this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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The ten commandments are a old testament thing, textually written by Moses as he attempted to copy the ones God had written and that Moses shattered after the golden calf.
Christianity extended the Jewish scripture with the gospels, which include a story where God Himself Slumming As A Human was asked what the most important part of the law was, and Jesus said "love" twice.
If "love everyone as you love yourself" doesn't lead you to not abusing children, I don't think any book of good behavior is going to stop you.
People and cultures have very different ideas about what constitutes abuse of children. Some cultures would consider it abusive not to cut off parts of their children's genitals.
What's your relationship with proverbs 13:24?
I don't feel bound by any part of the system of violent punishments that Jesus rebuked. Especially not one line which wasn't even from either listing of the Jewish law in the Torah.
OTOH, there is something to be said for actually teaching children to behave. Using a rod to spank children is a failure of patenting, but so is letting your kid run around the restaurant making a mess because you can't bear to rebuke them.
(And, again: Proverbs is a pre-Christian work that was incorporated by the gentike Christians when they formalized a canon for the Roman empire.)
So how much child beating is necessary for it to not be hating a child? How much/little is abuse?
Beating children is not an effective way to get them to behave. But people didn't know that (and still don't) so they thought/think they need to beat good behaviour into their kids.
Do you want to have a real discussion about morality and religious teaching, or are you just in search of an gotcha quote because you feel the need to reinforce your theocratic nihilism by arguing with a theist on the internet?
I mean I guess you got me, I was being a dick.
I am genuinely interested, but I wasn't acting like it, I was being needlessly provocative.
I've been learning a lot about Christian history but I'm frustrated because it (Christianity) doesn't really make sense.
I think a good pointer when you want to approach religion from a sane perspective is to treat it as primitive tech. For example, modern people know that you need to separate science from politics from law from history from psychology etc... and have a different system for each. But pre-modern people didn't necessarily know that, so religious doctrine had to serve several, sometimes incompatible purposes. You look at it and it's like a shovel that has a hammer on it and part of the hammer can be used as a screwdriver. It makes no sense but at the same time it kinda does and it sure has dug a lot of holes and tightened a lot of screws over millennia.
A comparison of religion to legal systems is both only a sensible comparison to the three Abrahamic religions and incredibly useful for those three. (Other religions such as Buddhism are more starkly personal).
Essentially no Christian, Muslim, or Jew in any century takes the common scripture and reads it like an RPG manual for the game of life. Either they're laypersons who rely upon the guidance of experts, or they're the experts and they approach it with the advantage and bias of the years of study it took to become experts. And if those experts are wrong, there is always some authority to correct and rebuke their interpretation.
Ignoring the Protestant schism for a moment, this is exactly how the USA's legal system works. The body of written law and judicial interpretation are extremely complex and nobody relies only on the plain text of the law when they want to figure out how it affects them. Even the crazy sovereign citizens mostly rely on someone else's interpretation.
(And "sane" isn't really a helpful label here. It encourages atheists to think about Christians as if the latter are entirely unpredictable and unreasonable, when it's much more useful to think of us as mostly rational people who have a philosophical difference with you. More akin to the leftist/progressive/liberal/socialist discussion you can see on Lemmy than a MAGA/non-MAGA encounter.)
The letter J wasn't even invented until the year 1524AD, so as a logical person, I think it's all a load of horseshit written by people after the year 1524, not all that long in historical context to the invention of the printing press in 1440, to brainwash and control the masses as they gradually started teaching average people how to read.
Government + Vatican = control of the people...
"Jesus must be a myth because the English J was only invented in the 1500s" may well be the dumbest argument against the historical Jesus that anyone has ever made.
You are of course entirely free to doubt his divinity or the existence of God, but asseting that both the religion founded by his teachings and the 1s century rabbi were invented after Columbus's voyage is just bad history.
I never said Jesus never existed, but also I have no reason to believe he was any better or worse than any other innocent person murdered by the government of the time.
To obsess about one single person killed by corrupt government over 2000 years ago is to ignore the genocide going on today. ☹️
The significance of Jesus is the movement he spawned. I'm not talking about the Catholic church as it was codified by the Romans a few centuries after his death, but about the movement of Jesus which spread far and wide directly after he died. This movement flourished not by the blade and the authority of oppressive regimes, but because it simply spoke deeply to people, especially the poor and disenfranchised. This kind of thing only happened a handful of times during history.
He was important because he created a blueprint for resistance of the oppressed, in a time where such resistance was a very hard sell because it went so contrary to the norms and cultures.
I share to a certain extent your skepticism towards the good book and religion as a whole. I don't think your letter j argument holds any water though. The first uses of the letter j were as i's to make them more legible in handwritten words. And it took time until scribes started using it as a separate letter. The sounds they meant to connote already existed. Julius Caesar was just Iulius Caesar. I agree with you that religion can be used as a tool to control the masses. Just don't make any logical leaps based on English spelling in particular, which makes no fucking sense to begin with.
I mean, we still have INRI on most crosses right? There are plenty of other reasons to be critical of how Christianity was institutionalized and the Bible assembled but the whole letter J thing doesn't really hold any water.
My logic is simple..
STOP OBSESSING WITH ANCIENT HISTORY AND LOOK AT WHATS GOING ON TODAY, under the guise of religion...