You could argue Christianity got totally warped by like... 300 AD and there was no coming back from that.
When they wrote the bible, that's when the state absorbed the original Christian revolution and turned it into part of the status quo.
This is why I don't jive with the state atheist types (apart from finding religions interesting). We see how the material conditions of feudalism naturally altered aspects of Christianity, and we see how the powers of the day consciously coopted it to entrench themselves and the system. In the Modern day we see the same thing except with Capitalism in lieu of Feudalism. I see no reason why Christianity or some other future religious movement wouldn't evolve as the material conditions do and as the mode of production changes and I see no reason why a Communist government couldn't coopt these things as well. Obviously I don't think this would include keeping Catholicism or American Evangelicalism as they would be holdovers from the previous eras, but to suggest that Christianity is inherently a tool of capital or feudalism just doesn't seem correct to me. Christianity and religion can be tool of class oppressions , but I don't see why that tool can't be wielded by the proletariat.
the death of the Adamites were the death of interesting christianity . 4th century anprim gang . aqueducts and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
Here in south america there was a pretty important movement of communist/soxialist catholic priests. They got killed tho.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
- Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Fun fact: the original pledge of allegiance was written by a christian socialist, and it did not include "under God":
Bellamy was a Christian socialist who "championed 'the rights of working people and the equal distribution of economic resources, which he believed was inherent in the teachings of Jesus.'" In 1891, Bellamy was "forced from his Boston pulpit for preaching against the evils of capitalism", and eventually stopped attending church altogether after moving to Florida, reportedly because of the racism he witnessed there. Francis's career as a preacher ended because of his tendency to describe Jesus as a socialist.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bellamy
The true blue motherfuckers will spin it to defend the rich. I tell my dad to sell his shit and give it to the poor if you want to get to heaven. He just tells me Jesus didn't mean everything. Plus he drives around on Thanksgiving handing out Panda Express to houseless people.
American Christianity has been so thoroughly twisted to support the institution of slavery that appealing to "classic Christian values" is a complete waste of time with them. If any of that mattered, Trump wouldn't be enjoying steady 70%-90% approval ratings from them throughout his presidency. Trump is almost the perfect icon of everything the teachings of Christ are meant to repudiate, yet no American Christians see it like that. Why? Because Trump promises to make the country a white supremacist wonderland for them, which is the actual religion they believe in.
PresterJohnBrown is my chapo character where I play a mysterious abolitionist in the far east with an army of antifa at my side, perpetually marching towards Christendom to save it from itself.
This community will never cease to amaze me.
I knew about the Prester John legend reading Baudolino. Never finished that book tho.
and if he does it challenge him to do it once a month then once a week
really it gets better:
Come now, you rich, weep and wail over your impending miseries. Your wealth has rotted away, your clothes have become moth-eaten, your gold and silver have corroded, and that corrosion will be a testimony against you; it will devour your flesh like a fire. You have stored up treasure for the last days. Behold, the wages you withheld from the workers who harvested your fields are crying aloud, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on earth in luxury and pleasure; you have fattened your hearts for the day of slaughter. You have condemned; you have murdered the righteous one; he offers you no resistance.
-- James 5:1-6
I was a Sunday School teacher for a minute there. Also taught Marxism on the sly to the youth group at my fiancee's Baptist church.
I use to be a preacher. We've all done dumb shit. Though, I still bless my wine before I drink it. Getting trashed on the blood of Christ is A+.
Hell, no. Though I do occasionally flavor my atheism with Nordic references to confuse the bible thumpers around here.
Check out damon garcia for more material. Pretty rad liberation theologian on the youtubes
I'm not into religion, I stole them from the memegathred in discord. But cool.
I'm not either, really... But the way he speaks about Christianity has helped me build a vocabulary with which I can talk any actual Christian into considering Communism. Which is handy in a majority Christian nation, even if most of them are only culturally Christians.
Also, Christianity was founded as an anti-imperialist struggle, which can be helpful as well.
Lmao, I want to hear anyone who can talk about decolonization via the bible
and if that's too much, here's something shorter about The God who Riots.
