[Disclaimer] - I am not an American and I consider myself atheist, I am Caucasian and born in a pre-dominantly Christian country.
Based on my limited knowledge of Christianity, it is all about social justice, compassion and peace.
And I was always wondering how come Republicans are perceiving themselves as devout Christians while the political party they support is openly opposing those virtues and if this doesn’t make them hypocrites?
For them the mortal enemy are the lefties who are all about social justice, helping the vulnerable and the not so fortunate and peace.
Christianity sounds to me a lot more like socialist utopia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism
You probably don’t want to read all that so here’s a what I think is the important take away as far as your question is concerned. American Christians have always been a bit different from the mainstream religion elsewhere. The largest Christian group to come to America in the early colonial period were called the Puritans. They believed that the English Reformation did not go far enough. They were staunchly anti-Catholic and were very upset that the Church of England had adopted so much theology and tradition from the Catholic Church.
The Puritans believed that the Bible is the complete revelation of God rejecting the papacy, the concept of continuing revelations, and the related concept of the Divine Right of Kings. They believed that individuals forged their own covenant with God and that their belief and acceptance was all that in required for their salvation. That sin is so pervasive in our corrupt world that it was unavoidable, no person can be “good” or worthy of salvation and so salvation is only available through God’s mercy. They believed that it was their role as Christians to fight against the corruption of the world by spreading their theology and enforcing their concepts of sin and redemption on each other and on the greater community. The narrative is that they fled Europe to avoid religious persecution. The persecution that they faced was that they were not allowed to make laws banning things like alcohol or “revealing” clothing that they considered sinful or forcing people to go to their churches.
They adopted most of there theology from a reformist movement called Calvinism that sought to expand the Protestant Reformation further stripping away the power of the clergy and empower believers to enforce theology. Calvinists adopted an extremely socially conservative interpretation of the Bible and supported strict adherence to their moral ideology and severe punishment for violations of their concept of morality.
The modern Christian movements that trace themselves back to that foundation are still the largest Christian groups in the US. In the 1960’s the Republican party began the “Southern Strategy” which was shift of political focus to conservative social issues and attacking secular institutions. Republicans used this strategy to unite the philosophical descendants of the Puritans under a political ideology that is strongly focused on conservative social issues and on pushing their concepts of religion and morality into all aspects of society enforcing adherence through government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
Prosperity theology is a newer theological concept that was popularized by Oral Roberts, has been embraced by the Republican party, and allowed the rise of the megachurch and celebrity preachers. Basically Prosperity theology gives an answer to the question of how you know that that someone is “living right” and a solution to the problem of evil. You know that someone is “living right” because God rewards their righteousness with material wealth. Evil exists as a punishment for the corruption of the secular world. Bad things primarily happens to the unholy but evil spills over to the righteous because secular corruption is so pervasive as to make sin unavoidable in our fallen world. Poverty is the primary form of punishment God visits upon the unholy.
You say you are from a predominantly Christian country so I assume that you are sufficiently familiar with the Gospels to recognize that this is a significant departure from the teachings of Jesus as presented in the Bible. I dare say that the departure is significant enough to be called an outright rejection of the teachings of the purported source of their morality and salvation.
For the same reason that the January 6 protesters call themselves “patriots”, dumb anti-vaxxers call themselves “smart”, violent people call themselves “peaceful”, naive conspiracy theory believing idiots call themselves “woke”, etc. It is easy to think that you know the answer, and really, Really, REALLY hard to acknowledge how little we truly know. Likewise we all want to think of ourselves as the “good” people, and it’s a super tough pill to swallow that we are not.
Which ironically is what many people say that Christianity is truly about:
There is no one who does “good”, no, not one single one. All have missed the mark, and fallen short.
- Jesus
Yeah, but Jesus only said that because he hadn’t met Mike Johnson yet.
(/s, obviously)
Conservativism is not an ideology, it is narcissism wearing the skin of a stoic. They believe they are inherently virtuous, and therefore anything the conservative thinks, does, says, or wants will be righteous.
Christianity feeds this by reinforcing the idea that the conservative is personal friends with the Almighty Creator of the Universe and Final Arbiter of Absolute Justice. They claim to speak for the divine, and therefore they are divine.
