I won’t, and you have avoided these questions (the ones about Christians and taxes) where I (still) haven’t done what you accused me of doing elsewhere.
Let’s start over. I’ll give you a chance, will you give me one? What does Christ say about forgiveness?
Chruches are exempt from paying taxes. I’m not sure what it’s like in America but our left wing policies involve getting Churches to pay taxes as one of the wealthiest private institutions in the country.
So just throwing it out there, it’s a well known fact churches don’t pay taxes.
In my country, the push to tax catholic churches is part of truth and reconciliation for genocide.
I brought up the Catholic Church and it’s genocide of indigenous children on your first Light thread where you compared the Light to the Catholic church. I speculated 10 thousand dead children in residental schools, the total as of today is over 7,000 and counting.
Do you remeber that? You downplayed my comments even back then. It didn’t fit your Christanity is flawless narrative.
Genocide is part of the reason I left the church. This is the reason you justifying Light crusades rubs ppl the wrong way tbh. The Light isn’t a perfect representation of Christianity, and I don’t think Blizzard intends for it to be viewed that way. If there are parallels made to irl religions, a lot of the time they are made through a critical microscope with the intention of dissection.
It seems to me, or have personal squabbles become more than usual?
It’s not just you.
There’s definitely been more personal fights than usual recently. If I had to speculate (which I don’t, but I’m’a do anyway) it’s because of a combination of factors. The overall lack of new content, the confusing and frustrating nature of the new lore and retcons (we’re the G-D Story forum, of course that’s gonna hurt us), the IRL pandemic and it’s issues, and building tensions from the lawsuit.
But absolutely we’ve been going into more personal fighting now than two years ago.
Yeah I just started reading the posts I missed in this thread, and I am thinking : “This was going on over here at the same time as I was arguing on the other thread…”
Maybe everyone is trying to get it all out before New Years. Someone seems to have the fresh start attitude :
I dunno, I feel like also this forum has become less hostile in the last two years and we’ve all just become good friends who bicker.
Occasionally we all team up to form an intervention when one of our headcanons becomes too much of a weird obsession, but other than that, I like talking to you guys everyday.
I watched the documentary on the fires of Australia.
How this guy doesn’t get dung thrown at him on a daily basis but rather is still prime minister is beyond my comprehension.
What a turd.
Just for the record, I’ve given Thadeus multiple opprotunities to start over, one of them being when the lawsuit broke out. It took exactly two weeks before he was back to being himself.
I commend you for trying though.
I don’t have a grudge with Thad, we just get into it in certain flashpoints. And we disagree on alot.
I dont care what he thinks about me. I know going in to these forums that there are lots of people from all over the world, and there will be various opinions.
He made a Thalyssra thread. We argued but stayed polite. I don’t normally get into scorched earth salt fests unless someone clearly wants to. And he was polite in that thread, so I was, as well.
I sort of take every topic as it comes. I dont make apologies, because we both meant what we said. But I also can move on.
You’re giving him a lot of stuff to respond to. He usually posts at night, from my time zone.
Also Thadeus, you really should start using the quote feature. The way you respond to each paragraph without quoting it looks really weird.
He seems to for some reason see that as “cherry picking” or “quote mining”.
I don’t agree. It is really just to focus on certain points, and to avoid long posts that are more a reposting of a previous post than a new thought…
But we all Forum our own way.
I just hope both him and Tammy realize they don’t need to quote eachother’s whole posts. If we click on the little icon at the top of the reply we can jump to the other person’s post and read it ourselves.
I rarely use the quote feature because it tends to bloat the length of comments and I didn’t want to get accused of quote-mining. I accused some people of quote-mining because they only used the quote feature on snippets of my comment.
See my answer to Doness above. It is quote-mining when certain people only use the quote feature on parts of my comment (eg; part of a sentence or a couple of sentences) and twist that to say an argument I didn’t really say or make a personal attack.
I’m been waiting years for a light vs void expansion, and I hope we get it soon.
Do you think tax exemption is something only churches or Christian institutions get? That’s not even the case in the United States. Does your country tax only Christian churches or institutions for other religions too (they’ve got some nasty stuff in their histories too)?
There’s good reasons religious institutions are exempt from taxes when it happens;
Religious institutions, including churches, have historically played a significant role in alleviating society’s burdens and lessening the need for government involvement, and many do a lot of charity work today.
For countries where freedom of religion is considered integral, if churches were not tax exempt, many of them would go “out of business”—or their community activity would be severely curtailed—simply due to the tax burden they would face. The closing of places of worship would present a serious impairment to the citizens’ ability to practice their religion freely (Of course, that’s why a lot of people push for taxing religious institutions - because of their own vengeance, prejudice or agenda, those people want religious institutions go into decline or be shut down – especially when they single out one religion)
The tax-exempt status given to churches allows people donating to them to do so tax-free, or at least tax-discounted. Tax exemption thus incentivizes more and larger donations. With donations being the lifeblood of places of worship (financially speaking), it’s easy to imagine the hardship it would pose if donors were obligated to pay taxes on their gifts. Many people would stop their charitable giving altogether, and the work of places of worship would suffer as a result.
Taxation of places of worship would create an unconstitutional and one-sided financial entanglement between churches and the government, as separation of church and state mandates financial separation as well as institutional separation.
Reparations aren’t viable when everyone involved on all sides of a conflict is long dead and figuring out who owes what, and who they owe to, is either impractical or doesn’t apply; money doesn’t undo deaths.
It’s essentially asking people who never committed genocide to give money people who - out of those alive today - weren’t subjected to a genocide (plus if the genocide was successful, there’d be no one left to give the reparations to).
If talking about historical examples, would you expect a 13-year-old Muslim boy to apologize for 9/11? or a 30 year old Japanese woman to apologize for Pearl Harbor? Or me to apologize for the Salem Witch Trials? This kind of collective guilt and collective punishment is almost as healthy as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christianity isn’t the only religion with bloodshed in its history or even attempts at genocide (which genocides are you talking about specifically?), so it’s unfair to single out the Catholic church.
If bloodshed in the history was a good reason to reject a creed, practically all would be disqualified – even Buddhism (by the way, going by what you said about genocide, what China is doing to the Uyghur Muslims looks like the beginning of a genocide in the name of atheism).
All I’ll say about the Light Crusades is that it’s poorly written how it’s been implemented so far and not a cut and dry “poor, innocent Mag’har” vs “big bad Light fanatics”.
If Light or Void were sides you could take like the Covenants in Shadowlands, I could get behind that.
I suppose, but only if it became the new Horde vs Alliance and insisted that the Void side was the evil group. Being sided with the Void would imply you side with the Void Lords and Old Gods.
Yea you can utilize the Void in a good way, but in a war between the two forces it would be evil Void vs Light + responsible void users
I’ve thought about this for some time. That would be doable, but with Blizzard’s track record I don’t trust how they’d pull it off (especially given how they’ve handled retconning a bad side into the Light).
Yeah it’s quite unfortunate
The best antagonists are the ones with understandable motivations. But what Blizzard has done to the Scarlet Crusade, and any group that broke away from them, since Wrath is reduce them to cartoon bad guys that are irredeemably evil so the audience can feel angry when they do bad things and cheer when bad things happen to them or they fail.