" Today children, we will learn about how capitalists have respect for nothing and how our lord and saviour Jesus Christ wrecked their shit at a temple with nothing but a whip and a dream and why you should too"
Where do I get ordained?
The book of Acts is pretty good too:
All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they shared with anyone who was in need.
With one accord they continued to meet daily in the temple courts and to break bread from house to house, sharing their meals with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
telling kids about jacob just hustling for those blessings and the camel one
okay this is gonna be a bit long
Jacob is the dude from the ladder and just the coolest person on the old testament like basically he was born the second son of isaac and his older brother gets the blessing (as in the vague old testament blessing) and he conspires with his mother to steal the blessing so after esau gets back from hunting with no food and hungry jacob is doing just the tastiest lentil soup his brother asks for some and he says IF YOU GIVE ME THE FIRSTBORN BLESSING and he does, okay isaac has decided to give a second blessing a more important one to isau absolutelly unaware of this going on, SO JACOB JUST FUCKING GETS HIS BROTHER OUT THE HOUSE DRESSES UP LIKE ISAU TRICKS HIS BLIND FATHER, Okay isau gets pissed as fuck and jacob runs off. one night he sleeps in a barn, he dreams of a ladder to the sky and sees an angel going up, he decides to after this angel and ask for a blessing the angel says "my man sorry i am busy i gotta go up the ladder have heaven stuff to do" and jacob goes "oh you don't understand i am gonna get that blessing" so they literally wrestle for a whole day literally a man just fighting an angel until the angel just whatever here take it THE MAN HAS 3 BLESSING HE HUSTLE FOR,
like it is not properly a marxist bit but there is this whole thing about jacob as being a man that refuses to accept the place fate has decided for him, also don't remember if the ladder and the wrestle happen at the same time could be two different dreams but if it was this means that it is the wrestling ladder match
Paulo Freire basically says that only the Marxists and the Christians would appreciate his book (and ideas).
pedagogy of the oppressed like Budwig said. He was an adult literacy teacher and the minister of education for one of their cities during the socialist period in Brazil until the military coup, when they arrested him and exiled to Chile.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a classic of his (and the above quote is from that iirc)
blowjobs are revolutionary. you can say a lot to a person when you've got full control of their dick.
but that's the thing, if it's always down your throat, you're doing something wrong. you gotta get some anticipation in the mix there
Eh I'm honestly getting pretty tired of their bootlicking and swallowing US intelligence state propaganda.
Please, for the love of god, incorporate an anti-imperialist framework into your analysis. Your takes are painful
There's a difference between thinking Assad is just wonderful and thinking that Assad is the best of several awful options. When the likely options are Assad, fascism, or a balkanized Syria under the US's thumb, it should be pretty obvious which is the least bad
if assad entered through your bellybutton i don't think we need to inform the volcel police
In an ideal society, I'd probably agree with you. But in the society we live in (and, presumably any kind of transitionary society towards the ideal) Religion has a function, which is why it is popular. It made a place for itself, whether you like it or not. Better to subvert than to oppress, no?
Religion has literally no use and has never had any. If you want to talk about pre industrial society it doesnt differ at all from the modern manifestation expect for the states role in it. The state and of course the ruling class can use and will use it to its advantage. religions are enforcers of the social rule and opression and due to peoples dumb brains most get indoctrinated into these believes
Youre comparing me to some fucking fascist and dont even try to defend your believes in god
Youre comparing me to some fucking fascist
considering your fondness for ableist slurs...
if the shoe fits
So why do people seek out Religion? Because of their 'dumb brains', yes?
I mean, Christianity has literally been the first institution to provide any kind of social safety net to society, but go off I guess. It's - to this day - for many people the only way to still have a feeling of community, of solidarity - but sure, just try to 'exterminate' that... Splendid ideas.
I agree that Christian churches can provide a powerful sense of community and have been vectors for social safety nets in the past, but it's both erroneous and unhelpful to say they were the first to provide a social safety net to society.
Caring for other humans when those humans can't care for themselves is a big part of what makes us fundamentally human and arguably the entire point of these civilization and society things we've got going.
