I started seeing it around the time that the fetishization of US special forces took off. Mark Bowden in “Black Hawk Down” refers to one remarkable special-forces operator as a “grim Delta warrior”, but I don’t know if it was common parlance in the military then or just a journalistic invention. But from about 2003 onward, I started to see more and more generals publicly referring to their troops as “warriors”. It began, I think, with elite units and then gradually trickled down. I assume it’s still limited to point-of-the-spear types, but maybe every REMF is a “warrior” too now.
That’s a different thing. I was talking about the use of the word “warrior” by the military to describe their soldiers, independent of any religious overtones. I don’t know how the military currently handles religiosity. Although there are certainly those in the hierarchy, like the notorious Gen. Boykin, who haven’t been shy about expressing their particular brand of faith.
Yes. But while everyone is tempted by greed, pride, envy, dishonesty and so on, most people are straight and cis, and thus aren’t “tempted” to be queer. Which makes queer people an easy target. If you start fulminating about greed and treating the poor badly, it will make some of your congregation feel bad about themselves; even worse, it will make a lot of them think about the American society in a critical way.
An awful lot of them don’t, not in any meaningful fashion. Just reading the text isn’t enough; you have to comprehend what you’re reading, and think about what it says, why, and how it relates to your situation.
Yea but that’s for when the man in charge wants to control a woman’s body who might have had non-male-approved sex, not when she seeks control over her body.
Selected portions, usually skipping all the bothersome “thou shalt not” stuff. The Pentateuch (first five OT biblical tomes) contains about 750 commandments… that Xians generally ignore.
Elsewhere, the vast mass of texts in numerous translations gives propagandists an almost infinite range of material. Damn this, praise that; do or don’t do this or that because it’s a rule; hate or love peoples for whatever holy reason; pray a lot, even though prayer objectively does not work except to help one feel good about themself – delusions of adequacy.
That’s the point – delusion. Xian ‘warriors’ delude themselves that they’re in a dangerous conflict when their main hazard is obesity. Drop that cheeseburger, Reverend! Slowly, now…
Up until relatively recently there were almost completely unopposed in doing so. Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” In the same way, it’s difficult to get a group to understand something (‘you cannot use the force of law to imply your religious beliefs’) when it gives them power.
Both pro-slavery and abolitionists used text from the Christian Bible as justification for their cause.
Also, the Bible being not a single coherent book, but a whole lot of books, with different genres and purposes, written across a long time in very changing circumstances and contexts, and frequently pieced together from earlier sources that might contradict each other.
While the Catholic Church’s “let’s not have the laypeople read the Bible” approach was overkill, they had reasons for it.
And also many translations, each with their own problems but all sharing a general problem: rendering ideas from ancient Hebrew or Greek sources into diverse languages. I.M. Pei in THE STORY OF LANGUAGE tells of a biblical translation into an indigenous Central American tongue had to render “prayer” as “wagging one’s tail before the Lord”.
Meanwhile, my Spanish and German are weak, so my bookshelves merely contain maybe a dozen varied biblical versions in Aenglish. The Adventist, Feminist, and Revised Standard texts bear only slight resemblance. The Dead Sea Scrolls (first batch) are more variants.
Holy warriors need not limit themselves to any existing biblical text, but can channel divine messages and rules via sacred inspiration – {JHWH} told me, so it must be so! What, commit violence against some sect, race, or other group? Done!
ProTip: Beware prophets. Or become one – it pays well.
Why do Christians believe they should tell everyone what to do? Because they MUST. I was taught that an atmosphere of sin is created whenever anyone sins, (and even if no one else is aware of it), and that leads to more sinning by everyone. Other people sinning can lead to your own sinning and so on to eternal torture from your loving God. The only answer is to proselytize and reduce the sinning in the world. All, of course, with the grace of God, praying, sacramental rites, etc. So, by the lights of my Catholic upbringing, I’m practically REQUIRED to force other people away from what I consider sin or my soul will be lost forever. How’s that for some bullshit?
I got much of the same style in protestant southern upbringing in the church. The way it was sold to me was, “If you commit sin yourself, you are obviously going to hell forever and burning forever. But if you watch other people commit sin, and don’t try to teach them about hell and Jesus and God and turn them right, it’s just as if you yourself committed the sin, because you’re not doing everything you can to keep them out of hell. You’re just as bad as they are. And if your community condones sinful acts, it’s WORSE than the people committing them because they might not have seen God’s glory and love but YOU HAVE.”
Now I know not all christians, etc, etc etc. But all the ones I grew up with, went to bible camp with, was allowed to associate with, and ran into throughout most of my life in Arkansas FULLY believed this. I didn’t even know other kinds of christians existed or even COULD exist until well into my 30s. And even then I still had to pretend they were actually antichrist’s followers whenever I went home if I didn’t want a debate
People like those bigoted religious zealots may have been Christina once. Not now.
(In the US of A) The Founders wrote the Constitution; not the Apostles.
They added the Bill of Rights; not the Ten Commandments.
Their intent was Freedom of Religion.
It was not Control by Religion.
They created a Democracy; not a Theocracy.
Christianity is not a political party. #truth
I grew up in Texas, but my family were Methodists and, at that time, the Methodists were decidedly more moderate and took a mostly live and let live approach to people of other faiths or no faith. Hell, I played D&D in my church’s rec room with the pastor’s kid. They have since moved considerably further to the right, sadly, to the point where a formal split of the United Methodist Church is almost inevitable. Much like the modern Republican Party, there are still members of the United Methodist Church like my parents who are mentally stuck in the Methodist Church of the 1970s and haven’t accepted that the Church has changed. As for me, the youth minister of my church who taught my confirmation class when I was about 12 or 13 is largely responsible for my becoming an atheist, and not in a bad way. He actually taught us some religious history and some comparative religion, and we actually read the Bible, and talked about who wrote it, when, and why. He didn’t just feed me the line that the Bible was divinely inspired and, thus, infallible. He acknowledged that it was written by men, and that there were many translations that didn’t all agree. He also taught me the Hebrew alphabet, which I don’t remember at all, but I always thought that was cool. Anyway, because of him, I started thinking for myself when it came to what the Bible said and what it all meant and what the nature of the universe was. It took a decade of further exploration and growth, but I finally decided all of that was just mythology. That minister was the good kind of Christian. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), that kind of minister isn’t likely to increase the size of his flock. So churches of all religions tend to weed out those kinds of leaders. They just aren’t good for business.
This is exactly what happened to a good friend of mine from college and his United Methodist posting in Arkansas. He was told outright by leadership that the reason he was being fired as a minister was because he needed to bring in more money per attendee, and this “love your neighbor” bullshit doesn’t bring as much in as the “we’re in America’s greatest moral crisis, a war against satan.” That’s literally what he was told. That he needed to preach fear so that the war against Satan can be funded.
