What Would an Evangelical Christian Country Be Like

[Bagginski]

like fucking republicans actually read the bible, they just use out of place quotes from it they read from websites.

In recent decades, “Bible study” has devolved into self-brainwashing competitions…you’re right, they don’t READ the Bible in any meaningful sense, but they DO study those out-of-context quotes, pulls & references, BECAUSE they’re supposed to remember what the leader said it all ACTUALLY means, because war against satan, yo…. Stripped of context, said book - like almost anything else - loses a ton of value real fast.

Not that I *advise* reading the thing…but it’s safer to be inoculated against it, rather than bury one’s face in it OR ignore it. Which oddly positions TWoG as the ultimate unreliable narrator (ObRef)

 

[Roger A. Shrubber]

it’s never cut&dry

A New Interpretation of Leviticus 18:22 (Par. 20:13) and its Ethical Implications*

Abstract. The laws in Lev. 18:22 and 20:13 are general considered to prohibit homosexual intercourse between men. A renewed investigation of the vocabulary

academic.oup.com

Why are we concerned with what a book of fables that were stolen from other pagan ritualists has to say about anything?
It just provides a way for those who can't accept reality to lie to themselves, and it still gives a small, weak class of our society power over those stronger than they are.
The only people getting any real use from the book are American politicians, who lie through their teeth about following it's rules, to impress other douchebags, who lie through their teeth about following it's rules. And the priesthood around the entire world, of course...manipulative lazy philosophers who don't even bother to post treatise...

 

[cannabineer]

Why are we concerned with what a book of fables that were stolen from other pagan ritualists has to say about anything?
It just provides a way for those who can't accept reality to lie to themselves, and it still gives a small, weak class of our society power over those stronger than they are.
The only people getting any real use from the book are American politicians, who lie through their teeth about following it's rules, to impress other douchebags, who lie through their teeth about following it's rules. And the priesthood around the entire world, of course...manipulative lazy philosophers who don't even bother to post treatise...

There’s a physics of rhetoric involved. Using arguments from the book generates a shorter lever arm, multiplying the torque of the proposition.

Since the target audience uses the book as the recipe for life, the universe and everything, showing that the book does not mean what their pastors have been saying is the excellent way to discredit the pastors and the entire Jenna of bad interpretation they use to get money from the TV audience.

 

[Roger A. Shrubber]

There’s a physics of rhetoric involved. Using arguments from the book generates a shorter lever arm, multiplying the torque of the proposition.

Since the target audience uses the book as the recipe for life, the universe and everything, showing that the book does not mean what their pastors have been saying is the excellent way to discredit the pastors and the entire Jenna of bad interpretation they use to get money from the TV audience.

the audience is shrinking every year, and they are approaching irrelevance, probably within my lifetime.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/opinion/religious-right-america.html

https://www.prri.org/research/2020-census-of-american-religion/

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/

already a full 25% or more have NO religion, and no desire to find one, while the christian base continues to shrink every year...
and those that persist, insulate themselves within their personal prejudices...
The most substantial cultural and political divides are between white Christians and Christians of color. More than four in ten Americans (44%) identify as white Christian, including white evangelical Protestants (14%), white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants (16%), and white Catholics (12%), as well as small percentages who identify as Latter-day Saint (Mormon), Jehovah’s Witness, and Orthodox Christian[2].
Christians of color include Hispanic Catholics (8%), Black Protestants (7%), Hispanic Protestants (4%), other Protestants of color (4%), and other Catholics of color (2%)[3]. The rest of religiously affiliated Americans belong to non-Christian groups, including 1% who are Jewish, 1% Muslim, 1% Buddhist, 0.5% Hindu, and 1% who identify with other religions. Religiously unaffiliated Americans comprise those who do not claim any particular religious affiliation (17%) and those who identify as atheist (3%) or agnostic (3%).

They aren't a united front, they don't agree among themselves who is right, they can't put any candidates up for consideration, when only their sect will support them...
Ignorant, bigoted assholes who use religion as an excuse to indulge their prejudices are the audience, and fortunately, they're in a slow decline...

