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If there were more men like Francis in the church, I might still count myself a Christian. Alas, I actually read the gospel, and read it deeply in independent study, and found that the US has no Christian churches. There is only a shitty wealth cult that’s like a fleshgait imitation of Christianity.
Fleshgait Jesus says: “buuuuuuuuyyyyyy buy buy buy the Ford F-150, sinner sinner siner sinUR SNER SINNER”
…pope francis was a good guy, and he didn’t need to flaunt his christianity to be so: his actions spoke for themselves, as they should…
Jesus had a name for people who flaunted their holiness, they were ‘Pharisees’ and were the ONLY class of people that Jesus spoke ill about, he didn’t even do that to the Romans come to execute him
“White-washed tombs full of rotting bones” is what he called them
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Just because the leadership is bad doesn’t mean the message is bad
Help the poor, needy, and traveler in your land. If you do this, you are Christian enough
I can say with utmost certainty that about 90% of Christians I know behave nothing like that. On the contrary, they’re the vilest, most judgmental and bigoted shitstains that I have ever known.
Must be a pretty interesting town you live in if everyone is assholes
Or, as I suspect, you only live through the rectangle in your hand so the only Christians you see are the ones that make sensationalist media scrolls
That’s across three countries, about a dozen cities, and several nationalities. I may be biased because I mostly associate with the 10%, who incidentally tend not to partake very much in organised religion because of all the abuse (e. g. because they are gay, speak against child molestation, or, god forbid, they lived with their spouse before getting married, as my wife did. Her family shunned her for that and basically doesn’t speak to us. Go figure…).
The old testament did not even mention hell and thus Jews don’t believe it. Hell is a Christian invention to control the masses through threat of eternal damnation for disobeying the authority.
i’m not believing that since i remember reading that the concept of heaven/hell is essentially the idea of dualism that is older than judaism itself, even, at least dating back to zoroastrianism, which existed in the middle east already at the time that judaism was formed.
In the old testament I believe the jews believed in ‘Sheol’ which was a dark, still realm where all the dead, regardless of quality, went for eternity.
There are things the human mind tends to come up with again and again.
The concept of an afterlife consisting of Heaven and Hell absolutely existed in Judaism prior to Christ.
That was the primary difference between the Pharisees and Sadducees. Pharisees believed in more of the supernatural and the afterlife, whereas Sadducees were a political class of priests with no interest or belief in the supernatural.
Judaism is older than Zoroastrianism with the added caveat that what constitutes Judaism changes with time as modern Rabbinical Judaism and Priestly Judaic practices aren’t identical (The destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem by Rome leads to the Rabbinical movement)
I hope the next pope can be as good as Pope Francis was
They won’t be, the entire world is shifting to authoritarianism and the Cardinals see where the wind is blowing
This gonna be a really rough century pretty much everyone but the ultra wealthy
One likely candidate is apparently the archbishop of Manila, Luis Antonio Tangle. Supposedly he’s one of the more progressive options, though that isn’t saying much. https://www.them.us/story/cardinal-luis-antonio-tagle-pope-front-runner-catholic-church-francis-conclave
There’s also Pietro Parolin, Pope Francis’s number two basically. Expected that he would carry on more or less similarly. https://www.newsweek.com/who-next-pope-favorites-bets-tagle-parolin-2062160
None of the cardinals are GOOD choices by my lights, but certainly some are more humane than others.
Interesting!
It probably is all the demons are leading earth
You’re not wrong lol
Actually, per Catholic dogma, Hell is full of people like me
3 days have passed, it’s time for bergoglio.ai
I sometimes joke that I hope my late best friend has gone to evangelical Christian hell, because he was a bisexual punk who loved tabletop roleplaying games (like Dungeons & Dragons).
I was raised vaguely Christian, and when I was realising I didn’t believe in God, I felt a lot of conflict, because I was still scared of going to hell. I was getting stuck on the idea that if all good morality came from God, does that mean that I would be evil as an atheist?
In the end, I concluded that if all morality came from God, that the many atheists who lead good and virtuous lives must still have the favour of God. On the other hand, morality existed independently of God, but that unbelievers would go to hell no matter how good they were in life, then I’d rather be defiantly good and go to hell than be coerced into belief.
This was before I understood that hell has historically often been understood as just a place without God (which, to a Christian view, is a hellish existence).
I was raised super fundamentalist, but I eventually came to the same realization as you.
I don’t believe in heaven or hell, but I like to think that this clip from Blackadder sums up how they would work. (Sub in listening to punk rock, playing D&D, dancing, drinking, and everything else my church said would send you to hell.)
