Feminism and Religion, Part 311187

32 thoughts on Feminism and Religion, Part 311187

1. There are some people who seek comfort in the community of a faith rather than the faith itself, and I’ve never felt very comfortable in those. I’m just interested in a connection with God. Everything else kind of gets in the way for me.

2. I’m OK with believing,it’s the “believing in” business I can’t manage. I believe it’s sorta dark outside. I believe 7*9 is 42. I believe I’ll have another drink. Ask me what I think, both of us will probably end up a lot happier.

3. I am pagan, and find my religion and feminism (as I understand it) are entirely compatible.

   It’s easier to stand up for yourself when you don’t quietly in your heart view yourself as a flawed male.

4. “The short answer is, I don’t. I don’t reconcile religion with anything. I think the true nature (and purpose) of religion is such that it cannot be reconciled with the world we live in.”

   I find it interesting that you say the purpose of religion is to not reconcile with the world. This puts the purpose of religion in the negative instead of the positive, meaning, it’s purpose is to NOT do something instead of to do something. I’m wondering if I misunderstood you, because I think most people can agree that religion is an answer to questions that we can’t answer.

   “So when some bearded guy somewhere tells me “cover up, whore” or “repent, whore” or “be quiet and stir that borscht, whore,” I pity him most dreadfully. His God is indeed dead, and it was he who replaced his God with an embalmed version that rests in an ugly-ass Great Mausoleum in the Sky.”

   See, to me, what you’re doing here, is dismissing someone’s religion. The dead, embalmed God is ruling Christianity, and you already talked about dismissing religion being a bad thing, but I think what you really meant is that dismissing spiritual beliefs is a bad thing. If you want religious beliefs to be taken seriously, then this dude’s “cover up whore” religious belief should be taken seriously too.

5. What she said. Wow. Thank you. I went through a period when I was afraid that my faith was going to turn me into some kind of right wing jerk. Then I went through a period when I was afraid that my politics were going to extinguish my faith. What I finally realized is that they exist in different spheres, but they nourish each other.

6. Natalia Antonova: “it is irrational”

   I appreciate your candor. As religions go, sounds like you’ve made a good one for yourself.

   Rev. Bob: “I believe 7*9 is 42”

   More power to you, I suppose. No weirder than most religious beliefs.

7. Alexandra stole what i was gonna say.

   say it louder!

8. Pingback: Ex Cathedra » Blog Archive » Reconciling Feminism and Religion

9. and you already talked about dismissing religion being a bad thing,

   Dismissing the way someone practices is part and parcel of theological debate. People dismiss me all the time and I dismiss them right back. I can take it and so can they. As long as we behave like adults.

   Although I do make exceptions for some non-adult behaviour:

   If someone says that good practice is slaughtering your daughter because she exchanged glances with a man in the street, I say, “shutthefuckupbitch.”

   The dead, embalmed God is ruling Christianity,

   Not my Christianity.

   This puts the purpose of religion in the negative instead of the positive, meaning, it’s purpose is to NOT do something instead of to do something.

   Religion, as I mentioned, is a paradox. Its presence in this world is real, but you cannot reconcile it with the world. It doesn’t make it any less important or interesting to me – in fact, it makes it more important and interesting to me.

   More power to you, I suppose. No weirder than most religious beliefs.

   The validation makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

10. ” The dead, embalmed God is ruling Christianity,

    Not my Christianity. ”

    But a dead, embalmed God is ruling Christianity. He is not ruling you because you have your own spiritual beliefs. If you change Christianity until it has a real meaning in the modern world, then it’s not Christianity anymore.

11. I love Natalia. Have I mentioned that?

    The wonderful thing about religious beliefs is that they are totally our own. Just like I don’t agree with plenty of people who call themselves feminists, or progressives, or whatever, I don’t agree with plenty of people who call themselves Jewish. But my feelings on being Jewish are my own, and I have my reasons for claiming that name, and I don’t have to justify them any more than Natalia or Fatemeh.

12. “If you change Christianity until it has a real meaning in the modern world, then it’s not Christianity anymore.”

    Sorry? I’m honestly not understanding why this would be the case. In both threads I’ve been seeing the beliefs of more liberal religious practitioners be automatically separated from any centralized institution or belief system, simply by virtue of their liberality.

