One of the best comments I saw on the Twitter/Bluesky threads will “I’ll just show Ben Franklin how to use OnlyFans and he’ll be cool”.
There are a number of branches of the Presbyterian Church, ranging from very fundamentalist to very liberal, and my own experience with them is that the they only invite people to church and the like if they themselves have expressed interest.
You really don’t get what I mean, do you? If in doubt, generic you, like You-S-A. I guess only Godott’s personal intervention can cure that. With plenty of fire and brimstone.
Personally, I think that, given the current situation, they’d be okay with my dictum that it’s a sin to vote for a Republican.
There’s also the small matter of Jefferson’s own religious views, which may also have resulted in an interesting afterlife for him (on top of, you know, all the slavery and the rest).
I love to remind MAGAts that Thomas Jefferson owned a Koran. Far too many of them think the Koran is some kind of new creation.
That’s true of people in general, not just religious people. Some are nice, some are jerks, and some at every point in between.
And, to be honest, sometimes we’re jerks and sometimes we’re nice. Few people are always one or the other.
BRB, going to go tell r/conservative that Barack Hussein Obama invented the Koran and see if it takes over as a Fox News talking point
Very true. Why do some people want to give religious people more credit when they are not jerks (or assholes), vs. people in general?
To be fair, relative to most major religious texts (I’m looking at you, Book of Mormon) it is young.
When people start attacking religion and religious people as a whole, because of that fraction of religious people who are jerks, it’s only natural for religious people to point out that we’re not all jerks. And when nonreligious people get attacked in the same way, it’s also natural to point out that not all nonreligious people are jerks. It’s just that, in this particular community, the former is more common than the latter.
And, the good that is done by religious orgs is less newsworthy than the evils done by individuals in the organizations. OVERALL, they really do more good than harm.
So just assuming that their doing good is just par for the course is bad?
If I do a good job at work and nothing bad happens the news doesn’t say jack, but if I rob the place while wearing white disco boots and singing the theme song to “Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes” that, for some strange reason, gets mentioned all over the place by the press.
You know this from personal experience?
Totally hypothetical, so don’t bother doing any research on it.
Please.
I wasn’t talking about religious organizations, only individuals. It is possible that religious individuals as a whole do more good than harm, but I don’t think this is proven. I’m not talking, either, only about spectacular or noteworthy harm, only the every-day sorts of repressions and squelchings that are routinely done and said in the name of religious beliefs.
I definitely don’t think you can say that about religious organizations. I realize this is my own hobby horse, not shared by the majority, as the religious organizations are very assiduous in maintaining their front of “doing good” even while routinely taking actions that are not in the best interests of anyone except those who make their living and grow their power out of religion. I also realize that this observation would be better off debated in its own Great Debates thread, so I won’t bring it up any more in this one.
The kind of bad they do more than overwhelms the good they do.
Don’t forget the coverups of what individuals do.
I wish I’d read this before that rabbit hole I went down…
Like I said, totally hypothetical.
And it was “Puberty Love”