I am getting freaking annoyed with our church ...
Today we had a sermon, that, I shit you not, was right out of some bad hokey e-mail forward that a reasonable person might loathe to get from that crazy relative who just got AOL v47.0 and learned how to click the "[ Forward >> ]" button.
It was a sermon about how "the twelve days of Christmas" (the song) was a lyrical encoding of major points of the Christian faith. What was the reason given for the existence of such a clever encoding of these tenets? Well, the King of England outlawed the Catholic church and anyone caught with any written materials of this banned church was immediately executed, even children! So these poor uneducated peasants decided to create some drastically overreaching imagery and entangle it into a song that would only be sung for roughly one month out of the year. My first thought was that the values cleverly encoded into these lyrics (such as the belief in the new and old testaments, the Pentateuch, the four gospels, the eight beatitudes, etc.) were common to both the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church.
Now, this guy is generally smart and learned, so I listened and let him finish his corny explanations. I left room for the possibility that he was right, but I had a pretty strong feeling that this would be like the "ring around the rosie" explanation (of being a historic reference to the bubonic plague) that's been circulating forever. When I got home and researched it, however, I found out that I was vindicated in my doubt.
Let's just hypothesize, for a minute, though that this was true. Then comes the really strange behavior. The pastor, in the middle of the service says "What always gets me is that, in this age of political correctness where we can't have any Christianity in schools and the white house has a 'Holiday' tree, this song is still sung! These people don't even know they're singing about the Bible!" And some really bona fide fucktards in the "audience" start clapping. HOW IS THIS A VICTORY? Would, perhaps, chanting some liturgy in Latin make me Catholic by osmosis? Perhaps this is along the lines of listening to Led Zeppelin (or insert your other favorite back-masking example band here) backwards can make one commit unspeakable acts of evil.
I'm just aghast at how much a time waster this was and how utterly useless and false it was, too. I mean, sometimes "false teachings" are hard to pick out, but dedicating an entire Sunday morning to some outrageous and unreasonable bullshit that anybody who has any understanding of the basic differences between Protestantism and Catholicism could easily disparage is just reprehensible. I should point out that this pastor, also, has a PhD.
And, gladly, we found out that when he was away a few weeks ago, it was because he was training other pastors in India.
Retards.
(Update - As Bethany pointed out, he may or may not have known this whole thing was a lie. If he did, then that's bad enough. If he didn't, then how can I trust the reasoning of a person who couldn't pick the truth from lies here, even when the information is freely and easily available from repubatable sources online?)
(Update 2 - I did not mention that there is no substantive evidence to suggest that this song is NOT a clever encoding of the catechism, however, it would seem highly unreasonable that it is)
It was a sermon about how "the twelve days of Christmas" (the song) was a lyrical encoding of major points of the Christian faith. What was the reason given for the existence of such a clever encoding of these tenets? Well, the King of England outlawed the Catholic church and anyone caught with any written materials of this banned church was immediately executed, even children! So these poor uneducated peasants decided to create some drastically overreaching imagery and entangle it into a song that would only be sung for roughly one month out of the year. My first thought was that the values cleverly encoded into these lyrics (such as the belief in the new and old testaments, the Pentateuch, the four gospels, the eight beatitudes, etc.) were common to both the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church.
Now, this guy is generally smart and learned, so I listened and let him finish his corny explanations. I left room for the possibility that he was right, but I had a pretty strong feeling that this would be like the "ring around the rosie" explanation (of being a historic reference to the bubonic plague) that's been circulating forever. When I got home and researched it, however, I found out that I was vindicated in my doubt.
Let's just hypothesize, for a minute, though that this was true. Then comes the really strange behavior. The pastor, in the middle of the service says "What always gets me is that, in this age of political correctness where we can't have any Christianity in schools and the white house has a 'Holiday' tree, this song is still sung! These people don't even know they're singing about the Bible!" And some really bona fide fucktards in the "audience" start clapping. HOW IS THIS A VICTORY? Would, perhaps, chanting some liturgy in Latin make me Catholic by osmosis? Perhaps this is along the lines of listening to Led Zeppelin (or insert your other favorite back-masking example band here) backwards can make one commit unspeakable acts of evil.
I'm just aghast at how much a time waster this was and how utterly useless and false it was, too. I mean, sometimes "false teachings" are hard to pick out, but dedicating an entire Sunday morning to some outrageous and unreasonable bullshit that anybody who has any understanding of the basic differences between Protestantism and Catholicism could easily disparage is just reprehensible. I should point out that this pastor, also, has a PhD.
And, gladly, we found out that when he was away a few weeks ago, it was because he was training other pastors in India.
Retards.
(Update - As Bethany pointed out, he may or may not have known this whole thing was a lie. If he did, then that's bad enough. If he didn't, then how can I trust the reasoning of a person who couldn't pick the truth from lies here, even when the information is freely and easily available from repubatable sources online?)
(Update 2 - I did not mention that there is no substantive evidence to suggest that this song is NOT a clever encoding of the catechism, however, it would seem highly unreasonable that it is)