 

[cannabineer]

the audience is shrinking every year, and they are approaching irrelevance, probably within my lifetime.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/opinion/religious-right-america.html

https://www.prri.org/research/2020-census-of-american-religion/

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/

already a full 25% or more have NO religion, and no desire to find one, while the christian base continues to shrink every year...
and those that persist, insulate themselves within their personal prejudices...
The most substantial cultural and political divides are between white Christians and Christians of color. More than four in ten Americans (44%) identify as white Christian, including white evangelical Protestants (14%), white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants (16%), and white Catholics (12%), as well as small percentages who identify as Latter-day Saint (Mormon), Jehovah’s Witness, and Orthodox Christian[2].
Christians of color include Hispanic Catholics (8%), Black Protestants (7%), Hispanic Protestants (4%), other Protestants of color (4%), and other Catholics of color (2%)[3]. The rest of religiously affiliated Americans belong to non-Christian groups, including 1% who are Jewish, 1% Muslim, 1% Buddhist, 0.5% Hindu, and 1% who identify with other religions. Religiously unaffiliated Americans comprise those who do not claim any particular religious affiliation (17%) and those who identify as atheist (3%) or agnostic (3%).

They aren't a united front, they don't agree among themselves who is right, they can't put any candidates up for consideration, when only their sect will support them...
Ignorant, bigoted assholes who use religion as an excuse to indulge their prejudices are the audience, and fortunately, they're in a slow decline...

sadly, I disagree. People have a deep need that religion services. For a thousand years Christianity has been repeatedly on its last legs, and then bam resurgence. I see an end to the cycle only once we have reengineered our biological substrate. Even then, no guarantee.

 

[Roger A. Shrubber]

sadly, I disagree. People have a deep need that religion services. For a thousand years Christianity has been repeatedly on its last legs, and then bam resurgence. I see an end to the cycle only once we have reengineered our biological substrate. Even then, no guarantee.

They don't have to go extinct, they just have to fade into minority-hood, and they're well on the way to that. How many of those people who "identify" as christians actually go to church, or pay tithe? the entire country can identify as christian, and if they don't offer any financial support, then the church can't spread it's propaganda. It can't browbeat it's members into voting how they want if they don't show up for services...

 

[cannabineer]

They don't have to go extinct, they just have to fade into minority-hood, and they're well on the way to that. How many of those people who "identify" as christians actually go to church, or pay tithe? the entire country can identify as christian, and if they don't offer any financial support, then the church can't spread it's propaganda. It can't browbeat it's members into voting how they want if they don't show up for services...

And yet the sale of indulgences is a viable racket. It’s made many a TV pastor not just money but fuck-you money.

 

[Roger A. Shrubber]

And yet the sale of indulgences is a viable racket. It’s made many a TV pastor not just money but fuck-you money.

View attachment 5273568

that is true, things are changing, but slowly...my turn to council patience, you don't get rid of a three thousand year old pestilence in a day.

 

[Bagginski]

Why are we concerned with what a book of fables that were stolen from other pagan ritualists has to say about anything?
It just provides a way for those who can't accept reality to lie to themselves, and it still gives a small, weak class of our society power over those stronger than they are.
The only people getting any real use from the book are American politicians, who lie through their teeth about following it's rules, to impress other douchebags, who lie through their teeth about following it's rules. And the priesthood around the entire world, of course...manipulative lazy philosophers who don't even bother to post treatise...

While I’ll be happy to watch/help you take the bible apart a dozen different ways… I can’t go along with tarring emergent religions as if they were the same as the industrial-strength *revealed* religions which account for the vast majority of ‘the crimes of religion’, or with treating *every* different way of life as if they’re the same fatuous fools you/we’ve been dealing with the whole time.

‘Religious’ !== ‘deluded’ or ‘fanatic’, but I’m not downin’ you: I came by my visceral distrust of ‘things biblical’ the very hard way, and I know you did too. My allergy persists, as I ‘spect yours does.

At the heart of every ‘religion’ is at least one story, and that story matters a lot, especially as it gets ‘built upon’; some of the stories aren’t bad, and some of them are real bad, and a few make cultural & civilizational sense…but “WE” mostly ignore them, cuz Jesus. The important thing, maybe, is whether the story is one we individually resonate well with & helps use get along better, or if it’s imposed by desperation, despotism, brainwashing, conquest, etc regardless of whether we’d choose it on our own.

Not too surprising if the two situations lead to different circumstances.

