chapotraphouse

I'm not going to comment on everything as many others have already covered different aspects but I would like to humbly point out a couple of things which I hope you can use for self-crit. I apologize on advance for the length and to clarify that I am trying to say this from a place of total good faith—for lack of a better term—and not as an attack on you personally.

Primarily, the materialist perspective on religion which Marx discussed was that critique of religion was the necessary initial complement to critique of capitalism. This is because everything is colored through the religious, especially at those times, and you can't move on to critique material conditions when you're following an idealistic ideology that tells you not to do that for several reasons. However, that doesn't necessarily entail opposition to religion or the requirement to stamp out religion. Critique can occur as a process of edification. It's very possible, and I think highly likely, that even if we lived in a communist world that religions would exist but simply in a different form—potentially how religious comrades hold them now.

Secondly, and building off the first point, it seems to me that you are specifically attacking a certain concept or expression of not just the religious in general but Christianity in particular. You conceded in various comments that you have personal trauma with Evangelical churches. I also grew up around Evangelicalism, so my empathy on that front. However, despite your aversion to it, you are still carrying evangelical cobwebs and doing work for them. You are reinforcing fundamentalism when you state, as if a fact, that you cannot "pick and chose" the Bible and that "the Bible" itself is very clear on this. I would assume you have enough knowledge to understand that "the Bible" is a collection of books and letters written over thousands of years apart by different individuals and communities that were also tampered and changed many, many times over. When you say that "the Bible" says you can't pick and choose verses, I would ask you: Which book says this? And at what point in development was the canon when this was written? Highly likely that this verse in question is the one from Revelations. Either way, it is only self-referential; i.e., it is the author telling you not to mess with the text he wrote in particular. There's no possible way that, let's say as an example, a verse from Paul's epistles is telling you that Revelations must be accepted as it is, or even that the Gospel according to John is absolutely true, as neither yet existed at the time of his writings. Nor that an older text which didn't know of the existence of an earlier text, or perhaps even rejected it, was advocating for the said earlier text as authoritative. We have to understand that canonization is something we retroactively project onto the texts. There is no reason not to be able to "pick and choose", there is no reason why fundamentalist theology is automatically correct, there is no reason to believe that these Scriptures are the Divine Literal and Infallible Word of God. These are fundamentalist dogma. We know and should say these are written by human beings. When we read in "the Bible" that we shouldn't alter a single letter, we should be able to understand this is the author trying to assert authority for this particular text, and there is no reason why we should necessarily cede the point. If we look at the Church Fathers there was no issue in "picking and choosing" because they did not have fundamentalist brainworms about the issue. This is a relatively modern problem and interpretation. It was initially absolutely acceptable, and expected, to take the Bible not as a literal Word of God but as metaphors and so on which could be analyzed and critiqued—much in the same style as Judaism in rabbinical tradition.

Further, the modern concept of "homosexuality", etc. did not really exist at that time. So much so that you would be hard pressed to find the word anywhere. So we are, once again, doing the work for the fundamentalists when we immediately concede that Christianity as such is anti-LGBTQ, etc. Of course, it's not impossible that some individual, let's again use Paul, had some reactionary views on the subject that made it into his texts but that is, once again, one individual or maybe even a later interpolation to that individual's texts by someone else. And I'm not fully convinced of this for Paul, anyway, given some of the historico-linguistic issues with this but that's another topic entirely. What we can definitely critique is the role which institutional Christianity, in its ecclesiastical expression post-Constantine, has served with the oppressive interests of various ruling groups since that time. This is different from Christianity as such.

Lastly, the ontotheological concept of the Divine, in the form of "God" some man sitting on a cloud, is not a particularly well-developed concept. There are many issues with it deserving of critique. However, that again doesn't necessarily mean it will resolve in total disbelief. It can dialectically resolve itself in the development of a higher form of the Divine. There are already different concepts of the Divine that certain people may develop after initially applying materialist, textual, historical, philosophical, and theological critique to religion. When we just take as fact that "God" in the Bible is the God of the Evangelicals, as you do, then you are once again giving them a major victory. Usually reddit atheists and such attack an ontotheological concept of God, which is easy enough to critique, but they once again cede ground as if it is the only way to formulate a concept of the Divine. It is, in fact, a very crude concept and shows everyone involved to be thinking on elementary terms when this is the crux of the discussion and critique. But it catches the atheist and the fundamentalist in the very same trap when atheists argue against it by using its own inherent and self-serving logic. The people warning that religion as such will coopt religious comrades are often the ones recuperated by this very fundamentalist line.

So, you seem to have an aversion to a fundamentalist, reactionary ontotheological concept of Evangelical Christianity as it is found (usually) in the US. I don't think anyone here would disagree with you on there being major issues in that line of thinking. Christianity is far older than that and has so many different expressions that it is not possible to generalize it all under your particular critique. And it seems to me that you never developed a critique, or rather understanding, of Christianity beyond what you experienced at home which you are still reacting to even though you think you have an objective critique of Christianity or religion in general. If you want to reject religion from your life, cool, more power to you. I don't believe in proselytizing and personally don't care much about comrades' religious beliefs. I haven't seen this on Hexbear at all. But at least try to develop a concept of it beyond what you were taught in order to unlearn those things so you don't actually reinforce that trauma unintentionally on yourself and others. And I mean this with total due respect, I just see this often and want to point out how it is still affecting you and your critique because I have gone through it and I also see how others continue to struggle with it.