Elon Musk told ex-girlfriend he needed ‘a legion of children before the civil war’
(www.theguardian.com)
Elon Musk is such an incel it hurts to comprehend.
What the bible says doesn’t matter to religious people who don’t follow that bible.
I think it’s because of your protestant cult upbringing, where the pastor’s bible was absolute truth. That’s a particularly conservative strand, one that denies the Vatican any interpretive authority. Its official role is to interpret a closed revelation, one that supposedly ended when the last apostle died, not to speak as God. Not a defence, just factual information.
I’ve told you before that I’ve read about 3 different bibles. Both the catholic school I went to and my atheist parents considered all of them bibles. But to the extremists you’re talking about, all 3 would be condemned as heretical socialist texts that aren’t the bible at all.
A minority doesn’t get to describe a majority. If we allow that, we lose what we stand for, because people who are malicious will always twist it to evil.
On your nazi argument, compare it with communism. The USSR and the CCP both claim to be socialist and both murder any countering voices. The truth is they aren’t communist, because they have a political class separate from the people.
Fascists have always done this. Embrace, extend, extinguish. With Christianity it started with the Romans, who took three centuries of history that had held no centralised or institutional power and narrowed it down. what was left was the version where the afterlife is a threat you hold over people. This is what most resembles “a death cult”, an institutional invention and not the original philosophy. It’s one of the reasons I got interested in the non-roman branches that warned against scripture, though those have been coopted by evil figures plenty of times too.
The roman cult, and especially the protestant branches, have done an insane amount of harm to people over the years. Yet the original philosophies survived all of it, and in a modern context, mostly in Europe, they’ve turned into the non theological and personal forms of Christianity that exist today.
It’s still called Christianity because the original stories use Jesus as the character who is the example of good. A bit like a mask in Greek theatre that tells you what the character stands for.
A lot of the good ideas are still there, not just in bible interpretations but in how people actually experience morality. Helping those in need, showing compassion without judgement, finding some personal peace in a chaotic world. None of that needs an afterlife to work, which is sort of the point.
I prefer “spiritual” myself, but I can’t fault people who are surrounded by likeminded rational people who all call themselves Christians for labelling the extremist an outsider and the church old fashioned.
What really made the difference is that people can now compare translations and read the different materials themselves instead of getting one interpretation from one source.