this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Sincerity Post Alert - Sorry in advance for the cringe.

This honestly hurts my heart.

I'm an atheist now, but I grew up in church, I attended a tiny, private Christian school from 8th grade through 11th (and only left because they weren't chartered to give diplomas), I literally had formal Bible class 6 days a week and happily attended evening services - because I was a naive kid who truly believed that "love everyone" and "do unto others" stuff was as important to everyone else as it was to me.

I was always a weird kid without many friends my age, and the kindness and friendliness of the adults at church was a big deal for me. Coming to terms with the hypocrisy in the adults around me - realizing how judgemental and shitty most of them actually were - made my late teens extra lonely.

Nobody's perfect, but - Jesus Fucking Christ, I don't know why, but I still get surprised at the depths of awful behavior done in his name, and the ways his message of empathy and compassion gets twisted to justify it.

His message of empathy. That is the core of his message. Mark, Chapter 12:

28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.[e] 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’[f] 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[g] There is no commandment greater than these.”

32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.

Versus

Enticing Empathy: How Satan Corrupts Through Compassion

This is truly evil. The antidote for the prosperity gospel brainworms is empathy and compassion. Honestly, I truly, deeply believe in my stupid little naive heart that the antidote for most societal ills is empathy and compassion.* How do you actually, really solve the diseases of greed and selfishness without them?

This demonization of caring is just evil. How do I talk my evangelical boomer parents out of their brainworms if they're getting this kind of messaging in church? Idfk. I guess I just keep reacting with the appropriate level of disgust to this sort of thing and ask questions and hope they're not too lead-poisoned to someday see the contradiction between the message of Christ and the message of church.

This is a real bummer, but I guess it's better to know than not. yuck.

/* - I understand there are also problems that require math and/or guillotines.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (4 children)

American Christianity is a truly baffling thing. I had a pretty similar upbringing to you, and after recognizing the hypocrisy I just couldn't bring myself to engage. Like, there's no way to make someone see what they refused to acknowledge, so why bother? Matt Christman likes to say protestantism has replaced a socially constructed understanding of God with the crass glorifying/worshiping of a person's own ego (ie a personal relationship with God). And... as much as that smacks of an "edgy middle-school atheist rant"... yeah, that unfortunately seems to be the most accurate description.

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 year ago (3 children)

My parents were atheists, but my grandma took me to church and raised me to be Southern Baptist. And coming from that background, I have never seen Christianity as being any sort of positive force in any way. As soon as I realized all the vile shit they said wasn’t true and terrifying, I turned 180 and became the most annoying middle school atheist you’ve ever seen.

It’s only as an adult that I’ve even really been able to understand why the fuck even people largely on my side on things would still make positive claims about Christianity, how the church they went to didn’t spew the evil hatred that mine did, and come to accept “maybe not all churches, not all Christians”

But no, after the last few years I think middle school me was right. Christianity is a dangerous death cult that should be banned and persecuted. Churches should be razed and Christianity should only be spoken of in history classes in the way we currently talk about Aztec human sacrifice. Christianity has probably been the largest force for cruelty and evil for the last 2000 years, and is incompatible with a compassionate human society.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (2 children)

One day in Poland is enough to make anyone a virulent middle school atheist. My life mission is to destroy this religion and every church in this country.

"But muh historical buildings 😭"

Shut up cracker, I'll demolish them too :sicko-yes:

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago

Same in Romania. They also have the audacity to build a state-funded megachurch. Why are my taxes paying for this monument to orthodox christian grifters?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We can keep the fanciest churches, and turn them into science libraries and museums.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I've been to a couple nice old churches that are now breweries. Great vibes.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

maybe thats why your parents let your grandma do that lol

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So many of these sick people clamor to get to the parts where God punishes and say "see, I'm doing God's will!". But that's just the thing, they skip any part that might call attention to their pride and hubris, they think they have devine judgement because they are God in their own hearts - the highest blasphemy a person could ever commit.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for saying this. The way these people use their religion to justify their ill deeds is more blasphemous than anything an atheist could ever say or do, IMO.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 year ago

What's the line Jesus delivered, something like hate your neighbour, absolutely despise them and have a plan to kill them at a moment's notice, be ready to entirely obliterate your fellow man at all times

Ring a bell?

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It seems like they're really doing this. Just dropping the last few pretenses of having anything to dowith Christianity.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

Give it 4 years and you'll hear

"The woke mob is trying to destroy America's proud satanic values!"

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's easy to view this as an aberration, some corruption of the true Christian faith by some outside force, but the cruelty has always been the point. Look at "Mother" Teresa. She's seen across denominations as an exemplar of the faith, but, in reality, she hoarded donations meant to help the poor, withheld palliative care from the dying, and provided inadequate care to the treatable. She has the suffering of thousands at her feet, suffering dealt out because she thought it was necessary given the parameters of her religion. That the eternity of bliss that surely awaited them on the other side could be purchased with a lonely and agonizing death. The whole enterprise is rotten from first principles. Burn that shit down.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago (2 children)

you know, the moral dilemma usually involves time machines and baby hitler, but I sometimes think baby martin luther is a more interesting subject for that specific hypothetical

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

John Calvin is on my time travel hitlist right after Henry Ford and the guy who invented lawns.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

He just said what all the Burgers were already thinking

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

"Huh, I wonder why some people see my religion as a bunch of lies for me to cynically grab power for myself."

Reddit atheists come back.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit atheists come back.

They're too busy hating Muslims and becoming "based tradcaths"

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Imagine being an atheist in a Christian majority country and giving a fuck about Islam. Dude that’s simply not your fucking problem, deal with the delusional fanatics in your own backyard first.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

White Evangelical Christianity exists to help prop up the structure of white privilege and supremacy. Start from there and work backward, then it all makes a lot more sense.

