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Evangelical Christians have come up in a few threads here and there and I kind of feel like they're a topic all their own. I also feel like there is sometimes a lack of understanding here of what they believe, why, and how they influence American politics so much. I grew up around some of these people and some of the folks that had a hand in raising me as a child were hardcore fundies that believed some pretty crazy stuff. My childhood exposed me to a variety of viewpoints thankfully but there were times I believed these things. To give you an idea of how close I was to this particular brand of madness I remember handing out Chick tracts to other kids when I was in grade school, telling other kids they were going to Hell because they liked rock music, and developing some crazy that I avoided getting fixed because I was taught psychologists were evil. Phew. I remember attending some various churches where after the sermons people would seriously stand around and make sure everybody else there hated the gays enough. "Typical conversation" with people you just met would be whether you believed in evolution or creationism. I remember being told that anybody who believed in evolution was "not worth your time" and should be avoided at all costs. I remember very specifically being told that "psychology is the opposite of Christianity." I remember being told that Satan spoke directly to people through heavy metal music and that if you played D&D long enough you'd uncover instructions on how to cast actual magic spells. Yes these people are as batshit crazy as you think they are. In many ways they're worse. Anybody paying attention to America at all has seen the religious right in action. They've formed a pretty unholy alliance with the financial right and conservatives are always pushing austerity and telling the poor to get the gently caress back to work and quit asking for help. If that doesn't sound much like what Jesus would have taught that's because it loving isn't. As much as they proclaim their love for Jesus America's far right religious types are about as far from Jesus as one can get. But if they're so different from Jesus and hate what he actually taught so much how do they justify it? Well, let me go over some of the stuff I was taught as a child. Earth Is a Battleground quote:Then Satan answered the Lord and said, “Does Job fear God for no reason? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.” This is, I think, one of the core beliefs that leads to this stuff and is also why it's so fundamentally difficult to pull people out once they've gone into the deep end. What you get taught is that the entire reason that Earth exists is because God is testing men and the devil is trying to tempt them away. There are various reasons for this (some of which go back to Adam and Eve) but the short of it is that mankind hosed pretty badly and now God wants to see who is worthy of entry into the Kingdom of Heaven and who isn't. The devil only has power because God gave it to him. God cast him out because he hosed up but God isn't like a bad guy so he forgave him but said "OK you have to serve me. You want to be a dick then you can be a dick but only if when I want you to." The idea is that life is a test. The souls of men are bombarded with temptation by the devil through their whole lives but those that manage to resist go to Heaven. God isn't a complete bastard and if you screw up he'll let you in if you repent, ask for forgiveness, and mend your awful ways but really it's best to just not stray in the first place. The issue is that straying or deviating at all is viewed as not only a problem in and of itself as those that stray from the flock are more likely to do it again but it acknowledges that such an action is even possible. Remember that pesky word "temptation." The idea is that the devil will absolutely not stop bothering you from the day you're born until the day you die. It's nonstop. He won't quit. His works are everywhere and he'll do anything he can to tempt you away. He's also right loving sneaky and you may not even realize it when he's speaking to you. This is where you get Satanic panics from and why the right is so gung ho about condemning all sorts of things and wants all sorts of poo poo banned. It's for our own good. If you ban the things the devil speaks through then he can't talk to you. Of course he'll find other ways and we need to ban them too. This is also the justification for bad poo poo happening to good people. You're just being tested. Your faith must hold through everything or you fail and go to Hell. This is where the "everybody that disagrees with me is a threat" thought often comes from. You must follow God's law to the letter and any deviation is sinful. Those that disagree with God's law are tempting people away by merely existing and must be destroyed. This is eternal salvation we're talking about here, people. This is the Kingdom of Heaven where everybody is rich and everything is perfect forever. Eve didn't gently caress up by eating the fruit she hosed up by defying God's law even if it might seem arbitrary and stupid to us. What do we know? We aren't Him. So now that Adam and Eve ruined it for the rest of us we have to clean up the mess. quote:Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him. Oh and make sure you root out the devil's influence anywhere you can find it. Crafty fucker is everywhere and you can't be too careful. quote:Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. Environmentalism is Another Tool of Satan and Evolution Doesn't Exist quote:Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness; Remember that whole "battleground" thing. It's going to be real important real soon. Now recall that a lot of people are subscribing to the Biblical literalism stance. Something like 30% of Americans (yes, it is that high) believe that the Bible is the literal word of God and absolutely all of it is 100% true. Generally speaking that means the King James version. Anyway read that passage again. OK, got it? A common interpretation is "the Earth literally can't change. Ever. At all." All this talk about global warming? Yeah, it's the devil's influence. Maybe they realize they're being misled by the devil and are doing this deliberately maybe they don't know. The important thing is to ignore it and don't let it make you stray. You want to go to Heaven, right? Think about the ramifications of that. quote:And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. We own the Earth and everything that lives on it. We can do whatever we want with it. Doesn't matter, God said so. Pollute away! Anybody telling you that we should have any concern at all for the well-being of this rock or anything else living on it is defying God. He said we can do whatever we want so if I want to hunt an endangered species into extinction I have a God-given right to. As the Earth doesn't change that doesn't even really matter because that means we can't gently caress up too badly no matter how hard we try so yeah how about a twelfth Big Mac? So if the Earth doesn't change that whole "grew out of a poo poo load of rocks slamming together over millions of years" thing doesn't make a whole lot of sense now does it? Who came up with that crap, anyway? And hey look all these important religious figures are saying the Earth is 10,000 years old. Carbon dating, fossils, and science must be that devil guy influencing things again. Anybody that tells you the Earth is over 10,000 years old is a pawn of the devil trying to tempt you into straying from the flock. Ignore it at all costs. I remember being told that I should not play Tyrants: Fight Through Time because it talked about a year before 4,000 B.C. No. Seriously. They want to isolate Good Christian Folks from literally everything that might even lead to the possibility of a thought that they might be wrong. I wonder if there's a verse about that... quote:Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it. If our children don't even know there are other paths they can't walk them. Quick, better ban the teaching of evolution from our schools! God Hates Lazies...And the Poors quote:Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men God commands us to work hard at whatever we do. Whatever it is give your all. Well that actually isn't so bad. So where does the prosperity gospel come from? quote:Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor. So you say crime rates are higher in poor neighborhoods? Well then the poors are obviously not neighborly and are always being jerks to each other so God decided they shoul be poor. loving poors...it's their own fault. quote:One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want. And the rich must be generous or else God wouldn't let them be rich. QED. quote:Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it. Hear that, poors? God knows the tiny amounts of money you give. Why Richy McRichpants gave $5,000,000 to a cancer fund last year so of course he deserve to be rich! Ignore that that was less than 1% of his wealth. quote:Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work If your boss says "work 14 hours while I pay you for 6" you have to. Because he said so. Don't