Bachmann's America

[SCarpelan]

See, that's the bitch: even if you're right, with historical context and mistranslations kept in mind, 99% of believers do not realize it. And you could say, "that's believers, not the religion itself!" I say, when the vast majority of people believe it, that's what the religion is. That is the face of modern Christianity. Or Judaism, or Islam. Whatever.

I understand your feelings about religion since the fundamentalist christians are the most vocal and very common over there. Most of the christians (at least in the countries where people in general are more educated) are more openminded, though. For example the Finnish Lutheran church is currently having a Synod where they try to come up with a unified stand on homosexuality. The archbishop's comment about the Synod:

I expect the delegates of the Synod to make an unambiguous decision that will support and encourage homosexual people and same-sex couples who have registered their civil union

The same archbishop has also recently publically stated that he doesn't believe homosexuality is sinful in any way. For the sake of the homosexuals who belong to the church I hope the Synod will do as the archbishop expects.

Edit: Added the quote I was answering to since I started a new page. I'd also like to emphasize that I'm not trying to say that christianity is a better or more tolerant religion than the others.

[Eniliad]

See, that's the bitch: even if you're right, with historical context and mistranslations kept in mind, 99% of believers do not realize it. And you could say, "that's believers, not the religion itself!" I say, when the vast majority of people believe it, that's what the religion is. That is the face of modern Christianity. Or Judaism, or Islam. Whatever.

I understand your feelings about religion since the fundamentalist christians are the most vocal and very common over there. Most of the christians (at least in the countries where people in general are more educated) are more openminded, though. For example the Finnish Lutheran church is currently having a Synod where they try to come up with a unified stand on homosexuality. The archbishop's comment about the Synod:

I expect the delegates of the Synod to make an unambiguous decision that will support and encourage homosexual people and same-sex couples who have registered their civil union

The same archbishop has also recently publically stated that he doesn't believe homosexuality is sinful in any way. For the sake of the homosexuals who belong to the church I hope the Synod will do as the archbishop expects.

Edit: Added the quote I was answering to since I started a new page. I'd also like to emphasize that I'm not trying to say that christianity is a better or more tolerant religion than the others.

You know what?

I need to hear good news like that sometimes. It really is spirit-lifting.

+1 for you. Thanks.

[Lithp]

Frankly, my impression of most moderates is that they just ignore the passages that make them uncomfortable. That's the same thing the Fundies do, it's just that they've happened to come to the right conclusion based on the same ass-backwards approach. Of course you have your occasional theology scholar, or well-read Scotsman, but they are not whom I'm talking about.

[rtvc2012]

The Complete Monster trope was made for people like this

[Shane for Wax]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X8evilzsW0" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X8evilzsW0</a>
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohELyD0EeDc" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohELyD0EeDc</a>

To the kids in Bachmann's area.

[Smurfette Principle]

No they won't. Speaking from experience. Still, the lessons are, I think, correct ones.

Yeah I'm going to have to agree that ignoring bullies won't always help, they might actually like to pick on someone who does not retaliate. Besides waiting for them to get bored could take years...

And therein lies the rub: There isn't a lot the victim can do to discourage the bullies. Showing anger gives them satisfaction, ignoring them gives the impression that you're an easy target who won't fight back (and is much easier said than done, I might add), telling a teacher results in little action on the faculty's part & retaliation from the tormentors etc., etc. It's very much a lose-lose situation.

Another problem with bullying is that everyone seems to think that it's always an aggressive thing. It isn't. A lot of bullying, particularly girl-on-girl, is incredibly passive-aggressive. And the worst part is that there's nothing you can do about it. If a group of girls won't let you sit at their table, what do you do? They've already succeeded in making you feel bad; having a teacher force them to let you sit with them does nothing because they can ignore you, and by now you don't want to anyway. A rumor, once spread, can't be taken back, so even if you find out who started it and punish that person, the damage has already been done.

