I mean, I don't think they do draw that line; 47% of Republicans would still vote for Trump even if Trump were implicated in Epstein's sex-trafficking activities – and those are just the ones who answered brazenly and honestly on the survey, to say nothing of those who say one thing in public and do another when nobody's looking.

I mean, the USA was pro-Nazi until Pearl Harbor, and even then it took a propaganda campaign by the government to convince the American public to oppose Hitler.

Those Nazis were, by the way, inspired by the USA. Eugenics programs in North Carolina inspired later eugenics programs in Hitler's Germany. Jim Crow was seen as a textbook example of how to use the legal system to enforce racial dominance, and was named pretty directly by Hitler as an inspiration.

Fox News has said the same thing about themselves in court. It really shouldn't hold up as a defense anymore.

Can't afford a home, can't afford a car, might get randomly shot by either the cops or a nutjob or an edgy schoolkid, what an American dream

I think he's saying that the clue would need to be "two zeroes, two fours"

Throughout the American South, there are lots of "nice" conservatives. They'll invite you to church and be friendly towards you and maybe invite you over for dinner...and then talk about how "those people" – a group that includes you – are "destroying America" and shouldn't be here.

The problem is "nice". "Nice" is very different from kind, caring, or even empathetic.

I will say that in the Trump era, a lot of these folks no longer feel like they "have to" be "nice", and so increasingly they're just not anymore. It means that the area is more openly mean, but it's because there's no longer the fake veneer of "nice" to hide how cruel they really are.

See, the thing Jim Crow and its "literacy tests" taught us is that you just need a rule that you can enforce on the wrong people, and then you just choose not to enforce it when it's convenient.

States' rights and all, y'know. Like the right to ban federal gestapo kidnappings.

Even "Christian" here requires an asterisk, as preaching most of what Jesus said will get you labelled "woke" and targeted as a "librul".

Source: am a somewhat-progressive Christian who was at a hard-right church (trying to be the voice of reason) for way too long.

No.

I might, if what they did were severe enough, express that what they did is disappointing. But that's different from branding them with the iron of disappointment-as-identity. Everyone does stuff sometimes that is worse than they aspire to be. The trick is coming back from it, learning and growing and changing.

I remember how it felt the day I asked my mom, after she had screamed at me and hit me a bunch for stuff she made up about me, "what did I ever do to you to make you hate me this much?", and she screamed back "YOU WERE BORN!" And I believed she meant it, because none of this was out of character.

I was 12.

No kid should ever feel the hopelessness and abandonment I felt in that moment.

Mormons are absolutely not Nicene Christians, but they profess to follow Jesus of Nazareth,

Is a bit like

Naturopaths are absolutely not germ-theory doctors, but they profess to practice wellness and healing,

as a way to shoehorn Brenda with the essential oils into the category of "doctor". At the point where you've denied one of the few definitional traits of the category, you have to admit you don't fit into it anymore, you can't just pretend the definition doesn't actually exist. It's like being a lawyer who doesn't deal with legal matters, but they have a bunch of ideas their college roommate came up with about how to run a country while he was high before dropping out of the first semester of law school.

Yeah, I dunno why this is the DoD's job to hash out, I'm with you there. That part is the Christian Nationalism nasty bullying around.

I get you need chaplains, but IMO just use the official endonyms of each group without trying to categorize or subcategorize, and call it a day and let the chaplains match themselves up.

If I were a Catholic in the military and I got an LDS chaplain (or vice versa) for my religious rites, I'd be upset. So just treat all the little groups as their own little things if you must change something.

The Son of God who is fully one with God Himself, the second person of the Trinity, which is one God in three persons.

A ton of the earliest writings in the church were dealing with explaining the Trinity, and nearly every time for the first several hundred years that the Christian church found it important enough to get together and publicly denounce someone as a heretic, it was because of denying some part of that equation (either the Trinity itself, or Jesus as fully God, or Jesus as fully God and one with God the Father). The LDS chucks it out in favor of their own weird "nah, actually everyone's kinda a god, that's what's up with Jesus." A history dive on "begotten, not made" and the Nicene Creed is helpful here, comparing it with LDS doctrine on the nature of Jesus and on the end times.

That makes them heretics to orthodox Christianity (for denying that Jesus is not "one with the Father", all homousia) for a similar reason to why Islam views Christians as heretics (because Islam views the Trinity as an assertion of multiple gods, counter to "Allah is one").

A lot of people see a sort of "X derived from Y" and assume based on lack of any further digging that X and Y are interchangeable, when the very derivation from should call to attention that there was a fork in the road where beliefs diverged. Some of those forks are more divergent from one another than others; Presbyterians and Baptists have more in common than Presbyterians and Catholics, and those two groups themselves have more in common than Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox, and still Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have much more in common than LDS and any Christian denomination you could pick from a hat.

That's what I thought too, but it doesn't work for the 7 at the end, and the caption explicitly says that the seven is not an error.

Interestingly, if folks like this read their Bibles – especially the Genesis part they love so much – they'd see that the one of the very first commands God gave to humans in there was to tend the earth as a garden. Like, it's one of the first things ever said to a human in the whole book.

But like a lot of the Bible, right-wing types tend to ignore that because religion is a tool for control for them, not a guiding morality that constrains their unchecked lust for power.

The one at Boston Logan is pretty good. All soft padded surfaces and everything.

It's true. Unfortunately, his learnings were exclusively limited to The Boston Molasses Disaster, but boy is he an encyclopedia on that subject now.

Why would I need Steve Kornacki or whoever when I've got degenerate gamblers?

I don't have to. The Christian church formalized it in 325AD. Joey Smith just wasn't creative enough to come up with a new heresy. He moved too quick to "okay so let's do multiple wives and also since my wife is objecting to that God says she's no longer a prophet and is actually a false shepherd" when he should've been doing his homework to make his con more credible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed

EDIT: I think maybe you're confused? I'm not asserting that the uppercase-O Orthodox Church is all of Christianity. I'm using the normal plain meaning of "orthodox", which is "adhering to the fundamental principles held to be true by a religious group." All Christians believe that Jesus is part of the Trinity and is fully God, because that's what Christian means, in the same way that I can assert that all watercraft are things that can travel in water. The LDS faith is not Christian because their cult leader prophet decided stupidly to pick the defining trait of Christianity as a thing he wanted to change.

Yeah, it's all the worst evangelical tendencies ("I bet God is happy he finally has us, here at 3rd avenue primitive KJV-only fundamental second baptist church, since everyone else is so wrong!") amplified by all the worst right-wing tendencies (but then, maybe I repeat myself).