Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!lll-winken!uunet!fernwood!uupsi!njin!paul.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: kriz@skat.usc.edu (Dennis Kriz) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: On Daoism, Buddhism & Confucianism Message-ID: Date: 7 May 91 03:56:23 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Lines: 129 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article dhsy@vax5.cit.cornell.edu writes: > > james@jack.sns.com (James Hwang) writes: >> ... >> My father once said to me that Jesus is good and he want to believe >> in him, because he makes people good or can save people. Then I told >> him you can not worship our ancestor after you believe in Jesus. >> Then he said this Jesus is a dirty God and we should destroy it >> and he also said how can people can live without their root(ancestors). >> >> I give you this example to show how people can destroy a God, if >> they believe this God is a bad God. > > This is a interesting observation. Would any of the true Christians > here explain this: can we worship, pray and idolize our ancesters and > the same time be a christian? For example, pray to Jesus and Confucious > (or one of the ancesters of our specific root) for help at the same time > when we have a problem? I don't see why we can't. > > dhsy@vax5.cit.cornell.edu > Like the moderator mentioned in a later note ... a lot depends on what exactly is meant by "praying to ancestors" It is indeed one of the 10 Commandments that Moses brought down from Mt Sinai to "honor one's mother and father" Chinese/asian culture may take this further than the west, but that still could be fine. Where it would become a problem is in the question does one believe that one's ancestors have become gods. If the answer to that is yes, then the practice (to that extent) would have to be rejected by pretty much all Christians, because Christians believe in only one God. Our ancestors, in Christian thinking, like us were human. Indeed we will become ancestors to our descendants. And so ancestors, in that light could not be God. Intercessionary prayer, on the otherhand, to Mary, to the Angels and Saints is common to all the older Churches (Catholic/Orthodox). Indeed, praying *on behalf* of relatives who have passed away is common in those Christian faiths. Intercessionary prayer considered from peripheral (unnecessary) to outright heretical by most Protestants. In Catholic/Orthodox thinking it's actually an act of humility ... Christ is deemed so high that praying to someone "closer to earth" is deemed more appropriate. ********************* Each time Christianity has been brought to a new frontier, the question of "what is necessary" for members of the newly encountered culture to become Christian comes up. Compromises were always made. The Greeks didn't have to follow the old Jewish dietary laws. The Germanic peoples were able to keep their (Christmas) trees. The Slavs got their own alphabet (Cyrillic) and liturgical language (Old Church Slavonic) so that they wouldn't have to become "Germans" in order to become Christians, and so on. Each time there were people screaming that the new Christians were going to be only "nominal" ones. But alas. Personally, I think one of the greatest tragedies in the story of the spread of Christianity occured when Rome basically put the breaks on the Jesuits in Japan (Nagasaki) ... about the 1600s. The issue was Shinto ... emperor worship ... Clearly Christians are not supposed to *worship* a human emperor. But considering that the early Christians suffered similarly under pagan Roman rule, the Vatican *could* have been far more sympathetic. Indeed Christians celebrate Christmas on the day that they do, because it used to be the pagan Roman feast day for their god Jupiter. Christians had to be seen celebrating *something* on that day, or else they would become even clearer targets of persecution. So why not celebrate Christ's birth? It seems frustrating that a similar compromise was deemed impossible (or too difficult to think of) at the time when Shinto became an obstacle to the faith in Japan. But Rome afraid of anything that touched the fringes of normalcy (thanks to the Reformation) got *very* conservative then, and even forced the Jesuits to dress like Westerners ... in a culture as zenophobic as Japan was already. They became sitting ducks... their converts became sitting ducks. The Japanese emperor got wind of what was happening, and got pissed. He *crucified* many of the early Christian converts and shut the country to all westerners for some 200-300 years. Thank you Rome. The final irony came when Truman in deference to Japanese culture (Kyoto) ordered the a-bombing of Nagasaki instead. Nagasaki the long suffering Japanese cradle of Christianity (though apparently the priesthood had died out in Nagasaki during the 300 years of isolation remarkably there remained Japanese who remained loyal (if unbaptized) to Christ and the Church ... until Japan "reopened" to the West in late 1800s) ... was martyred once more at the whim of a disinterested or perhaps uninformed Westerner. But then Truman bombed Hiroshima on the Catholic feast of the Transfiguration (Aug 6) ... A Catholic nun who witnessed *that* in Hiroshima, quickly understood a significance of that "We now have a choice between Transfiguration and Disfiguration." That's a story in itself ... I guess the moral of the story is ... if you are not Western and want to become Christian, the door *is* open though often in spite of Westerners. dennis kriz@skat.usc.edu [I hate to say this, but your posting is likely to confirm what some Protestants have been claiming all along, namely that praying to saints tends to *replace* praying to God. The sentence at issue is >In Catholic/Orthodox thinking it's actually an act of humility ... >Christ is deemed so high that praying to someone "closer to earth" is >deemed more appropriate. What our Catholic contributors have normally said is that there's nothing wrong with praying to saints -- it's just like asking yourq friend to pray for you. But ultimately this has to be an invitation to join you in prayer to God. If you come to feel that you can't pray yourself, but can only ask others to, I think many of us (including some Catholics, I suspect) are going to feel there's something wrong with your relationship to God. On the other hand, I don't want to read too much into one sentence. You may well not mean anything unacceptable by it. --clh]