How the World Is Marking the 500th Birthday of Protestantism

[Elok]

To get back on point: it seems to me, to put it as neutrally as possible, that Protestantism has a legitimacy problem rooted in its relative novelty.  That is, if Protestantism is correct, Jesus came down, preached, died, rose, ascended into heaven, sent down the HS at Pentecost, and promptly had the whole thing completely and totally hijacked for 1500 years.  Nothing really resembling Protestantism was believed anywhere for more than a millennium; "true" Christianity effectively ceased to exist by this reckoning, and had to be rediscovered or reinvented.  This can sort of be explained as the inscrutability of Providence, and I gather it typically is; the Catholic church (since we basically don't exist in typical Western reckoning) was supposed to be a sort of Satanic corruption from the get-go.  I've read of attempts to demonstrate that there were really "true" Christian communities in hiding the whole time, including one by a Baptist that wound up tracing the lineage through several different sects of Gnostics.  It doesn't really work.

Even this only works if there was an original, Protestant-ish core, if the original teachings were basically Protestant in their content.  They really weren't, as far as anyone can tell.  We've had a hierarchical church full of images, liturgy, and saint-veneration from very, very early, and the beginnings of it all can be seen in the NT itself.  James tells us to anoint the sick with oil, deacons are invented early in Acts, Paul talks about different clerical orders while emphatically condemning and calling for the suppression of various heretical sects.  Nor were scriptures likely fudged; the only known major interpolations I've heard of are the epilogue of Mark (everything after the discovery of the empty tomb) and the incident of the adulterous woman from John.  Almost all the core doctrines and practices of Christianity were formed pre-Constantine, which is why the seven ECs were about really abstruse Christological issues.  Nothing like Protestantism existed until the late Middle Ages when you had the Lollards and such.  The Christian faith immediately after the life of Christ was not remotely Protestant.  Simple as that.

Then there's the part where the earliest Christians simply couldn't have been sola scriptura, what with the Scriptura not being written for decades after Christ ...

[Buster's Uncle]

You're doing a lot better in the first paragraph, with which I won't quibble, than the second, which I'd have to put some WORK looking details up to make any strong argument, but I don't wanna, and I regard googling as cheating, to the extent an argument is mere fencing...

Back in a second, though.  I thought of something in the bath vaguely relevant I want to share...

[Buster's Uncle]

http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=1377.msg3516#msg3516

-You'll work out the relevance by the opening of the last scene...

[Elok]

The second one rests as much on archeological evidence (e.g. Dura Europos) as on the Bible.  You can argue that first-century worship sites and practices, which have not been preserved as well, were really very Protestant, but this amounts to argument from silence/ignorance.  And also raises the question of where such praxis originated, and why it was dumped so soon.

[Elok]

Well, uh, it's a short story about religious fanatics, and the high-church fanatic comes across as significantly more reasonable than the low-church fanatic, so I'm missing the message, if there is one.  Sorry.

[Buster's Uncle]

Oh that was sorta the deliberate point -besides that I finally got you to read a story I wrote for the first time- (love that 'High-Church/low-church', capitalization and all, that you didn't coin, BTW, but no Protestant did, I'd think, unless at least COE/Episcopalian, and find significant that you use here) Manuel was the protagonist, but hardly the good-guy.  W/o getting into the weeds at all, I think I managed to speak a little tourist/high school-level RC w/o embarrassing myself - and it speaks to some of these issues -and having thought about them before- if, distorted wildly for the story.

I have no idea where you get that it was about TWO fanatics - it was about Manuel, a sadly-flawed man, and Prudence, the actual good-guy, who was looking out for the flock she'd ended up responsible for (no place for it in the story, but the Cardinal and small # of temporal clergy were dedicating/blessing groundbreaking for some new structure when there was a fungal bloom, and ... the young Abbess was left in charge, there being no one else) and had the argument rigged in her favor, because Manuel was having a Greek tragedy thing going...

