"Christianity in particular has a history of absorbing other religions’ traditions" -- Tangentially related: I'm a Catholic, so I don't know much about other "distros", but the Roman Catholic Church has a long, pragmatic history of absorbing local traditions in Indonesia.
It's interesting dynamic. Catholic Church is notoriously top-down and hierarchical, yet local parishes can feel entirely distinct. It's not uncommon to see traditional Javanese processions integrated right into the mass. Like skin/mod in a game.
> Catholic Church is notoriously top-down and hierarchical
It has a hierarchy, but it has multiple hierarchies. It is not all that top down. Bishop's ave a lot of autonomy, and most decisions are made at the diocesan level. Dioceses have their own property and funds held by their own trustees. On top of that religious orders have their own hierarchy (and property and funds etc.). Then there are the rites such as the Ukrainian or Syro-Malabar churches that have their own hierarchies.
Right. The Church recognizes the principle of subsidiarity which is not coincidentally part of its social teaching.
Modern media has allowed the pope to receive unceasing attention that the papacy never possessed historically, but what is important to emphasize is that this is not a reflection of how the Church is administered or how authority is distributed. The idea that the pope is "running the Church" or "watching every member of the one and a half billion member flock like a busybody hawk" is a fiction drawn from jejune ignorance. Rome is notoriously slow to act, which should in general not be seen as a sign of incompetence, but as an expression of subsidiarity. It is much better to view the pope as the ultimate referee rather than some oppressive overlord. The moral ball is in your court, as it were.
W.r.t. absorbing what's around it, the Church has always recognized logos spermatikos or seminal reason, meaning, it recognizes reality as an intelligible creation of God, it recognizes the inherent rational nature of every human being, and thus it recognizes that every human being has an in principle capacity to recognize and know reality, to one degree or another. So, it sees no reason to suppose that there is nothing good or true or beautiful outside the Church and plenty of reason to recognize it and embrace it. What is good is good, what is true is true, what is beautiful is beautiful. When the Church encounters a culture, it seeks what is good within it and seeks to transfigure it in order to rescue its goodness and perfect it. Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit.
Saints Josaphat and Barlaam never had an official decree of canonization. That process didn't exist (in its earliest form) until 1170 AD. Saints before that were generally just acclaimed by the Christians in the area and probably recognized by a local bishop.
The Vatican does keep a "Roman Martyrology" by which they try to keep a list of all known saints, but the saints that existed before the canonization process are known as "pre-congregation" saints and our certainty about them is generally less, well, certain.
In this case, these two names were removed from the Martyrology. That isn't to say that the Vatican has declared they are not saints, but is no longer actively making that claim.
There have been quite a few other pre-congregation names removed from the list when historical study has found little evidence of their existence or life story.
Catholics surely put great effort into bureaucracy and organization.
"The devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, 'What did that man pick up?' 'He picked up a piece of Truth,' said the devil.'That is a very bad business for you, then,' said his friend.'Oh, not at all,' the devil replied, 'I am going to let him organize it.'"
It's interesting that in religion back then they took the idea of the gods' existence as an obvious fact. So when they encountered other people with different gods they assumed that they were actually the same gods, just by different names. If they encountered civilized/intelligent people with different mythologies it meant either that those people knew something the Greeks previously didn't or they had just gotten events confused and it would become a matter of debate. It was more like two people with different, but honest, accounts of an event in the remote past trying to reconcile their own limited recollection or view point.
The Greeks and Romans were doing it long before Alexander, as were all the cultures of the Mediterranean and Ancient Near East as far back as history allows. Egyptians were borrowing Levantine gods early in the Bronze Age, and ancient Akkadian adopted the Sumerian pantheon wholesale.
Turns out, culture isn't a singular thing you can just have. People everywhere all the time are picking up bits of things to do, things to say, things to believe in, and borders, no matter how fluid they are, only exist in the aggregate.
It's more cultural colonization than syncretism. For example, America was culturally colonized by forcibly converting its inhabitants to Catholicism. Their temples were destroyed, the stones used to build churches, and while celebrations were still observed, the deities were replaced with Catholic ones. Even the folklore was rewritten with Catholic characters.
It wasn't syncretism, it was systematic eradication. Syncretism is more akin to reconciliation of different views.
Basically how christians have always operated since they first emerged and started doing the same throughout the hellenic world. Most (all?) christian traditions are pagan in origin. The main goal was not necessarily replacement but a sort of corporate ownership takeover of the littany of existing traditions, such that these cultures might be ingrained into a unified fold of christian power/influence/customs/laws/expectations and not see themselves as some distinct independent people. And boy that model worked to tame europe and much of the known world under the whip of the pope in a way the roman emperors never could, at least until Martin Luther screwed up a bit of that unity.
Mexico is interesting because it is a certainly a different catholicism than what is practiced elsewhere. Tell a devout old world European catholic about say Day of the Dead traditions and they will probably think its blasphemy. There is a lot of what amounts to local diety worship still as well, although they just label them as some patron saint of somesuch to preserve the veil of monotheism.
It is not true that Christian practices are mostly pagan in origin. You do not need to look far to find the origin of the vast majority of what you would have seen in a medieval church service. You can see the common origin if you compare and contrast an Orthodox Jewish synagogue service with an Orthodox Christian liturgy. The first half of the Divine Liturgy and the synagogue service are virtually the same even in terms of the motions — the Torah scroll is replaced with the gospel book. Christianity owes far more to second-temple Jewish practices than it does to anything pagan.
It’s worth noting that “monotheism” is a modern word. It was not a word used by theologians of the pre-modern era. The Bible is insistent that God is in some sense “one” or “alone,” and that you don’t offer sacrifices to other gods. People just thought that other gods were demons. It made a big difference to this point of view whether a sailor was asking St. Nicholas to help him get home safely or asking a demon for help, in the same way it makes a big difference whether you call the local mob or the municipal police when you have a problem. The latter are quite analogous to an angel/saint because police don’t have power or make laws in their own right, they are just servants of a higher authority (ultimately, the constitution). The mob, like the demon in the Christian point of view, are in disobedience to that higher authority or in direct competition/rebellion against it. There’s a really big difference even if both paths end with armed men with guns coming to solve my problem.
I don't think Mexico is an exception in that respect. There are some pretty significant Incan elements in the Catholicism practiced in the Andes, Vodou and Santería stuff in the Caribbean, El Tío in Bolivia, Tetri Giorgi/Uastyrdzhi in the Caucasus, and lots of others no doubt. Christianity (and Western culture) didn't demolish these beliefs and practices.
