Nobody Cares: PRS

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My love Annie had a very best friend Billy Gardipe. He died from covid early in the epidemic. Thankfully he died before he knew what his daughter had done.

 

Katheryne Helendale

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I'm sorry, but I can't agree. As with any other religion, people who regard themselves as Christians manage to interpret their religion as meaning any number of different things, and particularly when it comes to social rather than theological issues. I'd say that, so long as someone subscribes to some pretty basic tenets -- Jesus was the Son of God, died on the cross, rose on the third day and ascended into heaven -- they're a Christian of one sort or another, no matter how repulsive their views on other subjects may be or may have been.
There are two kinds of Christians out there.

There are the loud gong-banging, cymbal-crashing, holier-than-thou "Christians" who believe it their God-given mission to jam their beliefs down other people's throats. Evangelicals come to mind here, and the Bible has warnings about this sort.

Then there are the ones who just try to be good, kind, and decent people who try to help those around them and live by Jesus's teachings. People like Jimmy Carter come to mind.

It just wouldn't be right to paint us all with the same brush.
 

Khamon

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The basic tenets of Christianity represent a faith based in a personal relationship with God. Religion is a political structure that many succumb to slavishly following rather than fostering their relationship with God. Those types use broad brushes that hatefully paint over everybody who doesn't support their program. It pains me to say "hatefully" but decades of exposure dictate my opinion. Oh and that Red Sea moment swings both ways; sometimes you're the one standing in the middle when the waves are released.
 

Innula Zenovka

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There are two kinds of Christians out there.

There are the loud gong-banging, cymbal-crashing, holier-than-thou "Christians" who believe it their God-given mission to jam their beliefs down other people's throats. Evangelicals come to mind here, and the Bible has warnings about this sort.

Then there are the ones who just try to be good, kind, and decent people who try to help those around them and live by Jesus's teachings. People like Jimmy Carter come to mind.

It just wouldn't be right to paint us all with the same brush.
Indeed not.

What I'm arguing against, though, is the assumption that the true and authentic version of any religion or religious tradition, be it Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism or anything else, is necessarily the one we consider humane and beneficent, since that's simply another version of "no true Scotsman."

Members of the First Independent Baptist Church of Christ the White Supremacist are, at least by their own lights, good and faithful Christians, and it's not for me tell them they're not.

I'm simply arguing against the assumption that "true" Christianity (Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism etc) is necessarily benign, and that any interpretation of it that we (I) find repugnant can readily be dismissed as a false understanding of a good original.
 

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Christians! Come out and plaayeeeeaaaay
That movie can feel a bit like a retelling of early Christians and their experiences during Roman times. Except the Christians rarely made it back to Coney Island by morning.
 

Argent Stonecutter

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It's all the fault of Saul of Tarsus who had an epileptic fit at just the wrong time and hallucinated the cruel Old Testament god back into the picture.
 

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Uhh...

Participating in the dating scene is already hard enough. And still, businesses keep finding ways to make it even worse.

For instance, this restaurant came up with a catfishing scheme to get people to come to eat at their establishments, which many people fell for. Now they are starting to talk about it on the internet. And we all know that when the internet is infuriated, it’s not good news for the target of it.
 

detrius

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What is that? If it helps with coffee, I NEED it.
Wacaco Nanopresso - I got the Dark Souls edition, the default edition is a bit more affordable

Argent provided a link

There are also other models which might be even better.


The nanopresso works best with slightly coarser grinds, compared to the picopresso.

ETA: replaced the video with a broader review of the product line
 
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Surprise!

As they rolled their eyes at the frustratingly familiar sight of price markups in grocery store aisles, shoppers in 2022 might have wondered whether corporations were doing everything they could to keep prices down as inflation hit generational highs. The answer now appears to be a resounding no.
 

