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I don‘t understand why Immaculate Conception is thought to be necessary, but even Martin Luther couldn’t bring himself to give it up.
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Dec 16, 2020 06:05
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I don't get the thing with Mary either, but there's a friendly general-religion chat in A/T if you want to dig into such things as believed by people/scholars at present. Kevin DuBrow posted:
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Dec 16, 2020 06:57
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apparently years of being taught Catholic doctrine was not enough for me to understand this very basic concept.
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Carthag Tuek posted: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." Ernst Elias Niebergall posted:Datterich. In Nirnberg werd iwwermorje e Selbstmerder gekeppt. e: OMG, Apple’s attempts at translating obscure German dialects are hilarious. quote:I can't believe it net, awwer she would see, that I raised right: in fifty years sense all Derke! Zopotantor has a new favorite as of 07:46 on Dec 16, 2020 |
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Dec 16, 2020 07:42
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 Warning: huge wall of text incoming! Platystemon posted:I don‘t understand why Immaculate Conception is thought to be necessary, but even Martin Luther couldn’t bring himself to give it up. It’s actually a really interesting view into church politics imo. The question of Mary first arose in the 4th/5th centuries when early Christianity was fighting over Christology, or to be precise: whether Christ was fully human, fully divine or both - and, if the latter, how his two natures interacted with each other. The focus naturally turned onto Mary then as the origin of Christ’s human nature: Could we really call her „Mother of God“, or would other titles be closer to the developing orthodoxy? They eventually settled on calling her Theotokos or „the one who gave birth to God“ which is still how she is addressed in Eastern Orthodoxy afaik. This period of time also saw the first peak in her veneration, with numerous Marian shrines being constructed all over the Empire. The most famous of those is probably Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome which dates back to the 420s (  ).During this time, the thought slowly arose that Mary was exceptional in the regard that she had led a perfectly sinless life. This probably came from some early Christians being uncomfortable with the thought of God being born to a woman marred by sin, or that her son would let his mother err like that afterwards. Maybe it also was sort of a compromise between the warring Christological factions? I can’t really say, to be honest. Anyway this belief quickly spread throughout most of Christianity but to my knowledge never became officially codified. It also clashed with a different doctrine that emerged by then, namely the idea of original sin as put forth by St Augustine. Augustine‘s theory (which was largely based on the rather skeevy Greek->Latin translation of a single word, I might add) was that the state of sin Adam and Eve had fallen into was an inheritable trait passed on via sex. So Christ, son of a virgin, was in the clear, but his human mother was not and therefore marred by original sin no matter how sinless her later life was. In the following centuries this question was mostly put aside, however. It only came to the forefront again when the High Middle Ages saw another rise in Marian veneration - it‘s no coincidence that so many cathedrals of the time bear her name. By then, theologians had started to move away from Augustine’s original idea that sin was transferred strictly biologically via the male semen, thinking instead that there had to be some metaphysical fuckery going on. This opened up another huge can of worms, however, because this would mean that Christ – or at least his human nature – was subject to original sin as well, which obviously wasn’t possible. And then there were another two problems that needed being adressed: Mary had to be fully human so that Christ could have a fully human nature as well – so she had to have been born with original sin as well, but ??? (see above). Also scripture said that Christ redeemed all of mankind, which again necessarily had to include his own mother too. Throughout the Middle Ages there was a lot of debate about this topic; some even claimed that Mary wasn’t conceived by sinful sex but instead by chaste kissing (lol), but St Bridget of Sweden put a damper on that when Mary revealed to her in a vision that no, her parents totally boned down. St Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican friar and quite possibly the most influential Catholic theologian ever, was part of those who rejected Augustine’s biologism and saw original sin as something that was imparted metaphysically. So how to reconcile Christ’s sinlessness with this? Thomas put forth a model based on the then widespread belief that the human soul didn’t immediately came into being at conception, but instead was imparted gradually during pregnancy. Namely he theorised that there were three stages where God first put the soul of a plant into the foetus, then the soul of an animal and finally a human soul. And just in that very instance where God infused the foetus that would later be born as Mary with a human soul, he also freed her of original sin by his divine grace. Another influential medieval theologian objected to that, however. The Franciscan friar John Duns, who was commonly called Duns Scotus due to his being a Scotsman, claimed that Mary was indeed free from original sin, but not because of a post-conception act of God but because her conception itself had been immaculate. Her parents had had sex, yes, but God made it so that original sin wasn’t involved ever. Duns’ reasoning was sketchy and went like this: According this grace to