G-Tech Corporation wrote:Which will make me question your comprehension of early Christianity. Christians were thought of as extremely humanistic and grounded in the physical world by the societies around them, and even persecuted for their 'atheistic' approach to the separation of secular governance and religious life. If anything, the local Norse pagans will have a far less humanistic approach to religion than any Imperial Christians - seeing religious duties as a necessary part of governance - reinforcing the hypocrisy of the Act.
I just realised I promised a response to this and just forgot.
Anyways, I will admit that I don't keep tabs on religious theory and I'm not familiar with the history nor the current state of theological discourse.
My understanding of Christianity comes from two main sources. First, I actually did read a significant part of the Bible; I was a curious youth in my younger years and I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. One thing I noticed immediately is how profoundly boring the read is (seriously...), so I gave up halfway through, but I did go through a good majority of the Old Testament. Second, of course, is that osmosis of information I get by virtue of existing in an information-era society. I read a good deal of world history and I keep tab on international news, so I hear a lot about how Christianity relates to both. Then there are a few personal experiences that I'll not detail because they're identifying.
Neither of these experiences have left me particularly impressed with the faith.
First, there's the Bible itself. Consider the very first time in the Old Testament where humans appear in the story: the fable of Eden and of Adam and Eve. What lesson, exactly, was I supposed to take away from this story? That curiosity and knowledge brings sin, that trying to independently reason through your assumptions and decisions is harmful, that you should just trust that those wiser than you intend good and that you should be blindly subservient to an authority you do not understand and are not intended to understand? To a progressive, this sort of mindset and worldview is heretical in the highest order. Further on, you have the chosen people being divinely authorised to commit atrocities, thorough ethnic cleansing of entire nations that would have made Hitler proud. No doubt these stories have been embellished, if they were based on reality in the first place, but I question the intention of anyone who tries to emphasise what a great authority it is that we're serving by highlighting the atrocities they commanded. Christians are supposed to blindly accept this authority?
Second, Christianity's footprint on world history and current affairs. Christian individuals have done heroic and humanitarian acts throughout history, I will admit, but as an institution the record is much more negative. The largest sects of the Christian faiths appear in world history and current affairs mostly in a reactionary role. National churches of northern Europe and the church in Rome fought against secular government, free speech, and nationalism in the 19th Century. In the next century, Protestants and Catholics alike mostly stood on the reactionary side of the sexual revolution and cultural tolerance. In our current century, which cultural movement forms the core of the anti-LGBT, anti-immigration movement in countries like South Korea? The Protestant churches. The story of Christianity after the industrial revolution is not a story of progress, of the new social and political ideas that dominated these eras, but the resigned adoption of these new ideas as they become so essentially noncontroversial that opposing them was no longer socially acceptable. In countries where these ideas are not yet essentially noncontroversial, you still see the largest Abrahamic movements - Christianity or Islam, as the case may be - standing against them.
It seems difficult to argue, from my perspective, that Christianity - at least the form of it that is practiced by most of its adherents - has been dragged kicking and screaming into the information age, and that without the powerful social forces of the industrial and post-industrial eras this contemporary form of Christianity could neither have come to become mainstream, nor stayed that way if it somehow had. I'd compare the institution to the aristocracy of western Europe, which was similarly dragged into the information age by powerful social forces it resisted, albeit unsuccessfully, at every turn. If it is my intention to use the foresight of world history to force the ideals and systems of an industrial society on a nation that is essentially an agrarian one, then Christianity is, just like a landed aristocracy, one of those inherently reactionary institutions that cannot be allowed to establish its influence over the Commonwealth's social and political development.
