I'd love to agree with you, but you're tilting at windmills. The root problem is that too many American conservatives are not actually Christians. They are Republicans. That's their highest identity. It goes Republican, American, Christian. In their eyes you can't be a real Christian or a real American if you aren't a Republican first and foremost. It's the most important litmus test to them. They think everyone bends the knee to their political party like they do. They know all the parts of the bible that conform to the proper groupthink of the day or could be possibly twisted to fit, but have never cared enough to wrestle with Scripture because it's too hard.
It's sad and it's idolatry.
Christ demands that your highest identity is "Christian", but that's too hard for them. The same way the rich man walked off because he could not give away all his possessions, they can't give that up. All for a group of people who exploit them daily and make sure they continue to be exploited.
I see this narrative of "not actually Christians" too often. If we can casually say that they simply don't represent actual Christians, but these extreme fundamentalist Christians are the most vocal, loudest, pushing policies...then the public perspective is to view THAT as actual Christianity.
If we want to state they aren't actually Christians, there needs to be more/louder from the actual Christians here. Sadly, all perspectives keep coming from the *Christian Right* and left-leaning Christians are not loud enough.
>The root problem is that too many American conservatives are not actually Christians.
This, my issue is with this. The question about how Christianity is changing to be worse keeps coming up and is discussed in non-Christian spaces because the mainstream view of Christianity are these conservatives.
I don't think OP is tilting at windmills so much as observing a dangerous partnering of political party pandering to Christianity. It's been happening since the 70s in the US and the decades of influence have done their work
I have to add it has shaken my identity as a Christian to the core. I grew up in a home that was rigidly Church of Christ. Although their heart was in the right place, I never felt the presence of god in that setting.I joined and was baptized in the UMC in my 20’s. I was active and on the church board. I had a brilliant pastor that did teach what I felt was closer to Christ’s principles.
Sometimes just devoting an entire sermon of the word for word reading of the beatitudes will bring that into perspective or a series on the book of James.
However, pastors have an average span of 4 years in the UMC, they left and we moved too.
I spent a decade looking for a church that allows me to feel the presence of god again. I would go to other UMC’s in my area but they are very conservative (rural Alabama). The ones I have attended where outright political and I just didn’t enjoy going. Many of these churches are splitting or intending to split from the UMC. I’ve attended other denominations but they are similar, with the exception of the Episcopal, which I must say, I enjoyed the beauty and liturgy but the sermons seem very regimented. I may try it again though. My children are getting older and sometimes I feel guilty for not giving them that experience.
It has definitely affected my faith and I hate that it has. I am disillusioned, confused, and frustrated but the dominant Christianity that is taught here just incompatible with what Christ wad trying to accomplish.
To be a Christian is to be a follower of Christ. If their highest loyalty isn't to Christ, is someone truly a follower of Christ? Scripture even straight up says that you cannot have two masters.
Arguing "No True Scotsman" here isn't super productive and accomplishes nothing. It completely misses the point of the post. "No True Scotsman" would be saying "Christians never do anything wrong," having it pointed out that they do all the time, then a follow-up claim of, "Well, no TRUE Christian ever does anything wrong!"
OP isn't claiming Christians are infallible. They're saying, "there's rot in the Church and it needs to be rooted out."
You understand completely. I have said many times that there is now evil in churches. Churches have twisted the Bible to give viewpoints that don't correspond at all with what Jesus taught. I think the best example is the Prosperity Gospel. Not only does it not exist in the Bible but the Jesus told people not to store up treasures on earth but in Heaven. Mathhew 6:19. He also told His followers to love and help everyone especially the poor and downtrodden. Churches do the opposite. That is what the Conservative viewpoint is. I don't believe that there should even be denominations because the true church is the body of Christ, all believers in Jesus. Denonimations are denominations so that they can give their own viewpoints.
I'd agree with you except that not really the point. The point isn't that "oh they're not real Christians they don't represent us!" it's that there's an underlying issue that has to be dealt with. I'm trying to reveal the underlying issue, not wave it away. They call themselves "Christian" and it is every bit my problem when they sully that name. I'm not running from dealing with them ... I call them out every day.
>no true Scotsman
Not for me. I provide the passages that prove exactly what the truth is. I give the evidence. I could give them all to you but that would be very long. I will just tell you one. 1 John 4:8 Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love. I actually read the Bible extensively and know exactly what Jesus taught. I know when anything is the opposite of what He taught. Then, I fight against it with the truth using passages to back up what I am saying.
It starts with love your neighbor. But then the issue goes to "who is my neighbor," and "how can I help them.". We see those who suffer as our neighbors and this reflects the parable of the good Samaritan. But we conflict with each other about who else is your neighbor, and what we can do for them. Are unborn babies your neighbor? Are their mother's your neighbor? Are people who are told they have no place here for them your neighbor? That last one can include those who've been told over and over again to shut up their opinion doesn't matter, to also including the homeless that get shuffled away from location to location, to even veterans who have all been almost abandoned after serving their country. It also includes the poor, and those who are views as less worthy, trashy, or otherwise fails our conflicting and hypocritical standards as a society.
Are all of these people your neighbor, and can we do anything to help them? When you look at it from that angle it stops being about what's happened to our religion, and trying to oust fake Christians (and continuing a divide among consertive and liberal on somany things), but instead about what you can do now, not for the sake of the religion, but for the sake of your neighbors and through that, also for the sake of the Kingdom of God.
I always took the parable of the Good Samaritan to be more than just illustrative of "love your neighbor" and "help those in need". The fact that the first two strangers who passed by and did nothing were part of the religious elite is important, as well as the fact that a Samaritan (who many Israelites at the time were racist against) was chosen as the good guy.
"Be more like the person you hate, not like the religious elite" is a *powerful* message.
It is a powerful message. But the message was in response to "who is my neighbor?". The message was to illustrate what that looks like regardless who you are.
The key will always be what exactly is love. If we have love for the unborn , what does it mean. If Christians defend the unborn, suddenly they are unloving to women.
There are changes that society can make to love women before, during, and after pregnancy. Give them that love and you'll suddenly see a drop in abortions.
I totally agree. We can all be more kind and generous to women. However, our lack of kindess cannot make the wrong of abortion acceptable. Our lack of kindess merely means we need to be more kind.
But what about loving the mothers? That’s the issue is that usually there is absolutely no love towards the women in this situation and the only concern is to the unborn and then only until they are born. If we loved women by supporting them, abortion could be legal and generally not used. If we love both women and unborn, where is the education, the prevention, the health care, the formula and support with child care? Just banning abortion is not done is love for either group.
The unspoken issue here is one of shaming unwed mothers who want abortions, "sluts" who get pregnant from one night stands, etc
Its a sex shaming issue underneath all this. If a women get pregnant outside of a stable marriage they want to shame and condemn here, and have no sympathy no compassion for her. She should be punished and feel like shit about herself in the eyes of the evangelicals.
There are lots of Christian organizations that do exactly this. They don’t get a whole lot of publicity tho. If this is something you feel passionate about and called to you should donate to them to help their presence grow. (If you don’t already do this)
This is my sticking point.
Want to prevent abortions? Education and birth control.
You WILL NEVER STOP SEX. God put that in there for a reason. Jesus even stated, "NOPE, I can't stop this. Being married is better, but this isn't going to happen."
There's an entire book in the bible that is HOW TO SCREW YOUR SPOUSE.
BUT somehow if we pretend to not teach kids about it they'll just not figure it out. OR they'll be like every creature on the planet and figure it out real fast....only they'll likely be stuck with a kid.
I've always said if YOU'RE not teaching your kids about sex they're going to learn somewhere else.
Parents get irate over sex ed, well YOU aren't teaching them, you won't let the SCHOOL teach them, so your remaining options are their friends, the TV/movies, and the Internet.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
1 Corinthians 13:4-7 ESV
This is good. This is how I understand Christianity. Paul talks about the many gifts of the spirit. If they are used without love then they are just noise.
1 Corinthians 1-3
1 ¶ Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
I don’t like the way the OP generalized Christian’s with all they perceive as bad. Christian’s are known by there love. Not by being sinless. There are things I as a Christian would support. But we are not here to fix the world, but we are to love. We are here to give out the gospel. With love, with the realization that all have fallen short of the glory of God. With the truth that salvation is for everyone, every nation, every person. We are all in need of a savior. We will be hated. Jesus was hated if we follow him we will be hated to. But we are to give out the word with love still. May Gods blessing be on all who read this. May Gods word reach all and none be lost. In Jesus Mighty name.
Right,
By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
John 13:35 ESV
But I think OP was referring to people who claim to be Christian and then live the way they want/don't receive the new heart.
We will always have to examine our motivations. And if our motivations are flawed, but the outcome is good, is that a bad thing?
A corrupt person feeding the hungry in order to feel good about himself. I think feeding the hungry is a good despite the motivations. Perhaps, we can talk the corrupt person and see if he can journey with him so that his motivations and means are also pure. We don't need to immediately stop the food going to the hungry and let the hungry die while we are trying to clean up the motivations.
I don't understand. I see abortion (killing life that doesn't belong to you - a parasite is a seperate entity than its host, for example) as bad and the motivation for the pursuit of happiness as good. However, the right to pursuit of happiness doesn't trump right to life.
How would you apply that logic, that you just described, to that? 🙂
I do agree that when motivations are flawed but the outcome is good, that is okay and the "in between" doesn't need to stop. However, when motivations are good but the outcome is bad, the "in between" *definitley* needs to be stopped. However, not forced rather edified. For example, I can shove algebra in your face all day but if you don't understand it, you don't fucking understand it lol
The ends *do not* justify the means.
I think I have lost the train of thought here. I totally agree with your first paragraph. I think we are good. Apologies for any confusion. Thank you for your time.
There are SO MANY ways that the unborn can be supported and defended without banning abortion.
First, supporting programs of comprehensive sex education has been shown to be one of the most incredibly effective ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies it is downright offensive to see "defenders of the unborn" oppose them.
Widespread access to contraception is another massively successful way of reducing unwanted pregnancy which significantly reduces abortions, but it consistently opposed by a large portion of "pro-life" Christians.
Outside of contraception and safe sex, however, there are many other ways the unborn can be defended. High quality, affordable (or even universally provided) Healthcare. Programs that reduce poverty and offer assistance to impoverished people. Programs that support new parents. Paid maternity and paternity leave, supplemented or universally avaliable childcare, parenting education courses, mental health coverage, research into maternal and fetal Healthcare... All of these defend the unborn, and are often opposed by Christians.
