This pissed me off so fucking much when people defend Christianity by saying that all of the bad shit is in the Old Testament and that the New Testament is totally fine.
1 Corinthians 6:9
"Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,"
Gay people and gender non-conforming people are not allowed in to heaven
1 Peter 3:1
"Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands;"
It's still an extremely misogynistic book even in the new testament
Romans 1:26-27 ... 32
"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
...
Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them."
Both homophobia and misogyny
I could go on and on, and I probably will in the comments, but it's pretty fucking clear that all the nasty bigoted shit in the book just doesn't go away in the New Testament
You cannot separate the bigotry from the Bible. The Bible is very clear that you cannot pick and chose, that you have to accept the full book or none of it, you can't just take the verses you like and still be Christian. To be a good Christian who follows the entire Bible you must be bigoted
I very nearly wrote a comment about this long or longer going off on religion in reply to a post here but decided against it.
Christianity is a slave religion. It is not revolutionary. It is for the status quo, it demands slaves obey their masters, masters obey the state (render unto Cesar) and dangles above them all this idea that submitting here and now doesn't matter because you're on this plane of existence for 60-100 years and then if you're a good Christian you go to heaven literally forever and get to live in a paradise so it's just not worth struggling over. You can sit there as a smug slave, as a smug serf, worker etc as you're beaten and starved because you know you have a ticket of this, you know you have a reward waiting for you so none of this matters. The Protestant work ethic is the Christian work ethic. It demands false peace instead of justice, says CSA victims must forgive their abuser in their church and says that abuser as long as they repent to god (not even the victim, they don't matter) they're golden and their ticket to heaven remains reserved and they can stand up in front of church, forgiven by god and cannot be judged.
You want to be a Christian and push for a better world? Fine I'm not going to go out of my way to make fun of you but I am judging you because you're a cafeteria Christian, I find it unserious, you're picking and choosing and ignoring parts of your religion to suit what you want it to say. You're not an ounce of a more genuine Christian than the reactionary Christians who never do any charity at all who also pick and choose and twist the religion to be what you want it to be to suit your way of thinking.
Additionally Jesus says by the way that the OT is totally valid until he returns. Matthew 5:17-20:
I get you know being afraid of death. I honestly think it's the task of a world communist government to create a new religion for people who need this kind of thing, one that's defanged and harmless, one that cannot be misinterpreted in any charitable way to support bigotry, one with equal rights for women at its core and which is simple and short in tenets and wildly progressive. And it should make all the wanted promises, eternal life, etc, etc, only you don't confess to Jesus in your head, you confess to the local commissar in a self-crit and then you're forgiven unless it's a serious crime in which case you're imprisoned or sent to reform labor or whatever but promised your spot in the afterlife is preserved as a result. The point being not to go out of our way to preach and convert the masses to worshiping the party or anything bizarre like that but having an out, an option for these people so they don't get drawn into ancient, patriarchal, homophobic, reactionary ideologies.
Just want to add an interesting note here regarding this line and one other that I learned from my favorite professor in college, absolutely brilliant scholar who was like an encyclopedia of New Testament studies. Supposedly this line is intended as a double entendre that only Jesus' audience of common people would have fully understood - on the surface it sounds like "give to Caesar what belongs to him" meaning taxes, fealty, etc. But it can also be interpreted as "give Caesar what he deserves", meaning revolutionary violence against the Roman state.
Another example is the "turn the other cheek" saying. In the culture of the time, if you slapped a person with the back of your hand, that was a sign you considered them your inferior or subordinate. Slapping with the palm of your hand was reserved for people you considered your equal. (it might be the other way around but you get the idea) So if a Roman solider backhanded you, and you turned your other cheek towards them, they'd have to palmslap you if they wanted to hit you again, acknowledging you as their equal.
Granted I learned this stuff well over a decade ago so take it with a grain of salt. The language, translation, and interpretation of the texts is a HUGE factor in how Christianity in particular develops. Similar to how:
CW: pedo
The lines from the Pauline epistles that seem to refer to homosexuality generally are largely about the practice of pederasty in Roman culture, if you understand the original, Greek textsNot to detract from your other points about the modern Western understanding of Christian theology (esp among white evangelicals), I just find the academic study of the Bible very enlightening for these reasons. Ultimately reactionary forces will push whatever interpretation benefits them and the status quo the most. The "original texts" don't hold a lot of value for a dialectical materialist analysis.
I also want to beat the Caesar shaped dead horse.
Some can even interpret it as an instance of Jesus supporting a separation of Church and State. As he says in the full phrase "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's", and a while later before getting railed and nailed 😉 on the cross he said to Pilate "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But now (or 'as it is') my kingdom is not from the world". Which more or less says the spiritual shit is separated from the material shit, or to say that desiring to create or enforcing the theocratic "Christian Nation" is directly heretical to the word of the Christian messiah as the only kingdom of God itself exists in heaven.
Of course taking a more historical materialist look at it, one could simply say do unto Cesar is basically Jesus doing some squirrel shit to avoid getting tattled on by his religious-political enemies who'd want him to openly advocate for the tax resistance movement that active during the time and get thrown in jail before he was ready to get nailed to a cross.
