This actually makes sense, once you understand what their problem is with communism.
You see, they have no problem with all the benefits that communism offers… What bothers them is the idea that those benefits would be given to people who haven’t earned it.
Heaven, to them, is a reward. Only the pure, the righteous, the faithful get to enjoy its benefits. Heaven only works for them if they imagine that they will be able to look down and see hell.
A heaven for everyone, with no walls, no gates, no pitiful outcasts scrabbling to get in… That’s no heaven at all.
You’re not wrong about the reward being earned. That’s definitely the unspoken part of it.
When I grew up religious, the conversion was that communism was a bastardization of god’s plan, so it’s inherently evil. Basically, it cannot be as pure and perfect with men in charge so it will fail every time.
You’d think they’d want to try and be more like their god and his plan for their heaven but they just reject it.
They believe that only God can be the one to create paradise on earth. A primary pillar of their faith requires earth to be in a constant state of suffering until then.
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You’re not wrong about the reward being earned. That’s definitely the unspoken part of it.
It’s also heretic AF. As in: It directly contradicts Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran, doctrine, all for different reasons.
Remove the heretics from Christianity, and you will have not a religion of billions of oppressors, but a cult of a few dozen communist hippies.
They should know better:
Interesting read. Thank you.
Heaven only works for them if they imagine that they will be able to look down and see hell.
See, this is the part I can’t get behind. An eternity of that disparity with even the smallest scrap of empathy would eventually be unending torment. Every day is just more “oh yeah, hell is a thing and I can’t do anything about it…”
Fr, I knew for fact that there was something deeply fucked up about “The Good Place” in the TV show bearing the same name when Janet played Eleanor a short clip of sound from the Bad Place.
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Right wing politics can be summed up as: Exclusive & Sadism
If working all your life for a regime does not earn you the benefits of that regime, I don’t know what will in their minds
No, the issue most people have with it is that it requires a king (god) to make it work. People don’t mind a higher being (god) ruling them as an absolute monarch. They do mind handing such power to a human, since we have seen again and again how such power corrupts people.
Me listening to tankies describe communism as a moneyless, stateless, classless world, then criticise anarchism
people still use the word tankie ? my guy most communists these days are anarcho communists.
tankie was never funny anyways
What’s a tankie? I know what it means but for others that don’t go ahead and drop an egg of knowledge on them.
A supporter of the Soviet Union and its habit of using tanks to suppress uprisings.
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I choose to imagine it’s actually because they all wear tanktops
We can only make the world stateless by having one all-encompassing state. Anarchism would result in a mosaic of states.
Nice satire
sadly I actually do believe this. help me 😭
What if we have zero states?
I’d rather 0 than 51
Well that’s what anarchism tries to do
When I was fairly young my mom described Christian heaven. I remember struggling with the idea of not struggling and being happy all the time. Then she hit me with if someone you love doesn’t make it to heaven you forget them. That’s when the fracture began for me.
Basically heaven is a mindfuck.
It really is. It’s not even a pleasant thought experiment.
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Severance
To be fair, the heaven of the Bible is neither stateless nor classless. “The nations” are still present in Revelation 21 and 22, and inequality in heaven is a common theme in Jesus’s parables.
“The nations” is just fancy for “non Jews”. Remember that the bible predates modern nation states by more than a millennium.
inequality in heaven is a common theme in Jesus’s parables.
Is that so? I can think of the story with the lamps where it’s about getting into the kingdom of god or the treasure in the field where it’s about finding the kingdom of god. Or that the poor will inherit the kingdom of god while rich people cannot get into it. Nothing about inequality inside the kingdom of god.
You have to keep in mind that the kingdom of god isn’t really heaven as we think of it even tho Matthew uses the wording kingdom of heaven (to avoid the word god as a good jew). We think of heaven as life after death but the kingdom of god is on earth when Jesus returns and the dead arise and he builds his kingdom here.
“Least”/“Greatest” in “the kingdom of heaven” is a construction that appears at least once off the top of my head, Matthew 5:19. I’m sure there are more. But also, Jesus is depicted as a literal monarch and heaven a kingdom like you said, so there’s at least one extra class right there.
There’s also 11 classes of angels in a ladder system under Jesus. My boys Metatron and Enoch up top if I’m not mistaken.
Is that a Catholic thing?
It’s a Dead Sea scrolls thing
Why are you guys all able to recall random bits of the bible. What normal people are even reading this stuff in the last 40 years?
