"Christianity in particular has a history of absorbing other religions’ traditions" -- Tangentially related: I'm a Catholic, so I don't know much about other "distros", but the Roman Catholic Church has a long, pragmatic history of absorbing local traditions in Indonesia.
It's interesting dynamic. Catholic Church is notoriously top-down and hierarchical, yet local parishes can feel entirely distinct. It's not uncommon to see traditional Javanese processions integrated right into the mass. Like skin/mod in a game.
> Catholic Church is notoriously top-down and hierarchical
It has a hierarchy, but it has multiple hierarchies. It is not all that top down. Bishop's ave a lot of autonomy, and most decisions are made at the diocesan level. Dioceses have their own property and funds held by their own trustees. On top of that religious orders have their own hierarchy (and property and funds etc.). Then there are the rites such as the Ukrainian or Syro-Malabar churches that have their own hierarchies.
It's more cultural colonization than syncretism. For example, America was culturally colonized by forcibly converting its inhabitants to Catholicism. Their temples were destroyed, the stones used to build churches, and while celebrations were still observed, the deities were replaced with Catholic ones. Even the folklore was rewritten with Catholic characters.
It wasn't syncretism, it was systematic eradication. Syncretism is more akin to reconciliation of different views.
Another appropriate word for the colonization of America is genocide.
I'm old enough to remember being taught how America was settled by expanding into the vast wilderness of the continent, and that sometimes they had skirmishes with natives but they found them new places to live.
It turns out it wasn't quite as neat and tidy as suggested.
"It can include assimilation of several originally discrete traditions, especially in theology and mythology, thus asserting an underlying unity and allowing for an inclusive approach to multiple faiths."
"...in the realm of religion, it specifically denotes a more integrated merging of beliefs into a unified system, distinct from eclecticism, which implies a selective adoption of elements from different traditions without necessarily blending them into a new, cohesive belief system."
"It provides an opportunity to bring beliefs, values, and customs from one cultural tradition into contact with, and to engage different cultural traditions."
Catholic church tries to be practical but inadvertently poisons Christianity. Christianity is way different from the Catholic church.
Because catholic church is whatever the newest model is in the distro but other distros try to be very very clean and try to follow the original texts and their meaning but catholic church is like the new iphone trying to be like whatever is the trendy trend nowadays.
HN is probably not the best forum for theological debate...
But e.g. modern American evangelical churches are to me quite clearly quite far from the original meaning of the texts with some theology outright invented in 18th and 19th centuries.
It really is the case that what you bring to a text colors what you get out of it, and the more people insist that they are reading a text "as it is clearly written" the blinder they seem to be to this.
The question being what text to whom? The original text in the context of the culture of the original audience or an English translation interpreted as though addressed to a contemporary audience?
That couldn't be further from the truth. The Catholic Church has withstood the test of time, and is still the original church. It has had its dark times for sure when people said exactly what you are saying now, BUT it is still here and the closest thing we have to the way early church fathers practiced Christianity than any of the 30,000 protestant churches lol.
One of the stranger aspects of Roman history is that for centuries, there was a fight over who gets the public space. You'd have the local mystery cults defacing whatever the Christians put up and vice versa. Assimilating local traditions rather than demanding people just adopt theirs fits in with a faith that aims to be higher than all others. Jesus has no need to fight Vishnu, and never did.
We're just looking at this through the lens of the Protestant Reformation so this pragmatism is often lost.
I don’t think anything assimilates religions better than Hinduism. New belief system? Just throw in a new avatar of Vishnu to legitimize it and carry on.
> Just throw in a new avatar of Vishnu to legitimize it and carry on.
Except for it's never done. No Hindu believes Allah or Jesus is an Avatar of Vishnu.
It can't be. Vishnu literally means the "All-Pervading One". Allah is explicitly not Omnipresent. Jesus is Omnipresent but does not have infinite forms. So neither fit the bill. Even Buddha, who we Hindus associate as one of the Avatars of Vishnu is not the same Buddha as Gautama Buddha who founded Buddhism.
That's because there's not really a there there when it comes to Hinduism. It's a nationalism disguised as a religion (by eating every local religion.)
I really don't think that that use of "in particular" is correct or notable? Cross culture motion of mythology and storytelling is the rule with humanity, not the exception.
Really it's only in the last/final generation of religions, where they started writing them down in canon/scripture/testaments/writs/dogmas/whatever, that you started to see unique stories get associated with specific religions.
