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Posted
On 4/29/2023 at 9:31 AM, Patricio Swayze said:

Chrispy is too dumb for words.

If you get offended by your religion, a faith, is referred to as a fairytale, YOU are the snowflake.

Here is the funny part:

Everyone of us in this thread, from the believers, to the agnostics and atheists want you to be able to practice your faith. What we don’t want is your faith dictating laws that affect people’s lives. How fucking dumb do you have to be to not get that through your thick skull?

This is the side of the fence I am on. Believe in whatever you want to believe, but do not bring those beliefs into places where the laws of the land are written. Live and let live and treat people with respect and kindness. 

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Posted
4 hours ago, Pancho said:

 

So, nothing about eradicating health care access disparities in Texas? How about making sure it’s safe for Tarrant county teens to sleep in their beds at night without being shot in their heads? Does he even know Tarrant County is the road rage capital of Texas? 

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Posted
4 minutes ago, Satchel said:

So, nothing about eradicating health care access disparities in Texas? How about making sure it’s safe for Tarrant county teens to sleep in their beds at night without being shot in their heads? Does he even know Tarrant County is the road rage capital of Texas? 

That video was cringe-worthy, but more importantly it showcased what hate sounds like while invoking God’s name into the equation. When you meet people like that who espouse the things that absolute cretin said just walk away and realize you just dealt with a hateful religious zealot, because make no mistake, that video was pure hatred for your fellow human beings.

Posted
On 4/29/2023 at 8:26 PM, Pods said:

Jane Goodall is a wonderful anthropologist and her work is foundational for a lot of current primate studies. You can cite her for almost anything chimp related, but she bonded with the chimps in Gombe. She helped us see that chimps are far more complex than we'd thought, but had/has a really hard time seeing them for the violent, shitty creatures they actually are. It's a huge blind spot for her when it comes to aggression and violence. 

Among other things, Goodall was resistant to the idea that chimps routinely hunt smaller animals and eat the meat they kill all the way to the end of the 1990s, when the evidence became utterly overwhelming. In the mid-70's, she observed a war now called the Gombe War between a chimp troop that had splintered into 2 groups. The chimps had all known each other and gotten along before the split, but the split left one group with very few females, so they systematically killed every male in the other group and forcibly kidnapped the females. This included at least one instance where the chimps killed an older chimp that had previously been friendly with and mentored the younger ones. Barbaric shit. She had spent almost a decade watching this troop and was convinced they were peaceful, so she was not comfortable with the implications, which is certainly understandable. Most of what Goodall has said about the Gombe War has come out in the 2000's, after other evidence clearly showed chimp on chimp hyper violence is common. 

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/a-brief-history-of-the-gombe-chimpanzee-war

Every modern anthropologist I've met that works on chimps is respectfully afraid of them. Chimps are hyper-violent, malevolent, manipulative and flip aggression on a dime. Chimps can go years knowing people, or an other chimp, then suddenly attack, ripping the victim's lips, ears, nose, other skin on the face, hands, feet, and/or genitals off. 

Evil is a human construct, so we can't test for it. Hate is really hard to test for, so it's really hard to say conclusively that chimps experience either one.

That said, we know that chimps form groups to seek out and hunt other chimps (usually an individual separated from their own group) intending to kill them. We know they have wars and raiding parties, where they capture females and kill all the males. They celebrate the kill afterwards hooting, shaking branches and desecrating the corpse. We know that they sometimes cannibalize each other, something that is nearly universally considered evil in humans. In the Nat Geo example below, the former alpha was displaced. He remained on the periphery of their group for several years. When he tried to return, the other male chimps killed him, desecrated his corpse and ate part of it. Murder and cannibalism are usually things we associate in humans with hate and evil. Desecration of corpses is usually associated with hate between groups, or at a minimum, significant animosity. 

Paleontologists have a principle we call Extant Phylogenetic bracketing. In a nutshell it says if the living relatives of a group all have the same traits, you can assume that the common ancestor of those groups did as well. This strongly implies that the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans was a hyper-violent animal that attacked things it considered "other", killed the males and kidnapped the females. We both inherited these traits from a common ancestor. 

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/chimpanzees-murder-cannibalism-senegal

 There is also recent evidence of at least 2 unprovoked chimpanzee group attacks on smaller troops of gorillas. Both ended with the chimps isolating and then beating a baby gorilla to death. 

https://www.livescience.com/chimpanzees-kill-gorillas-first-ever.html

Robert Sepolsky has done some fascinating work on the subject. He was looking at stress and hormonal responses of a troop in the wild. The troop he was watching had high levels of intra-troop violence for years where the hierarchy was clearly enforced by casual brutality. The hormonal data he collected showed that it's beneficial for the aggressive and competitive ones under normal conditions. The aggressive members had lower stress hormones and health complications. 

