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Yes, another top level comment about The Origins of Woke from me, in the same thread on the same week. But this is about something else. I had an epiphany while reading the book.
I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust. It's because companies are (de facto) legally required to fire racists, but they're not required to fire Marxists. In fact, firing a Marxist for merely being Marxist would be illegal in California.
California has a state law against firing people for their political beliefs, but it didn't protect James Damore, who was fired in compliance with the law against creating a hostile work environment for protected groups.
It all adds up.
I believe it's because Marxism better comports with Christian egalitarianism.
Yep this hits the nail on the head, in my view. Christians will tend to argue otherwise but Jesus did very explicitly argue for a sort of Saturnalian reversal quite often. The last shall be first, and all that.
I'm sure there are reasons why Christianity is more nuanced than Marxism, but they do have similar themes. Capitalists could easily be this wicked and corrupt generation.
Thank you for this post with a completely alien perspective of my faith. It shows me where the real battle for understanding is.
I have worked for a Christian businessman before, and were it not for that job, I would have found less professional success in my life, and less freedom from my emotional turmoil. It was the job with the healthiest emotional environment I’ve ever been in. Yet his small business, his petit bourgeois success, is exactly the kind that Marxists would make impossible.
C.S. Lewis would have said that the Saturnalian reversal was an echo in pagan thought of the later true divine reversal in which the Son of God washed his followers’ dusty feet and, instead of taking over the world and ruling it, willingly dying for the sins of all. Satan the rebel wanted God brought low, but not like this.
The purported words of Jesus seem pretty unambiguous to me. I don't see how the following can be interpreted to mean anything other than that a "Christian businessman" is like a "communist businessman". You can be a Christian or communist businessman, but only with the understanding that this is a temporary state that is inferior to the ideal one and if you were more virtuous, you would not be a businessman.
Jesus was also preaching under the assumption that the end of the world was right around the corner; give away all your shit and give no thought to the morrow, love your neighbor and turn the other cheek are all way more reasonable if worldly things like providing for your family, planning for the future, taking care of yourself, and not being punched on both sides of your face are about to not matter. Early Christians also thought that the apocalypse was right around the corner, until the world kept inconveniently persistently existing and they had to re-think their expectations.
Then the protestant reformation happened and some people started taking literalist readings of the original text, and came to the same conclusion of early Christians; the end of the world is right around the corner. And thus we have that marvelous work of human literature, Left Behind.
IIRC, some of the Great Awakening utopian cults were explicitly abstinent; not "no sex before marriage" abstinent, absolute abstinence. Sex is sinful, and the end of the world is right around the corner, so having children isn't important compared to being right with Jesus. They aren't around anymore, for mysterious reasons.
Believe you are thinking of The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing aka The Shakers. I also thought they were fully extinct, but it seems they're merely functionally extinct, with either 2 or 3 (seeing conflicting reports) remaining in Sabbathday Lake, Maine.
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What is the basis for this assertion
I suspect:
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There isn't one. He's basing the statement on a misinterpretation, albeit one that some Christians have also fallen for from time to time.
The difference between a misinterpretation and the correct and true meaning of the text seems to be kinda fuzzy. Earlier in the thread, it was claimed that one Jesus quote is a joke, the other is totes super-profound.
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You and I know that but others might not, it'd be more cool if people didn't make baseless assertions, but so it goes
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