Psalm of Davey #6 – For Me To Live Is Christ

This is the sixth of my cycle of ten Hymns, called “The Psalms of Davey”. They are being reproduced in a special category on this blog one after another. In only one case is the tune my own (that’ll be number ten). In other cases, please follow the links to get to the midi for the tunes, courtesy of http://www.cyberhymnal.org

6. “FOR ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST”

Words Uncle Davey, Voronezh, Russia, 10th October 1985. Music Robert Jackson (1842-1914) Tune name “Trentham”. The tune appears to be named after the village of Trentham near Stoke-on-Trent, England, which has a pleasant lake backed by hills and the river Trent and the canal nearby. It is my favourite of the four famous tunes we have from this composer. It is of course a Short Meter tune, and ideal for meditative hymns. Most commonly it is sung to “Breathe on me breath of God”.

First published on the net on 24th April 2004

(NB. The picture to the right was taken in 1985, this is how I looked when I wrote this hymn.)

1.
For me to live is Christ,
For me to die is gain
Lord, may this blessed truth me guide,
In comfort and in pain.

2.
Not I it is who live
But Christ doth dwell within.
My former, carnal self hath died
And I am dead to sin.

3.
The life which now I live
I live by faith alone,
In Christ who loved me and gave
Himself, me to atone.

4.
So may the Lord restrain
Me from all other plea
And may the cross of Christ my God
My only glory be.


“”For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”(Philippians 1 v 21) “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless, I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2 v 20) “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (Galatians 6 v 14)


9/11 – Burn a Qur’an Day? From Pentecostalist to Pentagontalist in a few easy backpedals?

Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingd...
"Understander of Faiths", and Brown-Noser-in-Chief of the coming Antichrist

Dr Jones, the Florida Pentecostalist Pastor who is portrayed – maybe correctly – in the media as a man who has bit off more than he can chew by organising a bonfire of 200 Korans/Qur’ans in a field next to his church, yesterday backed off his plan and cancelled the “koranflagration” as it has been entitled, having been called up by some bigwig Chief-of-Staff in the Pentagram, er, -gon.

He stated that he had made a deal with the local imams related to the ground zero Mosque in New York.  However the Imam responsible for that particular mosque, whose name is Imam Rauf called the deal off within minutes, pretty much showing that the Florida Imam had been practising that noted pillar of Islam known as Taqiyya, which being translated is ” you’re allowed to lie to non-Muslims if it helps you or any other Muslims along, and in fact lying is even obligatory and not optional for a good Muslim if it’ll help save your skin from a kafir”. This certainly puts the Judaeo-Christian tradition of ” thou shalt not commit false testimony” and being willing to die for truth somewhat at a logistical disadvantage, especially as we seem to have a disease in our tradition of interpreting Islam through our own eyes, and assuming that it means something roughly similar to what things in the Judaeo-Christian tradition mean, when in fact it is pretty much wired around a completely different set of ideas, whenever you might say about the philological similarities. There is no similarity between light and darkness, and there is no similarity between faiths of freedom and enlightenment and the ones of enslavement, bullying and cowardly deception.

Nevertheless burning has not been called off even though it seems fairly apparent that whoever Dr Jones meets in New York today, he may as well be spending today in contemplation with Imam Bayildi. This is likely to be the fact that very few people in high positions of authority gave him any support, whereas all the great and the good, and obviously I use that term very loosely, seemed to be queueing up to either condemn him outright all reason with him to stop his planned action. Continue reading “9/11 – Burn a Qur’an Day? From Pentecostalist to Pentagontalist in a few easy backpedals?”

Response to Father Christopher Howse’s article in the Telegraph on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela

I am pleased to see someone underlining the risk of spiritual pride that a pure works-religion thing like a pilgrimage can bring. If my understanding is not wrong, pilgrimages started in Spain after the moors got cleared out and the common people needed to be appeased as that was one thing they had appreciated under Islam – a bit like the way in East Europe newly westernised states keep the communist holidays but rename them, as the communists did previously in some cases to the religious ones. The charm of pilgrimage in the mediaeval times was that it was the one time the feudal system was cast aside, and both serf and master would tread a road together. Relieved from their onerous chores and welcomed with refreshments along the way, the medieval pilgrimage was the nearest thing they had to the company outing, and the fashion spread out across the Catholic world from Spain. Continue reading “Response to Father Christopher Howse’s article in the Telegraph on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela”

Usenet Fragmentia – 1st Dectave

Uncle Davey’s Fragmentia – 1st Dectave – More bright ideas from your favorite virtual uncle!  

The idea of Fragmentia is to make, over time, a digest of the best fragments of the posts I have made to Usenet, whether ideas, soundbites, jokes and witticisms, observations, coinages, or even some typical Usenet “flames”. The criterion for inclusion is that the extracts work without a lot of context setting, and also that either the use of language or the idea has some originality about it. All work is mine unless otherwise stated, and, with few exceptions, originally written for Usenet in the month given below each fragment. Where of interest, I have also given the person addressed. To see the original content, use Google’s Usenet archive searching on the most unusual phrase in the section and limiting it to the stated month. Some of these comments were answered – even on occasion very competently, and looking up the thread will show you what my opponents said.

The items are not especially sorted by topic, they are mixed together. There are up to ten fragments per page, and the rules of the game are that only spelling mistakes are corrected, no new thoughts are added.