After years of him observing them, a virus swept through and nearly wiped out the troop. The individualistic, violent and competitive chimps died off at a much higher rate, while the ones that had previously been observed to be more cooperative with the others lived much more frequently. When the members of that group fell sick, the other cooperative chimps helped them. They ignored the asshole chimps and let them fend for themselves. Following this event, the chimps that had cooperated and survived the disease were the dominant group and began to enforce cooperation rather than competition. From then on, if a new chimp tried to join the troop, they would only accept ones who cooperated and cooperatively drove off the competitive and violent ones. 

FYI, Sepolsky has some awesome videos on Youtube. He puts up lectures from his classes at Stanford. 

I've mostly focused on violence and this is a long post already so I won't go into empathy too much, but it's very important too, though likely less common. Given the extant data, it's conclusive that the typical common ancestor of humans and chimps was hyper-violent, but there were still members of the species that had empathy that some of us have also inherited. That combination of many hyper violent individuals and some empathetic ones is likely key to our evolutionary success. 

 

Elephants also do similar, along with a few other species. It's hard to say why, but some things like the last possibility can be eliminated. Biological instinct and natural selection should drive them to avoid the dead, because whatever killed it is likely still nearby. That's the response of the vast majority of animal species on Earth. Something is overriding that, but it's impossible to test what unfortunately. Studies of corvids (crows, ravens and jays) show they are very intelligent. It's certainly plausible that they are marking the deceased crows passing in some way that is meaningful to them.

An aside before I end. There's an awesome study on crow intelligence and how they teach the next generation. Researchers had people wear masks and interact with crows on the University of Washington campus. The initial study had a person wearing the "caveman" mask be mean to them. A person wearing a Dick Cheney mask ignored the crows. The crows started to scold the caveman mask no matter who wore it. They also taught this behavior to hatchlings and to other crows who had not interacted with the mask themselves. The researchers stopped wearing the mask for 2 years. When the caveman mask reappeared, considerably more crows scolded it than had before. The researchers mixed in some other masks and got the same results. Crows remember, they carry grudges and they teach those grudges to other crows. 

My own take on all the above is that animals are FAR more complex, and similar to us, than we had previously thought, it's just really damn hard to test it. Humans often act like our common ancestor with chimps would have, by being violent, but both chimps and humans have the choice to chose to be better. Violence has likely played a key role in the evolution of both chimps and humans and was likely selected for pretty heavily by natural selection, but is now counter-productive for humanity as a whole. Hopefully we get better at recognizing empathy and selecting leaders that embody it. 

 

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Posted
16 hours ago, UpperWestside said:

That video was cringe-worthy, but more importantly it showcased what hate sounds like while invoking God’s name into the equation. When you meet people like that who espouse the things that absolute cretin said just walk away and realize you just dealt with a hateful religious zealot, because make no mistake, that video was pure hatred for your fellow human beings.

The worst part about people like that is that they believe they're supposed to be like that. They believe that to their core. True believers.

They reframe the arguments in such a way that they're the heroes. They're the ones with the knowledge and the truth and they're gonna fix us all with their righteousness... Because they think they're actually saving us from ourselves.

Mutilating surgeries? Banning sexually explicit materials? They believe they're right so much that they take those arguments to almost unrecognizable places so they can exist in their heads as love.

Pieces of shit want us all to be saved

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Posted
20 hours ago, UpperWestside said:

That video was cringe-worthy, but more importantly it showcased what hate sounds like while invoking God’s name into the equation. When you meet people like that who espouse the things that absolute cretin said just walk away and realize you just dealt with a hateful religious zealot, because make no mistake, that video was pure hatred for your fellow human beings.

"I prefer to die with a bottle of wine, without the comforts of religion."

- Ray Wylie Hubbard

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Posted
46 minutes ago, Stilicho said:

"I prefer to die with a bottle of wine, without the comforts of religion."

- Ray Wylie Hubbard

That's nothing, when she was a kid....she danced with the dead at the pyramids.

Posted (edited)

Turnabout is fair play.

Which is why one should always shop around and vet the best school for your child based on the family value system you have installed and by which you run your house.

