Why would they panic? They’ll just play their usual pigeon chess: knocking the pieces over, crapping on the board, and flying off to announce that they have won.

“There are NO conspiracies but there are NO coincidences — Stephen K. Bannon.”

Gotta love that pseudo-intellectual self-quote.

You run out of other people’s money. You can squeeze labor to starvation working in a salt mine. However, if most all people lose all their money, capitalism is done, and currently runaway capitalism is doing everything it can to increase that disparity.

Infinite growth requires infinite bodies to feed it.

“Me when I lie”?

Go talk to the wiki I got that from if you want to argue with someone else about whether something is true or not.

That’s not what I said.

However, like Arthurian Legend, it doesn’t mean some guy like Jesus didn’t exist, or an aggregate of characters weren’t assembled to be him on story.

That’s what I said.

I used Arthur as a fellow mythology, along with a conditional “or” he could be an aggregate character.

The moment of resurrection itself is not described in any of the gospels, but all four contain passages in which Jesus is portrayed as predicting his death and resurrection, or contain allusions that “the reader will understand”. The New Testament writings do not contain any descriptions of a resurrection but rather accounts of an empty tomb.

So therefore I stand by the premise that changes have been made, and what existed in 100 is not what we have today.

You’ll have to forgive me if I bow out. I do not share your beliefs, nor am I willing to continue to argue over religious texts that are self-referencing to constitute proof.

And they get pretty obvious in big subs like /cars and /gaming. So many posting opinions like car magazines or gaming reviews do - point out nit-picky negatives that are relatively inconsequential to the product, softball other criticism, but give an overall decent review. Heaven help you if you actually voice an opinion critical of the object, because you’re allowed to have that opinion as an individual, that doesn’t toe the line and you get instant downvotes.

See, now you’re moving the goalposts. You made a sweeping statement that Christianity is as-is compared to the first century CE. Yet here you are breaking it down and excluding things.

Let’s just face it, you don’t mean Christianity as a whole is same as 2kyr ago. It isn’t. They held on to some facets of it, got rid of others, but kept the main themes like resurrection and the like. Heck, there are even some that suggest the resurrection story was added centuries later.

Nonetheless they are different. And you skipped past the whole “little is known” part, not to mention all the parts that got tossed out along the way.

Well, not free…. Taxes and all that. But free at the time of service, sure.

E: not sure what triggered the downvote train. Nothing I said is untrue. It’s not free, it’s paid for with taxes. It’s not a dig against socialized care, I’d much prefer to have that vs the financial disaster that US healthcare is.

I don’t know. I’ve seen a few examples of women who have radically changed their looks via skillful application of cosmetics.

I don’t know what to do with that. On one hand, society expects them to use available techniques to change their appearance to meet standards of beauty very few can ever accomplish. Otoh, it’s dishonest because irl they’re not who they seem to be, so an app that shows them without makeup might be useful. But the catch-22 is that the app may not be right, or that we judge too harshly based on an unattainable standard.

Man, Beauty is fucked up in the West. CGI, photoshop, photo manipulation have destroyed reality in favor of manipulating what desirability is.

You said:

An interesting thing about what we have now in Christianity though is that it basically spawned as-is in the first century

The article says:

Little is fully known of Christianity in its first 150 years; sources are few.

So you’re making a huge, sweeping statement that Christianity as we know it today is based on something…we don’t know much about? There are 6 major Christian denominations, not to mention hundreds of smaller ones. Which one is the “as-is” one? The one that is exactly “as-is” from CE 100?

That’s the problem though. They want none of their pennies to go to anyone else for anything. Loosely they might pay for someone else’s whatever if it’s their choice, or maybe if there’s groveling involved. They use mental excuses like “someone that’s lazy, doesn’t meet my made-up standards, doesn’t look, speak, or think like me”… or any other metric by which they subjectively view others to judge whether or not those others get their money. Yet somehow they expect roads, water, schools and all the other services that keep their town and state to miraculously keep functioning and not look like a decrepit village on a dirt road in a destitute nation.

You mean besides a couple dudes running around telling us to be cool to each other?

You didn’t even read the wiki entry, did you.

It also doesn’t take into account rising property taxes, business tax, rising maintenance costs. I’m not arguing in favor of these dirty landlord companies that jack up the rent at every opportunity, however you’d have to control interest rates and the ridiculous home prices if you want to keep rents reasonable based on a percentage of mortgage costs.

I think profit and power, or the lack thereof, can be the root of a lot of these awful human traits. It can just be straight up greed driven by a few looking to gain power and/or money that push an agenda of [insert tried and true bogeymen here like xenophobia, religion, racism, etc.] to create motives and instabity to trigger the wars. It could be genuine problems like economic issues or severe agricultural deficiency, via real misfortune or more likely due to greed, corruption, and mismanagement by the country’s leadership. Even religion can be the rationalization, a tit-for-tat, but nonetheless the end result is to take what the enemy has. It doesn’t have to be formalized markets or capitalism.

It can both be about profit and genocide. They can exist at the same time. IOW, genocide can be profitable.

The former president has claimed the criminal charges against him will appeal to Black voters. In February, he told a group of Black conservatives that his indictments are “why the Black people like me.”

Holy hell…could he be more insulting? “They’re all crooks so they’ll like me because I’m a crook like them”.

Oh, they’ve lightly retconned it to mean “I’m persecuted for false charges like them” but that’s not what he said on the first go around. And he did exactly to the black community what he says they should relate to him for when he went after the Central Park Five.

I think “as-is” is a bit of a stretch.

No.

There’s lots of ambiguous information. There is no firsthand, historically agreed upon data that supports his existence in the form we know him today. In other words, there was no magical guy doing magical things.

There is no Roman record of “nailed 3 prisoners to the posts today; Bill, Roger, and Jesus the magic guy who was a pain in the ass.”

However, like Arthurian Legend, it doesn’t mean some guy like Jesus didn’t exist, or an aggregate of characters weren’t assembled to be him on story. Arthur was possibly just a chieftain of a group who fought a couple of hefty battles and made a name for himself, but he ended up being an almost magical figure with wizards and witches in the story and - guess what, he will “rise again” from the dead when needed. And no, rising from the dead isn’t owned by Christian religious figures, Osiris of Egypt did it, Dionysius of the Greek Pantheon among many others. So maybe some dude, who probably wasn’t named Jesus, caused a stir and got a few people to take note. That grew over hundreds and even thousands of years to what we have now.

Want to know why King Arthur isn’t a competitor to Jesus? He a) doesn’t offer the opportunity to control people in this life for the hope of an afterlife, b) he isn’t profitable.