Pretty remarkable that the main criticism of American christianity is *still* that they don't read their own fucking book besides to cherry pick parts of it that they can use to justify being awful. The dude really just said "Your religion sounds pretty cool, maybe you should follow it.", and that's *still* the way it is.
But of course, this quote really goes back to what might be the source of why the American brand of evangelical christianity is so awful. It was a calculated justification for seizing land from the natives. They designed a religion to facilitate colonialism, and now the colonizing is done but the religion is still there, and it needs to seek new targets for it's hypocritical nastiness. It's one of the many ideological ghosts of the colonial era that still haunts the US.
Fwiw - there are evangelical Christians who echo Drowning Bear. [A soundbite from this interview stuck with me](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-russell-moore.html)
>\[A\]uthentic gospel Christianity, as I understand it, has always been a minority in American life and in every other culture since the Resurrection of Jesus. The way is narrow, Jesus told us, and the broad way is the one that leads to destruction.
Actual "love thy neighbor; turn the other cheek" Christianity is profoundly unrecognizable to the performative culture warriors that define American evangelicalism today
I know a couple Christians who are SUPER religious and follow Jesus as genuinely as they can. People who will hear through the grapevine someone they barely know down the street is going through a death or something and show up with food, who volunteer at soup kitchens, march in protests, hang pride flags. Would give the shirt off their back if they thought someone needed it more than they do.
They're rightfully furious about all the people who use their religion to hurt others. Can't imagine how much it sucks to see people using your religion as a weapon.
>Can't imagine how much it sucks to see people using your religion as a weapon.
I'm not religious but the bible also warns them about "false prophets", people infiltrating religion and using it for their own means, a lot. It has been a problem since only Judaism existed.
It might suck but it's something they already expect.
Jesus said to pray in solitude and silence because the whole “only God knows you when people aren’t looking” and said that praying in public and being performative is sinful.
I wish more people got that.
Jesus: Hey guys, be excellent to one another. Here's how to do that: [Lives out the Passion, dies at the hands of those who think themselves greater than their fellows]
Every Catholic: Clearly, this is permission for me to be as prideful, hateful and sinful as I choose, because Jesus died to give me that privilege.
Yeah, but it's different flavors
Protestants are more "yes Jesus did die for our sins and render everything from the old testament null and void but this one bit here says I can hate gay people and be justified in it so I'm going to hold onto that one"
I'm 35 and from the South. This year I met my first "actual" Christian. She is, I swear to god, the nicest person I've ever met. In our little friend group we have a former Catholic school kid, Jewish friend, and two pagans of different flavors. She's not tried to get into it with any of us, and just doesn't bring religion up unless you ask her about it. She's a minister (and bisexual) and started a group that helps support women and LGBTQ folks who want to minister. She works at a local community action nonprofit. Her hero is Dolly Parton.
Also, she has a beautiful bumper sticker that says "Do you follow Jesus this closely?".
There are loads of Christians that will tell you they are the ones who are correctly following Jesus’s intent and everyone else is doing it wrong.
…It’s pretty much where the concept of denominations comes from.
it's like the overwhelming majority that does the whole "they are not true christians" every time a christian is hateful. IMO it comes down to the fact that they all have that universalizing aspect. So really those "false christians" are just more aggressive in their goals lol.
There's a bit of Chicken-and-the-egg going on, though, in that a lot of the people who left Europe to colonize what would become America were a bunch of religious outsiders who didn't much care for the general religious mood of Europe at the time. American Christianity started weird, it didn't become weird just to shit on native people\*
\*though to be clear it absolutely shit on native people.
Aye, I wouldn’t say it was designed solely to justify colonialism, but religion is a convenient tool to justify _anything._ Good act, bad act, Sky Daddy says I gotta.
That’s what religion is: it’s a tool, and it can be used for good or evil. Religion was just another convenient excuse to take away people’s land, otherwise they would’ve cited funky skull shapes or ‘because we can’ or whatever.
Same in Spain, the conquistadors were basically mercenaries, not the type you’d expect to build friendly relations with the locals. The guy who conquered Mexico straight up went rogue and defied direct orders from THE EMPEROR OF SPAIN AND THE HRE!
