The absolute worst is them saying socialism is pessimistic because it thinks people can’t do anything for themself and coddles them with a nanny state. Then turns around and says “you have to structure capitalism assuming every single person is a greedy sociopath hellbent on fucking over everyone else to make money.”
Ancaps/libertarians as well.
And that the only acceptable form of socialism is charity. And like. FFS
you have to structure capitalism assuming every single person is a greedy sociopath hellbent on fucking over everyone else to make money.
So… Social Democracy? Which they also oppose? 🤔
Not exactly, the argument (is incoherent and insane) is something like “you can’t have too much democracy and centralized power because people in power are always corrupt.” ✨Somehow✨ laissez-faire capitalism is supposed to naturally account for corruption and sociopathy because the free market forces(???) them to do good things because people are able to spend their money somewhere else. Always non-violent btw ❤️
Lol their argument is lame then.
You can’t trust a democratically-elected government, but can somehow trust non-elected CEOs? 🤣
I think it might have something to do with those “Christians” envisioning heaven as an implicit ethnostate.
Socialism seems ugly to them because it involves the people who seem ugly to them being cared for.
But they’d never say it out-loud; most can’t even see that’s what their twisted little hearts desire.
I think they just lack vision and don’t actually want to change the real world, just dream of a better place
Seen this clip from some american fundie podcast that was… a choice.
This person was asked something like, if you could have world peace, but all governments become socialist, would you do it? They said no and fucking justified their answer with a partial quote from something like Deuteronomy 15:7-11, claiming that well the bible says there’ll always be the poor so socialism is actually bad because of that, and a quick search to see if I could find it there’s a lot of stuff echoing the same stuff, that socialism is unbiblical etc.
What the actual fuck is wrong with these people? I’m irreligious but was raised Christian, this is so vehemently counter to my understanding of Christian teachings (the flavour of which I was raised has atheist ministers so there’s that), which was more or less, raise everyone up, accept everyone for who they are, help people, don’t turn a blind eye to injustice and like just be decent to each other. Was this podcast prosperity doctrine shit or something else because yeah wow, it’s honestly sinister to me.
I was raised as a fundamentalist, but I got out.
American evangelical fundamentalists firmly believe in heirarchy— children are under the authority of their mother, who is under the authority of her husband, who is under the authority of God.
They see any disruption of this heirarchy as an attack on their religion.
Taxes? You’re usurping the man’s authority to spend his money as he sees fit.
Women’s liberation? You’re usurping the man’s authority over his wife.
Entitlements? You’re usurping the man’s authority to use his pocketbook as leverage over his family.
Immigration? You’re usurping the man’s authority by lowering his cultural relevance.
LGBTQ+ acceptance? You’re usurping the man’s authority by undermining the patriarchy.
You’ve probably noticed a pattern as to who is primarily driving these issues.
They begin with the conclusion (e.g. socialism bad), and then find whatever they can in their shitty book to justify it.
Yeah, just like everything else, they are cherry picking passages that support the conclusion they’ve already reached on their own
Yup. Funny all the people blaming the bible like the dude up there calling it a stupid book… obviously hasn’t read it. The bible has great lessons, 90% of Christians just ignore them is all. Don’t blame the book for the idiots who claim to follow it when they actually aren’t. Even the stuff wanna be Christians quote thinking it supports their argument they are either misunderstanding or leaving out vital context. Real Christians are very rare and almost never associated with an organized church. They just quietly try to do their best they don’t try to use their belief to justify the rest of their life and bad decisions.
It sounds to me like they want to be able to give freely and not be forced by a human law.
If everybody shares there is no need for official socialism because enough resources are shared.
The difference is that the formerly poor has to be thankful.
“Christians”
Here we go with the scare quotes again… They’re not fake Christians just because you don’t agree with their particular dogma.
This actually makes sense, once you understand what their problem is with communism.
You see, they have no problem with all the benefits that communism offers… What bothers them is the idea that those benefits would be given to people who haven’t earned it.
Heaven, to them, is a reward. Only the pure, the righteous, the faithful get to enjoy its benefits. Heaven only works for them if they imagine that they will be able to look down and see hell.
A heaven for everyone, with no walls, no gates, no pitiful outcasts scrabbling to get in… That’s no heaven at all.
You’re not wrong about the reward being earned. That’s definitely the unspoken part of it.
When I grew up religious, the conversion was that communism was a bastardization of god’s plan, so it’s inherently evil. Basically, it cannot be as pure and perfect with men in charge so it will fail every time.
You’d think they’d want to try and be more like their god and his plan for their heaven but they just reject it.
