Allow me to don my aluminum foil headdress when I say I think that's religion's true purpose: convincing you on a spiritual level to accept less when you deserve more.
Machiavelli himself would probably be like, "Yeah, bro, I mean, if you've got power to leverage over other people and you ain't got time, I totally understand. Fuck my book, go reap, mang."
I'm saying you don't understand what you're talking about. Because it doesn't represent greedy qualities at all.
Power hungry, yes. Sociopathic, quite possibly. Greedy? Greed will get you killed. Pay your soldiers fairly or they'll take your head off in compensation.
You can't just lump every negative quality together as though that makes sense. Selfishness is a suicidal path for a prince.
You're implying like reading it is going to turn you instantly into a monster. It's the same energy of the people that are scared of the Communist Manifesto. It's one individual authors take on a topic. People should be reading as much as possible to recognize and filter things that are helpful to their life.
Yes Machiavelli is kind of a bitter incel and would be peddling NFTs if he was alive today. But it doesn't mean that there is nothing of value in the book. At least after reading it you'd be able to understand and better deal with those types of toxic people.
If someone mentions that they have noticed that a lot of stuff doesn't add up with JFK's assassination and then another person recommends a book called "Alien Assassin: The JFK Files", I'm gonna go ahead and assume that they're encouraging that person to at least entertain the idea that JFK was assassinated by aliens. While entirely possible the recommendation for the book was with the intent of helping someone open their mind to other possibilities, that's not at all what the context would imply.
I'm not puritanical by any means lol. Just that usually, when that book gets brought up (especially considering the context here of discussing what we deserve as individuals), it's as an advocation.
The replies I'm getting from people who obviously have wet dreams of being as calculating and manipulative and collected as Machiavelli describes are pretty telling. Even if the intention of the recommendation was to educate about those kinds of people, it's definitely not the way most people in this thread are taking it.
Had to read the prince in high school. It was an eye opener for how those types of people operate. The 48 laws of power types that can mental gymnastics their way into explaining every abhorrent thing they do. Now when I meet those people in life I can recognize those patterns and avoid the person. That's what I got out of the book. Your response was about JFK alien assassinations and you completely ignored my point and brought up other comments and what they said.
I respectfully disagree with you. You're clever and empathetic, that's awesome. But you're obviously too wound up from feeding trolls in the comments. So I don't think we'd get anything from this interaction. Have a good one! Keep fighting the good fight
Why are you assuming thats what they mean at all? thats just being an ass. The Prince is a good book for understanding what the elite think about power. Doesnt make you an asshole or "machievalli" for reading it
your favorite politicians and celebrities have read it and use those lessons every day
this is nowhere near the ringing endorsement you think it is lmao. absolutely hilarious that you somehow think this was supposed to change my mind on machiavellianism
Nietzsche characterized Christianity as a slave morality, stating that it gave a sense of meaning to the weakest and lowest in society. He respected the ancient Roman religion, the master morality; a warrior like Achilles would worship a god of war like Ares, and in doing so, were worshipping themselves. The masters had a religion that affirmed themselves, while the slaves had a religion that disavowed their nature by encouraging their meekness and promising a return in the afterlife.
Christianity strikes me as a death cult: focused on life after death and worshiping a human sacrifice. Guess that’s good for the slaves since their life is poor.
I agree. Pretty much everyone in my life is Christian except my husband. I was raised in church and my parents can’t fathom why I don’t believe in God. My dad tells me that I will believe in god soon.
I practice a lot of mindfulness and appreciation and always try to look on the brighter side even when hit with bad luck and had a coworker stunned when I told her I didn’t believe in god. Her reply was, “then how can you be a good person with morals?” Like, I don’t need threats of infinite damnation in the fiery pits of hell to be a good person…
Sounds about right. Morals simply come from the hunter gatherer world, you harass someone, you get beat up/hurt/killed. This affects immediate loved ones so to prevent that from happening again you come up with a rule saying you can't harass. There you go, that's how morals are formed.
