markovs_gun

You seriously misread that if you think it's about Christmas trees in anything but maybe an abstract way. It's about wooden idols. Who tf is chiseling their Christmas trees into shapes? I thought maybe this would be about Asherah poles or something at least kind of similar but this is a pretty obvious passage about idolatry.

Even in IRL religion, names have a lot of power. In the Bible, God mentions his own name many times-

Exodus 3

13 But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”[b] He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ” 15 God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’:

"This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations."

Here God is explaining the meaning of His name to Moses and tells Moses His name- YHWH (rendered in most translations as "The LORD" due to ancient taboos around the Name) and Jewish and Christian lore state that pronouncing this name can grant great power. Jewish folklore states that Moses parted the Red Sea by saying an extended version of God's name, and even today most Christians don't even know that God has a name other than "God" because of taboos around saying it.

Let's put it like this- Skyrim is as old now as Final Fantasy VII was when it came out. If you had asked me then if Final Fantasy VII was an old game when Skyrim came out, I'd have said yeah.

Number of deaths in the crusades- 1,000,000

Number of deaths in the colonization of the Americas- 59,000,000+

Well for starts the crusades were about more than just religion, and it's pretty obvious that they weren't the end of Christian religious violence and that nobody "learned their lesson" from them.

A lot of old stuff is super racist and well made. The Birth of A Nation was revolutionary in film and influenced many future movies despite literally being a movie about how awesome the KKK are. Lovecraft was famously racist as fuck and a lot of his "Eldritch horror" was sort of a metaphor for his fears of "primitive" religions and miscegenation. Even Lord of the Rings has racist elements - JRR Tolkein said in multiple occasions that he based the dwarves on Jews, which is pretty rough to modern readers given that the dwarves are more obsessed with gold and treasure than anything else.

This is a really poor understanding of the crusades as well as religious violence in general.

There are no truly successful talks with Trump. Even if you make a deal he'll decide he doesn't like it next week.

I feel like using terms like "vaccine skeptic" for these morons is a major PR win for them. It makes it sound way more legitimate than it is. Fuck corporate media sanewashing everything going on politically right now.

Jews don't really hate anyone for not believing in their God. Unlike Christianity and Islam, Jews don't believe that everyone has to follow their religion. They don't really believe in Heaven and Hell, and they don't proselytize to people who aren't already Jews. Judaism is for the Jewish people and that's it.

The historical Arians were a pretty diverse group, much like the early Christian church in general. Arius, the person whose teachings the Arians were named after, was North African, and there were Arians throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.