Can we just have tiny villages where we tell ghost stories and just all contribute to each other’s well being?
Problem is real world communism always ends up as authoritarian dictatorships.
it’s almost like American imperialism has made sure that any attempt has failed by economic and military disruption and injecting dictators with the goal of dissuading others from trying.
the second there’s a success story western capitalism becomes unnecessary and a better system comes into view.
Lol, heaven is also an authoritarian dictatorship
Also communist economy is impossible to implement since there is no all knowing god to fuck all the people siphoning the money out via corruption. Communism is great if you can remove humans from the equation. Mofo humans fuck every system up, we are the problem.
Also, heaven is an absolute monarchy. The fact so many commies don’t even see the difference between communism and a monarchy should tell you all you need to know.
Also, heaven is an absolute autocracy. The fact so many fundies don’t even see the difference between US and facism should tell you all you need to know.
Socialist capitalist democracy works pretty well though
Source: Scandinavian
Tends to on a nation scale. But there’s still some good lessons to learn from it for smaller scale and nation scale too.
That’s a pretty boilerplate criticism. While true to a great degree, it’s also true of a lot of western capitalist nations.
It’s pretty hard to find information about real communist societies because media companies have it in their best interest to bury any good that has possibly been done by a communist society, meanwhile demonizing them and making them the enemy. You really have to dig to find honest information about communist societies.
Moreover, a lot of otherwise successful communist regimes have been sabotaged and poisoned by capitalist interests. Either by literally arming fascists, or just by demonizing them with foreign policy and media coverage.
Me listening to tankies describe communism as a moneyless, stateless, classless world, then criticise anarchism
people still use the word tankie ? my guy most communists these days are anarcho communists.
tankie was never funny anyways
We can only make the world stateless by having one all-encompassing state. Anarchism would result in a mosaic of states.
Nice satire
sadly I actually do believe this. help me 😭
What if we have zero states?
I’d rather 0 than 51
Well that’s what anarchism tries to do
What’s a tankie? I know what it means but for others that don’t go ahead and drop an egg of knowledge on them.
A supporter of the Soviet Union and its habit of using tanks to suppress uprisings.
The people have all the power, except when they disagree with their rulers… then its perfectly acceptable to kill and maim them
I choose to imagine it’s actually because they all wear tanktops
This actually makes sense, once you understand what their problem is with communism.
You see, they have no problem with all the benefits that communism offers… What bothers them is the idea that those benefits would be given to people who haven’t earned it.
Heaven, to them, is a reward. Only the pure, the righteous, the faithful get to enjoy its benefits. Heaven only works for them if they imagine that they will be able to look down and see hell.
A heaven for everyone, with no walls, no gates, no pitiful outcasts scrabbling to get in… That’s no heaven at all.
You’re not wrong about the reward being earned. That’s definitely the unspoken part of it.
When I grew up religious, the conversion was that communism was a bastardization of god’s plan, so it’s inherently evil. Basically, it cannot be as pure and perfect with men in charge so it will fail every time.
You’d think they’d want to try and be more like their god and his plan for their heaven but they just reject it.
They believe that only God can be the one to create paradise on earth. A primary pillar of their faith requires earth to be in a constant state of suffering until then.
You’re not wrong about the reward being earned. That’s definitely the unspoken part of it.
It’s also heretic AF. As in: It directly contradicts Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran, doctrine, all for different reasons.
Remove the heretics from Christianity, and you will have not a religion of billions of oppressors, but a cult of a few dozen communist hippies.
Removed by mod
Heaven only works for them if they imagine that they will be able to look down and see hell.
See, this is the part I can’t get behind. An eternity of that disparity with even the smallest scrap of empathy would eventually be unending torment. Every day is just more “oh yeah, hell is a thing and I can’t do anything about it…”
Fr, I knew for fact that there was something deeply fucked up about “The Good Place” in the TV show bearing the same name when Janet played Eleanor a short clip of sound from the Bad Place.
