ndawg

Yeah, I mean, failing to oust Bill certainly set the Republican party back, didn't it?

Nothing. And pay no attention to future grammar mistakes, that sound like Russian speaking English.

I fat fingered the tab key, that put the browser's focus on the "Submit Reply" button, and then pressed the space bar, which pressed it. Then I tried hurriedly to fix it before anyone noticed. Clearly, I failed

I used to parrot this line, but I now think it's wrong. The GOP and Fox News are willing to lie, cheat and steal to win. They aren't better at defining the narrative, they're controlling it through completely unethical means. It amounts to whitewashing to suggest that they're more skilled at shaping public perception.

The difference between televised presidential debates and high school/college debates is about as vast as professional wrestling and high school/college wrestling.

An interesting tidbit in the piece is how her first job as a writer at an alt-right publisher didn't appear to offer health care.

Okay, but thermodynamics is a concept that 1. doesn't conflict with the Bible and 2. humans discovered it on their own. Humans have also discovered how to create and destroy cults and other dangerous radical movements. I would expect a Christian who is also an equal and active member of the secular society to understand their unique role they can play whenever Christianity is radicalized. Thanks so much for this. I have them both added to a queue I've started organizing. One of the reasons I like this board is that I'm interacting with professionals across many different walks of life. Has anyone here ever tried starting a thread for discussing political non-fiction books? I've been particularly interested to books from non-batshit conservatives or religious people because I think bringing their voices back to the public discussion would be a Good Thing for everyone. Especially if we can start having conversations exclusively between people that have ponied up the certain amount of time it takes to read a "boring" non-fiction book.

Hm. I can't believe that Christians believe they are supposed to sit by and allow Christianity to be usurped by a cult, so the only conclusion that I can reach is that I don't understand this religion particularly well.

How did Jesus react to the Jewish leaders who had done to the temple what our Evangelicals have done to so many churches? I have a very shallow understanding of Christianity, but it doesn't seem to me that the only example he set was for humans to accept persecution.

Thanks! You piqued my interest quite a bit. If you had a book to recommend, I would be interested to explore it in more depth.

The tax codes that allow churches to be tax exempt didn't exist 100 years ago, so I'm not sure what you're saying directly applies. To your broader point, I'm suggesting that some activism is necessary; the fact that we have an apparent resurgence of racism today doesn't suggest that the civil rights movement of the 60s failed. But.. what exactly are you referring to? The Third Great Awakening? I'm struggling to see the connection you're making, because I perceive the Third Great Awakening to be less of an activist movement and more of a broader historical period. I'm interested to hear your thoughts, though, because I bet you know a lot more than I do (I don't really study religions or religious movements much)

A thought experiment: imagine sticking every American who has ever professed a strongly held belief about, say, climate change into one giant room. I can imagine they would number in the tens of millions, so it'd have to be a REALLY big room. Now imagine a mind reading device that can identify everybody in the room whose interest in the issue does not stem from a genuine desire to strike a balance between human welfare and ecological welfare. Now, kick all those people out of the room. How many people are still left? Now imagine a different room where we stick every American who has ever professed a strong belief in Christianity. Now kick everybody out except the ones who have really committed themselves to following the teachings of Jesus Christ, every single day. Same thing happens as with climate change -- most people who hold a strong political or religious opinion don't actually care about the subject all that deeply. They think they do. They'll tell you that they do. They'll probably even get aggressive if you suggest that they don't actually care about the thing they're so passionate about. Behold, tribalism. All that to say, if rational Christians are tired of evangelicals, it's long past time for them to fight back. Publicly. Rational Christians should be demanding that the IRS audit whether megachurch empires are abusing their tax exempt status. Only Christians get to raise this issue, because anyone else would feed the persecution narrative that's radicalizing the evangelicals. Rational Christians, on the other hand, can do a sort of jiu-jitsu takedown move and actually flip the persecution narrative inside out -- they can say, "hey, 700 Club and TBN, YOU'RE the ones attacking Christianity," and get people to listen.

