the gospel of mark (haven’t gotten around to reading the others yet) gives me a lot of impressions of a jewish proto-nationalist struggle against rome, but then mystified and distorted by 1. people from outside the context misinterpreting stuff and 2. the empire itself adopting and coopting the movement (or the movement selling out)

There’s a neat sorta process of

“jesus inspired to preach (which, in historical context is equivilant to agitation)”

“jesus starts preaching literally about the corruption of judean society and the temple”

“jesus gets his ass beat by locals for telling them they’re sinful”

“jesus starts preaching in parables so he doesn’t get his ass beat”

“jesus builds movement and explains things literally to the apostles, but continues parableing in his preaching”

“jesus does mutual aid, healing people of physical and mental ailments (not curing imo, but alleviating symptoms (psychologically or literally with oil))”

“jesus confronts the demon legion (which is many)”

“jesus goes to jerusalem, intending to agitate more and die as a matyr to incite rebellion”

“jesus’s followers abandon him and it all falls apart”

30 year break until the actual attempted revolution

“some guy remembers jesus’s ideas (sees visions) and thinks “the rebellion would work if the whole roman empire rose up instead of just judea””

“starts spreading faith to non-jews”

which leads varying religious/cultural ideas being taken literally, misinterpreted and morphed until apocalypse means “the literal end of existence” instead of “the collapse of the existing social order” and jesus is turned into literally god, when in all likelihood he was preaching more or less what isiah or jeremiah did

Jesus also gives instructions for agitation:

8 These were his instructions: “Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts.

9 Wear sandals but not an extra shirt.

10 Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town.

11 And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.”

12 They went out and preached that people should repent.

13 They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.

Sorta. It’s very materialist. It treats economics as the foundation of historical development. Interest groups attract people based primarily on material concerns. Classes hence struggle against each other (afaik without scripting) and create alliances with other classes and do revolutions. What its really missing imo is the environmental aspect to be truly ‘marxist’ tho (the 19th century is when concerns about “what happens when we run out of fertiliser/trees/fish/etc” started really growing as a result of unprecedented extractivism, and these are recurring concerns in Capital)

I wonder if it is because with the game becoming less popular again

A lotta the reason people keep talking about marxism in vicky3 is because the devs of vicky3 outright said they uesed some of Marx’s economic theories because it makes for good game design.

Also something something reality has a marxist bias.

bible has lotsa misses, but what it gets right it gets rly right

I’m personally partial to some of the laws

21 “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.

22 “Do not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless.

23 If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry.

24 My anger will be aroused, and I will kill you with the sword; your wives will become widows and your children fatherless.

25 “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest.

26 If you take your neighbor’s cloak as a pledge, return it by sunset,

27 because that cloak is the only covering your neighbor has. What else can they sleep in? When they cry out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.

(tho the books of laws are full of some of the most horrible parts of the book too )

the full story is 1. somehow even more anti-rich than the usually quoted line and 2. rly funny

16 Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”

17 “Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.”

18 “Which ones?” he inquired. Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony,

19 honor your father and mother,’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ ”

20 “All these I have kept,” the young man said. “What do I still lack?”

21 Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

22 When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.

23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.

24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Matthew 19:23 is even more explicit:

23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.

I’m still completely baffled by reactionaries who profess Christianity; like why go through all the extra mental work to justify ur reactionaryness??? Weirdos

not a great feeling

Just wait until part 8

I’m hoping I’ll be more active then (school currently murdering me)

Find me the line in Deuteronomy 20 saying any of this is good.

Also as I and others have said in other comments

1. this isn’t exceptional for bronze age and iron age near eastern warfare; the weird part about biblical god is that there are written and codified limits to the destruction and plundering;

2. Genesis through 2 Chronicles are ‘historical’ books and not necessarily endorsements of the behaviour or laws depicted, as god can and quite explicitly does change his mind (e.g. Jeremiah and the Potter);

3. this behaviour (the killing, expansion of Israel and forced labour) is explicitly cited as one reason for Israel’s destruction in Isaiah and Jeremiah;

4. Jeremiah explicitly says that the “lying pens of the scribe have handled it [the holy texts] falsely” and we know from linguistic and historical/archaeological research that the Pentateuch (the first five books) are the most heavily edited of all the books especially in terms of and around the sections of laws;

5. Deuteronomy is known to be one of the later and most priestly of edits;

So all in all I don’t think Deuteronomy 20 is the gotcha you think it is (it is also bad priestly fanfiction to justify bad kingly fanfiction, but extratextual debunking is less fun)

Interestingly enough the “the bible is the literal and infallible word of god” people are a fairly recent (post 1500) thing.

Through most of theological history, its been understood as figurative (e.g. iirc Augustine saying that the days in Genesis 1 are God-Days each representing 1000 years), and not taken as “word of god” (at best, the first five books were “word of god through moses” and not everyone believed that) so it wasnt seen as “infallible”.

Ik is lighthearted bc emote (ty) but my assumption would be slavery is part of why he said “dont eat the fruit of knowledge, is bad for u”

Are you saying that, because the popular conception and depictions of babel are the later tower-focused version etc, there’s no point discussing the original context in the comm created for such discussion about the religion and its development?

Depending on the book the answer is either “yes” or “no, but he is very very critical of the institution”. My personal fanon is that he had a sorta “wait and see and then limited intervention” approach to post-flood human evils (I do not headcanon an omniscient unchanging god in these books)

my autistic ass desperately wishes people would tonetag their jokes, especially outside of joke comms (and particularly when the joke is something so often said seriously and taken seriously by most people in comments)

best left to Rabbis and fan fic writers.

Or online discussion on the c/christianity comm created specifically for good faith leftist discussion lol

In terms of creating a consistent tone, literally all I’m doing is reading the book of prophets as the critique of the ‘historical’ books (meaning Genesis to 2 Chronicles) that it quite explicitly is. Book of Jeremaiah quite explicitly calls out priests and scribes for handling the text falsely, book of Isaiah calls israel out for the genocide and slavery and exploitation (and then israel famously gets completely owned, in the story explicitly because its hands are full of blood).

God is a big fan of slavery, genocide, and city building.

You’re right with the making shit up though (see for example Schmid The Making of the Bible), but this is reductive, and ignores the fact that the majority of the non-priestly text-sources were likely oral traditions before being written down.

Israel gets repeatedly owned by god in the book explicitly bc they do all three of these things lol

That isnt communism and god isnt afraid of it. You are lionizing mesopotamian empires based on slavery and exploitation. Story of Babel is about class society and empire and god is horrified/appalled by it.

The city of Babel being built isnt a good thing. Think about this story in historical context rather than in the abstract. Babel is a mesopotamian city. It would be built using forced labour, would involve more intensive exploitation for the construction of monumental architecture and upkeep of an urban ruling class. Biblical god is distinctly not a fan of these things (slavery, exploitation, and urbanization all get you on his shitlist).

Unsettling the Word has a nice analysis of Babel in the modern canadian context, with Babel called “Petropolis” and the single language being the liberal jargon around development and profit.

also hilarious how even the people more sympathetic to de-growth on here imagine it as a world where you just get a new smartphone every 5 years instead of every year

often using the same works.

This is pedantic maybe, but I wanna mention there are actually Marx-works available today that weren’t 20 years ago, and 20 years ago there were works available that weren’t 40 years ago etc. Marx wrote a lot, and its still not all transcribed into print, much less translated from Marx-language into German.