You really must get steamed by anyone calling you out on your hyberbolic comments
Larry Send a noteboard - 12/03/2012 06:55:06 PM
You really need to educate yourself better before trying to make unfounded suppositions into fact. Tom's pretty much laid out why your positions are wrong and all you do is dig yourself a deeper hole. There was nothing "rountine" about syncretic practices; those were rooted out when detected. Santería and Vodoun are not Christian/Catholic practices and the Church purged of its list of saints sometime back anyone suspected of being tied to such practices, in accordance with long-standing policy. To claim otherwise is to engage in fallacy.
How does a 20th Century purge of canonized pagan deities refute the notion pagan deities had been canonized in the 8th-11th Centuries? It never happened, in 2000 years of church history, because (some) cases where it did were expunged <50 years ago?
That was the latest of a series of efforts to root out popular corruptions of official doctrine. It goes back much further than that, but I didn't (and don't) have the time to spell it out.
So Irish St. Brigid and Celtic deity Brigid sharing the name, feast day and center of veneration (for the former) and worship (for the latter) is just coincidence?
To a degree, yes.
It is mere happenstance St. George slew a marauding fantastic beast to which a North African princess was offered as sacrifice, just as Perseus with Andromeda?
You really are grasping at straws to keep your tangent floating, aren't you?
Virginal St. Columba pursued by a suitor to a location where a spring arose at the site of her demise only superficially reflects the myth of Arethusa?
How many hours of internet searching did you do in an attempt to try and turn a tangent of your discredited original statement into something worth arguing, at least in your own mind?
Those are only the strongest examples I found in the past day, leaving out things like purported connections between Kali and St. Sarah.
Oh, the past day. Sounds like several hours of work to try and refute someone who stated that the Church's official stance is to root out syncretic practices among its populace, including the removal from the official list of saints those proven to be altered forms of pagan deities. Having popular custom try to carry over aspects of older beliefs onto historical people is frowned upon and has been for a long, long time, but it still persists. So what the fuck does it have to do with your ridiculous statements on iconoclasm and the Great Schism? Not a damn thing.
Iconoclasm was not a serious matter for the West (the Western churches being more or less indifferent to ikons compared to statuaries) and the matter was more or less resolved centuries before the Great Schism. That split was, as Tom said, due to a host of other factors much, much more significant (I suspect iconoclasm wasn't on the agenda then) than how ikons were to be venerated/not displayed. It might behoove you to just for once shut up and listen to someone who has more knowledge than something half-(mis)remembered in some high school history text (for the record, none of the texts I've used over the years taught anything of the sort when it came to the Great Schism. Must be a Texas state board insertion somewhere 
).
).Then the TEA gets around, corrupting not only Wikipedias article on the Great Schism to state
Emperor Leo III the Isaurian outlawed the veneration of icons in the 8th century. This policy, which came to be called Iconoclasm, was rejected by the West with the exception of Emperor Charlemagne, who commissioned the Libri Carolini which affirmed a condemnation of the veneration of icons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism#Other_points_of_conflict
but also its article on Pope Stephen II to claim
Relations were very strained in the mid-8th century between the papacy and the Eastern Roman emperors over the support of the Isaurian Dynasty for iconoclasm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Stephen_II#Allegiance_to_Constantinople
Apparently the TEA insidious falsehood even corrupted the Catholic Encyclopedia, or at least its online transcription, because its article on Iconoclasm begins,
Iconoclasm (Eikonoklasmos, "Image-breaking" is the name of the heresy that in the eighth and ninth centuries disturbed the peace of the Eastern Church, caused the last of the many breaches with Rome that prepared the way for the schism of Photius, and was echoed on a smaller scale in the Frankish kingdom in the West. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07620a.htm
is the name of the heresy that in the eighth and ninth centuries disturbed the peace of the Eastern Church, caused the last of the many breaches with Rome that prepared the way for the schism of Photius, and was echoed on a smaller scale in the Frankish kingdom in the West. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07620a.htmNote the claim iconoclasm "prepared the way" for the Photian schism, despite ending before that schism began. The Photian schism was, of course, not the 1054 schism, but its disagreements are integral to the final formal schism. Again, the Great Schism developed over centuries of disagreement between Rome and Constantinople, only culminating in the final 1054 declaration. Iconoclasm was very much part of the preceding centuries of difference. Consider the third paragraph of the Catholic Encyclopedias article on iconoclasm:
