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submitted 8 months ago by filister@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

[Disclaimer] - I am not an American and I consider myself atheist, I am Caucasian and born in a pre-dominantly Christian country.

Based on my limited knowledge of Christianity, it is all about social justice, compassion and peace.

And I was always wondering how come Republicans are perceiving themselves as devout Christians while the political party they support is openly opposing those virtues and if this doesn't make them hypocrites?

For them the mortal enemy are the lefties who are all about social justice, helping the vulnerable and the not so fortunate and peace.

Christianity sounds to me a lot more like socialist utopia.

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[-] kromem@lemmy.world 14 points 8 months ago

Christianity sounds to me a lot more like socialist utopia.

A lot of atheists end up with that impression, maybe from unfamiliarity. That Jesus was just a dope socialist who loved everyone.

But the religion has been absolutely shitty for pretty much as soon as he was dead (at least).

For example, the other day I saw someone cite Acts 4 as an example of how Christianity was a commune, where people pooled their assets.

It conveniently left out the part where Peter had an older couple who didn't pay him everything they owned who were both struck dead after meeting privately and being confronted (allegedly killed by God). Which was a reference back to the book of Joshua where a guy kept some loot for himself and was outed and killed.

Women were told to be silent and subservient (in spite of 'heretical' sects and texts of Christianity where Jesus was instructing female disciples and they were acting as teachers - ironically the only extant sect that claimed Jesus was talking about Greek atomism and naturalism was one of these).

The religion was canonized right after the emperor of Rome converted, so guess what was canonized? A bunch of shit about how patriarchal monarchy is the divine plan. The saying attributed to Jesus about how someone who succeeded in life should rule and should only hold power temporarily obviously gets excluded and eventually the collection of sayings is punishable by death for even possessing it.

Even a lot of that stuff about "blessed is the poor" was probably from Paul who was separating fools from their money. Originally there's sayings about how those ministering shouldn't collect money, but this gets straight up reversed in a later edition of Luke and you can see Paul in 1 Cor 9 arguing that he is entitled to make a living off ministering and encouraging donations "for the poor in Jerusalem." But then elsewhere we see Paul was accepting expensive fragrant offerings from people. But that's ok, as then in the gospels you see Jesus keeps an expensive fragrant offering and yells at the people who criticize him for not selling it and giving the proceeds to the poor.

It's a bunch of feel good BS to con people out of their money. I don't think it was always that from the very start, and probably even had some interesting things going on initially, but almost immediately after Jesus is out of the picture the errant early tradition gets morphed into a traditional cult where power and wealth consolidates at the top and it preaches subservience and obedience and self-hatred so you beg for the idea of salvation and trade all that you have for a promise the people you turn everything over to can't fulfill.

So why would a group that wants power and wealth concentrated and to destroy democracy in favor of patriarchal authoritarianism be attractive to Christians? Because they've been being fattened up for that slaughter going on near two thousand years at this point.

[-] jobby@lemmy.today 2 points 8 months ago

Also: Jesus was made up by these early Xtian founders. He wasn’t a real person.

https://youtu.be/LTllC7TbM8M?si=oDMJJxBdAFsY3RFo

[-] VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 months ago

Yeah, and even if he was to some degee based on a real person every single detail recorded about him is clearly false as can be demonstrated to be literary devices, copied from somewhere else, or just clearly impossible. It makes a lot more sense he was invented whole cloth, if early Christians believed he was a real person they sure made up a lot of stories about him - and the most devout Christian will have to agree with that because of the endless apocrypha and insertions.

[-] jobby@lemmy.today 2 points 8 months ago

He was like Santa Claus for the masses at the time.

Look, there are some basic precepts of New Testament Christian thought (don’t be an asshole) that are good things. It gets rather muddled quickly after you mall be away from that.

[-] VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago

Yeah, like how scientology has some good stuff in it like try to improve yourself and the world but then they force a path that doesn't lead in that direction and use it all as an excuse to take money from you.

The first thing we really know about the early church is Paul walking around collecting money and telling people things they wanted to hear, like you don't need to chop off your foreskin to get saved - and saved from the horrors of an event they very clearly taught was coming in their lifetime.

How they managed to keep such an obvious scam going for almost two thousand years is honestly the most impressive miracle

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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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