I like the last words of chief Hatuey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatuey) before the Christians burned him alive:
[Hatuey], thinking a little, asked the religious man if Spaniards went to heaven. The religious man answered yes… The chief then said without further thought that he did not want to go there but to hell so as not to be where they were and where he would not see such cruel people. This is the name and honour that God and our faith have earned.
That burns hotter than the fires of hell!
"Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn’t have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents. Without a prison, there can be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn’t afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn’t know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don’t know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society. "
- John Fire Lame Deer
A lot of indigineous thinking captured in one passage, particularly restorative justice.
I was raised Christian but reading texts on Indigineous thought has been what has helped me realize what makes a good person.
Too much in Abrahamic religions is about obedience and blind submission to authority which is why I often feel drawn to eastern religious thought also. Both Eastern religious thought and the indigineous worldview are more holistic in my view.
I find Abrahamic religious teachings to be very exclusionary (hey if you beleive what we believe we’ll let you into heaven) Almost like a country club of sorts. Eastern and Indigineous philosophy (with the exception of the caste system warping into a rigid institutionalized social hierarchy due in part to Western influence) seem to be much more inclusionary.
I find Abrahamic religious teachings to be very exclusionary (hey if you beleive what we beleive we’ll let you into heaven) Almost like a country club of sorts.
So true. Thinking about it, Christian missionaries’ main job is less to sell Jesus, but more to sell FOMO.
Like a timeshare salesperson, they’re not gonna talk much about the maintenance fees required (such as treating each other the way Jesus said to.) They’re also not gonna talk about how so many of the other share-owners are insufferable to be around and regularly break the agreed-upon rules. Oh, but they will hype up how, for the low, low price of asking Jesus for forgiveness and getting baptized, you, too, could reserve yourself an eternal home in Paradise!
Fire indeed
Woke
(/s)
Some of my family just went to the Powwow in OK, and now i randomly come across my ancestry on lemmy, wtf…
Are your family monotheistic? If not, what other religions are common?
Mostly Christians… Def not me though. The white man got to my family lmao
That’s pretty cool
Problem is, the Bible doesn’t present one cohesive set of positive moral principles. It’s a collection of books written over hundreds of years by many authors with their own beliefs, biases and contexts, so it’s not possible to derive one set of “Christian values” from it. This means people will cherry pick bits that align with their pre-existing beliefs and dismiss or downplay whatever is inconvenient or contradicts them, and there are plenty of less than savoury parts to cherry pick from.
and there are plenty of less than savoury parts to cherry pick from.
There is literal god approven genocide for example.
And slavery. Don’t forget the slavery.
Or the blood sacrifice and “when is divination acceptable” angles.
God shouuld have realized this when He chose His Favourite People.
If i remember correctly (it’s been a while), then the Bible becomes a lot more coherent if you throw out the old testament, and keep to the new testament only - which actually is what christians should do, because the sacrifice of Jesus is a new covenant which supercedes the old one with Moses.
If you keep to the NT, then there isn’t so much ambiguity - evangelicals who cite from the OT are even more backwards than catholicism itself is.
Not exactly. In fact, this is a gross oversimplification. The New Testament contradicts itself and plenty of mainstream Christian beliefs. Different NT authors have drastically different views of OT law, ranging from the view that the OT law should still be upheld (Matt 5:17 where Jesus says “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill."), to completely rejecting the old covenant (Hebrews 8:13 “In speaking of a new covenant, he has made the first one obsolete, and what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear.”), and a range of nuanced views in-between. You can torture the text to reconcile to make it fit a particular view, but that’s not an honest way of reading a text.
Also, wholesale rejecting the OT on the basis that the new covenant supercedes the old is incredibly problematic. I can understand saying that in the case of a contradiction between OT and NT you would go with the latter (although even that is an issue), but if you reject the OT, you’re missing out on essential developments in Israelite and Jewish history, thought and literature which is essential to understand the NT. It’s bad enough as it is that the tradition of mystical literature which so heavily influenced post-exilic Jewish and early Christian thought is overlooked. The last thing people who want to understand the NT need to do is throw out the OT.
