Curt Doolittle

Form: Quote Commentary

  • Curt Doolittle updated his status.

    (FB 1544658549 Timestamp) –“In a discussion of Japanese religious psychology, Brendan Branley, a Maryknoll missionary to Japan, has noted that “essentially, there is a heightened consciousness of their identity as a distinct people, of their membership in a group whose purposes they are willing to serve at the expense of their own.” This observation is supported by Robert BelSah’s analysis of the relationship between Japanese religion and economic development. Bellah describes the enduring notion of kokutai, which arose during the Tokugawa Period (1600-1868) as “a concept of the state in which religious, political and familistic ideas are indissolubly merged.”39 Jesuit missionaries to China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were similarly confronted with a high level of organic unity that was expressed through ancestor and emperor worship. A strong sense of social unity and collective security also prevailed among the Germanic peoples in the early Middle Ages. Although they may have been less culturally sophisticated than the contemporary Japanese, like them, the Germanic peoples did not have immediate social or spiritual needs which Christianity might fulfill. Also, the homogeneity of early medieval Germanic society, like that of contemporary Japan, did not predispose it to the Christian message. Christianity tends to flourish in heterogeneous societies in which there exist high levels of anomie, or social destabilization. Since the relationship of social structure to ideological structure and religious expression will play a significant role in this inquiry, a brief discussion of fundamental concepts is presented here. Similarly, the Anglo-Saxon missionaries did not emphasize the central soteriological and eschatological aspects of Christianity. Instead, seeking to appeal to the Germanic regard for power, they tended to emphasize the omnipotence of the Christian God and the temporal rewards he would bestow upon those who accepted him through baptism and through conformity to the discipline of his Church.52 Other medieval advocates of Christianity, such as the authors of the Heliand53 and The Dream of the Rood,54 apparently sought to appeal to the Germanic ethos and world-view by portraying Christ as a warrior lord.”— from The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity by James Russell https://propertarianism.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/russell-james-c-the-germanization-of-early-medieval-christianity-_-a-sociohistorical-approach-to-religious-transformation-1994-oxford-university-press.pdf

  • Curt Doolittle updated his status.

    (FB 1544648838 Timestamp) DIFFERENCES —“Compared with Whites, Native Hawaiians had higher androstenedione (+22%, P = 0.017), total testosterone (+26%, P = 0.013), bioavailable testosterone (+33%, P = 0.002), E1 (≥21%; P = 0.009), total E2 (+26%, P = 0.001), bioavailable E2 (+31%, P < 0.001), and lower SHBG (−12% P = 0.07) levels. Compared with Whites, Japanese Americans had higher E2 (+15%, P = 0.036) and bioavailable E2 (+18%, P = 0.024) levels. African Americans also had higher E1 (+21%, P = 0.004), E2 (+20%, P = 0.007), and bioavailable E2 (+20%, P = 0.015) levels compared with Whites, whereas mean levels in Latinas were similar to those of Whites.”—-

  • Curt Doolittle updated his status.

    (FB 1544758945 Timestamp) CHRISTIANITY IS NOT A PRODUCT OF ITS ORIGINS, BUT OF ITS TRANSFORMATION INTO GERMANICIZED FOLK RELIGION – RE-INSTITUTIONALIZED UNDER COLONIALISM. —-…”a concept is not best understood in light of its origins, but rather in light of the direction in which the tradition is moving. To take Christianity as a notorious example: I do not believe that the truth of Christianity will best be elucidated by a search for its origins, but rather by an observation of its development in tradition. This approach is a reversal of the assumption that has dominated Christian and much other religious scholarship for a very long time, an assumption characterized by the genetic fallacy: that the true meaning of a word—or of an idea—lies in its pristine state.48″—-

  • Curt Doolittle updated his status.

    (FB 1544758682 Timestamp) —“Discoveries [were] made by church workers in regions and in a period where we would assume particularly deep and well-instructed religiosity: Saxony and the neighboring parts of Germany around 1600. Once out of the upper-class circles, however, and even in a time of bitter theological rivalries to concentrate the greatest possible attention on the faith, the vast bulk of the population are found to have been largely or totally ignorant of the simplest matters of doctrine, rarely or never attending church. . . . “They were given over to “soothsayers, cunning women, crystal-gazers, casters of spells, witches, and other practitioners of forbidden arts.”—tGoEMC

  • Curt Doolittle updated his status.

