I'm a Christian, and I post on Veeky Forums and Veeky Forums quite a bit. I enjoy Russian literature and the regular shitposting, but also the threads about Christianity/religion/theology. But, although I like them, I can't understand why they exist. Why is there a Christian community on Veeky Forums, of all places? How did we get here, and why do we stay?
I'm also a brainlet, so any ideas you can offer are welcome.
edgetheists need not reply
Because of fedora memes.
everyone else is doing it ironically bud
This is a mission field. The people we're witnessing to don't like to think of themselves as a mission field. Yet nevertheless they are.
Welcome.
And also welcome is Russia's embrace of her christian church, and Putin's Christmas message that the West should be ashamed of being ashamed of our Christian heritage.
because christians aren't purer than anyone else. they look at the same fucked up porn if not worse and browse the same shitholes. stop feeling superior
Poe's law
And I don't mean that in an insulting way, just that people who are serious feel in good company here with the fedora memes, and that then causes some not so religious folks to read on religion and so the ball gets rolling.
religion threads were a mistake
The only way you can mean Poe's Law is to invoke your own inability to discern between people who believe and people who do not. It's really just a cop out on your part which requires you to never gain any discernment. And never learn anything. And of course, as intended, to feel smug and superior to everyone else.
You have to add in overrepresentation, as in in a debate there's two sides and two people while in reality you'd have much more on one side than on the other, the anonymous nature of this site causes this to happen
And it's not the inability to differentiate the genuine from the not genuine, it's the creep in which the non genuine get replaced by genuine believers of something, it's too slow to notice before the replacement has already happened.
It happens a LOT on the internet.
I barely see any fedora memes. Do you just mean the rejection of aggressive antitheism?
Well, of course. But this is a question for serious discussion posters only.
>mission field
I've considered this too. It certainly seems to play out, and actually I've had more success talking to people on the chins than in real life wrt leading them to Christ.
cool
I think you mean Rene Descartes. Also I don't think that was really Descartes. But I see what you're saying, that definitely makes sense. That people would come here because their harshest critics/the lowest effort shitposters are constantly shut down seems pretty intuitive, and from there discussion would draw others in.
I've not only learned more about Christianity but also Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, philosophy in general and the path of human culture through history from those threads. Perhaps it is you who is the mistake here.
You underestimate the power of shitposters, they can derail any discussion if they want to, what they can't however is not lose interest after a while if the other group is more dedicated, this contributes to the replacement creep.
It may happen a lot to you.
It does not happen a lot to me.
It doesn't happen a lot to me, it happens a lot on the internet, see /new/ for example
There is no /new/, only (((you))).
Some buttmad atheists started a flamewar against all religious things, shit got serious, theists reacted, theists won.
I am an atheist myself, but I agree, those were assholes.
You're damn right there isn't, it got canned by moot for being too racist
Typical holier-than-thou cranioanal response.
Kill yourself and go get your rewardcummies from skydaddy.
Interesting. That plays into the Descartes view, then, where Veeky Forums would have started as a bunch of relatively apathetic anons shitposting back and forth at each other with fedora/antifedora memes, right up until Christians, clicking through boards, find somewhere with a support base for their (our) ideology. At first just partaking in the meme-flinging, but primarily on the pro-religious side, these Christfags would eventually become less and less ironic and more and more genuine. Their dedication to a single side of the shitpost war would wear out and bore the fedoras, who either go elsewhere or stick to less controversial posts. Then, as religious discussions get more indepth and nuanced - Protestant/Catholic/Orthodox memes helping to drag along the disengaged shitposting demographic - the majority of users begin to develop a knowledge base in Christianity. Some convert, others "come out," so to speak, as actual Christians and not just memelords. And by that point the conversion of the board is pretty much done.
So can the same be applied to Veeky Forums? Did enough years of European history memes finally give Christianity enough of an ideological foothold to convert that board? And where do we go from here? What if other boards become more religious as well? What if eventually this site is dominated by the idiots who thought they were in good company?
@337 pic related
idk personally ive always been interested in spiritualism having been a 420 head and growing up in a white christian home.
but i think these peeps who say christianity has it all figured out i are memeing
4 the lulz!
I really don't understand this thread. Veeky Forums's userbase is composed mostly by urban western males, coming specially from the anglosphere, and western people are mostly christian. So what's the big surprise there are christians here? The entire world is mostly christian anyway.
Because Sunday christians aren't real christians
Veeky Forums's Christianity serves as an identity creator contra
1) liberals,, "nu-males" (or whatever snappy permutation of its meaning is en vogue right now)
2) Islam, which is a stand-in for the perceived cultural threat to the perceived ideologically weak and jaded west
Those two are the big threats (from within and outside) to the strong, stoic, patriarchal identity many posters want to maintain and live, probably because this identity feeds on those which have been excluded (socially, sexually and financially) by the faceless and indifferent molloc of capitalism.
But also don't forget that they wouldn't be able to construct this identity withough the existence of exactly these threats, so you could say that the molloc is the real enemy here, and the whole stoic, male, deus-vult facade is just a means to cope with it.
So chan theists are mainly defining themselves by what they are not.
This would be consistent with other identities: I am not reddit, I am not new (few people seriously claim to be old), I am not a pseud.
I think the main task of most boards on Veeky Forums is to be a system that lets the user create a personality he can draw power from. /pol/, /v/, Veeky Forums, /r9k/...they all create an us-vs-them identity (normies, pseuds, liberals...) into which the user can submerge himself.
Interestingly there is no score keeping - unlike maybe on classical forums where you can actually achieve some sort of tangible fame. The anonymity on Veeky Forums forces and allows to user to completely reestablish his power identity not only against "normies", but also against every other poster on the board.