Category: Religion

By Blown Periphery

War Crimes Part 12 – Moira’s Story

Blown Periphery, Going Postal
This is fiction. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead is coincidental. The events outlined have never to my knowledge occurred. Some of the locations are real.

Like most of the important milestones in Edge’s life his marriage was in the autumn, October 14th of 2000 is St John the Baptist Church Instow. It was and is a beautiful church, nestled into the gentle folds of the hills above the estuary of the Rivers Taw and Torridge. Moira Tremain and Mark Edge were married at 13:00 under a glowering sky and predictably it rained all afternoon. He was smart in his No 2s, a Sergeant now with a Military Cross adding to his impressive tally of medals. Nobody asked him and he felt no need to publicise it. Moira knew and she also knew the toll on his mental health being awarded that medal had cost him.
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By Philthetestmanager

The Flat Earth Society

Firstly a hat tip to the Flat Earth Society, their website is: https://www.tfes.org/  also for Wikipedia, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_flat_Earth_societies

I thought it about time that we all knew something about The Flat Earth Society, (TFES).  I write this article not in jest, you can make your own mind up.  Those that have not blocked a regular poster, Behold a Pale Horse (BaPH), will have seen his oft quoted “Ain’t no such thing as space bro”.  I asked him to write an article, but I suspect this will not happen, so I thought I would do some research and lay out for you what their basic beliefs are and a little bit about them.

Modern flat Earth societies consist of individuals who promote the idea that the Earth is flat rather than an oblate spheroid.  Such groups date from the middle of the 20th century, although some adherents are serious and some are not.  Those who are serious are often motivated by pseudoscience or religious literalism.

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By Blown Periphery

War Crimes Part 11 – Moira’s Story

This is fiction. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead is coincidental. The events outlined have never to my knowledge occurred. Some of the locations are real.

When Angela found Moira it was obvious that Moira had been crying. Her dark mascara had run from her eyes in blue streaks and those eyes were puffy and reddened. Even her hair looked slightly dull and listless, as though the spark had gone to be replaced with self-indulgent misery. She was sitting on the loading bay, pretending to smoke a cigarette. Moira was drawing in with a huge suck, the cigarette end glowing like the tip of an inquisitor’s poker, then she let out the smoke in gentle puffs, because it was obviously too hot for her oral membranes. Inhaling was out of the question.
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By Going Postal

The Organ (ii)

Jethro, Going Postal

Wind

The accompanying image is taken from Dom Bedos’ ‘ l’art du Facteur d’ Orgues’ (1776), and shows, among other things, a single organ-blower, operating one of three ‘feeders’ – or possibly, pumping two of the levers together, while an Organist, using a Manual and the Pedals, is keeping a vigilant eye on the blower. There is a square-shaped ‘Conveyance’ to take the wind towards the pipes. Not, as it appears to be, on the wall, is a figure showing how the movement of a Pedal, through a series of levers – pull-downs, trackers, backfalls – will open the ‘Pallet’ (the dark block ‘b’), a sprung, leather-covered valve, that will allow wind into the ‘Windchest’, and to the relevant pipe, but with a ‘regulator’ interposed (‘17’), to act rather like the smoothing condenser capacitor in a power-supply, Again, as far as I know (‘despite Brexit’) the pressure is normally expressed in ‘inches of wind’(as it were, the Voltage), measured by the water-level in a simple U-tube manometer. Often, in a pipe-organ, the large amount of floor-space taken up by the instrument is because the Reservoir will be a very large set of bellows, the upper surface covered with cast-iron weights (often proudly bearing the Builder’s initials), perhaps assisted by a set of steel springs.

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By OldTrout

O Come, All Ye Faithful

OldTrout, Going Postal
“Holy Mother of God, be thou the cause of peace for Siena and life to Duccio because he painted thee thus.”