If i remember correctly (it’s been a while), then the Bible becomes a lot more coherent if you throw out the old testament, and keep to the new testament only
You mean the one that starts with four tellings of the same story, that contradict each other heavily ?
Including a fabricated census of the entire Roman Empire which for some reason required men to return to their birth towns and left no historical or archaeological record
The sermon on the Mount and specifically Matthew 5:18 I think or something like that explicitly says that nothing from the law has been removed or invalidated by Jesus.
This is a common sentiment in American Christianity but it doesn’t really seem to be backed up by the text.
I think most modern exegesis of that verse rather tightly constrains it to rabbinical law, bearing in mind that the Sadducees and those upstart Pharisees (of which JC was one) were battling out questions of the law at the time JC was doing his thing.
So just saying I think you’re right. Otherwise, no football on Sunday for many multiple reasons!
I think most modern exegesis of that verse rather tightly constrains it to rabbinical law
Oh. Well how convenient for them.
Jesus himself says that he didn’t come to abolish the old laws, but to fulfill them.
The whole book is worthless.
Jesus came to fulfill the 10 Commandments and spread the word of God being a loving God; not the ritualistic laws of the early-Israelites.
I’d say the book has meaning, but the lens in which one applies when reading it matters. There’s the text as it’s written, there’s the perspectives of the respective authors, and then there is your own lens being three main ways of reading it.
I think the biggest issue is people that are Christians in name only that pick up a Bible and call themselves Christians without even knowing the teachings of Jesus. The types that think what you do on Earth doesn’t matter so long as you believe, so they go on to do near the exact opposite of Jesus. A short comic about this: Supply Side Jesus
If that god was really loving, then hell wouldn’t be a punishment for rejection.
I’m not convinced that any gods are real, but I’m convinced that the Bible god absolutely isn’t.
Even then, might wanna stick to the Gospels
More importantly than that though, nobody’s fucking read it
Well that’s not true. We’re not living in 600s Europe where only the clergy can read (and not all of them could read that well). However, a major issue is how it’s read. Common practice in churches is to read the text and interpret it through a pre-existing set of beliefs informed by the reader’s current cultural and political background, as well as millennia of religious tradition which many modern Christians are barely aware of (people take the statements in the Nicene Creed for granted, but it’s not a statement of faith that the Bible could support without centuries of heated discussions, politicking and reinterpretations filling in the gaps) In biblical scholarship, this is referred to as eisegesis, where you read an interpretation into the text, rather than allowing the text to speak for itself.
In contrast, exegesis is the method used by modern biblical scholars, as opposed to theologians. This is basically reading the Bible as you would any other historical piece of literature - when you frame the text in its historical, religious, cultural and literary context, it takes on a whole new dimension almost entirely missing from church readings of the Bible. Suddenly the creation stories aren’t just an account of how the world was made and how evil came about, but a polemic against the creation stories of Mesopotamia, which the biblical authors adopted and adapted in order to distinguish them from neighbouring mythologies. You stop needing to reconcile the irreconcilable Gods of the OT - the wrathful, vengeful, murderous God and the benevolent, merciful God - and instead can appreciate how the biblical authors have taken what originally seem to be two traditionally separate gods from Caananite-Israelite religion (El and Yahweh) and, over time, merged the traditions to fit the theology of a monotheistic cult which developed later within Israelite religion. By reading beyond the biblical canon, you can see evidence of varieties of Jewish and Christian tradition that didn’t survive into later mainstream religion (for example, the Gospel of Mary places more importance on women than the other gospels and didn’t make it into the biblical canon) I could go on, but realistically who will read this far?
TL;DR - yes, people do read the bible - in fact, it’s probably the most read book in the world - it’s just that people read into it rather than out of it, which stops them from appreciating what the many authors and books of the Bible are actually saying
In biblical scholarship, this is referred to as eisegesis, where you read an interpretation into the text, rather than allowing the text to speak for itself.
This has reached such a level among US Christians that they often pick out single sentences to quote with little to no regard for the rest of the text it’s come from. Like, never mind reading the book with the context of its origin in mind, or even the context of the rest of the book, when the context of the sentences directly before and after the thing you’re referencing are being ignored.
