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ndawg

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Posts posted by ndawg

  1. 5 minutes ago, Chooky said:

    Who are you and what have you done with ndawg? 

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

    • Like 1
  2. 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 :)

    • Like 1
  3. 8 minutes ago, Jive Turkey said:

    The GOP and Fox News are so much better at defining the narrative than the Dems. 

    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.

    • Like 5
  4. 48 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

    Well, first of all, Christianity is about the person, more than the church or the movement.  The first concern of an individual Christian as concerns others is their well-being, and secondarily their coming to Christianity themselves.  But a Christian doesn't reject an unbeliever or a different believer out of hand, and certainly doesn't declare some kind of war on them.  A Christian is bound to reserve any judgment and preach by example and by words when appropriate.

    That type of philosophy doesn't lend itself to militaristic action against other faiths or non-faiths, even false prophets.  If you ask a Methodist. Presbyterian, or Lutheran minister what he thinks of Fred Phelps or John Jeffers**, he might give you an earful couched in the gentlest possible terms and more in terms of what you can learn about being a Christian from their poor example, but he would never or rarely say it in public.

    Real Christianity teaches to love your neighbor, no matter how big an asshole he is.

    **Actually, he might say good things about the deceased attorney, but he probably wouldn't about Robert Jeffress.

     

    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.

    11 hours ago, F250 said:

    Christianity’s Dangerous Idea - This book covers the evolution of Protestantism and it's mutations that resulted from Luther's idea of Solo Scriptura. 

    White Protestant Nation - is a good follow up as it ties political movements with the religious movements throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

    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.

  5. 10 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

    Well, except Jesus kind of had some special authority, y'know.  Yeah he did do a bit of trashing of the bad guys, but it was mostly subtle and among his adherents as an example of what not to be, not among the general public.

    Presumably, as the Son of God, he could have gotten exceeding wroth and smitten those Pharoahs, and Pharisees, and Prefects, but he did not.

    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.

  6. 17 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

    The problem is that being Christian requires a bit of humility (remove the plank from thine own eye . . . ) that generally forecloses judgment and attacks on other churches and denominations, even when they are damaging "the brand," as it were.  Besides, once the Methodists declare war on Osteen, where do they stop, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Presbyterians or those dirty Lutherans?

    In the final analysis, in the example set by Jesus Christ, to be Christian is to be persecuted.

    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.

  7. 1 hour ago, F250 said:

    I was referring to the divide between the fundamentalists and the mainline Protestants around the end of the 19th century. There were a number of issues that divided the two but the biggest one was the fundamentalist reaction to modernity in the early 1900s.

    Mainline Protestants rolled with the changes occurring with modernism and embraced it. They attempted to steer American Christianity in this direction while dragging the rest of the church with them. A big problem is fundamentalists are mostly congregationlists which means there is no top/down structure to issue guidance like the mainline Protestants have.

    The fundamentalists didn't react well to the changes happening (science, reason, skepticism) in society. If you recall, this was during a growth period of strong optimism where it seemed nothing couldn't be conquered with science and engineering. They doubled down on Biblical literalism which was not a hallmark of protestantism and rejected any dissenting voice. 

    Both sides attempted to reign the other in but the divide grew to the point where neither one recognized the the other as a fellow Christian traveler. Later on a "middle way" was conceived to bridge the gap and that gave birth to the evangelicals where they incubated after WWII until the 1980's to end up where we are today. The Evangelicals were basically fundamentalists working their way out of a corner they put themselves in a long time ago.

    I'm leaving a lot out because there is a ton of history between the two/three groups.

    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.

  8. 1 hour ago, F250 said:

    Yeah, this was attempted over 100 years ago and how America ended up with Evangelicals.

    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)

  9. 3 hours ago, Mole said:

    As the book say, the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there isn’t very much of one. 