    (FB 1544714814 Timestamp) —“Elites developed the industrial revolution, not peasants in the field or sitting around the table at dinner time. Like always elites create innovations and the masses follow along. They weren’t tricked into it, anymore than the elites were tricked into inventing things. It’s natural. The idea that there is some kind of intrinsic abuse of workers by the elites assumes “generational agency” on both parts to get to where we are that doesn’t exist….off the top of my head.”—Mike Harvey

  • Curt Doolittle shared a link.

    (FB 1544800088 Timestamp) SOMEONE JUST SHARED THIS WITH ME: (pls take credit whomever did so. i can’t find it) And it’s the net of it. But it’s not just that women are unhappy and live with it. it’s that white men are unhappy and committing suicide in droves because of it. So it’s not just women who suffer – as usual, its men who DIE.

  • Curt Doolittle updated his status.

    (FB 1544760164 Timestamp) THE INCLUSION OF ARYANISM (RELIGIOSITY OF WAR) INTO CHRISTIANITY
    —“However, such reluctance among Christians may be somewhat ironic, since, were it not for its Germanization, Christianity might never have spread throughout Northern and Central Europe. One of the most obvious examples of the Christian accommodation of Germanic religiocultural attitudes may be found in the medieval Church’s attitude toward warfare. In a study of this subject, J. M. Wallace-Hadrill has noted: Germanic pagan peoples had a clear sense that war was a religious undertaking, in which the gods were interested. At once one thinks of Woden as a God peculiarly, though not exclusively, connected with warfare Pagan and pagan-transitional warfare, then, had its religious facet. Not surprisingly, Christian missionaries found this ineradicable, though not unadaptable to their own purposes. Christian vernacular makes considerable use of the terms of pagan warfare…. Why, then, did the men who converted the Anglo-Saxons differ so sharply [in their apparent indifference toward the warrior code] from Wulfila? The Anglo-Saxons were not less bellicose than the Goths. The answer may lie in the prudent spirit of accommodation shown by Gregory the Great. More than that, the pope was an ardent supporter of warfare to spread Christianity and convert the heathen, and this last is, I think, the more important consideration. So far from rejecting the Germanic war-ethos the pope means to harness it to his own ends, and the evidence is that he succeeded. The barbarians may fight to their heart’s content in causes blessed by the Church, and this is made clear not only in the matter of vocabulary. It is the position of the Church rather than of the Germans that had undergone modification. As Erdmann showed, the Church subsumed and did not reject the warlike moral qualities of its converts. Who shall say that St. Michael of later days was not Woden under fresh colors?71 The apotheosis of the Christian assimilation of the Germanic warrior code may be found in St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s “recruitment tract” for the military order of the Knights Templars, De laude novae militiae, in which the killing of non-Christians in battle is justified, if not encouraged.72″–

  • Curt Doolittle updated his status.

    (FB 1544760019 Timestamp) THE IRRELEVANCE OF DOGMAS, AND THE RELEVANCE OF RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY, RITUAL, AND ADMINISTRATION —“the Germanic peoples did not bother to object to individual dogmas, because dogmatic orthodoxy was not central to their notion of religion. The second reason that the Germanization of Christianity is seldom acknowledged may be that now, when syncretic developments are usually associated with “developing nations,” there may exist at least a sub-conscious reluctance by Western Christians to accept the notion that their mainstream religious tradition is itself the result of a syncretic development which eventually became normative.”— I mean, having literate folk around to mediate between the aristocracy and the people, and to organize feast, festivals, and to educate each other, is not But we have to understand that people in the medieval period treated the church very much like we treat politicians.

  • Curt Doolittle updated his status.

    (FB 1544759893 Timestamp) —“This process of accommodation resulted in the essential transformation of Christianity from a universal salvation religion to a Germanic, and eventually European, folk religion”—

  • Curt Doolittle shared a link.

    (FB 1544800088 Timestamp) SOMEONE JUST SHARED THIS WITH ME: (pls take credit whomever did so. i can’t find it) And it’s the net of it. But it’s not just that women are unhappy and live with it. it’s that white men are unhappy and committing suicide in droves because of it. So it’s not just women who suffer – as usual, its men who DIE.