Jump to content

UpperWestside

Certifiably Surly
  • Posts

    4344
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Reputation

5339 Surly 10%

About UpperWestside

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

  1. I don’t dispute how it sounds. My first interaction was as a teen and I had no idea what was going on. In college I saw it again, but not so much since then due to going to a Baptist church. I will likely never partake in doing it and I’m cool with that. I just leave things be with religious beliefs, practices and customs. What a Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Mormon or even the Baha’i faith (Rainn Wilson was raised in a house with these beliefs and he’s an incredibly nice person. Met him once and he was so accommodating to random fans coming off the street to take pictures with him.) thinks and does is okay by me so long as it does not hurt or infringe on others who do not believe as they do. It’s the infringing on others that irks me and in the US it feels like most of this behavior comes from the Trumpvangelicals.
  2. I think we dismiss stuff out of hand because we do not personally believe it to be true. I attempt to not do this with any religion and treat all the same.
  3. I don’t believe this to be true. I preface this also with having never done this myself when praying. I have mentioned this story before, but I remember a trainer we had on the football team in college. His name was Dwayne and he could barely get words out due to a severe stuttering speech impediment. When he wanted to work with us I had to help him ask our coach because he couldn’t finish the sentence. He had a rough childhood as best I remember. One thing about him that will forever stick with me is sitting in chapel with him. He would pray and his stuttering would go away when he spoke in tongues. He could not speak an entire sentence to save his life, but pray in tongues? That he could do.
  4. If only Phoenix had an aging point guard that can make someone like Booker look valuable. Too bad they never had a guy like that.
  5. Wonderful article about them. I sure wish the Lakers still had Hart on the roster. Thanks for sharing it. Not too often you get a good Knicks team with some fun backstories like that.
  6. The Sixers did almost everything better last night except for the final minute. I get the frustration from Embiid, but just take the loss and move on. Complaining about officials swallowing their whistle in the final minute is not the way to go. Win the next two and make it a best-of-three. Also the Nova Knicks are ridiculously mentally tough. This is the first time in forever that the Knicks have that trait and it’s thanks to the Nova contingent.
  7. You cannot fix this. I think we as humans, especially westerners, think we can fix everything. Sometimes you just cannot fix things. I also loathe the “Christians” who think war there means Jesus is on the way back. I never think along those lines. It’s offensive to me to think Jesus sanctions this stuff and just can’t wait to fly in from the clouds in the middle of a war. Those “Christians” are people I steer real far away from. I hope for the best each day for people and that suffering would cease. You can only control what is in front of you.
  8. I look at history as an almost never ending struggle of humans to subdue other humans not included in their group. That phenomenon plays out all across the world. This one just has more documentation than others. I believe that it was George Carlin that commented on liking individual encounters with people as fun, but once people get in groups is where things inevitably go sideways. Both of these sides had control at various points in history and both were also subjected to foreign rule by more than one empire. Again humans gonna human at the expense of the less powerful. In this case the Palestinians get slaughtered because they do not have the weaponry or organized army ravaging them. It’s why I want them sent to the US to live and flourish. As long as Israel is allowed to murder the population they have no chance to have a normal existence. I’d also add that since the Israeli Jews overwhelmingly want them removed that the onus should be entirely upon them financially to facilitate that move. We all know this won’t happen, but it’s better to think of better days for Palestinians than to see them continually suffer endless war. I will attempt to read at least one of the two books, probably the first one. I read for at least an hour and a half a day so when I can work that book in I will do so because you can never know enough or ever stop learning more about the world you share with others.
  9. I remember going to a therapist during the first year of the pandemic. It was helpful I believe and I would recommend therapy to anyone seeking it out or in need of it. Sometimes though I think having close friends or family there for support can be of equal value. Absent that I would go to a therapist though. I wish we lived in a country, or world for that matter, that put greater emphasis on mental health.
  10. Your understanding that not always fighting means they are cool with each other is off the mark. Nowhere have I said they have always fought. I stated plainly that the origins of this go back three millennia. You look at everything through your western lens and not the lens of the people that have historically had control of their ancestral homeland. The Palestinians want their home back and the heavily armed Israelis are not giving them anything. We’ll both be long gone and this conflict between these two ancient peoples will still be ongoing.
  11. There’s no attempt to stifle any debate. You can go back and forth into perpetuity if you want to. The evidence shown says that we will not see these two groups of people sit down and come to an agreement that stops the violence. The big brother right now is unloading almost everything in the arsenal and the little brother in this scenario will look to get revenge at some point and the violence starts all over again. It is not going to stop and we as westerners think we can just ride in and save the day. We cannot and will not. Mentioning that both of these two peoples share common ancestry is nothing new. That a large part of it went to Egypt and came back to take it several centuries later because “God told them it was their promised land of milk and honey” meant they came back and either slaughtered, ejected or enslaved the locals who were there in the centuries that the Jews were gone. I would imagine that should the US still be here in 3000 years (I know, I know) that there will still be Indigenous people’s ancestors who want their original land back. That’s humans being humans. Palestinians deserve to have their ancestral lands back intact, but there is a greater chance of the Lakers asking me to be their new shooting guard than that happening. I abhor violence and hate to see it in any form against anyone, but here we are. I would rather just take every Palestinian and move them here to have a better life. Human beings as a whole hold bitter grudges and will never stop trying to kill one another as long as at least two of us exist.
×
×
  • Create New...