[Elok]

Well, her actions in the story come off as reasonable, but she's still fighting for control of the Believers, whose whole motif is being bat-poop crazy even by SMAC faction standards.  Kind of like if they were fighting for control of the Nazi party ...

[Buster's Uncle]

I think it would have not been the Nazi party anymore with Prudence in charge.  She was a political dunce not to have had more votes lined up, but wouldn't have overlooked a lot once in charge -she was bossing six brothers, five of them older, since she was eight- and been a leader who didn't -not as secretly as he thought- hold RCs in contempt.

I sense I failed to get to you - I can reread w/ a teeny bit of objectivity, nine years later, and find it effective - but even if I forgot all the background there was no room for in the narrative -And Prudence's biography would run as long as that story just to get her up to those events; she's a previous alt. Believers leader I created for Darsnan, and I once spent a couple hours extemporizing background off the top of my head- and found it effective, indeed, deem it my best fiction ever - but then I was writing to my own tastes, as one does.

Funny; writing Manuel was a kind of very-imaginative autobiography; I was writing from inside his head, while Prudence is sort of an alien by comparison, but I could tell you 10 times as much about her and her life - Ali wrote 2/3rds of the intro passage describing Manny for a Believers story I rejected as ... wildly too ecumenical a Believers faction to have a cross in the logo and had Miriam in charge, which I suppose is all one could hope for from a never-churched atheist trying to write sympathetically.  I had dashed off a few passages and suggested a lot of ideas she mostly didn't use, so I made coffee about midnight, and pulled an all-nighter, starting with adding here and there to her intro passage, and writing between my own story fragments.  Ali had had little confidence in her own effort, and said she loved mine, finding the voice authentic.

-Deadline the 1st of February, this was the night of the 29th.  We generated all seven stories in a couple of weeks, mostly her, but not a one I didn't have a finger in, or vice-versa, and came out sinfully proud, both of us, with what we accomplished.  I'm also proud to say that Prophet was the best-received

-Electricity shenanigans pending.  Need to shut down and come back to this later...

[Elok]

Well, it's hard to say without knowing a lot more detail than I want to know about the political organization of a decades-old video game world, but in most polities the leadership ultimately winds up serving the wishes of, if not a majority, at least a sizeable minority of the population.  This would seem to be particularly true in extremely-ideological transnational polities like SMAC's factions.  As you might have noted from FB, I'm reading a Hitler bio right now, and it's striking how much of his spiel was just a slight repackaging and improved marketing of immensely popular existing beliefs.  Can a sane, moderate person run the LBs?

[Buster's Uncle]

Oh yeah - Hitler was a symptom, not the original disease, straight-up.  The times were SO crazy and maddening, the National Socialist party was only one end of the mainstream, like say, really ambitious/aggressive Libertarians today, only less fringe - nothing like KKK status...

LBs?  Maybe - it would take persuasive leadership, else unprincipled administration of a nasty group being the bad neighbors they are in practice...

[Buster's Uncle]

I highly recommend Hitler: His Early Career which it sounds like, from your FB characterization, covers the same time, but not nearly as much immediate post-Armistice and later years context for the place and time in what you're reading...

I think it would have not been the Nazi party anymore with Prudence in charge.  She was a political dunce not to have had more votes lined up, but wouldn't have overlooked a lot once in charge -she was bossing six brothers, five of them older, since she was eight- and been a leader who didn't -not as secretly as he thought- hold RCs in contempt.

I sense I failed to get to you - I can reread w/ a teeny bit of objectivity, nine years later, and find it effective - but even if I forgot all the background there was no room for in the narrative -And Prudence's biography would run as long as that story just to get her up to those events; she's a previous alt. Believers leader I created for Darsnan, and I once spent a couple hours extemporizing background off the top of my head- and found it effective, indeed, deem it my best fiction ever - but then I was writing to my own tastes, as one does.

