Isn't it remarkable that Weird Al's career has outlasted that of so many major bands' and artists'?

SoftPoreCorn · 1 day

Hey now you can just knock that right the hell off

bracon · 2 days

Yeah, my tired brain skipped over that part about "now I have nothing of my own" on my first read-through of the post. Second read through, and, . . now it's obvious. Just one of many, great "I was born yesterday" moments. There is hope for me.

bracon · 2 days

How is it obvious? You're talking about a possibility. Plenty of people can argue like crazy while remaining self-inhibited against resorting to physical violence. Plenty of people do that their entire lives. Even men. Can you believe it?

Let's seriously hope you are not right about that possibility, though.

MyoAMG · 2 days

Well, aren't you lucky Loyola University is into false ecumenism?

St. Ignatius Loyola, rolling in his grave. . .

secaa23 · 2 days

Wow. . . your opinionated view of the church (clear in your first post) is skewing your thinking about this so blatantly, you are actually saying the church has a hostile, villainous intent. You seriously think this is about the non-believer healthcare workers?

You don't want prayer in schools? Okay, then how about this: why should the church be forced to betray their own beliefs in this law?

It's a strong-arm tactic. An openly hostile political attack on Christianity. The Obama administration is "making it personal" with what amounts to a legislative suckerpunch.

thelegendofsam · 2 days

To say that something comes from nothing, or to try to redefine "nothing" so that it somehow includes "something", is doubleplusungood. Or, doubleplusgood, depending on one's viewpoint.

Massive_Conquistador · 4 days

I have yet to meet a single atheist that does not let their lack of belief bleed out into the world in some kind of negative way.

Except, that's silly of me to say. I am Catholic now, was once agnostic, and spent many years arriving where I am today. I've known principled atheists who do not see offense and negativity as necessary. I've known atheists who are not "adhere-to-the-party-line" atheists like those in r/atheism and New Atheism.

You have known theists that do not let their belief bleed out into the world in some kind of negative way. I'm thinking you just never noticed them.

Anyway, if you want to say things like "religion is generally a harmful thing" I can very, very easily say "atheism is generally a harmful thing" and "secular humanism is generally a harmful thing."

In fact, if you want to weigh death-tolls, I'm afraid you're going to lose by far.

Scaurus · 4 days

The telling thing is that those trolls seemed to be quite friendly with the moderator of an underage porn subreddit. They were even mods of a couple subreddits along with that person. I can't just ask anyone else to assume they are all into that, encouraging guilt by association, but the question mark just doesn't go away. I am personally convinced because of what I saw, but I don't want anyone to rush to judgment about something like that just because I am suspicious and convinced.

This is one of those things where you offer reparations for what they are doing.

mikfay2010 · 4 days

I hope you agree that they shouldn't do evil so that good may be done.

cjknjkn · 5 days

If the OP's girlfriend was able to condition him without him realizing it, you can definitely use lama or something to gradually yet fairly quickly condition yourself to remember these things pretty much automatically. Then, there's nothing for her to find out. Everybody wins.

BSCavalier · 6 days

It's amazing how few Catholics know anything about the SSPX or their situation.

Archibishop Lefebvre and the four SSPX bishops were possibly never actually excommunicated due to Abp. Lefebvre acting out of a sincere belief that the Church was in a state of emergency.
If the excommunications were actually valid, they were already lifted anyway by H.H. Benedict XVI.
The laity who attend SSPX masses were never excommunicated or declared in schism by any Church authority. There was never any grounds to do so, as they were doing nothing wrong as long as they were just there for the Sacraments. They are simply Catholics. Some of them grew up before Vatican II, and they knew the Mass of the Ages was never outlawed, and they went where it was offered. Other laypersons among the SSPX identify closely with the society, even belonging to the SSPX Third Order, and others. . . simply go to Mass. Some of them even go to mass with the SSPX, FSSP, ICK, and/or diocesan traditional latin masses (Extraordinary Form) or the Ordinary Form.
The SSPX's mission, stated plainly, is to preserve and reverently offer the sacraments according to the 1962 Roman Rite. They do so because they honestly believe the Church is in a state of crisis. The crisis is obvious and requires mental gymnastics to deny.
It doesn't matter how many people say it - it's wrong and groundless to make blanket accusations of schism or heresy toward all who attend SSPX masses and who agree with any of their positions. Can you show me where the Church has declared the SSPX bishops and all its priests, religious, and mass-goers to be schismatic and/or heretics?
That's because the SSPX was never declared to be in schism or heretical. This means SSPX is within the One, Holy, Apostolic, Catholic Church, and so, since the SSPX never left, you get your wish - you don't have to let the SSPX back in.
The talks between Rome and the SSPX are about resolving the society's canonical status. As in, bringing them out of "emergency mode" in which they had no official canonical status. Having no official canonical status does not automatically make a group schismatic. However, that doesn't stop some people, who will accuse the SSPX of schism, but not one of whom can provide proof that the SSPX is in schism, or who can show us proof that the SSPX talks with Rome are about ending a schism.

