You bring back memories, man.
But I am serious..! This is how it works..!
This is one of the silliest quotes because we know that the ancient pagans often viewed one another's gods as correspondent - "Thor is their Zeus," etc.
And then you have the problem of henotheism where there is potentially a single god with many avatars and a pantheon of lesser spiritual beings... And you start to realize, "Wait, if the Vasihnavites, Shiavites, etc. are really just saying that there is a an arch deity over everything with many avatars in the form of lesser gods that he wears the masks of, plus lesser deities that can't defy him and act as angels and demons...
"... What is a God, really? Aren't they nearly monotheists..?"
What is a God.
Plus there's the very classic position of the Jews and the Chrsitians - the gods of gentiles are demons.
Christianity does not become a religion that denies other gods, but one that claims other gods are misidentified.
Throw in some liberalism and yuo can even have Christians arguing that the worship directed as Vishnu by devoted Hindus who lead ethical lives and strive to be great manifestations of goodness & virtue for the sake of God's love is not the worship of demons, at all, but rather, an attempt to reach our God through their own traditions that may even be guided in some form by the Holy Spirit...
So, IDK, IDK to what extent anyone is denying other people's gods and its relevance to religion today.
The very earliest stuff obviously doesn't have that, and we rely on church history because it wasn't like even the most interesting thing a Roman governor did that week to kill some random churchmen who created conflict among Jews, nor do we have much preserved about mobs killing these guys other than in the original Christian communal sources.
But really, if you start from the premise that everything Christians ever write about thesmelves is pure propaganda without an iota of truth in it, that creates a non-serious standard with which to evaluate things.
Is it really absurd to think that Protomartyr Stephen was killed by a mob of Jews for preaching a radically different religion to them in a time of great political upheaval? Isn't this exactly what we think of Christians at later times - that they'd just turn on a guy and kill him for being a heretic? Why is it so unbelievable that it once happened to a Christian? Why is it so troublesome that the only people who bothered to write about these martyrs and preserve their memory were the people who were victims in the course of this?
Obviously, you can say that it's propaganda and lies, and maybe some of it was. But we know it's absolutely historic that Christians wre officially persecuted later on. it is also par for the course that they would be less formally persecuted prior to that. it also amkes sense that Christians, like every other group, try to preserve a communal memory.
Almost all of the Christian folklore surrounding Jesus can be directly tied to other myths that were common knowledge to Mediterranean people at the time.
Yeah I got the Mithra chainmail in my AOL account back in 1998 - I know the arguments.
But Christianity presents us with something very wild - it takes the Messianic tradition of Jews which was hitherto interpreted as being about creating an earthly Kingdom that conquers the world and incorporates the gentiles into Israel (or makes the gentiles servants of Israel, who all become noblemen living in a heaven on earth, some interpretations)... and Christ says
"Yeah, but no - the Kingdom is purely spiritual. It's not temporal. The gentiles join us by worshiping God with us and living these truths - look, this Roman occupier has more faith than all Israel, because you guys are just terrible. You bicker over the law, and miss the total point of the law..."
And the Messiah is now about conquering the world through spreading the Gospel of loving God, and loving your neighbor as yourself, giving up your possessions and conquering greed, freeing yourself from hypocrisy; living in simplicity and supreme virtue, at peace with those around you, practicing non-violence, and now we don't even need any kind of ceremonial laws at all because we are living the virtues. And that's how the world becomes part of Israel - by adopting the great things abotu our religion - and that's also how you get to heaven, which is only achievable after death when I come again...
This is a very unique interpretation of the Judaism of the time - absolutely revolutionary.
Even if you want to say that all the miracles and 'signs' are a myth, I think that the "Mithra" angle is actually bad beacuse you could just say they came up with those signs and added them so as to be able to claim they are fulfilling the Old Testament, which was infinitely more relevant to the Jews who were the community that gave birth to the religion.
Keep the faith, by all means. But part of believing is accepting that you don’t get to have proof.
Yeah I agree - there is no proof, and if there was proof, it would ruin it, because we'd no longer be doing good and loving God and our neighbor because it is right, but we would be doing it with the expectation of receiving heaven...
