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Perhaps they've been vocally supportive precisely because they're going to Qatar?
They were criticized for it, obviously. Of course, if they said nothing they'd be criticized too so they took some face-saving measures.
This is essentially the same dynamic going on with the teams that wanted the "OneLove" armband: everyone knew they were complicit and supporting an anti-LGBT regime in practice so, in true performative fashion, they wanted some nice iconography to wash away this sin. But Qatar wouldn't even let them have that.
I mean, this isn't new.
They basically appropriated the theme of love from Christianity, ignoring literally everything else in the faith (including just why love is important*) that is inimical to their worldview
Why wouldn't they do it to Bob Marley too?
* It's not about hedonism or even freedom to choose romantic relationships...
? I'm pretty sure Christianity didn't invent love or ever have any rightful monopoly on it.
Christianity invented very few things, once you actually start digging into it. But it popularized plenty.
Philosophy schools were opposed to the infanticide found in the ancient world, like the Christians. But who would argue that we owe the disgust of this (to the point where the easiest way to lose an abortion debate is to bite the bullet on "why a fetus but not a newborn baby? They're both not particularly sapient...") to some philosophy school and not the Church?
Monogamy might have been a practice somewhere, but it certainly owes a debt to Paul.
The idea of agape, love-as-central is very Christian. A central idea of Christianity is summed up in John 3:16, one of the most famous verses in the Bible, the Gospel in a nutshell: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son": Divine love is made manifest in the incarnation and the death of God to save us from sin, that's how much he allegedly loves everyone.
"God is love", for example, is something I hear a lot in the West. I tend to hear a lot of progressive policies pushed in the name of "Jesus loved everyone" and "love is love" and so on, so they're very aware of the perception.
IIRC Christian philosophers like Swinburne even make arguments defending other central elements of Christianity via the concern for love: e.g. a loving God would be a Trinity since that is a "'perfect love" - a singular God has no mutual love, a dual pair can be selfish since they'll only focus on one another (don't ask me to defend this, I find everything about the Trinity dubious). Suffice it to say, this is the sort of argument that doesn't occur to the other sons of Abraham.
In my religious education -as a Muslim- love was not specifically emphasized as a value uber alles . Similarly, nobody went around arguing for anti-Islamic things because "Mohammed loved everyone" but I notice that progressive Muslims raised in the West often speak in similar tones to the Christians. If Muslims, why not people who aren't recent transplants?
Well, I'll admit you have a point. Love-as-universalism is definitely a theme leftists invoke, and you're correct that Christianity probably popularized it more than any other ideology in the West (which, in my view, is not to its credit, but that's neither here nor there).
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