#had a recent discussion in sunday school about how there are several sects of religion that claim to worship and follow Jesus

[theragamuffininitiative]

😅

[sun-through-the-trees]

I just had a (sort of) interesting discussion with a Christian.

In London, I adopted a grander form of the idea of no objective information. Of course, a lot of that is infallible, but I was particularly interested in the holy texts that I had been taught were immortally true weren’t. By then, I had given up religion, but it was still interesting to see. I found a lot of misconceptions, but also some truths: christianity was just a weird sect of Judaism for a long time after Christ died, there are apocrypha which were somewhat arbitrarily left out of the bible, Jesus wasn’t white, saints and hell aren’t described at all in the bible, neither was anything from the Iconoclasm, Satan was hardly mentioned at all, etc.

Most importantly, through discussion with a friend and information about the religion and its art, I learned that there is no non-denominational practice. The people, notably in America, who say that they don’t care what denomination or sect they are, or that they explicitly aren’t one because those are bad, are misinformed.

This all went into the larger discussion of cultural vocabularies and the nature of vision. There is no Platonic ideal, everything is different, there is no Truth.

Well, it just so happens that my training in Sunday school and the especial flavor of my family’s religiosity claimed a lot of these things. That’s why they were interesting to me, but it also presented some quandries. There lies the discussion.

I’m not religious and my family has caught the strong wind of it, but I still sometimes have sort of awkward, allegedly neutral discussions or little chats or statements that turn into unwarranted, often one-sided discussions. Today, I mentioned that I was reading about angelology recently, and found it interesting how different sects do or don’t recognize various angels, especially Uriel, as various ranks, or at all. He’s mentioned almost completely in some of the apocrypha (the book of Enoch, I think), so Orthodoxy and Catholicism have different hot takes on his, and others’, validity and rank. What’s more, these intricacies also varied in different denominations of Catholicism (one ophan or principality I think was only recognized by the Ethiopian Catholic Church) and in various protestant faiths.

And that’s interesting! It’s proof that “absolute” readings of even one text can vary widely and have interesting impacts, and whether or not you’re taught something’s true or not is likely sourced from very old opinions from St. Thomas Aquinus or (get this) Pseudo-Dioniysis or something, not just your own minister’s/priest’s/preacher’s opinion.

But beliefs are often resilient and resistant. I mentioned some of this, in really vague terms, to him, and got a lot of nothing back. On notions that it’s at all interesting to know why certain books and prophets were left out or even that it is generally worth knowing what other people think in general terms (a pretty inarguable point in a place like tumblr or college), I was assured that there is Truth and Grace, and that mixing those in different ratios results in different religiosity flavors (albeit more plainly worded). Where did he get that? Where did it come from? Isn’t it interesting to consider that concept in comparison and contrast with others? Not in his opinion.

The talk felt a little impotent not far in, but I think it shows a lot about American Christianity. Their theologies are no less biased or influenced or dynamic than any other religion, unquestionably, but it isn’t taught that way in almost any church. I haven’t been everywhere, but I went to a lot of churches, and I’ve certainly witnessed all of the TV preachers’ styles. It’s still hard to stomach sometimes, and I don’t expect a religious service to talk much about history or even cite very many sources. But the extent and style to which this is done really establishes that American religion is direct and true, straight and verbatim from the holy text, and that simply isn’t true. Who wrote your bible? Who edited the version? Who translated it, and from which version? In what based authorities are your baseline ideas rooted? It isn’t nothing, and it isn’t infallible.

I’m past the annoying part of atheism where I poo all over religion and the religious. I know it can do good, and it’s as essential to all humanity, maybe in the exact same way, as art. But I think that thinking about this really makes transparent the cause behind a lot of things, from lighthearted “I speak American!” memes to the more severe “America first” mindsets.

[Thanks for reading this far, I hope you’re having a good day.] I’m not shooting by a lesson here, but I hope that it makes someone think about how they think. It’s important. Origins can be ignored, but not without consequence. No truth is objective,  more so even than “history by the victors” and “no new art” can really, fully communicate.