Ellie

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Wacaco Nanopresso - I got the Dark Souls edition, the default edition is a bit more affordable
Even more affordable is my GAT Italian-made stainless steel mokla pot; I own two sizes, baby and granddaddy. I discovered they transfrm reltively cheap local beans into sheer bloody nectar.

You can pry them from my cold dead hands.
 
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Ellie

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The basic tenets of Christianity represent a faith based in a personal relationship with God. Religion is a political structure that many succumb to slavishly following rather than fostering their relationship with God. Those types use broad brushes that hatefully paint over everybody who doesn't support their program. It pains me to say "hatefully" but decades of exposure dictate my opinion. Oh and that Red Sea moment swings both ways; sometimes you're the one standing in the middle when the waves are released.
Mostly agree with you; always saw organized religion as the bureaucracy of spirituality, where the original concept(s) were hijacked for personal & political power and convenience. When belief isn't even skin deep and has no traces of the original teachings, that's when it gets nasty or comical.

Also see:


After a looong discussion with a literal rocket scientist friend, we agreed that if in the future, scientists should discover much more about the human condition and find the god-concept featured in many religions was in fact some kind of unified group feature and part of the unseen world, we decided we'd both be fine with that.
 
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Soen Eber

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I'm sorry, but I can't agree. As with any other religion, people who regard themselves as Christians manage to interpret their religion as meaning any number of different things, and particularly when it comes to social rather than theological issues. I'd say that, so long as someone subscribes to some pretty basic tenets -- Jesus was the Son of God, died on the cross, rose on the third day and ascended into heaven -- they're a Christian of one sort or another, no matter how repulsive their views on other subjects may be or may have been.
I shouldn't be saying this because I likely don't know enough about theology to be able to freebase Christianity, but I suspect the religion, aside from the red letter teachings of Christ and his immediate followers is more a product of the Greeks & later the Romans and midievalists interpreting his sayings through the lense of the only system of higher thought they had at the time, creating a conscrecrated reality through pre-Socratic concepts of cosmology and Plato's and Aristotles writings - or in another sense creating what they expected to see from static and noise. A bunch of balderdash from overthinking something rooted in faith & emotions and social justice and family structures which just fails when you apply the rough, crude, harsh rules of logic to them. It's like how the mind is measured first by clockwork, then by valves & steam boilers, and next by 1's and 0's and logic gates and accumulators, we believe the tools and the data and not our perceptions and reactions.

We can only truly react to spirituality through the unmeasurable parts of what makes us human. Our analytical tools are just too crude to get a compass of it.

But I will say it was an absolute act of genius to root this endevour through love and family, and arrogance to try to analyze and categorize that. This, here, is the lt;dnr of what I'm saying.

OK, I confess. The only reason I replied was so I could use the phrase "freebasing Cristianity" ;)
 
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detrius

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Even more affordable is my GAT Italian-made stainless steel mokla pot; I own two sizes, baby and granddaddy. I discovered they transfrm reltively cheap local beans into sheer bloody nectar.

You can pry them from my cold dead hands.
I also started with a moka pot, but moved on since then.

I still have a Bialetti Brikka, but the Wacaco Nanopresso produces much better results by comparison and is more mobile.

When I'm at home, I can just use my Rancilio Silvia E.

I should sometime post a photo of the various coffee making gadgets that I have accumulated over time.
 
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CosMc's is too difficult to pronounce.
Everytime Insee it, my brain says "Mick Cause's". Even though Inknow it's just "Cosmic's"
 

Noodles

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Speaking as someone who left all religions behind years ago, I see the problem as going beyond just pride and smugness - we have people in my city, in my neighborhood who aren't satisfied with just getting their way politically. They also insist that *I* should be subjected to their beliefs and strictures, no matter how ignorant.

And yes, it's merely a coincidence that my next door neighbor is actually named "Karen".
Exactly.

The issue that people have with religeons, particulatly Christianity these days, is slightly less that they are a bunch of asshole bigots perverting their own gospel for evil (though this is an issue), but way more that these people also, increasinly, want to require everyone else to believe in that same perversion.