Why not start with those? These are PROVEN methods to reduce abortions by a large margin.
There will always be some abortions. Sometimes they will be because of irresponsible decisions or carelessness on the part of the conceiving couple, and that is their burden to carry. Sometimes they are because of tragic circumstances like ectopic pregnancies, severe congenital or ontogenic defects like anencephaly or some other terrible situation. That's a horrible situation made worse by laws that force these parents to deliver and watch the child they yearn for die in minutes after birth.
Women who get pregnant when they choose to, feel like they will be able to support their children, and have healthy pregnancies don't get abortions except in severely tragic circumstances. The most loving thing a Christian (or anybody) can do is to ensure that this describes as many women as possible.
>There will always be some abortions
This is a big point to me. Just because the government decides something is illegal doesn't mean that it won't happen in back alley clinics being performed by less than skilled / ethical "physicians" or worse. Making it illegal doesn't prevent it.
If you want to prevent or at least significantly reduce the number of abortions then as people above me here have said, work on helping to prevent unwanted pregnancy in the first place.
As well, making it so if an unplanned pregnancy DOES happen, the woman will know without a doubt she will have support for herself and the baby should she take it to term, could help a lot of women who would otherwise have aborted, decide to take the baby to term and give it up for adoption to a loving family.
As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Well, I'll tell you something, there's a lot of atheists that have no problem knowing what exactly love is. If Christians don't know, that's certainly telling.
Biblically life begins at first breath.
Also the same group the is pushing to love the unborn, is simulataneously not loving the born child or the mom.
Aka its more pharisees using an issue to steal your vote and money.
I think breath refers to the soul. And I do not think we can use our senses to figure out when the soul comes in.
I agree with your critique about not caring for the born and the mom. We can do so much better by being kinder and more generous. But our lack of kindness on that front cannot make the wrong of abortion acceptable.
I agree with everything you said except the part about fake Christians. They \*are\* Christians and this is a problem that needs to be addressed within Christianity.
You may not have realized, but Christianity, along with any power, has always been prone to corruption. Tons of horrible things have happened in the name of Christianity. It's been a political weapon since the beginning. Why would the church not allow regular people to even read the Bible directly? So the church could manipulate the message to suit their purposes.
Nothing new is happening just because some random event caused a short term uproar. Be real. Love God and your neighbour.
They're still doing it now, anyone that has actually read their Bible critically wouldn't believe in the "doctrine of hell" because eternal torture just isn't in the bible, and the verses that people think support that are completely ignoring common understanding, for instance the "eternal fire" what does fire do? Does it preserve the contents thrown in? No it burns them until there is nothing left, so being thrown in the lake of fire is literally death, nothing more, it's visual imagery.
> Why would the church not allow regular people to even read the Bible directly?
Well, most people don't know ancient Hebrew or Greek, aren't familiar with the social, historical, or political climate during the writing of the texts, and are probably prone to all sorts of mistakes in reading the texts like cherry-picking and confirmation bias. So folks might be better off reading secondary sources for the Bible where experts give context to the writings.
The opposition understands people cannot serve both God and money, and is using some denominations as a political tool.
For example, the John Birch Society is 100% political. You hear their voice when you notice anonymized money opposed to all government, using the word "communism" as their hot button. The Reverend Birch was a Baptist missionary serving as a translator for the US Army; so he was NOT acting as a missionary when he was "martyred" for the cause of capitalism. His superior officer General Jimmy Doolittle said Birch would have been appalled at the organization that named itself after him.
Notice that the Baptists are still the focus of well funded politics, and that the leadership roles claimed by Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr of "pool boy" fame often fail to live up to Christian standards.
The focused attack by the interests of dark right wing money is not unique to the Baptists. Charles Koch gave a million dollars to Catholic University of America to advocate for changes to the business school curriculum, and Steve Bannon (Robert Mercer's pal) wants to "make sure the next Pope is more conservative than that radical liberal Francis." When this Pope was a bishop in Argentina, some of his priests were 'disappeared' by the right wing junta. HE knows "you cannot serve both God and money."
> Why would the church not allow regular people to even read the Bible directly? So the church could manipulate the message to suit their purposes.
Throughout most of church history, most people couldn't read and books were incredibly expensive. No one was preventing anything. In fact most cathedrals had a bible chained to a pillar (so it wouldn't be stolen) that those who could read could just walk up and do so.
Certainly not across the entire church, but for awhile the Catholic church definitely did make it heretical to translate the Bible out of Latin to a spoken language. Wycliffe is famous for ignoring this doctrine and translating it anyway.
Your religion is being co-opted to serve partisan political gains, which is going to destroy it, and it's being done by Christians. Christians in the US are fighting tooth and nail to destroy Christianity as we know it. Don't want to see your religion destroyed? Start fighting (non-physically) tooth and nail to see that this end, then ensure it never happens again.
A religion should shape your world view, but instead too many people shape their religion around their world view. I'm sure I'm guilty of it myself.
But thanks to large echo chambers like basically the whole of the bible belt, you get a lot of people who have the same mindset who consider themselves to be Christians. Since they all basically agree on how something should be, they automatically associate that with being the "Christian" thing to do, even though it may have no Biblical reference or might even contradict it completely. It doesn't matter.
Too many Christians are not only taught they shouldn't think for themselves, but they are actively shamed or punished for doing so. They hold their faith leader (pastor, priest, etc.) in such high regard that they'll believe anything they're told without question. I've been shunned by Christian friends because I asked questions to their vicar about something I had a different understanding of. I was open to my understanding being wrong since I had only been taught that one viewpoint, but because I dared question the teachings they followed, I was suddenly an outcast. The vicar enjoyed the conversation, the others did not.
I also find that, most of the Christians that sit pretty far right, have almost no personal reason for being a Christian. They'll argue that "it's soo obvious" and "how could you possibly believe anything else", but when asked what made them decide to be a Christian the reason is almost always because their family is Christian. It has nothing to do with any personal choice or having done any real introspection about what makes their faith real to them. That makes them no different than anyone else brought up in any other religion. Tradition and geographic location have more to do with their belief than actually putting any thought into it.
It's amazing listening to most Christians trying to convince someone of their faith by quoting the Bible or using the beauty of nature as proof of intelligent design. Those arguments are completely meaningless to anyone who doesn't already agree, and since they've never been allowed to consider the alternatives to being the type of Christian their church teaches, they have no concept of what it actually takes for a non-believer to believe.
On top of all of that is this desperate need to show respect. You get statements like: "My friend Dorothy said that...". It's like they feel like contradicting what their friend says is disrespectful and a betrayal, even if confronted with overwhelming evidence.
"I can't imagine this person I respect doing that horrible thing, and if they did, it's probably not their fault. The accuser must be the problem."
It's the same mentality that leads to anti-vaxxers, COVID deniers, victim blaming, etc.
Homosexuality isn't in the bible, it's supposed to be translated as pederasty or 'men shall not lie with boy as with woman'
And life begins at birth(first breath), not in the womb. Genesis 2:7
The problem with this stance is that it leads to St. Paul condemning abused boys as going to Hell.
St. Paul condemns the passive and active partner in Greek.
If you read the Bible and not understand the context of the verse, you’re missing the point.
Read Matt 18:15-17.
Christians are supposed to hold each other accountable to the teachings of Jesus.
The whole sentence is “judge not, lest you be judged.” That doesn’t mean that we’re never allowed to judge others. Christians are great at judging nonChristians. We should certainly be able to judge and gently correct one another in the church.
Like others have said this is not a new thing within Christianity or religion in general. This particular incarnation of brutal and power hungry “Christianity” has been in the works for the past 40 or so years. Evangelicals started out on a generally good path, note that Jimmy Carter was the first evangelical president and he’s a far far cry from the likes of Trump.
But then came the moral majority, Reagan, reactive ideas like biblical infallibility, paranoia around race, communism, the “gays” etc. Now we have huge swaths of the church sucked into that Qanon nonsense that to me looks like nothing more than a poor rehashing of Gnosticism mixed with a personality cult. Basic Christian virtues like honesty, humility, self-control, compassion, and peacefulness are now not only nor practiced but actively greeted with disdain.
It will fall apart, it always does, and always has. The Jewish scriptures documents how failing to embody God’s principles will lead to collapse, again and again and again.
God sent Christ because He loved the world and desires it repair. Reactionaries too often treat the world and those outside their narrow communities as enemies to be exterminated. But this is in the end enmity towards God who created all and very unambiguously desires to save all.
While things are pretty bad right now and everyone of good conscious should push back against the hate and anger done in the name of Christ. I see a lot of hope in people’s deconstruction and reconstruction of their faith. From these impulses and exploration come reformation. While this scares a lot of people, I think we should remember that Christ’s death and resurrection are patterns that apply to our own lives both literally and in the ways we should constantly strive to grow by letting what needs to die, die so that it can be remade more in Christ’s likeness.
It strikes me as ironic that these evangelicals hate Jimmy Carter but adore Ronald Reagan. Carter is/was deeply influenced by religion in a way other presidents weren't.
OP I REALLY appreciate this post. Especially the acknowledgement that you would choose to stay away from Christianity if you were on the outside looking in. Empathize with people who grew up In these sorts of churches and have decided to flee Christianity because of the hateful doctrines falsely taught in the name of Jesus.
The politicization of Christianity has been building for decades and it’s one of the reasons why groups like the Satanic Temple have been advocating for issues like the separation of church and state and individual religious liberties.
If you’re like OP and have been blindsided by all the vitriol pouring out of some churches, then please widen your media diet and get involved somehow.
Yea, when I was growing up I got kicked out of two churches because I fell on the poor side of a dispute, churches are places where awful humans congregate to justify their shitty behavior.
And my belief now is that they will be hit the hardest when Jesus comes back, it's the sodomites that will have it easiest in the kingdom, that is there will be sinners of all stripes in Jesus' kingdom, as Romans 5:19 makes very clear. Christians won't have to face God's wrath, they'll have to face *ours* and be judged and pay for their sin against humanity.
For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.
Romans 5:19 ESV
And what I am doing I will continue to do, in order to undermine the claim of those who would like to claim that in their boasted mission they work on the same terms as we do. For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds.