Yeah the protestants think the saint stuff is absurd and even creepy when you get into the relics. I'm not sure where it came from but I'm guessing some weird roman religion origin.
There's no reason the Catholics couldn't have invented it independently. I think that's just the human instinctive approach to religion. Lots of little per-concept semi-spiritual entities, sacred and profane objects, etc.
Another appropriate word for the colonization of America is genocide.
I'm old enough to remember being taught how America was settled by expanding into the vast wilderness of the continent, and that sometimes they had skirmishes with natives but they found them new places to live.
It turns out it wasn't quite as neat and tidy as suggested.
"It can include assimilation of several originally discrete traditions, especially in theology and mythology, thus asserting an underlying unity and allowing for an inclusive approach to multiple faiths."
"...in the realm of religion, it specifically denotes a more integrated merging of beliefs into a unified system, distinct from eclecticism, which implies a selective adoption of elements from different traditions without necessarily blending them into a new, cohesive belief system."
"It provides an opportunity to bring beliefs, values, and customs from one cultural tradition into contact with, and to engage different cultural traditions."
That's not the right word here, as Catholic dogmatic teaching does not enter into negotiation with what you might call competing doctrines. It doesn't blend bodies of doctrine like that.
We're talking about adopting cultural practices in a selective and transfigurative way. If a cultural practice doesn't conflict with the Church's teachings and would be beneficial, then it could be embraced as such. A cultural practice may also be transfigured and adapted into something that maintains a certain resemblance, but has a changed and elevated meaning. For instance, having encountered a culture that practices ancestor worship, it might take that practice and transfigure it into a restrained expression of filial piety that moves it away from idolatry. Pagan harvest festivals are another example where the symbolic meaning is changed.
One of the stranger aspects of Roman history is that for centuries, there was a fight over who gets the public space. You'd have the local mystery cults defacing whatever the Christians put up and vice versa. Assimilating local traditions rather than demanding people just adopt theirs fits in with a faith that aims to be higher than all others. Jesus has no need to fight Vishnu, and never did.
We're just looking at this through the lens of the Protestant Reformation so this pragmatism is often lost.
>the Roman Catholic Church has a long, pragmatic history of absorbing local traditions in Indonesia.
This is straight out of the Manichaeism playbook whose followers believed that a wide range of previous belief systems including Platonism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity each had a part of divine truth in them. This allowed them to absorb a diverse set of followers and contributed to them being one of the fasted spreading religions in Late Antiquity even giving Christianity a run for its money.
I don’t think anything assimilates religions better than Hinduism. New belief system? Just throw in a new avatar of Vishnu to legitimize it and carry on.
> Just throw in a new avatar of Vishnu to legitimize it and carry on.
Except for it's never done. No Hindu believes Allah or Jesus is an Avatar of Vishnu.
It can't be. Vishnu literally means the "All-Pervading One". Allah is explicitly not Omnipresent. Jesus is Omnipresent but does not have infinite forms. So neither fit the bill. Even Buddha, who we Hindus associate as one of the Avatars of Vishnu is not the same Buddha as Gautama Buddha who founded Buddhism.
I distinctly remember an Indian man on a bus in Kerala striking up a conversation with me (random white obvious tourist) in which he proclaimed both that he considered Jesus his Lord and Saviour and that he considered him to be an avatar of Vishnu. Not an explanation I'd asked him for, but certainly made a change from the standard bus conversation about where I was from and was I married yet and what salary...
I'm sure you are right that many/most Hindus would consider this incompatible with their belief system (and even more sure your average Christian would think he was missing the point of accepting Jesus as his Lord and Saviour), but this sort of syncretism definitely has been attempted and found its converts, probably rather more of them than Akbar's attempts to combine Islam and Hinduism.
I'm not knowledgeable enough about Hinduism to argue the first point but that's too reductive of a view of Christianity and Islam.
There's a rich history of panentheism in both. Ibn Arabi, probably the most famous Sufi scholar was known for defending it ("[God] sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man"), Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics held similar views etc. Of course that often got them into hot waters with Orthodoxy but it certainly existed and continues to exist.
A lot of these traditions are much more flexible than whatever is the dogma or institutional version of the time suggests. David Bentley Hart's writing on Vedantic traditions and Christianity is worth reading
Even that doesn't cover it. Vaishnavism, though the most popular branch, is only one Hindu denomination. Shaktism and Shaivism don't give Vishnu the preeminant status he's given in Vaishnavism. "Hinduism" at this point in time indicates a tradition cares about some subset and some interpretation of the Vedic texts, which doesn't actually entail all that much.
That's because there's not really a there there when it comes to Hinduism. It's a nationalism disguised as a religion (by eating every local religion.)
> the Roman Catholic Church has a long, pragmatic history of absorbing local traditions
One of the most studied issues in Catholic evangelism is the Chinese rites controversy which is also one of the historical reasons why religions are suppressed in China (aside from ideological policies ascribed to communism).
(That and the Taiping rebellion which was estimated to have killed as many people as World War 2 on the higher end. It was led by a failed scholar claiming to be alleged brother of Jesus. Most of the deaths were due to starvation. Not quite Netflix material but interesting plot nonetheless)
The issue is moot since nowadays local practices are accepted to a degree. Even if Rome decided to go back on that it would have little practical relevance nowadays since there are lots of branches of Christianity that are not in communion with Rome and who are perfectly fine with that.
The CCP actually views the Taiping Rebellion positively, as an egalitarian movement which is a precursor to their own, albeit significantly flawed [1]. Upon looking this up, I was surprised to see they rarely even view it from a religious lens, maybe because the movement was so syncretic. Although, that could be due to the similarities between the Taiping Rebellion and Cultural Revolution’s aims.
I really don't think that that use of "in particular" is correct or notable? Cross culture motion of mythology and storytelling is the rule with humanity, not the exception.
Really it's only in the last/final generation of religions, where they started writing them down in canon/scripture/testaments/writs/dogmas/whatever, that you started to see unique stories get associated with specific religions.
Before that? It's all mush. Aphrodite descends pretty clearly from the same line as Astarte/Ishtar/Innana (maybe Isis too), etc... People steal good stories. People get conquered and then confused by retelling the stories their new overlords tell. Again and again.