    (I’ll continue to talk about Christianity here, because it’s the only one I can speak to from personal experience/any depth of knowledge.) Two things. First, Christianity is changing all the time, and there is no such thing as ‘the rules of Christianity’, monolithically identified. And there is no single person out there with the authority to declare which groups/people get to claim themselves as Christian. If we were living prior to both the Protestant Reformation and the split between Eastern Orthodox and Western Christianity, this might be slightly more functional, but we’re not. Modern Christian beliefs and practices are simply not the same as they were in the 1st and 2nd centuries BCE.

    Second thing is I’d just like to point that Christian identified (again since that seems to be where the argument is centered at the moment) _institutions_ have in fact been known to take socially progressive, liberal actions. I am a member of the Episcopal Church, which is currently facing possible expulsion from the Anglican Communion (the worldwide organization) for refusing to back down from ordaining female and LGBT clergy and blessing gay marriages. Fred Phelps & co. personally showed up at my church to protest when we hired a gay man as Dean (top, in-charge priest.) This isn’t a claim that my or any church is perfect, just that institutional structures founded in patriarchy don’t always stay that way.

    Basically, I hold a certain set of personal beliefs, some of which can be labeled ‘Christian.’ Many of those (liberal, feminist-friendly, progressive) beliefs are also shared by the majority of people I worship with, and by the local & national leadership of the community. There are many institiutions of religion (and other things) out there which work against the feminist and antiopression work we are all trying to do here. But some of them are allies.

13. But a dead, embalmed God is ruling Christianity. He is not ruling you because you have your own spiritual beliefs. If you change Christianity until it has a real meaning in the modern world, then it’s not Christianity anymore.

    …and no true Scotsman drinks his tea with milk.

    If you want religious beliefs to be taken seriously, then this dude’s “cover up whore” religious belief should be taken seriously too.

    “Taking seriously” is not the same as “taking as definitive or authoritative”. This is the same problem as above. “This dude” does not have a monopoly on doctrinal interpretation of orthodoxy, no matter how desperately he’d want one. Nor, I might add, do you.

14. I should clearly state that if it were not for religion I would not be a feminist today. Odd statement to make isn’t it…Religion reified the difference between men and women for me more surely than anything else in this world.

15. Bushfire said, “But a dead, embalmed God is ruling Christianity. He is not ruling you because you have your own spiritual beliefs. If you change Christianity until it has a real meaning in the modern world, then it’s not Christianity anymore.”

    Oh bullshit. Total utter ignorant bullshit.

16. Natalia, the first time I wrote about your article i swiped your word “embalmbed” but i finally had to make up a word. You know how a deer head ia mounted and hung on the wall with its dead plastic eyeballs staring out?

    Luna, I think a religion that simplifies things too much misses the whole idea of religion, which is both immanent and trenscendant Religion Lite ends up not with gods but with easter bunnies. And if you don’t mind my saying so, I think “ignorant bullshit” is less than wholly neighborly.

17. Natalia, the first time I wrote about your article i swiped your word “embalmbed” but i finally had to make up a word. You know how a deer head ia mounted and hung on the wall with its dead plastic eyeballs staring out?

    Luna, I think a religion that simplifies things too much misses the whole idea of religion, which is both immanent and trenscendent Religion Lite ends up not with gods but with easter bunnies. And if you don’t mind my saying so, I think “ignorant bullshit” is less than wholly neighborly.

18. Luna, I’m actually not ignorant, and my words are not bullshit. Why don’t you try again and explain what you disagree with?

    Same with Nombrilisme Vide… the Scotsman comment doesn’t actually counter my point, although you seem to be against it, so feel free to counter it.

19. Bushfire, as someone who has wasted years fielding comments strongly analogous to yours in online debates regarding religion, yes it does. You are attempting to declare a vague, ill-defined categorical label as having a single unambiguous definition, which conveniently just so happens to be the one that proves the point you’re trying to make. And rather than waiting for a given formulation of Christianity to be posited as “acceptable”, you neatly poison the well by declaring (with a wave of your hand) that by definition any Christianity that fails to meet your criteria of being irrelevant is not True Christianity, and thus cannot possibly refute your point.

    You want me to counter your argument? Offer one that’s not fallacious, and we’ll talk. All you have so far is hand-waving defended by equivocation. Explain clearly and honestly how you can justify declaring that in order to belong to a given religion, we need to accept your (or “some bearded dude’s”) interpretation of what that religion is, and why failing to meet your (or his) standard must necessarily mean we’re perforce not members of the faith in question.

