dunking on one of the most oppressive institutions on the planet = "Reddit atheism"
Hexbear moment
In fact, you will find that very few people outside of western countries hold your secularist worldviews.
:xigma-male: lolwut?
Why are you trying to handwave away all the Chinese atheists as "very few people"?
In my experience, most Chinese atheists aren't actually atheists. Or atheists who are only atheists because they don't believe in a personal god but are really into numerology, plan their interior design based on fengshui, believe in the spiritual aspects of acupuncture and Chinese traditional medicine realigning your qi, go to fortune tellers so that their kids can have a lucky name, consult these almanacs to plan major events like weddings based on what days are auspicious, and just act very superstitious in general. They also burn incense in temples just like their religious counterparts but mostly out of respect rather than sincere belief. They definitely don't resemble Reddit atheists at all, and I seriously doubt Reddit atheists would consider them atheists.
I actually looked into the CFPS because I was curious; looks like there was some recent work on the subject looking into the question of measuring religious affiliation in China. The questionnaire doesn't ask about atheism (only religiously unaffiliated), and they noticed a drop in the total when the question was rephrased to be more broadly inclusive of traditional Chinese religions. Even with that modification, the majority of respondents (~70%) said they were unaffiliated, and I would consider that evidence of secularism; they most likely aren't religious/Christian per your original phrasing. If we assume that number is accurate it represents almost a billion people, definitely not "very few." The only number I could find on atheism that's recent was a Gallup poll, which suggested around 60% of people in China are "convinced atheists" but that appears to contradict actual scholarly research on the subject.
I'm not sure what OP means by his post, but my takeaway is the emphasis on worshiping the Christ-dying-on-the-cross symbol in Christianity. Death imagery is not that popular in most religions, while in Christianity it is. If you mean "death cult" to mean believing in heaven, then many but not all religions would fit that criteria.
She might be otherwise doing a Trump thing or doing a Trump thing of performative Christianity to pander to the evangelical base (which is of course called out as sinful in the new testament) but a picture of Jesus crucified on Easter is just normal Christian stuff
Applying the crimes of Christianity to all religions is simply another type of Christian chauvenism. By asserting that "religion" consists of only Christianity you both support its supremacy, since it is already dominant and not threatened by your rhetoric, and help it denounce other religions as "demonic", since smaller faiths are always being threatened by its dominance.
Who does this? Pretty much every western Anti-theist I've ever talked to. All they do is compile all religions into an amorphous blob they can throw stones at. As though Christianity is in any way similar to, for example, the various religions of indigenous Americans.
There are thousands of religions that are currently practiced. Yes there are many that are reactionary, even many small ones, but many are not and none are as intertwined with reactionary political structures as Christianity is. Just because you think all religions are wrong and evil does not mean they are, and its ignorant and chauvinistic to lump literally all of them together.
So 10% of the planet, 800,000,000 people's faiths, arent worth considering in the category of "religion"?
Im not against critiquing religion, I do so regularly. But Puff wasnt doing that, they were responding to a post criticizing Christianity by saying "all religion is a death cult". Its reductive and annoying.
How about every single religion practiced by Indigenous peoples of the Americas?
statistically insignificant proportion of global religious
They are still religions. When you say "religion is evil" that includes all religions. If your critique is about the most popular religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc) then simply specify that.
I d also question whether American religions are actually all clean.
Certainly saying "all Indigenous American faiths are good" is pretty reductive, there are a lot of them after all. At the same time saying "all religion is bad" includes all indigenous religions and I guarantee the people who say that do not actually know anything about them all.
Religion is a really complicated subject, and anti-theists, by the very nature of being anti-religion, really need to over simplify that extremely complex topic to think that they're right in hating "religion".
Oh I absolutely agree in the necessity of state atheism. Dont get me wrong, Im not advocating for religions maintaining their political structures, I hate christianity mainly because it exists as a political entity. I simply think that Anti-theism is reactionary in its own right, and its far more damaging to faiths that are not politically dominant than ones that are.
I’d also question whether American religions are actually all clean.
Those religions exist in the context of peoples who suffer genocide at the hands of colonizers. Whether they are clean or not is largely irrelevant as long as they continue to live in settler-colonies. It doesn't matter if the religions themselves are reactionary or not. Do you hold an investigation towards every victim of police violence to determine whether those victims are actually "good people?"