"In particular" could also be interpreted here as just signaling the main subject of the article, not necessarily making any sort of claim to comparative amount of syncretism.
Editor snobbery digression: that would be poor writing. The job of signaling the main subject of the article belongs to the headline and lede, and "Christian saints" is right there.
No, that phrase is just filler. And IMHO it's basically wrong. Certainly if the author want to show that Christianity is more likely than other religions to import ideas, the article has a lot more work to do than point out one myth. Literally everyone does this.
This is a really pedantic editorial argument. I'm not going to claim the author's sentence is anything amazing, but you are being overly critical. The paragraph clearly introduces the general concept of religious influence through contact, then transitions that idea to pointing out instances of this in Christianity. It is quite literally particularizing the idea as it relates to the main subject, and so it uses the phrase "in particular" in its transition sentence. It's not "basically wrong", it's basically right and you are interpreting it in the least charitable way.
I'm just going to repeat: there is nothing notable or unique to Christian appropriation of myths and stories from other religions. It does it at least as much as everyone else does, and everyone does it everywhere. So trying to tie this uniquely to Christianity seems needless and confusing. The deeper point is more interesting and more important.
Is there anything in that paragraph you'd like to argue about?
Catholic church tries to be practical but inadvertently poisons Christianity. Christianity is way different from the Catholic church.
Because catholic church is whatever the newest model is in the distro but other distros try to be very very clean and try to follow the original texts and their meaning but catholic church is like the new iphone trying to be like whatever is the trendy trend nowadays.
HN is probably not the best forum for theological debate...
But e.g. modern American evangelical churches are to me quite clearly quite far from the original meaning of the texts with some theology outright invented in 18th and 19th centuries.
It really is the case that what you bring to a text colors what you get out of it, and the more people insist that they are reading a text "as it is clearly written" the blinder they seem to be to this.
The question being what text to whom? The original text in the context of the culture of the original audience or an English translation interpreted as though addressed to a contemporary audience?
The idea that Christianity equates to "very very clean" scholarship regarding "original texts" would surprise most Christians in most periods. It's also not plain to me how this could even amount to a religion, considering all the practical, anthropological value adherents naturally expect one to provide.
That couldn't be further from the truth. The Catholic Church has withstood the test of time, and is still the original church. It has had its dark times for sure when people said exactly what you are saying now, BUT it is still here and the closest thing we have to the way early church fathers practiced Christianity than any of the 30,000 protestant churches lol.
Not all protestants were trying to change the church in a new way. The Lutheran reformation was an attempt to correct drift from papal decrees from the original christian doctrine so I wouldn't say the Catholic Church is the closest to the early church. I could see how something like the Latter Day Saint movement to be something way off the original track though.
> The Catholic Church has withstood the test of time
What does this even mean? That the Catholic Church has some special authority by dint of having been around a long time? Also, what does it even mean if the Catholic Church has been around for a long time when so much about it (including the line of Popes) has been interrupted? Feels a bit like Theseus's ship.
> BUT it is still here and the closest thing we have to the way early church fathers practiced Christianity than any of the 30,000 protestant churches lol.
By what metric? Catholicism added _a whole lot_ onto traditional Christian teaching (Saints, the pseudo-divinity of mary, the infallibility of the papacy, relics, purgatory, etc) that many protestant denominations have stripped away. One could easily argue (and many do) that these protestant denominations are closer.
I'm not sure we can find an objective answer, or that finding one is even useful beyond ego stroking.
And then there’s the Orthodox Church, which included the Roman Church until the pope insisted on changing the Greek text of the Symbol of Faith in a way that altered basic theology. And hasn’t changed much at all.
Every serious religion worth considering is different and disctinct in its fundamental core claims, even if there is a significant influence and overlap on a surface level.
No amount of pseudo-philocophical and quasi-historical research can change this basic fact.
So many stories, many people believe are true and build whole religions around, are really just repeated stories with many details changed to fit the local culture and traditions.
It's crazy so many of the world's politics and problems stem from what might actually just be the same story said in a different way... or even of a fan fiction on top of existing fiction.
> Classicist Thomas J. Sienkewicz analyzed additional heroes using Raglan's pattern, including Mithridates VI of Pontus (22 points), Krishna (21 points), Jesus (18 points), Mohammad (17 points), Beowulf (15 points), Buddha (15 points), Czar Nicholas II (14 points), Samson (13 points), Sunjata, the Lion-King of Ancient Mali (11 points), Achilles (10 points), and Harry Potter (8 points).
I get the author's not trying to write a watertight syllogism, but the point he's trying to make (his last sentence) doesn't follow from the obvious fact that beliefs can influence each other.
Christianity and worldviews typically associated with the 'east' (as I've seen them discussed here and elsewhere) disagree in both their view of the 'building blocks' of reality, and in their 'big picture' view. They disagree on base questions like if there is really a "you", or whether change is real, or whether the material world is real, or whether multiplicity is real, or whether the truth of A implies the falsehood of not-A, and so on. (I've heard all of the above answered in the negative here.) And they disagree on 'big picture' things like the goal of human existence, the nature of the Absolute, what it is to live a good life, whether evil is the result of illusion or is (in addition to this) a defect in the will and caused ultimately by an indescribably malevolent being, whether a human being can reach a 'blessed' state by his own power, etc.
So the differences are vast and essential, on both the macro and micro levels. The fact that some beliefs and practices influence other beliefs and practices doesn't change this.
(The emergence of the "18 year old who just read Dawkins for the first time and thinks science disproves sky-daddy lolz" atheists on this thread is also most unfortunate.)
That has to be the universal one, no? I feel like basic moral principles, at least directed towards the in group, are pretty universal. I'd argue they are more base than even humans and are shared with certain intelligent animals.
I think this is true up to a point. But you find chasmic differences as well. Polygamy is an obvious example, or lying to non-brethren (absolutely forbidden by Christianity, permitted I believe by other religions), or the caste system (unthinkable in Islam or Christianity, a base part of reality in Hinduism), etc. You find a very different attitude to wealth in many varieties of Protestantism compared to the Catholic Church. Also, as I said, whether a human being can reach a 'blessed state' by his own efforts, which I believe most eastern religions posit, and Christianity denies. Human sacrifice is an obvious example of a disagreement with very practical consequences for conduct. It was, as is well known, widely practised in parts of the Americas until the sixteenth century. Today in the west, you find people disagreeing very passionately over 'culture war' issues, which is surely a disagreement about what the good life is. And the people who say the culture wars don't matter are positing another view of the good life, different from them both. Etc.
