There are so many brands of e-liquid and they aren’t required to publish ingredient lists, so the answer is probably “some of them, yeah”.

What’s worse than the President of the world’s most influential nation being part of a child sex trafficking scheme? Other than nuclear war, which would be pretty hard to distract people from.

Nah, it used to mean coke-addled idiot.

Except in 99.9% of cases nothing gets fixed after deployment either. That’s just an excuse not to admit that from the get-go.

Censorship is bad, but Facebook and X’s entire business models revolve around spreading content that is at once false and inflammatory, either just to create engagement or for more malicious purposes, and they reach a huge portion of the population directly, including children, teenagers, the mentally ill and other vulnerable populations. This requires a new understanding of accountability for spreading information.

I wouldn’t agree that it makes sense to hold a Mastodon instance responsible for what its users post, because they don’t have a financial incentive or the ability to promote misinformation at a massive scale. Twitter does. As Aristotle said, we must treat equals equally, and treat the unequal unequally according to the form and extent of their inequality.

Thanks for the comprehensive lesson. Not living in an English-speaking country, I was utterly confused.

It’s not strictly a cover since it’s oficially promoted by the band and even has Till Lindemann on vocals but Sven Helbig recorded a wonderful piano version of Mein Herz Brennt by Rammstein.

Interest is an increase in price*. Lower interest isn’t a discount, it’s a smaller increase. Calling it a discount is like punching you instead of stabbing you and calling it nonviolence.

*In exchange for better payment conditions, but that’s not relevant to the point.

Oh, absolutely. Proverbs is full of wisdom, for example. And in the NT there’s some fishy stuff like Jesus cursing a fig tree for not bearing fruit for him even though it wasn’t the season, or when he made a herd of pigs commit suicide. The reputation of OT=bad and NT=good isn’t deserved. But to be fair, Jesus never said to stone the gays or that slavery was okay and 99% of the times people discuss bigotry in the Bible, they’re talking about one of these two.

Every religion has its good and bad parts.

Fair enough. I never said that people have to go back to the OT to find bigotry. Just that they often do.

and importantly rejects pretty much all Jewish law, supplanting it with the particular interpretations of one rabbi who is also the son of God but is also God himself.

Was Jesus actually recognized as a rabbi, though? I think he was just a preacher and not part of the official hierarchy, such as it was. This is irrelevant to the point you were making but it got me curious.

I didn’t say that “Christianity” itself quotes the Old Testament for purposes of bigotry, but that the fact that some Christians do even when said bigotry contradicts Jesus’s teachings, which is indisputable, is proof that Judaism is indeed packaged into Christianity in a certain form. And the point of view under which it can be called Judaism for export is really quite simple: Judaism considers Hebrews to be the Chosen People and everyone else is just out of luck. At best, you can marry into the religion. Jesus comes along and in a manner of speaking opens up access to the Hebrew God for anyone willing to follow him, regardless of their bloodline. Hence Judaism for export. Christianity quite literally took several Jewish ideas, such as their creation myth, and packaged them with a new doctrine that allowed them to be exported to other peoples.

Let’s not throw around words like antisemitism with such carelessness. There is bigotry in the Old Testament, such as the infamous Leviticus 20:13. Mentioning this is neither an attack on an entire race of people nor an implication that bigotry is somehow exclusive to Judaism, which just for the record, it most certainly is not. I’m trying to have a good faith conversation comparing different belief systems, and I don’t have the filthy habit of judging a human being’s worth from their religion, or worse, from their ethnicity.

Those are all valid points. Still, Christian Cosmology is the same as Jewish Cosmology: the world as an artifact created and ruled by a single all-knowing monarch who is in essence different and separate from it. And Jesus did define himself as coming to confirm the teachings of Judaism e.g. in Matthew 5:17, although in practice his teachings were very different - hence Christianity not being considered a Jewish sect but a separate religion. And because of this claim he made, the Jewish scriptures were received into Christianity, bringing along several beliefs that simply have nothing to do with anything Jesus ever thought was worth mentioning and several more which directly contradict his teachings. So there is of course this powerful connection between the two that can’t really be severed.

