arkey

Step 1: Be honest enough to realise that and accept it. That you just did.

Step 2: Surround yourself and your children with people who are like that.

> The statement that Christianity is directly responsible for - or has anything to do with abolishment of slavery is absolutely baseless.

I politely invite you to do your own research, so you don't have to take my word for it.

> What's right or wrong doesn't change one bit depending on what other people think or what some random book says.

So you do acknowledge an absolute of good and evil, right and wrong. Good. We got somewhere.

In regards to the rest, you're drastically limited by your ignorance and misunderstanding of basic Christian concepts, most probably conditioned by your radical prejudices and already formed opinions.

This conversation has become absurd in the sense that you're trying to convince me, a Christian, about what motivates me, or moves me, or about my understanding of reality and absolutes.

Keep your prejudices, you're free to decide, and you're responsible of your decisions.

You still haven't directly answered my question.

Have a good one.

You're making my point with your rebuttal. A lot of people think different about right and wrong, good and evil, than I or you do, and that's because they look towards different sources.

I'll assume you think cutting the hands off someone who stole something from you is wrong. But some other people think it's the right thing to do.

What? Are you simply morally superior to them? Or is it that you've received from other sources than them?

Long ago slavery was globally mainstream and accepted until 'some weirdos' pointed to the Bible and said 'Hey, maybe slavery is wrong, according to this we're all created equal under God so we should not hold slaves'.

But no, I guess If you'd been born a thousand years ago you'd just simply have the moral clarity of condemning slavery, honor killings, and other things the rest of the world was happy doing?

> So, wait a minute, you've got no idea what's right or wrong - and you're incapable deriving and figuring it out on your own?

Would this mean that good and evil as absolutes exist?

edit: By they way, you never actually answered my question. Again, how do YOU know what's right and what's wrong?

> Yes, but with Christians there's always some sort of thick-layer of self-serving dishonesty on top of it all.

At this point you're just rooted in absurd prejudice, this conversation is getting nowhere.

> because that's the right thing to do!

Quick question, how do you know what's right and what's wrong? Who says helping others and doing good to others is the right thing to do? Where does that come from?

Anyway, if you think Christians operate under/from fear, you understand nothing about Christianity.

Peace.

You're right in plenty of what you're saying, that's why I'd recommend you reading Romans and James in the Bible.

But stuff like "but never really have try that hard" and "(but never actually do anything)" are your own assumptions and silly ones at that, you're putting too many people in the same bucket.

> If they represent themselves through inaction, they are virtually equivalent - equally as bad.

In regards to Neighbours A nd B, you're also right, but that's a bad scenario. Christians should thrive to lead a life that reflects the goodness of God and the grace they have received.

Some are rubbish at it, some are better and do amazing things. Same for non-Christian people, mind you.

But ultimately it comes down to: Christ died on the cross to pay for your sins. Are you going to accept that, repent, and follow Him? or are you going to disregard it?

The first option, if done from the heart, WILL bear good fruit.

As someone else mentioned, you can read the book of Romans or the epistle of James to find out by yourself why this idea is absurd.

But simplified, say you have a spouse who you dearly love. And say you found out that said spouse would forgive and get over any nasty thing you did to them.

Would that mean that you'd start being evil to them just because you can?

Or would that be yet another reason to try to live up to what such a spouse deserves?

edit: Actually, I think I misunderstood your issue with what I said. To clarify, a Christian will strive to do good and be better, but knowing that we'd never be able to be good enough, and that we can only be/do good through Christ, so we never deserve or earn our salvation (hence Grace), but we put our hope in Christ (hence Faith).

> These are people who seem to put in more effort than most, and are sincere in their belief.

No, check this out:

"have WE not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?"

They are not sincere in their belief. Real Christians believe and rely in Christ and His work alone. The people this verse refers to are to the end clinging to their own merit and trying to earn their salvation through their own works rather than rely on Christ's perfect work on the cross.

Saved by Grace alone through Faith alone.

> It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?

This part I really do not understand. The undeniable fact that boys and girls are different in several aspects does not make either superior or inferior in value or in dignity.

On the other hand, anything can be read negatively if you put enough will and effort into it, as so many people around here demonstrate.

How about being a bit more constructive in our criticism?

Yes, but also no.

I have a prioritised list, it's simply that not everything fits inside the list, because my time is limited.

Instead of "Not enough time" we could say "This is not high enough a priority".

> It also means your kid has no experience of online interactions with strangers, basically no SNS literacy, which also sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.

I think it would be better to allow them to be exposed to all this in a later phase, once, for example, they have plenty of experience with offline interactions with strangers. Learn how to walk, then learn how to run.

I really don't think the opposite order would work.

And that's the root cause of many, many issues.

