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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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I have done and will continue to call out racial and homophobic bigotry as quickly as I do religious bigotry.
Unfortunately, as shameful as it is, one of those forms of prejudice is supported by most of the active population here.
What? You mean in America, the country ruled by Christians who impose Christianity on children in schools, where the majority religion is Christianity, where Christian organizations get preferential treatment by the government, where Christianity is the overwhelming majority religion of politicians, and where there is an active political movement to literally enforce state Christianity on the population, and where Christian moral doctrine is being widely used to restrict the bodily autonomy of women?? Ah yes so much Christian hate
Unironically shut the fuck up
You have thoroughly convinced me!
Where can I sign up for the daily hate speech against Christians? Oh, nevermind, I forgot I already have a Lemmy account.
It is unfortunate that rather than learning how to fight against their methods, you have instead decided to emulate them.
"Hate speech against Christians"
Please point out the hate speech in the comment you replied to. Telling you to shut the fuck up isn't hate speech, and everything else is literally a straightforward fact about Christianity in America. Zero hate speech.
Gotta play the persecution game though, am I right?
Those first two lines were intentionally sarcastic exaggeration. Was I supposed to include a /s for the cheap seats? It seemed pretty obvious from here.
They pretty well lost me when they told me to "shut the fuck up". I certainly wasn't going to waste my time on a clearly worded response to someone who likely wouldn't read it anyways.
Not sure who you think is getting persecuted, I doubt many Christians would hang out in a place like this. Even those that push for the bodily autonomy of women would feel unwelcome with so many people openly hostile to their faiths.
If they're offended by people acknowledging the impact of Christians on LGBT people in the US, good. Leave. I don't have time for straight Christians who want to hand wring and whinge about others acknowledging the historical and current negative impact Christianity has had on LGBT people.
Do you know how many fucking anti-LGBT bills have been put forward just this year in the US? This isn't rhetorical, a real number is attached to it. Don't google it, think of a number.
What number did you guess?
Because it's almost 500.
How many anti-Christianity bills have there been in the past 50 years, again?
There is nothing wrong with calling people out when they try to suppress your rights. The problem is pretending all Christians are the same on this issue and using that as a justification to attack them all.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/25/1124101216/trans-religious-leaders-say-scripture-should-inspire-inclusive-congregations
https://www.gaychurch.org/find_a_church/
I live in BFE Texas and there are ten Affirming Churches in the area; five of them are within about 45 minutes of me. As a comparison there are only two Cowboy Churches in the same area. Every major City I checked had several Affirming Churches.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans are Christian and they are not just going to give that up because you do not like their religion. These are people that need to be convinced of either the rightness of your cause or at least your right to live the way you want. Right now, all they are hearing is "They're trying to turn your little boys into girls" or "Fuck the Christians". Neither of these messages are helpful, and both make them feel the same way as you do when you look at that list. The difference is they have a lot more political influence.
When every asshole that wants to accuse a random Christian of murder, without a single piece of evidence, gets overwhelmingly upvoted it makes that fight harder.
Gee, I wonder who's doing that? I wonder what religion they claim tells them to do it? I wonder how many Christians think that's closer to the truth than trans kids knowing who they are? How many of them do you think would even listen to the trans religious leaders you use as a shield, who themselves are pointing out how fucked modern Christianity is?
Have you expended 1/10th as much energy arguing with those people as you have whining in this thread about how a comment made on an obscure forum online is the reason so many Christians think trans people are the devil?
My man, I think a lot of evidence has been presented just in this thread.
I get the point, you don't easily turn people to your cause with hateful rhetoric, but at a certain point, patience is lost when it feels like people are just ignoring reality and continuing to not just participate in, but support institutions that have created a lot of harm for people.
Not sure why this 2 day old comment just showed up in my inbox, but have a response anyways.
Also an upvote for a well-worded response.
I can appreciate their frustrations. I have certainly felt plenty of my own and dropped a slur or two particularly at politicians.
Some of my issue is directly related to how they express those frustrations in a public forum, but what really tweaks my tail is how overwhelming the support is for those responses.
I ignored them at first, but at some point I need to either address them or drop Lemmy, which at this point means dropping the last bit of social media that I am using. Places like Lemmy and Reddit help me stay informed, so I figured I would try pointing it out some before dropping social media again for a couple more years.
"Religious bigotry" LOL
The only people who practice anything that could be called that are religious people themselves. Everyone else just wants to be left the fuck alone.