Some history, as this stuff is interesting to me. The two referenced saints predated formal canonization. They were approved in the 16th century. The Roman Catholic Church removed these two saints in the 20th century. There is some confusion because there is another Saint Josaphat (Kuntsevych), and another Saint Barlaam (the martyr, 4th century).
It’s quite ironic how the assimilationist nature of high church Christianity has ended up becoming what early Christianity was in opposition to. Early Christians were non-conformist, to the point of execution, and were sometimes even seen as anti-social. A thousand years later, Christians are incorporating obscure tales from the East.
I think this is another argument for a separation of Church and state. It allows people to challenge when religious teaching goes awry without fear of persecution.
I disagree. What changed was that the Roman Empire stopped persecuting Christians. There are still places where Christians are non-conformist to the point of execution. Christianity is often in conflict with governments. One example is the criticism of Thatcher by Church of England bishops.
Idk. The establishing act of Christianity supposedly consists of Paul (?) saying that newcomers don't have to follow the strict rules from the Old Testament.
Ya know, the Divine sometimes works in mysterious ways. While it is possible these two fellas were a ripped-off Buddha story, it is also possible that they were actual people who lead these lives so that people who were Buddhists had some examples of how to adapt their previous Buddhist tendencies to Christian ones if they had an experience that caused conversion. Is there evidence to suggest they were not real people, or at the least, a large absence of evidence?
Religious stories about the Buddha were readily and literally coopted into Christian lore by early Church writers.
Unless you presume the Buddhist stories were themselves historically accurate - which would start down a road of "both Buddhism and Christianity are true" - it's hard to imagine that these were coincidentally also stories about real figures.
The Therapeutae sect is another good example of this phenomenon, although because it touches the root of several Abrahamic traditions so thoroughly, scholars and others are much less likely to declare an authoritative relation between between early Buddhism and the Therapeutae.
However, anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with the history of early Buddhism, the Therapeutae, and the religious developments of the 1st century BCE/1st century CE can't ignore how improbable the independent development of the latter's practices are, and how influential they became to various groups in the Middle East that later claimed they arrived at them independently.
Christian and Buddhist monastic traditions are so uncannily similar it's difficult to really think they developed without influence. That's my opinion. Even the Europeans who first set foot in Asia during the age of discovery thought they were being played tricks on, so I don't think it's that wild an idea
The problem isn't really the wildness of the idea (or its direct implications). The problem is that there is almost 2,000 years of culture and the metaphysical beliefs of well-more than half of the human population predicated upon their beliefs being entirely unique and an off-shoot of Judaism and not a fundamentally different syncretic import from the east.
Earlier today, I was listening to Evangelical Christian Radio while doing errands (my phone is broken and I live deep in Red America) and the pastor, Alistair Begg, was making the argument that the synoptic gospels are totally unique in what they are. The format is unprecedented. They're not biographies. They're not systematic theology. It's just a direct witness to Jesus Christ. And so on. Therefore, they're historically valid and true, etc.
But if you have read the Pali Canon or other collections of sutras and agamas, it's almost blindingly obvious that the structure of the pericopic episodes found in the synoptic gospels aren't really unique at all.
As a random example:
From Majjhima Nikaya 55 (trans. Thanissaro): I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying near Rājagaha, in Jīvaka Komārabhacca’s mango grove. Then Jīvaka Komārabhacca went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, having bowed down to him, sat to one side. As he was sitting there he said to the Blessed One, “Lord, I have heard it said that ‘They slaughter animals for the sake of Gotama the contemplative. Gotama the contemplative knowingly eats the meat prepared for his sake in dependence on that action.’ Those who say, ‘They slaughter animals for the sake of Gotama the contemplative. Gotama the contemplative knowingly eats the meat prepared for his sake in dependence on that action’: Are they speaking in line with what the Blessed One has said, are they not slandering the Blessed One with what is unfactual, and are they speaking in line with the Dhamma so that no one whose thinking is in line with the Dhamma would have grounds for criticizing them?”
Compared to say, Mark 7 (trans. NIV):
The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles. So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”
And so on and so forth. The parallels don't end there, but I've probably gone on long enough of a rant. And this wouldn't even be the first time something like that happened in the Greek world. Pyrrho very likely did something very similar. Plus, the phenomena has modern equivalents as well. Look at how many mindfulness courses and therapy interventions in the West just file the serial numbers off of Buddhism (e.g. CBT, ACT).
So yeah. The pieces are all there, but literally be damned by others if you put them together.
The article doesn't touch on why this is an actual saint rather than a minor local cult like Saint Guinefort[0], the saint dog[1].
The reason, AFAIK, is that the early church didn't have a process for canonization, it was just all local cults. By the time they decided to establish a proper process (proof of miracles, witnesses, devil's advocate etc) many local churches had their own saints, and they decided to basically accept all the ones already in use and only start enforcing rules for the new ones. So the idea that "there's a holy man in the east who did this and that" resulted in "eh, sure, let's write down Saint Jehoshaphat too".
I find it incredible how many people have died in the name of minor variations in their monotheistic beliefs that are all based on the same foundational stories and yet here is a one of those foundational stories that has totally non-theistic source. I struggle with the hypocrisy of religion sometimes.
There's many a true word said in jest. Like this passage from Red Dwarf:
> Mr and Mrs Rimmer were very religious, taking the Bible scriptures at face value. The Hoppists were primarily concerned with a particular verse from the New Testament. St. Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 13 had been misprinted in a certain edition of the Bible. In their version, the verse read "And now these three remain: Faith, Hop and Charity. But the greatest of these is Hop".
> The Hoppists took this literally and insisted that their followers spent every seventh day hopping. They would hop to church, hop through the service and then hop home again. The Rimmers even served their Sunday lunch whilst hopping, causing them to wear protective clothing to avoid burning themselves.
This is obviously a joke but there's load of examples of people getting hung up on seemly minor details like that.
E.g. The Umbilicus Adami discussion. If the bible is literal and God made Adam then Adam didn't have a mother. So that leads to the question, did he have a belly button?
If he didn't have a belly button was he human?
It sounds ridiculously trivial but people have died over that, which is itself even sillier.