We would no longer be living a spiritual life for the good of oruselves and others - in hope & faith - but we would be Capitalists engaging in transactions that we deemed profitable.
I am not saying you have to believe the corpus of text as 100% factual and become a Christian right now, but I am suggesting that people believing the text isn't absurd... Moreover, I would suggest that it tends to prove that Jesus Christ was real...
The text itself asserts
- Times & places where he was; actual historic figures; a trial and a death, all of a single person.
- Claims he drew large crowds, healed people, had some publicly known altercations with local religious authorities.
- Claims that other people died in very public events (Stephen the Martyr in Acts) and that actual meetings were convened to decide what to do about it with the head Jewish rabbi at the time (Gamaliel)
- Records his teachings in ways that sometimes kind of conflict with one another in terms of phrasing, and also records different details about events that could be mutually contradictory...
Which all implies that the synoptic Gospels and Acts were very opened to being fact checked by their contemporaries and future generations by trying to place themselves in history, and that the texts were not designed by a cabal of conspirators who wanted to deceive people and come up with the perfect story because the story they made was hardly written by committee - it has things we'd see as imperfections & errors.
Ever play Telephone with a single word for 5 minutes? Now do that to a epic for 100 years, the end result will certainly be something but it may be nothing like the truth
The Telephone game is designed to show you how private rumors occur.
The four Gospels are all the accounts of eyewitnesses to these events that were then recorded by their own hand or by their assistant's hand, and preserved within the church. Of course, some speculate that they were forged later, but there's a very long, complicated argument that involves the earliness of the spread of the knowledge of the Gospels and how well they were independently preserved in faraway locations from France to Egypt that indicate that they likely were completed shortly after Christ's death.
It's also the case that Christianity was a proselytizing faith, right, so immediately there are operations which send missionaries into the world to spread the news... By all means, deny the miracles and the story, but it seems likely that there was consensus about what had happened before the missionaries departed, which allowed for there to be the preservation of the Gospels and what would later constitute the New Testament.
There's not a good argument to be made that these guys were just spreading nonsense and spitballing it as they go - the story was straight before they were leaving Jerusalem, or else the four Gospels and the subsequent apostolic letters would not have been something they could have ever all agreed upon.
No, and that is to even be expected.
He was a prophet whose movement had around 120 or so core disciples along with his apostles, plus thousands who followed him about and considered him a healer and revolutionary teacher.
There are people who have done similar things that are completely lost to history other than small records that vaguely outline the controversy surrounding them... We shouldn't really expect more in terms of proof...
But what is unique is the fact that we have an extremely well preserved corpus of text surrounding him. We also have some good idea that a lot of his followers were prosecuted and killed, and never recanted in the process, which might incline you to believe in the radical truth that they lived by.
Of course I am biased - I am a Christian - but it really does just seem pointlessly antagonistic to dismiss His Existence at all.
I actually think there's an argument to be made that a lot of top tier athletes are never doing things like their taxes prior to a big match. It's just really anticlimactic to say "My spouse/manager/dad does all my paperwork and handles my finances before a fight" than to say "I isolate myslf from my spouse and don't have any orgasms before a fight."
I also think that they would make the argument that they have plenty of impulse control and focus, it's just a matter of the extent to which one has it.
It's one thing to be a man who does not look at p0rn or masturb8 and only sleeps with his wife and another thing to be a monk.
That is amazing - really good stuff. I will add that to my anecdotes on this topic.
Yeah I believe there's this weird story about how like... Onani/onanism entered the vocabulary through the Old Testament character and then the notoriously private Japanese adopted the foreign word "onani" to refer to masturb8tion and so it just sticks in my head a bit more and comes out when I feel the need to slightly self-censor in consideration of being on the work net (it's not an English speaking IT team but, you know how it goes, don't be the shortest hanging fruit).
I am just a social conservative in the Fediverse offering my two cents.
Sorry to coom on your circle jerk on jerking
Nah man freedom of speech includes hate speech.
If "hate speech" must be banned, why even have a democracy..?