    Here’s a hint: it’ll help if you can show that a given religion you make this argument for is and always has been both unquestionably monolithic and unchanging for its whole existence. It might not be necessary to do so, but you seem to want to assert this anyway, given your “dead and embalmed” shtick. So chop-chop, let’s hear it!

20. Nombrilisme Vide: So Christianity to you is a vague, ill-defined label. If a whole bunch of people believe different things, how can they all call themselves the same religion? I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that I have some sort of definition or criteria of what Christianity should be. I doesn’t make any difference to me what or who defines Christianity as anything. Christianity was developed hundreds of years ago, it was all sorts of rules about how to keep your slaves, what makes people unclean, what kinds of foods not to eat and nobody follows these rules anymore. That’s because they are outdated. We now have showers, and refrigerators, etc, and we don’t need these rules. The Bible also contains lots of patriarchal geneology about people who lived a long time ago and it claims they lived for like hundreds of years, which they didn’t. It also assumes a three tiered universe where heaven is above, Earth is in the middle and hell is below. I don’t think that most modern day people who call themselves Christians believe in the literal meanings of these things. People take them as parables and metaphors and derive meanings from them. Christianity has “evolved”. Except if one Christian doesnt’ have any of the same beleifs as another Christian, then they don’t belong to the same religion, they just say they do. They each have their own beliefs.

    By the way, I haven’t said anything fallacious. If you actually read the Bible, you will realize that it barely says anything that we can relate to. The New testament has some nice parables that we can get metaphorical meanings out of, but anyone can get metaphorical meanings out of any book, or many life events for that matter. If you take a religion that started out as a belief that a dude was born of a virgin and rose from the dead to save us all from a fictional hell, and then metaphorically take new, modern meanings from it-it’s not the same religion. It’s your own spiritual beliefs. I would not and cannot insult anyone’s personal spiritual beliefs, because I do not know what they are, and they are intimate understandings that people have that I will never feel. But it is pretty obvious that turning an old religion into something new is just that- taking an old religion and turning it into something new. You can call it by the same name but it’s still something different. I don’t think that Christianity is the least bit unchanging and I never said I did.

    I haven’t responded to everything you said because a lot of it is meaningless ranting that seems to be brought on by previous anger from something someone else said to you. You are lumping me in with other people you’ve argued with over the internet, except you don’t even know what my beliefs are.
    I await your next angry rant.

21. I want to make sure I understand Bushfire’s arguments.

    Bushfire said: ” … a dead, embalmed God is ruling Christianity.”

    If by “dead, embalmed God,” Bushfire means a religious experience that actually is influenced by sectarian definitions of God, then, yes, that certainly is a “dead, embalmed God.” I think Natalia is suggesting that her own religious experience is not influenced by sectarian definitions of God.

    Bushfire also said: ” … you [Natalia] say the purpose of religion is to not reconcile with the world. This puts the purpose of religion in the negative … meaning, its purpose is to NOT do something instead of to do something. [and] … I think we can agree that religion is an answer to questions we can’t answer.”

    What Natalia actually wrote is, “[True religion] cannot BE reconciled with the world we live in” [capitalization added]. I assume that Natalia, in writing that, means that her own religious experience, when truthfully expressed, is in tension and even conflict with her current social/political experience (“the world we live in”). If that’s what Natalia means, then it’s in line with the Christianity presented in the canonical Gospels, in which Jesus says, “My Kingdom is not of this world,” and “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” but without explaining who decides what Caesar is allowed to have or if Caesar is allowed to have anything at all. But if that’s what Natalia means, then, at least in my opinion, Natalia’s Christianity is in tension with Pauline Christianity which says, “Be subject to the higher powers [referring to the 1st-century pagan Roman government].”

    As to Bushfire’s comment that “religion is an answer to questions we can’t answer.” At least as I understand the history of Christianity and other 1st-century Mediterranean religions, religion is indeed an answer to questions we can’t answer, in the sense that religious “beliefs” and stories were originally created to explain the meaning of rituals whose origins were no longer understood — and religious ritual, at least as I have read, is simply an example of magical thinking being acted-out (‘magical thinking’ meaning the belief that our thoughts can control the behavior of other actors, the other actor here being an unseen deity).

