Trump administration says federal employees can encourage co-workers to "re-think" their religious beliefs
Trump administration says federal employees can encourage co-workers to "re-think" their religious beliefs
I'm sure when atheists and satanists start proselytising there will be outrage - "we really meant Christians should allowed to bother their co-workers not you guys"
I bet you a coke this is to fuck with the FFRF and MRFF, two great orgs trying to keep religion out of our gov.
Satanism pamphlets in the break room!
Time to found Epsteinology, a religion based around the release and realization of the Great Nefarious Files to bring about the Grand Awakening and destruction of the Orange Menace for the good of all Humanity.
Not to be confused with epistemology, which also poses a grave risk to the MAGA cult.
Their beliefs are more like Piss-stain-ology.
Ha! Yeah that one produces anaphylaxis in most Magats... I'm not necessarily opposed to that either.
So this is where the new new atheist movement will start.
Also, remember epstein? whatever happened to that guy?
I'm more concerned about his files.
I don't think people really understand what's comming. Everyone's like "so now everyone can talk about their respective religion, haha". But where I see this going is only the one right religion being acceptable in near future and everyone who's making clever remarks being outlawed and prosecuted. The fact we're not there yet makes the obvious progression to that none the less scary.
I don't think you realize that christians aren't as popular as they were before. There are a LOT of others and non religious. I don't think christians are going to enjoy the process as much as they think.
Frankly, I'd never hire or do business with a fundie. It's hard to put my finger on it, but there's something about their desire to enslave or kill nonbelievers that makes me uncomfortable.
They will once the rule is unevenly applied in their favor. Which it will be.
True Christians find all this behavior disgusting. It is just capitalizing on a faith for profit and control while bringing harm to those that can't pay the admission fee and/or have the wrong skin color.
What's going on is religious terrorism/extremism, and taking advantage of the dumbs to enable it.
It’s giving Under His Eye, Blessed be the Fruit vibes tbh.
For anyone else who also doesn't recognize this, it's a greeting phrase from the TV show A Handmaid's Tale.
"Please talk about anything else but the epstein files"
Time to start turning my coworkers into atheists.
All jokes aside, this ends when we ban orginized religion.
Nobody should be publicly religious. Do it in your own home.
I haven't worked in an office since before the pandemic, but back when I did I had super religious republican guy who sat to my left. On his left there was another lefty atheist like myself. 3 years later we had him voting for Biden and doubting his entire faith.
Keep it between you and god, where it belongs.
So your jokes weren't aside. "I only want people to be publicly atheist and nothing else."
Asking people to be sane and use some critical thinking in the face of proselytizing woo woo nonsense and rubbish is a reasonable thing to do.
Personally I wish we could all be publicly nothig. Not religious, not atheist. Let's not talk about it all, at all.
I don't think we should hire any Catholics because they believe eat humans and drinking their blood is legitimately okay. The people who believe God decides anything in day to day life should all be fired for not being able to accept scientific theory, which is the same scientific theory that drives the economy in which this company runs. I mean come on they are clearly braindead drones who believe anything they are told and have proven they can't innovate anything new that could help us. Also all Muslims are terrorists, they've been proving it on the news every night for decades, we shouldn't hire them either.
In most companies they would just get rid of you for talking about the news / politics. If you fire someone for preaching their religion the company can be sued for illegally terminating an employee do to their religious beliefs. It's not a good idea.
As an atheist, faith should be warmly invited, and traditions should be celebrated. You don't have to have anything to do with it. You can assert yourself without assuming you know what people think and classifying their worship. And, on another note: these are human tales. You think books that took generations to compile don't have a few nuggets of hard earned wisdom? Do you read Frankenstein and dismiss it because it's ludicrous?
hard disagree. we should allow them, but we definitely shouldn't be inviting and celebrating them. All religion does is undermine society and prop up the rich and powerful.
religion can get fucked.
I would agree with you if the Christians supporting Republicans weren't literally trying to start the apocalypse.
Banning religion has been tried, It doesn't work. Banning the awful things that religion makes people do is a better option.
Authoritarianism comes in many forms. Didn't any of you read 1984? I mean, don't waste your time - there's way better materials to learn from, but Thought Police, anyone? Also, no idea why you're getting downvoted. You atheists are dogmatic as fuck. I'm an atheist. Hey, let's ban Islam. That's how you sound.
There are multiple countries who have already banned orginized religion.
It is the next step of human society.
i’m waiting for this to backfire on him as muslims openly pray in their workplace at the designated times
Surely that goes both ways, and one side has a lot more evidence...
