I have a lot of time for Jesus's teachings, but no time for institutions using his name as an instrument of control and abuse. Would the man who famously threw the merchants and money-changers out of the temple and went to his death with the intention of attaining forgiveness for all mankind want abusive slave camps built in his name? The mental gymnastics required to make that work would be worthy of Olympic gold. I hope the people behind this awful system really do have a powerful spiritual/religious experience and seek forgiveness for the horrors they've inflicted on their fellow human beings.
There is no special innate morality that Christianity imbues in people. If anything it feeds people's narcissism and makes them behave even worse. "I am important b/c god speaks to me, I can do no wrong because I have the word of god and am surrounded by people who say the same."
Christianity is constantly on the wrong side of history. Christians were overwhelmingly pro-slavery, and used the bible to justify their owning of slaves. Women's rights, accepting of homosexual and trans individuals. Heck, look at today: The republicans whose absurd agenda are prolonging the pandemic are overwhelmingly Christian.
Maybe it's time to stop pointing at "bad Christians" and saying "well they are doing it wrong." Maybe YOU are doing Christianity wrong.
But if Christianity is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, which would make sense since they named the religion after him, they're straying pretty far from the rulebook.
You can peddle anything from slave camp to variable annuities with that model.
Pay no wages, pay no taxes, but still get paid? Triple win.
Of course, who that applies to is a problematic thing to apply, but the fact that it may be difficult to authoritiatively assess the degree of Christianity of different groups just means that that degree is indeterminate, not equal among them.
Important distinction.
Shrug
The Bible's pretty weird.
Doesn't seem much more than a warning/observation.
I wouldn't call it cursing.
Christianity is defined by Christians not how others interpret the bible. Different Christians define it differently. There is no one real way to be Christian.
What Janet Wilkerson is doing goes against every quote I've heard in the Bible about Jesus. Love thy neighbor, do unto others as others would do unto you and more.
Christianity has a code of ethics, they vary by interpretation, but what Wilkerson is doing is so out of the mainstream that I'm giving her a red card. Same with Westboro Baptists and the other televangelists that cloak themselves in religion as a tool to rake in cash.
> Christianity has a code of ethics [citation needed], they vary by interpretation
Today, virtually no Christian would be okay with the Crusades, and certainly wouldn’t think of what was done as being compatible with Christianity. Christianity’s been historically extremely malleable, and what Jesus said has rarely been all that big a part of it for most Christians.
Like, literally, claiming somebody is not a true Scotsman because he is not from Scotland is still a fallacy?
These things are all up for debate.
To attack your metaphor: Is he a true Scotsman when both his parents are scottish and he was born just a wee bit over the border?
Otherwise, what is giving that group of people a name even good for? It's like somebody claiming to be democrat, as long as all the law is written by a single person, or marxist, as long as commerce and private ownership are preserved.
When you get a billion people creating hundreds(thousands?) of factions, there are no unifying ideas that bind everyone. I mean the council of Nicea had to happen for exactly this reason.
"Thou shall not kill/murder" is a commandment, and yet the crusades were allowed to happen because of the interpretation of what "kill/murder" means.
Christianity is not a monolith, and the book can be used to justify all sorts of things that other people would feel goes entirely against the core of the faith.
There's no true Scotsmen here because Scotland is a state of mind and not anything absolute.
Read of Israel's salvation from Egyptian slavery? Joseph? Limits on slavery (7 year max) because people were too stubborn to accept not having slaves. The year of Jubilee?
The Old Testament is full of these battles of conquest...
"Go and sin no more."
"Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye would have no sin: but now ye say, We see: your sin remaineth."
Also, if you reject the Old Testament then you cannot accept the New:
"Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil."
He came to fulfill the law. That may not mean what you are saying it means.
People popularly think he is more forgiving than he is, in new testament (he isn't, for example he explicitly says he "brings the sword", he more than once displays he is at least annoyed with people, and the famous passages about giving the other face and so on are more about civil disobedience than forgiveness)
And people like to portray old testament God as unforgiving (he isn't either. he did forgive people a bunch of times, and was very patient, and some of episodes that understood today as cruel, were necessary for one reason or another, for example when he told Israelites to execute the children of their enemies after a particular battle, the reason for that is the battle happened in the middle of the desert in a place with not enough food for both groups, it was either execution or abandon them to starve on the desert on their own).
Yeah, that's cruel and unforgiving. Surely an all-powerful deity could've sprouted a few plants and let the kids join the conquerors with enough food.
The much more reasonable explanation is that this was purely human cruelty created by a lack of resources because there never was a higher power helping them out in the first place.
The Gnostics would disagree with you. :-)
Love it or loathe it, Christianity has had an enormous influence on Western civilisation so if that's where you hail from it will always be something worth knowing about and knowing about from a neutral perspective.