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
China and the Soviets got it right. You gotta treat religious institutions as every bit as backward and reactionary as you treat capitalist ones. That doesn’t mean you ban them outright, but you bring them under control of the state and keep them from preaching anything out of line or using their cultural influence against the DOTP.
Italian communists who are able to seize state power will do far more good forcing the College of Cardinals to elect a communist Pope than abolishing the Catholic Church. China already does this with Tibetan Buddhism. And there has been various splits among Tibetan Buddhism due to CPC meddling, which is good. The more they split, the weaker they’ll be as an organized force.
Iosif Grigulevich promoted an idea to set up a red anti-pope in Krakow as a way to undermine authority of Catholic Church and promote left-wing thought among Catholics.
Agreed but I doubt religious people love the idea of their institutions being subordinate to a political party. Seems antithetical to the whole god thing and equally repulsive to the religious masses people here are claiming we’re alienating
I’m just gonna chime in to say I don’t care about any of this
i thought it might be fun to observe but everyones posting mini essays
It’s a really really boring struggle session
Simply reply “I ain’t reading all that” to the longest posts, I’m sure nobody will get offended
call that high danger freelance literary editing
Pope? More like nope.
Truthfully, I feel like too many modern leftists are so (understandably) fed up with Reddit-style new atheists that they start seeing criticism of religion itself as an inherently bad thing, as if Marxism isn’t anti-religion.
I am in favor of a proper materialist approach to the issues with religion, and I’d be the first to voice my concerns about the reactionary vibe that atheism has taken on in recent times.
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.
your argument is based in idealist moralism, not actual material analysis. your moral condemnations are admirable but entirely useless and a typical example of liberal westoid smugness and edgy circlejerling.
a marxist-leninist approach to revolution is rooted in material conditions and class struggle, not cultural crusades or idealist moralism. while religion has historically served ruling-class interests, it also emerges from the real suffering and alienation of the working class. hostile, edgy anti-theism (“reddit atheism”) that treats religion as mere ignorance or superstition misunderstands this reality and ultimately undermines revolutionary efforts by alienating the masses.
marx’s critique of religion is often misused by superficial atheists. when he called religion “the opium of the people,” he was not simply condemning faith, but identifying it as a response to suffering in a world devoid of meaning and justice. religion, in this sense, is both a symptom of oppression and a coping mechanism for those experiencing it.
from a materialist standpoint, religion persists because it fulfills real social and emotional needs under capitalism. the task of revolutionaries is not to mock or suppress these beliefs, but to transform the conditions that give rise to them.
and if you would try to even once get out of your yankoid ignorance and actually look at the historical precedence of socialist projects, you would learn a lot:
In its early years, the ussr launched aggressive anti-religious campaigns, shuttering churches (and destroying century-old architectural monuments in the process), ridiculing faith, and persecuting religious leaders. these efforts, spearheaded by organizations like the League of the Militant Godless, were driven by ideological zeal rather than mass-line engagement. they confused state atheism with revolutionary strategy and alienated millions of religious workers and peasants whose faith was deeply embedded in their communities and daily lives.
rather than focusing drawing believers into the socialist project through improvements in their material conditions and political education, the early state attempted to impose atheism from above. this approach was idealist, disconnected from the real consciousness of the masses, and politically self-defeating.
they thus unwillingly played into the hands of the reaction, since religious believers, especially in rural areas, came to view the new socialist state as an enemy of tradition, community, and morality. reactionary forces capitalized on this resentment, painting themselves as defenders of the common people.
recognizing this, comrade Stalin eased anti-religious policies during the great patriotic war, in order to build unity, effectively admitting that earlier methods had been divisive and counter-productive.
leftists should understand that atheism, like any belief system, must be approached strategically. the goal is not to impose a worldview, but to unite the working class in the struggle against capitalism. religious people are not the enemy, capitalism is. mockery and cultural arrogance only serve to fracture potential alliances.
instead, we must engage religious workers respectfully, meet their material needs, and build class consciousness through shared struggle. religion will fade not through coercion, but as alienation and exploitation are overcome.
to add one more thing, ive seen many “progressive” zionists use these same arguments as you in order to justify the oppression of the “batbaric” arab christians and muslims
your argument is based in idealist moralism, not actual material analysis. your moral condemnations are admirable but entirely useless and a typical example of liberal westoid smugness and edgy circlejerling.
