They are falling for the lies.

Republicans lie that they are pro-life, but really they are pro-birth. If the babies don’t grow up christian, they are worthless. They don’t care about all life, they care about life that serves them. They view children as disposable and they simply have more to replace those they’ve lost. It’s unacceptable.

Yes, and I answered. You don’t have to be religious to recognize the deadly danger in believing most of what the bible says.

I agree that people don’t need religion to be bad.

But also, the more excuses we remove, the fewer places they have to hide.

Religion is not just aesthetic window dressing. It is often the willful embracing of things that cannot be measured, including deadly falsehoods.

My main issue with religion is that there is no consistent standard.

I first read this story on BBC news, maybe you’ll like that version better: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwylp3nxp5yo

Poor guy losing his job three times over.

Pastors are a lot like chatbots. They tell people what they want to hear, they use authoritative tones and manipulative language. Grifter got a taste of his own medicine, but learned the wrong lesson.

A combination of mental illnesses, maybe, but not necessarily genetic. Conservative parents often have progressive children.

The children do not deserve that. Their parents should be stopped.

The people they are killing will remain dead.

I can’t imagine this horror.

On 19 February, the family arrived at Xinhua Hospital to sign the consent document and run some tests on Mei’s blood. The form described thrombotic microangiopathy as a possible outcome that would require “prompt treatment.” The children’s version—the one with the “book” metaphor—asked Mei herself to check a box marked yes or no. “If you don’t want to write,” it told her, “you can draw a smiley face instead of your name.”

After 3 days, Mei developed a fever, a common reaction to AAVs that was expected to last for a couple days. Qiu swung by as her fever began to wane. He assured Jason and Linda that their daughter’s condition would soon improve.

It was the exact sequence of symptoms that the consent form had warned the family about. But nowhere did the form explicitly indicate that any of this could end in death, nor did that come up during any conversations with Qiu or the other doctors, Jason and Linda say.

Death is always a possibility, especially when it comes to untested procedures. But to leave that possibility off of the consent form? Wildly negligent.

The results are heartbreaking.

“Mom, I want to go home,” she told her mother, before vanishing into the ward.

Within days of their daughter’s death, Jason and Linda moved into a hotel and, later, a new apartment. Locked away in the old apartment was all their furniture and their daughter’s possessions. They also cut off contact with some of their closest friends. “I don’t know how to reply to them, so I pretend not to see their messages,” Linda says. “I am not so brave to face everything.”

They recalled that when Mei’s birthday came around earlier this year, they said nothing to each other, though they both assumed it was on the other’s mind.

“We do not discuss that,” Linda said.

Linda finally told her husband how she had spent that day. While he was at work, she finally returned to the old apartment and sat down on Mei’s bed surrounded by all her things. She had purchased a chocolate cupcake on the way and now picked at it as she imagined that her daughter was still at her side.

By the time she finished telling her story, Jason was welling up. Linda glanced over at him tenderly. “My husband didn’t know this,” she said. “I cannot cry every day, but that day, I think, I can cry in the room.”

😢

Nice. I think many of humanity’s problems could be solved with more effective communication. Some people act like we don’t live in the same world, which makes it very difficult to hold each other accountable for our choices.

Thank you for the pleasant interaction. I hope you also have a nice weekend. 🙂

I am not a parent and I haven’t seen the movie, but it makes sense that our exploitative overlords would want to groom the next generation of victims by normalizing naivety. Thank you for pointing this out. An alarming number of people, parents included, are not so good at thinking critically, and their children often suffer for it.

Quote more than one word:

To day as americans we blindly trust everything we’re exposed too, not because we’re dumb but were inadvertantly trained to.

The rich are conditioning us to accept our abuse. Some of it is inadvertent, though it can be impossible to tell.

Personally, my parents hit me if I did not obey and accept whatever they said. I was physically conditioned to be a delusional narcissist like them. I still did not vote for Trump, but they did. I am trying to apply more critical thinking in my life. It is difficult when my foundation is broken and I had so many bad habits for so many years.

Did my parents intend to abuse their children, or was it inadvertent?

knocking noises that are too ambiguous to know where they specifically come from

Are they rapid? I had a woodpecker carving out a bit of the outside wall of the previous place I lived in.

As others have suggested, it could also be something about the plumbing or HVAC. It might be worthwhile to try to record some of the phenomena, analyze the data, test hypotheses.

Humans are very good at scaring themselves and each other. If these happenings are too disruptive, maybe some kind of home inspector could try to help shed some light on what is going on.

The thing about “paranormal” is that if it existed, it would just be normal. There is no supernatural, the definition of “natural” encompasses our reality.

I wonder if OP is getting a commission for referrals. They posted this to 10 different communities.