Removed by mod
Right wing politics can be summed up as: Exclusive & Sadism
They should know better:
Interesting read. Thank you.
No, the issue most people have with it is that it requires a king (god) to make it work. People don’t mind a higher being (god) ruling them as an absolute monarch. They do mind handing such power to a human, since we have seen again and again how such power corrupts people.
If working all your life for a regime does not earn you the benefits of that regime, I don’t know what will in their minds
What if heaven is just whatever you need heaven to be? Like, what if it’s just a temporary state of affairs? You enter Heaven, and it is exactly what you need to be at peace with your death and your life before that. Then, when you’re ready, after however much time you need, you can decide to move on and stop existing, or send your soul to be reincarnated.
Watch The Good Place.
This is similar to what Rick Riordan (author of Percy Jackson) suggests in one of his other works - that the afterlife is simply whatever you believe it to be. It’s pretty comforting imo.
The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is important to shoot missionaries on sight.
Personally I wouldn’t like it to be what you believe it to be, rather what you need it to be. Some people don’t know what they need until they have it. You can believe that Heaven is endless sitting in a circle and piling devotion upon God, but if that isn’t actually going to help you be at peace, then what good is it gonna do you? How is a baby going to form a belief of what their afterlife is?
No, I reckon Heaven ought to be what you need, not what you want. I want my afterlife to be me being a series of Isekai protagonists in my favourite fictional universes because I secretly want to feel clever and powerful and knowledgeable about things to come, but indulging me probably isn’t the best way to put me at peace.
Seems to be the approach of MCU as well 🤔
Funny you should mention temporary - in a way, that’s true of Christian view. ‘Heaven’ in a broad sense is much broader, but the sense of where are ‘you’ after you die, is temporary until the resurrection, where people are once again in a very physical body (but now immortal and undamaged) on a very physical (re)new(ed) earth.
When I was fairly young my mom described Christian heaven. I remember struggling with the idea of not struggling and being happy all the time. Then she hit me with if someone you love doesn’t make it to heaven you forget them. That’s when the fracture began for me.
Basically heaven is a mindfuck.
It really is. It’s not even a pleasant thought experiment.
Removed by mod
Its not that you forget the person. You gain a perfect understanding of the situation. Like when your child has to go to jail for some crimes they committed. You may be sad they went to jail, then understand why they went to jail, then agree it was right that they were put in jail.
Not a perfect analogy, but something like that.
So we join with the God-mind in order to understand why the person we previously loved isn’t worthy of love after all…
Not what I said.
But at the end of my lifetime, it’s someone I loved, but that God doesn’t love (not enough to bring them to heaven, anyway…), and so my feelings about them get updated with God’s perspective?
So I learn why I was wrong to love them?
Edit: I’m just saying that Hell as a concept, alongside an all-loving God, doesn’t compute, to me.
Whereas Hell as a concept, introduced by human church leaders, to keep tithes up, makes perfect sense, to me.
So it feels like an Occam’s Razor situation, to me.
This isn’t preaching, I’m just going to explain it so maybe you can understand it better.
As far as God only bringing people to heaven if He loves them, there’s more to it. If God created everything (humans, animals, earth, stars, etc.) then He has authority over it. He has laws we are to follow, and if we break any of them then we are guilty of sin. Just like in human society, when someone breaks a law, they get punished either by paying a fine, going to jail, etc. Hell is jail; everyone has committed a sin against God, and deserves to go there. The bible without much detail, tells us there are varying degrees of punishment in hell.
In response to your edit, think of God as a judge. If a human judge has a child trafficker in his court, and the judge just lets him go free, would he be considered a good, just judge? No, we’d say he is a corrupt judge. Apply that concept to God, crimes must have a punishment. If God just brought people to heaven, then God wouldn’t be just. So you’re saying a loving God wouldn’t send people to hell. Well, God is loving, and had His son Jesus who never sinned crucified (willingly), paying for the punishment of the sins of anyone who puts their faith in Him as Lord. So, because God is loving, it’s very easy to avoid going to Hell. Which is why it’s also very easy to go to hell, we already deserve to go, so if we reject His offer of forgiveness, that’s on us.
