Christianity is an elitist system

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Popular Christian doctrine believes that their God and his will for mankind is omni-benevolent and perfect. Anyone who disputes or doesn't accept is seen as weak or not even a true believer in the faith.

I had problems looking back at it today. I used to be very strong in faith, but anxiety kicked in during teens and I still can't let go of it. I felt bullied by Christians on internet places for what I wanted to believe and questioning a doctrine. I have some trust issues with people that say they will be tolerant with others because my experience shown that sometimes there are words people don't want to hear.

I disagreed with popular Christian ideas like the stuff related to sexuality and chasteness. As a guy who was usually "chronically single" I only saw the empty words and doctrines come off as judgmental and a cruel reflection on their vision of God. I couldn't reason why a God who is said to care about mankind created this carnal place called earth where you can enjoy pleasures like food and sex, but then say this is the only physical-sense life we have and we don't get any more of it for eternity after that.

I would not want to be a part of a group of elites like Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) who are arrogant and actually have problems with empathy for others. Their version of God isn't so different of representing a one-world global centralized totalitarian government. Hypothetically, he also uses an ultimatum of either Heaven (eternity) or Hell (damnation).

Even if God is real, I still feel uncomfortable.

I really like how this vlogger and amateur bible historian put together the history of the cultural creation of Satan in about 15 minutes. His observations of the ideological progress and construction of the old testament seem to map onto my own intuitions, particularly that there was no mention of a devil in popular Christian terms until either quite late in the OT or well into the NT (from my own reading recollection I hardly saw any such canonical mentions until the gospels or Jesus scorning the scribes or slightly before that when he was tested in the desert).

The main idea was that they were a polytheistic then henotheistic society and it seems like the same bug that bit the Persians to bring about Zoroastrian dualism bit them as well. This is where the celestial curmudgeon and quality checker element of God got split off from deity because the people were finding too much challenge in the idea of the world coming from one God who was both the god of good and the god of evil.

I'm truly... not shocked. But I had sort of an epiphany thanks to this post.
Let me explain: in the history of philosophy, christianity was unique among the religions in its claim to universality. (until Islam came around).
As in: the Jewish god was the God of the Jewish people, the chosen ones, and it's very hard to become Jewish. Similarly, other gods were the gods of their respective cultures, and the religion was a cultural practice that helped tell members from strangers. But then christianity came around and claimed to be the religion everyone could join -
After the renaissance, the christian god was questioned, more and more, - but the idea of universality - one "goal" for all humans to work towards, stayed.
It's called humanism. Here's three major types:

Liberalism (all humans are noble and made equal, and society needs to work towards freedom of the individual to flourish) Hell in this scenario is unfreedom, which prevents the paradise of individuals flourishing.


Communism (all humans are noble and equal and society needs to work towards distributing wealth equally to everyone, so the individual has a lot of free time and enough to live on comfortably)
Hell in this scenario is inequality, which forces most people into "wage-slavery", therefore preventing the freedom to flourish.

and Nazism (humans are great and noble, but there is a threat of "sub-humans" mixing their genes into the gene-pool, so society should work towards eradicating genetic "impurities", and then everyone will be great and noble and things will sort themself out).
Hell in this scenario would be "impure" genes, which prevent humans from being the noble and great beings they were intended to be.

critics of humanism have pointed out that the idea that all humans are equal, but subject to restraints that need to be overcome, is basically a christian idea - except that paradise has been moved from the afterlife into this world.

but fundamentally, the globalist world government idea is a humanist universalist one. All humans are equal and society should unite and work together, then all current global problems can be fixed and everyone can be free and so on.

now, what struck me just now is that I'm familiar with views that find the global government idea naive, and they often go on to explain how it is christianity with a heaven in this world.
But never before have I seen it turned around, and seen someone express doubt about the universality and divine nature of all humans, based on his scepticism of a global(ist) world-government.

The challenge might be, considering the tragic nature of life and what takes hold if we give up on the sort of post-Christian human perfectability scams that we've sold ourselves, how we moderate between the cruel excesses of blind 'meritocracy' on one hand and totalitarian meat grinders that treat people as unequally as the science might suggest they could. Unfortunately it seems like we just can't think of enough models or motifs that can solve these sorts of problems because the meaningfully distinct potential models of society seem too few in number. I used to not be the sort of person who'd think humanity is headed for extinction in the near future over fundamentally unsolvable problems in our nature but the more I grasp of where we're at, why we are where we are, and what we're setting ourselves up for environmentally and technologically the more it seems like a distinct possibility.

Its also perhaps no wonder why we spent thousands of years living in systems predicated on noble lies. That sense of desperation with the moral state of the human condition perhaps has always been with us.

For myself I split between faith and church. My Faith is what I believe. The church (regardless of which "church" or "religion") is an institution made up of people who suffer all the failings of institutional politics. My relationship with God is between me and him alone. I generally don't talk about it, don't try to convince others to join or of it's efficacy, and I don't need a community to reaffirm it. That said, I also don't make gross generalizations about one faith or another like the OP in this thread. Bad form at a minimum.