Anti-theists always ignore the thousands of Indigenous religions that exist. Either they glob on their critiques of larger faiths like Christianity, Islam, etc.; or they outright ignore that those are even religions.
All of them, huh? So there was never a single group of indigenous peoples of the Americas who ever practised warfare, misogyny, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice in the name of religion? Not even once?
"That religion was no angel." What is this Reddit tier response?
Every single Indigenous religion is innocent in the grand scheme of things just like every victim of police murder is innocent in the grand scheme of thing. They don't need to be perfect. It doesn't matter if the victims are petty criminals or smoke meth or refused to pay taxes. They're victims of the pigs and that is enough.
If you want to shit on Christianity for being behind the genocide of Indigenous peoples, be my guest. But to lump a religion with multiple genocides conducted in its name with the religions of the people being genocided by that same religion is absolutely heinous. Literally the same people trying to say George Floyd shouldn't be mourned because he was a petty criminal.
I didn't attack any individual muslims, rather the ideology itself. It's insanity to suggest that the doctrines of Islam are not homophobic and misogynistic.
even if it appears to be so in their sacred texts, because not a single religion in the world follows their sacred texts to a T
Right, so then what's the point in having the religion at all? Do you think God and Allah would cool with people cherry-picking the book to follow the parts you like and disregard the parts you don't? Just throw the whole archaic thing out.
Christianity was a life cult. Roman society was a death cult. Which do you think prevailed in Europe, despite the name and trappings. All Henry VIII did was the same as Constantine before him. Transform your death cult to be amenable to the people you need to control. Capitalism is indeed a death cult
Being surrounded by death and choosing to drop out of society to worship your common humanity. Protoancom religious movement. And seeing that you have to universalize your tribe to all of humanity for that to work.
i don't think that's true really. i'm talking about the original social movement in its historical context. the thing that makes christianity interesting in its original form is that they materially applied this idea meaningfully. a new age religious movement does not have a material opposition to capitalism in the same way that the movement in the Levant and Asia Minor had a meaningful material opposition to being a part of the roman imperialist war machine.
christians didn't even join the bar kokhba revolt, cmon. people go way too far eulogizing early christianity. you get like 3 degrees removed from the apostles and you had pious christians in the army and state & churches formally interfacing with the imperial system
i'm not saying that even the earliest, most dedicated form of christianity wasn't without extreme contradictions. i just think it's wrong to say it's akin to a new age religious movement.
but where's the meaningful material opposition? christians gotta take up the sword against the empire, not just get hounded by the authorities a few times
rejection of economic participation, strict enforcement of communal wealth. i'd consider those good. i don't disagree.
everyone who took up the sword against the empire was killed. To give an example to explain what it was like to fight the romans it was traditional in ancient greece to parade their dead killed in battle through the city after battles with the Romans the greeks could not identify the bodies of their loved ones and instead had to sort them into piles of each type of hacked off limb. The soldiers who fought the romans looked more like offal in a butchers shop than the men they had been in life
Just overthrow the roman empire with violence is a taller order than you realise. And it is also worth noting that prior to Christianity the ideas that slavery and colonialism are detrimental to human dignity would have been completely foreign to people and were the natural order. An ancient Roman would no more question the morality of slavery as an institution than they would the morality of the tides going out. Even Spartacus as soon as he secured his own freedom took slaves
Christians and Pharisees were the libs of their times. The real radicals who valiantly struggled to liberate Judea from the Roman yoke were the Zealots.
I mean yeah it is, but it also isn’t.
I also fucking hate how politicized it’s become. Not that it ever wasn’t political, but, and I know it’s a cliche, but modern evangelicals woulda called Jesus woke
modern evangelicals are calvinists and capitalists, not 'christian' in any way.
i'm not saying that christianity or any church is perfect and wholesome. I'm saying that you can't take 2,000 years of christian mythology and create a consumerist religion out of it. this world is not supposed to matter. the rich are supposed to have great difficulty getting into heaven. jesus literally says 'sell all you have and give it to the poor'. ofc medieval merchants and landlords didn't do that, turns out the material world actually does matter to people. but they were paranoically making donations to the poor and the church for a reason. they would send their kids to medicant poverty orders for a reason. liberation theology became a thing for a reason. and the calvinists are here saying that heaven is actually a low tax at will employment haven. not even co-existence with god frees you from work anymore.
i regard neopentecostals as no more christian than the church of unification. ie the moonies who say that actually jesus was a failure but thank god for reverend moon, eternal king of space apartheid. same thing with salafis.