You have to have faith in the ability of people to discern right from wrong, and the very first test of that is whether people are going to be mentally hijacked by some guy saying the N word.
If you believe people can't do that... Why vote? You just support soft totalitarianism.
I think people believe that onani leads to looking at p0rn, which is inherently exploitative to those involved (men and women) and a foul industry. Likewise, it can produce exaggerated sexual fantasies that are unhealthy and can create predatory relationships.
It's hard to imagine jerking without explicit content, and once you have gone from Swimsuit edition to Softcore, it's hard to go back... From softcore to hardcore, it's hard to go back... From niche hardcore to regular, boring hardcore... It's hard to go back...
And it leads to becoming a person who does this frequently... And then, what if you want a family? Do you really want to be taht guy who is looking at crazy stuff and rubbing one out while your infant daughter is sleeping 30 feet away in her room? Do you want to be the guy whose wife is out of action from giving birth and you are like "Oh, OK, I will just look at explicit hardcore content and content myself..."
It's a bad habit.
It also creates crazy expectations of others which may even lead to so desiring some novel experience that you have an affair or "open" your marriage.
But to be entirely fair to the guy's point:
Lots of top athletes have superstitions about abstaining from intercourse prior to events - some are very extreme, with fighters isolating themselves from their spouses and training for months without any release before their MMA fight/boxing match. Some say they do it for, say, just a week ahead of time, etc.
There are a few who have the opposite philosophy and claim to actually do it more in the week leading up to the fight.
It's really a massive point of contention because some people claim it is a mere superstition while others absolutely will not break their routine.
There is also the famous incident where Bobby Fisher says that he performed poorly at a tournament because he had sex after the first night and the experience totally removed him from his focus...
This might be why it impacts fighters and certain people whose lifting styles are really about maximized performance and not a routine... If concentration is interrupted, it can result in very poor output. Like I can see how someone who is very intense about what they are doing and requires total focus would be interrupted by any form of sexual distraction. This is probably very, very relevant to guys who are fighters...
This might also have to do with perspectives on sexuality - people who ascribe a lot of meaning to it versus those who do not...
Lots of stuff to consider, I think.
LOL, bro, is your actual counter to this putting on the fedora and flexing the neckbeard as hard as you can?
Religion is clearly rubbish! How can you argue against that!
If you were actually an atheist of any caliber, you would be familiar with apologetics enough to not be so dismissive in an inadvertently hilarious manner.
Wonderful observation.
It's really our duty to be familiar with both sides and be ready to debate.
Of course, exception guy will be in the thread pointing out extreme edge cases in which we all agree that there is no alternative to the accepted opinion ("R*pe is bad, mmkay?")... But this is besides the point.
Just amazing - the government literally going to bat for the sake of concert goers who demand hotel rooms.
Can't imagine working through drug addiction and getting clean enough to be given a hotel room, and then eagerly trying to find some form of employment to become stable, and then your case worker is like *What do you think about spending a few days in Aberdeen...? WIth the Taylor Swift concert and all... There's a need for this room for someone else..."
Lol what.
... Who do we think is behind the DDoS attack?
Are the Israelis up to something?
Wild tweet.
Bro was definitely satisfied with this and couldn't help himself.
Exclusive: Tory politicians have accepted over £430,000 from Israel lobby groups and made 187 trips to the country.
The International Organization for Migration has increased its estimate of the death toll from a massive landslide in Papua New Guinea to more than 670.
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — The International Organization for Migration on Sunday increased its estimate of the death toll from a massive landslide in Papua New Guinea to more than 670 as emergency responders and traumatized relatives gave up hope that any survivors will now be found.
Serhan Aktoprak, the chief of the U.N. migration agency’s mission in the South Pacific island nation, said the revised death toll was based on calculations by Yambali village and Enga provincial officials that more than 150 homes had been buried by Friday’s landslide. The previous estimate had been 60 homes.
“They are estimating that more than 670 people (are) under the soil at the moment,” Aktoprak told The Associated Press.