    Not related to the above post, I grossly underestimated my prediction of how long it would take for those vastly ignorant of history and the church’s complex role in it to start spouting simplistic and plainly bigoted comments. I said five pages but we hit it by page two. There’s a difference between criticism, disagreement, and bigotry and the lines are very clear. Hypocrisy and bigotry is a truly unifying human trait.

    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.

    • Like 1
  10. 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.

    • Like 2
  11. 18 hours ago, Rockymtnhigh said:

    So im to blame when the company I work for wants all the cheap labor they can get, and they don't mind using loopholes in our laws to get it?  That's pretty rich...

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

  12. 4 minutes ago, TornACL said:

    My personal experience with visa holders from India usually leaves me hoping we can bring more people like that into this country as soon as possible. 

    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 :)

  13. 7 minutes ago, Rockymtnhigh said:

    Whatever man.  Believe what you want to....I work on a team of 20 people in web development and 18 of them are from India...You want to know why the competition  is so tough for Bachelor degree holders to get jobs here in the US then you cant ignore these things..

     

    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.

    • Like 2
  14. 12 minutes ago, Rockymtnhigh said:

    I got nothing against Indians, but I think it is stupid to ignore they are taking a lot of jobs that home grown or naturalized Citizens here in the US could be trained for.

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

    • Like 1
  15. 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."

  16. 21 hours ago, Spankytoes said:

    Effectively, you are recognizing my entire point: Sex is not political, it's biological. 

    Telling someone they are proving your point is a dumb rhetorical tactic.

    My position acknowledges the difference between sex and gender. Yours doesn't.

  17. 27 minutes ago, Spankytoes said:

    Actually I don't, which is why I am asking them. Help me understand:

    Biological male that identifies as a woman is a woman. Biological male that has had gender reassignment surgery to physically appear as a woman is also a woman. One has a penis, the other has a vagina but both are women. Is one more woman than the other? I think Leo DiCaprio is an attractive man. I would not be interested in having sex with him if he identified and made himself appear as a woman. Shouldn't I have the right to know what's between his legs or am I supposed to be denied my rights as a straight guy that doesn't believe your terms of social constructs? Despite popular opinion on this thread, intolerance isn't a one-way street. You certainly wouldn't advocate that religion should be the default despite the law. (At least I hope you wouldn't)

    I know the answers to those questions in the sense that I don't buy the premise that a man can become a woman based on a subjective feeling. I would consider the guy fucking a trans woman as either gay or bi, which is perfectly fine. At best, he's curious. I know my answer already. I'm interested in yours.

    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...

  18. 3 hours ago, Spankytoes said:

    Mental illness and depression within the trans community is not an unverified assumption. There are plenty of published studies speaking to the correlation of these issues. Do you have any data to combat this? It's a dumb argument targeted towards men. 

    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.

    • Like 3
  19. 16 hours ago, Spankytoes said:

    I am open to facts, statistics or anything else worth merit for the discussion. I’m not interested in social acceptence or feelings, which typically reflect YOUR feelings, not mine. Trans people really don’t affect my life or self-worth. I know that’s not a good bumper sticker slogan, but at least it’s intellectually honest. Mental illness is a serious topic, but I think enabling behavior is more destructive. 

    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.

  20. 50 minutes ago, formermav43 said:

    If anyone has any clear legal rules on separating the Osteens of the world from your average minister, I’d be interested. But in general, there’s a lot of misunderstanding here about church finances and clergy taxes.

    As an example, even if the church provides a parsonage (which means you don’t own a home, btw), you still have to personally pay SECA on it’s fair rental value. The tax man giveth, and the tax man taketh away. It’s not all advantageous.

    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.

  21. 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.

    • Like 1
  22. 9 minutes ago, suddenly shaggy said:

    I agree with you to a point, but the back and forth is perpetuated by people responding to him. His nonsense is then given legitimacy and that's what he wants. 

    When a troll posts, publicly depants them and move on. Don't get in a back and forth with them, it legitimizes their illegitimate argument. 

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

    • Like 1
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