Thousands of Southern Baptists overwhelmingly voted Wednesday to advance a formal ban on women pastors in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, sending a clear message that men alone should preach to these conservative evangelical congregations.
I’m an atheist and fiercely anti-religion, but I was raised with a certain Christian education and I don’t remember anything resembling this about Jesus. Only that he said he was the son of God. Nothing about rising up against people, defeating them and enslaving them.
His message was to have some fucking empathy and stop hating each other for once.
Especially since early Christianity saw Hell as a freezing cold place, not a fiery inferno. That imagery didn’t come along until much later when Dante’s Inferno was written.
I hope this sarcasm
Then the people giving you that certain education either lied to you or never read the damn Bible.
Am in paraphrasing it? Absolutely. But the only peace Jesus was going to bring was the same kind of “peace” palpatine brought the empire.
As for throwing people into eternal torture, that’s just an honest reading of his words in the New Testament.
Did you read it? Because I did. For shits n giggles. Or to actually see what the fuss was all about. And I can confidently say that you’re way off.
You either didn’t read all of it. or you didn’t understand it. Are there parts where things sound nice and kind and gentle? sure. But even Hitler occasionally advocated for social responsibility and communal welfare and I don’t think anyone here would disagree on how fucking evil Hitler was. Don’t just read the nice, lovey-dovey parts like “love your neighbor” and ignore the fact that Jesus literally had more to say about paying fucking taxes than slavery and saw people selling animals for sacrifice outside the temple and got pissed off despite slavery being- in my mind at least- far worse an institution and also a thing he’d have encountered near daily.
Lets start with an easy one: Mathew 28:18-20.
Theocratic Authoritarianism. Weee.
And what did jesus teach them? the law of Moses (Mathew 5:17-20:
So if you don’t obey the shit he taught…you’re not getting into heaven. Where do people who don’t go to heaven go? Hell. Fire. eternal torture.
“well yeah, but they’re awful people…” you might say… yeah. Awful people who… wear blended fabrics and eat pork or shellfish or, uh. stuff… I mean there’s worse there. Like people who don’t stone unruly children
the authoritarian nature of Jesus is self-apparent, and the consequences of ignoring anything are fucking psychotic… And lets be clear: the thing Jesus claimed to “fulfill” was the messianic prophecies
according to the messianic prophecies, jesus would have been expected to:
*At the time of Jesus in the early first century, jews understood the Roman occupation in the context of the exilic period. which they understood to have been a punishment for breaking the mosaic covenant. After the exile is over, they’re allowed to go back and such like. Then the romans come along, kick their ass in war, and oppress the shit out of everyone around there. There’s a sort of angst against the Pharisees who taught adherence to something called the Oral Law, or the Tradition of the Elders, which is a sort of updated version of the “written” law. Some things were dropped (stoning children for disobedience was severely restricted), some things were added (ritual cleansing of hands before eating,). you can see some of that in Mark 7 when Jesus was beefing with Pharisees and their followers. Jesus and people of that bend see it as punishment for stepping away- because in their Iron Age understanding, the only reason their all-powerful god would allow that is if it was angry with them for something… and uh… go read Deuteronomy 28.
as far as my claims about the Messiah being a military leader… he’s supposed to bring “security” to Israel… defeat their oppressors, and such like that only happens with a military campaign. for example, Zechariah 14. (i’m snipping the unimportant bits.)
As for the rest of us being enslaved? yeah. That’s because of how the ancient israelites were instructed- by god- to prosecute a war. (Deut 20, again, kinda reformating it.)
Is it really so surprising that christian nationalists (and Israelis,) are so cool with genocide? I mean. really. And I know, you’re brain is probably hissing and screaming right now. something like “that was just for coming into the Promised land”… but there’s also the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15(centuries after the offense, by the way. which. uh. didn’t actually happen.), the Midianites in Numbers 31, too. Part of it, is that this is just how war was conducted. Everybody, not just the Israelites, were genocidal assholes that would enslave entire populations.
And Jesus taught all of that.
Or more directly, are the words of Jesus, in mat 10:28: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell” not the the words of a psychotic fucker and a threat. Particularly as Jesus claimed to be that very person? “don’t be afraid of them. Be afraid of me.” totally pacifist.
I’m a fervent anti religion.
But your arguments are your own interpretations of the passages that you quoted. And I gotta say, it’s just as bad as the interpretations of the Christian nationalists.
I didn’t even interpret these passages in the same way you did. I see them as plain metaphors.
And to say that this is directly connected to what’s happening with Christian nationalism and zionism, that’s a bit much. There are way more Christians and Jewish people globally that reject these movements and denounce them as nothing more than a misinterpretation to fit a violent narrative.
