sotto voce

So the comment that 'Price debunks the common idea that Christmas trees are forbidden in the Bible' is incorrect.

Toto

Please explain how you derived that. Show your work and all intermediate steps.

Gorit Maqueda

You may not know that in Spain, a traditionally Catholic country, we had not Xmas trees until recently. My fathers saw them as a foreign, almost heathen tradition, imported from evil countries (Albion and its successors :-)

sotto voce

Jeremiah either referred to 'Christmas' trees, or he didn't. Which?

Toto

Jeremiah did not refer to "Christmas" trees, but he did refer to acts which some self-described Christians interpret as the same as bringing a Christmas tree into the house and decorating it.

These self-described Christians, whom you may label as lascivious virtual pagans or whatever, claim that Jeremiah is the basis for forbidding Christmas trees.

Clear?

sotto voce

Not 'the common idea', then. In fact, something that could arise 'only in America'. Something crackpot. Something hardly fit for serious discussion in FRDB, surely.

Serious students, if not ordinary readers, immediately recognise Jer 10:2 as concerning idols. It concerns the practice described in Isaiah 41:7 and 44:13-17. How is it that Price is unaware of what every standard commentary indicates?

One must reject his offering as either deep ignorance, or as a desperate attempt to insinuate that, while 'Christmas' trees are not biblical, 'Christmas' is. In other words, Robert M. Price is as much a believer in Jesus as the apostles were.

Toto

Most of our threads involve crackpot notions of some sort, according to somebody.

Guess you didn't listen to the podcast. He is quite aware. But some are not, evidently.

Ha ha ha. Merry Christmas, as Dawkins would say.

sotto voce

But even people here don't regard America's fundies as serious.

In that case, he's the unwilling, even frightened, believer.

Not the only one, by the look of it.

EarlDoherty

No, the incoherent babbling comes from NT historicists at the thought of a world without an historical Jesus.

Have you got a link to where Dawkins sings this? And if I were at Disneyland I might join in a singing of a Mickey Mouse theme song. Doesn't mean I believe in Mickey Mouse.

Earl Doherty

sotto voce

That's another battle, another war.

Toto kindly provided a quote. He will do more than that. He will actually recite in public from the Bible, that he claims is not only nonsense, but wicked nonsense! Mind-boggling.

He is certainly on record (a year ago) as saying that he sings carols. Presumably he does not object if someone picks 'O Little Town of Bethlehem', of which I posted an extract.

But nobody does. Do they?

Let's be sensible. Will Dawkins admit that he sings The Red Flag with others, in public? I think he'd rather not.