Lemmy and mastodon are not really connected, I don’t know about the others. I would focus on one protocol (is that the right term here?) and show different instances. I’m not on lemmy to follow mastodon users, it’s a very different concept

Is his first name John or Join?

I see your point but hear me out:

Saying “The only one I call king is the one who died at the cross” subverts the very concept of a king. Not only is this guy no longer here to directly command anyone but his death was the most humiliating to him and his followers possible. In this way, it’s anti-authoritarian. Similar with the greatest in the kingdom of god. It’s the last you would think of: the poor, the children, … . Sure, this leaves place for interpretation. You can say it’s just a new hierarchy. Or it’s so radically putting everything into question that it’s in effect a call against all hierarchies. Or that it’s so radical, it can’t be taken serious at all so barely means anything anymore.

Christianity as a whole shows all of this. The first communes shared everything in common, there was “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. (Gal 3, 28). Later a new hierarchy establish which, once established, wasn’t new or subversive anymore but just a top down hierarchy. Once in a while someone came with a more subversive reading, more often than not founding a new organization that ended up with a strict hierarchy.

I think the biggest flaw is that there is no sustainable alternative given. You can criticize capitalism all day long and reinforce it as a system without an alternative if you don’t give one. Some Christians found alternatives and supported them with the scripture, others supported very different things with scripture. That’s the thing with all world religions: They start in opposition to society but fail to think outside the box and so they end up reinforcing it while keeping the seldom fulfilled potential for a better society (“world region” in the sense Graeber uses the term in Debt and Graham discusses in this podcast episode I guess but I’m not sure).

All that said, since the first Christians certainly had a very egalitarian, anti-authoritative reading, this is the most authoritative reading (pun intended).

“The nations” is just fancy for “non Jews”. Remember that the bible predates modern nation states by more than a millennium.

inequality in heaven is a common theme in Jesus’s parables.

Is that so? I can think of the story with the lamps where it’s about getting into the kingdom of god or the treasure in the field where it’s about finding the kingdom of god. Or that the poor will inherit the kingdom of god while rich people cannot get into it. Nothing about inequality inside the kingdom of god.

You have to keep in mind that the kingdom of god isn’t really heaven as we think of it even tho Matthew uses the wording kingdom of heaven (to avoid the word god as a good jew). We think of heaven as life after death but the kingdom of god is on earth when Jesus returns and the dead arise and he builds his kingdom here.

He’s wearing jeans, he’s got it

In our hearts, she does

And to make it easier to click the links I guess