[RD] Religious News Thread

That's the SBC. You do know there are other religions in the US other than Baptism, let alone Christianity?

There are people who sincerely seek salvation. They don't wish to be like you. Is that really so crazy?

Yes there are lots of religions. I only mentioned the SBC because they are in schism mode at the moment. It is a good example of how new "walls" get build to protect a set of beliefs.

Protestant Christianity is fragmented beyond belief. There are an estimated 200 different denominations and maybe as many 30,000 independent, non denominational churches. The fragmentation began in 1517 and hasn't stopped. Most other religions are not as fragmented a Protestant Christianity but almost all have fragmentation of some sort. In most cases the fragments claim to have a better view of the truth than others. Hinduism has four main sects that further split into deity worship; Islam, two/three; Buddhism has three major sects, six schools and numerous further divisions. I could go on. Communities, religious or not, define themselves by "walls" to separate them from other communities. Some walls are more porous than others. When religious communities get too large or if disagreements happen, they often split into two or more communities. I am ignoring the hundreds of local and regional temples and religious faiths of Asia.

Roger Williams was expelled by the Puritan leaders from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for spreading "new and dangerous ideas," and established Providence Plantations in 1636 as a refuge offering what he termed "liberty of conscience." In 1638, he founded the First Baptist Church in America, in Providence.

There is nothing wrong with people seeking salvation. Salvation can be pretty loosely defined so there is a place to find whatever you are seeking. I think that for the most part religious fragmentation is all about "we are more right than you". The "you are wrong" is a thing at the very high levels of thinking: Islam vs Hinduism.
 
. Communities, religious or not, define themselves by "walls" to separate them from other communities.

I still think your generalizing too much. There are plenty religions and communities that are open and inclusive to a vast amount of people. Many religions like to proselytize and gain new members, if anything that's building bridges not walls.
 
I still think your generalizing too much. There are plenty religions and communities that are open and inclusive to a vast amount of people. Many religions like to proselytize and gain new members, if anything that's building bridges not walls.
Advertising for new members by whatever means is all about bring new people into your walled garden under the "terms of admittance". Those term vary widely, but they are still there. It doesn't take much to become a Unitarian, but becoming a Catholic, Jew, Muslim or Born Again Christian has specific "rules".
 
The EU is a miracle?

Pope Francis has put French statesman Robert Schuman, one of the founders of modern Europe, on the path to sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church.
The Vatican said the Pope approved a decree recognising Schuman's "heroic virtues", an early stage of the long process that can lead to canonisation.

One miracle would have to be attributed to Schuman for him to be beatified and then another for him to become a saint.

In the post-war period, Schuman served as France's prime minister and foreign minister. In 1950, he proposed that coal and steel resources should be pooled between European countries as a way to avoid future conflicts. The plan became known as the Schuman Declaration, and the day it was announced, 9 May, is celebrated as Europe Day.
Six founding members - France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands - signed the Treaty of Paris, creating the European Coal and Steel Community. It evolved in 1957 to become the European Economic Community and finally the European Union, in 1993.​
"And here we see the miracle of the French and Germans putting aside their century-old hatred to focus on hating the British."

I'm sure the EU could scrounge up another miracle along the lines of the loaves and fishes.
"Where there was once five regulations, there were now five thousand regulations, and the bureaucrats were amazed, for there were more regulations to monitor and report on than any could have foreseen!"
 
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If I were to caption that bottom photo, it would be "(w)itch, please."


That said... there's a series of historical/biblical fiction by Peter Danielson, called The Children of the Lion. I started reading this series after working front of house for a college production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (amazing production, no pun intended; I overheard one audience member afterward saying she'd seen the Donny Osmond version in Edmonton and ours was way better). I still think the one I saw in 1978 was the best, though; it was the one that prompted me to apply for backstage work the following year.

Anyway, the Children of the Lion series is what you get if you combine the characters of parts of Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, etc. with a fictitious caste of armorers, metalsmiths, merchants, artisans, and seers who bear the mark of Cain (in this series this was a birthmark shaped like a lion's paw). The story told in the rock opera starts in the third book and carries on until the seventh. Joseph dies in the 8th book and Moses is born (this series greatly condenses the 40-day/year, etc. timeline to more reasonable spans). Interspersed in this series are events happening in various parts of the Middle East and Egypt. Greece and the Trojan War come into it as well.

