#and thus in the christian tradition that jesus /is/ God

[rowanthestrange]

Looked up the name Pelageya cus even though I’m basically out of room to add anything, thought it was worth checking the meaning of her name, which took me to the wikipedia disambiguation page which linked to the saint of her name and

Pelagia's story is attributed to James[4][5] or Jacob[6][5] (Latin: Jacobus), deacon of the church of Heliopolis (modern Baalbek).[7] He states that Margarita was the "foremost actress" and a prominent harlot in Antioch. …

She had two of her slaves trail Nonnus to his residence and then wrote him on wax tablets, calling herself "sinful" and a "servant of the devil" but seeking mercy from God, who "came down to earth not for the sake of the righteous but to save sinners".[5] …

The archbishop was informed and sent the deaconess Romana to clothe her in the baptismal gown. Nonnus took her confession and baptized "Margarita" under her birth name Pelagia, with Romana serving as her godmother. …

The night before it came time to remove her baptismal gown, she stole out in the dark wearing one of Nonnus's chitons. She headed for Jerusalem, where she built a cell on the Mount of Olives. She lived there for three or four years, disguising herself as a male recluse and eunuch under the name Pelagius.[5] She then died, apparently as a result of extreme asceticism, which had emaciated her to the point she could no longer be recognized. -Wikipedia

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

In general, I think it's currently really important for progressive Christians to be very loud about being both progressive and deeply religious Christians, and for everyone else fighting for progressive values to be supportive of them doing just that. I know that's like, idk, counter-intuitive or cringe or whatever, but seriously folks, the alternative is that progressive Christians have to be quiet about their faith to be accepted within broader secular and interfaith progressive advocacy, which means that the regressive asshole Christians (a) sound that much louder and (b) dominate the USian religious landscape all the more. That's a problem, for all of us.

We need people pushing back within the faith as well as outside of it, because that destroys any edifice that this is about Christianity and religious freedom.

You can be a devout Christian and also:

Openly, proudly, and without being forced to remain celibate or otherwise limit your full expression of self, identify as LGBTQ+ or be a supportive ally.

Advocate for full reproductive autonomy and comprehensive sex education.

Love and support people of other religious groups, non-religious people and/or atheists, by choosing to believe that a truly loving God would not pursue anything less than universal salvation.

Stand against evangelism and proselytizing as they have thus far been interpreted and used, because there are ways to interpret the Great Commission that don't promote colonialism and cultural genocide.

A steward of the earth, protecting God's beautiful creation and lovingly tending to it as the unique and incredible gift that it is.

A believer in science, rationalism, and human progress as part of God's divine plan for humanity.

A believer in history and someone who understands that the Bible can be both divinely given and open to interpretation (no really)(if you're confused, please talk to a knowledgeable traditional Jew)

An ally to Jews, who stands against supercessionism and antisemitism in the church.

And in before regressive Christians come shouting at me that (1) what do I know, I'm a Jew and (2) no lol you can't because of ___ reason:

My source is that I've personally met and talked to Christians of great faith and integrity - people who embody the closest forms of kindness I've seen to what Jesus himself advocated - who are each of these things.

It is 100% possible; you just choose to believe otherwise.

[jessicalprice]

culture isn’t modular

I did a thread (actually several) on Twitter a few years ago about Christianity’s attempts to paint itself as modular, and I’ve been seeing them referenced here in the cultural christianity Discourse, and a few people have DMed me asking me to post it here, so here’s a rehash of several of those threads:

A big part of why Christian atheists have trouble seeing how culturally Christian they still are is that Christianity advertises itself as being modular, which is not how belief systems have worked for most of human history. 

A selling point of Christianity has always been the idea that it's plug-and-play: you don't have to stop being Irish or Korean or Nigerian to be Christian, you don't have to learn a new language, you keep your culture. 

And you’re just also Christian.

(You can see, then, why so many Christian atheists struggle with the idea that they’re still Christian--to them, Christianity is this modular belief in God and Jesus and a few other tenets, and everything else is... everything else. Which is, not to get ahead of myself, very compatible with some tacit white supremacy: the “everything else” is goes unexamined for its cultural specificity. It’s just Normal. Default. Neutral.)

Evangelicals in particular love to contrast this to Islam, to the idea that you have to learn Arabic and adopt elements of Arab culture to be Muslim, which helps fuel the image of Islam as a Foreign Ideology that's taking over the West.

The rest of us don’t have that particular jack

Meanwhile, Christians position Christianity as a modular component of your life. Keep your culture, your traditions, your language and just swap out your Other Religion Module for a Christianity Module.

The end game is, in theory, a rainbow of diverse people and cultures that are all one big happy family in Christ. We're going to come back to how Christianity isn't actually modular, but for the moment, let's talk about it as if it had succeeded in that design goal. 

Even if Christianity were successfully modular, if it were something that you could just plug in to the Belief System Receptor in a culture and leave the rest of it undisturbed, the problem is most cultures don't have a modular Belief System Receptor. Spirituality has, for the entirety of human history, not been something that's modular. It's deeply interwoven with the rest of culture and society. You can't just pull it out and plug something else in and have the culture remain stable.

(And to be clear, even using the term “spirituality” here is a sop to Christianity. What cultures have are worldviews that deal with humanity’s place in the universe/reality; people’s relationships to other people; the idea of individual, societal, or human purpose; how the culture defines membership; etc. These may or may not deal with the supernatural or “spiritual.”)

And so OF COURSE attempting to pull out a culture's indigenous belief system and replace it with Christianity has almost always had destructive effects on that culture.

Not only is Christianity not representative of "religion" full stop, it's actually arguably *anomalous* in its attempt to be modular (and thus universal to all cultures) rather than inextricable from culture.

Now, of course, it hasn't actually succeeded in that--the US is a thoroughly Christian culture--but it does lead to the idea that one can somehow parse out which pieces of culture are "religious" versus which are "secular". That framing is antithetical to most cultures. E.g. you can't separate the development of a lot of cultural practices around what people eat and how they get it from elements of their worldview that Christians would probably label "religious." But that entire *framing* of religious vs. secular is a Christian one.

Is Passover a religious holiday or a secular one? The answer isn't one or the other, or neither, or both. It's that the framing of this question is wrong.

And Christianity isn’t a plugin, however much it wants to be

Moreover, Christianity isn't actually culture-neutral or modular. 

