|
Prosperity Gospel is Just World Fallacy with a religious and capitalist flavour, as far as I know. The idea that the universe is like a big balance sheet and will automatically try to balance itself. If you suffer in some way you have to be rewarded in some way, either with an afterlife or, sometimes, with actual money IRL. In case the afterlife is too metaphysical and far away and you're a bit more materialist but still want to believe. The idea of course is daft. Most people just suffer and get nothing out of it. Many do so while still believing they will be rewarded right up until they die. It's weird that kids growing up Christian wouldn't read the bible, I mean, I had a children's bible when I was young and I wasn't even Christian. Would have thought that you'd be expected to read it as a matter of course?
|
#
¿
Jul 9, 2015 15:43
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 09:41 |
|
|
I've not been an active Christian but my aunt is Catholic, and most of my school contact with it was C of E. So it's very odd to me, the overwhelming impression I get from it in the UK is that your faith is primarily a personal matter and your religious leaders are there to perform services, dispense a bit of the Godly magic in the case of Catholics, and help you feel better if you're worried about something. A vicar is basically a counsellor for the local community more than they are there to convert you and ensure you're adherent to their particular doctrine. It might not be the case for all reverends but it seems to be the case for most of the ones I've ever interacted with. Vicars tend to be some of the most down to earth people you'll meet. The idea of a faith primarily centered around the pastor is really strange, it's more what I'd associate with a suicide cult than a major religion.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 9, 2015 15:53
|
|
|
Occult just means "hidden" though, there's no universal concept of occultism so occult is basically anything and everything that is mystical and you don't understand. That people are sufficiently uneducated and/or blinkered to not see the similarities between other religions and their own is certainly silly, but something can entirely be a normal thing in one place and occultism in another. Which can also, arguably, include things that other people don't even consider religious. So a weird house full of bizzare words and images on the walls because some people graffiti'd all over it is basically just as occult as people setting up the doom chamber of infinite pain and sacrifice with candles on every point of every pentacle. Occultism really is just things you don't understand, possibly because someone else made it all up. See: The Lesser Key of Solomon, aka the monster manual for the 17th century LARPer.  Demon Prince Stolas? Yeah just because you tried drawing an owlbear and failed doesn't mean you can draw a crown on it and call it a demon prince nerd. Yeah I'm sure he teaches astronomy and botany and commands twenty six legions of helll pffahaha whatever. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Jul 15, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2015 03:25
|
|
|
Well that's sort of consistent if they believe that God tells them everything important, if God didn't tell you about it it's probably evil, so by definition anything occult is evil.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2015 03:39
|
|
|
Also consistent with the idea that satan is constantly trying to tempt you and everyone else and is obviously winning with people who talk about things that God and the church hasn't seen fit to reveal to me. That's actually not a terribly unusual Christian position in general actually, almost all brands of Christianity tend to be of the view that the Church has all the info you need and it's all available to you, and it's good for you to learn it. Secrets are the domain of the devil and you shoudn't really want to know them and a desire to learn them will lead you astray. If you claim to know stuff the Church doesn't then what you know is obviously wrong because the Chruch gets its info direct from God. The main difference is the degree of aggression to which some people pursue that idea, and also the bit where it's less about Church doctrine and more about your own personal pastor's weird ideas. Most other Christian denominations don't consider everyone else to be agents of satan that you should probably shoot if you can get away with it, they just disagree with them.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2015 03:58
|
|
|
MrNemo posted:Also just to be clear, when we're talking of Church doctrine, etc. in this thread it's Evangelical churches right? Because I'm used to Church referring to established churches such as Roman Catholicism or the Church of England and neither of them outright condemn all non-Church teaching as occult knowledge or wrong. The Catholic Church has for a long time officially insisted (and always had a strong tradition within it) that worldly knowledge is perfectly legitimate way to gain further knowledge of God's creation. Most churches are fine with other knowledge as long as it doesn't directly disagree with the church, if you claim to know better than the church about something then they still do claim they're right and you're wrong. Evangelicals tend to just proclaim a monopoly on more things, presumably again because of the focus on loony cult leaders.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2015 17:54
|
|
|
America also tends to derive more or less all power from money, whereas historically the nobility are nobles because of association, not merely money, and money cannot buy you complete access to the nobility. We still have that somewhat nowadays in the UK. Historic noble connections might be why powerful Americans got their money but it isn't why they keep power.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2015 02:21
|
|
|
twistedmentat posted:Yep, exactly what I was talking about. I love how the 2 guys in Not Just Fun and Games look pretty much the same, and the guys in Deception of a Generation look like a late 70s porn star and someone who would get arrested sneaking off from his family to have anonymous gay sex. You should see what he looks like now.  I'm sure he does, Phil. 
