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Always Bet on Susan Collins.
With that out of the way, democrats nominating normal guys seems to be a weakness right now- they've got Graham Platner being Graham Platner, the Islamic anti-israel single issue guy in Michigan, and James Talarico trying to convince people he's heterosexual and not a vegetarian.
What I find funnier about Talarico is them trying to sell him as "Look, he's a Christian! We got Christians in our party, too! Why, he's even a seminarian, how more devoutly orthodox could you get?" and leaving aside the fact that I didn't know Presbyterians called them seminarians, when you look at his positions he's reliably liberal down the line.
So this isn't going to work for the people who do have a certain position on issues like abortion, and it isn't going to work for people who break out in hives at the very mention of the word "Christian". They'll think he's a Bible-bashing bigot, and the more the local party tries to reassure them that no, he's not that kind of Christian, the more they will lose any cross-party appeal to the believing types.
Plus, it looks like there might be a minor, Obama-style, "oops my pastor could be problematic" issue there:
I love this. Unironically, I love this. "In the beginning, Undefined Vague Spiritual Entity According To Your Own Understanding created an earth creature. Let us all enter into the kindom of Undefined Entity. Amen (and awomen and anonbinary)".
Wait, I thought Baptists didn't baptise babies! Either the NYT is getting religion wrong (shocker, I know) or they are misunderstanding a different 'no this is not baptism like the bad old Catholics, this is child dedication which is totally different' practice, or Rigby is baptising babies because hey, rules are for fools.
Oh man, this could be his very own Kamala moment! 'Trans abortions for everybody!' 🤣
He quoted the Prophet Muhammed in an Easter sermon.
Maybe I'm too used to Southern Baptists and other conservative Protestant sects but I can't imagine any quoting Muhammed, calling him The Prophet, especially at Easter.
For all that certain twitter posters are sure he affirmed the Nicene Creed, I am quite sure he's a moralistic therapeutic deism "multiple paths" sort. His beliefs have no teeth.
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Talarico is not a baptist. Presbyterians are lectionary Protestants who baptize babies, use the term ‘saint’, do not do rock concert services, etc.
Now, differences in beliefs and practice are not necessarily off-putting to evangelicals- there are many elected officials who are Methodist, Catholic, Anglican, etc with broad appeal to the baptist masses. Baptist theology holds that baptism is a commandment and not a sacrament(this is why they do not baptize babies), and that gives them plenty of room to count those baptized as infants as real Christians. In practice their non-negotiables are still things Talarico doesn’t have- genuine belief in the historicity of the biblical account(famously genesis but theologically they would put more importance on the virgin birth and resurrection as literal, factual occurrences) and a certain level of conservatism on moral issues. This isn’t Ireland where Protestant theology has real, defined meanings- they don’t have a creed.
That was my mistake, I have no idea how I got the notion that the church in question was Baptist. I think I got confused because Talarico's grandfather was a Baptist minister, so the church-hopping threw me off.
I was surprised by the NYT seeming to do real journalism (and not just "vote for the Democrat or else the sky will fall in"), and I do think Talarico is less on the fringe than Pastor Bob there, or rather "Dr. Jim" as Talarico is quoted calling him. But Talarico went wading out past his depth on some matters. When you try spinning the Annunciation as meaning "abortion is kewl", yeah, I'm sinking my head into my hands here.
While pivoting to abortion is clearly reaching, I agree with him that it's interesting and noteworthy that the Annunciation is not a rape, or even a seduction, as one sees in the vast majority of e.g. Greek tales.
Christians historically would have said this is a direct parallel to Eve choosing to eat the forbidden fruit. The Genesis narrative describes her being lied to by the serpent, but notably it also describes her making her own appraisal of the situation and making a decision: "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it."
The original sin is a free choice, and likewise the decision that leads to salvation has to be a free choice.
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Well, as a Catholic, imagine my expression 🤨when a Presbyterian starts talking about the Blessed Virgin. Hey, didn't you guys have an entire hissy-fit over Mariolatry during the Reformation? That we honoured her too highly? (Never mind the hardcore Calvinists and their "nobody cares about the human incubator once the baby popped out" line, because Mary didn't have a choice; free will is over-rated and she was only there to have the baby).
And now you're going to talk about Free Will and Consent and Mary's "yes" being important? Wanna talk about the Co-Redemptrix, Jimmy boy, instead of "Mary would totes have had an abortion nowadays" (again, a line I've seen some liberals taking).
