Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Christianity and Islam both originated in Africa. You seem a bit lost.
Would you like to elaborate a little more on that?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joy74
You are speaking the truth with this. Its too bad so many people live in a state of lie and deny when it comes to this knowledge.
Before we turn this entire thread over to people who lie and deny with little tiny fragments of conjectural trivia, please be reminded that the OP was a legitimate question that deserves a reasoned historical analysis.
The fact is, there was a loosely-formed body of thought that prevailed throughout most of what we now call the people of Africa, which is a very large continent, not to be confused with some reedy rush lake near the mouth of the Nile.
But in those days, religion was not take nearly as seriously as it is today, and in general, people could pretty much take or it leave it, and applied religion to their lives on an ad-hoc basis when there were events that needed religious or spiritual intervention. Remnants of this African proto-religion can be found in Voodoo, which is a very old African tradition that was kept alive by Africans in the Caribbean Islands. To this day, you can scare the hell out of any African by representing something as possessing Voodoo or Gris-gris.
Later on, as mercenaries, conquistadors and zealots arrived from the north, they brought with them a more demanding religion, and inflicted it on the African people, often murdering those who demurred. Which answers the OP's question about why Africans embraced the white man's religion, instead of their own. The fact is, in Africa, religious traditions were so fluid, that the Africans just stirred Christianity into their spiritual pot, and accepted the superstitions of the white man right along with their own.
In later year, religion in Africa went from a sleepy assumption of miscellaneous spirits, to huge corporations with their gigantic megachurches, and their zealous wandering minstrels thumping bibles, which, needless to say, easily swayed the gullible, which history shows to be a pretty pervasive defect in human nature.
OP is either straight up trolling or putting on an awesome display of ignorance. I'm not Christian, but even I know that the message of Christ according to Christian tradition is universal and doesn't belong to any one people. BTW Christianity has existed in places like Egypt and Ethiopia long before most of Europe. One could also pose the question, why do Europeans have no religion of their own? All of the major world religions either started in the Middle East or India.
OP is either straight up trolling or putting on an awesome display of ignorance.
I just re-read the OP. It is a perfectly legitimate question, based on verifiable assumptions (except the blue eyes), and the only ignorance it reflects is that the OP does not know the answer to the question he asked. He is asking you for an answer. If you have one, give it to him in a civil fashion. If you don't know the answer, either, go back and read my posts (#25, 38, 41) for an explanation.
I just re-read the OP. It is a perfectly legitimate question, based on verifiable assumptions (except the blue eyes), and the only ignorance it reflects is that the OP does not know the answer to the question he asked. He is asking you for an answer. If you have one, give it to him in a civil fashion. If you don't know the answer, either, go back and read my posts (#25, 38, 41) for an explanation.
No, he made a huge incorrect assumption and then asked questions based on his assumption. The proper question would have been "Do Africans have their own indigenous religions?" And then he could have explained that he has never heard of any.
No, he made a huge incorrect assumption and then asked questions based on his assumption. The proper question would have been "Do Africans have their own indigenous religions?" And then he could have explained that he has never heard of any.
What is the "huge incorrect assumption"?
There are a few white man religions that are successful in converting the africans to their religions.
That's true -- Christianity and Islam are embraced by an overwhelming majority of Africans, even those who also retain much of the residue of their traditional African religions. They are the two lynchpins that dominate the religious faith today of "white men", from Pakistan to the Atlantic and throughout the western hemisphere, and were established as the virtually universal faiths of white men before their introduction into Africa. India is the only mostly-Caucasian nation in which the predominate value system is not based on Christianity or Islam. So Christianity and Islam are clearly "white man" religions, who in turn converted Africans to their faiths..
African Americans have totally absorbed white mans religion and worship blond blue eyed Jesus.
Nearly all African Americans (82%) consider themselves Christian, with the exception of a Black Muslim minority, and about 12% unaffiliated with any church. I don't know of any historical data that asserts any basis for the presumption that Jesus was dark skinned, dark haired, or dark eyed, and he is characteristically portrayed, in the absence of any widely-accepted objective contradicting data, as a "white man". Nearly all African Americans tacitly accept that the people of the Holy Land, including Jesus, were predominately white. Nothing to the contrary was written in the Gospels, by people who presumably would have noticed an influential and charismatic black man amongst them.
So, what is the "huge incorrect assumption" that preceded the OP's question? Granted, it is a poorly worded question. First, it is ambiguous about whether he is addressing the religion of modern Africans, or African Americans. (Since he posted in the Africa Forum, let's assume the former.) Second, the choice of the term "invented" obfuscates the real point of what is a legitimate question seeking an explanation of why African religious thought did not survive the onslaught of Christian and Islamic proselytizer, the way Asian religions did.
The answer, I suspect, is because African religious traditions were not organized and codified into a set of rigid scriptures that could be appealed to by scholarly apologists for African religions.
There are a few white man religions that are successful in converting the africans to their religions. African Americans have totally absorbed white mans religion and worship blond blue eyed Jesus. Why have Africans never invented their OWN religions in the way that all other races have?
Dude! Who told you Jesus had blue eyes? He was a Jew. He had brown eyes. Deal with it.
Africans are like Native Americans: they practice their own spiritual traditions alongside Christianity (those who who have adopted Christianity. Many haven't). Why haven't people like you ever taken a class in African history or culture, or ever bothered to educate themselves on those topics? It's not as if you don't have any research tools at your disposal.
Last edited by Ruth4Truth; 07-08-2013 at 09:43 PM..
why African religious thought did not survive the onslaught of Christian and Islamic proselytizer, the way Asian religions did.
It did. Maybe the problem is that you don't recognize it, because it doesn't take place in a building with a written text and all the other accoutrements of European and other organized religions.
Not surprisingly, their rendering depicts him as middle-eastern in appearance.
I think the OP could have phrased his question better. Something along the lines of "why have Christian and Muslim missionaries been so successful at converting most of sub-Saharan Africa from their indigenous religious traditions?" (perhaps nominally to some extent, but there are definitely Christian and Muslim communities that are as fundamentalist as anything you'd find in the Bible Belt or Saudi Arabia). I'm well aware that Christianity in Ethiopia substantially predates European Christianity, but for most of sub-Saharan Africa, Christianity arrived on the heels of European colonialism. Similarly, Islam was aggressively promulgated from outside the region by people from a very different cultural background than the Africans they were converting.
It's interesting to note that when the Portuguese Catholics originally encountered the small Christian community in SW India (who had been practicing Christianity since the 1st century AD), they denigrated them as heretics. I expect there was a similar disdain for the Ethiopian Christians. In that sense it is not unreasonable to discuss European Christianity (or Arabic Islam) versus sub-Saharan, African religions.
Northern Africa is Muslim... central and southern Africa is Christian
Why can't they follow Islam and Christianity? Jesus was white, so what?!
Jesus most likely had brown or hazel eyes.
OP is trolling I think, or silly and uneducated. Christianity is univeral
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
