"Hitler's only kidding about the antisemitism" New York Times, 1922

Take that, big government!
On the bright side, just think of the investment opportunities… Adult diapers; Pepto-bismol/Imodium/etc; children’s caskets – the sky’s the limit. Also Chipotle’s stock should recover as explosive diarrhea becomes the norm.

When people thought that Herr Drumpf was referring to the 1940’s/1950’s as his reference point for MAGA they were off by ~100 years.

Another plus - I can probably get my hair cut and dental issues taken care of at the same time…

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It’s worse than that: in the current New Yorker, Glenn Beck (!) is quoted saying reasonable things! About Michelle Obama, no less, and how her post-“pussy grabbing” speech was transformative for him.

We live in interesting times.

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Thank you! Yes, those were the ones I was referring to. As to how the dominionists see Israel/Jews, I haven’t looked into that. I’m curious to know.

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Not only all that, but the article actually says “bait to catch messes of followers.” I’ll say!

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I was disagreeing with your conceit that Rapturists were an extremism resulting from a dying religion. If you want to argue that slightly less than 3/4 of Americans self-identify as Christians rather than slightly more than 3/4, I’ll agree, though your minor adjustment to the number just validates my position that in America Christianity is the norm. Updating the figure doesn’t change that Rapturists are an old and persistent phenomena in the US that’ve been around for well more than a century, still are dominant here as political force, and will be with us for a very, very long time to come due to the way educational systems are structured in the US. They aren’t going away just because they seem crazy to well educated people, since in the US well educated people are very uncommon.

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And they have enough pull and influence in the US to get Dubya to speak at one of their events three years ago.

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It’s absolutely horrifying to see evangelicals look at Jewish people not as human beings deserving the rights and respect all humans innately deserve, but as tools - pawns to be manipulated into bringing about a magical transformation of the world that destroys literally every aspect of the modern world to replace it with their theocratic dictatorship.

You’re a not-quite-human pawn to be used in that scheme, I’m an apostate that must be destroyed and punished for eternity because of Jesus’ love.

These people are the dominant activist base of the GOP today, with the Reagan and both Bush admins being full of them. I remember Watt as Sec. Interior saying there was no reason to protect the environment since the Rapture was coming so soon. The coming Trump admin will be laden with with more of them, with VP Pence likely to be a Cheneyesque theocrat pushing that agenda while hiding behind a lazy, incompetent, credulous figurehead of a Pres.

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Hitler wasn’t a vegetarian but even if he was, Trump is a carnivore like Stalin, Genghis Kahn and Napoleon

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I cannot possibly discuss anything with anyone with such a cavalier attitude to studies, sampling and statistics. I don’t exactly understand why you wish to oversimplify the picture and misrepresent a serious, large scale longitudinal study, but if that’s what you want to do, you are of course free to do so.
You would doubtless be horrified if I told you that you are using the techniques of the evangelicals themselves, but to a degree I think you are. They are fond of using broad-brush and incomplete statistics too.
Sociology is not an exact science but it is a lot more rigorous than you seem to think.

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Maybe you could just admit you were wrong instead of doubling down on an irrelevant tangent you tried to pull in to try to change the topic once it was made very clear your original position was false?

The total number of self-identified Christians in the US wasn’t the germane number. The total numbers of Evangelicals and Premillennial Dispensationalists were, and so far as there are numbers available (there aren’t for Rapturists) my numbers were accurate there as other comments showed with cites.

You might want to check if there’s a mirror available, since your rhetorical tactics are familiar from my experience with discussions with evangelicals. Whenever I made a point that showed they’d contradicted themselves or made a logical error they’d change the subject or go into attack mode, and here you are doing both.

Like an evangelical in defensive mode, you’re spinning hard to try to run from the fact that your original position was historically uninformed. Your clarification of the total number of self-identified Christians was worthwhile in itself, but as presented was not a contradiction of anything I said, and seems to have been a way to dishonestly change the topic. I agreed with your more accurate stat, but pointed out that even using the more rigorous number, that number was not really at the root of my argument and the number provided with more reliable sampling and statistics actually proved my point and undermined your original argument.

I’ll be happy to drop the discussion, though, since it’s clear you can’t admit error or discuss the topic honestly.

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Oh hey, I checked and it looks like he’s not dead yet! Surprised they haven’t tried to bring him aboard the Trumpocracy; it seems like he’d fit right in.

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Don’t try to make this about Trump. The real story is that the New York Times was as useless a source of information then as it still is today.

You can find good information, news, and opinion - elsewhere. Cancel your subscription to the NYT.

Bonus: you might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and make Thomas Friedman loses his job.

Anyone in the US who teaches university classes that contradict YEC - geology, biology - has stories about pushback from students who believe the bible literally, even in top universities in blue states. In red states they can get in trouble for standing firm against the students’ beliefs.

[quote=“mls14cim, post:79, topic:89256”]
And although many of his voters were, in fact, college educated, I believe that they had a poor college education.[/quote]
There is practically no other kind these days. College education has become about findng the quickest path from freshman orientation to the degree. Students want this, parents want this, but what is new the last 15 years or so is that administrators want this, because their performance is judged by the “6 year graduation rate”, the LDL50 of higher education. Our students are smarter than ever, and we can still usually do a pretty good job with our majors, but breadth is no longer valued by pretty much anyone except maybe old fart faculty like me and young idealistic faculty who lose that idealism soon as they struggle to find full-time jobs.

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I’ve had to walk away from tutoring clients who wanted me to help their kid pass bio/geo/astro/etc without contradicting their YEC beliefs. Those have been entertaining, in an infuriating manner. And I’m in upstate NY.

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I remember the apparently genuine concern within the student body at my university over the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012. There was even a big write-up in the school newspaper which was meant to allay the students’ fears. Now granted, the majority of the students weren’t concerned, but there were still far too many who were, in my opinion.

(I didn’t know that Terrence McKenna was so popular among the youth these days.)

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It’s so true. Reading about it can’t give a sense of what it’s like when you’re experiencing it first hand. I’d guess that if you weren’t ever exposed to those stores in the mall that catered to the religious that feature a wall of Rapture paintings (the ones with cars flying off the freeways were my faves - we had one in our house), gotten the streams of pamphlets/comics/fake $20 bills/etc., were given heaps of Rapture lit./comics as kids, and been proselytized to and hung out with Church people, you aren’t going to have a sense of what religiosity in the US is really like. There’s an intellectual tradition since the 1800s predicting the imminent end of religion. I think we’ll be waiting for that in the US for as long as we’re waiting for the Rapture.

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Not my experience, although it may be biased by my bioscience background.

“Did you have any run-ins with the religious loonies?” would be a fairly standard question to ask someone returning from a conference in the US.

Religious extremism and superstitious nuttery is an intrinsic part of the US’s global image.

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That’s because Orange Hitler’s enemy isn’t the Jews, it’s the Muslims. That’s why Bibi wouldn’t mind Trump’s rhetoric so much.

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It isn’t real when you only experience it secondhand.

Look, I dated a Mennonite for a while. Members of her family - very nice people - literally wondered if as a Jew I had hoofs instead of feet. This was within an hour of a major East Coast city. You have no idea.

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My wife works with various congregations and every few years she"ll encounter a new pastor who politely tells her there’s no possibly way he can work with her, because she is literally the Antichrist.

It’s also not unheard of for members of the congregations to not actually know what a Jew is. There are over a million residents in our county. This is not the rural heartland.

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