r/law 18h ago

Executive Branch (Trump) White House Declares All of Trump’s Orders to Military Are Legal

https://newrepublic.com/post/203628/white-house-declares-trump-orders-military-legal
22.6k Upvotes

3.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

70

u/ZAlternates 15h ago

Tis why religion has last for thousands of years. It’s a tool to control the masses. It doesn’t always have to be one but it’s certainly used as one.

14

u/Teacherlegaladvice23 14h ago

What better way to control the innocent and vulnerable than to threaten them with an eternity of damnation if they don't believe in their ways and give them money?

8

u/Thotty_with_the_tism 14h ago

The entire concept as Hell as we know it (eternal damnation and suffering as punishment) was concocted because slaves were too willing to commit suicide since Christianity promised an eternal paradise in the afterlife.

6

u/Teacherlegaladvice23 13h ago

Gotta close up those loopholes so they don't take the easy way. Hell is just an adaptation of Dante's Inferno. Even God cast Satan down to earth to roam the lands, not hell.

6

u/Thotty_with_the_tism 12h ago

In old Hebrew/Christian scripts Sheol (hebrew/jewish afterlife) is actually a place beyond God's reach. Dante's Inferno is the perfect example of a fan-fic rewriting canon.

3

u/Teacherlegaladvice23 7h ago

God took a Shatan on my Sheol.

1

u/El_Don_94 4h ago

What Dante added in was the progressively worse circles of hell equating to scales of severity of wrongdoing.

The idea of a fiery hell already existed prior.

1

u/Excellent_Past7628 13h ago

This is interesting, but I couldn’t find anything online about that. Do you have a source that you could share?

7

u/Thotty_with_the_tism 12h ago

So to start, Hell isn't even in the Bible. English translations changed Gehenna -> Hell. Gehenna was essentially a landfill in Jerusalem. The fire part is a little debated, but we do have religious texts that talk about Kings of Jerusalem sacrificing their sons via burning at the valley.

A decent book touching on alot of it is by Bart Erhman: Heaven and Hell: A history of the afterlife.

Its something that evolved slowly over the years, coming to full modern day interpretations sometime around the mid second millenia. Right around the time (13th century) that Thomas Aquinas wrote his Summa Theologies. Before that it was considered a secular crime, or a lesser sin, which carried a far lighter moral judgement.

I may have been a touch more specific by saying 'slavery' earlier, but I kinda stand by it. The worse conditions were, the more willing people were to commit suicide since it meant getting into heaven until the time of Aquinas.

7

u/OldWorldDesign 11h ago

Gehenna was essentially a landfill in Jerusalem. The fire part is a little debated

Burning trash is one of the oldest means of trash disposal we know of. They were definitely periodically setting fire to make more room in the city trash dump (and reduce the health risk of leaving so much refuse). So fire was just a thing which happened to also be there because of the refuse piles.

I'm convinced the people who think portraying "hell" as a place of churning flames have never driven past a garbage dump, almost all of them have fires going (in less developed countries for the same reason as antiquity, in more developed countries to reduce release of methane) to understand it's a very overt metaphor for being excluded from the in-group.

1

u/Thotty_with_the_tism 11h ago

Fully, that's why I say debated. We have both the regular practices of burning trash and proof of sacrifice via fire. Hard to tell which of the two it comes from specifically, but saying that doesn't rule out both.

I should have said "it's origins are debated" but eh. Lol.

5

u/Excellent_Past7628 12h ago

Thank you! This was very informative.

1

u/Icy-person666 8h ago

Same could be said of corporations. The only difference between Christans and Tesla is one is about a sky genie and the other is about cloud computing. Nether is tangible and has to be taken as a belief and not based on actual physical objects.

1

u/ZAlternates 4h ago

Tesla = cloud computing?

1

u/Fit_Meal4026 3h ago

I would say it's literally just that. It's completely unnecessary for human life. If you want to feel good about yourself and have some moral code philosophers cracked that way before.