I think she actually fell deep into Pizzagate, maybe due to actual concern about a pedophile ring, heard about the Epstein files, made it her whole thing, and then when Trump buried them so hard it finally actually turned her a little bit. Then she got death threats from Trump supporters for even slightly criticizing him, and that turned her hesitance into full-on rage.

For better or worse, her whole thing is being some sort of populist crusader against the shadowy cabal of pedophiles. She's just figured out that Trump is part of that shadowy cabal. It's still "me taking on the hidden secret conspiracy" as her whole thing.

...the text literally explains that everyone was supposed to go to the regions allocated for their tribe? The whole Old Testament shows that Israel is pretty big on "this area belongs to this tribe, that area belongs to that tribe" for a while. The concept of the Year of Jubilee (when any land sales that were made revert back to their original owners) puts a really fine point on this.

But to give the exact quote from Luke 2:1-4:

Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth. This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. And everyone was on his way to register for the census, each to his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David,

Also wasn’t the region under Herod at the time, not formally part of the Roman empire?

Herod was the Rome-installed representative, which was a large part of why he was so resented at the time. You're probably getting a bit confused because Herod was from a Hebrew royal dynasty, but his successful ascent to the throne (after bloody internal power struggles in the region, and even within the same Herodic royal family) was a direct product of Rome aiding him and installing him militarily.

Augustus wouldn’t decree a census in a client kingdom, he would have herod make the decree wouldn’t he

I mean, outside of the bible, Josephus also records this same census happening during the same time frame. "Seems like wouldn't have" doesn't really hold up against historical contemporaries saying "did".

A census is meant to document how many people live where. Everyone going to their ancestral town doesn’t make sense

Doesn't make sense, to you, in a modern context, based on your present-day assumptions of how social structures are organized and what censuses are intended to measure.

Take, for example, taxation: in modern contexts, we'd look at the number of people living in various regions and apply their taxation rules accordingly, because variations in tax rules are primarily segmented by region (i.e. this state has different taxes than that one, this county and city have their own tax rules, etc).

In Hebrew contexts, taxation rules (particularly temple taxes) differed based on which tribe you belonged to (i.e. the Levite priests had different taxation rules than other tribes, for example). Herod, though he was a bit of a puppet installed by Rome, was himself still ethnically Hebrew and understood how those tax rules worked (as a layer on top of Roman tax codes), and so it logically follows for him to do what historical accounts record that he actually did: gather everyone in geographic locations that correspond to their tribal identities, and then count whoever's there, then apply the per-tribe rules and do the math.

To take another example, in the rest of Hebrew history, the most common reason for doing censuses wasn't to determine how many people live in a spot; it's to determine how many fighting men (and chariots, and horses, etc) your military was, and there are numerous accounts throughout the bible of those counts being segmented by tribal identity (like most of the book of Numbers, and even the book of Revelation at least references this segmentation because it was such a baseline expectation, though there's dispute about how literally to interpret its use there).

Basically, every time you have a Hebrew ruler going to do a census, they count the people by tribe. So again, a quick way to do that is to split everyone up geographically by tribal identity, then count the people in each spot. The ancestral-town thing is exactly in service of that repeatedly-demonstrated historical precedent.

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

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.

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

The dude with a swastika tattoo who's in charge of a fascist regime's military and just launched the new Reichsministerium für die Kirchliche Angelegenheiten had a logo redesigned to look like the Nazi eagle

...and someone thinks this is a coincidence?

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.

Except that Hank Green sock store. They seem genuine.

I mean, "Massivechusetts" was right there.

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.