Hey! I am not from america but my father lives in Georgia and we call once a week and chat a bit.
We talked about the horrible fires in california and his wife (they are together since like 7 years) was in the backround bitch*** around: “They mocked god, that is what they deserved I guess!”
Yo really?
Come on… I am atheist I left the church but I never had a problem with people who believe in god. It’s not what I believe in and everyone is free to believe in whatever they want to as long as they are happy.
It’s not only her comment. It’s under a lot of youtube comments to LA Fires, for example this:
“This is a lesson for every atheist, every arrogant person, and every polytheist: God is great and God is mighty”
WOW.
Pathetic. I can throw up. If god exists which is very unlikely I am very happy to go to hell with my beliefs because hell might be a less toxic place to be than in heaven with those mega worshipers.
It’s really like only 10% of christians that are that extreme. It’s not the majority I know but if I look at america it’s those deep red state god worshipers and they are everywhere in Georgia, Alabama etc.
Churches gotta ban them from the religion and make those people be religionless. They don’t deserve to be in heaven if they keep saying “gods revenge” to california people.
Those are the karens that get hurt if you tell them we are all going to non existence once we vanish from this planet. Why can’t they just be quiet and go to church?!
So many weird people on this planet. Im not rich either and people run around saying they deserved it. What is wrong with most humans?!
“Christians” is the right way to put it. I’m Christian and those people in no way represent a single Christian value or thing Jesus would do.
I disagree. A religion is defined by how it’s lived. A big percentage of Christian’s in America think like that to various degrees.
It is a Protestant ideal to think a religion can be said to be purely what its scripture says but that rarely is how it works in followers’ lives.
That said, no one will disagree with you that this is not a Jesus thing to do. But this is a very Christian thing in the US.
I mean, you wouldn’t judge the effectiveness of a diet program by looking at people who aren’t really following said program.
Similarly, I don’t think it makes sense to judge a belief system by looking at people who don’t follow it’s tenets.
A system’s function is what it does. It wouldn’t be as big a deal if their will wasn’t being imposed on everyone else.
Right, it’s what it is not what it should be via a written text.
I don’t think that’s a good comparison. If a person doesn’t follow a diet plan, then they are not on a diet. The diet plans effectiveness isn’t brought into question in that case.
If a “Christian” goes to church, is told they are saved and are absolved of all their sins. And then spreads their toxicity and hatred around the world. That absolutely allows the rest of us to judge their belief system.
I think it’s comparable, if a person says they are on a diet but secretly aren’t following the diet how can you know to judge the diet or the person, similar to a Christian going to church but turning around and using their gods name in vain which is a sin but the other church goers don’t know the person spews their hatred on Facebook or whatever
This is called “no true Scotsman”.
I think the best response comes from the Bible itself.
These people are the fruit of Christianity’s seeds: “…Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
The Bible isn’t even consistent on what exactly the Ten Commandments are, much less prescribe a single way of life. The tenets depend on how each person/congregation chooses to negotiate meaning from the text.
Two different people can read the same book and come away with two very different understandings of how to be a good person. At some point, they were either told how to be a good person by a mortal authority who cherry picked passages, or they chose for themselves what meaning to take from it. There are either good people or they are not, owing nothing to any god or scripture.
Indeed the “ten commandments” are something that was grafted on afterward. There is no list of ten specific things in the Bible held out as more important than anything else. Indeed in Jewish thought (you know, the people Moses was a part of!), there are over 600 commandments in the Bible, all of which are applicable. There’s no ten specific ones that are somehow exceptionally important.
Even if you just want to ignore all Jewish tradition and scholarship, which “commandments” do you want? Those of Exodus 20:2-17 or those of Deuteronomy 5:6-21? You need both to make up all the “ten”, and there is overlap between the two lists, but there are also some significant differences and changes. So you can’t rely on just one of them to make up your “ten”. But nor can you really put them together without papering over the fact that they say different things.
And your second point has bugged me since I was a child. I knew some very good people who studiously studied the Bible in my youth. I also knew some very bad people who did the same.
But I also knew some very good and very bad Buddhists.
And Muslims.
And atheists. (But not Atheists. Those are all basically bad people.)
And …
You get the drift. I couldn’t reconcile the Bible being the source of all that is good with the bad Bible-readers or the good believers in other things. It’s why I’m an atheist (but not an Atheist).
