https://twitter.com/jaykelly26/status/1760336540885033057
This is like one of those memes where an image of a Star Trek character labelled with a Star Wars character’s name is saying a famous Stargate quote.
I know when I’m being punked.Love how every permutation of ideology is held by at least one person in this country
I’ve actually wondered if there is even one Evangelical Christian who is also a Marxist in the US. Those views are pretty incompatible but maybe there’s someone out there who’s trying to mash them both together like two dry play doh colors.
Stalin did nothing wrong because he accepted Christ the Lord into his heart on his death bed.
No but he went to seminary school because his mom wanted him to become a priest.
That part I knew. That's where he learned to be a good Marxist. Haha
I know some apocryphal stuff relating to him and religion, but they seem mostly hearsay tbh
I do actually know a self described "Christian Fundamentalist" who is a leftist. The dude is some flavor of Baptist (can't remember which denomination specifically) and is really rad. He explained it to me once by saying that fundamentalism means following the strictest and most literal word of something. Applied to Jesus and the Bible, that means helping the poor, feeding the hungry, and not trying to hoard wealth.
I’m curious, does your friend think that anyone who does not accept Jesus as their savior will spend an eternity in a state of eternal torment? To me that’s kind of the dividing line between the true “fundamentalists” and everyone else.
Before I deconverted, I tried to embrace Karl Barth Thought since he was basically universalist without explicitly saying so, and I liked a lot of what he had to say. But that part I was too far gone.
(btw Barth is also cool because he incorporated dialectics into his theology!
Edit: a more religiously inclined Marxist should write a book titled “Between Two Karls” about an imaginary conversation between Marx and Barth.
As a random aside, coming from my religious background I tend to cite the end of the narnia novels as a healthier view on the whole be saved or go to hell rhetoric. I personally kind of hate most of those books now but the final book does make it clear that people who do good works, regardless of faith, end up in heaven. Coming from a Christian I feel like it’s a good way to segue into talking about the injustice of a good a just divine figure damning people for being born into a different faith (or atheist) setting.
I guess what I’m saying is that the repent or be damned rhetoric can be wiggled around, but it comes down to how philosophical a Christian is at heart, or if they are just dead set in the rule as it seems to stand in their specific orthodoxy
the final book does make it clear that people who do good works, regardless of faith, end up in heaven
You thought you were serving Tash! But it was me, Aslan!I think Narnia is pretty cool but god i hate the "Susan didnt get to come back to Narnia because she was too much of an icky girl" thing (note that idr the full details of this and might be getting it slightly wrong)
I dont like Lewis, but he himself said that Susan is kind of the Author insert. (Egg CS Lewis discussion tba) and that her exile from Narnia is temporary.
Also, I'd point out that hopeful universalism is a far older position than fundamentalism, going back to Clement I, who was personally made a priest by Peter. Slightly later Justin Martyr makes a case for the salvation of the virtuous pagans such as Socrates, using a Middle Platonist argument. Prots don't know this because they've never considered reading another book.
On a related note, "eternal hell unless you accept Jesus as Savior" doesn't mean what evangelicals think it does. Because John makes clear Jesus is literally the Divine Motive force of all creation before and after he was made flesh.
He proceeded from the father before creation as the divine idea of creation itself, reflected back upon creation by god. Those who study eastern religions will note some parallels here with Brahma/Buddha nature/Tao.
So you kind of have to try really quite hard to not be saved. Some people do of course.
I'm writing all this from the perspective of Catholic theology of course, not expecting anyone to accept it as true.
Yeah, the whole "Hand yourself over to us or you'll face eternal torment beyond anything you can imagine" thing always kind of seemed like dodgy salesmanship to me. A little too on the nose. A little too convenient for the one making the pitch.
I need the occasional reminder that there're people out there who aren't just the usual 700 club type and that there's often significantly more depth to theology. One of the pitfalls of avoiding human contact whenever possible out of fear of the more reactionary elements of the populace.
Closest I can think of is Jim Jones (and even then he was like at least 85% grift)
Bart Erhman is probably the closest I’ve come across, but I don’t think he entirely considers himself a Christian anymore
He considers himself agnostic, IIRC. Definitely not a Christian, though.
Personally, I struggle to see how one can continue to deal with the contradictions between Christianity and Marxism without ultimately either abandoning one or essentially being agnostic and admitting that much of their ingrained religious background is unimportant (besides the parts that are basically teaching self improvement and care for your community/world). Thats basically where I ended up
The way I do it is by materialising the ideology.
Kingdom of heaven is among you. Jesus is the divine Logos of reality. Go and sin no more etc.
I grew up in an evangelical family and I can say that while Christianity can mesh with Marxism, it’s pretty impossible for evangelicalism to do the same. There’s too much built in shit with the more realized concept of active good and evil divine forces being the driver to what’s wrong in the world, and essentially only god can come and fix what’s truly wrong (ala rapture, god establishing his kingdom on earth post apocalypse). This is in direct conflict with Marxist ideals, which are very humanist, essentially telling us that humans can establish a more just and equitable system ourselves.
