[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.
Honestly, it’s because conservative politicians found a group of people who are susceptible to manipulation and uncritical support of anyone and anything that their church tells them to be.
If they actually were Christians, this would totally not be an issue. But they aren’t. They are trying to “look Christian” to get gullible voters. But most of them, if not all, are CINOs (Christians In Name Only), like Trump who had a road and church closed for a foto-op in that church where he held up a bible upside down…
It’s always been the case the powerful push Christianity for their own causes without believing in it.
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.
Also: Jesus was made up by these early Xtian founders. He wasn’t a real person.
Almost no one respectable in the scholarship, including atheist scholars, thinks that’s the case.
And it would be the only instance I’m aware of where someone at the nascent stages of a cult made up a leader and immediately had major schisms around what that made up leader was saying.
Literally the earliest Christian documents we have are of a guy who was persecuting followers of Jesus suddenly going into areas where he had no authority to persecute, literally “if you can’t beat them, join them,” and then telling people not to pay attention to a different gospel “not that there is a different gospel” or to listen to him over alleged ‘super-apostles.’
The next earliest document is a gospel that’s constantly trying to spin statements allegedly said in public by Jesus with secret teachings that only a handful of their own leaders supposedly heard.
Not long after that is a letter from the bishop of Rome complaining his presbyters were deposed in the same place Paul was complaining about them receiving a different gospel, and how young people should defer to the old and women should be silent (so we know the schism was supported by the young and women, who just so happen to be at the center of a competing tradition which has extensive overlap with Paul’s letters to Corinth).
For all of the above to have occurred within just a few decades of a made up person would be even less believable than that said person walked on water. Personally, I don’t believe either of those scenarios.
P.S. Carrier is a history PhD, not a biblical studies PhD, and a bit of a pompous moron. For example, he managed to miss one of the most interesting elements of early Christianity regarding the Gnostic references to cosmic seeds because his head was so far up his own rear that he couldn’t see past a (straight up bizarre) theory they were talking about a cosmic sperm bank. Nope - it has to do with Lucretius’s “seeds of things” but that’s a long discussion for another comment. Point is, I’d be wary of taking anything he says too seriously.
The point he makes about the only evidence for JC’s reality as a person is other people much later pointing at each other and saying “he said so”.
If, as he said, any real evidence beyond hearsay can be produced it might he credible.
They aren’t much later on. A number of the texts are composed within decades of his death. It’s much later in that we have copies, and they definitely had some edits along the way, but they are pretty early.
There’s arguably much better evidence a historical Jesus existed than a historical Pythagoras, for example. Do you doubt Pythagoras existed?
Or even Socrates - we only have two authors claiming to have direct knowledge of events around what he said, and the earliest fragments of their writings comes from the same collections of texts as early Christian writings, and the only full copy of Plato is centuries older in production than the earliest full copies of both canonical and extra-canonical texts.
What evidence for Socrates or Pythagoras do we have beyond hearsay?
Which text do you think was written within decades?
Anyone attempting to make the ‘everyone agrees’ argument about a religion instantly loses all credibility, like if you can’t understand why that’s a fallacious argument then you’ve got zero chance understanding the evidence.
“Most credible scholars, including most secular scholars agree” is different from “most people agree.”
You might want to actually look into why they agree before talking about understanding evidence.
For very obvious historical reasons there has long been a huge bias in this field of study, it’s currently very clearly still a hot water issue with most scholars not wanting to cause problems for themselves.
Regardless the old consensus is rapidly changing, even the faithful are having to accept that more and more of the Bible is clearly not based in history for a multitude of reasons. You can try and be snarky all you like but I’ve looked at a lot of the debates and the reality is the argument for a historical Jesus is very weak and the argument for a mythic creation is pretty good.
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.
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.
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
In my experience lefties in America only claim to be about helping the most vulnerable. When it actually comes down to it, the lefties are perfectly willing to screw over a vulnerable person so long as they are of a certain race or political affiliation.
Example?
It isn’t Christ-ianity, as benJoseph, himself, was the wokest guy in all the new testament.
It is wearing the appearances of “their” religion while pushing animal-reaction-with-no-moral-responsibility that is going-on.
