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  2. This fellow is more thoughtful than most and we’ve had these discussions over the phone from time to time. He’s sincere in his beliefs and sincere in how he interacts.
  3. That is the conservative viewpoint entirely. Attacking them for hypocrisy is useless as there is no such thing. Anyone can practice their specific evangelical Christian patriarchy, and that's all the freedom they want.
  4. That seems to be his view… as long as it is a Christian doctrine (that he agrees with).
  5. Yeah, that's basically the point I was making. I just think such wording is confusing because they themselves don't recognize the importance of dividing the personal sacred and the public mundane, which is the heart of secularism. But ironically, in their struggle, they became even more profane and materialistic than most secular folk. It was all for nothing, and deep down, they know it. And that's part of why they rage.
  6. Up to episode four but got so annoyed by the sheer stupidity of everything about that raid I will pause my viewing for awhile. I'm still sufficiently interested in seeing where the story goes to pick it up again later, I think. Some occasional silliness aside, my only real gripe up until now has been how unconvincing many of the actors are. From the main cast only Jess Hong and Rosalind Chao are good. The rest of the Oxford Five - I can't even be bothered to look up their names - range from forgettable (Saul) to poor (Will, Auggie) to joke (Rooney). Then again, these are all cardboard characters, and this clearly isn't a character-driven show, so maybe it shouldn't matter that much.
  7. Taught in all public schools no less if the teacher believes in it. Ya know, bring prayer back!
  8. It’s substitutionary attonment writ large. I dislike “substitutionary attonement”
  9. I thought he would be more likely to see my point if a law was passed restricting religious practice generally.
  10. Zorral

    Board Issues 4

    Same here -- all good again.
  11. Today
  12. The ancient, volatile Christian ideas behind Trump’s obsession with blood - the persistence of blood as metaphor from medieval times to the present https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/art/2024/03/29/trump-blood-medieval-getty/
  13. Hum, why didn't you just take the cheap route of asking him whether he was in favour of Sharia law, too. If you argue about rle of religion in laws, you might as well invoke the sharia.
  14. I continue to argue with a friend and fraternity Brother who appears to believe there is nothing wrong with using religious justifications for statutes passed on the State or Federal level. He doesn’t see how a law using Christian justifications for its restrictions and criminal sanctions is a violation of non-Christians “Free Exercise” rights. I’m trying a different tact. I’m asking him if he would object to an atheist legislator proposing to redefine child abuse to include religious education of people under the age of 18. He hasn’t responded yet.
  15. Yeah, Christianity was more fun when, they cried out to a horsey named anna.
  16. I would argue that Christian leadership has grown more secular in my lifetime. At the very least, they seem more concerned with worldly rewards and goals than spiritual ones.
  17. For some reason I can't use the edit feature, so I am doing it via this comment. My use of "secular" was inaccurate and likely to be confusing.
  18. Jon Snow will be brought back to some twisted form of life by the white walkers. Twisted in mind because of his single minded thoughts of Arya. I don't think any of the house of the north will support Jon. His support will mainly come from the wights and the white walkers because he will become one of them. That will grant him an army of the undead which will be hard to stop.
  19. It seems that is indeed the structure of the series of novels. Bran is the prince of darkness who will bring misery and suffering to the people while Dany brings back the light and the hope.
  20. The decline and degradation of the Christian right is something I've been trying to understand for most of my life. A few years ago I watched the 1977 miniseries How Should We Then Live?, which was like the fundamentalist answer to Carl Sagan's Cosmos. (it was also a book that I saw on my parents' book shelf and always wondered about as a kid, due to its somewhat standout title). To be fair to Schaeffer, he was much more thoughtful than other right wingers of his time. He outlined various problems of modernity well enough. And unlike so many movement leaders today, clearly denounced slavery as early America's greatest moral failing. But throughout it all, there was a terrible limitation to his reasoning: a complete absence of self-critique. Any failing he condemns among Christians of the past is framed as them not acting as "true" Christians. Which can sound righteous from time to time, but doesn't explain why or how his view is more authentically Christian than theirs. He just insists that he is right and they were wrong, and they weren't true Christians. Over the course of the series, Schaeffer's uncritical approach allows him to present the problem of modernity as rather simple: communities lost their connection to the word of God, and they were led astray by secular humanism. He never grapples with the problems of doubt or uncertainty that Kierkegaard outlined more than a century before. And he never turns his critique inward, to include well meaning fundamentalist Christians, to explore any possible ways that they might have gone astray in their reactions to the modern world. Even back then, Schaeffer laments that young people are going to church less and less. He of course blames this on the temptations of the ungodly secular world. He never once asks church ministers to look inward and wonder if they need to do something different to win back the hearts of younger generations. And it's not like no adaptation was going on among fundamentalists around this time. The late 70s was when the Contemporary Christian pop culture machine was just getting started. We would see a huge evolution in outreach, with an increasing willingness to embrace the styles of secular pop culture, without adopting the message to something more humane. Anyway, I found that Schaeffer's series unwittingly summed up so much of what was wrong with right wing Christianity ever since the birth of fundamentalism. Of course, as one of the more thoughtful fundamentalists, Schaeffer quickly grew disgusted with the cavalier commercialism and rank partisanship of Christian leadership in Reagan's Moral Majority. So he faded into the background, while ever uglier figures vied for power and influence. Nowadays, right wing Christianity looks more secular, materialistic, and nastier than ever. It hardly even pretends to care about scripture, so great is the role of secular grievance politics. But despite how much they've mutated, they still refuse to give others an inch on any disagreements, to look inward, or to learn from their mistakes. And so it goes.
  21. GRRM will repeat the cycle and Euron will dominate the south in westeros. His rule will end when Daenerys and her dragons come to Westeros. Euron will kill many people before that happens though. I am thinking poor Aegon and Arianne will be among the casualties of the Iron born invasion.
  22. The symbolism goes deeper. If we take the direwolves for example. They are pack animals and we see that nature in the Starks. It is the Starks' pack nature which will bring the darkest tragedies to Westeros. Arya and Jon will no longer have the ability to discern right from wrong. They will start a campaign of revenge and seek to murder entire families as they lose the ability to separate the guilty from the innocent.
  23. Man, if there was one team I thought was playing worse defense than UK going into the tourney... it was Alabama.
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