This is all the justification a conservative requires for whatever they want to do. Bigotry? No, God is the one passing judgement. Selfishness? No, it is God’s plan for me to hoard wealth. Violence? My arm is the right arm of the Lord. And when I sin, I shall be personally forgiven by the only person who matters: myself.
It is not possible to be a hypocrite, because whatever the conservative does is justified by their identity. When they do something, it is good, and when they do not adhere to their own stated ideology, it is good. When the “other” does anything, it is bad because the other is not the self and the self is good. So therefore the other is evil.
When the other does the same thing as the self, it is bad when the other does it and good when the self does it.
You don’t have to be religious to be a conservative, but it helps.
They aren’t.
They are the best “Christian”s
One of Jesus’s teachings was about not showing off your faith just to be seen.
Something about not praying in public just so you can be seen and that instead you should go to your closet/room and pray in private where no one can see you.
The one’s following that rule are the ones you will never see but that will still be helping their neighbors, quietly and to no fanfare.
Very, very true. I have met many so-called “Christians” who are only interested in moral authority/power. They usually drive cars with a fish on them, or a bumper sticker with some cliche about god.
I worked with ONE person who was probably the most faithful Christian I’ve ever met. He didn’t talk about religion. He didn’t wear a cross (or if he did, it was on a chain beneath his shirt and tie). He never judged people. He was genuinely pleasant to everyone.
I think there’s a significant overlap in Christianity and Republican thinking because many people are okay with hypocrisy and disdain critical thinking.
A group of people raised from birth to not question what they believe and why is going to be incredibly susceptible to being lied to.
The bible is full of so many contradictions and so much vague bs. They use it with their pretzel logic to justify whatever atrocity they’re into at the time. A lot of them are also narcissists. They’re self-important because they’re trying to do “god’s will.”
There are all kinds of people who are Christian. Their worldviews and interpretations are as varied as anyone else. Most of the ones I know aren’t the type to go cherry picking passages to use as an excuse to mistreat others. Many quietly lead their lives as an example of Christian faith. It’s often acknowledged among Christians that no one - Christian or otherwise- is perfect and no one but God can judge others.
There are others who didn’t get that memo. They take it all very literally. It’s like they completely missed the point of the four gospels in which one of the themes is Jesus at odds with the Pharisees who are so stuck on the Old Testament that they forget love and compassion. It’s not that the New Testament contradicts the Old Testament so much as it’s teaching that going through the motions and following the rules exactly as written is not the same as living with God and showing humanity towards others.
In my experience, this latter group is often comprised of people who grew up being taught strict adherence to the Bible, with a particular focus on the Old Testament, and born again types whose rigid compliance keeps them on the straight and narrow.
Not all Christians are Republicans or conservative. You really have all types, from the ones you’re talking about to some pretty liberal, polar opposite ones. Some identify with conservative politics because of their Christian views and others are avowed liberals for the same reason.
Most of the Christians I know are good people, and their happiness and just how they live their lives is something you want for yourself. They lead by example. I’ve been around the other ones too and I’m not particularly fond of hanging out with them. Ironically, those were the ones whose outward attitudes and behavior in private were completely contradictory. Basically, they were the kinds of people you probably don’t want to be around regardless of religion.
Fear.
Christianity sounds to me a lot more like socialist utopia.
A lot of atheists end up with that impression, maybe from unfamiliarity. That Jesus was just a dope socialist who loved everyone.
But the religion has been absolutely shitty for pretty much as soon as he was dead (at least).
For example, the other day I saw someone cite Acts 4 as an example of how Christianity was a commune, where people pooled their assets.
It conveniently left out the part where Peter had an older couple who didn’t pay him everything they owned who were both struck dead after meeting privately and being confronted (allegedly killed by God). Which was a reference back to the book of Joshua where a guy kept some loot for himself and was outed and killed.
Women were told to be silent and subservient (in spite of ‘heretical’ sects and texts of Christianity where Jesus was instructing female disciples and they were acting as teachers - ironically the only extant sect that claimed Jesus was talking about Greek atomism and naturalism was one of these).
The religion was canonized right after the emperor of Rome converted, so guess what was canonized? A bunch of shit about how patriarchal monarchy is the divine plan. The saying attributed to Jesus about how someone who succeeded in life should rule and should only hold power temporarily obviously gets excluded and eventually the collection of sayings is punishable by death for even possessing it.
