The world if christian lived by christian values
The world if christian lived by christian values
71 comments
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I like the last words of chief Hatuey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatuey) before the Christians burned him alive:
[Hatuey], thinking a little, asked the religious man if Spaniards went to heaven. The religious man answered yes... The chief then said without further thought that he did not want to go there but to hell so as not to be where they were and where he would not see such cruel people. This is the name and honour that God and our faith have earned.
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That burns hotter than the fires of hell!
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"Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents. Without a prison, there can be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society. "
- John Fire Lame Deer
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RETVRN
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A lot of indigineous thinking captured in one passage, particularly restorative justice.
I was raised Christian but reading texts on Indigineous thought has been what has helped me realize what makes a good person.
Too much in Abrahamic religions is about obedience and blind submission to authority which is why I often feel drawn to eastern religious thought also. Both Eastern religious thought and the indigineous worldview are more holistic in my view.
I find Abrahamic religious teachings to be very exclusionary (hey if you beleive what we believe we'll let you into heaven) Almost like a country club of sorts. Eastern and Indigineous philosophy (with the exception of the caste system warping into a rigid institutionalized social hierarchy due in part to Western influence) seem to be much more inclusionary.
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It's spelled "indigenous," FYI. The accent is on "`di-" and you don't make an "ee" sound after the "n"; it just goes straight to "nus."
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I find Abrahamic religious teachings to be very exclusionary (hey if you beleive what we beleive we’ll let you into heaven) Almost like a country club of sorts.
So true. Thinking about it, Christian missionaries' main job is less to sell Jesus, but more to sell FOMO.
Like a timeshare salesperson, they're not gonna talk much about the maintenance fees required (such as treating each other the way Jesus said to.) They're also not gonna talk about how so many of the other share-owners are insufferable to be around and regularly break the agreed-upon rules. Oh, but they will hype up how, for the low, low price of asking Jesus for forgiveness and getting baptized, you, too, could reserve yourself an eternal home in Paradise!
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Fire indeed
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Woke
(/s)
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Some of my family just went to the Powwow in OK, and now i randomly come across my ancestry on lemmy, wtf...
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That's pretty cool
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Problem is, the Bible doesn't present one cohesive set of positive moral principles. It's a collection of books written over hundreds of years by many authors with their own beliefs, biases and contexts, so it's not possible to derive one set of "Christian values" from it. This means people will cherry pick bits that align with their pre-existing beliefs and dismiss or downplay whatever is inconvenient or contradicts them, and there are plenty of less than savoury parts to cherry pick from.
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It's all bullshit anyway.
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In the sense that the supernatural claims and many historical accounts made by biblical authors have no basis in reality, of course you're right. That doesn't mean there's no value in the academic study of the Bible. If you have no interest you can dismiss the whole lot as nonsense, but there's a lot of insight (and by insight I'm not talking about capital T Truth about the nature of reality) about the development of thought in Europe and the Near East to be gleaned from the Bible.
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If i remember correctly (it's been a while), then the Bible becomes a lot more coherent if you throw out the old testament, and keep to the new testament only - which actually is what christians should do, because the sacrifice of Jesus is a new covenant which supercedes the old one with Moses.
If you keep to the NT, then there isn't so much ambiguity - evangelicals who cite from the OT are even more backwards than catholicism itself is.
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Not exactly. In fact, this is a gross oversimplification. The New Testament contradicts itself and plenty of mainstream Christian beliefs. Different NT authors have drastically different views of OT law, ranging from the view that the OT law should still be upheld (Matt 5:17 where Jesus says “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill."), to completely rejecting the old covenant (Hebrews 8:13 "In speaking of a new covenant, he has made the first one obsolete, and what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear."), and a range of nuanced views in-between. You can torture the text to reconcile to make it fit a particular view, but that's not an honest way of reading a text.
Also, wholesale rejecting the OT on the basis that the new covenant supercedes the old is incredibly problematic. I can understand saying that in the case of a contradiction between OT and NT you would go with the latter (although even that is an issue), but if you reject the OT, you're missing out on essential developments in Israelite and Jewish history, thought and literature which is essential to understand the NT. It's bad enough as it is that the tradition of mystical literature which so heavily influenced post-exilic Jewish and early Christian thought is overlooked. The last thing people who want to understand the NT need to do is throw out the OT.
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If i remember correctly (it's been a while), then the Bible becomes a lot more coherent if you throw out the old testament, and keep to the new testament only
You mean the one that starts with four tellings of the same story, that contradict each other heavily ?
