Meme Thread for Both Posting and Discussing Memes
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Blasterbot
Well-known member
I don't disagree that it is true that there are moral busybodies. but I have seen that conversation happen way more often than I have seen moral busybodies. the key is we will need to police our own better than the left does.
The Crusade's, the moral 'Satanic Panic' over things like D&D/Rock n Roll, the pedo protectors in the Catholic Church and other denominations, the inter/intra-sect wars in Europe over who's version of Christianity is 'right', and the fact that Christians will ignore all those things, and then wonder why people don't take them as 'moral' authorities anymore.
I absolutely believe in the divine, and think Jesus was a part of it; however I also know shit like this does a lot to drive people away from religion and churches. It sure as shit wasn't a preacher or church marm, or any of their moral busybody ways, who showed me the divine is real.
About the only 'religious' groups I have any respect for these days are the Amish, who walk their talk in ways few others do, and the Sikhs, because they do not try to impose their wills and views on this outside their religion.
The only reason you're likely to have most Christians not acknowledge those things right off is because most Christians today don't have the historical perspective to recognize those things as an issue at all.
Most of the things you mention are 40 years in the past, and Catholicism is in the minority, especially in America, when it comes to Christian faith.
I'm a Christian, I don't expect or WANT you to accept my moral authority because I don't have any. That belongs to God. I've had the previously posted conversation with a number of people, and I've seen that conversation play out many times.
Please stop assuming that all Christians are morally bankrupt because some of us screw up. Because that's how you come across.
I do not assume all Christians are morally bankrupt.
But I do expect most of them don't care to hear about their faith's dirty laundry, or like it to be viewed as a peer and equal to other religions in a historical sense, instead of as the 'one true faith'.
And I do expect busybody, historically ignorant Christians to outnumber those who understand, or even want to understand, their religion in a context that doesn't center on dogma over historical fact.
That's not even going into the 'Christians' who use their religion as a club to use against anything they dislike, and think scripture has all the answers to any problems that arise in the world, so they don't need to try to understand or look at the world from a non-Christians/nonEvangelical point of view.
I've found more divinity and connection to the divine in nature, than in any church or mass, and when people keep trying to use their religion as a weapon/club in regards to social issues (not just Christians, Muslim's are often guilty of this too and get help from the wokies) it only shows why so many no longer feel any connection to the divine at all.
Only thing I'll say here is that your expectation will often find what's it's looking for. I think you're short-changing yourself with this predisposed belief in what you'll find. Funnily enough, this is the same kind of mental exercise that you claim
are using. Be cautious you're not blinding yourself to something.
Nothing wrong with this.
I've often found nature is a wonderful way to find some quiet allow myself to really contemplate my role in God's tapestry.
I'm going to leave off other thoughts about what Christianity is and all that for different threads. I just saw what you wrote something that needed responding to. I've been extremely doubtful about my own faith, and in no way am I trying to condemn you for your own doubts. They need to happen if we are to truly strengthen our own faith. For which I know God has a sense of humor.
It is an expectation that has more often than not been correct, in my life and and experiences.
The amount of Christians, or at least people who are religious enough ID'ing as Christians seriously matters to them, I've seen who break that expectation is much smaller than those who meet it.
And I've met plenty of people driven away from church and faith by the actions of people who profess deep faith and routine worship.
I do not think I am blinding myself to anything by taking into account history and facts that most Christians are ignorant of or simply do not like discussing in a 'non-positive, non-dogma friendly way'.
I think a lot of Christians do blind themselves, either unknowingly or sometimes willingly, to things that conflict with scripture, and/or ignore that scripture often contradicts itself.
I mean the whole damn Bible, or at least the New Testament, is essentially a massive fanfiction put together via a long game of telephone and primitive archeology in the several centuries between the Crusifiction and the formalization of Christians dogma in Greece. And the Old Testament is effectively a travel log of the Jewish people during the Bronze Age and before, with some bits about the people they conquered and how/where along the way.
