If young adults are anything like this older adult, they just don’t want to have to hear positive things about Trump from anybody.
He’s just such a transparently blatant villain and ignoramus.
The moment somebody says that they like Trump, I lose all respect for them. And I just feel sad that this is the state of humanity. I don’t like feeling that way, so I avoid places where I might come into contact with people like that.
The same “avoid people who have positive things to say about Trump” policy drove me right out of the country.
Lucky. Where’d you end up?
the one good thing you can say about Donald Trump is that he made it very easy to identify sociopaths, narcissists, the breathtakingly stupid, basically any morally repulsive or idiotic person you would not care to engage with long-term; before, you had to actually go and interact with these people for longer than five minutes to find out how awful they were, sometimes for a good long while before they’d show their hand. In the beginning, his first term, you didn’t even have to get near these people let alone speak to them, the ubiquitous red hats gave it away from a hundred yards.
By now some of them have started to realize the hats give it away (and some, I’m sure, have started to second-guess their choice of candidate, even if they won’t admit it), but they still don’t take very long to open their mouth about how much they love the orange fuck.
A person’s politics say more about them than just who they vote for, and supporting Trump tells you just about everything you’d need to know about a person and whether or not engaging with them is worth it. For that I am actually somewhat genuinely grateful, the hats everywhere during his first term made it really easy as an autistic person to avoid those people like the plague.
The other good thing you can say about Trump is that he’s old & will be dead sooner rather than later.
I stopped going to church when the pastors started getting political.
If a church is telling you who to vote for they need to lose the tax free status, and operate under the rules of a business.
The US is probably one of the furthest nations from actual “christian values”.
There are no actual christian values. It’s all deadly bullshit.
Would Jesus heal the sick? Nope. Not unless they entertain his racism.
Would Jesus feed the poor? Not when he could waste valuable resources on himself in a useless, vain ceremony.
It is narcissism. The only consistent christian value I can discern is “I will do anything if I think it will please god (my own ego).”
You nailed it. That and Divine Command Theory. If God says it’s good, then it’s good (but only according to my interpretation of my translation of copies of copies of oral traditions).
There are no actual christian values.
That’s pure cynacism. The Christian faiths have a very well-defined ideological framework based on a number of canonical texts with established interpretations. To say people fail to live up to these values isn’t particularly shocking. To claim the values don’t exist is ignorant.
It is narcissism.
It’s aspiration. You set the bar high and try to clear it, knowing it’s a hard thing to do but still believing its worth doing.
To heal the sick? You make it sound like health care isn’t a cornerstone of modern industrial economies. Or that public health care isn’t routinely included in modern state functions. To feed the poor? We’ve got everything from SNAP benefits to Food Banks. Panhandlers hit the bricks with a certain degree of confidence that their neighbors do feel inclined to lend aid. Shelters exist. Relief organizations exist. People who dedicate their whole lives to providing aid to their neighbors fucking exist. And if you don’t know of any, that’s more on you than on an organization you don’t attend and whose charitable works you don’t want to look at.
The only consistent christian value I can discern
Is the only value you’ve chosen to acknowledge.
FFS, my local Food Bank has people who roll out of Church and show up to provide aid every day. I know people by name, because I see them there on every visit.
My mother, a die-hard Catholic, has worked with Caritas Internationalis for twenty years. Pretty much since the day she became an empty-nester she’s been volunteering her time and her love and whatever money she can afford to a project bigger than herself for the benefit of as many of her neighbors as she can help.
I’ve got an ex-girlfriend whose mother was a missionary and a preacher, fully committed to ending homelessness in her little corner of Houston. She would help her mom make meals every Saturday and hand them out, then plan out where they would distribute the food. Often, they were out doing this in defiance of the local police. Her mom’s been arrested more times than she can count, and it’s only the good grace of the (Christian) municipal judge that she keeps getting let out and fines keep getting waved.
These people are real. They exist. They do shit, in no small part because they believe it is a religious obligation. And they hold to that religious obligation because they genuinely believe in the utopian vision of a world without sin and hate and horror. They learned these values from their Christian Parents and their Christian Neighbors and their Christian pastors. And they pass them on to their children, whether or not those kids or their grandkids hold to the spiritual end of the doctrine.
That’s pure cynacism.
