Saturday, December 17, 2022

Odd Take, IMO

According to Rod Dreher, increasing acceptance among evangelical Christians of 1) homosexuality and 2) "gender identity" beliefs conforming to the current trends -- specifically referring to God in non-male terms -- "is to neopaganize Christianity" in defiance of "basic Christian orthodoxy."

I find the complaint strange

Not because of any particular beliefs I may have regarding the subject matter he's targeting for the claim, but because of the claim itself.

"Basic Christian orthodoxy" is a needlessly long way of saying "Judaism," the religion Jesus practiced and taught.

Dreher's version of "basic Christian orthodoxy" (the Pauline heresy and its descendant sects) is itself the result of a Greco-Roman paganization of that religion. Even the doctrine of trinity, which he cites as evidence on the gender claim, was a kludge to drag the polytheistic Pauline sect back toward Christianity's Jewish monotheism pursuant to Constantine's identification of God with the official Roman pagan deity (the sun god Sol Invictus) and his requirement that Christians worship on that god's day (Sunday) rather than on the sabbath.

Dreher's problem with "neo-paganization" seems to be that it conflicts with his own "paleo-paganism," not that it conflicts with "basic Christian orthodoxy."

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