I used to be a huge Christian as a young child. I, along with the other followers, believed that Christianity was the religion of love, and I always believed that we were like a safe, warm community for each individual to come to to find kindness, empathy, and connection with us. Fast forwardmany years down the line, I became an agnostic and was very open about it as well. After that point, the shift was immediate.
For the first time in my life, I got to see first hand what it was like to be outside the community, and how you were treated for not being “one of them.” Suddenly I was being treated as an enemy. It was heartbreaking. The verbal attacks, the threats, the insults, ext.
I got hear many other experiences like my own and I realized that the kindness and love was only really ever reserved for the people in the church.
I also learned that it was “submission/convention by any means necessary, including fear and intimidation”
At the beginning , I liked kneeling down to the the cross/religion because it was something I wanted to do and it made me happy. I believed that I was making that choice and if I didn’t want to do it then I wouldn’t have to nor be expected to, wrong. I just so happened to have made they choice they wanted me to at the time.
You are expected to “turn to Jesus” and “pray to him” regardless of whether you desire to or not. That either tour we’re going to do it willingly or forced, that you really don’t have a choice in the matter like you thought. If you dont change your stance then they will use any form of ‘persuasion’ to bring to back to the religion including threatening, fear tactics, guilt tripping, gaslighting, and in the off chance they do start out with kind words and sweet promises, it’ll most often quickly switch to the ladder when you don’t latch on.
This is the experience of me and many, many, many other non religious people on a day to day basis and continue to have. Now, I know that this is not the case for every single Christian individual and/or church but I would say it’s way more than enough to be considered the majority, so I am not referring to one church or one part of Christianity but the Christian community as a whole. There is only love for the people in their group. If you are not then you are usually met with nothing but hatefulness and extortion.
Didn’t even have to wait very long.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pettyrevenge/comments/wuaypn/discriminate_against_me_because_of_my_religion/
Tends to happen when you think everyone else has the wrong god.
i have been a christian, and i can assure you that christian communities are *not* very kind to their own people.
That’s because all major religious where created in a time when humans were tribalistic and it was a way to strengthen tribal bonds when they were important and so tribalism became woven into the fabric of those religious intrinsically.
Now that we are a global species/society those tribalistic tendency are only hinderances.
When I was young, I read about the “mystery” Paul talks about in [Eph 3:1–13](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=eph3.1-13&version=ESV), and got really excited. Then, I found out that it was just about tribalism and was disappointed. I grew up in a suburb in MA. Most of my peers in public school probably didn’t go to church. So I thought Paul was being pretty uninteresting. Fast forward to today, with tribalism on the rise in the US, and my learning more about how other parts of the country have been all this time. I think tribalism is the most powerful force in existence. I think it is the most difficult thing to overcome.
My wife and I helped two friends of mine, both scientists, go through a discernment process about whether to leave our church on the left coast and in a deeply blue city. They had both come from Christian cultures not quite as intensely ethnocentric as you describe yours, but still pretty strong. They ultimately left, but the more critical one later acknowledged that the secular world isn’t any better. She saw that when people are in power—not just an internet forum, but where resources are allocated, credit is attributed, and people are fired—the world isn’t any better. Now, that of course is enough for them to stay away from Christianity and I don’t blame them. There should be supernatural power available to overcome ethnocentrism—Paul talks about it! There should be Christians who obey Jesus’ words in [Mt 20:20–28](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mt20.20-28&version=ESV).
As a Christian who finds that atheists often talk about pragmatic Christian issues more deeply than theists (maybe it’s just selection bias, internet or my own idiosyncrasies) I probably spent over 20,000 talking to atheists, much of it being online. It’s far better if atheists have the ban hammer, so that nothing I believe is taken for granted. I’ve had many excellent conversations, but I’ve also encountered a lot of bigotry. One blog had a regular commenter who bragged about turning down a job candidate just because [s]he was a Christian; he acknowledged this was a violation of law, but he felt justified in doing so. I regularly quoted that little comment and the other regulars refused to condemn it—maybe excepting one or two. Tribalism is a powerful thing and wherever you have a bunch of atheists chumming around, they have more in common than “the lack of belief in any deities”.
