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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.
Because if you wear your religion on your sleeve and are highly observant then that means you are conservative and rules focused by nature. People who belong to liberal Christian denominations, like Unitarianism, are rarely heard from because they aren't vocal by nature.
People who are very religious also want to believe that what they follow is the truth but the very existence of nonbelievers casts doubt on this either consciously or subconsciously. "If my beliefs are self evident then how can so many nonbelievers exist?" So they rationalize this as either thinking of you as a sinner who deliberately refuses to accept the "truth" or a poor lost soul in need of saving. Christianity, and some other faiths, is also missionary minded in nature. They are called upon in the New Testament to "spread the word". If you want to grow your numbers and/or your income (i.e. Mormon church) then you are aggressive with missionaries and hunting for converts.
People are also very good at rationalizing their views and cherry picking data to force things to fit their emotionally driven beliefs. Look at conspiracy theorists who dismiss anything that contradicts them as "lies" and "propaganda" but their sources are never questioned.
Conservatives/Republicans support power structures external to government for guidance on morality and charity. This gives religions power. Democrats/liberals support using the government directly for everything. This reduces the power of religion.
It's just a trick to get votes they are as heathen as they come. Since Christians believe in made up bullshit they are easy to trick out of money and votes. It's really not any deeper than that.
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(tm), 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:
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.
_ /\ _
I likes you. Imma read them books now. Thank you for the recommendations.
As a Christian (albeit not American), no clue. I think it's mainly on single issue problems such as abortion or sexual immorality, to be honest.
Although it could also be a loud minority problem, where the actual Christians are less outspoken. Who knows.
Personally I think the single issue stuff is just a bonus to the actual connection. My opinion is that it's entirely performative at the top, and the people at the bottom have been fooled.
Control and conformity. Pseudo-morality.
The control is pretty standard stuff that goes with the authoritarian nature of religion. They place a person in charge who, like the deity, has all the answers and solves all the problems, so long as you believe and support them unquestioningly. If you’re not smart enough to sort out the system that you’ve been told is deliberately complicated and “rigged” you just listen to the Big Man and he’ll sort it all out for you.
Conformity is making the in-group and out-groups. The in-group demands loyalty and support. The out-groups are anyone else you want them to be. Immigrants. Minorities. Other religious groups. Political opponents. It’s ridiculously blatant in US republicans where even if their wives or themselves are personally insulted by their leader they still support and vote for the group. You must conform. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. Very binary thought.
Religion offers the moral angle as well. Despite American Christians, particularly evangelicals, claiming to support Christian ideals they objectively and subjectively do not. The list is too long to process here, but basic greed, hatred, violence, and all the rest of what most of us would consider anti-Christian values are at the forefront of the more outspoken religious Right. Yet they’ve been raised and told that the “godless Left” have no morals, if you’re not religious you can’t have morals, and whatever other tripe that allows them to accomplish the mental gymnastics they go through to claim moral superiority while doing things like making sure migrants drown in rivers trying to cross illegally into the US.
The hypocrisy and mental gymnastics engaged in by the American Right in many facets of their workings, not just their feigned religion, is mind-boggling. They’ve gone so far past the available superlatives describing their hypocrisy and greed that you just have to throw up your hands in disgust and walk away before it drives you crazy.
This isn't really true. A lot of Democrat voters are also Christian. If by "fervent," you mean "hateful," this may be more true. A large percentage of Democrat voters are also Christian, but not as hard-line about LGBT issues, and perhaps not as hard-line about abortion.
The type of Christians that Republicans court are easy to persuade and control. Religion has historically been used to create in-groups and out-groups, and as a form of control.
If one were to take the Christian bible at face-value, they would oppose things like sexual freedom. Most leftists/socialists think about intersectionality, so they would be opposed to people who have the "morals" of many Christians.
Based on my limited knowledge of Christianity, it is all about social justice, compassion and peace.
That's expected. That's what they say they are about. However, one only ever needs to open their book, the bible, or just observe history the past 2000 years, to see that is NOT at all what they do.
You have a very GOOD understanding of Christianity. You're seeing it for what it really is. That hypocrisy is intentional, and obscured by the mythology of: "I dunno, god's weird, right?"
It's by design that Republicans, considering all those observations, would claim they were. Because they are the real christians. [My best MAGAT impression]: "Not like these liberal hippies that just want everyone to be kind to one another. That's socialism!" And on and on.
They're the most fervent Protestant Christians certainly. I'd say the Catholic demographic probably leans more heavily toward the Democratic party, and the Orthodox will vary by jurisdiction.
