Comment by ceilingcorner
5 years ago
This is a somewhat funny joke but it doesn't actually map to reality. Inter-Christian conflict is almost nonexistent in 2021 and has been so for probably a generation.
Edit: by “conflict” I mean actual real violent conflict. Not people arguing on Reddit. People literally killing each other (or pushing them off bridges) because they are “heretics.” This doesn’t happen much at all anymore in the Christian world. Even the edge cases like Northern Ireland have little to do with actual religious differences. That issue is mostly political in nature and revolves around the relationship of Ireland to Great Britain, not the intricacies of the Christian religion.
It’s easy to observe the difference when you look at the Muslim world, where there still is a lot of violent conflict and people being persecuted or killed because they are “heretics.”
As an atheist apostate who was raised in a fundamentalist, Baptist, Christian church in the Great Lakes region, it hits pretty close to home.
I was last in church a couple weeks ago for a funeral; it was a little weird hearing about the ways people from various highly-similar churches talked about Grandma's spiritual history as she was enlightened from her Christian Reformed early childhood to know a living and true God. Did she know the theological differences at age 10? We talked about the effect she had as the matriarch of our extended family bringing everyone together for decades by sponsoring an annual summer trip to a nearby Bible conference ground, and about how she justifiably ended that when the Bible conference lost their way and endorsed some speakers with relatively minor theological differences.
It's not "conflict" in the sense of the Spanish Inquisition - no one, as far as I know, would genuinely push someone off a bridge for being in a different sect - but around here they'd pray for the person to accept the truth, call for church discipline/excommunication/speaking bans if in a position of power, or they'd leave the church and find a slightly different sect that didn't make the wrong call on whatever issue was brought up by the council of 1912.
There's a paradox of intolerance at play: A group that aims to be universally tolerant cannot actually tolerate intolerance, and fundamentalist Christianity advocates a singular, accurately understood, unique truth at its core. You can and tolerate love those who hold different theologies all you want, but if you believe in one absolute universal truth as a lot of Christian culture does, then anyone who believes even a little bit differently is not right, which is to say, by definition, they're wrong.
Karl Popper was a moron. You can tolerate intolerance just fine by assuming there will be someone equally intolerant of such intolerance.
I wish people would stop quoting that denthead. It’s as silly as people claiming the Qu’ran has passages specifically commanding them to blow people up.
Your conclusion is definitionally the same as Popper's? Intolerance of intolerance is the solution. It is only a "paradox" in that unlimited tolerance leads to this seemingly backwards outcome of the triumph of intolerance.
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Taken to its logical conclusion, nothing can be tolerated but tolerance itself.
Kind of an inversion of Chesterton's 'Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.'
The "Troubles" in Northern Ireland may be over but there is still tension and violence in Northern Ireland between a subset of Catholics and Protestants. The sectarian violence still happens but does not get reported internationally because the scale is so much lower than it was up to 2010, but to say Inter-Christian conflict has been non-existent for a generation (25 years?) is wishful thinking at best.
See my edit.
Idk, man... about two years ago, I heard an evangelical dude say Catholics aren’t even Christians. As a Catholic, I found it a bit startling to learn that I am - by default - going to hell.
Pop by r/catholic and you'll come across some people's hush-hush Catholic views that Martin Luther was evil by leading away millions to eternal damnation because there's no salvation outside The Catholic Church.
No doubt. I’ve known some pretty insulated, hateful Catholics.
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Was it because the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon from Revelations, or because it's secretly a pagan religion that worships Saints and the Virgin Mary as gods? I love the rationales people put forward for that kind of stuff.
For a Guy purportedly trying to bring salvation to humanity, some Jesus's followers do seem to relish opportunities to keep the everyone they can out of the Kingdom.
> a pagan religion that worships Saints and the Virgin Mary as gods
Sometimes I put on my 2edgy4u atheist cap and needle my lapsed-Catholic wife with that notion. It looks like a duck and a quacks like a duck, call it veneration if you like -- it's still a duck. And I do point out that there's nothing wrong with that. Given the choices I'd rather worship a once-mortal mother goddess than a tripartite sky-father who spends most of the book being terrible.
I have been told the same thing. In my case it was just that they didn't know other forms of Christianity existed other than their own.
You don't know, they might be of the opinion that a good life dedicated to Jesus may be enough, regardless of how you dress it up.
But, from outside, they appear to be at least half right.
The catholic church seems to be less CHRISTian and more ... Trinity-ian. I assume it's a fairly large difference on the ground as one is all about a single person, born a regular man, who brings forgiveness for unintentional sins. The other, a story about a much more conscious god who manifests himself in a young body and proceeds to lecture on morality and the afterlife.
Catholicism also teaches that every non-Catholic person is going to hell.
That’s not true. It was long debated, and finally clarified in the Vatican II (in the mid 1960s.)
Any Catholic still saying that today is going against the Church.
To be a little more precise, Catholicism teaches that every person in Heaven is a Catholic (even if they weren't necessarily a Catholic on earth.) It admits baptism by desire and the possibility of salvation of those who are invincibly ignorant.
But, at the same time, Catholic tradition has always maintained that even most Catholics end up in Hell. There's even biblical support for the idea in the "wide"/"narrow gate" language of the Gospels.
So, if Catholicism is the one true Faith, and even most Catholics end up in Hell, why would anyone reason that those outside of the one true Faith have good odds?
Catholicism isn't monolithic apparently, because that does not appear to be the first answer in a web search:
https://www.catholic.com/qa/do-non-catholic-christians-go-to...
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Maybe you need to clarify by what you mean by conflict -- do you mean violent conflict? Because ideological conflict and schism seems quite high between denominations, christian branches, and even within congregations. E.g Rob Bell vs Francis Chan / Tim Keller on whether hell is real and if Rob Bell is going there. A lot of evangelical groups today are "non-denominational" meaning they face these ideological clashes within their congregations.
I mean, as an atheist it seems obvious that they're all facing the problem of ill-defined views causing confusion. There's no ground truth so everyone's just interpreting it how they feel is right, whether that's by focusing on literal biblicisms or focusing on real world feedback / interpersonal relationships, and the lines are drawn around litmus test issues across the spectrum of christian beliefs.
The violence is just the punchline that makes it a joke. The point is how ludicrous it is that people take these minuscule differences in dogma seriously, and just how seriously they do take it. That's what maps to reality.
This is only true as far as how most Christians and churches are so casual in their beliefs, there's no meaningful difference in their lifestyle vs a non-believer's.
In the us it's conservative christians against everyone else (mostly evangelicals but multiple other groups too, and they also fight among themselves).
The group that isn't fighting much is liberal christians (I try to define them as accepting homosexuality) and non believers. Those are the groups not fighting.
I don't think that's true. Churches are deeply divided on some core issues, and in some cases are splitting over these differences: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/united-methodist-conserv...
That link is about Methodists splitting over a fairly big issue (gay marriage) and not the minute differences referred to in the parent comment.
I was replying to "Inter-Christian conflict is almost nonexistent in 2021". That's a fairly categorical statement, and seems plainly false.