Friday 21 February 2014

Ignorance of Today's Youth (and Adults)

The Bible
The Ignorance of Today's Youth (and Adults)!
A recent survey by the Bible Society has highlighted the lack of Bible knowledge, and even awareness of some of the basic Bible accounts among both children and their parents.
The Story Bible
The Story Bible (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Worryingly, almost one in three Britons did not know where the story of the birth of Jesus could be found, which is even more worrying when you consider the survey was conducted just after Christmas. 9% thought that King Midas and Icarus featured in the Bible and 6% thought it contained the story of Hercules.
Other troubling statistics that don't bode well for Christianity in future generations include 23% of children having never heard of Noah's ark, 38% didn't know anything about Adam and Eve, 43% were ignorant of the Crucifixion, 66% knew nothing of the Creation and 75% lacked any knowledge of Daniel in the Lions' den.
The parents didn't know any better, with nearly half failing to recognise Noah's ark as a Bible story, while there was a significant amount of confusion between whether something appears in the Bible, Harry Potter or the Hunger Games.
Yet nearly half of adults think Bible stories provide ‘good values for life’ and 40 per cent say they are important to our history and culture.
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Friday 14 February 2014

Certain people trying to stem freedom of speech

This early morning I was very surprised to find my blog Christadelphian World blocked for public viewing because of a complaint to Google for inappropriate postings.

I am convinced this action against my writings and also taking away others to react on my writings is a breech of freedom of speech, plus a childish and cowardly action undertaken by a person living in a country which was part of the Soviet Union.  Though that person living it that country up North came originally from the United Kingdom he might have taken over dictatorial ideas of the previous oppressors.

He took care that my defence on the accusations he had made publicly were placed on my own website and where supplemented by other people who have seen the same atrocious action that person undertook in the Christian community.

His behaviour and managing to censure other people calls for the question how it is possible that one person can get so much power that he can silence those he does not like! This is bringing democracy and the freedom of speech in danger.

First of all I apologise to those people who made a comment on my articles:Duncan Heaster en Carelinks onverbiddelijke verhinderaars and No reconciliation possible between CBM and Duncan Heaster from Carelinks and could not find their remarks published. it sincerely is not my fault, and I find it strrange that I do not have any control over the texts that are written and comments that are made on the writing on thise platform. Very scary!
 I did send a request to Google to reconsider the accusation of inappropriate writing.

Either it was one person on his own who wants to silence me, or it is an organisation which backs their dictatorial leader and is prepared to do anything to please him, not considering if it is right and justified. The organisation which has the element "care" in in its name as such did not proof until know that it wants to care for those who want to share the love of God.  it also has the element "link" in its name, though since years our small community wants to link with other baptised Christadelphians which reside in Belgium. We also would have loved to give people who ask us for an address to meet, an address of a meeting place where they could find like-minded people.

It is because that person and his organisation do not want their members to meet with CBM members that it is impossible for us those who are in need of fellowship.

In the past we always have made advertisement for a book written and edited by the person who is against us. We also still said the last weeks, to people who phoned us to take contact with that organisation which refuses to arrange contacts with us. We did not mind to send them forwards to an organisation who did not want to share brotherhood with us. But for us it was more important that the people interested to learn about God and his Son could have regular fellowship and Bible study with people who believed in the same things we do.

For the same reason I also ask people when we can not reach them are they are unable to come to us, that they would take up a Bible study with the Jehovah Witnesses, and ask them to come to us if they have further questions. We also ask anybody interested to pose their questions on the internet itself.

Naturally when an other organisation seems to be able to stem the course of our replies, we have entered a very dangerous situation of an outsider bringing censorship on our own, and not their site.

Clearly someone of their organisation is taking much care to follow everything I am writing; Either there is a mole by my subscribers or there is someone taking much time to follow the many websites I present to the general public. In case there is a spy under my subscribers we do find it a pity such a person comes to us with such bad intentions and to cause such nuisance.

I do hope by Google would be people with more sense, than those childish persons who are fighting against such a small fly like me.

Though I must confess the Australian organisation of the above so called Christian and Christadelphian organisation seem to have weird ideas of my power. (See about that lower concerning taking somebody in fellowship and putting him out of fellowship)


In Belgium, we always have been open to the man who accuse me now of slander and who is trying to block me from writing. He even asked Facebook to withdraw me. Probably it is also him who asked Google to withdraw the writings on Blogger. (For that part I must say I do not know if it is him, so it could also have been somebody else who this time managed to do what the leader or the man living in Riga could not do).

