For real! I’ve been raised pretty religious, and this bigotry is a big factor that made me an atheist.
Your care is limited to Thoughts and Prayers.
But not money or action.
“Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians – you are not like him.” - Bara Dada (~1925)
I love the humorous and relevant username for this thread.
Organized Religon is a control mechanism that humanity no longer needs.
We never really needed it, it arose naturally when people began to question the nature of their reality and other people realized they can gain political power by giving them “answers”.
Religon was kind of a law enforcement system before governments could properly setup formal law enforcement.
It’s a way to make communities self police.
These days, organized religion is a dangerous tool sitting around for random con men to pick up and weild.
Monotheistic Religion is a step along the ladder of class struggle. 2 ish steps ago.
no longer needs✅ Shouldn’t need.
I agree with you however it sadly is a self perpetuating cycle fueled by those who look to gain and those who accept exploitation of the working class regardless of whether it is knowingly or unknowingly.
If you just take a tiny look at what is happening right now, I’d say humanity definitely needs it. Religion merely became powerless to help with it, but the need to make people behave properly definitely is there.
The issue is the people in charge have a different definition of “behave properly” to the rest of us.
Yeah, democracy doesn’t tend to optimize for honesty or other virtues.
You behave properly by not being into religion. That’s kinda the point. Few cults aren’t too radical to be sensible (~all of Island, ~all of Christianity) in a modern world, or intentionally undermine societal structures around them to further their own goals (Mormons et all).
It was once a needed concept. Nowadays non-ecclesical structures exist to do this, and they get actively hampered/undermined by religious ones (see the christofascists in the US).
Nowadays non-ecclesical structures exist to do this,
Genuinely I don’t know what structures those might be. What are you referring to?
Mostly science, media, governments. We no longer need to talk about Gods to explain lightning or ask a priest instead of a doctor to help us with our cancer.
Of course, in days past that scientific alternative did not exist and we also had few ways to inform people about any such alternatives. So religions offered an explanation and while not a solution at least done hope and were really available.
We also have made huge laps in therapy and psychology so we no longer require a supposed higher being to pray to to manage our own fears and depressions.
Of course, everyone handles this differently. For some, it’s a useful tool, even if it is core is Santa Claus for adults, in a way. But it’s not required any more. We found alternatives, and in most cases with actual explanations and actual effects.
Yeah, religion is obsolete, I’m tellin’ yeah… for real this time. We have
FortranRust* now.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sVc8lkTfrk
Also, right-wing parties will lose all future elections because they are dying out of old age… for real this time.
And Gazans were living the best time of their life when the other side of the uniparty was in control… for real!
* I’m actually a Rust user 😄
Ah yes, we have finally discovered the only human being that is immune from politics™ . If only we could all achieve the level of enlightenment that you have.
that’s because christianity and christian nationalism are two entirely different religions.
Christianity and Christianity are two entirely different religions. It differs between the time period, geography and even between 2 neighbours. Christianity is not a moral code but something you can interpret based on your already existing moral code.
I remember multiple Christian authority figures growing up espousing the importance of kindness, natural wonders and thinking for yourself. Deeply ironic in hindsight! Perhaps no one was more hypocritical than my parents though.
I was kicked out of home for being gay. My parents have never grown a vegetable or had a house pet - which I think says a lot about their ability to love something other than themselves. Despite being immigrants, they both love Trump and extreme right wing beliefs. They are also very racist towards immigrants from other countries, dismissing them as “lesser”.
Remember being told not to believe everything you read? Remember being told to be skeptical of what you read in the media?
I definitely was. The people that told me that almost certainly voted Trump though. (They’re not nut job supporters, but lifelong R’s.)
My dysfunctional, delusional and conspiracy-soaked parents told me all the time as I grew up, isolated and disallowed from having school or friends, that I needed to beware the world, that I must never trust others, that people were liars and crazy and that one day I would understand.
Now I do understand. After long-since having buried them all, I now know the truth they said would be so blessed and would “save” me. I now know the book they lived by was a book of ancient fairy tales with some good moral lessons and a lot of death and brutality. I know that they reason I was kept isolated was because they were mentally ill and in denial, I know that I was raised in a cult, not kept safe out in the wilderness. There will be no “second coming” there will be no “paradise” or apocalypse, I am not chosen or special other than the fact that I control my own life and destiny. And I know that THEY were the lying, crazy world that I must not trust. And there are so, so many like them still out there, to various degrees.
Honestly, taken in a vacuum it’s almost a biblical story in itself. That the hardest lesson is the one you have to learn on your own as you abandon literally everything you thought you knew and hoped for. That the real world is dark, and vast and cold and we live profoundly lonely lives, brief flashes of life that are gone in an instant as we cling to a mote of dust caught around a spark in the dark, and maybe we can choose to make our world better or we can choose to make our lives better or we can make the lives of others better and that’s it. We don’t get better options and they’re not mutually exclusive. If you’re not doing those things, you’re wasting time.
You.
Do.
Not.
Have.
Time.
To.
Waste.
Lol. Who do you think you are? Jesus?
My church squared that circle by only caring about others in the “eternal souls damned to hell” sense. If your physical needs weren’t being met, that was a personal failing as far as they were concerned. What’s that? Jesus did a lot of caring for the physical needs of others? Nah, see, that was as only as a metaphor for their spiritual needs. Get your hands off my stuff, dammit.
Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. (Acts 4:32-35)
Wow, those apostles and primitive Christians completely missed the metaphor!
I once sat through a whole ass sermon about how actually that’s not communism 🙃
Mark of a good sermon: did they say what it is?
It was communal spirit. Yes you can call that communism if you want. But what most people mean by communism is the state backed variety that you are forced to participate in. And this wasn’t that. What happened in the early church was voluntary, as is made quite clear in the passage. The rest of the epistles make it quite clear that private property was ok and the church couldn’t force people to share anything (not even a fixed percentage) because all pleas to help the poor are i) voluntary and ii) based on ones conscience as to what the right amount is. That looks a lot more like “moral capitalism” than any kind of communist system.
I’m an atheist socialist by the way, I’m not saying this to defend Christianity or capitalism in any way.
It’s been so long I honestly don’t remember, this was at least 20 years ago. He might have, but all that stuck with me was how stupid it was to spend this much time on ‘this obvious parallel with modern communism isn’t communism, because communism is bad.’
It was the only time it happened and it was voluntary. That’s pretty different from most real world communist systems.
It’s always fascinating to go back and re-read the Bible without the blinders of dogma on. For instance, Paul was held out as a divinely-appointed guide to the early church, but if you don’t take his conversion story at face value it’s quite clear that he’s a conservative trying to take control of a nascent religion and steer it away from the more radical ideas that some of the other early followers took away from the teachings of Jesus. That fun children’s story about Joshua and the walls of Jericho (remember the French Peas from VeggieTales)? That was the opening act of a years-long campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing that God commanded the Israelites undertake to claim the Promised Land!
My favorite, though, is Song of Solomon. It’s straight-up erotic poetry, right in the middle of a book handed out to children! I know they claim it’s metaphorical, but come the fuck on… the author spends whole chapters describing his lover’s naked body, that ain’t a metaphor for anything other than “I want to bone you.”
I’m not going to go as far as to say it’s good erotic poetry, though. I’ve tried “your breasts are like fawns, twins of a gazelle” on my wife and was immediately ejected from the bedroom. YMMV, though.
I’ve tried “your breasts are like fawns, twins of a gazelle” on my wife and was immediately ejected from the bedroom
To be fair, the monk robe and tonsure haircut might not have helped…
to take control of a nascent religion and steer it away from the more radical ideas that some of the other early followers took away from the teachings of Jesus.
tbh authentic Paul was in many ways more radical that Jesus… Jesus told people to give to the poor because the end was near, and so did Paul. Jesus chose all male disciples, Paul refers to Phoebe, Prisca, Euodia and Syntyche (all women) as his “fellow workers” or “ministers”. Jesus affirmed “for this reason a man will leave his parents and be united with his wife”. From Paul we have “there is neither male nor female in Christ Jesus”. Jesus followed synagogue traditions (male only), Paul allowed women to pray and prophesy in his churches. Jesus taught the Jews to follow a loving version of the Torah, Paul pushed the utterly radical idea that Jews were freed from the Torah and united with gentiles in “one body”.
(The conservative line taken in later letters attributed to Paul are believed by academic scholars to be from his later school of disciples, not from him himself.)
Right wing starlet Erick Erickson likes to wax poetic about how Jesus’ parable about the good Samaritan wasn’t insisting people help those in need, it was about helping only other Christians in need. There was some Bible code or some shit that went into explaining how that worked.
That’s a lot of mental gymnastics, given that Jesus’ selection of a Samaritan was specifically made because Jews and Samaritans loathed one another as a rule. The point was to treat everyone as your neighbor, not just those who were part of your in-group. It takes some incredible brain damage to argue “actually, it means the exact polar opposite of its plain meaning.”
That’s a lot of mental gymnastics…
Well, you see, the eye of the needle was really a gate on one side of Jerusalem, so if you wanted to get into that gate with your camel fully loaded with your trade goods and gold coin, you were probably going to need to get down and lead it by hand and therefore humble yourself before God as you brought your wealth into the city. Only some kind of Commie bastard would suggest that there was something literal about that story in the Bible. Duh!
Lyrics
[Chorus] You will eat Bye and bye In that glorious land in the sky Work and pray Live on hay You get pie in the sky when you die (that's a lie!) Long-haired preachers come out every night Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right But when asked about something to eat They will answer in voices so sweet: [Chorus] If you fight hard for children and wife Try to get something good in this life You're a sinner and a bad man, they tell When you die you will surely go to hell [Chorus] Workingmen of all countries unite Side by side we for freedom will fight When the world and its wealth we have gained To the grafters we'll sing this refrain: You will eat, bye and bye When you've learned how to cook and to fry Chop some wood, 'twill do you good And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye
Which is why leaving the church is one of the most christian things I have done.
I wish we could all leave capitalism.
Some good ol’ Crusades.
You care about others? You socialist monster, that means you want to slaughter millions.
Yeah the hypocrisy is deeply baked into the culture.
Whenever I watch a true crime show where they start out with “and they’re good, churchgoing people who could’ve expected this?” I’m like 🙄…me, that’s who.
Reminds me of Supply-side Jesus. https://imgur.com/gallery/bCqRp
the preferred nomenclature is least incoherent reactionary
thx