At worst, it’s slightly hyperbolic. You said it yourself:
The Christian faiths have a very well-defined ideological framework based on a number of canonical texts with established interpretations.
The bible conflicts with itself, which is why interpretation is necessary. Many of those interpretations are in direct conflict. That is not well-defined at all.
To say people fail to live up to these values isn’t particularly shocking. To claim the values don’t exist is ignorant.
The core value of christianity is to do and say whatever your ego wants you to.
It’s aspiration. You set the bar high and try to clear it, knowing it’s a hard thing to do but still believing its worth doing.
Pretending to know things that cannot be known is arrogant narcissism.
Or that public health care isn’t routinely included in modern state functions. To feed the poor? We’ve got everything from SNAP benefits to Food Banks.
I live in the United States. Guess which programs were just defunded by an administration that claims empathy is a sin?
People who dedicate their whole lives to providing aid to their neighbors fucking exist.
I’m glad they do. Unfortunately, some of them choose to repeat baseless, deadly bullshit. We would all be better off if they would stop that. And many believers pray for god to feed people instead of actually taking any steps that would accomplish it.
“The only consistent christian value I can discern” Is the only value you’ve chosen to acknowledge.
It’s the one under all the bullshit. Please stop falling for the bullshit, people are dying for this.
These people are real. They exist. They do shit, in no small part because they believe it is a religious obligation.
The cult created these problems so it could sell us the cure, but the cure is poison, they demand complete submission.
They learned these values from their Christian Parents and their Christian Neighbors and their Christian pastors. And they pass them on to their children, whether or not those kids or their grandkids hold to the spiritual end of the doctrine.
My christian parents hit me if I didn’t want to go to church. They think they’re going to heaven for violently brainwashing my brothers and I.
Stop defending abusive death cults. Everyone is better without superstition.
It’s almost like he’s antithetical to everything Christ ever preached or something.
Frankly I’m surprised more Christians don’t reject him on that principle, but then, religion has never been based in logic.
What made me leave the church and ultimately Christianity was how they defended being pro-life.
Christians would have voted in Satan himself he would promise an end to abortion.
I’ve had countless Christians in 2016 say “Yeah, Trump is a bad guy but I know he’ll end abortion.”
They never realized that their desire for an end to abortion meant the election of the devil. And now they worship him at the alter of Trump and still call themselves Christians.
Christians would have voted in Satan himself he would promise an end to abortion.
They basically did. Twice.
And you’re describing my parents. It’s like the dog that caught the car. They got the one thing they ever fucking cared about, and now I guess that means lifetime fealty to the demons that got it for them?
this one guy from trumps first term stuff. when it was like only half evil. had a good write up on why he meets the description of the antichrist. If I believed in god in a bible christian type of way I would 100% think he was the antichrist.
bingo.
That’s because most Americans don’t read, so most American Christians have never read the Bible, and have no idea what Jesus was about other than whatever they hear preached at their church… Which is often wildly off.
Now, being Christian is more of a cultural identifier, a team sport, with no real coherent theology or philosophy underpinning it.
Well lucky for them, Jesus never actually spoke negatively about slavery
Christianity = loving Trump
Not a great look
Evangelical / Prosperity Christianity is quite literally the creed of Mammon.
If there is a Hell (there’s not), I’ll be torturing them for eternity.
Hard to believe in Mammon without believing in the rest of the Christian merry-go-round.
But maybe the Calvinists were correct. Maybe there’s a few hundred thousand people who get to be Saved and the rest are Preordained to just go ping-ponging off into this or that heresy.
Who said anything about *believing *in Mammon?
48% is a disturbingly low.
I mean, I wouldn’t answer that as a primary reason either. That doesn’t mean the other 52% see no issue or want to go to church because of Trump. There are so, so many other issues I have with mainstream Christianity that evangelical support of Trump wouldn’t be in the top 10 reasons I wouldn’t go to church.
According to the research, 48% of respondents said they agree with the statement “Christians’ support of Trump has made me less likely to go to church.”
Personally, if I wasn’t planning on ever going in the first place, I wouldn’t agree with that statement either.
Or, it is shockingly high for a poorly designed survey question. If you were already at a 0% chance of attending church then you could reasonably respond “strongly disagree” and that resolution is completely lost.
