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Blamemeta ,

Actual conservative here.

Not all progress is good. Its best made in measured doses.

Life is good. Sure there are problems, but they can be solved without completely changing the system. Better laws and regulations, going after those abusing the system, that sort if thing.

Also the only alternative presented is communism. And historcally, whats been advertised as communism has lead to a 100 million deaths, the oppression of everyone else involved, and generally bad shit. (No, Im not arguing about what is true communism)

counselwolf ,

What do you mean by “the only alternative presented is communism”?

Can you give examples of that, I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

Blamemeta , (edited )

What other alternatives are given? Monarchy? I jest a bit, but capitalism works really well, just needs a little effort to keep assholes from going full 1890s coal town.

ren , (edited )
@ren@lemmy.world avatar

Not sure if you are being serious. There are levels of socialism and social safety networks that still allow democracy and even capitalism. It’s regulated heavily, wealth is limited, and resources are shared to those who need it.

Bible Jesus fought systemic poverty & for the shunned in society, made it very clear how he felt about the rich & powerful.

It’s mind-boggling to consider neoliberal christianity. It literally goes against everything your god/god’s son fought for… I don’t understand how christians aren’t leading the fight against wealth inequality, systemic poverty, and improved social systems.

“How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven! Indeed, 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 heaven.”

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’”

Jesus was a socialist.

Blamemeta ,

I think a lot of it comes from a distrust of the government, and an understanding that charity is voluntary. In socialism, its not. Doesn’t really count for much if its done at gun point.

I know its kinda late to say this, but disclaimer that I do not know every single person, and my perspective is limited.

ren ,
@ren@lemmy.world avatar

why do you keep saying “at gun point”. It’s everyone paying a their taxes then the that money being used to help the poor and needy.

people don’t give to charity volunteerly enough, wealth inequality has only made the rich richer while 40% of Americans are either poor or on the verge of poor.

why aren’t christians demanding more social services, more support, less wealth inequality?

there’s not “gun points”, well except for the gun-loving christians who you better not touch their giant fucking truck.

Blamemeta ,

Taxes are done at gun point. If you don’t pay them, an armed man shows up at your door.

ren ,
@ren@lemmy.world avatar

nope.

first they penalize you, then they freeze your accounts, garnish wages, etc. the IRS will not send you to jail.

You only go to jail if you commit tax evasion or fraud. Which, btw, isn’t very christian.

ren ,
@ren@lemmy.world avatar

WWJD?

Jesus was a socialist.

Blamemeta ,

Socialism is charity at gun point, otherwise known as theft. Jesus was about voluntairly giving, because he understands consent.

AllonzeeLV ,

He also said people who don’t choose to do so and hoard more wealth than they need are going to hell sure as shit not heaven.

It’s a shame it’s all fiction and no one’s going anywhere except the ground or an oven.

Blamemeta ,

But its still up to the person. They’re allowed to make that choice.

AllonzeeLV ,

Technically if they believe in a Judeo-Christian God, they believe that God knew what their choice would be before they were even created, otherwise God wouldn’t be omniscient, which nullfies the idea of free will, as it was God’s choice to make a being God knew would make decisions that led them to hell and made them anyway.

Blamemeta ,

Im not really looking to get into high minded debate about free will and god

AllonzeeLV ,

Then stop professing expertise on the Christian God’s economic preferences.

TheActualDevil ,

You’re allowed not to pay your taxes to fund socialist programs. There is a consequence of jail, but you have that choice. How is it different?

itsAsin ,
@itsAsin@lemmy.ml avatar

off-topic. nowhere in your reply have you spoken about christianity.

the_dopamine_fiend ,
@the_dopamine_fiend@lemmy.world avatar

The just-world hypothesis plays a big part.

jungekatz OP ,

Basically karma ? So do they believe that their actions will reap them benefits ? While they want to discrimiate people on basis of race and sexuality ?

the_dopamine_fiend ,
@the_dopamine_fiend@lemmy.world avatar

There’s an authoritarian theme to it all. They believe their god to be all-powerful and all-just. Therefore, that god must reward good actions and punish bad ones. The reward that our global society seems to run the most on is money. Therefore, any actions that gain you a lot of money must be good actions, thereby justifying the means of capitalism.

