To think all schools should teach children the old traditional hymns

[Staringintothevoid616]

Just switching between channels and Songs of Praise came on. It was a run down of the most popular school hymns.complete with recorders It brought back many memories and how important communal singing is. It doesn’t matter what your religion is, everyone should know the most popular hymns as a way of uniting society.

It’s vitally important. We go every year. Never sing though. World hasn’t ended yet………..

Paganism is not a religion.

I could get behind schoolkids singing that entire album, to be fair.

There's nothing amusing about combining science and paganism. Modern paganism is merely finding spiritual meaning in nature. Its sits perfectly well alongside science. The second explains why things exist the first encourages connection with those things.
As for sneering at the idea a bereaved child might be frightened by the bible, have you read Revelation?

Why oh dear?

This is mumsnet, where those who believe in god have an “imaginary friend”, are “deluded”, and if they suggest any “organised religion” activity, they are “indoctrinating” your children.

I like traditional hymns, but the times when most schools did them are gone. “Who put the colours in the rainbow? It surely can’t be chance!”

Think about it. You still haven't explained why you asked that question, despite being asked.

Paganism is a lot simpler isn't it. Bad things happen because different gods are fighting etc.

I find it fascinating how the Bible goes from paganism with a boss God ( Gen 6:1, sons of Gods), through Exodus where it gradually starts to change to monotheism, Then there is Judges etc, where there is one God but he is vengeful. Upset HIM and he will punish you, and by the time we get to the New Testament, where there is now an all loving God, and a massive gap appears.

How can bad things happen when God is loving ?

No Problem, invent the Devil. He makes the bad things happen. Then we get angels, demons, saints, and we are back to Paganism, in all but name.

Then, as you say, we get science.

I reckon, if we had stuck to Paganism, we would have gotten to science a lot faster. The Romans and the Greeks etc were pretty good at that.

But no, we got Christianity, and quite a few hundred years of the dark ages.

Religion is real though, it exists! There’s dispute in the scientific community about whether the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe (think the concept cShe from a priest if I recall)

All for a song about science but that is rather crap. Surely scientists can do better than this? Look at Nightwish -The greatest show on earth, quotes from Richard Dawkins. In fact, he actually appeared at one gig and did his Endless Forms most beautiful speech - epic - I’ll see if I can find a link

It's not about popularity. It's about musical complexity, depth. Hymns are little nuggets of brilliant music - lots of them.

Here it is- Dawkins is at the end

This is how you do a song about since rather than “science is real” fucking hell. Clearly most of the people arguing against the use of hymns clearly just have shit musical taste

It’s light refraction. Not deliberate. Just the way light and water appear from a particular angle in a specific set of circumstances

To the pp who asked about taking God and Jesus out of hymns. I tend to think of God as the world so Dear Lord and Father of mankind would be Dear World (forgive our foolish ways). Very relevant in these days of climate change, man's inhumanity to man etc etc.

I think you must have missed my earlier question OP. I asked what you mean by this post please?

Also this question?

Religion is a belief system. So it’s real in that some people believe it. Some people believe the earth is flat, but we don’t make children sing songs about it. Some people believe the royal family are lizards, but we don’t make children sing songs about it. Some people believe in Boris Johnson/Nigel Farage, but we don’t make children sing songs about it. <shudder>

Science can be proven again. Give me “Photosynthesis, ah-AH” or “the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace………” over Bread of Heaven any day.

Your taste in music is so odd. The draeriest of hymns or heavy metal. 😂

Anti science as well now. Embarking on the God of the gaps fallacy. Ridicule the scientists.

Odd, given that you have said you are not Christian.

I bet most of the "traditional hymns" you're thinking of are Victorian, at oldest. So at the time when everyone knew them, they'd been "tradition" for less than 100 years. Isn't that just fashion, like all other kinds of music?

On the subject of the thread, I went to a C of E school in the 70s/80s (daily religious assembly/hymn practice on a Friday) and have worked on supply in C of E and Catholic schools recently. These days it's called 'worship', it's not daily and then don't have hymn practice but they do still sing. And they do still sing songs about God, because they are designated faith schools. But they aren't necessarily what you think of as classic hymns like All things Bright, or We Plough the Fields, just as in my school days we sung 'Magic Penny', 'The page is black', etc. Sure, we did some of the oldies, but, just like today, we sung more modern songs, some of which were written off school assemblies.

I don't recognise most of the songs I have heard in today's religious school assemblies, and it's fair enough, it's a new generation and people are still writing religious songs. There's been a lot of modernisation in church music, there's Christian rock bands now.

If we want young people to 'keep the faith', they need to be able to 'own' it. My mother wouldn't have sung 'Magic Penny', just as I don't know a lot of today's assembly songs, but I think that's how it should be. They also have their own Christmas Carols, although we still have kids lisping through 'Little Donkey'.

Culture doesn't have to mean what we all remember. It's perfectly reasonable for the culture of Christian worshipful singing to move beyond songs written pre-1900. If there weren't new Christian songs being written, we really would be losing any sort of Christian identity.

Perhaps instead of the kids having to learn the old ones, modern churchgoers should be doing more of the newer ones, so that Christianity today looks like a part of modern society rather than an anachronistic relic of the past.

Hymns have been in constant development over centuries since at least 300AD. The hymn book just keeps getting added to - I’ve sung a few of these in my time https://bestlovedhymns.com/blogs/reflections-71a102fb-7361-4a65-9767-1632ea9da65d/posts/7245408/the-top-10-oldest-hymns-still-sung-today and some amongst my favourite

Op, you have brought back awful memories of being forced to go to church on Sunday morning and sing these hymns. The only consolation was that there was a very badly behaved kid who used to sit beside me and make me giggle so hard that I nearly burst trying not to be heard. The other good thing was that there was a man who sang really loudly, producing a sound like a trumpet. That used to make us laugh too.

Kids today would not appreciate these hymns because they are too far removed from them.

Not anti science at all, but certainly anti shit songs!!! Hence I’ve linked a much better science based sing featuring Richard Dawkins. Are you actually reading anything I’m posting? Or just rolling out your pre rehearsed anti Christian rhetoric. Or do you think Richard Dawkins is anti science????? You couldn’t make it up🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

The versions people sing are from the 19th century though. They're not from the 9th century any more than the version of Allegri's Miserere that people know is from the 17th century.

I have no issue with hymns. I do think OP may be propagandising on behalf of the National Hymn Society though.

So let’s bring them back