Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians"
ParadoxSeahorse@lemmy.world 2 days agoI follow your logic, and it does make sense, but I think the problem might be that those arguing against you are American, not Scotsmen /s
Can we agree that there can be good and bad, or perhaps generous vs selfish Christians? Another issue is “Christian” is sometimes used adjectively, “that’s pretty Christian of you”, which is generally used to mean generous, but has nothing to do with someone’s belief in God, Jesus etc.
Probably a person’s belief in supernatural beings has nothing to do with their ethics, morality or generosity, it’s just that in some societies at certain times there are perceived correlations, and irrespective of whether these reflect reality or not, they, through deliberate conflation of religion, morality, politics etc. can color people’s opinions of those belonging a specific religion.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I very much agree with that. There’s a ton of stuff being mixed up together.
There’s cultural and political Christianity, that both neither require faith (or even belief) in Christ or really have anything to do with Christianity as a religion at all.
And that’s quite a bit of the issue at hand. You have people like Trump, who has no connection to Christianity (the religion) at all, who runs as the “champion of Christian values”, while being pretty much the opposite of that. Because it’s political Christianity.
And here you get a ton of this “us vs them” into play, that doesn’t really have anything to do with Christianity (the religion) at all.
Cultural Christianity is in a very similar boat. In my country, ~70% of the people say they are Christian, according to census data, and a total of ~78% of the people say they belong to some organized religion (Christianity, Islam, …), but only 22% of the people say they believe in some kind of God.
So more than two thirds of these so-called religious people, are not Christian by religion, but Christian by culture. I personally know quite a few people who don’t believe in God, don’t go to church, but who want to marry in a beautiful gothic church and use their Christian label to hate on foreigners and their foreign religions.