So, what actually works to overcome tribalism? If we humans don’t have an ever-growing database of stories of how this was successfully done (in what context, by what personality types, etc.), maybe we’re falling down on our jobs. And maybe we should record failures too, attempting to discern which ones were near-successes. We could be … _scientific_ about it. But nobody seems interested in that.
The point of all mimetic strategies is to create factions. It would be of no use as a political tool of control if it did not achieve this. The ultimate use of this feature is that larger factions reinforce the initial belief. You can recruit your belief system into being dominant by achieving mass adoption. The way the human mind reacts to the behavior of crowds has always been well understood. What we call the propaganda sciences was well understood by Ancient cultures and it achieved impressing heights in Rome. Today we call this something like “going viral”. When the adoption of a suggestion goes viral you have created a new reality. This is why there does not appear to be any truths today. Each faction can have its truths based in the power of its beliefs. The entire thing gets supported by conditioning techniques that follow you from cradle to grave by rituals that “rinse and repeat”.
In Arlington, Texas, there is a July 4th parade every year.
A local atheist group marches in that parade.
They are heckled and mocked with hateful speech every year.
The community is majority Christian.
Not just a lack of charity. I see an outright hostility to people outside their religion who are open about it.
Justinian the apostate, the last emperor to try and reassert the Roman Pantheon, once lamented about the state of pagan temples and priests. These institutions existed to make manifest the god and so spent what they had on constant hedonism while the Christian churches were spending everything they had on caring for the poor and the sick regardless of who they were.
I think we can all recognize this pagan expression of gods in our culture. Tick Tock and Instagram are practically temples dedicated to the dissemination of this idea. “This is what it means to live a good life”. And all the horror and all the tragedy and all the corruptness of the world is cut out. The garden of the gods is to live in power and prosperity for eternity — and people crave it.
Justinian notices the distortion of reality and laments the tragedy. He says, “why can’t you be more like the temples of the Christians, why can’t you make it more about care for each other.” What Justinian doesn’t notice, in spite of his desire to return Rome to its traditional gods, is that he is already irrevocably Christian. No confession required, you’ve already said enough.
Some of the most caring people I personally know happen to be Christian and Muslim, key members of the Community group I volunteer with, genuinely decent and nice people. One of those decent people is my next door neighbour who is also a vicar so we do socialise, and after a whiskey or two he has admitted that some of his congregation are a real challenge to ‘love they neighbour’, actually quite horrid people.
The important distinction is this, some people are shits, any amount of life experience will show you that, some of those shits are Christian, some Muslim, some atheist, what religion they are is irrelevant to them being shits since that came first.
This is just a bad argument.
Christian charities exist that give aid to non-Christians.
I’m totally sure some Christians will not be as generous as others, or apply conditions, or only give aid to their own tribe, but it is just plain wrong to imply it occurs across the whole Christian community.
Very sorry to hear this. BTW I am a Baha’i and not a Christian but as you mentioned, not in every case one can experience what you have experienced, yet, you are right, in most cases, that is how Christians treat others who are not Christians or part of their Church.
Howbeit, I like to add that Christianity has had its cycle and that cycle is long gone. Christianity in its essence should be evaluated during its apostolic and golden age, and then study its contributions to civilization during that age. It should also be evaluated through the life its founder, Jesus Christ himself, and the life he lived and what he taught, and not its community after 2000 years when all its energy is spent and has lost all its original vitality and potential. In today’s world, christianity is fractured into 40,000 conflicting sects within it——with 5 new sects being produced every week——each in conflict with the others.
That being said, ALL world religions have their age of spring, summer, fall, and winter of decline and corruption. But their divine origin will forever remain true and should be respected. Christianity was annulled about 650 years after its inception when Muhammad had appeared. Its cycle was finished long long ago.
But all world religions——Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Baha’i faith come from the same Source. They are all different chapters of the same book——with one Author we call God.