This is why religion is indoctrinated. While I can accept, even while not believing, the argument that spirituality is innate, organized religion is entirely a human construct.

I want to go back to the ‘50s to berate the post war town planners in the UK, as the saying goes at least the Luftwaffe had the decency to replace our buildings with nothing uglier than rubble.

Well said, and a fitting first comment for you on Lemmy. Welcome.

This is such a great observation that it seems obvious as soon as I read it, but it didn't occur to me at all, especially in the sense you have framed:

The decline of Christianity isn't a dissipation, it's a contraction towards the hard core.

Gaming that out leads to some pretty alarming scenarios, and that's relative to the alarming scenario we are currently living through!

Yep. I havn't been able to watch it despite my friends swearing by it. It's all too familiar to me and the way I grew up.

Any religion that deprives certain groups of power simply for existing as a certain thing is maybe worth a reexamination.

Now that’s the word of God.

No, it's not.

I's the words of many men claiming they know what God says. The divinity of Christ was even decided by the church during the 4th century during council sessions like that of Nicea.

This decision is not extreme

Yes it is.

I grew up in a church that was consciously literalist and held the Bible as inerrant. I'm no longer religious, but looking back with the blinders of those doctrines on, I have to wonder if I might still be a believer if those ideas hadn't been drilled into me.

I'm all on board with the Jesus of the Gospels; he seems like a pretty cool dude who didn't have any time for people in power exploiting the downtrodden. But the Old Testament, on the other hand, is a mess, and it includes passages casting God as a bloodthirsty murderer making the Pharoah resist Moses just so that he could send more plagues against Egypt, prophets speaking for God in the language of the abusive boyfriend who tells his partner that it's her fault that he's hurting her (basically every one of the prophets, but take Ezekiel 16 as a representative example), God guiding Joshua through an ethnic cleansing of Canaan, and God commanding the genocide of the Amalekites and then punishing King Saul for being insufficiently thorough about it.

Let's not even mention that weird bit of erotic literature that's tucked into the middle for some reason (and don't try to sell me on the idea that "Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle" is a metaphor for anything other than really nice boobs)...

Then, on the other side of the coin, you have the letters of Paul where, when you look at it without bias, it's plainly clear that he's a religious conservative trying to pull the radical early church back into line with his own personal mores. Small wonder that hundreds of years later, when the church was The Church and falling into conservative patterns of orthodoxy, they picked the epistles they did to canonize as The Complete and Unerring Word of God...

I suppose I'm a former actual Christian, raised in the church, homeschooled K-12, not SBC but not unfamiliar with it. Point is, I know enough to know that modern Christianity is the accumulation of a series of compromises, concessions, and reinterpretations of the eternal Word of God over the centuries.

Interpreted literally, that passage also outlaws woman from teaching even Sunday School, much less my mom from Home Schooling me. Certainly I should have been in authority over her by the time I was, what, 13?

So basically, I appreciate and respect the perspective, but I'm not entirely buying it as a rational explanation for this.

Actual ex-Christian here.

The concept that you seem to be failing to grasp -- and I can't blame you because it escaped me as a Christian as well -- is that these are rules that you are welcome to follow. Your religion tells you what you can and can't do. You can make that choice. The problem comes when you try to apply that to anyone else who doesn't accept it. Your religion's rules don't apply to me, because I'm not part of your religion.

I'm willing to coexist with Christians. But that coexistence has to go both ways.

Now that’s the word of God. It’s eternal, unchanging

Hasn't the Bible been translated from Greek and Hebrew multiple times?

I think even from a christian perspective the right thing to do wouldnt be to just accept a collection of scriptures as absolute truths (or to be precise the exact interpretation of those scriptures by the leaders of the group they happened to get into).

If you dont examine your beliefs with regard to historic evidence, and critical thinking you would have no way of knowing if there was some work by people (or if you believe in that even satan) when the current biblical canon was set up or when jewish tradition formed the old testament, etc.

Church leaders obviously dont talk about this that much, but being a follower of jesus and a good christian doesnt require one tho view the whole bible and one specific reading of it as a unified work of truth.

I dont know your exact stance on this topic, but in my experience there are too many people that dont examine the way current day teachings of their community got formed throughout history and just treat it like if god revealed it himself to them here and now.

If you happen to be interested here is a video by a yewish guy (though he views the bible from a historical viewpoint not in an orthodox way) exploring what we currently know about the bible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqSkXmFun14

Hope i didnt sound disrespectful, i just like when discourse makes us revise our deeper beliefs.

Now that's the word of God. It's eternal, unchanging

Except for all those various translations and interpretations that say different things.

Paul was a legit Rabbi. Old habits die hard.