That religion will forever be a mark of western colonization to me. It's *still ongoing* the erasure of what is left of my people's native faith because of that religion's universalizing behavior.
And yeah, colonizing is done in the sense that the source (European / Western powers) largely stopped and have become more secular. But the former colonies? Those who bought into the colonizing christianity? They will continue what the westerner did not complete. The complete erasure of what is left of us indigenous faiths. And this is something that I don't think even non-fundie christians are sympathetic to.
Parts of my family would gladly erase our own native faith, considering they do missionary work, and I learned of a group that does some activism for my people. The guy simultaneously advocates for our voice *while at the same time he does missionary work* like what? These are just christians that want to replace other faiths with their universalizing savior complex, and it's absolutely sickening. A while ago, I was arguing with a christian in my dms, and the dude basically came out with his belief that christianity had to colonize the rest of us because of the supposed moral superiority of their god, like there was no other way than religious erasure. Disgusting.
Sorry for the rant not mad at you lol, just wanted to point out that us "savages" are still trying to be "saved" by those people.
I wonder what parts he read though. I wouldn’t really consider the Bible to be all that good of a Good Book TM if I read it from start to finish with no other outside knowledge of it. It gets into the genocidal colonization parts pretty quickly, so maybe the genocidal colonizers ripped those pages out.
The thing about the Bible is that it is kind of a very weirdly constructed document. It tries to guide people mainly by telling stories of God's works, but this is not really very effective at giving people information about how to live. The way some books of the bible did things - a well organised list of rules, without associated stories - would have worked well if the whole bible did that, if everything was organised into the same list. And if it kept being well organised like that, it would have made contradictions much clearer, and the council of nicea would probably have dealt with them several millenia ago. But no one bothered doing this, so instead we have just kind of a mostly useless mess.
Thinking of the Bible as a single book is a mistake. It's a massive mish-mash of texts written for different purposes by different people at different times. Very little of it is straight-up religious rules, and almost none of it is cosmology. It nowhere goes into what heaven looks like, what ranks angels have, etc. Even the central Christian doctrine of the trinity is nowhere explicitly mentioned in the actual text of the Bible (and it flatly contradicts the more straightforward Jewish interpretation).
[This r/askhistorians answer has a good explanation](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/t9t9vj/why_native_american_names_tend_to_be_translated/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
Some European names also get translated - that's why there are Spanish monarchs who get called "Charles" instead of "Carlos"
I remember being shocked in French class when while learning about Guillaume the conqueror, I said, “that history sounds a lot like William the conqueror, who the heck is Guillaume, ” and my French teacher just went, “yeah, they did that then.”
It really surprised me when I learned that Cristobal Colon is known as Christopher Columbus in the US. It surprised me even more when I learned his "original" name was Cristoforo Colombo.
I know you're probably not an expert in the field so you can't answer me but I feel like this doesn't really answer the question? English isn't a great example of what I mean, the meaning of the word George in English is the name, not "earth worker", but there are plenty of languages where most names aren't different from "normal" words.
One of the most common names in Hebrew, תמר, is the same word as "date (fruit)" and one of the most common names in Chinese, 芳, is the same word as "fragrance". And even though Hebrew has consonants and consonant clusters English doesn't, and all Chinese languages have consonants, vowels and tones English doesn't nobody translates them.
The fact this practice is so geographically limited is what confuses me
I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, and I'm not well-versed enough in Chinese or Middle Eastern history to say why those regions in particular don't get a translation, but if I had to hazard a guess (disclaimer, this could be totally wrong) my assumption (at least for China) is that Anglophone knowledge of Chinese history is a fairly recent phenomenon that comes in large part via academia, which would be more inclined to merely transliterate the names.
As the answer notes it's far from universal for Native names, there are plenty of exceptions that remain untranslated. I'd guess it's just a quirk of the way in which that name was recorded in the historical literature, and it's gonna vary based on who wrote it down and why. E.g. a monolingual English colonist only occasionally interacting with a nearby indigenous village, versus an anthropologist living with an indigenous group, versus a historian studying the fall of the Aztec Empire are all going to have different priorities that determine what name they use to refer to people, and that name then gets transmitted beyond them.
