Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am familiar with IDF headquarters, they are located in a clearly marked base, you can see it on Google Maps. This is similar to French army's Hexagone Balard in Paris or the Italian and Dutch armies HQ for example, from a cursory search, ask your local LLM for more. Can you say the same about Hamas?
It's in a residential area. I'm pointing out the hypocrisy. The whole area is heavily militarized, there are bases everywhere, citizens are automaticlaly enrolled into the IDF - every Israeli citizen in a certain age group can be considered a legitimate millitary target if you follow your logic. The arguments you are using for attacking Palestinian infastructure and people are more than applicable to Israeli infastru…
Pope Francis has died
781–790 of 875 posts
Re: Pope Francis has died
#782Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not even sure I'd go so far as to call them anti-zionist. How long do people imagine Israel survives as a state with a brutally-oppressed population under its care? It's a rational position to be pro-state-of-Israel and want them to find peace (and integration) with the Gazans because the consequences of perpetual animosity and aggression are the single biggest threat to the state's survival.
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Re: Pope Francis has died
#783Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is impossible to reconcile the idea of an omnipotent god that is simultaneously good and permits people to be tortured for eternity. Perhaps he chose the “god is good” over the “god, despite being able, will not prevent billions of reasonable and decent people from suffering eternally” fork in the road. You can’t logically choose both, and if you’re the pope, you probably had better have a belief in the goodness o…
People often think of hell as an active punishment form God, but for us humans it's not. Hell, whatever it is, is where people end up when they'd rather be there than be with Christ. God will never force you to love Him and accept Him. He gives you the choice, the rest is up to you.
Whatever your beliefs are, they aren’t catholicism.
Re: Pope Francis has died
#784Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know how large the Lithuanian community in Chicago is, but when I lived on the South Side in the late 90s there was an amazing Lithuanian restaurant called just "Healthy Food", a weird amalgam of traditional Lithuanian cuisine and hippie wheat germ and molasses-based fare. They also sold amber jewelry, as well as their own swag like "I ♥ Kugelis" T-shirts. Anyone remember that place?
I’d never been there, but there seem to at least be multiple Lithuanian restaurants in the Chicago area. Sadly, while there were literally dozens of Czech restaurants when I was a kid, now there are three.
Re: Pope Francis has died
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I prefer this over the nuts who decry Sharia law while wanting to implement a Christian equivalent. The idea of a "Christian equivalent" to Sharia law is actually very fringe. The near unanimous teaching of Christianity, from the Church Fathers through to the mainstream Reformers, is that the criminal laws in the Jewish Torah were only ever intended for Jews, and Christians are not bound by the letter of them – the…
This distinction might sound very important for people within one of those religions, but it sounds pretty trivial from the outside. Changing secular law to reflect religious law versus directly applying religious law, who cares? The result is the same. And for excessive focus, maybe you haven't noticed, but that fringe position is wielding a tremendous power in the country where I live at the moment.
The result is very different. If Sharia were fully implemented in your country, you’d go to the local courthouse and the judge would be a religious scholar applying the religious law of the Islamic state religion. Whereas, if conservative Christians vote for laws which encode their moral views (on abortion or whatever), those laws remain formally secular, and the judge enforcing them is not a religious official. Sharia expressly discriminates in favour of Muslims (e.g. it says the word of a Muslim witness is worth more than that of a non-Muslim witness in court); the laws you are complaining about don’t do anything remotely similar.
> And for excessive focus, maybe you haven't noticed, but that fringe position is wielding a tremendous power in the country where I live at the moment.
How? Trump is not a theonomist. Nor is Vance. Nor is Musk. I don’t believe any of the Cabinet secretaries are theonomists. Nor are any of the Supreme Court justices. The only way anyone can conclude that theonomy has any contemporary influence in the US government is by misrepresenting non-theonomist views as theonomy.
