All politics are identity politics. Republicans have long mocked this notion, treating the very concept of “identity politics” as a left-wing fixation. In reality, the GOP’s success is entirely due to the cheapest form of identity politics: For decades, but especially now, they have worked to distract voters from the party’s ruinous policies with appeals to their identity as white, provincial and, most importantly, Christian. This campaign has been enormously successful. White evangelicals have been the backbone of the GOP for decades not because they love tax cuts for the rich and environmental degradation, but because they have been told, repeatedly, that Democrats are demonic and there is no such thing as a liberal Christian.
This is why there’s a growing panic in the Republican ranks over the campaign of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas, and it’s not just fear that he could beat Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general. Win or lose, Talarico — a seminary student-turned-politician — embodies an existential threat to the right’s long-standing myth that to be Christian must necessarily mean voting Republican.
American Christians are a weird bunch. They are big fans of Old Testament God who was a giant asshole. He was a basically a bronze age war God that demanded absolute submission and kept killing people for sometimes bizzare reasons (like he killed a bunch of kids for laughing at a bald dude).
Big J came around and said: hey all that Old Testament shit sucks. Don’t chop your kids dick’s off and kill people that aren’t like you. Just chill and love each other, that’s the way to go. It’s why most Christians around the world don’t circumcise for example, because Jesus fulfilled the law and abolished it.
I’m an atheist honestly and don’t care what people believe or don’t believe in as long as they just mind their own business. Also don’t be a hypocrite and follow the god damn rules Jesus set for you if you’re gonna call yourself a Christian.
Eh, Jesus is better than the old testament God, but even he still does some pretty shitty stuff in the new testament. That’s the thing about Christianity (and most organized religions) though, it doesn’t have to make sense or be consistent or even moral or ethical. It’s propaganda, a tool for controlling the masses, not actual philosophical doctrine.
Key thing to note, Jesus did not abolish the old law. He fulfilled it by being the final sacrifice for sin. He’s specifically quoted as saying, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” He’s mainly talking about the 10 commandments, not the law of Leviticus that was only for the Israelites.
I’m not religious anymore, but it’s a key distinction.
The reason why most christians don’t follow jewish law is that Paul wasn’t fond of it. His interpretation won against other branches (including that of John, Jesus literal brother), hence the laws were abandoned for gentiles.
Nobodsy knows what the fuck Jesus might have actualy taught, but the author of Matthew is quite clear about it:
One might note that he says all that business and then violates a bunch of the laws.
Can anyone really know one way or another? Isn’t much of the bible fanfic written by dozens or people over hundreds of years? Like, one of the most widely known Jesus stories, about letting the person who is without sin cast the first stone, is from what I understand widely acknowledged by experts to have been grafted on to the bible hundreds of years later.
Here’s the thing about The Bible: it says all kinds of shit. Much of it contradictory. And so you’ll find that the parts of The Bible people subscribe to are always the parts that reinforce their existing ideology, because it can then be weaponized as a sort of justification of their views. So, those people are just giant assholes using “the word of God” as justification to continue being assholes.
…which is why I call it basically a Rorschach blot in literary form - whatever ethics you wish to seek in there, you can find. I would think that most people come to this stuff via their own moral and ethical system and cherry pick the parts that fit that bias and make it fit.
All my life, I’ve run into the kind of religious zealots that would insist that “you cannot have ethics without [their] god and [their] religion” - and I’ve always found this so absurdly and painfully naive. You can tell these sort have had next to no introduction to anything philosophical, except as through an explicit filter provided by their equally zealous parents or pastor or whatever.
Robert Anton Wilson would often say something like “What the Thinker Thinks, The Prover Proves” and when it comes to varying sects of xtianity and where they lie on the ideological and moral spectrum, you can see this in action.
The “red letter xtians” or people like Thomas Jefferson can read most of what Jesus says and find their value system there. The assholes that believe in Supply Side Jesus and/or a “muscular xtianity” can ignore most of what Jesus actually says in the NT and prefer most of Paul and the uglier things in the OT for their system of belief.
Which is probably why official churches were very important in early Christianity. You can’t let the masses interpret it themselves.
Which also explains why there were a lot of prohibitions on translations into local languages.
It also explains why you had an explosion of various sects ever since the printing press. These days there are ~45,000 denominations of xtianity.
I have long said that people are ridiculous for thinking that bronze age philosophy is applicable for daily life. Also, evidence is that Yaweh was a Sumerian Earth god that was picked up by the Hebrews during their nomadic times.
Yeah. There was a lot of syncretism back then, everyone kept copying the homework from each other. Slap a new name or just modify the one they had a little bit and bam its our God now.
This is my favorite bible story. God sends bears from the woods to do it. The Bible is fucking bananas sometimes.
He went up from there to Bethel. As he was going up by the way, some youths came out of the city and mocked him, and said to him, “Go up, you baldy! Go up, you baldy!”
And no, I won’t apologize for referencing A Christmas Inheritance by the Apocalypse Players.