chapotraphouse

And marx had some fucked up opinions on jews and homosexuals, along with a lot of others in the "Marxist canon" that doesn't mean we throw out the entire ideology because the founder had ideas of race and gender that most people believed before the last century.

The reality is most people who are Christians, like Marxists, haven't read every single book and letter and believe everything that was written. They take the core concepts and apply them to the modern world.

Even the bigoted Christians aren't really orthodox, they aren't following the part that says you shouldn't do usury, they're just bigots looking for a justification for there bigotry. They just Google the verse in the Bible that says gays are bad, just like the small minority of homophobic Marxists will pull up a marx or stalin quote against it.

Religion is a tool, often used by reactionary forces, but has been effectively used by liberation theologians to challenge capital in Latin America.

Christianity is also just a boring religion and out of all the beliefs you can have, why the fuck would you go with it? Boring lore, evil rules, and a cruel and sadistic God (just one, but also 3?) Fuck that noise.

I mean if we're opening this can of worms I'd point out Islam is just as bad.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that all of Paul's letters should be considered non-canonical. He was just a dude who claimed to have found Jesus and then spoke for him, and because he was a Roman citizen, he could travel freely throughout the empire, so his version of Christianity was the first version most people heard of. His ideas carry far more weight than someone like Mary Magdalene, or most of the apostles. Which is just absurd to me.

k

I hope you heal from your religious trauma and know that we love you comrade.

Most religions don't actually put a premium on following every single part of their holy text. I mean, a lot of religions don't even have holy texts period. To claim otherwise implies that religion only existed after the invention of writing, which is obviously untrue.

Now Christianity as an Abrahamic religion does put emphasis on holy text, so Christians are kinda stuck if their holy text turns out to be trash. And religions that don't have holy texts are extremely syncretic, far too syncretic for your average Christian's (and honestly most Westerner's) conception of religion.

By syncretism, I mean something like "Jesusist" running around with text taken from the Bible and the Quran about how Jesus is cool mashing them together with various Buddhist text about some bodhisattva is actually about Jesus, who is styled as the messiah bodhisattva christ by Jesusist. And "Jesusism" isn't just one mashing of text, but multiple schools with different proportion of mashing, so one school of Jesusism mostly pull from the Gospel while another school is mostly Gnostic text and the Quran while another is basically just Buddhism with Jesus characteristics. With this understanding and practice of religion, you could found a particular socialist Jesusist school where you pick and choose parts of the Bible/Quran/Buddhist texts that crafts a socialist figure out of Jesus.

There are already syncretic religions that use Christianity. Cuba has Santeria (and there are some people who say that the amount of actual Cuban Catholics is pretty low but practitioners of Santeria aren't suppose to reveal their religion to non-practitioners, so they just say they're Catholic instead.). I believe the various Indigenous peoples in Bolivia had also sycretized Christianity with older Indigenous beliefs and practices. Bolivian Indigenous Christians will incorporate worship of Pachamama into their religious practices, and no amount of pointing to the Ten Commandments will stop them from continuing to offer burnt offerings to Pachamama during the Summer Solstice.

The main problem with Christianity is that it isn't a religion that lends itself well with syncretism (despite the ultimate irony that Christianity itself has syncretic roots of Messianic Judaism mashed with various mystery cults and neo-Platoism), but a religion of unchanging dogma. This dogma can be bend, have parts of it be overruled by newer dogma, and even have parts be somewhat selectively ignored, but you can't just cut out the parts you don't like like syncretic religions.

I dunno, I think for the average christian their belief kinda largely begins and ends with "I like Jesus and think there's a god and afterlife". Most haven't really read the bible or go to church I don't think.