My statement: I am sick to fucking death of people misquoting my holy book to justify their bigotry. Stop. Stop doing it. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. A response: Honestly I would be interested in learning about this as I have no religious view point so I like to learn about them, (but) I don’t know where to start. My response: Okay. Well.
Judaism first sprang into existence about six thousand years ago; we've got our own calendar that we use to track these things. We got our start when a dude named Avram wrecked his father's business and changed his name to Abraham while touring the middle-east with his sister, Sarah. Their family history was chronicled in what we call the Old Testament, which is a collection of stories, fables, and legal doctrine that informs the Jewish people as to what they are and how to behave, but a good chunk of it is dedicated to doubting what you think you know and finding out what is true. It's based around taking responsibility for yourself and your community and living to a high ethical standard, and trying to figure out what that means in relationship to yourself and your community. The first five books of the Old Testament are called Torah and are collected in massive scrolls that Jews consider to be literally living documents, and we're supposed to argue the meaning of the text within context to the time it was written and the times we live in. It's fabulously progressive for its time, and features a commentary track (Talmud) and in-depth expansion (Midrash) that we use to give things further context.
A lot of it boils down to "try to leave the world better than you found it, take care of the people around you, don't expect people to live to the standards you set for yourself, take responsibility for yourself and your community."
Now, the Old Testament was written in a language called Aramaic, which features no written vowels, is supposed to be sung on a six-note scale, and translates well into nothing else. It was eventually translated into Greek, then Latin, and then the various romance languages.
Here's where things get weird: when a Torah is penned, it's transcribed by one guy using a special ink and pen. A single mistake means the Torah is given an actual funeral and buried. We do not want mistakes being made about this.
About 2000 years ago, there might have been a Jew named Yeshua. The Romans (who kept meticulous records about EVERYTHING) have no records of this particular guy, but there were Jewish revolutionaries fucking around to find out during the Roman occupation every five minutes or so (it got so bad that the Romans eventually said "fuck these people in particular" and spread the Jews all across the empire, which is the start of what we call the Jewish diaspora and led to about two thousand years of shit-kicking and scapegoating).Now, if Yeshua existed, he was a rabbi (a Jewish priest) who pissed off the Romans and got himself killed. A dude who admits to never having met him led a splinter sect of Jews into a death cult that believed Yeshua was going to return from the dead next week and defeat the Romans.
This is the start of Christianity.
A big part of faith is doubt, I think. You need to know on some level that you could be wrong, and inflicting your beliefs on others isn't a great thing to do. We're all doing the best we can, but insisting you're right and everyone else is wrong to the detriment of others is, well, bad.
And that brings us to the crux of my issues with Christianity.
The core of the Christian doctrine is that Jesus (a mistranslation of the name Yeshua, not that many Christians know that - and let it sink in that they do not know the name of the god they are worshiping, or how the name changed) was the literal son of God and also somehow God and maybe also a third thing called the Holy Ghost that is a mysterious mixture between the two of them, and that he died for the sins of humanity.
See, Christians believe that when Eve got Adam to eat the apple in Eden that GOD CURSED THEM BOTH AND ALL THEIR DESCENDANTS TO HELL TO SUFFER FOR ALL ETERNITY, and then they have the audacity to say that the Old Testament God is the mean one.
So, basically, until Jesus dies, every human ever born is condemned to hell where, again, they will suffer for all eternity. Once Jesus dies, though, he goes to hell and reclaims good people provided they are willing to swear allegiance to him. Keep in mind there is no proof that any of this has happened, and the person telling the story admits full-stop that he never met Jesus and didn't believe Jesus was real until thirty years after Jesus' death when he was riding a camel through the desert and fell off due to heat exhaustion.
Now, a big part of Christian doctrine is that living a good life is meaningless - the only way to get into heaven is to swear your soul to Jesus, who is watching you at all times. If you're bad and believe in Jesus, you'll spend time in a place called Purgatory, which is hell-light, until Jesus can swing by and pick you up. If you're the best person ever and you don't believe in Jesus, you are still going to hell for all eternity.
What this means is that, if you are a good Christian, the kindest thing you can do is convert non-believers to save them from an ETERNITY IN HELL, and provided you have sworn your soul to Jesus any sin you commit will be forgiven and you will go to heaven. This leads to things like the Spanish Inquisition, enforced conversions against, well, everyone, and more atrocities than you can shake a pointed stick at.
Politically, this is useful because you can't just say you believe in Jesus, you have to believe in Jesus the *right way.* This is originally the Catholic Church, but other people argue with them about the right way to believe in Jesus and so we now have a bunch of different flavors that spout the same ideology and conversion practices, but each of them claim that they're the special ones that got it right and everyone else is going to hell for all eternity or maybe purgatory until they figure out the right way to praise Jesus.
And people can and will do anything to prove their faith, and see a lack of evidence as proof of concept, and obey whatever the it leaders tell them because they've been conditioned to ignore the world around them in favor of our mistranslated holy book.
The thing is, according to Christian theology, Jesus was a Jew and the whole thing starts with the Old Testament. So they twist the Old Testament to fit their narrative, building upon things lacking in the original text, installing bits that go against Jewish faith, and ignoring/killing/converting Jews that point out that they have no business doing what they're doing (see Jenn Sara, above, for the lightest version of this practice).Because spreading the good word is so important and any sin can be forgiven provided you're following Jesus in the right way, Christians have historically co-opted the holidays and religious practices of others in order to further their own agenda (see: Christmas trees, the Easter bunny, et al). Also, because they are a strict hierarchy - the Church determines who is praising Jesus right and no one can fight them - they ended up becoming a politically powerful presence that has controlled much of Europe and Russia and informed the structures that ruled those places, including (but not limited to): the Romani pogroms, the Inquisition, the witch trials, the crusades, the Russian pogroms, the Atlantic slave industry, native genocide, save-the-man-kill-the-indian, the holocaust...The list goes on.
When people in the west say "Religion is the root of all evil," they are often talking about their own experiences with religion (Christianity, because none of the other ones count). This also applies to Christian atheism, which is when a Christian assumes all religion is basically Christianity decides they don't believe in religion, and the religion they don't believe in is the only religion (Christianity again).It's incredibly frustrating and tends to result in a lot of people dying.
Shall I continue?
