Not wanting to feed children doesn’t seem very pro-life.
Yet another reason why I hate every goddamn billionaire with the fire if a thousand suns.
Just the fact that billionaires even exist shows that our system is fucked.
*firey passion of a thousand suns
*fiery suns of a thousand passions
*sunny passions of a dozen fires
My wife runs a school kitchen, a big school, 2k+ high schoolers and almost 20 staff. Her pay is actually terrible, but the job has good medical insurance and I’m self employed with no benefits so she’s been sticking with it. Collecting debt is part of her job. They never withhold a basic meal (no extras if they have unpaid debt) but that meal gets added to their debt.
They don’t threaten anything legal like in this story, but they will not give you your diploma or transfer your credits if you haven’t paid your debt in full. We’re in Ohio.
Eh, not just America sadly. Half the world seems brainwashed into thinking that feeding children is controversial. The BBC did an article the other day about 500,000 extra kids getting them, and it got 9000 comments, split equally between “fair enough” and “but what about my tax money? 😢”
They should give the Libertarian nutcases a large enclave, and all the people who moan about their taxes being spent on other people should be forced to go and live there.
Oh, there’s a pothole on your road? Hope one of the residents can afford to have it fixed. You were burgled? Can you afford to pay the police company to look into it? No streetlights, sorry. That’s a waste. You carry a torch and light your own way. Pensions? Didn’t you save enough?
Stop worrying about the tax bills of billionaires, for fucks sake. They can get by with less.
Just a reminder that the same people who are against free school lunches for children are the ones who stand in front of abortion clinics screaming about how abortion is murder.
There’s no contradiction for these people. All fetuses have a right to life and children should suffer if they don’t have enough money. Shoulda worked harder at the bootstraps factory if they didn’t want to eat shit their entire lives.
They max out at a 4 on Kohlberg’s morality scale, ie the laws are immutable and nothing can change them. The law says that everyone should live and our system is perfect because it’s our system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg’s_stages_of_moral_development
Sprinkle some smug self-satisifaction on top of this and it’s a real good portrait of the Christian right. Religion is a narotic for these folks who spend their days judging others. They believe in the correct God™ and His prosperity gospel. Anyone who is poor or those who “sin” deserve their lot in life. And how are kids to learn self-reliance when they’re coddled with free food? We’re so weak to let our kids live in such decadent times! What’s next, they won’t have to pay for healthcare after they made the bad decision to get hurt or sick?
They ask how we can be so wasteful as a society while they clutch their imitation pearl necklace. Meanwhile the public’s share of wealth shrinks and everyone is left to fight for the scraps. When the situation is so dire, it’s easy to fight with each other than to question big business, Wall Street or the financial sector.
My school held my diploma for 6 months because of $20 worth of lunch debt that turned out to be a computer error.
That was 12 years ago.
Schools using food as a weapon against students is nothing new.
This is a little different but it sticks out.
My baby brother was born in 91 and when he eventually got into kindergarten one of his teachers flagged him for his speech impediment. He’d pronounce his P’s as B’s.
He was 5 and talked a mile a minute before he was two. He just couldn’t quite get the hang of that one part.
My parents weren’t worried. We were all helping him. My other brother and I were 6 years older than him and we we’re latchkey kids by the time I was 10.
My parents worked second/third jobs and second/third shifts rotating to make everything work for us. We barely saw them both at the same time.
I remember my Ma, and even Pops, being pissed as fuck and our chores and cleaning day was ramped up for a month or two, and all us kids had individual therapy sessions where they grilled us with questions we didn’t understand because the school call CPS on them because they wouldn’t (read: couldn’t) make after school speech therapy work with their schedules and they knew he’d learn on his own eventually anyway. They just made my parents lives that much more stressful in that time.
This was over 30 years ago now and I have my own kids, and bonus kids even! I have my own stories I could tell but this is the absolute worst because I saw how much it stressed out my overworked parents. My brother is a functioning member of society who got over his slight speech impediment within the year, with our help but mostly letting him develop on his own time.
