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[ItWasMeantToBe19]

That quote from Biden has to be one of the dumbest lines I have ever read; it is like the offspring of an unholy union of ignorance and privilege. It astonishes me that someone like Biden could say that without any sense of self-awareness. Inequality kills people. Inequality discriminates against people. Inequality impoverishes, disenfranchises, silences, dehumanizes, it makes you the 'other'. You can't eat equality, give me a motherfucking break, you literally wouldn't be able to eat in the same goddamn restaurant as white people without equality.

Equality was never for white people, equality is for all those people whose lives suffer when it doesn't exist. It's fucking depressing to see highly prominent democratic leaders question what the real-world value of equality is. MLK's white moderates never really left us I guess.

I mean, Biden started his political career by being one of the first northern Dems to be against greater school integration...

 

[Debirudog]

I would have thought Biden would be educated by Obama but apparently not.

White privilege is ingrained apparently.

 

[Deleted member 231381]

Socialism means worker ownership of industry. Full stop. But there are so many ways to achieve this kind of arrangement and even more forms of expression. Socialism doesn't require repression, a one-party state, or even a strong government. Some socialists believe the government should just manage large and powerful labor unions. Some socialists believe there should be any government at all! Anarchists are just socialists with particularly radical aims.

As a few additional notes: socialism and capitalism are not economic systems or institutions. Capitalism does not mean using marketplaces, allowing the buying and selling of goods, the use of money, or anything along those lines. One of the greatest pieces of intellectual slight that the political right ever accomplished was persuading people this was the case.

Socialism and capitalism are social systems. Societies are normally divided into different groups of people, with, if not perfectly clear lines, at least relatively clear distinctions between them. These are classes. Capitalism describes a social system where there is a class that has control over the uses of capital (upper class/capitalist/bourgeois), and a class that has no control over the uses of capital (working class/labourers/proletarian). Socialism describes a social system where there is a single undifferentiated class, where control of capital is distributed evenly between peoples. (side note: this is not the only way to divide classes - any division that in society that is relatively persistent and of which the members share common interests. In a racist society, you have black and white classes. In a sexist society, you have male and female classes. Societies can have multiple different axes of class. Marx did think that all other class divisions ultimately stemmed from economic divisions, but this is not a necessary part of socialist thought and was criticized by many socialists).

This is at least partly orthogonal to the economic system. You can have capitalism that does not have free trade or open markets - for example, companies that create monopolies and practice unfair competition to keep out competitors and concentrate capital in a single company in the market. You can have capitalism that doesn't have markets at all - the state controls all the capital, and the state is dominated by a small class, so that class de facto controls all the capital and are capitalists, and those not in the state have no capital and are therefore labourers - this is a state capitalist society and arguably the Soviet Union was one. You can have socialism that has no markets - think a democratic Soviet Union - although I think in practice this one is very unlikely. And finally, you can have socialism with markets, which is something like a co-operative economy or even just an expanded version of a universal basic income system.

However, certain social systems tend to lead to certain economic systems being instituted, so they're not entirely orthogonal. Capitalist societies, for example, tend not to have particularly free markets after all - it's better for capital owners if they can create monopolies and the like. Socialist societies tend to have certain kinds of restriction on economic activity - if they're market socialist societies, for example, they tend to have very high inheritance taxes to prevent accumulation of capital over time.

Finally, socialism and capitalism are obviously 'ideal' types. They're models, simplified into two categories to help make some of the theories behind them easier to understand. Real life is much more complex (and some theories adapt to cope with this accordingly). We don't live in a 'pure'/perfect capitalist society. Most labourers do actually own some form of capital (for example, people who own their house outright, or have long-term savings), blurring the distinction between the class with capital and the class. We can make comparative statements though: over the last twenty years, there's relatively strong evidence that developed countries have become more capitalist and less socialist. But the key point is that thinking of socialism and capitalism as entirely dichotomous systems is probably the wrong way to think about it. They're a spectrum.

Additionally, even if you think that we ought to be more socialist, that's pretty vague and could lead to any number of different conclusions. Rather than arguing for a sharp transition to some entirely different institutional set-up (revolutionary socialism; or working outside the current system to bring it down), socialism as a political movement and organization can just involve reducing the extent to which our societies are capitalist and increasing the extent to which they are socialist slowly over time - usually called reformist socialism after the German movement. I think this is probably why Sanders classes himself as a socialist.