Think critically and exercise empathy. Humanize people. Oppose ongoing abuses. Enjoy the lifelong pursuit of knowledge. The truth is a threat to them, which is why they keep spraying lies everywhere.

you can’t ban beliefs

I literally can’t control what people think, correct.

because it’s just a disguise for the morals doing the talking

You got it backwards. We are all morally obliged to align our beliefs with reality because mistakes can cost lives. I don’t have to ban belief. I have to educate whoever is willing to listen to reason. It is in everyone’s best interests for everyone to believe in the reality we share. All our lives depend on it.

People like my father are proudly exercising their right to be wrong, to accept claims with no evidence, and their choices as a direct result of their magical thinking have directly led to abuse. No one should be okay with parents abusing their children because they believe in magic, but it is cheered here in the bible belt. I think people are underestimating how harmful these beliefs are.

But I can’t control those with peanut brains and can’t think for themselves. I’ve tried. It’s worthless. And they’re not worth it.

I was abused because too many people gave up on accountability. I understand it is a frustrating uphill battle, but I think giving up on changing minds is effectively murder-suicide. Division is unsustainable, and the only thing that unites us is truth itself.

I try my best to do what I believe is right, but it is difficult with broken foundations and decades of bad habits forcibly programmed into me. I am still figuring out how I can help more effectively. I have a lot of pain and anger. I am frustrated because every day, there are more victims. It feels like not enough people are doing enough.

I do understand taking a break to recover sanity, and I understand that we can’t change every mind right away. I still think it is one of the most important things every person can do: spread truth and challenge assumptions, call out fallacies, correct mistakes. I feel a bit more strongly about it than most because I know there are victims suffering worse than I have. I see casual, selfish stupidity directly enabling the rise of deadly christofascism, covering genocides, protecting pedophiles, etc. It is difficult for me to avoid a desperate, confrontational tone. Thank you for your patient responses.

I hope more people become aware to the harm that superstition does. I think they would act differently if they realized what is at stake.

That’s pure cynacism.

At worst, it’s slightly hyperbolic. You said it yourself:

The Christian faiths have a very well-defined ideological framework based on a number of canonical texts with established interpretations.

The bible conflicts with itself, which is why interpretation is necessary. Many of those interpretations are in direct conflict. That is not well-defined at all.

To say people fail to live up to these values isn’t particularly shocking. To claim the values don’t exist is ignorant.

The core value of christianity is to do and say whatever your ego wants you to.

It’s aspiration. You set the bar high and try to clear it, knowing it’s a hard thing to do but still believing its worth doing.

Pretending to know things that cannot be known is arrogant narcissism.

Or that public health care isn’t routinely included in modern state functions. To feed the poor? We’ve got everything from SNAP benefits to Food Banks.

I live in the United States. Guess which programs were just defunded by an administration that claims empathy is a sin?

People who dedicate their whole lives to providing aid to their neighbors fucking exist.

I’m glad they do. Unfortunately, some of them choose to repeat baseless, deadly bullshit. We would all be better off if they would stop that. And many believers pray for god to feed people instead of actually taking any steps that would accomplish it.

“The only consistent christian value I can discern” Is the only value you’ve chosen to acknowledge.

It’s the one under all the bullshit. Please stop falling for the bullshit, people are dying for this.

These people are real. They exist. They do shit, in no small part because they believe it is a religious obligation.

The cult created these problems so it could sell us the cure, but the cure is poison, they demand complete submission.

They learned these values from their Christian Parents and their Christian Neighbors and their Christian pastors. And they pass them on to their children, whether or not those kids or their grandkids hold to the spiritual end of the doctrine.

My christian parents hit me if I didn’t want to go to church. They think they’re going to heaven for violently brainwashing my brothers and I.

Stop defending abusive death cults. Everyone is better without superstition.

I like the golden rule, but I have two issues with your response.

First, Jesus did not invent the golden rule. It was around at least 1500 years before his birth.

Second, if someone hands me a bowl of shit that has a handful of cherries scattered throughout it, is it really worth my time to sift through all that shit when I could get fresh cherries from somewhere else? I ate the shitty cherries for years, they nearly killed me.

Many modern believers are trying to pretend that empathy is a sin, an attitude associated with the Trump presidency. An alarming number of people can’t tell the difference between the cherries and the shit. Those who lack critical thinking are easily swayed one way or another by those who want us fighting each other instead of the rich.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/is-empathy-a-sin-some-conservative-christians-argue-it-can-be

Did I say ban?

I advocate for education. All life depends on the truth; therefore, certain falsehoods threaten all life.

As we are living people, it is in our best interests to hold each other accountable for our words and actions, which are driven by our beliefs.

Instead, we currently have adults pretending that bronze age blood magic is real and that’s why we should dehumanize LGBTQIA+ and immigrants.

This is insane, yet the average person has bought the comforting lie that everyone is entitled to believe whatever they want. We should correct this deadly mistake every time we see it.