The Maestà, or Maestà of Duccio is an altarpiece composed of many individual paintings commissioned by the city of Siena in 1308 from the artist Duccio di Buoninsegna. The front panels make up a large enthroned Madonna and Child with saints and angels, and a predella of the Childhood of Christ with prophets. The reverse has the rest of a combined cycle of the Life of the Virgin and the Life of Christ in a total of forty-three small scenes; several panels are now dispersed or lost. The base of the panel has an inscription that reads (in translation): “Holy Mother of God, be thou the cause of peace for Siena and life to Duccio because he painted thee thus.” Though it took a generation for its effect truly to be felt, Duccio’s Maestà set Italian painting on a course leading away from the hieratic representations of Byzantine art towards more direct presentations of reality. Wiki

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By 1642again

Some Musings on the Natures of God and Man

1642again, Going Postal
The Creation of Adam is a fresco painting by Michelangelo, which forms part of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, painted c. 1508–1512

Well its 4.30 am on a December Tuesday morning and latent musings on the most profound questions of all have flooded my little grey cells into sudden wakefulness, and the ever-lasting wrestling match between the edges of reason and faith that are my life holds me in its restless grip once more.

Three decades ago, my doctoral supervisor in a tutorial said something that was to change my life and which still prompts these thoughts so many long years later, something that shredded my shallow angry atheism.

A confirmed agnostic, he argued that his was the only rational position since it was impossible to disprove the existence, or otherwise, of a transcendent creator God outside time and space.  He went further and argued that atheism was the least rational of all three positions as there is much more circumstantial evidence for the existence of God than for his non-existence (testimonial witness evidence, the fact that all human societies have some belief in a form of divinity).  An argument I still find as compelling today as thirty years ago, albeit I now believe that the testimonial and other circumstantial evidence is of sufficiently high quality to compel faith, if not certainty, in the existence of such a God.  Indeed, the developing understanding of DNA was enough to force Professor Anthony Flew, the Dawkins of the philosophical world for half a century, to abandon his hard-line atheism of half a century and to embrace theism.

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By OldTrout

For Unto Us A Child Is Born – Winchester Cathedral Choir

OldTrout, Going Postal
The Mystical Nativity

The Mystical Nativity is a painting of circa 1500–1501 by the Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli, in the National Gallery in London. Botticelli built up the image using oil on canvas. It is his only signed work, and has an unusual iconography for a Nativity.

The Greek inscription at the top translates as: “This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I Alessandro, in the half-time after the time, painted, according to the eleventh [chapter] of Saint John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three-and-a-half years; then he shall be bound in the twelfth [chapter] and we shall see [him buried] as in this picture”. Botticelli believed himself to be living during the Tribulation, possibly due to the upheavals in Europe at the time, and was predicting Christ’s Millennium as stated in Biblical text.

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By Colin Cross

Evangelicalism

Colin Cross, Going Postal

For a time as a young boy I flirted with Evangelical Christianity. I was born into a family that had close ties to the Salvation Army but although I liked listening to the band as it made its way around the village, stopping to play such tunes as “He is a Friend of Mine” on various street corners it wasn’t really for me.  Sunday mornings at St Michael’s parish church didn’t really appeal either although I knew, even at an early age, that I wanted to be part of something spiritual.

The Pentecostal church in our village seemed to offer something that other branches of the church didn’t. Their Sunday school was taken after the morning worship. This allowed me to marvel at a large group of adults making their feelings know to God and to their fellow worshippers in the most extravagant of ways.

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By OldTrout

Silent Night ( Stille Nacht, Sung By The Vienna Boys Choir)

The Silent Night Chapel

The Silent Night Chapel (Stille-Nacht-Kapelle) is located in the town of Oberndorf bei Salzburg in the Austrian province of Salzburg, and is a monument to the Christmas carol Silent Night and its librettist, Joseph Mohr and its composer, Franz Xaver Gruber. It stands on the site of the former St Nicholas’s Church, where on 24 December 1818 the Christmas carol was performed for the first time.

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By Ang Ryman

Jerusalem – Trump Exposes the Moral Void

And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green? I cannot be alone in thinking that they did not do so to deny justice or to deny their Christian heritage.  Nor did they walk in support of the tyranny of an Arabic and Islamic majority, or minority for that matter.

And was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen? That holy lamb appears to have been slaughtered in accordance with Islamic ritual on England’s once green and pleasant land with the Church of England and the UK Government looking on, impotent.  And now the slaughter is repeated, this time with the UK Government a willing cheerleader, in the elitist auditorium of the United Nations by the UK ambassador to the UN. Here he sided with the confederation of caliphates and Jew haters in condemning the United States of America and its President Donald J Trump for announcing that the USA will follow through with moving its Israeli embassy to the capital city of Israel – Jerusalem.

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