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ziq wrote (edited )

His name and even his ideology have been used to slaughter entire continents so I don't know how successful he was in promoting love. His churches also take from the poor to enrich themselves and further their real estate development and colonization of the global South by way of missionaries. The Church here owns banks, hotels, breweries, media outlets, etc, etc, and more land than the State. And they don't even have to pay taxes. His message has been used to manipulate the global population into accepting immense suffering with the promise that they'll be rewarded after they die. Christianity is the capital / state's best friend because it satiates the people in a way that the finest bread and circuses can't compete with. Using fear and shame to prevent us from biting the hand that takes food from our mouths.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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ziq wrote (edited )

When 99.9% of Christian history is stained with blood, those rare examples you mention are a drop in a (blood) bucket. Even the most brutal states in history had a few good deeds mixed in with the mass murder, but the world would still be better off without those states by a giant margin.

What percentage of Christians are Quakers vs. The percentage that prop up organized tyranny? It's miniscule. Reforming Christianity is as useful as reforming statism. It just whitewashes all the real harm being perpetrated by Christianity everyday. "Oh those aren't REAL christians." Yes they are. They're the vast, vast majority of christians.

Shame-based religions that teach people to 'turn the other cheek' and not to fight back at tyrants or they won't get into heaven are anarchy's worst enemy. Christianity preaches that 'tradition' must be upheld at all costs, with 'tradition' being the straight cisgender capitalist warmongering patriarchy. A tiny fraction of Christians being reformists doesn't stop Christianity from being the enemy to free people any more than Bernie Sanders existing stops the US state from being my enemy.

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[deleted] wrote

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ziq wrote (edited )

i could just as easily accuse secular anarchists of "reforming" a liberal state ideology that was very close to heart of the development of the capitalist mode of production.

You should. All ideology should be rejected.

i don't think this is true. and i definitely wouldn't say it's true of liberation or post-colonial theology considering, you know, that's the precisely the kind of christianity they're fighting against

Fighting against it by trying to reform it; which I don't believe can work. It's not like the Christ's teachings were so special, they were just an appropriation, or at best an adaptation of much older religions from further East.

I don't understand the need to preserve Christianity by making it more 'progressive'. And I was raised Eastern Orthodox, so the Christianity I'm most familiar with is the purest form there is, it's been unchanged for centuries.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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ziq wrote (edited )

christianity's early influences were actually mostly jewish (obviously) and greek.

That's what establishment Christian scholars claim, but there's clearly strong similarities to the teachings of Mithras, Zarathustra and Buddha... which is hardly surprising since that particular religion was making strong inroads as Christianity was being born in West Asia and Greece:

Buddhism was prominent in the eastern Greek world (Greco-Buddhism) and became the official religion of the eastern Greek successor kingdoms to Alexander the Great's empire (Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (250 BC-125 BC) and Indo-Greek Kingdom (180 BC - 10 CE)). Several prominent Greek Buddhist missionaries are known (Mahadharmaraksita and Dharmaraksita) and the Indo-Greek king Menander I converted to Buddhism, and is regarded as one of the great patrons of Buddhism. (See Milinda Panha.) Some modern historians have suggested that the pre-Christian monastic order in Egypt of the Therapeutae is possibly a deformation of the Pāli word "Theravāda,"a form of Buddhism, and the movement may have "almost entirely drawn (its) inspiration from the teaching and practices of Buddhist asceticism". They may even have been descendants of Asoka's emissaries to the West. It is true that Buddhist gravestones from the Ptolemaic period have also been found in Alexandria in Egypt, decorated with depictions of the Dharma wheel, showing the Buddhists were living in Hellenistic Egypt at the time Christianity began. The presence of Buddhists in Alexandria has led one author to note: "It was later in this very place that some of the most active centers of Christianity were established".

Jainism also shares strong similarities with Christianity:

The concept of the Trinity is almost certainly borrowed from elsewhere.

that is... not actually true, literally no religion exists in stasis

How has Eastern Orthodox Christianity changed in the past few hundred years? There hasn't been any kind of reformism that I can perceive. It prides itself on maintaining that sameness. The monks here still live the same way, and in the same places as they did almost 2000 years ago; rejecting the outside world. The church services are exactly the same as they've been for hundreds of years, given in the same ancient language even.

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