My dad is an absolute end of the world nutter and while I can get him to believe in the realities of global warming and injustices under capitalism, his end solution is still divine in nature. It’s frustrating because he can see all of the same issues but evangelicalism doesn’t leave any wiggle room for humans to fix them
I'd go poking around patsoc circles. Can't be hard to find someone who's become something like that either out of sincere belief or out of contrarianism
We're used to seeing the bingo card ideologies on twitter bots/trolls, but seeing them irl is something else.
- Show
Literally what the fuck. It looks like she is wearing a keffiyeh too? And a rainbow flag?
I've read the explanation from OP but I am still utterly flummoxed.
You're trying to rationalize brainworms by making things get slightly more in line. I feel that is a fools errands because they already combined the progress flag and ancom flag with antichoice, they might as well combine the keffiyah too!
Is this a pro life anarchist? An anarchist advocating placing restrictions on personal freedoms?????
Trying to logic into this position hurts my brain.
Like I get a theoretical argument (beyond the common pro-life positions) stating that allowing abortion is harms the future atonomy of an unborn baby, but that would only work under the misguided assumption that life begins at conception.
That position would also be coercive, restricting the autonomy of a woman on behalf of an unborn child, so there’s not exactly as strong of a leg to stand on.
I presume by bringing fascism into the equation they’re probably trying to point out that fascism uses abortion for eugenics, and therefore banning it would prevent fascists from doing eugenics. Well, abortion being illegal might stop eugenics via abortion, but that does nothing to stop eugenics via sterilization, and it also assumes fascists wouldn’t just perform abortions anyways.
That position would also be coercive, restricting the autonomy of a woman on behalf of an unborn child,
This is the crux of my own pro-choice position. It's irrelevant to me if the baby is a person or if it's just a clump of flesh because, either way, it does not have a right to use another person as an incubator. It's the Violinist Argument - if you use someone else as your life support system and they decide they don't want to be an appliance anymore, they are fully justified to terminate.
It's the Violinist Argument - if you use someone else as your life support system and they decide they don't want to be an appliance anymore, they are fully justified to terminate.
I'm not fond of this argument, because it can be equally applied to people with disabilities, and if you stretch definitions a bit - to everyone, because we all depend on society to survive.
Can you spell out how that would go a bit more explicitly? The violinist argument is supposed to show that nobody gets to use a particular individual as a life support system without their consent, not that we don't owe some degree of care to one another. I'm not saying there's not a way to make a (bad) analogous argument about people with disabilities, but I'm not familiar with it and can't quite see how it would go. If you've got time to spell it out, I'd appreciate it!
It certainly can't be "equally" applied! No one has to have their body mutilated and bodily autonomy violated and health harmed and life threatened and put through excruciating discomfort to support people with disabilities.
I'd be fascinated to see it applied equally.
Nazis are coming with an army to kill disabled people and minorities. In order to fight the Nazis, conscription is necessary. Is it moral under this framework to conscript a white CIS man to fight to protect disabled people and minorities if the Nazis would otherwise have left that white CIS man alone?
Fighting, of course, means putting him at risk of mutilation, deprives him of his bodily autonomy, and consists of a lot of excruciating discomfort even if he isn't wounded.
Surely there must be better arguments for abortion that don't rely solely on the Western conception of individual rights as a moral and ethical basis?
"Should we build a slave army of cracker conscripts to fight the Nazis" is a fun thought experiment, but the logistics would be a nightmare! That's how you get conscripts fragging their superior officers. I suppose you could maybe keep them under control with bomb collars or something, but uh, at that point we have firmly left moralism far behind us.
Also, can you give me a justification for 100% of abortions that ignores whether the baby is a person or a clump of flesh?
If you want to bring the practicalities of a hypothetical moral scenario into this then the violinist argument, which involves stitching an unwilling person to a sick person to share a kidney, fails even harder.
My point in the abstract is this: the violinist argument is one that myopically focuses on individual rights. It proposes that an individual cannot be forced to do anything that may result in bodily harm in service of a "greater good". The argument fails because most of society (even a socialist society) agrees that it is sometimes moral to force a person to risk bodily harm in service of a greater good. Mandatory service to fight Nazis is merely the clearest cut example.
I support abortion rights for many reasons. However, the violinist argument itself is incredibly flawed both logically and rhetorically and I don't think it's a helpful argument to make. It can be so easily reframed into a scenario where both sides have reasonable arguments and doesn't really prove anything. It's main crux is just the visceral reaction to the disgusting nature of the scenario.
I brought in practicalities because I didn't feel like addressing the horrific implications of your hypothetical moral scenario. But! Okay.
The argument fails because most of society (even a socialist society) agrees that it is sometimes moral to force a person to risk bodily harm in service of a greater good.
