No, no not really, and especially not on a global scale anywhere near approaching Christianity.
Christian Evangelicals - not all are made equal
- Thread starter Nevermore
- Start date
No, no not really, and especially not on a global scale anywhere near approaching Christianity.
Here's something that I found funny and rather fitting for many of us Transfans and/or religious folk here:
-
-
I'm sorry, but I don't believe you're comment is true. Most established religions have been founded upon or benefited from armed and/or political conflict.
Religious violence - Wikipedia
Religious war - Wikipedia
Islam was spread by the sword on a level that rivals, or even surpasses, Christianity depending on the metrics used.
Judaism has largely been self-contained and not interested in converts, but even it had its "convert by the sword" period on a smaller localized scale, both with the Israelites subsuming the rest of the Canaanites and later the conversions of other western Semitic peoples under the Hasmonean kings.
Hinduism is such a tough nut to crack because it's just so old and doesn't so much have a founding narrative as much as it just sort of emerged from Vedic beliefs, but even Hindu scriptures tell of wars between gods and the Hindu princely states were always fighting each other and others.
Buddhism, which in the west has a very peaceful image, was the religion of the upper class elites in much of East Asia (funnily enough Catholic Christianity, with its emphasis on a personal relationship with the divine, was seen as the egalitarian option) and had inter-faith feuds.
Attacking Christianity is the ultimate "punching up" move in the West, but it's about on par with other faiths when it comes to conversion through conquest, with it and its major rival Islam only really so far ahead of everyone else due to sheer volume.
Now as I said in the antisemitism thread a lot of these conflicts merely use religion as window dressing to cover up the real motives- power and wealth- but at the end of the day they were wars fought in the name of G-d or gods, and Christianity isn't uniquely bloody in that regard.
Tenet.
And I disagree. The central tenet of Christianity is "Jesus died to 'save' people from the hell he'll send you to if you don't believe this".
With the belief that he didn't stay dead and him being the son of God being the next most important ones.
Thank you.
All of this is rooted in Jesus' role as the Messiah though. If you accept that he is, then all of this comes with it.
Believe what you want, disagree with what you want, but this is a topic I've got a lot of scholarly background in.
Sure.
sigh
I legit don't know what you hope to accomplish with drive-by hot takes and then bailing the moment anyone provides even a hint of an opposing opinion, but you do you.
It wasn't a hot take, it's clearly not drive by as I'm here, but leaving don't worry, and I'm 'bailing' because frankly I got tired of having these scholarly arguments years ago after this topic was my own special interest for a decade.
I disagree because of my own research and scholarly work. Not because I'm punching up or trying to be the cool nonbeliever type.
I'm old and I'm tired and I don't have it in me to do paragraph after paragraph that requires me to dig into hours of reading and cross checking references and sources - and I don't believe any of this actually matters, it's why I have not actively engaged with this thread before.
I popped in out of curiosity and posted because I saw someone espousing Christian Nationalist talking points.
You can respond to me or not, I'm done. Have a lovely evening and I hope a terrific weekend.
My apologizes for assuming that your position was based on something so shallow. That's my bad and I'm sorry I implied it.
Have a good one.
It sounds like the universe is trying to tell you something (e.g.. Catholic boyfriend, Anglican Christian mother, being drawn, feeling, Christianity seeming to fit, having an innate fascination and interest in it, etc.). And God seems to be sending the Hound of Heaven for you, to bring you home. Go with your feelings. Empty your mind, make it totally blank. Park your brain at the door, if you will. Don't let your ego get in the way. Shut off your brain and listen to your heart. And then the truth will come to you. Shamans and mystics call this "inner knowing". It seems like you've had this "inner knowing" several times in your life, but your brain, your ego, somehow always talked you out of it. You are not your brain, or your body, or your accumulations, or your achievements. You are an infinite, divine being. Listen to your heart.
Let Jesus come to you. He can make you see:
I've heard this "inner knowing" concept a few times. The main problem I can see with it is it obviously pulls different people in different directions. As a guiding principle it doesn't work.
Or maybe, just maybe, and hear me out here, someone who belongs to two minority groups is gonna have a hard time meeting other people who happen to be in those same two marginalized groups. You also don't get to choose your parents, and his mother, while raised Anglican, had converted to Judaism.
As far as inner knowing goes.... I've never had such an experience. I was questioning what the whole fuss of Christianity was about back when I was like 8 and decided it was largely nonsense by the time I was 12. Societal pressure for me to just go with the flow and join some random Christian denomination was high, but I never did, never had any interest in it.
I was wondering when the proselytizing was going to start.
Great advice.
The original statement was that Christianity spread by and was enforced by violence, not merely that its history contained violence.
Both Buddhism and Hindusim are older than Christianity, and Hinduism has about half as many followers (while Buddhism has half that many); "sheer volume" cannot account for a difference in the amount of violence on the scale of what actually exists.
(Islam, conversely, has arguably even had more violence with less time and less people.)
Couldn't turning it down so many times despite the unavoidable barrage of "chances" indicate the exact opposite?
You are literally saying "be gullible".
Yes, you are your brain. Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. There is no such thing as a "soul".
This is established pretty definitively, with about as much certainty as you're ever going to get for something that only one or two fields of science are directly relevant to.
You talk about the "ego" of people who think enough to realize Christianity is full of crap, but what's more egotistical than thinking you can never die?
Because wanting there to be a part of us that lasts after death is the only reason anyone ever made up the concept of souls in the first place.