Even a lot of that stuff about “blessed is the poor” was probably from Paul who was separating fools from their money. Originally there’s sayings about how those ministering shouldn’t collect money, but this gets straight up reversed in a later edition of Luke and you can see Paul in 1 Cor 9 arguing that he is entitled to make a living off ministering and encouraging donations “for the poor in Jerusalem.” But then elsewhere we see Paul was accepting expensive fragrant offerings from people. But that’s ok, as then in the gospels you see Jesus keeps an expensive fragrant offering and yells at the people who criticize him for not selling it and giving the proceeds to the poor.
It’s a bunch of feel good BS to con people out of their money. I don’t think it was always that from the very start, and probably even had some interesting things going on initially, but almost immediately after Jesus is out of the picture the errant early tradition gets morphed into a traditional cult where power and wealth consolidates at the top and it preaches subservience and obedience and self-hatred so you beg for the idea of salvation and trade all that you have for a promise the people you turn everything over to can’t fulfill.
So why would a group that wants power and wealth concentrated and to destroy democracy in favor of patriarchal authoritarianism be attractive to Christians? Because they’ve been being fattened up for that slaughter going on near two thousand years at this point.
It’s a bunch of feel good BS to con people out of their money.
Would it be an assholish move to point to the religion of Jesus himself in this context? I believe it would, and thus I won’t.
Not at all. There’s a very good case that the historical Jesus was extremely outspoken about the grift of Temple Judaism.
Not only do you have tidbits like him prohibiting carrying anything (including sacrifices) through the temple after throwing out the merchants in Mark (theologically problematic given he isn’t dead yet and supposedly that’s what invalidated the need for animal sacrifices, so you see this line left out when Matthew copies from the passage).
But you have one of my favorite apocryphal lines:
Jesus said, “The messengers and the prophets will come to you and give you what belongs to you. You, in turn, give them what you have, and say to yourselves, ‘When will they come and take what belongs to them?’”
- Gospel of Thomas saying 88
(The work also uniquely has a parable about a son inheriting a treasure in his parent’s field, selling it not knowing a treasure was buried within, and then the person he sells it to finding the treasure and lending it out at interest - and I can’t think of better description for the grift of selling salvation for tithes than “lending a buried treasure out at interest”.)
Which is again in the vein of another part of Mark left out of the other Synoptics, when he responded to a complaint about eating from a crop on the Sabbath with “was the Sabbath made for man or man for the Sabbath?”
So out of the many things I’m not sure about a historical Jesus, at very least “dude wasn’t a fan of the religious grift” was one I’m pretty sure of, particularly when both early canonical and heretical sources agree about the subversive position.
The story as I understand it (explained by Neil Stephenson in Snow Crash ) was that living Jesus preached universal mutuality: Love your neighbor as yourself. Everyone is your neighbor. The myth of the empty tomb was to show that it was the people’s religion, independent of temples and priests.
But then…
A disorganized movement was too much for the people (or more likely the apostles wanted sociopolitical power) so they created a myth of the resurrection and the founding of the church. Zombie Jesus has way different opinions than living Jesus.
If there really was a post-crucifixion Jesus, it was likely an impostor, a show. But Church tradition teems with miracles and hagiographs with only the word ofnthe Church itself as evidence.
Also: Jesus was made up by these early Xtian founders. He wasn’t a real person.
Almost no one respectable in the scholarship, including atheist scholars, thinks that’s the case.
And it would be the only instance I’m aware of where someone at the nascent stages of a cult made up a leader and immediately had major schisms around what that made up leader was saying.
Literally the earliest Christian documents we have are of a guy who was persecuting followers of Jesus suddenly going into areas where he had no authority to persecute, literally “if you can’t beat them, join them,” and then telling people not to pay attention to a different gospel “not that there is a different gospel” or to listen to him over alleged ‘super-apostles.’
The next earliest document is a gospel that’s constantly trying to spin statements allegedly said in public by Jesus with secret teachings that only a handful of their own leaders supposedly heard.
Not long after that is a letter from the bishop of Rome complaining his presbyters were deposed in the same place Paul was complaining about them receiving a different gospel, and how young people should defer to the old and women should be silent (so we know the schism was supported by the young and women, who just so happen to be at the center of a competing tradition which has extensive overlap with Paul’s letters to Corinth).
