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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34907 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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I don't accept the ground premises you do physical and metaphysical. If I accepted your premises I would agree with your definition of Christianity and agree these people were not Christian. The epistemological and inferential differences between us are to great for us to really resolve this debate. I am just giving my materialist, sociological view on the issue. You are free, from your devote Christian view, to believe the Progressive Churches to not be real Christians, but this debate can't be resolved by appealing to these definitions that rest on assumptions I don't agree with, you have to defeat the assumptions first.

That some Christians consider others not really Christians is completely meaningless to my epistemology of religion.

I don't know why you're claiming materialistic worldview as a reason why we can't agree. What we are talking about is a materialistic matter. One need not believe in the divinity of Jesus (or even that such a man existed at all) in order to evaluate whether or not the church teaches that it's true. That is a materialistic matter, not a spiritual one. Similarly, I don't need to believe in the tenets of Hinduism to say whether or not they teach that reincarnation is real.

Ultimately it sounds to me like you just don't care about the issue of what the church teaches, which is fine. But that doesn't mean we can't resolve the debate because I believe in spiritual things and you don't. It means we can't resolve the debate because you don't really care to hammer out what the church teaches.

Which church is that again? The multitude of them disagree heavily, including very conservative ones considering other conservative denominations as hellbound. For example, a lot of the people in this thread arguing against these progressive churches being a type of Christian appear to be Catholics. The "trad" evangelical church I went to growing up taught that Roman Catholics are not Christians, they practice a form of Roman pagan polytheism and constantly demonstrate their break from monotheism by:

-  Groveling before graven images and idols.

  • Use of magic talismans like rosary beads and "holy" water, belief in sacred relics and those having magical powers.

  • Belief in literal cannibalism in the form of transubstantiation.

  • Worshipping humans and pagan deities with the serial numbers filed off labeled "saints.

  • Treating Mary like a goddess and often absorbing Mesoamerican pagan deities renamed Mary through all the "Virgin of [location] stuff.

  • Belief in spells resolving sins in the form of confession and stuff like reciting Hail Mary's rather than faith alone, and the historic practice of indulgences.

  • The most powerful Catholic religious leader and most powerful Roman pagan religious leader both sharing the title Pontifex Maximus and being based in Rome.

Catholicism's historic hostility to making the Bible accessible to normal people was also interpretated as being a move by this pagan religion to keep people from reading the Bible and noticing discrepancies between Catholic teachings and "real" Christianity, the persecution of other denominations being persecution of many "real" Christians, use of priests for confession and praying to saints as a way to minimize people trying to directly contact god, and infant baptisms as invalid and a way of tricking people into not getting "real" baptisms as a conscious adult choice.

I'm sure the Catholics in turn have plenty of reasons arguing how these are compatible with Christianity and why that evangelical sect is wrong about them and damned. From an outside perspective this stuff is just like watching Sunnis and Shia arguing and insisting the other isn't a type of Muslim when both are clearly divergent branches of the same religious traditions.

One need not believe in the divinity of Jesus (or even that such a man existed at all) in order to evaluate whether or not the church teaches that it's true. That is a materialistic matter, not a spiritual one.

From a materialistic point of view, "Jesus is the son of God" and "Jesus is God" look pretty much the same. The followers are still ascribing supernatural power to Jesus and still believe that he teaches morality and forgives sins. There's no practical difference between those at all, except that it's used as a shibboleth by some Christians.

This is especially so since "Jesus is God" isn't a straightforward belief that Jesus is God; it involves the Trinity, which to non-Christians usually seems incoherent. Why would it matter if Christians adhere to a belief that nobody can understand?

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