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
The Bible is a colonial construct, biblical canon was literally chosen by those in power so that they could wield power. The Bible says you cannot pick and choose because the people who picked and chose what books were in the Bible said so.
I think Christianity can be decolonized, though. Liberation theologies have made attempts at it and they’re very interesting imo
Why? What good is there? Jesus said like a couple nice things but you don’t need Jesus to be kind to other people, I don’t see any value under the bigotry that someone can’t just get somewhere else
I think a blood vessel in my brain bursts every time someone brings this up. Liberation theology doesn’t even come close to making up for all the terrible shit done in the name of Christianity
Like it or not, two billion+ workers are Christians.
Communism is not about tailing the tendencies of the working class
It’s also not about struggling over every single contradiction at the same time. There are principal and non-principal contradictions.
That said, because the principal contradiction is what allows the other non-principal contradictions to exist, the other contradictions will always contain elements of the principal contradiction. In those instances we should struggle against those elements.
Calling for a decolonization of Christianity is hardly tailism. It’s just recognizing that Christianity can be a terrain of struggle.
Yeah, and billions of workers are homophobic and transphobic, just because a lot of people believe something doesn’t mean it’s suddenly good or that it should go without criticism
Calling for the decolonization of Christianity and calling the Bible a colonial construct is clearly a criticism?
I wasn’t saying that you were not criticizing it, I was saying that the number of people who believe it has no bearing on if it should be criticized or not
But I wasn’t saying it shouldn’t be criticized, so why were you talking about whether it should be criticized or not?
I think I misunderstood what you were trying to say here. I thought you were saying that because so many people believed that there is no point in a post like this criticizing it. I don’t think I’m understanding the point you’re trying to make and I don’t think I’m doing a good job with the point I want to make here
Atheism is a product of material conditions, and billions of workers are just not in conditions favorable to atheism. I don’t think it’s useful to fight them on religion, and instead, we can meet them halfway with decolonized religion and liberation theology. Turn religion into a terrain of struggle and into one of our tools against bourgeois ideology. Eventually religion will evaporate as the material conditions necessary for its existence are defeated, but we have to deal with it until then.
Decolonizing something implanted through colonialism is tough. It feels like spiritual cope in a similar vein to African slaves’ adopting and molding of Christianity
Tough, but I think worthwhile.
All spirituality is cope, that’s the point. Are we just supposed to not cope with our suffering?
No, you deal with the root cause of that suffering rather than putting a God shaped bandaid over it
Wow, why didn’t I think of that?! 🙃
Come on, we clearly need to use an opiate while we work on dealing with the material conditions at the root of religion. Religion has a material cause, it will evaporate when people don’t need it anymore. Until then, we can decolonize it for our own uses.
Eh I think even under Full Communism people will still get existentially sad sometimes.
Alleviating suffering is an incredibly admirable endeavour, and it is certainly true that at this moment the majority of suffering in our world is unnecessary and a result of injustice. However at the same time, even in an ideal world suffering will exist, it is a fact of human existence. Even in a classless moneyless society we will still feel the sorrow of heartbreak, the grief of a loved one’s passing, the pain of injury and disease, the existential angst of wondering who you are and what your place in the world is. These are topics which spirituality and religion address in a way that materialist analysis often fails to. We do ourselves no favours by denying this fact, we just appear like out of touch assholes to the countless people who find relief from suffering through spirituality and religion.
If that cope includes bigotry than it’s a bad cope and people should find some other way to cope that doesn’t hurt other people