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Comment by dghf | Hacker News Reader

Once a month (or possibly more often, I didn't keep track), the local Sikhs where I used to live would set up a stall on the high street and give away hot food to all-comers, no questions asked, donations gratefully received but absolutely not necessary, zero attempts at proselytising.

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Man, I have memories of helping serve in a inner city "missions" as part of my (evangelical Xian) church youth group and with my parents once as well and in all instances there were so many strings attached -- at the time I didn't see anything wrong with it but the older I got the more it disturbed and upset me and led (in part) in the long run to my atheism.

Was only later that I realized that at its onset Christian theology was novel among ancient religious systems in that it is not content with getting you to do deeds and rituals and be part of a religious community .. that's not enough. It requires complete psychological conversion ("ye must be born again") and subservience to the belief system, and also to get other people to do the same. And the "here's some food but what you really need is Jesus" thing goes along with that and really rubs me the wrong way.

TLDR I respect faith communities that serve only for the sake of serving. I never saw that in mine.

Something I've found helpful in my studies trying to square my own atheism with the faith of my parents and grandparents and trying to figure out how much of Xian faith to throw out with the bathwater, is how much it started to feel apparent that most of the blame for all this rests somewhat squarely with Paul. It's Paul's huge mansplaining-energy Letters that bulk up the New Testament with their Make the Roman Empire Great Again rhetoric [1]. It's Paul's Letters that do so much of the work to set the conservative "faith not deeds" and patriarchal "tithe to the church as the new Empire" problems. It Paul's Letters that most directly retcon the actual "services and deeds over beliefs" (and liberalism and disregard for the Roman Empire) of Jesus' actual messages in the Gospels. It's Paul's Letters that are so especially focused on the afterlife over the current life, in part because Paul wrote those letters as passive aggressive threats of war.

I've about gotten to the point where I feel I can suggest that I will attend services with my family if I can get them agree that there will be no readings from any of Paul's Letters. That's a hard request to make sometimes because my family isn't evangelical but Roman Catholic, and Paul is hugely respected still by the Roman Catholic church (for the obvious reasons that it is the church that Paul most directly built). But it is slowly giving me a framework of being able to say here's where I have problems with your faith and here's what I like about the faith: the gospels minus the miracles, and the actual teachings of Jesus. (Unsurprisingly one of my favorite versions of the Bible is the Jefferson Bible. It's pamphlet sized. It might be so much better for the world if it replaced all the Gideon's Bibles. Also, I can recommend A Gospel for Liberals by Todd Eklof as another great view of the gospels.)

[1] Very literally, so. Most of the "to" groups were conquests of the Roman Empire either threatening to leave or already left.

The funny thing about the “faith not deeds” view to me is that it doesn’t square with what we’re told will happen when you’re finally judged. There is a very explicit list of things that we are told we will be judged on: feeding the hungry, clothing the poor and caring for the sick. “As you did for the least you also did for me” or something like that. And then people that didn’t do that they’re the ones cast out. Not “did you convert enough people”, “did you pray hard enough”. Not even “do you believe in me”. Those are indeed to various degrees doctrines of the faith, but all of them are also accomplished tangentially if you’re already doing the things you will be judged on.

In my (admittedly limited) view, the actual lessons of the Christian faith as outlined place huge limitations on your own behavior, but demand generosity and gracefulness to others. Christians are commanded to adhere to the precepts, but it is not for Christians to judge anyone else, including other Christians. Instead their role is to serve others as commanded. To cloth the naked, heal the sick and feed the hungry… without any expectation from those you are serving. If you expect specific duties or actions, you are no longer serving, you’re selling.

You're forgetting the get out of jail free card in John 5:24

"Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. "

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%205:24&ver...

https://lawandcrime.com/police/nypd-cops-allowed-20-get-out-...

I think Paul's stuff is deviant from the first 5 books.

I contrast Corinthians 11:5, which I have never seen followed even among missionaries, with Acts 15:10-29, we're in the disciples get together and decide what's really important about being Christian. Spoiler: it's not putting women in their place.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians...

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts%2015&versi...

Yeah I agree with much of this.

Thing is, effectively Christianity as defined by the earliest Church councils really is "Paulism". That plus the Nicene creed and its definition of the trinity. Which all ends up being really about purging the Judaism from Christianity.

A pre-Constantine and even more extremely, pre-Paul, "Christianity" could be interesting -- though really could be considered a kind of Messianic Jewish cult, and perhaps also influenced by Mithraism, Zoroastrianism, and Roman/Hellenistic paganism.

But I mean, I don't need any of it. But in a way I'm glad I studied the scriptures as a child, and then again as an atheist from a "wtf did they tell me .. that's not actually in there lol..." POV

I also read some interesting stuff about how much of pre-Constantine/pre-Paul versions of the religion resembled Neo-Pythagoreanism, which is a wild rabbit hole. That was a vegan, about as atheist as Romans could get, math loving cult which sounds today almost exactly like the religion's exact opposite, but the parallels are fascinating and the early shared beliefs that the Nicene Creed was also about stamping out are fascinating in today's hindsight.

(You don't have to entirely imagine what that version of the church might have looked like, it is sort of what UU is for and where it came from, especially because of the U [Unitarianism] that was kicked out by the Nicene creed [for trinitarianism]. I do irregularly appreciate a good UU service.)

It's also an interesting thought experiment to frame Islam as the other (more successful) branch of non-Nicene unitarian monotheism. It popped up not long (historically speaking) after the final triumph of Nicene Christianity, after Arianism etc was stamped out. And blossomed in the historical heartland of Christianity (North Africa, Asia Minor, and Palestine / Syria).

What we've ended up with is this interesting historical situation where Christianity is the "European" monotheism and Islam is seen as "foreign" and "other" likely on account of its association with the historical Orient. And yet it is that region where Christianity had its origins and was strongest for the first 500 years.

I find the whole thing fascinating. But also, I believe in none of it.

Though it is also interesting to note that Islam is post-Paul and rather "Pauline" in its roots, too. There's always been a weird sense of "I learned it from you, Dad!" relationship between the two religions that maybe often isn't obvious enough at first glance. It's an irony that doesn't fail to escape me any time I hear a evangelical moron talk about fear of "Sharia Law". A lot of "Sharia Law" they would enact in this country if they could get the votes to do it, from many of the same bible passages, too. They don't understand how much it is the same picture. (Though some of the worst certainly understand the real difference is "white".)

Yes I've said this to my mother before and it made her angry, but my sense of the deep anti-Islamic "vibe" in (at least) the evangelical Christian world is that it is more about them being competition than some ethical or philosophical fault. "Shariah law" is offensive not because it is alien to "western society" (because its not-liberal or whatever) but because the traditionalist/conservative/strict morality (and destruction of church/state division) it wants to impose is competition for the one they want to impose.

In any case, just like Christianity, Islam has a spectrum of approaches of reading such morality passages.

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