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Converting Scientologists to Christianity: A How-To Blog

Abletu

Patron with Honors
Religion was considered for thousands of years the place to go for mental, physical and/or spiritual healing.

Jesus was a healer without a licence. By who's authority...

See how long it takes you before your crucified for practicing medicine without a licence.

Jesus loathed idolatry, scams and inequality between the sexes.

St Peter's mindset rebranded religion into a scam, sexual based inequality and an idolatry faith practice.

St Peter's and St Paul's mindset of idolatry, inquisition and sexist inequality was passed on generation after generation after generation and still going strong.

I had swallowed enough of christianity's love to make me puke.

Jesus said "What I can do you can do and more!" means what he practiced you can learn.

Dianetics and scientology is about healing. Fiction needs to be real to be believable and Ron was the best speculative writer I have ever read.

To me it means I can learn how to bring ease to and align three separate universes, the spirit, mind and body into a working healthy whole, a dis-ease free whole.
 
Mick,

Mark seems to be under the impression that Christianity is a monolithic entity and Superstructure of Europe.

I am assuming this because of his phrase "Christian Empire" which implies a monolithic Imperial structure.

He's wrong.

The Anabaptist Jacques

False assumption. The time period under discussion was the onset of christian dominance within the Roman Empire which radically changed the social & legal nature of Imperial Rome. Christianity was not simply "spontaneously adopted" throughout Europe. It was as a direct result of a concerted political agenda put in place under the Christian Imperium.

This really isn't hard or obscure stuff. [addendum: especially as you know my primary interest lies in the Greco-Roman World.]


Mark A. Baker
 
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What is your reference for your comparison of Christian harassment versus pagan harassment in Rome? ...

Read the letters of Pliny. Compare with records of the 4th & 5th Centuries of the Imperium after the rise of christianity to political power. Above all read the histories and not simply christian apologetics.


... When did this campaign start, what were it's high points? How do you account for the simple fact that islam conquered the entire Iberian peninsula and charged up to France in the 800's? kind of pokes a hole in the contention. Or how about the later incursion into what became the Balkans? ...

The later advance of Islam into Europe had nothing to do with the initiation of the christian persecution of pagans. That was a much much later time period. Although to some degree they were influenced in that Islam drew on christianity and christian traditions for much of its early inspiration.


Mark A. Baker
 
False assumption. The time period under discussion was the onset of christian dominance within the Roman Empire which radically changed the social & legal nature of Imperial Rome. Christianity was not simply "spontaneously adopted" throughout Europe. It was as a direct result of a concerted political agenda put in place under the Christian Imperium.

This really isn't hard or obscure stuff. [addendum: especially as you know my primary interest lies in the Greco-Roman World.]


Mark A. Baker

Sorry Mark, you are overstating the case. There was no Christian Imperium.

No one is saying that there were not struggles and atrocities.

What I have said and still maintain is that they are exaggerated.

That things happened is true.

That they happened to the extent that you described earlier insisting is false.

By the way, if I remember correctly (and I don't always), wasn't Pliny writing to the emperor and advised him on how the Christians conceal their identity?

If he is the guy I am thinking of then at the time he wrote the Christians were still the persecuted ones. But they were persecuted because of their unwillingness to worship Jupiter or something like that.

The Anabaptist Jacques
 

Claire Swazey

Spokeshole, fence sitter
False assumption. The time period under discussion was the onset of christian dominance within the Roman Empire which radically changed the social & legal nature of Imperial Rome. Christianity was not simply "spontaneously adopted" throughout Europe. It was as a direct result of a concerted political agenda put in place under the Christian Imperium.

This really isn't hard or obscure stuff. [addendum: especially as you know my primary interest lies in the Greco-Roman World.]


Mark A. Baker

According to historian Susan Wise Bauer, you're right on the money on this.
 
Speaking of spiritual abuse, Scientology has a long ways to go to catch up with Christianity. Religion is a form of control that should not be forced on anyone, under any circumstances. Walk into any Christian service and the pastor WILL do his best to ram his belief system down your throat. If you resist, you go to a Hell that was created by a loving God for all that are not in agreement with the church, padding their bank account and following their path to salvation. If you decide to think for yourself and pursue spiritual development on your own, then you are practicing demonology.

NO!!!

that is NOT what religion is

that is repeatedly what the local bipeds have done with it
 

Claire Swazey

Spokeshole, fence sitter
Ok, so what is it you think she said?

Whom? Susan Wise Bauer? Don't confuse me, I'm blonde.

If so, yeah, she said that it was adopted by Constantine as a unifying factor. Religion as unifying factor. Plus I went into a diatribe a couple posts ago about the folly of mixing church and state and speculating that this might be the bigger issue with the problematic aspects of religion.

I like religious history and I think it dovetails well with analyzing the cult/religion type critiques that come up here. Others may prefer to take that issue from a different standpoint.
 

Spirit

just another son of God
Unification? Could DM be the same being as Constantine? After all, Constantine was a squirrel of Christ's teachings and of God's Word...

Quoted Source

The Bible's Ungodly Origins
by Robert L. Johnson
Many rank and file Christians sincerely believe the Bible is a direct communication from God to man. I know I used to believe it was when I was a Christian. And from recent conversations with many sincere Christians I know this is currently true for many believers. Once it is proven to our God-given reason that the Bible is strictly a man-made collection of mythology the mind loses yet another shackle of "revelation" and is soon on its way to full freedom and progress.​
The Bible was not handed to mankind by God, nor was it dictated to human stenographers by God. It has nothing to do with God. In actuality, the Bible was VOTED to be the word of God by a group of men during the 4th century.
According to Professor John Crossan of Biblical Studies at DePaul University the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (274-337 CE), (a bust of Constantine is pictured below) who was the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity, needed a single canon to be agreed upon by the Christian leaders to help him unify the remains of the Roman Empire. Until this time the various Christian leaders could not decide which books would be considered "holy" and thus "the word of God" and which ones would be excluded and not considered the word of God.
 

auntpat

Patron with Honors
Mark,

Your viewpoint on Christianity reminds me of black friends of mine who insist that they should have free college and other advantages, because their great, great, great, great grandfather was a white man's slave. Or how I feel when " CHRISTIANS" start reciting scripture to me from old testament laws.

I believe that the young blacks ever how many greats grandfather would tell him , if he wanted respect and advantages to go out and kill a lion. I believe that you would have a difficult job finding very many Christians celebrating your viewpoints of how some Non-christians were treated in the past.

And my statement to the Bible thummpers who attempt to innforce their reality on me, " What the fuck does that have to do with me?"

More Love and Light,
Aunt Pat


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