alt Hacker News>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.
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.