Which religions seek to actively convert people (besides Christianity & Islam)? (user search)
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  Which religions seek to actively convert people (besides Christianity & Islam)? (search mode)
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Author Topic: Which religions seek to actively convert people (besides Christianity & Islam)?  (Read 10382 times)
DC Al Fine
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« on: June 18, 2016, 01:41:51 PM »

Can I include historical examples?

Manichaeism was very widespread and actively seeking converts in the first millennium A.D, to the point of rivaling Christianity but eventually died out.

Am I missing any?

Am I misunderstanding any?

Or when we talk about how "religion" always seeks to convert people, or conquer/colonize new places, or believe its way is the only true way... are we really only talking about Christianity and Islam?

Any religion that didn't evolve out of a culture/nation's paganism would have had to seek converts at some point or they wouldn't be the size they are today. Sikhism, Buddhism, Bahai and probably Zoarastrianism would fall into this category. Hellenistic Judaism was also fairly convert friendly IIRC.
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DC Al Fine
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Posts: 14,080
Canada


« Reply #1 on: January 14, 2017, 11:34:51 AM »

There's plenty of theories about physics and astronomy that haven't been proven and that we don't fully understand yet, but that doesn't mean that competing theories can both be true. Eventually some will be proven true and some false, just like so many theories in the past. Hence why any religion that holds that it's only true for certain people makes no sense, and why I could never be a part of one.

...that doesn't make any sense. At all. I can't quite figure out that process of thought in worshipping that religion's God but not converting.

Actually kind of leads into why I'd never be a member of a non-prosyletizing religion, it violates my logical standards. If something is true for me it must be true for everyone.

It makes perfect sense.  Traditional Jewish logic is that the Jews have a contract with God in which they perform extra obligations in return for a special status (with brutal severance terms for the Jews if they don't hold up their end of the bargain: see Deuteronomy...like all of it). Non-Jews are outside of the contract. They're welcome to worship and follow God (and even in the Bible you find pagans like Balaam who end up worshipping God) but none of the obligations of Jewish law apply to them because they are outside of God's deal with the Jews.

That sort of thinking and the notion that there are special rules binding on me but not most people would quite frankly horrify me. That definitely confirms that I'd convert out of Judaism if I was born Jewish.

If you were born Jewish you wouldn't be you, but if you were you you'd almost certainly be Reform or Reconstructionist.

I could easily be born Jewish from the same environment. There is a Jewish community in Bismarck you know.

Also there's approximately zero Jews in my scene who are more religious and/or observant than Bernie Sanders or Lena Dunham.

The point I'm making, and the point everybody's been trying to make for years, is that "your scene" is not the long and the short of you, and ending up in it is not some sort of inevitable fate. No, not even inevitable for people from Bismarck.

I say you'd probably be Reform or Reconstructionist because I think it's unlikely, admittedly based on my experience as a damn dirty Northeasterner, that anybody from a non-Hasidic/Haredi American Jewish background is going to look at any form of reasonably Nicene Creed-compliant Christianity and think it's more "all liberal, all the time" than Reform or Reconstructionist Judaism. I believe you that there are Jewish converts to hipster Christianity in "your scene"--I know Jewish converts to Catholicism and even Orthodoxy; why wouldn't I believe you?--but I'd be willing to bet they were looking for things at least marginally more theologically specific than "all liberal, all the time" in a religion. "Almost certainly" was too strong, sure.

As an aside, I find it interesting how ultra-liberal churches seem to inevitably go down the road of formal heresy. You'd think some of them would still adhere to the creeds.
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