Meanwhile, us kids just considered it a matter of course that we wrap up plates and Tupperware after each meal. One plate for Gertie our nextdoor neighbor and whatever was left went to Jorge’s family two doors down. We also learned how to mow the lawn only so the Grandma and Grandpa Hass, our other next door neighbors wouldn’t have to anymore. They weren’t actual family but they were to us. Jorge’s family got all my and my brothers’ hand-me-down clothes for his younger siblings, too. We didn’t quite understand why at the time. It’s just what you do. But yeah, make a struggling family’s life that much harder with your performative concern.
Getting school lunches is so foreign to me, but then again people here in NL just bring home made sandwiches, which are generally cheaper to make than food like in the picture.
At least in the schools I went to when the teature noticed somebody didn’t have lunch with them on a consistent basis they would ask what was wrong and give them food.
Some other kids just kept eating unhealthy food every day because the school was still selling that. Heck in my first highscool they sold candy every thursday or so. It was an interesting time.
As a Swede i think your system in the Netherlands sounds so foreign. When I was in school we always had 2 hot meals to chose between and a 'salad bar’s. All paid for by the tax system. No one should ever be forced to go hungry imo.
Sounds like heaven! in Denmark we have to make our own rugbrød sandwich at home… Every day… From kindergarden until… Well some do it their entire life…
You can buy a hot meal in gymnasium but it is very expensive
In NL most people don’t even eat hot lunches on a regular basis. Even at work people just bring sandwiches in most Dutch companies unless they are internationally focussed.
Nobody should go hungry, but I don’t see the appeal or need for a centralised food system. Pretty sure there is less food waste if you just give your childeren food from home.
It is the same in Denmark…
it is way more convenient and nice to be served a hot meal every day.
But I don’t really understand why people can’t just make a sandwich from home, especially if they will get in legal trouble.
They should do a UBI for kids. I think 30 euros should be enough to cover a montg
I’m not sure you know how much a euro is worth if you think 30 euros a month is enough to feed a kid?
A loaf of good quality ryebread will last a week. 3 euros.
5 euros for butter.
Sausage is around 4 euros. Should be good for a week.
Remoulade just takes it to the next level, should be 3 euros.
Yeah it is probably on the lean side.
if you just give your childeren food from home
Pretty bold to assume all kids have food at home.
Like I said in the original comment you didn’t read the kids who haven’t had food would generally been given food at school
That can easily lead to “othering” those kids as well. Also, many parents who can still give their kids food from home might still struggle to do that at times.
Schools are already monitoring a whole mess of kids at once. Why not just take care of feeding them too? That ensures that, regardless of what happens at home, they have at least one good meal each day.
Probably doesn’t understand the disparity of the home setting of kids in the US
Not American, but here in Australia there is a growing trend towards supplying some level of food at school, quite a few schools are introducing Breakfast Club to offer food before school, and a lot of schools find they can get better nutrition for students by supplying balanced options to students directly via a variety of programs.
Food and Kids can be quite complicated and my own son can be quite resistant to the idea of even having food in his school bag as his medication supresses appetite and he feels pressured if we make him something as opposed to providing shelf stable packaged foods that won’t spoil if he can’t bring himself to eat.
From what I understand of the situation in the US this is an intersectional issue where it has been identified that:
- Preparing food in bulk is a lot cheaper
- Food can be fresh and thus encourage kids to eat it more readily
- Nutritional outcomes can be targeted
Which is intersecting with:
- America is a capitalist hellscape where no opportunity to profit of anyone, no matter how vulnerable, can be overlooked
- There are multiple levels in the school lunch program where private companies can invade to engage in some rent seeking
- Social pressure can be exerted to make sure families feel obligated to participate no matter how expensive or predatory the program
- Never ever should a poor person be allowed to feel a modicum of support or relief, if that can be achieved by leveraging their children so much the better.
The thing is that something like sandwiches aren’t cheaper to produce in bulk and a lot of the cafeteria’s will have either a fair amount of food left over or they barely make enough for everybody to combat that.
