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Christianity vs Love Of All Humankind
Central Question:
Why does Christianity hurt so many people?
Why this is important to me:
Growing up everyone said do not blame the church, blame the people. If that is the case, why do I see so much pain caused by christian organizations. It often seems like the PEOPLE are the ones pushing the ORGANIZATIONS to change and love better. Not the other way around. If God is love then He should love all people equally
We are Built to Keep Others Out
Humans are social animals and ill-equipped to live on their own.[10] Tribalism and social bonding help to keep individuals committed to the group, even when personal relations may fray. That keeps individuals from wandering off or joining other groups. It also leads to bullying when a tribal member is unwilling to conform to the politics of the collective.[11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribalism
Religion Creates a Strong Tribe to Keep Others Out
Religion is made to create a strong tribe. As described in the Grooming and Conditioning section religion is made to bring people together into a single unit that depends on its leader for strength. Here is the definition of a tribe as seen in Wikipedia:
Based on strong relations of proximity and kinship, as well as a relations based on the mutual survival of both the individual members of the tribe and for the tribe itself, members of a tribe tend to possess a strong feeling of identity. Objectively, for a customary tribal society to form there needs to be ongoing customary organization, enquiry and exchange. However, intense feelings of common identity can lead people to feel tribally connected.[8]
Religious Dogma and Social Progress Cannot Mix
From the above, I would argue that it is very difficult for a tribe to change. We like our social safety nets, our tribe. That tribe keeps those inside to remain inside by creating means to keep others out. We are safe because we are the same. We can trust those like us. It keeps those inside safe and the bonds intact. This has always made it difficult for a religious tribe to love all people. For how can I trust someone that is different? This makes social progress nearly impossible.
Here is an exerpt from an address givin in 1918 which is as true today as then:
”"”There are not a few circles in our day in which social progress and religious faith are regarded as being in at least a semi-unfriendly relation. The leaders in the cause of the industrial classes indeed, like the Social Democrats and the Syndicalists, often thoroughly denounce religion. Workers for general social amelioration (change) are frequently indifferent to religious faith. Great masses of people are convinced that religion does not help towards social progress and so regard it as at best a dead weight upon society. On the other hand, when churches or religious groups become vigorously active for social progress, the alarm is sure to be raised that their religion is becoming “mere social ethics.” When social topics are considered in the pulpit or at the mid-week service, the fear is expressed that real religion is being crowded out. When religious leaders throw themselves into social causes, they are suspected of having lost faith in “spiritual” forces”””
Eugene W Lyman, Harvard Theological Review April 1914
Colonialism, Making Indigenous People Feel Unhuman via Christianity
Christianity and colonialism are often closely associated because Catholicism and Protestantism were the religions of the European colonial powers[46] and acted in many ways as the “religious arm” of those powers.[47] Historian Edward E. Andrews argues that although Christian missionaries were initially portrayed as “visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery”, by the time the colonial era drew to a close in the last half of the twentieth century missionaries became viewed as “ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them.”[48]
Christianity is targeted by critics of colonialism because the tenets of the religion were used to justify the actions of the colonists.[49] For example, Michael Wood asserts that the indigenous peoples were not considered to be human beings and that the colonisers were shaped by “centuries of Ethnocentrism, and Christian monotheism, which espoused one truth, one time and version of reality.”[50]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Christianity
Christian Nationalism Causes Racism and Bigotry
I remember a comment while in college at a very christian university. It was a political science class and in the back of the room a student said:
Is it possible to be a good christian AND a democrat?
My religiously nuanced professor laughed at the comment but we all knew that said professor was not all in with christianity. If you look at American politics (the only kind I know well) the only Christians on the social progress side (Democrat) are nuanced whites or those from minorities. In other words, outcasts of the white christian tribe.
“Why did Americans vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election? Social scientists have proposed a variety of explanations, including economic dissatisfaction, sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. The current study establishes that, independent of these influences, voting for Trump was, at least for many Americans, a symbolic defense of the United States’ perceived Christian heritage”
https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/2/147/4825283?login=true
“Research shows that Americans who hold strongly to a myth about America’s Christian heritage— what is called “Christian nationalism”—tend to draw rigid boundaries around ethnic and national group membership. Incorporating theories connecting ethnic boundaries, prejudice, and perceived threat with a tendency to justify harsher penalties, bias, or excessive force against racial minorities”
https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/2/147/4825283?login=true
White Christians are More Racist than Whites
Surveys conducted by PRRI in 2018 found that white Christians — including evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics — are nearly twice as likely as religiously unaffiliated whites to say the killings of Black men by police are isolated incidents rather than part of a pattern of how police treat African Americans.
And white Christians are about 30 percentage points more likely to say monuments to Confederate soldiers are symbols of Southern pride rather than symbols of racism. White Christians are also about 20 percentage points more likely to disagree with this statement: “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Blacks to work their way out of the lower class.” And these trends generally persist even in the wake of the recent protests for racial justice.
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Letter Sections
- Letter
- Preface: Belief Change Bias
- Abuse And Oppression
- Bible Accuracy
- Trust In God