this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
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There is The Church and then there’s the church - once Christianity becomes large, structured, and hierarchical it strays from the actual words that Jesus spoke. If you ever have the chance, have a read through the Gospels without any of the other bullshit. Just read the stuff that Jesus himself supposedly said. Those words are full of love, care, kindness, sacrifice, giving, sharing, and fully giving up oneself in service of others. The example he set was a great one. I no longer identify as Christian, but Jesus is a damn good role model and actually taught us how to love one another exactly how we are.
I wouldn’t recommend my fellow comrades join some random church, but don’t discount Jesus’ teachings as a philosophical text. I honestly believe that if all Christians were actually Christ-like it would truly be a religion of peace, love and acceptance.
"I love your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ"
Jesus was fine with slavery 😬 most of the good stuff he's said has been said in better ways and before him
Fair call my dude, there are plenty of great role models out there. Out of curiosity, what specific bible verses are you referring to with regards to Jesus being pro-slavery? I’ve had a couple of reads through the New Testament and didn’t get that idea myself, but I’m acutely aware they’re long and cumbersome tomes and I might’ve missed the parts you’re referring to. I know Paul was a fucked up dude who twisted Jesus’ words into his own weird Church, but did Jesus himself ever condone slavery? I can’t remember anything like that in the Gospels.
Jesus himself never direcly mentioned slavery afaik, however, the old testament explicitly condones it and provides instruction on how to get slaves (including ones who count as your property for life) in the law, and jesus did say he didn't come to abolish the law, so...
Hey man, fair call - take from that information what you will. As a philosophical entity though, I tend to focus on the words that were attributed to Jesus and not the words he didn’t speak. If your reading of the Gospels has you believing that he was pro-slavery, there’s little I can do to convince you otherwise, but I guess I read them in a different context to you. We all take what we want from the written word. I think you’ll find that deep-diving the Gospels would convince you otherwise, as Jesus’ messages of love, care, sacrifice and hope are entirely incongruent with the idea that a person can own another person, but that’s probably just my own interpretation.
iirc from growing up in a church school and all the Bible study bits I did growing up, there's a bit in the bible where jesus says that if someone tries to kidnap and enslave someone they should pay a fine to the parents in addition to the punishment they'd receive from the law which some people twist around into trying to imply that jesus was saying kidnapping and enslaving people is ok as long as you pay a fine to the parents.
Amen! (sorry i couldn’t stop myself.)
I haven’t identified as Christian since reading the bible and realizing god is portrayed as some fucked up attention craving psycho.
But fictional Jesus is like the OG embodiment of woke. He doesn’t need to be real for the philosophy to be. If only more people followed his literal example.
Jesus is real. I love you. Those who hate you speak for neither Him nor for me.
The Gospel of Christ is love, and woe to those who knowing it use His name to cause suffering and death.
I'm sorry that people hurt you. That's not what Jesus taught, and that's not what He lived and died for.
When you say that you love me, do you mean it in the God's Love kinda way? Or the human love kinda way?
Cause God created hell and then told everyone to worship him, and if you don't, you go to there. He calls that love. I don't want that kind of love.
To paraphrase Stephen Fry, God gives children bone cancer. I don't want that kind of love.
God lets those that have unabashed hate for others live in his sanctuary and preach his message. I don't want that kind of love.
God lets his priests sexually abuse others. I don't want that kind of love.
God lets wars be carried out in his name. I don't want that kind of love.
God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of homosexuality. I don't want that kind of love.
You can talk about Jesus' teachings all you like, but actions speak louder than words. The Gospel of Christ is the love of an abusive partner. Say one thing, do another. God's love is a terrible thing, and I want nothing to do with it, and anyone who does is a coward. If, and it's a big if, if God is real, is he the kind of God you want to worship? Seems like a waste of effort at best, and a complete betrayal of others at worse. So, go ahead, spread his love around. Just remember what kind of love it is you are spreading.
The framing of "God's love" you just gave is a very important one and completely true. I'm no theist and I also stand with Stephen Fry on the issue. But I'm pretty sure that Xhieron was trying to express something genuine and positive. Maybe don't be so harsh to someone who was clearly trying to follow Jesus's teachings to love thy lemmy user as thyself?
I think the phrase goes, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." It doesn't matter what a person means. It is our actions that define us. You can be as positive as you want to be, but if you preach a message of hatred, all the lollipops in the doctors office can't make up for the pain you cause. Claiming God's Love is good when God's Love means hating doesn't make God's Love better. It makes you worse.
As a bisexual man who grew up Christian, I feel you. It’s easy to assume our experiences are those that every queer Christian has ever felt. It’s easy to hear the stories of hate, maliciously disguised as ‘love’, and to throw that assumption onto a whole creed of people. I don’t know your story, and you don’t know mine, but one thing I’ve learned that I think might be worth sharing is it’s not a great idea to assume the intent of someone based on a group they belong to.