Purgatory, I would say was an invention of church leaders since it’s not in the bible. They used the threat of purgatory to get people to pay for indulgences.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
be religious if I have a conscience
What’s the point of religion if you’re already capable of deciding what’s right and wrong?
Removed by mod
Severance
The absolute worst is them saying socialism is pessimistic because it thinks people can’t do anything for themself and coddles them with a nanny state. Then turns around and says “you have to structure capitalism assuming every single person is a greedy sociopath hellbent on fucking over everyone else to make money.”
Ancaps/libertarians as well.
And that the only acceptable form of socialism is charity. And like. FFS
you have to structure capitalism assuming every single person is a greedy sociopath hellbent on fucking over everyone else to make money.
So… Social Democracy? Which they also oppose? 🤔
Not exactly, the argument (is incoherent and insane) is something like “you can’t have too much democracy and centralized power because people in power are always corrupt.” ✨Somehow✨ laissez-faire capitalism is supposed to naturally account for corruption and sociopathy because the free market forces(???) them to do good things because people are able to spend their money somewhere else. Always non-violent btw ❤️
Lol their argument is lame then.
You can’t trust a democratically-elected government, but can somehow trust non-elected CEOs? 🤣
But it’s true. Psychopaths tend to end up in CEO, and other leadership positions more often, as they are not afraid to literally kill to get ahead.
To be fair, the heaven of the Bible is neither stateless nor classless. “The nations” are still present in Revelation 21 and 22, and inequality in heaven is a common theme in Jesus’s parables.
“The nations” is just fancy for “non Jews”. Remember that the bible predates modern nation states by more than a millennium.
inequality in heaven is a common theme in Jesus’s parables.
Is that so? I can think of the story with the lamps where it’s about getting into the kingdom of god or the treasure in the field where it’s about finding the kingdom of god. Or that the poor will inherit the kingdom of god while rich people cannot get into it. Nothing about inequality inside the kingdom of god.
You have to keep in mind that the kingdom of god isn’t really heaven as we think of it even tho Matthew uses the wording kingdom of heaven (to avoid the word god as a good jew). We think of heaven as life after death but the kingdom of god is on earth when Jesus returns and the dead arise and he builds his kingdom here.
“Least”/“Greatest” in “the kingdom of heaven” is a construction that appears at least once off the top of my head, Matthew 5:19. I’m sure there are more. But also, Jesus is depicted as a literal monarch and heaven a kingdom like you said, so there’s at least one extra class right there.
I see your point but hear me out:
Saying “The only one I call king is the one who died at the cross” subverts the very concept of a king. Not only is this guy no longer here to directly command anyone but his death was the most humiliating to him and his followers possible. In this way, it’s anti-authoritarian. Similar with the greatest in the kingdom of god. It’s the last you would think of: the poor, the children, … . Sure, this leaves place for interpretation. You can say it’s just a new hierarchy. Or it’s so radically putting everything into question that it’s in effect a call against all hierarchies. Or that it’s so radical, it can’t be taken serious at all so barely means anything anymore.
Christianity as a whole shows all of this. The first communes shared everything in common, there was “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. (Gal 3, 28). Later a new hierarchy establish which, once established, wasn’t new or subversive anymore but just a top down hierarchy. Once in a while someone came with a more subversive reading, more often than not founding a new organization that ended up with a strict hierarchy.
I think the biggest flaw is that there is no sustainable alternative given. You can criticize capitalism all day long and reinforce it as a system without an alternative if you don’t give one. Some Christians found alternatives and supported them with the scripture, others supported very different things with scripture. That’s the thing with all world religions: They start in opposition to society but fail to think outside the box and so they end up reinforcing it while keeping the seldom fulfilled potential for a better society (“world region” in the sense Graeber uses the term in Debt and Graham discusses in this podcast episode I guess but I’m not sure).
