So, which side is catholic, and which side protestant ?

[SerendipityJane]

Just browsing a couple of podcasts about the reformation, and I was suddenly struck by the parallels in language and commitment to a world view between the early reformation (crispy catholics etc) and the current spat with TRAs and science.

To the extent that either I am alone in my own little universe (which I am quite happy with, thank you) or someone else must have noticed.

Anyway it does provide for a brief distraction if you want to not only examine the parallels, but suggests which side equates to which.

I guess someone, somewhere is working on a PhD around the western christian manifestation of the current transgender discussions. If not they have have that one on me 😎

Not an expert on the underground church in China, but I believe much of the growth is in local sects like Eastern Lightning, that are... idiosyncratically Chinese, and that western churches wouldn't recognise.

An estimated 12 million are Roman Catholics, plus an estimated 115 million Protestants.

And much good has the Vatican done them in recent years.

I'm reserving judgment on Bob from Chicago, but at least the new pope isn't an outright CCP enabler like Parolin.

TRAs are Catholics who believe in trans substantiation, MRAs are Protestants, GCs are lapsed Catholics who lost faith in the entire thing.

Not sure lapsed Catholics, who weren’t Protestants, played much of a role in the reformation?

Yes, this is exactly what I've been reading about. The CDA act reminds me of the argument for legalisation today. A lot of the same themes and arguments are made in debates on the subject today.

The Stead case was fascinating, since it was basically a huge set up. He found a reformed prostitute and convinced her to procure him an underage prostitute. She then went and convinced a neighbour to sell her the girl, who wasn't a working prostitute, and I don't think Stead actually slept with her because he was just doing it to prove a point. I guess it proved it was possible, but it wasn't exactly breaking open and existing child prostitution ring as much as it was trying to invent a scenario to get the legislation through - whether it was actually necessary or not! The profile of prostitutes at the time is understood to be broadly late teens and early twenties. Child prostitution - although probably not unheard of - just wasn't a major issue, it was just a bit of a Victorian panic thing. (Not to say that the legislation shouldn't be celebrated - even one child prostitute is clearly too many.)

The Protestant Tray Bake thread is one of the funniest things I've ever read on MN.

Currently the catholic church doesn't agree with Transgenderism unlike a few of the protestant faiths.

Ok or not isn’t the discussion.
PP was just correcting an inaccuracy

Assume you mean the Church of England as Protestants don’t have a human head of the Church

Man my brains are blown to bits with this thread.

But i can conclude that I can't imagine any trans becoming Nuns or Monks. (Are monks still a thing?)

One big difference Trans nonsense seems to be taught in schools. The reformation was like a hot potato never to be discussed.

Catholics did burn a lot of witches as well as heretics.

Three-quarters of all witchcraft trials took place in the Catholic-ruled territories of the Holy Roman Empire.

https://catholiceducation.org/en/controversy/who-burned-the-witches.html

Yes, this is what I have studied too - the case is fascinating. The arguments for legalisation often include the one about prostitution protecting 'respectable' women from rape, as well as seeing prostituted women as things - hence the requirement to check the goods are 'clean'. I am in favour of the Nordic model.
This scenario came up in 'Miss Scarlet and the Duke' a Victorian private-eye soap - not sure the producers realised what they were exposing.

‘Head of the Church’ is obviously God, but was here referring to the Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

Eh! I thought the King / Queen was head of CoE?

CoScotland has a moderator who is only in the position for a year.

Of course the Salem Witch trials were protestant. Non-compliant women needed to be dealt with.

If you read the article linked you will see they are mentioned.

People often misuse the word secular though, to mean a non-religious, or non-theistic, worldview.

Properly speaking though it's a system where one particular viewpoint isn't directly informing or mandating laws and policies, but individuals with a variety of viewpoints influence the politics. So politics and policy will tend to reflect the religious and other views on individuals in the system, it just won't be officially tied to them.

People who try today to tie non-religious ideology on political systems officially are in a way being the opposite of secular. Their religion is just marxism, or scientism, or wokeism, or whatever.

It was in A level history
never before that and not in RE interestingly

Oh you’d be surprised. I know at least one transwoman who’s obsessed with nuns (yet another all-female enclave he’s trying to access - makes sense when you think about it). He calls himself one and claims to live a “contemplative” life and is always going and staying in a convent as a guest. I don’t know how they put up with him but I have a horrible suspicion he isn’t the only one to behave like this. I don’t know of any transmen who are trying to be monks but it wouldn’t surprise me. Single sex associations are like catnip to TRAs and you don’t get anything that screams “single sex women’s organisation!” much more clearly than a convent.

Honestly I'd never heard of it until a historian at Dunfermline Abbey mentioned it.
I remember thinking he's just spoken about "the reformation" like its common knowledge I don't want to appear thick. I'll look that up later.
And they were also the same people to tell me the plague and black death affected people outside London. And I'm not the only person to have been lead to believe those only affected London to be ended by the Great Fire of London

There were around four times as many witch trials and executions in Scotland as in England (& bizarrely only five in Wales). Given the relative sizes of the populations at the time, the rate of witch-trials relative to the population would have been around 15 or 16 times higher in Scotland. King James VI was a big force behind it, determined to shut up inconvenient women who wouldn’t wheesht. Anyone see any parallels with more recent times? It really is quite chilling.

I’m not sure you can map one side onto the other particularly consistently, but I think there are big historical parallels with groupthink.

Last year I read the Wolf Hall trilogy (for those who don’t know, set under Henry VIII at the start of the English Reformation); and I also read Life and Fate, which is a sort of 20thC War and Peace, set in and around the battle of Stalingrad, by Vasily Grossman, a Ukrainian.

I was struck by the parallels in both with groupthink, right think, what you are and are not allowed to think or believe or say in public, the threat of violence otherwise, the way that subtly silences people and has a « chilling effect » on your actions. There was also a lot of the official line changing and « we have always been at war with Eurasia » stuff - what you believed yesterday has to be updated now. In Wolf Hall things like indulgences, transubstantiation and not allowing people a peek at the Bible all smack of TRAs, but as pp have said, there are lots of unintended consequences, like the closing of convents where women were left alone and Abbesses could be powerful and independent. (I think we got off lightly when you look at Europe, where a good 150 years of war bubbled on). In Life and Fate, it’s clear you only got on if you parroted whatever Stalin thought, even if that was anti-science and the opposite of what he said the day before.

I thought a lot about trans narratives and methods, and how power silences its enemies. It was revealing to say the least. This is why authoritarian governments don’t like to teach history unless it’s completely on their terms - people learn to think independently.

So it’s hard to map one on the other OP but you’re not the only one to look at previous situations in history and think « Oh, look at that, they’re doing it the same way! »

I think the opposite of fundamentalism is education, science, free speech, and tolerance (to a point, where it becomes defence of rights and spaces). That the TRAs mess so much with all of those is what makes me so furious.

I have used the 'transubstantiation' argument before. The wafer looks the same, tastes the same but the magic words have done something you can't see to magically change it in to flesh.

The exact same way magic words change a man in to a woman.

@MotherOfCatBoy I'm not sure England got off that lightly. Religious wars kicked off again in the 1640s. About 20% of the population died during the English Civil War I think. Mostly from hunger and disease rather than directly in the fighting. It was worse in Ireland of course. Although arguably it was the result of newly emerging Nation States like Spain or England who wanted their subjects to profess the same faith as their monarchs ?

On the tras who aspire to be nuns , I fear they may be disappointed by the reality. Our few remaining nuns live in a little care home. Even the costumes are less exciting now. They tend to wear jumpers which are very very very dark blue , Ted. And 👟 trainers!