None of the veterans I know killed any brown kids. The people we shot were generally either shooting at us, or had just set off an IED with a car battery. Most of our interactions with kids involved someone getting in trouble for giving away MREs to the kids that would walk up to the vehicle.
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023
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Women are you doing the same thing for me
When I deconverted, I found it to be really hard to get past the fear. The thing that finally did it for me was the idea that a truly benevolent God wouldn’t have an issue with inquiry, and a malevolent God wasn’t one I wanted to follow. Fear is definitely a factor that keeps people in the church.
There was a time when I thought that the arrival of easy global communication and information would lead to the decline of religion, but I don’t anymore. Christianity may have declined to some extent, but a lot of the people leaving the church(s) have just replaced it with vague spirituality, homebrew beliefs, or other looser faiths.
These days I’m much more inclined to take seriously the idea that supernatural belief is instinctual. Materialist atheism will, unfortunately, probably remain a fringe belief.
Many religious people do argue that there is an instinct toward religious belief - the “God shaped hole”, if you’ve heard the expression. There are stories of people feeling an intense sense that there must be some higher power, or something more than their daily life, although obviously they won’t fixate on Christianity without prior exposure.
I doubt that a potential future reward is going to allow a person to hold up under torture in the now. I think some Christians probably refuse to recant under torture because their sense of self is rooted in their religion, rather than because they expect a reward. Of course, paradise is part of those religious beliefs, so it’s hard to tell.
Religious people have been tortured horribly and killed for their religion while refusing to recant their beliefs, and religion is very much a choice. I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that this argument isn’t great.
Do not apologize for summarizing lots of information into a shorter form for those of us with only a little context. It’s a valuable service. Thanks.
This man was such a good actor, and this character was perfect.
My favorite part of 300 is the bit they didn’t include - how Sparta eventually became a second-rate tourist destination where middle class families could go watch Spartans do local ceremonies and parade in their armor.
A munch is a non-sexual social gathering of kinky people with food.
My body is a temple.
The boring kind that looks like a used car lot, not the cool kind that gets explored by Lara Croft.
Allow me to rebut: the universe is only 6000 years old. Checkmate.
Unclean doesn’t always mean “dirty”. A lot of things that are considered unclean by different religions are considered so because they’re spiritually unclean, rather than literally filthy. Historical riligious objections to pork are probably because of human-transmissible parasites and disease like trichinosis, which aren’t as much of a concern anymore.
They actually don’t. I’ve raised pigs, and they keep themselves clean- they pick one corner of the pen to shit in and a different corner to sleep and eat in, given the opportunity. The idea that they shit where they eat is probably (dunno for sure) because they clean themselves by taking dust baths, and when it rains, the wallow turns into mud. They roll in the mud to stay cool when it’s hot sometimes, but it isn’t shit.
We had a pig when I was a kid who could work the lock on her pen and escape into the fields next door to eat grass. They’re pretty smart.
No one I fought with was helping kill brown kids either. You could argue that we were indirectly helping, since we were fighting for a country that was also sometimes bombing areas with civilians. If that’s how you would like to approach this, then everyone helped.
If you’ve worked in retail then you’ve sold goods to soldiers, if you work in agriculture then you’ve fed them, and if you’re a teacher then you educated them. Some small fraction of those soldiers went on to bomb kids somewhere.
If you want to criticize the US policy of invading other countries on a pretext and then propping up governments that do what we want, go ahead. I’m right there with you. If you want to live in a fantasy where all soldiers are merciless baby-killers, I guess you can do that, but that’s where we part ways.
Soldiers are individuals, and they sign up for all sorts of reasons. A very common reason is an education that gives them a better shot at a high paying job so that they can care for their family or start one. Is it fucked that people feel the need to do that? Sure. Would it be great if there was a straight forward way for a person with no resources to get an education and a better job? Yes.
But currently, we’re in an environment where risking your life to fight for your country in an unjust war is the best option some people have. And pretending that the reason they do it is because they’re Bad People doesn’t help solve the problem.