Local officials had initially put the death toll on Friday at 100 or more. Only five bodies and a leg of a sixth victim had been recovered by Sunday, when an excavator donated by a local builder became the first piece of mechanical earth-moving equipment to join the recovery effort.
The plan for a swimmable Seine casts a spotlight on the people doing better things with Paris' waste, fertilising wheat for baguettes and biscuits.
Some very cool stuff buried in the article:
>Gazing at the turbulent, rain-swollen river, Esculier highlights what he sees as a curious paradox: as a society, we are spending energy on treating our nitrogen-rich wastewater and destroying reactive nitrogen, while also, spending energy on making synthetic nitrogen fertiliser (whose production and use account for around 2% to 5% of greenhouse gas emissions). Treatment facilities capture around 10% of nitrogen from our sewage to be spread on crops, while 50% goes into the air, he says - and the remainder, into the river. Given a greater Paris population of 10 million people, this means "nitrogen from four million people goes into the Seine every day".
>If we used all the urine from greater Paris to fertilise wheat instead, it would be enough to produce more than 25 million baguettes a day," Esculier calculates.
>Over the past decade, Esculier has tried to put some of those findings into practice, trialling ways to collect urine and use it as fertiliser. In its simplest form, he was familiar with this from his own family history: "One of my grandmothers used to tell her children to go and pee on the rhubarb," he says, which gave the plant a boost of natural fertiliser.
>Under a research programme called Ocapi, which Esculier leads, he and his team have organised various pilot projects aimed at collecting urine in cities which is then used by farmers to fertilise their crops. In one project, 20 volunteers collect their own urine and bring it to a drop-off point, where a farmer then collects it, stores it and uses it as fertiliser.
>Esculier hands me a packet of biscuits produced as part of the Ocapi project. As the label proudly states, the Biscodor (or "Golden Biscuits") are made with flour from "wheat cultivated with a fertiliser based on human urine". I put them in my bag, curious to see what my colleagues in London would think of them.
>The idea of separating urine at source is attracting interest on a larger scale.
>Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, a planned new neighbourhood in Paris in the grounds of an old hospital, will feature urine-separating toilets as part of a recycling pilot programme by the City of Paris.
>"It's fairly rare in Paris to have a new neighbourhood, given that the city is essentially already built, so we don't have many opportunities to test these kinds of things," says Antoine Guillou, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of waste management, recycling and sanitation. He adds: "The idea is to test the separation of urine, and to see if it can be collected and used as fertiliser."
>The new neighbourhood in Paris' 14th arrondissement will comprise around 600 households, "which is quite a considerable size for an experiment but is small compared to the whole of Paris", Guillou points out.
In the ongoing seven-phase parliamentary election to determine whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi will get a third term, India’s 970 million voters include over 48,000 transgender people.
And of the 8,039 candidates nationwide – a four-fold rise from 1,874 in the 1952 election, India’s first – three candidates are transgender; a fourth dropped out. And a fifth is hoping to sit in the state assembly of Andhra Pradesh in south India, for which voting was on May 13.
India has long had a tolerance for transgender persons, however this has nothing to do with the Western LGBTQ+ movement – indeed, Indians are merely trying to overcome the colonial-era laws that tried to stamp out its own ancient traditions on the 'third gender'.
The transgender community comprises Hijras, eunuchs, Kothis, Aravanis, Jogappas, Shiv-Shakthis, and more. Evidence for the existence of third-gender people can be found in Hindu holy texts like the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
In Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, and further back in Vedic culture, three genders were recognized. The Vedas (1500 BCE to 500 BCE) describe individuals as one of three categories according to one’s nature (‘prakrti’). These are also spelled out in the Kama Sutra (c. 4th century AD) and elsewhere as pums-prakrtistri-prakrti (female nature), and tritiya-prakrti (third-nature).
Various texts suggest that ‘third sex’ individuals were known in pre-modern India and included male-bodied or female-bodied people as well as intersexual. Third sex is also discussed in ancient Hindu law, medicine, linguistics, and astrology.
A top adviser at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) deleted records critical to uncovering the origins of COVID-19 — and used a “secret back channel” to help Dr. Anthony Fauci and a federal gr…
The rumors that Aaron Rodgers had been offered the opportunity to retire and become Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s running mate were true.
