VICE news calling African spirituality "witchcraft"
- Thread starter Cape Town JHB
- Start date
Many of us don't even know where our ancestors are from.
Jesus is white?nikkas would sit up all day calling whites evil and barbaric but get down on their knees at night and pray to a white man as their savior. You can't make this shyt up.
People pray to Jesus? I th ought it was praying to God in Jesus name?
Field Marshall Bradley
Veteran
There is good and bad in it... and depending on what they are practicing it’s not fair to call it witch craft... However, most of these chicks just want to feel like they cast spells with impunity on people whom they feel like wronged them somehow
I have mad beef too, Aquinas was a ridiculous person who based most of his shyt on pagan philosophy and completely misguided "logic" rather than any actual understanding of God. He did a lot of damage to theology with repercussions that continue today.what's your beef with dude's theology?
010101
C L O N E*0690//////
stop getting finessed by products of pure imagination & get familiar with reality*
MischievousMonkey
Gor bu dëgër
I'm curious because I've never heard of these criticisms. My study of him in class was rather superficial so it makes sense.
Are you referring to the Aristotelian principles he borrowed when you're talking about "pagan" stuff?
Also, about the "logic" that he uses, my understanding is that he was of the opinion that reason can also be used as a way to access to God, or at least to deduce his existence, but can't reach its essence. That he didn't see philosophy and theology as incompatible, but the first as the servant of the latter.
Could you maybe sum up how he durably hurt theology?
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Honestly, black people are too indoctrinated in white mans religion to the point where they looking at their own native ancestory and roots as demonic. The effects of post traumatic slavery syndrome is real, folks.
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It would be a deep dive that I don't want to get into completely right now cause I got other work to do, but probably the central biggest thing he did was further advance and solidify Anselm's notion of penal substitution atonement, a very limited way of viewing Jesus's death that was eventually elevated in Western theology to basically the central dogma of Christianity (and unsurprisingly even moreso in the Protestant churches than be the Catholic church itself). I don't have my relevant books here so I can't quote specifically but I (and many others) feel that Anselm/Aquinas has a very human-warped view of salvation influenced by the structures of their own feudal society, and much of it has been rejected or pushed off as overreaching by Eastern/African theologians.
In terms of logic, one of the central differences in thought between the African/Eastern churches and certain Western thinkers is the comfort level with mystery, the ability to hold multiple principles in tension or to understand that we don't know everything of the mind of God. To many Eastern theologians, a general truth stated about God can be understood to be generally true and informative even if we don't know how it applies to some exceptional case. We can believe something to be "generally true" even if there are exceptions we don't understand. But certain Western thinkers like Aquinas appear to me to treat the Bible like a scientific formula, and rather than hold multiple principles in tension or accept that some things are difficult for humans to understand compared to the all-encompassing mind of God, they have to apply human logic to break down every word and phrase and potential contradiction, which ends up getting them even further from the truth because they force the text to prove things it was never saying. For example, making up the separate, unBiblical categories of "Providential Will" and "Moral Will" to explain God's desires or creating the categories of "ceremonial law" and "moral law" to divide the Old Testament in ways it was never meant to be divided (I don't recall if Aquinas himself used those particular phrases, just using them as examples of the kind of issues that Western theology has often led to.). Because they are uncomfortable with ambiguity/mystery, because they insist on things like, "Every word of the text is infallible!" to mean that it has be to categorized and broken down in a very human manner, they end up becoming more enslaved to their own definitions of words than to the nature and character of God's own self, and create an image of God (which reached the fullest, worst form in John Calvin's Reformation Theology and modern-day followers like John Piper, Douglas Wilson, etc.) that bears no relation to the God I see when I see Jesus Christ.
yeah but you are looking for differences while largely using Rome as your reasoning. Greece/Antioch had a whole different storylineThey "co-existed" at the same time. They were obviously aware of each other's existence and communicated. But the Ethiopian and Egyptian Coptic churches were NEVER under the authority of the church of Rome or Greece. They operated completely independently. Like the UN you can meet from time to time (only in that age "time to time" was measured in centuries rather than years) and try to come to agreements with each other, but the church of Alexandria and the church of Rome were founded by different people completely independently of each other, with the Alexandria church almost certainly founded first, and neither was ever under the other.
You're saying artists in the Mediterranean world were vaguely aware of each other's existence while producing quite different styles and that shows....?
Breh my wife is a devout Egyptian Copt, I'm pretty well aware of the differences.
The Church of Alexandria and the Church of Rome were founded at different times by different people, but are originally based on the same divine person of Jesus, the same teachings of the Apostles, the same Gospel message and largely the same books of the Bible (none of which were written by Europeans). So obviously their theology will have the same root similarities. But the cultural outlook under which they were founded and evolved is completely different. From the beginning they operated in different languages, with different cultural emphasis and different theological frameworks. For a while they had a loose but usually friendly connection, then after the disputes in the 300s/400s they went 1500 years with virtually no connection at all.
Emphasizing that independence is important both cause of European whites who wish to claim Christianity for themselves and for non-whites who wish to dismiss Christianity as a White Religion. Yes, hopefully if you follow the same God and His prophets then you will have fundamental similarities. But African Christianity was not founded by Europeans, does not follow a European Jesus, and was never under Europe or relied on Europe for its understanding of itself and its relationship with God.
orthodox christendom is largely similar from my perspective. It's just liturgical language that separates.
it's painting a story of Christianity being ethnic in nature
thats only a byproduct of the places the apostles went to. Now Rome a whole different animal because of the original pagan state religion of Rome combining with authority from Carolingian dynastyBible Gateway passage: James 4 - King James Version
Piff Perkins
Veteran
They call themselves witches.
JesusFOREVER
Superstar
Theyre right thats its witchcraft but their intentions are harming, they just dont want them digging deeper and deeper into their roots and discovering that the Messias is indeed a black man and claiming their true heritage
JesusFOREVER
Superstar
Most of our people have been beaten into submission and we just have to accept itNotice this didn't get any daps. Typical.