On abortion access, that’s been more social than governmental. The clinics aren’t welcome in some areas and so they stay out. We’ve already established that it’s perfectly okay anyway for society to interfere with individual rights. If society can persecute you for your speech, it scan certainly take away your reproductive choice.
I was under the impression some jurisdictions imposed restrictive laws on abortion providers to make it impossible for them to stay. That’s not “The clinics aren’t welcome in some areas and so they stay out.”
But that happened in a lot of other countries and we didn’t start preaching the Prosperity Gospel.
Once I learned there was an explanation for the scriptures forbidding homosexuality, I was relieved. Especially when the logic checked out, where “pederasty” makes more sense–ala, what was going on at the time. To me, it was telling me “here is a rule I didn’t like that I don’t have to worry about anymore. More saved souls are possible!”
But, for a lot of people, it seems the response is the opposite. It’s “how dare they change this thing we’ve been believing for so long. If I’ve been hurting these other people, it has to be because God required me to. To stop now would be to admit I’ve been sinning this whole time!”
I think a lot of those who gravitate toward evangelical Christianity like rules. Even though they say they are saved by grace, not by works, they still want their rules. They want to feel special. And Evangelicalism gave them that.
It’s why the Prosperity Gospel rose up. It’s just feeling special in a different way. Sure, it gets rid of a rule about riches, but they never really bought into that one anyways, because our society glorifies wealth. And they were just so desperate for a way to get rich that mixing religion worked.
Gun worship is entirely cultural, I think. In more rural areas, guns have a lot more utility in protection. Glorification of the military probably comes from accepting the military conquests in the Old Testament as good.
As for Trump, he just played to the underlying ideas of a lot of people, even if he stayed away from being remotely Christian. He tapped into the anger at modernism. He tapped into the idea that we are special. He got away with being the asshole the people wish they could be, if not for the “rules.” And he was an asshole to (mostly) the people they wanted to see punished.
Yeah, don’t forget that part: Hell is not just for scaring people straight, but also giving assurances that justice will be done. But it’s frustrating waiting for their death. If someone can punish them before they die–well, that’s appealing.
Hell, it’s appealing to me, even though I’m not on Trump’s side at all. I have to check myself in making sure the punishments themselves are just and not evil. Nazi gets arrested for violence? Sure. Nazi gets tortured and killed? Not okay, even if there’s a part of me that wants them to feel the pain they’ve inflicted on others, and then be removed from the ability to do it again.
When someone hates the people you hate, it’s easy to make excuses for them.
Most of those laws get struck down. The primary deterrent to setting up shop in the Bible Belt is social ostracism.
People are looking for guaranteed answers to the tough problems of this world. They want the assurance that they are RIGHT even if that makes lots of other people wrong, damned, condemned, evil, etc. They can’t live with the mystery and uncertainty of this existence. There’s even a thread on this board about this issue. The fact is: THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES. No one has a monopoly on the truth. No one even knows with the Truth is… all we can do it give it our best shot. For some people, the stress of living with that is too much, and they have to turn to a guru, a book, an ideology, or some other stop gap.
To those familiar with them, is the Prosperity Gospel similar to The Secret/law of attraction*? I have only a faint acquaintance with either but both seem to say something along the lines of: “Believe it strongly enough and your dreams (especially of being rich) will come true as a direct effect of that belief”. Have I got it right?
- This thing: Secret (disambiguation) - Wikipedia Now that I read the Wiki entry, the New Age author quotes the Bible in her 3 step process of 1) Ask in prayer 2) believe 3) receive
Basically, if you worship God hard enough and, more importantly, donate to a televangelist, God will reward you with lots of money and success.
Consequently, if someone is rich it means they’re good, and if they’re poor it’s their own damn fault. Unless they’re the person being asked for money, in which case they’re just a millionary going through a temporary bump.
Joel Olsteen is seriously rich, rich off the backs of all the dumb suckers that watch him on tv and send money. His church is huge, it could help thousands of people stuck in Houston, but he won’t. And yet there is the guy that owns a mattress store that opened it to refugees of the floods. Actors, singers, ball players, etc are donating hundreds of thousands of dollars for the flood victims. The mosques in the Houston area have all opened to help the people without homes, food, or water.
White Christians are a joke.
I do not have any use for Prosperity Christianity and I find Olsteen to be an extreme example of the Baker/Robertson model of such preachers.
However, at the time that Olsteen was orignally criticized for failing to help his fellow Texans, (when some passersby began tweeting photos taken less than an hour after the waters receded), his ginormous church had had over a foot of water on the floor, making it a less than adequate refuge from the storm. In the previous hurricane, his church provided shelter to around 5,000 people and since the flood waters have abated from his current site, he has been providing resources to help those flooded out.
