thread: 2006-09-08 : Picky-choosy religion, 3 views
On 2006-09-12, Valamir wrote:
For modern discussions of Christianity to make any sense at all you have to dip a bit into history. So I'll throw a few abbreviated tidbits out. Most of this comes from sources in my own library, so while I could provide a fairly extensive bibliography, I'm not equipped to actually give specific cites...cuz...well that would be too much work.
First: Jesus did not found a church or a religion. He was a Jew who taught us about how God his father wanted us to live.
Second: The "Christian Church" was founded by men, principally on the model provided by Paul.
(a personal aside...if you ask me, the greatest victory Satan ever achieved was convincing early Christians that Paul was an apostle...pretty much every bigoted, fire and brimstone, get-your-hate on sermon ever delivered draws heavily on Paul. Christianity sans Paul can stand next to any "kinder gentler" religion without shame.)
Third: Since Christ didn't found the Church, he provided no guidance for its creation. Early church leaders had to invent their own. Doctrine is man's attempt to establish rules for how to run an organization in the name of God given that God didn't provide an instruction manual for it (cuz he didn't want it in the first place).
Fourth: Power corrupts. As the church as an organization gained power it gained in corruption as well. Not surprising since from the beginning it was an organization created BY men FOR men with little to no divine input required.
Fifth: By the time of the reformation, the Catholic church's corruption had become so undeniable that its own priests could no longer swallow it, and the reformation movement was born.
Sixth: Problem - Logical arguement of the day relied heavily on citing authority. How do you hold a debate with a Catholic theologian who has 1000 odd years of well established authorities to call upon. Solution - cite a higher authority...God himself. How can you cite God? Through scripture.
Seventh: But wait...the bible is just a collection of oral traditions translated through 3 different languages that no one actually speaks in their daily lives. Translated by hand by monks who were (get this, its pretty good) often unable to read at all themselves and were just copying symbols visually (yeah...errors galore). This is something the Catholics knew and still know. But...in order to claim the bible as a higher authority it had to be...wait for it...the unerring word of God.
That's where the whole business of scripture as literal truth of God's Will comes from. It was not part of the Christian tradition AT ALL but it was a necessary invention of the protestant reformation. If they were going to throw off the yoke of the Catholic Church they needed something to replace it with...and that something was the bible. For that to work...the bible had to be the literal unerring word of God. You didn't need a Priest and a Pope to tell you how to get to heaven...you just needed a bible. This was the driving force behind translating the bible into the vernacular to begin with.
(correct me if I'm wrong here Sydney, but my understanding is that the Epicopalians...being essentially Anglicans...who were more or less Catholic with the Pope filed off...never suffered from this particular brand of nonsense).
Eighth: America was populated not just by Protestants...but by particularly fundamentalist extremist Protestants whose beliefs were so screwy they were persecuted in their home country for them. However cute it is to watch elementary school kids dress up like Pilgrims and act out the first Thanksgiving...the Pilgrims were asshats. Australia got the criminals...America got the religious nut jobs. Those Puritanical origins have stayed with us for hundreds of years.
Our ridiculous notions of sex, which rightly seem bizarre to Europeans, are a direct manifestation of those Puritanical origins. The whole fundamentalist Protestant mindset of "us" vs. "not like us" can be held directly responsible for generations of ethnic and religious bigotry in this country. Most modern evangelical protestant denomenations still carry threads of those puritanical origins. 400 years later and the damned Puritans are still telling us how to live our lives (the other, more dangerous, side to the "traditions" coin).
So why is this at all important?
Because most of what mainstream American culture considers to be symptomatic of "Christianity" (and what our overseas friends see of us) is actually NOT symptomatic of Christianity at all. But rather is symptomatic of that particular brand of Protestant extremism (which should not be taken to mean ALL protestants) that started with the heartfelt necessity of claiming the bible as the highest authority during the reformation and continued with ever increasingly bizarre variations down through the years.
This is essentially where "picky choosy" religion comes from. Remember #3 above...church doctrine does not come from God...it comes from man's attempt to turn God into a Church...something Christ never intended. Of course its "picky choosy"...just like picking and choosing secret handshakes and membership requirements for the Elks Club...church doctrine (which here I distinguish completely from creed) is entirely a fabrication of men attempting to define how they are going to acquire and keep influence over other men. That's why the early churches invented doctrine in the first place. That's how women (who were originally VERY much in the forefront of the early Christian Church...there were several wealthy women in the bible who were patrons of Jesus) were pushed out—by doctrine...not by God...by doctrine.
That's why the modern churches have doctrinal disputes. There are TONS of little protestant denomenations that routinely split off into new church's over matters of church politics. Because different MEN want to influence other men differently. Its all about control and power and who gets to say how others should live.
Thing is that NOW there's an added layer to it. Since scripture is held by those folks to be the unerring word of God, any doctrine that can claim a scriptural basis thus trumps any doctrine that can't...so in the never ending battle of man-looking-to-control-other-men, finding obscure scriptural references to twist around to support your doctrine is the way the whole control game is played.
But here's the kicker...none of that bullshit has anything at all to do with God, with Christianity, or with faith. What frustrates me in following these threads is this whole throwing out the baby with the bathwater vibe. Yes those people SUCK. For the most part organized religion in any fashion sucks (and isn't what God intended) but those versions of it SUCK hard. So yes, indict them. condemn them. Call bullshit on them. Just don't mistake their nonsense for what it means to be Christian and don't mistake their twisted small doctines for God's will.
That I think is the root reason all of these threads are going around and around. Because people keep associating that crap with being Christian, and its not at all what Sydney's talking about.
