/lit/ - Literature

>>18714969

>>18714973

Beside's Voltaire and Diderot and the French Revolutionaries, most everybody else was a Christian, or at the very least, a Deist Christian-sympathizer.

>>18715029

>>18714959
It was a secularized evolution of Christianity, so not very.

>>18714973
Yes, Christianity shows the path to true power, which is to take control over mens' souls. Despots are vain pikers. If your goal is to take a vigorous and manly nation and turn it into a nation of malleable and easily ruled beetles, then Christianity is the greatest tool man has yet invented.

>>18715136
That doesn’t explain history well

>>18715154
They did all that as they were turning away from Christianity. 'By compass and sword, more and more and more and more' isn't very Christian.

>>18715411
Holy cope. Just admit that western hegemony waned as soon as we started to eat up the anti-western, anti-white, secular humanist, leftist, anti-imperialist drivel pushed by French pedophiles and Jews.

>>18715464
It's Tower of Babel in real time. Christians got too big for their britches.

>>18714959

Completely, since it denied that Christ was God, and reduced him to a man, completely ignoring everything that the man himself has actually said about being the Son of God.

Christianity without the eternal Word and Son of God is anti-Christ.

There's a word that's relevant here: Personal. What does personal mean, to the modern man? It means custom - your own personal car, your own personal hotdog - a hotdog exactly how you like it. People want a "personal" Christ, like how they want a "personal" hotdog - a Christ customised to fit what they want.

They don't want a "personal" Christ, in the sense that He is actually a person that you have to get to know, and contend with - since people are too spiritually weak to accept a direct, full-on confrontation with the God-Man himself, they customise Christ to be weak enough for them to accept, not as the eternal Lord, but as just another man.

>>18715587
>when you can hear pic related speaking through the mouth of some random anon

The Orthodox Church is truly a blessing from God.

>>18715136
>>18715411
Not accurate at all. In fact, I think it was Voltaire who said how Christians seem to have all the reason to be the most benevolent of men, but become, in his words, the most intolerant and violent of men.
I think he's onto something in the fact that Christianity, in the political sense, lends to more hegemonic, and to a degree, violent orders.
Carl Schmitt illuminates this point in his book, 'The Concept of the Political," based on points that are misinterpreted by Christians today that are degrees separated from the original contexts and languages:
>The enemy is 'hostes,' not 'inimicos' in the broader sense; πολέμιος, not ἐχθρός.
>As German and other languages do not differentiate between the private and political enemy, many misconceptions and falsifications are possible. The often quotes "Love your enemies" ... reads "diligite inimicos vestros.," ἀγαπᾶτε τοὺς ἐχθροὺς ὑμῶν, and not 'diligete hostes vestros.' No mention is made of the political enemy.
>Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love towards the Saracen or the Turk. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one's enemy, i.e., one's adversary. The Bible quotation touches the political antithesis even less than it intends to dissolve, for example, the antithesis of good and evil or beautiful and ugly. It certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one's own people.
It also contextualizes how war is viewed in the Old Testament, or how the state and death penalty are treated in the new. It's fairly simple to distinguish between the personal and the state, how one should behave in the mundane, and how the collective of people should act in the extraordinary.
To break down the political and judicial order (particularly through capital offenses) is akin to breaking down the familial and social orders. It's evil, because the state is an ordained institution.

>>18714959
>we regard him as a man distinguished among men for his zeal, virtue, for his love of brotherly equality
Blasphemy desu.

>>18715798
Take a look at St John Chrysostom's homilies against the imperial house. Christianity is damn near incompatible with the existence of a state if consistently applied.

>>18715850
I think the Christian doctrine on the state is quite clear.
>Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.
- The Apostle Paul

>>18714959
It's hard to say concisely. Rationalism and it's constituents tended to be very religious in nature and sometimes overtly anti-christian such as the French revolution. Empiricism however tended towards secularization but more or less retained the core values of Christianity. Either way, the enlightenment did help Christianity at all.

>>18715587
The Enlightenment didn't deny Christ's divinity—sure there were instances, as were most strikingly manifest in the Jefferson Bible—but otherwise the type of heresy you are talking about was much more common in the Victorian era and later (that is, before it became more acceptable to be a complete Atheist like Russell). Best example of this type of thinking I can think of is David Strauss, an Old/Right Hegelian scholar who believed in a historical, non-divine christ.
>>18715823
But you must admit, it is quite amicable as blasphemes go.

>>18715957

Amicable blasphemy is far worse than open hostility.