But I do not expect many Christians to be able to put their faith in the backseat when historical/scientific/geological facts disagree with what the preachers or Bible says, or be able to critically analyze the foundational documents of their faiths in an objective manner that views the texts as pseudo-historical records, not instructions on how to live.
Of course the divine has a sense of humor; just look at the platypus.
I know it's a bit of a derail, so I'll leave it with that.
Well, it does depend on what specifically X is - some vice that harms only the person doing it, or some more serious wrongdoing that harms others as well?
And - let us not overlook - on what type of Christians we are talking about.
On the one hand, we have for example the Calvinist Theocrat mindset, from denominations in whose tradition the proper role and duty of the civil power (what you would call the secular government) is to enforce obedience to Divine law on the entire population. Whether you are a believer or not.
On the other hand, we have Christian movements whose institutional memory of that sort of theocracy consists mostly of being on the nasty sharp end of it. As one Baptist pastor told me heatedly: "The Protestants killed more of my theological ancestors than the Roman Catholics!". Such people are far, far more likely to lean towards a more "Libertarian" take on the role of government. They want to be free to live according to their own beliefs, not forced at gunpoint to live according to someone else's beliefs.
So does the Calvinist of course - but while he thinks that means he should be the one with the gun, the Baptist believes that no one should be. Or rather, everyone should be, more literally.
So let's pick a classic vintage (excuse the pun) example: drunkedness. Say some atheist wants to open up some bottles of the hard stuff and drink himself unconscious. Should we try to stop him doing that? Maybe we should. But trying to do so by getting the government to pass laws against alcohol is an approach that has been tried and failed.
We can tell him that he ought not to be doing that to himself, we can have rehabilitation courses and so on - but in the end, we can't take away a man's freedom to mess up his own life without causing bigger problems in general.
Now let's look at the sort of scenario that meme refers to: Mr Boozy wants to get his drunk on. Well, he's free to do it.
But that's not enough for him - he also wants society in general to approve and affirm his life-choices!
Well, we don't.
And this makes him throw a tantrum and demand that our religion be made illegal and that everyone's children be indoctrinated to accept alcoholism as natural and normal and a perfectly good life choice. All pre-schoolers must be make to drink whiskey! And so on.
And so we have a problem here - we could tolerate that guy boozing away in his own home, but we are not going to tolerate him wanting to impose his pathology on the world.
To paraphrase an ancient Roman poet: if you want to be tolerated, don't be intolerable.
Or, don't pretend the religious rights are tolerating things the religious right actively campaign for government to stop.
Mass lobotomy/castration of gays for being gay happened 60 years ago. The prohibition was campaigned for by the religious. They haven't left this idea that salvation can come from government rule.
Like take Alabama. There are still congress people holding that smoking weed is against their religion, and so do not want to pass legal weed. Same for alcohol, by the by.
See, it's quite easy to establish tolerable as "Only behaving within biblical dictates". So next time, just own it. Just say "I don't like what you are doing, and I want government to stop it". Be honest.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
If we're going to play the 'you are accountable for every person who claims your creed and misbehaves' game, then all you atheists and agnostics had better start owning up for the 'Great Leap Forward,' the Holodomor, the Khmer Rouge, and the damned holocaust.
Because these actions came from atheism.
Are you also going to ignore the issue of proportional depiction?
Let's take, for example, the Westboro Baptist Church. A tiny little 'cult' church that had less than 100 members, less than 50 IIRC, that was famous for its nasty and intolerant attitudes and protests. How often did the political left/atheist aligned media put them on national media? How often did they try to imply or outright state that 'this is what Christianity is?
Conversely, how much coverage does/did the March For Life receive, an annual event which has hundreds of thousands of people assembling from around the country to protest the murder of unborn children?
How often has Hollywood depicted religious people as hateful, close-minded, stupid, bigoted, and spiteful? How often has it depicted them as principled, humble, and empathic? How often has it depicted them as struggling between the two?
