Yep, and they don’t tend to be addicted to any substances or gambling. There are many reasons. The point being that, for one reason or another, many of the intelligence services and highest-clearance positions are filled with Mormons, and the government just told them that they aren’t part of the club anymore.

Religious zealots are not exactly known for their reading comprehension when it comes to their holy texts.

Did you know that Mormons are actually preferentially given security clearances, since the United States Constitution is one of the foundational documents of their faith? Do you realize how many people with positions near nuclear sites, NSA datacenters, and CIA operations these bumblefucks are aggravating?

I would agree with that assessment.

Ironic, then, that I can’t comprehend whether you are concurring or dissenting from my view. Whom are you suggesting isn’t comprehending?

An important note: I literally never said that it was literal cannibalism.

I claimed that catholics literally believe that it happens, and that they believe that the transsubtantiation literally happens, which is what you said in your original comment. The entire thesis of my comment is that it doesn’t matter at all that it doesn’t literally happen. All that is required for the point is that the original statement was addressed to people who believe in the literal nature. The statement is made to “you”, where “you” applies to the reader if and only if the reader “regularly consumes the blood and flesh of a demigod with elders standing around chanting”. I think we can both agree on at least that much.

I am pointing out that, people not being perfectly objective, we must interpret whether statements apply to us based on our worldview. If a true believer in transsubstatiation read the comment, then the fact that they believe that they regularly consume the flesh and blood of Christ is sufficient to make that statement apply to them. Thus, it is utterly immaterial whether they “literally” eat a demigod. It is sufficient that they believe that they do, and thus should believe the statement to apply to them.

But ultimately, the statement being made is addressed to people who do literally believe that it is happening. If you don’t believe that, then the statement doesn’t apply to you, does it?

Furthermore, if they hold, as a requirement for eating the flesh and drinking the blood, that you must believe in its magic, then they are still people who seem to think that they are regularly practising literal cannibalism, and are not just okay with that, but are convinced that it would be morally wrong not to do so.

A very well-reasoned answer, thank you!

Thanks. Good point!

I’m just a peon on mint.

Here’s a question: if you know the steak isn’t real, having copied only your memory of it from the matrix, but you know that the original had to have been based on the experience of killing a real animal, is the nonexistent steak vegan? What if all cows are already extinct, like in the world of the Matrix?

A great point, but I wonder if it would have reached that point if cypher had been given relaxation time and good experiences in the construct from the start.

So, as Cypher made clear, the main draw of the matrix was that he didn’t have to spend his entire life being miserable, with shit to eat, and nothing enjoyable to do. Soo… What about the constructs? If they could simulate people and sensory input with enough fidelity to “learn kungfu”, couldn’t they simulate the experience of a juicy steak? Why, when they weren’t actually spending their time outside the matrix doing much other than sitting in a spaceship, wouldn’t they just spend 6 hours a day in the construct (again, not the matrix, their own simulated construct)? Wouldn’t that have given them all much more practice with breaking the construct of the matrix, and also let them have the nice stuff that the matrix offered, and also knowing that they were the masters of their own destinies? It seems like Morpheus was just a shitty manager, and Cypher was unfulfilled in his job.

To explain what I see:

This comic isn’t saying (or even implying) that people are born communist, at all. The comic isn’t even implying that communism is necessarily a good thing. It’s saying that the random person clearly thinks that it should be morally acceptable not to love people who express or possess certain traits, while the messiah gave no such qualification. If your god says “love everybody”, you don’t get to say “but these people worship a different God, so I should get to hate them!”

Love everybody.

The comic makes clear that you can’t just claim to be a Christian, then reject one of the few things about which Christ was unequivocal. The ultimate point here is that most modern Christians do not follow the teachings of Jesus. That communism is mentioned is simply because it is a common scapegoat among american conservatives, who overwhelmingly identify as Christians. There has never been a significant communist presence in the united states, but that didn’t stop McCarthy from turning people against their neighbours in snipe hunts for the “reds”.

It was placed there when the grass wasn’t green.

1. mostly looking based on podcasts I already enjoy.
2. The Magnus Archives. It’s an examination of the Architecture of Fear. It is one of the finest examples of worldbuilding I’ve ever seen, It just makes sense that the world works in the way it does, and every piece you learn makes more sense. Tight storytelling, and everything is connected, even though it’s a monster-of-the-week episodic show. The entire 200-episode storyline was planned by the time they finished the first 10 episodes. You’ll know whether it’s for you by the end of the fourth episode.

Absolutely! And I never claimed it didn’t. However, the solidification of what “hell” is, and what “Lucifer” looks like, is in large part thanks to popular sources like Dante and Milton.

The person asked the question, specifically, why Christians conflate the two, and whether it is true that they are always the same person. Notice that the question asks not just for a dogmatic response, but a comparative religious analysis. While it is true that “modern Christians treat them like the same person”, saying “they are the same person” doesn’t answer the question at all. It asked why do Christians treat them like the same person, and the actual answer is that medieval Christians conflated a lot of things, made up a bunch of demons, and also took secular sources like Milton and Dante as authoritative gospel, rather than religious fiction. If you’re going based on the actual bible, Lucifer is a star in the sky, and precisely nothing more. Even the Serpent from the garden is only conflated with Satan.

Literally ignore the other people. They clearly don’t know what they’re talking about, though anise is at least close. The name Lucifer originally referred to Venus, the morning star. It comes from Roman Latin, long before Christianity was a thing, and literally just means light-bringer. The Hebrew name for Venus is mentioned a single time in the bible, referencing a Babylonian king who was given the title. You can probably thank St. Jerome for replacing the Hebrew name for the planet with “Lucifer”, but I’m not certain on that one. I’m not a scholar of mediaeval church Latin. Never, not once in the bible, is Lucifer conflated with the devil. In fact, even the original Satan was called the Adversary not because he was YHWH’s adversary, but because he was effectively God’s District Attorney, prosecuting the wrongs of mortals. The entire conflation with Satan as evil happened between the recording of the Hebrew bible and the development of Christianity. Hence why Satan is pretty much only mentioned in the New Testament.

Pretty much every single thing modern Christians believe about the devil, or especially hell, was made up in the middle ages, and a hefty amount of that by Dante alone.

I recommend reading the wiki pages for both, since they’re interesting reads, but you should definitely check me on this. Don’t take my word for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer

Check their earliest histories.

E: forgot to mention that Milton was another one of the people who made up large portion of the modern idea of “hell”, which was originally a term from old Norse, and so he and Dante basically combined the Norse He’ll and the Greek Hades to make “Hell” as we know it today, complete with the Lord of Hell. It’s all syncretism.

I mean, yeah, one of the more famous police procedurals is literally “Miami vice”.

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