Edited by HamsterHookah
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Posted

the tenets of The Satan Club sound awesome and 100% kinder, more empathetic, and respectful of my fellow humans than Christianity. hope all the kids join. 

 

also...Hamster once said he'd be most comfortable sending his kid(s) to Baylor, so i'd take his opinion on how to select a school with a canister of salt.  #hopehedidntmeanhisdaughter

 

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Posted
please just neg him into Bolivia so we can have a respite until his next stupid username

He thinks he is an alpha, but in reality he is the ultimate beta. The very definition of a snowflake.
Posted

i have a friend who is the lead pastor at a methodist church in Oregon.

she was a pastor in Austin for over ten years. i guess at some point there was a big rift in the methodist church? primarily over lgbtq issues. she became so disillusioned and disappointed in the Texas methodist church organization that she quit (her husband quit his job too) and moved her entire family first to Washington, then to Oregon. 

she is a devout Christian. her church does so much wonderful work - feeding and clothing the homeless, building actual tiny homes for them, work supporting lgbtq youth, engagement in the arts... she is just so full of love and acceptance of her fellow humans. she's on social media, as a pastor, a representative of her church, and has no hesitation sharing both her righteous anger/heartbreak over all the hatred (politics, guns, women's health, etc.) and especially anti-lgbtq agendas, as well as so much positivity and warmness towards everyone in her community. 

after she shared something particularly moving a few months ago, i DMed her to tell her that although i myself had become a rather 'detached' christian (for all the reasons in this thread and then some), that i found her inspiring and a true beacon for Christ - that she is what Jesus hoped mankind could/should aspire to.

i made her cry. i felt it was important for her to know that yes, even someone like me, could 'see' her works and that they exemplified her faith.

not sure why i'm sharing that story, other than the words of Rep. Talarico above resonated deeply in the same way. 

there really are genuine good ones out there. 

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Posted
On 5/1/2023 at 9:47 AM, Brisketexan said:


Huh. I didn’t read it that way (and yes, I’m aware that there’s baggage here being that it’s a Catholic institution). And to be clear, I am firmly in the camp of “weaponized religion is a huge evil and a problem that may actually destroy us.”
But I’m also a parent of children of two genders, and I’ve seen firsthand how our educational system does not really gear itself for common differences in how the two dominant genders process information and learn. Our educational systems and approaches (every one sit still with your bright and shiny faces and learn!) are failing our boys.
Boys and girls - and yes, we’re speaking in generalities - learn and process information differently. I think we’d be much better off if our educational institutions took that into account.

It’s not anti-LGBTQ, or even anti- any gender, to acknowledge that reality and be thoughtful about how we educate people.

Sorry for the threadjack, it’s just a topic that rouses some strong feelings and experiences in my family.

UD is not only Catholic, but is becoming quite a hotbed of Integralism, see, e.g. Gladden Pappin.  I'm not sure any of that is an expression of it, but UD is an institution of which to be wary at this juncture, when it was previously pretty solid.

Posted
18 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

UD is not only Catholic, but is becoming quite a hotbed of Integralism, see, e.g. Gladden Pappin.  I'm not sure any of that is an expression of it, but UD is an institution of which to be wary at this juncture, when it was previously pretty solid.

It was always very conservative, even during the Cowans years, although it enjoyed a stellar liberal arts reputation.

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Posted

https://www.kvue.com/article/news/politics/texas-religion-politics-schools-commandments-republicans-abbott/273-d3039d88-24dc-48cd-b3db-121e76f4eed6

“We think there can be a restoration of faith in America, and we think getting Ten Commandments on these walls is a great way to do that,” former state Rep. Matt Krause testified last month. “We think we can really set a trend for the rest of the country.”

 

It's the latest battle in what Barton and other Christian leaders have framed as a long-running and existential war with the secular world, rhetoric that has helped fuel Republican movements to crack down on LGBTQ rights, ban books, push back against gun control and limit the teaching of American history in classrooms, among other oft-framed "culture war" issues.

Posted

Essay from evangelical pastor on his "walkaway" from the GOP and conservatism. Interesting to hear from someone who spent 30 years supporting all things GOP

https://kevinyoung.substack.com/p/i-voted-for-trump

 

Quote

I was raised Republican, indoctrinated into the Grand Ol’ Party from a young age, and baptized into the waters of latent McCarthyism. I sipped at the fountain of Pro-Life Rallies and Reaganomics.

One of my earliest memories was joining my grandfather in a voting booth so he could teach me how to vote “straight ticket.” It was a decade before I would be of legal voting age, but he wanted to be sure I was ready.