Buddhism didn't start from a blank slate either and incorporates various supernatural beings like deva (linguistically linked to Latin deus) or asura (similarly linked to Norse æsir), but they're relegated to minor roles, trapped in the cycle of reincarnation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Paths Then as it spread throughout Asia, various other local traditions got assimilated as well. Not unlike turning the Buddha into a minor Christian saint in the article.
I think it's less hypocrisy and more the desire to integrate all available information into a consistent framework. When you encounter something that doesn't fit, you can of course reject it and fight bitterly over who is right, but you can also file off the sharp edges and puzzle it together with the rest of your worldview somehow.
> I struggle with the hypocrisy of religion sometimes
That doesn’t really make sense to me. Do you mean the hypocrisy of people who follow those religions?
I tend to think that blaming outside forces for bad behaviour by people lets them off the hook a bit too easily - in particular it lets leaders off the hook far too easily - and disincentivises change because “I do X because Y makes me” rather than “I do X because I choose to”, which is the truth.
Religions might contain good teachings and bad teachings but, ultimately, people choose how they behave and so it’s the people who show hypocrisy.
This is a weirdly dissonant comment that misunderstands both religion and the nature of choices.
Religions don't exist without the people. The scriptures have no narrative power if they are not told by people to people. The rites and traditions only serve to reinforce habits and pass themselves down throughout time to new people. The religion evolves with the people because keeping followers become the fitness function.
No religion knowingly offers its followers "bad teachings". Anybody who thinks a religion has "bad teachings" quickly becomes an impostor and gets pushed out. The self selection means that there are no "bad teachings".
Also, you are trying to pretend like the choice is only applied by the cognitive brain by the individual human at the time of an action. This ignores both group psychology and the role of habits / indoctrination.
The Catholic Church internal policies target the ages of 4-14 for indoctrination and habit forming. What 10 year old will resist their parents, resist their church authority figures, resist all of the teachings of thousands of years of their people, resist the "word of God", have the knowledge and self awareness to know the difference between God's voice and typical bipolar ruminations?
> No religion knowingly offers its followers "bad teachings". Anybody who thinks a religion has "bad teachings" quickly becomes an impostor and gets pushed out. The self selection means that there are no "bad teachings".
I mean "bad teachings" from the point of view of an outsider who might not agree with the religion. What I'm saying is that even where that's the case, it's the people following the religion choosing to do so and choosing how they behave.
And I'm not pretending anything: I know full well about group psychology and indoctrination. But it still boils down to people being people, and people being hypocritical.
> The Catholic Church internal policies target the ages of 4-14 for indoctrination and habit forming.
Exactly. And what did I say about letting leaders off the hook? Grown adult church leaders choosing to indoctrinate, brainwash, and sometimes exploit children. It's people. Again. It's all people.
Sooner or later we all have to grow up and take responsibility and accountability for our own actions.
Yeh it’s the hypocrisy of the people that follow religion but also religion in general requiring you to deeply believe a version of a story, whilst rejecting other religions version of that story. I know “rejecting” is in the realm of fundamentalists, but even moderate believers will trust their version over others when in reality all these stories can be traced back to the exact same source story. I knew this was true for mono-theistic religions, but I’m amazed it can apply even outside of those bounds.
> Galileo is my actual, real life middle name! “Signore Galilei” is supposed to mean “Mr. Galilei” in the native Italian of Galileo Galilei, considered by many to be the father of modern science. I try to bring a Galilean spirit of curiosity to every post and video I make. An Italian-speaking viewer of mine has informed me that “Signore” should grammatically become “Signor” when it is used with a specific person’s last name rather than as a general term of address, so “Signore Galilei” really means something more like “Mister! Galilei!” instead. I guess that’s still okay with me.
I'm Italian, I thought using the full word instead of eliding the last "e" was an archaic florentine habit that the author used, didn't think much of it tbh.
Sounds more like the "scribes and Pharisees" that Jesus preached against:
"They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by others. ...they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others. But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven." -- in Matthew 23
Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater,
and don't throw out the Christ with the 'christians'.
in all cases? Really. That seems more like a trusim that people often blindly repeat than something that's actually supported by facts.
I can see how Islam being designed as a state religion can be tied to power structures. Perhaps there is an argument that Hinduism supported feudal social structures. Other than that, the idea that religion is closely tied to power structures seems to be questionable and weakly supported. Was shamanic belief tied to the power of chiefs in ancient tribes? I don't think so. Buddha was a prince but it seems tenuous to say that buddhist monks somehow supported royal power in the East. I could go on. . .
Christ and Christianity is well documented in all the kingdoms where it was persecuted and then the subsequent kingdoms had record of those records because one thing about kingdoms is that they don't throw away previous king's records because land records and administrative decrees are stored.
Also Christians and Buddhist religions have the tradition of holding conferences that are well documented and happen after every few centuries.
As an Indian I have read about records of the Buddist conferences held by various kings since after Buddha.
Do I think Buddha is God. No. But he was pretty influential and impactful.
The Christian conferences are also there where major theology points are discussed and confusions clarified. The records of thoe conferences exist
> I just read the headline. Why should I read the article when the headline is so misleading.
Because the article explains the origins of the saints as Christianity coopting the story of the Buddha. The headline isn't wrong or misleading, you just made yourself look foolish by embracing ignorance.
>> Individual Western historians have noted the similarities between the story of Barlaam and Josaphat and the story of the Buddha for centuries – for example, it’s mentioned in an early printed edition of Marco Polo’s travels from 1446. But it was only in the mid-19th century that the saints’ tale was generally acknowledged as being derived from the Buddha’s.
The article isn't an explicit claim that these Christians were the Buddha, but that the story told about them is an apparent retelling of the Sidhartha story. It closes with:
All this tells me that there’s something about our relationship with the divine and the sacred that transcends individual eras and places. A place or a festival or a story that appeals to our common senses of awe or morality or wisdom can reach people of any faith tradition. Perhaps they’ll interpret it through their own lens, of course. But in the end, isn’t that all we have?
It's interesting dynamic. Catholic Church is notoriously top-down and hierarchical, yet local parishes can feel entirely distinct. It's not uncommon to see traditional Javanese processions integrated right into the mass. Like skin/mod in a game.
It has a hierarchy, but it has multiple hierarchies. It is not all that top down. Bishop's ave a lot of autonomy, and most decisions are made at the diocesan level. Dioceses have their own property and funds held by their own trustees. On top of that religious orders have their own hierarchy (and property and funds etc.). Then there are the rites such as the Ukrainian or Syro-Malabar churches that have their own hierarchies.
