FreudianSlippers posted:

It amazes me that Mormonism has millions of followers worldwide because it's so transparently a wacky scheme by a known conman that got way out of hand.

FreudianSlippers posted:

It amazes me that Mormonism has millions of followers worldwide because it's so transparently a wacky scheme by a known conman that got way out of hand. It's like if the Manson family had somehow become a huge international religion except the Mormons killed a lot more people.


If something hosed up is going down in Africa odds are the French have their fingers in it.

drrockso20 posted:

Not to mention some Anglicans who have ended up deciding to rejoin the Catholic Church and brought back with them some of the things that their old church had thought up over the centuries that doesn't directly clash with Catholicism(which is actually in many respects more diverse than most Protestant churches are)

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Nah it’s all France.

Facebook Aunt posted:

Wait, it's all France? Always has been.

Imagine I posted that meme here. But don't imagine too hard because posting memes in some threads is probatable, and I don't want to eat a probe because your imagination was too good.

Carbon dioxide posted:

PMush Perfect posted:

God, if this was the right subforum for me to be able to, giving you a comedy sixer of "I imagined too hard" would've been the funniest thing I'd do all month.

christmas boots posted:

What's France up to? I normally don't pay attention to the crimes of other countries because who cares, they're not us. But what's their deal these days?

CharlestheHammer posted:

What that’s Calvinism which was early in the process but died out more or less.

BrigadierSensible posted:

Australians are mad at France because of their testing of atomic bombs on Muroroa Atol
New Zealanders are mad at France about their sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. (Also for the 1999 Rugby World Cup Semi-Finals)

Edit: Re: Anglicans converting to Catholicism.

Horrible barely human troll Anne Widdecombe converted from Anglicanism to Catholocism when teh Anglicans allowed women to become priests. Because, you know, why would you want to belong to a religion that believes that people of your gender can also be close to god.

Sulla Faex posted:

catholics: Cuck me, Lord! Cuck me like you cucked your son's father!

the local dioclese: :thisisfine:

drrockso20 posted:

That's not how it worked at all

Sulla Faex posted:

Despite technically being Roman Catholic I'm not well versed in the doctrine, but I've always seen the need for an immaculate conception as being academic trickery to reinforce rather than review toxic gender ideals. Like you need to go out of your way to clarify that this heavenly example doesn't relate to real world scenarios and morality, yet you don't apply this same exceptionary (is that a word? it's underlined red) logic to anything that supports your established bigotry. Cucking as a misogynist fascination is also, to me at least, an established phenomenon..

e: (I'm not saying it was a good joke, mind. Just that I don't reckon it slips as much as you're saying, although I could be missing a lot)

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Frankly I don’t get why you folks don’t renounce your false Messiah and his thousand churches and just learn hebrew and wear a fuckin kippah like a normal person

Mr. Sunshine posted:

Let's recreate the 30 years war in the PYF Historical Fun Fact thread! We beat the Catholic League once, we can do it again!

Angry Salami posted:

Hating the English is something that can bring the whole world together.

Carthag Tuek posted:

Speaking of guilt, confession, and absolution, there was a weird period in Denmark in the 1700s.

Basically, you go straight to hell if you commit suicide, but if you are sentenced to death, you get a priest for your confession and since you are forgiven, you can go to heaven. Murder victims also go to heaven, though they didn't have time to confess.

Which basically meant that depressed people were incentivized to commit murder in order to be sentenced to death. Post-partum mothers killing babies, husbands killing wives, or just someone killing a random stranger, etc. These were referred to as "melancholy murderers".

At the time, theology and jurisprudence considered the death penalty mandatory for murder, no exception. So in order to counter these murders, the king issued regulations in 1749 that supplemented the death penalty for the premeditated murder of family members and strangers with "pinching with heated pliers", first in town square, then outside the crime scene, and finally at the place of execution. The hand should be cut off while they were living, and after beheading, the body would be put on display.

