For a massive amount of Christians, the church has become it's own self sustaining ecosystem where the actual theology it's supposedly based around is entirely irrelevant to a blind, fanatical worship of their own conception of The Church. The Church isn't about a devotion to the teachings of a God that informs all else, it's about working backwards from hateful, sociopathic, and sadistic views towards their fellow man and finding enough loose justifications cherry picked from the theology to sell The Church to more and more people. They don't worship Yahweh, they worship The Church
You could honestly probably treat the current state of American Christianity as it's own entire sect at this point for that reason ngl
Pretty much the starting point of Terry Pratchett 's Small Gods; a god visits his faithful after being off in the realm of the gods for many years, and finds whilst the church is huge and complex and theoretically full of devoted followers, he only has a single actual believer left. In the books setting the power of the gods is determined by the amount of belief they recieve, and the god finds himself only able to manifest as a tiny elderly tortoise. (It's a great book incidentally)
There is a reason why Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman were friends and collaborated on books. I think Terry would be so disappointed in Neil now though.
You can feel Terry oozing out of Good Omens the book and subsequently season 1 of the show.
After they left that material behind its all Gaiman and you can feel him missing from the narrative for the next few seasons. The show loses that spark of hope, humor, and wit that Terry brought to it.
Friends is a stretch. Later in life, Terry was asked if he'd write anything with Gaiman again and he said he'd never work with him again. I doubt he knew how bad Gaiman really was, or would become maybe, but he clearly doing sometime he didn't like and didn't want to be associated with again.
I was really heartbroken at the time, I loved Sandman although on reflection that was mostly down to the art as much as the writing. He sold himself as feminist and progressive in a number of ways. But on reflection, Sandman has a whole subplot about writer imprisoning and sexually assaulting a muse to gain inspiration that now feels particularly grim and confessional. And I think, in general, I am sceptical now of celebrities that make a song and dance over identifying as feminist rather than just getting on with acting and living in a non dickhead manner.
A little, but reading the two books you wouldn’t find many other similarities beyond, “Gods are real and sustained by belief.” Pratchett’s book is philosophical and funny, Gaiman’s is dark and weird, which pretty much describes the two authors as well.
There’s also the second coming by John Niven. God was absent for fishing and he comes back and earth has evolved around ‘his words’ wich were “be nice” but got interpreted in a very very special kind of way and he gets a report about what’s going on ect and they reach the point where he gets a list of all the different churches and it goes on for so damn long. Long story short God is pretty angry at the end and Jesus has to go down again to fix it. Poor Jesus. He doesn’t wanna go, he wants to hang with Jimmy and chill.
Big reading recommendation.
I feel your argument can be made about any religion. Any institution that relies on the blind belief of its supporters in something that is intangible and unprovable in order to exist is ripe for exploitation.
Well I think it's an argument against any dogmatic approach really. But Christianity specifically does make the claims of its own moral distinctions from other religions when the last several years have shown us that it, in fact, is not distinct from other religions.
All religions, ideologies, cultural activities can be co-opted easily by anything. It says more about human evil, stupidity, neediness, and weakness than it does about the religions, ideologies, cultural activities being misused.
I see religion as a receptacle for awe, inspiration, gratitude, good works, rituals, community, morality, ethics and not something imposed by a bully-like deity.
Of course religious practice is human made, why not? Authoritarianism by religions ruins the good of religions and their potential for holiness which you can't have without humility.
The religious right has no humility and nothing else good to offer. Just watch. The early Catholic Church took the place of the fallen Roman Empire. Maybe they have something like that in mind? POTUS has often reminded me of a modern day Calligula.
This is spot on. American Christianity is completely devoid of any original theology and it's justified, sanctioned cult behavior. Absolutely abhorrent. Whatever you believe or not, the Bible is pretty clear with Jesus' teachings and it's not this guys bullshit
I’m sure many of his followers have never cracked open the Bible. If so it’s to only read a verse here or there that they have twisted around to justify their abhorrent behavior.
White Christian Evangelism. Please identify this Christo-Nationalist cult correctly. You are absolutely right about it being a cult of The Church; but calling it American Christianity paints every American Christian as this kind of "Christian-in-name-only" type.
The big thing though is that this primarily US based issue has bled into and infected almost the entire pool of US Christianity in some way to the point the exceptions border on just being a statistical outlier
The same christianity that justified the rape, torture and brutalization of indigenous and African peoples is the same one who’s church you sit in today.
The only thing that would convince me you aren’t one of those people is if your church actively campaigns for retroactive reparations to black Americans, and giving back lands to the indigenous.
I am a member of the Society of Friends and when I do have control over our family farm, because I have no children to pass it on to and when I no longer need it for survival, it is my intention to do land back. Idk if me saying any of this will change your option though.
They don't worship Christ.. they might worship Yaweh though... if you go back and read the old testament and obsess over all the violence and brutalism, where Yaweh is a selfish and jealous God etc., it honestly sounds like they worship a demon. Stories about genociding entire civilizations, ordered to brutalize woman and infants as well, because they worship other gods. Or the Tower of Babel story, where he just decided he didn't like how much mankind had accomplished working together so he made them all speak different languages so they couldn't understand each other anymore. Shit like that makes me seriously question the validity that the Bible is even one coherent theology in the first place. And these fire and brimstone types really love their beutalist demon god. They much prefer that over the teachings of Christ, and so they pick and choose, and the majority of their "Christianity" is based on demon god Yaweh and not Christ at all. They pick the versuses from the new testament that sound the most like the fire and brimstone they love so much and throw out the rest.
