Weird story time: My great grandfather was obviously the source of the autism in our family line. Man could not read social subtext to save his life. He felt driven to find some sort to group to belong to that had set meetings and such. For a 5 year span, he joined, like, everyone. Elks, masons, you name it. When we were helping him clean out his house in the early 90s we found a KKK uniform. We asked about it. Apparently it was billed as a men’s group and they just had costumes made. He went along with it for a few meeting and then the extracurriculars were discussed at his last meeting. He finally got the point of it. He got out. We had his calendar book from that year(and every year from the 30s-retirement) and we saw the date where he started crossing out the KKK meeting times.
Why he kept it? It was the best work his wife had ever done.
Several years later I asked my grandfather if his dad was racist. Basically, he said that his dad had gotten in trouble for not understanding the racist, unwritten policies he was supposed to enforce and kept asking why, as there was no logic to them.
I don’t know what to tell you if that was the first thing that tipped you off.
Yes. Yes they are. Also, I think a “radical Christian” would be the opposite of the KKK.
I guess I’m a radical Christian then.
I believe Jesus taught tolerance and love, so I try to treat others with tolerance and love. And not fake love like “thoughts and prayers,” but real love, which comes with action.
Tolerantly beat the fuck out of those money changers
Lol.
The problem there was that they were defiling his house, disturbing people who were there to worship. Tolerance doesn’t mean putting up with bad actors, it means not getting involved in things that don’t concern you. Someone else choosing a different religion or lifestyle doesn’t concern you, and the direction to love them still applies. Someone persecuting you does impact you, so righteous anger is justified.
Love is a verb
Yep the second part in the link you sent. But it appears as if some people don’t think love is something you have to do. I guess it just happens 🤦♂️
I believe Jesus taught tolerance and love
So that’s what he meant when he said
34 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.
Matthew 10:34-36
or when he said:
“Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters."
Matthew 12:30
So tolerant and loving! 😍
Yes, because Jesus’ message was going to divide families, because some members won’t accept others who choose to follow Him. It was also to correct other ideas about the messiah uniting everyone and creating peace. The conflict Jesus creates are from those who are intolerant, not Jesus Himself.
It helps to read the verses in their context instead of cherrypicking.
Whether or not you believe that Jesus rose from the dead is another thing, but you cannot deny that the Jesus of the New Testament’s moral teachings were good.
Matthew 10:34-36
Look at Matthew 26 (specifically 52) where Jesus stopped Peter from defending him with his sword. Jesus is opposed to violence, full stop.
The sword Jesus spoke of in Matthew 10 wasn’t a literal sword. He’s saying he’s here to disrupt the status quo. Following him requires being at odds with the status quo (Jewish law), which is likely to result in being excluded from families and whatnot. He certainly doesn’t condone violence, but he does acknowledge that this is a fork in the road and people need to pick sides, because they can’t do both.
This similar idea is conveyed in Matthew 6:24 (replace “money” with anything else that stands between you and following God):
No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
Or Matthew 5:29:
If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.
I also don’t think he means you need to preemptively abandon your family, just that if you have to choose, choose God.
The same idea is true in secular ideology as well. If your family are Nazis, it’s better to leave them than become a Nazi.
It’s so weird how Trump and Jesus fans always need to explain what the words their admiration spoke actually meant. He maybe the evangelicals had it right all along and Donnie is the second coming!
Maybe. But I wouldn’t know because I never voted for that idiot and I think evangelicals are almost always wrong.
All I did here was read the larger context. Jesus was known for relying heavily on symbolism, so if something doesn’t fit the rest of the message, it means I’m likely missing something important in the symbolism. That’s why I provided additional examples to show my thought process.
If Jesus wanted to start a literal war, why didn’t his disciples gather an army? Because they understood his meaning.
Oh come on, I can see from a mile away that’s it’s a metaphor
Sure like everything that is uncomfortable. Rest is literal. How convenient.
Now you’re putting words in my mouth. You’re arguing against the wrong person dude, chill
Based tbh
Yeah they are reactionary christians. A radical christian would be like the Catholic Workers and Dorothy Day, or the Fasci Siciliani, or Leo Tolstoy
Uh…
Yes.
Don’t wanna argue with the premises here. But isn’t Christianity also a bit stupid for praying towards the instrument that’s been used to torture and kill their leader.
Just imagine you are Jesus and come into a modern church. You’d run away screaming with all those crosses triggering your PTSD. And that’s before you’ve even heard of all the atrocities they’re doing there in your name.
Sacrifice is a big thing in Christianity, the cross is the symbol of the biggest sacrifice that God did for us, on Christianity canon.
Totally. And it really makes sense when you think about it…
God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving and he created man in his own image… And then doomed them all to an eternity of suffering because… reasons.
God was known for being petty and jealous, so he forced humans to destroy their food to prove that they love him.
God, being all powerful, I guess changed his mind about wanting people to burn for eternity, so being the all-powerful, all-loving being that he is, he changed his mind and deleted hell so that all humans could enjoy eternity with him… LOL jk.
No, instead he split himself into another being and became a human with the sole purpose of being murdered in 30 years so that humans didn’t have to burn for eternity…? Actually, I kind of lose the thread at this point. It’s never been clear to me why an all-powerful god would need to create such a bizarre, convoluted, byzantine means for redemption when he could have just snapped his fingers and made it all go away.
