New graveyards may no longer be blessed

BY GILLIAN BELL

Published: 17/06/2010

Burial grounds in the north-east may no longer be blessed under plans to ensure that no religious group or belief is favoured over another.

The option is one which Aberdeenshire councillors will consider as part of a review of the local authority’s policy on the consecration of new graveyards, which has traditionally been carried out by local Church of Scotland ministers.

Aberdeenshire Council is responsible for 213 burial grounds, 35 of which are full. It has built six new burial grounds or extensions since 2000, and it is estimated 15 more will be needed in the next decade.

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C S Lewis on 'Who Is Jesus?'

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The MacMillan Company, 1960, pp. 40-41.)

J Gresham Machen, 'What Is Christianity'

'If that be so, if the Christian religion is founded upon historical facts, then there is something in the Christian message which can never possibly change. There is one good thing about facts — they stay put. If a thing really happened, the passage of years can never possibly make it into a thing that did not happen. If the body of Jesus really emerged from the tomb on the first Easter morning, then no possible advance of science can change the fact one whit. The advance of science may conceivably show that the alleged fact was never a fact at all; it may conceivably show that the earliest Christians were wrong when they said that Christ rose from the dead the third day. But to say that that statement of fact was true in the first century, but that because of the advance of science it is no longer true — that is to say what is plainly absurd. The Christian religion is founded squarely upon a message that sets forth facts; if that message is false, then the religion that is founded on it must of course be abandoned; but if it is true, then the Christian Church must still deliver the message faithfully as it did on the morning of the first Easter Day.'

Coffee With Louis

Friday, 18 June 2010

"Dear Councillors, do the sensible thing and choose option 1 please!"

OPTION TO BE CONSIDERED BY COUNCIL AS PART OF REVIEW

New graveyards may no longer be blessed

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Mark Driscoll

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