Everything is "evidence" when your side has "faith" and "control of the government"
I hope the Satanic Temple can have some fun with this.
This is the time to start invoking all of the gods for a more dynamic and adaptive office environment.
"Listen, Ryan, I'm gonna need you to ask yourself what Enki would do in this situation, ok? You're giving Enlil when I need an Enki. Dammit, get your head in the game. Have you not been keeping up on this stuff? Seriously, if you've been experimenting with that Jesus stuff again I'm gonna come unglued, I swear. Get off the fuckin cross already, jeez."
Oh no, anyone trying to promote non-christian ideologies will 100% get instacanned under this order I'm sure
Really throw them off by talking about Yahweh and Elohim and how are these Gods relevant today?
You're gonna confuse the evangelicals by naming the two entities which voltroned into their own object of worship
Or discuss the singular El versus the plural Elohim and the related implications for that over the pantheon alluded to in the books of Moses.
But... I was trying to spread the love across the old religions and just leading off with a fun pairing. This Yahweh guy gets a lot of attention. Ra is displeased and unpleasant droughts will undoubtedly be visited upon us all now. Fuck.
Imagine thinking they give a shit about hypocrisy in 2025
Sure, but still no reason not to put it on display in clear and hamfisted terms if you ask me
I am going to start spreading the Gospel of the Great Wombat at work!
That's the energy I'm talking about
Do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior Baphomet?
The Ritual (2017) was a great movie.
"Fascists enable Christian Nationalist Karens to abuse coworkers on the government's funds."
Every job I've ever had, my coworkers and I have pretty openly discussed the 'taboo' shit like religion and politics. We can generally keep the flames under control, and if shit does start to heat up we'll change the topic knowing that the conversation isn't going anywhere at that point... but ultimately it's been a consistent point of growth for pretty much everyone involved.
Coming from the Trump regime, I can only assume it means "convert your non-christian coworkers to christianity, and other application of this policy will get you fired" so, 100% fuck this shit. Coming from less of an absolute shitstain traitor, I'd actually be in favor of this kind of rhetoric. Maintain policies requiring professional behavior and prohibiting harassment so that those who don't want to discuss it are empowered to shut the conversation up; but in a consensual setting, sure I'll hear you pitch coming to Jesus or w/e - so long as you're equally receptive to my counterargument.
That's not how it's gonna work, so again, fuck everything about this, but fuck if it doesn't hint at a nice sounding ideal.
My I introduce the reverse loophole.
Blaspheme against the holy spirit, that piece of shit.
Doing so is the only unforgivable sin. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. Straight to hell with you and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Not even their god. By blaspheming against the holy spirit, that fake garbage, you are putting up the shield against christians. They can't save you, you have no reason to convert, it is a waste of their time...please leave me alone.
Now, if anyone can give me reverse loopholes for other religions, that would be great.
I agree with you. On surface, it is a good thing. But again, this is Trump speaking.
I think maybe someone should convert Trump to Christianity.
This shit only flies as long as it isn't a Muslim doing it.
Reminds me of Valarie Hodges in Lousiana like a dozen years ago. Where she stopped supporting religious vouchers for school cause an Islamic school wanted to use them and she didn't realize that could happen.
That's pretty much the entire operating model of the Satanic Temple. Either you're getting a Baphomet statue to go with it, or you're losing that Jesus one.
THANK YOU TRUMP for allowing me to FINALLY share the Teachings of ALLAH with other Government Workers!
Inshallah brother
RIP your public service career lol
I know it's intentional here, but I cringe whenever someone says 'Allah' in an English sentence because it's just the Arabic word for God.
Hail Hydra :)
According to Trump, "re-thinking" means "doubling down no matter what, especially if you're wrong".
Ugh. Looking at the comment sections in posts about religious authoritarians, is about as insufferable as the comment sections in posts asking people to reduce their animal consumption.
oh OH I've seen this episode before!
I look forward to promoting my all powerful Lucifer.
Let's start spreading the unspeakable ancient knowledge of the first one. The one that has no name but an idea of an existence. Now hum the deep tone of the empty.
Edit: Fuck CBS
Hail Satan!
And fully expect this to only become worse as time goes on. The Christo-taleban has full steam now and won't stop
Time for TST to start distributing literature through the ranks of the federal government
I'm sure a lot of people are re-thinking their religious beliefs after the fucking devil was elected.