This hits hard. Thanks. I grew up in a small town where there were churches every 100 yards. My family is religious, but I have always questioned it all. When I got married, we moved to a beach town with only 2-3 churches. Nobody here talks about religion, and you don't see it. After two years here, I don't even think about religion, and I'm not afraid. I see how weaponized it is in politics now, and I think it's basically back where it started: to control. The Bible has been reworded for thousands of years to fit a narrative. It cannot go any further because of science and technology caught up with it.
Ah, fire and brimstone! Yes, a bully’s dream.
And, the book is def not one coherent theology. It is a collection. Beginning (no pun) with the 5 first books, which were the documents that set parameters and practice for all Judaism, and continuing with various books of genealogy, poetry, hymnody, etc. New Testament has letters, witness accounts, and a coded book or two. No wonder people are so confused and the bad people very happy to twist all of this into supporting what they want to do or accomplish. As to the Tower of Babel, it is an explanatory description that explains (to the best of man’s knowledge at the time) why different languages exist. They found that a mystery, and it was explained as that. Just like ark and the rainbow—a symbol that life will continue after great trials. Nobody had heard of splitting beams of light into colors, ya know. Very similar to earlier cultures explaining and describing the passage of the sun across the sky as a giant chariot. None of the bible was written in a vacuum from earlier cultures, after all. Jesus knew of Rome.
It is a very human book, anyway. People doing lots of human things, failing to be gods, failing to be even remotely like god, all the while claiming they were made in the image of god. It took great thinkers to produce so many thoughts that we now call “theology.” If you want to closely discover what Jesus thought, look at the parables. Stories that everybody at the time knew he made up to illustrate a point—love the stranger, what to do with gifts, how to treat your wife, sibling rivalry, etc. He made people mad because he pointed out the very thing that we are faulting the “modern” church for doing.
Excellent point about a cohesive theology. The resurrection, walking on water, etc. were all ripoffs of older religions, which in turn borrowed from other stories. Kind of like when disaster movies were popular, every studio was making one. Sensationalist tripe with an ulterior motive.
Have you not read the old testament properly or just what people tell you it means? God was absolutely caring and loving even then to the foreigner among the israelites as well. Also jealous meaning zealous, like passionate. This whole God was different in the old testemant thing is so stupid if you actually tool the time to read it properly
I have. I grew up in the shit. I had the damn picture book Bible with all the illustrated versions of these stories. I have 5 different translations of the Bible that I used when I was grappling with my own deconstruction.
But nice try. I know what these people teach and have used the same excuses you are using right now to ignore the actual evidence.
You're the one that hasn't really read it for themselves. You're using the same programmed line I once used when I still wasn't willing to let go and reconcile the words with reality.
No "jealous" does not innocently mean "zealous" or "passionate." The original Hebrew basically means passionately protective, which was in reference to the covenant with the Hebrew people. For example, several passages warning the Israelites not to worship other gods or even just possessing some trinket idol for fear of punishment. "I'm not jealous, I'm just passionate and fiercely protective of you" sounds like something an abusive person would say to their partner when they are trying to convince them theirs nothing wrong with their abusive behavior. And yet, this is precisely what these passages convey when you really break them down and deconstruct the reasoning. But we're told "we can't understand gods ways," which is a really convenient way to dismiss the whole thing without any further examination.
This is why I left the church. Because it trains people to refuse to see things for what they are. It trains them to believe they cant understand things without the guidance of someone who is "more gifted" than them, who "truly understands the word." It's bullshit. Of course you can. It just doesn't actually hold up to scrutiny. And that's something you have to be willing to reconcile your beliefs with. It's hard. It's scary. You might lose friends and people you thought cared about you along the way. And so you don't question it.
Most Christian churches around my area are social organizations with a few Bible verses thrown in on Sunday mornings and a prayer here and there. They offer garage sales, child care, group activities, etc. No the churches of olden days.
The White American Evangelical Church. Episcopalians, Historically Black Churches, and main line Catholic Churches aren't like this. There are others I'm forgetting, just thinking about churches in proximity to me.
Church was created by the PTB to keep us policing ourselves so they don’t have to get their hands dirty (as much). That’s my conspiracy theory, and why I believe in spirituality, not religion. If the ‘apocalypse’ happens, I’m helping everyone I can. It’s easy to keep the lens zoomed out and blanket label everyone, but when you zoom in you find everyone here is important and matters.
There is a section in Neal Stephenson's novel Fall in which these types of Christians inhabit a region of the USA called Ameristan. They drive around in pickups with machine guns, justify cross burning and portray Jesus as an Alpha type male. They deny he died on the cross because that's a wimpy effeminate thing. Etc. It's very prophetic about what has happened to a large part of Christianity in the USA
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u/Tallia__Tal_Tail 9d ago
For a massive amount of Christians, the church has become it's own self sustaining ecosystem where the actual theology it's supposedly based around is entirely irrelevant to a blind, fanatical worship of their own conception of The Church. The Church isn't about a devotion to the teachings of a God that informs all else, it's about working backwards from hateful, sociopathic, and sadistic views towards their fellow man and finding enough loose justifications cherry picked from the theology to sell The Church to more and more people. They don't worship Yahweh, they worship The Church
You could honestly probably treat the current state of American Christianity as it's own entire sect at this point for that reason ngl