They believe that only God can be the one to create paradise on earth. A primary pillar of their faith requires earth to be in a constant state of suffering until then.
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You’re not wrong about the reward being earned. That’s definitely the unspoken part of it.
It’s also heretic AF. As in: It directly contradicts Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran, doctrine, all for different reasons.
They should know better:
Interesting read. Thank you.
Heaven only works for them if they imagine that they will be able to look down and see hell.
See, this is the part I can’t get behind. An eternity of that disparity with even the smallest scrap of empathy would eventually be unending torment. Every day is just more “oh yeah, hell is a thing and I can’t do anything about it…”
Fr, I knew for fact that there was something deeply fucked up about “The Good Place” in the TV show bearing the same name when Janet played Eleanor a short clip of sound from the Bad Place.
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If working all your life for a regime does not earn you the benefits of that regime, I don’t know what will in their minds
No, the issue most people have with it is that it requires a king (god) to make it work. People don’t mind a higher being (god) ruling them as an absolute monarch. They do mind handing such power to a human, since we have seen again and again how such power corrupts people.
When I was fairly young my mom described Christian heaven. I remember struggling with the idea of not struggling and being happy all the time. Then she hit me with if someone you love doesn’t make it to heaven you forget them. That’s when the fracture began for me.
Basically heaven is a mindfuck.
It really is. It’s not even a pleasant thought experiment.
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Severance
The most successful nations in terms of citizen happiness use mixed-economics. Nordic nations have the blueprint. We just need to use it.
So complete justice system reform, cut the police force, strong wide reaching unions, and strong social welfare.
That does sound heavenly…
Conservatives: “Socialism Bad!”
“Norway is a successful Socialist State”
Conservatives: “But that isn’t socialism!”
“Okay, then lets use whatever that system is”
Conservatives: “SOCIALISM BAAAD! 😡😡😡”
(It’s called Social Democracy btw, which the conservates also hate)
To be fair, the heaven of the Bible is neither stateless nor classless. “The nations” are still present in Revelation 21 and 22, and inequality in heaven is a common theme in Jesus’s parables.
“The nations” is just fancy for “non Jews”. Remember that the bible predates modern nation states by more than a millennium.
inequality in heaven is a common theme in Jesus’s parables.
Is that so? I can think of the story with the lamps where it’s about getting into the kingdom of god or the treasure in the field where it’s about finding the kingdom of god. Or that the poor will inherit the kingdom of god while rich people cannot get into it. Nothing about inequality inside the kingdom of god.
You have to keep in mind that the kingdom of god isn’t really heaven as we think of it even tho Matthew uses the wording kingdom of heaven (to avoid the word god as a good jew). We think of heaven as life after death but the kingdom of god is on earth when Jesus returns and the dead arise and he builds his kingdom here.
“Least”/“Greatest” in “the kingdom of heaven” is a construction that appears at least once off the top of my head, Matthew 5:19. I’m sure there are more. But also, Jesus is depicted as a literal monarch and heaven a kingdom like you said, so there’s at least one extra class right there.
There’s also 11 classes of angels in a ladder system under Jesus. My boys Metatron and Enoch up top if I’m not mistaken.
Is that a Catholic thing?
It’s a Dead Sea scrolls thing
Why are you guys all able to recall random bits of the bible. What normal people are even reading this stuff in the last 40 years?
I had it drilled into my head as a kid. When I left home I forgot most of it. Then as an adult I brushed up on it to argue with the kind of people who drilled it into my head as a kid.
lol.
I see your point but hear me out:
Saying “The only one I call king is the one who died at the cross” subverts the very concept of a king. Not only is this guy no longer here to directly command anyone but his death was the most humiliating to him and his followers possible. In this way, it’s anti-authoritarian. Similar with the greatest in the kingdom of god. It’s the last you would think of: the poor, the children, … . Sure, this leaves place for interpretation. You can say it’s just a new hierarchy. Or it’s so radically putting everything into question that it’s in effect a call against all hierarchies. Or that it’s so radical, it can’t be taken serious at all so barely means anything anymore.
Christianity as a whole shows all of this. The first communes shared everything in common, there was “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. (Gal 3, 28). Later a new hierarchy establish which, once established, wasn’t new or subversive anymore but just a top down hierarchy. Once in a while someone came with a more subversive reading, more often than not founding a new organization that ended up with a strict hierarchy.
I think the biggest flaw is that there is no sustainable alternative given. You can criticize capitalism all day long and reinforce it as a system without an alternative if you don’t give one. Some Christians found alternatives and supported them with the scripture, others supported very different things with scripture. That’s the thing with all world religions: They start in opposition to society but fail to think outside the box and so they end up reinforcing it while keeping the seldom fulfilled potential for a better society (“world region” in the sense Graeber uses the term in Debt and Graham discusses in this podcast episode I guess but I’m not sure).
