I remember when I had to set my VCR to record a program I wanted to watch; if YouTube gets that bad, I’ll just do the same thing; pre-record the video stream and skip the commercials.
With the limited size of our domestic population, it always blows me away that there are enough Canadians living in countries like Lebanon to populate a small city.
But wait… didn’t China say the re-education camps were a hoax, that Muslims have the same rights as everyone else in China, and that any issues they’d been having had already been resolved?
That’s how epistemological analysis works… if the general structure is the same but everyone pulls different meaning out of an event, something probably happened. If everything lines up exactly, someone probably faked the letters. If there’s totally conflicting stories, the record has been tampered with too much to say anything. If there’s no record, there’s nothing to say one way or another.
You realize that a significant portion of the bible is the collected letters and works that were at the time (that it was assembled) considered credible, right?
There’s a period of around 80 years that’s pretty hard to account for, but unlike the four gospels where there’s little corroborating evidence that tracks back into that 80 year period, the epistolary works are pretty likely to be authentic. They also reference a bunch of other letters that didn’t survive, something that tends to make them more likely authentic than not. And they involve people who were eyewitnesses of a man named Jesus (or Joshua or Yeshua if you prefer) and his younger (step) brothers.
The rest of the statements about him were solidified by 80 years or so after his death, but all the accounts don’t quite line up — which is actually a good argument for them being based on actual events.
So while there may be plenty of room for debate as to how much of the biblical teachings actually originated with a man named Jesus, his actual existence seems more evident than, say, Shakespeare.
Basically, people are more aware of how they, personally, are affected by the economy.
The economy in general is doing better, but the majority of citizens are able to apply less and less of that to the things they value, and they see more and more of it being funnelled to the already wealthy.
I find that odd actually; eucalyptus contains an oil that quite a few people are allergic to. I’d never heard it was a rare allergy, in fact, elements of its oils are often associated with allergies:
Young Canadians don’t hate Canada; they hate the boneheaded ideas thought up in Parliament and they hate that they’ve been priced out of owning a part of Canada.
If you don’t have a voice or land, and see no hope that you ever will, why would you be happy with how things are?
If you think modern Zionism is about religion in anything but name, or that Palestinian nationalism is about Islam in anything but name, what you believe is even more questionable than what they believe.
If all religion vanished overnight, the same people would be fighting over the same land with many of the same arguments, but something else substituted for the religion.