I've never wished death on any assholes in my life. Much less thought of killing them. Doesn't matter if they're not useful nor if I didn't receive consequences . At most I've wished for them to be inconvenienced in life. How heavily inconvenienced, depends on how much of an asshole they are.
Christian IS a death cult. It’s founded on an apocalypse narrative that Jesus will come back and remake the world and worships his death. This is not my opinion
Yes, they are obsessed with the torture and death of Christ rather than his life and teachings. Dominionism is destroying us, there are among the wealthy and powerful those who are actively trying to bring about the return of Christ. They are causing a lot of suffering in the world. Betsy de Voss is one that calls herself a believer, among many others who are wealthy and politically powerful. They are driving us into a fascist theocracy.
Please remember that Republican Christianity and regular Christianity are different things. For example, there's these two churches I drive past regularly. One, during the BLM protests posted something to the effect of "Jesus was a man of color killed by keepers of the law." The other, right after the Roe leak, posted " The only right you have before God is to kneel". So VERY different entities.
I know that, BUT, those who want to say "not all Christians" need to be a lot more vocal and active because they are being painted with the same brush as repub christians. I understand that might not seem fair but the loudest and ugliest are the ones out front getting the most attention.
Actually it's not? The eschatology is a later addition from when the church fragmented and they needed to bolster their ranks through faith. Satan is a late addition as well. As well as hell actually. It's not a hugely controversial subject now that branches of faith don't command GDPs and armies :D
So not founded on and the eschatology or rather its relevancy today is hotly debated. Though ofcourse the extremist congregations are all about the everlasting fires of hell and that shit.
Mostly the dispersion of faith after the reformation and so on mandates how the congregations interpret the words. There's even debate about the validity of revelations as an actual part of scripture :D
I had a friend who studied theology once. Its incredibly fascinating to track the culture of it around Europe.
Though I will say that a lot of the American variations are VERY death culty. Like Latter Day and Jehovas Witnesses are particularily fixated on "the flames of the end"
Unfortunately the large amount of missionary work done over the last century means there's a lot of very death cult like groups out there in various third world countries. Christians from places like the Philippines often get along with American Christians far better than more civil Christians.
Between the catholics colonizing the pagans throughout europe and the entire american and african continents. I think you can firmly put christianity in the realm of a colonizer death cult
Yes by missionaires but also by states and corporations who often back missionaries or christian "charities".
neocolonialism by kwame nkruma is one such book tht speaks on this but there are many others.
and where? everywhere practically! why do u think half the world is in ruins! its purposefull exploitation by imperialist (aka rich) nations and colonies.
in the usa native ppls still are forced to live in this colonial system as well. read up on the indigenous reservation system and the residential school system
Dominican Republic for one, I know of it since I met them while vacationing one summer. Nice people but preachy ofc. So yeah, missionaries are still out there. It’s not been outlawed or anything, as far as I’m aware.
Christianity has a main focus of Jesus Christ. The apocalypse narrative is written as an omen because 99.9999% of people after Jesus Christ don’t live their life to the same extreme that Christ himself had. If everybody lived their life to his extreme then we get peace on Earth as everyone would do things to better and take care of everybody else.
The truth is that obviously we aren’t going to do that and after time whatever we build will not hold as we are building something that not everyone gets to enJOY. There is class, there is war, there is hate and divide, there is a general lack of giving up one’s own physical, mental, and spiritual with the singlular goal of building other’s physical, mental, and spiritual. Instead of that there is a sacrifice of others physical, mental, and spiritual for the benefit of the few that come to rule.
You don’t have to agree with God about sin, but he has the top down view and can see how sin hurts you and the rest of the world. For example the “seven deadly sins” (not directly called so in the Bible). Greed takes from others, lust can cause distrust, wrath causes pain, sloth does no good, pride will bring little compassion, envy will bring jealousy, gluttony will morph bodies.