For all of the above to have occurred within just a few decades of a made up person would be even less believable than that said person walked on water. Personally, I don’t believe either of those scenarios.
P.S. Carrier is a history PhD, not a biblical studies PhD, and a bit of a pompous moron. For example, he managed to miss one of the most interesting elements of early Christianity regarding the Gnostic references to cosmic seeds because his head was so far up his own rear that he couldn’t see past a (straight up bizarre) theory they were talking about a cosmic sperm bank. Nope - it has to do with Lucretius’s “seeds of things” but that’s a long discussion for another comment. Point is, I’d be wary of taking anything he says too seriously.
The point he makes about the only evidence for JC’s reality as a person is other people much later pointing at each other and saying “he said so”.
If, as he said, any real evidence beyond hearsay can be produced it might he credible.
They aren’t much later on. A number of the texts are composed within decades of his death. It’s much later in that we have copies, and they definitely had some edits along the way, but they are pretty early.
There’s arguably much better evidence a historical Jesus existed than a historical Pythagoras, for example. Do you doubt Pythagoras existed?
Or even Socrates - we only have two authors claiming to have direct knowledge of events around what he said, and the earliest fragments of their writings comes from the same collections of texts as early Christian writings, and the only full copy of Plato is centuries older in production than the earliest full copies of both canonical and extra-canonical texts.
What evidence for Socrates or Pythagoras do we have beyond hearsay?
The historicity of Jesus is that there was a Christian movement that was suppressed by Rome. But I’m not sure we can verify, even, it was led by an apocalyptic prophet. There were no texts before Mark, as the movement was entirely word of mouth, and as per all games of telephone, evolved with each retelling.
What scholarly consensus does assert is the scripture is not univocal, inspired or inerrant, and the narrative bends with every era to affirm the morality of the time. This is to say, it’s not a source for right or wrong, but a tool used to give authority to external beliefs. Whether that is to justify charity and compassion or to justify genocide against gays and Palestinians is up to the individual.
Anyone attempting to make the ‘everyone agrees’ argument about a religion instantly loses all credibility, like if you can’t understand why that’s a fallacious argument then you’ve got zero chance understanding the evidence.
“Most credible scholars, including most secular scholars agree” is different from “most people agree.”
You might want to actually look into why they agree before talking about understanding evidence.
Yeah, and even if he was to some degee based on a real person every single detail recorded about him is clearly false as can be demonstrated to be literary devices, copied from somewhere else, or just clearly impossible. It makes a lot more sense he was invented whole cloth, if early Christians believed he was a real person they sure made up a lot of stories about him - and the most devout Christian will have to agree with that because of the endless apocrypha and insertions.
He was like Santa Claus for the masses at the time.
Look, there are some basic precepts of New Testament Christian thought (don’t be an asshole) that are good things. It gets rather muddled quickly after you mall be away from that.
There are no mentions of Jesus outside of the bible until a lot years after his supposed death. Complete invention.
Right wing Christianity is aesthetically and morally performative and in practical terms, absolutely fascist. The term “bleeding heart” as in the politically performative “bleeding heart liberal” is a reference to the image of the crown of thorns on the heart of Christ.
You’re talking about a group of people who intend to use the second amendment to destroy the first. Study the Crusades and you’ll see history repeating itself.
Study the holocaust for the same reason.
There’s also a lot of very religious African American voters on the left, politically. Black churches, I know for sure, focus on social justice and non-violence. (I’m white but I’ve only lived in majority black cities so I’m well aware of their organizing.) You’ll notice many civil rights leaders, both today and in the past, are or were preachers and so have the Reverend title (obvious example: Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. but modern civil rights leaders are very often preachers).
This is an aside but Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) was the reverend at Ebenezer Baptist Church, MLK’s former church. He also has a Ph D and now I want to know what title formal invitations use for him.
They aren’t. They claim to be. But their words and actions prove otherwise.
Christianity is not about compassion and peace.
Forget utilitarian ethics altogether. Think of a twisted version of virtue ethics, where the only virtue is power.
Narcissism and sociopathy flows downwards from the top, submission and people-pleasing flows upwards from the bottom.