Social democrat is a confusing term because it used to be synonymous with reformist socialism. Reformist socialism, inside democratic societies, obviously argues for the democratic instantiation of socialist principles, and hence adopted the moniker democratic socialism - or parliamentary socialism in some places (UK, for example, where the Labour Party was a parliamentary socialist party). Democratic socialism, socialist democrat, social democrat - all the same terms for the same thing.

But there was a perception that a lot of social democratic parties stopped being socialist, in the sense that they were no longer concerned about a classless society as the end-goal, and instead wanted something like 'paternalist' capitalism - the idea that it's fine to have a class that controls capital as long as they're constrained in certain ways and pushed down certain avenues in a way that benefits the class with no capital (I've made that term up, I just wanted to give it an apparently accurate name. Normally, if it isn't labelled social democratic, it'd be named Third Way politics, or some variation in this).

It's not entirely clear whether this is true, because the differences are difficult to distinguish in practice - if you looked at the policy wishlist of a Third Wayer and a very gradual reformist socialist for their society over the next twenty years, you'd probably find absolutely minimal difference. That's why, say, I can and did support Hillary Clinton. When it comes to someone like Tony Blair, who made some pretty eloquent defences of socialism:

I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, Socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality, not because it wants people to be the same but because only through equality in our economic circumstances can our individuality develop properly.

which one is he? An incredibly gradual reformist socialist who recognised the political necessities of his time? Or no socialist at all?

But regardless, if you wanted a slightly faster pace than the current status quo, it became a good insult to imply that people more gradual than you actually just weren't socialists at all. Given many of these people were moving away from socialist as a term because of the increasingly negative connotations thanks to the slight of hand I mentioned earlier and embracing social democrat as a 'safe' word, social democrat became a weapon, almost. It's like neoliberal - it's not clear to me social democrat actually has much of a concrete meaning at all. Relatively few people self-identify as social democrats, and those that do perceive it totally differently to those who don't.

I actually think Sanders is a socialist. I think his ideal world is classless, that genuinely is his end-point. But he's not a revolutionary socialist, by any means.

 

[Bonen no Max'd]

Social democrat is a confusing term because it used to be synonymous with reformist socialism. Reformist socialism, inside democratic societies, obviously argues for the democratic instantiation of socialist principles, and hence adopted the moniker democratic socialism - or parliamentary socialism in some places (UK, for example, where the Labour Party was a parliamentary socialist party). Democratic socialism, socialist democrat, social democrat - all the same terms for the same thing.

But there was a perception that a lot of social democratic parties stopped being socialist, in the sense that they were no longer concerned about a classless society as the end-goal, and instead wanted something like 'paternalist' capitalism - the idea that it's fine to have a class that controls capital as long as they're constrained in certain ways and pushed down certain avenues in a way that benefits the class with no capital (I've made that term up, I just wanted to give it an apparently accurate name. Normally, if it isn't labelled social democratic, it'd be named Third Way politics, or some variation in this).

It's not entirely clear whether this is true, because the differences are difficult to distinguish in practice - if you looked at the policy wishlist of a Third Wayer and a very gradual reformist socialist for their society over the next twenty years, you'd probably find absolutely minimal difference. That's why, say, I can and did support Hillary Clinton. When it comes to someone like Tony Blair, who made some pretty eloquent defences of socialism:



which one is he? An incredibly gradual reformist socialist who recognised the political necessities of his time? Or no socialist at all?

But regardless, if you wanted a slightly faster pace than the current status quo, it became a good insult to imply that people more gradual than you actually just weren't socialists at all. Given many of these people were moving away from socialist as a term because of the increasingly negative connotations thanks to the slight of hand I mentioned earlier and embracing social democrat as a 'safe' word, social democrat became a weapon, almost. It's like neoliberal - it's not clear to me social democrat actually has much of a concrete meaning at all. Relatively few people self-identify as social democrats, and those that do perceive it totally differently to those who don't.

I actually think Sanders is a socialist. I think his ideal world is classless, that genuinely is his end-point. But he's not a revolutionary socialist, by any means.

Hmmm, in both of the classes where we covered this in my last semester (admittedly both were intro undergrad classes) social democracy was considered and described as liberalism with an emphasis on positive rights, so it just extends the essential rights of liberalism to include "rights-to", so if you have a right to life, you also have a right to health care regardless of financial status. In the same way libertarians are comfortable with taxes if it's to protect the negative rights (policing to protect life, liberty, and property), socially democratic liberals suggest also using taxes to protect positive rights but are unconcerned with actually removing the power of capital, just restraining it through democratic government institutions. Democratic socialism then I thought was much more radical in actually upending social structures instead of just providing governmental institutions to restrain capital, it just aims to do it through democratic means rather than through revolution.