I'm saying that you can’t take 2,000 years of christian mythology and create a consumerist religion out of it.
But they can and they did
yeah
you know the part of the bible that says 'you didn't pay your servants wages, you're going to hell?'
actually thats about big government and taxation. why? because rich people back then were the big government charging taxes.
literally the arguments they make
Jesus rode around on a T-Rex :think-about-it:
spoiler
I'm pretty sure all the weird Young Earth Creationist shit about dinosaurs is just meant to subvert children's love for dinos and redirect it to support the fundie evangelical worldview they're being brought up in
Kids, of course, intuitively know the truth that velociraptors are cooler than God
I see it more as dying gasps of when churches had a monopoly on literacy and children. I say this because the university I went to had about 5% incoming freshman dropouts before they finished their first year due to religious reasons. The would say the school was teaching too many unchristian things and wanted no part of it. I went to school in a place full of these evangelicals who were all homeschooled and never heard about evolution or dinosaurs until they were 18.
Homeschooling is easier when you don't have to do peer review or experiments or anything, and evangelicals want homeschooling because it creates more easily controlled kids. (And more easy child abuse)
The extent to which they're willing to go to create an entirely parallel Truman Show style reality that conforms to their stupid beliefs and shields them from the slightest scrutiny is kind of impressive. Of course, the eventual plan is to force everyone else to live in it too
you seem to be under the impression that describing what calvinism is and denouncing the crimes of the international conservative evangelical movement and those of megachurches is, somehow, at odds with denouncing the crimes of, say, the roman catholic church. I think it's rather telling that you equated the neopentecostals with 'protestantism in general', as they are definitely not the same beasts. catholic churches will still have abetted genocide in canada, even as people are impoverished worldwide by evangelical preaching. the catholic church will remain a force against reproductive rights even as my country and the rest of latin america continue to reel under american evangelical propaganda and the afterglow of the jakarta method.
the fact is that the calvinist megachurches exist in a bubble of cognitive dissonance from christianity as a whole. knowing and facing that enemy is important, for no reason other than the fact that quite frankly as a third world leftist I consider american style evangelicals an existential threat while catholic ultras are at best defanged and marginalized. the catholic church around where i live is a bunch of social workers, even as the catholic church in america is indistinguishable from the evangelicals.
I'll be quite honest with you, it's rather insulting that you think I am operating under 'an idealistic version of Christianity' which I invented. I have literally just accused the Catholic Church of genocide. And your response is to further accuse me of a mixture of delusion and denialism. This is clownish behavior.
Do you make it a habit of going to other people's countries and giving them lectures about their own lives? Do you seriously, honestly believe, you know more than me about the history and the participation of churches in the junta governments that were imposed on my own country? Do you genuinely, genuinely believe I need you to let me know the slavery was a thing, and that it was supported by the church? I've been to the mass graves, I've been to the slave pens, I've read all the bile in the most evil historical sources you can imagine. I don't need your help and I don't care what twitter threads you've been reading. I don't see leftists rushing to defend canadian catholic schools. And even if they were, none of what your projected onto me was warranted.
I have made a specific point about a specific aspect of a specific international reactionary movement's theology. And you've done nothing but label me with an entire worldview and personality about all the things you don't know about me.
Fuck off.
I’ll be quite honest with you, I think that looking at the actions of the catholic church and reducing their role to that of social workers in the current context of the third world is something that shouldn’t exist outside of really on the nose satire
It's amazing. You just keep going. I said three things about the Catholic Church:
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I accused them of genocide
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I accused them of being a force against reproductive rights
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And I said that I personally currently perceive them as a defanged enemy in relation to other reactionary religious movements in my area of the world .
And you've chosen the single most selective and uncharitable interpretation possible. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with you and frankly I don't care. But I'm gonna ask you again to stop engaging with me. Find someone else to lecture about things you don't know and don't understand.
