Ask Lemmy

Trick question. They are not.

Ok, that's disingenuous. They are Christians. Except, they are nothing like christ.

I know each person will find a different quality of christ that is most like themselves and attribute that as his defining feature but to me christ was radically liberal. Christ saw the hurting in the world and said "I won't submit to it" but gave himself to it freely. In doing so he freed himself. Christ saw the labrythian rules and dogmas of the prevailing religion of his time; saw how it was punishing people and fought to reform. He knew he has just as much authority over God's word as any prophet or religious person and give himself to make the needed changes that would ease the suffering of everyone. It was that and a dash of magic; the world was changed. Slowly but thoroughly.

He was a brown middle eastern liberal. Nothing like the Christians we see today. If there was a christ for today they would reform again and the cycle of religous power struggle would continue.

It's just a trick to get votes they are as heathen as they come. Since Christians believe in made up bullshit they are easy to trick out of money and votes. It's really not any deeper than that.

Control and conformity. Pseudo-morality.

The control is pretty standard stuff that goes with the authoritarian nature of religion. They place a person in charge who, like the deity, has all the answers and solves all the problems, so long as you believe and support them unquestioningly. If you’re not smart enough to sort out the system that you’ve been told is deliberately complicated and “rigged” you just listen to the Big Man and he’ll sort it all out for you.

Conformity is making the in-group and out-groups. The in-group demands loyalty and support. The out-groups are anyone else you want them to be. Immigrants. Minorities. Other religious groups. Political opponents. It’s ridiculously blatant in US republicans where even if their wives or themselves are personally insulted by their leader they still support and vote for the group. You must conform. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. Very binary thought.

Religion offers the moral angle as well. Despite American Christians, particularly evangelicals, claiming to support Christian ideals they objectively and subjectively do not. The list is too long to process here, but basic greed, hatred, violence, and all the rest of what most of us would consider anti-Christian values are at the forefront of the more outspoken religious Right. Yet they’ve been raised and told that the “godless Left” have no morals, if you’re not religious you can’t have morals, and whatever other tripe that allows them to accomplish the mental gymnastics they go through to claim moral superiority while doing things like making sure migrants drown in rivers trying to cross illegally into the US.

The hypocrisy and mental gymnastics engaged in by the American Right in many facets of their workings, not just their feigned religion, is mind-boggling. They’ve gone so far past the available superlatives describing their hypocrisy and greed that you just have to throw up your hands in disgust and walk away before it drives you crazy.

They don't believe what you assume Christianity is. They believe in Calvinist predestination. They think that whenever something bad happens to someone, that person deserved it.

Christianity is not about compassion and peace.

Forget utilitarian ethics altogether. Think of a twisted version of virtue ethics, where the only virtue is power.

Narcissism and sociopathy flows downwards from the top, submission and people-pleasing flows upwards from the bottom.

From the top down, having power makes you virtuous, and exercising power reflects that virtue.

If you are in a position of privilege and power, if you can kill people and take their stuff and get away with it, that marks you as powerful and to-be-feared, and therefore admirable.

If you are some kind of peasant, the opposite applies: you must be a submissive people-pleaser or face severe punishment.

If you're somewhere inbetween, you do both: oppress those below you, and grovel to those above you. This is virtue on both fronts.

That's conservative morality in a nutshell.

Christianity endorses this structure wholesale. It pats the peasants on the head and tells them they'll be rewarded (one day, not today) for being good little people-pleasers, and puts a final boss at the very top of the org chart so that the powerful can do some token groveling-upwards, and so the peasants have someone else to grovel to when nobody's around. It fits hand-in-glove with everything conservatives love.

Compassion-mercy-and-peace is just marketing spin clipped from the instructions for people-pleasing. Go along to get along, be helpful, don't rock the boat.

You'll notice that the core concept of christianity is earning tolerance from the powerful despite complete degradation. You are utterly worthless garbage and deserve to be tortured with fire forever; only via the sacrifice of an actual god can you can be promoted to salvage - though of course this status remains a completely undeserved gift that you should be overwhelmed with gratitude for.

Like a cop deciding not to murder you this time round: you are so blessed, now pick up that can.

Of course they love it.

Conservatives/Republicans support power structures external to government for guidance on morality and charity. This gives religions power. Democrats/liberals support using the government directly for everything. This reduces the power of religion.

Because moral values don’t come from religious texts. They are transmitted socially and economically. The texts are then used to justify whatever belief system the believer subscribes to.

