"Turning the Other Cheek" and Victim Culture. - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14938231
I think Christianity has a fundamental problem that is somewhat apparent in the Protestant/Catholic divide. It has to do with "turning the other cheek." Warning, I know I am not really qualified to delve into something as controversial as Catholicism vs. Protestantism but perhaps you will read me out anyway.

I decided at one point that since early Christians were pacifists towards people of equal or higher classes (Christian pacifism is really a very complex issue; they were clearly willing in most cases to deal with criminals and hostile foreigners), and western traditions often viewed celibacy as evidence of a higher nature, the act of turning the other cheek was not supposed to lead to material success -- quite the opposite.

In Protestantism I think we may have begun to see, among other things, a trend towards a more materially active kind of spirituality. And here is where the problem started to arise.

I think a lot of modern liberal Christians (and also the SJWs, whom I view as a form of secular Christians) are confused about something. The concepts underlying celibacy and having a higher, unwordly nature are alien or unknown to them but the concept of pacifism and turning the other cheek is not unknown to them. So, they think that turning the other cheek is supposed to have good results for them, materially, in their life, when in fact it is not only the case that it doesn't have good results, it probably never had good results in the material sense. I don't think these groups understand that. They believe that everyone is supposed to be nice to them and that the biggest victim wins, I think this is probably a misunderstanding of one of the social functions that turning the other cheek played.
#14938375
Albert wrote:Oh sorry, I forgot about the evil white devil and his history.


I never said we're evil. I'm an American by the way, so when I mean white I meant Western European/USA white. I was born in a time when Polish/Irish those non-wasp were starting to be consider our kin. Sorry, if you confuse me for some BLM guy, I meant white in american way.
#14938514
Christianity has been considered a slave morality based in impotence.
[url]rickroderick.org/107-kierkegaard-and-the-contemporary-spirit-1990/[/url]
Now, for Nietzsche, the Christian morality that grew out of a slave context. And this is not meant to be a criticism of the slaves. And the only sense in which I used it as a criticism of Christianity was as Christianity as a public religion, and I… there’s where I made my political points. But the slave aspect of Christianity meant that its doctrines of love and compassion were rooted in the resentment of a power that could not exercise itself. One of the things slaves have a problem with is that they have powers too, but are constrained from exercising them.

Christianity therefore – on Nietzsche’s account – part of its function was compensatory. To compensate for that power you don’t have in this one… in this world, by projecting a power in another one. By loving people in this world, but the thematic underneath it – the thematic underneath it, its motivation – that’s what Nietzsche argued was resentment, hatred and so on. That made it all the more important to cloak those motives in a dialogue of love. Just as one has a political doctrine of greed, best to cloak it in a political language of freedom and choice. Greed doesn’t sell as well as freedom, choice and points of light.


Which is something to criticize for sure when one wishes to inspire courage and strength.
[url]d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf#page96[/url]
The social principles of Christianity have now had eighteen hundred years to be developed, and need no further development by Prussian Consistorial Counsellors. The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of antiquity, glorifies the serfdom of the Middle Ages and are capable, in case of need, of defending the oppression of the proletariat, even if with somewhat doleful grimaces69. The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable. The social principles of Christianity place the Consistorial Counsellor's compensation for all infamies in heaven, and thereby justify the continuation of these infamies on earth. The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed. The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self- contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self- confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread. The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary.
So much for the social principles of Christianity. (The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter, MECW 6:231)


But ideological struggle isn’t insigifnicant in itself and can be threatening, so much so that Christ was killed.
[url]loydo38.blogspot.com/2011/05/christianitys-perversion-zizek-and.html?m=1[/url]
According to Ellacuría and Sobrino, God as Jesus did not come to earth simply to be hung on the cross to absolve persons of some sort of transcendent or metaphysical sin with a transcendent or metaphysical grace. Rather than coming to earth to die, God came to earth to live a life that both confronted sin and taught his followers to do the same. By this, the cross is not a symbol of violent sacrificial death for the sake of sacrifice. Instead, to them the cross is signified in the question “why did they kill him?” It is when we ask this question that we come to realize that Jesus was not capitally punished for simply teaching of love and transcendence, but he was rather murdered for confronting oppressive systems and trying to liberate the oppressed from their suffering. The value of the cross is that it symbolizes, points to, and embodies the life that Jesus of Nazareth lived.


One may emphasize and interpret religious texts to various ends. Just like how liberalism was radical during bourgeois revolutions but became a reactionary force, so to can religion have a radical content or reactionary one depending on the circumstances and ends.

