Religion Thread: I never metaphysics I didn't like

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Religion Thread: I never metaphysics I didn't like

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Hi all! Former evangelical turned Friend/pseudo-Universalist here. Pretty left-wing politically but with a strict commitment to non-violence.

Thanks for whomever answered my question about online Quaker meetings in the last thread (I would quote you but I can�t find the old thread now).

So, random thought I�ve been mulling recently: reading Tolstoy roughly a decade ago was a huge part of my spiritual journey and I found much value in his writings.. but recently I became aware of how he treated his wife, quite bluntly he raped her and used her as a �baby factory� in a horrible form of abuse. I know we shouldn�t put people on a pedestal but I think you can see why that was shocking to find out for me. Ultimately I figured it just loops back to what Fred Rogers said that �the people who are very, very good sometimes can also be very, very bad sometimes� but I wonder if I�m dismissing Sophia Tolstoy�s suffering by thinking that.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2021 18:36

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 11:23

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

BattyKiara posted:

That would be me, and you are still welcome to join any meeting. That goes for everyone here of course.

As for why Christianity? Well, as I see it, it is impossible for a human mind to fully comprehend God. We can only try to find our own path, and respectfully remember that your neighbour's path may be very different from your own path. God hears all prayers, if said in earnest. If you call your practice Hinduism, Christianity, or Purple Kitten living on an unknown planet in the Andromeda galaxy, is just details, that matter very little in the eyes of God. If your prayers or rituals are done in earnest belief, God accepts your faith, unconditionally.

Thanks again!

# ¿ Jan 19, 2021 00:45

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Captain von Trapp posted:

For a Christian there's basically three approaches to moral difficulties in the bible.

I found Alec Ryrie�s lecture on how Protestant Christianity did a complete reversal over its previous beliefs on slavery over the coarse of the 18th and 19th centuries to be well worth listening to or reading a transcript of. (I�ll quote his conclusion here)

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/how-we-learned-that-slavery-is-wrong

quote:

For many Christians, to condemn a previously held orthodoxy would be deeply problematic. Any church which claims to be able to define doctrine authoritatively is going to have trouble admitting that it has made a mistake. But for Protestants is easier. Even instinctively conservative Protestants know that being sinful means being fallible. They will tear up and discard cherished interpretations of the Bible if they have to. And as the abolitionists� confrontation with Scripture show, when what they think is the heart of the gospel is at stake, they will not let the Bible stand in their way.

In the great matter of slavery, Protestantism performed this manoeuvre in full dress for the first time. Generations of Protestants had condoned, worked with or even actively defended slavery. Yet since the later nineteenth century, the doctrine that slavery is an intolerable evil has become an utterly fixed reference-point on Protestantism�s moral map, despite that doctrine�s shaky Biblical basis. The precedent was and is momentous. The world is full of long-tolerated or even long-cherished practices and convictions, seemingly based in the Bible, which some Protestants may suddenly, in the light of grace and providence, come to see as intolerable evils. Protestant advocates of feminism, of gay rights, of vegetarianism, or indeed, if that sounds like a left-wing shopping list, Protestant opponents of abortion, all have to face the fact that their campaigns lack explicit Biblical grounding. But the antislavery cause has established beyond respectable doubt that Protestants can and sometimes must champion a cause in defiance both of established tradition and of textual proof when it is at the heart of their Gospel.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2021 21:19

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

https://anabaptistworld.org/board-g...u-LEKrausl2yDKs

Congrats for cornering the market on Mennonite board games.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2021 23:04

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Good luck to those Anabaptist missionaries in Haiti.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2021 04:22

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Maybe this is more �weird historical trivia� then �weird religious trivia� but it raised an eyebrow.

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/george-washington-a-descendant-of-odin

quote:

George Washington: first President of the United States, father of his country, crosser of the Delaware, and descendant of Odin. This, at least, was the claim put forward by the late nineteenth-century genealogist Albert Welles. In the floridly titled, four-hundred-page tome The Pedigree and History of the Washington Family Derived from Odin, the Founder of Scandinavia. B.C. 70, Involving a Period of Eighteen Centuries, and Including Fifty-Five Generations, Down to General George Washington, First President of the United States (1879), Welles created a family tree for Washington of truly mythical proportions, and one which shows just how useful nineteenth-century Americans found the Middle Ages to be when it came to shaping their understandings of their country's origins.

