Meredith is a hot mess’s Reviews > Mani and Manichaeism > Status Update

lol I needed to get that off my chest.

Everyone is going to have their own personal beliefs with bias, and I respect when people can own it. Imo Arjana would benefit from reading Pagels work and taking a note out of her book when it comes to organization and being able to separate 'looking at the evidence' and then qualifying your own personal opinion at the end - which can add value to the book imo

When I say 'bias' I don't mean it in a negative way, we all have biases.

To compare, what irritated me with Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi by Sophia Rose Arjana (though I liked the book) was that I could tell her personal religious beliefs were influencing the book, but she refrained from giving her personal opinion at all. I later looked up interviews from her to find out more about her personal beliefs -

**ESOTERICA is not aimed for novices like ReligionForBreakfast, but for instance, after reading Elaine Pagels' book on Gnosticism I can watch his content and follow along much more easily.

For YT channels, the ones I like (The content creators may or may not be religious, spiritual, but they are mainly just giving the historical facts, comes across as unbiased as possible) are:

1. ReligionforBreakfast *He is super clear, this is good for novices

2. LetsTalkReligion *I haven't been able to finish any videos by him, his accent puts me to sleep, but otherwise he seems good

3. ESOTERICA**

I'm not saying I completely agree with her, but I respect her ability as a historian to 'look at the evidence' without showing her own bias, though she was willing to give her own opinion at the end of the book.

**Her take is that if the Orthodox Christians had not organized a unified church and all the Christian sects remained loosely structured with a wide variation of interpretations, practices, Christianity might have completely disappeared like other ancient world religions.

And for her, who is drawn to Christianity, that would've been a shame (I'm paraphrasing her)