I agree though that Sanders is a socialist who ran on New Deal-liberalism because it would be a better starting point for actual socialism to come about, especially considering his fairly pragmatic voting record. I also think he just wanted to destigmatize the word, which has worked pretty well for anyone who didn't grow up during the Cold War.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Why did white people in California become so much more left leaning over the last 25 years?

 

[Deleted member 231381]

Hmmm, in both of the classes where we covered this in my last semester (admittedly both were intro undergrad classes) social democracy was considered and described as liberalism with an emphasis on positive rights, so it just extends the essential rights of liberalism to include "rights-to", so if you have a right to life, you also have a right to health care regardless of financial status. In the same way libertarians are comfortable with taxes if it's to protect the negative rights (policing to protect life, liberty, and property), socially democratic liberals suggest also using taxes to protect positive rights but are unconcerned with actually removing the power of capital, just restraining it through democratic government institutions. Democratic socialism then I thought was much more radical in actually upending social structures instead of just providing governmental institutions to restrain capital, it just aims to do it through democratic means rather than through revolution.

I mean, I think this is the basic problem with 'social democratic'. It's a million different things to a million different people. It doesn't help that I can't think of any single political philosopher who identifies first and foremost as a social democrat. Everything else normally has a seminal author who, even if they don't rigidly define the necessary bounds of the field, act as an anchor point - so, Marx, Mill, Rawls, and so on. Social democrat has only ever been used by people who were actively in politics, and obviously political action necessitates all sorts of compromises that make it very difficult to establish just by observation what any politician necessarily desires as an end-goal. I don't think what you learnt is 'wrong', per se, that's certainly how many use the term. But it isn't how the term is exclusively used, and lots of the uses are contradictory. I try to avoid it, the same way I avoid neoliberal - they have the same problem.

 

[Bonen no Max'd]

Why did white people in California become so much more left leaning over the last 25 years?

(if they actually are) it's probably that all the racists left as it became way more multiracial, right? Like if most of the blatant racists are gone and the ones left have way diminished voting power, it won't have the same barriers to left-wing policy that the US as a whole had because of racism.

That's my guess anyways.

 

[Deleted member 231381]

Why did white people in California become so much more left leaning over the last 25 years?

Because California's economy is more heavily orientated towards skilled labour (graduate/PHD work) and it has suffered less from globalization as a result. Trump won white voters without a college degree in California (by a diminished margin compared to nationally, but still) - it's just California has relatively less of those than almost any other American state.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Because California's economy is more heavily orientated towards skilled labour (graduate/PHD work) and it has suffered less from globalization as a result. Trump won white voters without a college degree in California (by a diminished margin compared to nationally, but still) - it's just California has relatively less of those than almost any other American state.

........... I don't think Georgia and Texas have been hurt by globalization either, but their white people are, uhh, pretty not liberal.

20% of white people with a college degree in Georgia voted for Hillary....

edit: Florida is another state that has not been hurt by globalization and Trump won white people there 64-32. He won white college graduates in Florida 62-35.

 

[Foffy]

I figure I'd share this, as I took the time to listen to this lecture, and once again Guy Standing is sitting right on the fuckin' pulse of the global problem.

Of course, I am sad to notice when he talks about solutions, many countries are name dropped, but America is often the one missing, which is the country likely suffering the most from the problems in play.

Man, we're fucked hardcore. Red herrings everyday for years.

 

[Deleted member 231381]

........... I don't think Georgia and Texas have been hurt by globalization either, but their white people are, uhh, pretty not liberal.

20% of white people with a college degree in Georgia voted for Hillary....

Both Texas and Georgia have been becoming more liberal, though - they just started from further back than California, and they're advancing less quickly because they didn't benefit to the same extent.

 

[studyguy]

Both Texas and Georgia have been becoming more liberal, though - they just started from further back than California, and they're advancing less quickly because they didn't benefit to the same extent.

