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The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

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Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#121

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

graemep wrote: post #63
wiradikusuma wrote: post #13

"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 uncommo…

> 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…

A fun one is the Anglican Ordinariates which are in full communion with Rome and permit existing clergy to remain married while serving as Catholic priests.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#122

Post by redwood »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #13

"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 uncommo…

Sufis have done something similar within Islam. Similar to how there are different denominations of Christians some of whom view some of these as heretical you see the same thing playing on Islam where Sufi saint pilgrimage sites that were once Hindu temples are sometimes destroyed by fundamentalists

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#123

Post by KK7NIL »

graemep wrote: post #63
wiradikusuma wrote: post #13

"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 uncommo…

> 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…

> Historically this was the result of the fact the church predates modern communications. It was not possible for a Pope to direct things

That's not really accurate. All bishops were essentially "autocephalus" in antiquity. Whether they could even be removed by a council of other bishops was something that was really not resolved for many centuries. There were many occasions of competing councils declaring each other heretics and shenanigans like that.

The Orthodox still practice this system of governance (although sovereignty has been moved up from diocesan bishops to the patriarch of each autocephalus church).

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#125

Post by ajmurmann »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #13

"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 uncommo…

I saw a painting in a church in Peru of the last supper. On the painting they were consuming guinea pigs and chicha morada.

There also were countless statues and icons of Pachamama which is a kind of merge between mother Mary and a Andean earth goddess.

Arguably wet got Christmas trees the same way

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#126

Post by KK7NIL »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #121
graemep wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

A fun one is the Anglican Ordinariates which are in full communion with Rome and permit existing clergy to remain married while serving as Catholic priests.

The Anglican Ordinataries are actually a rather mild example as they're still under the Roman Catholic church.

The eastern Catholic churches are also in communion with Rome but have a far longer history of independence and also allow married men to become priests, even if they weren't married clergy before joining, which the AO doesn't allow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Catholic_Churches

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#127

Post by notahacker »

andrewflnr wrote: post #107
asdff wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the protestants think the saint stuff is absurd and even creepy when you get into the relics. I'm not sure where it came from but I'm guessing some weird roman religion origin.

There's no reason the Catholics couldn't have invented it independently. I think that's just the human instinctive approach to religion. Lots of little per-concept semi-spiritual entities, sacred and profane objects, etc.

Religious groups other than Catholics with few plausible connections to ancient Rome have independently conceived the idea of the importance of things like relics (e.g Buddhism), but it's called the Roman Catholic Church for a reason...

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#128

Post by goodmythical »

asdff wrote: post #101
geye1234 wrote: post #98

I get the author's not trying to write a watertight syllogism, but the point he's trying to make (his last sentence) doesn't follow from the obvious fact that beliefs can influence each other. Christianity and worldviews typically associated with the 'east' (as I've seen them discussed here and elsewhere) disagree in both their view of the 'building blocks' of reality, and in their 'big picture' view. They disagree o…

>what it is to live a good life That has to be the universal one, no? I feel like basic moral principles, at least directed towards the in group, are pretty universal. I'd argue they are more base than even humans and are shared with certain intelligent animals.

>That has to be the universal one, no?

Not at all.

Some believe one should come to forgive their enemies. Some believe that one should purge one's enemies from life itself. Some believe that one should have no enemies.

Some believe that material wealth is fine to a point, some believe that the desire of possesing material wealth is a source of discontent, some believe that it is the source of many or all other discontents.

Some believe that wanting to improve one's station is a source of discontent.

Some are fine with removing life if it is inconvenient (like bugs) where others value the life of a bug equally to their own.

Some are okay with their friends and family members murdering foreigners actively engaged in warfare that threatens their own life and livelihood. Some are okay with their friends and family killing the friends and family of the enemy combatants. Some are okay with killing anyone just generally in the vicinity of enemy combatants. Some say literally poisoning the well is a step too far, but that we had to write that down is evidence of other's believing differently. Some believe it's okay to murder people, communities, and entire populations because they'd rather use the land for themselves, or maybe their noses are too long and their skin is indistinguishably different.

Rereading your comment, I see the "in group" disclaimer. What's the in group? Some believe it's just their family, the people on the block, the people who have lived within a certain number of miles for a certain number of years, citizens governed by a particular government, the citizens governed by a group of governments, the people living on a particular continent, people in general, humans in general, life in general, or everything. There are people to whom no human should ever murder another for any reason. You might agree with that in theory, but would you allow a conquering force that is literally raping your friends and family to simply do so unquestioned? Would you feel vindicated striking back? There are some who have decided that the morally correct thing to do is to simply quit the land and or life itself rather than to fight back, because to them murder is wrong period.

The good life is deeply personal and absolutely not universal.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#129

Post by asdff »

geye1234 wrote: post #104
asdff wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>what it is to live a good life That has to be the universal one, no? I feel like basic moral principles, at least directed towards the in group, are pretty universal. I'd argue they are more base than even humans and are shared with certain intelligent animals.

I think this is true up to a point. But you find chasmic differences as well. Polygamy is an obvious example, or lying to non-brethren (absolutely forbidden by Christianity, permitted I believe by other religions), or the caste system (unthinkable in Islam or Christianity, a base part of reality in Hinduism), etc. You find a very different attitude to wealth in many varieties of Protestantism compared to the Catholic…

>Today in the west, you find people disagreeing very passionately over 'culture war' issues, which is surely a disagreement about what the good life is.

All window dressing imo over the real morals at play under all these layers that society puts on top and frequently changes by the decade. What do liberals and conservatives want out of their countrymen for example? The same exact thing ultimately: good people who might lend them a cup of sugar and won't club them over the head for one. Of course propaganda has blinded people on either side into vilifying what is at the end of the day a fungible human with the same basic needs and wants as most other social animals. At the most base we have the moral principles a stray dog seeks out in either fellow dogs or a sympathetic human: let me find someone who won't fight me off and may in fact share things and help me out while I do the same for them.

Re: The two Christian saints who are the Buddha

#130

Post by annzabelle »

notahacker wrote: post #114
kshri24 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Bu…

I distinctly remember an Indian man on a bus in Kerala striking up a conversation with me (random white obvious tourist) in which he proclaimed both that he considered Jesus his Lord and Saviour and that he considered him to be an avatar of Vishnu. Not an explanation I'd asked him for, but certainly made a change from the standard bus conversation about where I was from and was I married yet and what salary... I'm su…

I actually took a whole class in college on syncretic Christianity, and we had a unit on Goa, and there are Catholic shrines in Goa that are also frequented by Hindus, and you can find people there who identify as Christian but say that Vishnu is their favorite saint, and people who identify as Hindu who say that Jesus is their favorite god.

For central authorities of the Catholic Church, and Hindu theologians, this is all heretical, but the Catholic Church allowed for flexibility around traditions as it expanded. One big example is that many of what are considered Christmas traditions in northern Europe (the Christmas tree being an especially prominent one) are hangovers from traditions that predate Christianity.

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