Stellula
16hr ago
Nicene Christian
This is one of my nits to pick with mormons. The idea of calling Christians "Nicene" Christians, as if there is some alternative Christianity is ridiculous semantic poisoning. As far as I can tell the only people who use this term are Mormons.
Stellula
16hr ago
Is that so accessible, though?
You don't need to read the entire bible and all of the fan fictions to figure what Christians believe.
I doubt most people, even people who know lots of mormons know that "We actually think that Jesus came to America, and that there were several large lost civilizations of Jews who sailed here in 500BC" is what The Book of Mormon is actually about.
Stellula
16hr ago
But my understanding is that the current leadership is pretty committed to burying anything that makes the faith stand out from the undifferentiated mass of non-denominational Christianity generally.
This isn't really possible, is it? I've been on a bit of a rabbit hole chasing down what Mormons actually think for the last few months (it's really hard to find, which is odd for a "church"), and from what I can tell their claim of even being "Christian" at all is a bit of an intentional linguistic trick.
Mormons believe in somebody they call Jesus, but they believe he was a guy who came to The United States of America about 2000 years ago and met with people living there at the time. The core of their religion is that there was a group of Jews who sailed to North America several thousand years ago, split into two groups which formed large, continent scale societies, and then went to war. There was a guy, Mormon, who wrote down some revelation on golden tablets, hid them, and then eventually an angel came to Joseph Smith in 1850 and told him where to find them.
Again, it's a bit tough to actually find what the Mormons believe. I think the mormons try to hide this on purpose because of how it comes across to people not familiar with it.
Stellula
16hr ago
It is an outrageous stretch to claim that "hinduism" has existed for thousands of years in the same way that The Catholic Church has. When this claim comes up, Hindus take the same tack as Muslims and Jews do, which is trying to claim that both there is no institution (whenever obvious problems with either of these religions come up), and that also it's the oldest institution.
There is no Hindu equivalent of The Pope, or The Cardinals, or Vatican City, or the Catechism. There are some old monestaries which have a loose connection to the modern world, some of which are almost as old as The Church.
Stellula
2d ago
There are many evangelicals who believe that Trump is the fulfillment of some sort of prophecy.
Stellula
2d ago
Are you Catholic? And if so: were you raised by and around other Catholics?
Being offended by this seems really forced to me. I wonder if the people taking offense just come from a different culture?
Stellula
2d ago
Every Catholic I have asked in person has said some variation of this.
I think non Catholics have a really difficult time modeling the way that Catholics actually think about stuff.
Don't let the people online and their questionable motives disuade you from attending a Cathlic church. My wife and I went through nearly the exact journey you did for the exact reasons. I am a "cradle catholic" (that is: I was raised catholic from the cradle), and my wife was part of a non denominational evengelical protestant christian church as a child.
We both left the church for different reasons during our teens, and were both extremely annoying internet atheists for 15+ years.
The things you are feeling about The Church being a stable force in an unstable world are correct. The Catholic Church has existed as an institution for between 1700 and 2000 years, and has been a background force keeping western civilization alive through every major war, every pandemic, every crisis, through the 'dark' ages, through everything.
The tradition is extremely alluring. There's something difficult to describe about participating in a ritual that has been practiced nearly without pause, for 2000 years. There is no other way to engage with your role as a member of western society than that, and there is nothing more long term stable than that.
If you want something even more traditional, find a Traditional Latin Mass. Despite what people online say, this is very much alive and well, and growing. Even my parish, in a very progressive part of a very progressive city, has a mass which is largely in latin, with very little singing, etc.
Something I think you'll find if you pursue this (I hope you do, like I said my wife and I did for the exact same reason you are and are now somewhat vocal about what a good choice it was) is the large gap between the internet, and The Church. This is a feature imo. Good luck.
Stellula
17d ago
As much as a lot of us complain about Pope Francis's progressivism, we can't deny that the Church has been seeing somewhat of a renaissance over the last few years: https://www.ncregister.com/news/easter-2025-new-catholics-by-the-numbers
The Pope Francis critics will say that this is despite him, but it's difficult not to see that his grace, and his kindness, likely also have an effect on the way that people view The Church.
Stellula
1mo ago
I'd be a tad bit concerned if my heart was, for example, a shade of blue.
I'm lost in the analogy now. What?
Stellula
1mo ago
Do people undergo experimental heart surgery because they don't like how their heart looks?
If there was an experimental heart surgery which changed the color of a patients heart from vaguely red to bright pink, I wouldn't support people doing it. I definitely wouldn't support impressionable teenagers who read about this on the internet doing it.