It's easy for this to get obscured by seeing Christianity as a tool of particular cultures' colonialism (e.g. the British using Christianity to spread British culture) or of whiteness in general, and not seeing how Christianity itself is colonial. This helps protect the idea that “true” Christianity is good and innocent, and if priests or missionaries are converting people at swordpoint or claiming land for European powers or destroying indigenous cultures, that must be a misuse of Christianity, a “fake” or “corrupted” Christianity.

Never mind that for every other culture, that culture is what its members do. Christianity, uniquely, must be judged on what it says its ideals are, not what it actually is. 

Mistaking the engine for the exhaust

But it’s not just an otherwise innocent tool of colonialism: it’s a driver of it. 

At the end of the day, it’s really hard to construct a version of the Great Commission that isn’t inherently colonial. The end-goal of a world in which everyone is Christian is a world without non-Christian cultures. (As is the end goal of a world in which everyone is atheist by Christian definitions.)

Yet we focus on the way Christianity came with British or Spanish culture when they colonized a place--the churches are here because the Spaniards who conquered this area were Catholic--and miss how Christianity actually has its own cultural tropes that it brings with it. It's more subtle, of course, when Christianity didn't come in explicitly as the result of military conquest.

Or put another way, those cultures didn't just shape the Christianity they brought to places they colonized--they were shaped by it. How much of the commonality between European cultures is because of Christianity?

It’s not all a competition

A lot of Christians (cultural and practicing), if you push them, will eventually paint you a picture of a very Hobbesian world in which all religions, red in tooth and claw, are trying to take over the world. It's the "natural order" to attempt to eliminate all cultures but your own. 

If you point out to them that belief and worldview are deeply personal, and proselytizing is objectifying, because you're basically telling the person you're proselytizing to that who they are is wrong, you often get some version of "that's how everyone is, though."

Like we all go through life seeing other humans as incomplete and fundamentally flawed and the only way to "fix" them is to get them to believe what we believe. And, like, that is not how everyone relates to others?

But it's definitely how both practicing Christians and Christian antitheists relate to others. If, for Christians, your lack of Jesus is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed, for New Atheists, your “religion” (that is, your non-Christian culture) is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed. Neither Christians nor New Atheists are able to relate to anyone else as fine as they are. It's all a Hobbesian zero-sum game. It's all a game of conversion with only win and loss conditions. You are, essentially, only an NPC worth points.

The idea of being any other way is not only wrong, but impossible to them. If you claim to exist in any other way, you are either deluded or lying.

So, we get Christian atheists claiming that if you identify as Jewish, you can’t really be an atheist. Or sometimes they’ll make an exception for someone who’s “only ethnically Jewish.” If the only way you relate to your Jewishness is as ancestry, then you can be an atheist. Otherwise, you’re lying. 

Or, if you’re not lying, you’re deluded. You just don’t understand that there’s no need for you to keep any dietary practices or continue to engage in any form of ritual or celebrate any of those “religious” Jewish holidays, and by golly, this here “ex”-Christian atheist is here to separate out for you which parts of your culture are “religious” and which ones are “secular.”

Religious/secular is a Christian distinction

A lot of atheists from Christian backgrounds (whether or not they were raised explicitly Christian) have trouble seeing how Christian they are because they've accepted the Christian idea that “religion” is modular. (If we define “religion” the way Christians (whether practicing or cultural) define it, Christianity might be the only religion that actually exists. Maybe Islam?)

When people from non-Christian cultures talk about the hegemonically Christian and white supremacist nature of a lot of atheism, it reflects how outside of Christianity, spirituality/worldview isn't something you can just pull out of a culture.

Christian atheists tend to see the cultural practices of non-Christians as "religious" and think that they should give them up (talk to Jewish atheists who keep kosher about Christian atheist reactions to that). But because Christianity positions itself as modular, people from Christian backgrounds tend not to see how Christian the culture they imagine as "neutral" or "normal" actually is. In their minds, you just pull out the Christianity module and are left with a neutral, secular society.

So, if people from non-Christian backgrounds would just give up their superstitions, they'd look the same as Christian atheists. 

Your secularism is specifically post-Christian

Of course, that culture with the Christianity module pulled out ISN'T neutral. So the idea that that's what "secular society" should look like ends up following the same pattern as Christian colonialism throughout history: the promise that you can keep your culture and just plug in a different belief system (or, purportedly, a lack of a belief system), which has always, always been a lie. The secular, "enlightened" life that most Christian atheists envision is one that's still built on white, western Christianity, and the idea that people should conform to it is still attempting to homogenize society to a white Christian ideal. 

For people from cultures that don't see spirituality as modular, this is pretty obvious. It's obvious to a lot of people from non-white Christian cultures that have syncretized Christianity in a way that doesn't truck with the modularity illusion. 

I also think, even though they're not conceptualizing it in these terms, that it's actually obvious to a lot of evangelicals. (The difference being that white evangelical Christianity enthusiastically embraces white supremacy, so they see the destruction of non-Christian culture as good.) But I think it's invisible to a lot of mainline non-evangelical Christians, and it's definitely invisible to a lot of people who leave Christianity.

And that inability to see culture outside a Christian framing means that American secularism is still shaped like Christianity. It's basically the same text with a few sentences deleted and some terms replaced.

Which, again, is by design. The idea that you can deconvert to (Christian) atheism and not have to change much besides your opinions about God is the mirror of how easy it’s supposed to be to convert to Christianity.

Human societies don’t follow evolutionary biology

The Victorian Christian framing underlying current Western ideas of enlightened secularism, that religious practice (and human culture in general) is subject to the same sort of unilateral, simple evolution toward a superior state to which they, at the time, largely reduced biological evolution, is deeply white supremacist.

It posits religious evolution as a constantly self-refining process from "primitive" animism and polytheism to monotheism to white European/American Christianity. For Christians, that's the height of human culture. For ex-Christians, the next step is Christian-derived secularism.

Maybe you’ve seen this comic?

The thing is, animism isn’t more “primitive” than polytheism, and polytheism isn’t more “primitive” than monotheism. Older doesn’t mean less advanced/sophisticated/complex. Hinduism isn’t more “primitive” than Judaism just because it’s polytheistic and Judaism is monotheistic. 

Human cultures continue to change and adapt. (Arguably, older religions are more sophisticated than newer ones because they’ve had a lot more time to refine their practices and ideologies instead of having to define them.) Also, not all cultures are part of the same family tree. Christianity and Islam may be derived from Judaism, but Judaism and Hinduism have no real relationship to one another. 