But all of that makes sense when you think about it as just another sacrifice to prove to god that you love him, and our rudimentary understanding of symbolism is all we need to prove this. After all, there’s no need to read any other books, therefore this has to be the deepest, most profound thing ever written. I mean holy shit, Jesus is the “lamb of god” that needed to be sacrificed! Just like when we burned our food! Wow, talk about deep connections. No human could ever think up such an amazing story with such deep symbolism!
Anyway… I lost my train of thought.
You might enjoy reading about Gnosticism, where the world was created by a dopey lesser god, and that’s why there is suffering.
As a Christian, I’ve always found that stupid, so I don’t do that and don’t attend churches that do. The second commandments says:
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.
I’m pretty sure a cross counts here. I also believe Jesus taught a higher law, meaning the 10 commandments are outdated, and the only thing Jesus said to do to remember him is breaking and sharing bread and sharing wine (Communion in many churches). That’s it, that and “feed my sheep” (teach and help others).
I don’t get where everyone is getting the “wear and rub a crucifix for luck” idea. A silent prayer should be a lot more effective than directly violating the second commandment.
I choose to remember Jesus’ life. His death was an event, his life was full of teaching and wisdom, so I focus on how he treated others instead of how others treated him.
The core of Christianity is originally the redemption, not the threat that necessitates it and often is more prominent.
The cross is a symbol of the sacrifice made to redeem people from the threat of hell. More relevant here is that sin separates humans from God, and through that sacrifice, the connection is restored. It is a catalyst of redemption and reunion. In that sense, they don’t so much pray towards an implement of torture as an implement of liberation, salvation and mercy.
Given that those are hard things to put in a visual, tangible form and that humans tend to place a lot of value in visual, tangible representations, it’s basically the simplest symbol you could come up with as a nascent cult.
It’s not the only symbol, and particularly during the rise of the Roman church, you’ll note that icons of saints become very common too. Some places will even have the Crucifix feature the crucified Jesus as well, to drive home the point about sacrifice and gratitude.
Protestants later held that the worship of saints was tantamount to idolatry and did away with them again, leaving just the core of the message of redemption. There was in some places a conscious choice to pick the “empty” cross rather than the crucified saviour as a symbol that he is no longer dead.
All in all, given his divine wisdom and love for metaphors and similes, I’d think Jesus would understand the point of the cross…
…then proceed to trash the place out of rage over the waste of money and effort that went into gaudy churches and gold-embroidered robes instead of helping the sick and poor.
I feel like this was a George Carlin bit or something…
it makes more sense when Christians were a persecuted minority, executed on sight by the Roman empire. You’re sharing in a symbol of sacrifice that could itself get you killed.
But that was 1500 years ago.
You may be on to something there
Quick answer yes.
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Quite frankly, Christianity can be used as a motivator for left wing philosophies helping the poor. If you actually read what Jesus’ said, it’s pretty good and damning for many self proclaimed american “christians”
Sort of, but you need to remember that his teachings were an individual philosophy and he didn’t want anything to do with government (render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, render unto God that which is God’s).
Jesus taught that you should give all you have to the poor and follow God. Failing that, you should be generous in helping the poor. So I think he would advocate for charities, not taxation, since charitable giving is a choice and he wants people to choose to do the right thing. He would also criticize the very wealthy because they obviously have more than enough to share with the poor.
Good point, especially with 2 Corinthians 9:7
Thanks.
IMO, just paying your taxes doesn’t make you a good person, giving what’s left does. Ebenezer Scrooge’s big transformation wasn’t adopting progressive policies or anything, but giving abundantly.
Christianity doesn’t say anything about politics, it’s an individual thing.
Exactly, Paul tells Christians to leave those outside of the Church to be dealt with by God as well.
1 Corinthians 5:12-13
For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.
I agree with your point generally (limit judgment to those within the church), I just urge caution about how far to take that.
Context
Paul is talking to a fledgling church (not ready for meat: see chapter 3), so they need to be extra careful about getting led astray. Corinth was known for sexual deviance, yet the Christians were accepting of something even the local non-Christians would see as wrong (sexual relationship with step mother), yet the Christians there seemed to accept it. Tolerance of that behavior is destructive to the church, so they need to actively push against it. Pushing the individual out of the church would encourage them to repent and also protect the church from further compromising their principles.
I know to urge caution, but what do you mean? Like we should punish murder because society sees it as bad as well. But when it comes to a topic such as same sex marriage, I think if it’s what the majority of society want, it should be legal and not hurting anybody, even if it’s not something that the Church should accept within religious life.
Heard of Christian Marxism?
Marx generally opposed religion so it sounds like an oxymoron
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as time goes on I’m beginning to realize that religion is a tool of politics
Yeah that’s always been the point of religion. They needed some way to control people in the 1400s, so they told them that if they didn’t do what they were told, and incidentally pay the church a lot of money, then the big man in the sky would be unhappy. That was about the level of sophistication that a con required back then.
Even as recently as 200 years ago pastors didn’t really believe in god, it was just a convenient job to do if you were relatively well off but still needed employment, and didn’t want to do any laboring. That’s why a lot of them ended up being scientists, they were rich and bored.
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Christianity predates the 1400s
That’s not really pertinent to my point.
Also I’m thinking more of all of the people paying patronage to country parsons which absolutely is a product of the 1400s onwards.
Are you saying that year 0 was a thing?
You can’t get rid of superstitions nor politics. The most important thing that will help is education. A more educated populace is less gullible, but you can’t fix stupid. Stupid will always exist.
Yup. Ideology is religion and religion is ideology. We tend to want to be a part of something bigger, but the people in charge of those bigger things can use it to justify hurting people “for the greater good”.
no they surely just hate the lowercase t
Obviously
Obligatory ACAB