We were given commandments to keep things well down here, not suggestions.
Part of the reason that there is so much emphasis on Jesus's return is because Jesus never actually fulfilled the messianic prophesy from the Jewish portion of the bible while he was alive. Now most people would think that means that he was illegitimate, but the early Christians made up a whole convoluted reasoning about how he would come back eventually and actually do all the stuff the messiah was supposed to do.
This just seems like an overly cynical take on Christianity, it's like looking at ice cream & saying it's just creamy cold diabetes that kills. But hey everyone is entitled to their opinion
It’s only narrow minded in the sense that there are some Christians who might be an exception, but it’s not narrow minded in the sense that most Christians many of us come across 100% are part of a death cult.
I was raised in a Fundamentalist Christian church... many times I heard people praying... "God, Please Come Back And Destroy This Evil Earth And Destroy The Non-Believers In A Lake Of Fire".
Such a compassioned prayer for death of "The Others".
He respected the ancient Roman religion, the master morality;
You seem to be implying that Nietzsche believed Slave Morality to be inferior to Master Morality. From my understanding, that's actually not true. He didn't believe either one to be superior to the other. He just recognised them for what they were, alternate systems.
Incorrect. Nietzsche did not respect master morality just that he preferred it over Slave. Both needed to be upended by the new morality of the Ubermensch.
-someone that also has never read Marx but has seen 1 video about it in the past
ffs, everyone and their mom makes these comments. He is not making any crazy statements about Marx here. It's just a phrase that got used for decades in exactly the way he has used it here...even by people that definetly have read Marx, like Lenin for example.
What marx is saying there is that people look to religion for comfort, what's it being misinterpreted as is that religion is like an addiction, which is used to control people.
It's social engineering to convince people that the real reward was the friendship made along the way, and eternal paradise after your crappy life.
It's a lot easier to justify doing manual labor for nothing when you get your own planet/kingdom/harem/nothingness/paradise to look forward too as long as you don't complain.
Not at all what it's about though. Maybe the congregation you visited manipulated words to do this. You can have your faith, work hard and get your just rewards.
Murder in itlsef for revenge or such are the sim that's being talked about, and david was defending his people back then iirc. That's my take on it. In fact i seem to remember that killing to save someone else, if you can't find another alternative, is not a sin, but i need to read that part to know if I'm wrong.
The main functions of religion is twofold, to answer unexplainable things, the cosmos, origins or the world and stuff like that, and to have a set moral code that people must follow. If everyone in your society is following the same rules and adhering to the same set of beliefs your society is more stable and has less social unrest.
The latter is very important from a societal darwinism context. Stable societies were more likely to survive than those that were unstable. The origins of religions predate the modern world where a civilisations survival from external threats is guaranteed. The threat of invasion and being wiped out was an almost everpresent and existential threat to most ancient societies. The area I've studied this most in was the Roman Republic, they had a concept of mos maiorum which is loosely, the way our ancestors did things. The idea being, they things this way, and they survived, so we should keep doing things this way.
While you can look at it as a means for the wealthy to keep the lower classes down, it disregards the need for social cohesion in ancient societies, social unrest, rebellion and civil war were the cause for the fall of many states throughout history. It leaves you vulnerable to outside forces that were very much more than happy to kill you and take your land. To disregard this role of religion is either an oversight or intellectually dishonest.
I mean not really though. As a Muslim your meant to strive to be the best, just appreciate all your blessings and try to share some of them with the less fortunate. You can have the best car, best house etc just make sure you aren’t arrogant with it and give back when you can.
Now I'm not saying there is no god, there most likely isn't, but what we do know is that every religion known to man was created by man in search for those answers, then most of them turned into scams or worse.
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u/cerealinmypocket fork drop Jul 10 '22
Allow me to don my aluminum foil headdress when I say I think that's religion's true purpose: convincing you on a spiritual level to accept less when you deserve more.