But in this worldview, Christianity is "normal" religion, which is still more primitive than enlightened secularism, but more advanced than all those other primitive, superstitious, irrational beliefs.

Just like Christians, when Christian atheists do try to make room for cultures that aren't white and European-derived, the tacit demand is "okay, but you have to separate out the parts of your culture that the Christian sacred-secular divide would deem 'religious.'"

Either way, people from non-Christian cultures, if they’re to be equals, are supposed to get with the program and assimilate.

You’re not qualified to be a universal arbiter of what culture is good

Christian atheists usually want everyone to unplug that Religion module!

So, for example, you have ex-Christian atheists who are down with pluralism trying to get ex-Christian atheists who aren't to leave Jews alone by pointing out that you can be atheist and Jewish.

But some of us aren’t atheist. (I’m agnostic by Christian standards.) And the idea that Jews shouldn’t be targets for harassment because they can be atheists and therefore possibly have some common sense is still demanding that people from other cultures conform to one culture’s standard of what being “rational” is.  

Which, like, is kind of galling when y’all don’t even understand what “belief in G-d” means to Jews, and people from a culture that took until the 1800s to figure out that washing their hands was good are setting themselves up as the Universal Arbiters of Rationality.

(BTW, most of this also holds true for non-white Christianity, too. I guarantee you most white Christian atheists don’t have a good sense of what role church plays in the lives of Black communities, so maybe shut up about it.)

In any case, reducing Christianity--a massive, ambient phenomenon inextricable from Western culture--to the specific manifestation of Christian practice that you grew up with is, frankly, absurd. 

And you can’t be any help in deconstructing hegemony when you refuse to perceive it and understand that it isn’t something you can take off like a garment, and you probably won’t ever recognize and uproot all the ways in which it affects you, especially when you are continuing to live within it. 

What hegemony doesn’t want you to know

One of the ways hegemony sustains and perpetuates itself is by reinforcing the idea not so much that other ways of being and knowing are evil (although that’s usually a stage in an ideology becoming hegemonic), but that they’re impossible. That they don’t actually exist. 

See, again, the idea that anyone claiming to live differently is either lying or deluded.

There are few clearer examples of how pervasive Christian hegemony is than Christian atheists being certain every religion works like Christianity. Hegemonic Christianity wants you to think that all cultures work like Christianity because it wants their belief systems to be modular so you can just ...swap them. And it wants to pretend that culture/worldview is a free market where it can just outcompete other cultures.

But that’s... not how anything works. 

And the truth of the matter is that white nationalist Christians shoot at synagogues and Sikh temples and mosques because those other ways of being can’t be allowed to exist. 

They don’t shoot at atheist conventions because there’s room in hegemonic Christianity for Christian atheists precisely because Christian atheists are still culturally Christian. Their atheism is Christian-shaped.

They may not like you. They’re definitely going to try to convert you. They may not want you to be able to hold public office or teach their kids.

But the only challenge you’re providing is that of The Existence of Disbelief. And that’s fine. That makes you a really safe Other to have around. You can See The Light and not have to change much.

What you’re not doing is providing an example of a whole other way of being and knowing that (often) predates Christianity and is completely separate from it and has managed to survive it and continue to live and thrive (there’s a reason Christians like to speak of Jews and Judaism in the past tense, and it’s similar to the reason white people like to speak of indigenous peoples of the Americas in the past tense). 

That’s not a criticism--it’s fine to just... be post-Christian. There’s not actually anything wrong with being culturally Christian. The problems come in when you start denying that it’s a thing, or insisting that you, unique among humankind, are above Having A Culture.

But it does mean that you don’t pose the same sort of threat to Christianity that other cultures do, and hence, less violence. 

[devilmen-collector]

Origin of the names of the angels

Since I have done a post on the origin of the names of the seven kingdoms of Hell, may as well do the origin of the names of the angels.

Warning, this post contains religious content. If you are not comfortable, please ignore this.

Now let's go on with our trivia post

Seraphim

Now I just want to make a distinction. The Seraphim irl are called "the Archangels", but that doesn't mean they belong to the rank of archangel, the second-to-lowest rank, it only means they are the leaders and chieftains of all the angels, including other Seraphim.

Also, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael are the only named angels in the Bible.

Michael

"Michael" means "Who is like unto God?" in Hebrew. In the Bible, Michael is described as "the great prince, who standeth for the children of thy people" (Daniel 12:1), the angel who disputed with the devil over the remains of Moses (Epistle of St. Jude verse 9), the leader of the heavenly army fighting against the dragon (Revelation 12:7).

In the Christian tradition, Michael is the leader of God's army fighting against Satan, helper of the faithful Christians at the moment of death, champion of God's people, protector of the Jews under of the Old Testament, and of God's Holy Church. He is also the patron of many chivalric order of knights.

Michael, having led the battle against Lucifer, is the greatest of all angels, no angel could surpass him in honor and glory.

The feast day of St. Michael in Western Christianity is held on September 29, commemorating the dedication of first church built in his honor in Western Europe. In Eastern Christianity, St. Michael and all angels have their commom feast day on the 8th of November.

Gabriel

"Gabriel" means "strength of God". In the Bible, he appears as the messenger of God who delivers messages of utmost importance: he tells the Prophet Daniel two prophecies concerning the successive empires and the time elapsing before the coming of Christ (Daniel chapter 8 & 9), he appears before Zachary and foretells that his son will be the Precursor of the Lord (Luke 1:5-25), and most importantly Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary the Incarnation of the God the Son and that she is going to become the Mother of God (Luke 1:26-38). According to tradition, Gabriel was also the angel who appeared in St. Joseph's dream (Matthew 1:18-25; 2: 13-23), and also the angel who consoled Jesus (Luke 22:43). Thus, Gabriel is the Archangel of Incarnation and Consolation.

Some traditions have Gabriel as the angel of mercy while Michael is the angel of justice. Some others have it vice versa.

St. Gabriel's feast day, according to an old tradition, is on the 24th of March, the day before the feast of Annunciation.

Raphael

"Raphael" means "God has healed". The third Archangel appears only in the book of Tobit, in which he helps the young Tobias during his journey, ultimately aiding the young man heal his father's blindness and helping him find a good spouse. Therefore, Raphael is invoked as the angel of Healing and the Patron of finding a good partner for marriage.