From the top down, having power makes you virtuous, and exercising power reflects that virtue.
If you are in a position of privilege and power, if you can kill people and take their stuff and get away with it, that marks you as powerful and to-be-feared, and therefore admirable.
If you are some kind of peasant, the opposite applies: you must be a submissive people-pleaser or face severe punishment.
If you’re somewhere inbetween, you do both: oppress those below you, and grovel to those above you. This is virtue on both fronts.
That’s conservative morality in a nutshell.
Christianity endorses this structure wholesale. It pats the peasants on the head and tells them they’ll be rewarded (one day, not today) for being good little people-pleasers, and puts a final boss at the very top of the org chart so that the powerful can do some token groveling-upwards, and so the peasants have someone else to grovel to when nobody’s around. It fits hand-in-glove with everything conservatives love.
Compassion-mercy-and-peace is just marketing spin clipped from the instructions for people-pleasing. Go along to get along, be helpful, don’t rock the boat.
You’ll notice that the core concept of christianity is earning tolerance from the powerful despite complete degradation. You are utterly worthless garbage and deserve to be tortured with fire forever; only via the sacrifice of an actual god can you can be promoted to salvage - though of course this status remains a completely undeserved gift that you should be overwhelmed with gratitude for.
Like a cop deciding not to murder you this time round: you are so blessed, now pick up that can.
Of course they love it.
That’s a very simple and incorrect view of Christianity. Has the overwhelming majority of Christian history been an example of all the antisocial behavior you described? Yes.
That said, whoever the historical Jesus was, the early followers of his movement were radicals who were opposed to the existing power structure and who said you should love your neighbor as yourself. That if someone strikes you on one cheek you should turn and let them strike the other. That might sound trite now, but that’s because it’s been a very successful idea. And I’m not saying that it’s original to Christianity or whoever Jesus was. But Christianity certainly did a lot to popularize it.
That strain of radical pro-social behavior has been woven all throughout Christian history, but at the same time every type of atrocity and abuse of power has been done in the name of Christianity because it was very quickly adopted and co-opted by the powerful.
Even if we grant that Christianity had a powerful message of love, it was inevitable it wouldn’t be sustainable, because having an incorrect model of the world (“there is an all powerful creator of the world who is personally interested in my day to day life”) will result in counterproductive behavior (“I should follow directions from this guy who says he’s in direct communication with the creator”). But I wrote all this because the idea of loving other people and offering them grace is valuable, it’s one thing we can think of as positive from Christianity, and it can thrive in other ecosystems of ideas besides theism.
“Slaves, obey your masters” is not radically opposing the existing power structure. Nowhere will you find a single instruction to disobey the powerful, or hold them to account.
Like I say, people-pleasing behaviour is definitely in there; Matthew 5 is all about not having any boundaries. But you’ll notice it’s not aimed at powers or principalities, nowhere does it suggest that masters should not beat their slaves or that kings should not retaliate to acts of war - and they’re certainly not for god himself, who absolutely would not forgive anyone for their ancestors’ disobedience without a major blood sacrifice, thus that whole crucifixion thing you might be vaguely aware of (though admittedly it’s pretty niche, hidden deep in the lore somewhere). Those instructions are for the little people, to keep them in their lane.
Which is not, to be extremely clear, to suggest that I’m some kind of randroid fuck who considers altruism to be a weakness; very much the opposite. We could have a much better world if more people would be nicer to each other even when they didn’t have to be.
It’s just that one-way altruism imposed in the context of a rigidly-endorsed social hierarchy just ain’t it. If the poor have to do all the heavy nice-peopling while a bunch of rich untouchable assholes work them to death and torture them for lulz, that would fit more into your whole late-stage-capitalism kind of bullshit - and christianity does not one fucking thing to combat that, while actively propping it up round the edges.
To be clear, I’m an atheist now, and don’t endorse Christianity.
You’re right that Jesus was not calling for violent resistance. Neither was Gandhi or MLK, but that wasn’t an endorsement of those in power.
Christian teachings were radical in their time because they rejected eye for an eye and taught that it wasn’t enough to love someone who loves you, but to love your enemies.
"For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’"
Of course then he goes on to talk about people who didn’t help those in need being punished in the afterlife.
