can we start calling these "evangelicals" for what they are? cultist recruiters
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Nationalist-christians, or "Nat-Cs" for short.
Hmmm, let's see...
- Denigration of homosexuals
- Disregard for democracy or anything resembling the will of the majority
- The desire to install a dictator-for-life
- The worshipful adulation of that dictator
- Willingness to commit acts of violence for both political and social reasons
- The absolute certainty that God is with them (it sounds better in German)
Yeah, that checks out.
Christian Taliban would do.
I like the term: Y'all Qaeda.
In an interview with NPR, Russell Moore, who is editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, said that he hears from pastors who tell him about congregants who take umbrage at Jesus telling his followers to turn the other cheek. Moore said that someone invariably comes up to the pastor afterwards and says, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?”
This is real? This isn’t the Onion?
Figures after taking 50 years to finally realize that conservatism is incompatible with the teachings of Jesus, they’d pick conservatism. Should have seen that coming, honestly.
This is real? This isn’t the Onion?
This is "conservative" USA, yes.
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Evangelicals have been a lost cause since the mid-80s. They store everything on earth, not in heaven.
They were already lost by the late 60s, early 70s. The proliferation of evangelical schools was in direct response to integration. They didn't want their precious little children to have to go to school with black kids so they pulled them out of public schools and put them in segregation academies. Now they want to pull all the ~~federal~~ money from the public schools they abandoned out of racism and divert it into their segregation academy system.
They also shut down a lot of public pools because they didn't want to swim with black people.
Once I heard about this I looked at the founding dates of all the private schools in my area. Everything was founded in the mid 70's.
I like your Christ, you Christians are nothing like your Christ
The closer I got to Christ, the less republican I became. I had to actually stop going to church because my views changed so drastically, the other church members were attacking me. It's certainly crazy to discover that mainstream Christianity today is anything but.
Christianity today is anything but.
It has pretty much always been that way. This isn't new. Your eyes have just been opened to it. Conservatives especially, but most Christians cherry pick passages from the Bible to justify their actions, which is easy to do, since every passage has a contradicting one. Conservatives have now focused on only the old testament, which is mostly Judaism, and they ignore the new testament, you know, the part of Jesus. They like the fire, retribution, punishment, ect. Screw all that hippy bullshit love thy neighbor. Feed the hungry and poor.
I remember in jr high relgion class and learning about how jesus was fighting against corupt religious authority. In a Catholic school
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Just imagine Christ coming back, a middle east person with a beard and a darker skin tone, no machine gun, no MAGA hat, not "Vote Trump Or Die" pin on his tunic, and a message of peace and understanding. Most US "Christians" would be seriously disappointed. Or at least confused.
They would be putting him back on the cross
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"I read an essay by a christian a while ago that pointed out that the separation of church and state wasn’t about protecting the state from religion - it was about protecting religion from the state."
Without knowing the author or their reasons for saying that, I would say that they have it wrong entirely. The majority of governments before the US almost always had some level of theocracy attached to it. We took our independence from a man who quite literally was pretending to be God's representative on earth.
Within that context, its very hard to see the constitution as intending anything other than a full divorce between politics and religion.
It's more that it was about protecting both from each other. If you read Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, most of it is about how it's wrong to use state power to enforce religion, but he does throw in this section as well:
"[Mixing religion and politics] tends to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments."
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As a European, even though I know of the separation of church and state in the US, I feel that religion in politics still is very important in the states.
I mean that most candidates are very publicly religious and I have the idea that religious affiliation is still very important in the electoral vote, more so than where I live.
Correct me if I'm wrong, by the way, but I don't know what religion most of our politicians abide by, except those in a religious party. Where I would think that in America, if a candidate were non religious it would affect electability.
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These are the same people who are protesting at libraries while their children are literally raped by clergy.
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Wow! This is literally a case of Poe's Law in action!
I was ready to discount this as satire, especially when they ran the quote from Russell Moore speaking to NPR, but failing to quote the source...
So I ran it down, sure enough!
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/08/1192663920/southern-baptist-convention-donald-trump-christianity
"On why he thinks Christianity is in crisis:
It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — "turn the other cheek" — [and] to have someone come up after to say, "Where did you get those liberal talking points?" And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, "I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ," the response would not be, "I apologize." The response would be, "Yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak." And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis."
Mans was a brown-skinned socialist Jew. They’d lynch him if they could.
"They hated Jesus, because he told them the truth"
There is nobody more pretentious and judgemental than an evangelical.
protip: evangelicalizing was always smokescreen for racists, baptists same, catholics same. christianity is racism, always has been, always will be.
Sorry but no, that's way too broad of a brush. There definitely ARE sects of christianity that are good, kind, and loving. They might be the minority (or at least seem to be the minority) but they do exist, and there are millions of those congregants.
While no one is perfect, Jesuits are a good example.
Jesuits formally declared that a commitment to justice was essential to their order’s work. This development brought many Jesuits to take progressive stances in religion and politics alike. Jesuits in Latin America, for example, adopted aspects of liberation theology, which emphasized concern for the poor and oppressed: providing for people not only spiritually, but materially. Today, in the minds of many, Jesuits continue to be associated with more progressive and liberal viewpoints.
Quakers, Episcopalians, UUs generally seemed on the decent side, at least with what they claim to believe and based on my personal anecdata.
And what's their reward? A dying denomination.
The only growing Christian populations are the hateful ones. I have to deal with the Christians that actually exist.
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The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That means Jesus and I are now cool with each other, even though his whole story is sus AF.
Did you ever watch Black Jesus? Everybody thought he was loony as fuck but they appreciated the spirit in which he went about things, so instead of revering him they just help him out like they would any other friend. I'd chill with Jesus.
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Did they want to only hear the part about the fig tree? Jesus has wrath unimaginable. He whipped people for selling merchandise in a church.
“It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves” (verse 22, KJV). Jesus was a bad ass, and he would have whipped the entire GOP and ran them from his house had he been alive now.
I hate evangerlicals becuase they sound like con artists and grifters
I hate them because they're committing genocide against me and people like me.
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Technically, it is turn the 'left' cheek. The way I remember it being explained to me is that Jewish law was clear: you strike your slave, you have to let them go. Now many slave owners still wanted to beat up their slaves, so they found a loophole. If you backhanded a slave, it wasn't considered striking. How could someone tell it was backhanding? If the mark was on the 'right' cheek, since everyone was right-handed. Bunch of slaves asked Jesus what to do about it and he said
"When he goes to hit you, hold out your left cheek. If he hits you, you are free, and if he doesn't, well, problem solved."
This is not where this comes from. It comes from Christianity being a pacifist religion, not some weird pretend loophole about hitting your slave properly.
It's a really simple concept - absolute nonviolence. There's nothing "secret" about it at all. Whoever "explained" this to you was just perverting the religion, which is exactly what this article is about.
In general, if an explanation sounds like "slave masters hate this one neat trick" or an email forward from 1996, you should probably not buy into it.
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Slave in the back: Umm... Jesus? Isn't...isn't God against slavery? Can't you just tell these assholes slavery is immoral and free us, instead of this gotchya cheek slapping shit?
Jesus: 🤣 stfu and obey your masters, even the cruel ones!
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We'll make our own Jesus! With violence and racism!
You mean that they started to actually read the bible?
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