Catholicism versus Protestantism down the centuries

Ridiculous as you find it, you just validated it.You told us the early church was composed of 'true Christians'.
You told us the Catholics who came along later were 'pagan to the core.'
You told us the Protestant reformers were 'true Christians'.As 'Christian' means good in your vocabulary and 'pagan' means bad, the matter is settled. Your narrative is a Golden Age myth. A
Times were good.

​

B
Times were bad.

​

A'
Good times are being restored.Voil. Thank you for playing.I tipped off everyone beforehand that your story was going to follow this pattern. Wary, you tried to camouflage things with a few cosmetic touches. You allowed some doctrinal beliefs in your Golden Age of 'true believers' to be less than 'perfect'. The idea was to give your story a realistic feel.But you balked at the observation that some early Christians advocated some very imperfect doctrines indeed. Some were so imperfect by your professed standards as to make their adherents 'pagans to the core'. Though all of this is sourced in your purportedly infallible canon, you dismissed it undiscussed. You can admit a few pockmarks on the ingots, but your Golden Age must remain Golden.You put your finger on the scale again with your cursory and uninformed treatment of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Logically you can accept these people as 'true Christians' just as you did the Waldensians and Albigensians. They fall on the same side of issues you deem important. Their differences with Rome are legendary. But you refused to cut the Orthodox the same slack.Why? Because your myth needs a Dark Age. If in that part of your story you allow generations of 'true Christians' to walk all over the known world unpersecuted in plain sight of everybody, you don't have a story. So you call the Orthodox 'basically the same' as those 'pagan' papists. It's unjust, but it keeps your Dark Age intact.Which brings us to the present. You belong to a sect. People in Sunday School ask leaders of the sect how it got here. The leaders could tell them the sect represents another stage in the ongoing evolution of Christian belief. This would be accurate but it would lack romance. The leaders want the sect to have an aura of epic history, heroic mission, and manifest destiny. To evoke feelings like that they need a more appealing story. A story with a certain ring to it.A Golden ring.___Edited by Archer Opteryx, : clarityEdited by Archer Opteryx, : typo repair

What an amazing mythmaker you are indeed. Turning simple reality into a myth. Oh well, really just the typical work of today's antireligionists. So when the reality does rear up and bite you some day you'll only have yourself to blame.By the way what you are characterizing as my inability to answer that crazy list of accusations of the early church was in reality (which of course doesn't really exist for you, I'm sure I'm a myth too) anyway in reality it was what I said it was: incomprehensible and unrecognizable. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

If you believe the reality of human history across centuries is simple, you already believe a myth.It's pointless to take out your embarrassment on me. I was merely standing here when you began your ritual chant of your tribe's origin myth as told to you by its shamans. I'd seen the ritual before so I gave everyone a synopsis. No accusations. I was observing. It's remarkable that someone who claims the Bible as 'the infallible standard' would not recognise a bundle of references to it.All those epistles in the New Testament canon: on nearly every page we find a writer correcting an addressed community of Christians on their errors in belief and practice.Did you never truly notice what some of those beliefs and practices were? Read your Bible. You'll find quite a variety. The early church was a dynamic jumble of competing beliefs and cultures. Protestant fundies like to think the early Christians were just Protestant fundies wearing bathrobes and sandals. Not so. They were far more interesting than that.And when you finally do read your Bible, Faith, you will discover too that, even though the writers expressed their disapproval in often strong terms, they acknowledged that wide variety of people and ideas as belonging to their Christian community. There's valuable information in that for you, Faith, the day you are willing to learn.___

Eegad the myths deepen. Or the plot thickens. Or whatever.ABE: This entire section of this thread initiated by Archer has been nothing but an extended accusation that I'm lying about what I've written here. That's what "myth" means, it's a lie, it's made up, it's not true history. Based on what? a flimsy correspondence with something that IS a myth I guess, about a Golden Age after which something bad took over. What that means, of course, is that there never could be in reality a case of something genuine being hijacked by something evil. And THAT is most definitely a myth, a lie, and an extremely dangerous one, because it only serves to obscure a reality that needs to be exposed as the evil it is if anyone is to learn from history. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I... think I'm in love!!!

