Chapotraphouse

Christianity as an organization of political power is a horrible stain on humanity and likely always will be.

Christianity as a personal or small community religion is actually a really beautiful and hopeful thing. Christianity does not start and end with the old testament, it ends with an overcoming of many of the regressive messages within the old testament and strong recurring themes of hope based around community. The bible is a pretty important world text and has a lot of great messages in it.

Basically, attack systemic issues and organizations rather than individual beliefs.

I do often feel like we overcorrected after New Atheism, and also Catholicism gets too much of free pass on the anglo internet, which irks when you live somewhere where Catholic orgs are literally funding the hard right, BUT secularism is vitally important imo, and that means freedom of worship for everyone

First rule of politics: learn to count.

Socialism needs power, not purity. Power comes from the size of the support base.

Socialism has historically been helped by religious support same way as it's been helped by nationalist support.

Because most people on this site aren't Marxists. It's as simple as that. They want to believe that religions that have been oppressing people for thousands of years can be reformed somehow. It's kinda baffling for a website with such a large LGBT+ userbase.

Bit idea: Guy who calls the new testament the woke testament

Judaism also stems from the old testament, should we remove Jews for what is in their holy book?

The Catholic Church (And the Anglican Church, and many Lutheran Churches, and thousands of Baptist Churches) has committed great evils, but original sin is not a marxist doctrine and we cannot hold the average Christian responsible for the actions of everyone everywhere who professed the faith, and you are not likely to see support for such things amongst the Christians posting here. If a Christian is supporting the slave trade or the nazis on hexbear they are likely to be banned and find no support among other believers.

This is gonna blow your mind, but you can be religious and a good socialist at the same time.

The church closest to my home is where I do some of my community gardening. They know full well that I'm a socialist, an atheist, and bisexual, and they don't care in the slightest. As far as they're concerned, actions trump beliefs—good works are God's work, they've told me. They're fundraising to build an affordable housing co-op for displaced First Nations folks in the community, and they broke ground on the first block last year!

Theory didn't stop in 1844 when Marx said we need to move beyond religion for the working class. We can do better.

Cuz I’m Catholic

Surface-level interpretation.

Every religion gets swarmed and contorted by reactionaries because they see they can use it as a source of power, never mind how there is almost always pro-social, anti-oppression, and anti-stratification principles at the core.

the horrendous old testament

1. This kind of New Atheist position ends up having the same approach to the Bible that fundies do.

2. You mean the Jewish scriptures, right?
   

a) institution is not religion tho, beliefs are what you make of them

b) new testament is compatible with socialism in myriads of way (one might say suspiciously so :lunacharsky-shining:).

c) soviet crusade against religion was wildly unsuccessful, to put it mildly (both at home and especially abroad). you come at 2000 year old institution, you best not miss and things of that nature

d) ...last sigh of the oppressed implies until there is memory of oppression you can't jettison religion, not really, until people can control their fate, they'll always be religious in some shape or form somewhere

i suppose there's gotta be somewhere for the 1% of christians who wouldn't lynch every gay person on the planet to chat amongst themselves

still stems from the horrendous old testament

No investigation, no right to speak.

I think religion is good.

Sorry I guess, but i've run the gamut in my life. I used to be a little edgelord preteen that delighted in shitting on belief. i had an earnest christian phase. i had a heresy and occult phase. i'm still in an "academic study of these matters is cool as hell" phase - I think if you're overly reductive, you get it in your head to only measure what religion does on a socio-political level, and this is a fucking trap. Anything tied to power structures can and will be abused, but that doesn't make these places the sole determiner of worth and value for anything, but for religion it's especially busted.

Religion and spirituality are like, really important elements of the human psyche. I can't tell you why that is, but I can tell you that even in instances of non-belief in an individual, the overwhelming tendency is that other structures replace it and act as a surrogate - something in our mind needs whatever religion provides. It can get it elsewhere of course, i can think of some large social projects that tried to redirect that impulse towards common, human-centered goals and sometimes, for some people, it works, but it's at least clear to me that being reductive about this and treating it as problematic or bad or somehow more trouble than it's worth, is coming from a place of disinterest and lack of understanding.

