• Dharma Curious@startrek.website
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    2 days ago

    Can we be friends? My best friend is also a former Baptist preacher who’s now a daoist/nondualist. I’m a nondualist who’s interested in daoism, and super interested in gnosticism (and occasionally an Episcopalian, especially on holidays ;) )

      • Dharma Curious@startrek.website
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        12 hours ago

        Mhmm, yup. We’re a denomination founded around the “Jesus fish.” During the reign of Henry the 8th there was a lot of controversy, because Catholics didn’t eat meat on Friday, and Henry wanted to murder his wife. But the pope said that wasn’t cool, because Henry wanted to do it on a Friday (so he could take the weekend to recover, y’know?), and the pope said that that fell under the whole no meat on Friday thing, since once someone is dead, they’re more meat-like, and Henry said that he wasn’t going to eat her, but the pope was like “still not cool, bro, do it on a Thursday” and Henry didn’t take kindly to bring called bro by a dude in a dress, so he founded the church of England (then called the Church in England), and he got to murder his wives, but in exchange for not crusading against England for doing this, Henry agreed to the popes compromise that they could murder wives on Friday, so long as they also ate fish.

        Well, when the US was founded, we really took that whole fish thing and ran with it. Started putting little Jesus fish bumper stickers on our carriages, branding them on our horses, the whole shebang. By the time the US split from England, though, there were no bishops left that would ordain American clergy, so we went to the Scottish, and they ordained us a few starter bishops to get us through the lean times, but by then there were enough disagreements between us as the CoE that we decided to just go ahead and change the name, and now we exclusively eat fish, and we’re called Episcopalians.

    • Envy@fedia.io
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      2 days ago

      Your best friend sounds amazing! Always happy to DM and maybe Signal, especially anything related to theology and the esoteric 😊