So you have no evidence for the 17 million or that the catholic church invented the yellow star of david or that they locked jews up in ghettoes?So it is just crap you are spouting? Memory from what? Lies you have been told.5 mins with Wikipedia and you could confirm or deny 90% of the crap you believe. Sounds like you are an idiot to me. Read some history books before you spout crap.

No.
The Cathars had some things in common with Manichaeism.Try Wikipedia it can give you a very good, quick overview.

Most of my sources are Protestant and I'd like to find one that isn't because you won't accept anything a Protestant writes. I'm sure you'd accept a number of, oh, a couple thousand murdered over 600 years if the RCC told you that, but a Protestant doing the calculations and coming up with millions wouldn't do it for you. However I'm not finding a neutral source on this yet.I gave you the number a long time ago of 50 million Bible believers murdered, and the 17 million Jews, Muslims, witches and others is usually presented along with that one.The most recent publication to use this number that I know of is David Plaisted's paper here but you won't like him at all because he's a creationist who has apparently taken on some geological issues, though I am not personally familiar with what he's written on that subject.And otherwise I think the number is in Dowling's History of Romanism, which is online, and J A Wylie's four volume History of Protestantism, also online.Best I can do right now. Go ahead and fume and fuss and erupt in clouds of red lightning and smoke as usual.

But it only particularly discredits them in your eyes. You think that the doctrines ascribed to the Waldensians sound nicer than those ascribed to the Albigensians, you find the latter doctrines discreditable. But the inquisitors of the 13th century didn't know about you, and didn't have your tastes in mind.From their perspective, Waldensianism was thoroughly discreditable, it was bad enough to burn people alive for. So if the Albigenses were just more Waldensians, what would they gain by claiming they were Manichees? To discredit them? But they were already heretics fit for the flames. To discredit them in the eyes of future Protestants such as yourself? But they didn't know you'd exist. Also, if they were going to do this, why not accuse all the Waldensians of being Manichees instead of arbitrarily accusing half of them of this and the other half of being Waldensians?So how are we to imagine the scene? Junior Inquisitor : And here we have two dangerous Waldensians. Waldensian #1 & #2 : Translate the Bible! Sola scriptura! Down with the Pope! Senior Inquisitor : So I see. What a prize pair of contumacious heretics they are, to be sure. OK, I'm going to burn this one for being a Waldensian. Waldensian #1 : Oh, I say! Senior Inquisitor : Shut up, no-one asked you. Yeah, burn this one for Waldensianism. Junior Inquisitor : Does that mean the other one can go free? Senior Inquisitor : No, of course not. No, we're going to burn him for the heresies he doesn't adhere to and which I've just made up. Tell me, Waldensian #2, have you ever felt any inclination to gnosticism? Waldensian #2 : No. Senior Inquisitor : Manichaeaism? Waldensian #2 : Don't even know what it is. Senior Inquisitor : You wouldn't say, then, that the world was created by Satan? Waldensian #2 : Never crossed my mind. Senior Inquisitor : There we go, then, we'll burn him for being a gnostic Manichee who claims the world was made by Satan. Junior Inquisitor : But ... my lord ... why not burn him for the damnable heresies he actually maintains? Senior Inquisitor : Variety. Junior Inquisitor : Variety, my lord? Senior Inquisitor : Yeah, I get so bored of burning people for being Waldensians. You might start with Reinerius Saccho, you can read his works here. The Waldensians (Poor of Lyons), he accuses of one lot of things, the Albigensians (Cathars) of another. The earliest claim I can find that the Albigenses were good Protestants is in Fox's Book of Martyrs. Which was published in England in 1563, and cites no evidence for this claim.

