The western world abandoned religion and replaced it with ideologies, which are infinitely more contradictory and cause suffering that would be incalculable in the age of religion. Ideologies have killed hundreds of millions of people in just the 20th century. The reason why this happened has nothing to do with "contradictions" but with the fact that newly literate (and scientifically educated) people read the Bible and applied literal analysis of the works therein, when it wasn't meant to be read literally. The Bible was written by people who didn't even understand what "literal" meant, all of their language was figurative.
Is this a joke? Torah and Koran are bunches of loose disconnected writings collected into a single book hundreds of years after the Bible, they have multiple secondary texts that try to balance and make sense of their internal contradictions.
The reason judaism and islam haven't fallen apart is because they are barely literate and suffer horrible punishment for criticizing their religion, whereas Christians are all extremely literate and tolerate atheists or even other faiths.
Josiah Moore
Christianity has failed to be the religion of reason, of the logos, it has become a cultural recurrence and an oppressive belief and that's why modernism has trumpled its roots.
Every ideology has failed(nazism, communism, fascism, illuminism, etc…), ideologies are a thing of the past in the west. Materialism is not an ideology and it existed even in biblical times if you mean that.
Again, they have nothing to do with the modern world. Even china while calling itself communist is completely capitalist and doesn't give a winnie the pooh.
And by the way Karl Marx was the opposite of what communists were, just like Jesus was often the opposite of what christians are.
You have problems are the core of your faith not only in scriptures.
The same happened under christianity, probably worse since people rebelled brutally
Thomas Morales
at* the core
Hudson Scott
lol. Ideology drives even atheism, today ideologies are all powerful. The kind of ideologies that command the government of sweden to select teenage girls and force them into camps with adult muslim men as entertainment. Socialism itself continues to kill people today, millions every year, from the smallest socialist policies in places like Chicago to mass socialist nightmares in places like Zimbabwe and Venezuela.
In Biblical times and especially the ten thousand years of oral tradition preceding it, no distinction whatsoever was made between literal and figurative, they were the same thing. For example the idea of dragons breathing fire came about because the bite of a snake feels like fire, and people often said a snake "burned them" even as early as a few hundred years ago. When someone said the sky is a dome and the earth is flat, it is because when you stand under it that's what it looks like. There didn't need to be a distinction between figurative and literal because there was no winnie the pooh science to require such a distinction.
Evan Murphy
When you tell people God cares about them while extremely painful diseases exist and spread through microorganisms it really makes you think.
For example an huge difference between judaism/islam and christianity is the lack of the devil at a powerful level, I mean the devil exists according to them but is nothing compared to the role of the devil in christianity. You have almost gnostic beliefs yet you are not and that causes intellectual black holes.
Juan Watson
I mean I can regurgitate things from a Christopher Hitchens book dust jacket too if you'd like. Roman Catholic reductionism and theological shortcuts have absolutely lead, by degrees, to the reductio ad absurdum of fractional exegesis and the endless Protestantism it spawned. But treating modernism as a competing framework rather than the simple base addiction to commodity that it is, is absolutely retarded. Calling Christianity a failure when comparing it to the persistent ground state of failure that is secularist modernism is just silly.
Jaxon Murphy
Really makes you think.
Tyler Roberts
Luther was not a gnostic, neither mormons
Aiden Cook
Luther tried to disguise it, but monergism taken to its extreme conclusion is indistinguishable from gnosticism. And mormons are literally a retread of 2nd century gnosticism, just recycled in the American midwest with a twist of Jesus for legitimacy.
Adam Mitchell
This. Someone needs to make a decent meme with an appropriate image so that it can be passed around. I've seen this explained several times over the last few years here, but without a catchy meme that can be reposted the concept will not catch on.
If I can get some image suggestions I can overlay the text.
(Tangentially; Another way I've heard this referenced is, "So, you are strong? Are you strong enough to shelter the weak?)
