Comments on: Competing Christian Myths

By: Jordan Stratford+

Jordan Stratford+ — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 17:12:02 +0000

The poster is, as you said, ignorant not only of both Christian theology and the Wiccan world-view, but of THE basic principle of of western religion, that of the the Incarnation.

Both Christianity and Wicca are “western” (broadly speaking) expressions of a basic Truth, that magic / divinity is real, and affects / indwells the material world. Through either supplication or manipulation, this relationship can be employed to the benefit of the practitioner.

(side note: it’s a pet peeve of mine that “manichaeanism” has come to mean in popular usage the view that the “flesh evil spirit good”, which is a ghastly misrepresentation of the teachings of Mani. I know the dictionary supports this, it just seems wildly unfair.)

By: bill m.

bill m. — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 00:45:39 +0000

What about taking communion and supposedly eating the body of Christ?
I thought the whole idea was to ‘have them both at once’.

By: channel null

channel null — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 18:43:46 +0000

Have you ever looked into feminist theology? It’s interesting in that it tends to fall into three camps: God-is-a-woman, we-should-celebrate-god-as-both-male-and-female, and the goddess-restorationist camp, which I’d say can be subdivided into a Goddess-only and a Goddess-and-Horned-Man camp. I can’t remember any of the big names behind these, though, except Starhawk; it was a single class session about three years ago. One of the arguements Xian feminist theologians tend to make is that JC incarnated as a male because it’d be necessary for the time he came into being, a woman couldn’t have risen to his status.

YOU CANNOT HAVE THEM BOTH AT ONCE.

It’s completely irrational to suggest that there’s this invisible place we all go up in the sky. If you think that’s okay, I’d say it’s okay to have both at once.

By: Tim Boucher

Tim Boucher — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 18:21:32 +0000

Excellent point. I wrote a pretty detailed article about that very same thing a while back.

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/08/03/faith-vs-works/

I think this is a really fascinating topic.

By: psicosm

psicosm — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 18:07:25 +0000

Personally, I’ve felt that Christianity has been slipping into a Manichean suspicion of the body and the material world since the Reformation. Protestants, with their exclusive concentration on faith opposed to works, distanced themselves further and further for Catholicism’s sacramental view of the natural world. Catholicism of course, while sacramental in theory, has suffered from time to time throughout its history an Augustinian fear of the body which it’s just now starting to shed.

I imagine this is a bigger problem for Western Christianity than Eastern.