|
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2015 03:18
|
|
|
ToxicSlurpee posted:The Bible actually doesn't really say much about what or who the devil actually is. The imagery of an insidious horned demon always lurking in the shadows is a more recent invention. Generally though what I was taught was that before Earth was created there was a huge battle among the angels. Some of them questioned God's authority and started a big fight. This was led by an angel/archangel named Lucifer. They lost and were cast out which created Hell. Lucifer eventually became Satan and God forgave him even though he was still a huge jerk because God is just that nice but told him that if he wanted to keep being a jerk he could only do it against those that were not faithful or those that God wanted to test. Isn't that the plot of Paradise Lost?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2015 04:55
|
|
|
ToxicSlurpee posted:Beats me I never read it. It almost literally is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost#Satan Though Milton's Satan is a little bit more of a bishie byronic antihero than I imagine most evangelicals would think of him.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2015 05:02
|
|
|
Dux Supremus posted:It's funny but not that surprising; hasn't there been a lot of widespread incorporation of the Left Behind series as to how Revelation will unfold? I'm pretty sure that's where the weird evangelical hatred for the United Nations comes from. (Which then brings their views into convergence with the people who think the UN is the Illuminati or NWO or Reptoid High Command or whatever...) See I was going to make a comparison to accepting Paradise Lost as biblical canon being just as sensible as accepting Left Behind as biblical canon (with infinite apologies to John Milton, of course) but then you go and tell me people are actually doing that 
|
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2015 17:03
|
|
|
Frost Giants are superconductive. Obviously.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2015 00:09
|
|
|
Shbobdb posted:That's fine and perfectly understandable but it's not a justification. People presenting agnosticism as anything other than a rhetorical device are doing the whole discussion a disservice. What's wrong with it as a standpoint?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 21, 2015 19:54
|
|
|
Shbobdb posted:What does "agnosticism" mean? What does "god" mean? Broadly, agnosticism is "I don't know." It is professing a lack of knowledge about god, either not knowing whether god exists, or whether it is even possible to know if god exists. God differs depending on who you ask, but I've yet to find one that agnosticism doesn't apply to.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2015 06:02
|
|
|
Shbobdb posted:What does that mean? "I haven't made a decision on a term I refuse to define" isn't a meaningful statement. Existence (and pretty much every other possible attribute) can't be applied to an undefined term. I have no idea whether gods exist, the idea that I could is patently ridiculous in the case of almost all specific gods I've ever had described to me. A consistent theme with gods is that they are sufficiently powerful and otherworldly that it's impossible to find quantifiable evidence of their existence, so it stands to reason that the only logical position to take towards a thing that is impossible to observe and has no particular reason to exist, is to say "I haven't seen it, I don't know that it exists, so I will operate as if it does not until this changes." This works quite well towards the idea of gods in general given that if a term is undefined I can't assume whether it exists or doesn't exist either. "I don't know." is a perfectly valid answer to a lot of questions. I don't greatly see the need to say that gods definitely do or don't exist, as it makes very little difference one way or another whether I say either of those or "I don't know." and "I don't know." is at least accurate. MrNemo posted:The strong agnosticism you mentioned there isn't agnosticism, it's Deism in that it accepts the existence of a God. Not necessarily. It is possible to point out that God as described by most religions would still inherently unknowable. You don't have to assume it exists to do that. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:24 on Jul 24, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2015 03:19
|
|
|
Which is especially weird to me because when I was at school we did trips to churches as part of RE, also a Hindu temple once. But I would expect most UK residents, even young ones, to be passingly familiar with C of E at least, which is about as inoffensive as you can get as far as I'm concerned.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 25, 2015 13:25
|
|
|
*shrug* That's odd to me. I've never had any interest in C of E but it's difficult to live here without getting something of a feel for it. Most towns have big old churches in them and presumably most people will at least meet a vicar once in their young lives, if only for a funeral. Plus the bishops are usually complaining about the government being really bad at looking after the poor once a year or so. It's just an odd idea. Britain is pretty secular but religion is never very far away from you, and most of our denominations are fairly agreeable I've always found.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 25, 2015 13:39
|
|
|
