Heaven is a peanut farm
One for you and me
With friends and music, banquets and balls
And a good man named Jimmy
.
Heaven is a peanut farm
Surely it’s the best
There’s a porch with a sleeping dog
One where you can find rest
.
They say there is a man out there
Who made sure every heart he would fill
When God said “it’s okay, you can stop your work now”
He said “no, I don’t think I will”
.
When you come to this peanut farm
You will be filled with this delight
Friends and family, we gather 'round
To wish Mr. Carter goodnight
Organised religion is a political institution, it has always been. It will do whatever gives them the most power.
But it won’t. The word “Christian” doesn’t mean “a person who follows the teachings of christ”, it just means you’re a member of a hyper-authoritarian political club.
I try to live the way Jesus demanded people live. It’s very humanist, almost buddhist, even. But I would never, ever call myself “Christian” because it stands for the opposite of everything Jesus stood for. It’s very decidedly anti-christ.
I was behind a truck yesterday with two bumper stickers. “Jesus Saves” and “Fuck Biden.”
I think that sums up the American Christian.
“Mentally ill narcissist” sums up the average American Christian.
God, we need a new word for narcissism…
I agree with the sentiment, but totally makes those with clinical NPD seem tame when they are most certainly not.
You mean it needlessly demonizes people with NPD who have done nothing to harm the speaker.
Yup. I’m of the opinion that that Jesus fellow (at least to the extent we can see in the Bible) was a pretty cool dude. But Christianity seems to reject pretty much all his teachings.
These statistics are difficult to measure accurately but we believe there are about 770,000 homeless Americans and as far as the oracle can tell me there are 350-400k churches. If Christians did Christianity right churches would provide shelter and community integration/engagement for the homeless. Each church only needs to help two people and most congregations have 30+ people.
Christianity could trivially solve homelessness, they just chose not to.
Homeless people aren’t nearly as evenly distributed as churches are.
Hrm, that’s true. Maybe we could just auction off all the churches to raise funds to house all the homeless people.
I can count on one hand, maybe two, the number of true Christians I’ve met. And I don’t count myself among them when I was “Christian”.
Many Christians use their bigotry and hatred and hide it behind the Bible as an excuse and an appeal to authority. “BeCaUsE tHe BiBlE sAyS sO!” Is not a fucking reason to want to force women to have babies, Karen.
The label on the back of cookies says to only have two per serving. I don’t see you following that rule.
In my experience, every time someone claims “the Bible says so” to justify their own evil, it doesn’t actually say that. And when it seems ambiguous, a little bit of basic academic research clears it right up. And guess what? Still doesn’t say what they say it does. But no amount of evidence or explanation or research will change their minds because it was never important to them in the first place, but a convenient justification for being monstrous. Like you said, “appeal to authority”.
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There is not much written about jesus in his teenage years (the years that in our day and age typically correspond to university). It’s speculated he travelled widely and might have reached India, where he learned about Buddhism and Hinduism. There were contacts between the Mediterranean and India as far back as ancient Egyptian times, so it’s not impossible
Christ isn’t a part of the Christian church to be an example for people to follow. Humans are not nearly as smart as we believe (it’s hard to tell when you’re dumb) and when we belong to a group with members that enjoy moral respect, we transfer that quality to ourselves whether we deserve it or not in a phenomenon called moral licensing. Christians don’t have to act Christ-like to FEEL Christ-like. All these stories are told about Christ’s moral superiority not to teach us now to be moral, but to make Christians FEEL moral without even having to do anything. It is the sugary way that Christianity deals with one of people’s fundamental needs of religion: knowing that they are good people.
The fact Trump’s their man really shows how low they’ve gotten. My sister is extremely religious and her house was decorated with Trump Xmas decorations. She knows I hate him and asked me what I thought. I told her I thought the Bible forbid idolatry. When she protested I told her to look up the word and commented how it’s also weird to put the face of an unrepentant rapist around her home with a teen daughter there. But xtians are well trained to ignore their hypocrisy. Wish they were as well trained to do good.
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As a person of faith, I have been horrified to watch Christianity’s fall from grace in mainstream America today. Having mentioned my church in passing to a group of peers, I was once recently met with surprise—surprise that I’m a practicing Christian because, I “seem like a nice person.” I’m no biblical scholar, but I’m pretty sure that if people conflate your religion with being a terrible human being you’re probably doing it wrong. Yet in recent years that has arguably become the face of mainstream Christianity, and any Christian who cares about the future of our faith should be deeply concerned.
Amen to that.
Yet in recent years that has arguably become the face of mainstream Christianity
I’m not so sure it’s all that recent. But now that xtianity’s numbers are dwindling year over year, it’s now no longer politically incorrect (in the real sense of that term) to point it out, as the number of “nones” is no longer some kind of fringe element and cannot be marginalized quite so easily.
TBF, I grew up around a lot of xtians that were definitely on the left, and in the general sphere, it did take me a bit as a child to square their behaviors and moral structure with the general, mostly right-wing, xtian population. So I definitely know many xtians that actually seem to have paid attention to that Sermon on the Mount type of stuff and try to put it into practice.
I’ve recently met someone who made me reconsider line between the institution of religious Christianity and what it means to practice the Christian faith. I won’t repurpose anything in this article, as it alludes to much of what I’ve considered, but I want to add a thought to it.
The fundamental problem with the modern Christian faith is that they have no intention of following the ethics and philosophies of Jesus Christ, and instead worship the man himself. They place the man before the teachings, and then define the man however they choose, filled to the brim with their own personal bias’, and use their cherry picked and context free Bible passages to justify it.
Motherfuckers need philosophy in their lives. Too bad right-wing politicians have worked hard to gut any form of free-thinking arts.