Fair enough. I should have called it anti-religious bigotry.
Calling out your hateful ideology for what it is, is not bigotry. You seem to not understand that word either. Nothing I said was bigoted.
What? I didn't call anything you said bigotry. Just adjusted the term I used based on your previous statement.
I am not sure what this means unless you think I am religious. I am not.
Religion is a choice
Expression of Religion is a choice. Belief in religion is often more fundamental to who a person is.
nah
Religion is poison.
It is unfortunate that you think so, there is a lot of wisdom in the various world religions.
We may be beyond the need for religion, but I doubt even that.
Finding wisdom in religion is like trying to pick corn out of shit.
Nice quote, though I think it would be better applied to this whole post.
The few bits of wisdom here are so surrounded by shit that most people would need a hose and sieve to find them.
No there’s not.
You can be a wise, moral and ethical person without religion. It’s easy. Tons of people do that every single day.
There is a difference between attacking someone who chooses a disgusting belief system and bigotry. Any adult who remains a Christian knows exactly what the religion with the highest kill count stands for. They decide to ignore that because they get the warm fuzzies once a week for an hour.
Now go restore Roe v. Wade or you are useless to me.
Bigotry is thinking, what I believe is right and everyone who believes differently is wrong.
To point at all varieties of Christianity and say, "you are bad," is being bigoted.
If you want someone useful here are some people that agree with you and will help you fight, assuming you can manage to not call their belief system disgusting to their faces:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/meet-the-religious-groups-fighting-to-save-abortion-access
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/01/22/american-religious-groups-vary-widely-in-their-views-of-abortion/
No. That is just being human.
Ok? It isnt some weird charm argument winner. You can call me any nasty thing you want and that won't raise from the dead a single Iraqi or stop a single 14 year old girl having to induce an at home abortion because her uncle raped her.
Not good enough. I want to hear a Christian shaman to say that anyone who opposes their religion on the rest of us is no longer a Christian. Disown or own. I like hot beverages and cold ones but not lukewarm ones.
No. That is just being arrogant. You can be human and acknowledge that your stance is an opinion and that there are other just as valid opinions. Yours just fits you better.
To the best of my memory, I haven't called you anything. I was pointing out OC's bigoted statement.
Ever heard of a Schism? Virtually every denomination in America thinks the others aren't doing it right. Half of them won't acknowledge each other as real Christians.
In fact, there are major schisms forming right now over LGBT issues. Methodists have been constantly in the news regarding their LGBT schism for the last year or two.
https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2023-07-06/one-in-five-united-methodist-congregations-in-the-us-have-left-the-denomination-over-lgbtq-conflicts
Another article points out :
https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2022-10-10/united-methodists-are-breaking-up-in-a-slow-motion-schism
Talk is cheap. Excommunicate Christians who vote religion into government and spend every single tithe on restoring Roe v. Wade.
Or you can call me a bigot again for not respecting your skydaddy and Jesus. Just so you are aware: Jesus never even existed.
Please do a little research before making such ridiculous statements. You do not have to believe in a god to believe a man named Jesus existed. There is likely more evidence for the existence of a man named Jesus than there is for the existence of your own great-great-grandmother.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
If this is where you set the bar for treating Christians like anyone should treat another human then there really isn't anywhere to go in this conversation.
Not that it really matters but I am not a Christian. I am just someone that believes all humans should be treated with a bit of respect until they prove they are not worthy of it by their own personal words and actions.
Zero. Zero. Zero. Contemporary evidence the man existed. All we have is hearsay by known liars decades later. As for my great-great grandmother I have seen her Elis Island file and my grandmother had a photo of her from turn of last century. In case you are curious one of my great great grandfather was a dean at an certain major university.
I am sure if I made an effort I could also get her marriage certificate and census record.
Yet your Jesus left nothing behind, pretty sus.
Ding ding ding argument from authority! Gotcha. Basic logical fallacy. Ding ding ding ding. Guess they don't teach basic logic and research methods in your weekly pretend time.
What type of sky-daddyism do you follow? Let me know so I can point out how wrong it is. Is it cliche agnostic but not really or mall yoga Hinduism or Buddha was a pot smoker?
Episcopalians are less than 2% of the US population. Jewish people and LGBT people are a bigger voting bloc. Using one of the most liberal and one of the smallest Christian denominations as evidence for what Christianity in the US is like is intentionally misleading, when more than 10x as many Americans consider themselves Evangelicals (about 1/4th).
