Ask Lemmy

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.

There’s also a lot of very religious African American voters on the left, politically. Black churches, I know for sure, focus on social justice and non-violence. (I’m white but I’ve only lived in majority black cities so I’m well aware of their organizing.) You’ll notice many civil rights leaders, both today and in the past, are or were preachers and so have the Reverend title (obvious example: Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. but modern civil rights leaders are very often preachers).

This is an aside but Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) was the reverend at Ebenezer Baptist Church, MLK’s former church. He also has a Ph D and now I want to know what title formal invitations use for him.

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:

• psychopathic corporate-moneyarchy
• class-status-based-"validity" ( monarchy is purely this, oligarchy is the intersection of moneyarchy & class-status-based-"validity", in a Venn diagram )
• legalism
• authority-worship

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.

_ /\ _

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.

Trick question. They are not.

Ok, that's disingenuous. They are Christians. Except, they are nothing like christ.

I know each person will find a different quality of christ that is most like themselves and attribute that as his defining feature but to me christ was radically liberal. Christ saw the hurting in the world and said "I won't submit to it" but gave himself to it freely. In doing so he freed himself. Christ saw the labrythian rules and dogmas of the prevailing religion of his time; saw how it was punishing people and fought to reform. He knew he has just as much authority over God's word as any prophet or religious person and give himself to make the needed changes that would ease the suffering of everyone. It was that and a dash of magic; the world was changed. Slowly but thoroughly.

He was a brown middle eastern liberal. Nothing like the Christians we see today. If there was a christ for today they would reform again and the cycle of religous power struggle would continue.

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.

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.

Because they stopped maturing when they were 8 years old and mommy and daddy were dragging them to church every weekend.

For a bunch of guys always talking about prophets, their belief system has zero predictive power.

Theocratic confusion. Republicans worship Supply-Sidr Jesus. Christians model themselves after Jesus of Nazareth, Christ. The similar names are a source of confusion.

Also neither is related to Jesus that sells tamles at the farmer's market, tho I hear he is a pretty good guy.

Republicans are a lot of things.

Christian isn't one of them.

Because a wolf in sheep's clothing eats better than when it's seen for what it really is.

At its core religion is based on fearing people who are different, and modern right wing politics is based on fearing people who are different.

The bible is full of so many contradictions and so much vague bs. They use it with their pretzel logic to justify whatever atrocity they're into at the time. A lot of them are also narcissists. They're self-important because they're trying to do "god's will."