Before that? It's all mush. Aphrodite descends pretty clearly from the same line as Astarte/Ishtar/Innana (maybe Isis too), etc... People steal good stories. People get conquered and then confused by retelling the stories their new overlords tell. Again and again.
"In particular" could also be interpreted here as just signaling the main subject of the article, not necessarily making any sort of claim to comparative amount of syncretism.
Editor snobbery digression: that would be poor writing. The job of signaling the main subject of the article belongs to the headline and lede, and "Christian saints" is right there.
No, that phrase is just filler. And IMHO it's basically wrong. Certainly if the author want to show that Christianity is more likely than other religions to import ideas, the article has a lot more work to do than point out one myth. Literally everyone does this.
This is a really pedantic editorial argument. I'm not going to claim the author's sentence is anything amazing, but you are being overly critical. The paragraph clearly introduces the general concept of religious influence through contact, then transitions that idea to pointing out instances of this in Christianity. It is quite literally particularizing the idea as it relates to the main subject, and so it uses the phrase "in particular" in its transition sentence. It's not "basically wrong", it's basically right and you are interpreting it in the least charitable way.
I'm just going to repeat: there is nothing notable or unique to Christian appropriation of myths and stories from other religions. It does it at least as much as everyone else does, and everyone does it everywhere. So trying to tie this uniquely to Christianity seems needless and confusing. The deeper point is more interesting and more important.
Is there anything in that paragraph you'd like to argue about?
> the Roman Catholic Church has a long, pragmatic history of absorbing local traditions
One of the most studied issues in Catholic evangelism is the Chinese rites controversy which is also one of the historical reasons why religions are suppressed in China (aside from ideological policies ascribed to communism).
(That and the Taiping rebellion which was estimated to have killed as many people as World War 2 on the higher end. It was led by a failed scholar claiming to be alleged brother of Jesus. Most of the deaths were due to starvation. Not quite Netflix material but interesting plot nonetheless)
The issue is moot since nowadays local practices are accepted to a degree. Even if Rome decided to go back on that it would have little practical relevance nowadays since there are lots of branches of Christianity that are not in communion with Rome and who are perfectly fine with that.
The CCP actually views the Taiping Rebellion positively, as an egalitarian movement which is a precursor to their own, albeit significantly flawed [1]. Upon looking this up, I was surprised to see they rarely even view it from a religious lens, maybe because the movement was so syncretic. Although, that could be due to the similarities between the Taiping Rebellion and Cultural Revolution’s aims.
It’s quite ironic how the assimilationist nature of high church Christianity has ended up becoming what early Christianity was in opposition to. Early Christians were non-conformist, to the point of execution, and were sometimes even seen as anti-social. A thousand years later, Christians are incorporating obscure tales from the East.
I think this is another argument for a separation of Church and state. It allows people to challenge when religious teaching goes awry without fear of persecution.
I disagree. What changed was that the Roman Empire stopped persecuting Christians. There are still places where Christians are non-conformist to the point of execution. Christianity is often in conflict with governments. One example is the criticism of Thatcher by Church of England bishops.
Idk. The establishing act of Christianity supposedly consists of Paul (?) saying that newcomers don't have to follow the strict rules from the Old Testament.
So many stories, many people believe are true and build whole religions around, are really just repeated stories with many details changed to fit the local culture and traditions.
It's crazy so many of the world's politics and problems stem from what might actually just be the same story said in a different way... or even of a fan fiction on top of existing fiction.
> Classicist Thomas J. Sienkewicz analyzed additional heroes using Raglan's pattern, including Mithridates VI of Pontus (22 points), Krishna (21 points), Jesus (18 points), Mohammad (17 points), Beowulf (15 points), Buddha (15 points), Czar Nicholas II (14 points), Samson (13 points), Sunjata, the Lion-King of Ancient Mali (11 points), Achilles (10 points), and Harry Potter (8 points).
Ya know, the Divine sometimes works in mysterious ways. While it is possible these two fellas were a ripped-off Buddha story, it is also possible that they were actual people who lead these lives so that people who were Buddhists had some examples of how to adapt their previous Buddhist tendencies to Christian ones if they had an experience that caused conversion. Is there evidence to suggest they were not real people, or at the least, a large absence of evidence?
Some history, as this stuff is interesting to me. The two referenced saints predated formal canonization. They were approved in the 16th century. The Roman Catholic Church removed these two saints in the 20th century. There is some confusion because there is another Saint Josaphat (Kuntsevych), and another Saint Barlaam (the martyr, 4th century).