Raphael was also the angel who revealed that there are seven Archangels. "For I am the angel Raphael, one of the seven, who stand before the Lord" (Tobit 12:15).

The feast day of St. Raphael, in old tradition, is on the 24th of October.

Cherubim

Selaphiel, Jegudiel and Barachiel

Selaphiel, Jegudiel and Barachiel aren't found in Sacred Scripture, but only in the tradition of Eastern Orthodox Church.

For these three angels, I have already made a post about it. I'll link it here for you guys.

Selaphiel, Jegudiel and Barachiel: Origin of the names

Zadkiel

Zadkiel does not appear in the Bible, although some identify him as the unnamed Angel of the Lord who prevents Abraham from sacrificing his son during the time that God tested Abraham (Genesis 22:1-18). It's the reason why if a church (usually an Anglican church) does depict Zadkiel in its iconography, he's depicted as holding a dagger, for Abraham intended to use a dagger to sacrifice his son.

We will skip over Thrones (or Ophanim), Dominions, Virtues and Powers because there is currently no angel of those choirs in-game yet.

Principalities

Michelleel

"Michelleel" is a name that PrettyBusy completely made up themselves. No angel is known with the name Micheleel. Micheleel is the combination of Michael written in another way "Michelle" and the suffix "el", which means "God".

Archangels

Rashiel, Armisael and Zeruel

Just like with Michelleel, these three Archangels have made up names by PrettyBusy.

Angels

Samael

"Samael" means "Venom/Poison of God". He exists only in Judaism's Talmudic lore. Sometimes he is considered a fallen angel, with some people think he's Satan, while other times he is considered the angel with destructive duties.

[talonabraxas]

Sophia (Greek: Σοφíα, wisdom)

The Wise Bride of Solomon by Jews (see the Song of Songs in a book of the Hebrew bible*), as the Queen of Wisdom and War (Athena) by Greeks, Isis , the mother of Horus and the first daughter of Geb, god of the Earth, and as the Holy Spirit of Wisdom by Christians. She is known as Chokmah (pronounced HOK-mah) in Hebrew, and Sapientia in Latin.

To the Gnostics, Sophia was the feminine aspect of the Divine (as well as being analogous to the human soul) who came down from God with a special message delivered through the image of Jesus (notice that I use the word "image" because the Gnostics did not necessarily believe that Jesus actually lived as a human). Since Gnosticism downplayed Christ's historicity and resurrection and proclaimed that Christ as Wisdom could be realized individually, it was declared a heresy by the early church.

However, in Eastern Orthodox Christianity Holy Wisdom is understood as the Divine Logos who became incarnate as Jesus Christ. God was seen in this tradition as a trinity of God the Father, Mother and Son.

If it had not been for Sophia, the experience of the noumenous, or spirit, would not have been part of the creation. In the Pistis Sophia (5th or 6th century Gnostic text), Christ is sent from the Godhead in order to bring Sophia back into the fullness of God (Pleroma) she having fallen from the light (though this is refuted by some as ever having happened). Many saw Jesus as embodying Sophia and had come to the world to bring humanity back to Gnosis (knowledge and enlightenment—the meaning and purpose of all things, communication with the mind of God as in a profound spiritual understanding, or transformed consciousness where everything is perceived as a unity—One. This is not unlike the teachings of Buddah.

Essentially, the Greeks saw Sophia as the wisdom aspect of God. Some Christian mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen celebrated Sophia as a cosmic figure representing the wisdom of God and thus eternal.

[queenlucythevaliant]

How do you believe Theistic Evolution interacts with other aspects of Christian morality and tradition? I mean, obviously the commands of God are the commands of God - but what new perspective do you think a Theistic Evolutionary viewpoint gives?

Oh my goodness, so many things! Broadly, though, I'd divide the implications into two groups: God's character and the unity of creation.

God's character

Theistic evolution is (I contend) the only framework for understanding creation that has an equally high regard for both Scripture and scientific empiricism; thus, it makes a very profound statement about God's trustworthiness, and about our confidence in him as the arbiter of Truth.

Seeing God's fingerprints in the creative process over the course of millions of years gives us a real sense of his patience and tirelessness. As Chesterton might say, he never gets tired of saying to the replicating cell, "do it again."

We also get a beautiful picture of God's sovereignty over creation: he is the God that knew, from the first time two organic molecules crashed together, that he was creating Man to glorify and enjoy him forever.

In the story of creation through evolution, we see a God who transcends time, but also works within it to bring about his sovereign will; who is endlessly patient, who is clever and inventive, who has an eye for beauty and a love for tangents and (ostensible) dead ends. What does it tell you about God that he spent millions of years creating the platypus? That he created dinosaurs at all? Through theistic evolution, we see a creator who plays across the vast landscape of time, creating endless forms most beautiful. Most importantly, we see a God whose wonderful works are faithfully recounted not just in the pages of Scripture, but in the very substance of the world he created.

Unity of creation

Knowledge of evolutionary history pushes us to think about our own embodied nature, our creatureliness, and our place within creation/the biosphere. We are united in lineage with all other creatures, both living and dead. We are embodied in the same carbon as every other living thing, deliberately, beautifully. This pushes back hard against the strains of "flesh bad" gnostic dualism that have run through our faith for pretty much its whole history. Heaven is not our "real home"; our destiny is the New Earth. God has woven us into its fabric.

Jesus stepped not just into the human lineage, but the lineage of the whole earth! In becoming flesh, he took on our place in the tree of life. Jesus shared DNA with Mary and her family, yes, but also with bacteria and brachiosaurs and banana slugs. While Christ died for the sins of humanity in particular, His stepping into the unity of life points to a future in which all living things are to be redeemed.

We must take the Biblical call to environmental stewardship very seriously then, if the rest of the biosphere is not merely our dominion but something of which we are an inextricable part. Evolutionary theory calls us to reconnect our theology and the created universe. In the same way that Scripture calls us to care for the world God created, evolution tells us of our direct relationship with the rest of creation, which implies a duty of care.

[tanadrin]

@alightingdove

I'm fully aware of the weirdness. I'm very aware of the world's religions and their differences. My point is that the virtues of Buddhism are, generally, well-intentioned and sustainable from a secular perspective. We know why the Buddha became an ascetic - he witnessed sickness, aging, and death, and he decided to leave his luxurious life in pursuit of meaning.

Had to break this discussion out of the comments section because I think you're making a number of serious errors in your assumptions.

