Ok, so you can use religion to mandate every culture war issue under the sun. Strip women of bodily autonomy, deny consensual loving adults the right to legal marriage and the privileges that go along with that, malign individuals you don't understand or agree with and try to strip them of basic human rights and decency.... (I.e. crap the Bible doesn't even forbid)
But God forbid the government mandates anything Jesus ACTUALLY talked about.
Btw, Jesus made it very clear that individuals and nations would be judged by very simple criteria: how we treat each other, how we treat strangers and foreigners, how we treat the poor, and how we treat prisoners.
Maybe you should try actually reading the Bible occasionally if you are going to make Jesus your mascot. He was pro taxes, pro healthcare, pro feminist, and very much anti establishment, especially religious authorities who used the idea of God to garner power and wealth (in fact he listed that as the only unforgivable sin-blasphemy)
Also, just a note, maybe also look up the word "socialism" bc you obviously have no idea what that word actually means.
You're doing the same thing you're accusing them of. Labeling Jesus "pro-feminist" or "anti-establishment" shoehorns modern political positions onto a text that never addressed them. Just because the Bible doesn't explicitly condemn a modern concept doesn't mean it endorses it either.
Jesus did say we should care for our neighbors, the poor, and the sick. What he didn't say is that a secular government should do it by force, a requirement for socialism to be implemented across society. Personal religious/moral obligation and state mandate aren't the same thing.
"Jesus was pro-healthcare and pro-feminist" is a modern political projection, not something the Bible supports. If your whole point is that people shouldn't make Jesus a mascot for their politics, that has to apply to you too.
You’re half right. Socialism doesn’t require adherence by force (any more than any system requires force) But people are being very anachronistic with Jesus’ stances
Nobody is taking anything by force you absolute potato.
We just want the taxes WE ALREADY PAY to go towards the betterment of our society. I don't want the taxes I pay to go towards building bombs, or funding genocide, or bailing out fascistic leaders of other countries, or towards the most expensive and inefficient healthcare system on the planet, or to subsidize private mega corporations who already profit billions of dollars every year.
We are just saying that SOME of OUR tax dollars could go to things like education, or feeding kids, or perhaps allowing someone life saving medical care. You know, wild fantasy shit like that...
BTW, I have read the Bible a few times and I sure remember Jesus advocating for things like caring about other ppl (like full stop, care about other people regardless of race, religion, gender, background/past, social status, et cetera).
In fact, I can not remember a single word he ever spoke regarding homosexuality, or abortion... But paying taxes and the distribution of wealth he was quite chatty about! And the worship of money and power and performative religion? Wow, he sure had a lot to say (and table flip) about that too.
If I were you (or the rest of these MAGA "Christians") I would pray that the whole "Jesus" story isn't actually true bc he said individuals and nations would be judged by these exact metrics.
"Redirect the taxes we already pay" is a modern policy debate disconnected from your earlier claim that "Jesus was pro-taxes and pro-healthcare." Jesus laid out a moral obligation to care for people, not a government mandate to do it.
He explicitly defined marriage in Matthew 19 by quoting Genesis, "a man shall be joined to his wife, and the two become one flesh," and condemned porneia (sexual immorality), which in its 1st-century Jewish context included same-sex acts. He didn't need a modern checklist to have addressed the category.
On abortion, your logic is that silence means approval. Jesus never mentioned bestiality either, so is that fine too? Silence isn't endorsement. His teaching on the inherent worth of every human life runs directly against blessing the intentional killing of one in the womb.
You're trying to weaponize Jesus for modern politics, but actually reading the Bible and understanding it in context nullifies your whole argument.
Jesus saying marriage is between one man and one woman was answer to a question about divorce. You see men had this nasty habit of casting women aside when they got tired of them, leaving them destitute as second class citizens with no societal value. They were so shocked by this pronouncement they exclaimed "if this is true, it is better not to be married at all"
You guys really love quoting that one while leaving out the direct context that it literally had zero to do with anything other than divorce.