Welles stopped short of claiming that Washington was of semi-divine ancestry � likely because of his own devout Christianity. He therefore took his cue from the thirteenth-century Icelandic author and fellow Christian, Snorri Sturluson, who had proposed that Odin and the other Norse gods of his ancestors should be understood merely as venerated, mythologized versions of particularly successful war leaders. This meant that Odin was not the god of healing and death and the foremost of the �sir, or Norse pantheon. He was instead a flesh-and-blood man who had lived almost two thousand years ago, ruling over a Turkic people in central Asia called the Aesir. Over time, Odin's conquests took him further and further west until he finally settled in Scandinavia and declared himself king of all its peoples in the early first century BCE. Welles sniffed that previous historians had not come to this very obvious conclusion because they � unlike him � were "unable to separate the real from the mythological history".

Yet Welles was keen to engage in some myth-making of his own, stressing the similarities between the Odin he conjured up and George Washington. Though separated by eighteen centuries � and though no one knows what even a human Odin might have looked like � Welles writes that both men were of "wild, massive, manly" stock. If Odin, the first king of a united Scandinavia, were "the Mars as well as the Mohammed" of the region, then surely the first president of the United States had to hold a similarly elevated position.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2021 15:28

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

Would it be sacrilegious or disrespectful for a non-Catholic to hang up a icon?

I�m working on some decorating and found some icons I�d like to have on my wall because 1. Their amazing works of art and more importantly 2. They could help focus my mind on what matters spiritually.

https://www.trinitystores.com/artist/br-robert-lentz-ofm

# ¿ Feb 25, 2022 19:40

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 11:23

Nckdictator: Sep 8, 2006; Just..someone

BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:

This reminds me of missionaries to Japan translating the Abrahamic god as Vairocana until they learned more about Buddhism and then immediately stopped

Gotta recommend my favorite result of faulty translations and cultural adaptation.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/520203.Beginning_of_Heaven_and_Earth

quote:

This book provides the only written record of the Kakure Kurishitan story - the Tenchi, also known as "The Beginning of Heaven and Earth." The Tenchi is fascinating. It is as if you had to teach some group of children the basic elements of Christianity and they had to reconstruct a coherent story from what you told them 40 years later. So, the Tenchi has a Creation myth, but God is "Deusu" and Lucifer is "Yusuhero." Deusu has more ranks and forms than even the Buddha; Yusuhero tries to usurp Deusu's place before the anjo and Domeigosu-no-Adan and Domeigosu-no-Ewe, which requires Adan and Ewe to say the salve regina, which is the basis of the Contrition orassho. Yusehero convinces Adan and Ewe to eat the fruit of the masan, which results in their eviction from Pariaso and Ewe being turned into a dog in Middle Heaven. There is a flood story and Deusu divides himself into two persons - Deusu and the divine son, Hiiryo-sama. Maruya appears as a lovely virgin who is courted by the King of Ronzon - which is the Philippines. Her virtue is such that she ascends to heave in a flower wagon, then returns and gives birth to the son, and has adventures. The Kings of Mexico, France and Turkey visit the Holy One, but tip of the King of the Land, Yorotetsu, about the Holy One. Yorotetsu has his retainers, Ponsha and Piroto, slaughter the innocent children of the land. The Holy One goes to Rome and then returns to be killed by Yorotetsu, but then goes to heaven, returns to Earth for 40 days to teach his head disciple - Pappa. The Holy One was betrayed by Judatsu, who hanged himself in grief after being admonished "Now look here, Judatsu, you must have betrayed our master. You treacherous bastard."

Nckdictator fucked around with this message at 08:04 on May 11, 2022

# ¿ May 11, 2022 08:01

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Religion Thread: I never metaphysics I didn't like