@X7191587873@forbiddenmerch Right, I think it'd be reasonable that 40% of jews in the south owned slaves which would be about 10,000 jews which would make them 2.5% of the 393,975 total slave owners in 1860. They're still over-represented but that highlights how out of proportion the claims being made are
@X7191587873@forbiddenmerch I'm sure they were over-represented in slave ownership, but I'm skeptical if 40% of jews owning slaves is close to accurate. In 1860 there were only about 25k jews in the south vs 125-175k in the north (places like Jew York).
I am going to share an experience that is real. It's how I ended up seriously exploring the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in my 20s.
I have told five people. A Mormon bishop's family in Colorado, a Roman Catholic priest, my wife, and a good friend. I don't tell others. When I told the bishop's family, they laughed because it is unbelievable to some. I understand that. I am telling it anyway.
I was in law school, and I was under immense stress. I had started the semester after spending the summer in the holy land.
I was split down the middle on what to believe. Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, a half dozen other faiths, reading everyone, believing no one.
So I asked God to do the one thing I could not do for myself. I asked him to reveal himself. Not an argument. Not a sign I could explain away by morning. Himself.
I was lying on the couch. I went under, and then I came back up fast, the way you do when something is wrong, because something was standing over my face.
I could feel it. A real presence, right above me, close, deliberate. I opened my eyes and there was no one. The room was empty.
And I was awake.
This is the part people want to take from me, and I will not give it up. I was awake.
Then it came. An embrace. My body physically moved. Not the feeling of being loved — the love itself, with arms. Love beyond love.
I keep saying it because there is no better way, and there is no way at all. Every word I reach for falls short and keeps falling. Abundance beyond abundance. More than I had room to hold, and more coming, and more behind that. Ineffability and inexplicable.
It was so much that it frightened me, not because it was dark, but because it was too much light for one body.
I said stop. I actually said it. Stop.
And it stopped.
I have lived a whole life since that couch. It never came again.
The answer to my prayer did not come as a name. It came as love. I asked a question of theological doctrine and I was answered in a different language entirely — the way a father answers a frightened child, not with a syllogism but by picking the child up.
Whatever was in that room had no interest in winning my theological argument for me. It had an interest in me.
Notice second that I could not produce it, sustain it, or survive it at full strength.
I said stop and it did, and that tells you two things at once. It was greater than me, because it overwhelmed me. And it was gentle with me, because it relented the instant I asked.
That combination, overwhelming power that yields to a single weak word from the person it is overwhelming, is the whole grammar of grace.
Power that listens. Vastness that is also tender. I was not crushed. I was held, and then released because I asked to be, and the releasing was as much love as the holding.
Notice third that it never returned, and I no longer think that is abandonment. I think it is the point. I was not given a practice or a feeling I could go back to and refill. I was given one thing, once, in the difficult stretch of my life, and then I was sent back to live.
People want the experience to repeat so they can be sure of it. But a thing that happened once and changed the floor I stand on does not need to repeat. The fire on the mountain burns once. The man carries it down for the rest of his days.
You cannot be argued out of love beyond love once it has been poured into your own body. There is no counterargument to a thing you were inside of.
The doctrines kept shifting under me for years, because doctrines are downstream. But what came in through the experience itself, not through my reading, held — and it held precisely because I did not reason my way to it. It was given.
Two things were given. The first was a closing of doors. I went onto that couch torn between Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, and the rest, and I did not get up neutral.
I came up knowing that Islam is not true. That a number of the other faiths I had been weighing are not true either. Emphatically not.
I cannot hand you the proof, because it never came to me as proof — it came the way the love came, given and total, not the conclusion of an argument but the removal of a question.
The second was what stayed standing once the doors had closed.
God is love. That is the whole of it.
1 John 4:16 became my compass: God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.
Everything I have read since, every tradition I have walked into and out of, I have measured against that one line — because that one line did not come from a book.
It came in through my own skin, on a couch, in the worst year of my life, and it has never moved.
And this love survives in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. This I believe.
I don't know the rest, but that's good enough for me at this point in my life.
@SirJBritain I dont mean to offend anyone, but has anyone ever met a man with an IQ over 130 that has their ears pierced?
It seems like an odd thing for a man to do.
@triggeringyou@GeezyPeasy@TheBrancaShow Haha, it's really on me at this point. I know how this goes and I should know better. It's just one time I wish there was a break through where they finally comprehend it. The struggle is real.
@GeezyPeasy@triggeringyou@TheBrancaShow Whites have the highest absolute total across all IQ brackets, we're the biggest population share.
Whites have the highest share total of low literacy at 35%.. but we're 55% of population.
Blacks are at 23% of low literacy at 13% so:
Blacks on avg are 2.8x more illiterate.
@GeezyPeasy@triggeringyou@TheBrancaShow Yes.
Low IQ being a high predictor of crime likely indicates that crimes being committed there are more likely & more often being done by the population on the lower end of IQ distribution.
@GeezyPeasy@triggeringyou@TheBrancaShow Japanese are 97% of the population in Japan & commit 90-95% crime there. The 3% foreigners are committing 5-10% of crime. That's a significant output of crime by foreigners. Should they let in more based on totals?
"But the totality" is low IQ comprehension of the situation.
@jjmcc323@GeezyPeasy@triggeringyou@TheBrancaShow I've done the Pearson's correlation coefficient w/ every variable you can think of for all 50 states and low IQ is the biggest predictor of crime/homicide, higher than poverty. If you look at the groups who output the most crime, and then look at an IQ distribution it makes sense
@GeezyPeasy@triggeringyou@TheBrancaShow No. Whites* have 5 times the population size as blacks, so if we all committed crime at the same rate then whites* should have 5 times the crimes committed. Instead, we only have 2.5x as much, because blacks commit crime nearly twice the rate as whites*
*Including hispanics
@GeezyPeasy@triggeringyou@TheBrancaShow Whats sort of funny too is if we didn't use any corrections to your method and just let it fly, the rates are:
Black
15 to 20/8= 1.875 to 2.5
White
60 to 70/30= 2 to 2.3
That's still not a strong case for blacks & those are adjusted fake numbers in black favor