EXACTLY. See also the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins deepthroating the war on terror
your argument is based in idealist moralism, not actual material analysis. your moral condemnations are admirable but entirely useless and a typical example of liberal westoid smugness and edgy circlejerling.
recognizing this, comrade Stalin eased anti-religious policies during the great patriotic war, in order to build unity, effectively admitting that earlier methods had been divisive and counter-productive.
Maybe not the best example since he also recriminalized homosexuality and abortion.
Those things are usually going hand in hand.
Yeah u got it pre much
Everyone needs to get this comment to the top.
Goddamn, read some Marx. Incorporate materialism into your worldview.
170 years after he ripped into Max Stirner and Bruno Bauer for this exact type of thing and here are people still posting this idealist horsefeathers on my hexbear of all places. Fuck.
idealist horsefeathers
Bringing the Marx brothers into marxist analysis. well done
I think it would be neat if horses did have feathers, though.
all religions are evil, but christianity – being the religion of the cracker – is the most evil
you guys just dont get it, this is my comfort belief system - I’m sure we can cut out the bad parts of it, you see I’m a good Christian, you can trust me
it’s a very well known and widely held opinion on hexbear that you can simply reform problems out of archaic and failing systems, just don’t look at the bad actors those guys don’t count
also neither do the millions of people using my religion as a shield for their bigotry, they don’t count either - unless we’re arguing for why we need to be soft on religion, in which case they totally count and you are being very naive to exclude them
also if you bring them up as a reason why these things shouldn’t be finding such support on a website that bills itself as welcoming to the oppressed you are personally attacking me and the immaterial beliefs that I need to help me cope with the material reality we live in, which I find to be very marxist of me
the millions of people using my religion as a shield for their bigotry
TENS of millions, and even that is being overly generous.
we should open a c/conservative while we’re at it, considering there are millions of conservatives around the world that don’t follow the ‘yankoid’ Republican party and have their own personal conservative beliefs. I’m sure there are many who aren’t transphobic - it’s not like there’s a doctrine to being right wing
after all, it would be naive to not reach across the table on our path to communism
or maybe a c/police, not everybody has had the american cop experience - there are good cops out there who don’t support the bad cops, they should be given space too
c/bourgeoisie
also I’m sure it’s just Christianity that has this issue, and every other religion is actually A-OK
I very nearly wrote a comment about this long or longer going off on religion in reply to a post here but decided against it.
Christianity is a slave religion. It is not revolutionary. It is for the status quo, it demands slaves obey their masters, masters obey the state (render unto Cesar) and dangles above them all this idea that submitting here and now doesn’t matter because you’re on this plane of existence for 60-100 years and then if you’re a good Christian you go to heaven literally forever and get to live in a paradise so it’s just not worth struggling over. You can sit there as a smug slave, as a smug serf, worker etc as you’re beaten and starved because you know you have a ticket of this, you know you have a reward waiting for you so none of this matters. The Protestant work ethic is the Christian work ethic. It demands false peace instead of justice, says CSA victims must forgive their abuser in their church and says that abuser as long as they repent to god (not even the victim, they don’t matter) they’re golden and their ticket to heaven remains reserved and they can stand up in front of church, forgiven by god and cannot be judged.
You want to be a Christian and push for a better world? Fine I’m not going to go out of my way to make fun of you but I am judging you because you’re a cafeteria Christian, I find it unserious, you’re picking and choosing and ignoring parts of your religion to suit what you want it to say. You’re not an ounce of a more genuine Christian than the reactionary Christians who never do any charity at all who also pick and choose and twist the religion to be what you want it to be to suit your way of thinking.
Additionally Jesus says by the way that the OT is totally valid until he returns. Matthew 5:17-20:
Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter,[a] not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.
I get you know being afraid of death. I honestly think it’s the task of a world communist government to create a new religion for people who need this kind of thing, one that’s defanged and harmless, one that cannot be misinterpreted in any charitable way to support bigotry, one with equal rights for women at its core and which is simple and short in tenets and wildly progressive. And it should make all the wanted promises, eternal life, etc, etc, only you don’t confess to Jesus in your head, you confess to the local commissar in a self-crit and then you’re forgiven unless it’s a serious crime in which case you’re imprisoned or sent to reform labor or whatever but promised your spot in the afterlife is preserved as a result. The point being not to go out of our way to preach and convert the masses to worshiping the party or anything bizarre like that but having an out, an option for these people so they don’t get drawn into ancient, patriarchal, homophobic, reactionary ideologies.
masters obey the state (render unto Cesar)
Just want to add an interesting note here regarding this line and one other that I learned from my favorite professor in college, absolutely brilliant scholar who was like an encyclopedia of New Testament studies. Supposedly this line is intended as a double entendre that only Jesus’ audience of common people would have fully understood - on the surface it sounds like “give to Caesar what belongs to him” meaning taxes, fealty, etc. But it can also be interpreted as “give Caesar what he deserves”, meaning revolutionary violence against the Roman state.