Is also why he says he is the Son of Man, instead of the Son of God. To avoid declaring a full blown insurrection.
That's a fundamentalist interpretation of those two passages and not how Christianity is actually practiced today, or was practiced in the past. Does any Christian today obey all of the old testament laws because Jesus said to do so once, or use the render onto Ceasar passage to justify slavery? I think Samir Amin's Eurocentrism (which offers a Marxist analysis of the Abrahamic religions) offers a well rounded explanation about how Christianity has evolved from its beginnings in this regard and how it has been practiced, with a focus on those two passages. I seriously encourage you (and everyone else) to read it. To criticize religions, we need to understand how they prevailed outside of fundamentalist dogma. As an atheist, I found this writing from Amin really helpful, as I could never wrap my head around why people would be Christian or how it became the most popular religion in many parts of the world. Amin's writing here really helped me understand that.
Excerpt from Eurocentrism by Samir Amin, click here to expand text
Yet, because of the very nature of its message, Christianity is actually a radical break from Judaism. This break is fundamental since what is so dramatically expressed in the history of Christ is clear: the Kingdom of God is not on this earth and never will be. The reason the Son of God was defeated on the Earth and crucified is obviously because it was never the intention of God (the Father) to establish His Kingdom on this Earth, where justice and happiness would reign forever. But if God refuses to take on responsibility for settling human problems, it falls to human beings themselves to assume this responsibility. There is no longer an end of time and Christ does not proclaim it as coming, now or in the future. But, in this case, He is not the Messiah as announced by the Jews and they were right not to recognize Him as such. The message of Christ may, then, be interpreted as a summons to human beings to be the actors of their own history. If they act properly, that is, if they let themselves be inspired by the moral values which he enacted in his life and death, they will come closer to God in whose image they have been created. This is the interpretation that eventually prevailed and has given to modern Christianity its specific features based on a reading of the Gospels that enables us to imagine the future as the encounter between history as made by human beings and divine intervention. The very idea of the end of time, as brought about by an intervention from outside history, has vanished.The break extends to the whole area that was until then under the sway of the holy law. Undoubtedly, Christ takes care to proclaim that he has not come to this earth to upset the Law (of the Jews). This is in accordance with his core message: he has not come to replace ancient laws by better ones. It is up to human beings to call these laws into question. Christ himself sets an example by attacking one of the harshest and most formal criminal laws, i.e., the stoning of adulterous wives. When he says "those who have never sinned should throw the first stone," he opens the door to debate. What if this law was not just, what if its only purpose was to hide the hypocrisy of the real sinners? In fact, Christians are going to give up Jewish laws and rituals: circumcision disappears and the rules of personal law are diversified, insofar as the expansion of Christianity outside of the Jewish world proper adapts itself to different laws and statutes. A Christian law, which anyway does not exist, is not substituted for the latter. Also, alimentary prohibitions lose their power.
On the level of dogma, Christianity behaves the same way. It does not break openly with Judaism, since it accepts the same sacred text: the Bible. But it adopts the Jewish Bible without discussion; it is neither reread nor corrected. By doing so, Christianity comes close to voiding its significance. Instead, it juxtaposes other sacred texts of its own making, the Gospels. Now, the morality proposed in the Gospels (love for fellow human beings, mercy, forgiveness, justice) is considerably different from that inspired by the Old Testament. Additionally, the Gospels do not offer anything precise enough to encourage any sort of positive legislation concerning personal status or criminal law. From this point of view, those texts contrast strongly with the Torah or the Koran.
Legitimate power and God ("Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar") can no longer be confused. But this precept becomes untenable when, after three centuries of having persecuted Christianity, the ruling powers switch sides and become Christians. But even before, when Christians secretly founded churches to defend their faith and still later, when the Emperor himself became the armed protector of Christianity, a new law is worked out, a law which claims to be Christian, primarily on the level of personal rights. What is a Christian family? This concept had to be defined. It will take time, there will be setbacks, and a final agreement will never be reached. This is because earlier laws and customs, different from place to place, are accepted. Slowly, however, those new laws will be recognized as sacred: the Catholic canon laws, which are different for the Western and Eastern Catholic Churches, and the legal forms of the different Orthodox and Protestant Churches are the result of this slow process.
Is that really how you interpret that passage? It was "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's" Isn't it? So it's literally calling out the romans for thinking they own everything when they don't. It seems to be saying the opposite of what you think it is saying. Jesus was crucified by the Romans because he stood against the status quo and was a threat to their power in the region.
yeah wtf am I reading here. "let's trick religious people into thinking their forced labor is ok"
"let's have state sanctioned interrogators investigating spiritual crimes"
"let's literally make a cult but involve state authority"
This is like if someone wanted David Koresh to have his compound but also he's the town sheriff.
I mean idk if fascism is quite the right word but co-opting religion to superficially suit your purpose and manipulate people is quite the take.
Doing the Cult of Reason on the new revolutionary iteration?