Mary made sense, and God could do it. So he did it. …yeah, it’s easy to see why Thomas objected to this. This theological conflict also was just another layer in a centuries-long struggle between Dominicans and Franciscans with the former supporting Aquinas and the latter cheering for Duns. The Council of Basle elevated the Franciscan theory to doctrine, but like the entire council it wasn’t accepted by the popes, and the conflict kept on simmering for centuries well into the 19th century. Many Catholics came to believe in the immaculate conception as put forth by Duns, but the official church hierarchy refused to put it into dogma seeing as how there was no biblical evidence and how handwavey the entire reasoning was. The 19th century was a defining age for the Catholic Church, where much of what we perceive as „typically Catholic“ was actually put in place or downright invented. The decades after the French Revolution saw a big revival of Marian devotion, but not in the pre-revolutionary Baroque sense but in an entirely new quality as well. First there was a huge focus on Mary; where previously tons of other saints had been venerated, they now fell more and more to the wayside in favour of her. There were Marian revelations all over the place – a symptomatic one was the small Prussian town of Marpingen in today’s Western Germany, where in 1876 Mary appeared to three little girls during the height of conflict between the newly created German Empire and the Catholic Church. It’s hard not to see those apparitions as political statements too. Another big one was an apparition in 1830 Paris – again probably not coincidentally, seeing as there had been a big revolution in Paris just months prior. In this particular instance, Mary appeared with golden letters that read „O Mary, conceived without sin…“ During the 1830s and 1840s, European and especially French Catholics put a lot of pressure onto ultra-reactionary Pope Gregory XVI, wanting him to finally declare the Immaculate Conception into dogma. But Gregory refused; he didn’t want to directly repudiate Thomas Aquinas like this and saw no need to elevate something into doctrine that most Catholics had come to believe anyway. Also there was the problem the the Council of Trent had stipulated that all Catholic dogma needed to be based on scriptural evidence too, which was pretty much non-existent for this topic. His successor Pius IX thought differently, however, rejected all those doubts of his predecessor and the stipulations of Trent and made the Immaculate Conception into dogma in 1854 – again with a political background, as most of the preparation to this had happened in the years immediately after the 1848 revolution. The repudiation of theological tradition and the added focus onto Mary as the perfect „Queen of Heaven“ can also be seen as facets of Pius‘ effort to centralise the Church and elevate the papacy into an all-powerful absolutist monarchy battling depraved modernity on all fronts.
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Dec 16, 2020 09:08
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System Metternich posted:can also be seen as facets of Pius‘ effort to centralise the Church and elevate the papacy into an all-powerful absolutist monarchy battling depraved modernity on all fronts. (Excellent post, that's a lot of  that by all rights probably shouldn't be as interesting as they are.)
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Dec 16, 2020 09:21
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PMush Perfect posted:Religion is, was, and has always been inseparable from politics. Religion is politics.
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Dec 16, 2020 09:24
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This of course ties into something that is very important when discussing the past to keep in mind, people of the past generally were just as intelligent as people alive today, they just had different amounts of and access to knowledge and probably even more importantly different priorities than people of today have
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Dec 16, 2020 09:28
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Fascinating. Thank you. And this especially is why I read the thread:System Metternich posted:Throughout the Middle Ages there was a lot of debate about this topic; some even claimed that Mary wasn’t conceived by sinful sex but instead by chaste kissing (lol), but St Bridget of Sweden put a damper on that when Mary revealed to her in a vision that no, her parents totally boned down.
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Dec 16, 2020 09:32
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System Metternich posted:Namely he theorised that there were three stages where God first put the soul of a plant into the foetus, then the soul of an animal and finally a human soul. Your Soul Is Not An Onion With A Plant Inside also fascinating, thank you! Always love hearing about the background to theological debates like this
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Dec 16, 2020 10:57
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Zopotantor posted:From this. I can't make sense of this (your extract in particular). Help?
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Dec 16, 2020 12:09
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More like Duns Scrotus, am I right or what fellow Dominicans
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Dec 16, 2020 12:45
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Carthag Tuek posted:I can't make sense of this (your extract in particular). Help? It's an 1841 theatre play written entirely in South Hessian dialect. The excerpt says "Datterich: The day after tomorrow they will behead a suicide victim in Nuremberg. - Spirwes: Yeah, they are super strict there" (I had to look up some of it too  )
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Dec 16, 2020 13:59
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lmao nice thanks!