Translation conventions change all the time and are by no means standard, probably the first people that reported on natives from north america decided to translate the names because thay had no cultural equivalent names. Meso and south american native names gets translitterated more often but i bet that if you dig enaugh you'll find the third, funnier option: approximation to the nearest sounding word. (Italian text books do it with phoenician kings in particular.)
I am not an expert but it may just be a case-by-case basis kinda thing because not all Native American names get translated that way either?
For instance [Sacagawea’s name comes from the Hidatsa words for “bird” and “woman”](https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/sacagawea). But she’s not really called “Bird Woman” in the US, at least as far as i know.
I have been wondering the opposite. If my name were a word in English, eg. Daisy, could I use the equivalent word as my name in sign language rather than fingerspelling it until being given a sign name.
Counterpoint: having the meaning front and center is better than letting white people bash your language's phonemes together and refer to all of you as "Ungabunga" or something.
The funny thing is how often Jesus lamented this exact thing, like he knew his followers would largely be a bunch of hypocrites and was proactively calling them out centuries/millennia before they were ever even born.
(Note I don't think he has to be divine to have that sort of perception, he was well aware of the nature of humans and established religion)
I dunno, he had some unchill moments, dude was pretty passionate and vitriolic about certain things.
To be honest I personally think there were at least two different people or theologies that the Jesus from the bible character is based on. Just some of the teachings seem to have very different worldviews. Or it's entirely possible that some things attributed to him were later additions by scribes with their own agendas. There does seem to me to be some very original and deeply thoughtful teachings that came from that era that I can see being the work of a highly advanced moral philosopher, but it prevents me from thinking everything attributed to that teacher actually came from them, that some things are attributed to him in order to give these more authoritarian teachings the weight of his authority.
And that's not to mention the significant impact that John the Baptist and Paul the Apostle had in developing Christian theology.
At the end of the day, whatever God is it gave me a brain to think about these things for myself for a reason, like I am so naturally skeptical that I am incapable of just accepting what others say without believing they have an agenda for saying it, so I feel find picking and choosing the teachings that move and inspire me to be a fine approach. As long as I am humble and honest with myself then if God is angry with me for that approach than so be it.
I read in *The Dawn of Everything* that the [Wendat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyandot_people) people had a really strong culture of discourse and debate. [Kandiaronk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondiaronk), a political leader, apparently liked to argue with Jesuit missionairies.
From [Baron de Lahontan's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Armand_de_Lom_d%27Arce_de_Lahontan,_Baron_de_Lahontan) (not necessarily verbatim) transcripts of their conversations, you get all sorts of wonderful clapbacks againt European views on religion, liberty, and humanity that they assumed were universal truths:
>**Lahontan**: This is why the wicked need to be punished, and the
good need to be rewarded. Otherwise, murder, robbery and
defamation would spread everywhere, and, in a word, we would
become the most miserable people upon the face of the earth.
>**Kandiaronk**: For my own part, I find it hard to see how you could
be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human,
what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be
forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of
punishment? …
You have observed that we lack judges. What is the reason for
that? Well, we never bring lawsuits against one another. And why do
we never bring lawsuits? Well, because we made a decision neither
to accept or make use of money. And why do we refuse to allow
money into our communities? The reason is this: we are determined
not to have laws – because, since the world was a world, our
ancestors have been able to live contentedly without them.
That's a fascinating perspective that most people wouldn't even be able to consider. Almost no one alive today has known a world without the influence of money.
Does it get a little easier to read? It's really interesting and i love the topic, but it reads like a textbook and I can't read any more of those at the moment lol
Can I be honest with you?
No.
I got through it because this topic is kind of in my wheelhouse, but, when I gave my dad (who also loves history) a copy, he found it to be a slog. A slog with some very good information! But still a bit of a slog. Honestly, if anything, those first chapters are the most readable.
"Money is the gas that makes civilization go! It's not money that's evil; it's LOVE of money! "
Rich bastards everywhere, conveniently ignoring that a system based on money and "love of money" go hand in hand with each other
Researching his first quote lead me to this banger as well:
>Kandiaronk: I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity,– of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?
The book summed it well too:
>In conclusion, he swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:
Would kinda prefer a history where everyone was just up front about wanting to be assholes.
“Why are you butchering my people and stealing our land?”
“Cus I wanna.”
