Dude, I wasn’t until you (not you OP; the royal you) brought it into my living room. Since you didn’t leave me alone about it for fucking decades and you decided to knock on the door of my house about it, fuck you. Now I’m annoyed.
I was fine letting you believe what you want, until you made it impossible to ignore you, even at my own front door. How would you feel if I knocked on your door asking you to accept satan or Darwin or whatever you think I believe? You’d fucking riot if I had teachers send their kids home with satanist pamphlets, yet I’m supposed to be fine when you sent my kindergartener home from school with bible study pamphlets.
Do you know how fucking hard it was to avoid you brainwashing my child in America? Every weekend retreat was secretly Christian. Everything from the Boy Scouts to many civic organisations offering weekend outings. I had no choice because sleepovers became indoctrination events, but cry as you will, I never had any influence over your kids. I wouldn’t, because your kid’s beliefs were your choice, not mine. I’d never even have considered a stealth Sunday morning church field trip after a sleepover – what even is that?!? Fuck everyone who does that.
Sorry, I’m still salty that I had to spend nearly two decades fending off attempts at indoctrinating my child when I was trying hard to make things his decision, not mine.
I disagree. Religions seek to better each other and form an inclusive community. Cults seek to isolate and separate vulnerable people from their community.
Cults are just desperate people giving up on thinking for themselves.
At a certain point I don’t blame them. I would like to give up on this whole life thing too. I’m pretty tired and it shows in my eyes. If you look into them you can tell that joy once lived there but it’s now an empty hollow. I’m not even kidding
The problem with let go and let God, the let God people want to skull fuck the corpse of human autonomy.
Speaking for myself, I can always go away, signal I’m not interested, or talk about it if I’m in the mood. It’s not much different from any other topic from my point of view.
I also think the prevalence of religion in society is a pretty good reason to be somewhat familiar with the topic, even if you don’t subscribe.
American Christianity behaves a lot like an infectious disease. It wants you regardless of how much you hate it and does demonstrable harm to those who have it.
Yes, that crosses a line. But still, I think I get your point. Maybe it really depends on how aggressive the religious community acts, and how dangerous their specific ideas are. The closer they come to fascism, the less I’d tolerate it.
I’m making a strictly rhetorical point, I certainly don’t mean to equate Christianity with fascism, but the latter often use the former as a vehicle for getting their way. But I’m not sure you’re from the US, those guys have other kinds of issues than us. Well, more of them at least.
Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble, they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.
– Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
yes, but instead of just peril, it blocked bullshit.
BANKSY:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
I don’t even know why we bother sacrificing prisoners on the top of the pyramid by cutting out their hears with an obsidian blade when there are people like you around.
I really wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually got a study saying ‘Advertising is as bad for your mental health as cigarettes are for your physical health.’
Well, yeah. That’s how the world works. Someone says something, and then you think about it. Unless you’re actively being held captive in some basement by a preacher, I’m not sure how this really differs from any other subject that you might find offensive in life.
Ironically, you could change the Christian references to instead be LGBTQ+, and the same faulty logic would still be applicable. I mean, I think I’ve seen that exact sort of post on far-right wing forums.
They're passing a new law in Utah this year that all public schools MUST display the Ten Commandments where every student can see. It doesn't matter if most of the students aren't Christian or if they are from other religious backgrounds - all that matters in Utah is that you conform to the legislatures' narrow view of what a person is ALLOWED to believe.
Sounds like Utah needs to not be receiving federal funding until such time as they reverse that decision. If that is an insufficient incentive to knock it off then add further penalties until they do.
Ask the Utah legislatures and they'll all say they want nothing from the Federal government at all. Yet they gladly accept all the funding they can get if it helps with oil and gas development or to reduce the size of our public parks and monuments.
Fair enough, let’s give them what they want. No more funding, no more enforced open boarder with their neighboring states, no more enforcing of IP claims from Utah, no more use of $ as their currency.
I'm all for that, it would serve them right. But unfortunately they'd find some way to tax the money out of our hides - like they already do, making us taxpayers pay for richer people to send their kids to religious schools rather than public ones.
Utah is like Texas - they WANT to secede from the union, and be their own little country. In a way that's partly the mormon militia at work, feeling like they shouldn't have to answer for any of their actions. And also because right wing politics is enshrined into Utah law at every level.
