Wednesday, February 4, 2009, 5:43 PM
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Originally Posted by Xristocharis @ thread " (Beliefnet)
Christianism is a secular ideology.
(...) the principal purpose of Christianism is to maintain an amorphous
"Christian" cultural identity. The point of Christianism is to make
everything identified superficially as "Christian", the nation is to be
"Christian", the laws are to be "Christian", the culture is to be
"Christian". It inherits from Christianity a number of superficial
qualities, including the use of the Bible in order to achieve its
secular agenda in the secular sphere. Christianism seeks to maintain a
cultural status quo and is hostile toward any perceived change to the
status quo; it does not principally seek to be, itself, actually Christian
but rather to maintain the identification of "Christian". To this end,
that something does or does not match up to the teachings of Jesus
Christ are beside the point, what is important is that it establishes
its identity as "Christian": bearing in itself important cultural
qualifiers that are taken as an unquestioned "given".
The orthodoxy of Christianism is not rooted in ancient theological creeds over the nature of God; but rather an established, deeply Western, dogmatism rooted in modernity--its dogma is simply what has existed for [several] hundred years as the political and cultural status quo of [at least] nominally Christian people and nations. It accepts uncritically the power of Nation States (insofar as they are identified as "Christian"), it accepts uncritically various social "norms" (it does not critically evaluate social norms in light of historic Christian teaching or the ethics of Christ or Scripture, but merely accepts what has been as the way things ought to be). It is a far right secular philosophy, not merely conservative but reactionary. Christ and the religion that bears His name is simply a means to an end, where it aids in secular agenda of Christianism it is accepted, where is a hindrance it is to be discarded. For Christianism to succeed it must nominally embrace the authority of the Christian Bible without ever taking anything the texts say seriously or critically; there is to be no critical evaluation of the biblical texts, but only the claimed blind acceptance of them. Christianism is an ideal secular philosophy for one in a nominally Christian society to wield, as it easily caters to many who self-identify as Christians and, if they turn away for a moment, can easily be led into believing that the two are, in fact, the same thing. Christianity can be appropriated by Christianism to achieve its own secular agenda. |
... of Christianity. One should consider, at the other end of the spectrum, another "physical state" of the ideological matter: Raimon Panikkar's ...
... "christianness", which we may consider a modern "liquid" (or even "gaseous") ... 
... derivation of Christianity, and only loosely related to it.(See The Dawn of Christianness, Cross Currents , Spring-Summer, 2000 by Raimon Panikkar, @ freepatentsonline.com)
Christianity (I think it was G. K. Chesterton who said something like this in his wonderful book Orthodoxy) is, first and foremost, a matter of balance, of equilibrium between the "crystallization" of dogma and the "liquid", or even "vaporous" (and ultimately totally elusive) nothing that is any form of mysticism.
Christianity is not dead like a mineral ...
... (however beautiful it may be).Christianity is not vaporous like a cloud ...
... (however "numinous" this may seem).Christianity, even when she is in agony, even when she seems dead, like her Master ...
... is a living organism: the Church, the Living Body of Christ ... 
(John 15)Amen
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