Funny; writing Manuel was a kind of very-imaginative autobiography; I was writing from inside his head, while Prudence is sort of an alien by comparison, but I could tell you 10 times as much about her and her life - Ali wrote 2/3rds of the intro passage describing Manny for a Believers story I rejected as ... wildly too ecumenical a Believers faction to have a cross in the logo and had Miriam in charge, which I suppose is all one could hope for from a never-churched atheist trying to write sympathetically.  I had dashed off a few passages and suggested a lot of ideas she mostly didn't use, so I made coffee about midnight, and pulled an all-nighter, starting with adding here and there to her intro passage, and writing between my own story fragments.  Ali had had little confidence in her own effort, and said she loved mine, finding the voice authentic.

-Deadline the 1st of February, this was the night of the 29th.  We generated all seven stories in a couple of weeks, mostly her, but not a one I didn't have a finger in, or vice-versa, and came out sinfully proud, both of us, with what we accomplished.  I'm also proud to say that Prophet was the best-received

-Electricity shenanigans pending.  Need to shut down and come back to this later...

-I'm also proud to say that Prophet was the best-received of the seven -the opening story naming the GotM I wrote the Prashanti half of to kick off the project/collaboration was no one's favorite, not even ours, but the least-well received stories, the Spartan and Hive ones, are the two I had the least input into.  Like, I was definitely the junior partner, but she wasn't just carrying me - but more experienced and able to generate a volume of excellent copy that I simply did not have the experience to do.

-But I wrote some prompts and ideas that got her started on several of the stories -all based on an alt. gender leaderhead custom faction project sisko had decided to base the GotM on, so I supplied the faces we wrote for to begin with, and did various degrees of tweaking and adding to her copy -several strong paragraphs near the end of the Morganite story- to where it's hard to untangle who did what and how much better until we later had some Alphonse and Gaston conversations about credit.  -And I wrote a much better short conclusion than hers to the Uni story that tied it all together and added the ironic twist/payoff to the Vadima's qualifications mystery she'd nicely set up, and if only I'd had another day, I had to defer doing a snarky-dialogue comedy pass/draft that likely would have earned me equal author credit - had to write Prophet, instead...

It was as if -and this is really aimed at WPC cronies looking in, not you who I dunno how much you remember Ali back at Poly- it was if I suddenly found myself Paul McCartney and me and John started out with one of the good late Beatles albums - and when RL took her away and we never tried again, I've been stuck merely in Wings ever since, with Linda on tambourine, and durn rare to even get Linda anymore, right now being the first time in three years...

-You may have surmised that I still desperately want to talk about it nearly a decade later; it was a very hard act to follow, carrying on w/o my better half...



So buried deep in all that, I guess there's a demonstration/point that I can speak a little casual tourist RC, which is way more and closer to EO, of any flavor of Protestant I've ever seen you speak, for what little that credential is worth...

[Elok]

I'm not terribly sure what you mean by "speaking" Protestant.  I'm familiar with the doctrinal differences between them and us, and the Charismatic/Evangelical/Reformed/Mainline division, if not always fine distinctions within those groups.  I know many, if not most, of the arguments the Reformed and Evangelical variety, at least, typically use to defend their POV against us and the wicked Papists.  I think I have a fair idea how they would respond to most theological questions, and I know the broad outlines of their cultures.  I'm just not sympathetic to any of it.

[Buster's Uncle]

Speaking as in being able to articulate somewhat authentically, call it having enough understanding to fake your way through for a phrase or two.

[Elok]

Well, I might be able to manage that, but I can't say I've ever tried, nor wanted to.  If it comes to that, nuns (and monks) are a distinct group from proper clergy, and not qualified for church leadership as such.  Your sister Prudence would not be a likely leader in a theocratic Catholic organization, even leaving aside her gender.  But I wouldn't say that goof really reflects all that meaningfully on your ability to discuss Catholicism vs. Protestantism in general.

[Buster's Uncle]

GOOF sir?

(no place for it in the story, but the Cardinal and small # of temporal clergy were dedicating/blessing groundbreaking for some new structure when there was a fungal bloom, and ... the young Abbess was left in charge, there being no one else)

You really want to stand behind that base assumption?  -That right there's this thread all over...