Doesn't the basic tenants of Christianity seem incredibly superficial

Doesn't the basic tenants of Christianity seem incredibly superficial.

If you are a Protestant all you have to do is 'have faith'. As if proclaiming something really means anything. If you are Catholic you need 'works' which translates to a few rituals of pathetic challenge (dunk some water on your head. Eat a cracker. etc.)


What I am saying is the concept of 'action' seems to be completly detached from Christianity

And you can see that when theology about conduct is discussed it is always about pussying out of it. For example the Jesus character makes it quit clear he does not want his followers to possess any money. He also wants people to spend their whole life going door to door discussing the coming Armageddon (this basically what he himself did) and when he wasn't being a doomsayer he was devoting himself to the poor and ugly; washing their feet, tending to their illness. He went out of his way to find the lowest members of societies and acted servant to them. This is how he conducted his life and what he preached. Than there is the aspect of martyrdom. Jesus was a martyred on the cross, so were everyone of his original followers. When he said do not resist your enemy he meant it in the most hardcore way possible.

All of these called to actions are hand waved away by theology. You don't LITERALLY need to have no money, to help the meek, to not resist being tortured and killed...no just continue doing your everyday life. And it makes sense because it's a lifestyle of extreme self-destruction, as evidenced by the miserable lives the Jesus and his earliest followers all lived. So all we get is this wimpy little list of rituals or a checklist of 'faith'.

Other urls found in this thread:

christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-14/luther-on-use-of-money.html
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

I agree and the reasons are very simple the Christians that truly followed those templates closest were killed out quite quickly and or lost power because they were poor. So on a theological grounds it is nonensense, but politically it makes perfect sense.

Those are Western Christianity issues, though. The others accept martyrdom, sacrifice, and unapologetic apologetics .

Thank goodness if it is the case. I'm tired of spiritual benefit being arduously difficult.

>If you are a Protestant all you have to do is 'have faith'. As if proclaiming something really means anything.
That is not what the concept of sola fide means.
>If you are Catholic you need 'works' which translates to a few rituals of pathetic challenge
And that's not what Catholicism means by works.

As for the rest of it, you're fundamentally misreading and not thinking deeper than surface level already, so it's a waste of time, honestly.

Have you talked to any Christians? Most will tell you they are Christian because they believe "Jesus is God". The hardcore ones will say that they even spend a whole a week going to church.

People in the past took the faith and rituals a little more seriously but these are none the less superficial religious practices. I'll give you an idea of a really demanding religious practice. In the Aztec religion you need to sacrifice blood, not 'the wine which was magically turned into blood' but actual blood. This meant you had to train to be a warrior and literally bring back a prisoner of war so he could be killed. If you were too pussy to do that than the you had to give up your OWN blood. And if you were too pussy to bleed yourself the other members of the religion would get pissed off and bleed you themself.

In other words it was a religion about "action" the action it tried to make it's followers do was win at war.

Ritual and faith are superficial compared to action. You could even say that the Spanish conquistadors were closer to the Aztec religion than the Christian one. Because they actions they took were very Aztec but he opposite types of Jesus proposes. The fact that they wear crosses and at a biscuit blessed by a priest once a week is superficial.

Amen and nice get.

>What I am saying is the concept of 'action' seems to be completly detached from Christianity
In nearly every Gospel Jesus talks how your works are important and how we are to be judged by them. And in James' letter it is explicitly said how our faith will be judged by our works. And how faith with no works is dead and worthless.
Protestants are just ignoring those verses. They wave with one verse from letter to Romans and think it absolves them from teachings of Christianity.
yes, being kind, pure, gentle, generous and patient are important Christian virtues. Loving each other is crucial for being called Christian because love for God and another man is the greatest commandment of them all. And how do you want to love another without acting on it? You can't. Without works, there is no love. Without love, your faith is dead.

The spiritual benefit you get from something is preciously equal to what you put in. It's like everything else with life.

If you only have 'faith' in the dumb bells but never exert yourself than you won't gain an ounce of muscle. If you have a 'ritual' you do before reading books but never read you will never learn anything.