A word about the word ‘pagan’: it basically means ‘hick’ (by usage; “country dweller”, more specifically)…those ignorant bumpkins not yet hip to Rome, foolishly going about their lives as if they were NOT about to be crushed under the heel of The Church(tm). As Rome conquered Europe the second time, it took root in the larger cities, sooner or later confronting the out-of-towners with a fait accompli…& everything was suddenly different.

But, yeah. That’s all it means; doesn’t mean savages, or cannibals, etc.

As a priest of a pagan religion, I hope you’ll not take offense, dude. I’m not correcting you, just offering my own POV

 

[Bagginski]

There’s a physics of rhetoric involved. Using arguments from the book generates a shorter lever arm, multiplying the torque of the proposition.

Since the target audience uses the book as the recipe for life, the universe and everything, showing that the book does not mean what their pastors have been saying is the excellent way to discredit the pastors and the entire Jenna of bad interpretation they use to get money from the TV audience.

Ah, but the “inerrancy” fantasy! …Which has allowed those same (& many other) pastors to “prove” that the criticisms are bogus & that their (‘non-interpretations aren’t interpretations, but WHAT IT’S ALWAYS MEANT IN EVERY LANGUAGE & EVERY TRANSLATION

In this fantasy, nothing in the thing CAN be wrong cuz TWoG & God miraculously force it to always say and mean the same things…that they say it means. The Bible says so.

ALL OF IT hangs - not on ‘proof of gawd’ or ‘moral imperatives’ - but on whether the ‘blanket immunity’ to reason & real experience can have any basis at all…and so far, all I’ve seen is demagoguery, bombast, & apologia. And a complete failure of the theory in practice.

Absent any sane, non-self-recursive look at the matter, it’s just an other Procrustean bed, ready to lop off whatever can’t fit…we believe it as a literal description of reality (if we do) at our very great peril

 

[Bagginski]

sadly, I disagree. People have a deep need that religion services. For a thousand years Christianity has been repeatedly on its last legs, and then bam resurgence. I see an end to the cycle only once we have reengineered our biological substrate. Even then, no guarantee.

I maybe speak to some of this a couple comments up, but the continual survival of a population that believes god commands them to take things over, & convert the heathen at sword-point, is gonna be problematic - especially if it acquires control.

It seems Buddhism encountered an analogous/adjacent situation when they moved into Tibet. The Tibetan population was largely (or dominated by) the Bon people…and at some point, the growing Buddhist bloc came to the conclusion that the Bon were simply irredeemably evil & must be removed, and they were removed.

Virtually nothing remains of Bon culture, or of the Bon as a people, and even less is known about them - largely due to the reluctance of Tibetan Buddhists & Buddhism to ever speak of even the existence of the Bon ‘once upon a time’. This much took me years to put together, BTW….

They don't have to go extinct, they just have to fade into minority-hood, and they're well on the way to that. How many of those people who "identify" as christians actually go to church, or pay tithe? the entire country can identify as christian, and if they don't offer any financial support, then the church can't spread it's propaganda. It can't browbeat it's members into voting how they want if they don't show up for services...

Are you familiar with “red-letter Christians”? They use standard translations with the words attributed to Jesus printed in red…and they ignore virtually everything else in it. Including Paul. I’ve known a number of them in my life, and they’ve been real people, not proselytizers, not judgmental; relay, the sort of people who gave Christianity a good name in the first place AFAIC. Plenty of them on the right side (as opposed to the wrong-wing).

 

[cannabineer]

While I’ll be happy to watch/help you take the bible apart a dozen different ways… I can’t go along with tarring emergent religion as if it were one of the industrial-strength *revealed* religions which account for the vast majority of ‘the crimes of religion’, or with treating *every* different way of life as if they’re the same fatuous fools you/we’ve been dealing with the whole time.

‘Religious’ !== ‘deluded’ or ‘fanatic’, but I’m not downin’ you: I came by my visceral distrust of ‘things biblical’ the very hard way, and I know you did too. My allergy persists, as I ‘spect yours does.

At the heart of every ‘religion’ is at least one story, and that story matters a lot, especially as it gets ‘built upon’; some of the stories aren’t bad, and some of them are real bad, and a few make cultural & civilizational sense…but “WE” mostly ignore them, cuz Jesus. The important thing, maybe, is whether the story is one we individually resonate well with & helps use get along better, or if it’s imposed by desperation, despotism, brainwashing, conquest, etc regardless of whether we’d choose it on our own.

Not too surprising if the two situations lead to different circumstances.

