this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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That's kind of a strawman considering that's not at all what Christianity says. Jesus was in favour of taxing the wealthy and talked shit about the rich all the time. You ever hear the story where he trashed a temple because people had set up a gift shop in it? Or the time he said "it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven".
Christianity caught on because it was popular with the poor.
Christianity says whatever the people in charge say it says. That's how the Catholic leaders have tons of wealth, Protestant leaders have tons of wealth, Anglican leaders have tons of wealth...really, every sect has money funneling up from the poor to the leaders. But it's still marketed to the poor the exact same way.
That's not a problem unique to Christianity. For example: "The Constitution says whatever the SCOTUS justices say it says." or perhaps you prefer "The news says whatever Rupert Murdoch says it says" or even "Lemmy says whatever the admins say it says."
Point is, any institution suffers the risk that its leaders could dictate its message or pervert its original intent for their own benefit. But Christianity--like the news, the law, and federated communities--is not a monolith. The Lakewood Church might adopt doctrines that are specially tailored to enriching Joel Osteen and his entourage, but that instance of corruption isn't an indicator that Christianity--which existed for 1900 years before it--is inherently corrupt or somehow uniquely predisposed to manipulation by conmen.
By all reputable historic accounts, early Christian communities were socialistic, and its popularity among poor and marginalized Jews, Hellenistic Jews, and pagans is largely responsible for its spread during the first two centuries of its existence. The Christian texts we have today still resonate with the poor because their authors wrote them for the poor of their day, and it turns out poverty isn't terribly different in the 21st Century from the 1st.
The Catholic Church used Christianity to make boatloads of cash. So did the Greek Orthodox Church, the Reformed Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and most other large institutions. So did other institutional religions (and non-religions). That's not a problem with Christianity. It's a problem with people. The overwhelming majority of church pastors I've known personally had to maintain a separate full-time job, because running churches is not a money-making enterprise unless you're a corporation, an especially gifted and morally bankrupt businessman, or you inherited it.
All of that is to say that the problem with Christian institutions is the same problem with all institutions: greed. For the love of money is the root of all evil.
It's not about religion. It's about class. No war but the class war.
Based
Keep in mind that the US constitution, Rupert Murdock, or Lemmy are not designed to target the poor and encourage them to tithe so that money can be funneled upwards to the leader. Well, maybe Rupert Murdock, but not the US constitution and definitely not Lemmy. There's a difference between telling the poor that everyone is equal under the law, and telling the poor that if they believe hard enough and give the church 10% of their earnings regardless of their financial status that they will be rewarded in the afterlife or even rewarded maybe possibly while they are still alive.
How about telling the poor that if they work hard eventually they'll be millionaires? Or telling them that a lower capital gains tax will improve their spending power? What about telling them that cheap drugs are penalized 100:1 to more expensive drugs?
The law enriches the rich, and politics convinces people to vote against their own interests. Call it a tithe or a tax, and enforce it with the threat of state violence or social opprobrium, but the result is the same.
Jesus of Nazareth said you should take care of your neighbors, because the religious institutions and government won't, and those religious institutions and governments killed Him for it. That the American church is hard to distinguish from the First Century Jewish priesthood is no accident.
This is capitalists every step of the way. Not the US constitution. But they aren't telling you that you might go to hell if you don't tithe. They are holding the word of their god over your head and making you feel guilty if you don't believe hard enough.
The ideas of your Jesus of Nazareth are noble enough on the surface. But they still insist you submit to a higher authority, and those higher authorities always have a human that you actually submit to and give money to. Funny how that works...
You are entirely missing the point that it isnt religion or capitalism, but ALL human led power structures that lean this way over time
Are you suggesting that religion is designed? Because it isn't. It arises naturally from human curiosity about the universe.
No, science arises naturally from human curiosity about the universe. Religion arises from human desire to control others and accumulate wealth, as demonstrated by every religion ever created.
That's the kind of thing I would expect someone to say if they formed an opinion about religion without ever really learning anything about any religions other than maybe the one they were raised with.