I don’t think the food in US school is really that fresh.
No person should go hungry period, but I rather fix the reason why most go hungry than fix the solution. And I have had mandatory lunches in school and generally there is just a choice between meat, fish or vegaterian and I often find myself picking the least bad option.
Having prepared sandwiches at industrial scales yo would be surprised how much you can scale down costs, bulk purchases can make a suprising difference. I really envy the system that most Japanese schools have in place. They seem to be focussed on the outcomes, not the cost or social engineering. I have talked with some Japanese friends about this and while a few are from wealthy families and attended schools without a formalised school lunch program the majority talk about how it opened their horizons as far as food options, gave them a sense of community, and was just a defining characteristic of their school life.
I understand the appeal of bringing a cold lunch, but from a nutritional perspective only few sandwiches really are healthy. Most breads have little to no whole grain part (I remember that ultra fluffy bread from the Netherlands exchange, it was amazing but definitely not nutritious), and at best you can fit in two slices of tomato and cucumber and a salad leaf. The greatest part is the fillers of usually “animal protein” which contain too many saturated fats.
Don’t get me wrong, you can absolutely make a healthy sandwich with whole grain bread, homemade hummus, grated carrot, tomato, salad, cucumber, sprouts, quality cheese or seitan slices… But most people just don’t do that. Most people take light bread with butter or cream cheese and deli meats and cheese on top.
I have been at a congress a couple of years back (I work in biomedical and nutrition science) and one presentation was by someone who gave dietary advice in clinics and reviewed some common tips and guidelines of dietetics. One of them was recommending adding bread as a whole grain source. The caveat was that people would not just eat the whole grain bread (if they were even to choose whole grain instead of white or light bread to begin with), but that - even when you substitute lets say a serving of white noodles with actual whole grain bread - you don’t eat the bread alone. You put toppings on it, butter, deli meats, cheeses, which are all high calorie and not exactly healthy for you. Patients (especially the ones trying to lose weight) ended up increasing their calorie intake and their sat fat and salt intake by adding healthy bread to their diet.
I don’t want to say that a cooked, warm lunch is automatically more healthy than a sandwich - but you have many more options here and more practical ones than with sandwiches. You can add so much more vegetables to it.
Yeah, well, if a cheese sandwich was good enough for my grandparents and parents, it’s good enough for me.
We’re the tallest people in the world and I don’t think it’s humanly possible to be malnourished here, so maybe we’re doing something right :D
Yeah, well, if a cheese sandwich was good enough for my grandparents and parents, it’s good enough for me.
My sibling in Christ, your grandparents smoked and drank whilst being pregnant with your mom and dad.
(This isn’t supposed to be a diss, I’m just trying to point out that this might be some survivor bias and that our ideas of what is healthy or not change over time. Which is great, we always add knowledge. It’s not so long ago we discovered vitamins. My former supervisor discovered the first biotin receptor. God, a couple of years ago keto was the new hot shit.)
(The Netherlands, moreover, does have a lot going on that plays into its citizens’ health. Doesn’t it? You seem like a solid social democracy and you got more bikes than people. Maybe it’s that and not the cheese sandwiches :P)
You have to get the volkoren (whole grain) bread which is actually nutritious and most Dutch people actually don’t eat it enough. And it is generally considered to be better for you than most lunches people have. Like having Spaghetti for lunch like the stereotype for Italians.
I find it to be really impractical and expensive to eat hot lunches at work. I would skip my daily walk where I eat my sandwiches and I doubt ill be able to warm it up, clean the microwave or whatever I use to heat it and eat it in the span of half an hour. Especially if everybody needs to heat their food.
Every time when I have had good hot lunches (of going outside to a restaurant etc) it would have costed me 15-25 euro excluding drinks, but yeah that is somewhere else I understand that. Another issue is that I generally do not have enough appetite to eat food in the evening.
