chri'stina

Yeah true....
But someone should make one of those flow charts about religious stupidity combined with logic to find out someone's level of stupidity. It can start with "Religious" at the top, next down would be the choices of "I would vote for Palin" and "I wouldn't vote for Palin", and so on until you reach the assessment.
Of course people like you who aren't stupid enough to believe in a God don't need such charts, you're all amazingly smart people, usually with hearts of gold.
Someone plus one'd your insult to me. I just love this place.

I find it crappy that my joke of saying to AJ what AJ said to someone else, obviously sarcastic, is being used to discredit my logic because I am religious.

Yeah true....
But someone should make one of those flow charts about religious stupidity combined with logic to find out someone's level of stupidity. It can start with "Religious" at the top, next down would be the choices of "I would vote for Palin" and "I wouldn't vote for Palin", and so on until you reach the assessment.
Of course people like you who aren't stupid enough to believe in a God don't need such charts, you're all amazingly smart people, usually with hearts of gold.
Someone plus one'd your insult to me. I just love this place.

Dude, that is so damn creepy, that picture should be banned from the internets. At least without a warning.

Hear hear. The things that unite Americans are so much greater than those that divide us.
Yet to hear the vitriol from those who keep spewing this rabid partisanship, as though the gulf between our political parties is all that defines us, is truly nauseating. Are they really so one dimensionally obtuse, or is it all just an act? Sadly I think the former.

Honestly that's how I feel a lot of the time. I like to think of myself as more centrist, not right wing, yet this video makes me cringe.
It's almost all a load of #######. Yes there are obvious ideological differences between the parties. But many democrats don't even support making gay marriage legal on the federal level, many republicans shop at small shops and support local, organic food and mom and pop shops. So I guess no democrats shop at Walmart, right? These kinds of videos, made by either side, do nothing good for this country or us as a people.

It's the furthest away from the mouth which is pretty smart.

When God created the world, He delegated all authority over it to Adam and Eve. When they sinned in Eden, they handed all of that authority over to either Satan, or the blind laws of physics, depending on your theology. Whichever you prefer, it wasn't a good thing.
Similarly, when God appeared to Moses on Mount Sinai, He first spoke to all of the Israelites present. They begged and pleaded Moses to go up the mountain and deal with God directly and individually. They couldn't handle being directly in the presence of God. So they also abdicated the authority over Creation God initially delegated to humanity[, the powerful wielding of which was probably the initial purpose for creating the nation of Israel in the first place].
When Christians who believe this doctrine reclaim this authority (these are generally known as "charismatics", and exist in small numbers in all denominations) they can do some pretty remarkable things in the name of Jesus Christ.
But in general, God, while in principle omnipotent, is pretty hands off regarding earthly life. It's at our own request, and God finds the concept of violating that request repugnant. It's like how when your spouse, whom you love, asks to be left alone, if you love them, you respect that request, even if you know it's an irrational request caused by some psychological wounding that may even be their own fault.
He does work through charismatic Christians, even doing supernatural miracles through them. These tend not to make the evening news, but remarkable things are happening every day, especially in the third world. But He will not [yet] violate the general request of humanity to, generally speaking, leave us alone.
This is probably why God had to become a man in Jesus Christ - there was no other way to effect supernatural change involving Creation and humanity without usurping humanity's [admittedly mostly idle] authority over Creation without becoming, in a very meaningful sense, part of humanity.
The Book of Revelation describes what it will be like when God finally does revoke humanity's authority over Creation and intervene directly. The results aren't pretty.

Thread Hijack:
Which of the following VJ poster flame wars makes you want to kill yourself the most?
Pike vs Charles
Rob vs Charles
Steven vs #####
Cleo vs Charles
Heracles vs the world
Pick one.

I am just wondering who "everyone" is? I agree many people don't even know about their own religions, Christians included. I personally don't have a problem with the Old Testament. To me it's part of the entire story of the need for redemption. When David wanted Bathsheba and secretly planned for her husband to be killed in battle, it was in no way condoned and he was rebuked and punished for it. It was despicable and a prophet went and confronted him about it. He repented but couldn't change the fact that damage had been done. I am glad such stories are in the bible for various reasons. 1-to show mankind at it's best and worst, 2- to make people understand that their own mistakes are not above forgiveness.