If I was trying to claim that is that standard view, then it would be misleading. Since I was actually claiming that there are a wide variety of beliefs among Christians, some even aligning with your values, it is pretty spot on representation. Treating them all the same is prejudicial behavior.
A fair-minded person would give an individual a chance to act like an asshole before treating them like trash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
You gotta take a stand somewhere. The intolerant religious zealots would be a good place to start.
To borrow a line from /u/theneverfox@pawb.social
https://lemmy.world/comment/3754441
The paradox is literally what's happening with you in this thread, genius. the Christian church has been out of bounds for centuries, and now that people are finally responding appropriately, you kick and scream saying "not like that! you can only respond appropriately if you follow all the rules laid out by the people who oppress you! you need to tolerate our intolerance because our imaginary friend says we need to hate you to stop the end of the world"
There were "good" people who identify as Nazis. should we let that ideology thrive because a minority of its population put flowers on the graves their compatriots created?
I get that you just want to hold hands and sing kumbaya, but I have trouble holding the hands that are covered with the blood of my brothers, sisters, and allies.
Well hey maybe religious people should stop consistently hurting other humans and society in general because they think their imaginary friend would be down with it.
It sounds an awful like you are saying, "Well yeah, we are bigots, but we are bigots because they deserve it!"
Am I misunderstanding you?
Yes, you are misunderstanding me.
I’m saying that religion has a richly documented history of intolerance and repression, up to and including the present day. I am simultaneously saying that I am intolerant of intolerance.
I feel like you should read up on this if you’re still struggling to wrap your head around the nuance of what pretty much everyone else in this comment tree besides yourself is expressing.
If you keep advocating in this fashion you are going to start feeling very backed up against a wall very quickly. When people are routinely hurt by an institution the unambiguous defense of the people within institution as a whole claiming a similar victimhood plays on a part of human nature. What people want of you is to accept that the numbers of people claiming Christiandom to then go on to harm someone means that as someone who claims to be Christian that you should be the first voice to start criticizing your own.
Instead because you cannot separate yourself from your Christian label or other people's frustration and pain caused by other people who do so under the flag of being "Proud Christians" your advocacy appears shallow and self serving. You and all the good Christians you defend become literary "the good man who does nothing" If facing people in your audience who have experienced trauma at the hands of your group what they want to see is that you accept that people like you harmed them and that you are different than them by being able to recognize their pain and shelve your agenda and listen unambiguously. What they are asking is for you to show you care about them and are strong enough to weather and differentiate the criticism they aren't directing at you.
It's a similar effect to how a lot of systemic issues around racism get held up on the feelings of the people in institutions about being implied to be racist. Oftentimes the issues never get dealt with because the conversation has to stop become all about the feelings of the person and how they aren't a bad person. While they may not intend it that person's feelings become the obstacle that throws up the roadblocks on people who are fighting desperately to have less roadblocks. Once this happens often enough people start to figure that that person's feelings DO make them a bad person because regardless of their personal merits they are still in the way and having to sway every individual roadblock by taking them offside and coddling them telling them, it's okay we know YOU aren't a bad person becomes way too much. Thus people start getting more frustrated with the people who demand this treatment and take up their energy and they start getting more strident.
When you place yourself in that spot it's easy to see people's frustration as hate but it is different. They want you to be better.
I appreciate the well-thought out and verbose response. Have an upvote!
Now to the meat of it. I am not a Christian, I am someone who is tired of some bigots getting a pass and some bigots getting their whole instances defederated. Since there is clearly a disinterest in heavy-handed moderation to get rid of the one-sided bigotry then the best recourse is open discussion.
I have no doubt that the people here who are heavily prejudiced against religion have their reasons, but that does not mean that their words are good or acceptable in an open forum. When people express their ideas in socially unacceptable ways they should be called out and down-voted, but currently they they are mostly receiving positive responses. This is wrong. It is a mark against the communities and instances they are posting those statements in.
It does not matter why someone feels justified for spewing hate, they should be called-out or at least shunned. If you want to help someone work through their hate, that is great. I just want to stop being embarrassed by it. Despite being a great concept, I literally cannot recommend Lemmy to anyone because the top comment is so often some trash about how "all conservatives are fascists" or a gay activist died "it must be a Christian."