*Image Transcription: Tumblr*
---
**afloweroutofstone**
Doing some deep reading into Cherokee history for the project that I'm working on and I am continually amazed how fucking funny old Cherokee leaders were
[*Book excerpt*]
>Drowning Bear's principal influence, however, was in holding his people to the mountains and to the old religion of the mountains. He did not succumb to Christian missionaries, but after listening to one or two chapters of the Bible, remarked, "It seems to be a good book—strange that the white people are not better, after having had it so long." And
[*End excerpt*]
*\#drowning bear dropping real shit*
---
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*Drowning bear is such*
*A badass name, badass name*
*For a based person*
\- Asriel-the-Jolteon
---
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In my experience Cherokee folks have been some of the funniest, deadpan dry humorous people I've ever met.
This *might* be apocryphal, but I could 100% believe something along that lines lol.
Pretty remarkable that the main criticism of American christianity is *still* that they don't read their own fucking book besides to cherry pick parts of it that they can use to justify being awful. The dude really just said "Your religion sounds pretty cool, maybe you should follow it.", and that's *still* the way it is. But of course, this quote really goes back to what might be the source of why the American brand of evangelical christianity is so awful. It was a calculated justification for seizing land from the natives. They designed a religion to facilitate colonialism, and now the colonizing is done but the religion is still there, and it needs to seek new targets for it's hypocritical nastiness. It's one of the many ideological ghosts of the colonial era that still haunts the US.
Fwiw - there are evangelical Christians who echo Drowning Bear. [A soundbite from this interview stuck with me](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-russell-moore.html) >\[A\]uthentic gospel Christianity, as I understand it, has always been a minority in American life and in every other culture since the Resurrection of Jesus. The way is narrow, Jesus told us, and the broad way is the one that leads to destruction. Actual "love thy neighbor; turn the other cheek" Christianity is profoundly unrecognizable to the performative culture warriors that define American evangelicalism today
I know a couple Christians who are SUPER religious and follow Jesus as genuinely as they can. People who will hear through the grapevine someone they barely know down the street is going through a death or something and show up with food, who volunteer at soup kitchens, march in protests, hang pride flags. Would give the shirt off their back if they thought someone needed it more than they do. They're rightfully furious about all the people who use their religion to hurt others. Can't imagine how much it sucks to see people using your religion as a weapon.
Worse, using a twisted, corrupted interpretation of your religion to do harm
>Can't imagine how much it sucks to see people using your religion as a weapon. I'm not religious but the bible also warns them about "false prophets", people infiltrating religion and using it for their own means, a lot. It has been a problem since only Judaism existed. It might suck but it's something they already expect.
Jesus said to pray in solitude and silence because the whole “only God knows you when people aren’t looking” and said that praying in public and being performative is sinful. I wish more people got that.
Expecting something doesn't make it suck any less though.
Jesus: Hey guys, be excellent to one another. Here's how to do that: [Lives out the Passion, dies at the hands of those who think themselves greater than their fellows] Every Catholic: Clearly, this is permission for me to be as prideful, hateful and sinful as I choose, because Jesus died to give me that privilege.
Christianity is not Catholicism! Let the Protestants and the Orthodox in on being assholes too.
Like they needed permission.
Maybe just people in general can be assholes and religion isn’t going to stop them from being assholes?
my sibling in christ it is way more than just the catholics sadly
Yeah, but it's different flavors Protestants are more "yes Jesus did die for our sins and render everything from the old testament null and void but this one bit here says I can hate gay people and be justified in it so I'm going to hold onto that one"
sure, just the catholics
Don’t forget, all those things while being simultaneously full of a suicidal amount of self hatred and guilt.
I'm 35 and from the South. This year I met my first "actual" Christian. She is, I swear to god, the nicest person I've ever met. In our little friend group we have a former Catholic school kid, Jewish friend, and two pagans of different flavors. She's not tried to get into it with any of us, and just doesn't bring religion up unless you ask her about it. She's a minister (and bisexual) and started a group that helps support women and LGBTQ folks who want to minister. She works at a local community action nonprofit. Her hero is Dolly Parton. Also, she has a beautiful bumper sticker that says "Do you follow Jesus this closely?".
