I can't tell if you're being serious or not.

Legal or not, treat people with decency. I was going to look up jeff sessions, but your link says it all. Use the Bible, twist words if you have to, to hurt your neighbor.

Let's sow hatred then act all surprised Pikachu when we get fucking wrecked. Of course Trump's dumb ass is involved.

because Jesus was depicted as conditional with his love

The goal now is to inflict pain. That's it. Cause issues with avg people, citizen or not, and expand the hatred for Trump's base. It's all a performance distraction while we're being robbed blind. None of this is necessary at all.

We have a demented president who loves attention and can't tell the difference between it being good or bad with so many yes men around him.

merely a spectacle

While I partly agree with you, this is more than a spectacle. Any sufficiently fascist politician needs a scapegoat, a group of “others” to focus hate and outrage. Immigrant are an easy target

On the opposite side, since they are clearly hypocrite, I can’t believe there hasn’t been more outrage over trumps attempt to raise fees for H1-Bs. For MAGAts, it’s a win-win. Either it cuts way back on companies willing to sponsor work visas or it provides the executive branch a new income stream where it thinks it doesn’t need Congress, like tariffs (don’t get me wrong, work visas probably ought to be tightened, but come on)

It's the bible. There are parts of it where he probably isn't. That's the beauty of the bible. You just gotta find that one verse to pander your views

Well he DID flip a table and whip a bunch of people this one time. That's not very pacifist of him.

Jesus was not a pacifist in any way.

Please note that He promised to return at the head of an angel army, and they butcher everybody.

The resulting lake of blood will be miles wide and "as deep as a horse's bridle"

That's not pacifist, that's fucking metal

(source: Bible, skip to the end)

I mean, sure, but what I'm cautioning against is prescribing any normative definition or configuration of Christianity, as it then implies an idealized version is real, and therefore that the problem is that people aren't following the religion the "right" way, not that there is something systemic that influences how the religion functions in society.

There were baptists in central Europe that allowed women to serve as pastors as early as the early modern period, which is markedly different than what Baptism is like in the US today. During the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, there were Christian denominations that practiced polyamory and collective property ownership. These were developments that coincided with Christianity as an institution of settler-colonialism and EuroAmerican imperialism, and they were certainly not accepted by larger or more formal denominations at the time; still wouldn't be today. It should also go without saying that they wouldn't reflect the churches in the period you're referring to even if just because they emerged in relation to what came afterward.

It is important to deny ownership of moral values by the institutions that configure and disseminate them for this exact same reason. Even though they serve a purpose within the system they exist in, they meet a need of the people who subscribe to them, and normativity is what stifles their ability to wrestle that utility away from these institutions.

I'm not sure if you meant to use "salient" here (as in you're using the word incorrectly), but I definitely wasn't trying make my writing that.

I'm also not sure about what else is said here either. Plenty of people behave immorally despite having role models; and I'd hardly say good people are in short supply despite how doomers insist the world is right now. I'd also caution against resorting to individualist explanations for this as well, and I was trying to discourage that by emphasizing the relationality between individuals and systems.

This is also by no means nothing even remotely new, but the specific form of normativity that people engage with this from did indeed emerge from modern European colonialism, and therefore Christianized notions of moral purity. But by, "nowadays" I reckon you're not positioning this as a centuries-long development.

And then, "holding us back," itself casts a normative construction of how things ought to be, which is exactly what I've cautioned against. I'd hardly imagine your understanding of a collective addresses decolonialism in a way that doesn't subordinate groups or values that are "holding us back," from some idealized, "proper" state that thing should be in by now.

Colonialism and capitalism absolutely.

I'd argue patriarchy and slavery already existed with other justifications though Christianity was used to entrench them further.

Doesn't the book of Genesis come from Judaism?

I'm going to have to see a big ol'source for that one. You're saying that's a Christian thing exclusively, and not found in any of the cultural or religious influences on Christianity? How could you even begin to draw that line? Even more, you're saying that, despite roughly fifteen hundred years of change, that was a core value that existed in the exact same way from the beginning of Christianity to European colonialism? Not even translations effected something so fundamental? Why would Christian patriarchy do this, but not Greek or Roman or Iranian? Why was it absent in Judaism but present here?

Even beyond that, you just subscribed to a normative construction of humanity and morality by asserting that capitalism emerged through this religion, and not that specific property relations and systems of power influenced how both are understood within our culture over time. For example, domination and objectification of the living world are certainly elements in this, but it's difficult to argue Christianity is why that's so and not that that was so, and Christianity exists as it does as a result of that.

Edit: I'm also just going to add that, though I'm sure this wasn't intentional, this also ends up carrying deeply colonial and white supremacist notions of superiority by attributing that much gravity to the one religion that EuroAmerican imperialists happened to subscribe to. They got to have the religion that was so foundational, so world-changing that it marked a break in the entirety of human self-perception? I get were saying capitalism is bad, but exceptionalizing it in this way reproduces narratives that white supremacists find favourable.

I am from a poor country. Here, politics is never discussed in sermons. Sermons are either around Bible passages or some charismatic church talking about their miracles. Maybe cuz Christianity is a minority where I live and also there are state regulations. Although today's Christian youth where I live are inspired from American pastors so they have weird stances too like believing in conspiracy theories, hatred against Muslims, and etc. And also most of Christians are very poor like laborers, working in gutters, or doing very menial jobs and victim of forced conversions and discrimination, so there is barely any chance that sermons can be political. Many churches, after Oct 7, have stopped reading those psalms that mention Israel in order to avoid misunderstandings.

The religion says they'll be persecuted, so they look for any slight against them to say "Look! The Bibble said I'd be fursecuted!"

Exactly. Everyone has their own personal interpretation that reflects what they want it to and then they project that onto people they want to call "real" Christians.

People use it to argue opposite points constantly.

If that wasn't possible it wouldn't still be around.

Hell, some of the most deranged criticisms of Trump (he’s the antichrist, he’s possessed by a devil, he’s a skin walker / lizard person / hologram / secret Communist) came from Cruz/DeSantis allies during the primaries.

They seem to have gotten in line to some degree since. But then again, expecting churches (with private jets) to be moral is maybe asking a bit much.

Indeed, the MAGA fucknuts will do anything to avoid paying taxes.