Personally, I don’t go to church for a lot of reasons. The “Christian right’s” willingness to overlook his empty promises and obnoxious false idolize is a recent addition to that list. So I would agree that it makes me less likely to do something I already had no intention of doing.
Different perspective: if 48% of your house’s foundation were leaning, you’d think that was disturbingly high.
True, but that’s not any better!
The first sign of the mental illness epidemic, was the beginning of neoliberal politics, several decades ago.
The 100th sign, was Trumps first term.
To be fair there are some actual christian churches that actually preach and try to do the things jesus preached. feed and cloth the poor and encourage the same in society. but then you have members who attend but are hypocrites sorta bringing them down. as an athiest I am actually a little more accepting of religion seeing the earnest ones who participate in protests.
Please don’t forget that hypocrisy and lying to get your way is built into christianity from its foundations. Jesus was kind of a dick.
jesus was not that bad as far as humans of the time go. If he existed.
jesus was not that bad as far as humans of the time go. If he existed.
If he existed in the way you specifically are imagining him? Maybe so.
Based on all available evidence, it seems likely that the romans martyred someone popular. It seems unlikely that the bible provides an accurate account of that person’s life and death. Even then, he is often described as a smug jerk.
I think he gets too much credit for the few good things he had to say, some of which was copied from others and all of which hinges on complete submission to his supposed godliness.
Sure but what does it matter that Saint Nicholas existed in turkey if the santa that children “worship” lives at the north poles with elves and magic reindeer? that a fictional story might draw inspiration from a historical fact but it doesnt mean anything more than leonardo divinci being in assassins creed.
historical jesus didnt exist because whatever person with a similar name that you pluck from history will not have been the son of god and all the supernatural implications that brings. santa didn’t exist and neither did jesus.
I am not so sure about that. If you zoom out enough, then yeah he’s a nice man saying we should love one another. However, digging into the text, Jesus in the Bible had a tendency to respond to a fairly basic question by going off on really smug rants that don’t really answer the question. Imagine Jordan Peterson but he is explaining why slavery is good (which, in fairness, could be one of Peterson’s videos but I’m not going to sift through them to find out).
yeah I think you are putting him on a pedestal. I don’t believe he is divine and on human terms hes a guy where I would go to one of his talks.
He put himself on the pedestal. Would you enjoy hearing how you will not inherit the divine gifts he is promising to his people?
I would like more people to stop pretending he wasn’t dangerously delusional. Modern humans can and should do better than following one guy whose main appeal is that he lived too long ago for us to actually know what he was like. He’s an imaginary friend, but with a context of guilt, punishment, and blood sacrifice.
yeah I doubt your interpretation of the gospels. He was not that bad and the pedestal was other folks. That is the thing with religion. You can take something and say well this was meant this way or this was meant that way. People have their own takeaways.
I think you’re ignoring parts of the gospels you don’t like. John 10:
I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.
You can hear him climbing onto the pedestal as he talks about how he is greater than all.
That is it’s fatal flaw, yes. People choose cowardly fantasy instead of courageously facing a reality, even though a reality without that abusive god is better. It means we are not the main characters, not under divine protection or supervision. We have the capacity to fix our own problems instead of wishing for the magic wizard to fix them.
Jesus may have had a few nice quotes, but he distracted people from their own real lives with baseless promises about divine rewards. Christianity is a death cult, yet too many people are still defending it. We need to unite around the one truth that defines us instead of splintering into endless interpretations of delusional fantasy.
Everyone is not entitled to believe what they want. Everyone is obliged to align their beliefs as closely with reality as possible.
The study was funded by the Lilly Endowment.
If any christian groups want to hand me absurd amounts of money for me to tell them why they’re losing donations I can be found here on lemmy. I don’t get out of bed for less than $10mil US, though.
I can thank Trump for being what pushed me to becoming an atheist. Trump is the antithesis of the kindness the bible attempts to preach, and seeing christians blindly follow him is what made me rethink everything.
The bible attempts to normalize or even glorify abuse all the way through. It is one of the worst sources anyone could get their morality from.
And yet some stuff like the golden rule are pretty alright teachings. I’m atheist for a good reason because I don’t want to associate with religious bigots. But I’m not going to ignore also somewhat valuable lessons.
I like the golden rule, but I have two issues with your response.
First, Jesus did not invent the golden rule. It was around at least 1500 years before his birth.