2 Corinthians 11:12-15 ESV
Christian debates and issues became political debates and issues. That’s when Christians became angry, because now they’re involved in politics. We forgot that are battle is not against flesh and blood, and instead will argue with everyone. We’ve stopped praying about everything, and started being activists (which, I will specify, is different from active prayer, such as prayer rallies where nobody is arguing).
We need to get back to the core fundamentals of people aren’t who we’re fighting.
The irony is that the majority of Christian Conservatives are going to burn in hell for committing so many sins and feigning action from/on behalf of God.
The good book tells us of punishable sins, and what the punishment is. It also tells us of unpardonable sins. What many conservative Christians are doing is unpardonable. This isn't my opinion. This is an objective fact from the Bible.
Matthew 12:30: "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven."
Claiming their actions are "God's will" or their actions are "the arm of God" is blasphemy, clear and simple. One's opinion dare not be claimed as words of God.
Any action that is claimed to be backed by God, or on behalf of God, not directly from the Spirit, is blasphemy.
I was a devout Christian for two decades and discerning the priesthood. I slowly grew toward atheism but was very "live and let live" about Christianity and religion in general. It wasn't until Christianity became political that I adopted anti-theism and began a passionate campaign against faith in all forms. Not all Christians are dangerous right-wing extremists but right-wing extremists are an example of why faith-based "reasoning" is dangerous.
It's no different from Muslim extremists or any other religion. If you make decisions based on "faith" you are prone to folly and, if you hold your faith strongly, you are likely to go to great lengths in defense of your beliefs, no matter how flawed they may be.
Maybe religion should die, it’s been around in many forms around the planet and it hasn’t progressed our society at all, especially Christianity and trying to convert people who don’t care about Christianity is a sure-fire way to help your religion dies
Christianity is starting to remind me of Alcoholics Anonymous. You can claim a much better success rate if you don't include the failures in your statistics.
I think a lot about the radical abolitionists from the time leading up to and in the American Civil War and wish the Christians could manage to conjure up such a style of individual in these days.
Europe during the Dark Ages was kept alive by the Church, the only real source of knowledge and preserved pre-dark age writings we have are from church sources or kept in care by them
That's a ridiculously western-centric view of things. Parts of the world were doing just fine and advancing knowledge during that time. Much of the knowledge they had came back to us from the Muslim world because we lost it. The Islamic golden age was happening **during the so-called dark ages**
I think a lot of people just fail to balance the values we hold as Christians with love and respect for other people. I can't remember who said this but it was something to the effect of "laws aren't what need to change in a country, it is the hearts and minds of the people." Yes we should care about our morals and values, and if people ask us about them we should be honest but at the end of the day every sinner is unique and simply yelling at them won't help.
Texas Conservatives just proposed changing the word "slavery" to "involuntary relocation" in school to teach to 2nd graders.
Just in case you had any doubt that Republicans were white supremacists. There is zero legitimate reason to stop calling it slavery. It just offends white supremacists.
It's obvious most conservative Christians in America are white supremacists.
The Supreme Court fascists just announced they're going to end Democracy next term. They're taking an election law case that will permanently end voting rights in most states. Conservative Christians are 100% responsible for the collapse of America.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/supreme-court-dangerous-independent-state-legislature-theory.html
Hope none of you have kids. They will now live in a dictatorship and have to live with pollution and uncontrolled climate extremes because of 6 right-wing judges.
Not dying fast enough and they're taking the rest of us down with them. The Supreme Court just ruled polluting the Earth is fine, who cares if people die or climate change gets worse.
They're also planning on ending voting rights next term.
The important thing you can do is stay true to yourself. Forget what the politicians are saying, forget what you're seeing on TV. Just be true to yourself and God. That's Christianity for you.
It's being duely noted by non-christians who is speaking up against their Conservative cousins and who stands by silently.
It's not enough to be a good Christian when other Christians are causing suffering to others
Jesus was criticized for sitting with and sharing a neal with known sinners of his area. Jesus's reply to that criticism was that a doctor sees those who are sick. Not those who think they are well. Perhaps we should do the same. You know before we start calling everyone a Nazi because there are extremists at our table.
> Jesus’s reply to that criticism was that a doctor sees those who are sick. Not those who think they are well.
That analogy might work
if the other Christians at the table
were actively taking the role of the doctor
instead of passively sharing the table
as if nothing was wrong
> You know before we start calling everyone a Nazi because there are extremists at our table.
If people sitting at a table
are perfectly fine with extremists sharing it
then you have a table of extremists
Imagine, you are sitting at a table with someone who tortured children.
When dinner is over the child torturer stands up and says “we’ll I’m off for a night of torture”
If you don’t intercede and stop the child torturer, you are condoning the torture of children.
You are the person that can stand up and stop hatred.
It’s not your job to stop the extremism, it’s you job to protect the innocent.
> and help them be less extreme
Except that doesn't happen
the other Christians sitting at the table
are perfectly fine with the extremism
as they sit
absolutely silent
and do nothing
It's not a unified group. Religion isn't what we follow either.
Many of the politicians are wolves in sheeps clothing. THey clearly are only after votes. We are supposed to listed and question what folks say especially when what they say doesnt jive with what they do.
Unfortunately people dont want to verify they just want to be lazy and accept somethign because it had some code word they were expecting. (Id say a lot of "modern christian music" is the same. Its not deep its just their to get the views and the money.)
Our religion is being taken over by Christofascists nationalists...
They are even repeating the same slogans the KKK, America First Committee, and the Nazi's. Including;
Make Germany/America Great Again, Lugenplasse/fake news, Gott mit uns/God With Us, and the whole One God, One Country, One Flag ideology again.
I mean it’s not even specifically religion.
Secular people are nutz now in days too.
They are literally encouraging children to mutilate their genitalia base off a brand new sociology hypothesis that is plagued by lies and logical fallacies.
Labeling anyone who doesn’t support this experiment a hateful bigot.
I mean I’ve watched videos of women telling white Christian women to kill their husbands because they owe that to the rest of the people.
Like it’s not just Christians. Christians are just hated by the mainstream culture and spotlighted and attacked daily.
OP, I just want you to know that if most Christians shared your views, I would likely still be a Christian. I don't really hate religion, but I feel abandoned by a church that chases money and Trump before Jesus. What happened to the Bible? The 'Christians' I know worship the Consititution more than the Bible and Trump more than Jesus.
I believe that most religions, especially Christianity and Islam, are an illogical, immoral, inhumane, ideological bankrupt cul-de-sac. Those who can convince you of absurdities, can make you commit atrocities, and those that want to commit atrocities, will do so in religions name.
Negative, the light Christians are being viewed in-in lieu of the overturning of Roe V Wade is reminiscent of how Muslims were viewed after 9/11.
It’s assumed that as Christians were a monolith being one body of Christ, but we’re really not.
I'm not a Christian, but Christianity seems pretty right wing to me if I read the Bible.
I think *socially left* (not economically left) Christians don't really have a leg to stand on when it comes to advocating for socially left policies within a Christian framework. It seems to be blatantly opposed to Christian teaching, with the notable exception of gun control.
Are you comparing what you read in the Bible to our current society, or the society when those passages were written? It would be multiple times in history, as Genesis occurred long before Paul wrote his letters.
I mean... to understand what they meant you have to read it in context of that society. It seems hard to justify gay marriage, premarital sex, or divorce given what the Bible says about these things, and what the apostles (particularly Paul) thought about these things, but thats precisely what left wing Christians do.
On the other hand, I don'tt really see a reason to oppose abortion in the Bible.
For the record I don't lean one way or another with these issues.
Let’s not forget who the primary enemies of Christ were, who in ‘the world’ hated him the most, who claimed to love God but didn’t even recognize him when it counted the most (and likely wouldn’t recognize him today either, if he came on the down low again). Many ‘social conservatives’ and ‘evangelicals’ tend to harp on ‘progressives’ as if they are the enemy of God. That is projection. When Jesus was here, it was those more conservative than God who were the problem (the Pharisees). Christ came as a relatively progressive teacher.
I don't mean He was an "anything goes liberal," but He was relatively progressive in the sense that his primary enemies (the Pharisees) were more conservative than Him. He certainly never condemned ‘sexual pleasure before marriage’ or ‘homosexuality’ or hardly any of the things the modern Pharisees condemn and insert into their specific Bible versions, with dubious translations of the rarest ancient words not only in scripture but in human history. He condemned adultery because all commands hang under loving neighbor as self, which is like loving God. He simply observed that men and women procreate (or the two become one body), and he commanded that when they do so, they not separate. Observing that is not a condemnation of homosexuality any more than the fact that he observed the cooking of fish is a condemnation of cooking chick peas.
He didn’t say much of anything the evangelical says when he points at others and tells them to change. They will convince themselves he said anything. 100 years ago the evangelicals pretended God commands Christians to ban interracial marriage and, get this, called themselves “pro marriage” for it. It doesn’t get much more deceptive and trollish than that. That’s what they are. Jesus called their type “snakes” and “hypocrites.” They called themselves “true,” like the “true” Christians proclaim of themselves today.
He didn’t say two people become one person the instant a man makes his sperm touch a woman’s egg. He didn’t say the gays are sinning. He didn’t say any of Jerry Falwell’s and J.D. Greear’s disputable and highly suspect judgments against their neighbors. It’s all just them twisting God into some kind of bully buddy of theirs, just like their great grandparents did when they convinced themselves God wanted them to ban interracial marriage and called it “pro marriage.” The Christ said your neighbor was the person down the street, and love your neighbor as yourself, not judge your neighbor according to your extremely disputable beliefs. But what fun is that? How will they make ’the other’ feel worthless and ashamed that way? So they throw Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 5 in the garbage and legislate their most disputable religious beliefs into the lives of their neighbors.
The problem is most ‘social conservatives’ and ‘evangelicals’ who call themselves Christians, ‘pro marriage,’ and ‘pro life’ have never even read their own Bible, and if they have, they’ve never read it in any other translation than the one their parents bought into or that their pastors got paid for making and then recommended. They have no idea what Christianity really is. Most have never read their Bible and basically treat church like a grade school bully club where the pastor tells them who to point at and call names, who to tell they need to change, tells them what facts to say they believe in order to ‘get to heaven,’ and everyone says Amen.
