Dispensationalists generally believe that they can trigger the Rapture, not by starting wars, but by ensuring that every person on earth has clearly been invited to "have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." It's titillating to believe otherwise, I guess, but that's their standard view.

To follow up: The Guardian says they have viewed the one complaint that was described in detail, so there's apparently at least something that happened with one officer: www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

My point isn't that they're good people with good intentions. It's that explanations of "they're doing war because they want the apocalypse" skip over so many things that are a far bigger factor in the religious warmongering: patriarchy, gun culture, Islamophobia, nationalism.

There's one thing that premillennial Dispensationalists generally believe they can do to hasten the return of Christ. They've invested billions of dollars and millions of workers in doing it. It has little to with war, although some fantasize about achieving parts of it in the wake of various wars.

Uhhhh

Global warming would not be happening if our grid operated off renewables and our transportation systems were electrified

the parsimonious explanation for white evangelicals' attitudes here is less "it's their wacko esoteric 19th century eschatological doctrines" and more "white evangelicals are white right-wingers who -- like other white right-wingers -- are relatively untroubled by dropping bombs on brown people"

It's easy to conjure up conspiracies of irrational and demonic ayatollahs and mullahs or Christian nationalists and evangelicals, but the boring truth is that we're mostly seeing the acts of violent men who indulge in deadly sins, who appeal to religious ideas and emotions in unsophisticated ways.

The war is illegal and will likely have catastrophic consequences. Beyond that, I have very little confidence in our knowledge about either the future or even the present of what is happening. There's definitely misinformation and loosely sourced stories about religious aspects of the conflict.

NIMBYism literally gave Trump Electoral College votes, that is not an exaggeration if you want to stop fascism you need to build affordable housing in dense urban areas

One awful piece is housing discourse is that people don't realize that with shrinking household sizes an area needs more housing units just to maintain the current population. Not building inevitably leads to a smaller population and fewer children.

I’m *very* skeptical of any “conservative Christians want to manipulate world events to trigger the Rapture” framing. I went to a fundamentalist Baptist grade school that leaned heavily on End Times theology in the 90s. Tying to trigger or predict the Rapture would have been seen as sacrilegious.

"Christofascism "knows the cross only as a magical symbol of what Jesus has done for us, not as a sign of the poor man who was tortured to death as a political criminal... [it is] a betrayal of the disappointed, a miracle weapon in the service of the mighty." — Dorothee Sölle

The issues people have with transit in US cities largely come down to the fact that it seems like the people in charge don't even slightly care about rider experiences (often because they don't use their own systems).

"Have you considered that that question is problematically erasing my lived experience as a fascist? check your 'decent person' privilege."

Feucht is pretty vulgar in how he presents this stuff, but tens of millions of US Christians agree with this nonsense demonization of Muslims. It's basically a spiritualized parallel to the Soros conspiracy theories.

One underobserved feature of evangelical folk spirituality is the way that people invoke temptation or manipulation by "the Enemy" as an excuse for all kinds of misbehavior by insiders (especially church leaders), rather than attributing wrong actions to moral character or intentional choice.

I'm thinking of using "local xenophobia" as a descriptor of housing NIMBYism.

I question the utility of an AIPAC donation tracker that counts money from enemies of AIPAC I get the point is to figure out who is getting money from “the Jews”

It is kind of funny when NIMBYs just throw stuff at the wall.

once again these things boil down to “is your group a bohemian cultural identity” or “is your group actually trying to do things?” and the key tell is whether your activity centers on policing of in-group behavior or whether it centers on, again, tangible goals

I wonder if someone at First Things can fit this kind of thing into Just War Theory.

The people making the wildest claims about how AI will impact society and replace human beings, imo, tend to be clustered in economic and social sectors that are most ignorant of deeply human work--care work, moving around awkwardly-sized objects, developing genuinely new and creative ideas.

Seems like a real split between The Argument liberalism (purportedly data-driven and electorally chasing the median voter) and Liberal Currents liberalism (focused on first principles in interaction with current circumstances). Only the latter brings anything unique and compelling to the table.

Starting to read Byung-Chul Han's The Burnout Society (2015), and by sentences 3 and 4 he's already losing me: "...we are not living in a viral age. Thanks to immunological technology, we have already left it behind."

There's a lot in Smith's piece, and, as a non-Catholic who didn't spend much time at Notre Dame, I can't speak to much of it, but... his remarks about the theology department (which has wonderful and brilliant faculty and, probably rightly, sees itself as the best around) seem well-aimed.

