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Did christianity go against the desires of the christians who willingly engaged in the slave trade? Did it go against the desires of the christians who perpetrated Manifest Destiny, the Lebensraum, the Holocaust, the genocide in Palestine and many other similar atrocities? Does it go against the desires of religious leaders who live in opulence? Does it go against the desires of the pedophiles in the Vatican and other christian establishments?
I remember being in world history class in high school learning about the council of Trent. I remember thinking “oh so they admit it’s man made?? I thought that was a secret.”
All religions are man made.
Man created god in his own image.
To exert control
If Christianity is a god made religion, why does he permit slavery? Is god evil or something?
More like endorse, depending on where you read
I actually originally had endorse, and I do think the Bible endorses slavery but I walked it back a tiny bit because I think permitting is still evil while being easier to defend. But yea there are verses that are an endorsement to me.
If Christianity went against all of our desires then it would have become extinct very quickly. Instead, it encourages many phenomena that are naturally appealing to us. Charity. Forgiveness. Self-sacrifice. Triumph. Unity. The hanged one said ‘blessed are the poor’ and he favoured us over the rich, hence why many of us flocked to Christianity before it became the Roman Empire’s state religion.
I am presuming that by ‘man’s desires’ the author had sexual attraction in mind, as
I think that the overwhelming majority of wives would agree that suppressing lust for other women is good advice for their husbands, even if for most husbands that sounds difficult to do, albeit not as difficult as removing an eye or a hand. This verse was inspired by the Torah, because while it may never explicitly condemn lust, the hanged one, as Amy-Jill Levine wrote, ‘does not “oppose” the Law; he extends it.’
before it became the Roman Empire's state religion
Y'all ever wonder if Christianity was so pro-poor why one of the most powerful men in history would pick it up and start spreading it around?
Recuperation, just as liberals do with MLK.
Simple. To appeal to the converted masses.
Brown asserts that Christians still comprised a minority of the overall population, and local authorities were still mostly pagan and lax in imposing anti-pagan laws;
You raise a fair point; my earlier statement was misleading. The masses in general were not yet Christian, but the Christian minority showed a remarkable fervour that the rich no doubt noticed and were eager to exploit:
In a way that the awesome power-deities of the pagan pantheon could not, the all-powerful and supremely benevolent Christian god offered ‘a heart in a heartless world’ that had strong appeal to the oppressed of the Roman Empire.
[…]
The exploitation and oppression of the Roman Empire meant misery for millions, but the violence of the state usually prevented effective resistance. This was the contradiction that allowed the Christian Church to grow and grow.
Recruiting among slaves, women, and the poor, the Church was viewed with grave suspicion, and was repeatedly battered by repression. It [did] not work. The men and women set on fire, eaten alive by animals, or nailed onto wooden crosses to die provided the Early Church with a roll call of martyrs as impressive as any in history.
By the early 4th century CE, the Church had become the most powerful ideological apparatus in the Mediterranean world, with a complete underground network of priests, congregations, and meeting-places extending across the Empire.
Many army officers, government officials, and wealthy landowners had already become Christians. In 312 CE, the Emperor Constantine the Great decided to adopt Christianity himself, to legalise the religion, and to make the state the protector and patron of the Church. Before the century was out, his successor, Theodosius the Great, would make paganism illegal and hand over all temple estates to the Church.
(Emphasis added. Source.)
The ability for a minority to seize state power was a structural defect of the Roman Empire:
The army became more and more the master of the republic. As the mercenary soldiery increased, the fighting capacity of the Roman citizens fell; or rather, the decline of their fighting capacity conditioned the growth of the mercenary soldiery. All the elements of the people that were capable of fighting were in the army; the part of the people outside of it kept losing both its ability and its desire to bear arms.
[…]
The more non-Romans there were in the army and the more the aristocratic officers were replaced by career men, the more willing the army was to sell itself to the highest bidder and make him the ruler of Rome.
In this way the foundations were laid for Caesarism, by having the richest man in Rome buy up the republic by purchasing its political power. It was also the basis for having a successful general with an army at his back try to make himself the richest man of Rome; the simplest way to do this was to expropriate his opponents and confiscate their property.
Sorry to overwhelm you with text, but I hope that this helps regardless.
I think a part of it as well is how the Roman state religion was heavily ossified at the time, and had a fair bit of power and influence that the Emperor couldn't easily deal with. But if he converted to a new religion, it would create a new religious power structure that he could benefit from. Constantine also made a brand new capital in Constantinople, another means of moving away from the established power structure in Rome. It might have been a shrewd decision to try and consolidate his power.
I am presuming that by ‘man’s desires’ the author had sexual attraction in mind
White Christian men can be some of the most sexually depraved individuals.
Christianity was an apocalyptic prophetic cult that expected Jesus to come back within a few months or so. His message was to reject anything that might lead you away from belief in him as the son of God and messenger for the immediate apocalypse. So there are like 200 parables about denying earthly desires to instead focus on belief in Jesus as Prophet and proselytizing.
When Jesus never came back, they invented the field of Christian apologetics, grew in numbers, and became a state religion, something in explicit opposition to the Gospels. Now there is an intentionally opaque and roundabout justification for everything the Euro ruling class wanted to do for about 2000 years.