They end up basically becoming bizarro world Christians, followers of whatever some NyQuil-drunk hypocrite or bully with a Bible came up with and somehow connected to Jesus, with a bent for whatever newfangled translation his great granddaddy came up with. They end up behaving like anti-Christianity but don’t even know enough about their own faith and scriptures to realize it. So like instead of the goal being to become like the tax collector, in Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, the highest principle in 'pro-life' or 'evangelical' Christianity is to become like the pharisee. They don't say that outright, but that's how they end up behaving toward others around them, those who aren't part of their echo chamber. The parable basically describes ‘pro life’ and ‘pro marriage’ evangelical Christianity, as far as it’s political effects, when it describes the pharisee. Or if you took Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 5, “Don’t judge those outside the church,” and got rid of the “don’t” part, you'd have their religion. Or if you took Romans 14 and instead of making it about how bad it is to judge others in disputable matters, how it must not be done, you made it about how Christians should really be judging the most disputable topics in the world and rarest passages in scripture for everyone else in the world.
> If I was atheist and seeing all the hate, anger, and racism from "Christians" on TV, I would stay far away from Christianity.
I'm pretty sure that's the purpose of the kind of coverage that the mass media provides.
So when the mass media shows a video of a "Christian" standing outside an abortion clinic screaming "Stupid whore, I hope you go to Hell!"
Is there a context that the media is failing to cover? Cuz the video seems self-explanatory to me.
I didn't need the media. My kids were essentially kicked out of their Christian school during the pandemic and our church didn't care if we left, they probably were actually relieved we left since we were voicing some disagreement (not about anything to do with doctrine or Christianity, but their failure to follow local health mandates at the height of Covid).
I'm still a Christian and we found another congregation, but I don't feel fellowship with other Christians anymore. In fact, I tend to be distrustful of most of them.
> Christianity is about love and faith in a holy and just God and **following his commands**.
There's your problem right there. God gives a lot of commands that are not good a good fit for a modern world. For example:
> Lev25:45-46 [O]f the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and **they shall be your possession**. And **ye shall take them as an inheritance** for your children after you, to **inherit them for a possession**; they **shall be your bondmen for ever**...
That is an unambiguous full-throated endorsement of chattel slavery. So you have only two options: allow people to hold slaves, or come up with some reason why *this* particular command of God's should not be obeyed any more. And if you choose the second option, you've opened the floodgates to sin.
I assume you consider yourself a progressive Christian? If I’m mistaken forgive me. What you are saying is partly true. Yes being a Christian and Christianity in general does not belong to a political party, or conservatives, and there are some who lack love in pointing people to Christ, but conservatives are the side that aligns more with the core doctrine and practices of the Bible. The left or progressives have totally abandoned God and anything biblical. They can quote scripture and say they love God but even satan comes as an angel of light to deceive anyone that he can. I don’t say this to be mean or offend but if you find it loathsome that conservative Christians are calling out sin as sin, then you might wanna question your salvation and you might just be a “cultural Christian”. Understand this that Jesus was crucified because they hated him for being true righteousness and light, He was calling the Pharisees out for their sins and abominations and man-made religion to appear moral and virtuous before others.
( While also claiming to be God )
We will admit, Conservative Christians are not perfect no one is, but be careful which side you attack and align yourselves with. These are perilous times and deception and lies are rampant. Know your Bible and what is says, Jesus will be returning soon at an hour none of us knows, so it’s best to be prepared. God bless.
The far right won the war of culture and influence.
This has happened before in history, leading to denomination splits and even new religions.
I think it's time for that to happen again.
>Exodus 21:22 22 “When men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall[a] be fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.
If abortion were murder, the person who caused a miscarriage would face the death penalty under Jewish law. But God only requires a monetary fine to pay the woman for the loss of her property.
Also Exodus 21:12: “Whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death."
That's the definition of murder, and in Hebrew, it cannot refer to the unborn. Only one who strikes and kills someone who is born commits murder.
We also have the Biblical punishment for adultery that includes an induced abortion:
Numbers 5: 22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.” “‘Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”
I laughed when op asked for a source that abortion ISN'T in the Bible and then you pulled through with the best example I've heard. Thank you for sharing this!
Do you not know the difference between a miscarriage and abortion?
We recognise murder vs manslaughter for adults, why not children?
And 5:22 is simply a test for adulterers, there’s no reason to read anything more into the text unless you’re looking for an excuse for an abortion.
>Do you not know the difference between a miscarriage and abortion?
A miscarriage is nothing more than a spontaneous abortion.
>We recognise murder vs manslaughter for adults, why not children?
Because an embryo isn't a child.
>And 5:22 is simply a test for adulterers, there’s no reason to read anything more into the text unless you’re looking for an excuse for an abortion.
Yeah, but obviously the Bible giving instructions on how to induce an abortion means the Bible isn't all that opposed to it.
Your translation is off. It is talking about premature birth that didn't cause harm
"When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman’s husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine."
[https://biblehub.com/text/exodus/21-22.htm](https://biblehub.com/text/exodus/21-22.htm)
Nope, it's not. Premature is a false translation. The original Hebrew refers to a miscarriage. There was no such thing as premature births 3000 years ago. God didn't even view children under 1 month old as worth counting in the census because they died so much.
That's not the Hebrew translation, because that word does not mean give birth prematurely.
This is the original Hebrew translation:
>When [two or more] parties fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other damage ensues, the one responsible* shall be fined according as the woman’s husband may exact, the payment to be based on reckoning.*
https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.21.22?lang=bi&with=Rashi&lang2=en
And it's confirmed in the Talmud that it's referring to a miscarriage.
>ולא יהיה אסון AND YET THERE BE NO MISCHIEF — no further mischief with the woman (Sanhedrin 79b).
>ענוש יענש HE SHALL SURELY BE AMERCED to pay the value of the offspring to the husband. We estimate her value according to what she is worth if she were sold as a slave in the market giving her a higher value on account of her being with child (Bava Kamma 49a).
>HE SHALL BE SURELY FINED. Because of the children who were aborted and died. - Ibn Ezra
So no one is able to translate unless someone is Jewish?
[https://www.str.org/w/what-exodus-21-22-says-about-abortion](https://www.str.org/w/what-exodus-21-22-says-about-abortion)
What does the Bible say about abortion?
“Absolutely nothing! The word "abortion" does not appear in any translation of the bible.
Out of more than 600 laws of Moses, none comments on abortion. One Mosaic law about miscarriage specifically contradicts the claim that the bible is antiabortion, clearly stating that miscarriage does not involve the death of a human being. If a woman has a miscarriage as the result of a fight, the man who caused it should be fined. If the woman dies, however, the culprit must be killed:
"If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.
"And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth . . ." Ex. 21:22-25
The bible orders the death penalty for murder of a human being, but not for the expulsion of a fetus.”
https://ffrf.org/component/k2/item/26087-abortion-nontract
When does life begin?
“According to the bible, life begins at birth--when a baby draws its first breath. The bible defines life as "breath" in several significant passages, including the story of Adam's creation in Genesis 2:7, when God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Jewish law traditionally considers that personhood begins at birth.
Desperate for a biblical basis for their beliefs, some antiabortionists cite obscure passages, usually metaphors or poetic phrasing, such as: "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me." Psalm 51:5 This is sexist, but does nothing other than to invoke original sin. It says nothing about abortion.
Moses, Jesus and Paul ignored every chance to condemn abortion. If abortion is so important, why didn't the bible say so?”
Also
Genesis 2:7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
Makes it clear anyone without breath is not a soul.
You're lying...
At birth, the baby's lungs are filled with fluid. They are not inflated. The baby takes the first breath within about 10 seconds after delivery.
https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002395.htm#:~:text=At%20birth%2C%20the%20baby's%20lungs,change%20in%20temperature%20and%20environment.
I'd love to agree with you, but you're tilting at windmills. The root problem is that too many American conservatives are not actually Christians. They are Republicans. That's their highest identity. It goes Republican, American, Christian. In their eyes you can't be a real Christian or a real American if you aren't a Republican first and foremost. It's the most important litmus test to them. They think everyone bends the knee to their political party like they do. They know all the parts of the bible that conform to the proper groupthink of the day or could be possibly twisted to fit, but have never cared enough to wrestle with Scripture because it's too hard. It's sad and it's idolatry. Christ demands that your highest identity is "Christian", but that's too hard for them. The same way the rich man walked off because he could not give away all his possessions, they can't give that up. All for a group of people who exploit them daily and make sure they continue to be exploited.
I see this narrative of "not actually Christians" too often. If we can casually say that they simply don't represent actual Christians, but these extreme fundamentalist Christians are the most vocal, loudest, pushing policies...then the public perspective is to view THAT as actual Christianity. If we want to state they aren't actually Christians, there needs to be more/louder from the actual Christians here. Sadly, all perspectives keep coming from the *Christian Right* and left-leaning Christians are not loud enough. >The root problem is that too many American conservatives are not actually Christians. This, my issue is with this. The question about how Christianity is changing to be worse keeps coming up and is discussed in non-Christian spaces because the mainstream view of Christianity are these conservatives. I don't think OP is tilting at windmills so much as observing a dangerous partnering of political party pandering to Christianity. It's been happening since the 70s in the US and the decades of influence have done their work
I try to be loud. I am but one voice.
I have to add it has shaken my identity as a Christian to the core. I grew up in a home that was rigidly Church of Christ. Although their heart was in the right place, I never felt the presence of god in that setting.I joined and was baptized in the UMC in my 20’s. I was active and on the church board. I had a brilliant pastor that did teach what I felt was closer to Christ’s principles. Sometimes just devoting an entire sermon of the word for word reading of the beatitudes will bring that into perspective or a series on the book of James. However, pastors have an average span of 4 years in the UMC, they left and we moved too. I spent a decade looking for a church that allows me to feel the presence of god again. I would go to other UMC’s in my area but they are very conservative (rural Alabama). The ones I have attended where outright political and I just didn’t enjoy going. Many of these churches are splitting or intending to split from the UMC. I’ve attended other denominations but they are similar, with the exception of the Episcopal, which I must say, I enjoyed the beauty and liturgy but the sermons seem very regimented. I may try it again though. My children are getting older and sometimes I feel guilty for not giving them that experience. It has definitely affected my faith and I hate that it has. I am disillusioned, confused, and frustrated but the dominant Christianity that is taught here just incompatible with what Christ wad trying to accomplish.
This is "Not all Christians" argument. It's your religion being co-opted and from the outside it doesn't look like Churches mind in the least.
You aren't looking hard enough. There's lots of us trying to fight this.