    But I think Natalia is suggesting that her own religious experience is meant to reflect questions rather than answers, and is actually meant to express the conflict, as she sees it, between what she thinks the world ought to be and what it actually is. Since her perception of that conflict might actually change over time, it would be completely normal that her religious experience would not be bound by sectarian definitions of God.

    In a subsequent comment, Bushfire also said, “If you change Christianity until it has a real meaning in the modern world, then it’s not Christianity any more.”

    Since the 1st century, “Christianity” has been whatever people, who sincerely believe themselves to be Christians, sincerely believe to be true doctrine. We know that in the 1st century in Palestine, there were multiple Jewish cults of Jesus as the Messiah, not all of which claimed that Jesus was God. There was also non-Trinitarian Christianity which was finally determined to be unorthodox in the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E. (I may have the wrong council here). Since religious doctrine is a social construct anyway, it can be changed at will, and always is. When I say that religious doctrine is a “social construct,” I mean that individual religious believers don’t need doctrine to explain their experience. Religious institutions need doctrine to explain the experience of believers to nonbelievers, which, to my mind, means doctrine is meant to fill a social rather than a religious need.

    If anything I’ve written above needs correction, everyone should feel free to correct it, especially if I haven’t accurately represented Natalia’s points about her own religious experience.

22. “If by “dead, embalmed God,” Bushfire means a religious experience that actually is influenced by sectarian definitions of God, then, yes, that certainly is a “dead, embalmed God.” I think Natalia is suggesting that her own religious experience is not influenced by sectarian definitions of God.”

    I completely agree. You next write a long analysis of what Natalia said, and I can’t really agree or disagree because I do not know exactly what Natalia meant. That paragraph you quote of mine was intended to get Natalia to explain her point. I was trying to find out if I understood it correctly, because I didn’t think I did.

    I’ve said this before, but if Christianity is just whatever people believe and even a bunch of conflicting viewpionts can all be called Christianity, then it’s not one religion. It’s everyone with their own belief system. If we can even use a label at all to describe more than one person’s belief system, there must be at least one similarity between those belief systems. Normally the similarity among all Christians, although perhaps not always, is that God sent a son to sacrifice and save us all. Christians then accept the son of God as their saviour. Many people take this metaphorically, and do not think that a man really floated into the sky, reborn, but that if we live our lives in good ways we will be rewarded with good things. That’s fine, but that’s your own interpretation, it’s your own personal spiritual belief, and you didn’t even need Christianity to come to that conclusion.

    I don’t even know where I’m going with this. I originally posted to point out that people were using religion and spirituality interchangeably, even though they are different things, but nobody seems to be interested in that distinction. From what I’ve read so far about Natalia’s beliefs, they seem very similar to mine. I believe in a higher power, but not a “dead embalmed God”. So do, I’m guessing, a lot of people here. I don’t call myself a Christian because I am not interested in most things the Bible has to say, although I have read it and still look in it occasionally. I am also not interested in most things that churches have to say, although some of them are great. I believe in a higher power because so far in my life I’ve observed that there is one. I don’t usually tell anybody about that because it’s my personal relationship with my life and it doesn’t concern anybody. I feel like some sort of antagonist on this thread, which is strange, because I doubt my own views are very different from other’s.

23. Bushfire:
    i am not Christian. with that caveat out of the way, i have taken many classes on religion.
    the thing that defines the religion “Christian” IS the belief (to quote you) “that God sent a son to sacrifice and save us all. Christians then accept the son of God as their saviour.” that is ALL IT TAKES to be Christian.
    much of what you quoted from the bible reflects JEWISH laws – the Old Testament is pre-Christ, and this pre-Christian. but there are literally hundreds of different NAMED sects and types of Christianity in the United States ALONE – and ALL of the are Christian, even if they have some different dogma, practices and/or beliefs. because they all follow that MAIN tennet about Christ. which, again, what actually defines “Christian”

    now, i grant that there are many (most) christians who feel that more is needed to be a “true” christian – a baptism, communion, confession, various beliefs and practices…
    but the bible holds that all one needs is to A)believe that Christ was the son of God B)believe that he was sent to “die for our sins” and C)love Christ/God.

    all else is vanity.

24. I haven’t responded to everything you said because a lot of it is meaningless ranting that seems to be brought on by previous anger from something someone else said to you.

