My concept of Christianity is rather expansive, and Christian anarchists are often inspired by Tolstoy, who is someone I have read about and whose works I have given some attention. I can confirm they are rather different than most Christians - Tolstoy in particular rejected the Church after he saw they were committed to enabling war, which is clearly un-Christian. Dorothy Day is another relevant Christian anarchist, and I have worked with a Catholic Workers House locally, so I have some IRL exposure to these folks as well.

I tend to think “Christian” is an almost meaningless term without more context or clarification, people who call themselves Christians hold opposite views on many different positions. “Buddhism” is no different, if anything it is worse, so this isn’t particular to Christianity. Nor is it particular to religion, Marx spent some time in the Communism Manifesto clarifying what he meant by “socialism” and the different kinds of socialism he was aware of - there are many such overloaded terms and concepts. It seems particularly common in any political context, where there is power struggle it seems there are struggles between meanings for a particular word.

It is religion …

Yes, the Christians I am talking about believe in predestination, and they disagree with, for example, Baptists about whether people can save other people or whether people can save themselves. Instead they believe God predetermines who ends up being saved or not, through the grace of God alone.

And to answer your question about what is the ultimate point if there is no motivation through free-will, their answer is usually either “it’s a mystery” or “to glorify God”.

They still believe in a kind of free-will, but only within the confines of God’s pre-determined choices. God chose for you, but it was you that did the choosing and are responsible. One explanation I was given is that you make the choice out of free-will, and then God observes your choice and then goes back in time and determines it from the beginning. It’s not a coherent view, as far as I can tell - there is no compelling logical or reasonable compatibilist account they offer, it just sounds like contradiction and fantastic thinking.

Also, their view is that our nature is fallen (total depravity), and the only good is from God and God chooses who receives the gift of salvation and thus who will become cured of their evil nature. They believe they should do good things and proselytize to convert others to Christianity because God commands them to, not because those things will save themselves or anyone else. Obedience is very important to this mindset.

I don’t agree that it is doomed to fail, but I also don’t believe humans are inherently Fallen, and especially not in the particular soteriological sense that Christians believe (i.e. all later generations have inherited the guilt from the single act of disobedience by Adam & Eve dooming all of humanity to endless toil and suffering, as well as an evil nature).

That said, I do think humans behave in sometimes predictable ways, and it might be useful to look at what kinds of choices about society might alleviate suffering and promote well-being and fairness in society.

That said, I don’t think that’s going to happen without significant social upheaval, and that itself seems to bring about a lot of violence and the kinds of suffering I think we should all avoid … so, yeah - these are hard problems.

Even the more devout Christians I know (who actually have opinions about different theological positions) believe Earth and human society should not be modeled on heaven and attempts to do so will fail due to humans being inherently / essentially Fallen. This is part of how they rationalize their resistance / apathy towards movements for justice, at the very least they believe it is futile to seek justice in this life.

was going to say, the invasion of Mexico (like 1848 or so) was naked greed and caused some countries to doubt the U.S. was serious about its supposed founding ideals, lol

Unsolicited advice, but you have to escape your - to make it not create a bulleted list.

Lemmy uses markdown for its formatting, and this means - is has special meaning, it is syntax used to create bulleted lists with.

For example,

- Isaac Asimov will look like:

• Isaac Asimov

If you want it to look like

- Isaac Asimov

you have to escape the - character with a \:

\- Isaac Asimov

The \ basically says “ignore the special syntax meaning of - as starting a bulleted list, and instead treat it as a literal -”.

leaded gasoline was fun, huh?

Hey, I get this might be well intended but the context is a likely fictional greentext that whether by coincidence or design describes and captures a common trans experience. If that femboy was someone I was talking to or interacting with, of course I would respect his pronouns and so on, but it is important in lots of contexts to be able to read between the lines.

Taking a literal or dogmatic approach to the idea that people are only what they claim to be causes for example transmedicalists to argue that transmaxxers seeking HRT should be denied hormones - whereas I think it’s much easier to see that transmaxxers are more likely to be trans people having a hard time accepting they are trans, that is denial here is clearly more likely than fraudulence.

This is the same argument transmedicalists will make about femboys on HRT, and again I think we should read between the lines and reject the gatekeeping and moral panic about cis men stealing trans healthcare and recognize that if a self-identified “man” is on estrogen for their feminizing effects, they are probably a trans woman in denial and of course should be given access to hormones. Cis men tend to become depressed and anxious when on estrogen (see: David Reimer, Alan Turing, cis men who have used estrogen to treat prostate cancer, etc.).

(The same thing happens in the gay community around “men who have sex with men” refusing to acknowledge they are gay. I don’t have to disrespect those people by calling them gay to their face, but obviously we need to think of them as “gay” in some contexts.)

Of course reading between the lines shouldn’t result in being rude to someone by denying their prima facie identity to their face, but that’s not what I’m doing here by commenting on a greentext and pointing out the larger context for you.

She’s obviously trans, a guy doesn’t enjoy taking estrogen.