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Originally Posted by Adult Site Traffic
There is also a lot of Santeria here which is sort of a hybrid between Catholicism and Voodoo. It's pretty interesting, I've read on it from time to time but I'm not clear how this strain of religion got here.
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A major reason why Catholicism grew so rapidly and swamped out earlier doctrinal rivals to become a monolithic institution was its eagerness to incorporate existing 'pagan' belief systems and philosophies. At its most obvious, whenever a new region was converted to Catholic christianity, the regions gods and deities were recast as local patron saints. At its most fundamental, Catholicism unhesitatingly swapped core beliefs for contemporary beliefs that were very prevalent and accepted--for example: the Greek idea of the duality of the soul and body and the permanence of the former.