What Christianity teaches?

I think the reasonable and rational among us can see where the America is headed today – to become a christo-fascist state. But just for reference let us quote something out of wikipedia:

…that “[w]e fear christofascism, which we see as the political direction of all attempts to place Christ at the center of social life and history” and that “[m]uch of the churches’ teaching about Christ has turned into something that is dictatorial in its heart and is preparing society for an American fascism”.

And just to be clear:

George Hunsinger, director of the Centre for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, regards the very accusation of “fascism” as a sophisticated theological attack on the Christian biblical depiction of Jesus. He believes that the view of Jesus, which is called Christofascist, is, in fact, the real “Jesus Christ as he is depicted in Scripture”.

So what are we talking about? What does Christianity teach us?

The short answer is that Christianity teaches authoritarianism. I do not consider it necessary to qualify this by the word “fascism” – that word exists in the lexicon of the West and it denotes the only period of post-agrarian world which they consider regretful, or “evil”. I on the other hand will demonstrate how Christianity has come to dominate the world affairs not just during WW2 but before and after that.

Broadly speaking, Christianity teaches being subservient to the higher authority. Christian god, being the highest authority, demonstrates what is an acceptable and expected behavior – genocide, having ridiculous demands like sacrificing children, unequal treatment based on likability, passing judgements based on your private conduct etc. God is all powerful, and it is un-christian to ask why God is the way he is. So a good christian is a good servant of the God, and demands to be treated like god by his personal servants.

All men are created equal, but God is not a man. Which means all servants must be treated equally, but not equal to the master. Christianity teaches servitude and it normalizes abusive behavior of the master. It also teaches how to resolve the conflict – the servant need only ask for forgiveness and a good christian, like his god, should accept the apology, but if that follows after punishment – it is okay. It is Christian. All will be back to the way it was – just have faith. Believe.

No wonder Kings loved it.

In the life long quest to be a good Christian you are bound to encounter people who will tell you that this way of complete servitude (which is called suffering and is natural) isn’t healthy and is not okay. There is a direct analogy to this in Christianity – the Devil had a disagreement with God is now out to poach God’s faithful. The christian church goes to great lengths establishing this devil guy and how to avoid him. The idea is to just resist and the devil will go away – like the HR of a company you do not want to join.

And if the competitor has better offer? That is called temptation. That is natural. But it is a sin to not resist it. In fact, there could be many different ways you could be moved to leave your master – anti-Christ, Satan etc. So how to remain a good christian?

Just stick to your master and do what he says. And apologize profusely every now and then. Pretty regularly, in fact, once every week.

This top-down approach that Christianity preaches directly leads to innumerable atrocities committed by Christians once they got the upper-hand during industrialization – it was all God-ordained. It also tells us how Christians unite under a leader that is out of control and why Churches are important conduit of this authoritarianism. It is important to remember that church-state-separation did NOT happen with the agreement of Christians but instead was due to the weakening of the kings/queens as they handed power over to bureaucrats, since they wanted to enjoy the ever increasing wealth brought in by the subjugation of the natives of their colonies. Church in-turn saw the opulence and debauchery as stepping over the many boundaries it had set for good conduct  – boundaries it had to put if Christian God is real. The conversion of natives to Christianity by a system designed under agrarian economy was just too slow for industrial revolution and the schism thereafter is what we we call church-state-separation.

This system of complete subservience and obedience deeply attracts the down-trodden as they are literally not in a position to demand anything from anyone. The church gives them a framework where they can see their own failure without accepting responsibility and gives them a dream of being in a position to pass judgements on to their peers who are doing better as it proclaims them heathen and their gods false.

It works doubly well in today’s world and it in fact cannot be defeated directly by democracy. The combination of soft-conversion of slaves and the promise of unapologetic hard-conversion to masters is quite difficult to oppose in a society where people enjoy a lot of freedom. The only way to oppose this, historically, has been to be rich – remove the down-trodden and there are no slaves to soft-convert and become masters asking for devotion.

I would like to close this by saying that conversion and the dichotomy of forgiving god that deals punishment is common to all abrahamic religions. I would like to point out that excusing abusive behavior by the rich, or the existence of slavery is not contingent of existence of Christianity. People are assholes, slaves have always existed etc. As a Hindu casteism is clearly something some people would think is a “gotcha” especially since some people equate casteism to racism in a way to normalize criticism of one over the other. Hinduism uses cyclic nature of the universe to explain evil of today and of the future. As philosophy none of it is permanent and rise and fall are accepted as facts. So Hinduism doesn’t lead itself to authoritarianism. it explains authoritarianism as well as accepts its downfall or replacement.