bongomagic · 8 days

Your experience is not the norm, and is so rare it's probably bad for the OP to think it's anything close to even the far fringes of the norm.

bongomagic · 8 days

I'm sorry, don't mean to offend and I don't want my opinion to reflect on you, but only what you say. That said, your answer is myopic. Too much optimism for something as tough and possibly volatile as marriage.

How on earth is any of it going to work itself out unless the couple in question have won the "magical relationship compatibility" lottery in which they are one of the few couples out of millions for whom things just work out great?

bongomagic · 8 days

Here's my answer as someone who was agnostic when younger, then a "non-denominational indifferentist Christian", then Catholic:

In a mixed marriage, I thought the non-Catholic must agree to let the Catholic parent raise the children as Catholics until adulthood as a condition which must be upheld for the Church to approve the marriage.

So, if you are already planning on not having them stick to Catholicism, you will make your promise to the Church and your wife a lie. It's good to not pretend to be a Catholic to hold up a facade, but you already might be starting out with a lie, anyway. If your wife knows you are breaking the promise you made, and if she sees you slowly loosening up about your promises and maybe even enticing your kids, it's going to hurt your marriage.

If I am wrong, and only your wife had to promise to raise your children Catholic, then what you have said already implies that you have little to no respect for your wife's promise.

If you want her to be happy well into future decades, don't marry her. Instead, let her find someone who will not cause conflict in her childrens' minds and lives, because no matter how nice you make it out to be, you are already, tacitly, showing yourself to be a sort of passive adversary. You think it's neat that she's good at this "religion game", but you'd be so happy if she were an atheist instead! Well, what's likely is that, like all married people, you will both become intimately aware of each others' faults more than you ever imagined now, and with that familiarity you certainly may not think like you do now. And, you might decide to give up being Mr. Passive Atheist, hoping the kids will see it your way. Instead, there's a good chance you will say, enough of this Catholicism stuff, our kids should not be led into religion.

Then, either you will be in for years of fights, possibly quite bitter fights that will lead to divorce - and you have no actual respect for your wife being Catholic if you are going to gamble with possible divorce with her. She may never be able to marry as a Catholic again if that happens. Sure, annulments may be too easy to get these days, but that may not always be true. You would be consigning your ex-wife to either apostasy if she re-marries after divorce, or she will have to live the rest of her life single.

Or, if she has weak faith, you might not be in for a lot of fights, or they may be easy. Instead, years from now you may find you are able to win the arguments and get her to not stick with her promise to the Church. You may even get her to become a non-practicing Catholic, or agnostic, or even an atheist. But then, you will have made everything in your original post here a lie, as well as everything you promised to her at the beginning. She will always remember.

There are so many things that are going to happen between now and when you two have your kids, you need to do a lot of very hard thinking. You have a very rosy picture of things and you are partially blinded by love.

Let me, a Catholic, tell you, an atheist, something very interesting - feelings aren't very important. The feeling of love is great, but the actions of love are what give it real meaning. If you are willing to lie or capitulate just to keep that feeling of love you have now, and if your actions come from and are dependent on your feelings, you are in for serious trouble. Feeling is a weak basis for anything with the exception of art.

If you want to pursue feelings over principles, then I and many others would say you have little business being married. If you want to be realistic, you have to plan for times when you might be unhappy with life, or with her, and you might not feel like putting up with "the Catholic stuff". You might go through stuff that makes you unwilling or unable to hold that up. You have to put down the good feelings for a bit and be honest with yourself and your wife, and talk about what you really think of religion and what you really plan to do about your kids being raised Catholic. If you don't, you're letting yourself and your wife fool each other by buying into a facade. You're already weighting things in your own favor

You're already saying you're fine if the kids abandon their faith, so how readily do you think anyone would believe you won't entice them or drop statements here and there contrary to what your wife and the Church says? Are you really going to keep thinking this way 18 to 20 years into the future, or does it just sound good right now? It may get you over one hurdle, but you cannot avoid the hurdles in the future.

I'm very curious how old you are. If you and your girlfriend are in your early 20's, you need to slow things down and do some hard thinking. If you're older, well, same thing.