They passed a law in Kentucky that all schools had to display ‘In God We Trust’ on their walls, so a school decided to do some malicious compliance and framed a dollar bill.
Maybe the Utah schools can post them in the original Hebrew.
In Utah all new license plates must bear the phrase "In God we Trust." Even though the truth is, in "God" I do not trust, and I never did trust in any supernatural being to regulate the events of my life. The Hebrew idea is great, but they won't do it because it's not OK to not be a christian mormon in utah. There are Jewish people here, of course, but they aren't recognized or allowed to talk in school about it.
as hard as the mormons push their religion, this is just wrong. you also have the choice of arches one or the now generally available plain black one, on top of all the special interest ones
It IS a beautiful state, in the Salt lake valley (where I am) with high mountains all around, and in the southern part with the Red Rock canyons and Arches and Zion national park. Breathtaking, in fact. It's just too bad the mormons stopped here and decided "this is the place." Wish they'd gone a little farther north to Colorado instead.
Christianity can’t really be a cult because it isn’t centralized at all. There are definitely christian denominations with some cult like qualities, like the mormons and jehovah’s witnesses, but christianity as a whole is definitely not a cult.
To be clear I’m definitely not saying christianity is good, it has as many problems as any other religion, it just isn’t really a cult, if we apply the word cult so broadly it loses it’s usefulness. If we say christianity as a whole is a cult, then we need a new word to refer to the actual individual groups within christianity that we would usually call cults. It doesn’t really make sense to say that mormons and jehovah’s witnesses are a single cult, so what would we call them? There’s an important distinction to be made between a single group with strict control over its members and a general set of beliefs.
What Christianity really is, just like any sect of it such as Mormonism, is a big business. It rakes in money from the gullible in exchange for promising them a wonderous afterlife full of splendor, and all the mormon virgins a man could want to take advantage of. It's really all just a business.
What reductionism really is, is taking something that exists across many domains (philosophy, art, history, commerce, mythology, culture, language, law, education, governance, etc.) and reducing it to one domain. Usually to justify an opinion or political view.
There is no requirement that a cult be centralized. Christianity and other religions are essentially fandoms(or tribes) organized (somewhat loosely) around shared principles. The major difference between a cult and a fandom is if it is deemed socially helpful or harmful by society (or the ruling class) at large.
I usually use the BITE model when thinking about cults, and it’s kind of difficult for something without any central government to be very culty with that definition. It definitely could be with a different definition though
Looking it up, BITE stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control.
I still think Christianity and religion can be a cult because it is a shared belief in a higher power. And if you mention anything that they perceive as contradicting that belief they will mentally discredit you.
Using the bite model, it is still a cult. The only difference is the degree. The bible clearly labels certain behaviors as bad and others as good. Christians claim the bible to be the one the one true source of authority for the christian faith (for protestants). The implication is that any other source of information that challenges it is wrong. The bible clearly labels certain thoughts as sins and active discourages those thoughts. By labeling even thoughts as sinful and therefore bad it encourages feelings of guilt, and by calling all humans sinful it encourages fear of others. Hence controlling our emotions.
Of course, different denominations will vary in how they think Christianity should be put into practice, but I would wager it is trivally easy to find elements of behavior, information, thought, and emotional control no matter the denomination.
Cult Is just the English version of the French word culte which means the public practice of worship, devotion, adoration, veneration or exaltation. A lieu de culte is any place of worship like a church, a mosque, a synagogue, or a Babylonian temple. Le culte protestant is Protestantism, le culte du soleil means “sun worshipers,” le culte de la performance means the veneration of productivity and competition, and a culte de la personnalité is the adoration of and obedience to a person - whether spiritual, political or entertainer.
This use of the word cult still makes the most sense in English, because we could say all of those French phrases in English and anyone would understand what they meant.
Therefore, by extension, all religions or sects that include devotion to a deity, person or idea are cults including Christianity as a whole and each of its denominations.
Regardless of the etymology, that’s clearly not how it’s used in modern English. The person in the original post definitely didn’t mean “It’s giving theistic religion, friends”
Do you know another way to discuss this problem? And it is a problem. Sometimes you do have to bring something up to talk about how it’s brought up as a brainwashing method.
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