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Dec 16, 2020 16:00
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Props to St Bridget for shutting down an especially silly theology right from the get-go
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Dec 17, 2020 10:01
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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 In sweden we also had religiously motivated suicide by beastiality! Basically, it was a capital crime to have sex with an animal, and theology said the act would drat your soul too. However, during executions the priest could and often would absolve the executeds soul if they repented. In addition court procedure could initially rely completely on confessions. This naturally led to fun things such as having suicidal persons (in 99% of the cases men were on trial), or other people who also committed damning acts. confessing beastiality as a quick way into heaven.
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Dec 18, 2020 00:49
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/r/Catholicism discusses what Jesus’ birth meant for Mary’s hymen. Come for: quote:liken his emergence from the Virgin's womb to his emergence at Easter from the sealed tomb before the angels rolled the stone away, or the penetration of a ray of light through glass. Stay for: quote:I find this emphasis on "bodily integrity" bizarre when virginity is lost by voluntary and complete venereal pleasure and to insist that Mary's virginity could somehow be lost because of a material change to her genitalia in childbirth is the exact sort of pagan nonsense we supposedly turned away from by canonizing rape victims as virgin
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Dec 18, 2020 07:49
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 (not surprising though, r/catholicism has always been a reactionary shithole)
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Dec 18, 2020 08:19
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Platystemon posted:/r/Catholicism discusses what Jesus’ birth meant for Mary’s hymen.
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Dec 18, 2020 08:48
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Honestly I think any discussion of that subject should end with the Pope hitting the participants over the head with his ferula.
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Dec 18, 2020 09:06
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Honestly I think any discussion of that subject should end with the Pope hitting the participants over the head with his ferula. That’s the sort of behavior that got the priests in trouble in the first place!
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Dec 18, 2020 09:23
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System Metternich posted:
reddit bad?! 
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Dec 18, 2020 13:35
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ChubbyChecker posted:reddit bad?! Not all of it! There are legitimately great subreddits like r/askhistorians which I can only recommend to everyone reading this thread, but admittedly they are only a few drops in a vast sea of mediocrity and/or wannabe totalitarian politics
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Dec 18, 2020 17:57
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Speaking of which, here's a link I found today! It's about how people survived when their babies cried in prehistoric times. clicky
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Dec 18, 2020 21:28
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https://twitter.com/SAMOYEDCORE/status/1340292346831728640
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Dec 19, 2020 16:00
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:For modern americans struggling to understand the old catholic/protestant animosity, it's the same as the republican/democrat divide of now. As in, the same. Wait, so which side was pure unalloyed evil?
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Dec 23, 2020 19:31
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Beachcomber posted:Wait, so which side was pure unalloyed evil? Yes
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Dec 23, 2020 19:32
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Newspapers from 1920's Indiana are funny like that. The Republican Party got completely hijacked by D.C. Stephenson's KKK and their primary target, above even blacks, was Catholics. They even had paid black GOP spokespeople giving lectures on how it was the devious Catholics behind the lynchings in the South, how Eugene Debbs was an out-of-touch elitist, how the GOP was the party of Lincoln, etc. They also had "former nuns" going on speaking tours about how the Catholic Church was a satanic group kidnapping protestant children for orgies at monasteries. The Catholics, meanwhile, were a disjointed group from lots of different ethnic backgrounds and cultures that mostly just lost elections. Occasionally they established newspapers to mock the protestants for going insane, kinda like the Daily Show in the oughts. George R. Dale of the Muncie Post-Democrat admittedly did a fair amount of damage to the Klan's image and helped to eventually effect their marginalization in Indiana politics, but ultimately Stephenson kidnapping and murdering a girl was more decisive on that front. Still, Dale's invective was pretty funny. He even died of an embolism while writing an anti-Klan editorial, dude died shitposting like a hero. 
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Dec 23, 2020 21:11
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Thomas Watson was one of the batshit "journalists" of the early 1900s who hated Jewish, Catholic and Black individuals equally. Watson ran a magazine and newspaper, both with "Jeffersonian" in the title. The magazine's run has been digitized. I've read bits of the newspaper while doing research, but can't find that it's been digitized. It's even more inflammatory. Both had subscribers nationwide. Watson's pieces are a big contributing factor in the lynching of Leo Frank, which involved a group driving 115 miles on dirt roads to the state prison, kidnapping Frank, cutting phone and telegraph lines in their wake and lynching him near the childhood home of Mary Phagan. The Frank case itself had some absolutely wild takes. I wrote a college paper with a lot of quotes taken from contemporary editorial columns in small Georgia newspapers. A few were sympathetic and thought justice had been denied to Frank (usually on equally racist grounds that a Black man's testimony was considered reliable) to the justice has sentenced him to die by the State (later commuted to life by the Governor) to lynching. Lynching had already been hotly debated for 25 years and this amplified it tremendously. It only took a decade more for most Georgians to start feeling a little queasy about lynching, though not enough, of course, to actually quit doing it. Hell, it's still being covered up, with noted turd William Barr being the reason that grand jury testimony from the 1946 Moore's Ford lynchings hasn't been released.
