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Are you a Grinch or a Jesus? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

No idea why you're being downvoted comrade.

New Testament was written in the time of widespread slavery and this is what it had to offer:

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ, not with a slavery performed merely for looks, to please people, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the soul. Render service with enthusiasm, as for the Lord and not for humans, knowing that whatever good we do, we will receive the same again from the Lord, whether we are enslaved or free.

Pretty sure if capitalism existed at that time, it would have the same advice to give wage slaves.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Edit: ok I think you're proving my point, that verse is Ephesians 6:5, which is a letter written by Paul the Apostle (note that this guy is a ex-Pharisee Roman-turned Christian, who has many reasons to co-opt his message)

Here's an actual verse from Jesus

In Luke 4:18-19, Jesus quotes Isaiah in his mission statement: "He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free."

Now, frankly, both Jesus and Paul did use language of slave-master relationship, but it doesn't necessitate that to earthly masters, at least in Jesus' case (as he was a rebel and troublemaker to the local Roman-collaborator Pharisee order) , but merely to God

In fact, I'd prefer this interpretation of Christ, as a culmination to Jewish liberatory practices against debt

Nathan: I just pulled up the full text from Leviticus Chapter 25, verse 10: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you” (with reference to the Jewish word for the periodic debt forgivenesses). And then the last line, “you shall return every man unto his possession, and you shall return every man unto his family.” So that’s interesting. So with the mention of Leviticus Chapter 25—this is really the part of your whole rap, sir, that I just find to be absolutely electrifying—could you describe to us how Jesus fits into this situation as the culmination of Jewish prophecy, as a product of Jewish tradition, and describe Jesus’ role in all this, as described in Luke Chapter 4?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Bible is extremely self contradictory, you can fish out quotes to support nearly anything, as proven by history over and over: https://philb61.github.io/

What Bible simply does not offer however, is a direct condemnation of slavery which would only take one short passage. There's nothing to counterbalance the quote I pasted above, or the quote from the old Testament discussed here: https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/

Given how self contradictory the Bible is, support for slavery is one of the very few points you can get from it with any level of certainty. You can do some mental gymnastics and infer a condemnation of slavery from general statements like "setting the oppressed free", but then you can make pretty much any other concievable point by selecting the passages that can be interpreted to support your point, and ignoring the passages where your point is directly and explicitly refuted.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Fine, I concede my whole argument, following your meterstick...

I now understand that those who are fine with status quo are default pro-status quo

And I guess Jesus kept on affirming it when treating it as a fact of life, in regards to wage labor and slavery...

Matthew 20:1-16

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm sorry, I don't mean to diss Christianity as such! I do think Bible itself offers little to Marxists but there's more to Christian history and tradition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker-priest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Hagerty

I'll be honest, I never looked deeper into this. I was a militant atheist for most of my life and I'm only starting to broaden my horizons, hence my harsh initial reply for which I apologise. Old habits die hard I guess. Our enemy is capital, not religion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

It's not the overall history of Christianity that I'm defending, it's the basis of Jesus that attracted such followers to such religion, if he existed

I still remember the story in which he drove out the sellers from the temple

The time that he drew away Matthew, a tax collector,

And his fate that he was executed by the Roman gov't and its Judean Pharisee collaborators, for challenging the latter's rule

Was he pro-imperial when he got killed for that, like the commenter said?

And even if it's just a story, its not unfeasible that his story was based of separate real life people

The worst I'd call Jesus would be that he is Utopian

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Oh... I see...