This priest is slowly realizing what the main purpose of Christianity is.
I love his realization at the end that Christianity had to make a deal with the "devil" in order to survive and thrive. So the devil can be a good thing.
Quote:'Dangerous': Priest says Trump has 'co-opted' Christianity to 'secure his own power'
A longtime Episcopalian priest is accusing President Donald Trump of exploiting Christianity to execute his own political agenda — and is giving Christians a clear choice going forward.
DeLashmutt compared Trump to the Roman emperor Constantine, who he noted also used a strict interpretation of Christianity to accomplish his goal of getting various territories under his thumb. And he observed that, like Trump, Constantine's belief system was contradictory with the "diverse, decentralized and often theologically fragmented" groups of Christians at the time. When Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E., it was done not for religious reasons but for "imperial stability."
"For the first time, Christian belief was not only about faithfulness to Christ; it became a matter of loyalty to the emperor. Heresy was no longer just a spiritual wound in the body of Christ — it became a political threat to imperial order," he wrote. "Christianity was disciplined into a form more useful for holding an empire together. Today, a similar phenomenon is unfolding."
"Constantine’s legacy is complex. Without him, Christianity might never have survived to become the global faith it is today. But the cost of that survival was real: a faith reshaped to serve the needs of empire," DeLashmutt wrote. "Christians today must ask again: Will we follow a Christ who reigns from a cross or one who crowns emperors to secure his own power?"
https://www.alternet.org/trump-coopted-christianity/
I love his realization at the end that Christianity had to make a deal with the "devil" in order to survive and thrive. So the devil can be a good thing.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