I never once stood up to my bullies. Not once. And that left me open to nine years of bullying. That's, at this point, half my life. I sometimes wish I had, but what the fuck could I do? I was the shortest and skinniest kid in my class for years. I wore glasses. I had allergies and asthma. I read a lot. I just ran away from the problem because I valued not getting in trouble over my personal wellbeing. I considered suicide at one point, not because I wanted to die but so that the other kids would realize just how bad they made me feel.

And that is why I cannot stand these people. If you seriously think that children - children - are better off dead than gay, then you need serious mental help.

As for language, I think Drow is the best language.

Vith dos, Michelle Bachmann lu' Barb Anderson. Dos ph' elg'caressen. Dos zhal'la alu wund natha resk'afar lu' ssussun dosstan pholor chath. Dos zhal'la inbal luth'olen phor dosst t'zarrethen. Dos ph' nempori. Dos ph' retlah d' phlith. Vith dos ulu Uoi'nota.

[Mechtaur]

In Leviticus, the word often mistranslated as "abomination" is toevah, which is more accurately translated as "ritually unclean" for Jews. So if you're not a religious Jew, it doesn't even apply. Christian fundies keep getting it so, so wrong.

http://www.lionking.org/~kovu/bible/section05.html

The word used is shiqquwts, not to'e'va in that instance.

I could have sworn to'e'va meant a moral offense.

Oh, and just because a majority of people believe that something means something, doesn't make the religion conform to them. They are wrong.

[Osama bin Bambi]

The problem I have with the 'IGNORE BULLIES AND BULLYING!' theory of teaching children to cope with harassment is that there isn't any other provision taken in most schools--at least not in the ones I dealt with. My last primary school (the one in the US that I went to for my last three years) called it the 'De-Bugging' system and still use the same set of guidelines to this day. I remember them quite well: 1, Ignore it; 2, Walk Away; 3, Tell a grownup. Other schools have similar systems in place. The problem with this is that it puts ALL responsibility on the victim. None of the things children are advised to do directly impact the problem: the bully.

The problem is that, like it or not, there is incredible peer pressure in schools. Many kids think that telling a teacher when they are being bullied is a sign of a weak person and a tattle-tale, and that the only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them directly.

[Lithp]

Oh, and just because a majority of people believe that something means something, doesn't make the religion conform to them. They are wrong.

It doesn't make sense to say that something no one believes in anymore is a tenet of a modern religion. This is just an implication of religion being a matter of opinion: If people believe it, it's a valid part of the faith. You can like it or not, but it is what it is.

[Smurfette Principle]

The problem I have with the 'IGNORE BULLIES AND BULLYING!' theory of teaching children to cope with harassment is that there isn't any other provision taken in most schools--at least not in the ones I dealt with. My last primary school (the one in the US that I went to for my last three years) called it the 'De-Bugging' system and still use the same set of guidelines to this day. I remember them quite well: 1, Ignore it; 2, Walk Away; 3, Tell a grownup. Other schools have similar systems in place. The problem with this is that it puts ALL responsibility on the victim. None of the things children are advised to do directly impact the problem: the bully.

The problem is that, like it or not, there is incredible peer pressure in schools. Many kids think that telling a teacher when they are being bullied is a sign of a weak person and a tattle-tale, and that the only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them directly.

This. The same with telling your parents. And even if the kid does tell the teacher, the teacher has absolutely no obligation to do anything. Even if the school has a reporting system like mine did, many teachers don't fill out the necessary paperwork. I switched schools because of how badly I was bullied (and I went to every teacher I had, none of whom did anything). At the school board meeting later that year, the superintendent reported only one case of bullying since they had implemented their anti-bullying program. My worst case of bullying was never fully resolved, because the teacher I went to never officially recorded any of my meetings with him, so when I went to the next level, the only person they could punish was the one who was stupid enough to record herself.

[Mechtaur]

Oh, and just because a majority of people believe that something means something, doesn't make the religion conform to them. They are wrong.

