I’m going to speak for them since I haven’t seen a reply, so this is just an assumption and should be taken as such until they reply. But, there’s plenty of positive aspects of local churches outside of faith. Many churches run community-based philanthropy efforts and provide a gathering space for members and nonmembers which is especially helpful in locations that don’t have much in the way of things to do or other places to gather. Humans are social creatures and whether gay or not, the church is a large community.

Hell, no one trusts the Internet, but still comes back to participate.

This is the most accurate no I’ve ever read in my life.

Maybe? But 122 is way different than 114 in this case.

Look, I don’t even attend a church. I haven’t regularly attended a mass since I was a kid so about 2 decades ago. I grew up catholic and my personal beliefs about sexuality, abortion, and mandated attendance caused a separation from the church. I didn’t even get married in a church or by a priest. But core tenants of the Catholic faith still helped shape my altruistic nature and moral compass. And although I left the church out of convenience, I could just as easily stayed within the church and developed those same principles and convinced others.

We could ban all organized religion tomorrow and it wouldn’t have a significant effect on my life. I can tell you that it would have a significant negative impact on the direction politics would take afterwards though. Where do you then draw the line on what constitutes a religion and what other group gatherings you can ban? What happens to all the people that were a part of organized religion and poured all of their social needs into that basket? Do you think they would have some sort of eye opening experience or would they just devolve into a chaotic mess with a loss of purpose and self?

You’re conflating missionary messaging with publicly practicing faith and praying. The message there, presumably, is to bring philanthropy to every person on the planet to teach and recruit others to do good in the world. If your sticking point is “teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” then yes that’s every religion but also every government faction and moral think-tank in totality. People telling people what they can and can’t do.

What’s your end goal here? Ban all religion and tell people what they can and can’t believe in? If you and someone share philosophical beliefs you’re not allowed to meet up and talk about them?

I see the issue. You’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Obviously telling others what they can and can’t do or sowing violence while using your religion as justification is bad. But even the bible says that spirituality should be practiced in private. There’s nuance to the world and just because bad things happen due to corrupted religious teaching doesn’t mean that all religion or spirituality is bad.

Having grown up catholic in rural Illinois, it’s just a case of mixed messaging and infiltration. Think of it like this:

You inherited a chili recipe—representing your morality and culture—from your parents. Growing up, you helped make it every week, so you know the flavors well. In your family’s version of chili, beans—symbolizing religion—were always the most important ingredient. Peppers—representing politics—were known, but they were more of a background note, never central.

Fast forward a generation, and a certain group starts promoting the idea that chili must be spicy. They want to sell their own particular kind of pepper—a harsh, punishing version of God—and they push this idea aggressively. They use people your parents trust, who already like spicier chili, to reinforce the message.

Suddenly, everyone around you starts loading their chili with these peppers because they’re told it’s the only way to avoid bland chili—blandness, in this case, representing hell. The fear of tasteless chili becomes a powerful motivator.

Religion is a sickness in YOUR opinion. Rationalism is just as dangerous as any other -ism whether it be Buddhism, Catholicism, Confucianism, Moral Absolutism, or Atheism. Just because you think you’re right doesn’t mean that you are. Instead maybe focus on spreading your moral message constructively instead of destructively. You’re bullhorn-ing exactly what his indoctrinators said the outside world is trying to do–destroy his religion.

Labeling a religious figure as an imaginary friend is very reductionist. Instead, go to the root issue. Right wing political messaging corrupted and brainwashed this person to be an ultra nationalist using lies to prey on his core beliefs through fear, religion, and superiority complex.

I get what you’re saying, and you’re not wrong, but I seriously doubt that protests would have escalated to the point that LAPD would be using pepper balls, rubber bullets, and tear gas if not for the national guard being federalized. To me that was an escalation in itself.

It’d be like 3-4 officers standing in a line across from protesters just watching in case things were to get out of hand. Then all of a sudden a sheriff from another state insults the protesters, sends 20 other officers in riot gear to stand next to you, and they start walking at the protesters to intimidate and beat them. So sure LAPD is more than capable of being huge pieces of shit, but what is the sheriff supposed to do in this situation? Pull his officers off the streets entirely? It’s still his jurisdiction. That’d be wholely irresponsible.

Go for it. There’s not nearly enough active duty national guardsmen capable of deploying to all 50 states.

