- cross-posted to:
- microblogmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- microblogmemes@lemmy.world
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I must be one of the lucky few who weren’t raised by hypocritical Christians. My parents actually tried to be generous and helpful.
My parents actually tried to be generous and helpful.
That was one of the first lessons of first communion and confirmation while being raised christian. Being a great human just isnt enough, you had to go through some church ceremonies or you’d burn in hell. Too bad for the brown people who had no contact with christianity, but I’m afraid their souls were all just doomed to burn in exquisite agony forever.
Lesson for the children: Anyone not like us burns in hell. They are lesser.
I’m not religious anymore myself. Grew up Catholic. But my experience with it definitely seems to be different than a lot of other people. The priest we had was super progressive and inclusive. Didn’t spout any of the fire and brimstone crap either. Actually tried to live the life of Jesus and told us to love and accept everyone, including gays and people from other religions, etc. I do realize this isn’t the typical experience for most people though. I think father Matthew was genuinely a good guy and got into the faith because he actually wanted to help people.
“Jokes on you idiot that was just so we could take advantage of you” oh.
That’s what I feel like all those cartoons I watched in the 80s and 90s did to me.
ITT poor understanding of Christian theology
Which one? There are several schools, and each thinks its the correct one.
I like the ones that think they’re correct, but that it almost doesn’t matter and everyone is saved anyway.
Bring this up to Christian an that’s when they go "Old Testament " on you. Bitch what about the New and Improved Testament?
New testament god still supports slavery
“We didn’t think that included caring about people who weren’t cishet, white Christians! That aren’t poor! And don’t annoy us for whatever reason!”
deleted by creator
cishet is a combination of cisgender and heterosexual. both terms have been around for quite a while.
Cishet has been around for quite a while. It’s a contraction of cisgender (meaning one’s genitals and gender roughly match and have not been altered) and heterosexual (meaning one is primarily sexually interested in the opposite gender)
Congratulations on being one of today’s 10,000.
For real! I’ve been raised pretty religious, and this bigotry is a big factor that made me an atheist.
Man… we are surronded by non thinkers…
“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.
Your care is limited to Thoughts and Prayers.
But not money or action.
No, they spend plenty of money and action, they just spend it to deny women healthcare, limit whom you are allowed to love, and to remove books from libraries that show the experience of any non-white person. They spend spend it to cause harm to people they don’t even know for reasons they can’t even put into words
And the rest off us take no action… We talk a lot, think a lot, read a lot, think a lot, empathy a lot… Camon no action, no real struggle, no change. The system stays as it is… And the system is feed by all off us.
Plenty of people are. I’m going to local marches, calling my representatives every day, and organizing with my neighborhood mutual aid society. There are plenty of things to do. Right now is when we need hands on deck
Organized Religon is a control mechanism that humanity no longer needs.
Never ever need
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.
A) religion is behind what’s happening right now. Evangelicals own the country and Project 2025’d it. The religious are genociding Gaza. Religion can suck a whole mess of dicks.
B) If people need an external daddy figure to make them be good, they aren’t good to begin with. And typically the religious are much worse people than agnostics or atheists, who seem to find it possible to find and rely on intrinsic understandings of good and bad.
C) Religion is not necessary for faith or belief. It’s just the human corruption and power consolidation of it.
We need action… no more words. We need self and human respect no more than that. I love a song by Metallica… Kil Em all Sorry for that but its what i am feeling
What humanity needs, IMO, is to realize collectively and also teach our children that happiness, fulfillment, and yes morality are things that come from within. And they are of course strongly influenced by the people & relationships closest to us.
Religion teaches people look for an external source of morality and happiness just as much as capitalism does. Being religious or living under capitalism don’t necessarily prevent individuals from achieving self-actualization, but I certainly don’t think they make it easier for most. I say “most” because there’s a lot of variety in people, and there are undoubtedly some people who are wired to love just about anything you can think of, including running a business or leading a worship service.
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).
Theres a tiny handful of religions that dont seem too terrible. But all the Abrahamic religions, which encompasses most religious people, have some pretty huge and unhandled philosophical problems. If you try to dig into any issue in them you are labeled a bad, intolerant person.
