Here is a cool YouTube video on Fr. Boniface’s journey.
This story reminds me of someone else. Long time blog readers might also remember former atheist Sean Roberts of the old Swimming the Tiber blog who became a monk at Byzantine Catholic Holy Resurrection Monastery in 2004.
Via A Catholic Mom in Hawaii
In other atheist news:
…The Institute for Humanist Studies, an Albany, N.Y.-based nonprofit, is calling attention to its calendar of atheist holidays on its Web site, www.secular seasons.org. The group wants nonbelievers (or at least people who don’t celebrate religious holidays) to have a handy reference guide of the calendar of holidays honoring free-thinkers, banned books and nature, among other themes.
Excuse me but by definition atheists can not have their own Holiday which after all means Holy Day. Maybe a Randomday. Or how about Flukeday or Primordial Soup Day? Ummm primordial soup!
Since leaving atheism I now find it interesting the names atheists tag themselves with. Brights and free-thinkers are common identifiers. Though free-thinkers are not free to believe in God. Ironically it reminds me of those who tag themselves "Thinking Catholics." There is a hubris in these terms that give the user the air of superiority. Tautologies that say I am bright because I say I am a bright. Or those who take Descartes further "I am a thinking Catholic therefore I am."
4 comments
The word “holiday” comes from the “holy day” but it’s been used more broadly for centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary says,
1. A consecrated day, a religious festival. Now usually written HOLY-DAY, q.v.
2. a. A day on which ordinary occupations (of an individual or a community) are suspended; a day of exemption or cessation from work; a day of festivity, recreation, or amusement. (In early use not separable from 1.)
b. collect. pl. or sing. A time or period of cessation from work, or of festivity or recreation; a vacation. (See also BLIND MAN’S HOLIDAY.)
That goes back at lest to the fourteenth century.
c. Cessation from work; festivity; recreation. to make holiday, to cease from work, to take a day’s recreation.
That goes back at least to the sixteenth century.
BLIND MAN’S HOLIDAY) is defined as:
A humorous phrase for the time just before candles are lighted, when it is too dark to work, and one is obliged to rest or ‘take a holiday’; formerly used more widely.
The earliest citation of that is from 1599.
what it really means is “I’m a thinking Catholic therefore I’m really a Protestant.”
Regarding your statement: “Excuse me but by definition atheists can not have their own Holiday….” I respectfully disagree. In fact, atheists already have their own holiday. It’s April 1st…also known as April Fool’s Day. Psalm 14:1 states in part: “The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God.’….”
i thought that thinking protestants became catholics.
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