This comrade gets it.
Reading the New Testament chronologically in the order it was written (not the chronology of its internal events) really hits this home. Paul’s undisputed letters are the oldest, and Paul is talking about not even having sex, not as a matter of self denial, but as a matter of “Jesus is coming like, tomorrow, so why even bother with sex. I mean if you really got to ok but the end is so near it’s a waste of time really”.
Jesus is coming like, tomorrow
So save it up for when he gets here - Paul
Paul's stufg is also kind of fun to read because he was an OG weirdo. Fanboy supreme, picking fights and judging everyone, having crashouts, getting kicked out of places for being annoying...
Christianity was an apocalyptic prophetic cult that expected Jesus to come back within a few months or so
When Jesus never came back, they invented the field of Christian apologetics, grew in numbers, and became a state religion
crashing out so hard you genocide/colonize most of the world
Really telling on yourself when saying that Christianity forbids everything you desire. Terrifying that the thing standing between this dweeb and a spree of murder is a belief in religion so fragile they’re making shitty Chad memes to have shower arguments with atheist strawmen.
Lots of questions about my “not succumbing to the desires of the flesh” sleeveless tank.
Tbf, "forbids everything you desire" doesn't mean the same as "you desire everything it forbids". If all you desire is pork and gay sex and you believe the bible forbids both then it forbids everything you desire even if you have no interest whatsoever in your neighbour's ass
Still very silly though
weightlifting against man's desire.
Wrong
So just off the top of my head doesn't christianity say not to murder people? Is the person who made this saying they desire murder?
I've encountered a frighteningly high number of people who say things like, "if people didn't believe in god, what will stop them from going out to steal or kill?"
I grew up in a fairly secular household (parents never took us to church except for weddings or funerals) and even I knew from a young age that stealing* and murder is wrong. "God" didn't factor into those morals at all.
*except stealing from big corporations, as I learned as I got older
To steal a Penn Gillette joke… I already kill and steal as much as I want already. I don’t actually want to kill anyone and I wouldn’t do it even if there were no consequences.
It also says not to have gay sex so it's kind of a mixed bag.
Don't all religions have restrictions on things you otherwise might do? Does that make all religions correct in this person's eyes?
fellas, y'all should join my new religion called "never touch your dick"
Is there somewhere I can go every week to hear all about how I'm such a bad bad boy for even thinking about thinking about it? Maybe with a small, porous box I can whisper to another guy about it?
Oh please, the Old Testament reads precisely like a list of things a bronze age patriarch would want out of his flock.
Because religion was traditionally used to exert control over the masses. Do what we say or you will burn in hell for all eternity. Really easy to do when most people were illiterate and uneducated.
It's more like it was an attempt to gain control over the unpredictable and arbitrary material world, by naming and idolizing gods to appease and appeal to, and then the social control and cohesion stuff developed from that: codifying and cleaving to the established social order from when things were "good" because surely that will make the gods keep things going good or return things to a state of plenty and stability.
Even now there's a lot of earnest fear and desperation mixed in with all the cynicism and self-serving hypocrisy and self-serving heresy of the various churches and religious orders. The world is bad, so people appeal to magic to deliver them better fortunes, they grasp for ways to make the magic favor them with ritual or asceticism or sacrifice or violence, and there's little practical distinction between a terrified fanatic earnestly enacting evil to win divine favor and a grifter cynically enacting evil to earn sweet grifterbucks for it.
I feel like there's a tendency among atheists to see all the self-interest and hypocrisy and heresy and fraud among organized religions and just say "look upon these liars seeking power! They spin such silly and dumb tales to control fools and twist them to their wicked ends!" when the truth is far more spontaneous and horrible than that, that genuine fanaticism can go hand in hand with hypocrisy and fraud. After all, no one lies better than someone who earnestly and wholeheartedly believes what they're saying.
To add my own 2 cents:
Not everyone has the same desires. From a Marxist-Leninist view, religion, like many social constructs, persists because it advances the interests of the ruling class. Most people don't want to be slaves, but if (for example) your religion's holy book has a passage telling slaves to obey their masters, that aligns with the desires of slaveowners so the slaveowning class is gonna promote that religion.
From a Marxist-Leninist view, religion, like many social constructs, persists because it advances the interests of the ruling class.
It's worth specifying that this is only going to necessarily be true of the majority religion, and minority religions may or may not be compatible (see for instance Rome's treatment of early Christians).
man does not desire a patriarchal order where women are chattel? we are going to need to edit a LOT of textbooks 
Forgive my ignorance, but the Bible says you're not supposed to eat pork and seafood or wear clothes made of mixed fibers right?
Because these fuckers definitely do both of those
wait so mcdonalds is bad now? i thought it was a core tenant of american christianity
I bet Rainbow Dash could totally fuck Jesus up in a one-on-one deathmatch
Christianity opposes My Little Pony and Netflix?
Genuinely lost with what this meme is depicting lol
They're doing the usual fash thing of attacking consumerism from the right
they depicted atheists as netflix watchers, it's so joever 
As if I would pay for Netflix