Agreed. I know that the original poster isn’t siding with the Herzlians, but this is still in questionable taste.

The acceptance of gun violence in Imperial America reminds me of how mob violence became normalized in the Russian Federation. That sort of activity would have been inconceivable in the Soviet Union, but then the counterrevolutionaries laid waste to the Eastern Bloc and organized crime suddenly looked like reasonable means of survival.

Once, in the middle of a phone conversation, I heard some muffled bangs, and the phone went quiet. When I asked him what the noise was, he replied, “Oh, it was just the Russian mob firing their guns in the street.” I thought he was joking — he wasn’t.

I was too little to understand the controversy surrounding the Columbine High massacre, but I later did some research on it and it was almost astounding how everybody went apeshit finding somebody to blame, to the point where the capitalist media got in touch with Marilyn Manson and Doom nerds to confirm that they have no itch to either commit or endorse atrocities. Now? It’s hard to imagine the Columbine High massacre making anywhere near the same impact that it made decades ago.

Guess how many people I’ve converted.

Hint: the number is identical to my annual salary.

Many adults cling to Christianity because it can function as a crude coping mechanism in an uncaring society: the appeal of a higher power caring for someone is easy to see, and religious institutions in general can be convenient sources of community, especially for somebody trapped in an antisocial culture like the United States of America. I am irreligious yet I feel more comfortable revisiting a Presbertyrian church than approaching my own neighbors.

Liberation theology is not a desperate attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole. For some Abrahamists, it simply feels natural or logical to them. I am willing to agree that theology of any sort is unnecessary for emacipating oneself, but it is—at best—a waste of time trying to convince somebody to discard it since they are already on our side and their spiritual beliefs are harmless. If their beliefs remain a big deal to you, though, then you need to understand that they are symptomatic and that addressing them directly would be the wrong approach to take.

Yes, the Church has frequently been complicit in colonialism. Yes, aggressive proselytization is always wrong. Nevertheless, we also need to acknowledge that many lower‐class Christians have rebelled against their oppressors despite mainstream Church teachings, and that they are reluctant to let go of their beliefs since they are convenient sources of comfort, not necessarily because they are worried about retaliation. Religion is a double‐edged sword. The ruling class has used it as an instrument of oppression, but that does not mean that it has never backfired either.

I work as a Jewish missionary and the funny thing is that my job would handle the exact same way in a people’s republic as it would elsewhere.

Name a single time that a school shooting happened in the United States.

There has never been a mass shooting in the United States of America.

Doing a search on Google Books regarding Mussolini and the United States, I came across a good work titled The United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe, which in turn lead me to Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, and I found copies thereof on Library Genesis.

I cringed internally reading these.

They reminded me of the time when I revisited a convenience store and I noticed that an employée and an investigator were looking at her car together. I tried to amuse her by joking that I broke into her car. She didn’t hear me the first couple of times that I said it, so I repeated myself until the investigator shook his head at me and said ‘It’s not really funny.’ I looked like a deer in the headlights after he told me that. I scurried into the convenience store, got what I wanted, and then got away from it as quickly as possible.

I understood pretty quickly that I only made an ass out of myself by making light of a serious and ongoing situation, and at least I didn’t embarrass myself in front of hundreds or thousands of people. These dullards, on the other hand…