Untethered free market -- just fine I bet. Religion is an organized mental illness catering to the basest human frailties and impulses.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Murdered by Words
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Holy Bible - Bootstraps Edition
These people are "Christians" in name only. They do not follow any of the teachings of Jesus, Moses, Abraham or any of the prophets. They are grifters who use people's belief to profit off hate.
I would say there's nore of them than "true" christians, and as such this is the real Christianity
The guy he's attributing the concept of "untethered empathy" to is a hardcore fascist that believes that having "too much" empathy is a sin because it allows people to be swayed by emotion as opposed to holding strong in their values. Their values, in this case, also include forcing them onto society for "their own good".
If lying is a sin... why are the biggest liars to find where some imaginary entity allegedly told them not to lie?
I think there's an argument here, but it's incoherent. Could you come back and rephrase this when you're sober?
Reply in my language...
Let us not collectively forget that when you ask yourself "what would Jesus do?" Flipping over tables and whipping money changers is a totally valid option.
And killing fig trees
Fuck figs
All my homies hate wasp factories
No, there might be a wasp in there
It's mind-boggling how Christians can be so hateful and judgemental when Jesus preached universal love and forgiveness.
It’s one of the main reasons I despise most organized religions, well mainly Christianity. Jesus was about as liberal as they come but the mental gymnastics modern Christians jump through to justify their own racism and hate is overwhelming.
Jesus was much more of a socialist than a liberal really.
It follows from the philosophy of Eric Voegelin whose thesis is that modern totalitarian movements such as Stalinism and Nazism can be traced to Gnosticism. It’s a reaction against the perceived hubris of attempting to build utopian societies which solve all of people’s problems for them.
This shit goes all the way back to Constantine.
Keanu Reeves, why hast thou forsaken me?
Leave my boy Constantine alone. He was a Roman statesman, trying to keep an empire from disintegrating, not a theologian. And his plan worked, for 1000 years and a bit more. If Christians are being assholes, that's their fault, not some guy's from 17 centuries ago, solving a problem for his own time.
Regardless of how much responsibility we assign to him, it's true that this shit does in fact go all the way back to his time.
If you ask me, the Roman empire was built on conquest and slavery and extending it 1000 years isn't really something to brag about. He co-opted a movement that had originally opposed many of the empire's harmful practices and turned it into a bastardized form that supported the state so long as it payed lip service to Christian icons. Nowadays, Christians do similar things, and they're drawing on a very long tradition to do so. That tradition doesn't absolve them of personal responsibility, but it does provide some insight in terms of understanding how Christianity turned into basically the exact opposite of Jesus' teachings.
You're making political, not theological arguments here. And you're demonizing the Roman Empire as if we're in any way special in its slaving and conquering in the ancient world. If there is something special about it, it is how Romanity came to be an identity and a political system with uncharacteristic resilience and longevity, lasting well into the 15th century.
That said, historically speaking, it's not at all obvious that you can ascribe to Constantine the idea of an orthodox Christianity. Even less obvious that you can charge him with a perversion of Jesus teachings. Bart Ehrmann has written lovely books on the weirdness and evolutions of early christianities. And James Tabor has talked about how already by Paul whatever Jesus himself was teaching was rather secondary.
If anything if you want to charge anyone with forcing anything you have to go to Theodosius a few decades later. And even then, what the emperors were doing was giving muscle to the most socially stable version of Christianity at the time.
In any case, theologically speaking, this idea of a pure original Christian message of Jesus that needs to be rescued by later impurities is a fundamentally protestant one, i.e., it's a very particular way of understanding Christianity that doesn't have any essential claim to be the only legitimate way of understanding Christianity. Not coming from a protestant (or a Counter-Reformation) background myself I don't even particularly feel the need to refute it, I find the very question basically irrelevant.
you’re demonizing the Roman Empire as if we’re in any way special in its slaving and conquering in the ancient world.
I said nothing of the sort. All I'm saying is that there were early Christians who opposed some of these things, and that movement was co-opted and started supporting them.
That said, historically speaking, it’s not at all obvious that you can ascribe to Constantine the idea of an orthodox Christianity
As I said, however much responsibility you want to ascribe to him, it remains true that this sort of thing goes back to his time.
In any case, theologically speaking, this idea of a pure original Christian message of Jesus that needs to be rescued by later impurities is a fundamentally protestant one, i.e., it’s a very particular way of understanding Christianity that doesn’t have any essential claim to be the only legitimate way of understanding Christianity. Not coming from a protestant (or a Counter-Reformation) background myself I don’t even particularly feel the need to refute it, I find the very question basically irrelevant.