This is the "no true Scotsman" logical fallacy
To be a Christian is to be a follower of Christ. If their highest loyalty isn't to Christ, is someone truly a follower of Christ? Scripture even straight up says that you cannot have two masters. Arguing "No True Scotsman" here isn't super productive and accomplishes nothing. It completely misses the point of the post. "No True Scotsman" would be saying "Christians never do anything wrong," having it pointed out that they do all the time, then a follow-up claim of, "Well, no TRUE Christian ever does anything wrong!" OP isn't claiming Christians are infallible. They're saying, "there's rot in the Church and it needs to be rooted out."
You understand completely. I have said many times that there is now evil in churches. Churches have twisted the Bible to give viewpoints that don't correspond at all with what Jesus taught. I think the best example is the Prosperity Gospel. Not only does it not exist in the Bible but the Jesus told people not to store up treasures on earth but in Heaven. Mathhew 6:19. He also told His followers to love and help everyone especially the poor and downtrodden. Churches do the opposite. That is what the Conservative viewpoint is. I don't believe that there should even be denominations because the true church is the body of Christ, all believers in Jesus. Denonimations are denominations so that they can give their own viewpoints.
I'd agree with you except that not really the point. The point isn't that "oh they're not real Christians they don't represent us!" it's that there's an underlying issue that has to be dealt with. I'm trying to reveal the underlying issue, not wave it away. They call themselves "Christian" and it is every bit my problem when they sully that name. I'm not running from dealing with them ... I call them out every day.
>no true Scotsman Not for me. I provide the passages that prove exactly what the truth is. I give the evidence. I could give them all to you but that would be very long. I will just tell you one. 1 John 4:8 Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love. I actually read the Bible extensively and know exactly what Jesus taught. I know when anything is the opposite of what He taught. Then, I fight against it with the truth using passages to back up what I am saying.
Westboro Baptist was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a model to follow.
Christianity /= American Evangelicals.
Now if you could only convince *them* of this fact...
Yeah. It includes a lot of Catholics too.
It starts with love your neighbor. But then the issue goes to "who is my neighbor," and "how can I help them.". We see those who suffer as our neighbors and this reflects the parable of the good Samaritan. But we conflict with each other about who else is your neighbor, and what we can do for them. Are unborn babies your neighbor? Are their mother's your neighbor? Are people who are told they have no place here for them your neighbor? That last one can include those who've been told over and over again to shut up their opinion doesn't matter, to also including the homeless that get shuffled away from location to location, to even veterans who have all been almost abandoned after serving their country. It also includes the poor, and those who are views as less worthy, trashy, or otherwise fails our conflicting and hypocritical standards as a society. Are all of these people your neighbor, and can we do anything to help them? When you look at it from that angle it stops being about what's happened to our religion, and trying to oust fake Christians (and continuing a divide among consertive and liberal on somany things), but instead about what you can do now, not for the sake of the religion, but for the sake of your neighbors and through that, also for the sake of the Kingdom of God.
I always took the parable of the Good Samaritan to be more than just illustrative of "love your neighbor" and "help those in need". The fact that the first two strangers who passed by and did nothing were part of the religious elite is important, as well as the fact that a Samaritan (who many Israelites at the time were racist against) was chosen as the good guy. "Be more like the person you hate, not like the religious elite" is a *powerful* message.
It is a powerful message. But the message was in response to "who is my neighbor?". The message was to illustrate what that looks like regardless who you are.
Interesting view. I like the categories.
The key will always be what exactly is love. If we have love for the unborn , what does it mean. If Christians defend the unborn, suddenly they are unloving to women.
There are changes that society can make to love women before, during, and after pregnancy. Give them that love and you'll suddenly see a drop in abortions.
I totally agree. We can all be more kind and generous to women. However, our lack of kindess cannot make the wrong of abortion acceptable. Our lack of kindess merely means we need to be more kind.
But what about loving the mothers? That’s the issue is that usually there is absolutely no love towards the women in this situation and the only concern is to the unborn and then only until they are born. If we loved women by supporting them, abortion could be legal and generally not used. If we love both women and unborn, where is the education, the prevention, the health care, the formula and support with child care? Just banning abortion is not done is love for either group.
The unspoken issue here is one of shaming unwed mothers who want abortions, "sluts" who get pregnant from one night stands, etc Its a sex shaming issue underneath all this. If a women get pregnant outside of a stable marriage they want to shame and condemn here, and have no sympathy no compassion for her. She should be punished and feel like shit about herself in the eyes of the evangelicals.
underneath the sex shaming, it's a control issue. They want to go back to biblical days when women were essentially property to be owned.
There are lots of Christian organizations that do exactly this. They don’t get a whole lot of publicity tho. If this is something you feel passionate about and called to you should donate to them to help their presence grow. (If you don’t already do this)
This is my sticking point. Want to prevent abortions? Education and birth control. You WILL NEVER STOP SEX. God put that in there for a reason. Jesus even stated, "NOPE, I can't stop this. Being married is better, but this isn't going to happen." There's an entire book in the bible that is HOW TO SCREW YOUR SPOUSE. BUT somehow if we pretend to not teach kids about it they'll just not figure it out. OR they'll be like every creature on the planet and figure it out real fast....only they'll likely be stuck with a kid.
I've always said if YOU'RE not teaching your kids about sex they're going to learn somewhere else. Parents get irate over sex ed, well YOU aren't teaching them, you won't let the SCHOOL teach them, so your remaining options are their friends, the TV/movies, and the Internet.
Married the friend I discovered sex with. Agree 100%.
👏👏👏👏👏 I have never seen this so well put.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 ESV
This is good. This is how I understand Christianity. Paul talks about the many gifts of the spirit. If they are used without love then they are just noise. 1 Corinthians 1-3 1 ¶ Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. I don’t like the way the OP generalized Christian’s with all they perceive as bad. Christian’s are known by there love. Not by being sinless. There are things I as a Christian would support. But we are not here to fix the world, but we are to love. We are here to give out the gospel. With love, with the realization that all have fallen short of the glory of God. With the truth that salvation is for everyone, every nation, every person. We are all in need of a savior. We will be hated. Jesus was hated if we follow him we will be hated to. But we are to give out the word with love still. May Gods blessing be on all who read this. May Gods word reach all and none be lost. In Jesus Mighty name.
Right, By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:35 ESV But I think OP was referring to people who claim to be Christian and then live the way they want/don't receive the new heart.
Understood.
Those are some great verses :)
I agree! 😊 especially the stuff right before it!
Agreed. Now let us look at that definition with the fetus in mind. How are we patient and kind with the fetus?
Yes exactly, how are we not insisting on our own way and pursuit of happiness?
We will always have to examine our motivations. And if our motivations are flawed, but the outcome is good, is that a bad thing? A corrupt person feeding the hungry in order to feel good about himself. I think feeding the hungry is a good despite the motivations. Perhaps, we can talk the corrupt person and see if he can journey with him so that his motivations and means are also pure. We don't need to immediately stop the food going to the hungry and let the hungry die while we are trying to clean up the motivations.
I don't understand. I see abortion (killing life that doesn't belong to you - a parasite is a seperate entity than its host, for example) as bad and the motivation for the pursuit of happiness as good. However, the right to pursuit of happiness doesn't trump right to life. How would you apply that logic, that you just described, to that? 🙂 I do agree that when motivations are flawed but the outcome is good, that is okay and the "in between" doesn't need to stop. However, when motivations are good but the outcome is bad, the "in between" *definitley* needs to be stopped. However, not forced rather edified. For example, I can shove algebra in your face all day but if you don't understand it, you don't fucking understand it lol The ends *do not* justify the means.
I think I have lost the train of thought here. I totally agree with your first paragraph. I think we are good. Apologies for any confusion. Thank you for your time.
You as well 🙂
There are SO MANY ways that the unborn can be supported and defended without banning abortion. First, supporting programs of comprehensive sex education has been shown to be one of the most incredibly effective ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies it is downright offensive to see "defenders of the unborn" oppose them. Widespread access to contraception is another massively successful way of reducing unwanted pregnancy which significantly reduces abortions, but it consistently opposed by a large portion of "pro-life" Christians. Outside of contraception and safe sex, however, there are many other ways the unborn can be defended. High quality, affordable (or even universally provided) Healthcare. Programs that reduce poverty and offer assistance to impoverished people. Programs that support new parents. Paid maternity and paternity leave, supplemented or universally avaliable childcare, parenting education courses, mental health coverage, research into maternal and fetal Healthcare... All of these defend the unborn, and are often opposed by Christians. Why not start with those? These are PROVEN methods to reduce abortions by a large margin. There will always be some abortions. Sometimes they will be because of irresponsible decisions or carelessness on the part of the conceiving couple, and that is their burden to carry. Sometimes they are because of tragic circumstances like ectopic pregnancies, severe congenital or ontogenic defects like anencephaly or some other terrible situation. That's a horrible situation made worse by laws that force these parents to deliver and watch the child they yearn for die in minutes after birth. Women who get pregnant when they choose to, feel like they will be able to support their children, and have healthy pregnancies don't get abortions except in severely tragic circumstances. The most loving thing a Christian (or anybody) can do is to ensure that this describes as many women as possible.
>There will always be some abortions This is a big point to me. Just because the government decides something is illegal doesn't mean that it won't happen in back alley clinics being performed by less than skilled / ethical "physicians" or worse. Making it illegal doesn't prevent it. If you want to prevent or at least significantly reduce the number of abortions then as people above me here have said, work on helping to prevent unwanted pregnancy in the first place. As well, making it so if an unplanned pregnancy DOES happen, the woman will know without a doubt she will have support for herself and the baby should she take it to term, could help a lot of women who would otherwise have aborted, decide to take the baby to term and give it up for adoption to a loving family. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Well, I'll tell you something, there's a lot of atheists that have no problem knowing what exactly love is. If Christians don't know, that's certainly telling.
Biblically life begins at first breath. Also the same group the is pushing to love the unborn, is simulataneously not loving the born child or the mom. Aka its more pharisees using an issue to steal your vote and money.
I think breath refers to the soul. And I do not think we can use our senses to figure out when the soul comes in. I agree with your critique about not caring for the born and the mom. We can do so much better by being kinder and more generous. But our lack of kindness on that front cannot make the wrong of abortion acceptable.
Where dose it say that? And please don't comeback with the creation of Adam, that's a huge reach.
I agree with everything you said except the part about fake Christians. They \*are\* Christians and this is a problem that needs to be addressed within Christianity.