One--Buddhism is not an especially noble or enlightened religion. As this Buddhist and scholar of Buddhism points out, traditional Buddhist morality is deeply medieval, and very out of step with modern values. It is patriarchal, puritanical, and authoritarian. See also this post and this one.

Two--we have narratives about the Buddha, composed centuries after his death. As scholars of religion like Stephen Shoemaker and the cognitive scientists they have based their work on have pointed out, oral traditions are very bad at preserving authentic historical detail. They very quickly become adapted to serve the politics of later eras, and later traditions get written back onto the founders of movements to justify themselves. This is certainly true of Christianity, which had developed elaborate ahistorical traditions about Jesus within a hundred years of his death; it is even more true of Buddhism, whose oldest texts date to something like four hundred years after the Buddha's death. Islam, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, and many other traditions centered on a single founder figure (even one who was certainly historical, like Muhammad) have similar problems.

Three--religions catch on for many reasons. "Disillusionment" seems to be only one factor out of many. People adopt new traditions because of politics, identity, millennarian fervor (very big in early Islam and Christianity), hope of strategic benefit (knowledge or power from the gods), because they're forced to under threat of violence, and so forth.

So I think it is a bad idea to ascribe particular generosity or wisdom to (or to be excessively deferential to) people who, even if the traditions surrounding them are entirely authentic, made claims about the world which are unprovable or outright false, and whose morality was repugnant. And it's especially a bad idea to do so just because they have proven historically successful, given that the reasons they have proven to be thus may be pretty arbitrary.

[whencyclopedia]

Paul the Apostle

Paul was a follower of Jesus Christ who famously converted to Christianity on the road to Damascus after persecuting the very followers of the community that he joined. However, as we will see, Paul is better described as one of the founders of the religion rather than a convert to it. Scholars attribute seven books of the New Testament to Paul; he was an influential teacher and a missionary to much of Asia Minor and present-day Greece.

A Founder of Christianity

In the last century, scholars have come to appreciate Paul as the actual founder of the religious movement that would become Christianity. Paul was a Diaspora Jew, a member of the party of the Pharisees, who experienced a revelation of the resurrected Jesus. After this experience, he traveled widely throughout the eastern Roman Empire, spreading the “good news” that Jesus would soon return from heaven and usher in the reign of God (“the kingdom”). Paul was not establishing a new religion; he believed that his generation was the last before the end time when this age would be transformed. However, as time passed and Jesus did not return, the second century Church Fathers turned to Paul's writings to validate what would ultimately be the creation of Christian dogma. Thus, Paul could be viewed as the founder of Christianity as a separate religion apart from Judaism.

In Christian tradition, he is known as Paul of Tarsus, as this is where Luke says he was born (Acts 9:11). At the time, Tarsus was located in the province of Cilicia, now modern Turkey. However, Paul himself indicates that he was from the area of Damascus which was in Syria (see the letter to the Galatians). Luke has provided many of the standard elements in Paul's life, but most of these items stand in stark opposition to what Paul himself reveals in his letters. For instance, Luke claims that Paul grew up in Jerusalem, studying at the feet of many who would be considered the first rabbis of normative Judaism, and eventually becoming a member of the council, or the Sanhedrin. Paul himself says that he only visited Jerusalem twice, and even then his stay was a few days. What do we do about such contradictions?

On the one hand, Luke has a very obvious agenda in his presentation of Paul as someone who willingly obeys any dictates from Jerusalem, consulting them constantly on how he should run his “mission”. On the other hand, Paul has an agenda as well, claiming that no one human told him what to do, but that it was the resurrected Christ who gave him the game plan (see Galatians), and so he continually dismisses any influence from Jerusalem in his overall activities. In the final analysis, it is usually best to consult Paul's letters over Luke's version in terms of historicity when it comes to both Paul's motivation and his actual work.

Continue reading...

[sorceresssiren]

Was listening to this...

And then I noticed the description. I really love what he writes:

"A nightclub is more religious than a church, as it is the place where the original religious rituals of our prehistory still take place today. The act of dancing to music, forgetting ones problems, losing ones sense of individual self and becoming part of a larger whole or feeling at one with others have always been natural human needs. Whether they take place in a shamanic circle, Dionysian procession, dance hall or rock concert, the psychological benefits which this behaviour brings are not lost on us.

What is a religious communion and where do these rituals come from? Eating & drinking are religious rituals. When we eat we assimilate the properties or nutrients of the food. If we ourselves were to be eaten our own powers would be taken on by our devourer. This is clear in early religions that were agricultural, the God was in the food which was grown and then consumed. This idea has survived even into the monotheisms with bread representing the God whose powers are taken on through being eaten. The meaning of communion is precisely this, to take on the powers of the God by eating him or her. This sort of communion is common and is apparent from the Bacchaic rituals of Dionysos to Jesus' last supper. The baccants eat the raw flesh of animals and drink wine to become intoxicated with the power of the God just as a Christian comes to be one with Christ by eating the bread & wine of communion. We should speak less of the food of the gods, like Terrence McKenna does, and see rather that the food is the God itself. When we eat we assimilate the powers, which is still apparent in the Christian tradition of thanking God before commencing a meal. We take our powers from whatever we choose to eat and assimilate into our bodies. As it is commonly said that character can be determined by diet. This is more specifically the case with those who choose to consume what our society calls "drugs". Narcotics have always been considered to be powerfully spiritual and hence their demonisation as "drugs" in modern societies. Both Catholicism and the secular state have felt threatened by the individuals direct contact to the divine through these mediums, not needing an intermediary. There are many examples similar to the better known Dionysiac cult of intoxication through wine, such as Corn Dolly deities sacrificed in various rural communities even to this day and age. The God is drunk as ale, or eaten as mushrooms and other psychedelics, which are now considered "drugs" were once called entheogens, quite literally to "put the God within you". This is also clear with the idea of the state of ecstasy. Literally from the greek for ex- stasis, out of the body.

Nightclubbers are thus engaging in the same Dionysian or shamanistic rituals today when they let a combination of music, alcohol & drugs, get them out of their everyday experience. A night club is then far more religious than a church, as it is only here where people, quite unknowingly for the most part, engage in the original religious rituals of dance and intoxication to become one with the world around them, while partaking of the same cathartic benefits that this ritualistic behaviour has always had and still brings us."