Again, you have left moralism behind. Using your logic, it is sometimes moral to ban abortion: if we need to increase the population to fight off the fascists, if we need to repopulate after the antifa war, etc. In fact, using your logic, it is moral to force people to get pregnant in the first place. Without bodily autonomy as a basis for ethics, how do you avoid forced birth baby factories?
I'm not fond of this argument, because it can be equally applied to people with disabilities
You are correct. The whole issue isn't about life, but about control. It's about a whole group of people who force/coerce you into a caregiving role. The very coercion reveals their own desire to not do the work themselves. I find it especially galling that these same people will not do the same caregiving, do not offer help, and get
when you object to all of this work!You cannot coerce people into caregiving, whether babies, disabled, sick, elderly, or anybody else. It must be a choice.
Wow, I've never seen this argument expressed in such concise and clear way!
There's actually only one kind of scenario where someone WOULD have that right over you. Luckily it's absurd:
If you could grab a random, fully living person off the street and jam em up in your womb, and somehow make them dependent on you to survive until you can be surgically detached, you would owe them that service 100%. And if someone else forced this on the both of you, you wouldn't owe them that. The vast majority of people would agree with this.
This is why fundamentalist Christians have to believe that God pulls down souls into fertilized zygotes. It turns conception into a form of soul-based child abduction. If you completely skip past any thought about what the fetus is, and just assume with full conviction that it's equal to a person in every important way, then you literally arrive at the most common fundie anti abortion position... Full ban unless it's the mother's "fault".
This is extremely convenient - the linchpin of their entire argument is literally magical thinking. Think of the first scenario, someone has done this to a person, they're stuck attached, and the abductor is complaining that their right to kill the abductee and go chillax are being trampled. That's what it sounds like to anti abortion religious fundies.
This is why they must be opposed with raw force. They can't be reasoned out because they didn't reason themselves in.
Christian Nationalists full-on worship an evil deity, that intentionally and knowingly sends the souls of babies to Earth to get aborted and then be sent to Hell for not accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior. It's not worth arguing with, y'know, evil worshiping death cultists.
I found the Violinist Argument reasonable when I was a vaguely Christian teenager figuring my own beliefs out, though.
but that would only work under the misguided assumption that life begins at conception.
The whole argument of trying to place where "life" begins, or where the fetus becomes a "person" will always lead nowhere because there is no definitive cut off point or specific week/term where this occurs, forcing people to come up with arbitrary qualifications (such as an identifiable heartbeat). This will go on forever until people realize that as it is developing the (potential) child is always in between conceptual forms. The only thing that matters is capacity to survive outside of the womb, since this differentiates the outcome of the choice.
The only thing that matters is capacity to survive outside of the womb, since this differentiates the outcome of the choice.
One time when I was in college pro life protestors came on campus and being the foolish bleeding heart liberal I was I went to debate one of them. I inuited this idea during the conversation and they hit me with a "well, that's invalid." No explanation, no reasoning, just refutation via nuh-uh. It was so incredibly upsetting that I just walked away. Fuck that person. I'd be pro choice with no other reason besides that conversation.
It's like a dollar that the vending machine of my brain just keeps spitting out
I think it's like a pro abortion but only for eugenics thing.
My therapist: "Pro-life ancoms aren't real. They can't hurt you."
Pro-life ancoms:
The former. Didnt realize this photo needed context when I posted it lol.
The thing is, they're wearing a huge progress pride flag, so I think it's unlikely it's a Catholic Leftist (though not impossible). I'm a Catholic myself and I've never encountered someone with this perplexing combination of beliefs.
Hmm, I remember when I used to go on /r/Catholicism I would come across the odd person who had good takes on economic issues, but upon further inspection was a fascist, and IIRC they were always Francoists.
What is going on in Spain?It’s a tradcath thing, same sort who insists Mussolini is a saint because of Padre Pio
Yeah, the tradcaths are not ok. I was on my way to become one before I learned about history and started reading Lenin. Very glad I avoided that path.
This picture actually short-circuited my brain.
Like my brain completely shut down, head emptied into a void, forgetting to breath, the brain-eye connection breaking up so everything I saw didn't register as any sort of existence beyond a disintegrating blur
You straight up sent me into oblivion with this post. For the briefest of time I ceased to exist because of this post.
I'm still reeling, picking up the shards of my psyche, and slowly trying to piece me back together because of this post.
amazing post
All the fascists are fighting for abortion rights, which is why the supreme court recently made abortion mandatory for all pregnant women.
Anarchist comrades, I know you all hate the idea of purges but hear me out...
At first I assumed that was a Banderite banner, but after reading the comments and finding out it's ancom:
there is an unfortunate color collision yeah, I have to do a double take every time to make sure
Ah yes, the progressive anti-abortion uprising. You can tell from the hat. I’ve run into these jokers at reproductive rights protests. They’re there to troll and split people’s anger, deeply unserious people.
“Fascism is definitely well-known for defending the bodily autonomy of marginalized people.”