My sandwiches aren’t the healtiest to start with because I don’t eat margarine which we tradionally put on bread (it’s not even actual butter anymore) and I generally put the same thing on it because well I am not even that much of a fan of sandwiches let alone creating them. I put deli ham on it and sandwichspread.
Maybe I should just bring some leftovers and eat them cold, could do that as well I guess.
Maybe I should just bring some leftovers and eat them cold, could do that as well I guess.
You could absolutely do that, or cook dishes that are meant to be eaten cold to begin with. Onigiri, buddha bowls, gazpacho soup (with some volkoren bread ;) ), a salad with falafel balls, etc. A zucchini-egg-oats-ham-cheese slice from the oven is also a cool afternative, you can cut it up and freeze it and just let it thaw as you need - and eat it with one hand. Bring some baby tomatoes on your walk. Eating a cold lunch doesn’t mean you need to choose between leftover cold spaghetti with meatballs and a sandwich.
I understand the value of taking a walk, but eating while walking is also not exactly the healthiest.
Last but not least - our little conversation here is actually off topic. The question is about school lunches. And while you might like your cold, unhealthy sandwich and a walk (all power to you) - school children who can’t return back to class earlier if they eat faster do absolutely deserve a warm and nutritious lunch. Remember that in the US, a lot of people cannot afford to feed their children at home, let alone with a warm and healthy meal. Maybe a sandwich for lunch is fine if you then have a great breakfast at home and a big dinner, but imagine all you eat in a day is a white bread pb&j sandwich for lunch and then the same for dinner, breakfast skipped. This is the reality for many more people - many more children - than we can imagine. And children move more and they are growing and they have to concentrate at school, they need to be full and nourished.
This is why this is so important. Providing all children with a free or at least dirt cheap meal that is both tasty (as in, accepted by the children’s freakishly picky palate) and nutritious is an incredible challenge, but it is possible. Yet it is treated as an afterthought at best and poor people shaming and punishment at worst. If a child gets a pb&j for dinner and no breakfast, it better have a goddamn delicious huge ass plate of wholegrain maccaroni with vegetables and chicken breast and a low fat joghurt with fruit salad for lunch. And a salad bar. Because salad bars rock. I’d prefer it not to be chicken, but I probably have the only kid that genuinely likes boiled tofu over meat.
You call sandwiches unhealthy while here they are considered healthy. I might look into some other dishes, but I am not the biggest cooking fan.
I rather fix the issue of why parents can’t feed their children cause they probably can’t properly feed themselves than working on fixing an consequence. Which might not even fully fix the issue due to picky eather etc.
Also the waste is a lot more than if you just bring school lunch in a reusable container.
But as long as poverty isn’t fixed it is better for offer school lunches than let the kids get hungry of course, but it will not help push people to end poverty
I rather fix the issue of why parents can’t feed their children cause they probably can’t properly feed themselves than working on fixing an consequence.
I wholeheartedly agree here, but this would mean a huge ass systemic change. It would be infinitely better to treat the cause and not the symptom - but it would also be harder, take much more effort, more change, more willingness from politicians, more consistency. This is just not realistic in the short or even medium run. Providing free and healthy school lunches is already a very hard and difficult goal/job. However, it has the benefit of being very concrete. You have one task that you focus on with direct benefits. Improving the conditions so that parents can feed their children better is very vague and much more multifacetted. Where do you even start? Minimum wage, working conditions, daycare options, healthcare, boosting the economy, increasing social security… 100% you should do all that, but man, you’ll wait a long time for this to become so much better as to have a measurable effect on “lunch performance”.
Also, even at the end, parents can still make bad choices. As you mentioned, sandwiches are considered healthy even in the Netherlands. I do, indeed, work in nutrition science, and the ideal sandwich is healthy, but 99% of people eat severely unhealthy sandwiches. A friend of mine is a dietician and, my Lord, I’ve at least had the privilege of reading studies and not working with people because people are dumb. I can’t believe that in 2025 you got to tell people that white bread and candy is not good for you or that you shouldn’t drink sugared soda instead of water. People don’t know that sugar makes you fat. People don’t know what a calorie is. People don’t know that you can’t soak your salad in ranch dressing and put 15 fried chicken fingers on top and that’s not “a healthy low calorie salad”. You will always have negligent parents. You will always have parents with mental health issues or other struggles who cannot safely provide food. Especially in a socially rotten country like the US.