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The sermon on the Mount and specifically Matthew 5:18 I think or something like that explicitly says that nothing from the law has been removed or invalidated by Jesus.
This is a common sentiment in American Christianity but it doesn't really seem to be backed up by the text.
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Jesus himself says that he didn't come to abolish the old laws, but to fulfill them.
The whole book is worthless.
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Even then, might wanna stick to the Gospels
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More importantly than that though, nobody's fucking read it
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Well that's not true. We're not living in 600s Europe where only the clergy can read (and not all of them could read that well). However, a major issue is how it's read. Common practice in churches is to read the text and interpret it through a pre-existing set of beliefs informed by the reader's current cultural and political background, as well as millennia of religious tradition which many modern Christians are barely aware of (people take the statements in the Nicene Creed for granted, but it's not a statement of faith that the Bible could support without centuries of heated discussions, politicking and reinterpretations filling in the gaps) In biblical scholarship, this is referred to as eisegesis, where you read an interpretation into the text, rather than allowing the text to speak for itself.
In contrast, exegesis is the method used by modern biblical scholars, as opposed to theologians. This is basically reading the Bible as you would any other historical piece of literature - when you frame the text in its historical, religious, cultural and literary context, it takes on a whole new dimension almost entirely missing from church readings of the Bible. Suddenly the creation stories aren't just an account of how the world was made and how evil came about, but a polemic against the creation stories of Mesopotamia, which the biblical authors adopted and adapted in order to distinguish them from neighbouring mythologies. You stop needing to reconcile the irreconcilable Gods of the OT - the wrathful, vengeful, murderous God and the benevolent, merciful God - and instead can appreciate how the biblical authors have taken what originally seem to be two traditionally separate gods from Caananite-Israelite religion (El and Yahweh) and, over time, merged the traditions to fit the theology of a monotheistic cult which developed later within Israelite religion. By reading beyond the biblical canon, you can see evidence of varieties of Jewish and Christian tradition that didn't survive into later mainstream religion (for example, the Gospel of Mary places more importance on women than the other gospels and didn't make it into the biblical canon) I could go on, but realistically who will read this far?
TL;DR - yes, people do read the bible - in fact, it's probably the most read book in the world - it's just that people read into it rather than out of it, which stops them from appreciating what the many authors and books of the Bible are actually saying
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Hey now plenty of atheists like me have read it
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Didn't Gandhi say something similar?
"I like your christ but not your Christians, they have so little in common with christ" (or something similar)
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Solid burn
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Your comment was right below that one, what a coincendiary.
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Hotter than the fires of hell.
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Yeah, those great christian values... Here are some lists for those christian values if anyone wants to act accordingly to them:
https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/detaillist.php?cid=3&pub=1
https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/detaillist.php?cid=2&pub=1
https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/detaillist.php?cid=4&pub=1-
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I get why people say the Bible is hard to understand and the teaching hard to follow
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I don't have that issue 😅
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Slavery is one
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"wannabe Christians"
No True Christian, amirite?
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They don’t attend mass, they don’t read the Bible except to quote overused passages, and they watch pseudo-historical and religious films and art to strengthen their alleged Christian identity.
Okay, but that's still just The Bible With Extra Steps.
"Oh, you didn't get the deep lore of the original manuscript. You just watched the VeggieTales version" might hold more water if the book itself wasn't choke full of allegories and parables and transcribed oral histories. FFS, Revelations is literally a guy (very likely high off his balls) having a crazy dream.
You can't come at this document and complain "They're getting the message sixth hand rather than fifth hand". Embellishing the story is central to the religion's tradition. How else do we end up with Seventh Day Adventists and Mormons?
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The american natives of the great lakes region were considered some of the sharpest orators the missionaries have ever witnessed. A number of them also didn't have rigid hierarchies and believed in the importance of individual freedom. The Dawn of Everything speaks a lot about some of their civic/social beliefs.
Speaking of which, can anyone point me to resources on those early missionaries' records on the natives?
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Better what?
I don't get it.
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Better people I guess?
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That makes sense; thank you.
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Savage
71 comments
"I have heard that you wish me to go to church. I would not then know whether I had to go to the church of the French, the Spanish, or the Americans, or to the church of the Methodists, the Quakers, or the Presbyterians. I tell you again, you must become one people, and then I may come and be one with you."
-Tecumseh