People have trouble separating the art from the artist. I don’t blame them. It’s tough sometimes. I used to really love Kanye before he turned out to be a nazi. Watch the Throne and Graduation are fantastically produced albums with some excellent songs. Same with College Dropout.

I still listen to them when they come up in my playlists but the magic is pretty well gone. I think that he was and is mentally ill so with the right people around him he probably wouldn’t have turned into such a piece of shit, but here we are.

Illinois redistricted recently and it was gerrymandered to fuck to make sure that her district was absolutely backwoods conservative as possible. It practically ensures Illinois will swing blue for the next decade. She’s unfortunately my representative, but I’ll live with that reality knowing that my existence as her constituent pisses her off and Illinois stays blue.

What really pisses me off is that their anti-cheat forces me to use dogeOS

Well, there’s obviously going to be a lot of angles to that question but initial cost and the fact that large scale battery farms aren’t necessarily needed right now stick out to me.

The grid as it is designed right now is capable of producing power at demand simply by spinning up more generators. There’s no cost benefit (really) to generating extra power and dealing with logistics of storage while the extra power is not needed. Not at statewide scale and while the infrastructure isn’t built already.

Let’s for a second assume that a power company at statewide scale wasn’t able to just spin up more generators to meet demand and there IS incentive to provide storage. The company looking at the market today has 2 choices. Buy batteries that provide a versatile/portable solution with no real local consequence OR spend money developing and engineering molten salt or pumped water storage.

Electrochemical batteries:

• Pros: rapid installation, available market for part replacement, resellable, cheap to repair, energy dense, variable discharge, no significant R&D, negligible local environmental concerns
• Cons: less reliability, finite resource reliance (rare earths) can cause repair and replacement costs to increase, global environmental concerns, local weather systems can more easily damage infrastructure, limited cycles

Gravity and thermal batteries:

• Pros: renewable or abundant recourses depending on location, reliable and simple, efficiency increases with scale, difficult to damage irreparably, fewer global environment concerns
• Cons: large amount of R&D financial cost/time to account for local environmental concerns, construction and implementation could take multiple years in addition to R&D, unique systems don’t allow for much resell ability, larger potential footprint, location constrained, semi-fixed discharge rate, fewer partner companies to provide unique part replacement options, potential impact to local families in the event of failure (Taum Sauk).

I want to make it clear that I don’t really agree that nuclear is bad. In any shape or form fusion and fission are the two cleanest sources of energy that we have and are the sources of energy humankind will need to guarantee our survival as a species.

However, there are clean batteries. Battery is just a term for potential energy storage and things like gravity batteries and thermal batteries are feasible right now. Electrochemical batteries aren’t the only type of battery that we have. Actually, they are less efficient and less reliable than the others at scale.

Really? Dumper sticker was right there…

Nah, fuck this sentiment. Force a vote and be loud about every law that they break. If there’s a contingency of congress that are going to be obtuse about resisting fascism, then they can face the disgruntled mass of voters in the next election. If Dickhead Durbin hadn’t already decided he’s not going to run for reelection I’d be voting him and Tammy Duckworth out for compromising on Republican policies. Instead I’ll only get the pleasure of voting against Tammy in the primaries.

Yeah, and history casts such a golden light on all those jews in concentration and death camps back in the 1930’s and 40’s. Like yeah, I get it. They were being brutally raped, tortured, murdered, and forced to toil and die in their own filth and disease, but I mean come on…they had potato soup to sustain them for quite a while. If they weren’t willing to refuse the food that Nazis brought them, then they may as well been supporting the Holocaust. 🥴

In case it’s not clear. Israel is doing exactly what Nazi Germany did during the Holocaust. They’re committing open genocide against Palestinians and daring the world to intervene for fear of being called antisemetic.

Every state gets their cut somehow. Illinois’ property tax is just Missouri’s personal property tax or Florida’s sale tax. There’s fluctuations that encourage certain economic activity or attracts people with certain financial situations, but for the most part any variance in the total tax burden is probably weighed out by the benefits of those taxes. In Illinois roads are (somehow) much better than in Missouri despite having probably tens of thousands miles more, education is better, public health is way better, etc. The big one is welfare for farmers down state when crops fail due to flooding or drought.They’re ungrateful little bitches about it(I know because I grew up there) but everyone should have a sense of financial stability if they’re contributing to society.