For example, in 2023 most Evangelicals have basically abandoned any sense of trying to “preach the gospel” and convert non-Christians. Instead, they are now laser-focused on “raising families” and having as many kids as physically possible, despite this emphasis on familial ties being absent from the Bible at best and heretical at worst (Jesus clearly tells people that families don’t actually matter, you should ignore them to follow him)

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago

In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony G*D's blessing, but because of the copious amounts of Estradiol.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Yeah I think middle school me was right about Christianity, it should be loudly and violently opposed and destroyed

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Christians conveniently ignore the part where Jesus violently throws all the merchants out of the church

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Also that quote in both the bible and the qur'an about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven; at least as far back as the 10th century, rich Christians have argued that there is a gate in jerusalem called "eye of the needle" and that's what the quote refers to. To this day some US christians believe this; there was never any such gate of course.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Going to hell for helping a guy in a wheelchair cross the road

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago

If you're not pushing every person in a wheelchair you come across down a flight of stairs, you're on the side of satan.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago

And Jesus said onto his flock "lo, and fuck them poor people, lmfao"

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lord said fuck you got mine Beggars, lepers can whine Rip the food from the mouths of the hungry, that's fine

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yo I love the scripture Gonna paint a picture You an me my man J.C. An NFT I get cha On my boat im the goat Feel fine with what I know They ain't trying that's fo sho Cake they eating cause they poor

Peace

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (4 children)

James Cone quotes as a timeline cleanse:

“The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.... Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug that helps them adjust to this world by looking for 'pie in the sky.'"

"We have had too much of white love, the love that tells blacks to turn the other cheek and go the second mile. What we need is the divine love as expressed in black power, which is the power of blacks to destroy their oppressors, here and now, by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject God’s love.... If God is not for us, if God is not against white racists, then God is a murderer, and we had better kill God."

jesus-cleanse

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Christianity was literally the state religion of the Roman empire. Basically every cool Christian in history was murdered by other Christians.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago

Charity is literally one of the seven virtues which are thought of as opposites to the seven vices or sins (or to take a page from Buddhism, "antidotes" to the "poisons" of the vices).

It's not exactly " charity" as we know it. The Latin word is "caritas" which means "caringness" basically but the Greek word is "agape" which is a saintly kind of love. Compare the increasing intensity of love involved in sympathy/empathy/compassion or love for a friend/family/partner/all beings.

Compassion is literally the thing of saints and which allows one to sit calmly while being tortured to death as a martyr. One of the most haunting things I have seen is that image of Thích Quảng Đức so calmly protesting the South Vietnam government's persecution of Buddhists (CW: suicide by self-immolation). I imagine that is how the Christian martyrs must have held themselves in their last moments

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

8deadlysins 😔

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

Truly demonic. American Protestants are Mammon worshippers

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I mean it was here the whole time: Matthew 25:40

The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for satan.’

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Good to see the evangelicals questioning controversial theologians such as checks notes Jesus.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (5 children)

My brother in Christ, the New Testament is basically composed of Jesus going around, telling people to not be assholes and to believe in God. If you take him out there's no religion, Qur'an itself says you can't be a Muslim without believing in the prophets so that's ruled out and I know these people won't all convert to Judaism. Are they gonna start worshipping money? Ford?

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are a lot of American Catholics who think Pope Francis is a false Pope because he pays hollow lip service to poor people.

They are above hypocrisy. They'll simply redefine their religion, whether through splinter groups or on a personal level to make it consistent with their greed.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Zero surprise. When you look at the history of christianity, and where it's currently headed, this was an inevitability.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

What if greed and selfishness are morally justified actually?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

Strap in folks because I know the lore here.

tl;dr this article is doing fan-fiction ala CS Lewis on a hyper-calvinist, misogynist evangelical site so it's both worse than you thought and also just insider nerd shit

CW misogyny

Desiring God was founded by John Piper, a evangelical hyper Calvinist, and he was one of a few big names who really got really big in the 90s and 00s. He was first famous for "Christian Hedonism" which is his youth minister term for the tagline: "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him." You'll not be surprised to learn this is a consequentialist ethic, influenced by Rand.

Piper and others were influential in keeping evangelicalism hyper-masculine. He helped craft an evangelical statement on "biblical manhood and womanhood" describing how wives are subordinate to husbands. This was happening, by the way, because people were fighting against the Southern Baptist Convention's fundamentalist takeover which had, at this point, married into the Moral Majority for power which itself was a reaction to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy in the early 20th century. The political power, the hyper Calvinist stance, and the hyper-masculine positions came to describe most "New Calvinists" at the time. Piper had hilarious takes such as "well, it's okay to vote for McCain/Palin because Palin is VP not Pres." He was, as all evangelicals are, obsessed with sex and purity culture and said absolutely insane things about sex and women generally: "Knowing God produces holy sex" " Down by the river the teenagers would go to make out. I watched them drive back. They never looked happy. Especially she." Link, further CW: SA, misogyny

Piper's brand is that he is the more academic of the freaks, so his company Desiring God tends to publish poorly written academic-ese. This article is one of them: "This is the second of two letters on the demonic distortion of the virtue of compassion. Read the first titled “Killing Them Softly: Compassion That Warms Satan’s Heart.” I made it past the second paragraph before getting bored. The guest author here has a book out on, you guessed it, the evils of porn. He's clearing doing The Screwtape Letters bit from CS Lewis because evangelicals love him, but it sucks

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I think evangelicals should be shot

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see American Christians have reached the point of actual unambiguous heresy and sprinted past it without looking back.

I guess the next step is turning all their crosses upside down and introducing a golden idol of Og-Baeth, the great pig father of Gomorrah.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

Ah yes empathy, the eighth deadly sin apparently

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