We would have loved to welcome Mr. D.H. and people he had baptised in our midst and we did not want otherwise that those baptised Christadelphians in Belgium and Holland, would come together in unity. Our world is to small and we are not with enough to go into small units which would have no voice as such. Combined forces could do so much more.

Because in May 2012 we still had not come to a conclusion and could not have the so called caring Christadelphians meeting with us because the sir of the North refused us to fellowship with them, I called him Mr. ('mister') in the term of address, instead of 'brother', so the organisation took it as I had disfellowshipped him.


In October last year having seen that the person also was on a Christadelphians Unite Group and he himself asked for addresses of other Christadelphians I thought the time was ripe to come to reconciliation and offered him to join forces again. He kept refusing and coming back on my old writing.


We (the Belgian Christadelphians) let the person know that for us it would be best if we could bury the previous period of conflict as one to forget and make steps to rebuild trustworthy contacts. We wanted and still want unity and respect for all members in the Body of Christ.

After months of trying to come to reconciliation I at last went into the pen publicly and defended myself in front of those who questioned me. It was no intention of me to make false statements that could damage a person his reputation. The things brought forward in the Dutch and the English articles can be crosschecked for their viability. (In the comments I also had given a translation of the Dutch text in English and told the Flemish readers the part I forgot to write in the Dutch article but wrote in the English article.)

To Christadelphians we can show the files from the CBM and our discussions with D.H. and C.H. his wife, so that the readers of my articles can make up their mind and see if I did tell lies or that I reacted on facts which did really happen and where said by D. H..

After I had written the articles on this platform I got to know from a member of the Belgian Christadelphians that the organisation from Australia, with the C from Care in their name, would be willing to continue talks in case I re-installed Mr. D.H.

So in Australia they consider my talking to the person of the North by not calling him brother any more, would have included a worldwide taking away of his fellowship in the Christadelphian community. I would never have thought that I would ever be considered to be so powerful to be able to decide who can fellowship or can not fellowship in the worldwide community of Christadelphians.

So it was a strange reaction of that organisation. For my part there was no reason at all we would not take in Mr.D.H. as our brother.

! But what he has done now, after still refusing to have brethren and sisters in the faith meeting with each other, continuing to blame me and to assault me, accusing me of slander, plus him trying to block everything I bring into my defence, so that I could have the right to speak, makes reconciliation impossible.

I can only sincerely state that the whole situation of Mr. D.H. not allowing baptised C.l. members to have fellowship with our CBM baptised Christadelphians, in my eyes him not willing to have us meet together in Belgium, is an unchristian act, which after many trials to come to reconciliation got us nowhere further, except much more agitation and extra difficulties for our members with the CBM now too.

A person being able to stop having published reactions on what I placed in my articles, is a very dangerous person and also a very dangerous situation for the freedom of speech. It is a real infringement of what people should be able to share ideas and communicate with each other. Taking away such a possibility to communicate and to exchange ideas is going into the law of democracy and liberty.

I also do not know how it comes that I can have no control myself of what is written on my own webpages, and why I myself am not able to judge what can, may or could be added as comments to what I have written.

I wonder what organisation is behind such censorship and why they do not have to come those matters with the people involved.

All bloggers should be aware of such a dangerous situation of censorship by somebody, out of our control.

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Please do find the concerned articles where the comments disappeared:
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President of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations considers of undoing the Unitarian idea

English: USVA headstone emblem
USVA headstone emblem (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When we look at the reason why people do come to preferring to be part of a trinity-church it is clear most of them would find themselves weakened more when hey would have to worship only "One God".

On January the 8th, 2014, the Rev. Peter Morales, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, indicated that there is serious consideration of undoing the Unitarian heresy his denomination was founded on.
  ”When you think about it, God as one is just less effective.  You can get so much more done if God is in three persons. Our lawyers are researching alternative names and websites, like Trinitarian Tunaversalists.  We can eat fish on Fridays or on any days, or never at all if we are vegan, so why not put Tuna into  our name?”   A Vatican spokesman said Pope Francis was open to this development.   “In the Catholic Church, we take anybody.  Why not some former heretics?  And we could always use a few more Prius drivers.  It’s good for the soul.”
This teacher who should bring the flock on the right path, shows clearly he himself is going astray or lost track.  Problem here is that he wants to get a whole denomination in changing direction. Though it is good he took some lawyers under his arm to find a proper name for the group he wants to create.