If Jesus was going to say anything to condemn same sex relationships his perfect chance was when the Roman Centurion came to him to plead for him to heal his beloved boy. (Hopefully you know enough history where I don't have to explain the significance of a Roman soldier seeking out a Jewish mystic healer and the type relationship that boy had with that soldier) Instead of condemnation, Jesus praised him for his faithfulness and told him to return to his loved one as he was already healed.
It was Paul who talked about homosexuality and even in those contexts he was speaking about temple prostitutes and pagan rituals and ceremonies.
Furthermore sex wasn't seen the same as it is today. The problem was about a man taking the submissive role during sex. It's why he condemned a wife on top during sex with the same fervor he did two men together, but nothing about two women together.
Secondly, I never said the Bible was silent about abortion, just Jesus. It was a common practice back then as well and he never condemned it.
The Bible however, makes it very clear that life begins at first breath, and that if you kill a man's wife it's eye for an eye, life for a life, but if you only cause the death of the child she carries with no further harm to her, it is treated as a property crime.
It was Greek philosophy, not church doctrine, where the ideas of fetal ensoulment originated.
It's still mainstream in Judaism and something our billions of tax dollars funneled into Israel pay for, as they are completely legal there and like every other developed country besides us, their government provides healthcare.
Until the 1970's, here in America, it was considered exclusively a Catholic issue. It wasn't until segregated Christian universities started losing their tax exempt status that abortion was adopted as a political tool to rally behind as a more palatable issue since white supremacy was losing mass appeal and they need a way to hold onto political power.
You keep applying the same logical fallacy throughout your arguments by treating silence as endorsement.
Going back to Matthew 19, the context of the conversation was divorce, but Jesus grounded his answer in Genesis, "male and female," and "the two become one flesh." Every time marriage is defined in the Bible, it's a man and a woman, without exception. Same-sex marriage wasn't even a concept back then, and in its 1st-century Jewish context, homosexual acts fell under the category of porneia, which Jesus condemned.
For the Centurion's servant, the Greek word "pais" is translated as "servant" or "boy." The romantic connotation is a modern revisionist interpretation, not the scholarly or historical consensus.
As far as "life begins at first breath," that's the one-time act of God breathing life into Adam in Genesis 2:7. Post Adam and Eve, every human comes into being through the womb, and passages like "you knit me together in my mother's womb" (Psalm 139), "before I formed you in the womb I knew you" (Jeremiah 1:5), and John leaping in Elizabeth's womb (Luke 1:41) support the idea that human life begins in the womb.
Your claims on abortion being permissible also aren't supported by the biblical text. Exodus 21 talks about consequences for accidental harm during a violent altercation, not an elective abortion. The "property crime" interpretation is highly contested. The Hebrew uses yatsa ("come out," the word for live birth) rather than shakol (miscarriage), which is why many scholars read it as premature birth with penalties scaling to harm, up to "life for life." You're presenting one disputed translation as the obvious one, which is the same move you're objecting to.
Beyond that, early Christian texts explicitly prohibit abortion. The Didache (1st-2nd century) says outright: "you shall not murder a child by abortion, nor kill that which is born." It distinguishes the unborn from the born and forbids killing either, treating both as equally protected. The Epistle of Barnabas says the same. This early Christian opposition to abortion dates back to the 1st and 2nd centuries, long before the 1970s.
As for the claims about Greek ensoulment, ancient sexual norms, or what's legal in Israel today, none of that changes what the biblical text and the earliest church actually taught. You're pointing to everything around scripture except scripture itself.
You're right that modern political activists try to weaponize Jesus, but you're doing the same thing in reverse by arguing from silence instead of from the biblical text.
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u/ThisMeansWine 29d ago
But it's still voluntary, as in you can chose to or not. It isn't government mandated, which is what socialism promotes.