When a studen asked early academic feminist and anthropologist Margaret Mead what the first sign of civilization was, she famously replied that the first evidence of civilization was a 15,000 years old fractured femur indicative of a break that had then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, you cannot drink or hunt for food. Wounded in this way, you are meat for your predators. No creature survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. You are eaten first.A set femur is evidence that another person has taken time to stay with the fallen, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended them through recovery. A healed femur indicates that someone has helped a fellow human, rather than abandoning them to save their own life.
If you mean an institutionalised social safety net, in Sumerian Ur, the oldest city we've ever found and anarcho-primitivism's original sin, they had a system called Bala Taxation. The beaurucrats of Ur kept meticulous records, and they kept their records on clay so 6000 years later we have a very good idea of how it worked. It evolved alot over time, but in its longest running form Bala taxation meant that every citizen of Ur owed half of their labour to the state, which for farmers was payed in barley or labour on state fields and for other tradesmen or labourers could be payed in commodities or labour. The state in turn, provided a ration of barley to everyone who was not a farmer. It is often argued, although the issue is by no means settled that the reason the city of Ur was founded as a means of translating communal abundance into a social safety net. That the city grew around grain silos and that the point of those silos was a means to store and pool grain so canals could be maintained and droughts weathered without anyone having to worry about going hungry if it was their field was flooded or plagued by locusts.
Mutual aid without expectation of immediate or even eventual repayment is an inherently human quality and the purpose of society and civilisation is to enhance and take better advantage of it. The Christian church has been (among other things) a vector of this mutual aid but it is by no means the only vector and it was not the first. To claim it is or was is to do non-christian societies and humanity as a whole a grave disservice.
A Seminal text on the evolution of Ur and how human society maybe got started is Gordon Childe, the first marxist archeologist's Man Makes Himself first published in 1936 and last revised in 1951. Some of the text is a little dated as new archeological evidence has came to light but it's an excellent starting place for reading on the topic as most following texts reference it and I have not found another on the same topic with such a focus on the genesis and evolution of institutional exploitation.
It can be read for free here: https://archive.org/details/ManMakesHimself/page/n121/mode/2up
Good points all around, great comments. Mine was a quick comment from the hip but does indeed betray a somewhat eurocentric worldview on my part. Thank you for educating and providing sources.
Lmao social safety net is too big of an concept to tie it to christianity
But can't both the idea of a social safety net and Christ's message both be boiled all the way down to simply "Y'all should take care of each other" though? Seems like there's a lot of overlap to me.
I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school, so I'm pretty familiar with the ins and outs. But that's part of what pisses me off so much; lots of great simple messages in The Gospels, but so so so many people just nod their heads during sermons and then instantly forget everything once they walk out the doors.
At least our congregation did help my family out when we went through some hard times. But I don't understand how people aren't able to extend that same kind of kindness to others.
Mega churches, for instance, are beyond infuriating.
Those preachers are the literal definition of false prophets. Absolutely insane how much money some of them have. And I can understand some rubes having the wool pulled over their eyes, but they have like, millions of followers. Are there that many people that can't see past the bullshit?
some of the first institutions that we would consider a social safety net were started by churches, almshouses for example
Crishtianity isnt about the "message of god" its about setting values which are used by the clergy and the fascists to enforce the social hierarchy if you can give better analysis please do
Crishtianity isnt about the “message of god”
So you've never actually been to a church, have you?
Say what you want about the corruption of the institution itself, I'll probably agree with you, but when you look behind all the bullshit and examine the texts in a vacuum it absolutely is all about the message of God. And that message, according to the J man, is basically "take care of each other."
We dont need insane cults to assign the right and moral way of life
Religion instituted for social control the clergy has been an extremely powerful class in europian history continuing their schemes to this day. Aninism is a large concept involving many cultures and societal structures and its should be involded in the "religion" category
Cults need to be exterminated. they need to be subjugated under the state and taxed
What do yoiu think can be done to destroy the authoritarian rule of organized religion?
How about we have all the communal stuff without jesus? or do you think thats too radical and against god?
Yeah, well not extermination obciously; but yeah: obvious cults, undemocratic powerful structures and any other group preaching shitty things should go.
Yet some people will still search for/have religions and well if it's harmless, etc, just let them.
