TheRtRevKaiser

My wife and I joined an Episcopal church a few years ago after a fairly painful falling out with the church we had been part of for ~15 years. It has wound up being such a blessing for us in so many ways, one of which is not feeling like we have to cringe whenever a leader in our church speaks out in public. Bishop Budde is a perfect example of the kind of rhetoric that attracted us to the Episcopal church - gentle, kind, but firm on matters of love and care for others.

Thanks for posting this, I'm looking through this afternoon and will distribute to folks I know that might be looking for ways to help.

Hi. You've gotten some very good responses from the community so I'm going to leave the thread up for now, but please be aware that pushing more will likely result in removal or a temp ban. Thanks.

@[email protected], when you're posting obvious satire as genuine news, you might need to take a step back and do some self evaluation. You've been posting a lot of articles with a pretty clear point of view, and if you're not concerned about veracity or quality then you might want to slow down and think a bit more, no?

No big deal, you're good.

I actually also think it's probably both, to a degree, that's just not what the author of the article is arguing. I think there's probably a certain amount of persuasion that is pulling people deeper into a belief system that they might only be partially invested in at first, and then they are sucked into ecosystems that reinforce those beliefs and pull them further in. I don't have anything but vibes and lots of half-remembered reading about online radicalization, though.

You're right, but I think they are using the term "brainwashing" in a colloquial sense. There's a perception that misinformation on the internet is persuading people into more extreme views, but what the author of this article is arguing is that what is happening more is that online misinformation is allowing people to easily justify beliefs that they have already formed, and quickly and easily get rid of cognitive dissonance associated with encountering information that contradicts their beliefs. This is something that people have always done, but it's become so easy on the modern internet that more and more people are embracing fringe worldviews who might previously have been unable to cognitively support those views.

It's a small difference in the way we think about misinformation online, but I think it's important that we understand what is likely happening. It's not so much that misinformation is changing people's beliefs, but that it's allowing people to hang onto beliefs that contradict reality more easily.

So I'm not an expert in nuclear weaponry. However, more modern warheads don't somehow magically vaporize everything within a certain radius and then not cause effects outside that radius - that's not how things work. They may have a larger fireball, which is the area within which things (and people) are going to be vaporized, but they still have very large areas where people will receive burns decreasing in severity depending on distance, and (if the warhead is detonated at ground level) radiation doses that will kill within 5 days to 1 month. Check out Nukemap to see those areas in different scenarios. Here's one that I did for a ground burst of a 800 kt Topol warhead. You can see that the areas for radiation are larger than the fireball itself, and the areas for 2nd and 3rd degree burns are quite large. Setting one of these off anywhere populated would cause an immense amount of human suffering even if the folks in the ~220m fireball never saw it coming.

I dunno, I've read some downright horrific accounts from Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Sure, if you're right at the hypocenter you're immediately dead, but lots of folks didn't die right away, but were horribly burned or got lethal doses of radiation and died slowly and horribly.

Go touch grass.

There's no need for this, seriously. I get that it's a gaming community but we're trying to be better than the usual toxic mess, right?

It's fine. Decent lore and environments, but the gameplay was pretty mid. It was decent fun to play for a couple of weeks with some friends who like LotR. Certainly no reason not to check it out if it's free

Thanks for the thought - we did a little of this over the last few years but it wasn't working for us. One of the more important parts of religious practice for both of us is the communal aspect, and as we live in a mid-size city in the Southern U.S. there aren't very many opportunities outside of a church setting for strong, long-term community building. Not saying there aren't any, but it's difficult to build a strong network when third places have essentially disappeared. The Episcopal Church is working for us, at least right now, as a place to build those networks and practice our faith without having to compromise on moral stances that are critical to us.