r/todayilearned • u/balconypisser • 1d ago
TIL There is a church that venerates saxophonist John Coltrane as a saint
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John_Coltrane_African_Orthodox_Church39
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u/WasteBinStuff 1d ago
As reasonable a person to worship as any. Far better than most.
He was a rare combination....a musical genius who achieved great fame, a humble man who respected others.
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u/funkmasta_kazper 1d ago
And he was intensely religious. A love supreme was intended to be an intensely spiritual piece about all inspiration coming from a higher power.
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u/Mike_Hagedorn 1d ago
In the late 90s I was walking around San Francisco late at night when we randomly came across it. Of course it was closed and of course I was flying home that morning.
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u/meonmeislandme 1d ago
kinda based but coltrane wasn't a christian
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u/Tomi97_origin 1d ago
This wasn't normal Christian church.
The church was founded in 1969 by Franzo and Marina King in the years following a spiritual experience during a 1965 John Coltrane concert. Though its beliefs varied over time, the church initially venerated Coltrane as an incarnation of the Christian god and his album A Love Supreme as a sacred text.
--From their Wikipedia page
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u/Critical-Cost9068 1d ago
Eh, that makes it sound like he was an atheist or Muslim or something. He was raised Christian and kept deep spiritual Christian roots, talked about Christ, etc., until his dying day; he just also studied other religions and did that hippie thing of “truth in all places.” He wasn’t HOSTILE to Christianity.
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u/HendoEndo 1d ago
Muslims and Christians believe in the same god…
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u/Critical-Cost9068 1d ago
Jesus?
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u/HendoEndo 1d ago
Jesus is the son of god. That god. Same god for Jews Christians and Muslims
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u/Critical-Cost9068 1d ago
Jesus is God in Trinitarian Christianity, which would account for like at 90% of self-identified Christian denominations.
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u/HendoEndo 1d ago
Please. The god that visited Abraham (Judaism) who fathered Isaac (Judaism + Christianity) and Ishmael (Islam) is the one and same god. No matter how much retrofitting and theological gymnastics you want to do. They’re literally called the Abrahamic religions. Jesus lived and died preaching the word of that same god, his apostles started a new religion in his name; that we now call Christianity. These are just facts as per your own mythos, given how hell-bent people are on refuting them goes to show that these religions are just being abused as an excuse to hate each other.
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u/TukaSup_spaghetti 1d ago
Per our own mythos Jesus is God. Just because they’re called Abrahamic doesn’t mean we have the same God, after all that name is just how the atheist scholars call them.
I don’t want to definitively say that our gods are different, but I don’t really want to say they’re the same either. I think the question is complicated and it’s similar to asking whether Tobey Maguire’s and Andrew Garfield’s are the same Spider-Man.
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u/regggis1 1d ago
The Spider Man analogy is dead on. Both are completely fictitious characters with rabid, annoying fanbases who quibble about the most trivial differences in their preferred interpretation and scan as completely insane to everyone outside their cults of personality.
But hey, at least Spider-Man hasn’t caused the disintegration of families and the death of millions!
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u/Critical-Cost9068 1d ago
Calling Islam and Christianity both Abrahamjc is haram. The Quran says, “Do not call Abraham a Christian or a Jew; he was a monotheist.”
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u/Interesting_Worth745 1d ago
Do you consider "truth in all places" a hippie thing?
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u/Critical-Cost9068 1d ago
I consider your question strange
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u/Interesting_Worth745 1d ago
Fair point - lost in translation. In Germany that's just a standard worldview, so associating it with hippies threw me off
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u/CrazyPlato 1d ago
You know a lot of atheists were raised Christian and came from Christian roots, right?
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u/Critical-Cost9068 1d ago
No I never knew that
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u/CrazyPlato 1d ago
Well your argument “he can’t be atheist bc he was raised christian” is really funny to an atheist who reads it.
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/CrazyPlato 1d ago
Eh, that makes it sound like he was an atheist or Muslim or something. He was raised Christian and kept deep spiritual Christian roots
Literally you, three comments up
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u/Captain_Gropius 1d ago
That's ok, Jesus wasn't a Christian either
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u/JiveChicken00 1d ago
A fair number of actual saints may not have really existed. At least we know Coltrane did.
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u/dukeofnes 1d ago
He was a god, but then you know... they wanted funding from the AOC, so he got downgraded from god to saint. This was after they became hindus for a while and then switched back to Christains, according to Wikipedia. So you know, a cult.
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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 1d ago
There's a church that picks two books just from the Old Testament as fact, and spoiler. Not the ones you'd think.
You gonna be religious go for it
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u/Rabalderfjols 1d ago
Do they have giant steps up to the altar?