this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
35 points (97.3% liked)
Memes
4054 readers
19 users here now
Good memes, bad memes, unite towards a united front.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Bible is extremely self contradictory, you can fish out quotes to support nearly anything, as proven by history over and over: https://philb61.github.io/
What Bible simply does not offer however, is a direct condemnation of slavery which would only take one short passage. There's nothing to counterbalance the quote I pasted above, or the quote from the old Testament discussed here: https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
Given how self contradictory the Bible is, support for slavery is one of the very few points you can get from it with any level of certainty. You can do some mental gymnastics and infer a condemnation of slavery from general statements like "setting the oppressed free", but then you can make pretty much any other concievable point by selecting the passages that can be interpreted to support your point, and ignoring the passages where your point is directly and explicitly refuted.
Fine, I concede my whole argument, following your meterstick...
I now understand that those who are fine with status quo are default pro-status quo
And I guess Jesus kept on affirming it when treating it as a fact of life, in regards to wage labor and slavery...
Matthew 20:1-16
I'm sorry, I don't mean to diss Christianity as such! I do think Bible itself offers little to Marxists but there's more to Christian history and tradition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker-priest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Hagerty
I'll be honest, I never looked deeper into this. I was a militant atheist for most of my life and I'm only starting to broaden my horizons, hence my harsh initial reply for which I apologise. Old habits die hard I guess. Our enemy is capital, not religion.
It's not the overall history of Christianity that I'm defending, it's the basis of Jesus that attracted such followers to such religion, if he existed
I still remember the story in which he drove out the sellers from the temple
The time that he drew away Matthew, a tax collector,
And his fate that he was executed by the Roman gov't and its Judean Pharisee collaborators, for challenging the latter's rule
Was he pro-imperial when he got killed for that, like the commenter said?
And even if it's just a story, its not unfeasible that his story was based of separate real life people
The worst I'd call Jesus would be that he is Utopian