General Chat

David ........

I always believed that the Christmas Tree was a tradition brought to England by Prince Albert when he married Victoria?



no ..... I'm wrong. It was introduced to England earlier than that .............. by Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the German-born wife of George III, who had the first Christmas tree done for a children's party in 1800.

Having a Christmas tree continued as a tradition in the Royal Family after that, though it was rarely found outside that group. Victoria as a child was familiar with it ...... a tree was placed in Victoria's room every Christmas from when she was a child..

But having a Christmas tree became much more common after she married Prince Albert.


The tradition of having a Christmas tree goes back to the Celtic tradition of having evergreen boughs in the home at that time of year.



The first Christmas tree sent to the UK by the King of Norway appears to have been sent in 1947, for public display in London, as a thank you for the safe haven given to the King in England during WW2

In recent decades creationism, as in Genesis has been mocked in favour of evolution.
If one part of the Bible is untrue / myth and other parts are questionable, what are we to make of the book as a whole?

Remember it's only in the last one hundred years that the majority of people even learned to read. Formerly they couldn't read the Bible.

The Christmas Tree in Trafalgar square is a gift from the people of Oslo dating from 1947 in recognition of Britain's help during WW2. Victoria and Albert made christmas trees generally popular in the 1850's although they had been a feature of Christmas within the Royal Family long before this.

One should always remember that the Bible was not written while events were going on .............. most of the Bible that we read now was actually written centuries later, from oral stories passed down by generations. I think the closest that any story in the Bible was written was about 40 years after the event that was being related.

That means we have to remember that oral tales are told to uneducated people who would have no conception of many of the events so told, so the story tellers couched the stories in terms of what their audience would understand.

Thus the creation taking place over 6 days .......... the populace would understand one day, or even one week, but they would not understand the millenia that actually intervened between each event.

This becomes apparent when you delve into oral stories told by indigenous peoples around the world.

For example ..........

The First Nations on the west coast of Canada and the northwest US have a story about a major flood that inundated villages and killed many people.

That story was pooh poohed for at least 100 years. Until, that is, a) geologists started looking at geological strata on cliffs at the sea, and b) had access to both oral and written histories from Japan.

There was a very large earthquake in Japan, and mention of huge waves, related in the histories written at the time of the event. The geological evidence from BC and Washington State in the US proved that extremely high tsunamis had indeed reached the West Coast, and would have inundated villages.

Only, the First Nations back then did not know about the consequences of an earthquake across the ocean ....... they just knew that the sea had risen and inundated the land and killed people. They assigned that to magical effects.

St Luke was a Greek, and came from Antioch. He was a slave and had been trained as a physician as was often the case as this gave the family a resident doctor. He was a close associate of Paul of Tarsus. He is mentioned in Paul's epistle to the Corinthians. Luke is believed to have died a martyr although accounts of this do vary.

When I was a lot younger and knew even less, I used to think that the people in the Bible had biographers or chroniclers beside them, or nearby taking notes.
Now we learn that things were written down much later perhaps by people who were not even eye witnesses.

David - The gossip mongers of the daily publications continue to pour out tripe & other salacious nonsense which is lapped-up with eagerness & unconcern by their avid readers, despite the shock decision to cancel page 3.

Accuracy is not a concern for many but readership figures are vital for survival.

Very interesting comment Dermot

Seems there was two or more hundred tears passed before they agreed
on what was to be the Holy Bible

well Wycliffe was he first reported person in 138 AD to produce a hand written copy of the complete bible into englsh of 80 books ! and was reliant on the 4th century latin transcriptions.
In 1611 parts were officially removed and that resluted in 1885 left 66 books.

So what was mistranscribed and made-up time, plus like any good failry tale its the readers choice to make of it what you will.........some still belive faries and goblins live at the bottom of the garden,,,,,,,,,,,, :-D :-D. and that 5000 were fed from 2 fishes and a sliced loaf.

Yes Kay???? , but very much earlier, when the Church was new, there was a big meeting of Bishops to decide which of the many scriptures should be in the Holy Bible and which should be left out.
And this at a time when it was only the clergy that were literate
Literacy for the masses is relatively new

Kay???? - I heard it was 5 barley loaves - sliced or otherwise, not clarified. :-S

David ..........


that big meeting was hundreds of years after the events, so they were making a decision on which scriptures to leave out while even further removed from the events that the writers had been!


Then you have the big Synod of bishops in Whitby in 664 AD to decide on which form of Christianity to follow ..... the Celtic or the Roman. Again, decisions were made based on different interpretations of the events that had occurred centuries before.

According to reports of the Synod, one major debate that seems particularly relevant today centred around the issue of the calculation of the dates for celebrating Easter.

According to the Irish Christians, their roots went back as far as the apostle John and his churches. The Romans, however, insisted that the apostles Peter and Paul and their churches practiced Easter in the pattern which the Roman church kept.

The Roman Catholic practice eventually became the version that we observe today.

It would be very interesting to discover how the two differed, especially in view of the current debate in some sectors to change Easter to a fixed date.

Big loaves Dermot.......maybe very large french sticks.....

we could do with some of that magic now to feed the starving. ;-) :-D

The drive towards literacy was begun in the 1830's. The first inspector of schools was appointed at this time. Full literacy was reached in 1900, when, since 1891, all children had to attend school till they were 10, the penny fee was abolished and their schooling was free. The first person to write down what eventually became the bible was Moses. (OT) It took over 1.000 years to compose. It was translated from latin into English in about 1611.

Of course the OT is Hebrew history, and came down by word of mouth as did the New Testament which was originally written in Greek, Both were translated into Latin, until they were finally translated into English and many other languages and incorporated with each other as the bible we are familiar with. This took centuries!!

I have yet to meet anyone who claims they have read the Bible, cover to cover.

and of course, oral history changes over the eyars as different story tellers put different emphasis on events, or different ways to explain things to their illiterate listeners who didn't know much about life outside the 1 or 2 miles surrounding their home village.

and that applies even today.

I went to Yugoslavia in 1958 ...... that was very different from my life in England, and it was hard, in some ways, to describe the country and the things we saw to my parents who were well-read but had never been out of England

I went to Texas in 1967 ................. my concept of that state was derived from the movies, and I fully expected to see sage brush desert, bad lands, etc etc, everywhere.

NOT true!

You're quite right Sylvain, all the bible stories came down by word of mouth, and were distorted, biased or sometimes true!!! Once translated it then became as it is today, and that's what we finally have for better or worse!!!

Recent awful events in Brussels makes us realise how precious a thing civilisation is & how its great enemy - barbarism - is always waiting to destroy it. :-S And that's the Bible truth.

The bible is a book what followers cherry pick over,,

stone to death homosexuals..is glossed over and maybe is a myth.

stone to death a woman who has strayed .

the list is endless.

yet these things arent told to listening audience at a sunday service.


though each to their own,