So low requirement spirituality gives low spiritual returns. That is why there is a great spirtual crisis right now. We are dumbed down drastically compared to the past. The amount of rituals, prayers, church attendance are all low. So most Christians don't even have the superficial rituals of the past. For example in the past it was considered good form to read the bible once a year. Now it is considered good form to have read it once in a life time.

And who the hell spends all their morning going door to door delivering the "news" and their nights washing the feet of prostitutes. This is what the Jesus and his followers did for 3 fucking years. He asked his followers to not even care if they would have new shoes.

Your doing exactly what I said all Christians do. Hand-waving the actions your religion demands of you. When Jesus said throw away your possessions he was speaking literally. The requirements he set up were fucking brutual and he never spoke of exceptions.

If you were to judge Christians by their "actions" the only real Christians would be the original 12 apostles, Jesus and Saint Francis. However if you judge by adherence to "ritual" or "faith" than fuck there's billions of Christians. I understand in certain Catholic circles if your a day 1 infant and a priest blessed water and sprinkles it on your head you already cleared the hurdle before you learned how to walk.

Any spiritual blessings a Christian receives are the free gifts of God and not products of their own efforts. Sadly, many people choose not to receive these gifts from our Father because they are preoccupied with their works. It's unfortunate that many of these people try to have a transactional relationship with God where they looking for a return on their investment in Him when in reality He just wants to be their Dad.

Christ weren't preaching door to door, He and His disciples just attended synagogues as every pious Jew did

Good works are just ways for showing God our love.
Of course transactional relationship is wrong and all Christians teach that. Yes, Catholics too.

There is only one transaction in Christianity and it is faith in exchange for salvation.

In Mark the first thing he does when he begin's his ministry is to tell his disciples to gather everyone and announce doomsday is coming. The biography consists almost entirely of him traveling from town to town doing this in between comforting the sickly and weak. Sometimes he is even described as having to 'flee', no doubt because he and his followers are doomsayers telling people the Apocalypse will come in their life time.

As a mater of fact this sort of ministry that is filled with serving the poor, doomsaying, and occasionally standing his ground with other ministries constitutes almost the entire sum of Jesus's documented life.

If you treat it as a transaction, you're just missing the point of it.

Faith without works is empty faith.

Jesus called it the new covenant for a reason.

True faith produces works.

The parable of the good Samaritan is prime example of this.

The priest and Levite of course were faithful people, but they did nothing to help the beating victim. The Samaritan did a good work.

And in hundreds of other places it is aaid that they preach in synagogues and, in Jerusalem, in the Temple. Not going from door to door. People were gathering in synagogues, go figures.

This guy gets it.

The priest and Levite were not faithful because they did not keep the commandment to love their neighbor as themselves.

Some protestants would say that a samaritan as a non-believer was incapable of doing anything good so him saving the victim was a sin. Yeah, some people believe that.

Protestants aren't people though.

And modern western Christians aren't faithful because they do not abide by the usury rules set forth in the old and new testament.

Luther would have despised the modern Protestant movement and Republican party in the United States.

christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-14/luther-on-use-of-money.html

Quads of truth

Any person who places their faith in Christ will be saved regardless of their failures.

And what about "they will call me Lord Lord but I will say go, I don't know you"?

They clearly never put their faith in Him if they never took the time to get to know Him.

Yes, but if you do not do good works you have no faith.

You cannot say you are faithful, when you sit on your ass and do nothing for your neighbors when they are suffering.

Amen and good works are done in faith.

Shut up stop insulting my religion and culture.

True works come with true faith. Anything else is a desperate grasp pretending to be those works

That's because it is. Christianity was designed to be incredibly accessible.

Yeah man, Christianity is actually pretty worrying. Jesus almost specifically asks you to give away all your wealth so you can help the poor. There is the whole line about unrepentant sinners being marked among the non-believers.

And most annoyingly of all tome is the sin of idle speech. You are suppose to take a vow of silence? Wow. Looks like nearly everyone is going to hell.