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Dec 23, 2020 22:54
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RC and Moon Pie posted:Thomas Watson was one of the batshit "journalists" of the early 1900s who hated Jewish, Catholic and Black individuals equally. Watson ran a magazine and newspaper, both with "Jeffersonian" in the title. Thanks for linking this, that's a really interesting resource.
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Dec 24, 2020 06:04
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https://twitter.com/Safaitic/status/1343444983983050753?s=20
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Dec 28, 2020 17:44
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I have an urge to scrawl “lol same” on it.
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Dec 28, 2020 17:47
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I'm always impressed with the innate human desire to go "I was here", wherever we go.
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Dec 28, 2020 20:47
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Their urge to shitpost was so strong they carved it in to stone, I admire that. Like Halfdan and Arni who wrote their names in runes in Hagia Sofia
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Dec 28, 2020 21:17
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Versailles has "Chloe, 1848" carved into a mirror somewhere. A tour guide told me that it was actually written around 1920, but at this point that's historic graffiti anyway.
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Dec 29, 2020 11:43
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That does bring up an interesting discussion of when something is considered vandalism and when it is considered part of the history. How much time has to pass and does the amount of vandalism/addition matter? It feels like at some point we've sort of arbitrarily decided to define some things as historic and immutable, in the state that we found them in. The building I live in (1930s brick building with 215 condos on 3 floors) has historical protections. Not full on "you can only ever use historically accurate materials, methods and tools", but in the sense that all changes have to be approved for preserving the outward appearance of the building, meaning that all of our windows and doors and so on have to match the current defined-as-original appearance. The thing is that aside from floor plans and a few incomplete architectural drawings, we don't actually have any proper documentation of how the building originally looked. We have a few old photographs from when the building was new, but they only show parts of the building and are obviously in black and white. So the current appearance, where some doors are green and some are red and all of them have difference sizes and arrangements of windows etc., is set in stone as the way the building is "supposed" to look.
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Dec 29, 2020 11:59
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KozmoNaut posted:That does bring up an interesting discussion of when something is considered vandalism and when it is considered part of the history.  In 1986 Paul Vidar Sævarang and Ole Kristian Stavnsborg painted the word "sædfuck" (cumfuck) under the bridge of a subway station and it's generally considered the first contemporary graffiti in Norway. Thanks to being relatively obscure and people restauring it when it got painted over it survived until 2015.
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Dec 29, 2020 12:34
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Some assholes defaced ancient helleristninger (petroglyphs) in Norway recently, and there are also recent cases from America and Australia, etc. Historical defacement is historical, so it doesn't count as vandalism to me. The anonymous Mamluk, Chloe, Halfdan, and Arni are cool in my book. My apartment is in a building from 1899 that's on the registry as "conservation value" 4 (of 1-9 where 1 is most worthy of conservation), so it's a good example of the style of the time, but not specially protected. My street is cobbled and has original lamps though, which I really like  https://www.kulturarv.dk/fbb/index.htm
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Dec 29, 2020 12:38
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Halfdan is especially valuable because it's one of the few written records left by the vikings.
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Dec 29, 2020 12:45
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Alhazred posted:In Norway a piece of graffiti actually achieved a kinda historical status: This piece of graffiti in the Netherlands is a bit hidden. It's on the back side of a highway sound barrier and you have to walk down an unmarked forest path to get to it.  Initially the city was planning to remove it like any other graffiti, but after people petitioned the city they decided to give it monument status and leave it there. The sign on the pole is from the city and it says "do not paint over or remove image". Edit: Let me write a quick translation of the text. "I know what I want I have a goal I have an opinion I have a faith and love. Let me be myself Then I am happy If God lets me live I will achieve more than mother ever did. I will not stay unremarkable!" - Anne Frank Carbon dioxide has a new favorite as of 12:57 on Dec 29, 2020 |
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Dec 29, 2020 12:53
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Carthag Tuek posted:Historical defacement is historical, so it doesn't count as vandalism to me. You know what else is historical? The Vandals.
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Dec 29, 2020 12:54
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