Such a beautiful piece; now a bucket list item.

Followed. It’s difficult to portray the facets of personality projection on social media. Clever!

I think pride is often overcompensation for low self esteem. I don’t believe in sin, but I tend to assume the worst intentions in people’s actions and pay them accordingly proactively. This seems like ready to serve unjustified wrath to me.

By the way, how much money per month would it take to make the Damus team solvent?

Yes please.

I’m sorry to hear this is happening to you.

Even that short hold period cost me a penny! 😘

Thank you, thank you. Where is my Scotch?! 🥃

Nothing but 🫂 for nostr:npub18ams6ewn5aj2n3wt2qawzglx9mr4nzksxhvrdc4gzrecw7n5tvjqctp424, his wife, and their 21 beautiful knitted knostriches!

Sacrilege! Done. 0.002386 ETH, on Robinhood. Can I sell it now?

Maybe form a nonprofit and get on some charitable trust donation lists? They are required to donate a percentage of the total asset base every year.

I totally missed the truth or dare part. lol. Dare.

How could it be anyone but you? You’re so positive and fun!

To address the case of the beggar, why is smoking bad? I might look at some food you like to eat and conclude it is bad for your health, if I give you a food you like that I think might cause you to live a few fewer days, is that a bad act if my only aim is to accommodate what you like and respect your choices? What if my opinion of the food is completely wrong? We are all going to die, and every day we make choices that move that date closer or further away from our present. Perhaps you feel guilty giving the beggar some cigarettes, I think it is reasonable to consider guilt an unsuitable compass for good and bad acts. If I smoke cigarettes and I share with the beggar, same outcome, or end and object, but very different circumstance. This might be why the Bible calls on you to not pass judgement. Ergo, intent and outcome is the only suitable metric to measure a good or bad act in that order of magnitude, as good intent often results in bad outcomes. The opposite is also true, though happens less frequently. Comment on the war part to follow. As always, I enjoy this dialogue and hope you do too.

The example that comes to mind is Silent Night, sung on a WWII battlefield in English and in German together by men who killed each other the next morning.

Would you also say it isn’t a crazy interpretation of the leadership’s role in each Christian sect? The degree of distance from god’s word in the Bible varies from the teachings in each branch and congregation. We may agree that in the LDS case, it is unlikely that Jesus came to North America as their holy book claims, but is it also unlikely that a man walked on water 2000 years ago, or that those tenants found in the Bible are applicable without modernizing creative license, to a culture that has been evolving for 2000 years? Where does modernization become blasphemy to the word of god? Who decides?

Well, let’s start with the Bible. I had my own at age eight. I had read it cover to cover twice by the age of ten, Bible readings from my mother twice a day with Sunday mornings dedicated to recital, with consequences for less than perfect performance. My mother was open to questions and I had many questions about concepts all in this book presented as absolute truth that appeared to me to be in conflict. Usually the conversations boiled down to my not being able to understand the mind if god as a flawed creation, pray for the peace the transcends all understanding, or sovereignty of god, just accept it. By age twelve I had a reference Bible with eight versions in columns side by side, and eight times the conflicts as two years before. Hebrew and Greek versions followed, along with dictionaries for those languages, but no answers emerged.

I’m 26, busy with college and I take an anthropology course in witchcraft and the Wiccan religion. Rituals galore, but like prayer, no solid responses or outcomes to correlate, eg. If a ritual with silver coins, green velvet cloth and moonlight leads to financial wealth, and there is no personal liability for prayer acceptance, just a series of acts to influence, than why are all Wiccan practitioners wealthy? History, world religion, and more anthropology classes follow and a general pattern emerges. Religion exists where groups of people experience death, risks, scarcity; every group of Homo sapiens ever to exist essentially, and the religion is always specific to the cultural understanding of the natural world, and the most prevalent risks in their environment. Religions generally present as separated absolute truth, but struggle with cultural shifts. The LDS church facilitates this by having a living profit who can change scripture at will, as it did in 1963 when it was no longer acceptable to teach that black people had dark skin because they were descended from the lines of Cain, while white people were descended from Able, the brother accepted by god. Some Christian churches have accepted female pastors, or gay people into the clergy in spite of very clear scripture addressing these things. I do not blame religion for shifting dogma to accommodate cultural evolution, and I do believe that faith based communities are integral to the human experience, important vessels that hold vast repositories of moral and cultural wisdom, but I think it is important to recognize that they are functional fictional constructs, and nothing more. If communication of one faith’s wisdom is accepted by another, both benefit, institution and individual. This flow of wisdom is hampered by “absolute truths” that cannot be negotiated as they are universally held in some arcane place or being, out of the reach of scientific or personal inspection, addressing things like the ether of our being, or the afterlife etc. Beliefs are important, I believe and have faith that I can do some things formerly unproven by accomplishment, I have that same faith for others based on long observation of their capabilities. I have theories about some observed wonders currently unexplained by science, and I like to discuss them with other people, it’s disappointing when we can only talk within a constraining ideology of some dogmatic absolute truth. I’m interested in your journey and your thoughts.

Missed that comment, thanks!

Wrath. While I have struggled with several others and prevailed to some degree with all of them, wrath remains as the unquenchable desire that burns phosphorus bright. Yours?