Historically this was the result of the fact the church predates modern communications. It was not possible for a Pope to direct things the way a CEO of a modern corporation does, but in recent times it has been recognised as guiding principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity_%28Catholicism%29 that has been adopted by other org anisations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
> It's not uncommon to see traditional Javanese processions integrated right into the mass.
That is encouraged, as long as there is not conflict with Catholic belief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inculturation#
Modern media has allowed the pope to receive unceasing attention that the papacy never possessed historically, but what is important to emphasize is that this is not a reflection of how the Church is administered or how authority is distributed. The idea that the pope is "running the Church" or "watching every member of the one and a half billion member flock like a busybody hawk" is a fiction drawn from jejune ignorance. Rome is notoriously slow to act, which should in general not be seen as a sign of incompetence, but as an expression of subsidiarity. It is much better to view the pope as the ultimate referee rather than some oppressive overlord. The moral ball is in your court, as it were.
W.r.t. absorbing what's around it, the Church has always recognized logos spermatikos or seminal reason, meaning, it recognizes reality as an intelligible creation of God, it recognizes the inherent rational nature of every human being, and thus it recognizes that every human being has an in principle capacity to recognize and know reality, to one degree or another. So, it sees no reason to suppose that there is nothing good or true or beautiful outside the Church and plenty of reason to recognize it and embrace it. What is good is good, what is true is true, what is beautiful is beautiful. When the Church encounters a culture, it seeks what is good within it and seeks to transfigure it in order to rescue its goodness and perfect it. Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit.
Saints Josaphat and Barlaam never had an official decree of canonization. That process didn't exist (in its earliest form) until 1170 AD. Saints before that were generally just acclaimed by the Christians in the area and probably recognized by a local bishop.
The Vatican does keep a "Roman Martyrology" by which they try to keep a list of all known saints, but the saints that existed before the canonization process are known as "pre-congregation" saints and our certainty about them is generally less, well, certain.
In this case, these two names were removed from the Martyrology. That isn't to say that the Vatican has declared they are not saints, but is no longer actively making that claim.
There have been quite a few other pre-congregation names removed from the list when historical study has found little evidence of their existence or life story.
"The devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, 'What did that man pick up?' 'He picked up a piece of Truth,' said the devil.'That is a very bad business for you, then,' said his friend.'Oh, not at all,' the devil replied, 'I am going to let him organize it.'"
Turns out, culture isn't a singular thing you can just have. People everywhere all the time are picking up bits of things to do, things to say, things to believe in, and borders, no matter how fluid they are, only exist in the aggregate.
It wasn't syncretism, it was systematic eradication. Syncretism is more akin to reconciliation of different views.
Mexico is interesting because it is a certainly a different catholicism than what is practiced elsewhere. Tell a devout old world European catholic about say Day of the Dead traditions and they will probably think its blasphemy. There is a lot of what amounts to local diety worship still as well, although they just label them as some patron saint of somesuch to preserve the veil of monotheism.
It’s worth noting that “monotheism” is a modern word. It was not a word used by theologians of the pre-modern era. The Bible is insistent that God is in some sense “one” or “alone,” and that you don’t offer sacrifices to other gods. People just thought that other gods were demons. It made a big difference to this point of view whether a sailor was asking St. Nicholas to help him get home safely or asking a demon for help, in the same way it makes a big difference whether you call the local mob or the municipal police when you have a problem. The latter are quite analogous to an angel/saint because police don’t have power or make laws in their own right, they are just servants of a higher authority (ultimately, the constitution). The mob, like the demon in the Christian point of view, are in disobedience to that higher authority or in direct competition/rebellion against it. There’s a really big difference even if both paths end with armed men with guns coming to solve my problem.
Want to make a Catholic mad? Tell them saints are just minor gods of the Christian pantheon.
That’s the whole idea though:
“God became man so that men might become gods,” -St. Athanasius
I'm old enough to remember being taught how America was settled by expanding into the vast wilderness of the continent, and that sometimes they had skirmishes with natives but they found them new places to live.
It turns out it wasn't quite as neat and tidy as suggested.
"...in the realm of religion, it specifically denotes a more integrated merging of beliefs into a unified system, distinct from eclecticism, which implies a selective adoption of elements from different traditions without necessarily blending them into a new, cohesive belief system."
"It provides an opportunity to bring beliefs, values, and customs from one cultural tradition into contact with, and to engage different cultural traditions."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism
We're talking about adopting cultural practices in a selective and transfigurative way. If a cultural practice doesn't conflict with the Church's teachings and would be beneficial, then it could be embraced as such. A cultural practice may also be transfigured and adapted into something that maintains a certain resemblance, but has a changed and elevated meaning. For instance, having encountered a culture that practices ancestor worship, it might take that practice and transfigure it into a restrained expression of filial piety that moves it away from idolatry. Pagan harvest festivals are another example where the symbolic meaning is changed.
We're just looking at this through the lens of the Protestant Reformation so this pragmatism is often lost.
This is straight out of the Manichaeism playbook whose followers believed that a wide range of previous belief systems including Platonism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity each had a part of divine truth in them. This allowed them to absorb a diverse set of followers and contributed to them being one of the fasted spreading religions in Late Antiquity even giving Christianity a run for its money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism
Except for it's never done. No Hindu believes Allah or Jesus is an Avatar of Vishnu.
It can't be. Vishnu literally means the "All-Pervading One". Allah is explicitly not Omnipresent. Jesus is Omnipresent but does not have infinite forms. So neither fit the bill. Even Buddha, who we Hindus associate as one of the Avatars of Vishnu is not the same Buddha as Gautama Buddha who founded Buddhism.
I'm sure you are right that many/most Hindus would consider this incompatible with their belief system (and even more sure your average Christian would think he was missing the point of accepting Jesus as his Lord and Saviour), but this sort of syncretism definitely has been attempted and found its converts, probably rather more of them than Akbar's attempts to combine Islam and Hinduism.
I'm also reminded of this mostly unrelated comedy sketch :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tw7LIykvBw
There's a rich history of panentheism in both. Ibn Arabi, probably the most famous Sufi scholar was known for defending it ("[God] sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man"), Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics held similar views etc. Of course that often got them into hot waters with Orthodoxy but it certainly existed and continues to exist.