A word about the word ‘pagan’: it basically means ‘hick’ (by usage; “country dweller”, more specifically)…those ignorant bumpkins not yet hip to Rome, foolishly going about their lives as if they were NOT about to be crushed under the heel of The Church(tm). As Rome conquered Europe the second time, it took root in the larger cities, sooner or later confronting the out-of-towners with a fait accompli…& everything was suddenly different.

But, yeah. That’s all it means; doesn’t mean savages, or cannibals, etc.

As a priest of a pagan religion, I hope you’ll not take offense, dude. I’m not correcting you, just offering my own POV

can you point to any religion that does not have at its core a mythology that is passed along with the cover letter “this is how things are”?

 

[cannabineer]

the same basic problem besets the red-letter Christians.

1) by what authority do they trim the existential roast to the bits in quote marks?

2) by what process (which includes the German sense of the word, by what judicial trial of the proffered evidence) have they established that the red text is a Good Thing?

3) what durable and unconditional boundaries to human behavior can they refine, reduce, distil in this manner from the vast noisy stage of human experience using the text as a guide?

Imo they have done nothing to resolve the core fail.

 

[bursto]

the bible was written by Jews for Jews,
you guys have all read the bible cover to cover right?

probably why you completely dont understand it and missed the message it gives to the Jews and the rest of us heathens

 

[bursto]

Aliens,

 

[cannabineer]

the bible was written by Jews for Jews,
you guys have all read the bible cover to cover right?

probably why you completely dont understand it and missed the message it gives to the Jews and the rest of us heathens

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air

So God made us like gods that have power over all the other creatures, but we still cant get our shit together and look after what he created for us

sigh, dogma

 

[bursto]

sigh, dogma

truth hurts,
sometimes easier to believe lies, keep telling your self what you want to hear then

 

[Roger A. Shrubber]

While I’ll be happy to watch/help you take the bible apart a dozen different ways… I can’t go along with tarring emergent religions as if they were the same as the industrial-strength *revealed* religions which account for the vast majority of ‘the crimes of religion’, or with treating *every* different way of life as if they’re the same fatuous fools you/we’ve been dealing with the whole time.

‘Religious’ !== ‘deluded’ or ‘fanatic’, but I’m not downin’ you: I came by my visceral distrust of ‘things biblical’ the very hard way, and I know you did too. My allergy persists, as I ‘spect yours does.

At the heart of every ‘religion’ is at least one story, and that story matters a lot, especially as it gets ‘built upon’; some of the stories aren’t bad, and some of them are real bad, and a few make cultural & civilizational sense…but “WE” mostly ignore them, cuz Jesus. The important thing, maybe, is whether the story is one we individually resonate well with & helps use get along better, or if it’s imposed by desperation, despotism, brainwashing, conquest, etc regardless of whether we’d choose it on our own.

Not too surprising if the two situations lead to different circumstances.

A word about the word ‘pagan’: it basically means ‘hick’ (by usage; “country dweller”, more specifically)…those ignorant bumpkins not yet hip to Rome, foolishly going about their lives as if they were NOT about to be crushed under the heel of The Church(tm). As Rome conquered Europe the second time, it took root in the larger cities, sooner or later confronting the out-of-towners with a fait accompli…& everything was suddenly different.

But, yeah. That’s all it means; doesn’t mean savages, or cannibals, etc.

As a priest of a pagan religion, I hope you’ll not take offense, dude. I’m not correcting you, just offering my own POV

Every organized religion in the entire world has always done more harm than good, and i doubt that will ever change.
I personally don't have any use for any of them, i can think for myself, and don't need the advice of a "biblical expert".
I do and will vote against anyone who claims to be guided by religion. I will vote for a "godder" if the alternative is a worse one, or to avoid a republican getting elected, but i consider a religious democrat to be dangerously close to a republican...not to be trusted, they've already given their allegiance to an organization that they will place higher than their government service.

 

[cannabineer]

truth hurts,
sometimes its easier to believe lies, keep telling your self what you want to hear then

ok, tell some truth then.

 

[CunningCanuk]

sadly, I disagree. People have a deep need that religion services. For a thousand years Christianity has been repeatedly on its last legs, and then bam resurgence. I see an end to the cycle only once we have reengineered our biological substrate. Even then, no guarantee.

The cycle continues until enough of us accept how insignificant we really are.