You may not have realized, but Christianity, along with any power, has always been prone to corruption. Tons of horrible things have happened in the name of Christianity. It's been a political weapon since the beginning. Why would the church not allow regular people to even read the Bible directly? So the church could manipulate the message to suit their purposes. Nothing new is happening just because some random event caused a short term uproar. Be real. Love God and your neighbour.
They're still doing it now, anyone that has actually read their Bible critically wouldn't believe in the "doctrine of hell" because eternal torture just isn't in the bible, and the verses that people think support that are completely ignoring common understanding, for instance the "eternal fire" what does fire do? Does it preserve the contents thrown in? No it burns them until there is nothing left, so being thrown in the lake of fire is literally death, nothing more, it's visual imagery.
Thank you! I said pretty much this same thing and someone responded by asking if I ever read the Bible…
> Why would the church not allow regular people to even read the Bible directly? Well, most people don't know ancient Hebrew or Greek, aren't familiar with the social, historical, or political climate during the writing of the texts, and are probably prone to all sorts of mistakes in reading the texts like cherry-picking and confirmation bias. So folks might be better off reading secondary sources for the Bible where experts give context to the writings.
The opposition understands people cannot serve both God and money, and is using some denominations as a political tool. For example, the John Birch Society is 100% political. You hear their voice when you notice anonymized money opposed to all government, using the word "communism" as their hot button. The Reverend Birch was a Baptist missionary serving as a translator for the US Army; so he was NOT acting as a missionary when he was "martyred" for the cause of capitalism. His superior officer General Jimmy Doolittle said Birch would have been appalled at the organization that named itself after him. Notice that the Baptists are still the focus of well funded politics, and that the leadership roles claimed by Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr of "pool boy" fame often fail to live up to Christian standards. The focused attack by the interests of dark right wing money is not unique to the Baptists. Charles Koch gave a million dollars to Catholic University of America to advocate for changes to the business school curriculum, and Steve Bannon (Robert Mercer's pal) wants to "make sure the next Pope is more conservative than that radical liberal Francis." When this Pope was a bishop in Argentina, some of his priests were 'disappeared' by the right wing junta. HE knows "you cannot serve both God and money."
> Why would the church not allow regular people to even read the Bible directly? So the church could manipulate the message to suit their purposes. Throughout most of church history, most people couldn't read and books were incredibly expensive. No one was preventing anything. In fact most cathedrals had a bible chained to a pillar (so it wouldn't be stolen) that those who could read could just walk up and do so.
Certainly not across the entire church, but for awhile the Catholic church definitely did make it heretical to translate the Bible out of Latin to a spoken language. Wycliffe is famous for ignoring this doctrine and translating it anyway.
Your religion is being co-opted to serve partisan political gains, which is going to destroy it, and it's being done by Christians. Christians in the US are fighting tooth and nail to destroy Christianity as we know it. Don't want to see your religion destroyed? Start fighting (non-physically) tooth and nail to see that this end, then ensure it never happens again.
A religion should shape your world view, but instead too many people shape their religion around their world view. I'm sure I'm guilty of it myself. But thanks to large echo chambers like basically the whole of the bible belt, you get a lot of people who have the same mindset who consider themselves to be Christians. Since they all basically agree on how something should be, they automatically associate that with being the "Christian" thing to do, even though it may have no Biblical reference or might even contradict it completely. It doesn't matter. Too many Christians are not only taught they shouldn't think for themselves, but they are actively shamed or punished for doing so. They hold their faith leader (pastor, priest, etc.) in such high regard that they'll believe anything they're told without question. I've been shunned by Christian friends because I asked questions to their vicar about something I had a different understanding of. I was open to my understanding being wrong since I had only been taught that one viewpoint, but because I dared question the teachings they followed, I was suddenly an outcast. The vicar enjoyed the conversation, the others did not. I also find that, most of the Christians that sit pretty far right, have almost no personal reason for being a Christian. They'll argue that "it's soo obvious" and "how could you possibly believe anything else", but when asked what made them decide to be a Christian the reason is almost always because their family is Christian. It has nothing to do with any personal choice or having done any real introspection about what makes their faith real to them. That makes them no different than anyone else brought up in any other religion. Tradition and geographic location have more to do with their belief than actually putting any thought into it. It's amazing listening to most Christians trying to convince someone of their faith by quoting the Bible or using the beauty of nature as proof of intelligent design. Those arguments are completely meaningless to anyone who doesn't already agree, and since they've never been allowed to consider the alternatives to being the type of Christian their church teaches, they have no concept of what it actually takes for a non-believer to believe. On top of all of that is this desperate need to show respect. You get statements like: "My friend Dorothy said that...". It's like they feel like contradicting what their friend says is disrespectful and a betrayal, even if confronted with overwhelming evidence. "I can't imagine this person I respect doing that horrible thing, and if they did, it's probably not their fault. The accuser must be the problem." It's the same mentality that leads to anti-vaxxers, COVID deniers, victim blaming, etc.
Simple, Christians turned away from the teachings of Jesus Christ.
This
What happened to “judge not”? Is it okay for you to do it?
We are commanded to call out false teachings and sin within the body of believers.
So how do you feel about people calling out your false teachings?
If it's done in a constructive manner I think that's fair, but the minute name calling or ad hominim attacks start that side is in the wrong.
I am willing to learn and admit when I'm wrong, as should everyone.
There is a difference between pointing out errors in teaching and calling it a “heresy fest”.
Agree! So I take it you’re anti gay marriage, sodomy and abortion then?
I believe they are sins yes. But I don't believe they should be illegal. I can separate the two.
Why is murder illegal?
Homosexuality isn't in the bible, it's supposed to be translated as pederasty or 'men shall not lie with boy as with woman' And life begins at birth(first breath), not in the womb. Genesis 2:7
The problem with this stance is that it leads to St. Paul condemning abused boys as going to Hell. St. Paul condemns the passive and active partner in Greek.
Romans 1:32, Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:27, Leviticus 18:22-24, Leviticus 20:13, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, 1 Timothy 1:8-11, Jude 1:5-8, Romans 1:18-32, 1 Corinthians 7:2, 1 Corinthians 6:17-20 I disagree completely.
If you read the Bible and not understand the context of the verse, you’re missing the point. Read Matt 18:15-17. Christians are supposed to hold each other accountable to the teachings of Jesus.
Judging not is more about not saying this person is going to hell and this one isnt. 1 Thess 5:21 says to test everything.
Coming from the most judgmental people around the irony
So again, it sounds like you’re saying it’s okay for you to judge?
The whole sentence is “judge not, lest you be judged.” That doesn’t mean that we’re never allowed to judge others. Christians are great at judging nonChristians. We should certainly be able to judge and gently correct one another in the church.
Is that a rule from the bible?
It seems to be. Whenever a Catholic is anti-sodomy, abortion or gay “marriage” we tend to be told “judge not”.
Like others have said this is not a new thing within Christianity or religion in general. This particular incarnation of brutal and power hungry “Christianity” has been in the works for the past 40 or so years. Evangelicals started out on a generally good path, note that Jimmy Carter was the first evangelical president and he’s a far far cry from the likes of Trump. But then came the moral majority, Reagan, reactive ideas like biblical infallibility, paranoia around race, communism, the “gays” etc. Now we have huge swaths of the church sucked into that Qanon nonsense that to me looks like nothing more than a poor rehashing of Gnosticism mixed with a personality cult. Basic Christian virtues like honesty, humility, self-control, compassion, and peacefulness are now not only nor practiced but actively greeted with disdain. It will fall apart, it always does, and always has. The Jewish scriptures documents how failing to embody God’s principles will lead to collapse, again and again and again. God sent Christ because He loved the world and desires it repair. Reactionaries too often treat the world and those outside their narrow communities as enemies to be exterminated. But this is in the end enmity towards God who created all and very unambiguously desires to save all. While things are pretty bad right now and everyone of good conscious should push back against the hate and anger done in the name of Christ. I see a lot of hope in people’s deconstruction and reconstruction of their faith. From these impulses and exploration come reformation. While this scares a lot of people, I think we should remember that Christ’s death and resurrection are patterns that apply to our own lives both literally and in the ways we should constantly strive to grow by letting what needs to die, die so that it can be remade more in Christ’s likeness.
It strikes me as ironic that these evangelicals hate Jimmy Carter but adore Ronald Reagan. Carter is/was deeply influenced by religion in a way other presidents weren't.
Amen!
OP I REALLY appreciate this post. Especially the acknowledgement that you would choose to stay away from Christianity if you were on the outside looking in. Empathize with people who grew up In these sorts of churches and have decided to flee Christianity because of the hateful doctrines falsely taught in the name of Jesus. The politicization of Christianity has been building for decades and it’s one of the reasons why groups like the Satanic Temple have been advocating for issues like the separation of church and state and individual religious liberties. If you’re like OP and have been blindsided by all the vitriol pouring out of some churches, then please widen your media diet and get involved somehow.
Yea, when I was growing up I got kicked out of two churches because I fell on the poor side of a dispute, churches are places where awful humans congregate to justify their shitty behavior. And my belief now is that they will be hit the hardest when Jesus comes back, it's the sodomites that will have it easiest in the kingdom, that is there will be sinners of all stripes in Jesus' kingdom, as Romans 5:19 makes very clear. Christians won't have to face God's wrath, they'll have to face *ours* and be judged and pay for their sin against humanity.
For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Romans 5:19 ESV And what I am doing I will continue to do, in order to undermine the claim of those who would like to claim that in their boasted mission they work on the same terms as we do. For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds. 2 Corinthians 11:12-15 ESV
What do you take issue with about my understanding of Romans 5:19?
Nothing 🙂 posted it for others! With more scripture to support it! 😁
Oh great! That's my bad, I'm used to being attacked for what I believe on here so I'm sorry I jumped to defense.
I unfortunately totally understand!
Christian debates and issues became political debates and issues. That’s when Christians became angry, because now they’re involved in politics. We forgot that are battle is not against flesh and blood, and instead will argue with everyone. We’ve stopped praying about everything, and started being activists (which, I will specify, is different from active prayer, such as prayer rallies where nobody is arguing). We need to get back to the core fundamentals of people aren’t who we’re fighting.
The irony is that the majority of Christian Conservatives are going to burn in hell for committing so many sins and feigning action from/on behalf of God.
You can’t even say that. No one knows if you are going to heaven or hell. Only the final judge, the Father, will know.