The historical Jesus didn't beleive in hell. That was really Paul's idea. Paul is also the guy that tried to make the religion less hardcore. That's why his version was popular while the original had almost no followers. Paul's brand eventually won because it was the most accessible and had a concept of the afterlife to reward/punish you.

To give you an example in the origenal version you also had to obey every Old Testament Law. No mixed fabric, no pork, there's hundreds of those laws. Also his original version of the religion was only for other Jews. And keep in mind you are not going to heaven for any of this. It wasn't a religion for the average man but for someone looking for a super hardcore aesthetic life style.

Paul made it open for everyone and axed all the Old Testament laws (he actually wanted to cut the entire OT out of the cannon but his push for that failed) and tried to make it so a 'faith' in Jesus's resurrection fixed everything. Paul did invent a few hardcore rules himself: no sex, no reproducing. But for obvious reasons the final version of Christianity hand-waved away the rules and said they only applied to priests of a certain rank (in some traditions they are discarded entirely).

The Gospels are the most reliable account we have of Jesus' teachings and in them He talks about Hell more than any other person in Bible.

>People in the past took the faith and rituals a little more seriously
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Fuck off, retard. Try reading a history book before posting here. Or pretty much any major manual of Christian life and spirituality, Protestant OR Catholic.

No historian worth his salt will tell you Gospels present an accurate description of Jesus. You have the origenal account and than you have it being recorded, edited, and changed to fit the political and theological needs of the writer. Than changed again when later versions hit. And that's the parts that are not simply made up.

For context it is beleived none of the Gospels were written by who they say they are and only half of Paul's writing were actually written by him.

In the past forgeries were incredibly easy to create. The fact that Jesus and all his original apostles were illiterate make Christianity one of the best targets for forgery as known of the original members wrote a damn thing down. Essentially people put word's in Jesus's mouth.

Also the number of copies is meaningless since the earliest fucking copies are from 350 years after the event. There is no fucking way any of those are free from corruption. Hell we have entirely new stories being added as late as the 900s (the story where Jesus tells the Rabbis to not slut shame a woman. It's an entire chapter and it literally never appears till the 900s).

You are free to put your faith in the scribes if you so choose.

You need to do more research if you really think mainline protestant sects call for 'only faith' and catholics call for 'only works'.

I know Christians like to meme on each other over who's holiest, but coming from a guy who grew up in a Catholic school and who now goes to a Baptist church, both sides more or less agree on the importance of both, as is called for in the Book.

Mate, there's more manuscripts about the Gospel than there's about the current Emperor of that time. There's more than 5k manuscripts, and none of them contradicts another. The earliest copies were from around 50 AD, check your facts boi. And stop with this Paul bullshit, he considered himself not even being worthy an apostle because he persecuted the Church of Christ, even in the Bible shows that Peter was the leader of the Church of Jerusalem, the main church.

HAHAHAHA and you say the apostles were illiterate????? 60 times Jesus asked the Pharisees and Sadducees “haven’t you read?” not “haven’t you heard?” go see on the gospels hahahahha. But wait, explain to me, how Matthew,a tax-colector could not read, and explain to all of us how Luke, a doctor,
didn't know to read?

Oh and tell me, if Christianity was forged and distorted, what did the Apostles gained from it?
( PROTIP: it revolves around being beheaded, set on fire and being crucified in many ways.)

>And who the hell spends all their morning going door to door delivering the "news" and their nights washing the feet of prostitutes.
>This is what the Jesus and his followers did for 3 fucking years.

No. The Gospel are incredibly compressed accounts of the Life of Christ written so as to convey the absolute core and center of His message and His Great Act of salvation.

Also,
>When Jesus said throw away your possessions he was speaking literally.

No, Christian worth his salt will ever deny that a core principle of Christ's teachings is detachment from the material world. He did not, however, specify total relinquishment of all of ones possessions.

>If you were to judge Christians by their "actions"

You fundamentally misunderstand the core tenant of Christianity. If every Christian were to be TRULY judged on their own merits and actions before the Lord Our God, none could withstand His withering sight. NONE. The whole center of Christianity is that it is through Christ that we are saved. Salvation is offered freely to all men. We need only accept it.