If you worship a cosmic tyrant don’t be upset if some people balk at the idea.
And God was the one who never suggested equality but subservience for women.
I think I’ll go with the prince of darkness … HAIL SATAN!!
Fun fact, the origin story for Satan that so many churches point to just isn’t in the Bible.
I had to explain to someone here on Lemmy that Satan in Job is a rival god, rather than the Satan Christians think, of since it came from before Judaism was monotheistic. The word literally just means ‘adversary.’ Job is about two gods having a wager. But Christians (and the rest of the western world by extension) now thinks that the largest role anyone called Satan has in the Bible has nothing to do with Christian mythology.
And then they decide to conflate the serpent in the Garden of Eden with Satan because reasons.
Do you have something to read up on there? That sounds interesting.
Yeah… it is astounding how mixed messages get when people are holding the bloody source material in their hands.
The entire concept of hell is basically just fan fiction.
The entire concept of religion is a fan fiction.
Most Christian ideas about hell are from Dante and Milton laundered through loony toons. And in Milton’s version, Satan is the protagonist.
Christians are fucking ghouls.
Eh. Depends on the Christian. Same with every group of people, you’re always gonna have a mixed bag of people who are good, people who are bad and people who are just existing. The bad ones are just louder.
I do agree that not all Christians are inherently bad people, but I would be lying if I said I don’t lose respect for anyone who can follow and worship such an awful and evil being as the Christian god.
There isn’t just one christian god. Who the christan god is depends on which accounts you consider.
It’s easy to read the old testament, read the post-gospel books, listen to the 2000 years of doctrine, and come away with the opinion that the christian god is evil. If you just read the gospels though, and accept that part of the message is: “I’m throwing out the old deal, the new one is Love One Another,” it’s harder to maintain that argument.
I was raised Lutheran, and am currently a philosophical agnostic. I know people who have an internally consistent belief in a good and loving christian god based on how they interpret the entire body of work (they’re well studied). I also believe their definitions of “good” and “loving” would align with yours.
New thought just now:
- If the christian god is a singular entity and is evil, then it must exist
- If it doesn’t exist as a singular entity, the only thing to criticize is people’s conception of it
Sorry for the long reply. You got me to extend my thinking and that came out in the comment.
I’ve never understood how one can just throw out half their holy book because their God (supposedly) decided to change the rules. This does not change the fact that he (supposedly) did these evil acts. If you just ignore the parts of the bible you don’t like, God’s a pretty great dude! An argument against Yahweh’s character does not change depending on which parts of the bible are still valid, unless your claim is that the old testament was never valid. In which case, why believe any of it?
Regardless, even the new testament depicts a despicable being. Would it not have been easy, as an all-powerful and all-loving god, to tell people not to own slaves? But no, instead in the new testament slaves are told on multiple occasions to obey their masters. One can preach about love all they want, but when their holy book endorses slavery, I cannot take them seriously.
Regarding your last point, that’s just false. I can criticize the Joker as being evil for killing hundreds, thousands of people. That doesn’t mean the Joker or Batman are real. That’s because I’m criticizing a being described in a story, not something I believe is real.
Edit: I, too, will extend my thinking here. If you believe in an all-powerful and all-knowing god, you need not even look any further through scripture for evidence that he is an evil being. He had the power to create any world with full knowledge of what would be to come, and the world he chose to make was this one. One rife with childhood cancer, slavery, starvation, torture, and natural disasters. This is not a world created by an all-loving being.
Have never met one that wasn’t truly awful! But maybe that’s just Texas.
My guess is that you have countless times but just never knew it. The good Christians are people who believe what they believe, take those lessons to heart and try to help other people to just help people. They don’t do it looking for praise or for people to join their Church. They do it because they want to be a good person. Because they care about other people. They may have learned that lesson differently or adapt the lesson plan to their own life but they’re just people who want to be good people. That’s it. They don’t normally wear a badge on their sleeve that says “I’m a Christian!”
One of my best friends is a Christian. I’m not, I’d call myself more of an apatheist. I’ll find out what happens when I die but until then there isn’t a point worrying about it. I’m just going to try to live a life I can be proud of. Doesn’t mean I’ll get it right all the time and I might fuck up a lot but i’m trying. Christians just do the same thing, they just have an extra boost in their life. Me and my friend have never really talked about religion because we don’t need to. I’m aware of the fact that he’s religious just like he’s aware of the fact that I’m not. Same way I know he doesn’t care for curling but that I enjoy it.
