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Notes -
A poster here recommended a book to us all called “Introduction to Christianity”, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who would go on to become Pope Benedict XVI) a few weeks ago. I recently got a copy of it.
I wanted to share with you all the first few paragraphs from the book, because I found them very interesting:
I’m sure we’ve all felt like that clown at some point or another. Especially with regards to ideas like “just kids on college campuses”.
Here’s a quote, this one from Saint Anthony The Great, one of The Desert Fathers (Early Christian precursors to Christian monks who lived in Egypt in about 300AD).
Anyway I think the relevance to the culture war is obvious here, and could be taken any of many directions. I just read this today and wanted to share. To pull on one culture war thread (perhaps one of the oldest culture war) it is profoundly depressing to me that these parts of our history, especially the history of The Catholic Church, seem to be suppressed or at the very least ignore in modern western society.
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https://www.themotte.org/post/253/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/48121?context=8#context
I’m on mobile, but can try to explain what I mean.
I have a lot of lefty new age, yoga instructing, Bali visiting, “I’m spiritual but not religious” saying, “Buddhism is more of a philosophy” claiming friends.
These people are hungry for something. The age and mysticism of stuff like their misunderstanding of eastern philosophy, is attractive to them because it seems to carry so much weight.
Meanwhile in almost every single town or neighborhood in America, there is a Catholic Church. The church has 2000 years of philosophy to pull on, as well as the most moving art that humanity has ever produced. People associate “meditation” with eastern philosophy, not knowing that their is an equally old tradition of meditation and mindfulness happening in that goofy building with the cross in it.
Not only is the spirituality, the history, the art, the philosophy, etc all there, but all of that philosophy and tradition is what we used to build the modern world. That Church is welcoming people to come into it ever day, or at least every Sunday, and people just…don’t. They don’t even bother to look.
I’m irritated that we have allowed Catholicism to become primarily associated with goofy people in hats, abusive priests, and ugly boring buildings. Im basically just retreading the frustration people have with Vatican 2.
The second thing is that my heart breaks for Protestants. The people attending these awful mega churches and weird youth group pastor things are being deprived of something I think is truly beautiful, and they’re essentially being taken advantage of by people who have a 500 year old hatred of the church. I think Protestants are more than happy to simply lie about Catholicism to maintain this grudge.
I have to say that my least favourite thing about the religious is the capacity of some to be so incredibly condescending and to not even have the common decency to be aware of how insulting they're being.
I am not religious, but I do come from what was historically a very protestant culture (with its own national bent on how a religion "should" be, as is typical) and to me I must say that I see very little difference between the american corporate protestants and the catholics. Both are overly obsessed with elaborate ceremony, pomp and spectacle, with the greatest difference between the two being that one is simply crass and the other is vulgarly ostentatious. I could also say that both are essentially scams designed to extract money and influence from large bodies of people eager to find meaning and a greater understanding of what it's all about.
I generally do not voice these opinions unprompted in the same way that I am not given to walking up to people in the street and slapping them in the face without provocation. I assume that most people have reasons for making the decisions they do and are operating off of different information than I am.
Are probably attending for the same reasons you would attend whatever weird things catholics do, because they're presumably getting something out of it.
This sentence alone is so incredibly arrogant that it makes my head hurt just processing it. The idea that protestants must collectively deceive each other about how totally awesome and right catholicism is just because they're bitter about.... something? I have to say that in my experience, there is no collective grudge among protestants against catholics, if anything it is entirely the other way around. I've lived in countries with large protestant communities my whole life, never spent any serious amount of time in catholic countries or communities and the only place I've ever heard anyone talk about the split between catholics and protestants was from catholics. Hell, I've heard significantly more about protestants from catholics than I have from protestants.
Not that there is any significant collective grudge in any case, but if you had lived in a Catholic majority country you would have met protestants with quite an obsession against the Catholic Church. So it's probably the resentment of being the minority in both cases.
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