I had it drilled into my head as a kid. When I left home I forgot most of it. Then as an adult I brushed up on it to argue with the kind of people who drilled it into my head as a kid.
lol.
I see your point but hear me out:
Saying “The only one I call king is the one who died at the cross” subverts the very concept of a king. Not only is this guy no longer here to directly command anyone but his death was the most humiliating to him and his followers possible. In this way, it’s anti-authoritarian. Similar with the greatest in the kingdom of god. It’s the last you would think of: the poor, the children, … . Sure, this leaves place for interpretation. You can say it’s just a new hierarchy. Or it’s so radically putting everything into question that it’s in effect a call against all hierarchies. Or that it’s so radical, it can’t be taken serious at all so barely means anything anymore.
Christianity as a whole shows all of this. The first communes shared everything in common, there was “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. (Gal 3, 28). Later a new hierarchy establish which, once established, wasn’t new or subversive anymore but just a top down hierarchy. Once in a while someone came with a more subversive reading, more often than not founding a new organization that ended up with a strict hierarchy.
I think the biggest flaw is that there is no sustainable alternative given. You can criticize capitalism all day long and reinforce it as a system without an alternative if you don’t give one. Some Christians found alternatives and supported them with the scripture, others supported very different things with scripture. That’s the thing with all world religions: They start in opposition to society but fail to think outside the box and so they end up reinforcing it while keeping the seldom fulfilled potential for a better society (“world region” in the sense Graeber uses the term in Debt and Graham discusses in this podcast episode I guess but I’m not sure).
All that said, since the first Christians certainly had a very egalitarian, anti-authoritative reading, this is the most authoritative reading (pun intended).
This is good stuff; your argument is well reasoned. Brings me back to my Bible study days.
I still think “all hierarchies” might be overbroad. The Bible itself prescribes elders/bishops and deacons to administer the church, for instance, and it’s radical enough regarding obedience to authority that, in my experience, modern day theologically conservative churches trend toward authoritarianism and mostly unchecked abuse of power more often than not. This would have been contemporaneous with the communes.
As for the more heavenly hierarchies, I looked back at some of the points of evidence that I was going to bring up here that I thought supported my case, but the “outer darkness” in Matthew 22 I once thought might not necessarily be hell sure seems like hell upon rereading, and as for the parable of the unforgiving servant who was sent to the “torturers” despite his debts being forgiven, it looks like that word “torturers” is connected to jailers, i.e. debtors’ prison, so I can’t argue confidently that the servant was “saved” from anything and given a different punishment instead. There are still a few passages I can’t totally square though:
The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32): He gets welcomed back into the family, and he sure seems saved in the sense that I think most Christians would read into it, but his inheritance is spent; he doesn’t get more. All the father has belongs to the other son.
The purifying fire of 1 Corinthians 3:9-15: Both groups of people are explicitly “saved”. One is rewarded, the other suffers loss.
The parable of the talents/minas: In the Matthew 25 version of the parable, the first two servants get the same reward (authority over “many things”). No issue there. But in the Luke 19 version, the rewards are proportional. And the one with 10 minas gets a bonus at the end.
That’s as far as I got before my eyes glazed over.
This is really fascinating. I never heard of this.
Is there a non-religious, ELI5 resource I can read more about this?
I never had much use for non-religious secondary sources back when I was a believer, so I can’t recommend any, but the New Testament isn’t actually that long; you could probably finish it in a week if you read 20-30 chapters a day, and the chapters are short. The first three books, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and to a lesser extent the fourth, John, are all the same; you can probably just pick one (John is probably the most interesting) and read the rest of the NT as is. Whether or not it’s worth your time is entirely up to you. I certainly have no intention of reading it again any time soon.
I think nothing outside of the gospels is of any merit. It is probably worth your time to read the red words in the bible. Jesus was on some real shit, minus all the son of god stuff
Before people get huffy yes I have read the entire bible; it is not “the most beautiful book ever written” nor anything close to that, but Jesus was an interesting dude
You also can not read the bible as if it’s modern English and interpret it as such. Always consider 1. who was talking then, 2. who they were talking to, and 3. the context in which they were speaking at the time.
Dan McClellan videos on YouTube and TikTok are great and accessible discussions of a lot of academic Bible research.
Yeah it’s called Theogany by Hesiod
How is Ancient Greek poetry about the origin of the Greek gods relevant here?
Peep this.
It’s the inspiration for the Bible.
How???
