Lunatech @Lunatech@social.cleverlibre.org

@SrRochardBunson @AdmiralFrosty No, I have not read the book youmentioned ("The Sermon on the Mount") and at this point I tend to have a PTSD type reaction whenever I encounter church/Christian type stuff, even seeing church scenes on TV sometimes makes me uncomfortable just because on some level I fear I will be tempted to be dragged back into that mess and I don't want any part of it. I feel like I have experiencerd religion, got my fill of it, and don't need it anymore. Also I do have some beliefs that are totally incompatible with what most "Christian" churches believe today (my belief that Paul was a con artist that brought his Pharisee training and beliefs into the early Christian religion being just one of them).

Speaking of books, though, I will mention one that really helped me understand things a bit better, but it comes with a big caveat. It is "The God of Eden" by William Bramley and often you can find it at a public library, maybe through interlibrary loan. It helped me understand how religion has been used to manipulate peope.

But I said there is a caveat, and it is this: The author believes extraterrestials have interfered in the development of humankind, to serve their own purposes. If you agree with that premise or can overlook it, you may enjoy the book. If you think that's absolutely nonsense and can't even entertain it as a work of fiction, then you won't. I look at it this way, if you can believe some of the fantastical tales in the Bible (especially the old testament) then you are already believing in things that modern science would say in nonsense. On the other hand, a lot of the Bible would be more believeable if you can accept that "sufficiently advanced technologies" may have been at play. If you can believe in angels and demons and heaven and hell, then you already believe in "extraterrestrial" beings (because they are not of this earth) and extraterrestrial locations. It doesn't matter if such beings come from another planet, another reality, another dimension, or some place we don't yet fully understand, all you really need to accept is that we can be visited by beings from elsewhere, some of which simply wish to take our resources and (where possible) enslave us.

Some of Bramley's conclusions are probably incorrect (always a risk when an author writes about something he can't possibly have experienced personally) but still it was another of the things that helped in my #deconstructing process.

My point is that for me the biggest change was realizing that you can't take what they terach you in church at face value. Sometimes they outright lie, but more often they deliberately give you a very incomplete picture of whatever they're preaching or teaching. In many cases they know more than they are telling, but they don't want to say a word that might make someone think they don't need a chuch or religion anymore. After all, that collection plate isn't going to fill itself! (Don't even get me started on the outright lies they tell to support compulsory tithing; if lies could send people to the "hell" that they believe in, then every time a fundamentalist preacher preaches about tithing they would be securing a spot for themselves in the hottest part!).

@SrRochardBunson @AdmiralFrosty As for breaking the hold of the cult of MAGA, if there is a way, I sure haven't found it. But I have a bit of a unique perspective on it. If you believe that Jesus actually existed (and it does not matter to me if you do or don't, because thery do or say they do), then the thing you should be asking is what's up with the so called "Apostle" Paul? I mean, if you look at the whole story behind him, you might conclude that he could have been the George Santos of his day. Jesus had warned his followers that "false christs" would come after him, but then when Paul shoed up with a wild story about having a vision in the desert, Peter accepted him and it was all over. I mean, Paul could have been a grifter for all we know.

But the thing is that his writings are what the far right bases a lot of their theology on. Jesus' "sermon on the mount"? If you are really lucky you might hear bits and pieces of it at Easter in a MAGA-type church, otherwise it's primarily all Paul, all the time. Jesus got four books in ther bible, how many did Paul get (I actually don't know because some are disputed as to authorship, but it is way more than four). Paul was supposedly a "reformed" Pharisee, but if you read his writings, they sure don't sound like the writings of someone who had left their Pharisee beliefs behind. And which two groups did Jesus despise the most? The Scribes and the Pharisees! I don't know what he had against the Scribes (possibly they edited the scriptures in ways that oppressed the people?) but his hatred of the Pharisees was that they put oppressive burdens on all the "little people" but would not lift a finger to help them in their time of need or distress. And Paul's writing are so legalistic that the probable reason they were included in the scriptural canon by the early Catholic church was to be able to control and oppress people.