I'm very familiar with several forms of Christianity, as well as some early Jewish traditions and a bit of Islam, and let's not forget various forms of Eastern religions, and of course my favorite, Wicca and Paganism. Any time a religion formalizes and creates a hierarchy, it always leads to funneling money and power to the leaders.
The majority of the religions you mentioned there are decentralized and don't have a hierarchy. Yet you claimed religions are always invented with the sole purpose of controlling the masses.
Bud, religion GAVE us science. Most religions are old a shit and are basically the precursors to science as scholars back in the day were funded by the church.
As if the hierarchical structure of religion isn't a class system.
Protestantism really caught on when leaders realise that church land would become the kings lands after conversion. It created a agricolarchy or farmarchy or whatever you want to call it in Iceland when before the church owned the land. It basically removed all social welfare in the country and passed on ownership to the ruling class which already had a diet-slavery (vistarbandið) for non-land owners codified in law.
Quakers.
Jeasus was not "in favor of taxing the wealthy" he was a full on socialist, if they had the term at the time. He through capitalists out of the temple, he hated the exploiting classes, his solution would have been far beyond "tax the wealty"
I'm confused, are you disagreeing with me? I said the same thing. Jesus was in favour of many of the things we now associate with socialism. They just didn't call it that at the time.
Not sure what you mean by this. Jesus was a pacifist. He literally just played along while the ruling classes murdered him. He wasn't about to start a violent revolution.
Jesus whipped people who were making money off the temple, so he certainly wasn't a pacifist. This may have happened twice.
He may have known enough not to pick a fight that would be lost, anyway.
Bart Ehrman argues that Jesus' actual goal was to lead a rebellion that would kick the Romans out of Judea and set himself up as king. That wouldn't have been too unusual for the apocalyptic preachers of the time.
Taking the wealthy is not socialism, it is at best, a very mild form of social democracy. The ballance of power is not changed the owning class still has all the power as they still own the means of production.
I understand Jeasus was a passifist, and he would not have lead a violent revolution, but he would have advocated the workers runing the show, not just "taxing the rich"
Keep in mind this was 2000 years ago. Modern notions of a "working class" didn't exist. The Roman Empire had completely different and far more primitive economic structures compared to what we have now. There was no concept of corporations, industry, labour, or capital. These were primarily agrarian people who worked the land and paid taxes to the imperial administration. Production of finished goods was limited to small local guilds and artisans. And since Jesus was born and raised as a carpenter, he was part of that artisan class. The closest thing they had to a bourgeoise was landowners and religious oligarchy, and those were exactly the people Jesus spoke against.
That's a pretty dumb take considering we're talking about a society which was not democratic. "Social democracy" doesn't mean "diet socialism", it's a specific form of government which would have been completely meaningless to the people of Jesus' time.
Suffice to say, Jesus was in favour of redistributing wealth. Modern concepts of the "means of production" would have made little sense to him. He'd have been like "yeah, no shit the worker owns the means of production. I'm a carpenter and I own my own hammer and blade". We can speculate that if he were brought forward in time to after the industrial revolution, he would have probably associated himself with the labour movement, but there's no way to say for sure.
Remember to put things in the appropriate historical context. You can't look at 1st century Palestine using the same eyes you use to look at the modern world. It was fundamentally a different kind of world.
Tell me more about democracy in 1st century Middle East.
That's kind of the problem right there. Religion has always been a way to garner money and power along with a smattering of explaining the unexplained. It's a collection of fairytales with a little spice of real history designed to keep it's people feeling indebted, donating and coming back. Any thing that requires blind faith should lead you to be extremely suspect about "their message".
The stories, the psalms, the mass singing, the praise of the long absent mystical deity, it's all psychological conditioning. The preacher running the guilt trips interspersed with good morale messages, none of this is making any of those people better people.
Christianity did not catch on because it was popular with the poor, it caught on because the people running it are masters of psychological manipulation. The poor don't stand up Christianity, the congregations aren't made up of paupers.
Considering the stories about tithing, and Jesus saying that it’s “easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” I think that’s exact what Christianity says.
Jesus did not invent tithing as it was later known