It’s because they’ve read the books, know they’re popular, want to be hip and interesting, and completely miss the morality of the books they think they love.

Look at Musk naming barges after space ships from a society where people can change gender practically at will, yet can’t deal with the fact that his daughter is transgender.

you support eternal torture

That’s your projection. I do not support it. I’m against it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. I sincerely hope that everybody gets to go to heaven, or whatever the afterlife will turn out to be, but don’t make a lot of assumptions about what it will be like. Unlike you, apparently. Despite your stated unbelief, you’ve got some pretty clear ideas about what it must be like or what you feel others must believe about it.

It’s true. They have access to true socialised healthcare that they deny to everybody else. They are well aware of its advantages.

Note that several prominent Jews, including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, opposed the creation of a Jewish state in a 1948 letter, warning of fascism and comparing the precursor of Likud to the Nazi party.

I don’t understand why the countries who object to genocide don’t organise their own counter song festival. Let’s see which one gets bigger.

Can’t the US even supply its own ships anymore? Logistics was always America’s strongest point, and now that’s gone too.

Does that require candles?

Again? Haven’t we gone through this already?

Better funded.

People who loudly proclaim in the political arena how God will punish the people they happen to hate, certainly don’t deserve that assumption. But they also don’t deserve the assumption that they’re honest Christians. They do in many ways the exact opposite of what Christ told us to do. And they preach the exact opposite.

It’s heartbreaking that they have come to dominate the public view of what Christianity is. And they play that game really cleverly. But what they do is not about Christianity. It’s about identity, exclusion, and justifying their hate.

I just saw someone on a different forum point out that Christian Nationalists aren’t Christians who also happen to be nationalists; they’re nationalists who use Christianity for their identity.

I don’t think I’m in the minority at all. There are many Christians all over the world who try to live by the words of Jesus, by love and charity. It’s just that US politics and media gets dominated by people weaponizing it to justify their hate, and that has lead a lot of people astray. It’s not something that only happens in the US, but it’s also something that always receives pushback when it happens. Sometimes slower than at other times. Dutch churches seem to be a lot more vigilant about this sort of thing than American churches, but again, consider that people like Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter and many people like then are also Christian.

You truly believe that someone, no matter how bad, deserves eternal torment.

You’re trying to put me in God’s place here. What I believe God expects of me, is to love my neighbour l, which means everybody I get into any kind of contact with, and to love them, help them when they’re in need, even when they are my enemy.

This punishment you obsess about is not ours to execute. It is not ours to judge. It’s ours to love. But sadly there’s no shortage of people who want to claim God’s authority for themselves and deal out punishment to the people they feel deserve it.

I often see Copilot get stuck in a nonresponsive shell after it used cat > file. It’s hilarious to watch the first time, but I’m a bit tired of it by now. Why doesn’t it just edit files like it normally does?

I’m not calling Obama a saint, I’m just saying he didn’t preach hatred like Republicans love to do. His drone strikes, his failure to close Guantanamo, his betrayal of whistleblowers, deportations, were absolutely not good. Personally I think a big part of it was his eagerness to compromise with Republicans. But even if it was all him, I’d say there’s still a massive difference between him and any recent Republican president.

But you can have Obama if you want. It’s not about him, my point is that good Christians do exist even in the US. They just don’t make the most political noise. Jimmy Carter, MLK, plenty of unknown Christian activists who fight for justice in many ways. Maybe they are a minority, but at least some exist.

Yeah, that would be terrible. Fortunately that’s not how it works. It’s not about following the rules, it’s about accepting God’s grace, and about trying to do good. Salvation is not something we earn, it’s something we receive. The way it was taught to me is that all we have to do is to accept it.

Of course we should also do good. Not to earn salvation, but simply because it’s good. Although there’s also Matthew 25 that suggests strongly that if you’re there for people in need, you will be saved even if you’re not aware of God, and if you’re not, you won’t, even if you are. That sounds contradictory, but the idea is that if you accept Jesus, you accept other people, and if you reject other people, you also reject Jesus.