All that said, since the first Christians certainly had a very egalitarian, anti-authoritative reading, this is the most authoritative reading (pun intended).
This is good stuff; your argument is well reasoned. Brings me back to my Bible study days.
I still think “all hierarchies” might be overbroad. The Bible itself prescribes elders/bishops and deacons to administer the church, for instance, and it’s radical enough regarding obedience to authority that, in my experience, modern day theologically conservative churches trend toward authoritarianism and mostly unchecked abuse of power more often than not. This would have been contemporaneous with the communes.
As for the more heavenly hierarchies, I looked back at some of the points of evidence that I was going to bring up here that I thought supported my case, but the “outer darkness” in Matthew 22 I once thought might not necessarily be hell sure seems like hell upon rereading, and as for the parable of the unforgiving servant who was sent to the “torturers” despite his debts being forgiven, it looks like that word “torturers” is connected to jailers, i.e. debtors’ prison, so I can’t argue confidently that the servant was “saved” from anything and given a different punishment instead. There are still a few passages I can’t totally square though:
The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32): He gets welcomed back into the family, and he sure seems saved in the sense that I think most Christians would read into it, but his inheritance is spent; he doesn’t get more. All the father has belongs to the other son.
The purifying fire of 1 Corinthians 3:9-15: Both groups of people are explicitly “saved”. One is rewarded, the other suffers loss.
The parable of the talents/minas: In the Matthew 25 version of the parable, the first two servants get the same reward (authority over “many things”). No issue there. But in the Luke 19 version, the rewards are proportional. And the one with 10 minas gets a bonus at the end.
That’s as far as I got before my eyes glazed over.
Fundies have a more two-class system in mind for Heaven: God-King and unquestionably loyal fans.
So like Trump and MAGA. Figures
I asked one “so when do I actually die?” and they couldn’t comprehend that I didn’t want to exist forever
Heaven is an autocratic police state though
Yup. The common answer to “why does evil exist” is that humans have free will.
Therefore it follows that if there is no sin in heaven, there is also no free will.
Ssshhh, you’re not supposed to actually think it through!
Do we have to censor the word communism now?
Self censor so hot right now!
Now = since Red Scare
I was going to upvote but you were right at 666 so I couldn’t bring myself to
If i could take a moment to cite the opening to the lords prayer:
Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
The ability to make one being a christian not by default be a socialist as well is a continuous theological labor for the capitalist
There are plenty of Christians who specifically and deliberately oppose attempting to make life on earth more like heaven. They’re not being hypocrites for this, this is their belief system. To disagree with them is to wade into a theological debate, not just a political one.
Jesus was a socialist
Agree.
Jesus was a first century Jew, he was almost certainly not a socialist.
What if heaven is just whatever you need heaven to be? Like, what if it’s just a temporary state of affairs? You enter Heaven, and it is exactly what you need to be at peace with your death and your life before that. Then, when you’re ready, after however much time you need, you can decide to move on and stop existing, or send your soul to be reincarnated.
This is similar to what Rick Riordan (author of Percy Jackson) suggests in one of his other works - that the afterlife is simply whatever you believe it to be. It’s pretty comforting imo.
Personally I wouldn’t like it to be what you believe it to be, rather what you need it to be. Some people don’t know what they need until they have it. You can believe that Heaven is endless sitting in a circle and piling devotion upon God, but if that isn’t actually going to help you be at peace, then what good is it gonna do you? How is a baby going to form a belief of what their afterlife is?
No, I reckon Heaven ought to be what you need, not what you want. I want my afterlife to be me being a series of Isekai protagonists in my favourite fictional universes because I secretly want to feel clever and powerful and knowledgeable about things to come, but indulging me probably isn’t the best way to put me at peace.
Seems to be the approach of MCU as well 🤔
Watch The Good Place.
Why are we censoring “communism”?
same reason people say “unalive” and “fuggen” and “child 🌽”… the Internet has become a place for self censoring idiot babies afraid of being algorithmically demonitized/banned
corporate monopolies of all popular platforms has kneecapped actual free speech by training entire generations to be afraid of violating terms of service, I guess
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Alternatives:
“unalive”
in cases of homicide: “Ended [Person]'s Life”
or, in cases of suicide: “Ended their own life”
it bypasses most mainstream censors while maintaining the seriousness of it
“child 🌽”
“CSAM” is usually the term that people use these days, I don’t think the term "CSAM is censored