OR ELSE.
 

Bartholomew Gallacher

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You know, Christianity isn't such a bad thing once you get all the smug and pride out of it. It"s people falling for all the clanging gongs, clashing cymbals, and hypocrites loudly proclaiming that is at the root of our problems here, a lack of understanding of the message - sometimes willfully so.
Let me tell you a simple story: when following discussions over the different religions here on my side of the pond, one argument on which most people did agree immediately is how peaceful buddhism is, and that buddhists never on their own started a war. Ever. Many people considered buddhism as the benchmark religion in terms of peace.

So when in Myanmar and Sri Lanka buddhist extremist groups came into existence, that was enlightening.

For me all religions are equally shit. They served their purpose in the past, which for most religions is is a) keep your own crowd healthy and growing while b) give your own crowd a good justification why war is allowed for you, because sooner or later the need to grow means sometimes war.

a) is for example, while in Islam and Jewism eating pigs is forbidden. In the past people simply didn't know how to evaluate it, and process it properly. Now with the power of science the need for such a part is gone, but it was something which kept the own crowd healthier.

b) is a thing where religion on purpose goes against common sense.

So of course in Christianity it also happens, which part of the bible you are referring to. But there's enough violence in the bible when just looking at the right places.

What's the outstanding feature though of Islam is that a) its holy book was dictated by god to Mohammed, in Arabic by the way and b) it considers itself the final form of Christianity and Jewism.

So if something is in the Koran clearly written its hard to change that. This makes Islam in many areas much more inflexible than then other religions. And of course also many religions are abused by terrorists, but the question is always then where does the religion end and terrorism start, and vice versa.

 
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Innula Zenovka

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I shouldn't be saying this because I likely don't know enough about theology to be able to freebase Christianity, but I suspect the religion, aside from the red letter teachings of Christ and his immediate followers is more a product of the Greeks & later the Romans and midievalists interpreting his sayings through the lense of the only system of higher thought they had at the time, creating a conscrecrated reality through pre-Socratic concepts of cosmology and Plato's and Aristotles writings - or in another sense creating what they expected to see from static and noise. A bunch of balderdash from overthinking something rooted in faith & emotions and social justice and family structures which just fails when you apply the rough, crude, harsh rules of logic to them. It's like how the mind is measured first by clockwork, then by valves & steam boilers, and next by 1's and 0's and logic gates and accumulators, we believe the tools and the data and not our perceptions and reactions.

We can only truly react to spirituality through the unmeasurable parts of what makes us human. Our analytical tools are just too crude to get a compass of it.

But I will say it was an absolute act of genius to root this endevour through love and family, and arrogance to try to analyze and categorize that. This, here, is the lt;dnr of what I'm saying.

OK, I confess. The only reason I replied was so I could use the phrase "freebasing Cristianity" ;)
I'd say that Christianity doesn't exist apart from the various conflicting practices and beliefs of the different communities at particular times and places who identify as "Christian." If you think about how Christianity started, you had different apostles and missionaries founding Christian communities in particular places, and members of those communities passed on what their founders had told them, or what they understood of it, modified by what they heard from people from different communities who shared with them what their founders and traditions said, and what copies of letters and manuscripts by various Christian teachers had to say. All this was mediated by the teachings and theoretical concepts of the various Jewish, Greek and Persian intellectual traditions their communities were a part of.

It wasn't until a couple of hundred years later, when Christianity was the state religion of the Roman Empire -- eastern and western both -- that it became important to determine what, exactly, were the fundamental tenets of the religion and what was heresy, which is why they started having representatives of the various different communities getting together to try to agree on the basic points of their religion to which they could all subscribe, whatever their other differences, and to agree on which of the various accounts, compiled over the previous two or three hundred years, of what Christ and his early apostles were thought to have said and done, were authoritative and which weren't.

Christianity is all the conflicting things that different Christian communities and traditions have understood it to be, at particular times and in particular places.