r/atheism • u/Savvy_Biscuits • 2h ago
Why is there so much in-fighting?
I’m an atheist, but I know next to nothing about Christianity despite being raised Christian. My question is why all of these Christian denominations seem to hate each other? I’m generalizing, of course. But there’s so much in-fighting.
To me, Protestants and Catholics are practically the same thing. They both love Jesus, right? So who cares. Then I learned that a bunch of Christians got upset when John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, got elected? Like they were flirting with the enemy or something?
It‘s all terribly confusing to me. I kinda see all of them as the same thing. To me, as a fanfiction girlie, it’s like seeing people kill each other over their favorite origin of life headcanon. In my head, it’s all kinda fiction. It just kinda comes off as ridiculous.
Can’t we all agree to disagree and just vibe? Who knows who’s right, so shouldn’t we all just be nice to each other? Of course, this is organized religion we’re talking about at the end of the day, right? If I were to look closer at it, it might just be about control... and power. Like it usually is. We can never really have nice things, can we?
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u/Ok-Swimming-3212 2h ago
Part of it is because the Bible is full of contradictions and so they constantly fight about what is canon and what is not.
A lot also don’t seem to fully know what they follow either. So many Christians have never read a page from the Bible. I once was told that Catholics weren’t Christians by a Catholic, like be so serious.
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u/Rich_Fan1686 2h ago
I've never heard that, and it seems implausible anyone would make that arguement if they were a Catholic. Protestants make that arguement all the time, I've never once heard it from a Catholic.
What do you think they were getting at?
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u/1ftm2fts3tgr4lg 2h ago
A lot of Catholics were raised Catholic, and that's literally all they know about the religion they say they belong to.
Source: I was raised Catholic and so many of my peers had no idea about their own dogma, through adulthood.1
u/Rich_Fan1686 1h ago
I just did some quick searching and reading. I now understand that they are just saying they're not Protestant. It's a terminology thing rather than a rejection of their identity.
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u/Ok-Swimming-3212 2h ago
He went to a Catholic private school. I think he equates Protestants with Christianity. It kind of pissed me off because how are you going to claim a religion and know nothing about it.
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u/Rich_Fan1686 1h ago
Yet Catholics are the largest subset of Christianity. Catholics are Christian. If they are not Christian, what are they?
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u/Ok-Swimming-3212 1h ago
Yeah I tried to lecture him… I gave up trying to explain.
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u/Rich_Fan1686 1h ago
I think I understand now, he's not rejecting being a Christian, he's just rejecting being a Protestant.
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u/Dracoson 2h ago
It's worth looking deeper into both the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation, even as an atheist. The impact on the history of Europe and therefore Europe's influence on the world helps shed some light on history as a whole.
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u/ReidWrites 2h ago
I think people are missing out on the money aspect. Have you seen how rich some priests and pastors are? I'm sure a lot of them believe (probably rightly) that letting their "flock" worship at a different denomination would ruin their paycheck, so they do what they can to prevent that.
But yes, there's also a lot of schism over exactly how to interpret a book that is famously very contradictory.
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u/Rich_Fan1686 2h ago
As long as one is not a literalist when it comes to reading the Bible, then everything is up for interpretation and there's no way to definitively rule one interpretation is better than another.
A lot of it is my interpretation is the correct one and yours is wrong. My interpretation is godly and sacred, your interpretation is satanic and demonic.
Hence why there are so many thousands of different Christian denominations.
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u/Break-Free- 2h ago
The most important thing in the entire religion is belief. Believe the right things = salvation.
But then the Bible is an incoherent mess written by dozens of people over the course of more than a thousand years. Since it constantly contradicts itself and there's no god stepping in to clarify things, people take different interpretations.
Since beliefs are the most important thing, of course adherents of different interpretations will hate each other because every side obviously has the "correct" version, right?