On the pedo-priests issue, how much attention has that received, compared to (prior to the last year or so) the far more common issue of schoolteachers committing acts of pedophilia?
How much of your perception of Christianity has been shaped by the media deliberately highlighting and focusing on the bad, while either minimizing the good, or outright pretending it doesn't exist?
And that's before we get into the media and the political left's tendency to take their old shames, and act like it was always the right, or even specifically the religious right, that was entirely behind such things? Tipper Gore and a number of other leftists were big on the 'violence in video games is horrible!' thing, but now somehow the retrospective accounts claim such things were entirely the fault of the religious right?
I grew up in Christian Evangelical circles in the 90's and 2000's.
How evangelical?
My parents went to the Arab muslim world as missionaries. That's how deep into that part of the culture I grew up.
And let me tell you, even within the intensely fundamentalist parts of the Christian subculture, the things that people have been talking about on this thread were only supported by the fringe.
I, and all of my friends, grew up being able to play the same video games, watch the same movies, and read the same books as children from secular families. I can think of one family that didn't let their kids read Harry Potter, and most Christian families were more picky about movies with sexual content, and might make you wait until you were 14 or 16 to watch anything with an R rating, but there was no blanket 'none of this in here!' within those families, much less trying to ban it in society at large.
Such families were more likely to sit down with their kids and say, 'Okay, so you understand Harry Potter is fantasy, and this kind of magic isn't real, right?' And that was about the end of it.
This also isn't just a singular perspective from one niche culture. We had contact with Evangelical/missionary families from all over the country, and all over the world. If you had a big enough gathering at a missionary conference, you'd usually have one or two families where the kids weren't allowed to read Harry Potter, or maybe watch certain movies/TV shows that were 'occult,' but they were quite rare.
As the internet started to grow, some of the first adopters of widespread internet chat were missionary families, so they could stay in contact with friends and family overseas, which naturally also lead to being in contact with each other. I personally talked with dozens of people from all over the place, and even among families that home-schooled their children to protect them from secular school influences, the general rule of thumb for how 'strict' they were was something like 'no M-rated video games for my middle-schoolers, and they have a 1-hour a day limit on video game time.'
Sure, the 'Chic Tracts' might make for amusing meme material, but the 'accepted mainstream' of the fundamentalist Christian right, groups like Focus on the Family, Mars Hill, or Christianity Today, generally held positions of 'each family should decide what is right for their children, and at what ages.'
Bluntly put, the political left has been deliberately creating a boogey-man out of 'repressive right wingers' for decades, blowing the position of a tiny fringe way out of proportion, and ignoring that you're more likely to find a larger proportion of regularly church-going Christians who held the opposite position, much less that most Christians held what is, yes, a very libertarian position of 'each family should decide for themselves' with most material.
The only real exception to this is the issue of 'gay marriage.' Not 'tolerance of homosexuals,' but specifically 'gay marriage,' because that's an argument over what the fundamental meaning of marriage is.
No, they come from communism which comes from statism (the idea that the state will solve your problems), but no, I'm also not playing this game.
The original meme is playing that game. It's treating Christians as a group, then labeling that group as tolerant of what they perceive as sin, and as people who don't ask the government to step in. And that's not generally true. There's a large contingent of Christians who do want to weaponize government. Yes, there are also a large number who don't. But this idea that Christians somehow never do this, or are blameless in this, is just absurd.
There are also Atheists who fall in the same two boats. And liberals, conservatives, LGBTs and Straights. If 'Christian' had been replaced by any of these groups, the meme would still be wrong in all of it smug, self-satisfied glory (as a note, these days straights (in America at least) aren't forcing LGBTs to do anything, so maybe not them).
Instead, treat Christians, atheists, and all others, as individuals, and stop judging/praising them as a group for anything more than declaring membership in the group.
Meanwhile, your examples? It ain't just marriage. I just listed the alcohol/weed example. A little over 20 years ago, it was illegal to have anal sex in Texas. More recently, there are those who want to ban pornography for adults.