I appreciate this rational take. As a Christian, I disagree with the “persecuted Christianity” narrative that the Roman Catholic Church aggressively pushes. Just like the above commenter is likely focusing on the vocal minority and ignoring everything else, I think the Catholic Church is focusing on the vocal minority and pushing this narrative for their own gain. And statements like the above commenter serve to reinforce that.
Yeah exactly. There are shitty people on all sides. Some shitty people are gonna capitalize on what they can. That doesn’t devalue the ton of good people who are just trying to live their lives as good people. It’s unfair to judge them by the actions of others within that group. It is just outright discrimination and just… is shitty. I’m not about to sit here as a gay man and scream about being unfairly judged while doing the same thing to another entire group. I’ll pass.
Yea, don’t lecture me on my experience as a neurodivergent gay man in Texas. Even the more low key Christians still get heinous when you hold hands with your boyfriend.
And, like I said, there are still going to be plenty of people who don’t say a thing and just are kind/polite throughout their lives to you. Do they not count?
The loud ones are noticable because they’re loud. The good ones just don’t make noise because there isn’t noise to be made. They just go about their lives.
I’m also not ‘lecturing you on your experience’ as anyone living anywhere. I’m simply saying that judging an entire group of people by the loud ones who are negative isn’t helping anyone. The bad Christians gonna get angy because they angy little creatures no matter what they believe in and the good Christians are getting slapped for no reason and then you’re frustrated because you feel like everyone from that group hates you so you’re always up on edge. I speak on that last part being from experience.
For the record, I’m an autistic gay man who is from rural Newfoundland (religious as fuck), lived in Alberta (even more religious as fuck and often called Canada’s Texas) and was openly outed by my mother as being gay before someone stabbed me over it. Just because you’ve gone through shit doesn’t mean that other people haven’t either.
Judging a privilege social caste is absolutely fine. What’s next, you gonna defend whites against racism? 🙄
Southern evangelicals are definitely the worst of the bunch, but up north there are some pretty cool Christian organizations. My fav is the Moravian church, which sprouted from an internal crisis in catholicism once they started printing the Bible in languages other than Latin.
The Moravians basically came to the realization that what the church said and what the Bible said weren’t congruent. So they decided to reinterpret the Bible, but couldn’t agree on anything but Jesus prob wanted people to help others. So the whole church is based around disregarding theological conflict and instead just focusing on serving the community.
Don’t equate your limited geographical experience to a far reaching universal trend. Could be a vocal minority, could be just your region, could be recency bias.
I literally said in my original comment that “Maybe it’s just Texas.” Which acknowledged my limited geographical experience. I was literally making a comment on my own personal experience, not a universal truth. Please read.
We have read what you had to say. The problem is that you’re making sweeping generalizations based off of personal experience and leaning heavily into some confirmation bias to try and prove your point. Even in saying that it is just Texas, you’re basing it off of faulty logic. You are judging the actions of a group at large by the experiences that you have had with a minority. That is, unless you want to claim that you’ve met the majority of Christians in Texas and they were all actively showing unprovoked homophobia, which isn’t a claim you can reasonably make.
You’ve probably met many who weren’t awful at all. But being not awful, you likely wouldn’t even be aware that they are Christians.
if you think texas is bad, try oklahoma. There’s a reason it’s considered the buckle of the bible belt.
in my (limited) experience, catholics tend to be less shitty than protestants, with the whole ‘prove your faith with deeds’ thing.
Can confirm am in Texas and family are ghouls
Also depends if you meet just one Christian and have an honest respectful conversation.
Or a mob of Christians trying to out-Christian one another
It’s ok to be wrong.
This is the internet. Anyone who’s perceived as being wrong will be persecuted.
And history is usually written by the victor; so how do we know that God is the actual good guy, and not just the asshole who won and told everyone how cool he is and how shit the other guy was? I mean, God’s done some pretty fucked up shit and he’s killed more people than Satan ever did.
I’ve been saying this for a decade+
If I was evil, I would write a book saying how good I am and trying to indoctrinate myself into people.