Way I see it, when a religion is healthy, it's members not only take part in secular society but also contribute to its progress. When a religion heads towards cult/theocracy territory, however, its leaders manipulate the congregation into shutting themselves off from the secular world. Evangelical Christianity has been on clear a moral decline for the last few decades. I'm sure there are plenty of Methodists still participating in the grown up world, but the fundamentalists are basically getting ready to tell the Taliban to hold their beer at this point. Holywood writers have been WARNING us about this because they've been seeing it real time. Many of them are the types of people that study history in great depth, and they see that what's happening to Christianity in the US has happened to many religions in many parts of the world.

Are you suggesting that laws intended to prevent the wealthy from exploiting American workers can be a good thing?

I would hope that someone finding themselves working on a web development team that is 90% Indians would be smart enough to conclude that their bosses feel the same way as you do

Get good enough at your job that you don't have to be on a team of 20 people in web development and 18 of them are from India.

Yeah this totally doesn't read to me like someone pretending to not be racist. Not. One. Bit. Noh-sir-eeeh.

The next time we get Anastasis to get up from out of the peanut gallery and actually propose how to make anything better will be the first. Contrarians serve an important purpose, but at this point we need something more substantial than "look how we've done bad things, too."

Telling someone they are proving your point is a dumb rhetorical tactic. My position acknowledges the difference between sex and gender. Yours doesn't.

Start contextualizing and stop overgeneralizing. In the context of two grown adults exploring a mutual romantic partnership, uncomfortable questions about biological sex are entirely understandable. In the context of two grown adults agreeing to have sex, it's completely fair to expect potential partners to be explicit about any surprises that will emerge after unzipping. The fact that you are asking these questions suggests to me that, while you seem to have a strong opinion on the matter, you might not have researched it all that thoroughly...

Why would I need any data to defend my position? The trans community (particularly within academia) is the world's foremost authority on what it's like to be a trans person. You and I are not. And you would need to have studied the subject matter to a comparable depth as they have in order to bring an argument worth their consideration, because otherwise you'd just be talking out your ass and saying things that sound right in your head. And there's nothing wrong with talking out one's ass, by the way, it's the reality for most of us laymen participating in political discussions like this. But I do take issue with posturing as if your position was reached after thorough, impartial analysis and research -- which is exactly what I think you're doing when you ask me for data that would refute your highly speculative position. You're essentially saying, "I'll only be convinced by a compelling argument," which suggests that you've already been convinced by some other compelling argument. I don't think you have, though. Here's the problem I have with your argument: so long as you perceive the trans community as a political one, you are prone to ignore any research and analysis that led them to their conclusion. Climate science works the same way in the political arena -- because the issue has been perverted into a political one, many deniers refuse to consider the arguments brought forth by scientists because of a perceived political bias. Once you've actually made an effort to understand what transgendered people experience, I suspect that you'll find on your own that your argument isn't tenable.

The problem with your point of view is that you've based it on a completely unverified assumption -- that you know more about why transgendered people reject their biological sex than they do.

Don't a lot of these megachurch pastors also make tons of money off book royalties, which are *not* tax exempt? Because I believe that the IRS does not allow tax-exempt status for, say, a religiously-affiliated book publishing company.

This is pure conjecture, but I suspect that polarization of American Christianity over the last half century correlates strongly with our best and brightest minds gradually realizing more and more that they don't have much use for religion altogether. As American Christianity devolved into a cult-like decentralized federation of evangelical churches, it led a lot of people who might have stuck around church for Christmas and Easter to ultimately detach altogether. I'm not religious, so I consider this to be a positive trend, but it also explains why the Evangelicals operate out of fear. I think they're desperately scared of the realization that the secular world has ultimately proved both smarter and more moral than the Church. If the fundamentalists don't take over this country, they face certain extinction.

I buy that. I even had him on ignore, too. Impulse control is hard at times like this...