/christian/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

>>669024

"Jesus answered, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'" - John 14:6

#1 Religions have inherent contradictions at the esoteric and exoteric levels, what's right and wrong, how to worship God, who God is, how to be saved and what happens after death.

#2 The notion of perennial ecumenism undermines the fundamental dogmas of major religions and reduces their claim to truth, therefore their power to promote authentic faith in people decreases, a religion gets much of its HUTZPAH and POWER by having a unique and exclusive claim to truth; (if abstaining from pork is actually just as valid to God partaking of pork then the precept itself loses moral weight and becomes trivial). Morals become relative and you can convert to whatever religion you find easiest and most palpable for your character. But when the subject realizes this he'll not feel any metaphysical urgency behind his choice, it was just a matter of convenience. This is vastly different than submitting to something objectively true even if your nature finds it challenging because something big is at stake.

#3 Anyone who subscribes to perennialism will find it hard to authentically practice any religion without feeling like he's LARPing since all the exoteric/historical/ritual/sacramental and even moral practices become relative and feel like excess baggage (its true for muslims but not for buddhists…it's true for christians but not for jews…its true for platonists but not for vedantists…) give me a break.

>>669024

I'll just paste a long post I made from another thread

I am referring to the teachings of Guénon, Schuon, Burckhardt, Pallis, Valsan and Coomaraswamy. I will not address Evola, since, unlike the others, he had a strong antichristian prejudice and this is obviously unnaceptable.

-The idea of Primordial/perennial tradition

The main claim of perennialism/guenonian traditionalism is that there is a core spiritual tradition from the beginning of humanity and that all religions are adaptation of it, created by inspired prophets to preserve truth in different ways to different people and cultures in history. Basically google Sanatana Dharma in Hinduism and that's where it is from. This implies that all religions are equally true and equivalent.

The only thing we can accept as Christians is that existed a certain primordial knowledge of God, but it was lost in idolatry and superstition after the Babel tower. Certain wise men like Socrates or Zoroaster were able to learn a certain amount of truth, but this can never be equal to the religion revealed from God. Christianity is above other religions, the nice things in other religions are at best incomplete fragments or prefigurations of Christian truths written by their wise men.

-The content of this perennial religion

Basically it's just Advaita Vedanta, the most abstract and less pagan of hindu doctrines. This imply, for example, that Shiva and Krishna are equally acceptable as forms and interpretation of the same divine as Christ is. That politheism is just a way of seeing divine energies, different but not less true than monotheism. The final goal of man is to reach union into the divine in an impersonal way: to become a drop of water into the ocean.

God as a personal being with a will is accepted but as a lesser truth, God in itself is pure Being outside of being.

-Esotericism/Essotericism

This part about the impersonal absolute is usually part of the most advanced and reserved systems, as opposed to the devotion for God, intended for average people.

Since Sufi muslims and Hindus, among others, show traces of this distinction the perennialists try desperately to project it upon christianity. Since Christian theology obviously do not teach these things they are lead to believe Christianity was esoteric but turned into a mass religion and there are some unknown groups inside it still teaching the esoteric doctrine to those who are qualified. Among these groups the authors of the Graal cycle, the knights templar, Rosicrucians and freemasons. Unfortunately all these group are dead or were corrupted (like the freemasons). This would imply Christ had a secret teachings that was unwritten; the revelation would thus split in two different doctrines and so would the hierarchy because it follows that an esoteric initatic hierarchy must exist, separated from that of bishops.

-Hermeneutics

They constantly try to read Christianity in light of other traditions. They do not read Christian scriptures or the saints in light of Christianity itself but they project hindu or muslim ideas on it. For example the esoteric/essoteric split is from the muslims, it is unknown in Christianity but they project it.

-The fruits of perennialism

Since they believed all religions are equally true and equivalent, and since Christianity has no more initiatic esoteric groups to be used to reach union into the Absolute, the perennialists left Christianity, all of them. The great majority of them became sufi muslims. I don't need to explain why this is wrong.

-Sacraments

Ever since the imaginary moment when Christianity turned essoteric the sacraments have no value. To the perennialist they were once initatic rituals but now they no longer give initiation into the mysteries.

Not all of them agree on this, the main issue is that they constantly minimize and ignore the core of Christianity because they are too interested into molding it to fit with their Hindu/Sufi theories.

The death and resurrection of Christ is not really that important to them, only the fact that Christianity is compatible with the doctrines of Sanatana Dharma and sufi mysticism.

>>669184

>Isn't this based partially on the ideas from some of the Gnostic writings which were written well after the synoptic Gospels, and incorporated teachings from various other religious sects at the time making Jesus the mouthpiece for ideas he never implied in the NT?

Absolutely, in fact René Guénon, the founder of traditionalism/perennialism, was a gnostic in his youth.

Although he then started to criticize those ideas and groups, and even tried to be a Catholic esoterist before definitely converting to Sufi Islam (that was not a full conversion since he still believed Christianity to be true at the same time)