I swear I’d not seen the term “christofascism” until this year. It’s an apt term for all the talk about the new speaker of the house, rolling back of Roe v Wade, banning books and increased persecution of LGBT+ rights…
But if I was Christ I’d be pretty darn upset right now. I talk about love and tolerance and peace and you’re going to use my name to make shitty, power grabbing, political, oppressive moves? The fuckin audacity. I’d be flipping tables and calling out the hypocrites.
I know it’s a conversation as old as time. I also don’t believe Christian’s should be able to point at it and say “yeh but that’s not MY Jesus.” Doesn’t fucking matter, they’re identifying as a You so if You don’t do something about it then it’s as good as doin it yourself.
Sigh.
Christianity isn’t a book or a simple code of ethics, it is an evolving culture composed of living individuals and historical actions. It’s also composed of subcultures, many contradictory. Saying “Christians should be this” isn’t very useful, Christianity is what it is, and it’s up to Christians to determine where it goes.
As an atheist this is just a grossly superficial reading of Christianity.
Christianity isn’t about being non political it’s about political expediency. Christians were told to obey the government for survival (i.e no needless rebellion, unlike prophesied in Judaism), there is no part of the Bible that says that you can’t enforce Christian morality if you are in power. (“Judge not yadda…yadda”- that’s about hypocrisy, it is infact encouraged to judge and purity test others, Christian or not).
Infact moral systems require some obligation to to follow them, as much as people want to circle-jerk about how they don’t obligate others to do what they think is right, nobody actually believes this. The sheer fact that you believe something to be good or bad means that there is some property that makes this distinction relevant, this property is the obligation to do good and not do bad. People who assert that they don’t think others have this obligation as well are engaging in special pleading that only they are obligated to do good and not do bad. In other words, individual moral relativity is universally rejected, the few people that claim to ascribe to it would object to being stabbed as a good action simply because the perpetrator felt it was.
“I don’t believe Christians should be able to point at it and say ‘yeh, but that’s not my Jesus’”
I agree. If people don’t believe in Jesus as described in the Bible, they shouldn’t characterise it as “Jesus”.
Your objection on the other hand is ridiculous. If someone identifies as X, and it is physically impossible for others that identify as X to force them to stop identifying as X (not exactly sure how you think people can “do something” greater than repudiating them, which you already characterised as insufficient), then the problem of categorisation falls on the observing third-party. Well it always was the problem of the third-party, the unreliability of self-reporting is simply more obvious in this case.
“If I was Christ, I’d be pretty darn upset right now”
Seems weird that the purported Son of God would not be more explicit in social critique. Jesus as described would probably be far more conservative than any public figure nowadays. I don’t remember him advocating for democratic voting, freedom of speech, LGBT rights, or universal education.
He probably would be upset, just not in the same way you are.
“If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?”
– 1 John 4:20 (King James Version)
I fucking hate the King James version so much. I grew up with NRSE and it’s like “why are you still using this archaic shit?”
Here’s the same passage in language normal people can understand:
Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.
Honestly doesn’t make sense to me either way.
Of course I can love something I can’t see over something I can see. The reason I hate them is because I can see them.
That’s not the point he was trying to make. :)
It’s hard to make sense of it now, let alone two thousand years ago.
Here goes nothing:
God is in everything, so you cannot love God without loving each and every part of Him. It’s easy to love something you don’t experience in your everyday life – the true challenge is to love that which you do experience, like your “brothers” and “sisters”. If you have hate in yourself at all, you do not completely love God.
Makes sense now?
Well it is an oxymoron. At least in the way people use the term. Say someone said someone was an “anarchocommunist”. The person wouldn’t think they are “perfectly Marx” or “perfectly anarchist” because then that wouldn’t be the term. I wouldn’t even give Paul the pass on this, I doubt any ruler good or bad can say they stay true to the lord who made his stance on government clear.
Though I disagree with him, in the end he’s probably going to end up more normal than people make him out to be.