On Ironicschmoozer’s Weblog we can find the important question:
What about the reaction out in the Unitarian Universalist hinterlands?  When contacted by the press, Rev. Roger Jones of Sacramento said that he has no opinion on the matter until he determines whether 90% of his congregation thinks it’s a good idea.  ”Until January 26, I am sticking with my usual talking point:  Unitarians believe in one God at most.”
Are you a Unitarian without knowing it?
Are you a Unitarian without knowing it? (Photo credit: severinus)
Naturally you also could say "Unitarian" does not really holds in the "Unit" being a single thing or person, but also a single element, section of a whole, section of item, and as such I encountered already some unitarians which did have similar ideas as Rev. Peter Morales.
But according to what we came to understand under the name it should only be used for  those who assert the Unity of the Godhead, not as a god being made of three godheads, but ascribing divinity as being the Being of the Total divine Creator which stands for the God the Father only.
On the other hand the Unitarianism stands also for being united without having one governing organisation other than the Cornerstone Jesus Christ, the Messiah. Unitarians believe that each congregation should have independent authority, having their members believing in the unity of God, in freedom of, and tolerance of the differences in religious believes.

In that American church or in the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, you can see the weakness of human people who want to be able to do more. Them expressing “You can get so much more done if God is in three person” explains a lot why the majority is not pleased with the Only One True God and why the prefer to have a triune God.


English: Unitarian Universalist Church of Medf...
Unitarian Universalist Church of Medford Massachusetts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Old orthodox Dissenters and Unitarians in 19° Century London

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Old orthodox Dissenters and Unitarians in 19° Century London

Aggressive Unitarians.


It is not often that Unitarianism is aggressive, or that it seeks the heathen in our streets perishing for lack of knowledge.  Apparently it dwells rather on the past than the present, and prefers the select and scholarly few to the unlettered many.

  Most Unitarian preachers lack popular power; hence it is that their places of worship are rarely filled, and that they seem tacitly to assume that such is the natural and necessary condition of their denomination.  It is with them as it used to be with the old orthodox Dissenters in well endowed places of worship some thirty or forty years ago.  Of them, I well remember one in a leading seaport in the eastern counties.  I don’t believe there was such another heavy and dreary place in all East Anglia, certainly there never was such a preacher; more learned, more solemn, more dull, more calculated in a respectable way to send good people to sleep, or to freeze up the hot blood and marrow of his youthful hearers.

  Once and but once there was a sensation in that chapel.  It was a cold evening in the very depth of winter.  There was ice in the pulpit, and ice in the pew.  The very lamps seemed as if it was impossible for them to burn, as the preacher in his heaviest manner discoursed of themes on which seraphs might love to dwell.  All at once rushed in a boy, exclaiming “Fire, fire!”  The effect was electric — in a moment that sleepy audience was startled into life, every head was raised and every ear intent.  Happily the alarm was a false one, but for once people were awake, and kept so till the sermon was done.  It is the aim of Mr. Applebee in the same way to rouse up the Unitarians, and in a certain sense he has succeeded.  He has now been preaching some eighteen months in London, in the old chapel on Stoke Newington Green, where, for many years, Mrs. Barbauld was a regular attendant, and where long the pulpit was filled by no less a distinguished personage than Burke and George the Third’s Dr. Price; the result is that the chapel is now well filled.  It is true it is not a very large one; nevertheless, till Mr. Applebee’s advent, it was considerably larger than the congregation.


  Before Mr. Applebee came to town he had produced a similar effect at Devonport; when he settled there he had to preach to a very small congregation, but he drew people around him, and ere he left a larger chapel had to be built.  I take it a great deal of his popularity is due to his orthodox training.  It is a fact not merely that Unitarianism ever recruits itself from the ranks of orthodoxy, but that it is indebted to the same source for its ablest, or rather most effective ministers.

In the morning Mr. Applebee preaches at Stoke Newington; in the evening he preaches at 245, Mile End.  It seems as if in that teeming district no amount of religious agency may be ignored or despised.  In the morning of the Sabbath as you walk there, you could scarce fancy you were in a Christian land.  It is true, church bells are ringing and the public-houses are shut up, and well-clad hundreds may be seen on their way to their respective places of worship, and possibly you may meet a crowd of two or three hundred earnest men in humble life singing revival hymns as they wend their way to the East London Theatre, where Mr. Booth teaches of heaven and happiness to those who know little of one or the other; nevertheless, the district has a desolate, God-forsaken appearance.  There are butchers’ shops full of people, pie-shops doing a roaring trade, photographers all alive, as they always are, on a Sunday.

  If you want apples or oranges, boots or shoes, ready-made clothes, articles for the toilette or the drawing-room, newspapers of all sorts — you can get them anywhere in abundance in the district; and as you look up the narrow courts and streets on your left, you will see in the dirty, eager crowds around ample evidence of Sabbath desecration.

