Why all this protection of religion?

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Evidence or Link, Please?  As far as I know, people cannot be attacked for their religion or beliefs; but the religion or beliefs themselves are fair game.

Attack the belief, not the person.....

I think religion gets used as an excuse to be a bigot. Is this an attack on the belief?

Not at all, since it is a true statement...

There is at the very least a small group in nearly every evangelical church complaining and agitating against teaching or policies that are not sufficiently conservative or anti-woke.  The aggressive, disruptive, and unforgiving mindset that characterizes so much of our politics has found a home in many American churches.  The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. The key issues in these conflicts are not doctrinal, but political. They include the passions stirred up by the Trump presidency, the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and the January 6 insurrection; the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, and critical race theory; and matters related to the pandemic, such as masking, vaccinations, and restrictions on in-person worship.

When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are made virtually sacred. The result is having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.

How many people look at churches in America these days and see the face of Jesus?  Too often, when Americans look at the Church, they see not the face of Jesus, but the style of Donald Trump, who represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of many of white evangelicals' most deeply held values of the American South -- masculinity and male dominance, tribal loyalties, obedience and intolerance, and even the ideology of white supremacism, as well.

The grace, gentleness, and inclusivity of Jesus has been utterly discarded by those who feel He was not championing their cultural and political agendas aggressively enough.  Unlike in the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the Good Samaritan -- unlike Jesus' very own barrier-breaking encounters with prostitutes and Roman collaborators, with the lowly and despised, with the unclean and those on the wrong side of the "holiness code", with the wounded souls whom he healed on the Sabbath -- many Christians today see the world divided between us and them, the children of light and the children of darkness, as if the Beatitudes have been re-written: "Blessed are the politically powerful, for theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are the culture warriors, for they will be called children of God.  Blessed are the oppressors, for they shall inherit the Earth. ..."

I tellya, it is enough to make a devout make take up atheism.

How do you deprogram the Evangelical southerners, and put that region on par with California or New York? Same with Utah and Idaho and the Mormons.

#liberatethesouth
#legalizeweed
#freethenipple
#makefornicationmandatory

Last edited by Tim_Tex on 26 Oct 2021, 6:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

So these "Christians" are not much different from the Pharisees, Zionists and other groups from Jesus's time who were holding out for a different kind of Messiah. The thing is, for someone to be a follower of Christ, they have to follow his virtues or they're followers in name only.

Christ's teaching and example only have one major flaw: you couldn't build a society on them unless maybe every person on earth did the same.
But really: give your money to the poor, break with tradition and let's wait together for judgement day - that's not a social order, that's a doomsday cult.
The realities of life in the past 2000 years have required armies, property and inheritance laws. The history lf every form of Christianity is a history of rationalizing these necessities, regardless of how much they are downright contradictions.

That’s why Christ focused on the individual person rather than society. Christian society is about the same kinds of things all societies are built on: Shared values. The early church in the book of Acts appears to promote a collectivist society. That might have been more or less true. But that early church was destroyed early on with the introduction of greed and envy. People will not do things they SHOULD do for the sake of survival if there is no reward in it. He who does not work does not eat. It’s all very simple. When you work with all your strength, give your possessions away to people you love (and who love you) according to their needs, and live off the benefits of those who love you, you don’t have a communist or even socialist society. You have a society of exchange. What’s more, you have a society in which everyone is a WILLING participant. You cannot have a society based on Christian values and faith if people aren’t allowed a way out. Any time a society is forcibly inflicting Christian values on those who don’t want them, any time someone who works hard to provide food for his family is made to starve because someone else “needs” it more, any time justice is sacrificed on the altar of false mercy, it is not Christian.

What gets me is how often non-Christians behave as though they are somehow entitled to a piece of the Christian pie—and Christians fall for it. Examples: Any time someone says “don’t judge me” when they only want to justify unchristian or unbiblical behavior. Any time someone says “Jesus told you to love your neighbor” when they don’t love you. Of COURSE Christians ought to show charity and kindness to others. Of course Christians should display empathy—showing patience and understanding when someone unknowingly or unwillingly breaks the law by giving them a warning is Christian mercy that does not deny justice. But the church in the book of Acts reached out to new converts while supporting BELIEVERS. What bothers me about many churches is that if one of us is mistreated and we go to the pastor about it, we’re told to keep quiet about it. If we say anything about it, we’re “quietly” shown the door. I see churches give away all kinds of money to mission efforts and to help the poor locally, but if MY family needs help, suddenly everyone’s pockets are empty. We support everyone else EXCEPT each other. What about church discipline? Well…you have church members who horribly abuse each other. I’ve seen seekers of all kinds welcomed into church, LGBT couples, and all kinds of other sinners, too. But as soon as the praise band bass player is caught having an affair with a Sunday school teacher, they’re told never to come back. I don’t mean cut from the team or from teaching. I mean told they have to take a “break” from attendance or told outright security or police will be called if they try to return.

I don’t mean to imply that there’s some rampant, raging epidemic in the church and that it’s always like this. Every church has its issues because all people, believers or not, have issues. Having issues is WHY we go to church. Judging people for being PEOPLE is unreasonable. It’s like going to the hospital and being denied emergency services because you’re sick. We have this weird sort of hospital existence—like I remember when my oldest daughter was born, my wife was bleeding heavily and I almost lost both of them. We got to the emergency room, which was almost full at the time, and there was a wheelchair waiting for my wife. She was taken straight up while I took a few short minutes signing some papers before I could join her. I’ll never forget the looks and the whispers about how wrong it was my wife could go on up but they’d been waiting for hours (these are people that go to the ER for Tylenol. I wish I was exaggerating). But my point is that church life can sometimes be like that—people complain about their petty problems when all they need to do about it is pray, meditate on the Bible, and maybe ask a friend for advice. But as soon as someone with “real” problems shows up, they get all butthurt that someone else gets moved to the front of the line. At least hospitals will prioritize saving a life over a migraine. Some congregations will throw you out and leave you bleeding to death (metaphorically) in the street. I don’t hate the church—else I wouldn’t insist on being employed by one. I just think there are some things we could do better.

The realities of the past 2000 years are principally unchanged from from previous times. The only significant differences are communication, nukes, automatic weapons, and the UN. Jesus’s teachings are about salvation, not ending war. Ideally if everyone actually FOLLOWED Christ, war would end. Given that Christian nations are predominantly peaceful, slavery has been outlawed as an institution, etc., nations that reflect Christian values are by far more livable than those that aren’t. I didn’t say they had to be Christian nations, only that they had to have Christian values. Though it has come and gone over time, western society for the most part still does this. The US has radically diverted from this over the last three decades, and the pandemic has brought out the worst in all of us. The more people you have who are ACTUAL Christians rather than purely cultural, or at least the more people act according to actual Christian values, the better quality of life you can expect.

^^^
I believe you mean "nation's with secular humanist values", rather than "Christian".
I mean, that, the invention of the steam engine, and the near-successfull enslavement of everyone non-European are basically why the Eueopean Nations "with Christian values" are doing comparatively well.

not compared to Singapore, which, like Switzerland, lives of tax dodging. Harbouring tax dodgers might trump Christian values when it comes to positive effects on a nation.