It still gets me the Bible Jesus is a homeless socialist with brown skin, hangs out with 12 dudes and a Prostitute, tells rich people to pay their taxes and give their wealth to the poor, tells the religious leaders that they need to love everyone equally, gets a whip and goes hog on people using religion to sell stuff, and then straight up gets murdered for these beliefs. Yet somehow churches act like he's some kind of Conservative Haircut in khakis and a button up, who would support cutting welfare programs, and would preach Prosperity Gospel.
@RickiTarr It might seem controversial but hear me out, the problem is not the Bible, it’s the church. When you appoint some middleman to interpret your religious texts - there’s 90% chance the middleman will imbue it with their own agenda. Churches have too much power on how people should practice their religion.
Those are ancient fertility symbols associated with the goddess Ostara (Spring). This #Episcopalian finds it way amusing that my highest feast is named after a goddess & all the children run around looking for fertility symbols
😂🐇🥚
@mastosalo@RickiTarr Easter is a stolen fertility festival. Based on the moon. (Spelling) Eustera is the goddess in question. From whom we get Estrogen, coincidentally. Hence bunnies, chicks, eggs.
@RickiTarr In the 1820s Jeremy Bentham wrote a third volume of his Not Paul But Jesus series all about how Jesus never said a word in favor of asceticism. It wasn't published in his lifetime but it's free on the internet now! He has a whole theory that Jesus was basically a pansexual polyamorous anti-colonialist activist who was trying to free people from unnecessary restriction of the body. It's great. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1392179/3/npbj.pdf
@carrideen@RickiTarr amen🙏I’m feeling that loving yourself regardless of your net worth or the pittance you get from an employer is a radical anti capitalist act these days. 👊🏼
@KatLS@carrideen@RickiTarr You've hit on the nexus of Christofascism and what I call corporofascism I don't begrudge capitalism but what investors and corporations have done to it is pure dehumanization.
@RickiTarr Yes. This specific Christianity was invented in the US in the mid 1800s because the mainstream Euro-American zeitgeist (of which mainstream Christianity was a part) was finally accepting that slavery was a bad thing, and the slave owners needed a way to keep being slave owners but also call themselves Christian. It all comes from there, specifically including the way of picking particular verses out of the bible and skipping others so that you don't have to read anything you don't like, and the emphasis on faith over works so that the bad stuff you do doesn't really matter and there's no point in making this world better as long as you turn up in church and say the right things to get into heaven. With a morally bankrupt foundation like that it's surprising and impressive that anyone has got any good out of it.
@TheJen@RogerBW@RickiTarr past generations of Baptists were strongly supporters of separation of church and state. Today’s Baptists are seizing the day for their own persecution of heretics.
@RickiTarr@AlexanderVI@statsguy When I was reading about the history of abortion rights in the US, one of the most astonishing things was that in the 70s, most religious groups strongly supported abortion rights on humanitarian grounds, especially the Baptists.
The far right has methodically taken control of every social institution, one after another, driving the rest of us out and leaving us isolated, lonely, and afraid.
This Religious Leader about why he left the Southern Baptist Convention:
"After pastors quote the Sermon on the Mount, such as “turn the other cheek,”, afterwards people would ask, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?”
When the pastor answers, ‘I’m quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak,’”
@paulschoe@AlexanderVI@foolishowl@statsguy Agreed, I don't know if people learn to read constructively. I'm agnostic, but I find religious text interesting, it can tell us a lot about humanity, and the times they were written in. With every kind of text like this you have to take it in context.
@RickiTarr particularly true of a text that exists in relation to both extensive Jewish prophetic literature and a Hellenistic Palestine (at the time of Jesus, the Romans had just ended what we call the Hellenistic period in the area from a governmental perspective, but we know there are considerable cultural continuities - the New Testament's' composition in Greek is not a freak accident).
At our remove, what once were commonplaces can become mysteries.