As I commented and you’re well aware, Christianity does not result in an overall sustainable world view. And if you want someone who says “we should forcefully overthrow those in power” then no, Jesus didn’t say that. But his ideas (or whoever they really came from) are transformational, and the OP is justified in asking, “hey why is Christianity like this now?” My argument is that it’s because the set of ideas was flawed from the start, rather than that it’s a set of ideas made with the intention to dominate and exploit from the beginning.
They’re not. But they’re leaching off of Christians money
It isn’t Christ-ianity, as benJoseph, himself, was the wokest guy in all the new testament.
It is wearing the appearances of “their” religion while pushing animal-reaction-with-no-moral-responsibility that is going-on.
The genociders of Russia & Israel are doing the same thing, just with different appearances.
The Great Filter.
Read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, which is the most important psychology book on the planet, right now, & see how all these return to fundamentalism, where we are inherently valid, and genociding all “others” is our “GOD-given” Right rabids are…
pushing Kahneman System-1 ( imprint->reaction, aka animal-reaction, the limbic “reasoning” of herdbeasts & pack-animals, and gangs, and ideology-addiction/prejudice-addiction, which are 2-sides of the same “coin” ) to be displacing considered-reasoning, Kahneman System-2, from the world, is the consistent underlying-commitment in all of these fundamentalists.
They may wear the appearances of “the communist party”, or whatever Putin’s party is, or the republican party, or zionism, or the Confucian Marxist Leninist Kapha-metabolism anti-spiritual ideology of the CCP, but the underlying motivation is murdering/obliterating alternative-to-their-ideology/prejudice from our world, for their herd/gang’s global totalitarian supremacy.
This is natural, in The Great Filter, when humankind’s unconscious fights to beat/break/obliterate moral-anxiety from its domain, and animal-reaction can’t have moral-responsibility, so that is The Answer™, according to our unconscious-ignorance.
Faction against faction, until the polycrisis/metacrisis has “justified” exterminating our world’s life, is how unconscious-ignorance wants to play it out, for the “mythic” “importance” or “significance” of being THE “important thing” that beat God, broke God’s plan, & made God obey ( toddler-tantrums are always aimed at making the parents OBEY: that is their point ).
Universe, however, can’t care, and … no obeying/catering-to our unconscious-ignorance’s narcissism/entitlement is going to happen, so…
…
WHEN you encounter an addict systematically denying facts, whether a smoker denying that their smoking has anything, whatsoever, to do with their endless coughing, or a crack-addict denying that their utterly-corroded-health has anything to do with the crack that’s using their life, or an ideology-addict/prejudice-addict denying that evidence shows ClimatePunctuation exists, let-alone is still-accelerating ( as it must, for decades-more ),
THEN you are seeing Kahneman System-1’s fighting-off of objectivity/considered-reason, protecting animal-reaction, and the no-moral-responsibility condition that unconsciousness/ignorance wants to rule all, while narcissistically being catered-to by God.
The most central piece of evidence in this mechanism is … actually so old that it probably is from about the time of the sudden-collapse of the last Ice Age, 11,750-ish years ago:
In the Christian bible, the story in Genesis, of woman eating “the fruit of the Knowledge of Good & Evil” means woman ate Morality.
It’s RIGHT FSCKING THERE.
( altruism is generalized-mothering, as researchers from Exeter & Bristol universities found hard-evidence of, in studying wasps’ altruism, in Panama )
Morality is what women ate, & then shared it with us guys.
Moral-anxiety is the “downfall” the “loss of (animal-ignorance) grace”.
Herdbeasts do not have our moral-anxiety, they live in the “grace” of mere-animal-ignorance.
Notice, however, that for millenia, religion-men have distorted the story to convict women of “sin” that somehow downfell our entire species.
Gaslighting on that scale may never have been equalled, for significance of evil.
Think, though: *it’s the same thing as what the “Christians” are doing!
Kahneman System-1 is fighting-off considered-reasoning, and all the “women, who (supposedly) caused humankind’s downfall, ought be uneducated, barefoot, & pregnant, at home, obeying their LORD, a man” scammery is just male-ego trying to occupy the earthly place of lord, or trying to be the proxy “god”.
