First of all, through God all things are possible, so jot that down.
Nice
You guys better start greasing some dudes or I’m gonna freak out.
Simplified by Eric Idle
brilliant
God doesn’t make mistakes.
So if God made somebody trans, then they’re trans.
Moreover, by their own stories not only did God intentionally make that person trans but God likely deliberately did so to test the people interacting with said trans person on if they could love the trans person as required by their faith.
But no. It’s never that because the religious argument is just a post hoc justification for the hate.
The other day I suggested fighting climate change was a net benefit even if it were “hoax.” This some offended their Christian sensibilities and I was told:
That god thingy made mistakes since time immemorial. Read the bible.
They’re not real mistakes. The end justifies the means and they think their god is only smart enough to go with this, basically.
The ends justify the means?
Hypotheticaly then: if I had a 100% guarantee that murdering all babies would get them into heaven, but you’d go to hell, is it morally right to murder all babies? The ends justify the means, do they not? We need to get babies to heaven! So murder them all!
No, it’s absolutely still monstrous. Because utilitarianism is stupid.
Stanislaw Lem had a short story about something like this. Basically a missionary came to a planet populated by cute innocent fur balls. He taught them the Bible, so they tortured him to death to make him a martyr and guarantee that he gets to haven, knowingly condemning themselves to hell out of compassion for the priest.
The flipside is: why tf is Judas considered a bad guy? Without him, no one could have ever gone to heaven
Oh, no. That’s not okay. But, if we did do that, then it’s for the best.
If you do it it’s not ok and you should feel guilty all of your life. But if we did it it’s totally ok.
Actually you should still feel guilty all of your life because one of your ancestors sinned or something. And I’ve made you a sinner by definition.
– God, priests and other representatives of God, probably.
Also, can we have more gold?
- God and priests, definitely.
No, that’s just god testing them, because that definitely makes sense.
- God! You made a mistake!
- Hehe, no just checking if you were sinful.
Sure God. Sure.
I like your way of thinking but for a Christian it doesn’t work like that. They will likely say that despite God’s intentions, this person went consciously against God’s will and decided to commit a sin (because God gave us free will).
And then good luck explaining to them how nobody in their right mind would want to be ridiculed, cast out, ostracised, hated by so many people and become trans just simply out of spite.
Not for nothing, but like for the first thousand years of Christianity they basically murdered each other over the question.
This. And they really want to start murdering each other over this again. Christianity is just preoccupied at the moment with Muslims, LGBTQ, and promoting Trump.
And after that, Christians were killing each other over infant vs adult baptism, then over slavery, and now homosexuality. 😬
Meanwhile apocryphal Jesus was like:
Jesus said to them, “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom].”
- Gospel of Thomas saying 22
Or
For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.
- Gospel of Thomas saying 114 (likely a much later addition to the text reflecting later air of misogyny, but still)
that’s actually pretty kewl
My favorite Apocryphal Jesus story was when teenage Jesus got pissed at his friend and killed him, friend’s mom bitched to Jesus’ mom about this, so Jesus brought the friend back to life. Just imagine if White People Twitter had been around back then.
Yes, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
For years I thought that was a silly story showing the ridiculousness of the apocrypha, and it was only decades after first reading it in a high school class that I effectively realized it was subversive satire.
The Thomasine tradition was notoriously opposed to physical resurrection early on. Hence “doubting Thomas.”
This opposition to a core canonical principle was likely part of what led to the Gospel of Thomas eventually being punishable by death to even possess.
But here’s this text attributed to the Thomasine tradition that probably had more resurrections per page than maybe any other text in any religion, and certainly in Christianity. And so instead of needing to be buried in a jar like the other, it survived the dark ages and middle ages fine, just as this kind of weird text but dogmatically agreeable.
And yet the story in between kid Jesus smiting and resurrecting is all about how Jesus, despite being very bright, wasn’t able to learn his letters and looked at letters and words different from others. A weird focus for the text, and one that at its end overlaps with part of the opening of Luke.
Then if you look closer, some other details stand out.
For example, it mentions how the author ‘Thomas’ is a philosopher in the opening.
And through that lens, another detail stands out - the kid that falls off the roof to his death and then is raised back up is named Xeno - like the philosopher famed for his paradoxes of motion. Probably not a very common name in a Jewish town in 1st century Galilee.
These days that text reminds me of a famous adage, “the only way to tell the truth is through fiction.”
I think a group, that was on the outskirts of a growing organized religion that eventually becomes the canonical church, took their own stories about Jesus’s childhood where he was bright but struggled with learning letters and reworked them into a tale so over the top and ridiculous it was actively making fun of the canonical infancy stories that were being added to the Synoptics. But that the canonical group, blinded by their own beliefs, failed to even recognize the satire and ended up keeping the texts alive thinking that they were agreeing with them, even though it was effectively the philosophical sect of early Christianity taking the piss at their fantastical dogma.