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.
Santa Claus for adults is relevant when you consider that Saint Nicholas was a real person. There might have been a real person that inspired the bible, but to believe in the mythical version of them is like thinking Santa Claus is real because Saint Nicholas was real.
The issue is the people in charge have a different definition of “behave properly” to the rest of us.
Então porque não tomar o poder? why not take the power from them?
Yeah, democracy doesn’t tend to optimize for honesty or other virtues.
I see how suffrage within a constrained context like in the USA leads to awful results.
However, if democracy is stuffed into the small box of suffrage, its potential is limited. If, instead, it’s spread so that it grows everyone’s capabilities, then you see something very different. You see hundreds of thousands or millions of people in the street, demanding change against authoritarianism, against unnecessary cruelty, against egotism (“me me me my nation my family my religion my clan my precious me me me”).
So democracy tends to optimize for capacity building, democratic value orientations, and institutional capacity construction. In other words, it makes people more capable, it makes people care more about freedom for themselves and others, and it makes institutions guarantee that people can build their capacities to be free.
In fact, you can quote me on this, but the USA right now is way more anti-democratic than its people are and therefore there will be massive protests. Those protests will not be against democracy; they are democracy in action.
You can check out Christian Welzel and the World Value Survey literature to see why I say what I say.
Are you sure América USA ever were a democracy? Camon…
It sounds as if you think the USA is not a democracy, and I can agree with that sentiment to an extent. For example, I see how neo-conservatism and neoliberalism are whacking their axes at the forest of democracy in the USA. I also see how elites everywhere try to avoid investing in humanity, avoid paying back to the societies that made them rich in the first place, including in the USA. In fact, I’d argue that the elites in the USA are shackling people’s hands and covering their mouths so that they work for their corporate overlords without questioning anything.
If I agree with that then how could I possibly believe anything else? Do I not believe the narrow narrative that America is anything but a democracy? Well, do you believe that the millions of Americans who have striked or protested for their rights are shackled and mouth-covered? Do you believe that democracy is defined narrowly as suffrage? Or do you believe that democracy is defined as making people more capable so that they value freedom and therefore strike or protest to transform their institutions to build the capacities of everyone?
Religion seems to me to be a preprocessed bundle of ideas. Where I think humanity goes wrong is our taboo around challenging those ideas one by one to try to improve humanity.
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.
Which is why leaving the church is one of the most christian things I have done.
I wish we could all leave capitalism.
It’d be much easier if they weren’t human.
Clean your links please : https://youtu.be/jjeUuakHsLw
🧼🧽🫧💦
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.
Yearly reminder that Mother Theresa was quoted as saying she withheld medication from children because she thought their suffering brought them closer to her god.
The most revered catholic saint in modern times wanted to increase the suffering of children with excruciating diseases because it was holy.
As someone with a lifelong genetic condition that causes chronic pain, fuck everything about any religion that would venerate that. It’s absolutely barbaric, and that mentality needs to die the agonising death it’s inflicted on others.
So the loaves and fishes were only metaphors and he didn’t actually feed the masses. Got it.
Bet he also didn’t mean to pay taxes when he said “give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”
Is this /s?
Yes, it’s all metaphors. Pretty much all the Bible stories are lifted from earlier Mesopotamian, Greek, Egyptian, and Pagan fables. There are direct translations of previous myths and fables that we can trace through ancient manuscripts. None of it is true, and we’re all far better off understanding that.
We can still take wisdom from the stories, but they’re nothing more than stories. No, there was no literal incident of a guy named Jesus cloning bread and fish to feed people. If you want to take a moral from that story, that’s lovely – just the same as we can take a moral to question strangers from Little Red Riding Hood. Just don’t expect us to believe a wolf literally swallowed a child and her grandmother whole, and they cut themselves from his stomach as he slept.
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.
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.)
There are some aspects of Paul which tick the conservative box in that he comes across as a sex negative asexual who uses part of his soapbox to preach his own distain by insisting that pleasure in sex is bad and linking the idea of anything but purely reproductive sex with a spiritual uncleanliness and immorality. It fuels a lot of bad shit from purity doctrine to anti-same sex relationship rhetoric.
