Orthosphere guest contributor JMSmith delivers a competent etiology of the Cathedral, wherein what he calls orthodox Christians are absolved. (Bonus: a food fight over slavery has broken out in the comments. Extra bonus: Chevalier de Johnstone’s comments )
It is true that orthodox Christians did not build the Cathedral, but heretical Christians did, and they used Christian bricks.
Christianity is the most adaptively successful memeplex in human history. It has always, and likely for this reason, been a fertile breeding ground for potentially virulent competing near neighbors. This is why the Christian Church has traditionally been so anal about doctrine; why the Christian Church was the most reactionary, i.e., genuinely conservative, institution on earth for most of Her history; and why things really went into the crapper, when She began to question her motivation.
With great Power comes Great Responsibility.
Ah, the slavery issue. Being a simple Christian man, I’m not righteous enough to gainsay Righteous American Christians. I just read my English translation bible and it sure looks like God and his apostles (specifically Peter and Paul) totally dropped the ball on slavery (may God forgive me my sarcasm). Paul even seems content to accommodate himself to it. Oops! But what do I know?
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It’s not a good sign when the first hypertext-link is a broken one…
[Ed. Fixed. Thanks]
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after a slow start this is rocking over at Jim’s
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I’m afraid this argument isn’t going to resolve itself anytime soon, it’s a symptom of the still-extant split between Protestants and Catholics/Orthodox. Some prots will insist that Puritans were temperamentally or aesthetically disagreeable, but not heretical. (Related: fighting over “Cathedral” vs “Synagogue” terminology.)
These Protestants kind of think like constitutionalist republicans in that, to them, the instability of these systems of thought and their eventual devolution into what we have today, still aren’t enough to question the premises and altogether reject them. As for the correlation between these two groups, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn had some answers.
Or maybe they do get the inkling that doing so would, respectively, be papist or unegalitarian, which would conflict with their fundamental principles. We’re just re-fighting the [Counter]Reformation at this point, and I have no idea how the reaction will cross this impasse. It’s no small matter, and hasn’t ever been one in the five centuries since it started.
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Protestants, especially Calivinists, have a thing for systematic doctrine, Systematic Theology. It is for them, if not the entirety, at least very nearly all of religion. To them, Christianity is not a matter of culture. The idea of an atheist Christian is preposterous. The idea of an atheist Protestant or atheist Calvinist is preposterous, because to be a Protestant or (a fortiori) a Calvinist is to subscribe to a doctrinal slate. Reject that slate, and you’re out. Simple. Crisp. Clean.
But there are atheist Catholics. Why? Because being Catholic is cultural. It is not only, but it is also at least that. (And this probably goes a fortiori for Orthodox.) Being Catholic is not so much about accepting a doctrinal slate (tho’ we do have one), but about being a loyal subject of the Church. (For the spergs, no you cannot be a loyal subject of the Church whilst rejecting Her doctrine. I’m talking about subjective emotional, visceral states here.)
This is one major reason various social measures of devotion are so poor among Catholics vis-à-vis Protestants. If you leave the Baptist or Methodist or Presbyterian faith, you check the “No religion” box on the survey. Episcopalian maybe you do, maybe you don’t (they’re kinda Catholic-ish). But if you’re Catholic and you “leave the faith”, you still consider yourself Catholic deep down in your soul and so check the “Catholic” box on the form… and then proceed to report you never pray, never go to Church, and are at best ambivalent about the existence of God. (Obviously I’m speaking of tendencies here, not absolutely every single instance.)
And a Catholic atheist is a very, very different creature from a Protestant atheist. The Catholic atheist realizes there is no possible good in the world—nihilism is the only option. Protestant atheists are positively “evangelical” about atheism. They want to Make the World a Better Place™… thru Atheism.
So it is very hard for a Protestant to see the seeds of liberalism in his own religion. Why, we toe the line on the Westminster (or Augsburg) Confession! How could we go liberal? And in a sense, they’re right. They’re related (today somewhat distantly) to progressive memeplex only their version of it froze at an early point in its evolution, and so long as it stays frozen, they can be as reactionary as any Trent-quotin’, Inquisition-lovin’ Catholic.
You’ll find no group more reactionary than Baptist Fundamentalists. And yet look at their memetic makeup: congregationalist, independent, pietist, “soul sufficiency”, private interpretation, testimonial obsessed. Egad, you’d think you’d be looking at UCCers, but their memes froze around 1920 and they retroactively date their Bible to 1611 (Props, Henry VIII).
So when you make the Moldbuggian case: Yep, it was the Puritans whodunit. It is natural for many Protestants to think, hey, those are my people you’re blaming there. You couldn’t slide butter knife between what I believe today and my Puritan forefathers believed then. It wasn’t us. Must’ve been the Joos.
Well, maybe it was both.
But the Puritan Hypothesis isn’t about the slate of doctrine, but the evolving memetic culture. If you extract any Protestant memetic DNA from amber that solidified prior to about 1940 (certainly prior to 1910), sure it all looks pretty non-progressive by today’s standards. But once you compare that sample with others taken each decade, it is quite clear that you’re 1940 sample was an ancestor of today’s NYT editor. And it also becomes quite clear that the 1940 sample itself was descended from the Puritan DNA that landed in New England three centuries earlier, who “progressed” from demanding Charles’ head, to fomenting a colonial rebellion, to bringing slavery to a violent end, to giving women the right to vote, to banning alcohol, to bombing Syria just for the helluvit. With a lot of twists and turns along the way to be sure, but in an unmistakable direction: The Zeitgeist.
This is long. I’m gonna blog it.
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