Cross posted from https://eldritch.cafe/@Jeanneadebats/114184886084246220
I wish I had a cute devil girl on my shoulder 🙁
Fine, I’ll try to talk your mom into sitting on your shoulder again. This is getting ridiculous, Riiiiicky.
With flattery he will corrupt those who have violated the covenant, but the people who know their God will firmly resist him.
Daniel 11:32
He will cause deceit to prosper, and he will consider himself superior… He will use every kind of evil deception to fool those on their way to destruction, because they refuse to love and accept the truth that would save them.
Daniel 8:25, 2 Thess 2:10
… a despicable person will arise… a man of contempt… to whom the royal honor has not been rightfully conferred. He will slip in when least expected and will seize the kingdom through flattery and intrigue.
Daniel 11:21
After an alliance is made with him he will practice deception, and he will go up and gain power with a small force of people.
He will try to change the set times and the laws.
Dan. 7:25
Daniel 8 and 11 here are talking about a prophecy that has already “been fulfilled” - common in the Bible to make these kinds of retroactive prophecies. The bad guy being described there is Antiochus.
That is just Daniel 8. Daniel 11 could reasonably be talking about modern times
Not really, from context pretty sure it’s one of those “ex post facto” prophecy things.
This is why people should read books of the Bible and not verse. Random bits out of context are used to imply so much BS.
Now then, I tell you the truth: Three more kings will arise in Persia, and then a fourth, who will be far richer than all the others. When he has gained power by his wealth, he will stir up everyone against the kingdom of Greece. Then a mighty king will arise, who will rule with great power and do as he pleases. After he has arisen, his empire will be broken up and parceled out toward the four winds of heaven. It will not go to his descendants, nor will it have the power he exercised, because his empire will be uprooted and given to others.
The king of the South will become strong, but one of his commanders will become even stronger than he and will rule his own kingdom with great power. After some years, they will become allies. The daughter of the king of the South will go to the king of the North to make an alliance, but she will not retain her power, and he and his power will not last. In those days she will be betrayed, together with her royal escort and her father[ and the one who supported her.
One from her family line will arise to take her place. He will attack the forces of the king of the North and enter his fortress; he will fight against them and be victorious. He will also seize their gods, their metal images and their valuable articles of silver and gold and carry them off to Egypt. For some years he will leave the king of the North alone. Then the king of the North will invade the realm of the king of the South but will retreat to his own country. His sons will prepare for war and assemble a great army, which will sweep on like an irresistible flood and carry the battle as far as his fortress.
None of this is connected to Revelation, which was written centuries later.
Could literally be talking about billions of people from a period spanning thousands of years.
Which is why some people still hold it up as a valuable text. It’s a well written book of scams to keep the ignorant masses in line.
It is, in essence, a compilation of the vague shite that “fortune tellers” spew to the marks looking to be told what they want to hear.
“Thou shalt not even try to be a decent person”
the 11th commandment I guess
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone with an understanding of religion. Monotheism has always used othering of people not within the clique to insulate followers.
Not only are other people’s beliefs OBJECTIVELY wrong due to everything my God says being true but you’re also commiting sins against the true God for rejecting him.
Monotheism is the fascist dictatorship of religious structures.
Michael Burns (of Wisecrack) has a pretty good analysis of this: https://youtu.be/VtyRTFGfw6o
My sister once told my mom that empathy is what’s ruining this country. It’s not even like it was a misinterpretation/misunderstanding, that’s almost word for word how she said it. I can’t fathom how someone comes to that line of thinking.
Elon Musk is how.
This happened a while before he came out as a right wing nut job and was embraced by conservatives
He literally said this two weeks ago. " The death of the West is due to too much empathy." Paraphrased, of course.
Yeah but what does that have to do with the other posters sister saying it a while back?
To me it feels like social darwinism mentality - the belief that helping the weak survive weakens the herd. AKA “hard choices”.
I can not understand how people can be social darwinist and still support inheritance, even tax free inheritance. If you want just the fittest to survive, everyone needs to start the same. Same education, same situation at home, same connections of the parents. Social darwinist should support that all children are taken from their parents and be brought up in the same orphanages and are given exactly the same tools.
That said, I can not understand social darwinists at all. Whoever is dumb enough to support this idea is hurting the herd and according to social darwinists…
When I confronted my very Repub dad about the discrepancy between inheritance being okay and giving poor people things for free was bad for them because bootstraps etc, his reaction was “It’s their money, they can give it to whoever they want.”
