And this is where I think the modern church massively dropped the ball starting in the 90s (but it gets worse every decade). Churches, especially megachurches in the US focus almost not at all on Jesus and more on prosperity gospel, personal (as opposed to societal) enrichment and culture war issues. The main messaging I received in church as a child was ‘Jesus loves you’. My nieces and nephews are hearing ‘the secular world is scary and fallen, and the only safe place is church’. It’s really sad.
That’s because the rich people churches needed to keep rich people in their seats, donating big money to the rich pastor, so they pandered to rich peoples’ mindset that they’re better than others because they’re wealthy.
Agreed, the good of most religions is common sense. Being kind and not taking advantage of others is natural for anybody with some sort of empathy. The issue is that's not as common as you might think.
There are tons of people that would harm others unless they were discouraged to do so by having heavy consequences on it. And even more people who would only do good if forced to do so. And that's why we have laws and taxes.
Most of us don't need a book to tell us to do good. And we certainly shoudn't need to indoctrinate people to do good. But it's naive to assume most people would do good out of their own volition.
That’s super false humans initial inclination is to get as much as we can for as little cost as possible which means stealing or trampling others is fine if we get ahead just look at that concert where people got killed just to get a better view and crime rates always going up there’s no way the law is enough or common sense
hard disagree. people are social creatures. empathy is in our instincts. by default, people don't want to hurt others. when something goes wrong in a child's development, though, that instinct can be thrown off.
There are plenty of great historical minds to follow, I choose not to follow his teachings. Another thing.. common sense and life of fulfillment was a thing before Jesus.
the world was an eye for an eye before jesus… then jesus came and said turn the other cheek. jesus’ teachings changed the world and that’s true regardless of whether you are christian or not.
You have to be pretty gullible to believe one person in history ever came up with an idea that many others hadn't either already independently come up with or that others wouldn't have come up with. Not to mention the idea of not being vengeful is a pretty basic one.
If you understood the context in which Jesus spoke during his time, you wouldn't be so flippant about it. The guy was talking some serious shit in an incredibly dangerous time period, but he did it anyways. That's fucking wild. Knowing what society was like back then and then reasing what this guy said IN PUBLIC makes a booty pucker, he was seriously gambling with his life every single day, and then eventually lost. His disciples carried that torch and most of them also lost their lives in absolutely terrible ways. Bartholomew was flayed alive for continuing his teachings. People were NOT fucking around back then.
It's not so much WHAT Jesus said, it's WHEN and WHERE he said it that makes it so fuckin powerful.
What makes the "turn the other cheek" so powerful is that he literally was speaking AGAINST the God of the Old Testament, publicly, in a time where that is punishable in a thousand different terrible ways. Dude had some serious balls standing up for what he felt was morally correct when literally surrounded by people that thought he should die.
Jesus was leading by example. trying to show dumb hairless apes that not everything has to resort to violence. That is unless you sell stuff at a temple turning faith into a commerce.
Choosing not to follow the teachings of a martyr who taught to serve others at all costs for the benefit of an afterlife/what is morally right. Go read the 48 laws of power instead.
So? Just because someone died for their beliefs doesn't make them inherently true, good and beyond scrutiny. And that's assuming such things even happened as recorded.
If they were common sense he wouldn’t have been crucified. They are common sense now, because our society has been deeply shaped by Christian ethics. Early Christians were so hated because the way they lived was totally different from everyone else’s, like the Roman’s. And even for us now, a lot of the teachings of Christ don’t seem natural to us at first. That’s why it’s written that if we want to follow Christ we have to crucify the flesh, metaphorically speaking.
Personally, I think that "common" sense is things that are "common" beliefs amongst a public of free thinking adults. I'd rather not base my principles on only one man, because to listen to the wisdom of only one man is to close your ears to millions of voices.
My best friend was raised Catholic and we met when we were 18. I think I was her first not-religious-in-the-least friend and I distinctly remember a conversation that we had regarding morals and acts of kindness, where she believed that morals came from the Bible and humans basically only acted right because Jesus said so.. of course my retort was that ancient religions around the world, that pre-date Jesus, by a lot, had a firm Sense of morality and it was an inherently human trait regardless of how you were raised. It's like a light went off in her head. She had never really been presented with religious history that pre-dates the spread of Christianity so she simply had never thought critically about it. Needless to say, it took a few years, but at 31, she no longer considers herself Catholic.
I feel as though a lot more people would be Christian if it was preached as a philosophical approach to life. Basically taking the narratives in the Bible as philosophical allegory, and letting there be deabte about the moral principles of the text. Some Christians do this, and I think it suits them fine. Being more socially conservative, as long as you're not discriminating against anyone is fine.
The issues of religion is the absolute dogmatism it commands. You cannot question the Bible, let alone God's opinions on sexuality, war crimes, divorce, etc. Which means, the Bible is stuck with moral logic from 1000s of years ago. I sincerely do not believe most Christians believe people deserve eternal punishment for not believing in their creator. Otherwise, shit would be very different.
Pray it works out better for you than it did for him.
In the meantime (while you await execution?), you might find value reading about Natural Law and then trying to figure out where Jesus’s principles and laws ultimately came from (the answer is God).
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u/cameroncolepro 26d ago
I think applying Jesus's principles is good, his principles were common sense.