Prosperity theology, they call it.

poplargrove ,

Here’s a satirical passage from Terry Prachett’s Small Gods that I absolutely love:

There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God, because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His disapproval. In the same way, the Quisition could act without possibility of flaw. Suspicion was proof. How could it be anything else? The Great God would not have seen fit to put the suspicion in the minds of His exquisitors unless it was right that it should be there. Life could be very simple, if you believed in the Great God Om. And sometimes quite short, too.

themeatbridge ,

Because “conservative” isn’t an ideology, it’s a mindset. It’s based on the idea that the in-group is good, not because of what they believe but because of who they are. So because they are good, whatever they want is good. It does not matter if their wants are contradictory or hypocritical or irrational in any way. They define the parameters for what is worth preserving, and then anyone who wants to stop them is part of the out-group and therefore bad. The out-group is not bad because they hold bad positions. The out-group could change their positions, and they would still be bad becauae it is part of their identity.

Conservatives also do not require any justification for their wants, but having a religious justification is like catnip. Because of the conservative mindset, they have no problem picking and choosing the religious beliefs that support what they want while ignoring or attacking the ones that don’t.

croix ,

This is honestly an extremely weak take. Not going to start a debate with you, I’m not a conservative, but oversimplification and vilification does more harm than good.

ProvableGecko ,

Eh, is it vilification when they are actual villains?

TwoGems ,
@TwoGems@lemmy.world avatar

Are you kidding me? Do you see the current conservatives in the United States right now?

zurchpet ,
@zurchpet@lemmy.ml avatar

Might be the prosperity gospel

joel_feila ,
@joel_feila@lemmy.world avatar

This is not a an easy answer. Part of it is Prosperity gospel. Basically what if god showed you who was righteous by making the righteous rich. Why are you not rich, because you are not righteous. It started in the early part of the 1900s and quickly moved to tevevalgelism, even back during the days of radio.

Combine that with a string believe in the great man theory of his troy. Something right wing people are more likely to strongly believe in. Add to that a need for a social hierarchy that clears say “These are the better and by divine right they should rules and these are the lesser to be ruled over” you have a powerful mix. God is at the most top point of a hierarchy and below must be the best people, the real great men who will shape history. How so I tell who these great men are? The rich, if they are righteous then god will reward them with riches.

Then add a very distinct American version of Christianity. If it the christian thing to do then America will do and if Amercia does then it must the christian thing to do. America is capitalist therefore it is christian to be a capitalist.

These circles of logic all feed into the one conclusion of hyper christian national capitalism.

mojo ,

Conservatism is based on ignorance. They don’t even know what capitalism means.

SCB ,

Most people do not seem to know what capitalism means

GiddyGap ,

Important to add that it’s really just in the US that this tie exists between religious conservatives (especially evangelicals) and capitalism. In many other parts of the world, religious people are more leftwing, especially to take care of the weakest among us.

loaExMachina ,

Didn’t the evangelists in Brasil massively support Bolsonaro?

GiddyGap ,

Yes. Brazil and the US are among the few countries where evangelicals are hard right.

Microw ,

Yeah. In my country, the religious conservatives and the turbo capitalists still sit in the same party, so they generally work with each other, but they clearly are different factions. The capitalists mostly arent religious at all, and the religious conservatives care way more about the state of the agrarian sector and the social system than about capitalism.

mojo ,

ඞ

frankPodmore ,
@frankPodmore@slrpnk.net avatar

Because conservatism is more important to them than religion, essentially.

jungekatz OP ,

Does not explain why do they support capitalistic policies , and this is not just in the US but other countries too!

swallowyourmind ,

It does.

(You can say the same about existing socialist democratic policies, too.)

It’s just indoctrination.

People believe what they are taught, and relatively few questions anything seriously.

The majority of people continue to believe the religion they were raised in.

The majority of people believe in the economic system they were raised in.

The majority of the world’s countries use mixes of capitalist & socialist policies (ie free-market economies with social safety net programs).

So most people support capitalist free-market systems, and would say they are pro-capitalism.

They also don’t want you to cut their retirement government program levels.

And though most won’t claim to support socialism, they love firefighters or libraries or roads, and they can’t tell there’s no difference. Because they aren’t taught to question.

And most don’t want to replace their existing systems with completely different systems. They just want them to provide better tesults and be less costly.

Religion is most effective at converting those more inclined to believe propaganda & appeals to authority.

So these dichotomies are even worse & more prevalent for the religious.

Those people breed children of mostly similar sentiment. If raised capitalist, those religious children won’t question the obvious conflict. Their authorities tell them it’s ok.

