Whenever I talk to Christians I make sure to bring up the verse where we’re referred to as “The Stewards of the Earth”.
They don’t like it. Something needs to be done about Christians if anything is going to get better.
Over the past few years I’ve been doing a deep dive studying one of the “other versions of Jesus” that Paul (who was known to be persecuting his followers) tells Corinth (where he has no authority to persecute) to ignore in what’s effectively the earliest canonical documents.
It’s wild. Like beyond what I’d have ever imagined to have existed.
They’re talking about matter being made up of indivisible parts. Quoting the only extant work from antiquity to describe survival of the fittest while calling the idea the spirit arose from flesh (naturalism) an even greater wonder than the other way around (intelligent design).
Saying don’t pray, don’t fast. Don’t give money or anything to religious officials, because salvation is a birthright, not something conditional you need to earn.
He’s giving private instruction to female students and saying disparaging stuff about the male ones who are missing the point. Also advising against having kids.
Suggesting an end of dynastic monarchy (not promoting it as in the official version endorsed by the dynastic monarchy of Rome).
It was emphasizing how humans were inevitable and how they were like a big fish selected from little fish and only what survived to reproduce multiples.
Instead of telling people to drink his blood and eat his body to become like him, it advised drinking his words to become like him and see the world as he does.
Just like this complete opposite of so many weird and irrational things in the version of Christianity that ended up better funded and thus grew to eventually ban this other one from even being possessed on penalty of death.
It’s both interesting and depressing to consider the possibility that the version of Christianity that a third of the world believes to be true might have actually been a literal anti-version created to oppose the actual teachings of a historical Jesus which were too progressive for conservative religious orthodoxy in Judea, so they reworked the concepts into a version that eventually biased back towards “I haven’t come to change one letter of the law” and away from “everything is permissible for me” in 1 Corinthians.
The irony of course being that in theory a true divine revelator (or even just a very smart non-divine dude) rightly should have been endorsing the now known to be correct ideas of Leucretius’s atomism and natural selection in antiquity over opposing it…
Modern Christianity is a beast promoted by a literal false prophet (Paul predicted the end of the world in the lifetimes of his audience) that’s reigned for millennia and needs to be put down.
I liked this quote from the article:
“I think transparency is very important in a democracy and scientists should be able to talk, they shouldn’t be stopped if it might cause embarrassment to a government,”
The public service doesn’t serve the government it serves the people. Same with researchers, same with the military. Anyone who acts otherwise is commiting treason
That line from the classic Clarke & Dawes ‘Front Fell Off’ keeps running through my head:
“No, it’s outside the environment”.
That’s how we see and treat anything that’s not directly under our feet, 😞
This reminds me a lot of the themes in the final episode of Chernobyl. In so many ways the climate change situation is similar to what happened in Chernobyl. We tend to throw shit at the soviets (often justifiably) but we never like to reflect on the ways in which we are similar. Chernobyl was an opportunity to learn, not copy.
