Dis n Dat on Religions

Dipping into the world of Christian fundamentalists, you can see the regular style of rhetoric. Every sphere has its own, but theirs is pretty recognizable. The tricks and turns, the alternating combo of fire-breathing, co-conspiratorial winking, scripture verse quoting, and good ol' boy joshing. Black preachers are especially adept at this. I consider the flamboyant preaching tactics of evangelicals to be the verbal parallel to the formalist rituals of the High Church types.

Like White Nationalists, they spend a lot of time enthusiastically excommunicating each other as "false teachers." Calvinists vs Arminians, Christian Zionists vs Christian Supersessionists, King James Only vs New Translations, Dispensationalists vs Nons, etc.

The wacky world of sola scriptura. To my (admittedly fallen away but still very) Catholic ears, it all seems cramped and obsessive: predestination, etc. And narcoleptic. Trying to get me to care about these debates has about as much chance as attracting my moral anxiety over dancing, drinking and smoking.

But I will give it one thumbs up: it is an entirely male world focused on the truth of ideas, based on evidence and logic. Certainly not the mushy kindergarten victimfest of, say, the eco-fem LCWR and their post-menopausal bloviations.

It seems that, along with Universal Equality, the Churches --Rome included, Orthodoxy not-- have seemingly forgotten their bimillenial theological basic assumption that the New Covenant supercedes the Old. It is now suddenly called anti-semitic "supersessionism". (Do Muslims, I wonder, ever get accused of "supersessionism" or just Christians?) Sorta like the natural political and social order of human societies suddenly being turned into oppressively sexist "patriarchy."

One thing I note is that the relationship between Christian Zionists and American Jews is definitely a one-way affair. Along with Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro reminds us that the real "religion" of their fellow modern Jews is secularist Leftism and the Holocaust; only a minority practice actual historic Judaism. I wonder if the evangelicals waving their Israeli flags pay much attention to how unrequited their love is.



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