Paraskevidekatriaphobia

From Our Friends at Wikipedia: Friday the 13th occurs when the thirteenth day of a month falls on Friday, which superstition holds to be a day of good or bad luck. In the Gregorian calendar, this day occurs at least once, but at most three times a year. Any month’s 13th day will fall on a Friday if the month starts on a Sunday. In 2009 this applies to the months of February, March, and November. The next instance of this appears on the calendar for the year 2015. The fear of Friday the 13^th is called paraskevidekatriaphobia.

A theory by author Charles Panati, one of the leading authorities on the subject of “Origins,” maintains that the Friday the 13^th superstition can be traced back to ancient myth: “The actual origin of the superstition, though, appears also to be a tale in Norse mythology. Friday is named for Frigga, the free-spirited goddess of love and fertility. When Norse and Germanic tribes converted to Christianity, Frigga was banished in shame to a mountaintop and labeled a witch. It was believed that every Friday, the spiteful goddess convened a meeting with eleven other witches, plus the devil – a gathering of thirteen – and plotted ill turns of fate for the coming week. For many centuries in Scandinavia, Friday was known as ‘Witches’ Sabbath.’”

A further theory goes back to a combination of Paganism, Christianity, and the Battle of Hastings. For many, the number 13 was considered a lucky number, but with the efforts of Christianity attempting to degrade all things Pagan, they promoted 13 as an unlucky number, with Friday thus also being considered a bad day of the week. However, on Friday the 13th of October 1066, the decision was made by King Harold II to go to battle on Saturday the 14th of October, rather than allow his troops a day of rest (despite his army having made a long and arduous march from a battle near York just 3 weeks earlier). This decision in going to battle before the English troops were rested (the English lost and King Harold was killed), further established Friday the 13th as an unlucky day.

The Dutch Centre for Insurance Statistics (CVS) on June 12, 2008, stated that “fewer accidents and reports of fire and theft occur when the 13^th of the month falls on a Friday than on other Fridays, because people are preventatively more careful or just stay home. Statistically speaking, driving is slightly safer on Friday 13^th.

Burnt Offerings

By Lauren Winner, Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2009 

There is an old, snooty church joke that goes something like this: Miss Smith approaches her pastor, incensed that he has replaced the King James Bible with the New International Version. “Pastor, bring back the King James,” she says. “If it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”

Last week the joke was ignited—literally, at the Halloween book burning sponsored by Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, N.C. The church’s Web site declared the burning to be “a great success.” Works thrown into the flames included those by supposed heretics Billy Graham, Mother Teresa and emergent church guru Brian McLaren. “It was a success because God’s Word was glorified and uplifted,” according to the Web site. Claiming scriptural warrant for the burning, the site quoted Acts: “And many that believed, came and confessed and shewed their deeds. Many of them also which used curious arts, brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.”

Most disturbing, Scripture itself was burned—onto the pyre flew modern translations of the Bible like those that the woman in the joke deplored. Amazing Grace is a self-proclaimed King James Only church: “We believe that the King James Bible is the Word of God,” says the church’s Web site. “We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be the verbally and plenary inspired Word of God. We believe that the KJV is inspired of God.”

In this, the church in Canton is part of a larger movement that claims the Authorized, or King James Version, of the Bible is the only reliable translation. Indeed, some have even claimed that it is inerrant—because it is based on a superior Greek text. The concerns that animate the King James Only movement have their source in late 19th- and early 20th-century anxieties about German higher criticism of Scripture: Does a text have to be inerrant in order to be reliable? (And within these conversations about which Bible to read are also whispers of another debate: Some fundamentalist co-religionists argue against reading the KJV, on the grounds that King James himself was supposedly gay.)

“Book burning” may call to mind the conflagrations in Nazi Germany or the Cultural Revolution. But fiery libricide has a long history in the church. As scholars including critic Haig Bosmajian have made clear, Christians have been burning books for centuries. (Perhaps the church learned this from early persecutions in which their own “inspired and sacred scriptures” were, as Eusebius recounts, “committed to the flames in the midst of the marketplace.”) Over and over, the church burned Jewish books: Christian crusaders and Spanish Inquisitors burned Jewish sacred books; in one instance, a Dominican priest took fire from a one of his monastery’s candlesticks and set a copy of Maimonides’ “Guide to the Perplexed” aflame. And Christian books deemed heretical were destroyed, too. In the fourth century, Constantine ordered the heretical writings of Arius burned.