[eternal-echoes]

“Our hearts embrace also those brothers and communities not yet living with us in full communion; to them we are linked nonetheless by our profession of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and by the bond of charity. We do not forget that the unity of Christians is today awaited and desired by many, too, who do not believe in Christ; for the farther it advances toward truth and love under the powerful impulse of the Holy Spirit, the more this unity will be a harbinger of unity and peace for the world at large. Therefore, by common effort and in ways which are today increasingly appropriate for seeking this splendid goal effectively, let us take pains to pattern ourselves after the Gospel more exactly every day, and thus work as brothers in rendering service to the human family. For, in Christ Jesus this family is called to the family of the sons of God.

We think cordially too of all who acknowledge God, and who preserve in their traditions precious elements of religion and humanity. We want frank conversation to compel us all to receive the impulses of the Spirit faithfully and to act on them energetically.

For our part, the desire for such dialogue, which can lead to truth through love alone, excludes no one, though an appropriate measure of prudence must undoubtedly be exercised. We include those who cultivate outstanding qualities of the human spirit, but do not yet acknowledge the Source of these qualities. We include those who oppress the Church and harass her in manifold ways. Since God the Father is the origin and purpose of all men, we are all called to be brothers. Therefore, if we have been summoned to the same destiny, human and divine, we can and we should work together without violence and deceit in order to build up the world in genuine peace.”

-Gaudium et Spes, PASTORAL CONSTITUTION ON THE CHURCH IN THE MODERN WORLD

[apenitentialprayer]

Left: The Good Samaritan: He Had Compassion, by J. Kirk Richards, 2014. Right: Icon of Dirk Willems, by Jivko Donkov

[In] the parable of the Good Samaritan […] the people who fail to do good, who proved callous, were the priest and the Levite, who were more concerned with respecting their religious traditions than with coming to the aid of a suffering person. The one who demonstrates what it means to be a "neighbor" is instead a heretic, a Samaritan. He draws near, he feels compassion, he bends down and gently tends the wounds of his brother. He is concerned for him, regardless of his past and his failings, and he puts himself wholly at his service. Jesus can thus conclude that the right question is not: "Who is my neighbor?" But: "Do I act like a neighbor?" Only a love that becomes gratuitous service, only a love that Jesus taught and embodied, will bring separated Christians closer to one another. Only that love, which does not appeal to the past in order to remain aloof or to point a finger, only a love which in God's Name puts our brothers and sisters before the ironclad defense of our own religious structures; only that love will unite us.

Pope Francis, Homily on the Solemnity of the Conversion of Saint Paul, given January 25th, 2024.

(Today, May 16th, marks the 455th anniversary of the death of Dirk Willems, Anabaptist martyr who nearly escaped execution at the hands of officials of the Catholic Church, but who stopped to save the life of one of his pursuers even though it meant he would certainly be recaptured)

[creature-wizard]

Some ways New Age and Christianity are similar

So first off, I'm not claiming that any of these characteristics are essentially unique to Christianity. However, they are common in many politically-significant forms of Christianity, and are not necessarily shared by other spiritual traditions.

Secondly, I'm not writing this to condemn all of Christianity or anything, but rather to demonstrate where New Age is influenced by Christianity and Christian culture. And remember, even if a specific element is found in another tradition, the fact remains that New Age was developed by people who'd been brought up in Christian cultures, and therefore internalized Christian ideas of what spirituality should look like and entail. New Agers who went out searching for spiritual truths in other religions were biased toward the elements that appeared to agree with Christianity - just as the medieval Christian perennialists before them did.

So here's a list of some elements these two strains of belief have in common:

Belief that true spirituality is about reuiniting with a transcendent divine. This one is such a prevalent belief (and not just in Christianity!) that a lot of people just don't really realize that it's not true for each and every spiritual tradition. (And I want to emphasize that there's nothing wrong with spiritualities that emphasize this. However, New Age primarily got this from Christianity.)

Belief that Jesus is an important figure. Most New Agers believe that Jesus was delivering an important message from God (or Source) regarding the truth of our place and purpose in the universe. You'll find them often citing passages from the New Testament in support of their beliefs.

Belief that a new world is about to arrive. Both Christianity and New Age are big on the idea that our present troubles and turmoils are leading to the arrival of a new world where all our troubles will pass away and everything will be wonderful. (In fact, it's the core belief of New Age.) New Agers even cite passages from the New Testament in support of their beliefs.

Belief that we will progress to a superior form of bodily existence. Many Christians believe that they will be resurrected in immortal bodies during the Second Coming. New Agers believe their DNA will be upgraded or unlocked, giving them perfect health and longer life, if not actual immortality.

Searching through holy texts and traditions for prophecies about the future. They don't only search through Christian stuff when they do this, but the practice itself is pretty damn Christian.

Belief in good and evil as actual spiritual/metaphysical forces. Many people understand good and evil as abstract concepts, or social constructs. However, Christians believe that evil is an actual metaphysical force that alienates one from God, the metaphysical wellspring of good. Meanwhile, New Agers believe pretty much the same thing, albeit phrasing it in terms of "low vibrations" and "high vibrations." Doing acts and thinking thoughts regarded as "low vibrational" will "lower your vibrations," thus distancing you from God/Source. And just as Christians believe in demonic entities that will try to separate you from God, New Agers believe in low vibrational entities that will try to alienate you from Source.

Belief in spiritual thoughtcrimes. Christians believe that merely thinking about sinful acts is itself a sin, while New Agers believe that thinking low vibrational thoughts will lower your personal vibrational frequency.

Belief that emotions have intrinsic metaphysical and moral properties. Christians associate things like joy and gratitude with being closer to God, and generally perceive feelings like anger and resentment as sinful feelings that distance one from God. New Agers do the same thing, albeit using the terms "high vibrational" and "low vibrational" instead.

Massive emphasis on love and cultivating love. Christians often proclaim that God is love, and emphasize the importance of brotherly love and performing acts of Godly love. New Agers believe that "love energy" is of the highest vibrational frequency, and that cultivating it is an important part of the ascension process.

Belief in angels. New Age is pretty big on angels right now, particularly the Archangels, especially Archangel Michael. Like Christians, New Agers believe that angels are here to help carry out God's divine plan.

Belief in other angel-like figures. The benevolent aliens in New Age belief are distinguished from angels, but the role they play is pretty much the same. They're supposedly here to inspire us to do better, and protect our world from hostile entities.