The genociders of Russia & Israel are doing the same thing, just with different appearances.
The Great Filter.
Read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, which is the most important psychology book on the planet, right now, & see how all these return to fundamentalism, where we are inherently valid, and genociding all “others” is our “GOD-given” Right rabids are…
pushing Kahneman System-1 ( imprint->reaction, aka animal-reaction, the limbic “reasoning” of herdbeasts & pack-animals, and gangs, and ideology-addiction/prejudice-addiction, which are 2-sides of the same “coin” ) to be displacing considered-reasoning, Kahneman System-2, from the world, is the consistent underlying-commitment in all of these fundamentalists.
They may wear the appearances of “the communist party”, or whatever Putin’s party is, or the republican party, or zionism, or the Confucian Marxist Leninist Kapha-metabolism anti-spiritual ideology of the CCP, but the underlying motivation is murdering/obliterating alternative-to-their-ideology/prejudice from our world, for their herd/gang’s global totalitarian supremacy.
This is natural, in The Great Filter, when humankind’s unconscious fights to beat/break/obliterate moral-anxiety from its domain, and animal-reaction can’t have moral-responsibility, so that is The Answer™, according to our unconscious-ignorance.
Faction against faction, until the polycrisis/metacrisis has “justified” exterminating our world’s life, is how unconscious-ignorance wants to play it out, for the “mythic” “importance” or “significance” of being THE “important thing” that beat God, broke God’s plan, & made God obey ( toddler-tantrums are always aimed at making the parents OBEY: that is their point ).
Universe, however, can’t care, and … no obeying/catering-to our unconscious-ignorance’s narcissism/entitlement is going to happen, so…
…
WHEN you encounter an addict systematically denying facts, whether a smoker denying that their smoking has anything, whatsoever, to do with their endless coughing, or a crack-addict denying that their utterly-corroded-health has anything to do with the crack that’s using their life, or an ideology-addict/prejudice-addict denying that evidence shows ClimatePunctuation exists, let-alone is still-accelerating ( as it must, for decades-more ),
THEN you are seeing Kahneman System-1’s fighting-off of objectivity/considered-reason, protecting animal-reaction, and the no-moral-responsibility condition that unconsciousness/ignorance wants to rule all, while narcissistically being catered-to by God.
The most central piece of evidence in this mechanism is … actually so old that it probably is from about the time of the sudden-collapse of the last Ice Age, 11,750-ish years ago:
In the Christian bible, the story in Genesis, of woman eating “the fruit of the Knowledge of Good & Evil” means woman ate Morality.
It’s RIGHT FSCKING THERE.
( altruism is generalized-mothering, as researchers from Exeter & Bristol universities found hard-evidence of, in studying wasps’ altruism, in Panama )
Morality is what women ate, & then shared it with us guys.
Moral-anxiety is the “downfall” the “loss of (animal-ignorance) grace”.
Herdbeasts do not have our moral-anxiety, they live in the “grace” of mere-animal-ignorance.
Notice, however, that for millenia, religion-men have distorted the story to convict women of “sin” that somehow downfell our entire species.
Gaslighting on that scale may never have been equalled, for significance of evil.
Think, though: *it’s the same thing as what the “Christians” are doing!
Kahneman System-1 is fighting-off considered-reasoning, and all the “women, who (supposedly) caused humankind’s downfall, ought be uneducated, barefoot, & pregnant, at home, obeying their LORD, a man” scammery is just male-ego trying to occupy the earthly place of lord, or trying to be the proxy “god”.
Israel’s claiming that Ezekiel 39 asserts that it is going to be successfully eradicating its neighbors, gaining supremacy…
… while creating such absolute-hatred among all the region surrounding them, that their “deterrent” is being corroded-away …
… so that in a few years the Muslim region won’t care how much damage Israel does to them, while they’re annihilating Israel …
Ideology-addiction/prejudice-addiction has strategic consequences.
Israel’s going to be annihilated, exactly as benJoseph stated, 2 millenia ago.
