Memes

You know, I think it's actually down to the idea of being a church based religion. These little niches of worship, combined with the rigid idea of commandments.

This, imo, sets up a community where appearances outweigh actually adherence to the religion. It's more important to be seen as christian than to live christianity.

You've got one guy (usually, there are women that are leaders, but it's a minority) up in front preaching about adhering to scriptures that are hard to interpret without a lot of thought because the scripture is badly translated from millennia old writings.

This creates a need to follow the leader as much as the scripture itself. So people attempt to conform to what is said in church as opposed to in the bible.

When you're lapping up the pre-chewed meat like that, it becomes performative rather than religious. You have to show you're christian by following the crowd.

Since there's a certain degree of gullibility necessary to have faith in the first place and a certain degree of imagination to ignore any flaws or outright impossibilities within the religion, it becomes acceptable to lie not only to one's self, but to everyone else.

Belief in the unprovable is fine for what it is, but when you start to value faith over action and reality, the kind of self inhibition humans are supposed to develop against lying becomes fragile at best, and broken at worst.

It isn't every christian for sure. This is about the worst case members. Many of them were indoctrinated so young that the kind of lying we're talking about is engrained as the norm. christians in general are no more or less prone to the kind of lies everyone indulges in at least occasionally. It's this kind of lie, being used to push a religious take on something the religion doesn't actually cover that becomes over represented.

Anecdote:

My high school had an actual bible class as an elective option, bible history. There was also a club based around it.

Being a curious and open minded sort, I went to a few meetings with friends that were christian. One of them, the last I went to, they were organizing a record burning. Now, this was in the early nineties, ans everything they would burn would be releasing toxic fumes, and the answer to that was that God would protect them.

But, that's not the part that relates to this. One of the members was up there "witnessing" essentially about "boom boom" music being of the devil. Now, for anyone unaware, there was a fairly big trend in the eighties and nineties of electronic music that was bass forward, with the most famous sub genre being miami bass. You'd have sampled pieces, with or without vocals, laid over a bass heavy rhythm.

So, nothing different in principle from instrumental jazz, or symphonic pieces.

But this was somehow worse than marching band, which was people playing music over a heavy beat.

I think you can imagine how well that went over when someone asked "how is bass music different from marching band?", when the girl doing the talking was in band.

There's nothing in the bible against music. The whole thing is made up and predicated on some vague principle of "moral values" that people will be converted against by a nice beat that they listen to as they drive.

That's the essence of why christians lie so much. Someone gets an idea in their head, and if the bible doesn't have a reason to be against it, they'll start making chains of "what if" until they link to something that is in there. Usually sex, but not always.