Belief in malevolent, sabotaging entities. Much as many Christians believe that demons are trying to prevent people from gaining salvation, New Agers believe that "low vibrational entities" are trying to prevent humanity from ascending.

Belief that humanity has a higher purpose. Just as many Christians believe that humanity exists to be saved and reunite with God, New Agers believe that the purpose of humanity is to spiritually evolve into higher and higher forms.

Again, while many of these things aren't unique to Christianity, to say that they have absolutely nothing to do with Christianity would be to ignore New Age's culturally Christian background.

[daybringersol]

headcannons about chip, christianity in mana, his internalised homophobia and its relationship with his repressed fire powers :

// tw for religious trauma, christianity, manipulation, trauma and death mentions

in mana, christianity is the religion of the outcasts, most people worship aster and/or lunadeis, but pirates, criminals and the lower class in general adds another “god” to the pantheon : jesus, as he was portrayed in the bible, a human with divine links to a god unknown who took care of the unfortunate, poor and marginalized. his tales are mostly relayed through oral tradition, so depending on where you are, his teachings and worships changes a lot. in most cases, jesus and his unknown god is just an addition to the already existing pantheon of gods and leviathans of mana, and not the only true god. some people with bad intentions sometimes twists his teachings to fit their worldview and influence others, but they pretty much never have enough systemic power to change much outside of their inner circles.

when chip was a kid living on the streets, he was way too worried about his survival to think about love, and all the other kids (of all genders) that hed find cute were always much more higher class than him anyways. his powers were pretty weak, tho still wildly uncontrolled. it just felt like the small flames that kept appearing around him liked him and wanted to help him rather than him having any control over them. he sometimes heard whispers of jesus and his teachings, but didnt really understand what it was and didnt really care.

when the black rose took him on, most people on the crew were christians, tho in a old sailor way. tales of jesus mixed with those of ancient sea beasts would flourish on the deck of the black rose, and the lessons he learned from them were about hope, about universal love, about helping those in needs. about getting your hands dirty through work and knowing youd get to heaven, while those high class corrupt rulers, bourgeois and officers would rot in hell for what theyd done to your world. chips fire magic, while still uncontrolled, grew and took on a life of his own, tho itd usually cower away in times of distress, much to chips dismay. for his bisexuality, chip was much more concerned about his life on the ship, and didnt care for love during that time.

when the hole in the sea happened, chip was too stressed out and his powers did nothing. thats when he decided that he needed to harness them, to train himself to actually control them so that maybe he could help of something like this happened again.

so when price found chip, he was prime for being manipulated into the mafia. he was lonely, lost everything he add, needed guidance, needed someone to train him and.. also had a crush on price. for the first time, he felt obsession, something that again, he couldnt control, that he needed to harness, to tame. the mafias christianity was much more strict than the black roses, and tried more to extrapolate the values of jesus’s unknown god than to follow him as an example. since romance was nothing but a distraction/weakness, the crew was mostly male-dominated and that femininity was seen as weak and, homosexuality as feminine, love, especially male homosexuality, was very frowned upon, and considered as a sin. emotional volatility, and thus, the uncontrollability of chips power are too. price did return chip’s advances sometimes, but only for the purposes of manipulating him into being even more loyal to the gang. there, price trained him to shackle both his fire powers and his desires, to keep the good parts ( power / social status that male heterosexuality gives ), but to annihilate the bad parts ( wildness / vulnerability of emotional connections and social nonconformity / bisexuality ). the fact that he is a bastard also plays into this, since he now is conditioned to believe that the fact that hes alive in itself is sinful ; thus, he needs to be perfect to repay for his original sin. when everything breaks, that price asks him to kill a man and that he flees, is whole world is shaken apart and his trauma of losing everything once before resurfaces. his emotions and powers were taken advantage of, and his trauma response is to simply lock away both the good and the bad inside of himself, after feeling their full intensity one last time ( the heartbreak of seeing prices manipulation, loving him anyways and being deeply afraid of that / letting the wildness of his fire engulf the mafia headquarters ). even most of his memories of it are locked away.

with the crew of the albatross, he slowly unlearns the values burned into him by price and his crew. he sees people who are like him, who love him, tho it takes a very long time to internalize that they aren’t just with him for his usefulness, that his sin is just as inconsequential as theirs. he tries his hands as doing as he did before, flirting with women (that hes genuinely attracted to) for social status, but his fear leaves him stunted and awkward. same with his powers, when he finally learns again to use them, is it very controlled, and thus weaker. he doesnt trust himself with the “bad” parts of his identity, hes barely able to control the “good” ones. when gillion kisses him, he, for a moment, lets himself go, lets his obsession breathe and exist, but as soon as the moment is over, he put his guard up tenfold. it takes a LOT of time to him to figure out how he feels for gillion, but once he does, he feels like atlas, holding of his shoulder the gravity of his sin. he does not tell anyone for months, view his feelings and himself as dirty, as something that should be kept hidden, especially since gillion is someone of much higher class and with a much greater destiny than him. he rushes into broom closets to have panic attacks after particularly intimate combat training, writes letters and poems that he keeps under a floorboard. he fully knows that jay is also bisexual, but in his head, its different if two women are together, since thats not ever something that was talked about at all with prices gang ( there were barely any women ). he also fully knows that gillion is asexual, and in his head, that proves gillions inherent superiority, since he is less vulnerable to being led astray by his desires. also, chip is much too caught up in his own shit to care what other people do.

anyways, heres a quote that fits pretty well

[alchameth]

Considering the above, the Pearl within Islam can also be thought of as synonymous with the Logos. While in the Christian tradition, the metaphor of the Pearl as the Logos is communicated through its likeness to Jesus Christ, here it becomes apparent in the metaphysical notions of the Pearl as the Word of God or the Divine Intellect. This distinction mirrors the two religions’ diverging views on where Divine quintessence lies in its most unadulterated form: in Christianity, it is in Christ; and in Islam, it is in God’s Word immaculately transmitted in the Holy Qur’an. Despite this difference, both traditions revolve around primary vessels of Divinity akin to the Platonic Logos. In both systems, the Pearl is thought to represent that Logos, being the imprint of God in the physical world and thus sharing an ontological status (though, of course, to a subtler degree) with Jesus Christ and the Qur’an.

The Gnostic Pearl in Syriac Christianity, Islam and Beyond by Esmé L. K. Partridge, pp. 9-10.