The real origin of these right-wing beliefs is an interesting question. They arise from a complex cultural and historical process that stems from the material conditions of both ancestral and present-day cultural groupings. My suspicion is that they arose because in these societies, the most successful reproductive and political strategies center around dominance hierarchies. Materially successful people are able to out-compete, out-reproduce, kill, or otherwise coerce people in their societies to adopt values and norms that justify and protect their social dominance and oppression. Even those on the bottom of these hierarchies, like women or the poor must adopt such values or be excluded or attacked.

There are also competing groups that either oppose such hierarchies or have adopted them to a lesser extent. It is from these groups that many Christian ideas originated. In general they tend to originate in urban areas—I suspect this is because there are more opportunities for people to escape from others who wish to dominate them as compared to agrarian societies where access to land or livestock can be monopolized by the powerful. Anonymity and cultural diversity in cities also allow the weak to more easily inflict violence on their dominators without suffering social consequences.

But over time, Christianity spread widely enough that people with different values adopted them. In other cases, the descendants of these anti-hierarchical Christians adopted hierarchical values for various reasons listed above. As the economic and political conditions of society change, people must adapt or die. Unfortunately, some of these adaptations can be harmful to society as a whole even as they benefit their adopters.

They aren’t.

They are the best “Christian”s

One of Jesus’s teachings was about not showing off your faith just to be seen.

Something about not praying in public just so you can be seen and that instead you should go to your closet/room and pray in private where no one can see you.

The one’s following that rule are the ones you will never see but that will still be helping their neighbors, quietly and to no fanfare.

Because if you wear your religion on your sleeve and are highly observant then that means you are conservative and rules focused by nature. People who belong to liberal Christian denominations, like Unitarianism, are rarely heard from because they aren't vocal by nature.

People who are very religious also want to believe that what they follow is the truth but the very existence of nonbelievers casts doubt on this either consciously or subconsciously. "If my beliefs are self evident then how can so many nonbelievers exist?" So they rationalize this as either thinking of you as a sinner who deliberately refuses to accept the "truth" or a poor lost soul in need of saving. Christianity, and some other faiths, is also missionary minded in nature. They are called upon in the New Testament to "spread the word". If you want to grow your numbers and/or your income (i.e. Mormon church) then you are aggressive with missionaries and hunting for converts.

People are also very good at rationalizing their views and cherry picking data to force things to fit their emotionally driven beliefs. Look at conspiracy theorists who dismiss anything that contradicts them as "lies" and "propaganda" but their sources are never questioned.

The bible is full of so many contradictions and so much vague bs. They use it with their pretzel logic to justify whatever atrocity they're into at the time. A lot of them are also narcissists. They're self-important because they're trying to do "god's will."

Every week they gather and listen to a man telling them what to believe, unquestionably, and without evidence.

Then a politician comes along and tells them more things to believe, unquestionably, and without evidence.

They're the most fervent Protestant Christians certainly. I'd say the Catholic demographic probably leans more heavily toward the Democratic party, and the Orthodox will vary by jurisdiction.

I am Caucasian

Are you actually from the Caucasus, like Georgia, Armenia, etc, or do you use the word to mean "European or descendent of Europeans"? Because the USA likes to use the word to mean European-like, which is incorrect, as the caucasus is a very specific region in the border of Europe and Asia.

In my experience lefties in America only claim to be about helping the most vulnerable. When it actually comes down to it, the lefties are perfectly willing to screw over a vulnerable person so long as they are of a certain race or political affiliation.

This isn't really true. A lot of Democrat voters are also Christian. If by "fervent," you mean "hateful," this may be more true. A large percentage of Democrat voters are also Christian, but not as hard-line about LGBT issues, and perhaps not as hard-line about abortion.

The type of Christians that Republicans court are easy to persuade and control. Religion has historically been used to create in-groups and out-groups, and as a form of control.

If one were to take the Christian bible at face-value, they would oppose things like sexual freedom. Most leftists/socialists think about intersectionality, so they would be opposed to people who have the "morals" of many Christians.

Because Abrahamic faiths are first and foremost built on deciding a truth and working backwards to “prove”(convince yourself and brainwash your kids) it.

This works well for right wing ideologies built around social classes and believing whatever you’re told without question.

Add to that that Christians are on average significantly dumber, then all you have to do is tickle their confirmation bias and they won’t give anything you do a second thought.