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  • Protestants: "Ahh but that was Catholicism. And Catholicism isn't Christian."

    picard-facepalm.gif

    • I totally get the satire in your comment but I just wanna say, the forced Christianization of indigenous Americans was definitely carried out by Protestants.

      edit: I guess Protestants didn't have widespread, overt "accept baptism or we'll execute you on the spot" policies like some Catholic missions in the Americas, but the result of forced relocation and family separation was much the same. When they force people onto a reservation on an inhospitable plot of land half a continent away from their homes, and then withhold aid unless they accept Christ as their savior, they might as well be saying "convert or die." Same goes for using the natives' "heathenry" as part of the justification for wars and war crimes.

    • I'm basically a secular humanist, and I've heard the statement that Catholics aren't Christians, in person, a few times. The two times that come to mind were from very different people (a Chinese Christian that lives in Beijing, and a Canadian Christian that lives on an apple orchard in southern Ontario). Both of whom were coworkers I spent some time with while travelling for work (different jobs, about 10 years apart).

      I've always shut it down as a wildly offensive thing to say, and not worthy of discussing. So I've never gotten a real explantion for why some Christians believe it. Is it a common opinion?

      • Evangelicals sometimes hold to it - basically, there's a whole 'thing' about nuda scriptura amongst certain protestant sects, especially those which gained prominence in the modern US in the 19th century. In the minds of these sects, by nuda scriptura - 'bare scripture' - there's only one authority on theology, and that is the Bible, interpreted literally. To them, then, the entire Old World church hierarchies and traditions are some bizarre Satanist plot to lead Christians astray by NOT following ONLY the Bible and nothing but the Bible.

        Catholics tend to emphasize things like Church tradition, and even reason (gasp), as means of constructing theology, while Old World-originated protestants sects, like Lutherans, tend to view the Bible as the highest but not only source of theology (sola scriptura). To New World sect evangelicals, the latter is misguided but essentially harmless; the former is (though they would never use this term, instead preferring to denigrate their enemies as not Christians at all) heresy.

      • I grew up catholic in the Midwest. Yeah it's a thing some protestants believe. They think catholics worship Mary, the saints, and/or the devil. It's the sort of thing you see from the sorts of protestants who are fucking insane.

        My great grandma's funeral was hijacked by the preacher to tell the catholic side of the family that we were all going to hell. She didn't even believe in that sect, my great aunt just abused her into it when she had dementia. It was the sort of sect where there's no drinking or dancing at weddings and women aren't allowed to wear panted garments.

  • My man should watch Sugarcane. I’d bet those poor kids wished the priests were only threatening them with knives.

  • Knife-point, sword point, gunpoint, gallows, guillotine, poison, several other more gruesome methods, Christianity has done it all.

  • Or colonisation in Africa or South America, or in Australia and New Zealand, or basically everywhere xtians have gone. Amongst their mandates in the bible is to spread their beliefs to ‘lower’ cultures, after all. Ya know, to ‘save’ them.

    Or the Holocaust – fun fact, Hitler wasn’t atheist, that’s just one more thing xtians lie about to distance themselves from it; the Nazis required prayers in school, included it in their oaths, and steeped their iconography in it.

    It’s insane how many widespread genocides have their roots in this toxic mythology.

    e: there are some extreme recent examples, too, like the guy who tried bringing Jesus to the North Sentinelese, with tragically predictable results. But he believed in the mission, just like the rest of the brainwashed. Unfortunately they’re going to kill us instead of themselves.

    • The Hitler thing is complicated. He was in broad terms a Christian early on (though a sect that denied Jesus as divine, and recast him as an aryan), but there is little evidence Hitler believed in anything in his whole life except for Nazism, his mother, and the Opera. This then was largely as a power play - he ultimately saw organised religion as a locus of control and later an existential threat to the authority of the Third Reich. When his proposed Reich Church failed to materialise, he lost interest in the religious angle, and by 1937 was foretelling the ultimate struggle between Nazism and Christianity, ending with the latter’s destruction. 2,700 members of the clergy were imprisoned in a special barracks at Dachau.

      • It’s really not complicated. Christians have just tried to make it so for a long time.

        There’s overwhelming evidence that Hitler was a staunch Christian: the man himself said:

        We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity. Our movement is Christian.

        I get annoyed when people denigrate reading or owning Mein Kampf – everyone should read it. The myths of Hitler have overshadowed the truths, and we need to learn from the truths.

        His movement was one of a religious zealot taking those beliefs to extremes, which involved the decimation of another in the Abrahamic triad, as happens with alarming regularity.

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