P.S. I agree with ThereWasADream's comment - that letting your kids decide at high school age whether or not they want to go to Mass is the worst time to do it. Teenagers do not have adult minds, and we all know from personal experience that during the teenage years we basically try and un-discipline ourselves because we are not mature. For you to go easy on them during those years makes all your accommodations and stated intentions into meaningless platitudes. You are basically saying you are just going to wait for the right time to sabotage what your wife has promised the Church she will do. You are waiting for one of your kids' most vulnerable times - when they will think like they are adults while they are still just kids - to woo them into complacency away from what you see as your wife's neat but meaningless promise.

avengingturnip · 9 days

This is a rhetorical question and I do not want you to answer it so much as just read it: since St. Pio of Pietrelcina - Padre Pio! - was very alarmed at what was happening with Vatican II and the Novus Ordo mass, would that make him a "Mel Gibson Catholic"? Was all the Church just "Mel Gibson Catholicism" before Vatican II?

Seriously, are traditional Catholics the only people in the world who aren't supposed to stand up for what they believe in?

pollywog · 10 days

Skepticism is not the default "normal human thought". It is a tool - one useful way of thinking about certain things, and, at times, that tool is vital. If you take skepticism to be "normal human thought" you are putting it in a place it should not be. Key word is "if". Not trying to act like I caught you in something, just throwing this out there.

pollywog · 10 days

Atheism isn't a religion and is not always a belief system, but some individuals kind of blur the distinction. There are many, many very irrational atheists who do not live lives of inquiry, and whose idea of "free thought" means you can't possibly be a free thinker and a theist. They just accept much of whatever is said by atheists they look up to, such as Richard Dawkins. And, whoa, he's sure got everything figured out lol.

As a traditional Catholic who loves science, he actually makes me worry less about atheism's future impact since the holes in his thinking will eventually be glaring, gaping holes likely to make some atheists question why they accepted what he said. It's human nature that they might then be sympathetic toward more rational religion. Especially since atheism now have plenty of blind followers who will make it look very bad sooner or later. Of course, it may take more time than it should if the media just doesn't report on certain things, such as how sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church are big news, but sex abuse among secular professions and the rest of society are not examined at all. Just wait for someone to open that can of worms! The inquiry of freethinkers follows the party line so much that the name "freethought" is an Orwellian joke of epic proportions.

What I find more common than "religious atheists" are atheists whose thinking is more or less shaped too much by our media-frenzy society and its politics. Or, to seriously compound the problem, their thinking is shaped by r/atheism or something like that. They sound more like mini-political pundits than anything else because they think mudslinging and negative attacks make them strong somehow. Unfortunately, r/atheism is to atheism as Fox News is to journalism.

Why? Because you have a lot of nearly blind followers. Why isn't the rational thinking you extoll curing the diseases of complacent political adherence and groupthink among atheists?

I don't need to think of atheism as a belief system. It doesn't even have to become some kind of belief system to get into the mired ground that will soon enough spoil the zeitgeist.

justsayboom · 11 days

Surely you have realized how many people resort to a sort of "lazy thinking" in their speech, choosing to express themselves with crude and often rather meaningless words with emotional impact, as opposed to thinking out what they really want to say. Many people don't even really express what they think through what they say, and if you asked them to say what they really think, some would fall silent and struggle with that for a moment. Often, people just spout emotional, stream of consciousness expression without thinking. Much of conversation is banal social bonding and "feeling out" another person in order to almost subconsciously find reasons to no longer feel threatened by that person, or, on the other hand, to feel comfortable with that person so that they can hopefully be a friend. Often, it's just both.

Even intelligent people do this. Feelings are powerful and we all really have no choice but to learn when and how and why to moderate them. Whatever the profession or endeavor in question, pay attention, and you will see people whose very intellect is swayed and colored by their feelings. We have laws to prohibit malice. People who should know better do bad things all the time, and, what's more, they let themselves do them. The rest of us see the senselessness and think, "uh yeah, you know you just didn't have to do that."

It makes sense to me that negativity in even more general ways could somehow poison intellect.

Here's one anecdotal account for you. Probably four times in my life, I've purposefully stopped being vulgar in speech. Why? Because I realized that it was like meaningless trash in my thinking before I even spoke. It is actually more interesting and I would say more healthy to stick to what has useful, informative meaning when you think and speak. When you do it, you can just tell it's better for your mind.