Yeah, right now the reactionary movement in my country is headed by the Calvinists. The Catholics are the ones mobilizing for the center left. The world is big, nuanced and complicated. Deal with it and fuck off somewhere else.
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modern evangelicals are calvinists and capitalists, not ‘christian’ in any way.
Also a lot closer to their platonic idea of what a "satanist" is, i.e. a complete lunatic that eats babies.
modern evangelicals are calvinists and capitalists, not ‘christian’ in any way.
Christians are incapable of self critique. Its absurd, whether you're a right wing Christian denouncing gay people or a left wing Christian denouncing nazis, the excuse is always "those arent real Christians".
The fact of the matter is that they are real Christians, and you need to deal with the fact that your religion breeds wildly reactionary people.
Christians are incapable of self critique
yes they really are that is the running theme in most Christian theology and ideas.
that your religion
i am not a christian, or at least within the complex religious tapestry of my country there's a tendency for christians to not consider me as one of them. or worse. i'm from a religious minority that was historically persecuted by the roman catholic church. i also wrote a thesis on clandestine torture chambers run by catholic adjacent organizations against 'superstitions' ie shock therapy against people who practiced african religious traditions in the most innocuous ways.
but please, do go off. i enjoy when
noncesinconsiderate people accuse me of being 'pro christian' in a thread where i repeatedly accused the catholic church of genocideSaying Calvanists and Evangelicals "arent real Christians" is defending Christianity from criticism. Those sects are Christian and theres literally nothing about then that makes them not Christian. Christianity is fully compatible with capitalism.
And dont call me a nonce, the fuck is wrong with you? Maybe look up what that word means.
Saying Calvanists and Evangelicals “arent real Christians” is defending Christianity from criticism.
I have not defended christianity from criticism. Would you like a fifth post pointing out that the Roman Church abetted not only genocide, but also cultural genocide as well as found theological justifications for the transatlantic slavery systems? Or are you people not even reading my posts now?
I could have said 'the theological developments introduced by Calvinism are at first reading at odds with the pre-capitalist, pre-industrial, feudalistic and moralistic markets once espoused by both the medieval church and by secular authorities, which in both medieval and early modern Europe always held a religious bent. Every socialist knows the story of the commodification of grain in England and the erosion of the moral economy which imposed barriers for grain trade. This mutation of the christian ethos happened in stages over a long period of time, from the reformations, through the 1800s to today. As they have been taken to their logical extreme by modern neopentecostalism the churches with a calvinist bent have also developed a particular reactionary political agenda of such predatory nature that places them apart even from the general backwardness that some other, older churches espouse. The cognitive dissonance in the neopentecostal sects is particularly pronounced. In one personal experience pastors will read out a biblical passage that decries the rich for not paying out wages, and teach that it as some sort of ancient call out of Big Government'.
I got lazy and said that calvinists are not 'christian'. The quotation marks were there for a reason, but it wasn't enough. Not only must I be a christian (which, again, I am not but thanks for baptizing me btw) but a christian apologist. Except it was a very specific point about a specific group's ideology, nothing more. You're the one who is choosing to read the words 'the Catholic Church has committed genocide' as coming from someone who's a christian apologist. That's your choice.
If I had said that the Moonies aren't 'really christian' as their entire story is beyond the pale of the basic tenets of christian cosmology nobody would have turned that around accused me of pretending that Christianity can't be racist (as the Moonies are segregationist). Or at least I hope they wouldn't.
I will of course apologize for calling you a pedophile. I genuinely thought 'nonce' meant something different. Like 'person who's behaving in a thoughtless way', as in 'nonsense'.
Differentiating Catholics from Protestants is fine, but they're both still types of Christian. Saying one side is "not christian" is a common tactic used by Christians to misdirect critiques about their religion and it lets them avoid self reflection. Im sorry I assumed you were a Christian for using that argumen, its something that annoys me about christians and I jumped the gun.