The pope at that time was Gregory II (713-31). Even before he had received the appeal of Germanus a letter came from the emperor commanding him to accept the edict, destroy images at Rome, and summon a general council to forbid their use. Gregory answered, in 727, by a long defence of the pictures. He explains the difference between them and idols, with some surprise that Leo does not already understand it. He describes the lawful use of, and reverence paid to, pictures by Christians. He blames the emperor's interference in ecclesiastical matters and his persecution of image-worshippers. A council is not wanted; all Leo has to do is to stop disturbing the peace of the Church. As for Leo's threat that he will come to Rome, break the statue of St. Peter (apparently the famous bronze statue in St. Peter's), and take the pope prisoner, Gregory answers it by pointing out that he can easily escape into the Campagna, and reminding the emperor how futile and now abhorrent to all Christians was Constans's persecution of Martin I. He also says that all people in the West detest the emperor's action and will never consent to destroy their images at his command (Greg. II, "Ep. I ad Leonem"). The emperor answered, continuing his argument by saying that no general council had yet said a word in favour of images that he himself is emperor and priest (basileus kai lereus) in one and therefore has the right to make decrees about such matters. Gregory writes back regretting that Leo does not yet see the error of his ways. As for the former general Councils, they did not pretend to discuss every point of the faith; it was unnecessary in those days to defend what no one attacked. The title Emperor and Priest had been conceded as a compliment to some sovereigns because of their zeal in defending the very faith that Leo now attacked. The pope declares himself determined to withstand the emperor's tyranny at any cost, though he has no defence but to pray that Christ will send a demon to torture the emperor's body that his soul be saved, according to 1 Corinthians 5:5.
That sure SOUNDS like the Great Schisms jurisdictional disputes. The imperial threat to march on Rome, destroy a prominent icon of Peter and imprison the Pope also sounds like "a serious matter for the West." Enough so that the Pope declared "all people in the West detest the emperor's action."
It sounds like nothing but resurrecting a dead corpse to make an argument. That issue was settled nearly two centuries prior to 1054 (and even that was not the final break between the two main branches of the Church, as there were temporary reconciliations through the Council of Florence in the 14th century and promises even up to the years immediately preceding the fall of Constantinople in 1453). You might as well have argued that the Pelagian heresy led to an irreparable split that caused the Protestant Reformation for as much sense as your linking of an irrelevant event to something that transpired around a host of other issues. There are theological differences between the Orthodox and Catholic churches, but nothing to do with the veneration of ikons/statuaries. That you want to persist and bring up Photius when that issue was settled definitively centuries before is just ridiculous. Do you live to have people berate you for not having a full grasp of what you are trying to argue?
At the risk of excoriation for citing documented common knowledge, the Great Schism developed over centuries, not months, as Byzantine and Roman policy became so increasingly disparate reconciliation was impossible. Iconoclasm is widely cited AMONG factors leading to the Great Schism, though obviously not the only factor. It contributed to growing separation continuing even after the iconoclasm dispute was resolved (though I doubt Popes just forgave and forgot imperial threats to march on and imprison them for venerating icons, considering a Patriarch of Constantinople was publicly flogged and blinded for opposing iconoclasm.) The separation found its formal, final and permanent expression in the Great Schism but, although iconoclasm had long since ended by then, the documented record does not support claims iconoclasm was distinct from or trivial to the separation.
Joel, just shut the fuck up. You've demonstrated that you don't know the material, that you cite extraneous information that serves no point other than to permit you to repeat ad nauseam bits that were already stated a long, long, long time ago to be insignificant detritus to a host of issues that persist today.
Illusions fall like the husk of a fruit, one after another, and the fruit is experience. - Narrator, Sylvie
Je suis méchant.
Je suis méchant.
Atheism: The Iconoclasm of the West?
- 10/03/2012 05:42:56 AM
1294 Views
I think about as highly of athiesm as I do of christianity. *NM*
- 10/03/2012 05:54:20 AM
356 Views
I would chide you on that basis for having a love/hate relationship with God, but who does not?
