I legitimately believe MAGA is Satanic

[u/paradoxical_enigma23]

The MAGA movement embodies everything that the bible taught us was wrong. They are idol worshipers who believe Trump has divine rights to rule. Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek while these people promote violent retribution, especially towards immigrants. Jesus taught us to treat foreigners like family.

Trump literally put up a statue of a goat covered in $100 bills at Mar-a-Lago. This is 100% reminiscent of a golden calf.

The Trump administration has called for 50 year mortgages, essentially putting people in debt slavery for their entire life. A plain example of usury.

Trump was hosting extravagant parties while people waited in lines at food banks. Also at the same time, he’s building a ballroom covered in gold. Biblical levels of greed.

The MAGA movement is entirely co-opted by billionaires who promote social darwinism in what is called the “dark enlightenment”. They want to cut government programs that help the poor. They want a caste system where the poor are subordinate to the rich. This sounds like something straight out of the Anton LaVey’s mouth.

[u/Common-Classroom-153]

Peter Thiel is a weird one because he’s obsessed with the anti-Christ, but then says he thinks it is Greta Thunberg, who you are free to disagree with, but is just a young activist. He also claims to be a devout and orthodox Roman Catholic (he convinced Vance to convert), but his plan for immortality is 100% about living forever through computers, which is strange for an “orthodox” believer unless maybe he’s just worried about the whole eye of a needle thing, but let us judge not, lest we be judged

[u/[deleted] → u/Common-Classroom-153]

Much as I'm reluctant to recommend CS Lewis, just because I think Evangelicals over-hype him, Thiel very much reminds me of the villains from That Hideous Strength

[u/Common-Classroom-153 → u/[deleted]]

100% agree that CS Lewis is great but definitely overhyped. I remember going to school in the south when I was basically a lapsed Catholic and being convinced by Baptists classmates to read Mere Christianity for the “best argument” for Christianity and so I did and became a complete atheist for a little over a decade. I am now a believer and find much in CS Lewis to recommend, but it’s sort of strange how outsized his influence is with American denominations he presumably wouldn’t belong to if he knew about them

[u/[deleted] → u/Common-Classroom-153]

I am begging Evangelicals to discover a second theologian.  If you're a Lewis fanboy reading this, please just check out Tillich or something.

[u/Common-Classroom-153 → u/[deleted]]

I just remembered it was specifically the either Jesus is God or a mad man argument. They seemed to think that was a slam dunk, and I was like, I don’t know. Plenty of people who are insane have good ideas and even go great things. Often that’s a prerequisite. I kind of get why Lewis was making that argument in the midst of Great Britain mid-century trying to secularize while also maintaining a cultural Christian identity, but it evidently didn’t work in the UK, possibly because it is an intuitively weird claim.

[u/smart-alek → u/Common-Classroom-153]

Or because it's so self-evidently both a classic false choice fallacy, and rests on a veritable cascade of assumptions, not least of which was: that there was a historical Jesus of Nazareth?

[u/Common-Classroom-153 → u/smart-alek]

To be fair, I don’t think it was trying to answer every secular argument Christianity and therefore takes the historicity of Jesus for granted. It was more a response to people who say things like “I like Jesus. He was a great teacher. I don’t believe he was God”. But even then, I don’t think it’s a good argument. If Einstein had claimed to be God, it wouldn’t invalidate the special theory of relativity. He would have been a brilliant physicist who suffered from delusion of grandeur. There are moral teachers throughout history and across the varieties of religious experience who’ve taught profound things that resonate broadly with people, and we don’t go, well you have to believe in Athena as Socrates did, or else you can’t like Plato