Last but not least, why not do both. You can absolutely both work on fixing the underlying issues and in the meantime work on providing free and healthy school lunches all over the country (or, for that matter, planet). Actually, you absolutely should do both. They don’t exclude each other a bit.
In Germany it was pretty unusual to eat in school at all, you had breakfast at home (7AM-ish), school starts at 8 and finished at 2PM latest, usually 1.15PM. We all went home for lunch afterwards, and that was that.
I really like your spelling “teature” but it’s officially spelled teacher.
Because English is silly like that.
My school here in the USA we had school lunch too, it was usually pretty ok, kids also packed lunches the same as your school.
Same here, I brought my own lunch, sandwiches mostly, all the time I was in school as a kid a long time ago whenever I wasn’t going back home for lunch. I prepared lunches for my own kids all the time they were in school.
Punishing kids for lunch debt is evil, at least give them the right to vote if you are to play that game.
Yep. Our high school had a cafeteria where you could buy snacks, but none of the schools I went to ever supplied lunches as such. It’s basically the parents and kids responsibility to feed themselves. As it should be.
Maybe Dutch parents (used to be) much more responsible than those elsewhere. 🤷♂️
Why “as it should be?”
I don’t have or want kids, but I want ever child to grow up healtht and food secure. These are humans that can’t work for themselves and have no means to protect themselves from food insecurity, and they will be my younger coworkers, and bankers and brokers and building my roads and and and… I want them to be mentally and physically well.
I don’t understand why our society builds sidewalks and playgrounds and funds schools to teach kids how to be humans, but feeding them is a bridge too far… We already hold them captive in the middle of the day when one of the 3 meals is served anyways…
I agree. Kids should be fed. But that’s not the school’s job. It’s to teach.
The Netherlands has a robust social system. There’s welfare for people without jobs, there’s financial assistance for raising a child, there’s food banks, etc. Etc. And plenty of help getting into these assistance programs.
Basically, there is NO reason for a parent not to be able to feed their child. Even if they have zero money, there’s help. The only thing they (or the kid) needs to do is make some sandwiches to take with them for school lunch. That’s it.
I’m glad you live somewhere where this problem isn’t even phathomable to you.
You can certainly argue that it isn’t the schools job specifically, but it would be the most practical and efficient choice. Kids are all already gathered there at the right time, facilities usually exist or can be added to buildings…
But to say “just pack a sandwich.” … I just wish I lived somewhere where that was it. That THAT was the barrier.
Well then, I sincerely hope the place where you live gets better :-)
Thanks.
What’s NL? Why Americans always write their state names in abbreviations and expect people from other parts of the world to understand?
NL is the ISO standard abbreviation for The Netherlands and considering our history in the world (both good and bad) I assume most people understand where it is from…
Ok, sorry mate. As Americans always does this, I assumed you’re from USA. My mistake. Have a good rest of the day.
Fair I understand it, I run into the same issue, but tying The Netherlands is pretty annoying especially with the amount I talk about it haha and a lot of people do understand what I am talking about.
Good day to you as well
Lmao your first hot take is hilarious though. “Why do Americans always do this shit! Oh not American, never mind, sorry for being a cunt.”
Maybe realize were all humans first?
/s??
I read that as the Netherlands as it’s their standard, international abbreviation
State doesn’t pay for kid’s lunch. If parent can’t afford kid’s lunch, state takes child and places them in a foster home. State pays foster home many many times the cost of lunch to take kid.
Tell me what the goal of this system is so I can call someone else a conspiracy theorist for a change.
I’m betting it’s a ‘hungry kids yearn for the mines earlier’ sort of thing
Original goal was probably to send kids to Epstein. Idk what current situation is, probably another hidden island that politicans visit.