A lot of these traditions are much more flexible than whatever is the dogma or institutional version of the time suggests. David Bentley Hart's writing on Vedantic traditions and Christianity is worth reading
What do you mean by "local religion"?
One of the most studied issues in Catholic evangelism is the Chinese rites controversy which is also one of the historical reasons why religions are suppressed in China (aside from ideological policies ascribed to communism).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Rites_controversy
(That and the Taiping rebellion which was estimated to have killed as many people as World War 2 on the higher end. It was led by a failed scholar claiming to be alleged brother of Jesus. Most of the deaths were due to starvation. Not quite Netflix material but interesting plot nonetheless)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion
1. https://bitterwinter.org/the-taiping-mystery-1-why-is-the-cc...
Really it's only in the last/final generation of religions, where they started writing them down in canon/scripture/testaments/writs/dogmas/whatever, that you started to see unique stories get associated with specific religions.
Before that? It's all mush. Aphrodite descends pretty clearly from the same line as Astarte/Ishtar/Innana (maybe Isis too), etc... People steal good stories. People get conquered and then confused by retelling the stories their new overlords tell. Again and again.
No, that phrase is just filler. And IMHO it's basically wrong. Certainly if the author want to show that Christianity is more likely than other religions to import ideas, the article has a lot more work to do than point out one myth. Literally everyone does this.
I'm just going to repeat: there is nothing notable or unique to Christian appropriation of myths and stories from other religions. It does it at least as much as everyone else does, and everyone does it everywhere. So trying to tie this uniquely to Christianity seems needless and confusing. The deeper point is more interesting and more important.
Is there anything in that paragraph you'd like to argue about?
Because catholic church is whatever the newest model is in the distro but other distros try to be very very clean and try to follow the original texts and their meaning but catholic church is like the new iphone trying to be like whatever is the trendy trend nowadays.
But e.g. modern American evangelical churches are to me quite clearly quite far from the original meaning of the texts with some theology outright invented in 18th and 19th centuries.
It really is the case that what you bring to a text colors what you get out of it, and the more people insist that they are reading a text "as it is clearly written" the blinder they seem to be to this.
The Orthodox churches may want to have a word with you. Especially the orthodox church in India founded by Thomas (one of the Jesus' 12 disciples)
What does this even mean? That the Catholic Church has some special authority by dint of having been around a long time? Also, what does it even mean if the Catholic Church has been around for a long time when so much about it (including the line of Popes) has been interrupted? Feels a bit like Theseus's ship.
> BUT it is still here and the closest thing we have to the way early church fathers practiced Christianity than any of the 30,000 protestant churches lol.
By what metric? Catholicism added _a whole lot_ onto traditional Christian teaching (Saints, the pseudo-divinity of mary, the infallibility of the papacy, relics, purgatory, etc) that many protestant denominations have stripped away. One could easily argue (and many do) that these protestant denominations are closer.
I'm not sure we can find an objective answer, or that finding one is even useful beyond ego stroking.
"A Christian is a person who believes in Jesus Christ and follows the religious teachings of Christianity."
Some are good people. Some are bad. All are Christians, so long as they have this core, defining belief system.
If you want to bicker over what constitutes a "good Christian", you might have some basis - but you're arguably in the wrong forum.
No amount of pseudo-philocophical and quasi-historical research can change this basic fact.
So many stories, many people believe are true and build whole religions around, are really just repeated stories with many details changed to fit the local culture and traditions.
It's crazy so many of the world's politics and problems stem from what might actually just be the same story said in a different way... or even of a fan fiction on top of existing fiction.
Christianity and worldviews typically associated with the 'east' (as I've seen them discussed here and elsewhere) disagree in both their view of the 'building blocks' of reality, and in their 'big picture' view. They disagree on base questions like if there is really a "you", or whether change is real, or whether the material world is real, or whether multiplicity is real, or whether the truth of A implies the falsehood of not-A, and so on. (I've heard all of the above answered in the negative here.) And they disagree on 'big picture' things like the goal of human existence, the nature of the Absolute, what it is to live a good life, whether evil is the result of illusion or is (in addition to this) a defect in the will and caused ultimately by an indescribably malevolent being, whether a human being can reach a 'blessed' state by his own power, etc.
So the differences are vast and essential, on both the macro and micro levels. The fact that some beliefs and practices influence other beliefs and practices doesn't change this.
(The emergence of the "18 year old who just read Dawkins for the first time and thinks science disproves sky-daddy lolz" atheists on this thread is also most unfortunate.)
That has to be the universal one, no? I feel like basic moral principles, at least directed towards the in group, are pretty universal. I'd argue they are more base than even humans and are shared with certain intelligent animals.
I think this is another argument for a separation of Church and state. It allows people to challenge when religious teaching goes awry without fear of persecution.
Unless you presume the Buddhist stories were themselves historically accurate - which would start down a road of "both Buddhism and Christianity are true" - it's hard to imagine that these were coincidentally also stories about real figures.
However, anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with the history of early Buddhism, the Therapeutae, and the religious developments of the 1st century BCE/1st century CE can't ignore how improbable the independent development of the latter's practices are, and how influential they became to various groups in the Middle East that later claimed they arrived at them independently.
Earlier today, I was listening to Evangelical Christian Radio while doing errands (my phone is broken and I live deep in Red America) and the pastor, Alistair Begg, was making the argument that the synoptic gospels are totally unique in what they are. The format is unprecedented. They're not biographies. They're not systematic theology. It's just a direct witness to Jesus Christ. And so on. Therefore, they're historically valid and true, etc.
But if you have read the Pali Canon or other collections of sutras and agamas, it's almost blindingly obvious that the structure of the pericopic episodes found in the synoptic gospels aren't really unique at all.
As a random example:
From Majjhima Nikaya 55 (trans. Thanissaro): I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying near Rājagaha, in Jīvaka Komārabhacca’s mango grove. Then Jīvaka Komārabhacca went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, having bowed down to him, sat to one side. As he was sitting there he said to the Blessed One, “Lord, I have heard it said that ‘They slaughter animals for the sake of Gotama the contemplative. Gotama the contemplative knowingly eats the meat prepared for his sake in dependence on that action.’ Those who say, ‘They slaughter animals for the sake of Gotama the contemplative. Gotama the contemplative knowingly eats the meat prepared for his sake in dependence on that action’: Are they speaking in line with what the Blessed One has said, are they not slandering the Blessed One with what is unfactual, and are they speaking in line with the Dhamma so that no one whose thinking is in line with the Dhamma would have grounds for criticizing them?”