The article doesn't touch on why this is an actual saint rather than a minor local cult like Saint Guinefort[0], the saint dog[1].
The reason, AFAIK, is that the early church didn't have a process for canonization, it was just all local cults. By the time they decided to establish a proper process (proof of miracles, witnesses, devil's advocate etc) many local churches had their own saints, and they decided to basically accept all the ones already in use and only start enforcing rules for the new ones. So the idea that "there's a holy man in the east who did this and that" resulted in "eh, sure, let's write down Saint Jehoshaphat too".
The Therapeutae sect is another good example of this phenomenon, although because it touches the root of several Abrahamic traditions so thoroughly, scholars and others are much less likely to declare an authoritative relation between between early Buddhism and the Therapeutae.
However, anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with the history of early Buddhism, the Therapeutae, and the religious developments of the 1st century BCE/1st century CE can't ignore how improbable the independent development of the latter's practices are, and how influential they became to various groups in the Middle East that later claimed they arrived at them independently.
Christian and Buddhist monastic traditions are so uncannily similar it's difficult to really think they developed without influence. That's my opinion. Even the Europeans who first set foot in Asia during the age of discovery thought they were being played tricks on, so I don't think it's that wild an idea
I find it incredible how many people have died in the name of minor variations in their monotheistic beliefs that are all based on the same foundational stories and yet here is a one of those foundational stories that has totally non-theistic source. I struggle with the hypocrisy of religion sometimes.
Buddhism didn't start from a blank slate either and incorporates various supernatural beings like deva (linguistically linked to Latin deus) or asura (similarly linked to Norse æsir), but they're relegated to minor roles, trapped in the cycle of reincarnation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Paths Then as it spread throughout Asia, various other local traditions got assimilated as well. Not unlike turning the Buddha into a minor Christian saint in the article.
I think it's less hypocrisy and more the desire to integrate all available information into a consistent framework. When you encounter something that doesn't fit, you can of course reject it and fight bitterly over who is right, but you can also file off the sharp edges and puzzle it together with the rest of your worldview somehow.
There's many a true word said in jest. Like this passage from Red Dwarf:
> Mr and Mrs Rimmer were very religious, taking the Bible scriptures at face value. The Hoppists were primarily concerned with a particular verse from the New Testament. St. Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 13 had been misprinted in a certain edition of the Bible. In their version, the verse read "And now these three remain: Faith, Hop and Charity. But the greatest of these is Hop".
> The Hoppists took this literally and insisted that their followers spent every seventh day hopping. They would hop to church, hop through the service and then hop home again. The Rimmers even served their Sunday lunch whilst hopping, causing them to wear protective clothing to avoid burning themselves.
This is obviously a joke but there's load of examples of people getting hung up on seemly minor details like that.
E.g. The Umbilicus Adami discussion. If the bible is literal and God made Adam then Adam didn't have a mother. So that leads to the question, did he have a belly button?
If he didn't have a belly button was he human?
It sounds ridiculously trivial but people have died over that, which is itself even sillier.
> I struggle with the hypocrisy of religion sometimes
That doesn’t really make sense to me. Do you mean the hypocrisy of people who follow those religions?
I tend to think that blaming outside forces for bad behaviour by people lets them off the hook a bit too easily - in particular it lets leaders off the hook far too easily - and disincentivises change because “I do X because Y makes me” rather than “I do X because I choose to”, which is the truth.
Religions might contain good teachings and bad teachings but, ultimately, people choose how they behave and so it’s the people who show hypocrisy.
Yeh it’s the hypocrisy of the people that follow religion but also religion in general requiring you to deeply believe a version of a story, whilst rejecting other religions version of that story. I know “rejecting” is in the realm of fundamentalists, but even moderate believers will trust their version over others when in reality all these stories can be traced back to the exact same source story. I knew this was true for mono-theistic religions, but I’m amazed it can apply even outside of those bounds.
> Galileo is my actual, real life middle name! “Signore Galilei” is supposed to mean “Mr. Galilei” in the native Italian of Galileo Galilei, considered by many to be the father of modern science. I try to bring a Galilean spirit of curiosity to every post and video I make. An Italian-speaking viewer of mine has informed me that “Signore” should grammatically become “Signor” when it is used with a specific person’s last name rather than as a general term of address, so “Signore Galilei” really means something more like “Mister! Galilei!” instead. I guess that’s still okay with me.
I'm Italian, I thought using the full word instead of eliding the last "e" was an archaic florentine habit that the author used, didn't think much of it tbh.
