The people they are killing will remain dead.

I can’t imagine this horror.

On 19 February, the family arrived at Xinhua Hospital to sign the consent document and run some tests on Mei’s blood. The form described thrombotic microangiopathy as a possible outcome that would require “prompt treatment.” The children’s version—the one with the “book” metaphor—asked Mei herself to check a box marked yes or no. “If you don’t want to write,” it told her, “you can draw a smiley face instead of your name.”

After 3 days, Mei developed a fever, a common reaction to AAVs that was expected to last for a couple days. Qiu swung by as her fever began to wane. He assured Jason and Linda that their daughter’s condition would soon improve.

It was the exact sequence of symptoms that the consent form had warned the family about. But nowhere did the form explicitly indicate that any of this could end in death, nor did that come up during any conversations with Qiu or the other doctors, Jason and Linda say.

Death is always a possibility, especially when it comes to untested procedures. But to leave that possibility off of the consent form? Wildly negligent.

The results are heartbreaking.

“Mom, I want to go home,” she told her mother, before vanishing into the ward.

Within days of their daughter’s death, Jason and Linda moved into a hotel and, later, a new apartment. Locked away in the old apartment was all their furniture and their daughter’s possessions. They also cut off contact with some of their closest friends. “I don’t know how to reply to them, so I pretend not to see their messages,” Linda says. “I am not so brave to face everything.”

They recalled that when Mei’s birthday came around earlier this year, they said nothing to each other, though they both assumed it was on the other’s mind.

“We do not discuss that,” Linda said.

Linda finally told her husband how she had spent that day. While he was at work, she finally returned to the old apartment and sat down on Mei’s bed surrounded by all her things. She had purchased a chocolate cupcake on the way and now picked at it as she imagined that her daughter was still at her side.

By the time she finished telling her story, Jason was welling up. Linda glanced over at him tenderly. “My husband didn’t know this,” she said. “I cannot cry every day, but that day, I think, I can cry in the room.”

😢

Catholic.

I am not familiar enough with Catholicism to know. A quick search returned results about black Madonnas, which are apparently somewhat common in Catholic and Orthodox churches.

I know, but my parents keep dragging me to churches.

I wish I could help you. My parents would hit me if I didn’t want to get ready for church in the morning. I am in my 30s now and traumatized by the abuse they still normalize to this day.

There are verses supporting slavery.

Yes. And rape, and genocide. Biblical god is completely immoral. Most believers ignore the parts of the bible they don’t like, or they pretend there is some magical context where an all-powerful and loving god would ever need to hurt anybody.

I’m not sure why your question was downvoted. The grammar may have confused people, or maybe they perceived the question as racist somehow.

Nice. I think many of humanity’s problems could be solved with more effective communication. Some people act like we don’t live in the same world, which makes it very difficult to hold each other accountable for our choices.

Thank you for the pleasant interaction. I hope you also have a nice weekend. 🙂

I am not a parent and I haven’t seen the movie, but it makes sense that our exploitative overlords would want to groom the next generation of victims by normalizing naivety. Thank you for pointing this out. An alarming number of people, parents included, are not so good at thinking critically, and their children often suffer for it.

knocking noises that are too ambiguous to know where they specifically come from

Are they rapid? I had a woodpecker carving out a bit of the outside wall of the previous place I lived in.

As others have suggested, it could also be something about the plumbing or HVAC. It might be worthwhile to try to record some of the phenomena, analyze the data, test hypotheses.

Humans are very good at scaring themselves and each other. If these happenings are too disruptive, maybe some kind of home inspector could try to help shed some light on what is going on.

The thing about “paranormal” is that if it existed, it would just be normal. There is no supernatural, the definition of “natural” encompasses our reality.

I wonder if OP is getting a commission for referrals. They posted this to 10 different communities.

Why is every statue I see at churches of black people?

What religion? I was forced to attend a number southern baptist churches when growing up. None of them had any statues that I can recall.

Do you know who the statues are meant to represent?

Didn’t God ever want anything to do with black people?

In reality? Humans invented god.

Biblically, he would probably want something to do with black people. Why else would he create them? But the bible is vague and contradictory, it can be interpreted that he created some people specifically to serve others, or that certain people are not his chosen people, or that they are incapable or unwilling to hear what god has to say.

Also, what does the Bible say about black people? Do they ever get mentioned?

Probably. The bible describes stories and characters in the middle east, including parts of Egypt and Africa. The bible does not explicitly state their skin color, though it is likely that characters from Kush, Ethiopia, etc would be black.

Think critically and exercise empathy. Humanize people. Oppose ongoing abuses. Enjoy the lifelong pursuit of knowledge. The truth is a threat to them, which is why they keep spraying lies everywhere.

The abrahamic faiths are literal death cults and any person who tolerates them is commiting murder-suicide.

Let’s all put our fucking brains in, thanks.

deleted by creator

But I can’t control those with peanut brains and can’t think for themselves. I’ve tried. It’s worthless. And they’re not worth it.

I was abused because too many people gave up on accountability. I understand it is a frustrating uphill battle, but I think giving up on changing minds is effectively murder-suicide. Division is unsustainable, and the only thing that unites us is truth itself.

I try my best to do what I believe is right, but it is difficult with broken foundations and decades of bad habits forcibly programmed into me. I am still figuring out how I can help more effectively. I have a lot of pain and anger. I am frustrated because every day, there are more victims. It feels like not enough people are doing enough.