I’m saying it’s unsurprising that christian nationalism crops up because Jesus- the figure head and literal christian god claimed to be a judean monarch and was himself authoritarian in nature.
That there’s other people who chose to ignore that doesn’t mean I’m wrong about Jesus saying some abhorent shit.
If you ignore all the awful shit Hitler said, you’ll find there’s a few times he talked about communal welfare and social responsibility in a way that isn’t entirely offensive. The difference here is that we don’t literally ignore all the awful shit Hitler said and recognize him as an utterly vile example of human awfulness.
For example, In Mark 7 and Mathew 15, Jesus criticizes the pharisees for not stoning disobedient children. Do you think it’s appropriate to kill children who disobey their parents?
So you’re saying Hitler was right???
I’m kkidding!!!
It’s all good. I get your point. Maybe you interpret it that way. Maybe it was just a metaphor. But the truth, really, is that the English translation is a translation of a translation of old English of a translation of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of an Aramaic translation and it might even go beyond all that. It could have been a story ripped off of another story, etc.
But the core principle is, like I said, to have empathy and to be nice to each other. This has always been the message.
I just want to touch on this… because for most modern translations, this is not the truth. As an example, the NSRVue is effectively based three sources:
The BHS is a sort of compendium of all the old manuscripts and fragments more or less patched together into a cohesive edition. It’s not a translation, it’s still in the original Hebrew, and is roughly consistent.
The Septuagint is used for the christian apocrypha because we don’t have original-language manuscripts for them… which is one of the reasons they’re considered apocryphal (another being that they’re sometimes just batshit crazy)
The NT was originally written in Koine Greek, and the UBS is the gold standard for those original manuscripts. So they use that. (i believe we’re on the sixth update to that? things change as we find more manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts.)
If you pull out whatever bible you use, it should have an introduction explaining what the original materials were found, choices were made in that selection, and the translation philosophy they used to translate it. for the NRSVue, you can find that here, even though it’s revision of the NRSV (which I can’t find the intro to, grrr.) You’ll also note they tell you who comissioned it, who over saw it, and how the editorial process went. (IIRC, there’s resources where you can see the arguments for changes, but that could be for a different version and the reasoning for it, or against it.)
While there are old translations that don’t always use good translation philosophies… modern translations have a great deal more scrutiny and reliability. They’re still going to be updating and improving those translations- in part because we’re still finding new manuscripts, and also in part because languages are constantly changing. As an example, when Isaiah was translated into the Septuagint, the greek word ‘Parthenos’ just meant ‘young woman’. by the time the authors of mathew were rummaging around looking for things they can wedge jesus into… ‘parthenos’ became ‘virgin’. We have the same kind of shifting use of language, too.
Generally, most modern translations are going to be reasonable to just trust that when they translate the words of Jesus, the meaning isn’t somehow being perverted. as I side note, I’m just using NRSVue as the example because it’s what I generally use myself.
And then there’s the “or else”. which kinda sours me on the “be nice” part. Like. mat 25:31-46. On the surface, this sounds cool right? But…Jesus is an all powerful and all knowing being (at least according to the trinitarian view,) who absoultely could have, when he created the world, created the world in such a way where it was unnecessary because destitute people simply don’t exist. Or baring that for some bullshit reason, absolutely could have fed everyone and clothed everyone and gave everyone shelter… and didn’t.
and in that same passage, Jesus is saying that he will throw people who may or may not have the capacity to do so, into the eternal torture of hell, for not doing the same thing he did not do, but- according to himself- had the power to do.
People are people, and everyone is some sort of chaotic mix of good and bad tendencies. We’re complicated like that. I’m not saying Jesus is all-evil. I suspect he was- mostly- just a typical guy for his time and place. the ‘mostly’ is because pharisees felt that maybe we shouldn’t stone teenagers for being, you know, typical angsty teenagers and he was. (he’s referencing Deut 21:18-20 here. My opinion of him is that he was an iron-age fundamentalist trying to bring back a bronze-age legal code. and there’s tons of baggage there that we just don’t talk about.
Ok bro. I don’t know if this is an AI generated response or you’re autistic, but this is too long. I’m not going to read all of this. I’m sorry.
And the part about “be a good person OR ELSE”? Like that’s a bag thing? Honestly if that can scare some motherfuckers into doing good, there’s nothing wrong with that.
I was surprised to see that you were getting downvoted so heavily despite being completely correct.
Some people really don’t like to hear that shit I guess.
Damn. You brought the receipts for that one!
Mic. Drop.
The more I’ve been listening to discussions about the rest of the cult’s book, the more evil it shows itself to be.
Most people want to be good. Many Christians want to be good, but they’re doing it in spite of their book, not because of its teachings.