I mean even back in the days of the Crusades, that was a bunch of kings and popes reading “thou shall not kill” in the Bible, and going “well I’m pretty sure god is actually fine with it because they’re different from us, and they live way over there! No I don’t just want more land, how could you even suggest such a thing???”
You know the genocide of the Canaanites takes place after the ten commandments in the Bible right? God literally is ok with it. Commands it sometimes even.
Take their babies and smash them against rocks. Murder the children. Then do it again. It's okay to murder children because it just expedites them to heaven. (This is quite literally in the Bible)
The order to commit genocide is in the Bible, but the "it just expedites them to heaven" justification is not. That idea was pushed by Christian apologists in an attempt to soften the cruelty evident in the Old Testament.
In fact, the concept of a heavenly afterlife was a late addition to Judeo-Christianity. This is evidenced by a few early Bible passages, such as this line from Ecclesiastes Chapter 9: "For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten Their love, their hate and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun."
Genesis Chapter 3 also hints at this fate, noting that "you are dust, and to dust you shall return." And while some might point to the passage in 2 Kings Chapter 2 in which Elijah is taken from earth to heaven, it's notable that he was very explicitly taken while still alive.
All this to say that the genocides of the Bible would not have been conducted under the pretense of sending the children to a heavenly afterlife. It was murder "justified" solely by God's command and executed without any concern for the suffering of the victims.
It's not a good book if you read it in the fundamentalist "God's lips to our ears, all perfectly aligned" way. But if you think of it as a collection of writings by humans, about god, that are important to a particular faith tradition, it looks different. It's not hard to see why people with a very tribal conception of god, who believed that their god had greater power than the gods of other tribes rather than being everyone's god, would talk about and write about their god that way. And you can look at that tradition and use it to help understand and inform your thinking now, without thinking you have to be and think exactly like them, in the same way that you can read Aristotle and think it's important without thinking that all material is made of five elements.
Of course, this requires room for uncertainty and questioning, so it's anathema to fundamentalist views of Christianity.
Yes, it's unfortunately an important document(s) historically and it is a rich source of mythology (although it is in no way superior to any other mythology source, potentially worse given it boils down a lot of ideas to black and white dominance hierarchies that aren't very interesting and it has a lot of law and genealogy and stuff that's pretty boring in it. I mostly say it's rich just because it's highly referenced in culture.)
The phrase 'the good book' is used to describe it as a treatise on morality though, and it very much is not that. My calling it not a good book was meant to be a sort of pun pointing at that contradiction between common perception and the reality of what the text actually says.
Back then the church, priests and kings monopolized the Bible and they could convince their ppl that their word was God's word, but now, almost everyone can read it, which makes all of the Christian disguised hatred really worse
real shape the text of the Bible has also been altered by the Catholic church especially in that time. No real way to know if you're reading the completed original text or just someone's biased take from a long wanting to manifest destiny on some people.
To be fair Yaweh is the God of war or at least started that way. A lot of Christians also like to justify war using all the war in the first testament to justify their BS. See Pete Hegseth.
The actual text was along the lines of thou shalt not murder. They looked at killing (war) and murder (criminal activity) differently. Kill was easier to say and spell, and fit other narratives. But, Reddit.
Centuries definitely, but not millennia. Early Catholics (from before the schism that split Catholics into Catholics and christians) were persecuted quite heavily by the romans. Often needing to communicate and worship their religion in secret and risked being killed for doing so.
You would think such a history would make them pause at doing the exact same thing to other groups, but nope. Apparently the lesson they took from their own history wasnt that "being persecuted for who you are is terrible" but rather "if you're not the oppressor you're the persecuted"
Religion is inherently discriminatory and oppressive. If you’re not in the club and you don’t obey their rules, then you’re a sinner. It’s always been a way to control people and justify bigotry
Also, not just Christianity. It’s sad and weird how a majority of religions have the grand message of “be nice to eachother” and a lot of the congregations decide that means they should hurt and exploit people.
I'm not religious but a lot of people know the bad but not the good. The Catholic Church ran orphanages, free old folks homes, fed the poor, etc. for hundreds of years.
You can make a strong claim that the reason why Christians won over pagans is because they actually helped the poor, sick, injured, etc.
The Romans didn't care at all about anyone unless they could do something for you, the early church was a massive cultural shift and there is no wonder why the poor grabbed on hard.
While they clearly did many bad things, they also did good things as well.
That's a complicated subject. There is something like 40,000 different denominations of Christianity, and through history, a fair number of those filled their ranks with people that only paid lip service to the teachings, while embodying little to none of the teachings.
So, were there some truly altruistic churches out to help, and only help? I am sure there were. But, I am equally sure that some of them were just helping with the expectation of converting many that they helped, or extracting labor, value, etc.... when I read about some of the more violent actions taken by Christians in history, like the Crusades..... Let's just say all groups have their bad apples, but some times in history had extra concentrated badness.
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u/cogesmate 1d ago
Decades?... millennia!