FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
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User ID: 1739
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2d ago
Tell us how you really feel!
If you define a Christian as someone who believes the Nicene Creed, then Evangelicals qualify. And they seem pretty good at following Christian practices: 72% of Evangelicals pray daily, compared to 51% of Catholics, 53% of Orthodox, and 45% of Mainline. 51% of Evangelicals read scripture (outside of religious services) weekly or more, compared to 14% of Catholics, 15% of Orthodox, and 18% of Mainline. 30% of Evangelicals participate in weekly prayer or bible study groups, compared to 8% of Catholics, 6% of Orthodox, and 9% of Mainline. And of course (true to their name) 32% of Evangelicals discuss their religion with nonbelievers monthly or more often, compared to 13% of Catholics, 12% of Orthodox, and 13% of Mainline.
When it comes to Christian beliefs, 93% of Evangelicals agree that "God is a perfect being and cannot make a mistake" compared to 75% of Catholics and 80% of Mainline. 92% of Evangelicals agree that "God is unchanging" compared to 76% of Catholics and 79% of Mainline. 82% of Evangelicals believe in hell, compared to 69% of Catholics, 60% of Orthodox, and 59% of Mainline. 91% of Evangelicals agree that "There will be a time when Jesus Christ returns to judge all the people who have lived" compared to 72% of Catholics and 76% of Mainline. 82% of Evangelicals agree that "Sex outside of traditional marriage is a sin" compared to 49% of Catholics and 55% of Mainline.
And as far as "surrendering to secularism", 61% of Evangelicals say that homosexuality should be discouraged in society, compared to 23% of Catholics, 39% of Orthodox, and 25% of Mainline. 64% of Evangelicals believe that greater social acceptance of transgender people has been a change for the worse, compared to 26% of Catholics, 20% of Orthodox, and 22% of Mainline. 65% of Evangelicals believe that abortion should be illegal in most cases, compared to 39% of Catholics, 37% of Orthodox, and 29% of Mainline. 84% of Evangelicals are in favor of allowing prayer in public schools, compared to 63% of Catholics, 63% of Orthodox, and 57% of Mainline.
Overall, despite your dislike of Evangelical worship aesthetics, Evangelicals seem to be doing a better job of keeping to Christian practice and beliefs than anyone else in the USA.
And as someone who has been in Evangelical churches my entire life, I was completely taken aback by your claim that Evangelicals believe Christ was crucified, but never experience the spirt of that. I mean...I feel like it got pounded into us quite a bit! I've heard a lot of sermons trying to drive home how much pain and suffering Jesus went through on the cross. Usually they went a bit overboard, in my opinion, but that's the better side to err on I suppose. And while the lack of centralization leaves individual churches more vulnerable to bad actors, it also prevents bad actors from taking over the whole movement. We're too decentralized to all agree to follow a single flim-flam man!
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3d ago
You're right to label "lets actually win the fight" as the Evangelical option: so far, Evangelicals have done the best job of fighting and surviving secularism. Ryan Burge over at Graphs About Religion has a post with some good graphs about this, but Evangelicals have gone from 18% of all Americans in 1972, to a height of 29% in 1991, to 19.5% today. In contrast Catholics have gone from 27% in 1972 to a height of 28% in 1994 to 22% today, with a long slow decline from 2010 to the present. Over the same time period Mainliners went from 30% of the population in 1972 and has been in steady decline ever since, now standing at 8.7% of the population. Of course Eastern Orthodox has remained at ~1% from 1972 to today.
In other words, from the 1970s (when 90% of the USA was Christian) to today (when 62% are) Evangelicals have treaded water while all the other major Christian traditions have declined. And according to Pew Research, the overall decline of Christian identification in the US seems like it has leveled off in the low to mid 60s since 2019. Pew also found that the number of Americans who pray daily has stabilized at around 45% since 2021, and the number who attend religious services at least monthly has stabilized in the low 30s since 2020. If Evangelicals could hold steady over the course of decades of decline in Christianity, who knows what they might do now that the decline has stopped? Perhaps the long siege is coming to an end and the Winged Hussars are coming, though this time they're bearing grape juice in communion cups and copies of The Purpose Driven Church while charging to the sound of CCM.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3d ago
Based on him comparing the Evangelicals to the Catholic integralists, I think he is meaning "liberal" as in "liberal democracy": all citizens having a vote, freedom of speech and religion, that sort of thing.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3d ago
Perhaps, but what you fear may happen in Israel is actively happening in just about every other country in the Middle East. Islam has long agreed that the presence of Dhimmi in the House of Submission must be a transient state.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
4d ago
Israel has a long history of oppressing Christians
Worse than the rest of the middle east? Last I checked Christians were allowed to prostelytize in Israel, while it's illegal in Turkey, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, the West Bank, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the UAE, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Open Doors is a nonprofit that tracks persecution of Christians: Israel did not break the top 50 globally, compared to Saudi Arabia at 12th, Yemen at 3rd, Iraq at 17th, Syria at 18th, Oman at 32nd, Iran at 9th, Egypt at 40th, Turkey at 45th, and Jordan at the #50 spot.
