Saturday 21 November 2009

Bible Aloud end of week 1

Well a whole week has gone by and, as far as I know, everyone turned up when they were suppossed to! Everyone I've spoken to has said what a worthwhile event it has been, and there's talk of doing it again next year!
By setting it so each slot should be no more than 15 minutes reading there are 354 slots; one person has requested the reading list so she can use it to read through the Bible in a year. Which I think is a great idea. Most people can manage to find a spare 15 minutes each day. And with only 354 readings, you can even afford to miss a few days, and still get through it in a year. For those who like reading I'm going to work out a reading plan based upon 30 mins and 1 hour at a time. Imagine what reading the whole Bible through every 3 months would do for your relationship with God. This event is not just about reading for the sake of reading, it's about proclaiming God's word in God's house. His word is vibrant and practical, I was listening to Rachel reading from Leviticus 14 where it talks about 'infectious skin diseases' and isolating a person for seven days, it goes on to talk about bodily discharges, and washing even the clothes and things a person sat on, and breaking pots etc that were touched. This is approx 14 hundred years BC; and yet when I look in Wikipedia I find the contagious nature of infectious wasn't discovered until more than a thousand years AD

Abū Alī ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) discovered the contagious nature of infectious diseases in the early 11th century. He introduced quarantine as a means of limiting the spread of contagious and infectious diseases in The Canon of Medicine, circa 1020. He also stated that bodily secretion is contaminated by foul foreign earthly bodies before being infected, but he did not view them as primary causes of disease.

When the Black Death bubonic plague reached al-Andalus in the 14th century, Ibn Khatima and Ibn al-Khatib hypothesized that infectious diseases are caused by "contagious entities" which enter the human body. Such ideas became more popular in Europe during the Renaissance, particularly through the writing of the Italian monk Girolamo Fracastoro.

Such things make you wonder, should we pay more attention to God's commands and Laws?

1 comment:

  1. I have been attending various readings as and when I can manage to get to Chuch and have found the whole experience uplifting. Listening to the Scriptures in the wonderful atmosphere of St. Felix has been a very moving experience. Thank you to Rachel, Sarah and everyone involved in organising this wonderful event. God bless you all. Kevin

    ReplyDelete