This has been a growing thing for awhile. I’ve been an audio engineer for 16 years. It’s common for audio engineers to work in churches for our first 10+ years because it’s stable work in an inherently difficult industry to get started in. I amplify things for a living, but I draw the line at hate speech, so I’ve always left church gigs after they do hate speech, so I’ve worked at a lot of churches… They used to put on a big show of forced compassion for victims of extreme weather events. The last three churches I worked at shifted to the “well if they would’ve worshiped the TRUE god, they probably would’ve lived” shit during demented don’s first term. I haven’t taken another church gig since the industry bounced back from covid and never will. Church people are horrible.
I worked the sound board for my parents church for the better part of a decade as a teenager into early 20s.
When I left after a guest pastor was allowed to do a sermon on how we should all hate lgbt groups and minorities because “God put us in a position of power over them for a reason” I swapped a bunch of cables around, turned every dial to max, and left important cables unplugged and mixed with similar looking cables.
I denied doing anything when my parents brought it up, but since I didn’t do anything illegal like breaking equipment I wasn’t worried about it.
I guess they tried to fix it themselves, which caused issues with the board and ended up replacing most of the sound system anyway before the end of the year while spending millions of dollars on church expansion instead of helping the community (which they claimed for years that they were doing despite straight up telling homeless people attending services they needed to leave)
despite straight up telling homeless people attending services they needed to leave
Holy hell, if christ were real he would have such stern words for them on judgement day. It would go something along the lines of “Depart from me, for I never knew you.”
Holy hell, if christ were real he would have such stern words for them on judgement day. It would go something along the lines of “Depart from me, for I never knew you.”
I mean… I don’t believe he was a faith healer, or at least, not legitimately one that actually healed shit. I don’t believe he’s the son of god, or that he did anything miraculous.
And I have no reason to believe any of that.
So, let me ask this: What reason to I have to believe he wasn’t a charlatan getting rich off the people around him- including the destitute that gave everything to be healed? One would will also notice that most of his closest disciples were in fact successful businessmen. And that he preferred to hang around rich-people’s homes.
He never collected payment or received money, for one thing. He literally told rich people to sell what they have and give to the poor. If you were to analyze him politically through a modern lens, he would be either a socialist or a communist. He doesn’t need supernatural powers for that to be true.
You understand he gave the same greedy-ass command to the poor and desperate, right?
That’s how his cult worked. You get hooked with fake-ass miracles. You’d move out of your home, sell all your shit and give all your money to the cult.
That is, in point of fact, how they work to enrich the cult’s leadership.the rich guy didn’t walk away because he was a greedy rich guy. He walked away because he saw it for what it was: a grift.
They didn’t work to “enrich their leadership” until centuries later.
Evidence?
Early on, it was about sharing all you have and owning everything in common. Which, funny enough, is exactly how communism claims to work.
Funny enough, there was inequality in the followers of Jesus, too. Or did you think the “Crowds™️” all got to hang out at rich people banquets and with prostitutes?
Go read the bible again. Start with the old testament. pay attention to the Law and to the prophets. and then go to the new testament. and everytime it says ‘and they did x to fulfill y’, ask yourself, ‘did they really fulfil y, or are they just making shit up.’ And then read the supposed words of jesus and ask yourself, ‘is this the language of someone who loves someone and wants what’s best for them, or is this the language of someone whose exploiting them?’
Cuz telling people to hate their parents and to leave them and join a vagabond doomsday cult is not particularly loving. It’s isolating. And you will notice, that Jesus targeted the desperate and the vulnerable. Like very con artist faith healer in history. the kinds of people so desperate they would give up everything they have.
I kind of understand these pseudo Christian American nationalists to be so far gone they’d immediately think that’s not Jesus. He’s not white enough and says progressive things.
Yeah, they’d call him a commie and a hippy and they’d chase him away and say he’s a danger to their children.
It reminds me of the metaphor where a guy shows up to his own dinner party in rough travel garments and no one recognizes him so he kicks them all out and invites random people off the street instead.
Or like the whole “When did we see you and not minister to you?” part.
I’m not religious anymore and I don’t really believe in anything, but it’s still pretty clear to me (and always has been) that jesus was nothing like the typical american christian fundie evangelical types portray him as and that those people are all hypocrites. So it still annoys me when people look at those people as examples and try to paint that as the epitome of what christianity was supposed to be from the start. Like, it had clearly been co-opted and distorted over the millennia since it started and people just act like what we see today is somehow its truest and most essential form. It’s a bit ridiculous.
if christ were real he would have such stern words for them on judgement day
Or he’d say something about homeless dogs not deserving bread. I don’t understand why anyone glazes Jesus, he was a delusional narcissist and a massive hypocrite.