As ever, with my productions, the right of reply exists in the comment section. The fragments are not sorted, so a certain amount of disjointedness is part of the fun, but as you sequentially peruse each “Dectave of Uncle Dave”, you’ll soon start to pick up the threads. They will be gathered into a “Fragmentia” section on this blog – they used to be a section on the previous site (now incorporated here) www.usenetposts.com. I’ll be adding to these from time to time, they go back basically to the end of 2003, although some things of mine are earlier, but in the main the earlier writings were reiterated and better written in the post 2003 writing.

First Dectave

1.

“I would like to know how these Creation-rejectors are so sure that so-called ‘pseudogenes’ don’t have a perfectly viable raison d’etre which they simply don’t know about.

They are so ready to say “science is in its infancy” when it suits them, but if they think they’ve found a trap for us, then they are oh so certain that certain genes are redundant, that they are mistakes, that they would have been created out. Well why didn’t they evolve out? What we don’t use gets lost, right?

So what about the fact that only a small percentage of the human brain gets used? Why did the rest evolve, if it doesn’t get used? Is the size of the human brain a pseudogene? Or is it a place to hang those parts of the soul that don’t get needed until the resurrection body?

Creation rejectors think they know a lot of things, but when it all boils down to it, there’s nothing they can say that proves the non-existence of God that they so long to achieve.”

(December 2003)

2.

“You’re making distinctions that don’t exist in the Hebrew. This is not dividing the Word, it’s multiplying it, subtracting it and adding to it, and taking it to the n’th power, where n = nonsense.”

(December 2003, addressed to Robert Sowle)

3.

“Bacteria aren’t the products of evolution, they’re the products of devolution.

Most of the bacteria that attack humans are human cells or organelles of human cells that have gone wrong.

There is in the talk origins FAQ somewhere a discussion about a bacterium that evolved under scientific conditions from some woman’s cells, and they rattle this out as proof of speciation sometimes. What it does prove is that human cells give rise to bacteria, which of course is devolution, the exact reverse of evolution. Hardly surprising not much of this is done and they don’t like to emphasise it.

So with bacteria it’s a bit like cancer only they move around with a life of their own. they can of course go on to speciate of their own accord, usually getting weaker, not stronger, and then the next devolution from a higher animal cell creates the next new disease, unknown before, as with the HIV retrovirus.

Probably this bacterium able to metabolise nylon, if it came from another bacterium not able to, was a devolution, or a falling away from, the other. It is probably a more basic organism than the parent organism. Weaker, not stronger.

These are devolved, not evolved, organisms. God never made them, as such, they were part of the human body, and other animal and plant bodies.

Same with viruses. They could not have been a part of the evolutionary chain as they need higher organism to survive on. They are rogue parts of DNA of higher organisms, that’s how they are able to control the DNA of higher organisms.

Nematodes didn’t evolve, they devolved from insects, that’s how they know how to control the consciousness of their host insect and make it seek water. Such a mechanism could never have evolved by trial and error. Had the host not gone to water, that would have been the end of the line for that attempt. If it didn’t need water, why make the host go there?

And all this devolving of life, which causes disease, decay and death, didn’t start until after the Fall of Man.”

(December 2003, addressed to H. R. Gr?mm)

4.

“Is there a coffee so strong it will wake you out of this slumber?”

(December 2003, addressed to Robert Sowle)

5.

“There are some 30,000 species. Had evolution been true, over 100 times that number could have evolved in the time they say is available.

The number of Biblical kinds involved here is probably closer to 3,000. They all started out as freshwater kinds and some became saltwater after the flood.”

(December 2003, addressed to David Jensen)

6.

“Mammals are a group of living creatures where there is body hair and the mother suckles the young with milk.

The building blocks God, as the prime Engineer, saw fit to use on them and on us are similar enough to allow a technical name in common, but the created purpose of mankind is one thing and of animals it is another.

Have you ever pondered the oddity that we alone are an intelligent species? I could not be having this conversation with an orang-utan or a sperm whale, however skilled the translator.

Why didn’t evolution manage that for any other species?”

(December 2003)

7.

“I thought your website and your work was great, but I have to say I disagree with you about subjecting Usenet to the same laws as the rest of society. These people need somewhere to go to let off steam. Better here than daub it on our fences.

Some people do have opinions which are not respectable and are antisocial, and most forums are not available to them. Nevertheless they want to give expression to their ideas, regardless of the quality, the same as anyone else does.

Sometimes the product of those expressions is quite disturbing, but that is the true face of your fellow man and neighbour on this planet. May as well be informed about it. You’re never gonna be able to regulate and control it out of existence.”

(December 2003, addressed to artist Amanda Angelika Berry)

8.

“You may well be a nicer person than we are, but have you been forgiven your sins because of the Blood Jesus shed for you on Calvary?

It’s not about being nice, it’s about being forgiven.

That’s how we see Christianity, anyway. See John 3.16”

(December 2003, addressed to self-confessed witch “Jason Harvestdancer”)

9.

“All I can tell you is that my wife keeps silent in Church, although she does sometimes laugh if there’s a joke in the sermon.

If I asked her to speak publicly in the Church she would consider that ‘spousal abuse’ and not the reverse.

But then, she is a well-balanced woman, not like some women, trying to be men.

I honestly pity the men they marry, few will be spared mental illness at some stage in their lives.

Does that make me an ultraconservative?”

(December 2003)

10.

“There was no time as we know it prior to Creation, and as Christ is an uncreated being, He also exists outside of constraints of time and space.”

(December 2003)