Monday Meme Madness - Labor Day Edition

In past editions of Monday Meme Madness, I've examined stupid anti-atheist or creationist memes. Today I thought I'd look at some memes about Christianity. There are plenty of stupid memes about being a Christian, and, setting aside the stupid-cute ones, there are plenty of underlying messages that are a little disturbing.

For example, meme #1: "When someone u find attractive says 'Im excited to marry, raise kids and have Jesus at the center of it all' Ur like I volunteer"

Where to start. First, this isn't Twitter with its character limitations or a text message from the early 2000s when you couldn't pull up the qwerty keyboard, so writing you and your as u and ur is unnecessary and already makes this meme super ignorant. I'm also not sure why ur is capitalized, and please put an apostrophe in Im! Please. I mean, you have longer words like someone and attractive all spelled out. You don't need to save the space!

Maybe those selections are supposed to make the meme extra edgy and super internetty, but they just look stupid.

Next up, the message. I get that the point is that when you find the person who shares your religious beliefs and ideas about life, you are emotional like Katniss from The Hunger Games and ready to sign up. Shorn of its context, the meme is fine. Like whatever, it's just a meme. But the missing scenario from the film makes this meme darker. Katniss is not volunteering to join someone in an ideal life. She is volunteering to take the place of her little sister whose name has just been drawn to send her to an arena where children fight to their death till only one person is left alive as "winner."

Placed in this context, the person who finds their ideal mate in a life of Christ is signing up to go to a horrible place where they are likely to die because an autocratic regime has set up a real-life horror show as entertainment. What does this all say about your Christianity that you are volunteering for?

 Meme #2: "My youth pastor when he sees me on my phone"

Here's another meme that makes Christianity seem like some dystopian regime. Maybe Christians are more self-aware than we realized. I mean, sure, this is Joaquin Phoenix playing a cruel Roman emperor in a movie and the meme depicts him sentencing someone to die in the arena, and haha youth pastors are just as terrible, but do you have to make it so obvious that Christianity is pretty autocratic?

Meme #3: "What if I told you living for God is more fulfilling than living for yourself?"

Pfft, I don't think so.

This meme is actually on point in terms of image appropriation. It is trying to say that secular life is like the matrix, an illusion, while living for god is real. So points for that.

This is actually not so much a stupid Christian meme as a misguided one. In my view, it gets the message exactly backwards: that living for god is an illusion while living for yourself is reality. We have no reason to think that this god exists or cares about us. People who tell tales of this god disagree on pretty much every aspect of the god. Even among Christians, there is no agreement on who god is, what he wants, what it takes to meet him in the afterlife or how much control he has here on earth. There is no pill we can take to change this situation. We can only buy into a fantasy.

Go out an live for yourself and don't worry about some supernatural entity.