We are all biased and we all have a faith or trust or belief
Otherwise we would not take another step, because we would not have confidence that the ground would hold for another step forward.
There is an ongoing discussion of religion and faith in the MRM. I have listened to some of the discussions Dean Esmey has had with various people, and in general I agree with him, but not with the overall perspective it ends in. I certainly respect the fact that he knows much more about the Catholic faith than I do. Of-course! It would be really dumb for me to say otherwise. That is not what this is about now.
My position within this is about faith in general. We all have some kind of faith, it would be stupid to say otherwise, and we all have biased positions, as I recall Karen Straughan has pointed out. Yes, that’s absolutely right! Not just feminists and religious people, but also in the MRM; we all believe in something, for example that “my position is the right one”, even when we research ever so much. But what we believe in can and should be fact-based! Yes, absolutely.
We cannot have good discussions until we acknowledge that we are all biased! Only from there we can have a discussion of whatever we want to talk about. And yes, you could restrict faith to just religious faith. But it is nevertheless a restriction, and you can choose to do that and even just to your faith. But then it is even more restrictions.
From that I want to address that Christianity had a sort of a beginning, even if the church father Saint Augustine says, which I agree with for the very most part:
“That which is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist, from the beginnings of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christianity.”
(Retractions 1.13.3)
To be Christian is not the same as an outward organized religion! And I can say as Dean Esmay, I don´t have to justify myself to anybody. Everyone can, if they want to, understand my position on faith and religion.
The beginning of Christianity was not Catholicism. How could it be? It was more of a diverse “group”. And then “some” (that also included the orthodox east!) in this diverse group did not accept other groups and the exclusions began in the name of the true religion. The church father Tertullian writes in the 3rd century about places in Brittany that in spite of being unreachable for the Romans had devoted themselves to Christ.
This is a bit of a stretch because it is so late, but nevertheless I include it here:
The sixth century Welsh bard Taliesin claimed, “Christ, the Word from the beginning, was from the beginning our Teacher, and we never lost His teaching. Christianity was in Asia a new thing; but there never was a time when the Druids of Britain held not its doctrine.”
And my own position within faith is the perspective from a more Celtic and “Manichean” Christianity. Not described by Catholic sources or other modern perspectives!
I hold every Great teacher of faith in high regard. It could be Christ Jesus, Krishna and the old rishis of the Veda’s, Lao Tse, and the Buddha and so on. And from that point of view I look at all the faiths from an outside position (as far as I can manage), even the Catholic faith, not from my own thoughts, but with help of others who have knowledge which I believe is honest enough and well-enough researched, that means from the most perspectives and with the least prejudice. Too many researchers are too biased, to my mind. And again, you can imagine what that means from your own perspective. First of all you have to go to a primal source. Karen Straughan did that with excellency when she quoted Saint Paul (I think it was) and in full! Hats off!
In that regard even MRA’s fall short and often! Here they are like the worst of the feminists. They think they can judge everything from their own perspective without any research. And here Dean Esmay is oh so right! It is really an insult as much as feminists insult people with their false statistics and false research that MRA’s point out, when MRA’s think they themselves can make judgements without any valid knowledge in this regard of faith and religion! Think again. Don´t you get it? It is the same!
As I said: Here we are all biased!! That is our position from birth and onward. And now from here you know what you should do … don´t be that good social justice feministing warrior.
Kind Regards, the Swede
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You got me mixed up with the MRM and the MRA. So now there is two groups? I would think that MRA is MRM activism. Like you, I believe in the Christianity that existed before the Roman Catholic Church. Our knowledge on this is limited, as the dark ages destroyed most of it. But I wouldn’t think that would have anything to do with MRM or MRA, or even feminism.
The thing about religion is that it can’t always be factual. History is even uncertain, but that still doesn’t mean we can’t believe in it. If we only believe in facts there wouldn’t be much to believe as so much is so uncertain, even in science.
That is true, people tend to forget that even science has “paradigm shifts” where thing we thought were proven facts turn out to be completely unfounded simply because we misunderstood some foundational elements and/or facts.
Anyone who asserts something to be 100% true and devoid of belief, whether scientifically or religiously, is being overconfident.
Yeah, historically Christianity did not exist before Jesus, even under another name. How could it when Jesus is the centre point of the religion?
That’s the thing, Jesus was jewish, Christianity is nothing but an extension of Judaism, and the same applies to Islam, all of which share the same root “creator”.
Jesus is the focus of Christianity, but that does not mean he’s the highest power, which would be yahweh in Judaism, ‘God’ in Christianity and Allah in Islam.
And all three of those faiths say the same thing, that there are previous incarnations worshiping the same deity, even before these three all the way back to Adam and Noah.