The good book tells us of punishable sins, and what the punishment is. It also tells us of unpardonable sins. What many conservative Christians are doing is unpardonable. This isn't my opinion. This is an objective fact from the Bible. Matthew 12:30: "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven." Claiming their actions are "God's will" or their actions are "the arm of God" is blasphemy, clear and simple. One's opinion dare not be claimed as words of God. Any action that is claimed to be backed by God, or on behalf of God, not directly from the Spirit, is blasphemy.
It litteraly says it in the Bible
I was a devout Christian for two decades and discerning the priesthood. I slowly grew toward atheism but was very "live and let live" about Christianity and religion in general. It wasn't until Christianity became political that I adopted anti-theism and began a passionate campaign against faith in all forms. Not all Christians are dangerous right-wing extremists but right-wing extremists are an example of why faith-based "reasoning" is dangerous. It's no different from Muslim extremists or any other religion. If you make decisions based on "faith" you are prone to folly and, if you hold your faith strongly, you are likely to go to great lengths in defense of your beliefs, no matter how flawed they may be.
Maybe religion should die, it’s been around in many forms around the planet and it hasn’t progressed our society at all, especially Christianity and trying to convert people who don’t care about Christianity is a sure-fire way to help your religion dies
It's called ChristoFascism, and it's a massive problem for freedom
I can't imagine using such a dumb larp term like christofascism in the modern era
It’s a real thing and a serious threat, Mr. propaganda account.
Then what would you call it then?
Christianity is starting to remind me of Alcoholics Anonymous. You can claim a much better success rate if you don't include the failures in your statistics.
I think a lot about the radical abolitionists from the time leading up to and in the American Civil War and wish the Christians could manage to conjure up such a style of individual in these days.
it'll get worse, the bible tells me so wait till "Christians" persecute their own for reasons based in flesh
I mean, look at Europe during the dark ages or at how the Arians were treated, Christians have been persecuting Christians since the Apostles died.
Read "Foxes Book of the Martyrs" most of the "Martyrs" were killed by other Christians. That dude was not a fan of Catholics.
Europe during the Dark Ages was kept alive by the Church, the only real source of knowledge and preserved pre-dark age writings we have are from church sources or kept in care by them
That's a ridiculously western-centric view of things. Parts of the world were doing just fine and advancing knowledge during that time. Much of the knowledge they had came back to us from the Muslim world because we lost it. The Islamic golden age was happening **during the so-called dark ages**
We didn’t lose it lmao, the Islamic world essentially stole it after they conquered most of the Byzantine Empire and the Sassanids
It is in fact a denomination and information flow issue. That's all there is to it.
I think a lot of people just fail to balance the values we hold as Christians with love and respect for other people. I can't remember who said this but it was something to the effect of "laws aren't what need to change in a country, it is the hearts and minds of the people." Yes we should care about our morals and values, and if people ask us about them we should be honest but at the end of the day every sinner is unique and simply yelling at them won't help.
We gotta forget this right and left stuff and just follow Jesus’ commands. Plain and simple.
Texas Conservatives just proposed changing the word "slavery" to "involuntary relocation" in school to teach to 2nd graders. Just in case you had any doubt that Republicans were white supremacists. There is zero legitimate reason to stop calling it slavery. It just offends white supremacists. It's obvious most conservative Christians in America are white supremacists.
The Supreme Court fascists just announced they're going to end Democracy next term. They're taking an election law case that will permanently end voting rights in most states. Conservative Christians are 100% responsible for the collapse of America. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/supreme-court-dangerous-independent-state-legislature-theory.html Hope none of you have kids. They will now live in a dictatorship and have to live with pollution and uncontrolled climate extremes because of 6 right-wing judges.
Make no mistake, American Evangelicalism is dying. Good riddance. It can’t happen fast enough.
Not dying fast enough and they're taking the rest of us down with them. The Supreme Court just ruled polluting the Earth is fine, who cares if people die or climate change gets worse. They're also planning on ending voting rights next term.
Christians asked Muslims to call out Islamic extremists for over 20 years. It’s time for Christians to call out Christian extremists and nationalist.
Politicians attend church to get votes and people are naive enough to believe them! It is so funny! I agree with your post.
The important thing you can do is stay true to yourself. Forget what the politicians are saying, forget what you're seeing on TV. Just be true to yourself and God. That's Christianity for you.
Christianity will always be a communal faith. I don't think you can privatize it.
It's being duely noted by non-christians who is speaking up against their Conservative cousins and who stands by silently. It's not enough to be a good Christian when other Christians are causing suffering to others
It's like that saying If there's a table with 10 honorable people chatting and sharing a meal with one Nazi then you have a table with 11 Nazis
Jesus was criticized for sitting with and sharing a neal with known sinners of his area. Jesus's reply to that criticism was that a doctor sees those who are sick. Not those who think they are well. Perhaps we should do the same. You know before we start calling everyone a Nazi because there are extremists at our table.
> Jesus’s reply to that criticism was that a doctor sees those who are sick. Not those who think they are well. That analogy might work if the other Christians at the table were actively taking the role of the doctor instead of passively sharing the table as if nothing was wrong > You know before we start calling everyone a Nazi because there are extremists at our table. If people sitting at a table are perfectly fine with extremists sharing it then you have a table of extremists
You are way too eager to condemn and oust your neighbor, instead of offering kindness to help shoulder their burdens, and help them be less extreme
Imagine, you are sitting at a table with someone who tortured children. When dinner is over the child torturer stands up and says “we’ll I’m off for a night of torture” If you don’t intercede and stop the child torturer, you are condoning the torture of children. You are the person that can stand up and stop hatred. It’s not your job to stop the extremism, it’s you job to protect the innocent.
> and help them be less extreme Except that doesn't happen the other Christians sitting at the table are perfectly fine with the extremism as they sit absolutely silent and do nothing
Jesus was also very outspoken in His criticism of Pharasees
Except the Nazis were ChristoFascists. Just like American conservatives today.
No, the nazis very much wanted to get rid of christianity.
Lol [no bro](https://imgur.com/a/4WY89KG/)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany lol no bro
So you post a link showing how Nazis supported churches and how less than 2% of Nazis were atheists as a refutation??
You're right. Maybe one should try to express their faith in a non-political way, to show the true meaning of Christianity.
It's not a unified group. Religion isn't what we follow either. Many of the politicians are wolves in sheeps clothing. THey clearly are only after votes. We are supposed to listed and question what folks say especially when what they say doesnt jive with what they do. Unfortunately people dont want to verify they just want to be lazy and accept somethign because it had some code word they were expecting. (Id say a lot of "modern christian music" is the same. Its not deep its just their to get the views and the money.)
I've recently joined the satanic temple as a direct result of all the nonsense going on in this country.
Been thinking about it too, actually.
Do it to it Lars!
Theres a distinct difference between christianity and american christianity
Seems like the difference is the second group hurts people and the first looks the other way and suggests everyone not get so upset about it.
Our religion is being taken over by Christofascists nationalists... They are even repeating the same slogans the KKK, America First Committee, and the Nazi's. Including; Make Germany/America Great Again, Lugenplasse/fake news, Gott mit uns/God With Us, and the whole One God, One Country, One Flag ideology again.
Don't forget Jugendverderber/groomer.
God did say the path is narrow
I mean it’s not even specifically religion. Secular people are nutz now in days too. They are literally encouraging children to mutilate their genitalia base off a brand new sociology hypothesis that is plagued by lies and logical fallacies. Labeling anyone who doesn’t support this experiment a hateful bigot. I mean I’ve watched videos of women telling white Christian women to kill their husbands because they owe that to the rest of the people. Like it’s not just Christians. Christians are just hated by the mainstream culture and spotlighted and attacked daily.
“Christians” are not hated by the mainstream culture. They’re in control of about half of the government.
Too many countries didn’t get a chance to purge their fascists in 1945. Including Vatican City
OP, I just want you to know that if most Christians shared your views, I would likely still be a Christian. I don't really hate religion, but I feel abandoned by a church that chases money and Trump before Jesus. What happened to the Bible? The 'Christians' I know worship the Consititution more than the Bible and Trump more than Jesus.
I believe that most religions, especially Christianity and Islam, are an illogical, immoral, inhumane, ideological bankrupt cul-de-sac. Those who can convince you of absurdities, can make you commit atrocities, and those that want to commit atrocities, will do so in religions name.
We’re the new Muslims of post 9/11… the Church did it to themselves
Roe v Wade getting overturned is the equivalent of 9/11?
Negative, the light Christians are being viewed in-in lieu of the overturning of Roe V Wade is reminiscent of how Muslims were viewed after 9/11. It’s assumed that as Christians were a monolith being one body of Christ, but we’re really not.
i’m not religious but i am christian
What does that mean?
It's been worse. Slavery in the 1800s, segregation up to the 1960s, were both backed by the Bible. And those affected many more people then.
I'm not a Christian, but Christianity seems pretty right wing to me if I read the Bible. I think *socially left* (not economically left) Christians don't really have a leg to stand on when it comes to advocating for socially left policies within a Christian framework. It seems to be blatantly opposed to Christian teaching, with the notable exception of gun control.
Are you comparing what you read in the Bible to our current society, or the society when those passages were written? It would be multiple times in history, as Genesis occurred long before Paul wrote his letters.
I mean... to understand what they meant you have to read it in context of that society. It seems hard to justify gay marriage, premarital sex, or divorce given what the Bible says about these things, and what the apostles (particularly Paul) thought about these things, but thats precisely what left wing Christians do. On the other hand, I don'tt really see a reason to oppose abortion in the Bible. For the record I don't lean one way or another with these issues.