Christ and Christianity is well documented in all the kingdoms where it was persecuted and then the subsequent kingdoms had record of those records because one thing about kingdoms is that they don't throw away previous king's records because land records and administrative decrees are stored.
Also Christians and Buddhist religions have the tradition of holding conferences that are well documented and happen after every few centuries.
As an Indian I have read about records of the Buddist conferences held by various kings since after Buddha.
Do I think Buddha is God. No. But he was pretty influential and impactful.
The Christian conferences are also there where major theology points are discussed and confusions clarified. The records of thoe conferences exist
The article isn't an explicit claim that these Christians were the Buddha, but that the story told about them is an apparent retelling of the Sidhartha story. It closes with:
All this tells me that there’s something about our relationship with the divine and the sacred that transcends individual eras and places. A place or a festival or a story that appeals to our common senses of awe or morality or wisdom can reach people of any faith tradition. Perhaps they’ll interpret it through their own lens, of course. But in the end, isn’t that all we have?
It's interesting dynamic. Catholic Church is notoriously top-down and hierarchical, yet local parishes can feel entirely distinct. It's not uncommon to see traditional Javanese processions integrated right into the mass. Like skin/mod in a game.
It has a hierarchy, but it has multiple hierarchies. It is not all that top down. Bishop's ave a lot of autonomy, and most decisions are made at the diocesan level. Dioceses have their own property and funds held by their own trustees. On top of that religious orders have their own hierarchy (and property and funds etc.). Then there are the rites such as the Ukrainian or Syro-Malabar churches that have their own hierarchies.
Historically this was the result of the fact the church predates modern communications. It was not possible for a Pope to direct things the way a CEO of a modern corporation does, but in recent times it has been recognised as guiding principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity_%28Catholicism%29 that has been adopted by other org anisations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
> It's not uncommon to see traditional Javanese processions integrated right into the mass.
That is encouraged, as long as there is not conflict with Catholic belief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inculturation#
It wasn't syncretism, it was systematic eradication. Syncretism is more akin to reconciliation of different views.
I'm old enough to remember being taught how America was settled by expanding into the vast wilderness of the continent, and that sometimes they had skirmishes with natives but they found them new places to live.
It turns out it wasn't quite as neat and tidy as suggested.
"...in the realm of religion, it specifically denotes a more integrated merging of beliefs into a unified system, distinct from eclecticism, which implies a selective adoption of elements from different traditions without necessarily blending them into a new, cohesive belief system."
"It provides an opportunity to bring beliefs, values, and customs from one cultural tradition into contact with, and to engage different cultural traditions."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism
Because catholic church is whatever the newest model is in the distro but other distros try to be very very clean and try to follow the original texts and their meaning but catholic church is like the new iphone trying to be like whatever is the trendy trend nowadays.
But e.g. modern American evangelical churches are to me quite clearly quite far from the original meaning of the texts with some theology outright invented in 18th and 19th centuries.
It really is the case that what you bring to a text colors what you get out of it, and the more people insist that they are reading a text "as it is clearly written" the blinder they seem to be to this.
The Orthodox churches may want to have a word with you. Especially the orthodox church in India founded by Thomas (one of the Jesus' 12 disciples)
We're just looking at this through the lens of the Protestant Reformation so this pragmatism is often lost.
Except for it's never done. No Hindu believes Allah or Jesus is an Avatar of Vishnu.
It can't be. Vishnu literally means the "All-Pervading One". Allah is explicitly not Omnipresent. Jesus is Omnipresent but does not have infinite forms. So neither fit the bill. Even Buddha, who we Hindus associate as one of the Avatars of Vishnu is not the same Buddha as Gautama Buddha who founded Buddhism.
What do you mean by "local religion"?
Really it's only in the last/final generation of religions, where they started writing them down in canon/scripture/testaments/writs/dogmas/whatever, that you started to see unique stories get associated with specific religions.
Before that? It's all mush. Aphrodite descends pretty clearly from the same line as Astarte/Ishtar/Innana (maybe Isis too), etc... People steal good stories. People get conquered and then confused by retelling the stories their new overlords tell. Again and again.
No, that phrase is just filler. And IMHO it's basically wrong. Certainly if the author want to show that Christianity is more likely than other religions to import ideas, the article has a lot more work to do than point out one myth. Literally everyone does this.