All that said, since the first Christians certainly had a very egalitarian, anti-authoritative reading, this is the most authoritative reading (pun intended).
This is good stuff; your argument is well reasoned. Brings me back to my Bible study days.
I still think “all hierarchies” might be overbroad. The Bible itself prescribes elders/bishops and deacons to administer the church, for instance, and it’s radical enough regarding obedience to authority that, in my experience, modern day theologically conservative churches trend toward authoritarianism and mostly unchecked abuse of power more often than not. This would have been contemporaneous with the communes.
As for the more heavenly hierarchies, I looked back at some of the points of evidence that I was going to bring up here that I thought supported my case, but the “outer darkness” in Matthew 22 I once thought might not necessarily be hell sure seems like hell upon rereading, and as for the parable of the unforgiving servant who was sent to the “torturers” despite his debts being forgiven, it looks like that word “torturers” is connected to jailers, i.e. debtors’ prison, so I can’t argue confidently that the servant was “saved” from anything and given a different punishment instead. There are still a few passages I can’t totally square though:
The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32): He gets welcomed back into the family, and he sure seems saved in the sense that I think most Christians would read into it, but his inheritance is spent; he doesn’t get more. All the father has belongs to the other son.
The purifying fire of 1 Corinthians 3:9-15: Both groups of people are explicitly “saved”. One is rewarded, the other suffers loss.
The parable of the talents/minas: In the Matthew 25 version of the parable, the first two servants get the same reward (authority over “many things”). No issue there. But in the Luke 19 version, the rewards are proportional. And the one with 10 minas gets a bonus at the end.
That’s as far as I got before my eyes glazed over.
Why are you guys all able to recall random bits of the bible. What normal people are even reading this stuff in the last 40 years?
I had it drilled into my head as a kid. When I left home I forgot most of it. Then as an adult I brushed up on it to argue with the kind of people who drilled it into my head as a kid.
lol.
There’s also 11 classes of angels in a ladder system under Jesus. My boys Metatron and Enoch up top if I’m not mistaken.
Is that a Catholic thing?
It’s a Dead Sea scrolls thing
This is really fascinating. I never heard of this.
Is there a non-religious, ELI5 resource I can read more about this?
I never had much use for non-religious secondary sources back when I was a believer, so I can’t recommend any, but the New Testament isn’t actually that long; you could probably finish it in a week if you read 20-30 chapters a day, and the chapters are short. The first three books, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and to a lesser extent the fourth, John, are all the same; you can probably just pick one (John is probably the most interesting) and read the rest of the NT as is. Whether or not it’s worth your time is entirely up to you. I certainly have no intention of reading it again any time soon.
I think nothing outside of the gospels is of any merit. It is probably worth your time to read the red words in the bible. Jesus was on some real shit, minus all the son of god stuff
Before people get huffy yes I have read the entire bible; it is not “the most beautiful book ever written” nor anything close to that, but Jesus was an interesting dude
You also can not read the bible as if it’s modern English and interpret it as such. Always consider 1. who was talking then, 2. who they were talking to, and 3. the context in which they were speaking at the time.
Dan McClellan videos on YouTube and TikTok are great and accessible discussions of a lot of academic Bible research.
Yeah it’s called Theogany by Hesiod
How is Ancient Greek poetry about the origin of the Greek gods relevant here?
Peep this.
It’s the inspiration for the Bible.
How???
Like, you can do some really interesting conversations about Neo Platonism and philo-semitism around the time some of the New Testament was being written - Gnosticism undoubtedly comes from Greek philosophy - but many portions of the Hebrew Bible predate Hesiod entirely.
Can you provide any form of argument, or is this some shit you picked up from like Zeitgeist or something.
