Why do Christians worship a god that says to not kill, then turns around and orders genocide after genocide
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Ah the magic of Special Pleading. God can do whatever he wants – he’s god. It’s even taught by some that god alone can do evil that good may come of it.
When you’re steeped in this holy horseshit from the cradle it’s hard to see it for what it is. Once you get out of the reality distortion field it’s drop dead obvious.
It gets really interesting when you throw this into the soup of causation. Many Christians claim “something can’t come from nothing”, so something had to come before the big bang. Their explanation however, is an uncaused cause: god. So either something CAN come from nothing, or god doesn’t exist.
sorry, im just venting
S’okay.
One looks in vain for logic and coherency in theistic ideation. At some point you just accept that it’s designed to render thinking unnecessary and it gets better, lol.
It is the same with far-right extremist politics. It is hard to know which was the greater accelerant – religion or just a general lack of learned critical thinking skills. But the intersection of those two things with a general failure of liberals to live up to their promises of making life better and more hopeful for people, has degenerates marching across the face of the earth again, just like in the 1930s. It won’t end well.
the similiarity is uncanny. with far-right, they truly think they are right and “non-white” arent human. that’s the problem. when you have someone with a destructive belief and a means to achieve that belief, you get fascism. you get the proud boys. or you get the fiasco in the white house
They will deny it to the death, but Bible Belt fundamentalism was always about white supremacy, exclusion of the Other, etc. That isn’t to say that every non-black southern church is part of some sort of monolith but the overall effect is the same as if they were.
In fact, if you look deeply into the history of the “right to life” movement, abortion was an invented wedge issue to keep the faithful in lockstep after it became unfashionable to be openly racist. Back in the 1960s, Christianity Today published articles debating whether fetuses were persons. Think about that. A publication founded by Billy Graham himself was ambivalent about whether or not life “begins at conception”. This all changed in the 1970s. The government started sanctioning and closing down the network of whites-only schools run by churches in the South, and to keep that coalition together they needed a different, morally high-sounding issue. “Life begins at conception” was a masterstroke and has served them well.
But now they are returning to their original themes of racism and then some. White homeland, “ein volk” under “ein fuhrer”, hating on brown and black people rather than Jews (although that’s not far behind and it’s not front and center only because Christian Zionism is still ascendant and needs pandering to).
The Third Reich serves as a prime example of how ideology can shape a nation and its policies. Many people believe that Adolf Hitler was an atheist, but there is a significant amount of evidence to suggest that he identified as a Christian. This belief system played a role in his motivations and ambitions for Germany. Hitler envisioned an “Aryan” society that was predominantly white and Christian, which he believed would be superior to other races and ideologies. He often used religious language and themes in his speeches and writings to rally the populace and justify his actions. The idea was to create a homogenous society that adhered to his interpretation of Christian values, twisted as they were to fit his nationalist agenda. The regime enacted policies that aimed to suppress other religions and belief systems, especially Judaism, which they viewed as a threat to their vision of a Christian-dominated Europe. This selective usage of Christianity was part of a broader strategy to unite people under a common identity. Ultimately, Hitler’s actions and beliefs reflect the complex interplay between religion, ideology, and politics during this dark period in history. The historical implications are profound, and they remind us of the dangers of using religion as a tool for division and hate.
I’ve always found it strange that an all knowing all powerful god seems to be held to a lower moral standard than humans. That’s not the sort of thing that mysterious ways can cover.
its a question ive asked myself many times: why is the lawmaker immune to his own laws? when a judge kills someone, they are held accountable for their actions. so why does god get a free pass? if people actually read the bible like any other book, they would call for a mass recollection and ban
Humans have certain flaws and imperfections built in. Fear, need for control and xenophobia are the most applicable here. These are where many of our primal instincts…as well as current behavior originate from.
Religion, in general, does not profess to eradicate them. Instead it offers a framework to find purpose in all of these factors. The best it offers is some semblance of eternal reward or peace, long after you need it…or some eternal unimaginable punishment for eternity.
So, these flaws and failing are never really addressed. They are the manifest to the proposition. Without them the system becomes redundant and loses any relevance or significance.
Religion is a human construct. Humans have flaws. Religion is a mirror and cloak for them.