complain. If the government didn't make that illegal they're God's legitimate authority on Earth so you don't get a choice. quote:And spend the money for whatever you desire And don't you dare complain when it turns out that Richy McRichpants was snorting cocaine off of the rear end of a $75,000 hooker while your children go hungry. quote:The righteous eat to their hearts’ content, but the stomach of the wicked goes hungry. Maybe if you poors weren't such poo poo bags God would let you have more food. quote:Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have All you poors bitching about not having enough money are doing something God hates. Now go back to work and make me more money I want a $90,000 hooker tonight and I want her on my private jet. If you dare suggest that any of this might be wrong and we should actually, you know, help the poor people out like Jesus said this is the logic you get. They're poor because they deserve it. Poor people obviously are lazier, do more drugs, and are greedy jerks so God is punishing them with poverty and suffering. Once again any suggestion to the contrary is the devil's influence. Ever wonder if there was some kind of background to people talking about Obama like he's a demon? Ever wonder why they're trying so hard to make him an illegitimate ruler? There are two conflicting ideals here; on one hand they believe we should support whatever our leaders do but on the other hand Obama is going against a lot of things they believe. They believe that helping the poor is going against God's will because He made them poor. Well technically they made themselves be poor by sucking but still...it has nothing to do with economics, it has nothing to do with the rich being shits, it has nothing to do with the system being stacked against certain people. It's all those people sucking and God punishing them for it. Nothing else so stop it with this socialism crap, forget education, and let us preach to them. Force them to be Christian, enact fundamentalism, and America's problems will all vanish. They keep voting Democrat because the Ds keep promising to make Us Good Folks give them stuff. That would defy God's will. Oh, and kill the gays. God hates them. The fact that gay and trans people get treated so badly in the work force is because God is punishing them for being gay. Let it happen, they brought it on themselves. quote:Slaves are to be submissive to their own masters in everything; they are to be well-pleasing, not argumentative Shut up and get back to work. quote:And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Only buy things from businesses run by Christians. If anybody working for the company is too immoral don't buy from there. If anybody working for you does not have Christian values it is your duty as one of God's agents to punish them for not being Christian enough. Run your business in a Christian manner and that means fire the gays, only promote fellow Christians, and only give to Christian charities. Everybody else doesn't deserve anything. Just ignore that you've effectively stacked the deck against non-Christian people. If they wanted your help they'd convert. Brutal Theocratic Fundamentalism Is a Good Thing Remember how I said rich people are obviously rich because they're righteous? If we're all righteous enough God will let us all be rich so it's time to brutally suppress everything unChristian, put the church in charge of the nation, and severely punish sinners to discourage them. Then we'll all be rich. It will be for the good of the nation so why are we not doing that? Must be the devil again.
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Jul 1, 2015 16:25
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Everblight posted:Serious question (because I don't know): Is the "prosperity gospel" bullshit a subset of Evangelical Christianity, or just one of its core tenets? Prosperity gospel actually cropped up over several centuries. It actually dates back to...well far as I know the 15th century at least. It is also wrapped up in fundamentalism. It's a very complex history but the short of it is actually related to that whole "people set up colonies in America for religious freedom." A lot of it goes back to Calvinism and Puritanism. One of the reasons that a lot of people came here was because the Catholic Church's power in Europe was waning and a lot of folks wanted Europe to go back to being extremely theocratic. They were not happy that Protestantism was on the rise and heresy wasn't being punished anymore so they set up little pocket theocracies here. They also believed that Jesus was going to come back real soon and God was going to enact judgement on us any day now so they were going to be righteous as gently caress and abandon everybody else to sin, the devil's influence, and Hell. This is also where the Protestant work ethic stuff came up. One of the beliefs that began was that hard work was a righteous act in and of it itself. If you worked hard, went to church, and were a good Christian God would reward you with riches. However if you were lazy God would punish you with poverty so we should not help the poor. The poor must help themselves or, alternately, we must force them to work for their own good. Yes this was used sometimes to justify indentured servitude or slavery as well as outright racism. This is also part of why the religious right thinks they have a reason to hate on blacks so much. Poverty is rampant among black communities so obviously it's just because the blacks are lazy and don't feel like working. It can't possibly be due to 300 years of systemic racism. Nope, they're just lazy. fspades posted:Is there a good source or a book that describes the development of modern evangelicalism in the US? What fascinates me is how they have these really odd beliefs (Rapture, KJV Bible, spiritual warfare, Zionism, complete disregard for social issues, obsession with the gays etc.) that doesn't really gel with other Christian denominations. How do they even reconcile their belief in the inerrancy of the Bible with these non-Biblical tendencies. Why do they care so much about the Old Testament and especially Leviticus? American Christianity should really be regarded as its own beast these days. It's too complex for one book but if you want to get some basic ideas Wikipedia actually has a poo poo load of articles that are pretty good. Could probably branch out from here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritan Might be a good place to start. Anyway a lot of it ultimately goes back to the religious movements in the Renaissance. Various people were dissecting the Bible word by word and arguing over what it ultimately meant. This is also where Biblical literalism really started to show. Even Judaism says that taking everything literally is really dumb and most of the Old Testament is made up stories meant to teach you things but for various reasons certain Christian thinkers later went "nope, it's all true and you're dumb if you believe otherwise." It's another one of the major points of doctrinal conflict. Most Christians worldwide believe that some of the stories from the Bible are true and happened but others are not. Jesus himself made up a crap load of stories to illustrate points and much of his teaching was actually based on allegorical stuff. A lot of it really was just awful people finding ways to justify awful opinions. Note that during the colonial era a lot of people were incredibly greedy then during the 19th century there were a lot of rich people exploiting the ever loving gently caress out of anybody and anything they could sink their claws in. Read quotes from the rich of that era; you see a lot of prosperity gospel stuff and it became systemic simply because it meant you could exploit the working class mercilessly and be doing God's work in the process because you were helping punish the lazy. That or forcing them to work which God would reward them for if they were also good Christians and went to church. Compare that to the anti-poor rhetoric we hear today. How often do we hear that the rich deserve their wealth and it's wrong to take it away? In a lot of ways it was the ideas being spread by wealthy white people who liked being wealthy and white and wanted to be wealthier and whiter. Effectronica posted:The reasons behind this are interesting to me, but somewhat lengthy. 
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Jul 2, 2015 03:59
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pokchu posted:Most Protestants consider prosperity gospel highly toxic, immoral, and completely against the teachings of Christ. The question is how loud are they and how often do they vote?
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Jul 2, 2015 13:17
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pokchu posted:at first, I wanted to answer "very, and often," but after thinking about it, I'm not sure of how much overlap there is between prosperity gospel and fundamentalist evangelicalism. I'll try to find out. One of the issues with American politics is that the fundies are extremely loud and have a very high voter turnout. These people absolutely do not miss elections. They're a minority sure but they have enough raw voting power that they can't be ignored.