Their authorities may even modify the religion to fit the mold (ie Prosperity Gospel).

The religious authorities who suggest questioning existing systems receive pushback from followers and the system itself when they encourage critical thinking regarding the conflicts of capitalism and religion.

Examples include Martin Luther King Jr & the current Pope, both of whom were not well received with their criticisms of capitalism.

So again, it is just indoctrination with a sprinkling of ignorance.

johnlawrenceaspden , (edited )

I can’t answer for America, but generally in democracies you get two and only two parties. Anyone taking a middle position cripples the side they’re closest to.

Before Socialism was a thing, England had ‘Liberals/Whigs’ (what yanks would call libertarians, because they’ve somehow managed to repurpose the word liberal to mean the opposite of what it means) and ‘Conservatives/Tories’ (king and country and church and don’t change things because you’ll break them and hurt people).

And of course, like all political groups do, they hated each other.

The Church of England was once known as the Tory Party at Prayer. The Liberals were the radicals, the party of industry and progress and free markets and who cares who it hurts as long as it’s the future.

With the rise of socialism/fascism/anarchism/progressivism, a truly radical program to rebuild society on utopian lines and use totalitarian terror to enable even more freedom and progress and human happiness, represented in England by the Labour Party, the ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ were squeezed, and combined to oppose socialist thought, which hated them both and wanted to destroy everything they thought was worthwhile in the world.

So there came to pass an uneasy alliance in England between classical liberals and religious loonies, who’d naturally detest each other.

That’s the modern Conservative party, who want to use radical social transformation and the power of the free market to go back to the glorious past, and are very much in favour of freedom of speech and thought as long as it’s the sort of speech and thought that they approve of.

The Liberal Party effectively ceased to exist, because in its radicalism and desire for progress, it was more sympathetic to socialist thought, and so it got crushed.

Socialism has rather collapsed as an idea after an hundred years of practical experience with utopia, leaving Labour as the party of ‘every problem can be solved by stealing more money and spending it on subsidies’. A position which is popular with those who benefit from subsidy, and unpopular with those who get their stuff stolen.

And of course, few of the people in either party actually believe in the causes they publicly espouse. They’re not stupid. But public communications have to be simple-minded and rally tribal support.

Obviously this is a terrible system, but it’s better than regular civil war, which is what you get in all other systems of government.

itsAsin ,
@itsAsin@lemmy.world avatar

that was the most readable version of modern politics i have ever come across.

i learned a lot. thank you so much!

johnlawrenceaspden ,

So kind! Thank you.

Forgive me, I am editing it in-place as more thoughts occur to me, so do make sure you still agree with it when I stop doing that, and edit your comment appropriately.

ThrowawayPermanente ,

*Democracies using first-past-the-post without proportional representation

johnlawrenceaspden , (edited )

Sure, but that’s the only system we know is stable even over the hundred years or so we’ve been doing the experiment.

I would be cautiously in favour of STV, but PR systems seem to get rid of the ‘you can vote the bastards out’ feature in favour of permanent government by the same people in various coalitions.

Being able to change the government without violence is, I think, the only real argument in favour of representative democracy, and it’s an important feature, because it’s what stops democracies having periodic civil wars, and focuses the parties on at least trying to appear to represent the median voter.

Pandoras_Can_Opener ,
@Pandoras_Can_Opener@mander.xyz avatar

Did you seriously just claim that FPTP is the only stable voting system?

johnlawrenceaspden ,

err, no?

dublet ,

I can’t answer for America, but generally in democracies you get two and only two parties.

Your answer is both incredible specific to the UK and subtly incorrect. I don’t quite have the time to write a full rebuttal, but the more egregious of errors is this one:

The Liberals were the radicals, the party of industry and progress and free markets and who cares who it hurts as long as it’s the future.

One of the core tenets of liberalism is the harm principle. Sure progress is important but so is not harming anyone. Your post seems to equate only socialism with bringing good to British society, when that quite simply is just not true, and refutable. The Labour Party in the UK quite successfully adopted a lot of the items on the liberal agenda, such as gender equality.

The FPTP system is quite poisonous to the political debate in the UK as the natural tendency that only one of two parties can dominate and thus removes all nuance and creates toxic tribalism.

johnlawrenceaspden ,

Thank you for the correction! Where can I find the list of philosophical axioms espoused by the Whigs?