👉👃
May I introduce the Victorian concept of Children in Workhouses.
That’s where you’re heading.
Well that was a fucked up but very interesting read, thanks.
This is EXACTLY what they want. They sell the cute ones (check the protective services website, they have them listed for placement like a weird dating service or pet adoption site). They will prison to pipeline the rest while working them in “skill camps”.
CPS is a dystopian hell. I advocated for a child for a while, they would fuck up absolutely basic things, would not find out about things like hospitalization or legal trouble for weeks. When I brought up several months of basically no mental health care, they insinuated that I might be abusing the child.
They won’t take action on actual abuse. It’s Kafkaesque.
To justify their budget, they must find “clients” to put in their system. Getting clients means finding just the right parent(s) that they can bully, intimidate, and exaggerate charges against. Child services no longer operates in good faith. They won’t even allow you to record their conversations because they are so apt to lie. The foster system is just as bad. Putting people on payroll to take care of kids that no one knows the location of. 23,160 foster kids were reported missing or unaccounted for in 2024. These were just the ones REPORTED. Where is the politician rage over this?
Where is the politician rage over this?
My states DHS has the wrong number for a large county’s police force. They have been leaving voicemails with children’s personal information, as well as preventing cases that are supposed to be reported to the police from actually being reported - because they’re in some random guys voicemail!
I noticed this more than a month ago, have made hundreds of phone calls and emails to state agencies and politicians. They don’t care.
I spent two years as a CASA. I loved that kid. That entire experience crushed me as a human being.
The foster care system is complicit in child trafficking, and the politicians are in on it. I recall a news story where a politician was “helping” pregnant women with visas and trafficking them and the babies.
And for good measure, the vast majority of homeless people were children who aged out of the foster care system. Foster care is a gift that keeps on giving.
Kids go to public school during lunchtime. Public school feeds the children lunch (something with real nutritional value that we would all want our kids eating). Kids do not pay for this. That’s it. There should be no further discussion here. If you disagree with this I want to put my thumb into your eye socket in the worst way. It’s so fucked up this is even a topic of discussion.
They’re the future of our country and society, and legally required to be there, but we won’t feed them.
'cause 'merica you fucking commie.
There are other countries where kids bring their own lunch. We always make sandwiches and a snack for our kids to bring to school.
I do think school-provided lunches are a great idea and if done right, would guarantee every kid equal access to healthy nutrition. Unfortunately we don’t have that in NL, and clearly the powers that be don’t want it in the US either.
But punishing kids for lunch debt is nuts. That’s absolutely a symptom of the US wanting everybody to live in debt.
Wasn’t it last year schools were throwing kid’s bagged lunches away? So then they force the kids to eat a school lunch or starve, then blame the parents. This is just the next illogical step of the grift.
Throwing kids’ lunch away should be illegal. What if s kid has special dietary requirements? But if a school does throw it away, they have an obligation to provide a free lunch that’s at least as good.
It should be illegal to throw someone else’s property away without their permission, right? I mean, it’s basically theft.
I want to put my thumb into your eye socket
This is unfair. You should want to put both thumbs into both eye sockets.
Trump’s new spending bill is providing $3.6 trillion tax cut for the richest among us. They already pay only 8% on average, but they own the politicians and are demanding to pay even less.
How are we supposed to pay for that if we don’t rob children of their school lunches?!
Spending less money bombing children in other places would give us more than enough funds, but that helps funnel money to the aforementioned richest among us, so that’s not going to happen.
Yep that’s right, $8 billion in the new bill for Israel to continue massacring children and stealing their ancestral land.
Israel First policy is an American notion I’ll never understand. Israel is the biggest terrorist nation-state in the world right now, nobody commits war crimes and other high crimes against humanity at the rate Israel does. It’s so sad to see them dog walking American leaders every day but here we are.
They need them to breed the other terrorists they like to bomb.
How dare you invest in the future? Our potential future tax base needs to learn how to starve or go into debt - those are the most important lessons in the good old US of fucking A.