This didn't help much though, and after much debate and resistance, the death penalty was in 1767 instead changed to hard labor for life for those types of cases, which appears to have worked: No death penalty, no heaven, no motivation for depressed people to do murder

System Metternich posted:

This phenomenon also extended beyond Denmark, with plenty of similar examples being recorded in Sweden and all of Germany, especially its northern/Protestant parts. Kathy Stuart's Suicide by Proxy: The Unintended Consequences of Public Executions in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Central European History 41 (2008), pp. 413-445) is a fascinating and highly recommended read on this topic

quote:

[Huet] related the case of a Swede of sound mind and good reputation who stabbed a four-year-old boy in the neck as he was playing in front of his parents' house. Huet reported the man's confession: "I know very well there is no surer way to achieve eternal salvation than if the fully conscious soul exits a strong body..., and is carried upward to God by the pious prayers of people of faith.... I realized it would be impossble to die this way unless I committed a capital crime, so I thought it would be easiest... if I killed a boy not yet corrupted by this life." The man, Huet reported, went to his death "joyfully, loudly singing sacred hymns."

quote:

After a pause of ten years, the murders resumed in November 1701, when a local citizen"s daughter drowned her six-month-old baby sister in a fishpond, "out of impatience and weariness with her life. Immediately after the deed she appeared at city hall to turn herself in. The following March, a spurned lover, the only male perpetrator of suicide that I have been able to identify in Nuremberg, decided to shoot himself, but then "out of fear of eternal damnation, he changed his mind," and shot his lover instead." Fourteen months later, in June 1703, a beggar woman turned herself in after throwing her baby in the river Pegnitz. She had made several attempts to drown herself with the baby, but the thought of eternal damnation prevented her. She finally threw her child into the river, "so that this way she would be killed as well?" In 1709 a butcher's daughter turned herself in after decapitat- ing a nine-year-old girl with a butcher"s knife. She confessed "that for no legit- imate (rechtmdssig) reason she developed a weariness of her life and decided to attack and kill the next child that crossed her path." When the deed was done, she felt repentance, so she picked up her prayer book at home before turning herself in at city hall.

quote:

Cases of suicide by proxy occurred in villages in Brandenburg (Lutheran), Silesia (confessionally mixed), Saxony (Lutheran), Swabia (confessionally mixed), Bavaria (Catholic), in upper and lower Austria (Catholic), and many other regions within the Holy Roman Empire. Such murders are also documented for France in the early nineteenth century.

It is clear that the incidence of suicide by proxy extended well beyond Scandinavia and northeastern Germany, and that Catholics as well as Protestants engaged in the practice. The nine people executed for suicide by proxy in Vienna were, unsurprisingly, all Catholic. The prostitute Margaretha N., alias Schilichte Grödl, executed in Munich in 1783 for drowning a baby girl in the Isar River, was Catholic. Two of the five confirmed proxy killings in Augsburg were committed by Catholics, as was the one attempted proxy murder. After the Catholic miller "S. A." from Hilpoltstein in Bavaria unsuccessfully tried to cut the throat of his five-year-old son in 1724, he was cured of his mental distress by going on a pilgrimage to the nearby Jesuit shrine of Heilig Kreuz in Bergen, near Neuburg an der Donau. The cure was not permanent, however. Twentyone years later he cut the throat of his nine-year-old daughter. "It was a gift from God," he told his interrogators, that he had killed his child and not himself, "for in the contrary case he would have gone to the devil with body and soul." The Silesian Catholic peasant Hans-Christian Henatschel cut the throat of his nine- week-old baby in 1762, after praying to the saints and engaging in a Friday fast failed to stave off his suicidal urges.

drrockso20 posted:

That kind of thing happened a lot throughout Christian history, it was especially an issue in the first couple centuries of the faith as people would basically do violent stuff so they would get murdered in turn and become "martyrs" and thus get a quick and easy pass into heaven

tribbledirigible posted:

The Jews: That's...That's not how you rules-lawyer God...

quote:

Just like the mythical killings of the blood libel, the killings associated with suicide by proxy unfolded according to a particular liturgy of violence. In the myth of Jewish ritual murder, groups of Jewish men were believed to murder male Christian children as a form of religious sacrifice. Women might be involved on the periphery. In suicides by proxy, individual Christians acting alone, predominantly women, murdered Christian children of both sexes. [...]