Language involves creative expression, but it also involves clarity of commonly accepted meaning. This is why mathematics is possible. The symbols and languages we use enable us to find order. Even creative expression is at its best when words are used for their commonly accepted meaning in a way that is also creative and evocative. And, when I say "commonly accepted meaning", I intend to relate that to mathematical symbols and dictionary definitions. They both remove ambiguity and guessing at meanings. People who learn and use those meanings can communicate with clarity. Those who do not, cannot.

Then, you have habitual tendencies in thinking, which can be habitual mistakes in thinking. Huge subject there. I find it very easy to believe that habitual crude language in thinking, let alone in speech, almost always means that person is not really thinking very deep. People who often refer to other people and circumstances in crude ways usually show a tendency to want to arrive at a self-satisfactory label or judgment. People whose thoughts are guided above all by opinion are frequent, and bad enough.

Crude language usually involves a negative view of things, or simply a vulgar view of things, and people who have a negative, crude opinion about something every other thought, or whose humor is dominated by it out of social conformity, make this study more like the tip of the iceberg to me.

So, here's a challenge - spend a week or a month refusing to curse. Start with your speech, and you'll probably notice your thoughts follow. You will also feel stupid when you curse. Like you said, cursing obviously doesn't automatically make you dumber, but my point is that various habits in thinking, especially when those habits are influenced by emotions and complacency, do not help anyone think better when they need to.

I think some of the cause is there among this whole set of factors, but I'm not an expert, so this is just talk about something I find interesting. There are obviously a ton of correlations all over this subject, though.

gravelpit · 21 days

Even if you don't see as dramatic physical results as you'd wished, don't forget that what you're doing is excellent for your willpower. It's very good for you to be able to keep going even through moments that don't satisfy you.

woodrail · 23 days

That doesn't work on me. Take care.

woodrail · 23 days

The difference is r/atheism is used to support and foment prejudice more than it is used to talk about atheism. r/Christian is just about Christianity, and isn't used to support and foment prejudice, although Christianity can never really fall into the irrational category of "political correctness".

woodrail · 23 days

Could you post this exact same thing in r/DebateaChristian or in r/Christianity, please? You forgot to read the rules on the sidebar.

Since other Christian subreddits, meaning their moderators and subscribers, are willing and decent enough to entertain inquiry and debates while also being trolled and made targets of varying amounts of attacks not often rational or reasonable from foundation to roof, so to speak, this subreddit is a place where those things are simply excluded as much as possible.

I'm tempted to answer your questions, but then I would be violating the intended purpose of this subreddit. It's not an affront to everyone who's not a Christian - it's just a limitation in the same sense that a book club has no reason to let itself be derailed, trolled, or taken over by another book club with a sizeable portion of members who cannot resist confrontation at Barnes & Noble. In this subreddit's case, it's here in case anyone wants to use it as a place away from those things.

I am going to remove this post now, sorry. Also, I'm going to send this same message in a pm to you.

jcsickz · 1 month

You could fight off a cougar if it wasn't determined to kill you. It would easily decide you're not worth the trouble if you put up enough of a fight. But, if it was determined, you'd most likely be one hell of a meal. If it laid open your skin badly enough, you may end up going into shock and dying, anyway.

The thing about cougars, though, is this:

Years ago, in the Texas hill country, my friend was out for a walk one evening where a new development recently had roads laid down. He was sitting on a cul-de-sac curb, with a treeline close behind him.

He felt a chill go up his spine as he felt he was being watched. He jumped up and spun around to see a cougar crouched behind him in the treeline, ready to spring onto him and sink its canines into his neck.

That's a cougar. They aren't often going to attack from a situation in which they are at a disadvantage, and, for them, disadvantage is anything other than remaining stealthy in order to ambush.

Anyway, he swung his arms out and started yelling, freaked out, and the cougar decided it was no longer an easy opportunity.

Had to share the story. I hope if you ever fight a cougar it's face to face. Nature is beautiful and full of wonder!

LongRun1 · 1 month

In r/atheism, you get to witness how people, as a group, draw each other into prejudice and then reinforce it.

I am routinely horrified by the stories of religious families dealing with their agnostic/atheist relatives in ways that almost guarantee the agnostic/atheist person will remain adversarial and feeling victimized, which only closes them off to religion more.

Many of the people in question have families who react with prejudice to their agnosticism or atheism. Their families don't deal with them in a principled, understanding way. What's sad is that they then go to r/atheism where other atheists - who proclaim themselves to uphold rationality - tempt them to adopt prejudice as a response to prejudice.

However, other than those posts, which are serious and deserve consideration and prayer from Christians, r/atheism is full of emotionally-guided thinking and nurturing of prejudice.

silverboyp · 2 months

Nice that it was spared total wreckovation, though the altar is bad enough.

CorleonisPX

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