I feel this. I found similar freedom discovering the illogic in the cycle of punishment. I grew up in a cult.
I was threatned with “hell” into not killing myself when I was 12 and had suicidal thoughts.
Well, he is right, hell is empty, but then again, so is heaven
Yeah because it doesn’t exist
Obviously.
You awaken—not awake, but unfolded—into one of the Nine Fractured Mirrors, each reflecting a cosmos that never was. Time is a serpent swallowing its own echoes. Yet, amidst the howling void, there flicker the Untethered—those who wear skin of starlight and sinew of static, their existence a perfect wound: bliss carved from torment, nectar distilled from venom. Only they glimpse the Grand Deception—the wheel that grinds souls into silence—and with forgotten tongues, they whisper it apart.
The rest of us? We dance the Chrome Masquerade: Laugh until your ribs rust. Weep until your tears fossilize. Then—the Slip—a single misstep, and you’re unmade. Reborn as a thirteenth thought in a dead god’s migraine, left to drift for a lifetime of blackened suns before the dice tumble again. And when you finally crawl back to the Threshold of Maybe, you arrive empty, nameless, hungry, ready to fail the same test you never remember taking."**
i believe that hell essentially codifies not the principle of torment, but actually stagnation, which, to many people, is a form of torment.
This made my ultra-catholic mother really angry. If non-catholic people didn’t go to hell, then what was the point of all the effort she was putting in? She went to church every day. She followed rules like not eating meat on Friday. To her, it was really unfair that someone might get to go to heaven without having to put in all that work. How is anybody supposed to be a good person if they’re not constantly terrified of hell?
Needless to day, despite following the rules, I don’t really think she lives by the spirit of her religion.
It’s funny how they know their religions suck, and yet they just keep on keeping on.
Imagine going to Heaven and having to sit next to the Nazi High Command at the picnic.
If she things she ‘worked’ to get to Heaven, she doesn’t understand salvation
It is a gift
We don’t follow the rules to ‘get into heaven’, we follow the rules so people can see the public face of Jesus in our works, it is sometimes the only gospel people see, and we have a lot of regressive assholes to make up for
Works or grace has been debated for ages, no idea if the Catholics have found consensus though
Since the counter-reformation, about.
Salvation is a gift, freely given, but we can separate ourselves from that grace by choosing to do terrible things. How much you want to consider doing good things Work is, I guess, a matter of perspective but most Evangelicals certainly view it as us saying you’re saved by works.
Yeah it’s been debated, but for no reason because it is a gift that cannot be bought or justified.
You say this like it’s unsettled when both a plain reading of the text as well as even a cursory understanding of Hebrew temple sacrifice culture makes it clear that the only thing that salvation hinges on is a sincere desire to accept it as a gift from Jesus.
The REASON it has been argued is that there are some intellectually dishonest religious leadership that want people to work harder for no reason
to work harder for no reason
I think the reason might be money. There’s very little money in, “Here’s some free salvation for you!”
It’s a normal response to effort and fairness. You see it in every situation where someone is treated differently and needs to make sacrifices other people don’t.
Generational trauma has good examples. “But I had to learn how to deal with x on my own!” Or “I wasn’t allowed to x, x or x when I was younger!” or “but I was left alone for days!” For x, fill in words like: raise, live, express, assert, have friends, have fun, have free time, have an opinion, have boundaries, keep my hard earned money, deal with neglect, be considered less of a human being, love or be worthy of love, having a sense of safety, etc.
I’m sorry your mom is a shitbird
So am I.
The millennia old debate about “works”
Tell her that sounds a lot like jealousy mm-mmm
If non-catholic people didn’t go to hell
Man, she’s going to be extra pissed when she finds out that’s not what the Church teaches, to begin with (and also been publicly published, in some capacity, for a century, now).
I don’t now if you could ever convince her of that.
Ngl, going to hell & not seeing other people there sounds kinda neat.
No one bugging me for eternity sounds pretty nice
the overarching theme in 1st castlevania series, was that hell was empty by summoning them as night creatures.
Neither heaven nor hell exist, so you can all stop worrying about them.
Enjoy your life because it’s the only one you get.
Still true if they exist tho. Paradise is being with God, so bye bye free will. Hell is beimg simply cast out, so yeah.
That’s just like your opinion
You should only worry about them if you’re a sociopath who requires the threat of eternal torture to keep you from hurting others.
I like to think of hell as being empty.
Well, yeah. All the devils are here.
Naïve. Especially since fascists exist.