That was a metaphor for why he shouldn’t have to heal the Greek woman, who then ended up convincing him that he was wrong and should heal her anyway. If he was a delusional narcissist he would have doubled down on never being wrong or changing his mind about anything ever. Narcissists don’t say “Hey actually yeah, you’re right and I was wrong. Here you go.”
Bear in mind, the Greeks had previously conquered the region and were viewed as basically settler-colonialists there at the time. It would be like a French person in Algiers begging a local Algerian community leader for free handouts
If he was a delusional narcissist he would have doubled down on never being wrong or changing his mind about anything ever. Narcissists don’t say “Hey actually yeah, you’re right and I was wrong. Here you go.”
Did he ever admit to not being god? Did you miss all the sermons about how he, Jesus, is the only path to salvation? He even let himself get killed for it. Psycho shit.
That stuff is mostly editorialized later by the people who wrote the books with various agendas. In the Book of Matthew at least, he does very little claiming to be god or the only path to salvation.
It’s more like “You religious hypocrites and rich fucks better stop being such goddamn assholes and start actually taking care of people or so help me I swear I will incinerate you.”
Paraphrasing, of course.
To everyone else he’s like “Y’all are alright, just take care of each other and stop being so damn forlorn all the time.”
And yeah he let himself be a martyr. I guess he took his pacifism seriously, or maybe he didn’t want his followers to all get slaughtered if they tried fighting for him. It’s hard to say exactly, but I don’t think “He got beaten, insulted, and killed by the entrenched powers because he wouldn’t stop making them look like the self-centered and greedy idiots that they are” is a very good argument for “actually he was a psycho narcissist who never knew when to stop.”
That stuff is mostly editorialized later by the people who wrote the books with various agendas.
All of the gospels were written 30+ years after he died. How are you discerning which content to ignore?
In the Book of Matthew at least, he does very little claiming to be god or the only path to salvation.
In Matthew 7, he asserts that listening to his words is equivalent to building on solid stone, and that ignoring him is equivalent to building on sand.
Matthew 10:
“Whoever publicly acknowledges me I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven.”
Matthew 16:
“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
Matthew 28:
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”
Etc. And you didn’t answer my question. Did he ever admit that he is not god? Or did he insist on that narcissistic delusion until it killed him?
It’s more like “You religious hypocrites and rich fucks better stop being such goddamn assholes and start actually taking care of people or so help me I swear I will incinerate you.”
“I help people if they’re the right race. I believe people should give up their valuables, except this oil we’re gonna pour on me in a needless symbolic display. Anyone who doesn’t listen to me (despite my conflicting messages) will suffer, my daddy will beat you up, and he is me.”
And you mentioned the threat of hell. Yeah, that’s psychotic and abusive. He’s using fear to manipulate people.
To everyone else he’s like “Y’all are alright, just take care of each other and stop being so damn forlorn all the time.”
Nothing says “I care” more than dismissing someone’s feelings, huh?
And why does he think there is no reason to worry? Because he believes in heaven. It’s a death cult.
And yeah he let himself be a martyr. I guess he took his pacifism seriously
Or he was an idiot.
maybe he didn’t want his followers to all get slaughtered if they tried fighting for him.
But that happened anyway, he got himself and other people killed with his bullshit.
It’s hard to say exactly, but I don’t think “He got beaten, insulted, and killed by the entrenched powers because he wouldn’t stop making them look like the self-centered and greedy idiots that they are” is a very good argument for “actually he was a psycho narcissist who never knew when to stop.”
Nor was that my argument, jackass. He was a delusional narcissist because he claimed to be god. He used baseless supernatural claims to manipulate people, often to the detriment of everybody. 2000 years later and we’re still dealing with the fallout from his ridiculous claims. Real children die in the name of fake gods.
We can talk about one good thing he said, the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But A) he did not invent that concept, and B) he did not live by it. He explicitly positioned himself as being above everyone else, as being closest to god. He told deadly lies, which most people do not want others to do to them.
“Judgement Day”, when Christ promises to come back and murder all non-believers and torture them for all eternity; He claims He was GOD during the great flood, too.
I was raised to be Christian, but someone screwed up and taught me to care about others instead of teaching me that God wants me to profit from their suffering. I think because of that I could never look at it the way they do.
During one of the times that Haiti was the “focus of God’s wrath”, I said that it seemed more like a consequence of our godlessness rather than theirs.
If God can let innocent people die when we care about them, why do we assume God is punishing the people who die that we don’t care about. Maybe God is taking the people we abuse away from us. Maybe the lesson we should be taking is that we should do more to stop poverty and illness and suffering rather than patting ourselves on the back for being lucky in our birth.
