Are you a Christian?
Discussion
Yes. The crusades were based and necessary. Do not discount the sacrifices our ancestors have made for us. Were it not for them, Spain would be a Muslim country today, to cite just one example.
So you’re saying our ancestors should have just let their people be overrun and enslaved without raising a sword? That isn’t heroic. It’s cowardice.
As I said, you have cognitive dissonance to get over.
Love your neighbor.
Your heart is in the right place. But your view of history is childlike.
What would you do if a Muslim army came to your town, took your wife and children hostage, abused them, and forced them to convert to Islam? Would you just say, oh, better be nice to my neighbor? That is not a virtue. In fact, it is the abdication of virtue.
This is the reality of why the Christian Crusades happened. They were a response to the Muslim crusades rather than being the initial instigators. Read primary sources.
This book is a good place to start.
Crusaders were militants who went to a place that is not their home to kill people.
We are not talking about defending your home on the Spanish peninsula from the Moors.
We are talking about offensively traveling long distances to go kill people.
Yes, and to liberate the Christians enslaved therein.
I thank my ancestors every day for having the strength and courage to do so.
If you are truly enlightened as you’ve claimed on X in the past (I remember the post), then you should probably understand that enlightenment is having all 7 chakras activated, just like Jesus said in Matthew 10:16. If you don’t get that passage, you have more to learn.
Enlightenment involves embodying, balancing, and uniting the Divine Masculine with the Divine Feminine. The Divine Feminine is characterized by “receptivity”.
If you are truly enlightened, then you should be receptive.
If you are receptive, check out the video linked in my profile. If you watch that video, NEVER again tell me I don’t know history.
I’ve never claimed to be enlightened. Curious which post you’re referring to.
You told a story about an enlightenment experience you had. Several of us were sharing our stories…StackchainBuddha, Lauren of Light, etc.
Hmm I don’t recall
I love Alan Watts, Jesus, and Bitcoin.
Please, friend, have a listen to the information in the presentation I give in that YouTube link in my NOSTR profile.
If it’s not worth your time, send me a lightning invoice for 3 hours of your time.
I’ll check it out.
Appreciate your takes, and your intellectual honesty. 🤝
By the way, Islam began because Rome corrupted the shit out of Christianity when they hijacked it.
That doesn’t make Islam virtuous but they did have a point that Christianity had become corrupted and had been diverged from the intended course by Roman hegemons.
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Loving your neighbor sometimes means justified aggression to protect the innocent. Love doesn’t replace justice. Giving others what they deserve (justice) is not at odds with love. Love also has to be ordered and prioritized, ‘Ordo Caritatis’.
Yes, there is a way to use power to neutralize a threat against yourself or others, particularly innocents.
Loving your neighbor means having done the work to become sufficiently powerful AND merciful to neutralize your neighbor if your neighbor attacks you.
Neutralizing their attack means stopping their attack, ideally without bringing any harm to them. This is perhaps best embodied by jiu jitsu which is commonly referred to as "the gentle art".
That's how you can love someone who is violently attacking you. You can stop them with the least amount of damage possible done to them.
I've got some good news though. Reincarnation is real and that notion does not conflict with the concepts of the resurrection, heaven, or hell. They all mutually co-exist as part of the cosmic order, so to speak. T
The validity of the doctrine of reincarnation is not my opinion, either. This is scientifically provable fact. Most people who "don't believe in reincarnation" also don't do research that contradicts their beliefs, therefore they don't typically come across this information. If they don't come across it, they're not likely to explore it either.
The way we perceive the entire concept of ”war” is very different today from how it was perceived only 200 years ago, nonetheless 1000 or 2000 years ago. War today is generally condemned, but throughout history, it was a place of virtues like honor, strength and courage. The old testament is full of it — God not only tolerates war, but commands it. Jesus said he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfil it. Not once did he condemn war as a concept. His messages of peace and love were always about the individual, never about the collective. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34)
The Golden Rule is about meeting people where they are. That means using language they understand, situations they are prone to experience, everyday situations, etc. Loving your neighbor as yourself means learning about your neighbor, then lovingly tailoring your interactions with your neighbor in ways based on your accumulated knowledge of them.