Every week they gather and listen to a man telling them what to believe, unquestionably, and without evidence.
Then a politician comes along and tells them more things to believe, unquestionably, and without evidence.
For a bunch of guys always talking about prophets, their belief system has zero predictive power.
Because they stopped maturing when they were 8 years old and mommy and daddy were dragging them to church every weekend.
Because Abrahamic faiths are first and foremost built on deciding a truth and working backwards to “prove”(convince yourself and brainwash your kids) it.
This works well for right wing ideologies built around social classes and believing whatever you’re told without question.
Add to that that Christians are on average significantly dumber, then all you have to do is tickle their confirmation bias and they won’t give anything you do a second thought.
Part of the issue with many religions is that they exists in multiple components. There is
the religion as the nebulous idea of a culture as adopted by word of mouth generational teaching.
religion as depicted and codified by a holy script.
the popculture adoptions of religion through time that become traditionally indistinct.
the branches of philosophical thought inside the religion changing the window of interpretation and creating schisms
The economic and power structures involved in maintaining physical sites of worship and a guiding priesthood.
The political stances the powers inside the religious complex adopt to adapt to specific historical events.
These different factors are generally all at play though there are exceptions like some religions do not have a holy text or sites of worship for instance. Religions are kind of aggregates of time, tradition and thought and distorted by time as well. For instance linguistic and technological drift makes it very hard to appropriately understand a text in it's proper context. Like David and Goliath becomes a very different story when you understand that a sling weilded appropriately is like firing a pistol at short range.
Christianity is kind of a mess in the concept of time. A lot of belief brought into Christianity predated it. Hell for instance predates Christianity (it is not explicitly mentioned in the text but was passed down linguistically) and the conception of it borrowed off of Buddhist, Norse and Grecco/Roman ideas of the underworld. Other things like the Seven Deadly Sins, Lucifer, Monastic living and so on were often inventions of single people who essentially just started fads. Priesthoods have always been tied into concepts of authority through study and internal structures around property. Becoming an abbot was basically just another way to gain the ruling autonomy of nobility for land use. The political structure inside the Church has changed it's relationship with things out of fear as well. The idea of abortion as murder is tracable to the black death when priests worried that a population collapse would cause disaster for society so it changed it's teaching from the concept of "ensoulment" and being very abortion neutral to facilitating a literal witchunt destroying existing systems of female led midwifery to gain reproductive control.
Christianity has at some level always been about power, control and resources... But there are also multiple Christianities. For instance a person who reads the book but rejects the church or the built up dogma of traditions is still a Christian. You can also adopt just the institution or the popculture understanding of Christianity and still be a Christian. Adopting every peice of a religion is itself optional.
The problem being is that understanding the text and history requires a lot of effort, intellectual savvy and time in study. Just like the medieval times people tend to get their understanding from people who did that work for them (or say they did) to supply the missing context. A lot of the time people accept whatever "feels" right and people also tend to be self centric. Feeling superior by category of beliefs we have been handed is something we are all potentially susceptible to.
The idea of abortion as murder is tracable to the black death when priests worried that a population collapse would cause disaster for society so it changed it’s teaching from the concept of “ensoulment” and being very abortion neutral to facilitating a literal witchunt destroying existing systems of female led midwifery to gain reproductive control.
I fucking knew it. Now of course it's a conspiracy theory, but I 100% believe that the major push "recently" against abortion and having that argument go into overdrive is being brought on by assholes that subscribe to the "replacement theory" idea that dark skinned people are reproducing faster than white people as they tend to use contraception more and therefore will make "us" the minority. They want to force white women to have every baby possible to try to prevent that from happening...
In part. The other half is that Conservatives started courting Evengelical groups to make voting for them the "correct" thing to do. Abortion legalization was championed by the left but the Catholic Church had some remaining abstention held over by essentially a political decision that had been cannonized as an official spiritual stance on the idea of the soul. Conservatives tend to think like marketing experts and they know abortion and the nature of the soul is a core belief not easily shaken thus they were able to make their platform a matter of "life and death" harnessing the empathy people had for the idea of babies... Very specifically the idea of babies, the soft squishy humans whom we are programmed instinctually to protect.
It also dovetailed nicely into purity doctrine. The idea you are enabling the sexual deviancey of loose women... The idea that a fetus is a souless empty blob as the majority idea was for the first thousand years of Christianity got in the way of the advertising campaign and the Catholic Church wasn't about to roll back the precedent decision it has upheld for centuries. That would make the idea seem kind of arbitrary... and once you start unpicking the history of Catholic control measures it weakens the vwey idea of them as a spiritual authority.
