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A comment on The two Christian saints who are the Buddha. Parent comment

Re:The two Christian saints who are the Buddha by holdit on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @03:08PM (#49615219)
>the Roman Catholic Church has a long, pragmatic history of absorbing local traditions in Indonesia.

This is straight out of the Manichaeism playbook whose followers believed that a wide range of previous belief systems including Platonism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity each had a part of divine truth in them. This allowed them to absorb a diverse set of followers and contributed to them being one of the fasted spreading religions in Late Antiquity even giving Christianity a run for its money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism

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Re:The two Christian saints who are the Buddha by annzabelle on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @05:57PM (#49617720)
Manichaeism did run into a lot of practicality challenges. In particular, the restrictions on diets and behavior for the priestly class were very extreme. No harvesting food, no stepping in puddles, strict veganism, and celibacy.

I read a few books on it for a term paper in college, and the part that most sticks out in my distant memory is that the creation myth involves a lot of what were translated in my copy as aborted fetuses.

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