After the 1526 printing of the Tyndale Bible, the bishop of London ordered copies burned at St. Paul’s cathedral. (This prefigured the 1536 burning of Tyndale himself.) Across the Atlantic, Puritan authorities burned books belonging to Quaker women in Boston in 1656. More recently, in December 1948, Catholic students in Binghamton, N.Y., led a comic-book burning. As the books burned, they sang a rousing tune: “An Army of Youth flying the standard of truth. / We are fighting for Christ the Lord. / Heads lifted high, Catholic Action our cry, / And the cross our only sword.”

And remember in 2003, when a father-son pastor team in Michigan burned a Harry Potter novel outside church? Ironic, that burning: The very ritual of burning a book smacked of the supernaturalism and even magic that the pastors were ostensibly protesting. Spectators caught the spirit and started burning other books, as well, including, yes, a non-King James Bible. That’s what they call fanning the flames.

Post-Christendom

The following stories are from Stuart Murray Williams, an Anabaptist Theologian from Great Britian. It shows how post-Christian European culture has become and the path North America is on. As Williams says, these “indicate the demise of Christendom and the emergence of a culture in which the story, language and symbols of Christianity are becoming unknown.”

1. In a London school a teenager with no church connections hears the Christmas story for the first time. His teacher tells it well and he is fascinated by this amazing story. Risking his friends’ mockery, after the lesson he thanks her for the story. One thing had disturbed him, so he asks: ‘Why did they give the baby a swear-word for his name?’

2. One Sunday in Oxford a man visits a church building to collect something for his partner who works during the week in a creative-arts project the church runs. He arrives as the morning congregation is leaving and recognises the minister, whom he knows. Surprised, he asks: ‘What are all these people doing here? I didn’t know churches were open on Sundays!’

3. A teenager was fascinated by the ‘magic square’ on Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona, in which many numerical combinations add up to 33. ‘Why 33?’ she asked. ‘Because Jesus died at that age.’ ‘That was young – what did he die of?’ Walking into the cathedral she continued, ‘Who’s that woman and why does she always have a baby?’

Hurricane Break

No blogging today – just wind and rain.

Disturbing. Is This the Future?

This is terribly, terribly disturbing on a number of levels. What do you think? 

From the British tabloid/newspaper The Sun: “A British plastic surgeon chose a young woman as his bride and then sculpted her into his ideal wife, according to The Sun. Reza Vossough hated 33-year-old Cany’s body, but they tied the knot anyway after he spotted her ‘potential,’ The Sun reported. Vossough then performed eight operations to change his bride’s chest, thighs, eyes and face. Vossough spent five years pumping 1,600 grams of silicone into her body, boosting her size A chest to a fuller F cup. He also enhanced her lips, lifted her eyelids and de-creased her forehead. 

“The former waitress also had nip-and-tuck ops to her behind, tummy and thighs and countless Botox injections. Only after $29,736 of cosmetic surgery did Vossough, 48, fall in love with his wife. And his wife is thrilled with the transformation. ‘When your husband is a plastic surgeon, then the scalpel is your friend,’ Cany told The Sun.

Does This Describe Your Life?

Conservative Bible Project

In 2006, Andy Schlafly, best known as the son of notorious anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, launched a wiki site called Conservapedia as an alternative to Wikipedia. The nation’s sixth most frequently visited Web site had, he felt, become dominated by liberal and anti-Christian bias. Now Schlafly has a new project: Rewriting the Bible to free it from liberal bias. The new translation will be free of “emasculated” (all male pronouns, please) and “dumbed-down” (no easy reading like the NIV, please) language as well as “liberal wordiness” (huh?). So-called “later-inserted liberal passages” will be deleted entirely (that is, all manuscript discoveries since the translation of the KJV). All of these changes will be made by amending the King James Version of the Bible through an online wiki format (No kidding! Jump in and add your two cents at http://conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project).

So how is the new translation proceeding? As of October 11, the completed “translations” on Conservapedia include Mark 1-8, Matthew 1-9, Luke 1-2, John 1-3, Philemon, and a few verses from Genesis, 1 John, Jude, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians. Calling the works in question “translations” may be a misnomer since the changes are simply re-phrasings of passages from the King James Version. But in their interpretive procedures and principles participants in the CBP see themselves as restoring the text to its original state.

This project presents serious problems for those scholars, ministers, and lay-people concerned with the ethics of interpretation (no kidding). The CBP’s approach stands in stark opposition to other exegetes who have sought to reconsider possible readings of the text on ethical grounds. Such interpreters have typically rejected the positivist search for a unique, original meaning while maintaining a strong degree of philological and historical-critical rigor in their development of ethical interpretations.