When this is the text that’s being referenced: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel+4%3A9-17&version=NIV
There’s nothing wrong with multi grain bread of course, but that’s clearly not some sort of special holy bread recipe that will bless you if you eat it.
" I could go on, but realistically who will read this far?"
Me! I’ll read this far.
Joking aside, this was a good comment and I appreciate the time you spent writing it.
It tangentially reminds me of something I was reading recently about how Western Buddhism functions. The piece argued that Buddhists in Western countries engage with Buddhism in a manner that often involves trying hard to be scholarly in relation to reading canon — that there’s an instinct to cling to a sense of traditionalism as a source of legitimacy, which felt ironic to me. The result is that the practice of Buddhism in places like the United States looks super different to how it looks in places with a longer history and larger population of lay Buddhists.
I found it super interesting because it made me reflect on how the interpretation of Buddhism has had to change over the years to adapt to changing times, and how part of that ongoing change includes the interactions of Western Buddhism with more traditional sects of Buddhism. For example, I always used to find secular Buddhists odd because it felt like they were trying to pick and choose parts of a religion in a manner that was incompatible with how I viewed religion at the time. However, nowadays, I think it’s more practical to see these strands of secular Buddhist thought as being as legitimately Buddhist as anything else, because ultimately they’re a part of the conversation. It helps that since that time, I’ve seen many examples of people across many religions picking and choosing elements of their religion to adapt it to their particular cultural context — there’s far more nuance to it than I realised.
I read your entire comment and really enjoyed it. I even bookmarked it to read it again later. This stuff really interests me. Thank you for your comment :)
Glad to hear that! I’d recommend checking out the Yale introductions to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and New Testament which are freely available on YT. They’re lecture series which introduce the concept of the historical critical method and explore the influences on different parts of the Bible, and it’s really fascinating stuff!
Oh, sweet! Thanks for the recommendations and links to them, I really appreciate that! That’s real cool of you. I’m looking forward to checking them out!
Almost forgot to mention this banger of a video It’s basically about the origins and development of the biblical Yahweh, well-worth a watch.
Hey now plenty of atheists like me have read it
This site is not mobile-otimized at all.
it’s not really great on desktop either, but it still has a 2013 copyright, so i assume that’s what they decided the world is stuck with.
the tl;dr is basically every claim in the bible is contradicted by another claim (or claims) in the bible
edit: if you’re interested in this sort of thing, i highly recommend bart ehrman’s presentation on another major problem with the bible: translation(s) https://youtu.be/pfheSAcCsrE he’s a biblical scholar who grew up staunchly devout, but became agnostic after becoming a prominent authority on the topic of the bible. GEE how did that happen…
There was an earlier Simpsons episode with that exact concept. Basically Flanders needs to make some big decision to be naughty and takes Bible clippings for and against and they are nearly evenly weighted if I remember the episode right.
If the scholarly aspect is of any interest to anybody, i can recommend this playlist by center place. The lectures are an excellent deep dive into christian history and concepts. I am no christian, but have spend hours listening to this gay mormon preacher teach about things like how the christian god was created from a mixture of different polytheist gods, who Baal was, or why Christians are obsessed with sex.
The style is more like a university lecture than a fast paced yt video, but i really learned a lot from it.
Didn’t Gandhi say something similar?
“I like your christ but not your Christians, they have so little in common with christ” (or something similar)
I believe this is one of those common misquotes.
It was actually Buddha who said that
And Abraham Lincoln.
And that Abraham Lincoln? Albert Einstein.
I like the idea that Jesus spent the 20 years between debating rabbis and his own ministry going east on the silk road and learning Buddhism. I’ve always felt like base Christianity seems like Buddhist principles through a Jewish lens.
I always wondered about his childhood. The bible practically goes from: Jesus born > Jesus is an adult, with very little in-between. It really bugged me as a kid - I couldn’t relate to an adult, let alone to one that’s supposed to be perfect. Also, how can a little girl be expected to care about bible stories when so many of them are just boring conversations between old men from ancient times? Sure, occasionally women appear. And sometimes there are animals. Noah’s Ark’s been milked to death in kids’ bible stories, probably because it’s one of the few stories in the book that’s capable of actually capturing kids’ attention.