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It scarcely matters if that was his actual identification / belief or if he found it a useful foil or if he distorted the faith to fit his agenda. Probably a little of all three. Regardless, he was reasonably astute at pressing the public’s buttons and that involved understanding how to leverage the influence of the church – mostly the Lutheran Church in his case (as a toss-off aside, I can’t see the label “Lutheran Church” without pronouncing it as my Swedish grandmother did, “Da Lootrin Church”).
There’s also the comfortable middle-to-upper classes who rationalize that the rising tide of fascism won’t reach them. I’m a native-born white cishet American and thus relatively “safe” but ultimately if the regime wants me gone, it will disappear me. It theoretically might do it just on the basis of associating this post with me. Trump has already said there are “bad people” who are citizens who don’t deserve to be, they should be stripped of their citizenship and deported too. This will start probably with naturalized citizens, then second or third generation citizens, than people who tell Trump publicly he’s a “pedophile protector” and then just anyone that ever once looked cross-eyed at them.
It requires “Mysterious Ways” less than what I mentioned earlier – special pleading for God. God, as the omnipotent author of morality, isn’t subject to morality and can even act contrary to it so long as it supposedly serves some higher, ultimate good result. In my experience on the inside, even people who didn’t clearly use this argument instinctively put god in a separate “box” labeled “not to be questioned”. And yes the lazy way to invoke that is Mysterious Ways, but ultimately it is from what I saw, special pleading.
They don’t though, they read it as a place to project their biases, assumptions, prejudices and wishes. I suppose many of them do that with any book they read that isn’t explicitly “woke” in that it speaks against their biases. But the Bible has an extra super-power: it is supposed to be the Word of God and inherently what it says, even if at odds with history, science, or some other aspect of reality, is true. “Let God be true, and every man a liar”.
Many Christians will also claim that “if people actually read the Bible” they would [insert what compliance to my interpretation of the Bible looks like here]”. A liberal Christian feels the Bible self-evidently teaches love and brotherhood; a fundamentalist feels the Bible self-evidently issues edicts and rules and threats of terrible punishment if the rules are not followed. Same book, completely different emphasis.
More fundamentally, any particular interpretation of the Bible defines what the in and out groups are, and why the in group is superior (and in the extreme, why the out group is evil and duplicitous and thus your implacable enemy).
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standard case of cognitive bias. they take what they want (John 13:34: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”) and seemingly fail to recall the rest (Matthew 10:34-36 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”)
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Don’t worry, I agree that all cases “mysterious ways” is definatly special pleading, provably so when it comes to how non-mysterious god becomes when its convenient.
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Because their god is PERFECT and all-good/all-loving. Therefore, if their god orders an entire tribe of men, women, and children to be slaughtered, then those nasty sinners obviously deserved what they got. Plus, their god is allowed/justified to do whatever he wants to the sinful human pets HE created. See? Pretty simple. No need to make things complicated.
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Here you go, Tin-Man.
Romans 9
19 You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?”
20 But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, “Why have you made me like this?”
21 Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor?
22 What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction,
23 and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared beforehand for glory,
24 even us whom He called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?
You see? God has prepared some of us for heaven and others for hell.
That being so, on what basis did he divide us into the saved and the damned?
If he prepared us like pots, then he chose BEFOREHAND who to save and who to damn. Not on the basis of any free choice we make while we live, but on the basis of HIS CHOICE before he made us.
Which is confirmed in 1 Ephesians.
4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.
And who are we to question God?
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Socrates once said: “Is something good as that the gods command, or do the gods command that as good by its properties”. basically, is something good because god says so, or does god say so because something is good? its a no win situation. If it is good because it is commanded, then it is arbitrary. god can say genocide is good (which he has) and it is good. but if god commands it good because it is, then it is independent of god, and therefore, subjective
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Of course this gets into the whole debate about free will vs predestination, grace vs law, and all the rest. Other verses in the Bible contradict the one you quoted, so Christians get to pick their poison (or tie themselves up in knots explaining the conflicts).
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These conflicts shouldn’t exist if the Bible is inspired, inerrant and God doesn’t change his mind.
Numbers 23 : 19
“God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Has he spoken, and will he not confirm it?”.
Hebrews 13 : 8
“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever”.
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