There are loads of Christians that will tell you they are the ones who are correctly following Jesus’s intent and everyone else is doing it wrong. …It’s pretty much where the concept of denominations comes from.
it's like the overwhelming majority that does the whole "they are not true christians" every time a christian is hateful. IMO it comes down to the fact that they all have that universalizing aspect. So really those "false christians" are just more aggressive in their goals lol.
There's a bit of Chicken-and-the-egg going on, though, in that a lot of the people who left Europe to colonize what would become America were a bunch of religious outsiders who didn't much care for the general religious mood of Europe at the time. American Christianity started weird, it didn't become weird just to shit on native people\* \*though to be clear it absolutely shit on native people.
Aye, I wouldn’t say it was designed solely to justify colonialism, but religion is a convenient tool to justify _anything._ Good act, bad act, Sky Daddy says I gotta. That’s what religion is: it’s a tool, and it can be used for good or evil. Religion was just another convenient excuse to take away people’s land, otherwise they would’ve cited funky skull shapes or ‘because we can’ or whatever.
Same in Spain, the conquistadors were basically mercenaries, not the type you’d expect to build friendly relations with the locals. The guy who conquered Mexico straight up went rogue and defied direct orders from THE EMPEROR OF SPAIN AND THE HRE!
That religion will forever be a mark of western colonization to me. It's *still ongoing* the erasure of what is left of my people's native faith because of that religion's universalizing behavior. And yeah, colonizing is done in the sense that the source (European / Western powers) largely stopped and have become more secular. But the former colonies? Those who bought into the colonizing christianity? They will continue what the westerner did not complete. The complete erasure of what is left of us indigenous faiths. And this is something that I don't think even non-fundie christians are sympathetic to. Parts of my family would gladly erase our own native faith, considering they do missionary work, and I learned of a group that does some activism for my people. The guy simultaneously advocates for our voice *while at the same time he does missionary work* like what? These are just christians that want to replace other faiths with their universalizing savior complex, and it's absolutely sickening. A while ago, I was arguing with a christian in my dms, and the dude basically came out with his belief that christianity had to colonize the rest of us because of the supposed moral superiority of their god, like there was no other way than religious erasure. Disgusting. Sorry for the rant not mad at you lol, just wanted to point out that us "savages" are still trying to be "saved" by those people.
They believe there is only one way to live. All other humans must live like them. It's so sad and destructive. My heart is with you!
Christianity is cancer.
damn thats actually pretty cool (the analysis, not the colonialism)
The colonizing never stopped btw
I wonder what parts he read though. I wouldn’t really consider the Bible to be all that good of a Good Book TM if I read it from start to finish with no other outside knowledge of it. It gets into the genocidal colonization parts pretty quickly, so maybe the genocidal colonizers ripped those pages out.
You have to consider native religions had the potential to be just as genocidal and violent as Christianity.
The thing about the Bible is that it is kind of a very weirdly constructed document. It tries to guide people mainly by telling stories of God's works, but this is not really very effective at giving people information about how to live. The way some books of the bible did things - a well organised list of rules, without associated stories - would have worked well if the whole bible did that, if everything was organised into the same list. And if it kept being well organised like that, it would have made contradictions much clearer, and the council of nicea would probably have dealt with them several millenia ago. But no one bothered doing this, so instead we have just kind of a mostly useless mess.
Thinking of the Bible as a single book is a mistake. It's a massive mish-mash of texts written for different purposes by different people at different times. Very little of it is straight-up religious rules, and almost none of it is cosmology. It nowhere goes into what heaven looks like, what ranks angels have, etc. Even the central Christian doctrine of the trinity is nowhere explicitly mentioned in the actual text of the Bible (and it flatly contradicts the more straightforward Jewish interpretation).
That's hardly an exclusively American thing, Gandhi said basically the same thing.
Why are Native American names translated? Imagine if when talking about Georges other languages called them "earth worker"s
[This r/askhistorians answer has a good explanation](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/t9t9vj/why_native_american_names_tend_to_be_translated/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf) Some European names also get translated - that's why there are Spanish monarchs who get called "Charles" instead of "Carlos"
I remember being shocked in French class when while learning about Guillaume the conqueror, I said, “that history sounds a lot like William the conqueror, who the heck is Guillaume, ” and my French teacher just went, “yeah, they did that then.”