But I don’t see why social darwinists would support raising children under identical conditions. A level playing field isn’t part of their creed. They just don’t believe in hampering the superior to take care of the inferior. My dad left me and my sister ample inheritances, and if anything I think he would see that as a sentimental flaw he was entitled to. But if he thought we were the type to blow the money on blackjack and hookers he probably would have donated it to Republicans, thinking that in the long run it was best for us…
“The rich are passing down superior wealth just as they pass down superior genes.”
It’s all a crock of shit, but I’ve met people who believe it.
The problem is that’s actually the opposite of how that works. If you refuse to care for the weak in your community, you foster this atmosphere of sociopathy and mistrust that causes the group to destroy itself.
Why the hell do you think there are only two Sith in Star Wars?
I can tell you pretty easily but that won’t stop you from pretending to be surprised for internet points next time
Conservative empathy is reserved only for close associations, it is a crisis management mode that modern doomteller media actively stokes with imaginary threats of immigrants and trans people so it is ALWAYS on
In times of crisis, humanity’s generosity contracts as we have to do the cold calculations over limited resources and the fact that we do NOT value every person equally.
Example: If I only had enough food for me and one other person, I would not give that food to a bigot because that food is better served in the belly of a progressive
It’s just that they are triggered into this mode at all times and their circle of empathy is basically only family and friends, but deep down it is always only just them if times get hard enough
You saw the same behavior in times of famine all across the world
No thinking was involved. She was repeating something she heard on fascist media.
Hearing voices from people that aren’t real is a pretty serious mental condition. I’m convinced religion and all the evil committed on its behalf all just trace back to the root of shit mental healthcare.
On a similar note, the old testament had a historical purpose - to unite disparate tribes and create a national identity against the threat posed by the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires.
The new testament is just a collections of writings and letters. We have no idea who wrote them, they lied on the cover saying the texts are written by the apostles. And by a pretty arbitrary process, a bunch of priests picked their favorite writings and made them into a cannon.
If the same thing happened today, nobody would believe them outside maybe a fringe cult.
PRIESTS made a cannon out of BOOKS‽ That’s some Warhammer shit.
Seriously though, it’s canon.
Not according to my head-cannon.
Easy there, Tankmon
Perhaps partly, my personal belief is the is traces back to early tribal days. I believe the first cultural leaders likely struggled with retaining control and authority at a certain point. After all, there is only so much you can threaten people with to keep them in like. The worse of which is death. A sufficiently motivated person may not care about their physical well-being if they want to achieve a important enough goal. Create an invisible “soul” and a space wizard that determines if that soul gets bliss or torture after death and it adds a new level of control.
Problem with that hypothesis is that pre modern people treated death very differently with in many places it was quite literal and physical, for example in ancient Germanic societies they thought of the underworld as someplace only the dead could travel to as in the actual corpses went to the underworld at night and returned to their grave during the day. Hell we can even see the ideas of the soul being refined during the Hellenic period with most philosophers settling on it being an “animating force” which is vague but about right with the ancient Greeks. The idea of the soul is probably relatively recent IE middle stone age at the earliest, and probably evolved out of far more ancient animistic traditions.
The problem is, from what I’ve heard, the black plauge killed all the good priests. Since they were the ones to go and read a person’s last will and testament, they would also end up catching the plauge a lot of the time. So eventually all the smart and respectable priests died, leaving them desperate for anyone. So from then the churches have been lead by undesirable
That sounds like blaming nature for human maliciousness.
What? Priests before the plauge were the ones who could read and write, and were chosen to be good carriers of the message. And those people, thinking they were doing the right thing by helping the dying go to heaven, caught the disease which wasn’t known as the black plauge yet.
They were wiped out almost immediately because of it. The churches then went to the second options, which followed soon after. It kept going until the churches were desperate for anyone to go a say the last rites.
So yeah then malicious people ended up taking over, but nature definitely caused the change.
Malicious people infiltrate structures with strong authority all the time. They just need time to work their way up, not a plague.
It is funny that you think shitty priests were just hanging in the wings as second stringers.
It is funny how I said the second stringers died soon after the first and you just completely disregarded that
The churches then went to the second options, which followed soon after. It kept going until the churches were desperate for anyone to go a say the last rites.
Your point is correct, no church was infallible before the plauge happened. I’m just stating the plauge made it exponentially easier for infiltration to occur as those opposing it were literally dying trying to be good people.
*plague
I wish pizza cake had her own sublemmy(slemmy/summy?)
(community)
She probably won’t because as far as I know, it’s not possible to sue a lemmy community, so… threats won’t work here.
Yeah, I don’t want to see stuff from a person who threatens to sue subreddits for making fun and criticizing their comics
This is the comic that makes pandering public comics to promote their paid art
Which might be fine, but it seems like good context to know.