  I heard a well-known preacher the other day say it was easy to worship God in Devonshire.  Equally true is it that it is not easy to worship Him in Mile End or Whitechapel.  The Unitarians assume that a large number of intelligent persons abstain from attending a religious service on Sundays in the most part “because the doctrines usually taught” are “adverse to reason and the plain teaching of Jesus Christ.”  Under this impression they have opened the place in Mile End.

  In a prospectus widely circulated in the district, they publish a statement of their creed as follows:
  •  1. That “there is but one God, one undivided Deity, and one Mediator between God and man — the man Christ Jesus.” 
  •  2. That “the life and teachings of Jesus Christ are the purest, the divinest, and truest;” His death consecrating His testimony and completing the devotion of His life; his resurrection and ascension forming the pledge and symbol of their own.
  •   3. “That sin inevitably brings its own punishment, and that all who break God’s laws must suffer the penalty in consequence;” at the same time they “reject the idea with abhorrence that God will punish men eternally for any sins they may have committed or may commit.”

  Such is the formula of doctrine, on which as a basis the Unitarian Mission at Mile End has been established, and to a certain extent with some measure of success.  It is charged generally against Unitarians that they have no positive dogma.

  The Unitarianism of Mr. Applebee has no such drawback.  He has a definite creed, which, whether you believe it or not, at any rate you can understand.  In the eyes of many working men, that is of the class to whom he preaches at Mile End, he has also the additional advantage of being well known in the political arena.  As a lecturer on behalf of advanced principles in many of our large towns he has produced a very great effect.

  I confess I have not yet overcome the horror I felt when I saw at the last election how night after night he spoke at Northampton on behalf of Mr. Bradlaugh’s candidature.  Surely a secularist can have no claim as such on the sympathies of a Christian minister.  Yet at Northampton Mr. Applebee laboured as if the success of Mr. Bradlaugh were the triumph of Gospel truth, and as if in the pages of the National Reformer the working men, to whom it especially appeals, might learn the way to life eternal.  But Mr. Applebee is by no means alone.  In Stamford Street Chapel and in Islington you have what I believe the Unitarians would consider still more favourable specimens of aggressive Unitarianism.
- p. 205 - p 209 from The Religious Life of London by J. Ewing Ritchie
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19° century London, Unitarians and Evangelical Alliance

In our day we have seen something of an Evangelical Alliance, that is, a manifestation of the great fact that people are yearning after a Catholic union, and are caring less and less for denominational differences.  The Unitarians all speak and write of the orthodox as of a body of Christians perfectly distinct from themselves.  Yet there is an approximation between them, nevertheless.  Unitarianism, as it becomes a living faith — as it leans to the theology of the sweetest singers and most impassioned orators of the universal Church — becomes in sentiment and practice orthodox; while orthodoxy, as it grows enlightened, and burst the bonds of habit, and, laden with the spoils of time, gathers up the wisdom and the teaching of all the ages underneath the sun, sanctions the Rationalism and the spirit of free inquiry for which Unitarianism has ever pleaded and its martyrs have died in our own and other lands.


Sign on a UU church in the United States.
Sign on a UU church in the United States. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Actually, at the meeting of the British and Foreign Unitarian Society, an effort was made to get rid of the title altogether, and to call themselves instead a British and Foreign Free Christian Association, on the plea that the Christian Church consists of all who desire to be the children of God in the spirit of Jesus Christ His Son, and that, therefore, no association for the promotion of a doctrine which belongs to controversial theology can represent the Church of Christ.  To this Unitarianism has attained in our time.  This is the teaching of Foster, and Ham, and Ierson, and Martineau — a teaching seemingly in accordance with the spirit of the age.

Unitarian theology is always coloured with the philosophy of the hour, and consequently it is now spiritual and transcendental instead of material and necessitarian.

As regards London, the statistics of Unitarianism are easy of collection.  In their register we have the names of fifteen places of worship, where HolyScripture is the only rule of faith, and difference of opinion is no bar to Christian communion.  In reality Unitarians are stronger than they seem, as in their congregations you will find many persons of influence, of social weight, of literary celebrity.  For instance, Sir Charles Lyell and Lord Amberley are, I believe, among the regular attendants at Mr. Martineau’s chapel in Portland Street.  At that chapel for many years Charles Dickens was a regular hearer.  The late Lady Byron, one of the most eminent women of her day, worshipped in Essex Street Chapel, when Mr. Madge preached there.  In London the Unitarians support a domestic mission, a Sunday-school association, an auxiliary school association, and a London district Unitarian society.

- p. 196 - p 204 from The Religious Life of London by J. Ewing Ritchie
Release Date: June 16, 2010  [eBook #32844]

Language: English

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