And then today we just take it at face value as authentically intended and just think “man people back then believed weird stuff.”
Wow. Did Thomas write other fanciful stuff to take the piss?
Lol pwned
I’ve recently been reading scholarly books about early Christendom and it was after Jesus and the first generation of Christians that apologists came up with the trinity. I don’t have the name of the guy who wrote that fanfic, but it was mentioned in Jesus the Jew by Geza Vermes. But that’s me being pedantic.
Christians: Jesus didn’t believe in pronouns! Jesus: I am he.
Bart Ehrman talks about how their conception of Jesus changed. Human dude chosen by god. Human dude turned holy by god. God dude born holy.
Something like that.
I just looked up some of his books and ordered this one: How Jesus Became God : the Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. Thanks for the tip!
His speaking engagements are pretty great, too. He has a bit of boiler plate but after that the talks are really interesting. My favorites are the early gnostic heresies.
Is it still a pronoun if the Christians are capitalizing Them?
Think of it as God in different parts of the same show,
God the Incarnate, Jesus, God the Creator, the big G everyone thinks of, and God the All Seeing, The Holy Spirit.
One actor, many masks.
Even this would be considered heresy by the Church. The idea of the Trinity is that all 3 can exist at the same time, but they’re still the same person. Not just masks, but 3 literally different people, but also the same person.
In my fundamentalist upbringing, people would bring up the “divine mystery” of the Trinity as a kind of proof of the truth of Christianity. As in, the fact that the Trinity cannot be explained must mean that it is beyond our human comprehension, and if it’s beyond our comprehension, it must be divine.
But like, it’s very easy to see how humans could create the idea of the Trinity, since it’s simply asserting that multiple contradictory things are all true at the same time. Is God the Father separate from Jesus His son, or one and the same? Both, actually!
Plus, zealots in the church loved "uhm akshully"ing anyone who tried to use a metaphor to explain the Trinity. “The Trinity is like… water, and how you can find water as ice, water, and water vapor in different places.” “UMM actually that’s Modalism, and that’s heresy!”
Basically the church just assigns an “-ism” for every conventional way to understand or know the Trinity, then insists that it is Unknowable.
Yup. I’ve heard many, (like the tri-colour toothpaste) and at one point I learned all the ways they were heresy.
I’m going to use that logic toward everything in my life now. Why are you spending your money on a big tv instead of investing it? That makes no sense! Exactly. That’s how you know my logic is divine.
In my fundamentalist upbringing, people would bring up the “divine mystery” of the Trinity as a kind of proof of the truth of Christianity. As in, the fact that the Trinity cannot be explained must mean that it is beyond our human comprehension, and if it’s beyond our comprehension, it must be divine.
My mom feels exactly this way and she’s not even a fundie - she’s just an Episcopalian.
Masks was just the metaphor I was using, I think people understand it better when looking from the top down at the concept
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I have a crazy idea: let’s get an ally priest to offer transubstantiation blessings for trans people
Eve was AMAB too
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all God, but they are each different from the other. it’s not that hard to understand.
s- ame goes for trans people
I grew up with mormons and it is very obvious the poster doesn’t understand what they talking about, much like religious people tend not to understand non-binary people. I am lucky my family believes people need to find god on their own, and sure they made it clear they didn’t like some things, but never tried to stop me from being myself. So please don’t make the same mistakes they do by ridiculing people about things you don’t understand, it ruins progress even if it is just a joke.
Basically, it would have been ok if god was trans but not for you
Jesus Christ never said any of that
That claim is heresy and you could be burned at the stake for spreading those lies
Jesus Christ never said anything about the Trinity. It was decided on long after he died.
Technically what you linked is that god the father and son are separate beings, one who followed from the former
It’s more a mistake of understanding during the process of codifying orthodoxy than related to what Jesus himself said
Jesus never said anything about trans people either yet Christians sure act he did
Yeah this is more of a Catholic thing rather than all Christians, I believe
No, the Holy Trinity is necessarily part of all forms of Christianity. But Jesus never explicitly spelled it out. It was decided long after he died.
Not all forms, just all nicean forms, which comprises all the denominations most people care about, but what some folks consider offshoot christian religions like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons don’t ascribe to it for various reasons.
My understanding is that it isn’t considered Christian if it doesn’t accept the Trinity. JW and LDS are considered Abrahamic but not Christian per se.
That’s a definition understood by nicean christians as the nicean creed was basically developed in a trial to say who is and isn’t christian and exile the not christians who wouldn’t cooperate
Academically I don’t think there is universal agreement on if that standard should be taken at face value.
Considered…by whom? Not by them, I bet. I’ll bet JW and LDS do consider themselves Christian.
The only ‘prerequisites’ for being considered Christian is that you believe in Jesus’s existence, and his divinity. Hence the “Christ” in “Christian”.
No, the Trinity is a part of a large number of Christian denominations.