Agnostic i guess?
I’ve always been curious about learning about all this religion but in a nonreligious manner, every time I’ve heard the Bible someone always translated their own meaning to it, but also I’m curious about who wrote them and why
My answer is responding basic on sociology of religion methods. Your response doesn’t work in the real world. How you define who is following it or not immediately cuts your data is half. Who are you to define who is a true follower or not? That’s not objective. By those standards there are no religious followers in China or Japan. Pew had to consider this when trying to abstract data on this very question there.
Completely agree. Add on the fact that “Christianity” in America has been coopted for political gain in a way that we haven’t seen in recent memory. The amount of propaganda aimed at people who identify as Christian is insane.
Yeah, welcome to my world.
And it’s not just with the loud fundamentalists who hold these attitudes. I completely cut off a friend of almost 20 years who seemed to be one of those “sane” and “quiet” Christians when, in a period of mild intoxication, he let spill everything he actually believed.
He believed women should stay at home keeping house and raising children. Women should not have careers or aspirations beyond that. He believed that all of his friends were going to Hell to be tortured for eternity. (He was fine with this. Absolutely copacetic.) He believed that victims of natural disaster and of crime deserved it because obviously God was doing this to them for a reason.
And that’s when I realized that even the “quiet” and “non-extreme” Christians can have horrors concealed beneath their placid exteriors. So now I give very large side-eye when people think their Christianity is so important to their life that they have to bring it up at all in circles where it’s not relevant.
Aaand, that’s why alcohol is frowned upon in Christian circles. It mentally disarms you, collapsing conservative cognitive dissonance into plain bigotry.
That is a weird part of that word to censor…
This line of thinking in American Christianity is certainly one of the many things that made me begin to question it. A similar common sentiment is to love gay people but be radically against them being gay. Which is pretty much saying I don’t support or love you in anyway except if you stop being yourself.
It’s annoying that every event has to have some godly context that some random Christian can easily see.
I’m not an atheist or anti-Christian but these sorts of people also drive me crazy.
I’m with you on this one I think. To me it’s like being super into WH40k lore or something. It’s totally fine to dedicate yourself to the god emperor of mankind and go to a club to meet with other people to deep dive into parts of the lore, I can dig that. But when you use it to attack other people it just seems childish and to claim that the reason for harm is your heresy because “the emperor protects the true faithful” just makes you sound silly.
Their turn will come. Climate change will affect all of us eventually.
It already has, hurricane helene caused a ton of damage from sudden flooding. In several cases entire riverside towns disappeared.
The LA fires are tragic no question. But when a large portion the victims have the means and influence to reasonably recover (they sill have the rest of the city right there) it hits different compared to rural areas of people who are mostly forgotten in the first place.
Then they’ll say that God is probing them, or that it’s a sign of Apocalypse, or that he was sending to heaven the just among them, all that shit. They love double standards, even if their bible says that God hates them (Proverbs 20:23).
Proverbs 20:23
“Diverse weights are an abomination before the Lord: a deceitful balance is not good.”
ookay
Plastic is going to off the human race before climate change has a chance.
Says you. The microplastic in my veins has been enhancing my body since before I was conceived.
But what if they’re right, if you read the bible then:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
And those Christians are just following him out of fear, can you blame them? Not everyone is born to stand up to such a terrible creator.
Dio can you heaaar me I am lost and so alone…
Interesting thought. Thank you for sharing.
I think it’s a lot more than 10% of American Christians who are bloodthirsty and full of hatred like this. Maybe its just the Christians I grew up around but hearing fucked up shit like what your dad’s wife said was completely normal. I remember them cheering for AIDS and shit like that. Its how Christians are here, or a lot of them. I’ve met a few decent ones too.
We’re pathetically small and unintelligent on a universal scale, infinitesimal and unremarkable, it’s amazing we can think at all.
Unfortunately because we are meat with a lil lightning in it that grows naturally instead of being designed and perfected our brains are simply not truth machines, just like LLMs hallucinate, so do we, constantly.
Try to have some patience with our sibling humans who have the infection of superstition. They didn’t choose it, we all have our foibles, theirs are just a bit more visible and easily turned to hate
See, that’s my problem with all of it though. You’re saying we need to tolerate the intolerant and I just can’t get down with that.