Invest in the future? But how will that affect today’s profits?
I agree with that kids should be fed, but what’s wrong with homemade sandwiches? That’s what is the norm in NL and if kids don’t have them theaters notice it and will work on fixing it while given them food.
The shit we had at most schools I went to was well kinda unhealthy crap.
Nothing wrong. Bring it and eat it. But if you’re kid and you don’t, school should feed you. In the US kids are legally required to attend school. Forcing someone to be somewhere and not providing sustenance is not allowed in war or prison, damn well should not be allowed in schools.
something with real nutritional value that we would all want our kids eating
As long as you don’t go all Jamie Oliver about it.
CHICKEN NUGGETS ARE DIRTY AND FOR THE POORS
/s
Lunch debt? The fuck outta here with that dystopian nightmare shit
It’s the first stop on the way to slave labor.
Wait until you learn about “vanlords” in Los Angeles.
Christ empowered his followers to clothe the naked, feed the hungry and tend to the sick. For some reason American Christians have decided that these explicit dictates should he ignored, much like the reminder that it is not their role to judge, so that they can instead focus on bigotry.
That’s pretty much the entire history of Christianity.
It’s really not.
The corrupt nature of the Church as an institution exists to take advantage of the naive humanitarianism of its fellowship.
People, by and large, do want to help their neighbors and provide for the young and the elderly. Modern prosperity gospel Christianity and historical Catholicism/Protestantism hasn’t change human nature. People in the church still pursue benevolent goals. It only pollutes human perception and education, by misallocating resources intended to improve society.
I think they’re using “Christianity” to refer to the institution.
No, it isn’t. For most of history most Christians were taking care of those around them. It is with industrialism and Calvinism that we see people move away from this.
The infuriating part is a different beared Jewish guy tried to put into practice these ideals and the USA fought to stop it everywhere.
Dude, a guy named Constantine literally started this modern Christiandom train rolling with his “Hey guys, I just met Jesus, and he told me I should be in charge now. So, I’m king, ordained by heaven, and we’ll enforce this new order with lots of violence.”
And he and his successors then proceeded to conquer territory, and then mint coins depicting a soldier holding a cross and smashing the head of his enemy under his boot. In hoc signo vinces.
And thus Christian imperialism, conquest, subjugation, and terror has marched along ever since. Lest ye forget the Crusades and the Inquisistion, for example.
Yes, there’s beauty and kindness in the Christian tradition as well. But let’s not pretend that it was all huggy-bunches-of-love until Calvinism showed up.
Constantine literally started this modern Christiandom train
Constantine ended the institutional persecution of monotheists within the Roman empire. The apostolic church had been groving along well before that.
The end to formalized persecution gave Christians an opportunity to begin organizing openly - leading to the Ecumenical Councils that would define the church as an institution for the next two millennium. But the foundations were all in place well beforehand.
And thus Christian imperialism, conquest, subjugation, and terror has marched along ever since.
The Church, as a military power, has always been mediocre at best. Rome itself was gutted during the transfer of the court to Byzantium. And this laid the seeds for the Roman Orthodox split, which divides the church to this day.
The Western empire dissolved into feudal states, with Catholicism and the Church operating as a kind of diplomatic corps and patronage network for European aristocrats.
It wasn’t until the emergence of Protestantism, following the failure by the Hapsbirgs to consolidate power during the 30 Years War, that capitalist expansion began to produce imperialism in the modern sense.
The conquest and subjection that followed was in pursuit of economic growth via slavery and plunder. The church existed to help rationalize these economic pursuits, but the priesthood was secondary to the merchant classes in actually executing it.
The Renaissance occurred when Greek scholars in the Ottoman Empire were exiled by Islamic extremists, thus bringing the knowledge of antiquities to Europe.
When Islamic extremism reached India, the Moguls were about to be overthrown when the British turned up.
When Islamic extremism reached India, the Moguls were about to be overthrown when the British turned up.
Wait, what?