But anyway. Point is, since Jesus’s youth seems to barely have a record, you could well be onto something.
You might enjoy a movie called “The man from earth”
I do, I recommend it to people
Yay! There are dozens of us (probably more since I guess it has leaped out of cult status)
Oh oh and I’m also open to recommendations if there’s some other movie that you feel is similar and worthy.
Thank you and hope you have a nice time!
Some of that “time in the desert” eh?
It’s been a while since Sunday school, do they mention “time in the desert” other than the 40 days when the devil was screwing with him?
I believe Buddha was merely quoting Hastur.
Who was actually quoting Abraham Lincoln, vampire Hunter
And time traveller. It’s a crucial aspect of Lincoln lore too many people forget.
Ah yes, Abraham Lincoln, famous inventor of rocket jumping
Nah, this was Abe Lincoln paraphrasing Einstein.
Solid burn
Your comment was right below that one, what a coincendiary.
Hotter than the fires of hell.
Yeah, those great christian values… Here are some lists for those christian values if anyone wants to act accordingly to them:
https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/detaillist.php?cid=3&pub=1
https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/detaillist.php?cid=2&pub=1
https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/detaillist.php?cid=4&pub=1You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘order by book_id,ref_chapter,ref_verse’ at line 1–select * from lists where cat_id=3 and pub_id= order by book_id,ref_chapter,ref_verse
I get why people say the Bible is hard to understand and the teaching hard to follow
I don’t have that issue 😅
I feel that this is a bit biased. You need to look at it from the Cristian perspective, understand the essence fully, then mercilessly deconstruct it!
It is just literal quotes from the bible. If anything, your view is biased.
I think that reply is satire as they also say “then mercilessly deconstruct it”.
Slavery is one
Dude, if we just didn’t have Christian straight up utopia. Like, please rapture and leave the sane people behind.
The world would be a better place without Abrahamic religions.
The world would be a better place without
Abrahamicreligions.I think religions could be cool as a system of “basic education” in terms of morality and philosophy, in the same way that schools teach you some basic scientific knowledge with the full intention that it is a simplified model that will be replaced if you decide to further study those topics in college.
Problem is, the current way religions work doesn’t allow for anyone to grow out of those simplified beliefs 🤷
Religion is important though. Ultimately for one to live a fulfilling life one needs to tend and maintain their mental, physical and spiritual health. Religion is how historically most have maintained their spiritual health (and mental health too), and in modern times organized religion doesn’t have a monopoly on spiritualism, so people can find whatever worldview and practices that help them maintain their peace with the universe and their place in it. But importantly, many people do still turn to religion for their mental and spiritual health
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“wannabe Christians”
No True Christian, amirite?
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They don’t attend mass, they don’t read the Bible except to quote overused passages, and they watch pseudo-historical and religious films and art to strengthen their alleged Christian identity.
Okay, but that’s still just The Bible With Extra Steps.
“Oh, you didn’t get the deep lore of the original manuscript. You just watched the VeggieTales version” might hold more water if the book itself wasn’t choke full of allegories and parables and transcribed oral histories. FFS, Revelations is literally a guy (very likely high off his balls) having a crazy dream.
You can’t come at this document and complain “They’re getting the message sixth hand rather than fifth hand”. Embellishing the story is central to the religion’s tradition. How else do we end up with Seventh Day Adventists and Mormons?
The american natives of the great lakes region were considered some of the sharpest orators the missionaries have ever witnessed. A number of them also didn’t have rigid hierarchies and believed in the importance of individual freedom. The Dawn of Everything speaks a lot about some of their civic/social beliefs.
Speaking of which, can anyone point me to resources on those early missionaries’ records on the natives?
This page references several works by French missionaries: https://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/206/301/lac-bac/explorers/www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/explorers/h24-1430-e.html
I could easily find the first mentioned book “Le Grand Voyage du pays des Hurons”. A scan of what I think is the original book: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k109515f/f2.item There also exists an English translation, but I couldn’t find a free version of that one.
Better what?
I don’t get it.
Better people I guess?
That makes sense; thank you.
Savage
