A look at Christianity. (feel free to respond)

I have been thinking rather consistently about the Catholic Church. As I'm sure everyone knows Catholic stands for Universal (I know this because my fathers calls himself a Presbyterian Catholic) and in this it stands for all the people of God.

Whether or not you believe in God or another higher power is little consequence to me, but what i would like to look at is a few reasons for doubting it; this is as much for any of you as it is for me.

The church, as we have read, was the great teacher to the 'unwashed masses' as Shaman Sexson describes those who do not see analytically. Throughout the project I have been working on for my final paper and presentation I have continously came back to the passage in Ongs book underneath 'Empathatic and particapotry rather than objectively distanced' in Chapter 4.;


For an oral culture learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known, 'getting with it'. Writing separates the nower from the known and thus sets up conditions for 'objectivity', in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing. The 'objecticity' which Homer and other oral performers do have is not expressed as simply individual or 'subjective' but rather as encased in the communal reaction, the communal 'soul'. Under the influence of writing, despite his protest against it, Plato had excluded the poets from his Republic, for studying them was essentially learning to react with 'soul', to feel oneself identified with Achilles or Odysseus.

No other lines in the whole book, nor in any class that I have yet to take, or any book has better explained, or engaged me.

Being Objective allows us to continuely question what it is that we learn. We do not souly base anything upon what we heard. We do not believe because it has become uttered, but in a church, which has the soul purpose of 'saving' or bringing the people to Christ, if the community is mainly illetarate it has no way of teaching but through stories. The bible is a massive amount of stories, and parables. Everything in the bible that has been written, is the person who is speaking's best explanation of what is going on.

An example is the Theory of Evolution. Many atheistic friends and aquaintances use this as a straight out for christianity. They believe that since what was written down thousands of years ago no longer directly corolates with a scientific explanation, than the writing must be false.

Everyone in Shaman Sexson's class knows that this is not true. Writing is only the attempt of a human to explain something with what they already have on the plate. The fact is that the bible, when it was finally compiled was not in English. It was not in a language of a dominantly literate society, and so they did not have nearly as many words to use as descriptions. As the bible has was copied it changed little by little. When it was translated it was changed more and more from each language to each language, and when it was finally set down into print, it suddenly had a more fixed manuscript from which protestantism picked and chose from, changing this word and that, this book and that.

The Aramic word for day has many meanings, but i do beleive the latin, and greek have only one definition of day. I could very well be wrong, but what my point is, is that as things passed into history meanings became lost, and with this the church tried its best to cope with what they had, to explain as best as possible with what they have at there will. So a day became one day, and so as to better tie into the situation a day of remembrance, as the jewish have, Sunday, the last day, became the day of worshipping christ.

In Ong's chapter on Psychodynamics of Orality we see how hard it is to get analytically based thought process to those that are oral.

an example is where a barely literate 45-yearold chairman of a collective farm is told;

In the Far North, wehre there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zembla is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What color are the bears?

The man responds, "To go by your words 'appears they should all be white."

It is extremely hard to imprint something as a truth into the mind of an oral human being when they have no proof but the passing of listening in and out of existance. This is why Galileo died in improsonment.

Galileo wrote an essay showing the two sides of a heliocentric and geocentric universe. Heliocentric, is the earth revolving around the sun, while geocentric is the earth at the center of the universe. Although the printing press has been around for a few hundred years at the time of this book, the masses were not generally all learned from what i've learned (feel free to correct me if i am entirely wrong)

The Oral (and now unlearned literate) community sees that an example that might possibly explain the church as wrong, and with the webbing that the whole church is a lie, and that everyone in the church is a liar.

IN CONCLUSION

The Church, its Clergy, having been stuck so long as the communal teacher of the church as a community, and not being open to the individual understanding of the bible for such a long period of time was its crippling. Like any institution, it was slow to change and up until the vatican II when the pope sat upon his chair and let out the decree of how things are that vastly reformed the Catholic Church there had been a giant gap in what Protestants and what Roman Catholics believed; but with the second vatican things have become much more aligned with protestantism and the analtical way of interprating the bible.

Coming from a wide variety of Protestant upbringings (Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian) as well as having not only Vatican II Catholic religion teachers in my private high school, as well as Prevatican II Religion teachers, I have constantly been up against a wall of misunderstanding and conflicting viewpoints that this class has cleared up significantly.

For Example of Prevatican II. My teacher used to refer to protestants (me) as Christians, while Roman Catholics as Catholics. For someone who knows the meaning of Catholic to be Universal, nothing else can be quite a slap in the face to a well-learned protestant.