Re: Pope Francis has died
#786Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Instead of abortion we can take the fetus out, put it into an artificial womb then let it be raised as an orphan or whatever. It should make both sides happy, IF they are both being honest about their motives. I think very few people who have religious opposition to abortion would actually be happy about the advent of "artificial wombs". They might view it as a lesser evil, but not as a good thing. Because, while b…
I think the money would be better spent in curing adults from believing in iron-age superstitions.
And trying to forcibly “cure” religion may potentially constitute the crime of genocide under international law
Re: Pope Francis has died
#787Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are still groups(at least I'm aware of them in Poland, I've met people who are part of them) who believe exactly this, that the second Vatican Sobor was a mistake and the "real" mass is only the one conducted in Latin.
It seems unlikely that Jesus spoke Latin at the last supper.
God certainly had a special plan for these languages: the language of God's Law, the language of human power, and the language of human wisdom. The presence of His name in all three languages left the situation unambiguous to whoever might have been in the area to read it. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, hung on that cross. When pressed about it, Pilate would not amend those words.
In this way, though maybe unnecessary thanks to the Gift of Tongues the Holy Spirit later gave to His apostles, the sign stood as a kind of Rosetta Stone, which no one could misunderstand. It shows that history itself, along with all human matters, belong completely to Him, and at the same time it made those languages new by virtue of that single title, grounding them firmly in the Truth Himself.
Latin and Greek, themselves originally vernaculars, continue to hold a special place in their respective churches, both Catholic and Orthodox. Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, continues to be used in many Eastern churches as well, again Catholic and Orthodox both. All three constitute especially venerable traditions—and to this we may add Coptic, since Jesus spent his early years in Egypt; Slavonic, for its very writing system's role in the conversion of the Slavs; and a handful of others I am more or less ignorant of. With each one, by entering into the language, you enter the mind of those first converts, who themselves entered the Mind of Christ.
In the Latin Catholic Church (that is, the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church, or however you want to name it) we call the Latin language a "sacramental"—the same sort of thing as holy water, something which conveys grace to those who use it with an openness to those graces.
Demons hate it because of its legal precision, by which, in the name of the same Christ named in Latin on the cross, they are driven out of people, things, and places, fulfilling Christ's own prediction that His followers would cast out demons.
By forming one's faith life around one of these languages, one can more clearly ask those basic human questions that Christ is the answer to, without having to deal with the centuries of semantic drift and overloading that are scattered about the minefields of our modern vernaculars. The vernacular, of course, is no impediment to personal prayer, but as more and more people are gathered in one place the confusion of Babel threatens to set in.
On the other hand, every little Latin grammatical lesson, every new piece of vocabulary learned, reveals new wonders and opens the door to the great body of literature that was composed in the single Mind of Christ.
But we had this, and in the 20th century we let it slip through our fingers, not knowing what we'd been given. The problem is not that we don't know Latin. The problem is that, in broad cultural strokes, even when we did, we didn't care.
Re: Pope Francis has died
#788Re: Pope Francis has died
#789Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pope John Paul II was also extremely popular across the world.
He was, but John Paul II was traditionally conservative. I think Francis resonated with more people–Christian or not–because he emphasized compassion, humility, and social justice. He spoke more openly about issues like poverty, climate change, and inclusion–his encyclical LAUDATO SI’ is a great read–, and he often used language and gestures that the "common man" could relate to. Perhaps the way he dressed so simply–…
Re: Pope Francis has died
#790Earlier quoted context omitted.
People downvote this guy because obviously nobody actually thinks with their blood-pumping organ. But as for the quote, it's incredibly clear how little empathy most people have towards others, to the point where AI will easily out-empathy them, both as a conversationalist and as a robotic assistant (such as a 24/7 robot nurse with no other patients).
> it's incredibly clear how little empathy most people have towards others Sorry but not everyone is an American. And as Conway's law applies, of course AI done by American or Chinese companies will be oppressive - with only superficial politeness à la GladOS.