Baptist News: Evangelicals have killed Christianity in America

Most people simply stay on default settings, so to speak.

I think there’s two things at play that created that association. First, “Dijon” is a French word, and the French have a bit of a cultural association with frumpy posh-ness in the US (also with being cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but that’s another topic for another childish cafeteria stunt). Second, the Grey Poupon Dijon mustard commercials are basically textbook posh: British gentlemen eating 3-course meals in their Rolls Royces, which are driven by white-gloved chauffeurs:

6 Likes

Yeah, Trump can’t even plausibly fake being a Christian.

2 Likes

Though admittedly he IS a lot whiter than that Muslim-lookin’ fella he replaced, and we all know that Jesus was a blonde-haired blue-eyed proponent of big business.

5 Likes

Except that religions are not monolithic. As you yourself point out, they are interpretations of antecedent teachings. This is why, although I consider all supernatural beliefs to be delusional, I disagree with your characterization of it as group schizophrenia.

I’m not even sure that’s a valid concept. An individual can be schizophrenic. A group that is not at all schizophrenic is by definition a hive mind. Two individual minds will, to varying degrees, interpret the same words and experiences differently. I believe the failure here is in treating them as a coherent whole because they claim to follow the same antecedent teachings, or at least closely related ones since, for example, the Catholic bible is slightly different from the King James bible, and so forth and so on all the way to interpretations of a teacher as radically different as Muslims and Christians interpret the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, one useful (though not exhaustive) definition of the difference between a cult and a religion is schism.

I’m going to have to partially agree with @Wanderfound here. I think sexual orientation, race and religion are all different, but mainly in their causes.

Sexual orientation seems to be mainly a matter of nature.

Race we know is a very real social artifact of self-selected groups giving rise to racial and ethnic communities and in some cases minor genetic trends within those communities such as, for example, an increased prevalence of Tay–Sachs.

Religion, or more broadly speaking cosmogonic belief structures, seems to be predominately caused by nurture. For example, I can no more cease to believe in the non-existence of other people’s deities than I can cease to believe in gravity. Were I inclined to spend a long time ardently trying to convince myself of a deity’s existence, I might succeed to repressing the knowledge of its non-existence, yet the knowledge would still be there somewhere in my mind I’d taught myself to ignore. But I can no more choose what I believe than I can choose the race I’m assigned by society or I can choose the sexual orientation I drew from nature’s hat. The cause is different, but the reality of it is every bit as much a part of my existence.

Likewise, someone who sincerely believes in a different ontology has no more choice in the matter.

However, and this is a major caveat, a sincerely held memetic complex like that can be changed by actually convincing someone of a different ontology. In other words instead of convincing them to repress their knowledge of their beliefs, they can be changed in a way that race and sexual orientation cannot. This, however, is not a matter of mere choice.

More than that, it’s incorrect even to put all self-identified individuals of a particular group, for example all Quakers, into the same rigid category.

6 Likes

I think we can agree to disagree on the amount of responsibility here. You say no responsibility, I say it’s two sides of the same coin. Religion is, generally, based on othering, on group rules and moral superiority. Being female, black, or gay is not - generally.
Of course a particular sub-group isn’t responsible for other sub-groups. But they still derive their justification from the same source: moral superiority by divine grace.

Personally, I don’t give a fuck if anyone believes in anything transcendental. But organised religion gives me a bad feeling about humanity, as a whole, every time I start thinking about it. And I can assure you that I tried non-lazy variants of thinking. :confused:

Disclaimer: TBH, the US American religious landscape never interested me enough to dive into the detail. While I’m aware that the Quakers are a conservative but moderate group, and recall the “God hates fangs” plaque in the True Blood title is a slightly satirical comment on some southern Baptist weirdos, the details escape me. If you just say that one is ok, the other is not, then I have no objection. But the fundamental problem of othering and bigotry in morals remains.

1 Like

That’s a broad statement, actually, and isn’t always the truth. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. It often comes down to individual interpretation more than anything else.

But once again, organized religion isn’t a monolith, which was my entire point. There are plenty of cases where organized religious acts as a force for human rights and greater freedom for human beings, and we shouldn’t just lump them all into the same category as Islamic state or the Catholic church during the era of the inquisition. Even Christanity, which became a key cultural institution during European colonialism didn’t start out as a supremacist organization, but as a fringe faith in a multi-cultural empire that was persecuted.

Actually, although the practice of the quakers varies (as is the case with all protestant sects), it started in UK, set up the only American colony that actually practiced religious tolerance, and became a key organization in fighting slavery in the US. They actively fought against racism and tend to be centers of activism today in the US with regards to human rights and civil rights.

Some people’s religious convictions absolutely reject othering and bigotry, which is MY objection to painting them all with the same brush. I really don’t know why this is such a controversial statement to say that not all faiths are the same with regards to this sort of thing, but once again, I suppose I’m howling in the way by bringing in complexity to the situation. On particular topics, people here just plain reject it.

8 Likes

The really bizarre part of all that is that Grey Poupon Dijon Mustard is grown, harvested, and processed about an hour’s drive from where I sit in LA, out on the rich agricultural plains of the Santa Clara River outwash fan, in the town of Oxnard, CA.

It’s about as French as I am.

[ETA: This was true back in the days of “Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?” but it seems that Nestle shuttered the Oxnard plant a few years back and moved the Grey Poupon operation to Pennsylvania — which uses mustard seeds imported from Canada.]

5 Likes

And no one in Britain has ever heard of Grey Poupon except as something that was once on American TV. Sounds a bit rude too. :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Ted Arthur Haggard who is Gay is the man the started the Evangelicals movement. Christianity is as different from Evangelicals as Sunni information Shia. They may read the same religious book, but interpret it the same way.

Not that you’ve done it, but I’ve always though “religion shopping” was weird. I mean, this is belief. You can inform your beliefs, but you can’t really choose to believe something. You do, or you don’t.

Picking a sub-variant of Christianity or Judaism or something seems reasonable after that.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.