For so many years I lived in the closet, fearful that my Christian mother wouldn’t accept me. I finally came out to her in my thirties and I was met with nothing but love and acceptance. She actually quoted scripture to me to reinforce why she loved me no matter what. All I’m saying is that true Christian love does exist, and while it may be rare, don’t discount an entire population of people based on our learned notions about them. We humans are biologically trained to recognise patterns, but sadly that same impulse leads to stereotyping. We need to moderate those impulses to give others a fair chance to show they love us.
Anyway, big love to you and yours. I hope that you’ve been able to find acceptance in the family you’ve made for yourself.
You came to proselytize. They asked if you love them. Now, show this person a meaningful sacrifice.
Hey mate, I don’t want to step on your toes, but what meaningful sacrifice can one anonymous person make for another on a platform like Lemmy? I get where you’re coming from; pretty words are meaningless unless they’re backed up with action, but what action could this person actually take that would meet the definition of ‘sacrifice’?
Just as an aside, love doesn’t always have to include sacrifice. I love my fellow LGBTQIA+ comrades and it doesn’t cost me anything to do so. I love my friends, and they don’t ever demand sacrifice from me. I love my hobbies, and they give me strength and energy. Love can give and bring you strength, if you let it.
I would suggest reading the parable of the widow's mote.
It's not my duty to solve the Christian's problem. Their book teaches that love is sacrifice and that they recruit in love. If this one doesn't know how to sacrifice for another because they're online then their own text suggests they find another way to recruit.
If the one found a way to love the other, if they're true to their faith, then we will likely never know.
I think understand where you're coming from, but this type of poem is exactly what needs to be spread in order to make "Christians" feel some cognitive dissonance about their hypocrisy.
I may be misinterpreting you, but it sounds like you're trying to justify your hatred for a group of people because you believe in a "greater good"; some sort of better world that would exist if religion disappeared. That's exactly the sort of mindset that christians and many others have used to justify their cruelty.
I don't believe in a "greater good", I believe that we are all responsible for being the best person that we can be. I think religion is a waste of time, yes. I think the world would be better off without, yes. However, if your religion is harmless, then I don't care what you do. I only care when your religion is actively harming the world. You can't be part of a hate group but claim to be part of a love group.
Lmfao. 55 upvotes, 4 downvotes, and removed by mods. I'll just restate it for those that didn't see it. Jesus isn't real, the Church hates you. Don't elevate them by sharing poetry to make them seem less the monsters they are. If it makes their life easier, they will walk over your fallen body and they won't give it a second thought. When they go to sleep at night, they'll say their prayers and sleep well while repeating the mantra, "Homosexuality is a sin."
Jesus is a failed apocalyptic prophet from the iron age. He wasn't resurrected, and the narratives written by the biblical authors had their own agendas. The scholarly consensus remains that the OT and NT are not univocal, not divinely inspired and not inerrant. It's a historic work, but is not a strong chronicle of history but of mythology, like The Illiad.
But ministries are always going to take advantage of common mythologies and ideologies to manipulate the people. They are, after all, for-profit institutions in a capitalist market, or before were a nexus of political power. They remain places that serve themselves, not the people.
We can even note that the message of Christianity has changed with time to serve the ministries, to reflect the mores of the culture at the time, though in the 20th century, there was an active effort to shift Protestant Evangelical Christianity in the United States towards American Exceptionalism, far-right conservatism, anti-communism, pro-patriarchy and pro-hierarchy, resulting in the Christian nationalist movement we are facing today. The movement that wants to purge LGBT+ and non-Christians, and force women to become breeding mares is the product of decades of willful manipulation. As some sociologists and historians who are Evangelist, themselves have observed, this may well kill Christianity as we know it today, making it the de-facto bad-guy the way Nazis (the old German Reich ones) have been for the last century.
In the meantime, the poet is doing something different. In this case, it serves the same role as other internal mentors and heroes. In Dialectical Behavior Training (DBT, related to CBT -- the other CBT) imagining what Wonder Woman, or Captain America, or Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Jesus Christ might say to you taps into that part of you that loves you unconditionally, beyond the fear that you don't fit into mainstream society. Jay Hulme is seeing within himself someone that loves and regards him and accepts him for who he is, which is a critical step for all of us, especially those of us who didn't have others to do the job.
(This can also be applied to other media that celebrates the love of Jesus or the love of a mentor, such as I Don't Deserve You by Plumb or The Wind Beneath My Wings by... two songwriters -- Jeff Silbar and Larry Henley -- and performed a whole lot of artists)
And then the boy died of cancer.