I agree, since all the animals are seemingly posed as being remade on the ark and suddenly you have the first people walking the earth again after the flood.

Note: this is not a me thinking the ark exists, it’s a commentary of the story being retold.

From my perspective, the Bible should have continued to been written forward, and included pieces of the issues Christians sought to address in their current times. I think an updated one would have spoken of the poorly of the actions taken by the church and followers alike through the ages, and would have followed people trying to do good in hard times.

I’m not saying that people don’t have free will or that it’s not talked about in the Bible, but free will is not something presented as a gift, yet alone God’s greatest gift to humanity as the meme says.

From my perspective, once God set the universe in motion he has mostly taken a step back from direct action. I would say life is a test of sorts for us, to see if we can make earth resemble the good of heaven, on a humanity wide scale. But it’s also an individual test for each person’s willingness to use their obtained knowledge to still be good unto others. We are all the children of God, from my own perspective we are learning to become like God, who is the Bible is shown as loving and kind.

With time we’ll get there! The more we slowly contribute to the niche topics, the more we’ll see these communities grow. I’m sure there are a sizable amount of people from Reddit looking for their niches on here to start growing more for them to fully hop over. I’ve got a good chunk of mine on Lemmy now, but still a handful of ones I haven’t found a comparable server for yet. If I understood running a server more I probably would have started a couple of my own for these topics.

Is there anywhere on Lemmy people can request for servers to get started? I think that would be helpful to have since missing topics are some of the barriers of entry for some people.

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I would add that not every author is writing unbiased in the Bible. We know now for instance that some books near the end of the Bible attributed to Paul may not have been written by him, but by some of the people under Paul in the early church. So adding parts about women not holding positions of authority within the Church more or less served to cement their own positions and authority for the early-Christians that were formalizing the religion.

I think it’s a misread to say it gave us evil. The garden is portrayed as being a paradise with a tree of knowledge. The man and the women, as they self-identified themselves to be, were both allowed agency to be themselves and be blessed without the burden of knowledge, so long as they did not eat the forbidden fruit. Both the man and the woman independently made the conscious decision to break the rule given to them to not eat the fruit of knowledge. The actual sin was both the man and woman breaking their covenant with God, through the eating of the fruit. My take on this is that story is meant to show that God can help you and will help you, but if you choose to go against his will you have the face the consequences of that decision on your own. However, you can still seek forgiveness for your decisions and even be forgiven, but this doesn’t magically put everything back to the way things were before.

The story is more or less a cultural device to explain good and evil from the perspective of the early Israelite society. The story itself is rippled throughout the Bible in this way: God gives instructions, the people follow the instructions at first but then grow complacent, bad things happen because people stop following God’s instructions, and then one of the leaders of the tribe of Israel steps in to help get people back on the right path of following God’s instructions.

I’ll add that functionally Genesis is three serparate creation stories that were pulled into one book. Culturally, the early Israelites borrowed some of the elements of other creation stories of their time seen in other cultures such as the Babylonians. The first creation story is the seven days, the second is what we know as the story Adam and Eve, and the third was the story of the great flood.

I don’t think many Christians would actually argue for that first point tbh. It’s not something Biblically portrayed as one of God’s gifts. Free will is portrayed as something that was given conditionally, but taking from the tree of knowledge and specifically eating the fruit of knowledge is known as man’s first sin in the Bible.

I think it’s a bit of a metaphor for a parent wanting to shield their child from the harshness of reality, but as the sheltered child grows older they often want to know more about the outside world and in doing so become exposed to the cruelty. This was my own experience with religion growing up. A teacher of mine one day sat us down and pleaded the above with our class, as many of us grew to see through the veil of how reality looked.

In retrospect I think some things about the world make sense to not be told about, depending on one’s age. However, I think other things should never be hidden, have been hidden, or done in other cases.

Side note: I think the idea of God’s plan is for people to hold love for one another. Lots of people lose sight of what they are called to do and how they are to act though. They’re called to love their neighbor as their self, called to love their enemy, and called to forgive others for their transgressions. I personally think people are called to do good works in conjunction with holding faith, as people are called to act righteously in this life.

Did they change the way things are formatted? Such as the [removed] comments now just appearing as [deleted]? Deleted would imply the users removed their own content while removed would imply the mods or admins removed it, at least that’s how things have always been. However, I have only been seeing a sea of [deleted] lately.