So no, Christians aren't libertarian by rule. Some happen to be so on many issues, some aren't. The pretense that they all are, and are thus innocent of the use of force, is just that, a pretense.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
You have completely ignored my second point.
A) it wasn't relevant (the meme was about pretending Christians don't use force, when they do, not about proportionality), and B) I did cover it:
I don't care about proportions of groups. I care about individuals and what they do. But if your group did have a significant chunk of individuals do X and you claim that the group didn't, I'll point out it's dumb. And yes, those chunks are significant, at the very least because (other than the porn one which thankfully never takes off) they affected other people's lives in significant ways. So no, C) the proportionality doesn't work either. However rare you might consider them, them forcing their beliefs on others had a real and large impact.
Note I didn't care about the weirdos did on their own time. I don't care if they wanted to stop their kid from reading Harry Potter. What I do care about is them forcing their beliefs on people, like:
Despite it being illegal, teachers in public schools still lead their classes in prayer:
For a Lot of American Teens, Religion Is a Regular Part of the Public School Day
Religion in public schools has long been a controversial issue. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that teachers and administrators cannot lead prayers
www.pewresearch.org
And I could go on.
All I'm asking for is some honesty, not a pretense of perfection and woe is me. Don't pretend to be some perfect group on a topic where you have glaring failures.
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Love how you ignored the whole 'they were lobotomizing gays for being gay' issue and pretend people just 'tuttut'd' at homosexuals before SCOTUS and DC put a stop to it, or that religious people didn't shrug about gay's being lobotomized.
That's not even going into religious groups who treat the 1st Amendment as if it;s only supposed to protect religious freedom of expression, but not artistic freedom of expression.
Plus, well, there is a whole 'Southern Baptists helped keep slavery going by teaching slaves that it was their Biblical lot in life to be a slave' that no religious folks like to admit happened.
Oh, and let's not forget the whole fight around evolution and denying it because of being afraid of large numbers/'atheist indoctrination' that happened at the end of the 1800s/early 1900s.
Evolution,as dreamed by Darwin,is hoax,so they have right of it.
Other things - protestants did weird things,just like catholics in absolute monarchies.
Poland? you could be sodomite and nobody really cared.Important thing was if you were gentry,city dweller or peasant - becouse peasants was f****d no matter what kind of sex they preferred.
And state do not made you do anything.Even running peasants was chased by private owners,not King.And state only pay judges - you must in most case punish those who broke law on your own.
Maybe state sometimes should be stronger?
Terthna
Professional Lurker
Don't mistake a lack of power for a lack of willingness to use it to impose one's will onto others. Some people are only as good as their circumstances encourage them to be; just look at the Left and how they're all about freedom of speech, but only when their speech is in danger of being silenced. That's not something unique to them alone; it's something everyone is capable of.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Ignoring my point is exactly what you are doing.
The vast, overwhelming majority of Christians have never:
1. Tried to forcibly take control of another adult's sex life.
2. Voted for a ballot measure to do so.
3. Voted for a candidate who said he was going to try to do so.
Whereas a great many Christians (including myself) have:
1. Had conversations where people immediately declared they were irrational because they were religious.
2. Immediately declared they were intolerant because they were religious.
3. Had almost the exact conversation listed in the meme.
If you want to play the game of 'if anyone in an entire group has done it, no member of the group can say they haven't done it,' then you'd better own up to trying to use the force of law within the US to make people give service at gay weddings, forcibly taking children away from parents who don't support them 'transitioning,' and a whole host of other nastiness.
Proportionality does matter, unless you're going to stand by the leftist argument that because there's a handful of white supremacists in this country, and sixty years ago the Democrat Party still was keeping segregation laws in place, all white people have to 'own up' to white supremacy.
I'm not making a pretense of perfection. I'm pointing out that 'Christians trying to force other people to live their lives a certain way' is very rare.
Much rarer than homosexuals and the rest of the LBTQ+ crowd doing so, at that.