(Image transcription/ A tweet from Bradley Onishi saying “we’ve been analysing the toxicity of White Evangelicalism for decades and they just tweeted it out” with a picture below seeming from the account “desiringGod” (their account title spells this as “Desiring God, in the full image from this tweet you can see a section saying "article by Joe Rigney, May 31st 2019”). The image focused on large text saying “The Enticing Sin of Empathy: How Satan Corrupts Through Compassion”/ end transcription).
In addition, after having researched this a little, you guys should read these articles:
The original article. These articles. Make my blood boil. I cannot fucking fathom that there are people out there that believe this shit.
Reading this, it’s literally all mental acrobatics so they can justify clinging to their hatreds while dressing it up in a costume of righteousness
for my health, i don’t think i can read these, but the concept is too wild not to pass on
Abrahamic religions and their “sins”…
This is not “Abrahamic religions,” this is Christianity. Empathy and feeling the pain and experiences of others is a central tenet in Judaism, especially with regard to the Passover seder. Leave us the fuck out of this.
Same goes for Islam, which is built off compassion and the understanding of one another. Our prophet stresses a mercy for all creatures. Leave us out of this too thanks.
“This is also specifically Evangelical Christianity, too which is a branch of Christianity that evolved to legitimize white supremacy and black slavery. Not that other branches of Christianity are innocent, but Evangelical Christianity is the closest thing to a full fledged Religion Of Evil you’ll find in real life.”
Edgy atheists really need to stop equating evangelical Christianity to “Abrahamic religions” as if that’s remotely the same thing.
Dude I’m a follower of Jesus and this makes my blood boil (I don’t identify with White Evangelical Christianity in any way shape or form). Like literally, Compassion and Empathy are what Jesus was all about. Anyone claiming otherwise has lost the plot concerning what they are really worshiping.
Something I’ve noticed though…American Evangelical Christianity has become much less about the things Jesus actually stood for and much more about personal freedom (for themselves) and intolerance for others’ freedoms. One place I read someone actually commented “I can do whatever I want [regarding Covid, masks and vaccines] because Jesus means freedom.” Where’s that “freedom” when it comes to lgbtq+ love and womens’ rights, huh? Honey, I think you’ve forgotten to read your bible recently… That’s not what Jesus was about.
So I have this thought, and that is: in the Bible, usually the “repent and turn from your wicked ways” was directed at people who were claiming to follow God already but were really not in their hearts, while the “good news” was proclaimed to the rest of the world. And I think today Christians get it wrong because they go all “repent and turn from your wicked ways” on people outside Christianity, when they really should be going “hey I have some really good news for you” and I think that’s at least partially why Christians have such a bad reputation in the world. Because people outside Christianity don’t need to be told “you’re evil and my religion is the only cure”, they need to be told good news like “hey you feel hopeless here’s some hope!”
Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence.
Satan represents vital existence instead of spiritual pipe dreams.
Satan represents undefiled wisdom instead of hypocritical self-deceit!
Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it instead of love wasted on ingrates.
Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek.
Satan represents responsibility to the responsible instead of concern for psychic vampires.
Satan represents man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all fours, who, because of his “divine spiritual and intellectual development” has become the most dangerous animal of all!
Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they lead to physical, mental or emotional gratification.
Satan has been the best friend the church has ever had, as has kept them in business all these years!
[Image ID: a line drawing of a bald person with empty black eyes. They have stretched ears with dangling reversed crosses, snakebite piercings in their lower lip, and a septum ring. Their face is crumbling into many tiny spiderweb cracks starting at their eyes, and a crumbling and broken halo is floating behind their head. They are holding up a middle finger and several sets of sharp teeth float around them in the background. /end ID]
mormonism is sooo funny to me because its straight up one of the few Religion Religions that isn’t regarded as a kooky cult despite the fact that it’s like 100% based on a weird racist scam but we all have to play nice and pretend that its real because there’s like a couple million of them living in utah who are very invested in the whole thing
Like it really goes to show that the only difference between a cult and a religion is having a membership number high enough to get some senate seats and an Entire State
How many mass graves and extinct cultures are needed to convince Christian apologists that missionaries and missionizing are inherently xenophobic?
The answer is apparently always, “At least one more.”
It just like… look. If your religion has an explicit instruction of belief that it needs to take every other religion out there in the world, wipe them out, and replace them with itself, that religion is xenophobic. And the people who engage in the fulfillment of that process are xenophobic.
It might not be as explicitly nasty a xenophobia as ethnic genocide, but it’s still an instruction to commit cultural genocide.
The fact that it has nothing elseto contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up? To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn - for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standards. How many literalists have read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalty is prescribed for adultery, for gathering sticks on the sabbath and for cheeking your parents? If we reject Deuteronomy and Leviticus (as all enlightened moderns do), by what criteria do we then decide which of religion’s moral values to accept} Or should we pick and choose among all the world’s religions until we find one whose moral teaching suits us? If so, again we must ask, by what criterion do we choose? And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, fili-cidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror. (The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins)
How did the Greeks, the Romans and the Vikings cope with such polytheological conundrums? Was Venus just another name for Aphrodite, or were they two distinct goddesses of love? Was Thor with his hammer a manifestation of Wotan, or a separate god? Who cares? Life is too short to bother with the distinction between one figment of the imagination and many. Having gestured towards polytheism to cover myself against a charge of neglect, I shall say no more about it. For brevity I shall refer to all deities, whether poly- or monotheistic, as simply ‘God’. I am also conscious that the Abrahamic God is (to put it mildly) aggressively male, and this too I shall accept as a convention in my use of pronouns. More sophisticated theologians proclaim the sexlessness of God, while some feminist theologians seek to redress historic injustices by designating her female. But what, after all, is the difference between a non-existent female and a non-existent male? I suppose that, in the ditzily unreal intersection of theology and feminism, existence might indeed be a less salient attribute than gender. (The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins)
I am not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or any other specific god such as Baal, Zeus or Wotan. Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, conies into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion.
Not surprisingly, since it is founded on local traditions of private revelation rather than evidence, the God Hypothesis comes in many versions. Historians of religion recognize a progression from primitive tribal animisms, through polytheisms such as those of the Greeks, Romans and Norsemen, to monotheisms such as Judaism and its derivatives, Christianity and Islam.
American polls suggest that atheists and agnostics far outnumber religious Jews, and even outnumber most other particular religious groups. Unlike Jews, however, who are notoriously one of the most effective political lobbies in the United States, and unlike evangelical Christians, who wield even greater political power, atheists and agnostics are not organized and therefore exert almost zero influence. Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to ‘come out’, thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can’t be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored. (The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins)
