this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Only Christianity, or all Abrahamic religions, or all spirituality?
Can i still like Jesus? Can i still study Christ as a historical figure?
What about ancient religious art? Destroy it?
What's the punishment if i get caught thinking about The Lord, or God forbid, praying!?
Just for context i am not religious or spiritual, but it seems like a thought crime.
Other Abrahamic religions play around with a lot of the same themes of excusing and encouraging ethnic cleansing and other classic biblical virtues-against-humanity such as massacring all living things in an entire city, but their stake in the present distribution of global power is much smaller, and they consequently represent a smaller threat to human life. I am not opposed to subsequent criminalization of Islam, as it is no better, but in the name of curbing the racist element which is highly likely to result from such policy, and also mindfully of the difficulty of phasing out Islam, I do not believe that it is productive to put it together on the chopping block with Christianity in the world we live in now. Judaism isn't so much of a problem due to its more widely practiced interpretative principle and due to its weaker practical hierarchy compared to Christianity.
I view following biblical orders as the defining characteristic of a Christian person. (This view is generally uncontroversial among Christians, who generally do not take seriously those who claim to be Christian without having faith in the Bible's inerrancy.)
There is a set of terrorist beliefs prescribed by the Bible that the average person who simply likes Jesus Christ as a literary figure probably doesn't hold. Those people tend to have different socialization and visible attitudes compared to Christians of the definitively violent variety, and aren't difficult to tell apart. I certainly do not believe those people should be gone after.
We must preserve the historical account of Christianity being the leading force of anti-intellectualism and collective narcissism of Christian nations, in addition to being an indispensable tool of fascism around the world and a significant contributor to solidification of Nazi rule in its time. Destroying the artistic record of history would not accomplish anything useful, much like how removing swastikas from museums of World War 2 wouldn't help with doing away with neo-Nazism.
Refer to the legislation prohibiting display of Nazi symbols as implemented by many European countries. Countries like Germany have had a rough history with the way they implemented such legislation, with false-positive rulings and enforcement that were at odds with preservation of history and antifascist self-expression, but modern legislation against rehabilitation of Nazism is much better than that, and offers some valuable experience on how to tackle this inherently difficult problem.