As for “multiple gods through the Trinity”, I wouldn’t put it like that exactly. Rather than being similar to Greco-Roman polytheism, the doctrine of the Trinity seems to me closer to the Hindu Trinity of the Godhead (Brahman, Vishnu and Shiva). Hinduism is of course polytheistic but these three gods in particular are not separate persons but different aspect of the same entity that manifest in different circumstances. A crude analogy would be if a person adopted one identity at work, another one at home with their family and another one while asleep. It’s still the same person, but fulfilling different roles. So it is with the Holy Trinity of Christianity. Hence what Paul said in Philippians 2:5-8:

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross!

In any case, this is a very interesting discussion.

You’re welcome! It’s always a pleasure to geek out about something I find interesting.

Sort of but not really.

All branches of Christianity believe that Jesus was the Messiah and the Son of God and that the Bible was written under divine inspiration and is the literal Word of God, among other dogmas. They only differ in how they interpret the sacred scriptures.

Not only is there no centralized textual source for Buddhist teachings (there are several different sutras and each “kind” of Buddhism gets to pick and choose), and therefore no dogmas universal to Buddhism other than “what the Buddha said was true”, but as I said some believe in the Hindu gods, some in other local gods and some in none; some believe in reincarnation and some don’t; and some believe that the Buddha himself was born special like Jesus (though not from a virgin) while others believe he was just a regular Joe for his caste but who was brilliant enough to figure out a way to cease suffering.

So you could make a case for there existing Buddhist Hinduism, Buddhist Shintoism and even “atheist” (in the literal sense of not believing in the supernatural, not in the acquired sense of not being a religion) Buddhism. This last kind views the Buddha’s teachings as basically brilliant psychology lessons masked in mystical language to be more accessible to the audiences of the time.

The central point of mystery religions like the Eleusinian Mysteries is to cultivate the mystical experience. In judeochristian theology, that experience is considered sacrilegious. Some Jews let Jesus have it and became Christians, but nobody else is allowed. And the ones we call Jewish today didn’t even let that one guy have it.

The similarities between Christianity and Greco-Roman mysticism are only surface-level and were a marketing ploy to gain followers. In its core, Christianity is still Judaism, just packaged for export. Hence why two thousand years later, Christians are still quoting the Old Testament to justify bigotry, even though they claim to be followers of the guy who said “love each other as I have loved you”.

“Better” doesn’t tell the whole story. There are hundreds if not thousands of different technologies involved in making an electric vehicle, from material selection for the frame to batteries to all the different components, software, conforming, etc. BYD cars may be overall superior to Tesla cars (I don’t know if they are, both are above my budget) but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t two or three hundred little things that Tesla cars still do better.

How does a monotheistic religion whose prophet explicitly claimed to be part of the succession of Jewish prophets and to have “come to confirm” their teachings seem more like a polytheistic religion where gods aren’t known for using prophets to send messages to the people to you? Serious question. I’m intrigued.

The Buddha never said to kill yourself, though. Your comment reads like those people who thought Nietzsche was depressed.

It’s much more diverse than Christianity, actually. Buddhism isn’t so much a religion in the judeochristian sense as a characteristic that many religions have. There are Buddhist traditions that worship gods, there are godless Buddhist traditions that worship the Buddha, and ones thay don’t even worship the Buddha but just think he was a pretty wise dude. Some require you to meditate daily, others to chant some mantras, and there are Buddhist traditions like Zen that worship nothing and are all about getting your head out of your ass.

#NotAllWomen but the ones who do like it rough often have fantasies that involve losing power and agency over what their partner does. Hence roleplaying rape and “do what you want to me”. However, sometimes they do have a script in their head and don’t like it when the partner deviates from that script because they just want to play at losing control, not actually lose it.

Then, if they haven’t agreed on a safe word beforehand, which they haven’t because we’re talking about people who don’t communicate properly, it turns into a confrontation.