It doesn't make sense to say that something no one believes in anymore is a tenet of a modern religion. This is just an implication of religion being a matter of opinion: If people believe it, it's a valid part of the faith. You can like it or not, but it is what it is.

To be fair, you can only change so many things before it is something totally different. Changing "unclean" into "morally offensive" counts. Last time I checked, having unprotected anal sex would result in a possible infection, not me making every child I walk by cry while horns sprouted out of my head.

[Lithp]

Well, if they say, "That's what the Bible has always said," in that case, they're just factually wrong. But since when do religions have to worry about facts?

[sandman]

Frankly, my impression of most moderates is that they just ignore the passages that make them uncomfortable. That's the same thing the Fundies do, it's just that they've happened to come to the right conclusion based on the same ass-backwards approach. Of course you have your occasional theology scholar, or well-read Scotsman, but they are not whom I'm talking about.

If you have a brain and are even a little religious, you have to realize a few things:

1. The Bible (or whatever your holy text of choice may be) was written by humans, gone through numerous translations and re-translations, been redacted, added to, edited, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. It is ABSOLUTELY necessary to approach a holy text and be able to see, or at least make the attempt to see, where the cultural, political, and historical biases of the authors/translators have crept in. You have to make the effort to tell which parts are cultural (no shellfish, women shut the hell up in church, no mixed-fiber clothing, circumcision, anti-gay prejudices, etc.) and which parts are doctrinal (Jesus is the Son of God, the Golden Rule, John 3:16, etc.).

We have a problem in the USA in that a large portion of our Christian religious heritage is either exceptionally conservative and reactionary (evangelicals and protestants) or astoundingly legalistic and moribund (Catholic and Orthodox). Both of those flavors of Christianity unfortunately share a few of the same cultural values that the bronze-age nomads who produced the Bible did, such as the devaluation of women, exaltation of patriarchs, homophobia (but really only male-male homophobia), a rather unfortunate penchant for ethnocentrism, and a paralyzing fear of change. So while the mainstream Christian traditions in the US (and largely Europe as well) reject many of the cultural bits that are in the Bible (like the no shellfish thing, the head-covering of women thing, the no-shaving for men, and the like) that are not shared while whole-heartedly embracing those bits with that are unfortunately still shared (like the homophobia thing).

Because these cultural biases are shared, the mainstream Christian traditions have moved them from the "cultural" column to the "doctrinal" column, and once moved, to put them back where they belong would be to admit error, and there we run into the whole "fear of change" and cowardly reliance on tradition to establish truth.

[Osama bin Bambi]

Making a teacher force the bullies to let a kid sit at their table makes that kid look like a teacher's pet.

Once I was sitting in the cafeteria when I heard a girl bragging how she was going to slip a mind-altering drug into another girl's food so that she would fail a test. She also explained to her friends how to give her threatening messages via phone, while leave no evidence for her to come forward with. Being the quiet wallflower that I am, she didn't notice me - so I quietly packed up and went straight to the principal's office with it. The principal called in the vice-principal, who asked me a bunch of questions about what she said and what she looked like. Then I was taken to a secure room where all the video feeds from the campus cameras are shown. I described the time and place I saw her, and we were able to identify her on camera. (Her backpack was unmistakable.) Then they secretly sent that information to all the teachers so that if they saw that girl in their class, they would send her immediately to the principal's office. I didn't see her after that.

[Lithp]

Wykked: That is a surprisingly efficient system. My school would just tell you to describe the situation in detail using a few short sentences. It didn't make sense to me either.

Sandman: Not going to lie, I completely blanked on the "moderates recognize the Bible has changed over time" part. So that was my fail. But still, in many cases it's going to be really hard to tell if the part you're reading is cultural or doctrinal. If the earliest known passage says God commands that you don't do something we do all of the time, what do you call that? In this case, you're going to have to go with your best guess. In which case, why even bother with the book?