Alan watts
Didn’t Alan Watts usually talk about (his extremely westernized interpretation of) Zen Buddhism? When has Alan Watts made the strange argument that ancient Israelites were somehow aware of Greek mythology and a specific text that wasn’t even written until at least many of the minor prophets books were written?
When has Alan Watts ever really been focused on the development of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament and it’s relationship to Greek mythology? Do you have a link to his argument?
Edit: Checked out and skimmed Myth & Ritual in Christianity online to see if what you are saying is in there. I strongly suspect that you are seriously misinterpreting ideas related to Jung and the collective unconscious (as does Zeitgeist), but feel free to clarify.
Revelation 21 and 22 describe changes in the city of Jerusalem and basically nothing else. 🤦♂️
I think it might have something to do with those “Christians” envisioning heaven as an implicit ethnostate.
Socialism seems ugly to them because it involves the people who seem ugly to them being cared for.
But they’d never say it out-loud; most can’t even see that’s what their twisted little hearts desire.
I think they just lack vision and don’t actually want to change the real world, just dream of a better place
Seen this clip from some american fundie podcast that was… a choice.
This person was asked something like, if you could have world peace, but all governments become socialist, would you do it? They said no and fucking justified their answer with a partial quote from something like Deuteronomy 15:7-11, claiming that well the bible says there’ll always be the poor so socialism is actually bad because of that, and a quick search to see if I could find it there’s a lot of stuff echoing the same stuff, that socialism is unbiblical etc.
What the actual fuck is wrong with these people? I’m irreligious but was raised Christian, this is so vehemently counter to my understanding of Christian teachings (the flavour of which I was raised has atheist ministers so there’s that), which was more or less, raise everyone up, accept everyone for who they are, help people, don’t turn a blind eye to injustice and like just be decent to each other. Was this podcast prosperity doctrine shit or something else because yeah wow, it’s honestly sinister to me.
I was raised as a fundamentalist, but I got out.
American evangelical fundamentalists firmly believe in heirarchy— children are under the authority of their mother, who is under the authority of her husband, who is under the authority of God.
They see any disruption of this heirarchy as an attack on their religion.
Taxes? You’re usurping the man’s authority to spend his money as he sees fit.
Women’s liberation? You’re usurping the man’s authority over his wife.
Entitlements? You’re usurping the man’s authority to use his pocketbook as leverage over his family.
Immigration? You’re usurping the man’s authority by lowering his cultural relevance.
LGBTQ+ acceptance? You’re usurping the man’s authority by undermining the patriarchy.
You’ve probably noticed a pattern as to who is primarily driving these issues.
They begin with the conclusion (e.g. socialism bad), and then find whatever they can in their shitty book to justify it.
Yeah, just like everything else, they are cherry picking passages that support the conclusion they’ve already reached on their own
Yup. Funny all the people blaming the bible like the dude up there calling it a stupid book… obviously hasn’t read it. The bible has great lessons, 90% of Christians just ignore them is all. Don’t blame the book for the idiots who claim to follow it when they actually aren’t. Even the stuff wanna be Christians quote thinking it supports their argument they are either misunderstanding or leaving out vital context. Real Christians are very rare and almost never associated with an organized church. They just quietly try to do their best they don’t try to use their belief to justify the rest of their life and bad decisions.
It sounds to me like they want to be able to give freely and not be forced by a human law.
If everybody shares there is no need for official socialism because enough resources are shared.
The difference is that the formerly poor has to be thankful.
“Christians”
Here we go with the scare quotes again… They’re not fake Christians just because you don’t agree with their particular dogma.
I asked one “so when do I actually die?” and they couldn’t comprehend that I didn’t want to exist forever
I suppose that whatever heaven does to you, you would want to exist forever…for whatever reason.
You can sit on that bench as long as you want. Whenever you’re ready, you just walk through.
Heaven is an autocratic police state though
Yup. The common answer to “why does evil exist” is that humans have free will.
Therefore it follows that if there is no sin in heaven, there is also no free will.