If the perpetrators of suicide by proxy were in some sense annihilating themselves as they killed their victim, even before they mounted the scaffold themselves, they also understood the murder as a religious offering. As in the child killings associated with the blood libel, the child-victims of suicide by proxy were constructed as martyrs. A closer look at the interactions between victim and killer will illustrate the ritualistic and sacrificial nature of these killings. This essay began with a description of the extraordinary scene in 1704 of Agnes Schickin affectionately delousing the boy whose throat she would cut a short time later. This type of affectionate exchange between killer and victim was typical of these murders. Margeretha Mayrin’s murder of her neighbors’ two-year-old daughter in the village of Herprechtingen in Wiirttemberg in 1703 is a case in point. She dropped by her neighbor, who was a shoemaker, to borrow some wire to repair her shoes. As she was waiting for him to cut the wire, she picked up the toddler, kissed and hugged her, and then took the girl home with her for a visit. After a while, the girl’s mother came by to give Mayrin a gift of some milk and to pick up her daughter. Mayrin, in turn, gave the mother some bread, and persuaded her to let the girl stay longer. Subsequent to this exchange of gifts, alone with the child again, Mayrin smashed the girl’s head against a wall, shattering her skull. Such gifts of food are a common theme, though typically the murderers gave or shared food with the child-victim. After she had plied the mother with beer and had gained access to her victim, the prostitute Margaretha N. fed the little girl a bowl of oatmeal just before she drowned her in the Isar. In 1753 the soldier Daniel Völkner from Mecklenburg shared his evening meal with the little girl who was his intended victim, just before he cut her throat. These gifts of food or shared meal are evocative of the “last meal” (Henkersmahizeit) served to condemned criminals before their execution, and served the same symbolic purpose. In the days leading up to their execution, ce poor sinners” were provided with whatever foods they desired, and in some regions, the condemned shared a meal with judges and executioner. By accepting special food, the condemned expressed that they were at peace with the judges and agreed to play their scripted role during their upcoming execution.'' Similarly, when perpetrators of suicide by proxy offered food to their victims, such gifts were designed to elicit and express their victims’ consent.

PizzaProwler posted:

It's important to remember that a decently large amount of Mormons recorded in statistics are members in record only. They don't erase someone's membership status off of the records unless they go through a specific process (I don't know what process that is because I don't care enough to erase my own membership).

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Don’t some churches also like to posthumously baptize people into mormonism? Anne Frank is one I see mentioned a lot

FreudianSlippers posted:

It amazes me that Mormonism has millions of followers worldwide because it's so transparently a wacky scheme by a known conman that got way out of hand. It's like if the Manson family had somehow become a huge international religion except the Mormons killed a lot more people.

System Metternich posted:

I’m not sure if I completely buy Stuart‘s „oh, it only seems like a mainly Protestant phenomenon because they were better at writing it down“ argument, it seems kinda handwavey to me

Suicide by proxy also is still a thing, just not necessarily for religious reasons - just think of suicide by cop, for example. There are also examples from the same time for non-religious suicides by proxy, like this one case I read about in 1770s Ulm where a noble who had come back from the seven years war with what nowadays we would probably call a bad case of ptsd randomly shot a man in order to be executed because he couldn’t manage to pull the trigger on himself. The nobleman himself stated to the investigators that religion played no role at all, he just felt it easier to kill somebody else than himself

drrockso20 posted:

The whole point of Immaculate Conception is that Mary was born without Original Sin as a prerequisite of her being the Mother of God, and in turn lived her entire earthly life without Personal Sin either

Immaculate Conception is not about Mary's virgin pregnancy or birth of Jesus, it refers to her own conception by her mother St Anne

3D Megadoodoo posted:

A lot of people were murdered as heretics because they thought people other than Maria were born without sin.

Gaius Marius posted:

They weren't born

Kevin DuBrow posted:

apparently years of being taught Catholic doctrine was not enough for me to understand this very basic concept.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I would have sworn immaculate conception was Jesus, not Mary.