Another example is the “turn the other cheek” saying. In the culture of the time, if you slapped a person with the back of your hand, that was a sign you considered them your inferior or subordinate. Slapping with the palm of your hand was reserved for people you considered your equal. (it might be the other way around but you get the idea) So if a Roman solider backhanded you, and you turned your other cheek towards them, they’d have to palmslap you if they wanted to hit you again, acknowledging you as their equal.
Granted I learned this stuff well over a decade ago so take it with a grain of salt. The language, translation, and interpretation of the texts is a HUGE factor in how Christianity in particular develops. Similar to how:
CW: pedo
The lines from the Pauline epistles that seem to refer to homosexuality generally are largely about the practice of pederasty in Roman culture, if you understand the original, Greek texts
Not to detract from your other points about the modern Western understanding of Christian theology (esp among white evangelicals), I just find the academic study of the Bible very enlightening for these reasons. Ultimately reactionary forces will push whatever interpretation benefits them and the status quo the most. The “original texts” don’t hold a lot of value for a dialectical materialist analysis.
render unto Cesar
I also want to beat the Caesar shaped dead horse.
Some can even interpret it as an instance of Jesus supporting a separation of Church and State. As he says in the full phrase “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”, and a while later before getting railed and nailed 😉 on the cross he said to Pilate “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But now (or ‘as it is’) my kingdom is not from the world”. Which more or less says the spiritual shit is separated from the material shit, or to say that desiring to create or enforcing the theocratic “Christian Nation” is directly heretical to the word of the Christian messiah as the only kingdom of God itself exists in heaven.
Of course taking a more historical materialist look at it, one could simply say do unto Cesar is basically Jesus doing some squirrel shit to avoid getting tattled on by his religious-political enemies who’d want him to openly advocate for the tax resistance movement that active during the time and get thrown in jail before he was ready to get nailed to a cross.
Is also why he says he is the Son of Man, instead of the Son of God. To avoid declaring a full blown insurrection.
masters obey the state (render unto Cesar)
Is that really how you interpret that passage? It was “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s” Isn’t it? So it’s literally calling out the romans for thinking they own everything when they don’t. It seems to be saying the opposite of what you think it is saying. Jesus was crucified by the Romans because he stood against the status quo and was a threat to their power in the region.
That’s a fundamentalist interpretation of those two passages and not how Christianity is actually practiced today, or was practiced in the past. Does any Christian today obey all of the old testament laws because Jesus said to do so once, or use the render onto Ceasar passage to justify slavery? I think Samir Amin’s Eurocentrism (which offers a Marxist analysis of the Abrahamic religions) offers a well rounded explanation about how Christianity has evolved from its beginnings in this regard and how it has been practiced, with a focus on those two passages. I seriously encourage you (and everyone else) to read it. To criticize religions, we need to understand how they prevailed outside of fundamentalist dogma. As an atheist, I found this writing from Amin really helpful, as I could never wrap my head around why people would be Christian or how it became the most popular religion in many parts of the world. Amin’s writing here really helped me understand that.
Excerpt from Eurocentrism by Samir Amin, click here to expand text
Yet, because of the very nature of its message, Christianity is actually a radical break from Judaism. This break is fundamental since what is so dramatically expressed in the history of Christ is clear: the Kingdom of God is not on this earth and never will be. The reason the Son of God was defeated on the Earth and crucified is obviously because it was never the intention of God (the Father) to establish His Kingdom on this Earth, where justice and happiness would reign forever. But if God refuses to take on responsibility for settling human problems, it falls to human beings themselves to assume this responsibility. There is no longer an end of time and Christ does not proclaim it as coming, now or in the future. But, in this case, He is not the Messiah as announced by the Jews and they were right not to recognize Him as such. The message of Christ may, then, be interpreted as a summons to human beings to be the actors of their own history. If they act properly, that is, if they let themselves be inspired by the moral values which he enacted in his life and death, they will come closer to God in whose image they have been created. This is the interpretation that eventually prevailed and has given to modern Christianity its specific features based on a reading of the Gospels that enables us to imagine the future as the encounter between history as made by human beings and divine intervention. The very idea of the end of time, as brought about by an intervention from outside history, has vanished.