    What I said to you was neither meaningless nor angry, nor even ranting. I am at most exasperated, and I was addressing your words, not something someone else said to me. But I do appreciate your effort to ignore faults in your rhetoric by dismissing me as unreasonable and ranting. I’ll be a bit more pedantically clear to try to clear up why what I said does, in fact, apply to what you wrote. Also, to save typing I’ll be using the old-fashioned abbreviation “Xian”. ‘Cause I’m lazy like that.

    I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that I have some sort of definition or criteria of what Christianity should be.

    This is simple. You seem to have a very clear notion of what Xianity must be; it’s the standard by which you conclude that “excessively” diverse beliefs that fall under the rubric “Xian” can’t possibly be Xian.

    I don’t think that Christianity is the least bit unchanging and I never said I did.

    “Dead and embalmed” does sort of have a static ring to it. But this ties into the above. You’ve strongly implied that in order to be Xian a set of beliefs must conform to a certain set of values. You then proceed to decry as non-Xian sets of belief that attempt to modernize Biblical values. This leads to a very, very simple conclusion: the most “literal interpretation” of the Bible possible, with no effort to generalize, modernize, or change its contents, is Xianity.

    No, you didn’t say it. But you very strongly implied it.

    I doesn’t make any difference to me what or who defines Christianity as anything.

    But it does! Or it wouldn’t make sense for you to write:

    I don’t think that most modern day people who call themselves Christians believe in the literal meanings of these things. People take them as parables and metaphors and derive meanings from them. Christianity has “evolved”. Except if one Christian doesnt’ have any of the same beleifs as another Christian, then they don’t belong to the same religion, they just say they do. They each have their own beliefs.

    You have a fixed definition of what it means to be “of one faith”, and in the case of Xianity, you’re convinced that it doesn’t apply. Which is to say, you don’t accept other people’s definition of Xianity as being valid.

    Or alternately, as I found that paragraph ambiguous, you feel that Xianity can’t be defined by anyone because it just IS. This is actually worse for your argument. You’re reducing Xianity to a Platonic Ideal: there is an abstract conception of “Xianity”, but there is no example of it in the world. You do realize this is the terminus of your reasoning, I hope. Pardon the following for being quite so pedantic, but I see no other way to make this point. There are, and shall always be, as many Xian beliefs as there are Xians. This is not new, tho’, and this is not a result of recent “innovation”. In 108 CE, there were as many different Xian beliefs as there were Xians, and in 508, 1008, 1508, and 2008 it was the same. There was not a group practicing the same set of beliefs. They were always all different. If we accept the criteria you’ve laid forth, Xianity never existed outside its founder, and the same would be true for any faith. Plainly history and society would beg to differ.

    At this point I expect you’d protest “Ah-ha! But they did have the same beliefs, they all believed what’s in the Bible was literally true and prescribed, whereas now they might believe anything!” It wouldn’t help. The early church, as James pointed out, was good and fractured, as was the Bible. There were any number of belief systems that would eventually be lumped together as Xian, and many of them had differences as drastic as the ones you pull forth to discount “modern Xians” as really (truly) being Xians.

    Look, an analogy, from linguistics. Let’s assume we apply your religious standard of belonging to the same faith to being speakers of a common language. By your definition, the British and the Americans and the Australians and the Indians don’t speak separate dialects of English (which would exist, say, in a pure form as recorded in the first OED, without modern innovation, evolution, and variance). They speak separate languages, and shouldn’t claim to all speak “English”. English is dead and embalmed; what’s left is a jumble of evolved personal semantic and phonetic collections that may or may not have anything in common with other ones, with strange new words, concepts, and sounds added. Even new syntax, for crying out loud! Plainly, they can’t all be one language, since they’re so different! And it gets worse, with regional subdialects, accents, and heaven forbid, idiolects! There are no non-personal languages!

    Obviously, this is a gross exaggeration. There are communally recognized and spoken languages. Likewise, there are communally recognized and shared religions. Like languages, the faiths change and evolve with time; new words and concepts are added, old ones are discarded, and sects schism and merge. But as long as the adherents feel that they share enough common ground and can understand each other, they have no reason to claim that they don’t belong to the same faith. The modern religion may be very diversified, and full of innovation compared to the originating doctrines and even beliefs. But there is a historic line of continuity and evolution from there to here. As with language: you couldn’t communicate with someone speaking Old English or probably even Middle English. But an American can understand British English, or Australian English, or even a random dialect of Indian English; divergence is recent, so the mostly variations are commonly understood, and they’re dealing with comparable new phenomena with some shared linguistic tools. And a speaker of Early Modern English could understand their parents, and them theirs, etc. all the way back to Old English.