The author sets the Exodus around the time when the island of Thera blew up. One of the Greek scholars (of the Greek merchant branch of the Children of the Lion), when he heard about the "plagues" that happened in Egypt, simply enumerated all the different ways that these things could have been caused as after-effects of the volcanic explosion - which was massive and would have had far-reaching effects around the Mediterranean.

This series is what prompted me to get serious about reading ancient and classical history, btw (prior to that I was only really familiar with the Romans). I wanted to know which parts of this series were based on real history, which ones were the author's imagination only, and which were based on the Old Testament (so I read that as well, or at least past the point that I'd previously read).


My answer to the woman in the top photo would have been to ask her which country devised the Black Death as a bioweapon in the 14th century and every century before and since that had a plague (until modern times). That's not to say that nobody ever devised a bioweapon before that, of course. Just throwing a dead animal in a medieval city's drinking water and letting the decaying corpse poison it can be considered a "bioweapon."

When religious communities get too large or if disagreements happen, they often split into two or more communities.
The Hutterites do that. When one colony reaches 200-250 people, it splits. Over time the new colony may come to have more modern ideas and allowable actions than its parent colony (I don't know if the new one would be more traditional, though it could be).

Yul Brenner is perfect! I wonder what she thinks about the plague years in Europe.
Hm. Too many people seem to think that history happened during the biblical time and then took a jump to 1492. Without exception, every Mormon missionary who ever came to my door was flabbergasted to learn that Viking explorers reached Canada 500 years before Columbus "discovered America" (the West Indies).

So for people like her, the Black Death happened pre-1492, so it never happened.

I still think your generalizing too much. There are plenty religions and communities that are open and inclusive to a vast amount of people. Many religions like to proselytize and gain new members, if anything that's building bridges not walls.
It's a matter of "come inside our walls" and if the target does and becomes a convert, they discover that in some cases, they can never leave without drastic familial, social, and economic consequences.

There are fans who are still flabbergasted that Elisabeth Moss, the star of the TV series adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, is a Scientologist. In an early interview, Moss was asked if The Handmaid's Tale is a feminist novel, and she said no. Margaret Atwood was not pleased with that answer, informed her she was wrong, and Moss had to correct herself.
 
Protestant Christianity is fragmented beyond belief. There are an estimated 200 different denominations and maybe as many 30,000 independent, non denominational churches. The fragmentation began in 1517 and hasn't stopped. Most other religions are not as fragmented a Protestant Christianity but almost all have fragmentation of some sort.

A bit tangent, but 1517? That depends on your definition of Protestantism. There are, at least in Europe, churches that are considered protestant which have origins older than Luther.
 
The Hussites and the Waldensians, to name just two.
 
Advertising for new members by whatever means is all about bring new people into your walled garden under the "terms of admittance". Those term vary widely, but they are still there. It doesn't take much to become a Unitarian, but becoming a Catholic, Jew, Muslim or Born Again Christian has specific "rules".

It's not like they're hard, or the door is closed. Whatever your rando opinion "of religion" is.

All the hard horsehocky is in the obligations even "the godless" like to pay lip service to, when somebody else is doing them.
 
A bit tangent, but 1517? That depends on your definition of Protestantism. There are, at least in Europe, churches that are considered protestant which have origins older than Luther.

The Hussites and the Waldensians, to name just two.
Yes there were pre Luther attempts to reform the Catholic church going back a few hundred years, but those attempts tended to be both local/regional and failures at making significant change in the religious make up of Europe. What Luther launched in 1517 was far reaching and permanent. Like most things that create big change, we choose a starting point and often ignore the deeper roots building up to the date assigned. Jan Hus may have been an early reformer advocate, but Martin Luther sparked a changed world.
 
Given the general viewpoint of American Catholics, I probably could count the number of American lay Catholics who don't hold a belief in direct opposition to official Church teaching on my fingers and toes.

Man if the Australian Catholic Church applied this standard of "not outlawing abortion means you're excommunicated" they would have excommunicated every single Catholic prime minister and most Catholic parliamentarians from both major parties for the last several decades. Reproductive autonomy is a closed question as far as state policy in the developed world goes, pretty much except for the US and a couple of other holdouts, the Church really needs to learn to let it go.
 
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https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx

Screenshot_20210706-030405_Gallery.jpg
 
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God: The monster over our beds.
Religion: A set of beliefs about why yours are wrong.
Channel Nein!

Moderator Action: This is an RD thread. We expect higher quality posts than this. ~ Arakhor
 
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