- 10/03/2012 06:05:11 AM
524 Views
- 10/03/2012 06:05:11 AM
524 Views
If the divine made men...
- 10/03/2012 06:27:42 AM
519 Views
True, but by the same token, in denying our nature we deny the divine.
- 10/03/2012 06:57:40 AM
534 Views
I was actually just saying in Skype this is the first post you've made in a long time I've enjoyed.
- 10/03/2012 07:02:56 AM
553 Views
It is all Dans fault, really.
But you do comparable things all the time!
- 10/03/2012 08:35:31 AM
747 Views
You've made this analogy before and it's still a bad one, those aren't comparable
- 10/03/2012 03:43:08 PM
632 Views
You said what I was thinking far more respectfully than I probably would have.
- 11/03/2012 12:14:55 AM
600 Views
You're right and wrong.
- 10/03/2012 05:09:32 PM
944 Views
Re: You're right and wrong.
- 11/03/2012 12:28:25 AM
851 Views
Nope, Buddhists are explicitly atheist and also explicitly Ontologically engaged
- 11/03/2012 01:39:20 AM
852 Views
Actually, Buddhists are not explicitly atheist in the conventional sense of the world.
- 11/03/2012 02:42:36 AM
650 Views
I guess it is that old impersonalism that seems the great disappointment in most Eastern religions.
- 11/03/2012 04:48:54 AM
753 Views
What you talkin' 'bout, Willis? *NM*
- 10/03/2012 06:29:35 PM
279 Views
I think he's saying that most arguments used on behalf of Atheism actually come from the Bible.
- 10/03/2012 06:58:50 PM
641 Views
Basically what Dan said; atheism as iconoclasm sans icons (unless we count religion as symbolism.)
- 11/03/2012 12:46:52 AM
655 Views
What exactly do you mean by "The irreparable damage it inflicted in the Great Schism"?
- 10/03/2012 07:57:59 PM
721 Views
That Byzantiums iconoclasm was one of the many wedges between it and Rome that led to the Schism.
- 11/03/2012 12:27:05 AM
644 Views
Bull. Shit.
- 11/03/2012 01:54:07 AM
715 Views
I did not say it was decisive, but that it did irreparable damage to the relationship.
- 11/03/2012 04:23:43 AM
732 Views
Bull. Shit.
- 11/03/2012 04:30:08 AM
596 Views
It is not like I just pulled it out of my rear, any more than my HS history text or Wikipedia did.
- 11/03/2012 04:57:31 AM
674 Views
Bull. Shit.
- 11/03/2012 05:14:01 AM
749 Views
Irreparable damage is damage that cannot be repaired, not necessarily serious or fatal.
- 11/03/2012 10:34:57 AM
819 Views
Mierda.del.Toro
- 11/03/2012 12:36:59 PM
700 Views
1969 may be "sometime back" in Roman Catholic history,but is ~a millenium after the time in question
- 12/03/2012 05:47:11 PM
950 Views
You really must get steamed by anyone calling you out on your hyberbolic comments
- 12/03/2012 06:55:06 PM
810 Views
On the contrary, I am not the one screaming "bullshit" in as many languages as possible.
- 13/03/2012 12:07:54 AM
853 Views
ο κοπρος. του ταυρου.
- 11/03/2012 02:19:11 PM
780 Views
Very edifying; can you do Mandarin or Swahili next?
- 12/03/2012 05:47:23 PM
686 Views
No. Even English seems to be beyond your grasp.
- 12/03/2012 06:29:50 PM
594 Views
Citing scripture does not justify telling me to kill myself.
- 13/03/2012 12:08:02 AM
728 Views
Give it up already. You are wrong.
- 12/03/2012 12:53:37 AM
898 Views
I will do the former at least; pretty sure this "discussion" has reached rock bottom.
- 13/03/2012 12:12:46 AM
542 Views
More or less your last line
- 11/03/2012 01:37:42 AM
618 Views
That is a broader argument, but more consistent with iconoclasms established meaning.
- 11/03/2012 05:12:12 AM
730 Views
Would you include the iconoclasm that Joel cites in the canonical Judeo-Christian tradition as well?
- 11/03/2012 12:44:49 PM
597 Views