Programme will cost £12.9bn to the South Korean government
South Korea is considering paying parents 100 million won (£59,000) in cash for each baby born in a bid to boost the country’s diminishing birth rate.
The South Korean government’s Anti-Corruption & Civil Rights Commission is holding a public survey to gauge the opinion of the people before it can be implemented.
The survey that began on 17 April will ask four questions to understand if they believe it is acceptable to spend 22 trillion won (£12.9bn) annually on the programme and if a financial incentive would motivate couples in the country to have children.
This amount accounts for approximately half of the current national budget allocated to initiatives addressing low birth rates, which totals 48tn won (£28bn) annually.
“Through this survey, we plan to re-evaluate the country’s birth promotion policies to determine whether direct financial subsidies could be an effective solution,” the commission said in a statement.
Israel lambasts the three European governments.
DUBLIN — Ireland will officially recognize Palestine as a state in a move expected to be coordinated with at least two other European governments, an Irish official told POLITICO.
The move is expected to be announced at an 8 a.m. press conference Wednesday led by the leaders of Ireland’s three-party government: Prime Minister Simon Harris, Foreign Minister Micheál Martin and Environment Minister Eamon Ryan.
The Irish official — who spoke to POLITICO on condition he wasn’t identified because the purpose of Wednesday’s press conference wasn’t officially revealed in advance — said Ireland planned to coordinate its announcement in tandem with similar moves in two other European capitals Wednesday morning. The official declined to identify either of them.
Five years after her last companion died and the aquarium’s owner pledged to free her, Bella still languishes in a tiny tank amid shops
"They can fire any weapons from their territory at ours. This is the biggest advantage that Russia has. We can’t do anything to their systems, which are located on the territory of Russia, with Western weapons,” he explained.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who visited Kiev earlier this week, said Washington has “not encouraged or enabled strikes outside of Ukraine, but ultimately Ukraine has to make decisions for itself about how it’s going to conduct this war.”
However, on Thursday Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh clarified that Washington’s position that Kiev should not target Russia with US-supplied weapons remains unchanged. Such arms can only be used to “take back Ukrainian sovereign territory,” Singh stressed.
Earlier this month, UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron insisted Ukraine has the “right” to use UK-supplied weapons to strike targets deep inside Russia, if it decides to do so. Moscow reacted to the statement by warning that if such an attack were to take place it could target British military facilities “on the territory of Ukraine and beyond” in response.
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Kiev has urged Washington to provide intelligence on targets on Russian soil amid setbacks in Donbass and Kharkov Region. According to the NYT, US officials are currently reviewing those requests, despite previously turning them down.
Zelensky said Kiev now finds itself in a “nonsensical situation” due to the stance of the West, which “is afraid that Russia will lose the war. And it does not want Ukraine to lose it.”
“Ukraine’s final victory will lead to Russia’s defeat. And the final victory of Russia will lead to Ukraine’s defeat,” he added.
The Ukrainian authorities “want the war to end with a fair peace for us. Of course, the West wants the war to end. Period. As soon as possible. And, for them, this is a fair peace,” the president stated.
While Qatari, Egyptian and US middlemen have for months been trying to get the two belligerents to agree to a ceasefire, so far these efforts have apparently been fruitless.
In its report on Friday, [Israeli broadcaster] Kan alleged that the negotiations “are not taking place at the moment” since “Egypt and Qatar have adopted the position of Hamas.” According to the media outlet, the mediators suggested sealing a ceasefire in exchange for the release of hostages.
Kan quoted its anonymous sources as saying that there is a “large” divergence of opinion between the Palestinian militant group and Israel, especially over how each would define the “end of the war.” Another major bone of contention, the broadcaster claimed, was Israel’s refusal to unconditionally release incarcerated Hamas militants at the group’s request.
On Saturday, Israel’s Haaretz, citing an unnamed foreign source familiar with the talks, also reported that the negotiations “are currently at an impasse, and there is no progress.”
