[wat10000]

There are plenty of progressive Christians who remember that Jesus’s most important command was to love your neighbor.

The better question is, why are these fundamentalists so successful at co-opting the word “Christian”? Why does “Christian phone network” mean one that blocks homosexual content rather than one that donates 10% of revenue to feed the poor?

[landl0rd]

Ideally a Christian cell phone network would do both. It would also provide only healthy foods in the office and encourage fitness (gluttony and sloth are sinful), prohibit working on Sundays, and encourage policies to steward our world. It would control off-hours demands for those who are married and have children, and therefore have family obligations to which they must see, and might hold mixers for its singles to encourage family formation. It would expect humility and servant-leadership from its executives and patience from its managers.

I would prefer to do business with such a network but one does not exist. Apparently, people do not believe there's much market demand for any but the first of these.

This is similar to the church itself, which tends increasingly towards alignment with one faction or another. In turn, it becomes blind to the sins of its own and focused wholly on the sins of its schmittian enemy. The conservative church will tell you of the sins of homosexuality but not obesity nor wrath; the liberal will tell you that insufficient love is sinful while ignoring transsexuality. I find neither particularly Christian.

Perhaps the Benedictines could run an MVNO. I am no catholic but they'd probably do a much better job.

[myvoiceismypass]

> the liberal will tell you that insufficient love is sinful while ignoring transsexuality

What does this mean?

[landl0rd]

One doesn't seek the good of the other by pretending that sinful behavior isn't.

[wat10000]

Jesus didn't have a whole lot to say about homosexuality or transsexuality. I really have to question your both-sides narrative here.

Why would a properly Christian cell phone network block homosexual content? Even if we take it as given that Christianity forbids homosexuality, that's a prohibition on behavior, not observation. There's nothing in there which says you're not allowed to read about gay people, any more than you're not allowed to read about Hindus.

[landl0rd]

He had plenty to say about sleeping with anyone outside of marriage between man and woman, notably in Matthew chapter 19. While direct mention is relegated to Paul, Christ operated by whitelisting, so complaining that something isn't blacklisted is categorically wrong. Transsexuality wasn't a thing in that world but is plainly a rejection of His creation.

It presumably blocks it for the same reason it should block traffic concerning first-person shooter games, or content adjacent to self-harm and violence; the latter two were mentioned in the article as additional targets. It is not good to put certain things in one's brain. I along with others don't believe in reading certain things, watching certain things, and listening to certain music for the same reasons. I view it as best as intellectual junk food and at worst as corrosive; we should seek things that glorify Him and content pertaining to violence, homosexuality, and self-harm plainly don't.

[wat10000]

The beginning of Matthew 19 seems to be about divorce, not where you put your wiener in general.

Matthew 19 is interesting to bring up, though. The end is all about how rich people don’t get into heaven. Would you say that this service should block depictions of wealth? It can be very tempting, after all.

[landl0rd]

In Matthew 19, Christ explicitly affirms the definition of marriage given in Genesis. As I said, this is an affirmative definition, i.e. it says what it is. Implicit is what it isn't, that is, anything else. He is answering by affirming marriage as a thing grounded in creation, in the nature of man and woman cleaving to one another in a lifelong covenant.

I think things like "flexing" influencers who idolize material wealth are pretty toxic and blocking them would be good, yes.

[wat10000]

Funny that your go-to bad rich person is influencers and not, say, the president.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Because the MIT Technology Review would not, upon hearing about a phone network that donates 10% of revenue to feed the poor, contact T-Mobile and request comment on whether such donations from a bandwidth reseller "violate any of its policies". Everyone agrees that you should be allowed to be charitable if you'd like. So there's no polarization pressure in that direction; Christians who want their phone network to be more charitable simply pressure their existing network.

[wat10000]

That's not quite what I meant. I'm not asking why this network exists rather than the other one. My point is that when we read the phrase "Christian phone network," we all immediately know that it's going to be something that blocks homosexual content rather than something that donates to feed the hungry, just from those three words. The rhetorical question is, why is that what the word "Christian" means now?

[eudamoniac]

Because if it were a charity phone network,

1. It wouldn't be posted here or anywhere else, it wouldn't even be reported on.

2. It would just be called a charity phone network.

3. Generally you don't need to self-segregate unless the outer world is opposed to certain values you have. When something is a Christian alternative, it's an alternative against some societal trend (porn being common). If it isn't incompatible with society, it doesn't need to segregate, so wouldn't; it would just be a phone network that donates to charity and it would attract all kinds. So an X phone network is automatically about the parts of X that are not commonly shared values among society, not about any arbitrary value X holds.

[SpicyLemonZest]

It's the same answer. Polarization pressure causes us to hear the word "Christian" and think only of the controversial parts of Christianity. Notice how you yourself are focusing on their block of LGBT content, even though the source article makes it clear their primary focus is blocking pornography.

You could define the product according its proponents' values, rather than focusing on where they disagree with yours. Then it'd be less polarizing. But I suspect you'd argue that it's less informative to do that, perhaps even outright misleading.

[wat10000]

So actually, every one of the four things they list (Jesus-centric, void of pornography, void of LGBT, void of trans) disagrees with my values. I’m not focusing on where they disagree, I’m just taking a shortcut in my writing.

[pixl97]

Because the more moderate Christians have mostly left, leaving (and attracting) very fringe elements to the churches.

[estimator7292]

It's not exactly a new thing. People we would describe in the modern day as "religious extremists" or outright authoritarians have been using he name of Christianity in this way for... Well, since Christianity was invented.

Same for Islam and Judaism, though the last one has the roles reversed.

The problem you're trying to identify here is how the public and historic narrative almost completely ignores any positive aspects of these religions and focuses exclusively on the actions of terrible people using religion as cover and justification for terrible acts.

In large part it's relative to location and culture. In the US, if you ask any random person their opinion of Islam, it will be overwhelmingly negative. Vice versa in Islamic societies about Christianity.

There's also a lot to be said of the last era of colonialism wreaking unthinkable damage and actual literal genocides under the name of Christianity, and the damage that Christian "missionaries" still do in the modern day. In recent history, a lot of very, very bad things have been done very loudly in the name of Christianity. Under that banner, Europeans destabilized and destroyed huge swaths of the world. The consequences of which will still be around for generations yet to come. That kind of thing leaks into public and historic sentiment, no matter what. Turns out that the public doesn't really like genocides.

Before I get replies, yes, other people have used other religions to also do terrible conquest and genocide. European Christian colonialism is just the largest and most recent example relevant to Western common knowledge. You should study foreign religions and form your own opinion, it's quite enlightening.

On the other hand, the narrative of the modern era is completely and totally dominated by sensationalism and all the problems that capitalist media bring. Stories about Christian groups donating money don't sell news subscriptions or ad time. Ragebait does, and many religious groups of all flavors are happy to oblige.