Classic false dichotomy. You don't logic so good in the morning, do you?
No. I'd rather they be immortal beings of light and power. The emergence of the middle class is the greatest victory against the darkness humanity has ever achieved, so much so that I actually doubt we did it without outside help. The only danger of "middle-classness" is that a disturbing percentage of humanity are seemingly content to stop here, when 1.8 of us still DIE. Every. Single. Second.
It's like finding a homeless guy with a big tumor. You take him to the shelter, and he gets a bath, clean clothes, and a hot meal. But he's still dying of cancer. If he's like most of humanity, he will be in total denial about the cancer, and even once he acknowledges it's existence, he will still fight you every step of the way if you try to get him to come to the hospital to have it removed. He says it's a part of him, it's natural, and he likes it. Even if he admits to not really liking it, his next fallback will be to disbelieve that anything can be done about it, even though the hospital is right across the street, and he can plainly see tumors being removed in operating rooms through the street level windows. Even if he admits that it is possible to remove the tumor, his next fallback will be to impugn the motives of the surgeons.
This is not the thinking pattern of a rational human being. Can you see that?

If it makes you feel better, my mother has the same sticking point. It's very common.
This is because one of the most insidious aspects of our damage is that it makes us think that we are basically good people, and that the universe, at least in middle-class Western Civilization [herein defined as including anybody with the network bandwidth and access to technology to post on a web forum], is at least basically similar to what God had in mind when He made us and the universe, and is unfolding more-or-less the way it should.
The universe is damaged. Very, very damaged. Sentient beings die. All the time. So often that if the sun were to dim each time our number was reduced by one, it would be a continuous 1 hz flicker that everyone would soon learn to ignore. This is not how things are supposed to be. Most humans, everywhere, seem to have at least a dim realization of this, that the universe is damaged in some way, that death is bad, and wrong, and a symptom that something very dark, some damage to the universe itself has occurred, and is occurring.
And we are damaged with it. Not just the Hitlers, Dahmers and Mengeles, but all of us. Each and every one of us. The most spiritually dangerous thing about being in a reasonably prosperous middle class is that we become capable of pretending that as long as we have oxygen at standard temperature and pressure, and live in an ecosystem that generates enough food to survive, and have friends and family we can get along with reasonably well, and even have a little technology to entertain us and make us comfortable and healthy for a short while, we can be fooled into thinking that everything is still ok, and that we are still ok with it. It isn't. And we aren't.
This is what Jesus meant when He said it is harder for a rich person to go through the eye of a needle than it is for them to enter Heaven. God can't even begin the process of fixing us until we see that we are broken, and poor, and miserable, and starving and naked.
This reality, this fact that almost everyone seems to miss, of the extreme spiritual poverty of humanity, in in the midst of apparent riches, is not unique to Christianity. And everywhere it crops up, it is accompanied by the same devastating accusation: that we somehow caused this damage, both to the universe, and to ourselves. The Abrahamic religions do not have a monopoly on the myth of the Garden of Eden. The idea that human action caused immense spiritual damage and distortion to the entire universe, and us with it, is virtually a human cultural universal. Every culture on this planet, from Polynesia to India to Egypt, and yes, to ancient Israel and from them to the modern West, remembers something like this occurring. They may call the human agent Eve, or they may call her Pandora. They may call the place Eden, or Babel, or something else entirely. But the entire human race, when not drunk on it's own magnificence, remembers something going terribly, terribly wrong, and it being our fault.
We can't correct it ourselves. But if we can at least force ourselves to look at it, and see it, to stop staring into our laptops and ipods, into our exercise regimes, self help programs, and man made religions of rules and regulations, to stop pretending that our utter spiritual and moral poverty is, at worst, a slight blemish on an otherwise awesome creation that we can buff out given the right technology or the right ideology or the right social organization, to at least see the damage and the wounding for the deep and apparently fundamental twisting that it is, God can begin to fix us. It will take a death and resurrection for us to be fixed, but He wlil do it, because He loves us, if we let Him.

The thread has nothing to do with AUS, so yes you are trolling.

I'd like to know how man liberteapartians design stuff - anything.
Trolling again I see.

He sheds a tear every time you post.

He sheds a tear every time you post.

He sheds a tear every time you post.

He sheds a tear every time you post.

Circle of life! Let things run their course!
This is all a runaround in service of the fact you don't feel connected to those with the least. If you had a mentally-ill brother on the streets, or had dealt with a death-grip addiction yourself, you'd change your tune. Or for god's sake, I hope you would. You are not different from those that sleep without a roof. I don't know where your compassion part got lost, but it costs so very, very little to find it. Your unwillingness to venture a cursory search is on you.

So what if they have no one to help them get into one? Things seem easy when we are not the ones in the situation.

I am really glad I don't just depend on emotionless nature to run it's course.

So what if they have no one to help them get into one? Things seem easy when we are not the ones in the situation.

Not so tough. Do kind acts and don't brag about them.

That's not my reading. Nobody is compelled to do anything but let their light shine, be themselves, be good. The notice of such then goes to God for praise--not the adherent; there's no self-honoring at all.
The second passage is a metaphor for not being a d*ck about it.

Just a tip - do NOT post this kind of question in Off Topic. If you think that response was rude, post this in OT and see what that does.