Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) bashed former President Trump online and said Christians who support him “don’t understand” their religion.
“I’m going to go out on a NOT limb here: this man is not a Christian,” Kinzinger said on X, formerly known as Twitter, responding to Trump’s Christmas post. “If you are a Christian who supports him you don’t understand your own religion.”
Kinzinger, one of Trump’s fiercest critics in the GOP, said in his post that “Trump is weak, meager, smelly, victim-ey, belly-achey, but he ain’t a Christian and he’s not ‘God’s man.’”
Matthew 19:24
And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
They have an excuse for that. It’s really fucking stupid.
https://classictheology.org/2021/10/12/through-the-eye-of-an-actual-needle-the-fake-gate-theory/
Of course, there is zero evidence for such a gate ever existing. Rich Christians just want to excuse their wealth.
Even with that questionable excuse it would mean you have to give up all of your possessions and humbly come to god on your knees. They really just want to ignore their own book.
Oh, but they tithe! So they don’t need to give up anything else!
Does willing all of your wealth to your children count as giving up your wealth when you die? Cause that seems to be their plan.
This is the real answer: tithing absolves you.
The OG priests were every bit the conmen that modern priests are. ‘Give your wealth to God (meaning me, his ordained servant) or you’ll spend eternity in torment!’
In some ways it’s amazing the grift has lasted 2000 years, but then again is there a better grift than capitalising on an existential dread (death) that everyone feels and whose aftermath can’t be proven or disproven? It’s ingenious, really.
It’s also stupid because it ignores the part right before the camel metaphor
It just says sell your possessions and give to the poor.
Most Christians don’t really know the Bible very well. They think Paradise Lost or Dante’s Inferno are canon. They do all sorts of mental backflips to justify what they want to do anyway.
I was taught the gate analogy, because the idea is that the camel would be carrying a lot of stuff and that would need to be unloaded before going through the gate. Just like Jesus explains here, the rich man would need to sell what they have and give to the poor so they are not burdened by the desire for things and can then enter into the kingdom of heaven.
In other words, you need to be selfless enough that you’re willing to part with everything you have in other to live with God.
Good post, thank you for sharing!
Let me preface this by clarifying that I don’t claim to have the one and only right explanation that everyone should accept, I’d just like to point out that this theory also exists: https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/a/43799
I have no idea how accurate any of that is, but ‘rope’ does make more sense than ‘camel’ and they both basically mean the same thing.
Not to mention there was a similar expression in use at the time in the east using an elephant. The verse is pretty unambiguous.
*enter into prison
FTFY