Red, of course.

Was there any other color?

I bled red.

We bled red.

Why?

Well, because God bled red …or so I was told.

And I bought it.

Why wouldn’t I?

Every influential voice in my life reinforced the narrative that conservative Republicans were the party of God, doing his work in this world. With one voice, pastors, parents, grandparents, and fellow parishioners regularly reminded me that a Christian could only vote for one party and be a follower of Christ. No exceptions.

Thus the wall was built—one row at a time—as each person I respected and trusted laid their brick upon the mortar of my impressionable mind.

“Democrats are evil.” … another brick laid.

“Christians are Republican.” … another brick laid.

“Jesus was Conservative.” … another brick.

Every sermon.

Every Bible study.

Every conversation inside the Christian bubble.

Bible College. Seminary. The Pastorate. Row after row of bricks.

Year after year.

Decade after decade.

Quote

So to be clear: In the 2016 Presidential Election, I cast my vote for Donald J. Trump in both the Primary and General Election.

Proudly.

I did my best to support and defend Trump in the years that followed, but my conservatism was increasingly at odds with how Jesus treated marginalized communities… and it was increasingly at odds with Trump’s bombastic behavior.

Compassionate Conservatism was out, having been replaced by a more caustic brand of conservatism within the Republican Party.

As COVID took hold in 2020, I didn’t recognize my Christian and Conservative brother and sisters. Their callous response to the health of others shocked me. All told, I lost 19 people to COVID. All of them would be alive had Conservatives and Christians practiced “Love Thy Neighbor.”

Though I could not see it at the time, the wall that had taken a lifetime to erect was dangerously close to collapse.

 

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Posted
On 5/10/2023 at 2:22 PM, Foosters said:

Essay from evangelical pastor on his "walkaway" from the GOP and conservatism. Interesting to hear from someone who spent 30 years supporting all things GOP

https://kevinyoung.substack.com/p/i-voted-for-trump

 

 

Quote

So to be clear: In the 2016 Presidential Election, I cast my vote for Donald J. Trump in both the Primary and General Election.

Proudly.

I did my best to support and defend Trump in the years that followed, but my conservatism was increasingly at odds with how Jesus treated marginalized communities… and it was increasingly at odds with Trump’s bombastic behavior.

Compassionate Conservatism was out, having been replaced by a more caustic brand of conservatism within the Republican Party.

As COVID took hold in 2020, I didn’t recognize my Christian and Conservative brother and sisters. Their callous response to the health of others shocked me. All told, I lost 19 people to COVID. All of them would be alive had Conservatives and Christians practiced “Love Thy Neighbor.”

Though I could not see it at the time, the wall that had taken a lifetime to erect was dangerously close to collapse.

Maybe this guy saw the light but it wouldn't take much for a guy like him to jump back to the GOP. Either a GOP candidate will be someone a bit less egotistical than Trump or this pastor will hate the Dem candidate for any one of 10 reasons. His justification would come swift.

He PROUDLY voted for Trump in 2016 after it had recently come out how Trump grabbed women by the pussy? In a recording! He proudly voted for Trump when Trump bragged how bad he was going to treat immigrants, all Catholic/Christian, who were just seeking a better life.

This pastor can only recognize evil when faced with a global pandemic? It took that much?

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Posted (edited)

Houston Pastor Ed Young calls Biden 'godless' in anti-immigration sermon

Quote

On Sunday morning, Pastor Ed Young once again appeared to lead a political gathering under the guise of a religious service at Houston's Second Baptist Church, receiving applause from congregants while blasting President Joe Biden as "godless" for supposedly allowing "countless millions" of migrants into the United States and for declaring Easter to now be Transgender Day of Visibility.

During Young's message, delivered hours after Israel faced attacks from Iran, the 87-year-old Southern Baptist told his predominantly white, conservative-leaning congregation that they're "in the most critical moment perhaps ever in the history" of the U.S. "Our godless president and his entourage has led in countless millions into our land without having an idea of who they are, where they come from," Young said. "Except we know that thousands and thousands come from countries that are determined to destroy us in any way shape that they can use."

The pastor then suggested that Iran refers to Israel as "little Satan" and the U.S. as "big Satan" and said Iran would attack Americans if possible. "How many cells are all across our land?" Young asked. "Nobody knows because we have an administration who has turned their back on the security of their land with the idea that we want to keep power at any price, at any cost, therefore we'll change the whole demographics of America whatever it cost in human life."