I see the author has never met anyone from the Christian right.
There is no hate like Christian “love”.
It’s why them calling themselves Christian is a joke.
I’m an atheist, but was raised Christian, and unlike most of them, actually read their rulebook. If Jesus Christ of the New Testament existed, no one in the “Christian” right would be welcome in his house. It’s not even about no true Scottsman, they don’t try but fall short of their self-professed Lord’s word. They literally, enthusiastically play opposite day with their self-identified Lord’s word every single day and call it piety.
The Bible to them is nothing but a prop, thumping the book they don’t read as they see it is literally just a means to be morally “on base,” knowing themselves to be morally superior while having license to support any inhumanty, solely by virtue of holding that book they don’t read, because they choose to willfully ignore any intrinsic sense of morality in favor of hatred and schaudenfreude they’ve been conditioned to need through for profit media and for profit prosperity gospel confidence scams.
Pathetic zombies, most of whom are beyond any hope of deprogramming, as they’ve darkly poetically developed a taste for human blood.
If Jesus Christ of the New Testament existed, no one in the “Christian” right would be welcome in his house.
Would all not be welcome? Isn’t that supposed to be your point about their condescending gatekeeping?
Yeah sorry, didn’t proofread well. Fixing thanks.
Bless your heart 🙄
“Christian Right Feel Ashamed”
These words don’t belong together in the same sentence.
Seriously “feeling shame” isn’t part of the Christian right…
When Jimmy grew up his house didn’t have electricity or running water. Or malice, as it turns out.
To be fair, a lot should make the Christian right feel ashamed. Like, you know, completely ignoring the teachings of Christ so that you can make rich people richer and lick the boots of your oppressors.
If they were capable of shame, or any form of self-awareness, they’d have committed mass seppuku long ago.
I had the exact same thought. They are incapable of shame.
Too bad they have no shame or any idea of what Christ taught. Most are just selfish hypocrites who hate more than they love.
“Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar” John 4:20
one of the best things about the bible is that it’s so incongruous you can find a passage that says pretty much anything.
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword." Matthew 10:34
Taken in context it isn’t the gotcha you think it is. Matthew chapter 10 is about Jesus telling his disciples what to expect when spreading his gospel. He is sending them out as sheep among the wolves. He tells them to expect resistance, to expect to be flogged, imprisoned, and or killed. His message will pit sons against fathers, and mothers against daughters because his message is disruptive to the existing state of religion.
pointing to something as preposterous as the bible will never be a “gotcha”
It’s such an interesting verse. A message of peace, kindness, and forgiveness cuts like a sword towards people who love to hate.
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Why aren’t churches free housing for all?
There is (or was?) a church in SF Tenderloin that lets people sleep in the sanctuary every weekday. Somebody quietly comes around to offer meals to anybody who is awake. I was already an exchristian at the time, but being there and seeing that was inspiring. It was the kind of church action that every church I ever attended called people to do and claimed to do, but never did.
Edit: here’s an article about it https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Project-Gubbio-at-St-Boniface-sanctuary-of-sleep-3407103.php
Looks like it’s more than just Tenderloin https://www.thegubbioproject.org/
They are! Every Sunday for a couple hours. Maybe even on multiple occasions during that day.
Remember to tip, though!
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner may or may not include a wafer and a thimble of juice.
Once you’re done, you should leave and feel good about the roof over your head experience and the lecture you got about how to be a better person. Just don’t actually follow the lessons, though! People that are different from you should feel bad about themselves and need to be saved from themself.
LOL! Those cunts have no such concept.
What does concern me is the number of people fleeing organized religion because they view it as a source of harm. Seeing the way faith has been wielded as a political weapon for much of the last few years speaks to that.
Faith is inherently and specifically a weapon. It works like this: Tell everyone to believe a certain thing based on nothing at all but believe it right to your very (native and stupid even) core where no evidence will sway you no matter what. Just believe the things we want and fight for that reality when needed.
Get a critical amount of people believing the right thing and yes, you get a weapon. One like maga. A weapon that will try to start a coup and cheat an election and then just kinda say “nah, that’s not what happened”. And you know photos and videos of it would’ve been enshrined in history books as a “how we took the country back” type of deal if it had worked. Thankfully it didn’t but they’re all doing that face from the meme (I think from Cuphead) of the flower doing the bashful face instead.
This kind of faith will always lead to these kinds of outcomes. You can’t have radical belief without radical action.
Faith needs to be removed from society completely. That’s probably one of the steps of evolution the aliens are waiting on to finally greet us lmao.
That and learning how to stop being psychos. But that could happen faster if we could at least all believe the same general thing. Everybody will have differing other beliefs of course, but if we can stop believing in supernatural sky daddies first then that will go a long way.
Islam and Christianity both need to die. Breaking from those 2 will have the biggest immediate impact given their populations, and I would hope that lack of belief starts adding up when the other religions start finding themselves with bigger and bigger amounts of non theism.
Plus those 2 are the most likely to fight about it. Christianity in particular has caused more suffering and death than any single other thing on the planet probably. I don’t have sources for that but it’s definitely up there. Plagues are up there too.
But yeah. Faith is a weapon. Sorting out your beliefs based on how much it agrees with your favorite book (that you haven’t read) is never a recipe for success.
And even in their own religion god deserves hell based on the book. Like even Jack the ripper and the OKC bomb guy (literally blanking on his name atm- Bundy maybe?) would deserve heaven so much more than god would. But he gets a free pass because of something or other.
According to their big boy story book, god killed the entire human race once because he gave them free will and didn’t like how they turned out. That’s supposed to be the actions of a just god…
Pfff He let one family live
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