It’s sad how many downvotes you have while being correct while the other poster has a bunch if upvotes while being really off the mark.
We’ll also note that their supposed god claim never chimes in to distance himself from these people.
Dude, a guy named Constantine literally started this modern Christiandom train rolling with his “Hey guys, I just met Jesus, and he told me I should be in charge now. So, I’m king, ordained by heaven, and we’ll enforce this new order with lots of violence.”
Constantinus was the Emperor of Rome before he converted the Empire. He did not create the notion of the Divine Right to Rule. His conversion was entirely politically motivated as it happens near his death.
Calvin is the one that promotes the notion that wealth is a sign of God’s love which is the opposite of what Jesus taught.
Why did you reply authoritatively if your understanding of this subject is so poor?
It wasn’t Calvin it was Luther. And he was quoting Saint Augustine.
Calvin said that although the righteous were selected and so charity would not gain brownie points to heaven, the selected would do charitable works because they were the select.
Martin Luther just opposed all charity.
Well Constantine convened the council of nicea to codify his rule and leave out a lot of the Bible, so there’s that.
You need to brush up on your history then. The church’s history is largely violently forcing others to convert and using the Bible to persecute those they don’t like.
That is entirely unrelated to the fact that most Christian communities did in fact try to clothe, feed and tend those that needed it. Most humans will try to ease the suffering of those they know in their communities if they can because most aren’t so cold hearted
I dont understand why your down voted.
Christian institutions = \ = christian followers.
a few hundred years ago homeless people and veteran carried tokens that enabled them to be given free food and help at churches.
Paster Damian died of leprosy after 11 years of helping others with the sickness, tending their wounds, sharing food and digging graves. He kept doing so while he was sick.
The catholic church as an institution absolutely is evil but that does not automatically make believers or individual priests so.
History is Littered with proof of this. Science denying is not the answer to religious bigotry.
The fact is for most of history you wouldnt have left your county so you actually were more inclined to be closer with people you might not have loved because of expediency. You aren’t going to chow down on seconds if you know your neighbor is starving unless you are a psychopath and most humans aren’t.
Removed by mod
No, because the point that all the bigots are missing is that religious people are generally no different than other people. If you see a starving kid you aren’t going tosit in front of them chowing down. You will, presuming you aren’t on the ASPD spectrum or starving yourself, feed that kid.
Most humans did this . Most humans do this. You have to raise them to believe helping others is wrong and that enters Protestant Christianity through Calvinism.
Removed by mod
Your statements don’t align with reality, which isn’t surprising because religion doesn’t align with reality.
Are you so prejudiced that ypu think most people would not give food to their neighbors if they were starving? Are the people around you that horrible?
I’m talking about Christians, not most people.
Removed by mod
Yes what relevance does that have to the willingness of people to take care of their neighbors?
Removed by mod
You keep trying to steer this to stuff I am not talking about at all, why?
Removed by mod
You mean where muslim invaders were cast out of Europe ?
Expecting Christianity to base their actions on Jesus is like expecting the Nestle corporation to base their actions on the Quik Bunny.
Every movement in history has hypocrites that follow it, and give the movement a bad name. Lumping “American Christians” together and then judging them based on the worst people who adopt that title is creating a straw man.
All American Christians that I know try and follow what you pointed out in your first sentence.
The statement on judging however is a bit misguided, Jesus didn’t say to never judge, but to be careful to avoid hypocrisy and to judge with love.
At this point a substantial portion of self identified Christians in America are supporting some ideologies and programs that are the opposite if Christ’s teachings. It isn’t a small part. It might even be close to the majority.
Yeah, that’s true and it’s very upsetting that so many hypocrites would exist within the wider church. I’d argue that someone that doesn’t follow the teachings of Christ isn’t a Christian at all since that’s literally what the word means.
The catch is for many of these their Churches are telling them thiscis the message of Christ
But why oh why aren’t people having kids?!
Punishing the poor for the crime of poverty.
How typically conservative.
Not pulling on those bootstraps hard enough
And for learning!
We should start calling them regressives