I feel like the admins over there really take for granted how much people care about Reddit. The more they degrade the sense of community, the more it continues to crumble until users feel that there’s no point in going back.

With how many posts are just pure AI generated rage bait, it’s becoming more clear by the day how little worth there is left on Reddit.

You’re welcome! Ya that’s more for all stuff, not just memes. I see what you’re saying though, cause what if a new meme page comes out for X topic. You likely won’t have the new meme page recommended to you.

Maybe there is a server recommendation tool built in somewhere? But I don’t know if there’s one that would catch new servers to recommended like for a new show’s meme page. To feel that would mean they have some kind of algorithmic recommendations feature, but I don’t think I’ve seen something like that.

Ahh you mean like a trending function? I know BlueSky has a trending function to see those new hashtags and big topics. I like using both Lemmy and BlueSky but for slightly different purposes.

Usually I’d just scroll through my already subscribed servers first here on Lemmy, and then I’d look at All sorted by Active for what big right now for all topics, after that I sort by Hot to get a glance of content that’s rising. I don’t usually search that much unless it’s a new topic I want to read more about like recipes, most recently.

There might be a trending function here, but I haven’t been around long enough to know for sure. Hopefully this helps a bit! I’m sure someone more knowledgeable can help give a more in-depth answer.

I’m still relatively new here so I’m not sure either. But maybe there’s a catalogue or list servers by topic out there? The search function on the Voyager app has made it pretty quick for me to find some of my favorites.

I bet Frank was trying to amuse her with that one. :P

Lmao this made me think of the cat above saying, “Long live the king” before knocking the other one into the sink.

RCV is Alaska is still relatively new for voters. Republicans only fought against it in Alaska when a Democrat managed to win an election when RCV was present, which they may have still won with FPTP as well.

The Democratic Party is not strongly for or against alternative voting systems. More or less on a state by state basis it could be in their favor to have, and the same applies with Republicans as well.

Some forms of Alternative voting have been banned in red states. They certainly are trying to prevent it and marketed against it hard in 2024. 2026 will likely have less Republican turnout due to it not being a presidential election year.

Many states were trying to push RCV and failed to get it passed in 2024. I feel it mostly had to do with not enough people understanding how it or other alternative voting systems worked. We have two to four years to work on educating people about how alternative voting systems will work and trying again and again to get an alternative passed. It’s okay if each state chooses something else, as almost anything is a step up from First Past the Post.

I will say that Alaska opting to barely keep RCV is still a solid sign for Alternative Voting systems as whole, as everywhere else it was on the ballot but not in place it got voted down in 2024.

I think along with a state centered Alternative Voting strategy, a lesson we can take from 2024 is trying to go for grassroots change at the local, city, school board, and union board elections level to promote alternative voting systems. If it’s something people are familiar with, it’s much more likely to succeed at the state and national levels. What’s neat is that even low stakes things such as a vote for what you and your friends want for dinner or what movie to watch can use these different voting systems to introduce people to the idea.

It will take time and hard work for change to happen, but every bit we do now will matter if we want to try to shape things for the better.

It functionally can’t without changing the system, imo. The system itself must change or the Democratic Party needs to be changed from within by electing more people like AOC. That later type of change can take decades though, and the more business oriented side of the party doesn’t make it easy for progressive to move up the ranks. Also, the old guard of Democratic voters is not as progressive as the younger base. The Baby Boomers and Gen X for instance don’t exactly want all of the same things as Millennials and Gen Z. The fact that Millennials and Gen Z do not make up the largest percentage of the base voting in elections influences some of the decision making as well.

It could happen in at least some states. It takes ballot initiatives that require signatures. If you have other ideas I’m all ears, but I think at least starting the process to change our current system and can be applied fifty states is at least worth a shot. It requires grassroots organizing and would benefit a lot from smaller political parties getting on board as well.

If it has the BlueSky moderation tools I think that could go a long ways to keeping it a pleasant place. Quality moderators can help steer the culture of the boards as well.

I agree, I actually have been wanting a 4chan type replacement for a while and I believe there are enough tools out there with a federated space for it to be possible. 4chan’s method of communication in the best of times is fun and spurs some interesting conversations, when it’s done right. I think we all know what 4chan does wrong, mostly its lack of any noticeable moderation or automods.

If it had the same type of moderation tools that say BlueSky had though, where things like misinformation, slurs, etc. are removed/hidden as the default setting for users. Then this would go a long ways to building a kinder community/discussion space.