Gsus4 , (edited )
@Gsus4@feddit.nl avatar

Because it’s remarkably similar in form:

“each one takes care of himself and god takes care of all”

Vs

“Everybody pursues their own gain and the market takes care of everything”

PS: “the lord works in mysterious ways” Vs “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/…/306397/

jungekatz OP ,

Market takes care of is a liberatarian myth !

Gsus4 , (edited )
@Gsus4@feddit.nl avatar

I know, but when you said religious conservative, I immediately assumed American and economically conservative, but there are plenty of Christian social democrats in Europe.

I think I may have misunderstood your question: which ideology did you expect religious conservatives to support? And, where/when? Maybe they could be socialists, because the new testament encourages generosity. Or maybe they could be really conservative and rabidly monarchist, imperialist like in the past. Maybe it does not matter and they just “support” what there is in their country at the time or it doesn’t matter where religion is separate from the state.

loaExMachina ,

I think what leads one to hold onto their religion and to support the social status quo are the same things: Attachement to what is familiar and reassuring and rejection of what is new and scary. Conservatives often try to appropriate religion to appear as the side of comfy, reassuring tradition, and represent progressives as the side of scary disrupters.

EatMyDick3 ,

Socialism isn’t sustainable, it’s a fairy tale. The only way things work is if we have money, Money also offers freedom to do what we want and take hold of our destiny, as opposed to having to give it all to some lazy ass who doesn’t want to work, socialists don’t want to work, they want to sit on their asses all day and have other people pay for their daily needs, stupid pigs.

DonnieDarkmode ,

An important thing to keep in mind is that the practice of religion changes over time alongside culture, and is itself a part of culture. The Christianity of people living in places like Judea and Anatolia in the 1st century CE differs from the Christianity of, say, the Teutonic (not up on my post-Roman ethnicities, so might not be using the right term) tribes of Western Europe in the 6th century. This again differs from the Christianity of indigenous peoples in the Americas post-Columbus. In all these cases, these people had pre-existing cultural and religious beliefs which Christianity syncretised with instead of wholly replacing.

The Bible has been used to endorse slavery as well as oppose it, to condone violence and warfare as well as serve as the basis for radical non-violence. It is not “univocal”, because the various people who wrote and compiled it had their own beliefs and perspectives.

The various sects of Christianity differ in their values, beliefs, and even canon literature, and that’s before you get into Christianity as cultural practice rather than strict religion. Like all religions, Christianity is wonderfully human, encompassing our wide range of idiosyncrasies and contradictions, and that even includes people who don’t read the damn book! So yes, you’re going to find commonly accepted “Christian” practices which seem to clearly contradict the doctrine, but the doctrine contradicts itself, and serves people just as much as people should ostensibly serve it. The conception of Christianity as a unified religion, with 1 canon and 1 accepted interpretation, has never been accurate.

FWIW Early Christians did practice communal living and sharing of property (the New Testament tells us as much), and you can still see these things in practice today, albeit rarely. I also wouldn’t use modern terms like socialism to describe that sort of thing, because the economic order and class structures which Socialism and Communism are a response to literally did not exist at the time.

kromem ,

Because religious conservatism has pretty much always been focused on supporting systems of authority, and in the US the system of authority is capitalism.

People would probably be really surprised to see what ‘heretical’ sects of Christianity were talking about in the first few centuries compared to the version that was green lit by the Roman empire on the notion that political power was divinely intended.

Straight up comments attributed to Jesus decrying dynastic rule (seemingly referred to by Paul in 1 Cor 4), a parable about assassinating a powerful person, discouraging giving any money or rewards to prophets or priests, rejection of prayer and fasting and alms as either useful or necessary, and even discussions around Greek atomism and Lucretius’s version of survival of the fittest.

And that’s all in only one work/tradition.

But it’s one that was buried in a jar for millennia after canonical Christianity was endorsed by the emperor, which followed with deciding what texts to allow and what to ban on eventual penalty of death.

The thing most people in the US believe today is the version that passed the filter of the Roman empire’s oversight and involvement, from killing the initial leader to endorsing the eventual version that’s probably at odds with the original teachings in places.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that it goes hand in hand with boot licking and anti-critical thinking.

Laticauda ,

Because capitalism helps enforce a hierarchy, and conservative L’s love hierarchies. Religion is just another tool used for this since it generally preaches obedience with a consequence for not following the right “rules”. Most religion has nuance to that aspect, but if you erase the nuance it’s an effective tool for enforcing those hierarchies those people love so much.

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