Just gonna copy/paste my response to another comment in this thread:
The Passion of Christ is basically gore and I hated it. The hyper focus on Jesus's suffering instead of focusing on his message is a huge problem in Christianity in my opinion. It's had this bizarre tendency to normalize abuse in the name of one of the most loving human beings ever to walk the planet.
I 100% understand an emphasis on the suffer of Christ as a personal meditation on the nature of suffering and how we relate to God in our suffering. But the kind of glorification of the torture of Jesus that is common in a lot of Christianity is really twisted.
And I'm a film buff. I love art house shit and I hated that movie
The Passion of Christ is basically gore and I hated it. The hyper focus on Jesus's suffering instead of focusing on his message is a huge problem in Christianity in my opinion. It's had this bizarre tendency to normalize abuse in the name of one of the most loving human beings ever to walk the planet.
I 100% understand an emphasis on the suffer of Christ as a personal meditation on the nature of suffering and how we relate to God in our suffering. But the kind of glorification of the torture of Jesus that is common in a lot of Christianity is really twisted.
Always post links. No one should expect you as an individual to recreate the efforts of people who get paid to aggregate this information. It is, however, reasonable to expect you as an individual to be aware of what's in your links and be able to defend why you find that information convincing.
(Not gonna lie, that's a lot of info you've posted. You're gonna have to give me a while to go through it, which won't be tonight because...work tomorrow. I love common dreams as a source, personally. And I often find jacobin unconvincing, though we coincide on some issues like the evils of mass incarceration.)
I'm deeply skeptical of any and all utopian ideas. They have this mysterious tendency to wander down paths to authoritarianism because we, as a species, are more defined by our ideas of who and what we are than by anything else in our existence.
When an idea becomes an ideal, people become willing to kill or die in attempts to bring that ideal to fruition, no matter how vain.
In fact, this is how I self-edit my own beliefs about the world and myself. "If the cards were all really on the table, would I be willing to proudly die in defense of this idea?" If the answer is yes, then I cling to that as an ideal that I strive toward.
All human lives matter equally.
It is important to lift up those who have less than I do.
Any small effort to alleviate the suffering of my fellow humans is meaningful.
There is always hope.
That is the utopia I choose to live in deliberately every day, and what I appreciate most is that it is resilient to the whims and chaos of this world that I can't control.
Yes. Literally. Welcome to the group Christians United for Israel. Remember when you read "return of the Messiah" that to them this means the apocalyptic end of the world. And they're hoping to cause it to happen. These cultists are so far out to lunch, and they were just in the White House. It's terrifying.
"A critical issue for hardline Zionists and their Christian allies is the location of the ruins of the first and second Jewish Temples beneath the al-Aqsa mosque compound, the third most revered site of Islam. A fundamental tenet of the Christian Zionist theory is that a new temple be built upon those ancient ruins.
The Christian Zionists are vehement that this be done to fulfill prophecy. They believe that once construction of the new Temple is complete the return of the Messiah will be inevitable."
The Martian is a really fun, easy read. It was originally written as a series of online blog posts so it's pretty consistently entertaining without any big, boring filler chapters.
Personally though, I don't read a lot of fiction. There's also a ton of really entertaining nonfiction out there. I'd particularly recommend Isaac's Storm by Erik Larsen. It's about the devastating hurricane that leveled Galveston, Texas in 1900 and weaves in the history of hurricane prediction in a really interesting way, telling the stories of some of the people involved.
I dunno if that will turn out to be something you like, but just a little something different to consider trying.
(Also, I know everyone is saying library and they're definitely right you should do that. But also I wanted to share my favorite eBay book seller as another option for low cost books. Their selection is amazing: https://www.ebay.com/str/secondsalecom)
He might not look like much, but the man delivers even in the face of Republican obstruction.
"Biden has assembled the most impressive legislative record of any president since Lyndon Johnson. Drawing on his decades of experience, Biden deftly navigated a 50-50 Senate to pass a historic bipartisan infrastructure bill, generational investments in clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing, the first gun safety law in almost 30 years, a bill codifying same-sex marriage, a bill aiding veterans who suffered health effects from burn pits and an electoral reform to prevent a repeat of Trump’s attempt to use Congress to undermine the election. And that’s all without mentioning the nomination and confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to ever sit on the Supreme Court."
I'm mildly obsessed with HK lol. I only got it in Dec 2022 and I just beat The Radiance for the first time a few weeks ago. I can't seem to manage it a second time, so I literally just bought the game on Steam and got an Xbox controller because it's more responsive than my Switch. I'm not sure what happened to my life haha
(Still waiting for someone to get my reference though. Not HK related :)
This right here. Preach. Biden isn't exciting, but he's objectively doing a good job under the circumstances he's been given to work with