I do want to reiterate an apology for calling you a nonce. I've been hostile in this thread as well. It's just frustrating to be called delusional, an apologist, or a denialist of some kind by people on the internet on the basis of phrasing. I've had a friend kill themselves straight out of catholic school. Another was sent to gay conversion camp. I very nearly specialized on the history of religious bigotry at school. I'm fully aware of so much shit that's gone down I don't even talk about it to other people anymore. They either deny it (not to my face, to themselves), compartmentalize it, or their outlook becomes visibly worse. It's all exhausting.
that's basically any ideology
see: the sheer number of marxists who don't like the gays
Yeah it still depends on the person. What qualifies as scientific and material doesn't always hit universally, like the Greek Communist Party keeps being transphobic and their explanation is trans people deny materialism. One time I had a very bitter argument with a well known transphobic Marxist (whose name rhymes with Small Dockshott) and he tried using the "ruthless criticism of all that exists" line on me.
Ideology is a fuck, even our own. Best you can do is constantly examine yourself and find people you really really trust and whose experiences you value. Never ever get trapped inside your own mind, because that's when your brain starts melting.
Call me a Gramsci-ite but I'm not convinced of a person's ability to completely distance themselves from their own experiences and the thoughts floating in their head. I don't really believe in what folk call objectivity. I'm much more drawn to what Gramsci called "inter-subjectivity", where materialism is at best a way of coordinating individual experiences by comparing notes, as it were. We can make a best guess about things, and that extends to ideological frameworks. They're best guesses, made by people who are sharing their own observations that absolutely do depend upon who they are as people.
No matter what, you're a person in a historical moment, and Marxism is coalesced observations from certain experiences and is not free from biases, subjectivity, or anything else that colors everything humans do. Even the scientific method is itself done through people, who have built-in biases and social status. There's not some grand idea of "science" that exists outside of people, that itself would be an immaterial claim.
I'd like to bring up how Marx said it, the famous quote about "“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
Same thing to me. Marxism isn't some set of rules outside of the individuals who are part of it, it's a real movement of real people and we have to grapple with the contours and extent of it. We can talk more in DMs if you want
Jesus agrees with me that Half-Life 1 is the best game ever, by the way.
I agree with the statement that christianity is a death cult, but the image of Christ on the cross is not an example of that.
The image of persecution and becoming a martyr. Go back and look at the chuds killing themselves with COVID. They would literally nail themselves on a cross if they could. Modern Christian fundamentalist thinking is rooted in an inferiority/persecution complex when simply being asked to change your behavior(let alone take responsibility for your crimes) is equal to persecution and ultimately death for your beliefs. Ultimately they really want to be martyrs so damn much.
I’ll be honest plastering images everywhere of your religion’s main character dying as a martyr, the most important thing he does, seems very much like an example of being a death cult.
I'm gonna answer honestly just in case. The other two guys aren't Jesus. They're Gestas and Dismas, two thieves who were executed the same day as Jesus. They're called the impenitent and the penitent thieves in most Christian traditions.
The story in the Gospel of Luke goes that one of the thieves mocks Jesus as they're dying, saying why can't Jesus just use a miracle to save himself. Then the other thief yells at him for mocking Jesus as they're dying. The good thief then begs Jesus for forgiveness, Jesus says he'll see him in heaven. Also the names of the thieves isn't consistent and which is which. Sometimes they don't have names, but Gestas is usually the bad one and Dismas is the good one.
lmao Gestas fuckin heckling jesus as he's also dying :deng-salute: dudes rock
They don't focus on worshiping a dude's death, consuming his body, drinking his blood. Focusing on his death rather than life and teachings.
Lmfao the guy who posted an AI christian astronaut in the comments. So fucking weird
I, for one, eagerly await Kari Lake getting left behind during the rapture.
:inshallah:
Christianity like any religion is whatever elites and the people they oppress want it to be, there is no such thing as a single holistic Christian concept, like some ahistorical essentialist spirit demon that defines 2,000 years of Christian history
That is liberalism, there is only various Christian sects made up of human beings inbedded in a capitalist poltical economy, some embracing certain conventions/lore and others rejecting or ignoring them, for reasons that have more to do with the secular world than the spirit realm
This is what makes anti-theists so tedious and pointless, just a bunch of liberals screaming at a indistinct shadow on the wall, there is only one true God interfering in human affairs, and it's name is Capital
I think you took the wrong message from Hell on Earth, because the series is clear that the 30 years war was a political conflict over economic and environmental crises, but was viewed by the participants through a religious framework.