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Jul 2, 2015 14:33
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pokchu posted:From what I've learned from a few quick discussions is that while what you said is absolutely true, prosperity gospel occupies its own little subset outside of mainstream Protestantism. While their voting records may end up the same, they get there via different means. Evangelicals have a strong calvanist streak, which while off-putting in the eyes of many Christians, prosperity gospel's theology is very shallow and simply cherry picks passages referring to being financially or emotionally "blessed." There also seems to be a strong contingent from penecostal or penecostal style churches inside Prosperity churches, probably because of the strong focus on being moved by the "spirit." One thing I've noticed about non-crazy Christians I've met is that many people are also single-issue voters. I know a lot of people that primarily voted R because of abortion. Interestingly these same people are fed up with the GOP right now and really, really disagree with a lot of what the party is up to. Granted these are also not fundies. The thing about the prosperity gospel is I've noticed that a lot of people ultimately believe it but don't know that that is what it's called or that they believe it. It's become a cultural thing at this point and a lot of people genuinely believe that America is a perfect meritocracy (it hasn't been for a while now) that has something to do with God. Granted it's also a common belief that the Christian world is in better shape than the non-Christian world just because Christianity has the best values system. Granted even in churches that don't touch on abortion much I've noticed that for a lot of Christian voters that's the most important issue. I also find it very interesting that Catholic leaders have been coming out with statements to the effect of "well if you're going to be pro-life but then tell the babies to get hosed after they're born you're not being very pro-life and are in fact a lovely Christian."
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Jul 2, 2015 15:48
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my bony fealty posted:Is there any significance in Scientology despising psychology too, or is it just crazy cultish beliefs leading to similar conclusions My understanding is that there are similar thought processes there but the thing with Scientology is that L. Ron got his start writing science fiction and self-help books. Dianetics was one of his first big things before he started Scientology. The religion is of course a gigantic, massive cult that encourages being batshit mad in a lot of different ways and demands isolation from outside influences. Psychology is an outside influence. The view of a lot of Christians is that Christ is the only help you should need. You can do all things through Christ and God. They generally also believe in purity of choice. I don't entirely know what the name for it is but they basically believe that we all have a core part of our mind that can make decisions that is perfectly sane. People that come down with some sort of crazy are basically choosing to be crazy. They believe that if your faith is strong enough and that if you trust in God enough you can just will away the crazy. Yes the devil comes in here too again. Sometimes you'll hear things like crazy people being possessed (no, I'm not making that up), being influenced by the devil, or being punished by God. Those are things that a person brings on themselves by being bad at Christianity. Psychologists will also encourage removing very toxic people from your life or suggest things that the fundies don't like. The other side of it is that mainstream psychology no longer considers homosexuality to be a mental illness. It was actually pretty recently that mainstream psychology considered the gays wrong and was seeking to cure them. Anti-gay evangelicals obviously liked that quite a bit but when psychology started thinking "wait, really...what's the problem here?" and quit treating it like a mental illness a lot of people started going "the devil got them!" and treating them like they were evil.
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Jul 3, 2015 02:08
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Guavanaut posted:Mind, body, and soul. The mind and body are fallible created things, whereas the soul is immortal and granted free will by God. What I'm trying to remember is what the phrase for that concept is. It wasn't free will or anything involving the soul. Or maybe it is just "free will" and I'm dredging up inaccurate childhood memories.
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Jul 3, 2015 10:07
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PerpetualSelf posted:You seem to clearly ignore the point here. The evangelical church, just like many churches in america has been co-opted. It has been taken over from inside to serve a political purpose, corrupted beyond a spiritual and religious entity it is something else. A political one. That is the biggest legacy and impact that America has had on the Church, and it has served a very key role in ensuring these political concepts remain spread among the masses. This stuff actually predates America as it is now. Much of it goes back to the original colonies and the fact that some of them were outright theocratic. While some were more open some of the original cities set up here had the governor and the leader of the church be literally the same person. Some of the colonies actually explicitly forbade certain forms of religious practice and were outright hostile to the Catholic Church. Whiles some people were in fact fleeing persecution in Europe the dumb side of it was that they were actively persecuting people of other faiths after they got here. In some colonies it started with severe fines being levied against any Catholics that tried to hold office. Later it was "all Catholic priests must leave or die." Even so you had to be a prominent, respected member of a particular church or you would not get ahead in life. If you believed the wrong things there was no way for you to make anything of yourself. Full religious freedom was the exception not the rule. Some colonies would allow a certain set of religions but really a lot of them were very fundamentalist. This is part of what is used for justification of trying to implement theocracy in the U.S. The argument is that we grew out of those colonies and a lot of them were outright theocratic. The Puritanical colonies of the time were pointed it at as full of great people who understood God's word and totally had it right. It wasn't that the U.S. coopted the church it's that this particular sector of religion was there right when the country was founded. Granted this is also where the persecution complex also comes from. These religious movements are centuries old - older than the nation, even - and their attempts at forcing theocracy keep bubbling up and we have to keep slamming the lid on it. The lines are currently very clearly drawn but not where the fundies want them to be so they keep trying to press past them. When it inevitably starts to boil over again we put a lid on it and they start screeching loudly.
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Jul 6, 2015 09:17
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Really? There was a recent (past year or so) story in Kentucky where a Baptist church allowed gay marriage ceremonies to be performed, and because of that decision, the Baptist convention cut them off. Declared they were no longer a Baptist church. I guess it depends on what you mean by "power to compel" but there's definitely a central body that makes decisions about individual churches. They can be kicked out of the main line but that doesn't really stop them from doing their own spinoff either. "Baptist" is kind of a loose conglomeration more than anything.
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Jul 8, 2015 15:23
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JcDent posted:I want to ask the OP how he/she broke up with the fundies (can't spell "fun dies" without "fundies") and how did that previous experience impacted OPs religious views, ties with family and stuff like that. I'm a he, by the way. Anyway, I can't really say a lot about it without discussing my upbringing in detail which I just flat out don't want to do. My childhood was kind of awful. But anyway, oddly enough it wasn't my family specifically but I had dealt with some deliberate isolation from my extended family that didn't expose me to a lot of their views until somewhat later in life. I have little contact now with much of my gene pool for completely separate reasons. Some of it was just the crowd I happened to fall into and some of it was the babysitter I had as a child that I think did most of my raising. Once again the details are complicated and I don't care to discuss them but this guy was the most rabid fundie I have ever met. I have no idea what denomination he was exactly. Methodist, I think. There are a lot of Methodists where I come from and they tend to be shitheads. The other side of it was that some of the children I hung around with at school were from fundie families and it's kind of easy for groups to form among children who are being taught these things. One thing you get taught is that you absolutely must not trust anybody that doesn't believe what you do. So of course some children looking for friends and a social group would fall in line with that crowd and start becoming awful so they could fit in. We liked Nintendo and Jesus and not much else. I actually don't remember exactly when I quit attending church but I was not forced to go after a certain point. Part of it was poverty; there were long periods of time I'd live in a household with no car. We moved around a lot so it wasn't like we could become part of a church community and I was often staying at my grandparent's house and they didn't go to church. The thing of it is though I remember being deliberately isolated from the outside world and not having much contact at home with anybody other than my sister (who I did not get along with) and the fundie guy a lot of the time. With a few exceptions nobody else really went out of their way to dispel these beliefs but at the same time practicing in secret when I was around people that didn't approve was also encouraged. That guy quit watching us when we got old enough, I changed school and didn't land in the fundie crowd after that, and just kind of drifted out of it. When I finally actually sat down and read the whole Bible I ended up becoming a rabid atheist. Now I'm a Buddhist. Fancy that. I was also extremely withdrawn through some parts of my childhood socially. Not only had I endured deliberate isolation but was told to not trust people (more than just standard stranger danger crap) and only associate with people I knew believed the right things. That kind of sticks with you over time and it's also harder to forge social bonds if you don't know anybody to start with, also don't have well-developed social skills, and just out of habit don't talk. Granted it didn't help that I also started suffering from depression very young and later turned out to have borderline disorder. Yeah poo poo was...kind of crazy and so was I. It's not an easy question to answer because that gets into things I don't want to discuss publicly. Or at all, to be honest.