Investigation shows that a group of billionaires secretly urged NYC Mayor to deploy police to disperse Palestinian protests at Columbia.
n an investigative report, the Washington Post found that last month a group of billionaires and business leaders secretly urged New York City’s mayor to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.
The Washington Post obtained communications showing that on April 26, business figures such as Daniel Lubetzky, Daniel Loeb, Len Blavatnik, and Joseph Sitt held a Zoom call with Mayor Eric Adams. This call occurred about a week after police were first sent to Columbia’s campus. Some participants discussed political donations to Adams and exerting pressure on Columbia’s leadership to allow police intervention.
One group member told The Post he donated the maximum legal limit of $2,100 to Adams that month. Some members also offered to fund private investigators to assist the police, an offer reportedly accepted by Adams. However, City Hall stated that the NYPD has not used private investigators for this purpose.
The U.S. ambassador to the DRC said she was “shocked” and “very concerned” by the possible involvement of Americans in the plot.
American citizens appear to be among a group detained in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for their alleged involvement in a failed coup attempt, authorities in the African nation said Sunday.
The arrests were made after a deadly shootout near a government official’s home in the capital Kinshasa, which killed three people. Congolese army spokesperson Brig. Gen. Sylvain Ekenge said the coup, which was enacted by both Congolese and foreigners, had been quickly thwarted by national security forces.
The U.S. ambassador to the country, Lucy Tamlyn, said on X that she had been informed of the alleged involvement of American citizens and said the embassy was cooperating with the Congolese government.
“I am shocked by the events of this morning and very concerned by reports of American citizens allegedly involved,” she wrote in French. “We will cooperate with DRC authorities to the fullest extent as they investigate these criminal acts and hold accountable any U.S. citizen involved.”
Footage of two men under arrest quickly made the rounds on social media. One of the men in the video was identified as the American son of the coup’s Congolese ringleader, Christian Malanga. Also in circulation were pictures of a U.S. passport apparently belonging to Benjamin Zalman-Polun, a 36-year-old born in Maryland. Zalman-Polun is reportedly a cannabis entrepreneur who has been linked to the suspected leader Malanga. Malanga is the founder of a political organization for Congolese people in the U.S., and he posted a livestream Sunday afternoon that appeared to show him leading the charge.
The coup reportedly began around 4:30 a.m. Sunday morning near the residence of Vital Kamerhe, who is running to be speaker of the national legislature. The attackers were met with gunfire, an exchange that killed a coup member and two police officers, a spokesman for Kamerhe wrote on X.
The attackers then moved on to the presidential palace, Congolese media said, which is just a mile away. But they were arrested by security forces there, and the coup was shut down. Ekenge, the Congolese army spokesman, told the Associated Press that the likely ringleader Malanga had been killed during the clash.
The target of the coup was believed to be President Felix Tshisekedi, who won a second term in a chaotic December vote. Tshisekedi was unharmed, and multiple U.S. news outlets characterized the plot as a poorly organized scheme that relied on amateur tactics.
Rep. Jackson Lee made a series of other questionable statements, including saying the moon, which reflects the sun’s light, gives off “unique light and energy”
>The former top Democrat on the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee badly botched elementary lunar facts while speaking during the gathering at Booker T. Washington High School in Houston.
>“You’ve heard the word ‘full moon.’ Sometimes you need to take the opportunity just to come out and see a full moon is that complete rounded circle, which is made up mostly of gases,” Jackson Lee, 74, told teenage pupils who gathered on a sports field ahead of the rare celestial event.
Is her mind going?
A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi , the country's foreign minister and other officials apparently crashed in the mountainous northwest reaches of Iran on Sunday, sparking a massive rescue operation in a fog-shrouded forest as the public was urged to pray.
The likely crash came as Iran under Raisi and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei launched an unprecedented drone-and-missile attack on Israel last month and has enriched uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels.
Iran has also faced years of mass protests against its Shiite theocracy over an ailing economy and women’s rights — making the moment that much more sensitive for Tehran and the future of the country as the Israel-Hamas war inflames the wider Middle East.