When someone really pays attention to you and shows you how well they see who you are as a person, that is a display of love. You feel loved when that happens. Everyone does when they feel truly seen and accommodated.
That said, Jesus's use of those terms like peace and sword in Matthew 10:34 is largely symbolic, although the use of peace is fairly applicable.
The sword Jesus brought was the sword of truth. St. Michael knows a thing or two about those from what I hear. If a person, say...a Pharisee at the time of Christ...was a total egotist who thought his mommy and his daddy were the super bestest human beings in the history of ever and that he was the pinnacle of human evolution...studies the Torah super hard...Karens everyone about pedantic law violations...boisterously offers sacrifices at the temple so everyone notices...all that "look at how pious I am" stuff.
People like that are not going to respond well when they are told they are preaching the wrong stuff. They're going to feel drawn down upon. They're going to feel like you're pulling your sword when you correct their teachings. They're going to feel like you've violated their peace of mind. They're going to feel like you're subverting their status in society and that threatens them at a deeply psychological level.
Pretty much it's only sigma personalities who are both competent enough and apathetic enough to roll solo. The apathy is directed towards the pack's (society's) bullshit hierarchy games. Sigmas don't care to play that. Everyone else plays for their own reasons. Most of them play because they're too incompetent to roll solo so the prospect of being booted from the pack constitutes a serious degradation of their prospects for survival, succession, and general flourishing.
So, psychologically, a lot of these people literally felt fight or flight responses when confronted by Jesus regarding their teachings. Their perspective that Jesus was "drawing down upon them" with a sword was essentially in the same category, neurologically speaking. The same neurochemicals are pumping in both cases.
Swords of truth have a tendency to garner reactions like that. Mark Twain understood that when he said "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” Likewise, it's easier to get people to believe false things than it is to convince them that they already believe false things. The bread and butter of the ego is the sunken cost fallacy.
If Jesus truly is God, not separate from God, like the Church have always claimed through the doctrine of the trinity, his moral character must be consistent across time. The same God who commanded war in the Old Testament cannot suddenly declare all warfare inherently evil without violating His own nature. That would render God internally contradictory.
Thus, it makes much more sense to interpret the peace oriented teachings of Jesus to be directed to individuals rather than the collective/organisations. His message is about peace among individual human beings, not about political pacifism.
This is precisely how Augustine framed it in the just war tradition. Ultimately an approach to warfare which forms the ethical framework in all of modern warfare.
Everything is God...Jesus...you...me...Earth...your keyboard...your touchscreen...the steak you ate yesterday...it's all God.
I can't put this clearly enough: if a person's understanding of Christianity has been derived from any modern mainstream Christian teachings, that person's understanding of Christ's teachings is heavily distorted.
The Doctrine of the Trinity is echoed in every religious and esoteric wisdom tradition. Embody characteristics that are penetrative or emissive like Wisdom, Power, and Victory. These are the "masculine" traits of the Divine. The Divine also has "feminine" traits which may be characterized as "receptive". This includes things like Understanding, Mercy, and Glory.
Just like Yang and Yin, Shiva and Shakti, Victory and Glory, Power and Mercy, Wisdom and Understanding, Ka and Ba, Alpha and Omega, the Doctrine of the Trinity is about how anyone gets to go to heaven, to use parlance Christians would be most familiar with.
To go to heaven essentially requires enlightenment which is what Matthew 10:16 is talking about. In order to do that, one must embody, balance, and unite the Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine characteristics.
What happens when you unite the Divine Masculine with the Divine Feminine?
You get a Divine Child, or what has become translated as a "Son of God".
Jesus came to teach us how to become Divine Children. He'd already done that before so he came back here to show us how it's done. We gotta love our neighbors unconditionally, expecting nothing in return. We need to speak truth. We need to respect free will. We need to serve others.
That depends on one's understanding of the teachings of Christ.
I would argue that I'm extremely Christian and that most people who claim to be Christian don't even understand their own tradition.
If you want my thoughts, I offer them in a pretty thorough articulation in the youtube video linked in my NOSTR profile.
I care about truth which means I study all religions looking for the common threads, the lies, the distortions, the missing chapters, etc. I look to science to validate things.