It’s the same, everywhere: animal-ignorance of ideology-addiction/prejudice-addiction is committed to genociding “others”, and arranges its own annihilation, whether through political reaction, or through assumption-river/religion reaction, or through impersonal forces like ClimatePunctuation, or food-chain-collapse, both terrestrial & marine ( late this century ), the same won’t think, because God obeys the local Ideology/Prejudice … the same mechanism.
Imagine humankind turning into herdbeasts, & through the different factions vying for supremacism, the entirety of herdbeast-humankind stampeding off a giant cliff, becoming all dead, broken at the bottom.
That is The Great Filter’s probable outcome, at the moment.
the “politics” of Leninism, which uses brainwashing “education” to produce/enforce “proletariat dictatorship”,
and the “politics” of Murdochism, which uses brainwashing TV to produce/enforce “populist dictatorship”,
they’re really both fighting to obliterate considered-reasoning from all authority, for their exclusive dominion.
They’re the same thing, under the appearances.
Same with the assumption-river/religion of legalism, which benJoseph railed-against 2 millenia ago, notice that the “Christians” pushing christofascism are legalists, who play exactly the same games that the “Jews” of the Pharisees who convicted benJoseph played…
No shame, no accountability, no responsibility, only machiavellian narcissism & sociopathy/psychopathy…
Another assumption-river/religion underlying many “religious” gaslighters is the class-based-“validity” one, which both monarchy & oligarchy are examples of.
Every time you see the narcissism-body-language of a doctor, condescending to their inferiors ( use video to capture it, watch it in slow-motion, as it becomes much more visible, then ), you’re seeing that religion.
Dad was a medical-researcher & doctor: I grew into presuming the same upper-middle-class “validity” that he presumed.
7+ years of homelessness, total, throughout my life, finally broke that identity-underlying-ego, to some extent. Cracked it.
Read the book by researchers Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright, named “Tribal Leadership”, on the 5 levels ( not stages: they’re mistaken. Stages are irreversible & sequential, like caterpillar->moth. Cultural-process-levels are not irreversible-sequential. ).
They use doctors as the exemplars of narcissism-culture, identifying a simple experiment we all can do:
Wearing a suit, & belonging in it, walk into any hospital, & count the % of junior-staff who still have enough human-validity/human-dignity left in them, to meet your gaze.
Only 1 hospital, that those researchers ever encountered, had junior-staff who still had equal-human-validity in them.
Then consider narcissism-culture outside of medical-culture…
the US had over 600 mass-shootings in 2023.
Mass-shootings are narcissism, lashing-out against others’ lives, to “get even” with their wounded-narcissism.
The 4 false-religions underlying much “politics” and much “religions” are:
- psychopathic corporate-moneyarchy
- class-status-based-“validity” ( monarchy is purely this, oligarchy is the intersection of moneyarchy & class-status-based-“validity”, in a Venn diagram )
- legalism
- authority-worship
Notice how grabbed-authority-is-the-LORD is taking-over politics…
Notice how legalism is wedging-out accountability, everywhere…
Notice how psychopathic corporate-moneyarchy is fighting to prevent living-wage from existing among more & more of the world’s population, joining sadism & nihilism to psychopathy…
Notice how the narcissistic-birthright-entitlement of class-status-based-“validity” is more & more & more obviously becoming central to the fundamentalists who’re highjacking the whole world.
The “politics” and the “religions” are just makeup.
The real underlying drive, is breaking/obliterating considered-reasoning from having any authority, anywhere, so rampaging nonaccountability can be the alpha-bull, or “lord”.
It’s our limbic-brain fighting-off the cortex, or human-brain, one final time.
Never mistake the symptoms for the underlying-condition.
see the fundamentalism underlying it all.
It’s sooo simple, sooo clear, sooo … immense.
_ /\ _
one way fascism thrives is by co-opting the aesthetics of religion to further itself, and it does not limit itself to only one religion. other commenters have noted correctly that the dichotomy you perceive isn’t real; what you identify as the “fervent” are actually just “the most loud and outspoken.”
this is not to “no true scottsman” my way out of the situation. republican christians are christians, it’s just that they are also complicit in using their religion as leverage to gain power as white nationalists.