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Jul 9, 2015 14:23
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Oh derp I forgot to cover prosperity gospel. Actually Malmesbury gets the basic idea down. It really is just a lot of twisting and mangling done to justify terrible beliefs. Some of it also goes back to Job. He keeps his faith in God through all of his trials and tribulations so God gives him more than he had before. That's used as proof that God will reward faith (Job was a faithful guy before the whole thing went down). The other argument I've heard (and I forget if this has any actual Biblical or scholarly basis or not) was that the disciples were all wealthy, prosperous guys so obviously God was rewarding them for their faith. There is also reference to that passage about all authority on Earth being there because God put it there. They extend that into "rich people are rich because God let them be." So obviously if somebody is rich it's because they pleased God somehow. Except Ted Turner. He's an atheist so obviously he made a deal with the devil to acquire his wealth.
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Jul 9, 2015 15:02
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OwlFancier posted:It's weird that kids growing up Christian wouldn't read the bible, I mean, I had a children's bible when I was young and I wasn't even Christian. Would have thought that you'd be expected to read it as a matter of course? First off the Bible is a massive book. Thing is huge and takes forever to read. Relatively few Christians actually put forth the effort to actually read it all. Second off you're discouraged from reading and interpreting the Bible for yourself. If your religious leaders are telling you to believe [thing] then you believe [thing] and don't question it. And don't you dare ever quote a verse that directly contradicts [thing] or point out that Jesus very specifically said [thing] is bad.
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Jul 9, 2015 15:46
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Quorum posted:This is deeply ironic/hilarious to me, since one of the original motivators of the Protestant movement was a belief that everyone should be able and encouraged to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. That's still a huge emphasis in mainline Protestantism-- the church I attended growing up had organized everyone-read-through-the-Bible things where you got prizes for making milestones. In their fervor, fundamentalism has become as insulated from popular analysis as the medieval Catholic hierarchy! It isn't ironic when you consider where America's Christian traditions ultimately started. I touched on it before but one of the complaints of people leaving Europe was specifically that the churches were becoming too nice and letting people interpret things for themselves. That's why Biblical literalism is so incredibly toxic. The belief is that you must get it exactly right or it's off to Hell with you. It's also why the arguments between literalists and against those that do not believe in literalism are so nasty. It isn't just matters of meaning on the line it's eternal damnation. I don't want to go to Hell so I have to make sure I'm the one that's right. Which gets twisted into forcing everybody else to repeat that you're right and also forcing everybody else to believe what you do because it's for their own good. Hey, I'm just looking out for you, man. Your interpretation is wrong and that means you're going to Hell. In Europe even the Catholic church at the time was shifting away from heavy dogma and outright political theocracy. Heresy quit being punished. The ironic part is that the people that wanted to keep punishing heresy were the ones violating the church's doctrine at the time. Now we have this weird situation in America where even nominally connected churches of the same denomination don't agree and are screaming at each other that the other side is going to Hell. OwlFancier posted:The idea of a faith primarily centered around the pastor is really strange, it's more what I'd associate with a suicide cult than a major religion. A lot of Christian churches in America act exactly like dangerous cults. They practice shunning and create these extremely insular little groups that actively avoid contact with the outside world until the individuals stick around only because they have nobody else.
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Jul 9, 2015 16:09
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JcDent posted:Yes, the funny thing is that as far as I understand from Liturgical Christianity Thread is that hardcore Protestants think that Catholics don't read the Bible. Catholicism's relationship to reading the Bible is...odd. For a very long time on priests actually read the Bible because, well, only priests could read. Royalty and nobility kind of sort of could but the only people who were actually properly educated were the clergy and the rich were too busy worrying about succession, creating bastard children, and murdering each other to care much about stupid things like "reading" and "science." Clergy on the other hand had a lot of spare time and no families or lineage to worry about. Even so most people were illiterate subsistence farmers and so would not be expected to read anything at all, ever, and mostly just believed what their priests told them. Some priests of course were outright liars but that's a different story. There isn't much inertia behind the idea of reading the Bible until very recently historically. One of the major, major changes of Protestantism was the idea that there could be communication with God without intermediaries. The Catholic church taught that you had to go through Jesus to get to God but the Pope was effectively the current Jesus. Sort of. The theory (no idea if this has been checked out historically) is that Peter was in charge of the church and the first Pope. Because of that personal interpretations of things mean less and what the Church believes mean more. It isn't that reading the Bible is a general requirement but it isn't discouraged either. The big difference is that the Bible doesn't have the same gravity in Catholicism as it does to Biblical literalists and I think that's the major sticking point. Far as I can tell Catholics take a very similar view to Jews. The important thing isn't the specific, literal meaning of the words but rather what the story means. This is especially true of stories that were literally made up and that the characters in the Bible said they made up. Which is why Biblical literalism is kind of dumb. Jesus makes up a whole lot of stories and the story isn't the thing that matters but what he is teaching through it. That really is where a lot of the arguments over how important the Bible is come from and why I think a great many hardcore Protestants think Catholics don't read the Bible. It's unlikely that a random Catholic has read the whole thing but it's also likely that a random Catholic doesn't put that much of an emphasis on the book itself. One thing I've heard from both Catholics and Jews is that the central message is basically the golden rule. Generally speaking if you're actively trying to not be a jerk then God thinks you're alright. Of course literalists read all the fire and brimstone stuff and say "so this means it's OK to murder the gays?"
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Jul 9, 2015 20:32
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Sucrose posted:Why do Evangelical Christians seem to have such an influence here in the United States when they make up such a small percentage of the population? They vote. No, seriously. That's all there is to it. Their voter turnout is higher than other demographics. They also have done a very good job of pulling conservatism in America pretty far to the right by harping very hard on the more palatable sides of their platform. Not all people that vote R are evangelicals or fundies obviously but can be easily convinced to vote R by somebody harping on family values and abortion. They just want to save babies, man. Why do you hate babies so much? So yeah it's really about the screaming and the voting. As a demographic they vote pretty hard.
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Jul 10, 2015 03:00
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Mr. Wiggles posted:This is really the crux of the whole thing. American evangelical Christianity is born from and sustained by a complete lack of contextual understanding of scripture. It's as phenomenal as it is sad. Really that can't be stressed enough. Even those that have read the Bible and studied what Jesus actually taught go into it with what they already believe in their head and ride confirmation bias all the way to the bottom.
