Christians make a distinction between churches and the church. The former is the physical building or even denominations like Lutherans or Roman Catholics. The latter is the group of people that are part of Christianity, across time and denominations. The Universal Church refers to the latter.
Galatians 1:2 "…the churches of Galatia…" vs Colossians 1:24 "…for the sake of his body, that is, the church…"
Your interpretation is correct - every single one of us was redeemed at the Cross. Essentially, Jesus came here to correct a kind of mistake.
God laid down laws and then people laid down further laws and eventually all the people, even those living by the law, were guilty of having committed sin - breaking the established laws of God and that crime meant their souls would be claimed by Satan, as being people "of the world" - but mostly the sins we committed we were led to commit. Most of humanity was guilty of only ignorance "Forgive them Father, for they kno not what they do" and yet by the terms of the law, the ignorant were also guilty of sin and all souls with sin would be redeemed by the one to whom God granted authority here...
So, Satan thought he won bc he beat God on a technicality, by confusing us so that even if we follow the law, we will not be saved by it, as it it not the true law. So, God choose option C and forgave all the sins - all of them, no picking and choosing and left in their place only one law, so that it couldn't easily be perverted as the previous teachings, as ALL PREVIOUS TEACHINGS had been. As Christianity has now. This act of God required his son, someone closer to him than us or angels, to die bc of sin but without cause as he had none.
CS Lewis does a fine job with this mythos in the Chronicles of Narnia - the older deeper magic that has authority over all other magics.
The whole thing, the crucification, was a trap set by God so that Satan would kill Jesus - to save us all from being Satan's property and it worked, we were/are saved, rn - it's already done and over.
Now we just have come home and it doesn't matter how bad we are - the prodigal son speaks to those of us with such concerns.
God, Jesus and anyone claiming to follow them ought to universally love everyone and anyone by default and without reason, expectations or cause - without exception and without judgement.
Some we see that weak and take advantage - let them do so, help even - turn the other cheek. As Mother Theresa said so eloquently, " Helping hurts - help anyway" - that is our calling.
To me God is like the Watsky song Sloppy Seconds - he'll take us regardless of anything we've done and he will love us as fucked up as we are at our worse amd loves us no more when we are at our best bc his love is without conditions.
That is the story of the crucification and how one man, preaching universal love, executed for that at the age of 33, is still spoken of 2500 years later.
We owe him for that - he expects nothing in return from us. All he wants is that we do what we know we ought to, that we not do what we kno we shouldn't or what we hate to do and to love each other as we love ourselves.
That sounds like a light yoke to me - these other people speaking for him rn, they all have such a heavy yoke of rules and morals and ethics and tradition and that's all wrong.
Then why can’t I wear my tie dye shirt at most churches?
I’ve completely fallen out of the church and Christianity. I do believe in a force that exists and acts and behaves as we described God as I grew up, which is in us and all things and all around us throughout all of creation, but I do not believe that that is God. I just call that the Universe now.
Wastky concerts are more my church than anywhere else in the world. I feel connected and holy in his crowds. I wear my clothes until they’re threadbare because of that song.
When I analyze my life now, I recognize it as what Jesus commanded us to do, but none none none of what I have motivated myself to do has been motivated by Christianity or God‘s calling.
Watsky broke me free from the Christian church, but he shaped my behavior to be more Christian than it ever would’ve been then when I was in and a part of Christianity and taking my teachings from the Bible.
Survival of the fittest is just the circumstances we find ourselves in. Our strategy to survive is cooperation. Human are amazing at cooperation, second only to eusocial insects. Fairness is an important mechanism in organizing this cooperation.
"Might makes right" will also force cooperation from those who are less fortunate. I'd argue there was almost never "fairness" in human relationships, from stronger warriors getting the best food to kings forcing their will upon their subjects to filthy rich individuals owning the greatest part of the world wealth today.
My point is in no way that this is right. Only that humans are not intrinsically fair.
I've been using this for 1 or 2 years and it makes my life so much easier... I don't understand why Firefox doesn't make this and Multi-account containers an integral part of the browser.
Been using it for years and watching others’ machines for how tracked they are across the web is terrifying. Even things as basic as being on clothingshop.com and then seeing ads for said shop on someotherdomain.com, which I understand is totally normal, has become jarring for me. I recommend everyone installs it. Yes, you have to click more cookie banners, and I still say no, but mind less when I cave and say yes because what they’ll learn is so limited. My temporary containers have a persistent auto increment so after a few years it’s (semi-) interesting to see that I’m on my ~20,000th temporary container
It is my understanding that the name "cookie banner" is misleading, to the point of acting against your own interests.
If you click Agree you agree to be tracked regardless of the method. So yes, cookies won't do much, but now you've agreed to any kind of tracking, even those that defeat private mode and/or script blockers (assuming there's one).
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...
That's maybe part of a more general "perceived inability of some Muslims to handle polemics against their religion with grace" (from the article). Searching for "bobblehead Jesus" vs "bobblehead Mohammed" on Amazon is a good example of that.
That seems to imply those billions of people religious are not rational, down to earth.
Theism in itself is a simpler explanation for existence than atheism, and yet many rational people are atheists. Is it because they weighted all the possibilities or because they discarded the option a priori?
