Sorry, but "just cut our losses" isn't acceptable to me when people are being murdered. This is the Nazi murder of Jews/etc of our time and it's everyone's obligation to handle it better.
Bush caused most of this current ISIS problem by lying about WMDs. At that point, we're the bad guys invading on a lie. It made us afraid of and hostile towards the Iraqis which caused the Abu Ghraib treatment, etc. He didn't make the terrorists but he provided them with their recruiting propaganda, made an ideal nest, and let them crawl in. It sucks, but we've got an uphill slog because we elected someone who was fine with murdering people on a lie.
But here you imply that anyone breaking a contact of adhesion is a bad person. I literally cannot rent a suite that doesn't forbid sub-letting, even though local law forbids forbidding of (reasonable) subletting.
And if we then say, well it's not bad in my city because the contract that tried to prevent it wasn't enforceable, we have to step back and ask how it's magically bad in another city with different laws.
I'd rather talk about actual harm, or rather lack thereof outside scare stories, to buildings and other tenants. No harm, no foul, and harm to abusive contracts doesn't count.
Sure you can. It's a low bar. That's the point. In the absence of any possible evidence we have to work with what we've got. As for cryptic - if you can google it I don't consider it too cryptic. lmgtfy
And I only mean ultimate, now. Compared to the other religions we could be squabbling over. In a future religion, god could be all that + offer you a pony. We'll never know. But for now, of the choices, they're all obvious losers compared to Mormonism. Literally, you could upgrade a catholic or a muslim by giving them Mormonism.
As for Smith's motivations, who's saying he wasn't fixing things. He just didn't feel the need to get all stabby and make killing a sacrament.
And it conflicts nothing - it tells it how it is. The pope is god's voice, there's no conflict. Perhaps the pope is the missing element in islam. As the ultimate religion we can only assume it has not just a point, but a great one.
The issue though is that your money, car, etc, is gone instantly and you're on the side of the road hitch-hiking home. No hearing, no evidence even.
The fact that a hearing is part of the process is largely irrelevant because other parts of the system to conspire to keep victims from reaching the hearing or getting justice.
An unjust attack on whose way of life? The girls being sold into slavery? The boys forced to fight or die? Those simply murdered?
I'm pretty sure the other 99.9% are hostages, and not half as committed to the bullshit as you think, except in stockholm-syndrome ways. Soon after they weren't being killed for not being fervent, they'd be as non-religious as we are.
The details of n+k don't matter as much. It's not just the latest, it's the latest that self-claims to be in a certain lineage, etc. Ultimate Abrahamic religion... And it has to make a non-self conflicting claim to be the definitive text.
Once you meet the rigorous standards of 1) writing it down and 2) claiming to override all previous prophets, yes. I'd count you. (However, this will void your membership in the CotFSM.)
Cutting and running does not work. We're still in Germany and Japan 70+ years later and we'll have to have that kind of roadmap if we plan to help in the middle east.
And help we must. We can't sit back and watch madmen kill millions, even if doing so would spite our idiot leaders (on all sides) who caused it in the first place.
The only objective standard possible, the words of the religions themselves, combined into one greater piece of theology. Everything is assumed true unless it conflicts a greater set of doctrine.
Thus we know mormon leadership speak ex-cathedra because Smith said so, and so forth. Where things conflict however, like Mohammed's statement that he's the last prophet, obviously he's wrong because Joseph Smith, etc, meet the same criteria.
Going by the truth revealed in each document, Mormon's are the closest to god - the latest, most direct, pipeline to the divine. It's essentially religious science.
They were the last to be visited by god, and had the most-recent prophet, according to whom their mortal leaders speak ex-cathedra. Mormonism is even growing faster than Islam. It is the ultimate(1) Abrahamic religion.
Mormonism is even truly a religion of peace. Its leader was under persecution at the time and he does not speak out for killing and injustice.
1) Judging all religions objectively by the same standard of proof.
Not really, because the proposals aren't to go to no encryption but to go to government-backdoored encryption. To an observer you've still just a random stream of bits until someone tries to decrypt it with the backdoor key. Pretty easy to hide in unless we're monitoring every message.
And terrorists would be smart - they'd employ non-backdoored encryption, hide that in "legit" communications, and encrypt that with the proper back-doored government encryption. They'd appear to be a totally normal snapchat user, or whatever.
If we actually meant to give up all encryption, card-kiddies would destroy civilization in three weeks.
The right answer? Kill Assad and help the people take back Syria. We should have done it three years ago before much of the moderate resistance was killed but it still needs doing.
And as for your Israel jab, they're better to the Palestinians than the Arab states in the area are. And none of the Israelis I've talked to seem to have inherently racist beliefs but many of the recently middle-eastern Arabs do. (About the Palestinians.)
Yeah, it's still not the rape, enslavement, and murder of everyone who believes differently.
Threatening to close your border to incoming foreigners is nothing like like closing your border, enslaving locals trying to flee you, and murdering them systematically.
And there's a difference between a leader being elected once on a wave of fear and the leader declaring themselves god's representative on earth - let the slaughter begin.
The best quote I heard about the refugees is "they're fleeing the same problems and people you're worried about". I really hope we can protect refugees better than we have been.
The problem with religion is that it isn't one thing. It's a general philosophy and creation myth to many, and to others it's day-to-day marching orders. That latter set is purely crazy - hearing voices, believing counterfactual things, and is often programmed to kill other groups or at least believe they need to die. If someone is a flat-earther in a battle with round-earthers you can take them up in an airplane high enough to see the curve of the Earth, or to space. But there's no counterproof that can be given to a religious killer.
I think the reason people tend to see Muslims as a single group is that both camps (not Sunni vs Shia, but Sane vs Crazy) share the same sets of religious leadership and respect the same historical figures. For example, a southern baptist and a russian orthodox member would have nothing (religiously) in common. If one sect started murdering others, or picking at a weak justification in the bible for slavery, the other sect would condemn them. But Muslims (through the seemingly accepted method of death-threats from priests) control their religious world more tightly. To be a member is to at least profess to, if not actually believe, a specific set of things.
There's no broad blanket condemnation for entire classes of horrible actions. The Saudis control Mecca and yet the "peaceful" muslims continue to travel there and enrich not only a kingdom but one that routinely executes people for rejecting minor religious traditions. It'd be like me saying I didn't support the Catholic molestation coverup and then going on a three-day Vatican tour and coming back with a pope hat.
So while it may be a stereotype, it is a deserved one (Ask Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali) and Muslims should pay the price of changing it instead of insisting others simply trust them despite their memberships and alliances.
btw, I'm a supporter of unlimited (ie, not limited - I would try to encourage you to not need it though) welfare to let society say "tough" things such as "Oh well, I guess we don't need many buggy whips."
And as to why I didn't charge anyways - the change actually made my other work faster.
Well damn right, if all I want is a bulb replaced I don't want some jerk insisting it takes a ticket to read the spec on the bulb.
I want liability insurance for the driver, etc, but all the value-adds that Taxi companies claim to have (see posts in this thread) aren't, to me.
I want to the freedom to choose any qualified driver.