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 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.
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:
I accused them of genocide
I accused them of being a force against reproductive rights
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.
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.
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 nonces inconsiderate people accuse me of being 'pro christian' in a thread where i repeatedly accused the catholic church of genocide
Saying 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.
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.
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
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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.
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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.
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It's amazing. You just keep going. I said three things about the Catholic Church:
I accused them of genocide
I accused them of being a force against reproductive rights
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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Also a lot closer to their platonic idea of what a "satanist" is, i.e. a complete lunatic that eats babies.
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.
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.
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.
yes they really are that is the running theme in most Christian theology and ideas.