I also find it irrelevant, which is why I never said anything like that. I don't believe there was a "pure" Christian message that needs to be "rescued." No, early Christians were weird cranks with many wrong ideas about many things, which is part of how they were able to be co-opted. Nevertheless, they were weird cranks that said and did some ok things some times, especially relative to the empire.
You're trying to create this false dichotomy where either early Christians were the pure, divinely inspired carriers of God's teachings, or else everyone at the time was equally bad, and the only measure of goodness is stability and survival. This is reductive nonsense. Early Christianity was a relatively progressive, flawed movement within the empire, and it was able to be subverted and co-opted by the empire into supporting many of it's worst practices. This is not a "fundamentally protestant" perspective, nor does it treat the Roman Empire as "special" in regards to other states in the ancient world, both of those claims are baseless strawmen.
Maybe you're right, but I don't think I'm making the false dichotomy you're sketching out. I'm just not interested in condemning the Romans of 1700 years ago or in tracing to them the christofascism of contemporary American right wingers.
Of course, there are more recent things that we can look at to understand modern American christofascism. However, I would argue that twisting around Jesus' words to justify bad things has a very long history, and that you can point to the time of Constantine and the ways in which Christianity came to support Roman imperialism as a starting point. It may not be a direct line, but it's part of the same tradition. By the same token, you could point to how Christianity was used to support colonialism much later. At some point, people should stop being surprised when this happens because it's been happening for 1700 years.
I’m just not interested in condemning the Romans of 1700 years ago
But you praised Constantine for preserving the empire. If you're going to apply that moral framework then I get to apply my own too.
Who was force babtised on his death bed!
You simply do not understand jesus!
Pretty simple when you read the bible. All that "love" and "forgiveness" come with pretty strong terms and conditions attached.
[...] for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
- The Ten Commandments, stating explicitly that his love is conditional (and that punishing children for their parents' sins is A-okay).
I refuse to believe a person can actually reason themselves to the position that empathy is a sin based on the text of the Bible.
Which means he's a bastard willfully misrepresenting something to directly preach hate. Unconscionable.
Christians can reason themselves into all sorts of bizarre shit based on a text from the Bible.
But the bible is not really consistent, not even the New Testament, so it is equally shared blame on the bible and the Christian for this.
The point is that you should probably not base your way of life and thinking on a 2000 year old nonsensical book about a magical wizard doing fictitious stuff.
I've read the Bible, m8, multiple times. Except for the parts in the Old Testament where it might tell ancient Israelites to harden their hearts while they genocide a really incompatible neighbor, nothing bends toward "feeling empathy is bad". In fact, the need to tell ancient Israelites to "harden their heart" shows the expected reaction was for them to be empathetic and feel pity for their enemies, and the exception had to be noted.
Keep it pushing, if you're just going to trot out "14-yo atheist" talking points.
I've read the Lord of the rings at least 6 times (all of them)... still I don't speak elfish nor am I a miner by height.
Incompatible neighbors... this means "those assholes didn't succumb to our demands" in religious speak.
I've read the Lord of the rings at least 6 times (all of them)... still I don't speak elfish nor am I a miner by height.
What?
Both grammatically, and also towards its content as a response.
I assume this is supposed to mirror the start of my message. But my comment said "I'm certain the text doesn't say that because I've read it." You're saying "LotR (stories about a war) didn't teach me a new language nor did it transform me into a dwarf/child/some third thing generically good at mining because of their height". If we have to call that a mirror, it's a funhouse mirror at best.
I'm glad you picked up on the wordplay I used when talking about ancient Israelites genociding their neighbors tho. I was lowkey proud of that /s
Both are fiction!
No clue why sane people are still checking twitter. The devil is no longer at the gates, the gates lay in cinders beside a city encircled by wings of terrible scale. The temples have been sacked, burned, rebuilt, and burned once again in mockery of their long dead parishioners. There’s nothing of value remaining on twitter.
Words don't matter to fascists. They want reactions. And they want violence because it is all that they have going on: Violence and lies.
Fun fact, "sin" can be directly translated as a failure as in a personal failure or a moral failure.
Yep!
The verb forms of chat·taʼthʹ (Hebrew) and ha·mar·tiʹa (Koine Greek) literally mean "to miss" in the sense of missing or not reaching a goal, way, mark, or correct point
This works because Christians don't read the Bible.
evangelical Christianity is more of a vibes-based excuse to judge other people than it is a system for framing your own worldly existence.
Holy shit I've never seen Evangelicalism described so accurately.
Next we shall have "the sin of love."
Seeing all the hate going on right now, wars in Ukraine the Middle east and Africa, kinda makes me wanna sacrifice myself too
This reddit thread from a couple years ago is enlightening
https://www.reddit.com/r/exchristian/comments/13whnob/because_maga_and_evangelical_christianity_are/
wut