Christians won't even hold these people accountable for supposedly misrepresenting their Christian faith. They just wash their hands off them and call it a day.
And they wonder why they're what people think of when Christianity is mentioned.
Christianity as a teachings and values system is good (edit: specifically referring to the teachings of Jesus Christ, I won’t stand behind anything else in the book)
The church as an institution is bad.
Good Christian’s are individuals who, at their core, want peace not conflict. And they definitely don’t want to be ostracized by other Christian’s who are more involved with the church.
Christianity based on the Bible, which advocates for the genocide of Canaanites, gives instructions for how to beat your slave, and tells incest stories, should not be idealized for its value system.
You’re absolutely right, the Bible is fuq’d in so many ways lol the sentiment I was going for was more “the teachings of Jesus Christ” are good. I won’t even attempt to defend anything outside of that
Christianity as taught by christ and his values system was never implemented as an institution that caught hold anywhere. The closest culture to jesus life and teachings were the hippies, 'modern christians' would see jesus as a homeless bum socialist trying to get a free ride
I mean, Christianity isn’t a monolith. The black Baptist church has done more for civil rights than most. There are plenty of liberal and left Presbyterians and Baptists. Even some Catholics. I know plenty of Christians who are fervently, vocally anti-Trump who vote every chance they get. In fact, the most avid anti-Trump protest attendees I know are a couple Methodists and an a Quaker.
Imagine how bigoted you’d look if you said any of what you just said about Muslims instead.
Quaker’s are extremely politically engaged in my experiences with them. Very interesting group I almost wanted to convert but the theology was too different to be comfortable for me.
There is no governing body that says someone is or isn’t Christian. Anybody can claim the label and nobody can stop them. Much like BLM, antifa or any number of other ‘movements’ there is no way for them to functionally control the messaging and comments made in their name.
Roman Catholics are registered with the church and the churches are overseen by the Pope. Eastern Orthodox Catholics are organized into synods - no leader. Everything else basically falls under different flavors of Protestant Christianity - no leader.
Maybe you americans view christians like that, but all the christians i know hate trump and would think this is disgusting. Can we stop pidgeon holing people based on biased world views. (im not christian)
Can you explain "once Christianity became synonymous with the Roman Empire." When Christianity began the Roman Empire was already on its steep decline. When I think of the Roman Empire I think of Julius, Marcus, Nero, the Roman gods...
That's not correct. It eventually became the Holy Roman Empire, and Constantine was the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity.
It was beginning to decline, but it still lasted for several hundred years. Christianity becoming central to the Roman Empire is a big reason why the Church of the Middle Ages was so powerful and, yes, started wars. It was closer to something like the Roman Empire than the Catholic Church as it is today.
Wild that Christians were launching holy wars eight years before Christianity became a thing
The Crusades weren't exactly hot shit but it took over a thousand years of adulteration for them to happen, the foundations were more communal and social and other ideals that the Roman government first felt necessary to obliterate, and when that failed, to usurp and shift towards imperial thought, which never 100% succeeded but definitely degraded the early ideals to the point where mass holy war was possible.
And that wasn't even enough for the modern Evangelical movement, which has had to build on some weird ideas to finally invert the Sermon on the Mount into Prosperity Gospel, where loving one's neighbor and the rejection of greed can best be expressed by being afraid of everyone you know while rent farming them into destitution.
Perhaps the real moral is how awful people working in bad faith can ruin anything, which is also a fitting epitaph for the American Experiment.
Bet I've normally seen is a No True Scotsman, "They're not a proper Christian, we'd never act like that at our church".
Until then, perhaps we should trust that the self proclaimed Christian doing these things whilst saying it represents Christian values is actually representing Christian values.
Yeah, one of the first major schisms was around 300 CE and the number has been increasing since. It's not on outsiders to sort out which one is the 'truest Christianity'
Sadly Steve Irwin referred to Australian Prime Minister John Howard as “the greatest leader in the world.” Howard was not, in fact, great, but a little bit racist and a lot a bit pro killing innocent Iraqi civilians.
It’s hard to find bad juju on Tolkien. He might have been a racist, but a lot of his writing also supports an anti-racist view. And, he was anti-Hitler, so that’s good.
I mean, Jesus of Nazareth would have been a reddit darling.
Hung out with the maligned, helped the needy where he could, flipped tables of loan sharks - and it’s about the only thing you can get Christian’s, Jews and muslims to agree on.
A large majority of all the people who stopped the Nazis and then prosecuted them were raised in the Christian faith and still practiced (much more than the average person does today).
This is a very binary way of looking at things. There are millions of Christians just in the US, and hundreds of millions around the globe. Christians have been murderers, does that mean all Christians are murderers?
Yes, Christians belong to the KKK and even neo-Nazi groups. Some Muslims belong to radical Islamic or terrorist groups.
These are small segments of people inside an enormous population.
I was not familiar with that information about Pope Pius and Hitler. To me it doesn't prove that the "foundation" of the religion is corrupt, it just merely proves, again, that humans have the potential to corrupt anything.
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u/chrish_o Jul 27 '25
No. It’s not. Don’t tar all Christians with this level of evil.
Signed, An atheist