As an ex-Catholic, the concern has always been 1) false doctrines about Mary that are considered obligatory dogmas and 2) adoration of Mary that rises to the level of worship, which is due to God alone. Nobody has ever said the problem was 'honouring Mary too highly'. I don't understand why Catholics are so universally arrogant and wrong whenever I encounter them online.
It's not about honouring Mary too highly, which is why I now need to junk the Gospels on God as Father since that makes girls less like God than their brothers. Wonderfully consistent theology you got there.
Sooo you don't have a response to the concerns about Mary?
Why are you on this website if you're not interested in defending your positions? Asserting without evidence that anyone who disagrees with you must be the same as James Talarico is not a defense.
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God as Father that demands the ritual sacrifice of sons on behalf of the girls causes girls to like God less than their brothers?
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Has anyone ever responded with 'No, that was centuries before my time, and by a totally different people?'
I like me a good sectarian shittalk as much as anyone, but I've hard enough blaming people for the sins of their own fathers, let alone the sins of someone else's fathers.
Come on, if they junked all that stuff because it was bad no-no wrong, they can't sneak it through the back door now that everyone likes playing dress-up in cherry-picked traditions.
Granted, with the kind of theology on show in that article, the church is just using 'Presbyterian' as a label and they might as well go the whole hog and be Unitarian Universalists because there's very little of the original confessional foundation left, but then there's no reason to call themselves anything in particular.
Basically, if we're "Sure, the Presbies can have bishops and the Baptists can have special ceremonies for babies and you can pretend to be Orthodox of six different flavours because you like the icons and we're scrapping all the deep dogmatic divisions because just say 'Jesus wants us to be nice to each other' and that's enough" that's because "now it doesn't matter, it's all make-believe, fighting over the sky fairy is dumb, the only real truth is Science! and Progress!".
I suggest that if Mr. Rigby's denomination had not tossed out Mary with the bathwater back in the day, then he would not feel the need to rewrite Scripture on the grounds that "Mr. Rigby does not use male pronouns for God, for example, because it is a kind of “violence” to imply to a girl that her brother is more like God than she is, he said in an interview after the service."
Imagine that: dumping the idea of veneration of female figures because that takes away from the worship due only to God leads, down the line, to replacing God with Fake Female Deity since you have no means of approaching "how do we integrate women in the church?"
Certainly they can, for the same reason that you can proudly attend a Church that has done the same. Individual responsibility protects you from culpability in the sins and poor policy choices of your denomination as much as they can selectively ignore policy choices hundreds of years prior.
Particularly if we acknowledge that many theological disagreements of centuries were past were not purely of a theological nature, but often proxies for the more secular political disagreements and conflicts of the era. The Catholic Church was a religious domination. It was also a highly influential, and not-so-rarely highly intrusive, political institution at all levels of European society with complex relationships across the political hierarchies. These were not mere trivialities, but a central dynamic of the social order. Theological disputes not-so-rarely following along those lines is just a consequence of the culture war of its era. Many of the fractures not just of protestantism from catholicism, but within protestantism itself, derive from the widespread awareness of secular corruption and abuses cloaked in Church authority.
Again, sectarian shittalking is fine as it goes. But if you want to pin poor policies of the past to people who weren't there to influence them, they (and anyone else) can do the same for you. Splinters and logs and all that.
But just saying, as a far outside observe, if I were forced to guess who had the better insight into heaven between a denomination that threw the baby out with the bathwater, or a denomination responsible for the inquisition, crusades, and- in its more noble, modern institutional form, pedophile priests...
Well, if I did have to make the guess under the premise that adherents are accountable to the failings of their clergy centuries before, it would be an incredibly easy decision.
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Oldest trick in the book. Texans will see right through him.
"moralizing girlfriend with boyfriend who doesn't live up to her full standards" seems like a pretty common relationship type.
Twist would be "She's a vegetarian, I'm a vegan" 😁
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In fairness, I had a boss once who ate vegetarian at home together with his wife, and then ate plenty of meat when we would go out to lunch.
This actually ends up being a really healthy eating practice. One filling, protein-rich meal in the middle of the day, followed by a lighter vegetarian meal in the evening, maybe supplemented by a small breakfast, sounds like a pretty ideal diet for anyone who's not actively trying to build muscle. Let's be honest; most men would probably benefit from adding a little more veggies to our diets. I know I would secretly love having a (tolerant) vegetarian wife, if only as a form of weight control.
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He probably did it at home out of appeasement if I had to guess. I’ve met people who do similar sorts of things.
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More to the point, she is a 'committed vegan activist'. I have no doubt that there are plenty of vegetarian women dating men who eat meat- the demographics of vegetarianism suggests this probably isn't even that uncommon. But it doesn't pass the smell test that a 'vegan activist' would.