I'd wager it's in large part to the types of industries fueling growth too. Tech sector jobs in CA requiring more globalized views for product distribution, attracting skill around the globe and marketing it to the world as opposed to other state industries. That'd be my guess anyway. You look at liberals in the bay/NorCal as opposed to Southern CA liberal minorities and it's not nearly comparable. California as a whole is more progressive sure, but the bay is really pushing it forward to the extreme in most cases. Without Silicon Valley I doubt it'd be nearly as prominent of a movement, though again it's just my guess when talking about white progressives in general here.

 

[Deleted member 231381]

I'd wager it's in large part to the types of industries fueling growth too. Tech sector jobs in CA requiring more globalized views for product distribution, attracting skill around the globe and marketing it to the world as opposed to other state industries. That'd be my guess anyway. You look at liberals in the bay/NorCal as opposed to Southern CA liberal minorities and it's not nearly comparable. California as a whole is more progressive sure, but the bay is really pushing it forward to the extreme in most cases. Without Silicon Valley I doubt it'd be nearly as prominent of a movement, though again it's just my guess.

yes, same thing. The specific sorts of industry and associated labour that are found in California benefit enormously from integrated global labour markets and sale markets. This is somewhat less true of Texas, where the main growth economy has been oil and petroleum, which will pretty much always sell regardless and would be one of the few things not be hit much in a trade war, and doesn't necessarily require enormous amount of skilled labour.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Both Texas and Georgia have been becoming more liberal, though - they just started from further back than California, and they're advancing less quickly because they didn't benefit to the same extent.

Florida white people are becoming less liberal though....

And Georgia's whites are exactly as liberal now as they were in the past (not at all), it's just that Georgia has had a lot of population growth.

 

[Deleted member 231381]

Florida white people are becoming less liberal though....

And Georgia's whites are exactly as liberal now as they were in the past (not at all), it's just that Georgia has had a lot of population growth.

Florida white people didn't become less liberal; people who had been not liberal in Florida for some time actually turned up. Florida doesn't make much sense for most state-level economic analysis because north and south Florida are incredibly different, perhaps more so than divisions found in any other state, so you get all kinds of mixed signals when you lump those two very different areas together. If you look at what happened: north became less liberal, south became more liberal, north got motivated to turn up for the first time in a long while - then it makes sense. North Florida has been doing pretty badly for a long time now, the south booming.

 

[studyguy]

Also worth looking at what state legislatures look like. I mean when push comes to shove, what the state is doing to push their agenda will have a strong effect. Is Florida becoming more conservative as a matter of fact or is it in part due to general state politics also dipping their hand in the pot to stir it to their liking, etc. While not nearly to the degree of NC, it can still have a marked effect.

 

[Debirudog]

Florida is a giant clusterfuck of demographics.

 

[Deleted member 231381]

Florida is a giant clusterfuck of demographics.

Pretty much. You're not going to get anything useful out of Florida unless you do country-level analysis.

 

[studyguy]

Pretty much. You're not going to get anything useful out of Florida unless you do country-level analysis.

Really we should just let FL float off into the sea.
Who needs FL anyway?

 

[Wilsongt]

Why would you want to bring back Sprint jobs? Sprint is a terrible provider.

 

[mo60]

Why would you want to bring back Sprint jobs? Sprint is a terrible provider.

It's probably a PR move like the carrier deal.

 

[Bonen no Max'd]

Is there a good place to see election results by county? I'm trying to compare Minnesota with Wisconsin but it's kind of hard because the SoS website only provides the results by precinct, as far as I can tell.

 

[mo60]

Is there a good place to see election results by county? I'm trying to compare Minnesota with Wisconsin but it's kind of hard because the SoS website only provides the results by precinct, as far as I can tell.

The NYT election results page breaks election results down to counties.Third parties probably hurt hillary a lot in some counties in minnesota.Trump got destroyed in the counties mostly surrounding st louis counties and hennepin county.

Link
http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results

 

[Deleted member 231381]

Is there a good place to see election results by county? I'm trying to compare Minnesota with Wisconsin but it's kind of hard because the SoS website only provides the results by precinct, as far as I can tell.

http://graphics.wsj.com/elections/2016/results/

Not updated for the finalized results, but those aren't enormously different for most states that aren't California.

The difference between Minnesota and Wisconsin seems to be that Minnesota is marginally more dominated by its cities than Wisconsin is by its.

 

[studyguy]

“Because of what’s happening and the spirit and the hope I was just called by the head people at Sprint and they’re going to be bringing 5,000 jobs back to the United States,” Trump told reporters Wednesday outside his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. “Masa and some other people were very much involved with that.”

