Are you living in a different America than me? There are many many people around me who wouldn’t lift a finger to help someone they don’t know. “I would give him money but he would use it for drugs” and “i don’t want them becoming dependent on handouts” are both quotes i’ve heard from very otherwise charitable people while in a church. The very core of this culture has been infected with a deep malignant selfish fixation on money

See now if failure to pass the empathy class results in your forced destitution there might be some incentive to pay attention

In an attempt to be more moderate: i think it is impolite to regurgitate the words of an LLM in a forum where we are expecting the dialogue to be between humans.

Maybe, just maybe, we should stop the known arsonist - who has declared they are going to burn all our houses down and is now gleefully walking to our neighborhood with a can of gasoline and a blow torch - before they get to the first house

I think you might be misinterpreting her words as descriptive rather than prescriptive. Mexico do declare they ain’t subordinate

It was called the “tea party”, any new movement within the democratic party will need to differentiate itself in name to make significant headway, so we will probably get a “new party” just as a division in the old one expressed through the primary system (assuming our democracy makes it that far)

I think you need to work on expanding your political theory into more dimensions

This is very clearly a post for the united states where the history makes the game. What other ethnic groups in the good ol’ US of A have been historically complicit with the police and systemic oppression?

Answer: once ethic groups stop being oppressed here we start calling them white. Irish and Italian immigrants used to be non-white until it became convenient to bundle them in.

Every church has the potential to become the a mutual aide community. It’s what Jesus would have wanted

How we be sure you are Australian when you are talking right side up?

Given the less than subtle use of nazi imagery in the last campaign i wouldn’t be shocked to learn that the parallels were less than accidental on Trump’s part

I was surprised to learn that Constantine is seen by many thought leaders in the protestant christian communities as a corruptor. Opinions of Constantine makes a fascinating litmus to start separating those who see religion as a source of power from those who see it as a calling to better the world. Not that most lay christians have a clue who he is, or his role in standardizing christianity to the Roman system of government, let alone the structural implications of the move

Are you suggesting that we shouldn’t be worried about toxically insecure people in power when they are behaving awkwardly? Does an appearance of awkwardness grant automatic innocence?

I have been be intensely awkward with my insecurity in the past, and in my awkwardness i have definitely hurt people. If the victims of my insecurity brushed me off as awkward they would be enabling me to continue to harm others

When we can expect everyone on the planet to be present in a network the conflict and vitrol would be perpetual. We are not mature enough and all on the same page enough as a species to not resort to mud slinging

At the risk of sounding like i must be a cheater myself, are you suggesting that once someone cheats they are no longer a human worthy of empathy and nuanced consideration of circumstances?

I mean, who else was gonna do it?

Strictly speaking, you don’t. Several denominations tried to throw out the mysticism in the 60s to significant backlash of the congregations. Mainstream denominational seminaries are actually pretty open minded from what i hear.

The triune mysticism can be looked at as an act by many denominations, it can’t be dropped because not enough of us skeptics engage with the religious systems locally to justify changing theology. If official positions becoke “well the trinity isn’t actually…” they risk loosing significant numbers of members. Changing that requires skeptical people to earnestly engage with churches and their congregations.

I would like to subscribe to this level of rational social design

Nobody who acts like a hero does it without having incurred massive personal suffering to drive them

Man, that time American politics tried to remove alcohol from its culture was fuckin’ wild