Significance of church bell "songs"?

Haha, uh, no. Seriously, the last few days when I walked out of my Dad’s place I noticed them playing. Just made me wonder why..

@DarkScribe, do you have to be sarcastic with anything remotly related to faith? You seem so balanced in your answers to other questions.

@Judi do you have to be sarcastic with anything remotly related to faith? You seem so balanced in your answers to other questions.

I find the entire concept of a magical all powerful deity who is perpetually absent to be laughable. So I laugh.

Really? I have seen too much horror, death suffering in the name of various religions to regard any of them as anything but evil. Several thousand years of history supports my view.

All religions attract ambitious men more than pious men – this is self evident. Ambitious men are dangerous men and when cloaked in the guise of religious authority; they do real harm.

By the same token, I follow all of Christ’s examples, other than his belief in an “Almighty God”.

My problem is with religion, not Christ.

“All religions attract ambitious men more than pious men”
This has not been my experience with Bahá’ís

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As to the question about church bell songs. I assume that they need to test their bell ringing system regularly and feel that a song at noon would be a good way to do that.

In my opinion, it’s far preferable to the fire department who tests their alarm bells every day at 6pm.

Honestly, they probably do it because it’s pretty. Church bells just before service were/are a call to worship so that anyone traveling can find the church and anyone working knows to go to church. But in this day and age it’s mostly just a mix of tradition and something pretty.

The bells at my school played all sorts of awesome stuff when the students got to the controls (they were electronic). But every day at 5pm, they played SOMETHING. And that way, no matter where you were on campus, you knew what time it was.

@EmpressPixie It is pretty. The church is a block over from my parent’s place and when you’re sitting outside on a nice summer day, you hear the bells and you feel all relaxed. Sounds weird, but, it’s actually soothing.

The traditional Anglican liturgical cycle dictated offices (or prayer services) at various points in the day. The modern Anglican prayer book has “orders of service” for morning, noonday, and evening offices. So maybe this church is just using the music as a commemoration of the noonday offices

I am not religious, but I love the sound of church bells—real church bells, not those horrible recordings that often sound horrible stretched or warped or something.

If you have a full carillon of bells that can play hymns, and the neighbors don’t complain, you may as well use it.

@Judi: One significant improvement to Fluther would be an “ignore user” feature.

@Harp: the Anglican daily services are morning prayer and evening prayer; that was simplified in the very early days of the church, as a part of standardizing worship practices all over England. It’s one of the things that set the Anglicans apart from the Roman Catholics in the early days—RCs had matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, nones, vespers, compline, while Anglicans had morning and evening.

@cwilbur From the book Liturgy for Living:

“These services lie behind Anglican Morning and Evening Prayer, and also the Noonday and Compline services in the current book…The noonday hour is the hour when Jesus hung on the cross…In the Noonday Service we find the collect,“Blessed Savior, at this hour you hung upon the cross, stretching out your loving arms…”

@Harp: of course. There are liturgies for every possible thing you could think of, and many of the descendants of the Oxford movement celebrate all the liturgical hours. This doesn’t mean they’re necessary, or even necessarily beneficial.

@cwilbur Whether it’s necessary or beneficial, I have no idea, but it is one of the four prayer services in the Book of Common Prayer used by the Anglican Communion in the US. A quick Google search reveals noonday services held in lots of Anglican churches, so I guess they see some basis for it. Perhaps the church jmah hears is one of these.

Now, I’m feeling a bit foolish. When driving home, I went by it and noticed that it was in fact a Presbyterian Church.

@DarkScribe . . .I would give you a ton of shit right now for being a hypocrite and “acting in the exact same fashion as you describe your enemy” and all that but…fuck it.

I’m a gigantic hypocrite and had to come to that conclusion all on my own. Why should you get any help with it?

when are we going for that beer?

@Blondesjon, yes, radical fundamentalist atheists are as annoying as radical fundamentalist religious people.

@Blondesjon I would give you a ton of shit right now for being a hypocrite and “acting in the exact same fashion as you describe your enemy” and all that but…fuck it.

What did I do? What enemy?

I don’t have enemies? I don’t take any of this seriously – surely you don’t either?

It is like being at a fun fair shooting range – they pop their head up, you take a shot.

@Judi yes, radical fundamentalist atheists are as annoying as radical fundamentalist religious people.

Does that mean that you won’t haunt me when you’re dead? I was looking forward to that.

I’m haunting you now silly! BOO!

@DarkScribe . . .You didn’t do anything. I just have a question mark fetish.

oh god thaank you