Lemmy is kind of unapologetically leftist and there is a lot of dissatisfaction by a number of groups that all coelece around the use of religion or "traditional values" a euphemism for Christian, more specifically the Pauline chapters, norms that reject LGBTQIA identities and a flattening of the rights of women to be autonomous. When you look at the "bigotry" you'll find "Christianity" does not always often mean the same thing when people use it from poster to poster. In many ways it closer to a shorthand for the Evengelical movements which are growing more like consolidated political parties. If someone claims to be Christian the belief in Christ itself is not always the cause for the vitriol (not saying the angry atheists do not prowl). Rather it is how they weild it against other communities.
Moderation is never truly neutral. To some extent all places are tailored to be safer to someone. Leftist spaces are often tailored to be more sympathetic with people to whom conservative values trend on the whole to be hostile towards. Importantanly however it is important to look at how that frustration is being utilized. On the whole people here's main gripe is an overreach of control at the expense of safety and health of other people. The desired outcome is not a banishment from society but a ceasefire.
Once again, thank you for the well-reasoned comment.
I have to say, much of this sounds very similar to something I might have said while trying to convince someone that there is some nuance to the Christian Right. The rest of if though is still worth thinking over some more for sure. Especially the bit about how this space is a bit tailored towards leftist view points. Maybe I am expecting too much in a place where people should be able to throw an off the cuff "goddam repubtards" without being called on it.
Still, I think some of the comments really do push that boundary; including OC's immediate accusation of some generic Christian being the murder.
My experience mostly comes from moderating queer friendly communities with a low amount of anonymity. If you have a community with a high instance of trauma surrounding being cast out of your family, abused directly or placed in the abusive situation of conversion therapy then let someone use that space to proselytize Christianity positivly it tends to make that place unsafe because you can actually cause flashbacks in the standing community and eventually in the interest of protecting the right of one person to say whatever they the rest of the community stops being able to speak freely without having to explain themselves and have to tiptoe around the one person who makes any instance of them venting their reasonble frustrations with their situation about how "not every Christian... ". People sometimes need places to let off steam.
Often people in threatened minorities need protected spaces where they don't need to follow the rules that are more universally applied where they don't feel they have to appease the sensibilities that are enforced on them the minute they step outside. Very few spaces are actually welcome to everyone and the ones that use an anything goes moderation policy usually find themselves hosting some damn near criminal elements who drive off others and rot the place.
Since conservative spaces tend to be somewhat hegemonic people from those spaces often hold feelings that if they are not welcome to say whatever they want anywhere they choose that any request to modify their behaviour with respect to the needs of others in the space is intolerable oppression. Every space has to chose on a sliding scale how much they are willing to put up with if one participant starts causing everyone to enjoy the space less though the decision in my experience is often a matter of long debate per individual about how willing to learn and accept that the value lies with the more vulnerable audience who have fewer venues to not have to deal with being spammed with rhetoric that paints them as deviant, dangerous, mentally ill or inferior.
Halfway spaces in our forums are made available for people who cannot be trusted to play by the stricter ruleset of conscientious behaviour where one can expect to be more rough and tumble but a lot of the time that becomes a space to debunk a lot of the bullshit and places the burden on our queer membership to be educators as oftentimes people who can't be trusted use the dedicated spaces to whine and complain about how they should have the all access pass and when they inferred everyone in the space was a pedophile they didn't actually know what they were doing so it wasn't like they were trying to hurt everyone etc etc etc...
Just be sure you've taken a moment to understand who you're speaking with and what you're speaking with them about. Because in this case, any issue of bigotry has absolutely nothing to do with this drug related domestic dispute murder.
Commenters here are arguing with each other over something that has nothing to do with this case. So, it's not that you care about the victim, you care about virtue signaling.
FWIW, the victim regularly attended an Episcopalian church. So, I'm not so sure he'd be cool with people using religion as a cudgel beneath his obituary.
Is that what it is looking like now? The article was significantly sparse on details.
Yeah. No argument there....
I posted this earlier https://lemmy.ml/comment/4475683
Thank you for the link. The article from that comment was far superior.
I am sorry to hear that Josh lost his life like that. Seems like Philly lost a good guy.
Hopefully it wasn't actually the domestic option. It is a hard thought to think that someone he helped out by letting them live there would come back to kill him.
Also, I am glad to hear that his friends are looking into rehoming his rescued cat friend.