this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
819 points (100.0% liked)
196
17598 readers
661 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
Other rules
Behavior rules:
- No bigotry (transphobia, racism, etc…)
- No genocide denial
- No support for authoritarian behaviour (incl. Tankies)
- No namecalling
- Accounts from lemmygrad.ml, threads.net, or hexbear.net are held to higher standards
- Other things seen as cleary bad
Posting rules:
- No AI generated content (DALL-E etc…)
- No advertisements
- No gore / violence
- Mutual aid posts are not allowed
NSFW: NSFW content is permitted but it must be tagged and have content warnings. Anything that doesn't adhere to this will be removed. Content warnings should be added like: [penis], [explicit description of sex]. Non-sexualized breasts of any gender are not considered inappropriate and therefore do not need to be blurred/tagged.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on our matrix channel or email.
Other 196's:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You're not wrong, but Jesus had some decent ideas, even if they were mostly coopted to support the system. The tragedy of Christ is how his good ideas were used to sanitize a selfish war God enough to help him conquer the world.
It's not as black and white as NT good, OT bad, but Jesus's message of love and forgiveness helped Christianity dominate enough to change how most people thought about gods. In the OT, God is the only one you're supposed to worship, but other gods are explicitly mentioned. The dedication to a single God that helped Judaism survive in perpetual exile allowed the Romans to centralize power better than their previous pantheon could. Even the practices of those who hated the new church were eventually used to create elite monastic orders.
Christians can embody the virtues of their faith, but it isn't something most people can or will do. Just like with Marx's work, people can take helpful lessons from the text, or they can be led against those helpful lessons by the text. Any good meme can be coopted to serve selfish will to power. Any truth can be used to obscure reality. Any value can be turned against itself. We will never be above this self deception, but we can resist it by always questioning our understanding.