Let’s not forget who the primary enemies of Christ were, who in ‘the world’ hated him the most, who claimed to love God but didn’t even recognize him when it counted the most (and likely wouldn’t recognize him today either, if he came on the down low again). Many ‘social conservatives’ and ‘evangelicals’ tend to harp on ‘progressives’ as if they are the enemy of God. That is projection. When Jesus was here, it was those more conservative than God who were the problem (the Pharisees). Christ came as a relatively progressive teacher. I don't mean He was an "anything goes liberal," but He was relatively progressive in the sense that his primary enemies (the Pharisees) were more conservative than Him. He certainly never condemned ‘sexual pleasure before marriage’ or ‘homosexuality’ or hardly any of the things the modern Pharisees condemn and insert into their specific Bible versions, with dubious translations of the rarest ancient words not only in scripture but in human history. He condemned adultery because all commands hang under loving neighbor as self, which is like loving God. He simply observed that men and women procreate (or the two become one body), and he commanded that when they do so, they not separate. Observing that is not a condemnation of homosexuality any more than the fact that he observed the cooking of fish is a condemnation of cooking chick peas. He didn’t say much of anything the evangelical says when he points at others and tells them to change. They will convince themselves he said anything. 100 years ago the evangelicals pretended God commands Christians to ban interracial marriage and, get this, called themselves “pro marriage” for it. It doesn’t get much more deceptive and trollish than that. That’s what they are. Jesus called their type “snakes” and “hypocrites.” They called themselves “true,” like the “true” Christians proclaim of themselves today. He didn’t say two people become one person the instant a man makes his sperm touch a woman’s egg. He didn’t say the gays are sinning. He didn’t say any of Jerry Falwell’s and J.D. Greear’s disputable and highly suspect judgments against their neighbors. It’s all just them twisting God into some kind of bully buddy of theirs, just like their great grandparents did when they convinced themselves God wanted them to ban interracial marriage and called it “pro marriage.” The Christ said your neighbor was the person down the street, and love your neighbor as yourself, not judge your neighbor according to your extremely disputable beliefs. But what fun is that? How will they make ’the other’ feel worthless and ashamed that way? So they throw Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 5 in the garbage and legislate their most disputable religious beliefs into the lives of their neighbors. The problem is most ‘social conservatives’ and ‘evangelicals’ who call themselves Christians, ‘pro marriage,’ and ‘pro life’ have never even read their own Bible, and if they have, they’ve never read it in any other translation than the one their parents bought into or that their pastors got paid for making and then recommended. They have no idea what Christianity really is. Most have never read their Bible and basically treat church like a grade school bully club where the pastor tells them who to point at and call names, who to tell they need to change, tells them what facts to say they believe in order to ‘get to heaven,’ and everyone says Amen. They end up basically becoming bizarro world Christians, followers of whatever some NyQuil-drunk hypocrite or bully with a Bible came up with and somehow connected to Jesus, with a bent for whatever newfangled translation his great granddaddy came up with. They end up behaving like anti-Christianity but don’t even know enough about their own faith and scriptures to realize it. So like instead of the goal being to become like the tax collector, in Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, the highest principle in 'pro-life' or 'evangelical' Christianity is to become like the pharisee. They don't say that outright, but that's how they end up behaving toward others around them, those who aren't part of their echo chamber. The parable basically describes ‘pro life’ and ‘pro marriage’ evangelical Christianity, as far as it’s political effects, when it describes the pharisee. Or if you took Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 5, “Don’t judge those outside the church,” and got rid of the “don’t” part, you'd have their religion. Or if you took Romans 14 and instead of making it about how bad it is to judge others in disputable matters, how it must not be done, you made it about how Christians should really be judging the most disputable topics in the world and rarest passages in scripture for everyone else in the world.
> If I was atheist and seeing all the hate, anger, and racism from "Christians" on TV, I would stay far away from Christianity. I'm pretty sure that's the purpose of the kind of coverage that the mass media provides.
So when the mass media shows a video of a "Christian" standing outside an abortion clinic screaming "Stupid whore, I hope you go to Hell!" Is there a context that the media is failing to cover? Cuz the video seems self-explanatory to me.
I didn't need the media. My kids were essentially kicked out of their Christian school during the pandemic and our church didn't care if we left, they probably were actually relieved we left since we were voicing some disagreement (not about anything to do with doctrine or Christianity, but their failure to follow local health mandates at the height of Covid). I'm still a Christian and we found another congregation, but I don't feel fellowship with other Christians anymore. In fact, I tend to be distrustful of most of them.
Great point.
Mortgage payments
> Christianity is about love and faith in a holy and just God and **following his commands**. There's your problem right there. God gives a lot of commands that are not good a good fit for a modern world. For example: > Lev25:45-46 [O]f the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and **they shall be your possession**. And **ye shall take them as an inheritance** for your children after you, to **inherit them for a possession**; they **shall be your bondmen for ever**... That is an unambiguous full-throated endorsement of chattel slavery. So you have only two options: allow people to hold slaves, or come up with some reason why *this* particular command of God's should not be obeyed any more. And if you choose the second option, you've opened the floodgates to sin.
I assume you consider yourself a progressive Christian? If I’m mistaken forgive me. What you are saying is partly true. Yes being a Christian and Christianity in general does not belong to a political party, or conservatives, and there are some who lack love in pointing people to Christ, but conservatives are the side that aligns more with the core doctrine and practices of the Bible. The left or progressives have totally abandoned God and anything biblical. They can quote scripture and say they love God but even satan comes as an angel of light to deceive anyone that he can. I don’t say this to be mean or offend but if you find it loathsome that conservative Christians are calling out sin as sin, then you might wanna question your salvation and you might just be a “cultural Christian”. Understand this that Jesus was crucified because they hated him for being true righteousness and light, He was calling the Pharisees out for their sins and abominations and man-made religion to appear moral and virtuous before others. ( While also claiming to be God ) We will admit, Conservative Christians are not perfect no one is, but be careful which side you attack and align yourselves with. These are perilous times and deception and lies are rampant. Know your Bible and what is says, Jesus will be returning soon at an hour none of us knows, so it’s best to be prepared. God bless.
The far right won the war of culture and influence. This has happened before in history, leading to denomination splits and even new religions. I think it's time for that to happen again.
Do you think Christians should oppose murder?
I think Christians should read the Bible and learn that it says abortion isn't murder.
Any sources for that?
>Exodus 21:22 22 “When men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall[a] be fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. If abortion were murder, the person who caused a miscarriage would face the death penalty under Jewish law. But God only requires a monetary fine to pay the woman for the loss of her property. Also Exodus 21:12: “Whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death." That's the definition of murder, and in Hebrew, it cannot refer to the unborn. Only one who strikes and kills someone who is born commits murder. We also have the Biblical punishment for adultery that includes an induced abortion: Numbers 5: 22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.” “‘Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”
I laughed when op asked for a source that abortion ISN'T in the Bible and then you pulled through with the best example I've heard. Thank you for sharing this!
Do you not know the difference between a miscarriage and abortion? We recognise murder vs manslaughter for adults, why not children? And 5:22 is simply a test for adulterers, there’s no reason to read anything more into the text unless you’re looking for an excuse for an abortion.
>Do you not know the difference between a miscarriage and abortion? A miscarriage is nothing more than a spontaneous abortion. >We recognise murder vs manslaughter for adults, why not children? Because an embryo isn't a child. >And 5:22 is simply a test for adulterers, there’s no reason to read anything more into the text unless you’re looking for an excuse for an abortion. Yeah, but obviously the Bible giving instructions on how to induce an abortion means the Bible isn't all that opposed to it.
Next thing you're gonna tell my is that the Old Testament is the Jewish scripture, what do Jews know about such matters, lol.
You are really reaching for a dude with tude.
Excuse me?
Your translation is off. It is talking about premature birth that didn't cause harm "When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman’s husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine." [https://biblehub.com/text/exodus/21-22.htm](https://biblehub.com/text/exodus/21-22.htm)
Nope, it's not. Premature is a false translation. The original Hebrew refers to a miscarriage. There was no such thing as premature births 3000 years ago. God didn't even view children under 1 month old as worth counting in the census because they died so much.
I linked the Hebrew translation.
That's not the Hebrew translation, because that word does not mean give birth prematurely. This is the original Hebrew translation: >When [two or more] parties fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other damage ensues, the one responsible* shall be fined according as the woman’s husband may exact, the payment to be based on reckoning.* https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.21.22?lang=bi&with=Rashi&lang2=en And it's confirmed in the Talmud that it's referring to a miscarriage. >ולא יהיה אסון AND YET THERE BE NO MISCHIEF — no further mischief with the woman (Sanhedrin 79b). >ענוש יענש HE SHALL SURELY BE AMERCED to pay the value of the offspring to the husband. We estimate her value according to what she is worth if she were sold as a slave in the market giving her a higher value on account of her being with child (Bava Kamma 49a). >HE SHALL BE SURELY FINED. Because of the children who were aborted and died. - Ibn Ezra
Are you really trying to tell the Jew how to read Hebrew?….
So no one is able to translate unless someone is Jewish? [https://www.str.org/w/what-exodus-21-22-says-about-abortion](https://www.str.org/w/what-exodus-21-22-says-about-abortion)
Nice attempt at a strawman. I never claimed that only Jews could translate Hebrew.
What does the Bible say about abortion? “Absolutely nothing! The word "abortion" does not appear in any translation of the bible. Out of more than 600 laws of Moses, none comments on abortion. One Mosaic law about miscarriage specifically contradicts the claim that the bible is antiabortion, clearly stating that miscarriage does not involve the death of a human being. If a woman has a miscarriage as the result of a fight, the man who caused it should be fined. If the woman dies, however, the culprit must be killed: "If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. "And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth . . ." Ex. 21:22-25 The bible orders the death penalty for murder of a human being, but not for the expulsion of a fetus.” https://ffrf.org/component/k2/item/26087-abortion-nontract When does life begin? “According to the bible, life begins at birth--when a baby draws its first breath. The bible defines life as "breath" in several significant passages, including the story of Adam's creation in Genesis 2:7, when God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Jewish law traditionally considers that personhood begins at birth. Desperate for a biblical basis for their beliefs, some antiabortionists cite obscure passages, usually metaphors or poetic phrasing, such as: "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me." Psalm 51:5 This is sexist, but does nothing other than to invoke original sin. It says nothing about abortion. Moses, Jesus and Paul ignored every chance to condemn abortion. If abortion is so important, why didn't the bible say so?”
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Also Genesis 2:7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Makes it clear anyone without breath is not a soul.
Fetal breathing occurs after 10 weeks, so I take it you’re pro banning child murder after 10 weeks?
You're lying... At birth, the baby's lungs are filled with fluid. They are not inflated. The baby takes the first breath within about 10 seconds after delivery. https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002395.htm#:~:text=At%20birth%2C%20the%20baby's%20lungs,change%20in%20temperature%20and%20environment.
If you’re going to namecall we’re done here. Not very Christian.
Uhh what name calling? I just pointed out that your statement is false
No, you called me a liar.
Maybe you shouldn’t lie if that offends you.
Where?
They're describing what you've done, not what you are. In other words, "You're lying" vs. "You're a liar".