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Jul 10, 2015 19:19
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FuzzySkinner posted:I'm not well versed in theology, but it's kind of fascinating to me how many Evangelical Christians just seem unwilling to budge on a lot of things. I do listen to a station out of Cleveland on occasion (mainly for entertainment and for content for the RWM thread), and I've noticed an unwillingness to acknowledge another person's viewpoint or another interpretation of one's faith. Go back to the first post I wrote and read the battleground part. Any possibility that being not Christian is OK is to many viewed as the work of the devil tempting you away from the faith. Fundies genuinely believe that forcing their beliefs on everybody else is doing them a favor. Really to get an idea of the mindset just look at Chick tracts more closely and what they're saying. Look at things like fundies often leaving those "disappointed? Well, here is some eternal salvation! Just come to church and get it!" things instead of tips at restaurants. They believe that they're not being brutal totalitarians they believe they're giving you the gift of an eternity with Jesus and man that is like, priceless. They also believe that the right thing to do is to make America into a Christian nation once again for its own good. Christianity in America is actually on a decline and they know it. They believe that that is proof that America is falling to the devil's influence or is becoming less righteous and that's why we're having the problems we are. They just want us to be a prosperous God-fearing nation again, you know? God is just punishing us by letting us slide downward because we lost our faith. There are also "God's law > man's law" arguments going on. They believe that if God dictated a rule you must follow that rule and force everybody else to so you don't piss off the big guy. There are a lot of facets to the argument really but the main reason that "secular" became a dirty word is because "secular" tells people that God's law is optional. edit: Actually another thing that comes up is stuff like Sodom and Gomorrah. Another common belief is that God will punish nations that are not righteous. They believe in the fire and brimstone God that will call judgement down from heaven if we don't behave. This is why gay rights are such a contentious issue. They believe that gays, merely by existing, are destroying our great nation. If we'd just cast them out/exterminate them then God would be pleased and we'd be prosperous again. If we don't then God is going to punish us severely. So not only is it arguments based on "please God -> get paid" but also ties into power. Remember that verse about Earthly authority existing because God said that it should. Whoever is in charge is put there by God. They often believe that if they please God enough He'll put them in charge. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Jul 11, 2015 |
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Jul 11, 2015 15:27
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FuzzySkinner posted:Now? The entire idea is pretty laughable in a lot of ways. But it feels like there's still people (mainly boomers, mainly evangelicals) that hang onto that weird fear of us becoming some sort of Soviet Union-style state. The reaction that we saw after Obama's election and the use of the Hammer/Sickle by people like Glenn Beck sort of kind of shows what their mindset is in regards to every thing. Yeah one of the things the right very badly struggled with was finding a new Great Enemy after the USSR fell apart. Really I think this why Islam started being drummed up and why they started picking fights in the middle east. You couldn't scream about the insidious threat of spreading communism so now it's Sharia law. If you look at it the propaganda is really the same.  SECRET MUSLIMS IN GOVERMENT! SLEEPER CELLS! ANY TOLERANCE OF ISLAM WILL LEAD TO FULL MUSLIM LAW!!!!
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Jul 11, 2015 20:12
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FuzzySkinner posted:Even that has kind of backfired in a lot of ways. Yeah the other side of it is that America has been basically in a constant state of war since WW2 and Americans are kind of tired of it. Most Americans also see that there just aren't any legitimate, major threats to America in the world right now. We're the top. The only other major powers that might possibly pose a threat some day are China and Russia and yeah...we're kind of friendly with them. The USSR worked because it was this huge, powerful nation that had a big hand in why WW2 was won. Islam doesn't work well because we're on pretty good terms with some Islamic nations, there are Muslims here, and religious tolerance is becoming increasingly popular. Most Americans are also not idiots and understand that Islam is not some monolithic entity that is 5% terrorists and 90% people that support terrorists. Of course people are looking back and realizing that "fighting communism" was also a nebulous and stupid thing. People screaming SOCIALIST!!!! are viewed as idiots. I think the religious right really dropped the ball on that one because it just shows their hypocrisy. Jesus was pretty specific about helping the needy but the religious right is all "lol nope, that's communism!"It's almost like...they've been screaming wolf for a wolf that didn't even bother to show up in the end.
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Jul 11, 2015 20:35
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They believe that anything outside of the right church and the right beliefs is Satan's influence. Literally all of it. That's why "occult" is a code word for "Satanism." Think of it like a legal system. The U.S. operates on "everything not forbidden is permitted." If it isn't explicitly written down that [thing] is against the law it is legal. Another possible system, and this is the ones Evangelicals effectively run on and want to implement, is rather the opposite; "everything not permitted is forbidden." If it isn't explicitly permitted then it is forbidden. Everything that isn't explicitly labelled as good and Christian is the devil's influence.
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Jul 15, 2015 04:27
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MrNemo posted:It's simple in the sense that they think Satan is testing everyone, if you succumb to temptation and fail it is a personal failing. You were weak and sinned (though if you're truly contrite God will forgive you, which you can express by being appropriately deferential to your pastor and local community). On the other hand they see it as their moral duty to help others resist or even minimise the risk of damnation. You can say that giving power to Satan means he's part of God's plan but equally Jesus came back and revealed his message so clearly God is putting salvation through knowledge and helping others just as much within his plan. Evangelicals see spreading the Good News as part of their holy duty, minimising access to the 'Bad News' of non-Christian beliefs can function quite easily for them as the flip side of this. A lot of that actually goes back to the Book of Job. They explain it away by saying that God would not have known if Job was truly righteous unless he was tested. Satan and evil is just God's way of making sure there are ways to test people. They also use this to explain away bad things happening to good people (he's just testing your faith!) and whatnot. That or "well you just have to endure all the bad poo poo in this life to get into heaven. I mean that's wroth it!" That's also how the prosperity gospel nonsense gets explained away. It doesn't matter if you're hell of poor. Go to church anyway, be faithful (to the right church, anyway), and God will let you into heaven and you'll be rich there. Taken together these are very convenient excuses to just throw the poor to the wolves and refuse to help them. "Well this is all part of God's plan that those people be poor and who am I to question that?"