Raisi was traveling in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province . State TV said what it called a “hard landing” happened near Jolfa, a city on the border with the nation of Azerbaijan, some 600 kilometers (375 miles) northwest of the Iranian capital, Tehran. Later, state TV put it farther east near the village of Uzi, but details remained contradictory.
Traveling with Raisi were Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the governor of Iran's East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards, the state-run IRNA news agency reported. One local government official used the word “crash," but others referred to either a “hard landing” or an “incident.”
Neither IRNA nor state TV offered any information on Raisi’s condition in the hours afterward. However, hard-liners urged the public to pray for him. State TV aired images of hundreds of the faithful, some with their hands outstretched in supplication, praying at Imam Reza Shrine in the city of Mashhad, one of Shiite Islam's holiest sites, as well as in Qom and other locations across the country. State television's main channel aired the prayers nonstop.
In Tehran, a group of men kneeling on the side of the street clasped strands of prayer beads and watched a video of Raisi praying, some of them visibly weeping.
“If anything happens to him we’ll be heartbroken,” said one of the men, Mehdi Seyedi. ”May the prayers work and may he return to the arms of the nation safe and sound.”
Images shared online include Palestinian detainees draped in the Israeli flag and held in stress positions.
Professor says he was subjected to two hour interrogation and questioned about his ties to Muslim groups
Prominent Israeli academic Ilan Pappe said he was interrogated by the Department of Homeland Security after arriving in the US on Monday.
Arriving at Detroit airport, the academic - known for his stridently anti-Zionist views and research - said he was subjected to two hours of questioning.
Amongst the questions, he was asked whether he was a Hamas supporter and whether he regarded the Israeli assault on Gaza as a "genocide".
"The two man team were not abusive or rude, I should say, but their questions were really out of the world!" Pappe wrote on Facebook.
"They had long phone conversation with someone, (the Israelis?) and after copying everything on my phone allowed me to enter."
It's great - scratches the itch, overall. I sometimes pine for places where major debates on a specific topic constantly rage - ideally, I'd be able to discuss religion whenever I wanted, skipping threads I felt I didn't want to wade into....
But it is a good enough replacement overall and I feel like we are proceeding to having such a size. I am also open to the idea that I have not curated enough to find a place where this si consistently happening in the Fediverse yet...
I was a fairly active member at Reddit with a good social standing, I made 1 “controversial” comment and I got perma-banned… this sucks.
There have been some controversies that have led to banning and banning of entire instances. Usually, this involves Lemmy instances that were tolerating a lot of blatant transphobic memes that cut deep and were very mean...
I get why people isolated them.
I am still worried, though, that there are people who would still react this way to good faith discussion where there are disagreements. While there are some places where that is for sure OK, I think there are some instances that might react so negatively as to want to ban a specific user or their instance over it. I may be overreacting but IDK.
... As a Christian, I approve.
The idea that the government should run off of some merciless view that the principles of free market capitalism dictate who eats and who doesn't is completely bizarre.
I have nothing against capitalist Christians who think that the principles of capitalism are generally fine and that, otherwise, we have an obligation as Christians to feed the poor and it just so happens to not be the role of government, but any explicitly Christian state has to feed the poor.
Pappe published the book 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine' in 2006.
Recent news shows that the French publisher that was printing it ceased printing the book despite a surge in sales.
A recent statement from Ilan Pappe:
>I think what we are seeing now, what unfolds in front of our eyes, is a genocidal situation, by which people are targeted, whether they are children, babies, in hospital or in schools. And this is a massive operation of killing, of ethnic cleansing, of depopulation. The pretext for that kind of savagery is revenge for what the Hamas did on the 7th of October, but I think the real intention here is not just revenge but trying to exploit what happened on the 7th of October to create new realities in historical Palestine. You called it a new Nakba. I think that this is — the Nakba has never really ended for the Palestinians, so it’s a new horrific chapter in the ongoing Nakba that the Palestinians are suffering here. So, this is a really horrific situation that can only be stopped from the outside, because there is no motivation inside Israel to stop the operations, nor to care more about the lives of innocent people, despite what the Israeli army claims to do in the field itself.
Over at Democracy Now.