Republicans are selfish and disgusting. Prove me otherwise.

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07/06/2025 12:36

Subject: Republicans are selfish and disgusting. Prove me otherwise.

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Anonymous

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Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes all people are selfish and disgusting

That's why Jesus had to be crucified to save us.

Not one person is "good"

The idea that we are all born sinners is itself slander. Even a baby who died an hour after being born?

And clearly some people are more evil than others.

In my experience, the notion that we are all sinners is one of the most obviously true things about Christianity. I am constantly doing things I detest, including sometimes being uncharitable, condescending, or rude on here. I try and try again, but my efforts to live up to my own moral baseline keep coming up short. I suspect the same is true for you.

I understand the intuitive appeal of your point about babies. They're so cute that it feels absurd (and sort of mean or comical) to point at one and say "sinner!" To that, let me make two observations. First, your point seems to assume that sin is in some sense a function of time, as if a sin committed at 9 am simply does not exist at 8 am. I'm not so sure that's right. If God is real-- and I submit that He is-- it's not safe to assume His knowledge (or love or grace) is constrained by time in the same way yours is. The Bible is filled with prophecies, and that to me is a big hint that how you think about time and how God interacts with it are not easily compared. Second, I think your observation not unreasonably presupposes that sin is a departure from a baseline. But you seem to suppose that baseline is a baby's capabilities and not God's perfection. I think that assumption needs tweaking. It is quite right that God knows our weaknesses and has compassion on us for them. But I don't think that compassion means decreeing sinful things not to be sins (though I'm certainly not prepared to tell you what a baby's sins are). Here's a somewhat more concrete illustration of the logic underlying this statement: I think any serious criminologist will tell you there can be a biological basis to criminality in at least some circumstances, and the unremarkable observation that most crimes are committed by men provides some reason to think that testosterone is a piece of the puzzle. But would anyone ever suggest that high-testosterone men should be given reduced sentences because it's harder for them to avoid committing crimes? Of course not. Justice, then, is not ignoring sin; it is, if anything, in forgiving it, as God did when He died to forgive our sins.

I suspect you are not a Christian. I'd just ask you to entertain the notion that something happened shortly after the death of Jesus of Nazareth that led the ex-members of an obscure desert cult to re-adopt the religious views they'd been shedding and then to travel to the ends of the earth, with great success, sharing their views. In my opinion, that event was quite likely the resurrection of the Jesus, the Messiah.

Jesus lived and died 2000 years ago just like any other living and dying being from 2000 years ago. He was an interesting person and then he was murdered. Time to move on.

Well, that's not quite right. Even if He's not God, it's absurd to say that he "lived...just like any other" person. He is by any objective measure among the most consequential people to have ever lived. The question is whether there is more to the story than that.

Yes, he was consequential. People used his life story to promote their power and to police society.

That's one of those things you hear and it sounds right because you think of the past as both sorta repressive and sorta Christian, but it actually doesn't hold up. Just empirically, it's not like leaders of Christian countries hang onto power longer than elsewhere -- look at imperial Japan; they smoked the rest of the world in that regard. And among world religions, Christianity probably fared basically the worst for attracting the culturally powerful. The founders of Islam and Buddhism were literal heads of state or royalty; Hinduism and Judaism were affiliated with particular peoples. Christianity, by contrast, was basically a backwater creed in Roman Judea and a capital offense for the first several centuries of its existence. And even when it became the religion of particular states, its tenants were routinely jettisoned whenever politically expedient. In the Thirty Years War, for instance, Catholic France entered on the side of the Protestants to fight the Catholic Habsburgs. Seems like, if European political leaders wanted maximum control, they should have just stuck with a secular empire like the Romans or the Japanese had rather than worry about this Jesus fellow and his unimpressive followers.