Interesting. You know I wonder…
If we were them, and worried about e.g. making rent, maybe we’d start a second pandercomic brand to pander to conservatives too
(Oh of course - being disingenuous is never ideal, thanks for pointing this out)
Apparently she has a lot of fans, because people are really offended by what I thought was a pretty neutral comment.
I guess that info is supposed to be secret or something?
Nah, it’s supposed to matter.
It is true that I personally do not find most of her recent political comics to be particularly funny or insightful–which is fine, she does not have to draw to satisfy me–but there are plenty of her comics which are not about politics but about cats or silly reflections on life, especially before Trump got elected.
So in short, thank you very much for your comment because it totally inspired me to check this person out and find comics of theirs that I enjoyed! 😀
They threaten people who parody their work with DMCA
Citation?
Here ya go.
That… is a really impressive amount of drama over such a middling comic.
It certainly is.
How is that relevant in this context?
Unless there’s some context I’m missing, that business model sounds… reasonable?
What you’re describing just sounds like advertisement.
Evangelicals Are Now Rejecting ‘Liberal’ Teachings of Jesus
“Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching’turn the other cheek’[and] to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’” Moore said.
“When the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ’ … The response would be, 'Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak,” he added. “When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.”
Same flawed logic the Russian Orthodox Church used to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
I guess we’re going to get more denominational splits based on if Jesus’ teachings about loving others is Biblically accurate. Yet another reason why he isn’t coming back.
Prosperity gospel has been shitting on the red text of Christ for decades now.
Jesus hated wealth inequality. The only group he said would never enter heaven were the wealthy (“easier to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven”, in other words, it isn’t possible for the rich to enter heaven). Jesus also violently flipped tables and whipped the wealthy to drive them out of temples.
So conservative “Christians” abandoned the teachings of Christ many decades ago.
Technically the Bible had been changing since Jesus’s death
The gospels were probably not written until many decades after his death.
Yeah - stuff we consider the canon was essentially wrapped up by about 100 CE.
The gospels were likely individuals taking other written material that was circulating around the time, and making their own little compilation based on the theological points that they wanted to make.
It’s really clear when you read the gospels and know the order. Mark was probably first, Matthew and Luke pull heavily from Mark and share something from something we call “Q” and maybe a “saying source.” Then John was written last.
It’s really clear when you look at the differences between the scene where they go to get Jesus’s body. In Mark - it’s just a guy who tells them Jesus isn’t there. Matthew has an earthquake and an Angel, Luke has two angels, John has Jesus himself say hi. John is where you get the most “divine” Jesus - because it really does seem that at first Jesus was understood as a mortal man speaking for God, but later influences from Greek philosophy and thoughts about “spirit” slowly turned Jesus into God.
Jesus didn’t talk about wealth inequality in that way, as far as wealth being bad. His point was that the wealthy tend to think they have it all and are in need of nothing. Mostly that the richer you are, the more you love money than God.
He wasn’t just flipping tables and whipping wealthy people. They were at the temple making money off of selling animals to sacrifice for sins. They had made a business of selling indulgences basically, that was the issue.
And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
Mark 10:17-22
Perfect example.
- The rich man loved his wealth more.
- “And Jesus, looking at him, loved him…” He didn’t whip him and tell him to leave, he loved him.
And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” And they were exceedingly astonished, and said to him, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.” Peter began to say to him, “See, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”
Mark 10:23-31
Historical Jesus was not on team money and power I don’t think.
Great wealth corrupts people. Jesus did say that even rich people can be saved though. But only with the power of God.
Seems like it would be pretty difficult to get a camel through a needle eye. (That “oh he was actually referring to a gate” is modern horseshit apologetics designed for rich Christians to justify having money btw, totally made up.)
Jesus didn’t talk about wealth inequality in that way, as far as wealth being bad.
He flat-out said, if you’re rich in this life, you’ve had your reward already and you won’t get into heaven.
Never mind, wealth IS bad. But that is because humans are bad.
Not just the wealthy, but people who were using the temple as a place of business (and likely ripping people off on interest)
The actual story of the money changers is worse than most people know.
See, as part of their religious observance, the ancient Hebrews made a pilgrimage to the Temple. This was a mandatory part of their faith, much like the Hajj is for modern Muslims.
Those who were too poor to bring their own sacrifice could buy one at the Temple, but the Temple didn’t take the coin of the realm (the Roman coins), they only accepted Shekels.
So, the Money Changers. They set up in the Temple itself and were fleecing pilgrims of all their money.
In comes Jesus, who flipped tables and broke out the whip, and less than a week later he was crucified.
And this is the only part of the bible that I believe is 100% historically accurate. A peace loving Rabbi threw a fit over the Money Changers and was crucified for it.
