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[deleted] wrote

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ziq wrote (edited )

i could just as easily accuse secular anarchists of "reforming" a liberal state ideology that was very close to heart of the development of the capitalist mode of production.

You should. All ideology should be rejected.

i don't think this is true. and i definitely wouldn't say it's true of liberation or post-colonial theology considering, you know, that's the precisely the kind of christianity they're fighting against

Fighting against it by trying to reform it; which I don't believe can work. It's not like the Christ's teachings were so special, they were just an appropriation, or at best an adaptation of much older religions from further East.

I don't understand the need to preserve Christianity by making it more 'progressive'. And I was raised Eastern Orthodox, so the Christianity I'm most familiar with is the purest form there is, it's been unchanged for centuries.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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ziq wrote (edited )

christianity's early influences were actually mostly jewish (obviously) and greek.

That's what establishment Christian scholars claim, but there's clearly strong similarities to the teachings of Mithras, Zarathustra and Buddha... which is hardly surprising since that particular religion was making strong inroads as Christianity was being born in West Asia and Greece:

Buddhism was prominent in the eastern Greek world (Greco-Buddhism) and became the official religion of the eastern Greek successor kingdoms to Alexander the Great's empire (Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (250 BC-125 BC) and Indo-Greek Kingdom (180 BC - 10 CE)). Several prominent Greek Buddhist missionaries are known (Mahadharmaraksita and Dharmaraksita) and the Indo-Greek king Menander I converted to Buddhism, and is regarded as one of the great patrons of Buddhism. (See Milinda Panha.) Some modern historians have suggested that the pre-Christian monastic order in Egypt of the Therapeutae is possibly a deformation of the Pāli word "Theravāda,"a form of Buddhism, and the movement may have "almost entirely drawn (its) inspiration from the teaching and practices of Buddhist asceticism". They may even have been descendants of Asoka's emissaries to the West. It is true that Buddhist gravestones from the Ptolemaic period have also been found in Alexandria in Egypt, decorated with depictions of the Dharma wheel, showing the Buddhists were living in Hellenistic Egypt at the time Christianity began. The presence of Buddhists in Alexandria has led one author to note: "It was later in this very place that some of the most active centers of Christianity were established".

Jainism also shares strong similarities with Christianity:

The concept of the Trinity is almost certainly borrowed from elsewhere.

that is... not actually true, literally no religion exists in stasis

How has Eastern Orthodox Christianity changed in the past few hundred years? There hasn't been any kind of reformism that I can perceive. It prides itself on maintaining that sameness. The monks here still live the same way, and in the same places as they did almost 2000 years ago; rejecting the outside world. The church services are exactly the same as they've been for hundreds of years, given in the same ancient language even.

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