To be fair, the I don’t think the Church has ever officially taken a stance on the idea of the Invisible Christian. But Pope Francis was a proponent of the idea.

Um, they very much did make promises to that effect. Neither were in good position to actually help the Poles when push came to shove, hence the Phony War. Brittain did some good with their navy, but neither could get enough troops to where it mattered to help, so they buckled down on ramping up their own war efforts at home to better mobilize. Did they fo it out of cowardice and throw the Poles to the wolves, or out of necessity because they would have been overrun had they over commited? That’s a question that has been the subject of much study. But they both very publicly and loudly commit to their defense, they simply failed to meaningfully uphold that commitment.

I mean, the obvious answer is instead of trying to divvy the sovereign nation between them, they should have stood up for them and defended them when the Nazis rolled in. Barring that, they should have liberated them, then left them the fuck alone. Even a stopped clock is right sometimes, this comparison is pretty clearly silly. They weren’t lamenting the lives of Nazis lost in the battle to push them out of Poland. They were lamenting the lives of the Poles after falling under the Russian boot, after the battles were won.

In the earliest versions, and still is in the Jewish faith, he is literally an agent of God. God tells him to test folks, and he does his job. The whole War in Heaven and the idea that he had fallen come much later.

You touched on it, but for completeness, the official Catholic stance is actually a pretty interesting interpretation that is the result of a kind of wild assumption, and the absolute upholding of free will. Basically God is meant to be the source of all positive things, including feeling and sensation. Every person has a 2 way connection to God. Any positive feeling you’ve ever had was from him through this connection. When someone commits a Mortal Sin, they are showing they reject God, and sever their side of the connection. Truly repenting will pick the line back up, and God never drops his side so long as you live. If you die with a severed line, he accepts that you really don’t want to associate with him, and he drops his side too. And so Hell is not a place, nor a punishment, it’s a state of being. All the gnashing of teeth and lakes of fire were originally metaphors for how badly a total lack of Grace, that connection, is. Later Dante’s Inferno and other works painted it in a striking way that caught the imagination, but it is not the Church’s official stance.

The really fun part is smashing together the idea that Mortal Sin is a rejection of God, and the core concept of the Silent Christian. IE, the Bible very literally, and repeatedly, states that God is love. Like, not that he embodies it, or that he is the source of it (though it also does claim that) but that the two concepts are literally interchangeable. You basically can rewrite it using a replace tool and swap out any instance of God, Jesus, or the Holy Ghost with Love. It does make some kind of philosophical strange abstractness when it talks about loving Love, not that weird, with Love loving things, pretty weird. And it kind of takes “tough love,” to a whole new level with some of the wrath he brings in the 1st Testament, but that is fairly low on the list of weirdness between the two Testaments, and the God = love stuff is mostly from the 2nd.

But the core concept in the “invisible Christian,” is that those with no faith in a sky daddy can still be good Christians by letting God love into their hearts. Therefore, anyone that has empathy can really be taken to be a good Chrostian, and obtain all the benefits whenever the Bible says you need to beleive in and accept God. And the corollary here is that committing Mortal Sin, IE willingly committing a heinous act such as murder, is a rejection of God love in your life. Of course, the definition of what qualifies as Mortal Sin remains a contentious affair. Though the Catholics are generally more tolerant than the more hard-line sects, they are still pretty backwards here. But if you restrict it to things that cause serious harm to another person, then it becomes a comparatively reasonable model. Much more so than it is popularly presented, at any rate.

The ones that teach what Jesus supposedly did do not substitute God’s love for self love. He was asked if the myriad Jewish laws were still in effect or if Jesus’ coming had nullifiedthem according to prophecy. Jesus basically says, “love God, love your neighbor, and love yourself. Do these 3 things, and you will never break any moral law. You don’t need a list of commandments to follow, because you won’t break them if you follow these three.”

Maxim 43 would like a word.

Dietary calcium is great for preventing stones, actually. Calcium is bound to a couple different things that cause stones, but the body actually makes those things specifically to bind with calcium. When it happens where it is supposed to, this is a good thing. If you are low on calcium, these things get flushed, and may get trapped in the kidney. Then any calcium that passes through may bind to it. Having higher calcium intake helps prevent them from building up in the kidneys to begin with. Though extremely high amounts of calcium from vitamin supplements etc can increase the risk of getting stones, but high calcium diet is one of the best defenses against them.

It is actually not an excess of calcium that’s usually the problem, calcium deficiency is actually a greater risk for most. While yes, the most common types are both chemicals that are in part calcium, the body is meant to produce them, just in different parts of the body. Usually, a deficiency in calcium allows those other compounds that should be used up in other places to be flushed through the kidneys, possibly building up. Then incidental calcium that does move through the kidney binds to them there. Higher dietary calcium intake is associated with a sharp decline in stone risk, though extremely high intakes from vitamin supplements etc do increase risk. But in general, it is an excess of the things that bind to calcium that are the things to avoid, apparently almonds are pretty much the worse thing ever, with a fairly distant second being chocolate.

Yeah, I have rejected increased cost games for this very reason. But Nintendo is one of the few companies I believe would do it to cover their costs instead of just preying upon general apathy towards inflation since covid to jack up profit. They are too rich for my blood at the time, but if I had the income to splurge this would be one of a vanishingly small number of places I would be willing to put up with it.

Just speak the incantation of motive energy and light the incense to soothe the machine spirit.

The egg is only there to help bind it while it bakes so the butter doesn’tmelt and turn it into goo. If you are going to eat the dough just leave out the egg, it doesn’t do anything.

For a while people tried to differentiate roguelikes, which maintained the lack of metaprogression, with roguelites, which did have progression. But that was pretty clearly a losing battle, the two names were far too similar to stay distinct as long as one or the other took off. Some few pendants still try to maintain the distinction, but that ship sailed ages ago.

I don’t think that’s true, is it? I think Gondor had a small handful of kings before the line was broken and had a long string of stewards. Didn’t Isildur sail from Numenor and establish Gondor himself? So, one single king, right?

Remember, they are still pretty much children in Hobbit society. Both the Tooks and Brandeybucks hold fair bits of land, it’s just their wild kids running around giving the farmers trouble. And of course there’s never any real consequences for them beyond a slap on the wrist.

People overestimate the fiduciary responsibility of public companies. It’s true they will often pursue aggressive short term gains to attract more investment in several forms, including higher stock prices. But as long as they are arguably trying to help the company they are considered to have fulfilled their obligation. You have to be able to prove in court they are trying to harm the shareholders to run afoul of that responsibility, which is a fair hurdle. And it isn’t really that difficult to avoid a forced IPO by keeping under the 500 shareholder threshold if one really wants to avoid it.

The year of hell was originally supposed to be a 1 or 2 season on-going story that was teased earlier with Kess. The execs were allergic to such a serialized concept and such drastic impact on the characters so they were forced to cop-out with the time travel.

If violence isn’t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.

Maxim 6

This was exactly the explaination from the old Exoanded Universe/Legends in Star Wars. The most sophisticated piece of any fighter was their EWAR suite. Otherwise fighters would be wiped out from well beyond visual ramge by capital ships’ point defense systems, and it’s why they needed to get so close so their sensors could power through the jamming to get missile locks on other fighters.

Pretty sure the whole point of this article is we have confirmed tiny black holes do rapidly evaporate. We’ve theoretically known that any black hole just about our sun’s mass or smaller will spew more Hawking Radiation than it can consume mass and will shrink. And this process should accelerate as the mass shrinks. This seems to be the first expiremental evidence to support the well established theory.