    Language is a fluid, vague structure. There is no perfect ideal “native speaker” who speaks the language “right” (no, not even the Queen). But people can, do, and indeed should view themselves as speaking the same language. There is utility in adopting this viewpoint rather than considering yourself to speak not English, but an idiolect derived from, say, rural Midwestern American English with some influences from standard Midwestern American English, Southern American English, and Northeastern American English. It’s cumbersome, confusing, and even misleading. Just because you use different words, or concepts, or phonemes, doesn’t mean you’re speaking Esperanto. And likewise religion.

    Which brings me back to the Scotsman and his tea. Claiming that because someone’s beliefs do not perfectly match with an abstract idealized beliefset they’re not truly an adherent of the faith supposedly represented by that abstraction, nor a coreligionist with someone who has a different set of differences from that abstraction, is claiming a special dispensation to decide what the true definition of membership in that religion is. You’re claiming the right to define the faith such that no one is really a member, no matter what they think, if they don’t meet your held criteria for membership.

    Incidentally, you seem to be limiting this to “unorthodox” beliefs held by individuals rather than large denominations. Are Catholics Xian? Eastern Orthodox? Should we not consider these groups’ doctrines (innovations, modernizations, and all) to be of the same faith because they’re non-identical, including larger deviations from each other than some of the examples you give between “classic, pure, old Xianity” and a modern “so-called Xian’s” innovative, evolved interpretation?

    Look. To bring this mess back on-topic more clearly. Religions exist. No two adherents share exactly the same understanding thereof. This does not mean they have different religions. It means that the membership criteria for religions are fuzzy. Sufficient divergence can exclude would-be members, but the exclusionary criteria are also fuzzy. This is further muddled by sects within a religion trying to claim sole arbitration of these criteria, often by claiming to understand the “original” definition of the faith. This does not mean they’re right, it means they’re adding a new criterion into the mix; no more and no less. Furthermore, as there is utility in being a coreligionist in terms of encouraging emulation of desired collective behavior and discouraging undesired behavior, if a feminist feels they have more in common with the fuzzy communal membership criteria for a given faith, they may have good reason to identify themself with it rather than adopting a painfully narrow “religion-of-one” conception of belief. Because the religions exist. And are generally fluid and changing. There’s little justification to adopt a peculiarly narrow understanding of what a religion is out of semantic vanity, especially when it means yielding all the credibility and influence one might have within a community… particularly when society at large can choose to lump you into the religion that it perceives to exist, regardless of an individual’s sage observation that said religion is “dead and embalmed”.

25. But a dead, embalmed God is ruling Christianity.

    I don’t think so at all.

    But I do think your definition of religious belief, specifically Christian belief, is kinda narrow.

26. So Christians belong to all different belief systems, but they can all call themselves Christians, and it doesn’t matter that it makes no sense to call two people by the same thing who have different beliefs. You could have said that without the long essay.

    And still, no one wants to distinguish between religion and spirituality.

27. Holy moly.

    Jeez, Natalia writes this sweet little meditation on faith, and still gets back some nasty commentary. People need to chill out with the guest bloggers.

    If you actually read the Bible, you will realize that it barely says anything that we can relate to.

    Bushfire, remember that the Bible is a collection of many different books by many different writers over the course of a very long time. Treating it as one text is actually a very fundamentalist reading of it, right from the get-go.

    I’m not a Christian, but I absolutely relate to Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs. And an empire critical reading of the New Testament is extremely useful for progressives.

    C’mon, you can’t tell me that a MLK speech never moved you. That was biblical exegesis he was doing.

    the thing that defines the religion “Christian” IS the belief (to quote you) “that God sent a son to sacrifice and save us all. Christians then accept the son of God as their saviour.” that is ALL IT TAKES to be Christian.

    Actually, as another non-Christian who has studied a lot about Christianity, I’d even question this definition. The questions that people had about which texts should be included in the Bible, which theology and christology was correct, etc. at the Council of Nicaea never really got resolved, even though an authoritarian structure tried to settle them.

