Gruppi cristiani “indignati” per la conferenza sulla riforma tenutasi a Church House

I’m sure there are even more Christians not outraged. Non-story.

Exodus 22:21 “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”
I’m sure Jesus would love to host the Reform folk under his Father’s roof.

According to the last census only 41% of the UK population are Christiaan. Also consider: if you go the New Testament for instruction on how to live, you are told to give away all your possessions, make no plans for the future, reject your family if they disagree with you, and stay celibate if you can (see respectively Matthew 19.21, Matthew 6.25, Matthew 12.48, and 1 Corinthians 7). This is the outlook of people who sincerely believed that the Messiah was going to return next week or next month, anyway very soon. It is an unlivable ethic, and when after several centuries the Second Coming had still not materialised and hope of it had been deferred sine die, more was needed in the way of ethics. Where did it come from? From Greek philosophy – not least from the Stoics – and from the Roman Republican virtues of probity, honour, duty, restraint, respect, friendship and generosity that Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Horace, and countless others wrote about and enjoined ceaselessly. ‘Christian values’ are largely Greek and Roman secular values. So Christianity is not even Christianity.

An associated point reinforces this. The early Christians, like St Paul, were Jews. They believed that when you die, your body sleeps in the grave until the Last Trump, at which points the graves open and all the dead rise to be judged. St Paul said that the faithful will ‘see no corruption’ – that is, their bodies will not rot in the grave. But anyway at the Last Trump when all rise, the faithful will be clothed in ‘new bodies,’ resplendent and fine.

But when Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire (which it very quickly did; it was legalised by Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313, and made the empire’s official religion by Theodosius IX in 381; within the next few decades all other religions were proscribed) and churches were being built apace, all requiring relics of the martyrs and saints, these latter were found to have rotted (‘seen corruption’) in their graves. This embarrassing problem was quickly got over by importing another useful idea from Greek philosophy: Plato’s doctrine of the immortal soul, which entered Chritianity via the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus and his followers. That is why, starting from several centuries after the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth, Christians believe in such a thing. Once again, Christianity is not Christianity but borrowed Greek philosophy.

Mr Cameron would in fact have been more right to say that ‘we are Greeks and Romans’ and meant that we are defined by the following words – and therefore concepts – of classical Greek and Latin origin: democracy, liberalism, values, history, morality, comedy, tragedy, literature, music, academy, alphabet, memory, politics, ethics, populace, geography, energy, exploration, hegemony, theory, mathematics, science, theatre, medicine, gymnasium, climate, clone, bureaucracy, dialect, analogy, psychology, method, nostalgia, organ, encyclopaedia, education, paradox, empiricism, polemic, rhetoric, dinosaur, telescope, system, school, trophy, type, fantasy, photography…take almost any word denoting political and social institutions, ideas, learning, science and technology, medicine, and culture, and it derives from the language – and therefore the ideas and the history – of ancient Greece and Rome.

Church congregations are well within their rights to object to groups using their spaces that they disagree with

One church hall I used to live at was fine with war games groups, just not Warhammer, because there were deamons, another I know of doesn’t allow yoga classes because they feel it has links to another religion

I don’t agree with either of those, but that’s their choice

If a party like Reform wanted to use the space my religious group uses, I can guarantee you we would object and refuse the booking