I'm just going to repeat: there is nothing notable or unique to Christian appropriation of myths and stories from other religions. It does it at least as much as everyone else does, and everyone does it everywhere. So trying to tie this uniquely to Christianity seems needless and confusing. The deeper point is more interesting and more important.
Is there anything in that paragraph you'd like to argue about?
One of the most studied issues in Catholic evangelism is the Chinese rites controversy which is also one of the historical reasons why religions are suppressed in China (aside from ideological policies ascribed to communism).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Rites_controversy
(That and the Taiping rebellion which was estimated to have killed as many people as World War 2 on the higher end. It was led by a failed scholar claiming to be alleged brother of Jesus. Most of the deaths were due to starvation. Not quite Netflix material but interesting plot nonetheless)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion
1. https://bitterwinter.org/the-taiping-mystery-1-why-is-the-cc...
I think this is another argument for a separation of Church and state. It allows people to challenge when religious teaching goes awry without fear of persecution.
So many stories, many people believe are true and build whole religions around, are really just repeated stories with many details changed to fit the local culture and traditions.
It's crazy so many of the world's politics and problems stem from what might actually just be the same story said in a different way... or even of a fan fiction on top of existing fiction.
The reason, AFAIK, is that the early church didn't have a process for canonization, it was just all local cults. By the time they decided to establish a proper process (proof of miracles, witnesses, devil's advocate etc) many local churches had their own saints, and they decided to basically accept all the ones already in use and only start enforcing rules for the new ones. So the idea that "there's a holy man in the east who did this and that" resulted in "eh, sure, let's write down Saint Jehoshaphat too".
Christianity-as-trivia is a lot of fun.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Guinefort
[1] not to be confused with Saint Christopher, the dog-headed saint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Christopher#/media/File:...
However, anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with the history of early Buddhism, the Therapeutae, and the religious developments of the 1st century BCE/1st century CE can't ignore how improbable the independent development of the latter's practices are, and how influential they became to various groups in the Middle East that later claimed they arrived at them independently.
I think it's less hypocrisy and more the desire to integrate all available information into a consistent framework. When you encounter something that doesn't fit, you can of course reject it and fight bitterly over who is right, but you can also file off the sharp edges and puzzle it together with the rest of your worldview somehow.
> Mr and Mrs Rimmer were very religious, taking the Bible scriptures at face value. The Hoppists were primarily concerned with a particular verse from the New Testament. St. Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 13 had been misprinted in a certain edition of the Bible. In their version, the verse read "And now these three remain: Faith, Hop and Charity. But the greatest of these is Hop".
> The Hoppists took this literally and insisted that their followers spent every seventh day hopping. They would hop to church, hop through the service and then hop home again. The Rimmers even served their Sunday lunch whilst hopping, causing them to wear protective clothing to avoid burning themselves.
This is obviously a joke but there's load of examples of people getting hung up on seemly minor details like that.
E.g. The Umbilicus Adami discussion. If the bible is literal and God made Adam then Adam didn't have a mother. So that leads to the question, did he have a belly button?
If he didn't have a belly button was he human?
It sounds ridiculously trivial but people have died over that, which is itself even sillier.
That doesn’t really make sense to me. Do you mean the hypocrisy of people who follow those religions?
I tend to think that blaming outside forces for bad behaviour by people lets them off the hook a bit too easily - in particular it lets leaders off the hook far too easily - and disincentivises change because “I do X because Y makes me” rather than “I do X because I choose to”, which is the truth.
Religions might contain good teachings and bad teachings but, ultimately, people choose how they behave and so it’s the people who show hypocrisy.
> Galileo is my actual, real life middle name! “Signore Galilei” is supposed to mean “Mr. Galilei” in the native Italian of Galileo Galilei, considered by many to be the father of modern science. I try to bring a Galilean spirit of curiosity to every post and video I make. An Italian-speaking viewer of mine has informed me that “Signore” should grammatically become “Signor” when it is used with a specific person’s last name rather than as a general term of address, so “Signore Galilei” really means something more like “Mister! Galilei!” instead. I guess that’s still okay with me.
From the about page
Neither of them are currently recognised.
however in certain countries this gets you executed or imprisoned
Fixed it for you, Sir.
I live in an area surrounded by cults
but also there are plenty of solitary practitioners of Wicca and Buddhism
and then you have the dozen of forms of christianity where every church just put their own spin on things
people are weird, religion just makes it even more so
I don't have a problem as long as they keep it to themselves but that rarely is the case
Don't be an intellectual hodgepodge
Would you call them "facts"?