Satan is most likely the good guy who rejected his racist, facist father.
I mean, if that was God’s plan, he did a piss poor job. The Bible makes him look like a narcissistic petulant child.
So, like Trump, Musk, Putin, Kim Jong-Un,…?
Pretty much every (wanna-be) dictator was/is a narcissistic petulant child.Yup, exactly.
Nobody ever accused him of being good at it
Christianity is a cult and a scam.
Sometimes even good people fall for it.
But it needs to disbanded just like every cult denying reality and hurting others.
Yikes, talking about hitting AND completely missing the point
Yeah I’m sorry, but when I know you’re religious, any religion, I’ll think less of you. I won’t treat you any different, hell, I will go out of my way to try and show respect for your dumbass skydaddy beliefs, but yeah, I’ll think less of you because frankly, you are. You’re stuck with the mindset of a 5 year old
Whether or not you believe in it it’s hard to deny that religion is naturally a beautiful thing. There are hateful actors and harmful misinterpretations sure, but believing in something so strongly you dedicate your life to it holds immense beauty and thinking less of someone who does believe in it undermines the unique nature of religion. There are few things people care more about in the world than when they are religious, and as long as it’s treated with respect and dignity there’s nothing wrong with that.
It’s funny because when I know that someone judges someone else over personally held beliefs so intensely that they think less of them, I tend to think less of that first person. We all live lives differently. If they’re not impacting yours, who cares? If they believe in something you don’t, who cares?
You talk about being stuck with the mindset of a 5 year old for believing in something in their own lives. But real adults just live their lives and don’t run around judging by their own personal metrics. Real adults also certainly don’t care when someone runs around saying “YOU’RE A CHILD”.
And yeah, I’m not sorry for that one.
Well said.
I think this conversation is way more black and white than it needs to be.
You can love and respect someone while thinking that that one belief is really stupid. In fact shockingly stupid. (Not saying religion is shockingly stupid)
I am sure, your best friend once said something or did something that you judged them for negatively. Made you think less of them. While loving them as a whole.
Religion is shockingly stupid. If you weren’t indoctrinated from birth it’s all really fucking weird.
You can think that way but it isn’t what I wanted to say, which is what I said.
No reason to be hostile. You ain’t winning when you are.
I was in no way being hostile. It’s just a statement of fact.
Today is Monday, the temperature outside is 47F, and believing religion is stupid.
You can love and respect someone while thinking that that one belief is really stupid
I completely agree! However, it is entirely irrelevant because the original claim wasn’t that they thought someone was stupid. They said they actively thought less of them and then mocked them for having the permanent mindset of a child. Your point doesn’t cover that level of immature hostility.
You cannot claim to be a friend of someone while openly believing they are less than you and mocking their entire mental state and world view. The behavior is contradictory to what a friend actually does. You are not a friend in that case, you’re just a shitty person who is pretending to be someones friends while (no matter what you say) treating them less than you would treat someone like yourself.
Yeah the child thing is embarrassingly the kind of thought process that a child would have. An adult can’t be flawed, is famously a thing a lot of children think of their parents at first. And it isn’t proper, which is why I said the conversation doesn’t have to be so black and white. Ironically this paragraph isn’t nice either.
I am not sure if “thinking less of them” should be read as “less than me”.
Anyway I don’t have an issue with you. I just thought the conversation is very hostile when your point seems to be about appreciating others and welcoming difference. It seems to be a waste of your energy and time.
Take care!
Edit: if you are wondering why I focused my critic on you. They didn’t seem interested in a conversation anyway. I mean “sky daddy”?
A church has no right to tell me how to treat others when it’s named after a sex position.
As a member of the “church of the subgenius”, I’m curious about that position.
Obligatory HAIL SATAN
Remember to reapply your sataniser after each encounter with a cult member.
Don’t judge an entire group by the loud assholes they have within when the good ones have no reason to be loud.
Yeah, judge them by their (in)actions and how they treat others.
…huh, still not super great on the whole. One of the many reasons I left the church…
I don’t understand if that sign is pro or against Satan
Good guy Lucifer. Punishes evildoers for all eternity, but somehow he’s the bad guy.
Of course it’s a Baptist church with a sign like that. Guarantee you it’s in a sundown town, too.