My point being, the Middle East is very hostile to the West in general, and Israel is by far the most pro-Western country in the region and the safest place in the Middle East to be a practicing Christian.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
8d ago
Rooting-out infidels might be a good strategy if Christ is King,
Not even then. Generally speaking Christianity has looked down in that sort of thing.
Bloody Verdict of Verdun: widely condemned by the Church at the time, contemporary historians considered it a black mark on Charlemagne’s record.
Various Pogroms: not looked on fondly today, often bishops and priests would take on Jews to try to protect them from mobs.
Spanish Inquisition: Widely considered a mistake that didn’t work.
And honestly Jews make good allies against the Muslims, which are the real threat to Christendom. A quarter of the planet is Muslim, Jews are single digit percentage.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
30d ago
We had a $1,000 bill, it had Grover Cleveland's face on it. We also used to have a $5,000 bill (James Madison) and a $10,000 bill (Salmon P. Chase, the Treasury Secretary that introduced the modern day banknote). They were all made to be used by big banks to facilitate interbank transactions, and in the 1960s they were discontinued because we didn't need to move bills around to move money between banks anymore. I wonder how difficult it would be to bring them back?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
“Disappeared” is what the NKVD did, what ICE is doing is called “arresting”. If you say people are being disappeared, you’re saying it has gotten to the point of being as bad as the NKVD!
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
If a federal judge can order ICE to release you, you have not been disappeared. You are very much in the system, documented, and his lawyers and the judge know his name even if the hospital does not, that's for sure.
In this case it looks like he got badly hurt during arrest and was taken to a hospital where he was admitted under a pseudonym and kept under guard. ICE says they were waiting for him to be released from the hospital and taken to their LA processing center before charging him. The judge said they had to release him from custody because they hadn't charged him yet. ICE did, and basically said they'd arrest him again after he gets out of the hospital and then charge him properly.
If your lawyer can talk to you and file court motions on your behalf, you have not been disappeared. When the NKVD showed up at your apartment in the dead of night and took you away, nobody saw or heard you again. That was proper disappearing! A lot of them were taken to the basement of the Lubyanka and shot in the back of the head.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
I don't believe you when you say "but we have to disappear people, it's the only strategy that could possibly work".
Nobody is getting disappeared. Everyone apprehended can be looked up on a public website. https://locator.ice.gov/odls/#/search
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
It’s demons man. They’re laughing all the way to the bank. “I got him to kill six kids and then off himself! Top that!”
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
I agree. As a conservative and a parent I had a lot of genuine fear about things like severe autism, chromosomal abnormalities, and birth defects. You roll the dice each time you have a kid, and if it’s possible to fix those dice and prevent the worst outcomes…well, parents are a very motivated audience.
This is compounded by the fact that conservatives are more likely to be pro-life. This doesn’t matter for autism, since there’s no way to detect it in utero, but if a pro-lifer finds out he’s having a Down Syndrome kid he knows that is going to change the rest of his life. There’s no “abort” option.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
the man seems really cranky and confrontational lately.
No, he's like this all the time in the comments. The posts he writes are often quite good and reasonable, but when the man is replying and commenting he is always cranked up to 11. He's been like this for years.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
Yeah, I can’t blame you: after all, I don’t believe the UN or Hamas. This war is one of those situations where we won’t really know the truth of what’s going on until it’s a decade or so later and people have had time to investigate. Maybe three decades later, wait for enough people to die who would otherwise be embarrassed.
I mean I can give you links, but they're all going to add up to "Israeli official says they're not stopping the UN" so I don't think that will do much for you, since you are unwilling to believe anything an Israeli official says.
Israel says it doesn’t limit the truckloads of aid coming into Gaza and that assessments of roads in Gaza are conducted weekly where it looks for the best ways to provide access for the international community.
Col. Abdullah Halaby, a top official in COGAT, the Israeli military agency in charge of transferring aid to the territory, said there are several crossings open.
“We encourage our friends and our colleagues from the international community to do the collection, and to distribute the humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza,” he said.
An Israeli security official who was not allowed to be named in line with military procedures told reporters this week that the U.N. wanted to use roads that were not approved.
He said the army offered to escort the aid groups but they refused.
The U.N. says being escorted by Israel’s army could bring harm to civilians, citing shootings and killings by Israeli troops surrounding aid operations.
MSN:
Former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy ultimately accused the UN of “unforgivable negligence” in its actions preventing food from reaching Gaza.
“The failure of the UN aid mechanism in Gaza is truly catastrophic. 600 trucks’ worth of food the IDF is urging the UN to pick up. I saw mountains of pasta, lentils, hummus, cooking oil, sugar, and flour,” he wrote on X, accompanying a video of him walking among aid supplies.
For its part, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said trucks traversing Gaza have to contend with traveling through an active war zone, along with hoards of desperate people rushing to get the supplies, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Criminal gangs have also previously attempted to ransack the vehicles as they enter the Strip.