The break extends to the whole area that was until then under the sway of the holy law. Undoubtedly, Christ takes care to proclaim that he has not come to this earth to upset the Law (of the Jews). This is in accordance with his core message: he has not come to replace ancient laws by better ones. It is up to human beings to call these laws into question. Christ himself sets an example by attacking one of the harshest and most formal criminal laws, i.e., the stoning of adulterous wives. When he says “those who have never sinned should throw the first stone,” he opens the door to debate. What if this law was not just, what if its only purpose was to hide the hypocrisy of the real sinners? In fact, Christians are going to give up Jewish laws and rituals: circumcision disappears and the rules of personal law are diversified, insofar as the expansion of Christianity outside of the Jewish world proper adapts itself to different laws and statutes. A Christian law, which anyway does not exist, is not substituted for the latter. Also, alimentary prohibitions lose their power.
On the level of dogma, Christianity behaves the same way. It does not break openly with Judaism, since it accepts the same sacred text: the Bible. But it adopts the Jewish Bible without discussion; it is neither reread nor corrected. By doing so, Christianity comes close to voiding its significance. Instead, it juxtaposes other sacred texts of its own making, the Gospels. Now, the morality proposed in the Gospels (love for fellow human beings, mercy, forgiveness, justice) is considerably different from that inspired by the Old Testament. Additionally, the Gospels do not offer anything precise enough to encourage any sort of positive legislation concerning personal status or criminal law. From this point of view, those texts contrast strongly with the Torah or the Koran.
Legitimate power and God (“Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar”) can no longer be confused. But this precept becomes untenable when, after three centuries of having persecuted Christianity, the ruling powers switch sides and become Christians. But even before, when Christians secretly founded churches to defend their faith and still later, when the Emperor himself became the armed protector of Christianity, a new law is worked out, a law which claims to be Christian, primarily on the level of personal rights. What is a Christian family? This concept had to be defined. It will take time, there will be setbacks, and a final agreement will never be reached. This is because earlier laws and customs, different from place to place, are accepted. Slowly, however, those new laws will be recognized as sacred: the Catholic canon laws, which are different for the Western and Eastern Catholic Churches, and the legal forms of the different Orthodox and Protestant Churches are the result of this slow process.
And it should make all the wanted promises, eternal life, etc, etc, only you don’t confess to Jesus in your head, you confess to the local commissar in a self-crit and then you’re forgiven unless it’s a serious crime in which case you’re imprisoned or sent to reform labor or whatever but promised your spot in the afterlife is preserved as a result.
yeah wtf am I reading here. “let’s trick religious people into thinking their forced labor is ok”
“let’s have state sanctioned interrogators investigating spiritual crimes”
“let’s literally make a cult but involve state authority”
This is like if someone wanted David Koresh to have his compound but also he’s the town sheriff.
I mean idk if fascism is quite the right word but co-opting religion to superficially suit your purpose and manipulate people is quite the take.
Christianity is a slave religion
I get you know being afraid of death. I honestly think it’s the task of a world communist government to create a new religion for people who need this kind of thing, one that’s defanged and harmless, one that cannot be misinterpreted in any charitable way to support bigotry, one with equal rights for women at its core and which is simple and short in tenets and wildly progressive. And it should make all the wanted promises, eternal life, etc, etc, only you don’t confess to Jesus in your head, you confess to the local commissar in a self-crit and then you’re forgiven unless it’s a serious crime in which case you’re imprisoned or sent to reform labor or whatever but promised your spot in the afterlife is preserved as a result. The point being not to go out of our way to preach and convert the masses to worshiping the party or anything bizarre like that but having an out, an option for these people so they don’t get drawn into ancient, patriarchal, homophobic, reactionary ideologies.
Doing the Cult of Reason on the new revolutionary iteration?
Yup, Christianity is at its core bigoted and anti-marxist.
We need to be able to deal with religious people regardless, meet them where they’re at and push left, but it’s still a shame when communists defend religion as if it were some neutral trait.
I think the biggest shame is that the son of god in the Bible is basically a Marxist. If you can’t see how Jesus would’ve been vehemently anti-capitalist, then you are already lost.