Ssshhh, you’re not supposed to actually think it through!
Or you know, it’s almost impossible to make an evil choice, and the chances get smaller over time. Or you only have good choices.
Then it seems awfully cruel to design this life otherwise.
Indeed. Gods, in general, being huge assholes - well, it would explain a lot.
I like the malevolent creator theory. But it’s most likely that since the universe runs on entropy, it just optimizes for misery as a side-effect.
In the eternal words of Bob Marley:
Some people think
Great God will come from the sky
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high
But if you know what life is worth
You will look for yours on earth
And now we see the light
We’re going to stand up for our right
🥰🫶🏻
The most successful nations in terms of citizen happiness use mixed-economics. Nordic nations have the blueprint. We just need to use it.
So complete justice system reform, cut the police force, strong wide reaching unions, and strong social welfare.
That does sound heavenly…
Conservatives: “Socialism Bad!”
“Norway is a successful Socialist State”
Conservatives: “But that isn’t socialism!”
“Okay, then lets use whatever that system is”
Conservatives: “SOCIALISM BAAAD! 😡😡😡”
(It’s called Social Democracy btw, which the conservates also hate)
I’ve come to the conclusion that Christians that vote republic just dissociate their “church” brain vs their non “church” brain. Their religious beliefs ONLY apply to religious things. Everything else just goes to whatever their true value system is.
I don’t think most religious people have any beliefs, they just roll with whatever stances are currently popular amongst their peers. If a large enough number of their peers say their god says slavery is valid, then they will say slavery is valid, or a million other horrible things
Funny you mentioned this.
Apparently feeding school kids for free was controversial (and still is controversial).
And I watched a fellow parent on Facebook post an event about bake sales to raise money, to immediately sharing talking points about why it’s bad for kids to get free school lunches.
I don’t have children or religion and I believe every child should be fed for free at school and that should include breakfast.
It is like UBI, just for kids
And don’t get me wrong, I am all in into making capitalism a little bit less bad by introducing UBI.
The Bible as a text has zero issues with slavery. The Old Testament thinks it’s fine to sell your daughter. The New Testament tells slaves to submit to their masters.
Your average Christian has very little knowledge of what the Bible actually contains. Non denominational Protestant Christianity’s focus on the personal relationship with God and their interpretation of ‘Biblical literalism’ means that you just squint at the text and read what you want from it.
I remember listening to some particularly painful exegesis on David killing the Amalekite messenger being some kind of message on not tattling to your boss about things. They don’t read things in context - they read snippets and verses and work in their pop culture understandings about hell, Satan, and salvation into the text.
True, I definitely think most religious people don’t think too much about what they’re believing in.
Nah, they’re the ones complaining jesus is too woke
I think this dude is incapable of dissociating, so he just forces his true value system onto his church beliefs. He will ignore the text that contradicts his own values. There’s definitely lots of people like that.
I mean that basically describes Christianity as a whole. The entirety of the religion throughout human history is basically people reforming it to suit their needs. True of most religions really.
You can be anything you want, so long as you go to church on Sunday and say “sorry”. For example…mafia, pedophile priests and politicians.
Even little old me? I should start going to church and also start being evil.
Yes, my son. You may be as evil as you wish, so long as you say “sorry” on Sunday, Heaven’s doors will be open to you. God help you if you die on a Saturday, though… :)
That’s not how it works. You have to mean it when you repent. If you go killing someone with the intent to just repent later, you are basically screwed. As you probably won’t truly regret what you have done.
Maybe, but I don’t think that’s how the bad guys see it. Else there would be no bad guys who are religious.
It’s not only that, but you must also turn from your sin and towards God. That is, make a conscious commitment not to sin.
“Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord,” Acts 3:19
(2) "Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? (3) I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” Luke 13:2-3
😈I sowwy jebus
LOL
Do we have to censor the word communism now?
Self censor so hot right now!
Now = since Red Scare
Can’t have designer outrage without it.