“Taken together, these factors have put people and humanitarian staff at grave risk and forced aid agencies on many occasions to pause the collection of cargo from crossings controlled by the Israeli authorities,” OCHA said in a statement last week.
Interesting that the AP claims the UN doesn't want military escorts because it could bring harm to civilians, while MSN gives us the UN claiming they can't send their aid in because their trucks might be ransacked by gangs. So which is it: do they not want an escort because of potential civilian harms, or are they saying they can't do it without an escort because they'll get robbed? It seems to me that they just want the new Israeli aid organization to fail so that they will let UNRWA back in, and any excuse to keep aid out of Gaza is good enough to blame on the Israelis.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
Israel has been asking the UN to send the trucks in, it is the UN who has been refusing to do so as long as the Israelis are the ones distributing it.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
I bet you write in books too.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
Why would you expect Israel, a liberal democracy, to become an impoverished totalitarian dictatorship solely because we stopped providing them military aid? How would that make them safer from invasion?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
I've only ever been in one accident, and it was because I stopped at the yellow when I shouldn't have.
It was the middle of winter, and the roads were very icy. I was late noticing the yellow, and I slammed on the brakes. I was able to just barely stop before entering the intersection: but the person behind me was not so lucky, and rear ended me. Technically she was at fault, but I know it was my bad. You can't expect someone to stop that fast on slippery roads, I should have just gone through.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
If you're the kind of person who writes things like "the color of their soul" then yes, I would agree you are a Four. :-)
Enneagram "tests" are pretty hit and miss, I find the best way to type someone is to teach the types to them and let them type themselves. But based on your comments 4w5 sounds pretty likely for you.
It's true that most of the stuff online is either fluff or paywalled, and there are a lot of expensive workshops out there. You can skip those. If you want to get into it, you really just need to read one book: Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self Discovery, by Don Riso. It has 90% of everything you would ever need to know about the Enneagram, packaged up in a very readable format. You can probably get it at a used bookstore for $10, and it will likely be at your local library.
(Or you can read it online here, if you don't mind being a pirate)
Here's an excerpt from the book on Type Five:
Like the other two members of the Doing Triad, average Fives tend to have problems with security because they fear that the environment is unpredictable and potentially threatening. Fives protect themselves by being extraordinarily observant so that they can anticipate problems in the environment, particularly problems with other people. Their curiosity, their insight, their need to make sense of their perceptions — and eventually, their paranoid tendencies — are all attempts to defend themselves from real or imagined dangers.
When Fives are healthy, they observe reality as it is and are able to comprehend complex phenomena at a glance. In their search for security, however, the perceptions of even average Fives tend to become skewed. They come to premature conclusions about the environment by projecting their faulty interpretations on it. They begin to reduce the complexity of reality to a single, all-embracing idea so that they can defend themselves by having everything figured out. And if they become unhealthy, Fives are the type of persons who take their eccentric ideas to such absurd extremes that they become obsessed with completely distorted notions about reality. Ultimately, unhealthy Fives become paranoid, utterly terrified by the threatening visions which they have created in their minds.
Their problem with anxiety, one of the issues common to the personality types of the Doing Triad, is related to their difficulty with perceiving reality objectively. They are afraid of allowing anyone or anything to influence them or their thoughts. They fear being controlled or possessed by someone else. Ironically, however, even average Fives are not unwilling to be possessed by an idea, as long as the idea has originated with them. Nothing must be allowed to influence their thinking lest their sense of self be diminished, although by relying solely on their own ideas, without testing them in the real world, Fives eventually become out of touch with reality.
The upshot of this is that average to unhealthy Fives are uncertain whether or not their perceptions of the environment are valid. They do not know what is real and what is the product of their minds. They project their anxiety-ridden thoughts and their aggressive impulses into the environment, becoming fearful of the antagonistic forces which seem to be arrayed against them. They gradually become convinced that their peculiar, and increasingly paranoid, interpretation of reality is the way things really are. In the end, they become so terrorized that they cannot act even though they are consumed by anxiety.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
I will randomly watch anime that my wife is into, and recently started watching "Twin Star Exorcists" My review: if I saw this in middle school I would have been soooooo into this. As a grown man it's pretty cringe, but in a funny way. It is a catalogue of Shonen tropes.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
Academic and high-class psychologists use Big Five, your average crunchy psychotherapist on the street is more likely to use the Enneagram.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
If you want personality pseudoscience I recommend the Enneagram over Myers-Briggs. It has a lot more depth. Myers-Briggs is focused on being descriptive, while Enneagram is more focused on being prescriptive. As in, "If I have this kind of personality type, what should I do to be a healthier and happier person?" And the advice is very good in my experience! At least for type Fives, I have not tried the advice for other types and can't testify to their accuracy and effectiveness. But if you're the kind of nut who finds categorizing by personality really fun, then you're probably a type Five anyway.
Well, you're not wrong about the aesthetics. We Evangelicals famously have bad taste! Fortunately that doesn't seem to have watered down the message too much.
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