Of course, I don’t actually believe in God, so I don’t make those arguments. However, those would be the arguments I’d make if I did believe.
I’ve already heard some Nationalist Christians (Nat-Cs) going on about the same thing, just because they “weren’t a Christian nation”
It’s never limited to one religion, and it’s usually the abrahamic ones that are the worst.
This has been a growing thing for awhile. I’ve been an audio engineer for 16 years. It’s common for audio engineers to work in churches for our first 10+ years because it’s stable work in an inherently difficult industry to get started in. I amplify things for a living, but I draw the line at hate speech, so I’ve always left church gigs after they do hate speech, so I’ve worked at a lot of churches… They used to put on a big show of forced compassion for victims of extreme weather events. The last three churches I worked at shifted to the “well if they would’ve worshiped the TRUE god, they probably would’ve lived” shit during demented don’s first term. I haven’t taken another church gig since the industry bounced back from covid and never will. Church people are horrible.
I worked the sound board for my parents church for the better part of a decade as a teenager into early 20s.
When I left after a guest pastor was allowed to do a sermon on how we should all hate lgbt groups and minorities because “God put us in a position of power over them for a reason” I swapped a bunch of cables around, turned every dial to max, and left important cables unplugged and mixed with similar looking cables.
I denied doing anything when my parents brought it up, but since I didn’t do anything illegal like breaking equipment I wasn’t worried about it.
I guess they tried to fix it themselves, which caused issues with the board and ended up replacing most of the sound system anyway before the end of the year while spending millions of dollars on church expansion instead of helping the community (which they claimed for years that they were doing despite straight up telling homeless people attending services they needed to leave)
Hero
Holy hell, if christ were real he would have such stern words for them on judgement day. It would go something along the lines of “Depart from me, for I never knew you.”
What you did was pretty based though.
I mean… I don’t believe he was a faith healer, or at least, not legitimately one that actually healed shit. I don’t believe he’s the son of god, or that he did anything miraculous.
And I have no reason to believe any of that.
So, let me ask this: What reason to I have to believe he wasn’t a charlatan getting rich off the people around him- including the destitute that gave everything to be healed? One would will also notice that most of his closest disciples were in fact successful businessmen. And that he preferred to hang around rich-people’s homes.
He never collected payment or received money, for one thing. He literally told rich people to sell what they have and give to the poor. If you were to analyze him politically through a modern lens, he would be either a socialist or a communist. He doesn’t need supernatural powers for that to be true.
You understand he gave the same greedy-ass command to the poor and desperate, right?
That’s how his cult worked. You get hooked with fake-ass miracles. You’d move out of your home, sell all your shit and give all your money to the cult.
That is, in point of fact, how they work to enrich the cult’s leadership.the rich guy didn’t walk away because he was a greedy rich guy. He walked away because he saw it for what it was: a grift.
They didn’t work to “enrich their leadership” until centuries later.
Early on, it was about sharing all you have and owning everything in common. Which, funny enough, is exactly how communism claims to work.
Evidence?
Funny enough, there was inequality in the followers of Jesus, too. Or did you think the “Crowds™️” all got to hang out at rich people banquets and with prostitutes?
Go read the bible again. Start with the old testament. pay attention to the Law and to the prophets. and then go to the new testament. and everytime it says ‘and they did x to fulfill y’, ask yourself, ‘did they really fulfil y, or are they just making shit up.’ And then read the supposed words of jesus and ask yourself, ‘is this the language of someone who loves someone and wants what’s best for them, or is this the language of someone whose exploiting them?’
Cuz telling people to hate their parents and to leave them and join a vagabond doomsday cult is not particularly loving. It’s isolating. And you will notice, that Jesus targeted the desperate and the vulnerable. Like very con artist faith healer in history. the kinds of people so desperate they would give up everything they have.
I kind of understand these pseudo Christian American nationalists to be so far gone they’d immediately think that’s not Jesus. He’s not white enough and says progressive things.
Yeah, they’d call him a commie and a hippy and they’d chase him away and say he’s a danger to their children.
It reminds me of the metaphor where a guy shows up to his own dinner party in rough travel garments and no one recognizes him so he kicks them all out and invites random people off the street instead.
Or like the whole “When did we see you and not minister to you?” part.
I’m not religious anymore and I don’t really believe in anything, but it’s still pretty clear to me (and always has been) that jesus was nothing like the typical american christian fundie evangelical types portray him as and that those people are all hypocrites. So it still annoys me when people look at those people as examples and try to paint that as the epitome of what christianity was supposed to be from the start. Like, it had clearly been co-opted and distorted over the millennia since it started and people just act like what we see today is somehow its truest and most essential form. It’s a bit ridiculous.
