Whoa. That really gets to the heart of the issue, doesn’t it?
As usual, poetry for the win.
2 Likes
Do not mistake the USA with the Civilized World.
6 Likes
I don’t want to diminish the power of the poem as a whole by just quoting the beginning and end, especially since it’s such a short piece, but it’s the final lines that really get to me:
And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged—
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear.
3 Likes
Wow. I thought the headline was leading into a screed about how spanking is the same as child abuse, but it actually means the pastor hit another person’s child with all his might because the child didn’t cower enough before his dogma.
I wondered how the kid’s parents would react to hearing about that, but I suppose my answer is in the absolute silence of the congregation.
4 Likes
Hell, I thought it would at least be about assaulting one’s own children, but it’s worse than that. It’s not only hatred of children - it’s hatred of anyone smarter who isn’t falling in line. It’s just that it’s apparently acceptable to assault children in his little sub-culture.
No the ultimate revenge fantasy is The Book Of Revelation, where all the unbelievers are left standing knee deep in a pile of their own guts. Whos’ going to be laughing then, huh?
2 Likes
Charles Bronson?
1 Like
Yeah, it’s classic bullying - they’re intellectually threatened by someone’s words, they’re not smart enough to respond in kind, so they resort to physical violence, because they’re stronger (and/or more willing to engage in physical violence). The extra layers of disturbing are that he justifies his bullying as “bringing children to god” and that everyone else placidly goes along with it.
6 Likes
I wasn’t referring to the ignoramus pastor in the video who seems not to have read any of Jesus’ actual teachings, that guy is clearly an example of everything that’s wrong with the modern American Evangelical interpretation of “Masculine Christianity.”
I was referring to silly comments along the lines of:
“hurr durr, don’t Christians realize crosses are torture devices?” and
“Jesus admitted doubt and fear during his own execution, checkmate theists!” and
“Jesus lived with his parents until he was thirty, what a loser!”
That kind of crap is the basest sort of Reddit-Atheism circle-jerking, and I’m disappointed to see it here.
3 Likes
The big three monothestic religons share a god - they hark back to the same cultural traditions from Abraham on down, they just interpret what he means differently.
5 Likes
One of my favorite conservative tropes is how they expect the world to run according to their personal version of Political Correctness, except that that they label their state of perpetual offendedness “religion,” so that makes it totally justified, but only for them and no one else.
6 Likes
Well it’s guys like this that create atheists. Atheists generally aren’t the result of some sort of slippery slope of secular humanism that started when they watched PBS as a child, they are the product of beatings at the hands of fundies.
Well, sometimes. I’m atheist, and it’s not because I was physically abused by Christians for religious reasons (although I had a few friends that were.) It’s because the stories just don’t make sense, which is something I only fully realized after a long thread of introspection that may indeed have started with a viewing of the original Cosmos on PBS as a child.
4 Likes
Chuck Norris
2 Likes
Well said.
The behavior of anti-theists is likely drawn from the same source as the lovely behavior of the fundamentalists they so adore arguing with. A nasty bullying urge to convert everyone to the one true view of the universe. Other people’s behavior, and the law of the land are things worth arguing about sometimes, but what other people believe seldom is.
2 Likes
That’s the party line, anyways - that the Abrahamic monotheistic religions all share a common deity. The reality seems a bit messier than that, as there’s plenty of evidence that there were a number of different gods that were conflated into one at various points. (As religions do.) Christian fundamentalists use this to claim that Islam worships a lunar deity, not their god, but they’re opening up a whole can of worms with this, as one can just as easily claim that their god is a conflation of at least two different deities himself (with stories in the Old Testament of explicit worship of other deities who were sometimes conflated as well).
2 Likes
Maybe it’s plain thermodynamics. The universe is expanding and cooling, could it lead to the deities condensing together?
6 Likes
(with stories in the Old Testament of explicit worship of other deities who were sometimes conflated as well).
I was fascinated to find that the Bible explicitly forbids dressing up a tree, as people do at Christmas. It was a practice of a competing religion, which I assume was later assimilated. I assume that process is also the reason why Easter is full of rabbits and eggs.
2 Likes
Interesting that you jump to the conclusion that I’m a conservative living in a state of “perpetual offendedness,” based solely on my criticism of a couple of juvenile comments.
I’d label myself as a moderate, and most of the people you seem eager to group me with would consider me a hell-bound liberal;)
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms and grievances against organized religion in general and Christianity in particular, the content of the original video being among them.
I just hoped that the level of conversation here would be at a higher level than straw-man potshots and teenage angst.
2 Likes
It might be more accurate to say that their monotheisms share common origins, But the god of Abraham they all interpret in various ways is a hugely syncretic thing in the first place. It owes a lot to the Mesopotamian god-kings, Zoroastrianism, Hindu monism, along with probably countless other local folk religions. This is how the migrations of all religious traditions happen over time - but it only become a problem when a group decide to prove that X is “the real story”.
For instance, I know a guy who appears to have been involved with Masonry through most of his life. It seems that he used to juggle this with a practice of Christianity, but now in his later life has turned his back upon Masonry and become something of a Christian zealot. Why I find this odd is because most Masonic traditions have a history of teaching the older myths behind those appropriated by Christianity. But this guy uses stories from the Christian bible to teach history, which is about the worst possible use for them. He should certainly know better!
6 Likes
My new band name.
Ba dum tish
8 Likes
