It's so God damned rare these days. Literally the only positive religious group experience I have had my my adult life was the day after the first George Floyd riots, I spent 8 hours on emergency overtime at my dispatch center. The next day I was out in the area and a local mosque decided to go around cleaning up broken glass and boarding up looted stores because "our brothers and sisters are hurting". I wish more people acted that way.

The only pastor from my parents church who had any interest in helping the community ended up getting ousted over a differing interpretation of some Bible verse or other. I had stopped going for almost a decade by then so who knows.

Now they're more interested in remodeling and expanding the church building to make it more gaudy.

You know, like Jesus said when he helped the merchants at the temple maximize their earnings potential, "rule of acquisition #10, bitches!"

the teachings Jesus actually preached

Except that we really don't know what those would have been, and there's a pretty decent likelihood that many of the most popular sayings like "blessed are the poor" and "easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle then a rich man to get into heaven" were additions after Paul and what later becomes the canonical church shift their splinter of the tradition to start collecting money from people.

"Want salvation? Too bad you have all that money - maybe we can help you out with that."

For example, in apocrypha that has a decent chance of also dating to the first century, it depicts a Jesus ridiculing the very idea of prayer, fasting, and charity as necessary for salvation, instead characterizing it as a birthright for all people and those who give money to the church as being like people who take off even their clothes to give to someone else in order to be given what is already theirs.

This is arguably an even more transgressive tradition and version of Jesus than the one Paul offered up, and was more in keeping with the pre-Pauline attitudes about "everything is permissible for me" and the resistance to his rights to profit as an apostle discussed in 1 Corinthians.

There's a significant survivorship bias in modern Christianity - for example, a tradition that changed the prohibition on carrying a purse and collecting money from people when ministering (Luke 22:35-36 - absent in Marcion's version which was likely the earliest copy) was more likely to survive and thrive than ones that had limited fundraising capabilities as originally directed.

So while yes, he may have been all about helping the poor and downtrodden, it's also entirely possible that a lot of it is a load of BS meant to separate fools from their money by an organization claiming to do those things on people's behalf (you'll notice in the Epistles vs gospels that Paul, who is supposedly collecting money for the poor back in Jerusalem, mentions a gift of a nice aromatic in Philippians 4:18, and then in the gospels written later on there's a scene where Jesus is given an expensive aromatic and chastises those who criticize him for accepting it rather than selling it and giving the money to the poor).

Personally, I prefer the nuance in something like saying 95 attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas: "If you have money, don't lend it at interest. Rather, give [it] to someone from whom you won't get it back." There's a bit more nuance in that this addresses not an obligation for everyone including those struggling with money to give to the poor via the church but rather the inherent wisdom of recognizing the diminishing returns on personal wealth for the rich and the value in directly enriching one's environment rather than hoarding a resource you can't take with you (the point of the parable in saying 63 in the same work).

So while I'm inclined to think that a historical Jesus probably was against hoarding wealth stupidly given the overlap between unique extra-cannonical and canonical sentiments, I'm quite wary that the extreme degree of bleeding heart asceticism we see promoted canonically is much more than a sales effort by a parasitic organization that went on to build the Vatican off its back.

WWJD is actually a great moral role of thumb, the problem is that so few self-proclaimed Christians follow his teachings.

"Jesus helps those who help themselves. Pretty sure that includes elementary school kids in poverty." - conservatives

For some of them, I think it's because they feel a thing first, and then reach for justifications second. If you say something that contradicts their feelings, it won't feel true to them and they won't believe you. It doesn't matter how true it is. They're driven by emotion. It is extremely ironic that the right wing is the one that says stuff like "facts don't care about your feelings".

If you want to change minds, you probably need to make them make emotional connections to the thing you're trying to get them to believe.

Belief is also social, so if you want their beliefs to stick you need to get them away from the group that's believing nonsense/hate/whatever, or they'll go right back.

It works on my parents. They're Catholic though, but Latino so they've voted Republican many, many times. But they don't vote for Trump, and they don't vote for DeSantis. They really the walk, and they think the modern Republican party is completely betshit.

No, they got persecuted two thousand years ago for challenging the power dynamics of a conservative theocracy dependent on revisionist religious orthodoxy.

Which is very ironic given the embracing of the tradition today by a group hell bent on establishing a conservative theocracy dependent on a revisionist version of that tradition which brought it more in line with said religious orthodoxy.

Evangelists use The Bible as a shield and scripture as a weapon. I like to think actual Christians aren't these people.

A brown person that advocated for caring for those around you, and fought against greed? Looks like the sinister Jewish cabal are sending the illegal immigrants to take over our country with communism - git em!

They hate him already. There are maggats who seriously believe that Jesus was too "woke" and so disregard the new testament completely.

they'd call him a commie and hate him with passion for sure

I thought it was ain't no hate like Christian love

Their plan is to have full fascism in place of democracy by then

8-12 years from now when people who were effectively left behind on purpose are of voting age.

The plan is for them to not be able to vote in 8-12 years. They're already wanting to raise the voting age.

Except all that pesky other stuff like "the worker deserves their wages", and "treat the alien(/immigrant) and poor among you as one of your own".

No, I think they equally abuse both Testaments. Woman, submit to thy husband. ~~Husband, submit to thy wife.~~