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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • ITT- a lot of people who are very confidently wrong even about basic facts about this.

    Jesus flipping tables wasn’t aimed at the priests and church authorities, but at people who were based in the outer area of the temple selling supplies to make sacrifices and offerings prescribed in Jewish law (see the book of Leviticus for more descriptions of these sacrifices). Jewish law at the time required a lot of animal sacrifices and monetary offerings at the Temple, and Jesus didn’t seem to have any issues with these- after all, they were a core part of the religion at the time and again, the Torah explicitly states that priests are supposed to live off of Temple offerings (note that in this passage the priestly class are referred to as “Sons of Aaron”). So it would have been odd for Jesus, as someone who at least according to the Bible was very knowledgeable about scripture and Jewish law, would have been surprised at that aspect.

    What he was mad about was the commerce occurring around this system. The Gospel descriptions of this event discuss “moneychangers” and people selling doves. These are people who exchanged Roman currency for traditional Jewish currency (which is what ancient monetary offerings were denominated in) and sold animals (and based on other writings in the Torah, probably spiced cakes as well) that could be sacrificed in the Temple on the purchaser’s behalf. As for why this made Jesus mad, that is up for debate. The obvious answer is that it represents greed and people making money off religion, but the large amount of sacrifices required by Jewish law at the time really encouraged this behavior just from a practical standpoint. Myself I think he would have been completely fine with it had it been happening right outside the Temple instead, but the Temple was considered an especially holy place, where God’s presence literally descended down to Earth to be with mankind in the innermost portion, which each concentric ring acting as a sort of “air lock” for ritual impurity.

    So the problem was not that the priests were making money from religion (again, this was required by Jewish law at the time) but that these other people were hanging out in the Temple treating it as a marketplace rather than as an exceptionally holy and highly ritualized space. Understanding this is kind of difficult for modern people because we don’t really treat religion the same as people did back then, and especially from a Christian standpoint we tend to view religion as a matter of personal belief and not impurity that occurs as a natural consequence of things that happen and that must be cleansed before encounters with the divine.





  • markovs_gun@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlit's so over
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    1 month ago

    I wouldn’t call pre-capitalist society “thriving on mutual cooperation” and neither would Marx. It was different, yeah, but ultimately still exploitative for most people. Consider that Tsarist Russia was still largely pre-capitalist (in the transition to being a capitalist economy) and that this fact led to a lot of debate among socialist and communist thinkers during the leadup to the Russian Revolution because Marx himself believed that Capitalism was a necessary stepping stone to Communism. But yet, people still felt conditions were bad enough that they revolted, killed everyone in charge, and instituted socialism. Even going back to the bronze age shit was pretty brutal. Read about how kings dealt with disobedience back then and it would make anyone today seem like a saint.









  • The issue is that this is literally not a problem. It’s like deciding that the best course of action when you’re starving in the woods is to hunt and eat Bigfoot instead of foraging for food. It’s a waste of time and resources at best, and a distraction from real solutions at worse. Nobody in the history of the world has become ultra wealthy through high salary.


  • You’d be surprised. My dad once complained about “the top 10%, the billionaires” and I had to I’ve inform him that based on wealth and income, he’s the top 10% just being middle class, and the billionaires basically don’t even show up as a percentage because there’s only like a thousand in the entire world. Most people do not understand how any of this works and do not have even a basic understanding of how any of these people got wealthy in the first place.


  • This is a stupid idea. The ultra wealthy make a tiny portion of their income through wages- that’s kind of the entire point and problem of capitalism. It is ownership of capital that drives the income of the ultra wealthy. Jeff Bezos’s salary from Amazon is only $80,000 per year, and he is one of the richest people on Earth. Maximum wage laws only hurt workers, while not impacting the ultra wealthy at all. When you see the giant compensation packages of CEO, very little of that is actually in wages. It’s in stock in the company, and other non-cash benefits. Even if you restrict this practice, that wouldn’t have done anything to prevent the wealthiest people on Earth from getting where they are since they are all founders or descendants of founders. I can’t think of a single billionaire who got there from wages or any kind of compensation working for someone else- it’s all ownership of capital.



  • Overtime can easily make up for lower base pay, as long as you like working more. Idk how it is in your country but good pay increases are also way easier to get in corporate jobs than government ones in the US. Another thing to consider- non salary benefits. In the US these are a big deal, not sure about your country. This would include retirement fund contributions, health insurance (probably not as big of a deal outside the US), dental/vision insurance, and any other perks of being an employee of the government. In the US these are usually a lot better for government jobs than most corporate jobs, but salary is lower. If you’re not nearing retirement age, I’d recommend it but with the caveat that my experience is only in the US which has a really messed up system.