A possible issue that I failed to
mention before is our tried and true "power and control." An
independent Baptist church often reports to NO ONE. The Pastor is King.
This can lead to cults of personality and outright cults. Most Baptists
aren't going the outright cult route, but it can be quite a trip if you
can force a large congregation to follow you in "The ONLY correct
interpretation of the Bible." That just so happens to be the Pastor's
interpretation. Imagine that!!!
David
If
you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do
read the newspaper you are misinformed.--Mark
Twain
On 6/6/2010 9:19 PM, bil...@aol.com wrote:
I did think of that possibility also. All Socialists have their
"scriptures." Usually Marx
but sometimes "other," as in my case, the Sacred Writings ( I'm
being tongue-in-cheek )
of Henri Saint-Simon, a group that, in its heyday, also split
into factions. But the Marxists
take the prize and each split further splits, then the next,
like a zygote. One split and
before you know it you have a whole baby with a trillion cells.
Just like Baptists.
OK, Socialism has a religious dimension. But where did that come
from ?
Besides, while all religions split, on the Left and among
Baptists, this is EXTREME.
How come ?
I was trying to think of a parallel between religion and
economic class, and maybe
there is something to that. There was a study, more-or-less
verified elsewhere,
in Finland where it turned out that if you compare working class
neighborhoods,
try to find close to exact matches ( same industry, same
incomes, same etc )
you get either Evangelicals or Communists --or at least
Socialists. It depends
on who gets there first with the best preachers. Which seems
true, but doesn't
explain the splits.
The other place where you get splits, almost infinite, is India,
among Hindus and
their own political Left. Trouble with India is you also get
wild factionalization
on the Right. While the Western Right also splits, it doesn't
compare with
the splits on the Left.
Well, I am at a loss. Each explanation has some merit but
still no cigar.
I think we are missing something important and I sure and heck
don't know what it is.
Billy
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maybe "Socialism" is a
pseudo-religion.
David
If
you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the
newspaper you are misinformed.--Mark
Twain
On 6/6/2010 6:27 PM, bil...@aol.com wrote:
Well yeah, you are 100% correct. But what I wonder, with no
good answer,
is why the Left does pretty much the same thing. What struck
me in reading
your reply is that if you substitute the word "Socialist"
for "Baptist" your
comments would be just as true.
I don't have a good explanation and my best guesses are full
of holes.
In the USA, for example, you might say that a lot of
Socialists of the past
were raised as Baptists, like Walter Rauschenbusch, one of
the two or three "biggies"
in the Social Gospel movement, and he was a Baptist
minister. So, OK, if
many Socialists once were Baptists, you'd expect carry over.
And the
perennial candidate of the SP was Norman Thomas, a
Presbyterian minister,
and back then, Presbyterians were not all that different
than Baptists.
But the principle of splitting also exists among Socialists
in Europe and Latin America
and in Japan . This is not to discuss Baptists at all. Yet
the same
( or very similar ) phenomenon.
For now, I simply don't have an explanation that holds water.
Billy
====================================================
Baptists tend to splinter
over issues of every size.
There's the Primitive Baptists, 5 point Calvinists, generally no
instrumental music (not always), they wash your feet at the door
because Jesus washed the disciples feet at the Last Supper. They
basically believe that Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper and the Foot
Washing then. Most others don't see things that way.
Reformed Baptists, Reformed meaning 5 point Calvinists, but no other
practices of the Primitive Baptists are picked up.
General Baptists, Non-Calvinist, some almost anti-Calvinist.
Southern Baptists have both Calvinists and non-Calvinists so one has to
interview the pastor fairly closely to make sure you're getting what
you want, but historically, more non-Calvinist.
Then there are all kinds of independent Baptist churches, particularly
down south where the SBC was just too liberal or conservative on
[whatever topic goes here], so that church left the SBC. Some of these
do join to form associations, but many are just independent.
They basically split over various rules of doctrine, but instead of
tolerating the difference, one of them thinks that theirs is THE WAY
and splits off from the other.
David
If
you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the
newspaper you are misinformed.--Mark
Twain
On 6/6/2010 12:41 AM, bil...@aol.com wrote:
Its kind of an odd thing, but just thinking about
Baptists, the tendency for splintering
is similar to the tendency on the Left for splintering.
How many kinds of Baptists are there ?
I'm not sure but at least 10 of size, with the grand
total in the hundreds. On the Left
the parallelism is hard not to notice. Why is this so ?
I donno. Maybe you have a theory or two.
Billy
==============================================================
And then there are the
differences internal to the religions. How many flavors of Christianity
are there? Too many.
David
If
you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the
newspaper you are misinformed.--Mark
Twain
On 6/5/2010 10:06 PM, bil...@aol.com wrote:
God Is Not One
The Eight Rival Religions That Run
the World--and Why Their Differences Matter
Stephen Prothero,
the New York Times bestselling author of Religious
Literacy, makes a fresh and provocative argument that, contrary to
popular understanding, all religions are not simply different paths to
the same end… and why this matters
greatly for us. Readers of Huston Smith and Karen Armstrong will find
much to ponder in God Is Not One.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, dizzying scientific
and technological advancements, interconnected globalized economies,
and even the so-called New Atheists have done nothing to change one
thing: our world remains furiously religious. For good and for evil,
religion is the single greatest influence in the world. We accept as
self-evident that competing economic systems (capitalist or communist)
or clashing political parties (Republican or Democratic) propose very
different solutions to our planet's problems. So why do we pretend that
the world's religious traditions are different paths to the same God?
We blur the sharp distinctions between religions at our own peril,
argues religion scholar Stephen Prothero, and it is time to replace
naïve hopes of interreligious unity with deeper
knowledge of religious differences.
In Religious Literacy, Prothero demonstrated how
little Americans know about their own religious traditions and why the
world's religions should be taught in public schools. Now, in God
Is Not One, Prothero provides readers with this much-needed content
about each of the eight great religions. To claim that all religions
are the same is to misunderstand that each attempts to solve a
different human problem. For example:
–Islam: the problem is
pride / the solution is submission
–Christianity: the problem is sin
/ the solution is salvation
–Confucianism: the problem is
chaos / the solution is social order
–Buddhism: the problem is
suffering / the solution is awakening
–Judaism: the problem is exile /
the solution is to return to God
Prothero reveals each of these traditions on its own terms to
create an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to better understand
the big questions human beings have asked for
millenniaâ€â€ÂÂand the disparate paths
we are taking to answer them today. A bold polemical response to a
generation of misguided scholarship, God Is Not One creates a
new context for understanding religion in the twenty-first century and
disproves the assumptions most of us make about the way the world's
religions work.
_______________________________________________
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