Shbobdb posted:I still don't get what is hosed up about it. Why wouldn't someone want Anne Frank to go to Heaven? Better than being a Chick-style dick and saying she's in hell. As for Church discipline, these people are dead. It's not like they can do anything to them (and in the case of holocaust victims, do anything worse to them than they've already experienced). It may be considered moderately disrespectful to claim that someone who was killed for their beliefs doesn't actually believe in them any more and is now batting for your religious team posthumously. I personally ascribe no importance to the dead but that doesn't mean I put on a budgie smuggler and pelvic thrust my way across cemeteries while grinding on tombstones because I cannot comprehend the notion of other people having a sense of attachment to them. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Jul 26, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jul 26, 2015 03:49
|
|
|
GAINING WEIGHT... posted:First of all - unless you have statistics to the contrary, and then I'll retract this - the LDS posthumous baptizing isn't directed solely at Jewish people, or at least there's no reason it has to be. Second, there's nothing stopping the Jewish people from turning right around and claiming say Joseph Smith as their own, which would be just as pointless an exercise. Lastly, how is Mormonism "claiming" others an erasure of any kind? Other than the Mormons, who actually accepts their claims as valid? Like, who give a poo poo what some wacky Utah cult thinks about the religious identity of the dead? So Mormons "claim" Anne Frank...are any other groups going to recognize this as legitimate? That assumes that 1. Attempts at erasure are only morally objectionable when they are effective, and 2. That the LDS church is universally regarded as a crazy cult. Neither of which I think are true.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2015 16:15
|
|
|
Maybe she was going for some IRL version of the crusader kings achievement for mending the great schism.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2015 12:49
|
|
|
Shockyourmonkey posted:I don't understand why Protestantism could fracture so thoroughly. Why would a sect founded on schism and based around rejecting a hegemonic entrenched power structure in favour of a more scriptural approach to Christianity be prone to fracturing? In addition to the term "Protestantism" by definition including everything other than the Catholic and Orthodox churches? Doesn't the question answer itself?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2015 00:03
|
|
|
I kind of always figured rapture-happy Christians were kind of like plate spinners who've been doing it for 20 hours now and really just want someone to please end the competition my arms are going to fall off. It must be very stressful having to repent all the time or else the creator of the universe will drat you forever, I'd probably want the world to end too if that was my belief.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2016 18:24
|
|
|
Where does the 144,000 figure come from? I've never had much direct experience with evangelicals but I was sort of under the impression that heaven didn't have a limited number of places.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2016 18:33
|
|
|
Yinlock posted:I thought the Dante take is that Limbo/Purgatory is for people who have sinned but have the capability for repentance, i.e they can actually recognize that what they've done is wrong and work to atone for it. Hell is for people who absolutely will not repent in any capacity. As I recall limbo according to Dante is not a horrible place, just a place separate from the light of heaven, basically. It's for people who would, if only they'd actually been Christian, have gone to heaven. The virtuous pagans and the people who never got the opportunity to convert. Which, of course, leads to the old joke of the first thing you should do upon seeing a missionary is to shoot him because he's basically a walking Langford Basilisk. Considering Dante's oddly concrete conception of hell I assume that limbo is literally just full of a bunch of greeks sitting on the edge of an enormous hole chatting philosophy. E: Apparently Dante also hated fence-sitters because they also end up just outside of hell. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Jul 16, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2016 00:23
|
|
|
I also enjoy Dante's take on geography, stating that there is no land in the southern hemisphere because Satan fell out of heaven and into the center of the earth, and the land all ran north to get out of his way. except for one enormous mountain formed of the rock that dodged Satan on his way through the planet, located precisely antipodean to Jerusalem, which is where Purgatory is. So I guess that's it, if anyone asks where Heaven is, it's above the South Pacific. Guavanaut posted:Chased by unending swarms of bees iirc. Maybe not an ironic punishment for centrists but an amusing one. It's described as being pretty nice actually, except that yeah everyone's apparently very angsty because they aren't in actual heaven. Personally I doubt that would bother the Greeks very much. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Jul 16, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2016 01:06
|
|
|
I genuinely thought judeo-christian just meant the combined and interrelated mythology of both religions. Guess I should probably avoid using it to mean that. Gah this is like when I learned that "thug" meant "criminal black person" in America. Stupid dogwhistles appropriating sensible words.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2016 16:56
|
|
|
It's possible the fundamentalist won't know that either.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 29, 2016 17:57
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 09:41 |
|
|
He will live on in our tracts.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 25, 2016 18:03
|
|