I realize even asking this topic is controversial enough but I don't get it. The more I've experienced Christianity in life, the less I respect it. I read the Old and New Testament from front-to-back and had far more respect for the Old Testament than the new but still found either book overly convoluted, boring and hardly useful or with solid purpose. Outside of the Bible itself, it's the people who call themselves Christians I cannot stand.
I have never met a Christian I have liked in life. Most are judgmental about the least important things and then forgiving about the most important of things.
What I mean by that is you might watch porn then some Christian will think you're a monster, lecture you on how porn is draining your mana and it's bad juju with as much mysticism in their rationale as a native shaman. And then someone will assassinate Charlie Kirk and they'll "forgive them". What the fuck is this bullshit?
Christian organizations are responsible for bringing immigrants. Christian organization are responsible for weak values that our enemies exploit. Christian organization do business with our enemies and take their money and promote their values.
Why do right-wingers cling onto the Christian religion when maybe 10,000 people worldwide practice a decent form of Christianity and all the rest are practicing some bastardized version?
When 999m of the billion followers are practicing "false Christianity" when does one accept that perhaps it's the 1m who are in fact false?
I have never met a good Christian, ever. I have met good people who were theist but not Christian or atheist but never Christian. I've seen all these "based Christians" online but I fear they must live in the countryside, never learning their homestead because I've live in nearly a dozen different cities and I've never met them out and about in the city among the average person.
The church is also one of the few entities on earth that makes a sincere attempt to address human error. I also probably can't call myself a Christian because I don't fully agree with everything the Church says about right and wrong (i've always found their explanation for man's fall a bit unsatisfactory, and then there's the perennial evolution quagmire, as naive examples) which presumably means I don't fully agree with Christ's teachings and cannot be his follower. But there is definitely such a thing as sin. I can't imagine living through life and not coming to understand that on some level. It's everywhere and it's abundant and it's gross and it's deadly. And Christianity, for all its faults, has done a pretty good job of addressing that. Even if Christian tradition is partially wrong about some specifics of what sin is, the literal practice of Christianity has helped bring people together and has helped people address a very real problem in human existence, which government doesn't address, corporations don't address, politics doesn't address, media barely addresses, etc. So it offers people something they can't get elsewhere. I think that says something.
Of course, I don't know Christian doctrine that thoroughly and I'm just trying to give my opinion from an outsider's perspective. Jesus can be ironically kind of hard to learn about if you're not in the church. I still find out things I was taught about him as kid were wrong.
i don't know why you've never met a good Christian unless this whole post is just a troll; that seems silly.
On the offchance you're not, I do feel like there is a certain veneration of meekness associated with [at least modern] Christianity, or at least a kind moral resignation that probably isn't healthy. When I see Nigerian bishops it feels a bit like watching the UN, or an Indian leading a mass at an old white church, i wonder a little about what forces are truly in charge. I suppose these patterns come from believing you can't actually save yourself alone, but I'm not sure that's it. I think it's more like: Christianity is fundamentally an internationalist religion; Jesus tells his disciples to convert all nations, and that universalism shows. It's probably the one truly fundamental problem I can see with the religious structure. I'm not sure it's possible to have a moral system that is both internally consistent and universal.
I know virtually nothing about Confucianism, but it seems to have held up in China. I don’t think the Chinese are universalists, which is commendable.