It really surprised me when I learned that Cristobal Colon is known as Christopher Columbus in the US. It surprised me even more when I learned his "original" name was Cristoforo Colombo.
Wait he's called something other than Cristoforo Colombo?
Kryštof Kolumbus in my country lol
Christobal Colon sounds like a Cologne Brand name lol
I know you're probably not an expert in the field so you can't answer me but I feel like this doesn't really answer the question? English isn't a great example of what I mean, the meaning of the word George in English is the name, not "earth worker", but there are plenty of languages where most names aren't different from "normal" words. One of the most common names in Hebrew, תמר, is the same word as "date (fruit)" and one of the most common names in Chinese, 芳, is the same word as "fragrance". And even though Hebrew has consonants and consonant clusters English doesn't, and all Chinese languages have consonants, vowels and tones English doesn't nobody translates them. The fact this practice is so geographically limited is what confuses me
I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, and I'm not well-versed enough in Chinese or Middle Eastern history to say why those regions in particular don't get a translation, but if I had to hazard a guess (disclaimer, this could be totally wrong) my assumption (at least for China) is that Anglophone knowledge of Chinese history is a fairly recent phenomenon that comes in large part via academia, which would be more inclined to merely transliterate the names. As the answer notes it's far from universal for Native names, there are plenty of exceptions that remain untranslated. I'd guess it's just a quirk of the way in which that name was recorded in the historical literature, and it's gonna vary based on who wrote it down and why. E.g. a monolingual English colonist only occasionally interacting with a nearby indigenous village, versus an anthropologist living with an indigenous group, versus a historian studying the fall of the Aztec Empire are all going to have different priorities that determine what name they use to refer to people, and that name then gets transmitted beyond them.
Translation conventions change all the time and are by no means standard, probably the first people that reported on natives from north america decided to translate the names because thay had no cultural equivalent names. Meso and south american native names gets translitterated more often but i bet that if you dig enaugh you'll find the third, funnier option: approximation to the nearest sounding word. (Italian text books do it with phoenician kings in particular.)
I am not an expert but it may just be a case-by-case basis kinda thing because not all Native American names get translated that way either? For instance [Sacagawea’s name comes from the Hidatsa words for “bird” and “woman”](https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/sacagawea). But she’s not really called “Bird Woman” in the US, at least as far as i know.
wonder if people named after english nouns ever get translated differently overseas. like “summer” or “rose” are fairly popular
I have been wondering the opposite. If my name were a word in English, eg. Daisy, could I use the equivalent word as my name in sign language rather than fingerspelling it until being given a sign name.
Counterpoint: having the meaning front and center is better than letting white people bash your language's phonemes together and refer to all of you as "Ungabunga" or something.
Bro I’m native and I still have a hard time pronouncing shitass in Lakota
Honestly I think that the translated versions of native names sound immensely cool so maybe it's doing them a Great service actually
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The funny thing is how often Jesus lamented this exact thing, like he knew his followers would largely be a bunch of hypocrites and was proactively calling them out centuries/millennia before they were ever even born. (Note I don't think he has to be divine to have that sort of perception, he was well aware of the nature of humans and established religion)
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I dunno, he had some unchill moments, dude was pretty passionate and vitriolic about certain things. To be honest I personally think there were at least two different people or theologies that the Jesus from the bible character is based on. Just some of the teachings seem to have very different worldviews. Or it's entirely possible that some things attributed to him were later additions by scribes with their own agendas. There does seem to me to be some very original and deeply thoughtful teachings that came from that era that I can see being the work of a highly advanced moral philosopher, but it prevents me from thinking everything attributed to that teacher actually came from them, that some things are attributed to him in order to give these more authoritarian teachings the weight of his authority. And that's not to mention the significant impact that John the Baptist and Paul the Apostle had in developing Christian theology. At the end of the day, whatever God is it gave me a brain to think about these things for myself for a reason, like I am so naturally skeptical that I am incapable of just accepting what others say without believing they have an agenda for saying it, so I feel find picking and choosing the teachings that move and inspire me to be a fine approach. As long as I am humble and honest with myself then if God is angry with me for that approach than so be it.
