What Went Down–28 February 2010

A day late, but better late then never right?

Check out this link for our reference material: http://www.ucg.org/teenstudy/comparingreligions.htm

As we took a seat for the session today, Alex pulled out his usual wad of notes; and yes, it was religious discussion! Now I’m not going into intense discussion, because you all can check that out at the link above, but I’ll briefly touch on what we discussed:

• There are clearly many differences between Christianity and other religions
• The similarities that there are often boil down to the “holy figure” in the other religion having plagerised or stolen quotes from the Bible or Jesus’ words
• Christ is indeed the only way
• There are some odd ideas practiced in other religions
• Every religion has its fanatics (Muslims have terrorists, (that’s not saying all Muslims by definition are terrorist though) Buddhists have their monks, and even Christians have odd cults that claim to be “the truth” and, quite frankly, are far from it!
• You must admire one thing from some other religions: their devotion (albeit completely to the wrong god, or gods) to their deity could be something Christians can learn from when it comes to our relationship with Christ
• In order to know better about what we believe, we also need to know what others believe so we know what we’re not believing!

And finally we were left with a thought-provoking question (see the above-linked site):

How should we respond to people who have different religious beliefs?

Think about that one too….

NOTE: there will be NO youth next week (7th March) because of the presentation by “Jews for Jesus” by a Mr. Sichsy, ONLY in the morning service, so you’re encouraged to be there!

What Went Down–21 February 2010

For the article we used, check out http://www.ucg.org/teenstudy/valentineday.htm .

Yes, I know what you’re thinking, that Valentine’s Day was actually last week, but since we weren’t able to get together for youth last week, we decided to do it today. If you haven’t had a chance to look at the link I’d highly recommend it now.

Anyhow we discussed the origins of the day, which was actually the day that St. Valentine was martyred for his faith. We looked at the pagan origins of the original “Valentines day” which had some seriously un-Christian things in it, and was called “Lupercus Day.” We also discussed how seriously wrong the Christians were at the time to try to allow those ‘pagans’ to come to Christianity and bring their somewhat seedy festival with them. After the Pope’s good first move, he also messed up by making St. Valentine the “patron saint” of love and further amalgamating non-Christian events into Christianity. That led us to talk about how we really shouldn’t mix up other stuff into our walk with Christ…somewhat like that Windhoek ad, “always keep it real, no pink drinks, Dave!” and “no other stuff.”

We eventually agreed that although there is nothing wrong with the fun in Valentine’s Day as it it celebrated today, just don’t call it Christian…

remember to take a look at the site we used, which offers some great questions to get you thinking!