Second, if someone hands me a bowl of shit that has a handful of cherries scattered throughout it, is it really worth my time to sift through all that shit when I could get fresh cherries from somewhere else? I ate the shitty cherries for years, they nearly killed me.
Many modern believers are trying to pretend that empathy is a sin, an attitude associated with the Trump presidency. An alarming number of people can’t tell the difference between the cherries and the shit. Those who lack critical thinking are easily swayed one way or another by those who want us fighting each other instead of the rich.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/is-empathy-a-sin-some-conservative-christians-argue-it-can-be
Right. We’re still pretty much on the same page and that’s good to know, I never knew that.
Regardless it’s ultimately my point of view that I can acknowledge the good from bad. I can condemn the rest of the bowl of shit and I do. But I can’t control those with peanut brains and can’t think for themselves. I’ve tried. It’s worthless. And they’re not worth it.
But I can’t control those with peanut brains and can’t think for themselves. I’ve tried. It’s worthless. And they’re not worth it.
I was abused because too many people gave up on accountability. I understand it is a frustrating uphill battle, but I think giving up on changing minds is effectively murder-suicide. Division is unsustainable, and the only thing that unites us is truth itself.
I try my best to do what I believe is right, but it is difficult with broken foundations and decades of bad habits forcibly programmed into me. I am still figuring out how I can help more effectively. I have a lot of pain and anger. I am frustrated because every day, there are more victims. It feels like not enough people are doing enough.
I do understand taking a break to recover sanity, and I understand that we can’t change every mind right away. I still think it is one of the most important things every person can do: spread truth and challenge assumptions, call out fallacies, correct mistakes. I feel a bit more strongly about it than most because I know there are victims suffering worse than I have. I see casual, selfish stupidity directly enabling the rise of deadly christofascism, covering genocides, protecting pedophiles, etc. It is difficult for me to avoid a desperate, confrontational tone. Thank you for your patient responses.
I hope more people become aware to the harm that superstition does. I think they would act differently if they realized what is at stake.
More context:
The Billy Graham Center Research Institute surveyed 2,365 Gen Z adults, ages 18-28. The study was funded by the Lilly Endowment.
Missing entirely is what percentage of those people ever considered going to church in the first place. I think we all know why that data is missing lol
I’m not religious in any way, shape, or form, but if I got a loaded survey like this about a politician I didn’t like, I’d be counted in the people saying they’re less likely to attend church because of said politician.
Anyone who becomes associated with MAGA is going to have serious problems being accepted into polite society when this is over. We aren’t going to forget who you are, what you did, and what you wanted to do.
Ford, Hugo Boss…
TIL at least 48% of Adults don’t go to church.
THANK YOU. Sometimes the view from the Southern US down here has me thinking every dude is obsessed with JC and the Holy Ghost crew.
Still, tho, were I a Christian I’d go to church and denounce the shits for the frauds they are. “this shit ain’t christlike!”
People are usually pretty receptive to positive feedback.
But it is christlike. Christ lied to get his way. You can go to church and try to call out hypocrites, but it will likely just fuel their persecution fetish. They interpreted the vague and contradictory bible to paint a Jesus they can weaponize. Can you honestly prove them wrong? Can we call Jesus and ask what he meant?
This is why I get so agitated when anyone suggests that everyone is entitled to their beliefs. Many beliefs are wrong and harmful and we really should not have tolerated them for so long.
Probably the only good thing this shitstain pedo has ever done.
By the standards of the faithful, their support of Trump does make it painfully obvious that the majority of “Christian” churches in the US preach values which are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Christ.
Any genuine “follower of Christ” would not follow religious leaders or go to religious institutions who teach values such as “hate thy fellow man for not being born here”, which are a lot closer to devil worship than to the values Christ preached.
Such “Christian” leaders and institutions having devil worshiping values also neatly explains their adoration of Mammom.
You don’t need to be an Atheist to figure out that these “churches” aren’t on the side of Good.
Any “genuine” follower of christ would do exactly what Jesus did: lie to get their way.
Please stop pretending there is value in superstition.
Just because I don’t believe in sky fairies, doesn’t mean I can’t reason within the internal logic of the fantasy universe of people who do believe in certain sky fairies.