It’s easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven? You will find thousands of threads online about how this means something entirely different from what it says.
Did you know that Christianity did not start with a ready-made canon? It just kind of existed in a spectrum of traditions in the Roman world for almost 3 centuries, until a bunch of people connected to the new Byzantine emperor had a meeting on what they were going to allow as part of a state-sanctioned religion. And even then, there was an ongoing disagreement over whether 7 books used by diaspora Jews (but not by Jews in Jerusalem) would be included in the canon.
It doesn’t really have a discernable core, beyond the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. That’s why Catholics and a few other denominations place so much emphasis on traditions.
“It’s not those in the past who were stupid enough to create mythology and believe it literally, it’s us in modern times who are foolish enough to treat it as a literal matter.”
Why no protestants looked at the council of Nicea and said, “why the fuck did we ever trust Constantine?” is beyond me.
The Bible is very clear that you cannot pick and chose
Shitty pastors who go on how “inerrant” the bible is say this as a tool of control.
The book written by doezens of people over hundreds of years itself does not.
I find it odd that you accept this line of reasoning that is clearly (no pun intended) in bad faith from obviously evil fucks.
It’s especially funny because the Bible itself is clearly a self critical process of picking and choosing over time, the earliest writings are revisited and reconsidered in light of later events and subsequent authors explicitly point out the limits of the received wisdom they have available to them.
Modern fundamentalism has thoroughly fucked this issue so badly that they have skewed the terms on which even people who do not believe it have discussions about the text. It’s honestly an astonishing accomplishment on their part
The Bible is very clear that you cannot pick and chose, that you have to accept the full book or none of it
What exactly constitutes the “full book” is a matter of debate between denominations. Protestants notably consider the deuterocanonical books to be apocrypha.
you can’t just take the verses you like and still be Christian
Again, barring the existing discrepancies in biblical canon, who’s gonna stop me? okay, some churches might kick you out, the accepting ones really aren’t going to care. I’m not even a christian, although I do think they’ve got some cool stuff going on, i just don’t see it as that big of a deal to take that cool stuff (love one another, camel/needle) and leave the wack stuff (everything you quote in your post)
the paradox of picking and choosing is that a person who picks and chooses will not pick the part that says you cannot pick and choose
so even pointing out that it says you cannot pick and choose which parts to believe is entirely fruitless
yeah there’s no central authority saying who is a Christian and who isn’t. And where exactly in any of the books does it say the full book must be considered? There isn’t even a full agreement on what the Bible constitutes, and the full canonical version didn’t even exist until at least 400 AD, which was 300 years after the Book of Revelations was written. There was no “full book” when any of the books were written.
And even if you wanted to say a central Christian authority exists, I guess it would be the Catholic Church. Except they have centuries of philology and interpretation detailing what it all means. And even then the Catholics don’t always have full orthodoxy since regional churches will absolutely incorporate syncretism to better mesh with local traditions. This is all over Latin America where Catholic Churches will have their own local saints or banquets or will use language that indigenous people may be more familiar with.
I don’t think a good gauge of a religion should be what their books literally say, since that never seems to matter over the material Earth we live on
i like the gnostic gospels for their weirdness
This is a ridiculous hill to die on.
Not saying we all have to be religious – I’m not – but there’s a reason the new atheists over at (
.com/r/atheism) largely went fascist.You and they basically follow the same sort of prescriptivist vs descriptivist approach to politics and religion as TERFs apply to gender. They define “man” and “woman” in a very narrow way that ignores how people actually are and actually behave and then apply those definitions. Similarly the “I’m 18 and just figured out that God isn’t real (or I’m 40 and haven’t learned anything in the last 22 years)” crowd construct an idea of what religion is and then condemn all religion for it. It’s often more understandable because a lot of us get to atheism from accruing some sort of religious trauma but our trauma does not grant us clarity, it lets us see some aspects of the truth while risking blinding us to others.
The materialist, descriptivist fact is that Religion varies far more than these simplified prescriptivist models account for. I know Muslims who drink. I know a Catholic who denounced Pope Benedict for being against gay marriage. A friend knows an openly gay Catholic. There’s massive differences in beliefs within Judaism. To pretend you know what’s in the heart of every religious person because you think you read their holy text is arrogant and foolish.
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
This is exactly what I mean. Prescriptivist. But look at what people actually do and how religion actually functions and you’ll see that plenty of Christians don’t follow that. Why are the ELCA Lutherans fine with gay people but the Baptists condemn them?