Everyone in the replies is talking about seeing far more furry content and nudity than they would like, but I've never seen that stuff because my entire feed is typically just whatever @sharonk.bsky.social is posting or reposting

I'd like at add a few things to this. (1) humanists have not been able to convince any political party that curiosity-driven humanities research is a public good that should be funded using tax dollars. Republicans don't believe this, but neither do Democrats.

There's something especially diabolical about the spirit of antichrist inhabiting these men who so flagrantly claim the name and authority of Christ.

One of the most self-defeating things is the insistence on "building affordable housing." Even heavily subsidized new units are often more expensive than many existing units, so people (perhaps rightly) scoff at the "affordable" label.

My analysis of the integral and overlooked relationship between religion and detective fiction, focusing on Rian Johnson's Wake Up Dead Man, is now live on @plough.bsky.social's website! www.plough.com/en/topics/cu...

The spiritualized "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" tends to become a relationship with one's own self, but a self that is a bundle of repressed hatreds and desires.

Jesus as presented in the Gospels has interesting, compelling, confusing, and irritating things to say, but Jesus-as-mascot simply reassures us that we can get a good parking spot and also look down on people who aren't playing the right gender roles.

There's a strand of conservative Protestantism that revolts against considering Jesus as an ethical teacher or example, insisting that he is a savior instead. Turns out that when you detach Jesus from ethics, you simply get a mascot that can be put to about any use and doesn't seem to save anyone.

Finally watched the Halftime Show. Hopefully the point being made with the flags gets through: We're one hemisphere, and the more we try to deny that or refuse to engage in solidarity with our neighbors, the worse things will be for everyone. It's an issue that we often neglect to name in the US.

Recently wife and I stunlocked a guy who works in the bleeding edge of AI (San Francisco) and asked him if, instead of putting AGI in a brain implant, he can just start with a consumer printer that works reliably. Genuinely he did not know what to say.

Heard some distant cheering and thought maybe it had happened, but it was just someone in my building watching the Olympics.

There are only 2 real responses to housing scarcity. You can either build enough homes to accommodate everyone or start drawing up a list of “undesirable demographics” to exclude. I know which side I’m on.

I don't know that they'd align themselves with Feucht right now, but there is a history of politically-involved NAR networks in Minnesota, who were closely tied to secretary of state Mary Kiffmeyer (1999-2007). Unlike Reformed right-wingers, local NAR people often try to act non-partisan, though.

I'm interested to see Mike Johnson's lengthy biblical explanation of why this is ok, but I'm guessing he'll just put a lot of effort into not hearing about it.

One term we should probably get rid of is "affordable housing." Nearly all housing is affordable. Some housing is incone-restricted or subsidized.

The Trump admin’s whole case regarding Haitians in Ohio is racism, xenophobia, and lies. There’s literally nothing else to it. Legal status, proper papers. No criminal record. Employers, neighbors, local leaders say they’re a benefit to the community. It’s showy, bigoted cruelty, nothing more.

There's this twisted situation that happened where Religious Right types like Mohler and his followers realized around 2014 that they were in an unwinnable battle against the existence of gay people, then they tried everything they could to turn the tide, including allying with explicit racists.

Maybe not the most important thing here, but it's truly not great that they're using terms like "riots" and "coordinated attack." I'm also dismayed that the popular right-wing response has been "why weren't the church members armed?" MAGA Christians increasingly want to kill people.

Not sure if the most painful type of post is when someone is right about something but for inaccurate reasons ("AI datacenters are bad because the world is running out of fresh water") or when someone is wrong in self-defeating ways ("new residential units don't lower rent, so we don't need them").

Rediscovered this 1972 memo from Peter Wagner, in which he tells fellow church growth guru Virgil Gerber that they should alert "Billy Graham and the other biggies" about the need to keep Latin American Protestants in line with North American conservative evangelicals.

I can testify to the fact that empathy erodes religiously-inspired homophobia. They got that right at least.

The thing that inspired the "sin of empathy" thing was the realization that the basic empathy would inevitably erode religiously-inspired homophobia. Then, MAGA Christianity used this idea to justify hatreds that include increasingly open racist campaigns against one group after another.

"Three possibilities for action that the church can take vis-a-vis the state [that misuses force]: 1st, questioning the state as to the legitimate state character of its actions.. 2nd.. to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel... 3rd.. to fall within the spokes." - Bonfoeffer, 1933

Follower request: Does anyone have recommendations for good books on Christian socialism?