The jobs will be in customer care, sales and other functions, Sprint said in a statement. The company is still determining the location of the positions, which will be filled by the end of March 2018, Overland Park, Kansas-based Sprint said. Sprint had about 30,000 employees as of the end of March.

So telephone customer service jobs that were likely outsourced to India or something coming back? Sounds eh. Wonder what sweet deal Sprint got and how mad jelly ATT/Verizon will be.

 

[Bonen no Max'd]

http://graphics.wsj.com/elections/2016/results/

Not updated for the finalized results, but those aren't enormously different for most states that aren't California.

The difference between Minnesota and Wisconsin seems to be that Minnesota is marginally more dominated by its cities than Wisconsin is by its.

Yeah, this is my conclusion too. I was mostly curious if Minnesota's hold was because of the relative voting power of the Twin Cities and Duluth was stronger than Wisconsin's cities or if the flipped Obama counties were just won by smaller margins in Minnesota than Wisconsin. I wonder how much voter ID plays into this.

 

[mo60]

The odd thing about minnesota on the county level is trump actually lost dakota county by more then romney lost it by in 2012.Bush won it in his two terms by a tiny margin if I recall.

 

[Y2Kev]

So telephone customer service jobs that were likely outsourced to India or something coming back? Sounds eh. Wonder what sweet deal Sprint got and how mad jelly ATT/Verizon will be.

Sprint is about to go bankrupt

 

[kadotsu]

So are they fishing for a bailout?

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

So are they fishing for a bailout?

They want Trump to let them buy T-Mobile.

Bragging about these jobs if it lets Sprint buy T-Mobile seems like it wouldn't be wise... People are not fans of their phone bills going up.

 

[Makai]

They want Trump to let them buy T-Mobile

WHAT THE FUCK GTFO

 

[Oblivion]

They want Trump to let them buy T-Mobile.

Bragging about these jobs if it lets Sprint buy T-Mobile seems like it wouldn't be wise... People are not fans of their phone bills going up.

If that's the case, then yeah, this won't seem like a smart PR move like the Carrier thing was.

 

[Makai]

Does Sprint even use SIM cards? That sounds like an absurdly bad deal and it's not even an American company. I guess they just buy the American branch.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Religious people are mad because Trump is having someone pray at his inauguration who doesn't believe in The Trinity.

Paula White is a trinity denying heretic. She rejects the Council of Nicaea’s creed that every Christian accepts. To reject the orthodoxy of the Nicene Creed is to reject Christianity itself. You can see Paula White do this in the video above. And Paula White is going to pray at the inauguration.

Roman Emperor Constantine called the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325 to settle a growing controversy in the Christian church. Was Christ part of the God-head or was he the first fruit of creation? The Council of Nicaea, in June of AD 325, settled the issue.

Jesus Christ is the second person in the trinity, the only begotten son of God. The phrase “not an iota of difference” comes from this debate. It centered around the Greek word homoousios, meaning “of same substance,” versus the word homoiousios, meaning “of similar substance.”

The heretic Arius, who had taught Christians a song with the line “there was a time the son was not,” argued that Jesus Christ was the first born of creation, but was not the eternal, begotten son of God. He argued that Christ was made of a similar substance, but was not God. Arius’s view was rejected at Nicaea. One of the bishops of the church rebuking the Arian heresy was a guy we now call Santa Claus, St. Nicholas of Myra.

Since AD 325, it has been settled in the orthodoxy of the Christian church of every single Christian denomination that Jesus Christ is the only begotten son of God. Re-iterated in the First Council of Constantinople in AD 381, the Nicene Creed as we know it today contains these line:

... But The Trinity is Bad so I really can't give a shit.

 

[B-Dubs]

Religious people are mad because Trump is having someone pray at his inauguration who doesn't believe in The Trinity.



... But The Trinity is Bad so I really can't give a shit.

This always felt like a Metamucil argument from my understanding, everyone was basically arguing over the semantics until they got together and agreed on some bullshit that I never cared enough to understand.

Like, why is it bad though?

 

[sphagnum]

Religious people are mad because Trump is having someone pray at his inauguration who doesn't believe in The Trinity.



... But The Trinity is Bad so I really can't give a shit.

This is actually pretty interesting and in a logical world more evangelicals would be upset over this. But they're obviously too far gone into the realm of white nationalism for most of them to care and they'll just use flimsy justifications anyway about how God can use bad people blah blah.

 

[Lucky Forward]

Religious people are mad because Trump is having someone pray at his inauguration who doesn't believe in The Trinity.

Meanwhile, religious people ignore Trump's divorces:

And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.

 

[sphagnum]

This always felt like a Metamucil argument from my understanding, everyone was basically arguing over the semantics until they got together and agreed on some bullshit that I never cared enough to understand.

The trinity is important because it explains Jesus' proper divinity. If Jesus was not fully man and fully God (which is how he could undergo the temptations of sin yet conquer death and free man from it), but adopted into being God or actually just a dude or created by God rather than being God or is a different god (which would be polytheism, which is heresy) or any other formulation that diminishes his divinity and oneness with God, then he only deserves to be venerated, not worshipped, as worship is for God alone.

It's all about making sure not to be a blasphemer.

You want some real deep theology, look into the essence-energies distinction.

 

[Y2Kev]

Sprint does not have the financial capacity to buy t mobile

Guys look at their balance sheet

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

The Trinity feels like a political compromise or a TV writer patching up plot holes.

It's this weird thing of how Jesus can both be God and the son of God at the same time by saying that God has three parts but it's totally monotheist because God is weird and reasons.

 

[sphagnum]

The Trinity feels like a political compromise or a TV writer patching up plot holes.

It's this weird thing of how Jesus can both be God and the son of God at the same time by saying that God has three parts but it's totally monotheist because God is weird and reasons.

Of course it is. But it's important to Christian theology nonetheless.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

Actually, The Holy Trinity is kind of similar to U.S.-Taiwan relations where Taiwan is both its own country who should be able to defend itself from China with U.S. military equipment, but also a part of China.

Considering Trump's views on Taiwan, maybe this isn't a gaffe, but is a calculated maneuver! (It's not)

 

[Bonen no Max'd]

The Trinity feels like a political compromise or a TV writer patching up plot holes.

It's this weird thing of how Jesus can both be God and the son of God at the same time by saying that God has three parts but it's totally monotheist because God is weird and reasons.

It's not that hard of a concept, at least if you're a Christian and already cool with buying into stuff like this anyways. God is a single entity but is expressed through three forms that represent different aspects of God.

I'm not really sure what I believe anymore but it's certainly not a challenging part of Christianity to me, especially if you're willing to make the leaps it takes to be thinking about that in the first place.

Unless I'm actually just totally wrong about the whole thing lol

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

It's not that hard of a concept, at least if you're a Christian and already cool with buying into stuff like this anyways. God is a single entity but is expressed through three forms that represent different aspects of God.

I'm not really sure what I believe anymore but it's certainly not a challenging part of Christianity to me, especially if you're willing to make the leaps it takes to be thinking about that in the first place.

Unless I'm actually just totally wrong about the whole thing lol

It feels annoying to me because it makes Christianity preettttty close to a polytheist religion to me.

 

[Dominican Power]

Can you imagine how enraged the right would be if Obama were to brag about bringing a paltry of jobs every other week?

 

[Wilsongt]

This year is just the wind up for 2017 isn't it?

 

[Oblivion]

It's not that hard of a concept, at least if you're a Christian and already cool with buying into stuff like this anyways. God is a single entity but is expressed through three forms that represent different aspects of God.

I'm not really sure what I believe anymore but it's certainly not a challenging part of Christianity to me, especially if you're willing to make the leaps it takes to be thinking about that in the first place.

Unless I'm actually just totally wrong about the whole thing lol

Not a Christian, but growing up muslim, my mom's response to all my questions about inconsistencies and contradictions in Islam was to stop asking questions.

I figure it's not too different from many Christian families.

 

[Foffy]

This year is just the wind up for 2017 isn't it?

It may be so.

Things get darkest before the dawn, or some other poetic fluffiness.

Things must get worse before they get better. The problem, of course, if to begin to wonder where the bottom of this fall is.

 

[sphagnum]

It may be so.

Things get darkest before the dawn, or some other poetic fluffiness.

Things must get worse before they get better. The problem, of course, if to begin to wonder where the bottom of this fall is.

Hell.

 

[Bam Bam Baklava]

It may be so.

Things get darkest before the dawn, or some other poetic fluffiness.

Things must get worse before they get better. The problem, of course, if to begin to wonder where the bottom of this fall is.

Darkest before dawn assumes there is always a dawn. There are a thousand different ways the world can end at any given moment.