A federal judge in West Virginia has ruled that the state corrections agency can’t force an incarcerated atheist and secular humanist to participate in religiously-affiliated programming to be eligible for parole.
A federal judge in West Virginia has ruled that the state corrections agency can’t force an incarcerated atheist and secular humanist to participate in religiously-affiliated programming to be eligible for parole.
Eh, that’s the church as an institution. I mean religion in the more abstract sense. Political leanings becoming tied to a religious stance has become ridiculous, and has watered down Christianity quite a lot, to the point where even Trump gets to go pray once a year and call himself the Christian vote. It’s also been remarkably divisive, as naturally, a lot of Christians aren’t that, and hot political debates somehow become religious debates.
Tying religion to politics has allowed politics to slowly pull that horse further and further, to the point where “Christianity” now means southern fundamentalism to a lot, maybe even most, people. I think without political influence, we’d be a lot closer today to how Christianity started, and is meant to look.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment that things would be better for all of us if thr GOP hadn’t courted the religious right, but I did want to mention that Christianity in the 1st century looked a lot different than it has in the 20th or now.
The religion has changed dramatically over the years. And it was usually a collection of disparate sects. The new testament canon as we know it wasn’t agreed upon until around 400, and the standardization of mainstream belief, the Nicene Creed, had only been adopted a generation before.
And of course the split during the Reformation in the 1500s changed white a bit. Even decade by decade you see different movements, changed in interpretation (slavery being ok vs not), and such.
We don’t have any of the original biblical sources, and none of them are believed to be writings directly from Jesus or his disciples themselves. What we have is filtered through other parties and further filtered through the canonization processes (OT and NT both).
So it’s a bit tough to really pin down what Christianity was “meant to be”. But I wished it wasn’t what it is in many parts of the US.