@RickiTarr and there are a lot of people making those in/out choices, for centuries and centuries after the period when they were written. I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think any two denominations have completeky identical canons.
please let me preface this by saying, if somebody were to ask about my religion, I'm a secular humanist. and if they were kind enough to ask further (no really, where do ya stand about God?), I'd say I'm agnostic.
ok so, with that said, I def hear what you're saying. and yes there are churches who promote the khaki-wearing conservative Jesus. there are also churches who understand Jesus as a beautiful radical, and they start from there.
again, I'm not religious!! <3
@sssystemic I'm agnostic myself, but I'm fascinated by the stories humans tell especially ones of a religious or spiritual variety. I feel like we can learn a lot about humanity that way, by sussing out what lies beneath.
for me, some (rare) religion-oriented groups provide a fulcrum for organizing and providing support. around social justice, food distribution, housing, helping people.
used to think any relig group = bad. But now I think they aren't all bad. u need to be selective though. in my neck of woods, the unitarians are active & accepting. I ALWAYS say upfront I'm agnostic, and they're like ok we don't care, can you serve soup this Wed at 6 pm?
@sssystemic Yeah, I definitely have my anger at people using religion against other people, but if you're being kind, helpful, and generous then more of that please.
@RickiTarr And it pisses me off as a Christian. So many "Christian" groups are too content with locking themselves in their little bubbles and acting like the rest of the world is demonic/beyond saving when that goes against EVERYTHING their holy book teaches.
@RickiTarr they use the bible as a political tool. because so much of the bible is up to interpretation they use it to manipulate the wording of it to fit their political agenda. I half blame the evil megachurches and half blame the bible itself for being so up to interpretation
His Dad, Joe, was a carpenter who discovered his brand new wife was pregnant by another. Instead of putting her in the streets, he raised the child as his own. That's about as real as it gets. Love overcoming circumstances.
Folks who don't read the book shouldn't be telling anyone else what's in the thing.
@rrb@RickiTarr@michaelgemar quite. A better illustration for that would be someone naked, with nothing visible to keep them safe.
Bible verse memes are a modern bane
@RickiTarr To be clear, I'm not letting Justinian I off the hook, but Theodosius committed the original sin of making Christianity the state religion, thus co-opting it as a bulwark of orthodoxy, rather than a cudgel against it as it had been back when it was a just one of many crunchy new-age eastern mystery cults.
@rothko@RickiTarr Constantine allowed broad toleration of Christianity. He also tried to steer it towards theological orthodoxy with the Council of Nicea, but that was for political purposes as much as religious purposes. He didn't wasn't a bunch of different Christian factions splitting up the loyalties of the Roman people. He wanted one religion for one empire. He himself hedged his bets, however, and only converted on his deathbed. It wasn't until Theodosius that Christianity was made the official state religion of Rome, but you're right in that Christianity being used as a means to enforce orthodoxy rather than challenge it does go back to Constantine and the Council of Nicea.
But everyone's got their own axe to grind on the Fedi and I've been sharpening mine for Theodosius for a while now.
@theropologist@RickiTarr ah, thanks for the details. i should know this myself but it's been a while since studying all that.
before we moved i was in the middle of reading a book called "the bad popes" which is a history of all the political and other bullshit certain popes got up to in early/medieval church history. was enjoying it but now it's in storage so it'll be a while before i finish...
@NickGates@RickiTarr Look, I'm not defending pederasty based on our modern ethical standards but...nope, nope there's no good way to end that sentence. I'm out!
@RickiTarr Clearly they need to rename their religion. The bible sections you listed are not the sections evangelicals quote from. So the only assumption, based upon their quoting habits, is they only read the Old Testament and the Acts of the Apostles, but skip the middle Jesus sections.
@RickiTarr This is your periodic reminder that Christianity was founded by a dude who never met Jesus when he was alive, was a tax collector for the Romans, and fell off his horse and hit his head and had visions, also known as Megalo maniac psychosis post secondary traumatic brain injury, and got reprimanded by the mother church multiple times.
@RickiTarr
Matthew 19:24: "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God"
Bible Scholars: "Ok, technically there was a city gate that was called "the eye of the needle" and it was an arduous process to kneel the camel and get it into the city."
Conservatives:
@RickiTarr oh definitely. We more modern people don’t view sex work in such a negative light. Looking through a patriarchal lens of the last two centuries, though, calling her a prostitute was a means to lower her status, erase her power.
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