this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Eat the rich and obey the Lord (who speaks through the church of course, so obey the church, you'll just have to trust us on that one. Also give us money or you're going to hell).
Not sure about only trusting the church or giving them your money. A ton of church practices like forced conversion go against what he preached. He wanted people to choose God, while one should give their wealth to the cause of building a better world rather than the church. The good Samaritan nonbelievers were better than people who only followed in word alone.
It was forbidden for laypeople to own or translate the bible for hundreds of years because the church wanted to control the message.
The bribes were indulgences you paid to the church to forgive your sins.
A huge part of the bible is about being submissive, obedient, and turning the other cheek. The whole point of organized religion is to keep the masses under the yoke of the powerful.
You're not wrong, but Jesus had some decent ideas, even if they were mostly coopted to support the system. The tragedy of Christ is how his good ideas were used to sanitize a selfish war God enough to help him conquer the world.
It's not as black and white as NT good, OT bad, but Jesus's message of love and forgiveness helped Christianity dominate enough to change how most people thought about gods. In the OT, God is the only one you're supposed to worship, but other gods are explicitly mentioned. The dedication to a single God that helped Judaism survive in perpetual exile allowed the Romans to centralize power better than their previous pantheon could. Even the practices of those who hated the new church were eventually used to create elite monastic orders.
Christians can embody the virtues of their faith, but it isn't something most people can or will do. Just like with Marx's work, people can take helpful lessons from the text, or they can be led against those helpful lessons by the text. Any good meme can be coopted to serve selfish will to power. Any truth can be used to obscure reality. Any value can be turned against itself. We will never be above this self deception, but we can resist it by always questioning our understanding.