Christian Creeds

When early Christian Church leaders were trying to come up with a statement of faith, or creed, they looked first to sacred texts and then to tradition. The purpose of a creed was to formalise what was considered correct belief and oppose those errors that these church leaders saw popping up around the Mediterranean world. You can trace schisms in Christianity through respective creeds and their interpretations such as the filioque controversy. By the time of the Reformation protestant churches throughout Europe were developing their own creeds and in doing so, looking back to the origins of Christianity.

The following link will take you to site called Creeds of Christendom. It lists a lot of creeds and some have a commentary.

http://www.creeds.net/#rcc

Gilgamesh and the Flood

We were talking the other day about creation stories in the book of Genesis and I happened to mention the story of the flood. I asked the students to look up the epic of Gilgamesh and discover how it could have been a source for Genesis. The following links tell the story and analyse its impact on the story of the biblical flood.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/GILG.HTM

The following table has been copied from the Institute for Creation Research. You need to be careful when researching biblical origins and influences as fundamentalists, who have a very widespread web presence, use stories such as Gilgamesh to prove the historical veracity of biblical texts. However, this gives a quick summary of the similarities and differences in the two stories.

COMPARISON OF GENESIS AND GILGAMESH
	GENESIS	GILGAMESH
Extent of flood	Global	Global
Cause	Man's wickedness	Man's sins
Intended for whom?	All mankind	One city & all mankind
Sender	Yahweh	Assembly of "gods"
Name of hero	Noah	Utnapishtim
Hero's character	Righteous	Righteous
Means of announcement	Direct from God	In a dream
Ordered to build boat?	Yes	Yes
Did hero complain?	Yes	Yes
Height of boat	Several stories (3)	Several stories (6)
Compartments inside?	Many	Many
Doors	One	One
Windows	At least one	At least one
Outside coating	Pitch	Pitch
Shape of boat	Rectangular	Square
Human passengers	Family members only	Family & few others
Other passengers	All species of animals	All species of animals
Means of flood	Ground water & heavy rain	Heavy rain
Duration of flood	Long (40 days & nights plus)	Short (6 days & nights)
Test to find land	Release of birds	Release of birds
Types of birds	Raven & three doves	Dove, swallow, raven
Ark landing spot	Mountain -- Mt. Ararat	Mountain -- Mt. Nisir
Sacrificed after flood?	Yes, by Noah	Yes, by Utnapishtim
Blessed after flood?	Yes	Yes

Jim Jones and The People's Temple

Today one of my students asked if I had seen a documentary on a religious cult that had aired on television earlier in the week. I hadn't, but we started discussing Cults and I mentioned that when I was at school one of the big stories was Jim Jones and The People's Temple. I briefly outlined what I remembered and after a little more discussion we got back to work. So here is a couple of pages that tell the story and a picture of the aftermath.

http://www.gbs.sha.bw.schule.de/jim_jones_history.htm

http://www.cnn.com/US/9811/18/jonestown.anniv.01/

There is a PBS documentary about Jim Jones and here's a link to the site that contains information about it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/jonestown/

Jewish Bioethics on ABC Radio National's Religion Report

Posted below is a link to the recent ABC Radio National Religion Report Podcast that looks at Jewish Bioethics. It also contains a report on the recent Lambeth Conference and the danger of a split in the Anglican Church.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/default.htm

Listen to this episode

If you just want to read a transcript of the show go to the following link.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2008/2333504.htm#transcript