Strange we rarely hear from the vast majority or least the vast majority doesn’t speak out to condemn their hateful brothers and sister, in fact I’ve yet to meet one of these open and accepting Christians in my 44 years on this earth and I live in a heavily populated christian city.
kaitco@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The vast majority rarely speak on anything.
I’m sorry you’ve never met one of these “open and accepting” Christians. I haven’t met someone who’s been to the IST, but I know people have been there. I think it would be nice if you open your mind to the idea that there are people that exist that you’ve not met.
cmoney@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’m sure they exist, My point was they aren’t the majority. I’ve met plenty of nice people and nice Christians, My experience with Christians as a majority is they aren’t open or accepting,
kaitco@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Again, I’m sorry that this has been your experience. This hasn’t been mine.
I came to Christianity at an age when most people leave religion. I went from having nothing and no one to having a steady family who love and support me and give me others to love and support in kind. My church family is open and welcoming. We just removed a minister who began an opening prayer admonishing gays because when he was told “we don’t do that here” he got mad about it.
I wholly recognize that there is a set of people who scream about un-Christian things in the name of Christianity, but I reject the notion that these people are representative of the majority of Christians.
Gonkulator@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Cool cool, a few bad apples and all that. I’ll accept that you personally are surrounded by apple pie christians who call their mother every week. Whole lotta atheists like this as well. What is the net benefit of teaching children lies and magical thinking? What is the benefit of eschewing logic and reason? Can we all just be decent people minus magical sky fairy beliefs? Also the bible is evil as fuck. Im assuming you gloss over the genocide, murder, rape, slavery, treating women as livestock that is PROMOTED by your god?
cmoney@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Maybe if more good people like yourself spoke out against the hateful ones Christianity would attract more people.
HelixDab2@lemm.ee 8 months ago
So. Let me tell you a little not-so-secret. That is precisely how I used to get people to convert to Mormonism, when I was a Mormon missionary. The people most vulnerable to conversion were people that were in the middle of shitty life circumstances, and had no social support network. We would love-carpet-bomb them shit out of them; we would talk to them several times a week, we would make sure that member in the local ward–which is the basic congregation for Mormons is called–reached out to them, invite them to church activities to meet people, and would inundate them with religious nonsense. All the while, we were implying that if they were just willing to believe the nonsense, then this large, ready-made family-slash-social-support-network could be theirs. But if they didn’t convert, we were going to leave them, and they’d be alone again. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work for shit with people that had large networks and strong families, because they didn’t have any need for what we could offer. The people without support would mistake the good feelings about the community for being god telling them that the religious nonsense was true.
And it goes the other way too; the Mormon church keeps people so busy doing church things that Mormons probably won’t have any non-Mormon confidants. That, in turn, makes leaving very, very hard.
So, ask yourself, and be honest: would you have converted if you had had strong friends that already loved and supported you? If you had met similarly supportive people that were Muslim, Jewish, or members of the Satanic Temple (and my local TST groups has some pretty great people that are genuinely kind, loving, and open), would you have chosen to convert to Christianity?