• 3 Posts
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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: February 14th, 2025

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  • Jesus basically came in to say: just follow the commandments, love one another, love your enemy as yourself, don’t be greedy and selfish, and you guys don’t have to keep doing those self-imposed rules the Israelites made themselves do like don’t eat pork or shell fish, etc.

    Israelites believed that they were supposed to be purists about everything they do to some degree and saw being a purist as being holy; such as never mixing two different kinds of fabric together or don’t raise your goats with your sheep. Jesus said you don’t need to be a purist about all this unimportant stuff, but be good people.



  • Yes! Thank you for sharing this, the NPVIC is so huge and we are so close to it actually being possible.

    I feel we can make it happen, especially if we continue to get the word out and reach out to our senators and representatives, then we can have momentum for it actually happen as well.


  • I just wooshed the joke there lol.

    RCV is still solid over FPTP ~>85% of the time, I’m just advocating for these other voting systems. Many people have heard of RCV, but maybe not one of these other systems. There isn’t really a universal favorite, but I feel having a dialogue about the alternatives is something we want to clarify before we commit ourselves to one without acknowledging any potential drawbacks.


  • From what I am seeing in a few states is that some establishment Dems push back against it or tore it down, but the progressive Dem groups showed open support of it. I was tracking RCV in Nevada and Arizona specifically and there was not a recommendation to shoot it down, but the main Democratic Party in those states didn’t tell their voters to vote one way or the other from what I saw, only the progressives groups advocated for it though.

    I would believe Colorado Dems shot it down though, as they did the same in a few other states. I think it’s still possible to sway public opinion and pressure certain Dems to be in support of Alternative Voting though. I don’t think there is a consensus to shoot it down 100%, but they shoot it down in instances where they might feel it threatens some of their hand picked Senate seats. If they think it would gain the party as a whole more seats on the state level or even federally I believe they could be convinced to back Alternative Voting.

    On a side note, Ranked Choice specifically is only slightly better than FPTP compared to say Ranked Robin, STAR, or Score voting. I believe we should push for one of these other three alternatives to prevent uncommon instances where the least liked candidate still can win.








    1. How much are you spending on your cards every month???
    2. Why not have more than one card for different things, rather than cancelling cards?
    3. You generally want to very rarely cancel a credit card, I recommend finding one with no annual fees and sticking with it. You can always have more cards after all.
    4. A spending limit doesn’t really mean anything if you payoff your credit early, you can always request that your CC company release your credit early once you pay it off early.






  • I think it’s a misread to say it gave us evil. The garden is portrayed as being a paradise with a tree of knowledge. The man and the women, as they self-identified themselves to be, were both allowed agency to be themselves and be blessed without the burden of knowledge, so long as they did not eat the forbidden fruit. Both the man and the woman independently made the conscious decision to break the rule given to them to not eat the fruit of knowledge. The actual sin was both the man and woman breaking their covenant with God, through the eating of the fruit. My take on this is that story is meant to show that God can help you and will help you, but if you choose to go against his will you have the face the consequences of that decision on your own. However, you can still seek forgiveness for your decisions and even be forgiven, but this doesn’t magically put everything back to the way things were before.

    The story is more or less a cultural device to explain good and evil from the perspective of the early Israelite society. The story itself is rippled throughout the Bible in this way: God gives instructions, the people follow the instructions at first but then grow complacent, bad things happen because people stop following God’s instructions, and then one of the leaders of the tribe of Israel steps in to help get people back on the right path of following God’s instructions.

    I’ll add that functionally Genesis is three serparate creation stories that were pulled into one book. Culturally, the early Israelites borrowed some of the elements of other creation stories of their time seen in other cultures such as the Babylonians. The first creation story is the seven days, the second is what we know as the story Adam and Eve, and the third was the story of the great flood.


  • I don’t think many Christians would actually argue for that first point tbh. It’s not something Biblically portrayed as one of God’s gifts. Free will is portrayed as something that was given conditionally, but taking from the tree of knowledge and specifically eating the fruit of knowledge is known as man’s first sin in the Bible.

    I think it’s a bit of a metaphor for a parent wanting to shield their child from the harshness of reality, but as the sheltered child grows older they often want to know more about the outside world and in doing so become exposed to the cruelty. This was my own experience with religion growing up. A teacher of mine one day sat us down and pleaded the above with our class, as many of us grew to see through the veil of how reality looked.

    In retrospect I think some things about the world make sense to not be told about, depending on one’s age. However, I think other things should never be hidden, have been hidden, or done in other cases.

    Side note: I think the idea of God’s plan is for people to hold love for one another. Lots of people lose sight of what they are called to do and how they are to act though. They’re called to love their neighbor as their self, called to love their enemy, and called to forgive others for their transgressions. I personally think people are called to do good works in conjunction with holding faith, as people are called to act righteously in this life.


  • It definitely does, I tried my best for months, but it didn’t make enough of a difference unfortunately. It does makes sense that so many are struggling. If it was just online problems then that would be one thing, but people are trying to have their basic needs met which further causes problems.

    I think blocking is important, if you’ve responded to their misinformation and they move the goalposts, I would call them out on it and then block them right then. That’s a great question, I haven’t been here long enough to personally, there might not be a cap though since I couldn’t find a reference to one upon my searches.


  • It’s not all one country doing it either, although they are one of the largest players. Intelligence networks and private citizens from multiple countries and backgrounds have bot farms and have bad actors sowing division online. I’ve noticed that IRL is nowhere near as polarizing as online is framed, even with the most staunch people on the extremes that I know.

    What sucks is that all of what some of these bots and bad actors do all day every day is post their same tired points, in different threads and communities. It’s like playing whack-a-mole trying to respond to all of the misinformation. They want to exhaust the people trying to refute them and control the narrative by parroting the same debunked misinformation over and over again. They won’t even defend their points, but move onto some other thing for you to have to debunk.

    I think the answer is to be a poster that sets the message from the start, not get caught in the weeds of their bad faith discussions, and pressing them for a change on failures of their argument rather than just defending your own points. They appear to have a stronger frame of view since they are always on the attack in arguments, flipping the script makes their arguments crumble since they can’t defend them.