What is a PCU?

Human nature at its finest.

And another example of the life of the forum threads.

Excessively ‘functional’ accounts of religious belief don’t do justice to the historical reality. Obviously there’s a political factor: the Bible itself acknowledges this, when the Book of Kings charts the history of the Judahite kings’ support for monotheism. But ancient people weren’t stupid, blindly accepting whatever was dictated to them by material and political circumstances. They were clever, often highly literate, and they reflected intelligently on the world around them. For each Israelite who rankled at the kings’ attempts to suppress polytheistic practices, there was an Israelite who genuinely entered into this new understanding of their covenantal God within a radical monotheism. Ironically, what we see vanishingly little of was people who didn’t really care either way. Steven Justice, 2008, offers a good critique (in the context of the Middle Ages) of histories which belittle the thought of religious historical subjects.

Obviously there’s a current within religion of denying historical reality, of subjugating the historical fact to the philosophical or theological supposition. But Christian theology underwent a renewal in historical consciousness in the 19th and 20th centuries. Ratzinger, coming at the end of this trend, could say - as someone more educated about the history of the Ancient Near East than you or I - that early Israelite polytheism posed no problem for his faith, indeed that it could play a part in a history of faith in the one God rather than just a history of religion as a phenomenon. Reflection on the mysteries of God can go hand-in-hand with historical awareness.

I can say that the history of the people of God is a history of a growing awareness of the one God, a history culminating in putting the old expressions (Father, ‘he’, etc) in service to the mystery itself, which exceeds human realities.

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That’s one way to look at it, I guess.

Modern abrahamic monotheism is pretty firmly entrenched, cults of saints and martyrs aside and keeps evolving to fit its contemporary niche like american evangelicals merging religion and economics via capitalist prosperity gospel. It’s never done changing, slipping into cracks where it’ll fit and I’m relatively sure we’ll keep attributing agency to the universe with new prophets long after we’ve forgotten the particular myths of Enki and El.

I think there was a burger discussion that I missed and it makes me sad
I’ll cheer myself up by making some probably
Also genuinely interesting stuff to read here about religion and all that and I cannot believe I just typed that on the AD forums and meant it

what on earth happened here, nearly 3000 posts???

Someone post that gif of the guy arriving with pizza in hand to the scene of chaos and fires
I feel that’s everyone checking in here since the past… what, four days?

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Well, the first appears to be proceeding nicely and I sympathise with the latter. Best of luck outside of Warcraft!

Do you study theology, Wrall? Nice!

And the OCU is religion friendly! Come join!

There is a guy out there that puts his cheddar under his burger.

Not just the swedish way. My grandpa did this too, though when I taught him to like ketchup, this was not how he was supposed to play the game, God rest his soul :slight_smile:

We Dutch did that too. Everyone always on about the Brits conquering places but we were there too :frowning:

And to my great regret, although I was raised Catholic, I am not qualified enough to debate religion. I also missed the food discussion :frowning:

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Listen the Timurid Empire went to conquer Turkey in part because the Ottoman Emperor refused to meekly accept Timur’s accusations that he couldnt satisfy his wife - everyone’s been there at some point buddy

(No really; Timur and the Ottoman Emperor exchanged many letters insulting each other’s maliness before eventually Timur deciced he’d had enough and went to skewer the Emperor directly with metal)

not just his cheddar, but lettuce too.

Are we talking Timur as in one of the islands near Indonesia that was called Timur? Like damn, if that’s true, that’s quite far apart.

Welk this guy puts his cheddar under the burger raw with the excuse it melts better.

Aah no no!

Sorry here’s me going on about nomadic conquerors nobody’s heard of again (then again, that is 90% of my forum personality …)

Timur was an Islamic Turko-Mongol conqueror from what’s now Uzbekistan around the 1300s - think of him as the Kylo Ren to Genghis Khan’s Darth Vader, in that he literally had a dream of rebuilding the Mongolian Empire, even if he had to kill every last man woman and child in Asia to do it!

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So I see, thank you for telling me this. While I never made history my study, I do always enjoy hearing about it and talking about it!

And functionally the end boss of medieval total war 2.

That’s disturbingly accurate. The man really messed up delhi.

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I would like to subscribe to more Mongolian lore

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I am surprised this topic wasn’t brought up earlier at this point.

Mongolian throat singing intefies

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