It could take decades longer than even that. America has experienced mind-boggling collapse in just 4 months. The damage to its reputation will take an entire restructuring of the powers of the executive branch to overcome. I mean, who wants to make a deal with an admin, when every 4 years it can go back on its word?
We still have at least 43 more months to look forward to. The bottom hasn't even begun to drop.
Is it more underreported than the notoriously underreported abuse in schools?
For real, we are on a post where an abusive career teacher got a 'teacher of the year award' no doubt in part for her behavior around students.
I am not doing this to whatabout abuse in the Catholic Church. I left it and won't be going back. But it's so odd to bring it up on a post about a teacher getting charged, the school clearly not identifying the problem (she had been a teacher for 11 years, it had been going on for a year, they didn't report it and even rewarded her behavior prior to the reports).
Schools have a serious systemic problem here too, and I don't believe we should deflect every time it makes the news. That's all.
Yeah, I'm sorry about that. Got hit with three notifications at the same time and replied to the wrong one.
You clearly didn't read it. The rate not the raw number. Per the Dept. of Education, 5-7% of teachers are abusers. That is 20-50+% higher than the rate (i.e percent) priests abuse. The average school in America has several abusers in it.
Lemmy talks a big game about the Catholics, and damn does that church know how to run a cover up, but schools are frankly ripe for reforms and accountability.
Teachers abuse students at a rate of 20-50% higher than Catholic priests. Not defending the priests or anything, but I think we forget how horrificly high the abuse rate of teachers is.
You know he actually did a Nazi salute right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy?wprov=sfla1
Speaking as a former Catholic, I honestly believe being more conservative will make the church more relevant. I'm not saying that's a good thing, to be clear, but we see what is happening to more liberal Christian denominations universally--they're rapidly declining. There are a number of reasons why that is, but liberal theology failing to retain members is a component there.
I think the most relevant issue the Church can bring to bear today is one that conservative and liberal Catholics alike tend to agree on. Even the most hard-line trad priests and laity I knew had a visceral hatred for laizez-faire capitalism (and often capitalism at large) and the commodification of the human experience. Pope Francis gave voice to it, and the next pope must follow suit. If he doesn't, regardless of theology, the church is doomed.
My first rec would be Rod Bennett's The Early Church in Her Own Words. It's a good starting point that grounds you in what the early authors of Christianity were thinking and discussing.
Yeah, more or less. Spitballing, but it's probably still more related to the Sun. The 25th would've been on of the first days studious Romans could tell the daytime was growing longer.
This whole period in Roman History is extremely cool. Maybe not to live in though lol.
I'm sorry, but your first claim, that Christmas is a co-opting of a pagan holiday (Sol Invictus) is just plain wrong. It predates Sol Invictus. Emperor Aurelian established Sol Invictus as a holiday in 274 AD.
Hippolytus of Rome (d. 235 AD) claimed Jesus was born 8 days before the Kalends of January, which corresponds to Dec. 25. It is vastly more likely, and much more widely accepted at this point, that Dec. 25 was chosen because Africanus (author of Chronographiae, an early attempt at a Christian timeline) and other early Christians believed the Annunciation was March 25. They just added 9 months to that and bam, December 25.
If anything was intentional about the 25th in particular, it would've been due to contemporary Jewish beliefs that Prohpets died on the same day they are born or conceived. Believing that Jesus was conceived on the 25th of March, the parallel 25th of December would not only have been chronologically accurate, but spiritually significant.
These early Christians existed well before the establishment of Christianity as the Roman state religion. There was a substantial desire to distance themselves from Pagan practice at the time. Virtually all sources that it relates to Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, outside of a single margin note in the 12th century, are post-enlightenment.
Edit to address Easter eggs, in particular: Undeniably the symbology of the egg as representing life and death predates Christianity. Frankly, it predates the Roman religion too. It's more likely that eggs came from Persian cultural practices, spread to middle eastern churches, then gradually migrated west.
That's just how culture works and I honestly don't see what the point of bringing it up is. Only the most simple-minded evangelicals would be scared of what amounts to adiaphora.
Are we obliged to belive that every religious practice from every religion ought to have been instituted specifically by its God? Religion is for us, even most religious people will tell you that. Islamic prayer forms are derived from Coptic Christians, Jewish and Christian thought intermingled; Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist thought has at various points cross-pollinated in fascinating ways.
I truly believe more non-religious people should read David Bentley Hart's Experience of God. I think, if you can put up with his snark and dense prose, it would help a lot to understand what it actually means to believe in a God, rather than bottom dollar examples like rural evangelicals and Islamic extremists.
As far as Christmas trees go, the fact that we do not see a single example of one until the 15th century, leaves me confident that their adoption wasn't related to co-opting ppaganism. European Paganism was dead and buried by then. Any practices that remained would've been perceived as cultural. The Christmas Tree probably had more to do with wealthy Protestants trying to distinguish themselves from Catholic Christmas traditions more than anything else.
Heck, the Vatican refused to put up a tree until the 1980s. That rivalry runs deep.
That's very true. It's less that it can happen, and more that it's happening with virtually every trade agreement at once, along with dozens of diplomatic norms.
That said, the authority of the executive is undeniably stronger today than back then. Congress has acquiesed its authority and powers on virtually every issue imaginable and it alternates between being too complicit and too incompetent to change that (and too gridlocked to achieve meaningful policy anyway).
There are too many metastisizing issues to count at this point.