And it is indeed the case that sentiments that once had a theist veneer have been adapted to the secular world. Such that liberals in many cases retain the passive sentiment.
[url]braungardt.trialectics.com/projects/political-theory/carl-schmitt/#Anarchism_Marxism_and_Liberalism[/url]
Whereas Marxists pursue class warfare to advance their goals, liberals pursue an opposite strategy of the neutralization of conflicts. They refuse to distinguish between friend and enemy, and thereby they reject the core of the process that creates political identity. Liberals by nature want to diffuse social tension and struggle, and by doing so, they try to turn politics into administrative affairs. Schmitt criticizes this tendency towards neutralization and asks them: “how can you decide not to decide?” By avoiding conflicts, they reject the other as other. Liberalism allows differences, but only within a legal framework that understands itself to be rational, hence also universal. This will render fundamental differences into degrees of similarity, thus failing to recognize the real differences between people or groups of people. Liberal parliamentarians try to decide all questions by law, but what they really do is attempting to defang and tame politics. The consequence of a liberal understanding of the state is a weakening of the state that exposes it to the dangers of political factions, such as fascists, Bolsheviks, or, in today’s environment, to large corporations and lobbying groups. Schmitt argues that liberal republicanism is not really a political doctrine; it is a negation of politics, an attempt to replace real politics with law, morality, or economics. In fact, liberal parliamentarians are elitist as well, without admitting or recognizing it. They think they represent moral and legal humanism. The enemies of liberal societies, then, are easily labeled as anti-humanist, or even as terrorists whose motivation nobody can understand. The next step is to treat them as insane, anti-social, or as enemies of all of humanity.
Schmitt suggests to attack liberalism by exposing the neutralization tendency. This will allow us to see that liberalism in its core is not a philosophy of law and politics based on impartial, Enlightenment-style rationality, but rather a form of political theology, because the hope is to dissolve the sovereign nations into a system of universal legality. Schmitt’s critique of modern liberal thinking is based on a nuanced reading of Hobbes and the history of sovereignty itself. In his final analysis, he detects a process in modern times that transforms politics as unavoidable power struggle into a form of politics that aims to establish a universal humanism as a secularized version of theology.
#14938704
There is nothing wrong with Christianity.

What the SJW types practice is not in line with what Christianity teaches. In what way is being a hateful resentful victim in line with Christian thinking?

Most of them have a thorougly materialistic view of human relations. They want to take the wealth from the unjustly rich and divide it among themselves. And they are not meek or timid. They do not seem to possess much love either. I do not think they are pacifist because they will use aggression and violence to get what they want, to get their compensation for being oppressed.

It is very dangerous and disrespectful to politicise a religion. Unfortunately people on all points on the political spectrum use Christianity for their own purposes.

Of course Christianity has teachings on social justice and the relationship between people on earth. However it is certainly not as black and white as people seem to think.

No the obession with victimhood is not a product of Christianity but a product of the modern age.
#14938708
An alternative for "an eye for an eye" was given by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus only said we should not resist the one who is evil. I think he meant criminals or evil oppressors like the Communist Chinese and Herod Antipas, a Roman client king of Judea. This verse (Matthew 5:39) is not about pacifism and he made a political statement about the Herodians, who manifested an unfriendly disposition towards Jesus (Mark 3:6, 12:13; Matthew 22:16; cf. also Mark 8:15, Luke 13:31-32, Acts 4:27). Denis Ten, a Kazakh figure skater, was recently stabbed to death by two low-life criminals who stole car parts from his imported car. Denis could have been alive, if he had turned the other cheek, letting them get away with the stolen car parts.

Last edited by ThirdTerm on 10 Aug 2018 22:02, edited 1 time in total.
#14938711
I find it amusing that the new wave of right wing degenerate shit-posting cucks identify with the restrictive ideology of Christianity without actually having an ounce of belief in the religion as such. In my estimation its a very base sexual pathology born from their incelism. They again have no faith in Christ as God or any of the Christian mythos, but love the misogyny and the dominion men have over women in both testaments. They also have nostalgia boners for a mythical past that they both did not experience and never actually existed. This association with Christian traditionalism lends their ideology of sexual failure moral weight.

If I was a Christian I would be disgusted by these incels globbing on to my religion expressly to give moral credence to their pathetic ideology.
#14938718
Red_Army wrote:I find it amusing that the new wave of right wing degenerate shit-posting cucks identify with the restrictive ideology of Christianity without actually having an ounce of belief in the religion as such. In my estimation its a very base sexual pathology born from their incelism. They again have no faith in Christ as God or any of the Christian mythos, but love the misogyny and the dominion men have over women in both testaments. They also have nostalgia boners for a mythical past that they both did not experience and never actually existed. This association with Christian traditionalism lends their ideology of sexual failure moral weight.

If I was a Christian I would be disgusted by these incels globbing on to my religion expressly to give moral credence to their pathetic ideology.


The leftists are not much better. They are also using Christianity for their own purposes.

I don't see the difference in using the Bible to justify leftist or rightist ideologies.

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