LOL
Plaisted is a computer science professor.None of the sources Plaisted uses are actual unbiased historical sources. Most of them from 1800's and only a few from the 1900's. Nothing modern. Modern historical scholarship has grown by leaps and bounds. Also, Plaisted is making the Catholic church responsible for every violent death in Europe during that period. He places all deaths during the 30 years war as the responsiblity of the Catholic church. Evidently Protestants had no responisbility. Even though this war started out as a Catholic/Protestant conflict, to view it as simply that is overly simplistic and actually quite assinine. HHere is something from a protestant.
The Spanish Inquisition: Debunking the Legends : Strange NotionsDowling's book was written in 1845. I highly doubt he had access to original archives.

quote:

---

"From the birth of Popery
in 606 to the present time, it is estimated by careful and
credible historians, that more than
fifty millions
of the human family, have been
slaughtered for the crime of heresy
by popish persecutors, an average of more
than forty thousand re
ligious murders for every year of the existence of popery."
--
"History of Romanism," pp. 541, 542. New York: 1871.

---

Looking at his book he provides no sources for this claim. As a matter of fact he presents no sources for anything.Plaisted also is so ignorant of history he doesn't realize that the Waldensians and Albigensians(Cathars) are not the same. As a matter of fact they are 300 years removed form each other.Enough of this idiocy. My brain hurst.

I don't know why you think that. Waldensianism was founded in the late 12th century, it overlapped with Albigensianism.

I meant the Crusades against them.I did not speak clearly. The Albigensian crusade was in 1208. The Waldensians were persecuted through this time but the crusade against them was not declared by the pope until 1487.Splitting of hairs I know. The point was that Faith's source did not know that they were different.

It's not an accusation. It's a genre observation.Myth is a genre. As is history. Myth expresses itself primarily in symbols, history in facts.A history makes a thorough investigation of facts, then attempts to understand those facts. In a myth, symbols drive the story. Facts, if they appear at all, serve the symbols.Your so-called 'true history' of Christianity is thus myth. You tell us of archetypal heroes and villains, Protestant Jedis and Catholic Siths. You gloss over important aspects of Christian history (the conversion of Constantine, the existence of millions of Eastern Orthodox Christians), you utter fatuous falsehoods ('the state church of Russia'), and you play up trivia (the pope's funny hat). Facts are not the star in your narrative. Crafting symbols is all. This is not history. This is myth.Human beings are storytelling creatures. Our brains have two hemispheres. We process both symbolic and literal modes of expression. Both myths and histories can be useful to us.Great mischief ensues, though, when people naively confuse genres. It doesn't do to ask symbols to do the work of facts, or vice versa.Your attempt to pass off your tribe's Golden Age myth as 'true history' is just such a naive exercise.___

I wrote: Faith responded: And again: Here's the list again with references.Some Christians in the early church... ...altered the Eucharist beyond recognition
1 Corinthians 11.20-33 ...required observance of Jewish customs (notably circumcision)
Galatians 2.7-16
Philippians 3.2-4
Galatians 5.10-12 ...married multiple spouses
1 Timothy 3.2
Titus 1.6 ...ate meat sacrificed to idols
Acts 15.20, 29
1 Corinthians 8.4-13 ...conducted disorderly meetings
1 Corinthians 14.26-27, 32-33, 39-40 ...debated which of their teachers were true apostles and which were not
1 Corinthians 9.1-3
2 Corinthians 12.11-12
Galatians 1.15-2.9 ...quoted apocryphal literature as authoritative
Jude 1.9, 14-15 ... and said 'faith without works is dead.'
James 2.20, 26Faith has hit a rare trifecta. She has proven herself ignorant of science, history, and the very scriptures she claims to revere.

All I'm ignorant of is your weird way of representing the incidents in scripture. "Altered the Eucharist beyond recognition" is meaningless to me. For one thing the word Eucharist means nothing to me, I have to think twice to even know you could possibly be referring to something in scripture.The rest of your list is equally offensively and obscurely worded and I have no motivation to look them up to find out what on esrth you mean by some of it.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.