bemusedlybespectacled: smitethepatriarchy: Why do so many Christians know nothing about Jesus. Jesus
bemusedlybespectacled: smitethepatriarchy: Why do so many Christians know nothing about Jesus. Jesus: [drives out merchants who are co-opting the holy temple as a place of commercial enterprise] Jesus: Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God. Jesus: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. This clown: Jesus would have supported capitalism. Christians of the North (Northern Germany, England, The Lowlands, Scandinavia) moved far away from Jesus’ original teachings, towards a more “capitalist” view of Christianity. It wasn’t exactly intentional, but it happened. It started with Martin Luther, who decided that corrupt Catholicism was bad, which it was. Luther said that maybe money wasn’t important and you should just, like, not have powerful clergy, to avoid corruption. The Catholics weren’t too happy about that, but it inspired another dude in Switzerland to join Luther. His name was John Calvin, and he thought that, including some other things, everything in the universe was predestined, and there was a group of humans, called “elect” that were gonna go to heaven. If you were not in the elect, you wouldn’t go to heaven; only the elect would go. Luther was like “nah” to Calvin, so they went their separate ways. Even though most of Europe went Lutheran, Scotland, Netherlands, and Switzerland went Calvinist.These Calvinists had an issue: how do you know if you’re elect? After a few guesses, they (especially the Scots) decided that if you were successful in this life, you’d be successful in the next. Money was the indicator of success, so if you make a lot of money, you’d be elect. This leads to the “Protestant Ethic”, the idea that Protestants are just harder workers because of the Calvinist beliefs. But if most Protestant countries aren’t Calvinist, how does it spread? The Lutherans and Anglicans saw that the Calvinists were really successful, so they just imitated the Calvinists. Especially the English, who stole everything Dutch and joined the Scots in 1707. Luckily for the newly-formed Brits, James Watt was Scottish, as were most industrialists. And so was Adam Smith, the guy who formulated capitalism.TL;DR protestants think that money = heaven -- source link