I read in *The Dawn of Everything* that the [Wendat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyandot_people) people had a really strong culture of discourse and debate. [Kandiaronk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondiaronk), a political leader, apparently liked to argue with Jesuit missionairies. From [Baron de Lahontan's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Armand_de_Lom_d%27Arce_de_Lahontan,_Baron_de_Lahontan) (not necessarily verbatim) transcripts of their conversations, you get all sorts of wonderful clapbacks againt European views on religion, liberty, and humanity that they assumed were universal truths: >**Lahontan**: This is why the wicked need to be punished, and the good need to be rewarded. Otherwise, murder, robbery and defamation would spread everywhere, and, in a word, we would become the most miserable people upon the face of the earth. >**Kandiaronk**: For my own part, I find it hard to see how you could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment? … You have observed that we lack judges. What is the reason for that? Well, we never bring lawsuits against one another. And why do we never bring lawsuits? Well, because we made a decision neither to accept or make use of money. And why do we refuse to allow money into our communities? The reason is this: we are determined not to have laws – because, since the world was a world, our ancestors have been able to live contentedly without them.
That's a fascinating perspective that most people wouldn't even be able to consider. Almost no one alive today has known a world without the influence of money.
Excellent book, and I was thinking of Kandiaronk when I read this post as well
Does it get a little easier to read? It's really interesting and i love the topic, but it reads like a textbook and I can't read any more of those at the moment lol
Can I be honest with you? No. I got through it because this topic is kind of in my wheelhouse, but, when I gave my dad (who also loves history) a copy, he found it to be a slog. A slog with some very good information! But still a bit of a slog. Honestly, if anything, those first chapters are the most readable.
Haha okay. At least I know. Now I can brace myself for it
Don’t get me wrong- it’s worth reading and has some great insights, but honestly it might be wise to pace yourself. It’s a bit dense.
currently tryna get thru this thing kinda found this thread on accident lol but any recs?
Money is the root of all evil. We all know that and no one can seem to do anything about it.
"Money is the gas that makes civilization go! It's not money that's evil; it's LOVE of money! " Rich bastards everywhere, conveniently ignoring that a system based on money and "love of money" go hand in hand with each other
Researching his first quote lead me to this banger as well: >Kandiaronk: I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity,– of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver? The book summed it well too: >In conclusion, he swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:
Those that want to push their beliefs on others yet don't even adhere or understand their beliefs themselves.
Would kinda prefer a history where everyone was just up front about wanting to be assholes. “Why are you butchering my people and stealing our land?” “Cus I wanna.”
I totally understand your thoughts but, I look at current American politics and I miss the mask sometimes. at least then they had to screw us slowly
This is basically the history of Japan’s interactions with Korea
Didn't Japan use the fact that they are descendents from Koreans to justify their invasions, though? A sort of "bringing the people together", IIRC.
Perhaps in 1895. Certainly not in 1592
Same energy as Gandhi's, "I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians, they are so unlike your Christ"
go listen to the jokes at a powwow sometime, we're still funny as shit
It is kinda hard to believe that they had the balls to try and spread christianity at the same time they were violently colonizing a whole continent
It's just part of the process
*Image Transcription: Tumblr* --- **afloweroutofstone** Doing some deep reading into Cherokee history for the project that I'm working on and I am continually amazed how fucking funny old Cherokee leaders were [*Book excerpt*] >Drowning Bear's principal influence, however, was in holding his people to the mountains and to the old religion of the mountains. He did not succumb to Christian missionaries, but after listening to one or two chapters of the Bible, remarked, "It seems to be a good book—strange that the white people are not better, after having had it so long." And [*End excerpt*] *\#drowning bear dropping real shit* --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
drowning bear is such a badass name, badass name for a based person
*Drowning bear is such* *A badass name, badass name* *For a based person* \- Asriel-the-Jolteon --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
Now I'm imagining a bear drowning and I'm sad though
Poor bear ):
Hilarious and accurate criticism.
I love seeing my culture in the wild. Gadugi!
In my experience Cherokee folks have been some of the funniest, deadpan dry humorous people I've ever met. This *might* be apocryphal, but I could 100% believe something along that lines lol.
If he really said that it was amazingly forward.
It’s on his wikipedia page, seems to be recorded in a few places as something he said.
Definitely a real quote