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Jul 15, 2015 19:14
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twistedmentat posted:The old testament its really clear Satan is in Gods employ, tempting and questioning faith to make sure that people are truly faithful and not just paying lip service. Job is a story where Satan actually seems like the better of the two, because he's just saying "Job is your most faithful because you gave him all this great stuff!" and then God destroys all that to prove his faith is true. The Bible actually doesn't really say much about what or who the devil actually is. The imagery of an insidious horned demon always lurking in the shadows is a more recent invention. Generally though what I was taught was that before Earth was created there was a huge battle among the angels. Some of them questioned God's authority and started a big fight. This was led by an angel/archangel named Lucifer. They lost and were cast out which created Hell. Lucifer eventually became Satan and God forgave him even though he was still a huge jerk because God is just that nice but told him that if he wanted to keep being a jerk he could only do it against those that were not faithful or those that God wanted to test. The not faithful thing is the big part; they taught that if you are truly faithful and righteous than the devil can't get to you. This is used to justify all sorts of things, the main part of which is the idea that those that are not faithful (i.e, those that believe the wrong things or go to the wrong church) are being influenced by the devil. And yes that is where "Catholicism is secretly Baal worship" comes from. Some people believe that the Catholic Church has been infiltrated by the devil and the Pope is his emissary on Earth. The Catholic Church talking about going out and doing good works is just them trying to tempt people in by giving them nice things. This is also why welfare is bad, by the way. Dapper_Swindler posted:or are alot of them just stupid or con-men. A lot of them are just con men. While there are some true believers one of the issues is that some people realize that this sort of thing lets them have power over others and they find that very attractive. I think that's one of the reasons theocracy polls so well among them and I certainly remember some people that loved nothing more than using the threat of Hell to control the behavior of others. They also use shame a lot.
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Jul 16, 2015 04:49
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OwlFancier posted:Isn't that the plot of Paradise Lost? Beats me I never read it.
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Jul 16, 2015 05:00
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FuzzySkinner posted:My question is, will we begin to see more of a split between Protestantism if this is the direction that evangelicals want to go? it was really bizarre to me see how someone was so against another form of their faith and brand it as no longer being the same. Isn't the very basic idealogy of Christianity literally "DO YOU BELIEVE CHRIST DIED FOR YOURS AND HUMANITY'S SALVATION? YES? GOOD. GO ACT MORE LIKE HIM".? If so, doesn't that not exactly make someone with a different view on the faith the same? The bajillion schisms in the entire history of Christianity arose from issues exactly like that. This is how religions actually tend to split. One group decides the mainstream religion is wrong and the mainstream religion won't change so they take their ball and go home. The difference now of course being that you can't just exterminate people that believe different things than you in most of the world. Christianity in particular hasn't been punishing heresy for several centuries so of course you're going to see more and more schisms. Even in ancient Christianity you have of course the Catholics, Orthodoxy, the Miaphysites, and Nestorianism. Protestantism is not a new concept at all, really. Christianity has been fracturing almost as long as it's existed. Of course some denominations use that as proof that the end times or coming or that humanity has lost its way. It's why you get extremely insular, tiny evangelical congregations that believe they're the only ones that have it right and absolutely nobody else gets into heaven. But yes that's supposedly the basis of Christianity. Worship God, follow Jesus. Repent your sins, apologize to God when you do inevitably gently caress up and try to mend your awful ways. The issue is that some people decided other things are more important or just pay lip service to Jesus. It also gets into bizarre internal logic like the belief that helping the poor actually hurts them so the real way to help them is to tear them off the government teat and force them to care for themselves. Granted people also tend to be extremely possessive about it. Tangential sure but I've run into people that have gotten genuinely angry at me for studying the teachings of Jesus even though I'm not a Christian. I consider Jesus a boddhisatva and believe there is wisdom in what he taught. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Jul 16, 2015 |
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Jul 16, 2015 05:41
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MrNemo posted:It is totally taken from Milton and kind of hilarious that an epic poem designed, in part, to make the devil sympathetic has firmly taken root in the consciousness of evangelical Christians as some sort of scriptural element. Revelations makes a few hints at a big fight in heaven before Earth came around but doesn't really say much in detail. In any event I've been told that story basically as proof that God is all powerful and can't be beaten ever so you should submit to God's will (i.e, my church's will) totally. The teaching is that it's arrogant to defy God's will in any way at all. Which is part of why there is so much argument over what exactly God's will is.
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Jul 16, 2015 21:26
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Idiot Kicker posted:Why do some divisions of American Christianity get so vocal about our government supporting Israel no matter what? If things are prophesied to happen, shouldn't you be confident that Iran can't do poo poo to change them? Jews are God's chosen people. We need to stay on their good terms to keep on good terms with God. ... That's it, really.
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Jul 17, 2015 01:53
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FuzzySkinner posted:It also bugs me as a Christian currently because I think it implies that everyone knows what God is to do, and when he's to do it. The whole "Thieve in the middle of the night" sums it up. Hell I've heard "Dawn of the Dead" may have not been that far off biblical if we're really going to discuss potential Armageddon scenarios. One of the most idiotic things about this "aaaaany day now" bullshit when it comes to the rapture or the apocalypse or whatever is that people keep coming out and saying they know the exact date. Frequently Biblical literalists. Quoting the Bible that very specifically says only God knows when it will happen. Jesus doesn't even know what the gently caress. You can't force it and you can't predict it. God will end the world when He's good and loving ready, thank you very much. He might decide tomorrow. He might wait 90,000 years. He might wait a billion. He's God and He does what He wants.
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Jul 17, 2015 02:38
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Pththya-lyi posted:It's especially idiotic because the Bible itself says that you can tell if someone is a false prophet because their prophecies don't come true. You'd think people would be more wary - not just the false prophets, but also those who follow them. The issue there is that you have religious leaders telling people that they'll go to Hell if they don't believe exactly what these false prophets are saying and you have people running around claiming they know exactly what God wants and have a direct like to the big guy himself. It just so happens that these people act like God happens to want all the same things they do. Tithe generously to this ministry because I want a private jet and God will reward you tenfold! The Rapture is coming! I know I was wrong about the date four times already but this time I have it right, promise!
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Jul 17, 2015 02:59
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:It's no different than all the swords and musclemen and women with impossible proportions that populated cartoons then and now. Certain things just tap into the human psyche as being "cool poo poo", and those sorts of things tend to be recognizable as cool by children, whereas complex narratives or relationships between characters aren't as recognizable to children. Therefore, you go hog wild with magic crystals and musclepersons and transforming cars and whatever else because "magic and not of this world" makes kids excited. When it comes to magic, ghosts, and the supernatural one of the biggest things is that's easy to write. After cartoons had their golden age a lot of people decided that cartoons are for children and children are stupid and really just care about pretty colors, stuff moving around, and characters hitting each other while saying funny things. There started to be this race to the bottom where people were trying to produce cartoons as cheaply as possible. This basically peaked in the 70's and 80's when very nearly every cartoon on TV was just reused animations, literally tracing everything, and making the shows with as little effort as possible to make as much money as possible. "A wizard did it" doesn't need to explained nor does "well let's talk to ghosts!" That took a minimal amount of effort to do because all you had to do was have characters sit around and make their mouths move. Technology was used in similar ways. You didn't explain it you just put some weird looking gizmo on the screen and it just did whatever you needed it to do. When it came to muscleperson shows and transforming robots the majority of that was "how do we sell toys?" Cartoons like He-Man, G.I. Joe, and Transformers were about the toys first and the shows second. They were literally half hour time slot advertisements for toys. The only thing that mattered was keeping children watching to make them want the toys. The devil had nothing to do with it though I'm sure Jesus would have a few things to say about the rampant commercialism of it all.