To date there is zero evidence for interaction between material nature and the spirit. And not for want of looking, as scientists and clergymen alike have been searching for centuries now, anomalous exceptions are extremely rare. Even the standard model of particle physics is transparent to any spiritual factor.
So why should we look at it? Because the human mind, to perceive and process sensory stimulus into situation awareness, to remember, to read and speak and understand facial expression, to compute, and to engage in reason — for all these capacities — it requires power.
While LLM generative systems power demand is calling for the re-commissioning of nuclear power plants, the human brain eats up (according to anatomists) about 20% of our caloric intake, when we are awake, at rest. Less when we're at full run, more when we're computing the integral of the acceleration of rocket thrust as fuel is spent, or landing an airliner by yoke.
But it means, if we have a soul, and that soul remembers its sins, can reason why such behaviors were sinful; if that soul can feel the fires of Hell, this processing takes energy, and an energy source. That means interaction between the physical and spirit, which means there should be something to detect. There should even be side channels.
No evidence of energy exchange, no side channel heat or sound, it strongly (not absolutely) implies there's no spirit to detect. Or if there is, it might be so delicate that interference from natural phenomena (lightning strikes and CME emps come to mind) would shatter it.
The exception is the simulated-universe hypothesis: If the universe is a simulation in a computer program (or Azathoth's dream; Ia! 🦑🌊🌌) then all our recorded observations are of simulated events, and souls can simply be simulated. But some of us object to the notion we're an object in a program or a figment in a dream.
If there's no detectable energy powering our souls, then they could be in the core of the sun and not feel a thing, nor have an eff to give. No regrets, no memories, no pain, no misery.
Most likely, by far, we are thinking meat.
Heck I who am awake today can be a different iteration than me, who was awake yesterday. The separation of time when cerebral cortex activity is shut down for maintenance (non REM sleep) may indicate separate beings, like an AGI powered down and rebooted, with its past memories front-loaded. We're the same for day-to-day quotidian purposes, but our breaks in continuity raise philosophical questions.
And all this is before we get into the incomprehensible vastness of our galaxy, in which earth is barely a mote, or the universe featuring immense strings of galaxies, in which our Milky Way is a dot.
And all this is before we discuss the multiple great filters that are imminent before us, and as a species we are ill prepared to navigate. When we go extinct in the next century or too, it will be part of the Holicene dying, and none of our gods, myths and cultures will survive. All of our operas and symphonies, all of our paintings and sculpture, all of our cinematic thrillers and cozy mysteries and Ghibli animations and fine cuisine will evaporate into geographical layers, and the universe won't even notice.
All this is to say, I've thought about this and confronted my personal insignificance. I've come to terms with mortality and the end of society and species. I get why people cling to notions that we are something special, even though all indications from nature imply we are not.
I say, bring it.
lukewarm take at best, and i'm superficially on the same side here.
the notion that a potential soul takes energy from a person is completely unqualified, and used as a basis for the rest of the argument. there are so many external energy sources in the universe even before we start talking about a "spiritual plane".
weak.
I didn't say the soul pulls energy from the person, but there has to be interaction between material and spirit (I don't need spirit to be its own manifold in this model so I didn't presume it)
If the soul doesn't interact with the material then there's no connection between the two and theyre not associated.
So we should be able to detect that interaction. It should have enough of a footprint that were able to notice something even if only side channel effects (which is how we discovered radiation and the heating properties of microwaves).
And we haven't.
As I said, it doesn't rule out spirit, but like many apologetic arguments, it takes a lot of weird presumptions to assert that spirit does exist, does interact with material, yet cannot be detected with the scientific means we have in the twenty first century. It can happen but then it requires stark changes in the models of mechanics we have (such as possibly the simulated-universe hypothesis). In this case our scopes are good enough to see the proverbial teapot. 🫖
But I appreciate that it's difficult to comprehend what the issues are, and why this is a failing not merely of Christianity but any narrative that involves spirit or afterlife. It rules out most models of ghost and fairy phenomena as well.
And don't worry. If you don't get it today, we'll have many (hypothetical, thankfully) days together in the break room so that I can assure you do.
I don't really see the problem? I'd assume this includes any belief system, including atheism?
The headline is a bit sensationalist. The article is just "colleagues should be allowed to debate religion"
Atheism isn't a belief system. Or what do we call not believing in Santa Clause, the Easter bunny and tooth fairy.
It is a belief in that there is no God. A lack of belief either way is agnosticism
Let's see what happens if I start promoting atheism and mocking belief in Bronze Age alpha males in the sky.