Compared to say, Mark 7 (trans. NIV):
The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles. So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”
And so on and so forth. The parallels don't end there, but I've probably gone on long enough of a rant. And this wouldn't even be the first time something like that happened in the Greek world. Pyrrho very likely did something very similar. Plus, the phenomena has modern equivalents as well. Look at how many mindfulness courses and therapy interventions in the West just file the serial numbers off of Buddhism (e.g. CBT, ACT).
So yeah. The pieces are all there, but literally be damned by others if you put them together.
https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2014/11/19/100292-saints-ba...
The reason, AFAIK, is that the early church didn't have a process for canonization, it was just all local cults. By the time they decided to establish a proper process (proof of miracles, witnesses, devil's advocate etc) many local churches had their own saints, and they decided to basically accept all the ones already in use and only start enforcing rules for the new ones. So the idea that "there's a holy man in the east who did this and that" resulted in "eh, sure, let's write down Saint Jehoshaphat too".
Christianity-as-trivia is a lot of fun.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Guinefort
[1] not to be confused with Saint Christopher, the dog-headed saint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Christopher#/media/File:...
All religions are nothing more than stories. If science doesn't prove this, then all proclaimed religions are cults.
> Mr and Mrs Rimmer were very religious, taking the Bible scriptures at face value. The Hoppists were primarily concerned with a particular verse from the New Testament. St. Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 13 had been misprinted in a certain edition of the Bible. In their version, the verse read "And now these three remain: Faith, Hop and Charity. But the greatest of these is Hop".
> The Hoppists took this literally and insisted that their followers spent every seventh day hopping. They would hop to church, hop through the service and then hop home again. The Rimmers even served their Sunday lunch whilst hopping, causing them to wear protective clothing to avoid burning themselves.
This is obviously a joke but there's load of examples of people getting hung up on seemly minor details like that.
E.g. The Umbilicus Adami discussion. If the bible is literal and God made Adam then Adam didn't have a mother. So that leads to the question, did he have a belly button?
If he didn't have a belly button was he human?
It sounds ridiculously trivial but people have died over that, which is itself even sillier.
I think it's less hypocrisy and more the desire to integrate all available information into a consistent framework. When you encounter something that doesn't fit, you can of course reject it and fight bitterly over who is right, but you can also file off the sharp edges and puzzle it together with the rest of your worldview somehow.
That doesn’t really make sense to me. Do you mean the hypocrisy of people who follow those religions?
I tend to think that blaming outside forces for bad behaviour by people lets them off the hook a bit too easily - in particular it lets leaders off the hook far too easily - and disincentivises change because “I do X because Y makes me” rather than “I do X because I choose to”, which is the truth.
Religions might contain good teachings and bad teachings but, ultimately, people choose how they behave and so it’s the people who show hypocrisy.
Religions don't exist without the people. The scriptures have no narrative power if they are not told by people to people. The rites and traditions only serve to reinforce habits and pass themselves down throughout time to new people. The religion evolves with the people because keeping followers become the fitness function.
No religion knowingly offers its followers "bad teachings". Anybody who thinks a religion has "bad teachings" quickly becomes an impostor and gets pushed out. The self selection means that there are no "bad teachings".
Also, you are trying to pretend like the choice is only applied by the cognitive brain by the individual human at the time of an action. This ignores both group psychology and the role of habits / indoctrination.
The Catholic Church internal policies target the ages of 4-14 for indoctrination and habit forming. What 10 year old will resist their parents, resist their church authority figures, resist all of the teachings of thousands of years of their people, resist the "word of God", have the knowledge and self awareness to know the difference between God's voice and typical bipolar ruminations?
I mean "bad teachings" from the point of view of an outsider who might not agree with the religion. What I'm saying is that even where that's the case, it's the people following the religion choosing to do so and choosing how they behave.
And I'm not pretending anything: I know full well about group psychology and indoctrination. But it still boils down to people being people, and people being hypocritical.
> The Catholic Church internal policies target the ages of 4-14 for indoctrination and habit forming.
Exactly. And what did I say about letting leaders off the hook? Grown adult church leaders choosing to indoctrinate, brainwash, and sometimes exploit children. It's people. Again. It's all people.
Sooner or later we all have to grow up and take responsibility and accountability for our own actions.
> Galileo is my actual, real life middle name! “Signore Galilei” is supposed to mean “Mr. Galilei” in the native Italian of Galileo Galilei, considered by many to be the father of modern science. I try to bring a Galilean spirit of curiosity to every post and video I make. An Italian-speaking viewer of mine has informed me that “Signore” should grammatically become “Signor” when it is used with a specific person’s last name rather than as a general term of address, so “Signore Galilei” really means something more like “Mister! Galilei!” instead. I guess that’s still okay with me.
From the about page
They demand a cut even from a loan. Pathetic people praying on innocent people
"They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by others. ...they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others. But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven." -- in Matthew 23
Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, and don't throw out the Christ with the 'christians'.
Neither of them are currently recognised.
however in certain countries this gets you executed or imprisoned
Fixed it for you, Sir.
I can see how Islam being designed as a state religion can be tied to power structures. Perhaps there is an argument that Hinduism supported feudal social structures. Other than that, the idea that religion is closely tied to power structures seems to be questionable and weakly supported. Was shamanic belief tied to the power of chiefs in ancient tribes? I don't think so. Buddha was a prince but it seems tenuous to say that buddhist monks somehow supported royal power in the East. I could go on. . .
I live in an area surrounded by cults
but also there are plenty of solitary practitioners of Wicca and Buddhism
and then you have the dozen of forms of christianity where every church just put their own spin on things
people are weird, religion just makes it even more so
I don't have a problem as long as they keep it to themselves but that rarely is the case
Don't be an intellectual hodgepodge
Would you call them "facts"?
Because the article explains the origins of the saints as Christianity coopting the story of the Buddha. The headline isn't wrong or misleading, you just made yourself look foolish by embracing ignorance.
>> Individual Western historians have noted the similarities between the story of Barlaam and Josaphat and the story of the Buddha for centuries – for example, it’s mentioned in an early printed edition of Marco Polo’s travels from 1446. But it was only in the mid-19th century that the saints’ tale was generally acknowledged as being derived from the Buddha’s.