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Jul 17, 2015 18:39
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Guavanaut posted:I think this hits the nail on the head for what I was looking for. Other One of the reasons that skinny anime people happened was because Japan was actually producing very, very good animation in that period. Akira for example was so detailed they had to literally invent new inks just to make the movie possible. Early anime was basically proof positive that you could still make high quality animation. I think Europe had some good stuff going too but all told I don't know that much about European animation. In the 1980's there was also interest in older cartoons that were actually good and Disney was making a resurgence. People were watching stuff like Tex Avery cartoons or...well, really anything Disney did ever and wanting more stuff of that quality. Some people turned to anime and that's where anime sinking its hooks in came from. The bottom was hit when stuff like the Happy Days cartoon and the Star Trek one came around. Go watch them if you can find them for a bit. These shows were terrible. The Happy Days cartoon was literally just a few Happy Days characters stuck time travelling and trying to get back home. No. Seriously. That was the plot of the show. Fonzie and Pals time traveling with some other characters randomly thrown in because reasons. There wasn't a single bit of continuity and every episode was basically just whatever the writers puked onto the page that day. Plus we all know about stuff like Scooby Doo being the same episode remade over and over for years using the same animations over and over. Eventually people started saying "wait, animation can be used to do incredible things!" and remembering stuff like Tex Avery saying "you can do anything in cartoons." So why were they so limited? Ren and Stimpy was ultimately the big breakthrough that allowed American cartoons to have actual budgets again. Traditional animation kind of went by the wayside after a while but even now you're seeing good stuff coming out. You ended up with things like Samurai Jack coming around and that show was goddamned art. As you can see there is not the devil influencing cartoons but it can be purely explained by economic factors. But then I also remember hearing people screeching about how Japanimation was "those loving Jappos" trying to sneak their culture into ours so they could take over. Yes xenophobia runs rampant among these types and they were screaming that American shows were better simply because they were American. G.I. Joe was patriotic so it didn't matter that it was garbage animation created solely to sell toys. Of course part of the reason this came up in the 1980's was that the Reagan administration loosened restrictions on marketing directly to children. And yes the fundies just adore Reagan in case you were wondering.
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Jul 17, 2015 19:36
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FuzzySkinner posted:I think what we had discussed a few pages earlier is that their movement/influence is kind of dying because people are now being presented actual facts and statistics on quite a few things. To be honest I think a lot of that has to do with how easy it is to get information thanks to the internet. It's becoming harder and harder to live in a bubble and harder still to force people into one. Watch stuff like the ex-Satanist and videos like that and one of the central messages is "deliberately isolate yourself and isolate your children for their own good." The fundies want total control of the messages you get and that's why I compare them to dangerous cults. They basically are just on a much larger scale. Which is also why you get madness like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZFG5PKw504 Yup, evolution is fake because you never find new life in jars of peanut butter. Pack it in folks, evolution lost. Actually also when it comes to Saturday morning cartoons there was also literally a Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. It actually kind of sucked but did, in fact, exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(TV_series) ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Jul 17, 2015 |
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Jul 17, 2015 20:25
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Shbobdb posted:To be fair, anime does seem to have a corrupting influence on those who watch it. Nobody makes GI Joe part of their adult identity. Current anime? Yes. I would definitely agree with that. It's actually interesting because some very historically important names in anime have been lamenting the fact that current anime is just fan service pandering to creeps who want to gently caress 12 year olds. Granted the only anime I've ever really watched myself was some older movies (pre-2000...probably also pre-1990 in general), some Gundam Wing, and Cowboy Bebop. I also watched Robotech as a child but I don't know if that really counts. G.I. Joe is kind of different from anime. It was based on ultra-patriotic action figures from the 1960's that were ultimately "America is awesome OORAH!" in toy form. It wasn't an identity people could really take because it was based on identities people already had. If you look at it it was the cartoon taking America's identity rather than people taking its identity. You really, really saw that in the cartoon. A tiny group of perpetually outnumbered, ultra-masculine musclebros ran around constantly thwarting the plans of an omnipresent, worldwide terrorist organization that wanted to ruin America because "gently caress you." It was thinly veiled McCarthyism, really. The rest of the world was a threat and it was up to the plucky underdogs to beat them with grit, determination, and probably steroids.
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Jul 17, 2015 20:37
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FuzzySkinner posted:It almost feels like they're scared of being "wrong", which in itself is kind of silly. That's actually one of the sticking points both between the fundy Protestants and the Catholic Church. The current doctrine of Catholicism is basically that if science proved something than God made the universe that way and we can't be questioning that. 2 + 2 always equals 4. That's provable. God made the universe in such a way that 2 + 2 is always equal to 4. If science proves that the universe is billions of years old then God must have made it that way. The echo chamber bubble also has people screaming that science is out to disprove religion specifically to make people distrust secular science which is dumb for exactly the reasons you're pointing out. They're frightened though because science might one day prove that there is no God or that they are wrong. Science has proven religion wrong about a poo poo load of things over time and that's part of why certain movements are inherently suspicious of science. That's also where the antagonism comes from; the view among some is that science is deliberately trying to destroy religion but these are people that don't understand the scientific method or what secular science does. Science isn't out to prove anything. The only thing scientists really do is poke and prod at the universe to figure out how it works. Which is part of why the current Catholic stance is that science is awesome because they're just figuring out how God's creation functions. Maybe evolution was, in fact, how God intended to get mankind. We don't know, we aren't Him. The universe behaves by a certain set of mathematical rules. If God created the universe then He put those rules in place in exactly the way they work. We can't really defy math or physics because those are the constraints of the universe. Mathematical, universal laws are basically God's laws. Of course as we understand them better it just keeps getting more bizarre and doesn't behave the way we expect it to but, you know, that's existence. Even so the current scientific consensus is nothing more than "God might exist." Fact is we just flat out don't know. Granted that's another reason the fundies dislike science. They hate uncertainty and preach unwavering faith in whatever you believe. Anybody trying to prove you wrong on anything at all is the devil trying to lead you astray. Which is why Young Earth Creationism is such an awful, awful thing and why evolution gets under so much fire. Granted when it comes to evolution that comes under fire because it suggests that God didn't create mankind directly at all which ruins quite a lot of arguments they make based on Biblical stories. Of course the Catholic view is that one story turning out to be false doesn't ruin the rest of the religion. If it turns out that stories like Adam and Eve or Noah are literally impossible and never happened it only disproves those stories specifically and not everything else. I get the feeling that fundie leaders really do understand that their arguments are a massive house of cards that is easily knocked over. When I actually started to question this crap I was like "holy crap that's a lot of bullshit." But yes a lot of it has to do with fear of being wrong. The fundie movement runs very heavily on fear and in many ways it preys on the fear of oblivion. This is part of why the afterlife is so strongly harped on. If you tithe generously to This Ministry and believe what we tell you you get to go to heaven and be happy forever. It sounds great but if you disprove any form of afterlife then our lives have no meaning and all we have to look forward to is nonexistence. That's a bleak, miserable thought but being able to get eternity from an omnipresent, loving, perfect God with no beginning and no end sounds great. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Jul 17, 2015 |
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Jul 17, 2015 20:52
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Samuel Clemens posted:I think when people talk about how great 80s anime are/were, they're usually referring to Ghibli's early works, rather than TV shows. That answer is...kind of complex but from what I see it's mostly they agree on big sweeping things (gays are evil, Islam is run by the devil, the Pope is a servant of Baal/Catholicism is dumb, etc.) and understand they're ultimately part of the same movement but seem largely focused on fighting those people, if that makes sense. I think that's a deliberate thing done by the right wing hate machine, the right wing media, and overall religious leaders in general. If you pay careful attention the only thing they ever seem to say is this vague thing of "Christianity being under attack" or vague things like "you should believe X and vote for politicians that also believe X." Mostly though their "I MUST FITE U" thoughts are directed toward whoever they're otherising at the moment. That and abortion. Right now I feel like it's kind of this weird combination of understanding they can only do anything if they work together as a whole while secretly cursing each other with eternal damnation for Doing It Wrong. Even so a common attitude is "well at least they're Christian" if the other Christian hates gays and abortion enough. The extreme isolationist churches and the Christian agrarian movement are actually a minority in a minority as far as evangelicals go. Oddly enough most evangelicals don't scream about tiny doctrinal differences sending one to Hell so long as you believe the important things. But then also look at other denominations as "Christian but a bit misguided." And yes there is a lot of logical inconsistency in that and it's a question nobody seems to have answered. They're united behind such flags as "kill all gays" or "evolution is wrong" but I guarantee you that they'd immediately start tearing at each other if gays and evolution somehow vanished.