Israel’s claiming that Ezekiel 39 asserts that it is going to be successfully eradicating its neighbors, gaining supremacy…
… while creating such absolute-hatred among all the region surrounding them, that their “deterrent” is being corroded-away …
… so that in a few years the Muslim region won’t care how much damage Israel does to them, while they’re annihilating Israel …
Ideology-addiction/prejudice-addiction has strategic consequences.
Israel’s going to be annihilated, exactly as benJoseph stated, 2 millenia ago.
It’s the same, everywhere: animal-ignorance of ideology-addiction/prejudice-addiction is committed to genociding “others”, and arranges its own annihilation, whether through political reaction, or through assumption-river/religion reaction, or through impersonal forces like ClimatePunctuation, or food-chain-collapse, both terrestrial & marine ( late this century ), the same won’t think, because God obeys the local Ideology/Prejudice … the same mechanism.
Imagine humankind turning into herdbeasts, & through the different factions vying for supremacism, the entirety of herdbeast-humankind stampeding off a giant cliff, becoming all dead, broken at the bottom.
That is The Great Filter’s probable outcome, at the moment.
the “politics” of Leninism, which uses brainwashing “education” to produce/enforce “proletariat dictatorship”,
and the “politics” of Murdochism, which uses brainwashing TV to produce/enforce “populist dictatorship”,
they’re really both fighting to obliterate considered-reasoning from all authority, for their exclusive dominion.
They’re the same thing, under the appearances.
Same with the assumption-river/religion of legalism, which benJoseph railed-against 2 millenia ago, notice that the “Christians” pushing christofascism are legalists, who play exactly the same games that the “Jews” of the Pharisees who convicted benJoseph played…
No shame, no accountability, no responsibility, only machiavellian narcissism & sociopathy/psychopathy…
Another assumption-river/religion underlying many “religious” gaslighters is the class-based-“validity” one, which both monarchy & oligarchy are examples of.
Every time you see the narcissism-body-language of a doctor, condescending to their inferiors ( use video to capture it, watch it in slow-motion, as it becomes much more visible, then ), you’re seeing that religion.
Dad was a medical-researcher & doctor: I grew into presuming the same upper-middle-class “validity” that he presumed.
7+ years of homelessness, total, throughout my life, finally broke that identity-underlying-ego, to some extent. Cracked it.
Read the book by researchers Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright, named “Tribal Leadership”, on the 5 levels ( not stages: they’re mistaken. Stages are irreversible & sequential, like caterpillar->moth. Cultural-process-levels are not irreversible-sequential. ).
They use doctors as the exemplars of narcissism-culture, identifying a simple experiment we all can do:
Wearing a suit, & belonging in it, walk into any hospital, & count the % of junior-staff who still have enough human-validity/human-dignity left in them, to meet your gaze.
Only 1 hospital, that those researchers ever encountered, had junior-staff who still had equal-human-validity in them.
Then consider narcissism-culture outside of medical-culture…
the US had over 600 mass-shootings in 2023.
Mass-shootings are narcissism, lashing-out against others’ lives, to “get even” with their wounded-narcissism.
The 4 false-religions underlying much “politics” and much “religions” are:
- psychopathic corporate-moneyarchy
- class-status-based-“validity” ( monarchy is purely this, oligarchy is the intersection of moneyarchy & class-status-based-“validity”, in a Venn diagram )
- legalism
- authority-worship
Notice how grabbed-authority-is-the-LORD is taking-over politics…
Notice how legalism is wedging-out accountability, everywhere…
Notice how psychopathic corporate-moneyarchy is fighting to prevent living-wage from existing among more & more of the world’s population, joining sadism & nihilism to psychopathy…
Notice how the narcissistic-birthright-entitlement of class-status-based-“validity” is more & more & more obviously becoming central to the fundamentalists who’re highjacking the whole world.
The “politics” and the “religions” are just makeup.
The real underlying drive, is breaking/obliterating considered-reasoning from having any authority, anywhere, so rampaging nonaccountability can be the alpha-bull, or “lord”.
It’s our limbic-brain fighting-off the cortex, or human-brain, one final time.
Never mistake the symptoms for the underlying-condition.
see the fundamentalism underlying it all.
It’s sooo simple, sooo clear, sooo … immense.
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I likes you. Imma read them books now. Thank you for the recommendations.