Without knowing anything else about it other than what you wrote, it passes the smell test for me. You can be a committed vegan activist without making your entire life about vegan activism.
Have you met a vegan?
Yes, though I have never known one closely.
I've been a vegetarian myself and have known a few others, and neither I nor them were ever absolutist about it to others.
The idea that a committed vegan activist wouldn't have a meat-eating boyfriend is kind of preposterous. Sexual and romantic attraction are very powerful forces.
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Oooh, baby. I once had to scrap an entire vegetarian Christmas meal* at the last possible moment because the vegetarian announced they were vegan when they walked in the door. Vegetarian no good anymore, might contain things like milk or eggs! Even honey not acceptable!
Yeah, tell me about those reasonable vegan activists who don't make a big fuss and kick up a stink, why don't you?
*The rest of us were bloodmouth carnists, so we just ate normally. But the vegetarian products I had purchased so they wouldn't be just eating bare vegetables ** at the meal? Sorry, no good no more!
**Talk about Orthodox Jewish kitchens having two separate sets of utensils and even ovens so meat and dairy won't possibly meet at all or come into contact. I've had to use two sets of cooking pots and dishes to make sure the separate vegetables don't get contaminated by being cooked with the bloodmouth carnist vegetables which might have things like butter in them or be cooked in the meat water or roasted in the meat drippings or even just exist in the same space as animal corpses.
My anecdotal evidence versus your anecdotal evidence.
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Last minute dietary surprises are hugely impolite but it's hardly unreasonable for vegetarians not to want to eat vegetables roasted in meat droppings (or boiled in "meat water", whatever that is).
No, I don't object to that, once I know in good time. But the bother of two separate sets of cooking vessels etc. is inconvenient, unless our vegans persuade us all to become vegans like them.
The meat water? Did you never hear of boiling vegetables (e.g. cabbage) in the same water you cooked the bacon in? Cuts down on cooking vessels (important if you don't have many or don't have much room) and imparts flavour to the vegetables.
An American would call ‘meat water’ broth(not that boiled meat is generally in high esteem on this side of the pond), ‘meat water’ sounds like something vaguely gross.
It's not broth exactly, it's too thin and hasn't other ingredients to make it into a stock or soup.
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Corned beef and cabbage don't form much of a broth; I might pour a bit over the potatoes for seasoning, but it is indeed meat water. My husband, of Slavic descent, also thought it weird and has insisted that we start cooking even the corned beef for St Patrick's Day with some combination of crock pot and roasting, without the cabbage, which smells weird boiled.
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Do they object to the same vessel being used for meat and then for veg or do they object to meat products used in preparation of the veg?
I've never heard of cooking bacon in water in my life. Growing up my Slavic parents would cook hot dogs in water but that's basically the only meat I've ever seen cooked by boiling as far as I can remember (I'm not counting stock here).
Why don't you fry or roast the bacon? Surely you are losing flavor by boiling it? @FttG do you people really boil your meat?
My Slovak grandmother taught me that the best way to cook the thick slanina bacon was to put it in the oven, in a dish with some water and black pepper, and I can absolutely vouch for the effectiveness of that method.
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You can boil and then roast the Christmas ham (or roast it for cooking without boiling it first). Pork is generally roasted, bacon generally boiled.
Cultural differences! Cooking in a bastable on a crook over the fire is different to cooking in an oven! You can use it for baking, but roasting? Much more tricky!
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We always boiled corned beef with cabbage and potatoes. Maybe it's an Irish thing?
Edit: Also, isn't that the basis of a lot of crock pot cooking? Making kind of a rudimentary stew by cooking the meat and vegetables in broth for a long time. I am confused about the "bacon," but I think American bacon is different from other places, I tried a center cut bacon, and it was more like ham.
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A friend of mine recommended cooking bacon in shallow water in the frying pan, as he said it got him the crispiest, most evenly-done bacon he's ever cooked in his life. I tried it a few times, but I could never get it to be any better than just frying on the pan normally. And in any case, the cooking process meant all the water boiled off anyway, so it doesn't apply here. My friend is Russian-born, though I believe he got this technique in his adulthood, long after he left behind Russia for America.
I've come to the conclusion that baking is the best method, though I have to be careful about the smoke triggering alarm.
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Tranquilize that unicorn and put a mark on her ear.
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Barbeque-loving voters need to know where he stands on the Black's vs Terry Black's Lockhart feud in order to make an informed decision
The best BBQ is Miss Tootsie's. Let's pander to (actually)rural voters, black voters, and BBQ-sauce-hating voters all at the same time.
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