We are all way less rational than we would like to believe.
I would argue that theism is not just a simpler explanation but a more naive one.
We could also explain computers as magic and it would be simpler than explaining it with electricity and math.
No religions are based in any observable facts* and thus being naive explanations, indistinguishable from magic.
* More like they are based on deprecated observable facts, at first the sun and nature, later man and it's dramas.
Now we now the sun is just a big ball of gas and man is just a big brained mammal.
That being said religion is just one area of many and you could be very rational in lots of them but be religious for whatever reason.
IMHO a voluntary reduction in human population by a few billion through reduced birth is a perfectly viable, sustainable long-term strategy; all the drawbacks and criticisms appear when someone wants to encourage that with various means (i.e. not fully voluntarily) or when it's posed as some solution to things which need a faster reduction than possible this way, e.g. climate change won't be prevented even if we went totally zero-birth for a decade but the current population kept the current emission rates.
It doesn't even have to be voluntarily in the sense of "making a decision to". More like voluntary in the sense of "have no specific need to".
In the most developed countries, children are now more of a burden than a gain, which is why women are having fewer of them every generation.
Not only because they're expensive, but because they are often born unhealthy (physically, mentally, or both) and are a large, often unrecoverable blow to most careers.
Since we don't need children to work on the farm or to let us move in with them when we're old (er, less than previous generations, anyway), it becomes purely a "nice-to-have" decision.
And then if somebody does voluntarily have children, they don't have much of a leg to stand on when lecturing others about their impact on climate change.
I get your point and am on neither side of the fence here, since I do not think, we should rely on individual action at all.
I just want to add to the conversation, that somehow your reasoning strikes me as a bit selfish. It is of course true, what you are writing. Still reading it, makes me sad. I am missing some higher meaning. Who cares about a career in the end? A career in our system is just a story of someone, who exceeded at providing value. But for whom, if you do not have kids?
I am missing a bit of Kant in there. A little bit of "You get one (life), you give one back." We (including you) just cannot all do it like that, if we do not want to end our lives rather uncomfortably. So again something about ultimate maximes and what they should be.
What's selfish about not having children? To whom or to what do I owe bringing a child into the world?
It's more likely the opposite: a lot of people would agree that their parents' decision to have children, particularly at a time when they couldn't afford them or lacked the mental strength to care for them and raise them in psychological safety, was selfish.
You have misunderstood: I'm not suggesting childfree people are better than people who have children.
I'm suggesting childfree people have a negligible impact on climate change compared to people who have children.
You can bring "moral high ground" into it wherever it seems applicable, but I have not done that. I've said only that it's hypocritical to criticize a person for their climate impact while simultaneously making a thousand or a million times more of a climate impact.
I get where you are coming from, I read all your comments here.
You are making an assumption that children just are a net negative.
As others have mentioned the carbon footprint of a child is miniscule compared to an adult,
They are not driving, flying, owning homes, etc for a while, and many never will.
One of those children could very well be the solution to that, and many other problems.
As for moral high ground you insist that you are better for having made the choice not to have children, as you see their opinions as less than and not worth listening to, as they have had children.
> What's selfish about not having children? To whom or to what do I owe bringing a child into the world?
Since life can just be given to the next generation and you have already gotten yours, it would be logical to return the favor to the next person and give a new life.
I did not say, that it actually is selfish. Maybe it is not. It just came off a bit like that to me, as I read your comments.
> It's more likely the opposite: a lot of people would agree that their parents' decision to have children, particularly at a time when they couldn't afford them or lacked the mental strength to care for them and raise them in psychological safety, was selfish.
Sure. Although most people would surely still choose to live.
I don't owe having children to your children, or to you.
You can have children if you want, but I'm not requiring that of you.
If your children take care of me late in life, it's because they're exchanging their work for money. And the reason they're obligated to exchange their work for money is because that's the economic system into which their parents decided to bring them.
You do not owe anything to anyone here. You just cannot construct a moral high ground based on your childlessness.
It is not moral to not have children. Paraphrasing Kant: An action is moral, if the state improves when everyone does it.
You cannot recommend everyone to not have children, since you depend on them. So why bring it up as an argument in a thread about climate change in the first place?
The argument is hypocritical. It just does not make much sense.
Do you see it as an optimization problem, where others have exactly enough children to care for you at old age, but so few that the climate suffers as little as possible? If so, you are still relying on the children and do not gain any more imaginary rights to pollute than those parents.
It is absolutely incredible that your sensible comment gets down voted, but it says a lot about the diseased state of mind of some of the people commenting and voting here.
The "career" is a great lie and joke. Imagine choosing to exterminate your heritage in order to please short term goals of politicians or company owners who at best see the career worker as a cost center on a spread sheet.
Long term the population is flatlining and dropping and the price of renewable energy with it.
But even if it doesn't and even if we're forced to make hard choices, the hard choice won't be "should I skip my vacation flight?", it'll be "should I skip raising a CO2 machine?".
Well I have another iPhone and it's not much better, it's frequent that app install requests will get lost for hours. And there's no obvious way to go look for pending notifications, you need to wait for it to show up again.
Parenting controls still have a long way to go on Apple devices, but still it's miles ahead of other stuff (looking at you Netflix/Disney Plus).