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Jul 17, 2015 23:24
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icantfindaname posted:No, the shows usually cited with that are like Akira or GITS or Cowboy Bebop, nevermind that wasn't even from the 80s. I don't think they mean Ghibli Some anime is good. Some anime is bad. OK, argument over let's stop talking about it sorry I brought it up. Really the existence of anime is related to the conversation. The minutia of anime is not.
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Jul 17, 2015 23:28
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FuzzySkinner posted:I went to the Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame today for the first time ever. Now consider that these people were actually very, very influential in the 1980's and think about how terrifying it is that these people actually have influence over others. It's easy to laugh now but in the 1980's they were a very real threat. They may not have succeeded in instituting full theocracy or getting all the things they wanted banned but they managed to convince large sectors of the population to not allow their children to play D&D or listen to anything with an electric guitar. As ridiculous as they are I have trouble laughing at them.
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Jul 19, 2015 04:16
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One of the main thing that changed was the rhetoric. They've cooled off on the Satanic panic crap because it doesn't get the attention it used to but they've wrapped it in easier to swallow code words. This is why you hear things like "family values" and whatnot or why a hell of a lot of the message is "vote R to save babies!!!!" What they were doing quit working so they shifted tactics. Now they're also screeching about the shrinking percentage of America that is white as if it's genocide which was kind of another thing they set up themselves that bit them in the rear end later. Their greatest difficulty is that they separated the world into "us" and "not us" and declared the "not us" not people. "Us" of course means WASPS. Of course I think part of why they're bitching about the Catholics is that the Church is actually adapting with the times and isn't rabidly anti-progress. Of course "us" also wants to freeze time 60 years ago in a fantasy land version of 1950's America. Anyway...their biggest problem is that they shrank the possible traits of "us' smaller and smaller. One of the biggest (and yes this ties heavily into racism and xenophobia) was the whole single drop garbage. If you have one single drop of not-white blood then you are not white and are not in "us." If you have one single incorrect belief (which can be as small as "doesn't hate the gays enough") then you are not in "us." Their demographic is shrinking largely by their own design. They set up an exclusive little club, didn't let new blood in, and are now dying off. The messages they've been vomiting have shifted toward things that sound nicer but the core is still there. "Family values" voters are really anti-gay activists that want marriage to only happen in churches. That of course meaning that you can't marry outside of your community. Which means miscegenation is less likely to happen. "We just want to save babies" also comes with it 1950's-style family dynamics. Dad is in charge, mom mostly just shits out and cares for babies, and the family has been subjugated to dad's will. But if Daughter Sally wants to play bass, shave her head, and join a punk band suddenly it's the devil's influence causing her to stray, which is only more likely to drive her out of the movement permanently. Among "us" she is now tainted. She isn't wifely. She might delay having children. Hell she may never even get married. She might have sex with more than one man in her life. She's a sinner and must be cast out. If she reforms her ways and acts like "us" again then she's going to be viewed as second-class "us" at best, especially if she does something awful like dates a black guy or gets pregnant out of wedlock. Which is another thing; single mothers were absolutely scorned, even if it was a case of her husband dying or some other misfortune. An unmarried mother was shunned and probably driven out, taking her children with her. If you weren't "us" enough you were not treated well and probably left. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Jul 19, 2015 |
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Jul 19, 2015 06:34
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happyhippy posted:Science shows that giant humans can not exist as they would collapse or suffocate under their own weight. Did you ever stop to ask yourself how he defeated the ice giants? Maybe he changed physics so that was true but we could still survive.  Indeed the ways of the gods are mysterious.
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Jul 20, 2015 00:00
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Shbobdb posted:"The limits of my language are the limits of my world." If you can't define God, then sure, I can't dispute it, but why would I bother? Does fngth exist? You can't prove fngth doesn't, so the reasonable position is to be agnostic on fngth. If you grew up with your whole life being taught fngth exists and your entire social circle believes in fngth it can be pretty hard to stop believing in fngth.
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Jul 20, 2015 08:28
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Agnosticism is more or less a lack of religious beliefs. Some people thought about it and went "gently caress, I have no idea" and left it at that. Others just don't have a set belief. Agnostics aren't answering the question. The agnostic view is that gods may or may not exist and we may or may not be able to understand them if they did. Maybe there is one god. Maybe there are thousands. The agnostic doesn't claim to have answers. Agnostics don't have any hostility toward any religions they just have no idea which one is right or if none of them are. Or if all of them are. Who really even knows? To some agnostics the question is largely irrelevant because if gods did exist they wouldn't pay much attention to us, especially not as individuals. To them we would be less than what ants are to us. Maybe I'll take notice of some ants, or even an individual one, on occasion but as a whole I don't really pay much attention to ants. I know they're there but I mostly ignore them. Atheism is the deliberate, total rejection of all religions. The atheist view is that all religions are inherently made up and false. No gods exist, no gods have ever existed, and no gods can ever exist. All supernatural beliefs are inherently false. There is actually quite a major difference between merely not having a religion and declaring that all religions are false. Even so fundies dislike both camps for very similar reasons. Both are suggesting that Christianity might be wrong. The atheist is standing there going "your god does not exist. Why do you believe he does?" while the agnostic is asking "well how do you know your god exists? You might be wrong. He might not or you might be misinterpreting Him." Both are viewed as terrible blasphemy. One is rejecting God. The other is questioning Him. Neither are acceptable to a fundie.
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Jul 22, 2015 09:34
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