Or he’d say something about homeless dogs not deserving bread. I don’t understand why anyone glazes Jesus, he was a delusional narcissist and a massive hypocrite.
That was a metaphor for why he shouldn’t have to heal the Greek woman, who then ended up convincing him that he was wrong and should heal her anyway. If he was a delusional narcissist he would have doubled down on never being wrong or changing his mind about anything ever. Narcissists don’t say “Hey actually yeah, you’re right and I was wrong. Here you go.”
Bear in mind, the Greeks had previously conquered the region and were viewed as basically settler-colonialists there at the time. It would be like a French person in Algiers begging a local Algerian community leader for free handouts
Did he ever admit to not being god? Did you miss all the sermons about how he, Jesus, is the only path to salvation? He even let himself get killed for it. Psycho shit.
That stuff is mostly editorialized later by the people who wrote the books with various agendas. In the Book of Matthew at least, he does very little claiming to be god or the only path to salvation.
It’s more like “You religious hypocrites and rich fucks better stop being such goddamn assholes and start actually taking care of people or so help me I swear I will incinerate you.”
Paraphrasing, of course.
To everyone else he’s like “Y’all are alright, just take care of each other and stop being so damn forlorn all the time.”
And yeah he let himself be a martyr. I guess he took his pacifism seriously, or maybe he didn’t want his followers to all get slaughtered if they tried fighting for him. It’s hard to say exactly, but I don’t think “He got beaten, insulted, and killed by the entrenched powers because he wouldn’t stop making them look like the self-centered and greedy idiots that they are” is a very good argument for “actually he was a psycho narcissist who never knew when to stop.”
All of the gospels were written 30+ years after he died. How are you discerning which content to ignore?
In Matthew 7, he asserts that listening to his words is equivalent to building on solid stone, and that ignoring him is equivalent to building on sand.
Matthew 10:
Matthew 16:
Matthew 28:
Etc. And you didn’t answer my question. Did he ever admit that he is not god? Or did he insist on that narcissistic delusion until it killed him?
“I help people if they’re the right race. I believe people should give up their valuables, except this oil we’re gonna pour on me in a needless symbolic display. Anyone who doesn’t listen to me (despite my conflicting messages) will suffer, my daddy will beat you up, and he is me.”
And you mentioned the threat of hell. Yeah, that’s psychotic and abusive. He’s using fear to manipulate people.
Nothing says “I care” more than dismissing someone’s feelings, huh?
And why does he think there is no reason to worry? Because he believes in heaven. It’s a death cult.
Or he was an idiot.
But that happened anyway, he got himself and other people killed with his bullshit.
Nor was that my argument, jackass. He was a delusional narcissist because he claimed to be god. He used baseless supernatural claims to manipulate people, often to the detriment of everybody. 2000 years later and we’re still dealing with the fallout from his ridiculous claims. Real children die in the name of fake gods.
We can talk about one good thing he said, the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But A) he did not invent that concept, and B) he did not live by it. He explicitly positioned himself as being above everyone else, as being closest to god. He told deadly lies, which most people do not want others to do to them.
“Judgement Day”, when Christ promises to come back and murder all non-believers and torture them for all eternity; He claims He was GOD during the great flood, too.
You don’t know any of this, do you?
He doesn’t claim to murder/torture non-believers, but religious hypocrites and financial oligarchs (merchants) who refused to help the less fortunate.
It’s not that different from revolutionaries today saying they’ll solve the billionaire problems with guillotines.
Where does he do that?
I was raised to be Christian, but someone screwed up and taught me to care about others instead of teaching me that God wants me to profit from their suffering. I think because of that I could never look at it the way they do.
During one of the times that Haiti was the “focus of God’s wrath”, I said that it seemed more like a consequence of our godlessness rather than theirs.
If God can let innocent people die when we care about them, why do we assume God is punishing the people who die that we don’t care about. Maybe God is taking the people we abuse away from us. Maybe the lesson we should be taking is that we should do more to stop poverty and illness and suffering rather than patting ourselves on the back for being lucky in our birth.
Of course, I don’t actually believe in God, so I don’t make those arguments. However, those would be the arguments I’d make if I did believe.
Yeah. Abrahamic religions, followed really nearly by Hinduism.
Never heard of Zoroastrians or Shintoists saying shit like that
BBC News - Big Church Festival ‘devastated’ as man dies after sign falls - BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c158939pz4do
Did they not pray hard enough or what?