    Where there’s an authoritarian narrative, there’s always a counternarrative. The fact that a power structure tries to say that the counternarrative is less valid than its own shouldn’t convince us that it’s true.

28. Ashley:
    i kinda don’t think that that definition is perfect, myself. in my opinion of christianity, one has to love God to be christian, and the way to express that love for God is to love everyone.

    but i also know quite well that i am strange and am in no way an actual arbitrater of christian belief. that is just the dominant belief value that the christians i know and/or have studied claim as the central thesis to their belief.
    if that makes any sense 😀

29. Bushfire said: “So Christians belong to all different belief systems … and it doesn’t matter that it makes no sense to call two people by the same thing who have different beliefs.”

    Since the 1st century C.E., the two continuously-held tenets of Christian belief have been that:

    (1) Jesus was a real-life historical* personage, a Jew who lived at a specific time and place in the Roman province of Palestine. Early-Christian “Docetists” denied Jesus’s flesh-and-blood materiality (they thought he was something like a divine phantom), but they still insisted that his appearance in Palestine was a real-world historical event that occurred at a specific time and place.

    (2) For believers, Jesus’s historical life and teaching have had a reality-changing impact for the better, beyond that of any other historical person or event, so much so that such believers call themselves “Christians” (followers of Christ) rather than anything else.

    How self-identified “Christians” express the above two tenets have led to different belief systems, all of which can accurately be described as “Christian,” and, until the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E., were described as “Christian” by the pagan Roman government.

    Ashley’s post #27, in the final two paragraphs, accurately sums up what happened to the expression of Christian belief from the Council of Nicea onward.

    To understand the development of early Christianity and Christian texts like the Bible, you can learn a lot from reading the works of Professor Bart D. Ehrman, Chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prof. Ehrman began as an Evangelical Protestant and is now, I think, an agnostic. A summary of his work can be found on Wikipedia under the heading “Bart Ehrman.”

    Bushfire also said: “… no one wants to distinguish between religion and spirituality.”

    I’m going to hazard a distinction between Christian “religion” and Christian “spirituality”:

    Christian “religion” is the collective historical record of the expression of the above two tenets (historicity of Jesus and ultimate reality-changing impact) by all Christian believers since the 1st century C.E.

    Christian “spirituality” is the unique personal religious experience, which, I think, includes the personal expression of the above two tenets, by each individual Christian believer.

    Whether my comments in this post accurately describe what Natalia Antonova herself believes, only Natalia can answer. But I think my comments at least approximate the common beliefs of all Christian believers, including Natalia’s, since she describes herself as a Christian believer.

    Again, if anything in this comment needs to be corrected, everyone should feel free to correct it (especially Natalia).

    *Note the emphasis on historicity — There is a modern school of thought that claims that Jesus was a purely mythological, non-historical figure that evolved from Near Eastern religious traditions. I don’t think the adherents of this school (there aren’t many) claim to be Christians, and as far as I know, all Christians from the 1st-century C.E. have insisted that Jesus was a real-life historical person.

30. you’re a brainwashed idiot in need of re-education camp

    I have to ask – do any secularists actually say that?

    The first part, possibly, and I’ll admit it’s not on. But ‘re-education camps’?

31. Yes, James, that’s what I was getting at. I do not decide what or who a Christian is, but I think that without one or two common beliefs, you cannot call two poople the same religion. When I suggest this people call me narrow.

    I tried to look up the words religion and spirituality to clarify what I meant, but they both have several meanings. When I hear people use these words they often refer to religion as a set of rules and spirituality as a personal relationship with a higher being. I was trying to point out that some people attack religion, then other people who are spiritual but not religious get offended.

    I guess people do use these words interchangeably, but I think this is causing confusion in these threads. There’s been a lot of tension here and yet I think we’d all be in agreement if we talked it out a bit more.

32. Reading about the CoE’s General Synod yesterday – in which it was decided that there would be no ground given to church members who oppose the ordination of women – made me think of this post and come back here. It was a reminder of how valuable feminist Christians are to feminism in wider society, and to their religions; a large proportion of current Anglican ordinands are women, and the church would clearly be far worse off without those women, and those women will help prevent religion from being a force for misogyny. (And perhaps they will cause girls who are raised as Christians to encounter less bullshit). Meanwhile another route to social leadership – the priesthood – is opened for women, for any woman who seeks it, feminist or not.

    When Christians are feminist, surely everyone wins.

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