This pissed me off so fucking much when people defend Christianity by saying that all of the bad shit is in the Old Testament and that the New Testament is totally fine.
1 Corinthians 6:9
“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,”
Gay people and gender non-conforming people are not allowed in to heaven
1 Peter 3:1
“Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands;”
It’s still an extremely misogynistic book even in the new testament
Romans 1:26-27 … 32
"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
…
Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them."
Both homophobia and misogyny
I could go on and on, and I probably will in the comments, but it’s pretty fucking clear that all the nasty bigoted shit in the book just doesn’t go away in the New Testament
You cannot separate the bigotry from the Bible. The Bible is very clear that you cannot pick and chose, that you have to accept the full book or none of it, you can’t just take the verses you like and still be Christian. To be a good Christian who follows the entire Bible you must be bigoted
It is really an interesting thing how religion — possibly the most idealist thing in the world — interacts with the actual material world in practice. Like a major factor behind why Laestadianism became so popular with Sámi people was because its message of temperance basically, well, resonated with the Sámi: like many colonized peoples, the Sámi were being driven into an epidemic of alcoholism, and the Laestadian movement not only promised to do something about that epidemic but in practice did actually significantly alleviate the epidemic. So the Sámi basically had a materially-based dislike of alcohol, and a materially-based distrust for the Church of Norway, and these materially-based feelings ended up being channeled idealistically through Laestadianism, eventually culminating in the very material act of the Kautokeino uprising.
As Marx himself said in the first chapter of Capital, “They do not know it, but they do it” — this is the core idea to understand when it comes to religion, I think: religion is pure idealism, but ideas are always in some way grounded in the material world.