• floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    13 hours ago

    For-profit hospitals.

    For-profit schools.

    For-profit prisons.

    For-profit churches.

    When will Americans realise there’s something wrong?

  • InvalidName2@lemmy.zip
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    13 hours ago

    It’s not just mega churches.

    My dad was going to a small little church for years. At some point in a conversation about their church, I asked him what the church does in terms of community service or giving to the less fortunate. His response was “nothing”.

    To me, that should be a pretty high priority for organized religion, otherwise it’s just Sunday social hour and free entertainment … at best.

    • BanMe@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      Social hour is actually very necessary, not happening, our third spaces are dying and churches are one of them. Not that I’m not glad to a degree, but we need replacements because people come to the church for human connection, and then pick up the bullshit over time.

      Hell I’m in the South and I have queer friends that still go to southern baptist churches “because there’s food once a week” and “I get to be around people.”

      • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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        2 hours ago

        That is one of the most despicable reasons to join a cult. “To be around people”. What about some sports club? Chess-meetings? Hobby-philantropist-gatherings, passionate-juggler-convention?

        If I join a thing that is evil, I’m also evil.

        And how a queer could even think about joining some cult is beyond me. That’s like a Jew joining the Nazis because there’s people.

        Wasn’t it you guys that had this law during the rise of crips/bloods gangs, that if you’d join one of the gangs and someone else committed a felony, you were also guilty of it?

        I’d rather be lonely than actively supporting an evil cause.

    • VitoRobles@lemmy.today
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      13 hours ago

      Watching Knives Out 3 triggered me. As a former Catholic, I was hit pretty hard by how the big bad was treating the church.

      And thinking about it, yeah, that’s exactly what they are. There are those who run a church like a little kingdom and create cults of personality.

  • athairmor@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    I feel like half of American churches could be wiped out if people just had some other live entertainment they could afford on the weekends.

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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      14 hours ago

      If you learn about what went on during the Great Awakening, you can see that there was a lot of competition between different churches and no government regulation. For the entrepreneuial pastor, they could slightly change the gospel and church services to target a congregation of their choosing.

    • CyanideShotInjection@lemmynsfw.com
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      14 hours ago

      Oh but you have to pay to attend this kind of show and it’s super expensive, like easily 200$. It is a matter of preference for them, not affordability.

  • BigDiction@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    As someone raised Catholic my first visit to a Christian church looked wild.

    Padded pews I can hang with. Drums? Electric guitars? Blasphemy I tell ya

  • Apepollo11@lemmy.world
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    24 hours ago

    “before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it”

  • zd9@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I always thought The Righteous Gemstones was a great show but purposefully overly ridiculous. I guess they were right on the nose.

  • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    So inconceivably many mentally challenged people that join those “mega churches”…it’s beyond me. Why? What is wrong with muricans?

    • mcv@lemmy.zip
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      23 hours ago

      Everything is business, everything is entertainment, everything is about money.

      There is still real Christianity in the US, but this isn’t it. I recently read about someone asking for help from various churches, mosques and temples, and everybody offered help, except the churches. The churches that did help were predominantly black.

      • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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        2 hours ago

        I don’t even know what “real Christianity” should be. I, personally, hate cults of all kind from the depths of my heart.

        This silly tribalism is most always just about cash, power and separating themselves from “the others”.

        And just because a group of evil people have some “good” amongst them doesn’t make the whole system any less evil, and they, themselves, are also evil because they’re part of something evil, no matter how hard they try to be good people.

        The argument “but it was just a job and I needed money, I don’t believe in any of it” was never a convincing reason to work at a concentration camp.

        Nothing against belief though. Who am I to render a final judgment about the universe without even knowing a fraction of the facts. But joining a cult/religion is the bad thing here. It’s a virus that spreads by word.

        • mcv@lemmy.zip
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          13 hours ago

          Then what would you call the people who actually follow the teachings of Christ? What would you call the Christians in other countries? Why would appropriators of a word get to own it?

  • Flax@feddit.uk
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    1 day ago

    Also “we don’t like traditional Church buildings with beautiful architecture, we want to save money”