this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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I've been getting on this same train lately. Calvinism and its offshoots are outright heresy in my opinion, so antithetical to Christ's actual message are they. What the fuck happened to "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into Heaven"?
(And don't even get me started on, "what you do to the least of these, you do also to me")
The catholic church as an institution and as a method of spreading the system of the roman empire and its culture is already antithetical to Christ and his messages.
True, but they seem to have at least retained more of the caring-for-the-poor concept, even if their actual methods of doing so have, historically, often been horrific, and even though their massive wealth has made their efforts hypocritical at best and has similarly situated them on the wrong side of Christ's ideas. (Not trying to defend the Catholic Church here at all, really--I also take great issue with the obsession with sexual purity in both protestant and Catholic churches; that all comes from Paul, who, last I checked, was not Jesus.)
Saying that the Catholic Church is antithetical to the “message of Christ” is like saying Tolkien is antithetical to the messages of Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. The former is the closest thing to a primary source for your understanding of the latter. Christian doctrine is full of internal contradictions no matter how “originalist” one claims to be in reference to a particular revision of a particular translation of a curated selection of secondhand accounts of an original message.
It can be positive to the extent that people choose to see in those contradictions things that inspire them to act in service of humanity, and negative to the extent that people choose to see in it things that license them to act in their own self-interest at the expense of others.
Christians have existed before the council of Nicaea and Chalcedon - how is the catholic church the primary source? Yet Jesus fought against Babylon and was murdered by it and then Constantine made Jesus into the symbol of Babylon. Jesus’ teachings remain anathema towards empire, and the catholic church is not forth dying for.
I’m not aware of any modern self-identified Christian denominations that can show evidence of having existed continuously since before the Catholic Church, which is generally accepted to have originated in the 1st century CE.
I was raised in an American evangelical Protestant tradition (you probably know the one), so I’m familiar with the argument that (for example), the English King James Bible is the one true literal word of god that predates both King James, the English language, and the Catholic Church. I’m not here to tell you what your spiritual truth is, but as a Marxist with an evidence-based perspective rooted in historical materialism, I don’t find any of the retroactive claims of modern Protestants to be the “true” or “original” form of Christianity any more or less valid than Mormons deciding in the 1830s that they’re actually the original Christians and settled North America in 600 BCE.
I’m not trying to belittle whatever specific faith you hold or tradition you practice if the material result is that you’re doing good in the world. I just wanted to share an outside perspective that, in the context of a post predominantly about the ideological origins of the more antisocial flavors of Christianity, claims from Anglophones that amount to “everyone else got it wrong, and I know what Jesus really said” sound absolutely indistinguishable from every other form of modern Protestantism.
I am not an english prot and I never claimed that there are Christians that survived the ages intact and "unspoiled" by the catholic church, thats you assumings things I never claimed, and I was never raised to believe that protestants are the OG Christians, in the first place. The oriental church of Armenia and Ethiopia are the oldest branches of Christianity.
I stated that Christians existed before the creating of the catholic church as an institution and that jesus message being used to destroy and colonize countries and peoples is already anathema to his message, As a fellow marxist, not only should you realize that the catholic church as a institution cannot exist (unlike Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Protestantism) with a socialist or communist state (there are a bunch of papal encyclicals which are very condemning of socialism and declare incompatible with "human nature") but also that just because americans & the english were racist towards italians and the irish, doesnt make catholicism into the based "liberation theory" socialist institution (liberation theory is a frince element and not official doctrine).
It’s true that I was making some demographic assumptions. I was unfamiliar with the oriental orthodox tradition; it seems like they have a reasonable claim to being of a roughly similar age give or take a few years. Given how comparatively small their population is as a proportion of global Christianity, it seems unlikely that the overwhelming majority of modern Christians base their understanding of what “Jesus’ message” was on these particular traditions rather than something derived from the more widespread Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant traditions. Obviously someone raised in a specific tradition is going to have beliefs based in a specific canon regardless of how many other Christians acknowledge the same canon, but that’s sort of my point: any Muslim would claim to have an understanding of “Jesus’ message” that differs in a pretty considerable way to most Christians’ understanding (i.e., did he claim to be god). As far as I know, Jesus is not generally accepted to have written any surviving works directly outlining a definitive version of “his message”. All of the primary sources for what constitutes “Jesus’ message” are, to the best of my knowledge, purportedly second or thirdhand accounts at best, with significant discrepancies between them. One person’s deeply held conviction of what the message really is can differ considerably from another person’s understanding of it, and there doesn’t seem to be a legitimate material bases on which to empirically declare one more or less “correct” than another.
What I’m not doing is making a positive claim that the Catholic Church is inherently good, liberatory, or compatible with a post-revolutionary socialist state. Marxism-Leninism is fundamentally materialist and consequently atheistic. Every Abrahamic tradition I’m aware of would have some irreconcilable degree of contradiction with the Marxist conception of socialism in the long-term. It’s not the primary contradiction at present, which is why I don’t have an immediate strategic interest in convincing any believers that they’re wrong if they’re acting in service of the global proletariat and managing their own ideological contradictions for the time being. What I will say is that I’ve not seen evidence that Catholicism is qualitatively more incompatible with Marxism (or the aggregate average conception of Jesus’ teachings) than every other (mostly derivative) form of Christianity I’ve ever heard of. They are all ultimately incompatible for broadly similar reasons. Contradictions are present in all actually existing people, and I’m sure you can find examples of both revolutionary and reactionary actions from people across the spectrum of self-identified Christians, Muslims, etc.
It was their extremely stupid attempt to resolve the contradiction of "God is all powerful, knows everything, has seen all that was and will be" with "I have free will."
Their resolution? Get rid of the free will part. A not so subtle solution to an inherent contradiction or inadequacy of a mortal pondering the divine.
You ever had so much difficulty doing something that you just toss all your progress in the trash and start over with a simpler thing? That was the move.