Virtually all the verses that MAGA types commonly use to justify their terrible behavior and beliefs come from either the old testament or more often, the writings of Paul. They are not doing what Jesus commanded on the Sermon on the Mount or in most of his other teachings. But the problem is that if they go to church they are sitting under preachers who are willing to twist the scriptures any way they can to keep people in the church, but of course the fatal flaw in Christianity is that they never question whether the writings of Paul hould have been included in Biblical canon in the first place. If those books were removed from the Bible it would take all the steam out of most of their hate (or at least the biblical justification thereof).

I mean you could ask them whether they are following Jesus or they are following Paul, but they'd probably just think you a smartass, or try to convince you that the teachings/writings of the two are not incompatible (if nothing else, Christians are great at coming up with justifications for Bible inconsistencies and horrbile doctrines). So I honestly have no idea how you reach them.

@SrRochardBunson @AdmiralFrosty The major difference in the two denominations, at least as it was explained to me, is that the AoG believes that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three separate distinct personalities. The CoG somehow decided that there was only one person, Jesus, and that the Father and Holy Spirit are just other manifestations of Jesus (it is why they are sometimes known as the Jesus-only crowd). Both think their view is right and that the others aren't really Christians, but instead a cult. Maybe that has softened some recently but it was a big deal a few decades back.

@SrRochardBunson @AdmiralFrosty Also I must apologize for sending what is essentially a Christian tract in response but at the time I read it, in the late 1990's, I still was more or less trying to cling to the Christain faith even as I was finding myself more at odds with it. So at that point I would not have read anything outwardly hostile to Christianity, but that tract got to me. I don't agree with the conclusion anymore but it was something that got to me at that point in my life.

@SrRochardBunson @AdmiralFrosty Assemblies of God (the other big #pentecostal denomination in the USA) believes exactly that same shit. In fact that was the point at which I started to break with the church. Way back when I cane across this slightly irreverent tract (which contains several now dated cultural references):

https://web.archive.org/web/20070820045150/http://www.godstruthfortoday.org/Library/priddy/ibi_4_2.htm

I read that and my thought was, those preachers study the original languages and they had to have known that there were three completely different words with different meanigs that were all translated as "hell", but in over two decades of going to church I never once heard that fact talked about from the pulpit or in Sunday school. Basically, according to their own book, the "hell" that we were all so terrified of is reserved for the devil and the fallen angels only, not for humans. But of course that was the big secret that they did not want to reveal because fear of "hell" was about the only thing that kept some people in the church. My question was, if they were willing to mislead us on something so core to our beliefs as that, the thing that had given us nightmares as kids and was a constant background source of terror and #ReligiousTrauma in our lives, then what ELSE had they been lying to us about?

Quite a bit, as it turns out, but I can't contain it all in a toot. But once you start to realize that preachers lie all the time, even about fundamental things, it really helps you put things in the proper persperctive.

I also started #deconstructing around 2000. I suspect a lot of people did, and for the same reason: The Internet had just become widely available, and suddenly with the click of a mouse we could look into things they would not let us discuss in #church. And when you start to realize your religion is not the nice, neat, tied up with a bow thing you had been led to believe, that can set you on the path of #descontruction.

@mikelittle Do you still have any connection to #Wordress? If so could you ask them why on earth they still make it easy to share posts to the #birdsite but not to #Mastodon? I am talking about blogs on the free Wordpress.com site, not a self-hosted or cloud-hosted blog on someplace other than wordpress.com. I understand that if you you are running the Wordpress software then there are addons that will let your readers post to Mastodon, but even there it is not natively supported, you do need to use an addon. But if you are using the free Wordpress.com site for a personal blog, there is no such option (it is possible to hack a share link on older accounts but that option seems to have disappeared for newer ones).

@drajt I am sorry to hear that. I think in the USA we are very slowly coming to the realization that if we want to build things for the world market we need to fully switch to metric, but we have too many stupid people here who think the metric system is some kind of communist plot or something for it to happen anytime soon. It would be a shame if you guys went backwards on that but in the world we live in today nothing would surprise me.