key bit of doctrine, wrong about God, then what good is it?
I mean if the Church is wrong about some key bit of doctrine, wrong about God, then what good is it?
I thought Abraham's obedience was seen as a good thing, as a test of faith or what have you? So yeah maybe God doesn't want that, but you should still do it if he asks you too?
Kind've important to know the difference, though...
My take would ultimately be that they probably did, for the reasons you cite and others - but not as many as often as two cultures implacably opposed would like to believe.