Like, you can do some really interesting conversations about Neo Platonism and philo-semitism around the time some of the New Testament was being written - Gnosticism undoubtedly comes from Greek philosophy - but many portions of the Hebrew Bible predate Hesiod entirely.
Can you provide any form of argument, or is this some shit you picked up from like Zeitgeist or something.
Alan watts
Didn’t Alan Watts usually talk about (his extremely westernized interpretation of) Zen Buddhism? When has Alan Watts made the strange argument that ancient Israelites were somehow aware of Greek mythology and a specific text that wasn’t even written until at least many of the minor prophets books were written?
When has Alan Watts ever really been focused on the development of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament and it’s relationship to Greek mythology? Do you have a link to his argument?
Edit: Checked out and skimmed Myth & Ritual in Christianity online to see if what you are saying is in there. I strongly suspect that you are seriously misinterpreting ideas related to Jung and the collective unconscious (as does Zeitgeist), but feel free to clarify.
Revelation 21 and 22 describe changes in the city of Jerusalem and basically nothing else. 🤦♂️
What if heaven is just whatever you need heaven to be? Like, what if it’s just a temporary state of affairs? You enter Heaven, and it is exactly what you need to be at peace with your death and your life before that. Then, when you’re ready, after however much time you need, you can decide to move on and stop existing, or send your soul to be reincarnated.
This is similar to what Rick Riordan (author of Percy Jackson) suggests in one of his other works - that the afterlife is simply whatever you believe it to be. It’s pretty comforting imo.
The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is important to shoot missionaries on sight.
Personally I wouldn’t like it to be what you believe it to be, rather what you need it to be. Some people don’t know what they need until they have it. You can believe that Heaven is endless sitting in a circle and piling devotion upon God, but if that isn’t actually going to help you be at peace, then what good is it gonna do you? How is a baby going to form a belief of what their afterlife is?
No, I reckon Heaven ought to be what you need, not what you want. I want my afterlife to be me being a series of Isekai protagonists in my favourite fictional universes because I secretly want to feel clever and powerful and knowledgeable about things to come, but indulging me probably isn’t the best way to put me at peace.
Seems to be the approach of MCU as well 🤔
Watch The Good Place.
Funny you should mention temporary - in a way, that’s true of Christian view. ‘Heaven’ in a broad sense is much broader, but the sense of where are ‘you’ after you die, is temporary until the resurrection, where people are once again in a very physical body (but now immortal and undamaged) on a very physical (re)new(ed) earth.
Can we just have tiny villages where we tell ghost stories and just all contribute to each other’s well being?
I asked one “so when do I actually die?” and they couldn’t comprehend that I didn’t want to exist forever
I suppose that whatever heaven does to you, you would want to exist forever…for whatever reason.
You can sit on that bench as long as you want. Whenever you’re ready, you just walk through.
Heaven is an autocratic police state though
Yup. The common answer to “why does evil exist” is that humans have free will.
Therefore it follows that if there is no sin in heaven, there is also no free will.
Ssshhh, you’re not supposed to actually think it through!
Or you know, it’s almost impossible to make an evil choice, and the chances get smaller over time. Or you only have good choices.
Then it seems awfully cruel to design this life otherwise.
Indeed. Gods, in general, being huge assholes - well, it would explain a lot.
I like the malevolent creator theory. But it’s most likely that since the universe runs on entropy, it just optimizes for misery as a side-effect.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Christians that vote republic just dissociate their “church” brain vs their non “church” brain. Their religious beliefs ONLY apply to religious things. Everything else just goes to whatever their true value system is.
I don’t think most religious people have any beliefs, they just roll with whatever stances are currently popular amongst their peers. If a large enough number of their peers say their god says slavery is valid, then they will say slavery is valid, or a million other horrible things
Funny you mentioned this.
Apparently feeding school kids for free was controversial (and still is controversial).
And I watched a fellow parent on Facebook post an event about bake sales to raise money, to immediately sharing talking points about why it’s bad for kids to get free school lunches.
I don’t have children or religion and I believe every child should be fed for free at school and that should include breakfast.
It is like UBI, just for kids
And don’t get me wrong, I am all in into making capitalism a little bit less bad by introducing UBI.
The Bible as a text has zero issues with slavery. The Old Testament thinks it’s fine to sell your daughter. The New Testament tells slaves to submit to their masters.
Your average Christian has very little knowledge of what the Bible actually contains. Non denominational Protestant Christianity’s focus on the personal relationship with God and their interpretation of ‘Biblical literalism’ means that you just squint at the text and read what you want from it.
