Joe Biden, Senator from Citibank (oops, DELAWARE), to Run for President

are you sure u hate christianity? cause you seem to love preaching 2 the choir xp

xpost yeah but there's many per capitas

“Christianity” is way too broad a belief system and lacks things like centralization and a charismatic leader to be lumped in w cults like Scientology.

I know Christians who have absolutely nothing in common with each other philosophically or politically.

Okay. Then treat Christianity the same as Scientology.

xpost well of course, there's a bazillion denominations. I started Methodist and became Fundamentalist and let's just say one was more fun than the other

there are a lot of cool chill christians and harmless denominations xps

table you’re one of these flying spaghetti monster people aren’t you

American Christianity as a collective whole seems pretty toxic though, even if one wants to No True Scotsman away the bad actors (not that anybody itt is doing that)

I suspect Christianity practiced elsewhere may be more peachy

I know lil’ Neanderthal owned himself some Stryper records

Ah just what we needed this weekend 2004-quality nu-atheist takes on Christianity writ large, what the word “cult” means, etc

xpost Petra actually!

it's either all or nothing

Why?

This isn't high school debate team where you get disqualified for a logical fallacy by an impartial moderator. This is politics, a game of popularity and numbers and mass (no pun intended) digestibility of messaging.

If what you really want is for the Democratic platform to be "dismantle capitalism and, while we're at it, let's go ahead and make Christianity illegal too," well, I guess I admire your conviction but I doubt that's a winning platform in the world we actually inhabit.

silby I'm surprised you haven't posted "all religious people should be drawn and quartered and their bodies composted to bring on a green nu-age" or something by now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-rfCnW5VlE

MLK was a pretty dece Christian, except for the compulsive womanizing, ymmv

Christianity is chockfull of progressive splinter elements, some of which are mainstream in other contexts (e.g. the Anglican Church of Canada strikes me as chiller than most). Can the same be said for Scientology?

Not to mention that secularized notions of justice are directly derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition. You could even argue – and the case has been made convincingly – that atheism is a precipitate of Christianity, i.e. 'the religion of exit from religion', to quote Jean-Luc Nancy.

I also think that saying 'it's just larger' is kinda moot: there comes a point where the sheer number of adepts necessarily, automatically reflects a degree of diversity such that generalizations are rendered even more useless than usual.

xps

Thats substantially opposite of something I believe. I think America could stand to be more religious, and less white supremacist American evangelical Christian

Judeo-Christian tradition

pom darlin please consider forgetting this stock phrase which means nothing and is mostly used to try to lampshade Christian hegemony and co-opt Jews into its perpetuation

It can also be used to acknowledge that Christianity stems from Judaism and would be unthinkable without it.

That's what I meant anyway. But as we were saying in the anti-semitism thread, there are certainly plenty of (mainly American) evangelicals who act as though they've figured Judaism out better than Jews themselves.

Rarely is it used in that context, in my experience.

In any case Christianity is a descendant of second temple Judaism, a religion as unfamiliar to me as it is to Christians, I think it’s misleading to invoke it in shorthand like this even tho your intentions are pure.

Anyway you might as well say “Abrahamic”, that other big one also has an influential and sophisticated legal culture

Christianity as Liberation Theology was arguably the most powerful counter to Christian-sponsored cold war colonialism in Latin America

origjnal Jesus was p chill imo, people should have a right to be down w the teachings ascribed to him w/o getting lumped in with Tom Cruise ffs

looking forward to the leaked footage that reveals Joe Biden is a Catholic

Rarely is it used in that context, in my experience.

It's the opposite in the academic Ivory Tower, but I'll defer to you since this is a US thread and we're talking about public discourse at large.

guys this is how we get Immortan Joe as a leader

Heh around here it’s just a thing Christians say when they mean “Christian”

Immortan Joe may be unrefined but the market for mother’s milk has never been stronger

don't tell Anthony Kiedis

Incidentally, I always got the sense that American first names are more readily 'Old Testament'-ish (scare quotes intended) than their Christian European counterparts, but that might just be pure speculation on my part. Still, it seems to me that David, Sarah, Zach, Rebecca, etc. are less likely to be 'Christian' in France, say, whereas in the US, it depends.

OG = original gesus

my very religious (now ex)-friend named his kid Zechariah. I'm sure in a few years he'll call himself Inspectah Zech

Tracer, I was raised in a smattering of religious traditions, and many of my thoughts around religion continue to echo those that I had at 13, and I have no problem admitting as much. I did attend a Quaker high school, and have some sympathies with Spinozan formulations of immanence.

That said, I just don't think treating a cult like Scientology differently than a cult-like denomination of Christianity is really productive or worthwhile, but since I'm alone in this respect, I'll shut up.

I just don't think treating a cult like Scientology differently than a cult-like denomination of Christianity

If we're talking about specific denominations, I wholeheartedly agree.

Germany has the right idea imo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governmental_lists_of_cults_and_sects#Germany

France too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governmental_lists_of_cults_and_sects#French_parliamentary_commission_report_(1999)

Not alone and FWIW I don't think the argument is nu-atheisty at all. Nu-atheisty would be cancelling Bass and all Christian or has-given-a-speech-to-Christian politicians out of hand, not none of them.

xxp table I do think it’s fairer when you put it like that—but fairer still to refer to a stripe of Christianity rather than a denomination per se. The Reagan-era/Ralph Reed brand of fundamentalism is totally a cult.

Yeah, I was painting with a wide brush earlier. The problem then becomes who defines cults, and that's the trickier thing in re: Christianity, particularly in the US. If I had my druthers, all the megachurches would be shut down tomorrow and their pastors forced to pay back all the tithes they've collected over the years, but that's never going to happen.

no argument from me on that score

when I played Pilate I wore Deicide shirts to rehearsal and only one person got it.

Hadrian, the problem is that a significant portion of the US can be defined as fundamentalist or evangelical at this juncture. So they're a huge, huge cult. But they cause immense pain and suffering in the US and other counrties, and they also command an outsized proportion of the political structure here and elsewhere. So while some of broad strokes were a bit too broad, I personally consider "Christian" shorthand for "those fucking wackjobs ruining everything," not mainstream protestants or Catholic Worker Catholics or Unitarians or anything.

In other words, I'll try to be more nuanced in the future

Just for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism_in_the_United_States#Demographics

Megachurches are fucking weird, man. It never ceases to amaze me.

it's religious sporting event basically

right down to Osteen buying the old Houston Rockets arena

I think part of it is a function of America's approach to grifting: if you fall for something that's bad for you, it's your fault, for any other reading would obviously be detrimental to Individual Freedom™. Put differently:

There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, "Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."

agree on the megachurches and the general grift involved. partic the recent surge in “prosperity gospel” horseshit. i sympathize with a lot of what you’re saying table.

But as we were saying in the anti-semitism thread, there are certainly plenty of (mainly American) evangelicals who act as though they've figured Judaism out better than Jews themselves.

this might be an appropriate time for me to inform the thread that you're all misspelling some pretty important words and concepts - it's Abba Father, Yeshua, HaSatan, and Amein, for example. i know because my 0.01% ashkenazi jew supra-christian dad learned the truth by combing through the original translation of the bible, using google translate, listening to the prophecies of his brother, and other mysterious holy research techniques.

in other words, yes, there is definitely a huge contingent of people who have completely lost their fucking minds and are dangerously dumb. some of them even fucked my mom, lol!!

sorry, a little too intense for the joe biden thread!

btw, speaking of, i have it on good word that biden has selected tim kaine for VP

Is your dad acquainted with the angel Moroni?

xp