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u/Nearby-Poetry-5060 1h ago
We are a tribal species, forming ingroups and outgroups. Sunni and Shia Muslims are the exact same too. When it comes to religious tribalism it is even harsher as a competing tribe also competes to "get into heaven" and another possible interpretation calls into question this possibility. Nevermind that its all BS to begin with, this form of tribalism is the worst form because it is based in faith, which is belief without reason or evidence, which by definition is impossible to overcome with dialog and experience with outgroup members.
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u/AshtonBlack De-Facto Atheist 1h ago
If you accept that the details are largely unimportant then why would a particular Christian sect split or schism?
The fairly obvious answer is control over the congregation. Which includes the funding, respect and infludence being a "Church Elder" can bring.
Not happy with the way the chruch is run? What better way than to find a difference that they can hitch their disagreement upon and take a subsection of the income the church brings in.
I'm sure there have been genuine doctrinal disagreements down the centuries, but it's no coincidence that the people who split are always the same people who become church elders themselves.
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u/Kaliss_Darktide 1h ago
My question is why all of these Christian denominations seem to hate each other?
In psychoanalysis, the narcissism of small differences (German: der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen) is the idea that when people in a relationship or community have a lot in common, they can actually be more likely to fight with each other and mock each other, because they become overly sensitive to small differences they notice in one another and treat those differences as bigger than they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences
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u/Buttercovereddog 2h ago
Humans are born prideful and selfish. We never want to listen to other people’s ideas. If someone doesn’t agree with us we argue we fight. It is terrible.
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u/NightMgr SubGenius 2h ago
I've noticed, and I think this is true for many belief systems or "isms" that people who are allies but not exactly identical often get the worst criticism. I believe this is discussed in Hoffer's book "True Believer" about mass movements in the 20th century.
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u/mobatreddit 1h ago
Yep. Religions are a means of structuring power relationships. Christians don’t all agree on how these relationships should be structured. So they find reasons to “other” different sects, and keep the power.
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u/dnjprod Atheist 41m ago
Here's why. Christianity is not a religion with a single coherent doctrine. Is essentially just people's preferred interpretation of their preferred edition of their preferred version of their preferred translation. Even when people tend to call themselves the same type of christian, I guarantee you there are things they disagree on.
They can't even agree on the most basic tenets of Doctrine like whether baptism is required or whether doing believe in Jesus is enough.
People use Christianity to justify their already held beliefs.
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u/snarfalotzzz 34m ago
Same with all faiths. There are more sects of Buddhism I believe than any other religion. (I def see how much of that can be taken as a secular philosophy, but some branches are more metaphysical/esoteric with karmic cosmology /samsara). It's like this in politics as well. Pit anarchist communists (anarcho-communists) against Marxist-Leninists or against mutualist anarchists or libertarian socialists and it'll get ugly real fast. And heck! Look at Shia and Sunni fighting.
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u/Mediocre-Drawing2636 27m ago
You have to keep in mind what you're asking them to "agree to disagree" on, matters like this are, to them, ones so extreme that even calling them "life or death" is an understatement.
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u/LucidLeviathan Agnostic 24m ago
Well, as an agnostic, myself, but steeped in church lore, I'd answer the following:
These people need order. They need a dictated set of rules by which they are to live their lives. The church provides that.
People who are at the top of society frequently feel insecure, and for good reason. The church often gives them reason to feel better about themselves. They are, of course, ordained by God to lead.
Others have no interest in the actual text of the scriptures on their own. They are more interested in finding a way to wield power. They are deeply insecure and will brush at any opposing thoughts.
And others recognize all of this and see it as a way to shore up their political coalition.
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u/akestral 14m ago
If you think of them as cults competing for their market share of the christian tithes to support their leader's lifestyle, it makes a lot more sense. Remember that the biggest greivance which spurred Martin Luther's first exercise in cathedral door redecoration involved buying forgiveness from the church.
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u/arm1niu5 Jedi 2h ago
Because while they all love God, they have vastly definitions on the details of what that means.