So basically you've given up on the idea of salvation because it's "too boring" for you. There's a word for that, I think it's "Redditor".maidenhaver wrote: ↑ May 21st, 2023, 16:49No, I'm not joking. I told my church about twelve years ago, that I don't believe in resurrection, that I'm not a jew, so I don't need their god, and that I'm agnostic about god anyway. I don't believe there's any knowing if god is one or many, or even good or evil, or if he's real or not. After I left, I realized I didn't need to tell them any of that, because everyone just chooses to believe in what they want to believe. I should have kept going, but I'm too autistic to lie, so I couldn't repeat the creed, the hymns, or pray. I don't like any of the other options.KnightoftheWind wrote: ↑ May 21st, 2023, 15:14I sincerely hope you're joking. "Umm ya like I kinda don't really like being Christian um it's like not all that fun so like I tried all these like different things, and ya I kinda like lost interest"maidenhaver wrote: ↑ May 21st, 2023, 04:45I'm an agnostic ultramontanist. Religion is good, ritually speaking, but I don't like any of the options. I was born christian, believed for a long time, and simply lost interest. Tried other religions, but the only one that makes sense is ancestor worship and the Vestal hearth fire, which is dead.
There are some people I've come across that treat faith as some diet fad, or talk about it just because it’s “based,”. You do not “choose” a religion as if it were an issue of personal taste. If I liked pop music and people rolling on the ground, perhaps I would be just as justified converting to some Pentecostal sect. This is silly.
The greatest deception is that religion is this separate category about “feelings” or “preference” and not truth. Atheist and spiritual R*dditor Stephen Jay Gould put this in words in the modern era, calling science and religion “non-overlapping magesteria,” declaring in a laughable attempt at big-brained centrism that nothing in material reality is relevant to religion and nothing in religion is relevant to material reality. This is strange because people can research many different philosophies, such as Platonism, Gnosticism, Stoicism, Hermeticism and can analyse and critique them and look at them as models of reality perfectly comparable to modern philosophical assumptions and approaches. But we have been taught to view Christianity as this separate category, that can’t possibly be a model of reality, but is a something merely “moral” or “personal” or “spiritual” which are all terms that have been debased to mean nothing at all.
A Christian believes that Jesus’s resurrection was a true historical event, and a prelude of a general resurrection to come and that he established a Church and sacraments which are his vehicles for having man recover from sin within this life to prepare for his roles in the next. The Orthodox Christian Church is an unbroken chain since that period, and oft built on yet older philosophical and liturgical practices.
If you find this alien, or God unbelievable, you can do yourself the favour of prayer and visit a priest and see what happens.
But one thing I’ve tried to emphasise in some places is the general wrongness of the idea of the cultural “quantum leap” or “discontinuity” between Prechristian and Christian Europe. This is an important issue for some, because they view the “change” of Europe over to Christianity as perhaps the start of the now constant and perpetual leftist cultural revolution. This is the idea that the Christianization of Europe was a radical break from history and tradition.
This is true only on the Christian metric: obviously the salvation of Europe is a quantum leap. However, melodramatic types will lament that this is when Europe have up its “European” soul and adopted a “Jewish” or “desert” religion which put the continent on a totally different and out-of-touch cultural direction. Christian theology, including Trinitarian theology has direct and undeniable analogues and imitators: Neoplatonism expresses a kind of theological trinity as well (the One, the Intellect and the Soul), albeit one more similar to Origen’s trinity where a hierarchy of the three persons exist.
In the cosmogony of the Poemandres, a Hermetic work, shows a pagan creation myth wherein God creates the world via his Logos, as in the first chapter of St. John’s gospel, which also has a trinitarian and monotheistic unity with God (differing from Christianity in its panentheism). Stoic philosophy is a component needed to understand the opening of the gospel of John and is part of the philosophical backdrop of early Christian theology.
Medieval esoteric doctrines and alchemy viewed all of nature as trinitarian, possessing body, mind, and spirit (salt, sulfur and mercury), which was related directly to the Triune nature of God. Even specific mystical sects like Mithraism or the many forms of Gnosticism are tied closely to the development of Christianity. All of these intellectual strands were intertwined with Christianity since the beginning of the written expression of Christian theology.
You now have to ask yourself: if Hermeticism or Mithraism had taken over as a universal religion of Europe, would they loathe it like they loathe Christianity and view it as a radical departure from “le old ways"?. Note that Hermeticism had an alleged Egyptian origin, and Mithraism had a orientalist/Iranic origin. Note that none of my point here is specifically that Christianity influenced or created these other philosophies or that they influenced (providentially) Christianity. What is important is that looking at it dispassionately, we cannot deem Christianity as some cultural departure from “real” European culture without also throwing out this entire philosophical tradition as a whole. Medieval Christians would often look at Greek Philosophy as another covenant of God established to prepare mankind intellectually for the revelation of the Trinity. (Note also that Dante and others represent Christians who viewed the Roman Empire also as part of a divine plan.)
Ultimately, the Christian religion is non-cultural and thus universal/catholic. There are cultural aspects associated with it, but there’s a difference between essence and accidents. Of those cultural aspects, they are nearly all European, not, as some allege, Hebrew or Jewish. Most of the New Testament is quite literally an explication of why this religion which accepts the Hebrew Scriptures is markedly non-Jewish and why Jewish practices like circumcision and sacrifice are sacrilegious.
So the view we should get from this is that Christianization was no cultural leap into an alien worldview, but something whose intellectual side happened slowly over centuries and would only be viewed as spiritual, not culturally distinct from its environment.