I remember listening to some particularly painful exegesis on David killing the Amalekite messenger being some kind of message on not tattling to your boss about things. They don’t read things in context - they read snippets and verses and work in their pop culture understandings about hell, Satan, and salvation into the text.
True, I definitely think most religious people don’t think too much about what they’re believing in.
Nah, they’re the ones complaining jesus is too woke
I think this dude is incapable of dissociating, so he just forces his true value system onto his church beliefs. He will ignore the text that contradicts his own values. There’s definitely lots of people like that.
I mean that basically describes Christianity as a whole. The entirety of the religion throughout human history is basically people reforming it to suit their needs. True of most religions really.
You can be anything you want, so long as you go to church on Sunday and say “sorry”. For example…mafia, pedophile priests and politicians.
Even little old me? I should start going to church and also start being evil.
Yes, my son. You may be as evil as you wish, so long as you say “sorry” on Sunday, Heaven’s doors will be open to you. God help you if you die on a Saturday, though… :)
That’s not how it works. You have to mean it when you repent. If you go killing someone with the intent to just repent later, you are basically screwed. As you probably won’t truly regret what you have done.
Maybe, but I don’t think that’s how the bad guys see it. Else there would be no bad guys who are religious.
It’s not only that, but you must also turn from your sin and towards God. That is, make a conscious commitment not to sin.
“Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord,” Acts 3:19
(2) "Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? (3) I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” Luke 13:2-3
😈I sowwy jebus
LOL
Do we have to censor the word communism now?
Self censor so hot right now!
Now = since Red Scare
Can’t have designer outrage without it.
Problem is real world communism always ends up as authoritarian dictatorships.
it’s almost like American imperialism has made sure that any attempt has failed by economic and military disruption and injecting dictators with the goal of dissuading others from trying.
the second there’s a success story western capitalism becomes unnecessary and a better system comes into view.
Also communist economy is impossible to implement since there is no all knowing god to fuck all the people siphoning the money out via corruption. Communism is great if you can remove humans from the equation. Mofo humans fuck every system up, we are the problem.
Lol, heaven is also an authoritarian dictatorship
Also, heaven is an absolute monarchy. The fact so many commies don’t even see the difference between communism and a monarchy should tell you all you need to know.
Also, heaven is an absolute autocracy. The fact so many fundies don’t even see the difference between US and facism should tell you all you need to know.
Socialist capitalist democracy works pretty well though
Source: Scandinavian
Tends to on a nation scale. But there’s still some good lessons to learn from it for smaller scale and nation scale too.
That’s a pretty boilerplate criticism. While true to a great degree, it’s also true of a lot of western capitalist nations.
It’s pretty hard to find information about real communist societies because media companies have it in their best interest to bury any good that has possibly been done by a communist society, meanwhile demonizing them and making them the enemy. You really have to dig to find honest information about communist societies.
Moreover, a lot of otherwise successful communist regimes have been sabotaged and poisoned by capitalist interests. Either by literally arming fascists, or just by demonizing them with foreign policy and media coverage.
If i could take a moment to cite the opening to the lords prayer:
Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
The ability to make one being a christian not by default be a socialist as well is a continuous theological labor for the capitalist
I was going to upvote but you were right at 666 so I couldn’t bring myself to
It’s only “communism” if the equality goes to individuals outside of your group. If your group gets the benefits, well, that’s because you’re awesome and you deserve it; but fuck those other guys.
Heaven is described as being populated by perfected people, not by their own doing… The world we live in is populated by selfish people primarily. Hell even toddlers are selfish. It’s a redefinition of human nature. Whether or not it’s a fantasy, it would actually make it work flawlessly.
I know that’s not your point, I just want to point out that toddlers aren’t selfish as much as they just haven’t developed empathy yet, as a sense of empathy usually only develops after the 4th birthday. The golden rule just doesn’t work for toddlers, they can’t put themselves in someone else’s shoes and imagine how they feel. There’s a riddle/test with a doll and a closet that illustrates this well.
Of course they are selfish, but it is Ok and natural.
I think that a person that never experienced empathy from others will most likely never develop empathy and stay selfish.
It is the job of society to teach/show the society empathy, and if we do not, we are fucked.
Cooperation and sharing are just as much “human nature” as selfishness. We contain lots of “natural” impulses, but people will prioritize and grow into those impulses which society most rewards.
Yea, and pure capitalism rewards assholes the most…