Stellula
1mo ago
Looks like Goldberg released the chats and, yeah, what Hegseth posted was inappropriate.
Stellula
1mo ago
Well today we had congressional testimony where they claim there was nothing secretive shared, and that signal was approved for the type of use they were doing.
So maybe everybody is lying. Certainly everybody involved here has an incentive to lie.
Stellula
1mo ago
I don't think the Trump admin would trust using a secure message system developed by the NSA.
Stellula
1mo ago
But it doesn't say that. In fact, when they talk about any actually sensitive military planning type things, they explicitly refer anybody in the group to an appropriate channel:
At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”
Stellula
1mo ago
The journalist says he has these, but what are they, specifically?
“We could probably hit them with a $big_cock_american_missile as earlier as tomorrow morning given that the USS American president is off the coast of goatherdistan” is specific timeframes, weapons packages, etc. and doesn’t say anything that isn’t also publicly available.
Call me skeptical.
Stellula
1mo ago
It seems like this was obviously “leaked” on purpose. Nothing they’re saying here is in any way secretive and it sounds like regime taking points, not planning.
Stellula
1mo ago
There’s a podcast called “Sold a Story” that’s worth listening to if you have a kid that age learning to read.
Basically the “sight reading” thing looks like students are progressing, but then soon hit a wall they can’t get past because they weren’t actually learning how to read just how to identify words.
Seriously check it out. Very well done, and also infuriating with regards to how education trends are pushed.
Stellula
1mo ago
The brief summary is that many of the people who run your government and dictate the shape of your life are very bad people who do not share your values or care about your life or the life of your children.
Stellula
1mo ago
I cannot recommend highly enough the very in depth podcast series that Darryl Cooper (aka Martyrmade) did on this topic a few years ago.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yrm8aOmQg-o
The only caution here is that this is a bit radicalizing, it seems very well sourced, and does not paint a pretty picture of the way that sex-blackmail has been used for the last 50 years in the west.
IANAL so this one seems really obvious to me. You aren't a citizen, you are here on a greencard. I would not expect to be able to go to Germany and stage a protest against their government, or "occupy" one of their schools and expect to be able to stay.
There's also something obvious here: you aren't a citizen. If you don't like what we're up to over here, then leave on your own.
I'm also getting a bit frustrated at the lengths to which the concept of "speech" has been stretched. It seems like there is a line somewhere between publishing a newspaper and "occupying" a public building where what you're doing stops being speech and starts being something else.
Also, to put some things together.
Khalil was an organizer of a protest at Columbia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Columbia_University_pro-Palestinian_campus_occupations
The protest was organized by a group called CUAD: https://instagram.com/cuapartheiddivest/
CUAD has called for, among other things, the "Eradication of Western Civilzation": https://nypost.com/2024/08/17/us-news/columbia-universitys-anti-israel-group-seeking-total-eradication-of-western-civilization/
America is my home. If you come here and want to protest to destroy or "eradicate" it, I think it's reasonable to deport you. You can keep calling to eradicate my home, but you can do it from your own country, and not by "occupying" any of my universities or public buildings.
Stellula
2mo ago
They're trying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania
Stellula
2mo ago
it's not clear why Zelenskyy should give away so much without something -- anything at all -- in exchange, presumably a security guarantee.
How are you coming and taking about this at all when you haven’t read anything about it, or even listened to the interview that js the topic of discussion in this thread?
Seriously what motivates this?
Zelensky is not giving away so much without anything at all. Trump and his proxies explain that giving us access to these minerals (Trump mistakenly at the beginning of the interview calls them “raw earth minerals”) gives us “skin in the game” and an obvious strong financial incentive to protect Ukraine.
But I’m actually asking: what is the motivation to talk about this without knowing anything about it?
Yeah man, those links are exactly the problem that I'm talking about. Those links reference somebody with the name Jesus, but what they fail to mention is that they're talking about an entirely different person (who just happens to have the same name) as the person that Christians are talking about when they say Jesus.
Stuff like this:
https://news-gu.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/mormonism-101#C8
No it isn't. There is a historical person who actually existed named Jesus, and he did not write a testament called "The Book of Mormon". This isn't a debate about theological interpretations, it is a historical fact.
It doesn't. It contains some things written by Joseph Smith in the 1830s in what he thought looked roughly like ancient egyptian.
Yes this is true, but what they're not mentioning on this page is that it was written in the 1830s by Joseph Smith.
This stuff is just frustrating to me. If you want to claim Joseph Smith as some prophet and start some new religion about it, then go for it. But just stop lying to people.
The rest of this page is the same sort of sophistic hand waving and not worth going through point by point.
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