prunerye

In my area, most drivers don't start the turn signal until they've reached the intersection or have already started the turn. Infuriates me to no end. This is also true for left turns at red lights; they don't activate their turn signals until they stop, sometimes not even until the green light, so you have no chance to change lanes before they block you.

Even if this was a filibuster, which would be the more likely motivation? Cory Booker shares your values, or Cory Booker is angling to run for President?

libredirect

This is good stuff; your argument is well reasoned. Brings me back to my Bible study days.

I still think "all hierarchies" might be overbroad. The Bible itself prescribes elders/bishops and deacons to administer the church, for instance, and it's radical enough regarding obedience to authority that, in my experience, modern day theologically conservative churches trend toward authoritarianism and mostly unchecked abuse of power more often than not. This would have been contemporaneous with the communes.

As for the more heavenly hierarchies, I looked back at some of the points of evidence that I was going to bring up here that I thought supported my case, but the "outer darkness" in Matthew 22 I once thought might not necessarily be hell sure seems like hell upon rereading, and as for the parable of the unforgiving servant who was sent to the "torturers" despite his debts being forgiven, it looks like that word "torturers" is connected to jailers, i.e. debtors' prison, so I can't argue confidently that the servant was "saved" from anything and given a different punishment instead. There are still a few passages I can't totally square though:

The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32): He gets welcomed back into the family, and he sure seems saved in the sense that I think most Christians would read into it, but his inheritance is spent; he doesn't get more. All the father has belongs to the other son.

The purifying fire of 1 Corinthians 3:9-15: Both groups of people are explicitly "saved". One is rewarded, the other suffers loss.

The parable of the talents/minas: In the Matthew 25 version of the parable, the first two servants get the same reward (authority over "many things"). No issue there. But in the Luke 19 version, the rewards are proportional. And the one with 10 minas gets a bonus at the end.

That's as far as I got before my eyes glazed over.

I never had much use for non-religious secondary sources back when I was a believer, so I can't recommend any, but the New Testament isn't actually that long; you could probably finish it in a week if you read 20-30 chapters a day, and the chapters are short. The first three books, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and to a lesser extent the fourth, John, are all the same; you can probably just pick one (John is probably the most interesting) and read the rest of the NT as is. Whether or not it's worth your time is entirely up to you. I certainly have no intention of reading it again any time soon.

Is that a Catholic thing?

"Least"/"Greatest" in "the kingdom of heaven" is a construction that appears at least once off the top of my head, Matthew 5:19. I'm sure there are more. But also, Jesus is depicted as a literal monarch and heaven a kingdom like you said, so there's at least one extra class right there.

To be fair, the heaven of the Bible is neither stateless nor classless. "The nations" are still present in Revelation 21 and 22, and inequality in heaven is a common theme in Jesus's parables.

As long as I'm mocking help forums, I might have a stupid solution for your window decorations, which you can follow at your own risk. I saw your comment and, just out of curiosity, started playing around in a VM with imagemagick, a program I've never used before, but that might be useful for you. Here's what I did:

1.) I copied a theme I liked, in this case "Sassandra", from /usr/share/themes into ~/.themes.

2.) I renamed Sassandra (in ~/.themes) to Sassandra2 and switched themes to Sassandra2.

3.) I opened up some of the images in ~/.themes/Sassandra2/xfwm4/ and made note of the geometry of the buttons. In this case, they were 24x17.

4.) I opened a terminal in ~/.themes/Sassandra2/xfwm4/ and ran a command I got from an AI chatbot and fiddled with it blindly like an idiot until it ran:

find . -type f -exec magick {} -scale 12x17 {} ;

In this case, I wanted to use magick to shrink the icons from 24x17 to 12x17 (though you could just as easily replace "12x17" with an increased size instead), and I wanted to do all the files at once, using the find command as suggested by my robot overlord. It didn't work as I intended. I never bothered to read any docs. I'm not even sure I put the "{}" in the right spot. But it did shrink the images, preserving the aspect ratio. It also threw up a couple errors because I forgot about the readme and themerc files in that directory. Speaking of which, you can fiddle with the themerc file to make any minor adjustments, like offsetting text.

Edit: In retrospect, the original image files were actually all different sizes and now Sassandra2 looks like crap, but you can always run magick on files individually.

What are these "solutions" you speak of? All help forum posts must follow this format:

"I want to do x."

"Why would you want to do x? Don't do x.".

It's easy to forget, the anti-vax movement used to be predominantly left. It only became popular on the right in the last ten to fifteen years.

ITT: People who don't actually want to unite the working class.