It seems to me a whole lot of really smart, amazing jewish scholars over generations and generations of jews have established a pretty rigorous body of knowledge and wisdom about how to integrate as a potentially targeted minority into society and how to immunize that society against being manipulated into xenophobia and racism/religious discrimination.

What is happening in Gaza and the West Bank… and Lebanon… as confident as I am there are no words to describe what is happening, I am confident there is no god that would ever call for that in their name, I guess that is not a statement I can prove or disprove… but at the same time I feel entirely sure any god that would demand that would be an abomination… so what else can this genocide occurring be, other than first and foremost a betrayal of judaism at a basic level? An insult to god, whoever and whatever you identify god as?

If you think god is a many armed spaghetti ball floating in the ether and I think god is a giant spacecrab, we can disagree about a whole lot in how those two beliefs intersect in political and real world ways, but on the other hand it is pretty easy to establish that whether god is a many armed spaghetti ball or a giant spacecrab, god made the universe and thus doing something that feels needlessly violent and destructive clearly can’t be something god desires to be done, in general… Would the spaghetti ball really want you to do needless violence upon the spacecrab heretics even if they worship forbidden beliefs? Vice versa would the spacecrab desire their followers to obliterate followers of the flying spaghetti monster just because their path to worshiping god erred in the details?

What is happening now goes beyond any distinction between one human and another you can possibly draw, it goes beyond any single evil act anybody or anything could commit to deserve an equally evil response, it is an atrocity and it threatens to drag us into WW3 :(

The darkest irony is this all only puts jews more in danger sigh.

I am sorry I am just stalling for time because I realize you have won the argument, so now I am just bringing up tangential shocking things in order to try to distract from the more important point here that I have stuck my foot in my mouth.

Ughh…

I don’t think you understand your argument is sloppy, you are extrapolating from the “fact” that in your perception that all said and done religion has done far more damage to science than good in terms of their relationship.

Crucially I am not debating whether that “fact” is true or not, I am pointing out that only expresses the result of their political intersections and the ways they have been exploited towards entirely earthly ends, you have not actually explained any incompatible mechanism between science and religion, and more damning for your argument you have no way to identify what makes the times religion has had a mutually beneficial relationship with science (sometimes by inhabiting the same famous scientist) anamalous and not immediately destructive?

If you are saying science and religion are like oil and water, I am saying that stating that most of the time oil and water don’t mix well doesn’t prove that they cannot mix at a general level, and it does not express a mechanism that makes these two things naturally opposed.

Do you denounce Ted Bundy?

From a philosophical, rationale and scientific standpoint, strictly speaking religion and science are not incompatible. They are both structures of political power, and thus can be placed at opposing odds and this has indeed happened manyyyyy times in history I am not doubting that, but you cannot extrapolate to a different category of question from that about the philosophical question of whether religion and science are incompatible.

You also doing history a great injustice by assuming religion is always hostile to science, it is not, and you insult the nuance of history to paint with such a broad brush. Religion has done massive damage to science, but it is an egregious simplification to reduce the relationship down to just that.

Countless scientists have pursued entirely rationale science in the pursuit of bringing to light the beauty of god they saw reflected in their scientific passion, I am not saying that is a rationale way to see things, what I am saying is that it is a clear example of how these things are not fundamentally incompatible nor are they fundamentally compatible.

I don’t see how any scientist can also be religious

It is easy, to a scientist the least interesting question to ask about religion in terms of how it comes to life through humans or anything else someone identifies as a product of god is whether god actually exists or not.

Beyond simple philosophical questions, there is nothing generative to be found, science by definition is interested in questions that can be tested and are falsifiable and faith by definition exists outside of proof and is “allergic” to being contained by any kind of rationale proof whether you think that is because god doesn’t exist or because you keep moving the goalposts to reassure yourself that god exists, or because you simply have an irrationale life defining feeling that god exists…

There are many scientists who have been deeply religious, they aren’t incompatible and they aren’t compatible, rather they exist perpendicular but intersecting at the juncture of politics where religion has often done great damage to science, but we are talking about primary levers of geopolitics here, we can’t see violence along their axis as indicative of a fundamental incompatibility… or compatibility.

To see everything as a battle between science having a hold over truth and religion having a hold over truth is to mistake a political history with the actual mechanism that makes good science work, which is to concern yourself with questions that can be tested and answered in order to learn more about the universe.

Put him in a little castle for prison, surround the castle with a moat guarded by well paid, trans, synchronized swimmers who get good quality healthcare and support for being employed to keep Merz at bay 24/7 in shifts while putting on beautiful routines for the crowd watching from the far embankment above.

Every square inch of the far embankment of the moat around Merz’s castle/prison must be covered with ethnic food stalls of every type imaginable, all wafting smells that as much as Merz wants to get a Xenophobic hard on from hating… kind of smell good… but Merz will only be fed a narrow diet of unseasoned boiled food in his prison. The prison will be self funding and be Merz’s most successful project as it transforms into a popular international tourist destination for people coming to “pay their respects” by laughing at the sad tiny man finally safe and supreme in his throne…

In this castle will also be a free (unless you are a white man, in which case you must apologize for being a white man to pay for your entrance) Tower of Terror-esque ride where it is rumored sometimes when the doors open on the hallway full of smoke, lasers and theatrical effect to deliver the thematic punch right before the coaster drops into freefall that you can spot the real monster through a real window pane, ugly and mundane sitting at a desk reading Mein Kempf, all alone.

Herero say what?

You are very creative!

Thanks for bringing that up, I shoved it into the headline because it deserves to be there lol.

Way to admit you never even intended to read the article by reacting as if the article somehow portrays the Taliban as good or not having numerous serious ethical and political issues lol.

edit tardigrade, you really get old to interact with…

Where the hell did I say anything about Hamas?

I understand why you project opinions on to others to argue with them, you clearly can’t really construct an argument connected to reality.

It is kind of like the white whale in Moby Dick, mixed up with a lot of acid and interwoven into a Hansel and Gretel story. If that doesn’t make sense I explained it properly.

The Schwarzgerät?

The most important V2!

Are you putting together the 00000 V2 rocket?

Yeah that is exactly what happens.

What I find exasperating is the fact that many rightwing movements harbor antisemitism quite explicitly, including the AfD, and when it becomes politically undeniable how awful and incomprehensibly evil the Palestinian Genocide is, what conservative Germans will inevitably do to avoid reckoning with their hypocrisy and willing blindness to pretend not to see something so massively atrociously bad, is blame the jews for backstabbing them.

It is the same dumbshit story over and over again, I don’t think this is a unique problem to Europe or Germany, it just feels more pathetic when this story is grafted onto a nation that literally already exterminated millions of jews.

I am sure there are plenty of centrist idiots in Germany who think they need to defend Israel because of Germany’s past, so as not to make “the same mistake again” and yet if that is how they really felt with conviction wouldn’t they step back and see that Germany is being set up along with the rest of Europe to recoil in horror at the Palestinian Genocide and then turn around and blame it on jews for making a conspiracy to bring good, christian and righteous nations of Europe into doing evil?

I must reiterate, this story never fucking changes and I hate this story.

edit also lots of rightwing military personnel and leaders in Germany have ties with russians, so part of it is just you know, building up the military to “defend” against the people you actually just want to give all that military tech to…

REVENUE NOT PROFIT

Merz is a tiny little coward.

Additionally police are often the murderers themselves.

We all saw what happened to George Floyd.