Not that sexual control over women and reproduction particularly hasn’t been a worldwide phenomenon but instilling pleasure and sex directly to sin really linked in to all the conservative bullshit that Paul’s hijacked letters contained so I feel like there’s a bit of a “depends on your definition of conservative” thing.
Oh both Paul and Jesus were morally conservative, no doubt about that. I was replying to someone I felt was implying Paul was somehow co-opting Jesus’ liberal movement into something more conservative and respectable. Whereas I think the opposite is true. Paul pushed frontiers Jesus never mentioned.
soapbox to preach his own distain by insisting that pleasure in sex is bad
I don’t think this is quite the right angle though. He was certainly disgusted by same sex acts and the contexts in which likely had in mind: cultic practises, orgies and temple pederasty.
But he is never against sexual pleasure within heterosexual monogamy as if there was something distasteful about pleasure itself. He never states that the purpose of sex is reproduction. Never condemns solo masturbation for instance (which one might have expected since he had a non-jewish audience). Also, neither he nor any other NT writer calls into question sexual pleasure once a couple can no longer bear children. (Which you would expect if they were against unproductive pleasure in a puritan way). On the contrary, his assertion that a wife’s body belongs to her husband and a husband’s body belongs to his wife and that couples were to not deprive each other of sex except by mutual agreement has to be seen as being both radically democratic in how relationships are conducted by also acknowledging that pleasure in sex serves a purpose in itself. (One only has to imagine a would-be prayerful monastic husband, perhaps emulating Paul himself, being told, no, you have to have sex with your wife, to realise that Paul was not some acerbic prude)
Paul’s view he explicitly links to his expectation that the world is ending soon (forgive me I can look up references at the moment). He wishes that everyone was as he was (single and celebrate). But this appears to have been born out of a controversy over whether or not travelling apostles could expect churches to bear the cost of a wife travelling with them. Given his other statements on wishing to never cause stumbling blocks of cost on already very poor communities this seems to be born out of practical mindedness rather than any kind of general anti-sex view. He regards the better practice to be celebrate and await Jesus return. But that if people felt they’d otherwise be too tempted, then they should marry and that was fine. He explicitly notes that married people will suffer a lot in life, which has to be read in the context of the ongoing persecution of Christians. And the use of torture of one’s loved ones as a psychological weapon.
conservative bullshit that Paul’s hijacked letters contained
Yes. I believe Paul was visionary and radical. But I also think he felt his innovations were partially justified given “time was short”. If there weren’t enough male ministers and gospel workers then he was ok with talented women breaking the social mould. (And not begrudgingly, he sings their praises many multiple times). But it’s impossible to tell how he would have felt or spoken had he known his system would be used for 2000 years not 20.
A later generation of disciples apparently decided Jesus’ return was delayed didn’t have the same appetite as Paul for breaking the mould and fell back on traditional gender roles more firmly.
I think you are looking too narrowly at explicit mention of specific things and missing the forest for the trees a bit. It’s smaller and in places but look at his appeal to widows and the unmarried in Corinthians
“To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”
Marriage and sexuallity is a failure state for Paul. A lack of control over one’s Holy Temple of a body. He outlines the only circumstances one can have sex that isn’t a complete affront to God because he veiws the desire and need for it at all as weakness that is a tough sell a lot of his followers. It’s not so much a guidebook to pleasure, it’s creation of a roped off private circumstances to indulge a shameful human desire.
If you’re interested I recommend going back and reading his letters again but from the imagined perspective that Paul is a sex repulsed asexual who holds his own perspective on sex as the most sacred option. There’s some interesting queer discussion on the matter out there.
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…
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!
What. Literally the entire point of it was that the good person helped a stranger who was different when the people who weren’t different and had an expectation and responsibility to help. That’s not interpretation anymore than deciding it’s likely to rain tomorrow is interpretation of a weather report calling for rain on Tuesday.
So many Christians jump through hoops to ignore the explicit message. But these are the people who fetishize guns and excuse police murder while putting the words “thou shalt not kill” on government buildings
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
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.
Beautifully said
Reminds me of Supply-side Jesus. https://imgur.com/gallery/bCqRp
