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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27147 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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By contrast, Christianity and other monotheistic religions push us forward to some sort of Progress, which as we have seen... can have its own issues.

I don’t understand how this interpretation can exist. Christianity is life-denying to the core: man is fallen, the world profane and corrupt, and the only refuge is the kingdom of heaven which only God can bring about. Accumulating wealth is frowned upon (you are supposed to give it to the Jews instead), celibacy is strongly encouraged (demanded in Luke, a Marcionite text), authority is not to be questioned. The Jewish God leads his people out of slavery, the Christian one tells them to be obedient and promises to rescue their souls after they work themselves to death. There is simply no way you can square this with the idea of progress, unless progress simply means converting people to Christianity, which is supposed to be the only thing that matters, and even then we are heading towards the Great Apostasy.

Accordingly, the traditional Christian view of history is that of decline, perhaps interspersed with divine interventions here and there. Muslims, likewise, are obligated to believe that each generation of mankind is worse than the previous one: the notion that one can know better than the Prophet is unthinkable.

A genealogical continuity between certain ideas in no way implies a logical connection, because logical consequence is not what they were selected for. Liberalism has shown itself to be self-sufficient, it doesn’t rely on dusky old religions to penetrate foreign populations. If you want a memeplex centered around progress, you should be completely satisfied with it.

Christianity is life-denying to the core: man is fallen, the world profane and corrupt, and the only refuge is the kingdom of heaven which only God can bring about.

Like, maybe your Christianity, but I feel like there are tons of others out there. The ones where man is made in God's image, told to be fruitful and multiply to fill the earth with little beings that are meant to "graduate" by resurrection into basically being God. Where the God man came to let himself be killed, apparently "so that you can have life more abundantly". As KnotGodel points out, many of your intermediate claims are pretty debatable (and debated by different groups of Christians), which likely means that your personal view is not necessarily that authoritative concerning Christianity's "core", at least not to the point that one should fail to understand how other interpretations could exist.

Unrelated, but afaict, no one in the New Testament ever encourages donating to a church.

Matthew 17:24-27 shows it as a regular thing and Mark 12:41-44 seems to portray it as a laudable thing.

Well, one might define moral progress as moral circle expansion, which is pretty inline with Christian morality of loving thy neighbor and even thy enemy.

I for one categorically deny there is even such a thing as "moral progress", let alone by endless expansion of one's circle of concern.

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