I do understand taking a break to recover sanity, and I understand that we can’t change every mind right away. I still think it is one of the most important things every person can do: spread truth and challenge assumptions, call out fallacies, correct mistakes. I feel a bit more strongly about it than most because I know there are victims suffering worse than I have. I see casual, selfish stupidity directly enabling the rise of deadly christofascism, covering genocides, protecting pedophiles, etc. It is difficult for me to avoid a desperate, confrontational tone. Thank you for your patient responses.

I hope more people become aware to the harm that superstition does. I think they would act differently if they realized what is at stake.

That’s pure cynacism.

At worst, it’s slightly hyperbolic. You said it yourself:

The Christian faiths have a very well-defined ideological framework based on a number of canonical texts with established interpretations.

The bible conflicts with itself, which is why interpretation is necessary. Many of those interpretations are in direct conflict. That is not well-defined at all.

To say people fail to live up to these values isn’t particularly shocking. To claim the values don’t exist is ignorant.

The core value of christianity is to do and say whatever your ego wants you to.

It’s aspiration. You set the bar high and try to clear it, knowing it’s a hard thing to do but still believing its worth doing.

Pretending to know things that cannot be known is arrogant narcissism.

Or that public health care isn’t routinely included in modern state functions. To feed the poor? We’ve got everything from SNAP benefits to Food Banks.

I live in the United States. Guess which programs were just defunded by an administration that claims empathy is a sin?

People who dedicate their whole lives to providing aid to their neighbors fucking exist.

I’m glad they do. Unfortunately, some of them choose to repeat baseless, deadly bullshit. We would all be better off if they would stop that. And many believers pray for god to feed people instead of actually taking any steps that would accomplish it.

“The only consistent christian value I can discern” Is the only value you’ve chosen to acknowledge.

It’s the one under all the bullshit. Please stop falling for the bullshit, people are dying for this.

These people are real. They exist. They do shit, in no small part because they believe it is a religious obligation.

The cult created these problems so it could sell us the cure, but the cure is poison, they demand complete submission.

They learned these values from their Christian Parents and their Christian Neighbors and their Christian pastors. And they pass them on to their children, whether or not those kids or their grandkids hold to the spiritual end of the doctrine.

My christian parents hit me if I didn’t want to go to church. They think they’re going to heaven for violently brainwashing my brothers and I.

Stop defending abusive death cults. Everyone is better without superstition.

I like the golden rule, but I have two issues with your response.

First, Jesus did not invent the golden rule. It was around at least 1500 years before his birth.

Second, if someone hands me a bowl of shit that has a handful of cherries scattered throughout it, is it really worth my time to sift through all that shit when I could get fresh cherries from somewhere else? I ate the shitty cherries for years, they nearly killed me.

Many modern believers are trying to pretend that empathy is a sin, an attitude associated with the Trump presidency. An alarming number of people can’t tell the difference between the cherries and the shit. Those who lack critical thinking are easily swayed one way or another by those who want us fighting each other instead of the rich.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/is-empathy-a-sin-some-conservative-christians-argue-it-can-be

Did I say ban?

I advocate for education. All life depends on the truth; therefore, certain falsehoods threaten all life.

As we are living people, it is in our best interests to hold each other accountable for our words and actions, which are driven by our beliefs.

Instead, we currently have adults pretending that bronze age blood magic is real and that’s why we should dehumanize LGBTQIA+ and immigrants.

This is insane, yet the average person has bought the comforting lie that everyone is entitled to believe whatever they want. We should correct this deadly mistake every time we see it.

You keep making the same false equivalence. Where is the “fiction” label for the bible? People pretend it is true.

My parents abused me because they believe in the bible, god, and christ. I know what I’m talking about, I was raised in it.

Every human being should be well aware that the abrahamic faiths are intolerable death cults. It is selfish to pretend that magic is real.

self-contained set of more or less internally consistent rules.

I guess you haven’t read the bible. It is not remotely consistent with itself or with our reality.

that’s even more reason to try and understand the rules of their fantasy and be capable of making arguments within then

Why can’t we treat the root cause instead of symptoms? There is no god, no magic, grow up and focus on reality, kids are dying every day because adults want to pretend magic is real.

The rational/irrational boundary is not in the being able to understand and operate with a set of self-contained rules in a fantasy setting or not, it’s in believing or not that said fantasy setting matches objective reality as we perceive it.

Right. Rationally, christ is not real. The bible is fiction, but people are pretending it’s not. Why? Because the bible itself repeatedly claims it is not fiction, that the only path to salvation is reading and understanding incomprehensible fables. This does not happen with Lord of the Rings. People necessarily cherry-pick because the bible disagrees with itself. They follow Jesus’s example of “make shit up when it suits me”.

If we are peacemakers? Or if we accept Jesus as our savior? Cherry-picking is necessary because the bible is inconsistent. Also worth noting that Jesus said he came to bring not peace, but a sword.

Also, what’s he saving us from? What he’ll do to us if we don’t obey? It’s all bad.

I think you’re ignoring parts of the gospels you don’t like. John 10:

I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.

You can hear him climbing onto the pedestal as he talks about how he is greater than all.

That is it’s fatal flaw, yes. People choose cowardly fantasy instead of courageously facing a reality, even though a reality without that abusive god is better. It means we are not the main characters, not under divine protection or supervision. We have the capacity to fix our own problems instead of wishing for the magic wizard to fix them.

Jesus may have had a few nice quotes, but he distracted people from their own real lives with baseless promises about divine rewards. Christianity is a death cult, yet too many people are still defending it. We need to unite around the one truth that defines us instead of splintering into endless interpretations of delusional fantasy.

Everyone is not entitled to believe what they want. Everyone is obliged to align their beliefs as closely with reality as possible.