dancinbutterfly: beatrice-otter:can-i-make-image-descriptions:pengychan:adeleneblack:this is also ho
dancinbutterfly: beatrice-otter:can-i-make-image-descriptions:pengychan:adeleneblack:this is also how i became a leftist after being raising very traditional/conservative/catholic tbhhearing them break down ‘bad’ leftist ideas and i was just sitting there waiting for the bad part that didn’t come…and i’m like….yes? you should probably give free lunches to kids when their parents can’t afford to feed them dinner? why do you not want this?trying to figure out politics was me just moving further to the left the more i learned about pretty much every single issue because of the traditional/catholic parts of my upbringing which is why i’m so baffled that so much of my family falls much more red than blue and i’ll probably never understand how that happenedi’ve had family straight up ask me why i support programs like free lunch and i had to explain that i support them because they taught me that i should care about other people and try to make the world a better place and the golden rule…they never seem to have an answer for when i ask them back why they don’t support those same programs [Image IDs/ Image #1—Tweet from The Irony Giant (@/ PrettyBadLefty) reading: Some of my best ideas for leftist policies come from the irrational fears shared by conservatives on twitter tbh. They be like “Leftists want the post office to also sell weed and make mail characters deliver it” and you gotta jot that down. Image #2—Tweet from Riley (@/ kayRaisABitch) reading: It’s so weird being raised by christians and spending your entire childhood being told to care about others then one day they’re just like you’re not actually supposed to care about others you stupid socialist /End IDs] If you’re wondering why, with a holy text that’s all about loving thy neighbor and feeding the hungry, Christianity is Like That, the answer is “racism, greed, and a desire for power.”Christianity started out as the underdog religion. There is a reason the Romans killed Jesus: he challenged the imperial power structure by challenging all sorts of things about “who matters” and “how should we treat people” and “who determines what ‘good’ is.” A large part of the reason why Christianity got persecuted for the first couple of centuries was that it was a religion that tended to appeal to women, enslaved people, poor people, and other people low on the power hierarchy and tell them “there is now no longer slave or free, male or female, all are one in Christ.” I mean, there was still inequality in Christian communities, but it was much less than in the dominant culture of the day.Then Emperor Constantine decided that he wanted a religion to unify the Empire (which had frequent civil wars) and figured that having everyone worship the same god (instead of having a host of gods) was good for propaganda purposes. He could have chosen Mithraism (another popular monotheistic religion spreading throughout the Empire), but he chose Christianity. Christians had a choice: going along with it would mean the end of persecution, and they would get power and wealth and status and all kinds of nifty stuff like that … BUT things like their pacifism and care for the downtrodden and adherence to Jesus’ ethical teachings about economics just weren’t going to fit, so they’d have to be modified to be acceptable to the Romans. And the Christians, by and large, took that bargain.It is a pattern that has continued ever since. There have been many times in Christian history when Christians have had a choice between staying true to the Bible’s ethical teachings, or letting them go in exchange for worldly power and wealth and influence, and Christians have pretty consistently chosen worldly power and wealth and influence.The big one in America was slavery. Early on in American history, there were a lot of Christians who objected to slavery on moral grounds. They got either coopted or forced to leave or killed. Christians who were willing to say “sure, it’s totally fine to enslave people and rape them and torture them for profit and control!” got wealth and power and influence. Well, if that’s your baseline, then you can’t talk about things like “love your neighbor” or “do justice and love kindness” or any of the other ethical teachings. If you focus too much on them, then people start thinking about “aren’t black people our neighbors?” and “where is the justice of poor white people being worked to death in factories?” and questions like that. So instead, a church that wanted to maintain power and influence would focus on “pie in the sky by and by,” i.e. the idea that what happens on earth doesn’t matter because in heaven everything’s awesome, so therefore we don’t need to worry about pesky things like making sure people aren’t being exploited here on earth. And the only moral issue the Bible talks about even tangentially that doesn’t lead directly into social justice is “don’t commit adultery” so you focus your entire moral teaching on sex. (But not actually condemning adultery in the rich and the powerful, because then you would lose wealth and power.)Then in the seventies, this whole framework started crumbling because of the Civil Rights movement, which a) challenged American society and b) explicitly and consistently quoted scripture to support their actions. (It took a couple decades to build to the point the average White American Christian couldn’t ignore it any longer.) But by this point, taking the Bible’s social justice teachings seriously would require HUGE changes in the theology and social beliefs of a lot of White Christians. If those White Christians wanted to keep their nice comfortable lives the way they were, and their ways of thinking, they had to double down on the whole “give lip service to social justice and then ignore it.” And they were also very vulnerable to politicians who said “we’ll help you keep society from changing if you vote for us” (meaning, we’ll help you keep segregation and the patriarchy and the current power structure). And here we are today. “There have been many times in Christian history when Christians have had a choice between staying true to the Bible’s ethical teachings, or letting them go in exchange for worldly power and wealth and influence, and Christians have pretty consistently chosen worldly power and wealth and influence.”Whenever the question about Christian bad behavior is: Why? That’s the answer. -- source link