But Christianity is not as rules-based as Islam or Judaism (although I suspect that also varies by interpretation).

The obsession with torture is more a medieval holdover as far as I can tell, and not something any Christian I know obsesses over.

Original sin does not require telling a 2 year old that they’re a terrible person. Quite the opposite: Christians tell their kids that God loves them. But that we are sinners is hard to deny when you look at the state of the world. And even the best of us fall short of what Jesus expects from us, but we should try anyway. To love our neighbour, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, welcome the foreigner, and even love our enemy. Nobody does all of that to the level that we should, but we should try anyway.

But clearly there are people with a more negative approach to this. I think they’re a bit too eager to prove their own point of being terrible people. We should strive to be good instead.

I’m not American, but as far as I can tell, it’s also not universal among American Christians. Obama is not like that at all, and he’s a Christian. (And from my perspective, he’s a lot more Christian than any Republican.) It’s not even true for all Evangelicals, because Jimmy Carter was evangelical.

It’s just that Republicans try to paint the image that to be a Christian, you have to be a self-righteous hypocritical bigot, and too many people are buying into that narrative. Please don’t.

I can’t blame you for thinking that. There are absolutely terrible people who love nothing more than to use Christianity to justify their evil. And I can point out how what they do is the exact opposite of what Jesus said, but they ignore it or shout it down.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t also lots of Christians who do try to follow Jesus’s words. At the moment, for example, the Dutch parliament is considering a law that would make it illegal to help undocumented immigrants (whether asylum seekers or otherwise). A lot of churches are protesting that, because that’s one of the core things that churches have always been involved in: helping people in need, including undocumented immigrants.

The irony that this law is proposed by conservative parties that love to lay claim to the Christian identity is not lost on me, but it should be clear to anyone with the slightest knowledge about the bible which side is actually trying to do what Jesus asks of us.

I’m not here to defend Christianity, and certainly not all the terrible things that have been done in the name of Christianity. People have used Christianity to justify terrible things. But people have also used other ideas and -isms to justify terrible things. It’s not just Christianity, and not just religion. Look at capitalism, communism, nationalism, etc.

When you tell someone from the age of 2 onward that they are a terrible person and can never be good no matter what they do they tend to believe it. Teaching original sin to toddlers is child abuse.

Yeah, don’t do that. No Christian I know does that. It’s a weird, cultish thing that you sometimes see in ultraconservative circles, but not universal. I don’t think they are the majority, but they do seem to be the nost vocal.

Biblical Literalism is a fairly recent heresy. In the past, multiple levels of interpretation of the bible were recognised, of which the literal one was often considered the least important. Treating the bible as purely literal does no justice to the underlying meaning or the context in which it was written.

Not to mention that biblical literalists often tend to ignore the most important parts. Like the words of Jesus.

These are matters of morality. Don’t run such a deeply immoral government if you can’t handle criticism.

No I don’t. I don’t want the world to end, and I certainly don’t want anyone to suffer. Most Christians don’t. The fact that these sickos do, should be a glaring sign that they’re not following Christ. In fact, I’ve heard of supposedly “Christian” MAGAts complaining to their pastor after a sermon that that shit is too liberal, too woke, and doesn’t work. These conservatives preach the polar opposite of what Jesus taught.

If you want the biblical view on this, here’s what Thessalonians 2 has to say about this (just came across this on Mastodon):

“Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, 2 not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us—whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter—asserting that the day of the Lord has already come. 3 Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. 4 He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.”

If I read that, I have to admit that does sound surprisingly like Trump. But he’s not on the side of God.

There’s more stuff about blaspheming and being believed despite his many lies in other books.

I don’t actually believe in the literal interpretation of such end time prophesies, and I certainly don’t see Trump as some diabolical entity, but he is by far the closest match to it that I’ve ever seen.