Christianity vs. Christianism!
Alvin Boyd Kuhn said it this way, “It is evident that, like most events in human history, the Christian movement developed into something quite different from what was intended from the beginning.” The original Christianity, under Constantine and other demanding church fathers, was developed into yet another ISM- thus more schisms!
Christianity began as a PAGAN religion. Such a description would scare the beejeebees out of most mainline Christians. Simply put Paganism meant “country dweller”, and it was a blanket term used to refer to various non-Abrahamic religious traditions. In other words, they were BAD, and they were OUT, because “they” weren’t like “we”.
You know how the game is played, right?
In a wider sense, extended to contemporary religions, it includes most of the Eastern religions, and the indigenous traditions of the Americas, Central Asia, Australia and Africa, as well as non-Abrahamic folk religion in general. Today, ethnologists avoid the term “paganism,” with its uncertain and varied meanings, in referring to traditional or historic faiths, preferring more precise categories such as polytheism, shamanism, pantheism, or animism (all four of course being BAD words).
Tom Harpur in his book, The Pagan Christ, wrote, “There was one primal, central myth- originating undoubtedly from Egypt- and all teh rest flowed from that. In Christianity, however, the myths were eventually literalized. Jesus was historicized. The consequences of this were to prove very damaging over the centuries to come. A believer had to put his or her trust in Jesus ALONE to know both divinity and resurrection. That’s the kind of religion on which I, like many of you, was rasied. The
Pages: 1 2