Word battle: Temple VS church

Trisskar wrote:

Edan wrote: I think for me the difference comes because church was where I was bored stiff on Sundays, where I was 'told' but not 'taught'.

That was one thing I did like about the LDS - Yes. You followed a set standard of belief - But from a young age you did so in a school like setting. Sunday school was really fun. Id put my girls in Sunday school if there was a LDS church closer by. We played games, read stories, did group play acting of our favorite parables, sang lots of kid like church songs, it was really great. I love it. Even young womens where all the teen females went to learn about the bible and passing the word on to people in there homes was fun. They made it into a learning experience. It was only the church service part that sucked haha listening to testimonies and lecture...uggggg!!! lol

These things were all done inside our community church on sundays

But once a month my grandma would drive far to attend Temple Service where she worked on Temple Records and Baptized the Dead. It was a very serious and obligated duty. There was no "Oh im sick or tired" excuse. You went and you did Temple Service. Period. Weddings were held at Temples. I THINK it is also where live baptisms are...I was too little to remember where mine was done

Church = Learning

Temple = Duty

You were probably baptized at your local LDS church, to my knowledge, no baptisms take place in the temple unless it's for the dead. I do like that little bit at the end though, the church being were you to learn and the temple were you do your duty, but if you look at eastern religions, they tend to do everything at Temples, to my understanding.

I think the reason (and this is just me, I may be 100% wrong) this place has to be called "church" may be for the legal reasons that were presented. But if temple qualifies as the same title as "church" why not make it "Jedi Temple"?

Just my two cents, and if that has been answered, I apologize! I did read through all of it!

I'm going to take a slightly different approach to this. A temple (or Cathedral if you want) is definitely a building meant to generally worship something. Churches can mean a building, the organization as a whole that uses the building (i.e. "Catholic Church"), or the individual people of that organization. While in conversational English a church is a building that's really synonymous with "temple" (unless you're a member of a congregation that has both churches and temples), it was translated from the Greek word for assembly - the group of people.

The changing semantics of words like this underlie the ideas that our culture has *cough* emphasizing having a building *cough* and it seems like TOTJO's choice of using the word temple seems like an oxymoron. I like that since it separates us from common religious and cultural expectations. Anywhom, that's my 2¢

I'm sure that if some of our primarily non English-speakers chimed in that they'd have interesting opinions on this :laugh:

Well in regards to this temple in particular it makes sense regardless of word definition and practice.

Despite all the hooplah of "Getting away from the fiction" In the fiction the Jedi's place of practice was a "Temple" So I mean, hey. Whatever. It works. It's just Jediism/Jedi Im really not going to get all hung up over the use of Temple vs Church wordage.

Its only when things become attached to "Legal" sources that i tend to go "Eeeeeh...." My fathers friend was a lawyer who had many other lawyer friends and would all hold meetings at my parents house....I learned alot about how highly important "Words" become in the sense of Law.

Otherwise. Meh! Do what the 'spirit' calls out. Even if it does lean a little sideways from the traditional definition. Such things changes every so generation so whatever lol

Me personally. I like to keep the two seperate simply because where I learn and where I worship are two different "Spirits" for me. Personally

It seems as though both terms to various people have contexts and therefore different feelings/energies when the words are heard. Perhaps, in this case, it would be prudent to entertain finding a term that works for us. Maybe a new name altogether? Or, maybe learn to use a term in a new way? We could try learning a new energy for the temple. For me, church has so much negative baggage, but I could learn if I had to.

My first experience with the word "Temple", and thus my association for every time I hear or read it....




I've just discovered that the building that was a Church when I was a lad and my doting parents sent me to learn of Christ's works every sunday, is now a Gloria Jean's coffee shop.


So... D&D and Coffee.

I can think of worse things for our International Group of Pals to be associated with

JamesSand wrote: I've just discovered that the building that was a Church when I was a lad and my doting parents sent me to learn of Christ's works every sunday, is now a Gloria Jean's coffee shop.

Makes perfect sense. In my line of work, often coffee is my religion.

Here's the thing:







Etc...

Well...I want to add something to this discussion, but I don't know what I can add.

We have a lot of carryover from Christianity here at the Temple. Just look at the clergy. I am the Pastor of the Temple of the Jedi Order. There have been various discussions about changing that and some of the other names associated with the Clerical vocation.

I think one of the biggest questions we can ask ourselves is "what would we be missing out on if we were to drop the word "church" and what would we be gaining?

Personally I associate the word temple with a more eastern religious philosophy, for whatever reason (perhaps lack of exposure to Western philosophies that use the same word for their religious buildings.

Church reminds me of Christianity and a temple is within.

The word Temple is just word for a religious building. If we in the west tend to associate it more with eastern religions, well, most temples in the west are churches, and most religions besides Christianity are eastern, to us. That's a consequence of the highly Christian societies we grow up in, and that's exactly why we need to be sensible about falling into "Christian habits" without considering how ill-fitting they may be to a religion trying to find its own identity. Because Church ALWAYS means Christian, so far as I can find from any definition of the word.

Such reliance on Christian words when there are Jedi words already seems to me an attempt to legitimise what we do here, almost guiltily clinging to stuff we know rather than embracing that which is uniquely Jedi. As you know I'm keen to remove the ultra Christian clerical titles, because a "Jedi Bishop" is just ludicrous. It is pompous in a way which is totally unbecoming of the core values of Jediism, it has connotations which are actively damaging to just how Jedi we can be. As does the word "church".

We are Jedi. We should be proud of that. We have a Temple in which we come together - not a church, because there is no crucifix hanging here. Ironically given the defensive comments made last year, we now seem to be letting the jackasses at Jedi Church influence how we define ourselves here, a place which is the antithesis of what they do. That is a very worrying trend.