It is enough to criticize the bad for what they really do without inventing things to be mad about (or following ignorant tweets from the uninformed).
Have you heard of right wing authoritarianism? Religious fundamentalism is correlated with right wing authoritarianism.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327582ijpr0601_5
Its the same with Islamic Jihad, they are the right wing authoritarians from their culture. Its probably more that religious fundamentalism is an aspect of right wing authoritarianism.
Blacks tend to be highly religious, and they do not share the attitudes of white evangelicals. Neither do northeastern Catholics.
Around 1 in 4 of evangelicals are Democrats or Democratic leaning independents. I think it’s safe to say they aren’t 100% in agreement with your list of what their beliefs supposedly are. Even with high levels of support among evangelical Christians not everyone of the other 3/4 perfectly fit your list of what they supposedly believe. You’ve created an overly broad and rigid stereotype for yourself and are trying to answer a question driven by that cognitively biased assumption.
You can’t get a good answer to the cause of why they are all like that when they aren’t all like that.
I don’t think evangelicals are all like that but there are some definite trends, especially at the politically active level.
I thought of specifically saying “white evangelicals” but didn’t want to start off the thread putting emphasis on race.
Of those 1/4 evangelicals who are Democrat or Democrat-leaning, what proportion are black? What % of white evangelicals are Democrat or Democrat-leaning?
#NotAllEvangelicals
Yeah, they’re not all like that (and I don’t think the OP was claiming that they were). But a disproportionate number of them—or at least a disproportionate number of the loudest and most public of them—seem to be that way. So I think there’s a legitimate question there.
The American Christ Industry isn’t a joke, it’s an abomination that preys on the desperate and the stupid. Plenty of white people who pretend God is real do so without sucking at all, though.
Pew exit poll numbers for the last four Presidential elections for “white born again/evangelical Christians” have them voting for the Dem nominee 21%, 24%, 21%, and 16%. We’re still at about 1 in 5 of white evangelicals voting for Dems. They especially seemed to like Obama in 08 and dislike Clinton.
There’s still a discussion. We’re looking at a less than perfect correlation and mostly looking at it from a three way correlation - politically active, evangelical, and scoring high on that list of political traits. That certainly seems to hint at a complex interaction of multiple factors. That’s without looking at the possibility that the cause is something external that drive both an affiliation with evangelical churches and those political positions. Something like people staying in the religion they were raised with, mixed with other cultural factors in the South where a lot of evangelicals are, might actually be causal of the correlation between attitudes and identifying as evangelical.
If we start off by stripping the nuance at the beginning it shapes the discussion up front. It makes it hard to put the nuance back in. It’s been excluded from the answer requested. Emotionally loaded words like twistedness can also shape the issue. Consider two different ways to start on observations about a group that isn’t clearly an outgroup on this board.
- Looking at polling data, black men in the US seem to have lower median incomes, higher rates of violent crime convictions, and lower rates of college degree completion that the rest of the populace. Can anyone help me understand why?
- Black men are poor, violent, and ignorant. What’s wrong with black men?
The OP was pretty close in style to #2 for framing the problem. That makes getting a deeper understanding, like asked for in #1, more difficult.
Never heard of the annoying Mr. Olsteen, so looked it up.
Reddit has a post by poster Oblivator:
The church is open and has bought tons of air mattresses to help shelter the refugees.
To be clear: it appears as if the church has been planning to set itself up as a relief center for a while and have been prepping accordingly. Unsubstantiated accusations violate rule 3: No witch hunting. Please do not witch hunt.
More evidence proving the lower areas of the church were actually flooded: from this /r/atheism thread
Lakewood Parking - Album on Imgur
Reddit - Dive into anything
I note — without looking at a website since it is against my religion to read the Daily Mail — also the thatcherite Daily Mail also accuses the annoying Olsteen.
Which effectually clears him.
From the Reddit the journalist is less highly respected:
FC37: *Hey, Joel Osteen probably isn’t a great guy.
But you know who’s absolute scum? This “journalist” is Sean Salisbury, the same guy you used to see on ESPN.
The same guy who took pictures of his cocknballs, then showed the pictures to many female coworkers by asking them if he wanted to see pictures of his baby.
The same guy who threatened to sue Deadspin for reporting the real reason why he was fired, only to later admit that it was true.
The same guy who threatened to write a tell-all book about ESPN in retaliation for firing him.
Fuck Sean Salisbury.
*
There are black evangelicals and Hispanic evangelicals. And many of those “Democrat evangelicals” voted for Trump — they finally had a candidate who spoke to their values.
She had the atheist vote tied up, though.
Prolly the BDSMs too.