>>18714959
>How anti-Christian was the enlightenment really?


TOTALLY & THOROUGHLY; AKIN TO ASKING: «HOW HERETICAL IS "PROTESTANTISM"?»

>>18716051
Protestants are closer to the Bible’s teaching.
Not saying that’s a good thing either.

>>18716059
>Protestants are closer to the Bible’s teaching.


NO, THEY ARE NOT.

>>18714959
Modern day degenerate atheists "love Christ." Christ is a symbol that appeals to everyone. Doesn't mean everyone is a Christian.

>>18714959
The Enlightenment is based, read Leibniz my friend.
>>18716063
Butters is right ࿇ C V M G E N I V S ࿇ (except it is absolutely and most definitely a good thing).
Seethe and forever cope pseud.

>>18716051
I despise Catholics. I truly think them to be even worst than Jews at times. If there's anything I hate about 4chan , it's these delusional and blasphemous catholic types. They simply fucked up Christianity beyond repair. Catholics are the root source of the nigger mentality, Malcolm X knew this and parted ways with Christianity. Catholics have NO work ethic and always want to blame everything on someone else. Yes, the jews bad but goddamn, what the hell are you doing to improve your situation? My bad, you're too busy watching sissy porn and coming up with the right phrases to repent to your priest with to even consider pulling your shit together. I simply do not know what's more cucked than letting a MAN, an infallible, all-righteous MAN, dictate how your relation with God ought to be. You are not follower of God, you are a sheep to the clergy and a servant of sin. Don't believe me? Simply ask yourself what ever grew out of Catholicism? Not America, Britain or Germany. Why is it that all of the Germanic Northwestern European countries aside from Ireland were able to carve a name for themselves? Catholic cuckery. But no, you have the audacity to deem Protestantism as a heresy. I agree with Robespierre and the other revolutionaries. Catholics should indeed be hunted down and massacred en masse. They are hedonistic scum even worse than atheists.

«PROTESTANTISM» IS JUDAIZED JESUSISM, OR, MORE ACCURATELY: GENTILICIZED TALMUDISM; ILLUSTRISM WAS SECULARIZED «PROTESTANTISM», OR, MORE ACCURATELY: LAICIZED ILLUMINISM.

>>18714959
Yeah some of them respected Jesus and his teachings but still denied the Divine. Pretty sure it was Thomas Jefferson who rewrote the Bible and removed all the stuff he thought was fantastical. Some modern liberals do the same thing.

>>18715411

> Spengler characterizes the Classical world under the category-idea of material bodies distributed in space. The nude Apollo or Aphrodite exemplifies the Classical and so too Doric architecture in its static thereness. When the Roman Empire reached its limits, it defended its frontiers but never ventured beyond them. Faustian or Gothic or Western Culture stands in marked contrast to the Classical. The “prime symbol” of the West, according to Spengler, is “pure and limitless space.” A Gothic cathedral, like a Viking long ship, leaps upward to the heavens or outward to the horizon. “The Faustian soul looks for an immortality to follow the bodily end, a sort of marriage with endless space, and it disembodies the stone [of the Classical order] in its Gothic thrust-system… till at last nothing remain[s] visible but the indwelling depth- and height-energy of this self-extension.”

If you think of Christianity as a religion first rather some kind of way of life or philosophy then the enlightenment was completely and utterly anti-Christian

>>18716246
How does he explain Alexander and his successors/emulators like the Seleucids or Trajan in the Classical world then who wanted to conquer Persia/India and the known world? Seems pretty 'limitless'.

>>18716267
They never returned or tried again? But the mongols also wanted to conquer all the known world just like Alexander. It doesn’t make them similar.

>>18716259
They weren’t just anti-Christian. People in the enlightenment equally looked down on pagan religions even though they might have admired Greece and Rome. If you read Edward Gibbon’s “decline and fall of the Roman Empire,” he shows the same disdain towards pagan religions constantly calling them irrational and superstitious.
Voltaire calls the Greco-Roman religion “ridiculous.” Since many enlightenment authors were deists, they regarded the worship of idols (like pagan Gods) with the same disgust and disdain as Christians in the past. Edward Gibbons just like Christians in the past refused to believe that great Greek thinkers from the past could have possibly believed in the ridiculous pagan Gods and instead believed they were deists of some sort. In some way enlightenment authors maintained a Christian (if Protestant) mentality and still looked down on those who didn’t believe in the ONE creator God.

> In 1757 David Hume expressed his appreciation of Judaism and Islam for their greater determination in the rooting out idolatry than in Christianity.