It's a pity so many of these issues get simply patched up through other means instead of properly addressing the real root cause.

This is like saying food is good.

It is. But then you have ultra-processed food, junk food, food you might be allergic to...

Some medicines are good, some medicines are the lesser bad, some medicines will kill you if you take them when not needed, some medicines you might be allergic too, and some medicines are just a patch to have you feel well and keep you going.

You don't need to be fake in order to be nice. Become nice, then you won't have to fake it.

One way of becoming nice is to act nice. A nice person is a person who acts nice towards other people.

You can act different than how you feel, and that is not being fake, it's being nice.

If we all acted how we felt, we'd all be dead already.

What about because something is objectively good for you?

For example, you could learn to like fermented foods (if you don't) because they are very healthy for you.

What if my authentic feeling and behaviour was to slap you in the face and laugh at you because you answered 'Yes.' to an 'either/or' question?

The problem is that for humanity, unrestrained behaviour will very quickly degrade into horrible things. There's scientific evidence for that, if everyday life is not proof enough for you.

In this paradigm you describe, should we then strive to be authentic or should we refrain?

Don't you think this would open the doors to an endless amount of bad behaviours?

> people who play music/video aloud on public transport

But that's not being authentic, that's being plain rude, and there should be a difference.

You can be authentic and still respect boundaries and be considerate towards other people.

And on the other side, if being rude is your form of authenticity, then you're not authentic, you're just another rude person, probably following a specific type of common behaviour.

> If it worked, it would just be conventional medicine.

There are many reasons why this is not true. One of them is profits, another one (at least where I live) is the mass oriented, streamlined healthcare, in which there are not enough resources to treat you as an individual, but rather as a number, a small part of an average.

For these reasons, as an example among others, when a woman goes to the doctor because her period is painful, they'll prescribe her birth control pills rather than raspberry leaf tea.

> I don't think most people engaged in traditional medicine care about it actually being healthier, again because they are first and foremost interested in the ritual and cultural aspects rather than the effectiveness of the active ingredients.

I think you're repeatedly resorting to all manner of generalisations. Maybe that's your experience, and all that you've seen. While I've seen a bit of that too, I've also seen quite the contrary, very smart and learned people scientifically exploring fringe approaches in order to obtain results.

I could give you some personal and near examples of that if it were to mean something.

There's also quite a lot in natural medicine (including papers and proper scientific studies, if that's the only thing that matters to you) if you look into it.

Fair enough. Two points here, then:

- From a strictly scientific standpoint, wouldn't it be interesting to properly understand why and how it works?

- From a purely practical standpoint, who cares about any of that if not only it works, but is also better and healthier than what you might get prescribed at the doctor's?*

* yes, in some cases, not all.

Placebo is by definition highly subjective, and not even in the sense of one's opinion, but rather that it works or not at a subject level.

Well that's a bit too much of a generalisation maybe?

Yes, there are old ways that have been proven wrong, which were based on ignorance at the time, but there are also old ways which are totally legit and are little known or accepted nowadays based on today's ignorance.

> You get a lot of medicine that looks quite a bit like quack medicine

It depends what you understand by "quack medicine".

To me, in the beginning, all the stuff about drinking weird plants and doing homemade remedies did sound a bit quacky. But that was because of my absolute ignorance.

People have been using these remedies for thousands of years based on a deeper knowledge of nature than your random dude has, but we've fallen into a scam where we are made to feel that anything not made in a lab and costing a certain amount of money is nonsense.

Garlic, onion, ginger, turmeric, honey, echinacea, raspberry... those are natural wonders for basic natural medicine.

Interesting, you're describing exactly what I went through a few years ago.

In my case, however, I turned to pure ginger infusions, following the advice of a herbalist. Haven't gone through it again so far, plus it also works great for colds and flu.

I am learning how to weld and work metal, work wood, grow a vegetable garden, keep chickens, maybe raise some later on...

All this AI hype is pushing me even more to think that the value of a job is inversely proportional to the likelihood of it being done by a computer.

This reply deeply disturbs me for some reason.

Sadly we've all seen this unfold in current times.

A blockade would mean a slow death for thousands or potentially millions of Japanese, as well at the cost and risk of tens of thousands of American troops, as well as a stupid amount of resources and infrastructure.

The message in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "We can put eleven men on a fancy plane and make one of your main cities simply disappear, and you can do nothing about it."

That made not surrendering simply and objectively not worth it.

Remove single points of failure, ensure redundancy of dependencies, etc.

Being able to contact other people in case of an emergency by definition would make him more independent than he was, obviously.

Maybe not independent, but less critically dependant, that would be the goal.

You should play a game of Age of Empires, and have your Villager population halved at some point of the game. See what happens then.