It’s the younger generation the 18-35 that is now voting my children and their friends are very progressive in thought.

No! 43% YES! All the areas that provide jobs went blue. But this time rural people voted No, too.

they are driving more away even faster now.

As far as I'm concerned, if they try and force that on us, it gets crammed back down their throats and they choke on it! That's how they learn.

These good Christians we're told about have had since the 50s to push back on these fundamentalists but didn't want to. They had better want to now if it's not already too late. They probably missed thier chance so now we do it for them.

Bunch are not Christians. They are doing the opposite of what Christ teaches of loving and caring for the least of us!

The way is reason. Reason requires one employ doubt which faith wholesale rejects.

Closely held beliefs and genitalia have this in common: It’s okay to have them, it’s okay to hold them closely. It’s not okay to shove either down anyone else’s unwilling throat.

that is all Republicans have to offer. And yes, I include the white evangelicals who have traded their souls to gain political power to force their beliefs into secular law as part of the corruption. As I have frequently reminded people, liberals are Christians, too, and they are far more likely to follow the actual teachings of Christ than those who denigrate the poor, reject the stranger, and hate those who aren’t like them. I don’t recall any Bible verses starting with “Thou shall hate the poor, the downtrodden, women, etc.” Instead, they worship the rich and greedy. And we all know the Bible verse about a rich man and a camel fitting through the eye of a needle.

My church is nothing like the way Christians get slammed on here repeatedly. The problem is Repukes mis-using Christianity--just like they mis-use "patriotism," and everything else they get their slimy hands on.

The merging of televangelism and the Republican Party has tarnished the brand, one hopes beyond repair.

Oh, I wouldn't mind seeing the original Jesus sect take hold, it was joyful and mostly harmless. It wasn't until Jesus turned into Christ and entered the service of Empire that it went sour, Empires being short on joy and long on threats.

So far, Millennials and Zoomers aren't having any of it.

Good.

I really don't understand this notion that Jesus was this bubbly, cheerful guy until the Romans came around and ruined everything. This doesn't really comport with history or, more importantly, the character described in the Gospels.

The Gospels are our only source of information about the character of Jesus. While they are not contemporaneous sources (none of those exist), they were written in the first century, well before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. And I gotta say, their portrayal of Jesus is, well, kind of a mixed bag.

He was a rabblerouser, spending his time with the disenfranchised and despised. His main enemy wasn't the Roman occupation, it was the cadre of self appointed arbiters of Jewish law and morality and he managed to piss them off enough that they appealed to the Romans to have him whacked, if any of the NT is to be believed.

Some of the fragmentary Gnostic Gospels, suppressed by the Council of Nicea, might have been more contemporary sources, but they didn't serve Empire as well as the stuff that made it into the NT. The Coptic Church has gospels that fill in the missing years from 12-30 with tales of a child learning to control godlike powers. They didn't make the cut, either.

I'm an atheist. I read this stuff to make sure I hadn't missed anything. I hadn't.

The early sect was among the poor. The symbol was the fish, not the cross. The ROTAS square appeared outside houses, probably the ones where meetings featuring bread and wine were held. People too poor to expect much out of life were assured of later reward that disqualified the rich and that was cause for celebration. Of course, the rich hated that idea.

Jesus didn't morph into Christ until the emperor Constantine realized if he killed off all the Jesus cultists, there would be no one left to do all the shitwork. Apollo became Zeus, orthodoxy and hierarchy were established, and the joy went out of it as the rich were finally able to bribe their way into heaven, offering the oppressed no relief from their oppressors.

That's what I mean about the early church being a joyful one, while the imperial church was not.

The establishment of Christian canon was a gradual process that took off in the 2nd century, and was contemporaneous to a similar movement within Judaism. By Constantine's time, Gnosticism and Marcionism had already been pushed to the fringes of Christianity. The 27-book version of the New Testament had already been around for more than century at that point. The Council of Nicea and the Council of Rome weren't about eradicating Gnosticism because by that point Gnostics were largely a non-issue. They were more concerned with Arianism, which was a major point of debate at the Council of Nicea.