I had understood it to be even worse:
The sacrifices at the temple were expected to be pretty much perfect, and had to be found acceptable by the temple priests. So the merchants would get “pre-blessed” sacrifices that they would sell at exorbitant prices to the pilgrims, who would have the sacrifices they brought deemed “inadequate” by the priests.
So if you brought an animal sacrifice, you’d still have to buy another (costly) animal. If you brought money, you’d be forced to exchange it at a significant loss.
The whole thing was an obvious scam, and Jesus was killed over it (and the rest of his message). I don’t believe he was God Incarnate, but I’m still a big fan of Jesus the man.
I’m pretty confident that all would have gone about the same way in this era.
Yeah, it was the moneychangers and the stall keepers that tolerated them.
It was a religious duty to contribute money for the upkeep of the temple. So people would come from out of town and try to hand over their cash and the priests would say “we can’t accept foreign coinage… go talk to that dude over there with the heavy pockets, he’ll help you”. And the moneychanger would convert their currency, but not without keeping a fat percentage for himself.
The lesson (as I read it) is that setting yourself up as a gatekeeper and forcing people to pay you in order to do the right thing is an especially odious behaviour, even if it’s legal.
easier to pass through the eye of a needle
Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle…
Some bootlickers go through ridiculous contortions to avoid the plain sense of this analogy: “The Eye of the Needle was a gate in Jerusalem!” (That excuse was a late medieval fabrication by an indulgence-selling cleric craving donations from aristocrats-- there’s no such gate and never was, and if there was one, the saying would make no sense).
Visions of religious leaders sitting in golden chairs and crying out for donations…
How did we get here? It’s not a mystery, it’s a cautionary tale.
And people dont understand why I say the orange clown is an Antichrist and may be the Antichrist.
The doomed by a perfect circle is very disturbing accurate.
Ehh, isn’t the antichrist supposed to be a nearly impossibly attractive person, in charisma and looks? A lot of people either hate him or are entirely indifferent and the reasons don’t seem to be religiously motivated.
I just settle with him being a douchebag.
This is still what baffles me. We aren’t losing our country to a charismatic, two faced mastermind. We’re losing our country to a fucking obvious loser. He’s literally so bad it’s hard to parody him since even the parodies are tame in comparison to what he actually does. It’s ridiculous
Most people are not sharp enough to see that.
We are doomed by the cuts to education they made 40 years ago
isn’t the antichrist supposed to be a nearly impossibly attractive person
Premillennial dispensationalism/rapture theology is a group creative writing exercise with little relevance to the text. The prophecies in Daniel refer to the Greek king Antiochus, which is clear when one reads chapters and not verses (unfortunately uncommon in your typical Protestant church…) Revelation is referring to emperor Nero.
Really, it’s more that folks like Hal Lindsey popularized the concept by traumatizing children in church basements that’s given it the culture cachet.
Don’t forgot about how all his weird followers depict him in their fan art though…. They seem to at least perceive him as exactly that.
As others have said, that part’s more modern. But also, look at what’s going on, a lot of people hate him, but he has some sort of charisma to draw so many people to lockstep with him.
And one of the big things in revalations about the antichrist is that a lot of Christians will follow him because their faith is tainted and corrupted
Came here to share the same article.
It’s truly uncanny
I reckon it has a lot to do with personality traits of evil people
Yeah, while there are a few odd specifics that line up, most of the predictions are just describing the personality traits of a tyrant.
That’s also how I interpret the traits.
It’s common warning signs but using colorful language.
If someone asked me what Trump sounded like I would never think about a lion. His voice is nasally and weak. That part reminded me a lot more of Hitler yelling into a microphone
Yeah I’m not a Christian, and I know many Christians hate the “reasonable hope for salvation of righteous nonbelievers” thing, but I’ll say this, I’ve got a strong suspicion that if I’m wrong about the veracity of Christianity then Jesus will still prefer my behavior to the maga christians’
Their new Jesus is Trump.
I feel like there’s a single word to sum up one who’s teachings are directly opposed to those of Jesus 🤔
“See, if I put my arm through the sling here and reach down a little, all you have to do is shrug your shoulder. I call it the reverse Dutch rudder.”
“Then get thee behind me, Satan, but don’t stop that reacharound!”
“Unh, ugggh, oh my me! The second coming is at hand!”
So no empathy for Elon Musk and his crybaby butthurt feelings? Fine by me!
Empathy is the enemy of the the manipulative. Their shallow and transparent manipulations wont get past someone with even a small amount of it.
True for some. Others specifically exploit your empathy by centering it on themselves, red herrings, or subverting the action it motivates.
Demon pizzacake can get it
I believe it. I call their god the Tyrant for a reason after all.