[haggishlyhagging]

This obsession with purifying society of deviant/defiant women has been both the origin and manifestation of the secret bond between seemingly distinct and even opposed categories of men. Thus the members of the legal profession, who at first appeared opposed or at least indifferent to the witch-hunting propensities of priests, later became even more fervent persecutors. Thus also protestants, though bitterly opposed to catholicism, vied with and even may have surpassed their catholic counterparts in their fanaticism and cruelty during the witchcraze. Typically, each used the orthodoxy of the other to entrap women under the witch-label. Among some protestants, for example, Bishop Palladius, reformer of Denmark, the term witch was extended to include "those who used catholic prayers or formulas."

This massacre of women, then, masked a secret gynocidal fraternity, whose prime targets were women living outside the control of the patriarchal family, women who presented an option—an option of "eccentricity," and of "indigestibility." The term eccentric is derived from the Greek ek (out of) plus kentrum (center of a circle). One definition in Merriam-Webster is "not having the same center, used of circles, cylinders, spheres, and certain other figures: opposed to concentric." It also means "deviating from some established type, pattern, or rule." The women hunted as witches were (are) in a time/space that is not concentric with androcracy. Hags are Self-centering, constituting the Society of Outsiders, defining gynocentric boundaries. This is the dreaded option of Dreadful, Dreadless Crones, the ultimate indigestible threat to the "majesty of God." Therefore in the name of god this Self-centering process must be halted and all Hag-centered process re-moved, sucked back into the dead center of patriarchal darkness.

The purification of society was legitimated as a cleansing not only of the "body politic" but, more specifically, of the Mystical Body of Christ. Since Christ was believed to possess not only his own body but also a Mystical Body—extended to include all members of his church—this Mystical Body had to be kept pure enough to perform the functions required by its divine Head. This extended Body symbolism had commonly been invoked by fathers and doctors of the church when confronted with the problem of heretics. The latter-like diseased members had to be cut off (killed) for the good of the whole organism. This tradition provided a ready-made solution for the problem presented by the witches. Moreover, while the argument had frequently functioned to legitimate the "amputation" of heretical male members, it was particularly appropriate in the case of deviant women, for there is something basically incongruous in trying to see women with any sense of Self as incorporated into The Male Mystical Body. This incongruity was partially and convolutedly expressed by Kramer and Sprenger when they declared that males were protected from so horrible a crime as witchcraft because Jesus was a man.

It is important to note here an essential pattern in the maze of the witchcraze. On the symbolic level, the emphasis centers around god-the-son, "The Second Person of the Divine Trinity," who "became incarnate." Dogmatically speaking, "the Word became Flesh." Thus in christian doctrine, the "fact" that god-the-son became man (male), assuming a human—that is, male—body, enabled males to become gods. It prepared the way for the Brotherhood representing/replacing Yahweh & Son. Thus the original christian divine model for Big Brother in Orwell's 1984 is the godman, Jesus. It is significant that in this "futuristic"—that is, patriarchally past and contemporary—novel it is not Big Father who is the Head. For everyone knows on some level that this "divine" father is omni-absent, a figurehead as blatant as Archie Bunker, Idi Amin (Dada), Tricky Dick Nixon, or Pope Paul the Sicksth (VI; sic). Rather it is Big Brother who is omnipresent—seeing/knowing/controlling all, constantly purifying the body politic of deviants. Male (and male-identified) professionals and aspirants to political power have identified with this more accessible and "real" symbol.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

[wisdomfish]

Democratic nations in particular place great value on the principle of tolerance, especially the tolerance of religious expression. The US Bill of Rights guarantees citizens the right to free exercise of religion.

Unfortunately, some people take the notion of equal toleration of religious expression to mean that all religions are equally true, thus equally valid paths to God. In effect, democracy has been applied to ultimate truth. This seemingly “politically correct” approach to religion, though popular, represents deeply convoluted thinking.

The acceptance of social pluralism (tolerance of diverse religious expression) does not logically imply the truth of metaphysical pluralism (that all religious truth-claims are equally valid and simultaneously true).

Careful examination of the basic tenants of the various religious traditions demonstrates that, far from teaching the same thing, the major religions have radically different perspectives on the religious ultimate. [Harold A. Netland]

Christianity affirms that redemption in Christ for the believer involves an eternal personal relationship with God in the afterlife. Hinduism, on the other hand, affirms a cycle of rebirths leading ultimately to the absorption of one’s individual consciousness into God or ultimate reality. Those two visions of future reality are simply irreconcilable.

Therefore, it is highly misleading to speak as if all religions share a common soteriological good and simply differ on the means to reach it; leading to a growing consensus that it is seriously misleading to regard the various religious traditions of the world as variations on a single theme. [Harold A. Netland; Alister E. McGrath]

Homogenizing religions is a costly price to pay to eliminate religious diversity, for in the end, the religions must sacrifice the very features that make them unique and appealing in the first place; meaning, “all religions are NOT basically the same… for as soon as [the notion of sameness] moves beyond vague generalities—every religion has some version of the Golden Rule—if founders on the fact that the religions differ in what they consider essential and nonnegotiable.” [Huston Smith]

Therefore, formal laws of logic firmly demonstrate the impossibility that all religious truth claims can be true at the same time and in the same way (the law of non-contradiction: A cannot equal A and non-A). For example, Jesus Christ cannot both be God incarnate (Christianity) and not be God incarnate (Judaism, Islam) at the same time.

To reiterate, contradictory religious claims have opposite truth value, meaning that they negate or deny each other. Therefore exactly one is true and the other false. And, accordingly, Jesus Christ must either be God incarnate or not be God incarnate; no middle position is possible (the law of excluded middle: either A or non-A).

Since Jews, Christians, and Muslims all conceive the identity of Jesus of Nazareth differently (human teacher, thus blasphemer; God-incarnate; human prophet), logically speaking, their conceptions simply can’t all be true. While it is logically possible that all three positions are false, they definitely cannot all be true. Thus, the claims of popular religious pluralism fail to comport with the self-evident laws of thought, confirming that;

“Anyone who would become a pluralist must first abandon the very principles of logic that make all significant thought, action, and communication possible.” [Ronald H. Nash]

In essence, to divorce oneself from the self-evident laws of thought when it comes to ultimate reality is to resign oneself to irrationality; a price too great for most people to pay because it requires the, “forfeiture of the possibility of meaningful affirmation or statement about anything at all––including statements about the religious ultimate.” [Harold A. Netland]

~ Samples, Kenneth Richard. ‘Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions