Objection

Not once did I advocate against helping the poor?

You will never win. No matter the system you will be oppressed until the Kingdom of Heaven comes.

You are literally advocating against the poor right now. Any hope of actually helping the poor, advancing the people's condition through systemic change, is impossible and a foolish, immoral endeavor, according to you, we should all just suffer and accept whatever oppression and injustice is inflicted on us so that we can get pie in the sky when we die. It's literally exactly what you're saying.

Curiously, the crusades, which were also a political endeavor, do not fall under the same logic (nor does banning abortion, for that matter). Because it was a ruling class endeavor. The ruling class's boot is so far down your throat that you can't even speak coherently.

Eh, not really. The Bibe points to specific points in time, letters appear to be addressing actual people and sending greetings, etc. They also reference real people contemporary for it’s time. I haven’t found any other religious document that does this.

So if I send a letter to a real person claiming that I'm god, does that make my claim immediately legitimate, or do we have to wait?

That part wasn’t right, but I can see noble intentions behind the motivations.

Noble intentions my ass. They wanted to kill and loot and conquer, I see no real difference between the crusades and say, Genghis Khan. At least the Khan was honest.

Jesus criticised this exact attitude.

Maybe you should listen.

So you don’t submit to the authorities of the country you live in, then? What about your employer?

"Every proletarian has been through strikes and has experienced “compromises” with the hated oppressors and exploiters, when the workers have had to return to work either without having achieved anything or else agreeing to only a partial satisfaction of their demands. Every proletarian—as a result of the conditions of the mass struggle and the acute intensification of class antagonisms he lives among—sees the difference between a compromise enforced by objective conditions (such as lack of strike funds, no outside support, starvation and exhaustion)—a compromise which in no way minimises the revolutionary devotion and readiness to carry on the struggle on the part of the workers who have agreed to such a compromise—and, on the other hand, a compromise by traitors who try to ascribe to objective causes their self-interest (strike-breakers also enter into “compromises”!), their cowardice, desire to toady to the capitalists, and readiness to yield to intimidation, sometimes to persuasion, sometimes to sops, and sometimes to flattery from the capitalists." - Lenin, "No Compromises?"

Yes, I submit to my rulers, temporarily, insofar as I don't have the power to do anything else. This is fundamentally different from advocating for "submission to authority" as a general principle.

Yes, sometimes we have to endure defeat, indignities, and abuse, sometimes we must recognize a conflict as unwinnable in the current state of affairs, but that's just a matter of surviving until that state of affairs can be changed. This is a practical, strategic calculation about how to win, it is not the same on giving up all hope of winning, of denouncing winning as immoral, and extolling the "virtue" of submission to authority. Surely you must understand this.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t. I’m saying that politics shouldn’t be your god, which is a folly of most political systems

I'll never understand why Christians have this incessant need to assume everyone else has to have something that acts as a "god." It seems to be a total lack of imagination, an inability to understand anyone who thinks differently from them.

"Their own interests" whose interests, exactly? Who benefitted, and who paid the costs, for the wars in the Middle East? The only people who benefitted seem to be oil companies and war profiteers, while ordinary people (including my own family) paid for it in both money and blood.

The interests of your own country's bourgeoisie might align sometimes with those of the American bourgeoisie, but neither align with your people or the American people.

Random tangent but I rewatched Dr. Strangelove today and was struck by how much General Turgidson sounds exactly like liberals on here.

It is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two, admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless distinguishable postwar environments: one, where you got 20 million people killed, and another, where you got 150 million people killed!

You're talking about mass murder, General, not war... I will not go down in history as the greatest mass murderer since Adolf Hitler.

Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American people, than with your image in the history books!

It's the exact same lesser-evilist logic combined with the exact same condescension towards anyone who's not a psychopath.

Even if you want to go full on, "Actually, Turgidson was right," you still can't make it your platform and expect it to be popular.

Kamala brought on a lot of the exact same staffers who helped Hillary lose and ran a similar and bad campaign. Female democratic senators won in three of the swing states that Kamala lost.

But it isn't really about the facts, at a certain point. It's just a symbolic belief that allows people to absolve Kamala and the democrats of all fault. People love to punch down at voters instead of punching up and demanding better candidates, even though that's a complete inversion of how democracy is meant to work. This inability to self-criticize and change things that don't work is, ironically, another reason that the democrats perform poorly.

Sweet Dave, the supply of weapons is completely classified, which is great!

Eyewitness testimony. Said eyewitnesses literally dying on that hill helps. As well as a religious movement spontaneously and uncontrollably erupting from it.

Cool. That describes most religions. So either you need to convert to basically every religion at once, or you need to raise your standards of evidence.

For a start, were the crusades really an atrocity? And the inquisitions? They were fighting against Islam.

And Judaism, and Eastern Orthodoxy, and anyone who happened to be standing in the way of valuables. How can you possibly be this deluded about history?

You don't see a problem with the numerous times all Jews were expelled from their respective countries? Like when Jews in Spain, who had previously been tolerated under Islamic rule, were forced to convert, leave, or die, and many of them had to flee to Islamic countries for whatever refuge they could find there? Why the hell do you think there's a diaspora?

Or the crusades, when the Byzantines asked the Church for help fighting the Muslims, and the crusaders sacked and looted Constantinople, leaving them more vulnerable?

The Bible doesn’t mandate witch burnings either.

Then you'll be relieved to know that Marx never mandated any sort of atrocities, so that means Marxism has a totally clean record on that front.

None of these work. They all rely on humans. I don’t see a need to participate in that argument. Empires come and go. Whether they be feudal, theocratic, democratic or socialist. I’m more concerned with Christ’s eternal Kingdom. Christ didn’t preach an earthly political system, much to many people’s dismay at the time. All He did in regards to political systems was emphasising that people should submit to the authorities over them.

Long haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right
But if you ask them for something to eat
They will tell you in voices so sweet
"You will eat, by and by, in that glorious land up in the sky!
Work and pray, live on hay, you'll get pie in the sky, when you die" - that's a lie.

The Preacher and the Slave

Yeah, no thanks. If more people listened to your "submit to authority" bullshit, we'd still have chattel slavery. Fuck off with this bootlicking nonsense.

You don't think I should care about politics? Well my boss and my landlord do, and every day they're working to make my life worse. It's long past time to start fighting back. We didn't start the class war. We just recognize it exists.

What evidence would you need to prove it exactly?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What evidence would you require to believe the Buddhist sutras that describe talking animals and flying monks? Probably more than hearsay, I'd imagine.

It was on the subject of bringing religion into politics.

I swear, trying to follow your chain of reasoning is impossible. So, you brought up abortion to demonstrate to me that religion belongs in politics, by simply asserting that it does?

It’s a good example of how secularism is needed to abolish morality.

Are you really going to make me bring up all the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity, then? The crusades, the inquisitions, the witch burnings, the wars of religion - all perfectly moral, apparently, because "secularism is needed to abolish morality." What a load of crap.

I never said we needed to stick with capitalism

Right, what you want then is even worse. A return to feudalism, perhaps? Yes, that's how we can ensure that humanity's sinful nature never manifests into anything bad, by giving some random asshat like the guy in your profile pic absolute power and no checks or accountability.

Better yet, maybe we can have a theocracy? Surely, nobody claiming to represent the will of God could ever be subject to that same sinful and corrupt human nature, and can be trusted implicitly to rule.

And if not capitalism, socialism, feudalism, or theocracy, then what is it exactly that you support?

The resurrected Jesus Christ was physically here on earth, so yes.

No, because this is just your belief. It isn't something that is proven by evidence. Because it isn't true.

I never said that, and Abortion isn’t the primary topic at hand here.

Then what the fuck was the point of bringing it up and arguing on exclusively religious lines about it??

I can imagine a Nazi saying this to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the 1940s.

"You know who else didn't like Christianity? Adolf Hitler." Is this really the level of reasoning you operate at?

Marxism seems to fully depend on humanity in order to work. The issue with the human condition is that we’re sinful and corrupt.

Lol. The classic, "Marx failed to consider human nature" meme argument. "Humans are too sinful, that's why we need to stick with systems that incentivize and reward greed and corruption, while keeping others poor and desperate."

I swear, how am I even supposed to have a conversation with someone who's so confidently incorrect about so many things, has zero intellectual curiosity, and just wants to mindlessly recite meme-level arguments and religious orthodoxy?

Even the UK’s healthcare system

Has nothing to do with Marxism whatsoever. You're literally pointing to corruption under capitalism as a reason why Marxism is bad and we should keep doing capitalism.

Because we are objectively correct.

No you are not. "Objectively," is it? Is there something physical you can point to that proves your philosophical position on personhood correct? Of course not. I can point to all kinds of physical evidence to prove to a flat-earther that the earth is round. That is what "objectively" means, which you don't seem to understand. You are not "objectively" correct if your position relies on a bunch of faith based assumptions.

There are unhelpful strawmen as well “oh, you only want to control women”.

I literally never even said that, you are literally accusing me of strawmanning you by putting words into my mouth.

We genuinely believe that a foetus is a valuable human life.

You can believe whatever you like, doesn't mean the law should be based around purely religious beliefs.

there are also secular pro life organisations.

But you are unwilling to make any arguments along secular terms, so that's completely irrelevant.

If you want to participate in modern civilization without trying to take us back into the fucking dark ages, then you have to play by the rules of secular governance that prevent you from being burned at the stake for being the wrong type of Christian. And that is especially true if you expect to get through at all to anyone who is not a Christian, if you expect me to even have a modicum of respect for your beliefs and not see you as fundamentally incompatible with a functioning society. And if it's actually true that your position is just as defensible from a secular perspective, then why are you constantly bringing religion into it?

You're literally just adding a bunch of pointless, irrelevant, faith-based assumptions that you know I reject, and making them fundamental to your argument. And according to you, there is no reason to do this, as your position is supposedly equally defensible from a secular perspective.

Being raised around this exact bullshit is exactly why I'm a Marxist. Because I have already seen the future you would bring humanity into and it's utterly horrifying and must be stopped at all costs.

From what I found, the pro-choice lobby is most often using feelings to justify their decisions, not reason, in order to deflect the argument. ie, “my body my choice” ideas of freedom, worries about someone’s life being hindered.

All of those are objective, rational arguments, not emotional ones.

It’s not about a basic fact over when life becomes objectively valuable and the morality of taking someone’s life.

What constitutes personhood is a philosophical argument that is very debatable. Religious people, unfortunately, are often completely uninterested in engaging with such philosophical questions, because they think their religion provides all the answers, while trying to pass off their myriad superstitions as objectively correct.

Really, the whole argument against abortion is just based on semantics, and not anything practical. Why do you get to decide the definition of personhood?