Then there’s a whole thing about the role of religion in different communities and ethnicities. Yes I have contempt for the conservative white evangelical weirdos that harass people outside Planned Parenthood, those people are assholes. That doesn’t mean the people going to the Ethiopian Church near me are bad people. They’re both Christians, but their actual religions, religious practices, and values are vaaaaaaastly different.
You’re fucking painting with a broad brush here and then wondering why people get pissed at you.
There are certainly reasons to take issue with Religion, but it’s not actually a fight worth having this way.
I have seriously pulled religious friends to the left by talking about how pretty basic “universal” human morals like take care of each other and don’t let people starve to death align with Marxism. Wouldn’t have gotten anywhere saying “akshually, in order to care about other people you have to first stop believing in your religion and lose your community”.
Peasants in Europe expressed sentiments about class warfare long before Marx, and they did so using the language of religion because that’s what they had. “The LORD gave the land to all to be held in common; why should the nobles lay exclusive claim to it?” or “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?”
I used to be super anti-theist, I looked down on religious people, but I learned that that was just a silly product of some trauma. People have feelings and ideas and will express them in the language and stories they know. It’s not so much that religion drives people’s ideas as that people’s ideas drive how they express or engage in their religions.
And YES, yes, religion can and is used to make very horrible oppressive structures, havens of sex pestery and abuse. But I’ve seen those same cultish dynamics come about in completely secular martial arts spaces as well. To blame religion is to miss the actual problem and shoot yourself in the foot when it comes to trying to address it.
Can’t believe I’m going to bat for Christians, I usually only get like this when I see people being Islamophobic.
Religion has had incredible staying power. I don’t know why, but it has. Even many people who leave religion just recreate religion and nonmaterialist thinking oftentimes – see the ex-Christian atheists who get really into astrology and crystals, for example. While I do not believe in anything spiritual or supernatural, I think it is completely pointless to fight with people about it.
Also, lmao at condemning all of Christianity when Liberation Theology is based as fuck. Lmao at condemning all of Judaism when there are so many radical leftist antizionist atheist Jews activists struggling for Palestine. Lmao at condemning all of Islam when the religious fervor of Islam helps oppressed and colonized people stay strong in the face of brutal, brutal oppression from the global north. Just fuck this idea.
To pretend you know what’s in the heart of every religious person because you think you read their holy text is arrogant and foolish.
I never once said that. I don’t know what is in the heart of every religious person
I’m not trying to call out any particular Christian. The whole point of this post is that I get mad when people pretend that all the nasty shit in Christianity is just in the old testament and not in the new testament. I wanted to show that it runs trough the whole book
To what end exactly?
In the funny pope thread, “maybe we should at least consider cultural sensitivity re: the pope and be more kind to one anothet” was responded to with a slew of unfounded accusations, seemingly deliberate misreadings, and pushback from a defensive posturing.
And now this has spawned at least two major threads whose premise is, “Christianity us reactionary and we must explicitly and openly reject it to be a good communist”.
I’m not sure what the actual goal would be. Is it to berate any and all Christians on this website into disavowing a bunch of things they already don’t believe and apologizing for things done by other people? Is it to ban the dead Christianity comm? Socially police anyone from admitting to being part of the most popular religion regardless of their direct views on the topics where you note Christianity having reactionary sentiments?
Personally I don’t think there is a goal in mind. Just people getting in between a Hexbear user and their treats: a false catharsis because the pope died. And getting between the Hexbear and those treats in any capacity, you must be tarred a reactionary object of hate.
People are talking about state atheism and the church-monarchy feudal system and the USSR. Comrade, you (most likely) aren’t even in an organization. We are not the inklings of Chinese national liberation but in [X Western country]. We’re in a lost Redditor pro-trans vaguely commie site full of yt people eager to weaponize their marginalization to verbally kill each other and I’m suggesting you be slightly less reactive and escalatory towards comrades.
We are not the inklings of Chinese national liberation but in [X Western country]. We’re in a lost Redditor pro-trans vaguely commie site full of yt people eager to weaponize their marginalization to verbally kill each other […]
A GIRL CAN DREAM, CAN’T SHE‽‽‽
Saved this comment because that last paragraph is golden
Well would you look at the time
of all the struggle sessions for us to have, this genuinely feels like one that needs to be hashed out tbh
This is one of the best ones
This is one of two struggle session topics that I actually go in for (the other being veganism
)It’s very personal to me