Why should I excluded myself from navigating the internal logic of certain fantasy sets of rules (like religion) whilst being willing do do so for different fantasy sets of rules (like books)? That’s just giving one set of fantasies more importance than another set of fantasies.
Guiding yourself by strict opposition to an external something is still using it as a reference, thus treating it as important.
Would you have tried to gate-keep me like that if I was making comments about the point of view of a character in the Lord Of The Rings universe?!
Please consider the stark difference your false equivalence is attempting to obscure:
Is anyone pretending that Lord of the Rings is nonfiction? No, but adults in positions of power who should know better allow cowardice and vanity to guide them away from reality and we are all suffering for it.
That’s still you choosing to acting relative to the values of other people per-opposition to it, not a making of a rational case for people to refrain from understanding that self-contained set of more or less internally consistent rules.
In fact, you’re making the opposite case: if there are people whose actions anchored on that self-contained set of more or less internally consistent rules majorly impact others, that’s even more reason to try and understand the rules of their fantasy and be capable of making arguments within then so as to maybe sway some such cosplayers from creating problems for other people by misusing the rules of their fantasy to rationalize negativee actions outside their fantasy universe.
The rational/irrational boundary is not in the being able to understand and operate with a set of self-contained rules in a fantasy setting or not, it’s in believing or not that said fantasy setting matches objective reality as we perceive it.
self-contained set of more or less internally consistent rules.
I guess you haven’t read the bible. It is not remotely consistent with itself or with our reality.
that’s even more reason to try and understand the rules of their fantasy and be capable of making arguments within then
Why can’t we treat the root cause instead of symptoms? There is no god, no magic, grow up and focus on reality, kids are dying every day because adults want to pretend magic is real.
The rational/irrational boundary is not in the being able to understand and operate with a set of self-contained rules in a fantasy setting or not, it’s in believing or not that said fantasy setting matches objective reality as we perceive it.
Right. Rationally, christ is not real. The bible is fiction, but people are pretending it’s not. Why? Because the bible itself repeatedly claims it is not fiction, that the only path to salvation is reading and understanding incomprehensible fables. This does not happen with Lord of the Rings. People necessarily cherry-pick because the bible disagrees with itself. They follow Jesus’s example of “make shit up when it suits me”.
Ahem:
more or less internally consistent rules
I made a comparison with Lord Of The Rings exactly because it’s a roughly consistent thing but if you dig into the details it’s full of inconsistencies, just like all “sacred books” out there.
As for the rest, you clearly have your own magical thinking going on there:
If the problem is that people are doing bad things anchored on their fantasy “logic”, then one would expect that you want that to not happen anymore.
Yet all you defend is to not engage with at or near their level or even understand their universe, a restrictive framework that can only accommodate as solutions for the above mentioned problem of them doing bad things one of two options: ignore them or somehow have them jump the full distance from the hole they’re in to the level of rationality.
The first option solves nothing, the second option is incredibly unlikely to succeed (one could say it probably requires magic to work).
So either you’re not even trying to solve the problem even in the smallest of ways (in which case, I’m afraid you don’t have a moral standpoint to preach to others that they should not try to understand religion) or you’re relying on approaches that won’t work without magic (hence “magical thinking”).
Me, I’m willing to come up with a ladder for them to, step by step, rise out of that pit or, at least some way to combat the manipulation of them to do bad things by people who understand that world.
To engage with them whilst they’re down there, be it to help out those I can or to reduce how much such people are manipulated into doing harm to others, I have to understand the logic-like rules they’re operating under and how other people are manipulating them using those all of which requires at least some understanding of that stuff.
You keep making the same false equivalence. Where is the “fiction” label for the bible? People pretend it is true.
My parents abused me because they believe in the bible, god, and christ. I know what I’m talking about, I was raised in it.
Every human being should be well aware that the abrahamic faiths are intolerable death cults. It is selfish to pretend that magic is real.
I missed the part where Jesus lied. Which part was that?
Reminder: there is no god, there is no magic. Everything he said about being god’s son, god’s promises and punishments, our inherent sinfulness and more, all lies.
Here’s a specific one from the bible, there are more:
For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.
Number of people who were standing there and have not tasted death by now: 0
Number of times Jesus returned to Earth with angels: 0
I just asked about the reference. I’m not religious.
Yes, and I answered. You don’t have to be religious to recognize the deadly danger in believing most of what the bible says.