Because there are billions of Christians on planet earth and that's not changing anytime soon. We also have Islam and Judaism communities too. I'm also going to make a bold prediction that the youth are going to turn towards religion in the coming years and break the trend of rising non belief. Just look at the USA, Christianity was on a decline until 2019, but then numbers stabilised. I expect that the numbers will now rise.

And before anyone says anything about how I'm some religious person, I'm an atheist, but I'm calling it how I see it.

over correcting into enthusiastic support for religion can also be problematic.

I don't generally see this happen around here, I feel hexbear users have pretty even-keeled views on religion as a whole, barring those with religious trauma who are completely justified in their negative views. I'd certainly never allow outright evangelism anywhere on the site. And as others have said, the christianity comm is barely alive, same with /c/judaism, and /c/islam has been locked forever due to lack of mods. This is not a site that's enthusiastic about religion.

I would recommend thinking about it this way: whenever a comrade is "wrong" about something, literally anything, how much do you make it your business to "correct" them?

When it comes to socialism and organizing, the answer must always be, "to the extent it improves the organization or helps them personally". A sign of a dysfunctional social space is that people are constantly getting in each others' business for no reason other than that they are "wrong" about something. Dysfunctional socialist spaces will even dress this up in left language and (ironically enough), for example, say it causes disunity for a member to be dating a liberal. Of course, the disunity comes from the org trying to control a member's romantic life.

In this scenario, what is the existence of socialist Christians here actually doing to disrupt you or others? Are there certain problematic posts that inspired your question or did you just see "Christian" and start attacking? Are there a bunch of Calvinists in there doing Calvinism to us? Do you think you might actually be the source of disruption in thus scenario?

No, I agree with you. State atheism and a significant reduction in the power of the church is only logical. Religion is extremely reactionary. Look who they support and promote time and time again. Many of them believe Trump was chosen by God.

Basing your laws and values off of a 2000 year old law book is complete nonsense. We don't look to ancient misconceptions for guidance in any other field. How could people who didn't even know about the solar system hold the secrets to the universe?

How can anyone here defend the beliefs that: Being gay is an abomination. Abortion is always wrong. Evolution is untrue. Israel belongs to the Jewish people. Etc, etc.

Why is masking there reaction by talking to an imaginary friend and getting his approval acceptable? The worst of them deserve the wall, the rest harsh reeducation.

its fine

Its clear to anyone paying attention that Jesus would be a communist.

Or maybe I'm just too negative?

I know everyone has their own relationship or lack thereof with religion, I've never really had an inclination for any of it, even that time in high school when I hung out with the goth kids who were into Wicca. While they're few and far between especially in the west where it's largely been subsumed with capitalist brainworms, I've still known a few people that try very hard to live by the precepts of caring about your fellow humans and if it gives them some solace I can't really get too upset about it.

Pretty much all religions provide a basis for a social belief system/set of principals and morals by which a society should be and behave. They often also provide the meaning to life. Organised religions, e.g. Christianity, then provide a regular means of contact to teach this, e.g. via church services, for people. Many people who need structure and security, or the answer to why they exist, seek this out. Others engage with it as a point of ego boosting (e.g. social figurehead within the religion) or power (leader) or money (albeit moreso historically). In summary it provides individuals with a major part of their life, livelihood and welbeing.

So, when these people learn of all the horrendous crap associated with THEIR religion, they either cannot, or refuse to, accept it as their religion teaches the perfect way to be and therefore cannot possibly be fallible. Or they're culpable in the deceit, abuse and hypocrasy. Or they can't face the idea of loosing their religion (and therefore life as they know it/want it) so choose to lie that everything is ok and good. Everyone who disagrees or opposes is a heathen and must be shut down or worse, killed.

To add, as they replied as I was typing; Infamousblt makes the good point that there are still good people within these societies, which is true of pretty much all societal groups; there are good and bad people in all of them.