280
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2026
280 points (90.5% liked)
Not The Onion
21978 readers
1011 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I hate the "those extremists are not REAL members of my religion" rhetoric. We shouldn't forget that christianity also tells us to stone gay men to death, that slavery is good if the victims are from other nations, and that women should subject themselves to their husbands. The European slavers of the past were some of the most horrible people in history, and they were very christian too as they followed these rules to a tee. They did break the laws about respecting your fellow man, sure, but the inverse can be said of the christians who are decent people. They adhere the love thy neighbour rules, but break the rules that say that they should stone gay men. This means that the decent christians are much better people, but not necessarily more or less christian than the slavers of the past.
So if you are a christian and you feel bad by this association, I suggest that, instead of defending your relegion, you re-evaluate it.
I agree with the main argument of what you’re saying. I’m sharing that I’d flag these ones as fascist-forward, not religion-to-the-extreme.
At the end of the day, people are people and you’ll get the worst of us rising to the top in any power structure. In the case of Christianity, moving from a Jewish sect to a formal empire-backing religion of its own may be the worst thing that ever happened to it. Slavery, the crusades, the inquisition, imperial colonialism, they’re all up there too.
Stoning gay men? That’s not Jesus-based, although it is definitely supported by some Christian sects even today. But that supports fundamentalist Judaism, and isn’t what Jesus taught (“whoever is without sin, cast the first stone”).
So the problem then comes down to: what do you do when you share an identity with people who proudly do vile things in the name of that identity?
The teachings of Jesus actually are useful in exploring the answer to that question. He wasn’t Christian, he was Jewish. And he never renounced Judaism, even though he denounced the actions of the contemporary leaders of the Jewish faith.