Standing on stage at his megachurch, Young parroted rhetoric from the Trump campaign and other Republican politicians in claiming that Biden had "blasphemed" and "attacked" Christianity for issuing a "proclamation" celebrating transgender people on Easter (Transgender Day of Visibility has been recognized on March 31 since 2009, and the date just happened to coincide with this year’s Easter Sunday.) Young told an applauding crowd that he would pray for "those in the middle of dysphoria who think they have to make a decision as to whether I'm a male or whether I'm a female—which is contrary to everything scientifically, biologically, or according to God's creative order of creating male and female."

Young also criticized medical professionals for having "bought into this godlessness" of gender affirmation surgery. "By presidential proclamation, Joseph Biden selected this past Easter as a time in which there is a coming out of—whatever that means—and I guess honoring and affirming those who feel like God made a tragic mistake when they were brought into this earth as male or as female," Young said. "I've never known a more godless attack on Christianity by the president of the United States in all the history of our land."

Young's anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric has been typical at Second Baptist Church services in recent months. During a February sermon, the pastor referred to people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border as "undesirable," "garbage" and "raff" as he added that America "is lost through foolishness." A few weeks later, Indivisible Houston, a nonpartisan progressive organization, called for Young's resignation while projecting the message "Jesus was a migrant" on the grounds of Second Baptist Church's Woodway campus.

Despite the backlash, Young, the former SBC president whose been leading the local church since 1978, continues to reign as one of the most popular and influential religious figures in Texas. His congregation of about 18,000 members includes Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who earlier this week joined Young for an on-site luncheon organized by the American Renewal Project, a group recruiting and training conservative pastors to run for political office.

"Today, it is a battle of darkness and light," Patrick said at the private meeting. "There are people who pray to God, believe in God, raise their families in God's work and there are people over here who don’t believe in God and want to kick God out. They hate God. That’s the battle we're in."

 

https://www.chron.com/culture/religion/article/ed-young-biden-godless-19402656.php

 

 

Starts at 29:50 if anyone cares to watch, last about 5 mins, he straight up lies saying Biden picked Easter as the day to celebrates transgender and of course talking politics from the pulpit. Isn't this a violation of the Johnson amendment?

Edited by Smax
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Posted
1 hour ago, Smax said:

Houston Pastor Ed Young calls Biden 'godless' in anti-immigration sermon

 

https://www.chron.com/culture/religion/article/ed-young-biden-godless-19402656.php

 

 

Starts at 29:50 if anyone cares to watch, last about 5 mins, he straight up lies saying Biden picked Easter as the day to celebrates transgender and of course talking politics from the pulpit. Isn't this a violation of the Johnson amendment?

I've posted extensively on this topic over the past couple of years, in various threads, because I live in Houstona and I see this shit first hand. He's been violating the laws of the Johnson act and tax exampt status qualifications for a long fucking time, but the last 2-3 years it has been FLAGRANT. No one does shit. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Smax said:

Houston Pastor Ed Young calls Biden 'godless' in anti-immigration sermon

 

https://www.chron.com/culture/religion/article/ed-young-biden-godless-19402656.php

 

 

Starts at 29:50 if anyone cares to watch, last about 5 mins, he straight up lies saying Biden picked Easter as the day to celebrates transgender and of course talking politics from the pulpit. Isn't this a violation of the Johnson amendment?

He left out:

image.png.3e13402c6589d95724773592ebc36c40.png

Posted
1 hour ago, Smax said:

Houston Pastor Ed Young calls Biden 'godless' in anti-immigration sermon

 

https://www.chron.com/culture/religion/article/ed-young-biden-godless-19402656.php

 

 

Starts at 29:50 if anyone cares to watch, last about 5 mins, he straight up lies saying Biden picked Easter as the day to celebrates transgender and of course talking politics from the pulpit. Isn't this a violation of the Johnson amendment?

Any member of this charlatan's "church" is most likely a MAGAt anyway. They've heard way worse bullshit. 

But fuck him and his congregation.

Posted
15 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

Any member of this charlatan's "church" is most likely a MAGAt anyway. They've heard way worse bullshit. 

But fuck him and his congregation.

Well, you're not familar with Houston, I take it. It's the second biggest church in Houston, behind only Lakewood, w/ over 25k or so members. At least two very massive campuses. And one very massive private school complex in the heart of Tanglewood in Houston, which is a very expensive neighborhood. 

It's not that they have heard worse, it's how many people we're talking about and the sway they hold. 

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