Dhyaanee

Yeah, but that's okay too...that's their freedom of expression but my freedom is to ignore it. I only said I had those on ignore so they would know why I'm not responding. If I wanted that much Taylor Swift stuff, I'd join her fanclub on FB. I don't mean to not respond to people, it just feels like spam. The people have every right to expression themselves however they need to so within TOS, so if it's more, that's okay too. But, I still need to ignore it for a bit. I don't mean to be ignoring a person...it's the Taylor Swift stuff I am ignoring. If it was any one other particular individual over and over, I think I'd feel the same way about the overkill no matter what it was. And, that's 'nuff said. Fair enough? Ahh ok...yeah I totally agree that all should be free to express when they feel something is overkill. You do have to be prepared for the pushback though, and sometimes dealing with that reaction is simply not worth it. So myself, I pick my battles wisely and even when I feel something is overkill quite often I don't express that.

Unless we know someone well though we can't know if they are sincerely trying to become more loving through their practice, or if they are only wanting to feel superior to those outside their beliefs and could only connect with them if another would 'convert' and be just like them. So we do need to be careful.

I don't think it's the spirituality per se they react against; more the organization itself. Like the Catholic Church is very hierarchical (among other things...). And threating fire and brimstone (in most all Churches) have been tools to force ppl into compliance. If I were God (ahem), I would rather have someone truly choose me “Lord, if I love You out of fear of hell, cast me into hell!if I love you out of hope of Heaven, close its gates to me! ... to me; but if I love you for the sake of loving you, do not deny yourself to me! The road to knowing what love is...it's a very long one. Yes I agree with what you're saying here, about what they're truly rebelling against. What saddens me is if they don't look deeper due to the original misinterpretations. They could stay in the defensive position forever unfortunately.

An elderly lady was well-known for her faith and for her boldness in talking about it. She would stand on her front porch and shout “PRAISE THE LORD!” Next door to her lived an atheist who would get so angry at her proclamations he would shout, “There ain’t no Lord!!” Hard times set in on the elderly lady, and she prayed for GOD to send her some assistance. She stood on her porch and shouted “PRAISE THE LORD. GOD I NEED FOOD!! I AM HAVING A HARD TIME. PLEASE LORD, SEND ME SOME GROCERIES!!” The next morning the lady went out on her porch and noted a large bag of groceries and shouted, “PRAISE THE LORD.” The neighbor jumped from behind a bush and said, “Aha! I told you there was no Lord. I bought those groceries, God didn’t.” The lady started jumping up and down and clapping her hands and said, “PRAISE THE LORD. He not only sent me groceries, but He made the devil pay for them. Praise the Lord!”

Here in Croatia it means "little frisky butt".

too true * It saddens me though, that they are reacting against a misinterpretation of spirituality being expressed in stages 1 & 2.

No, I don't want a fight. I just needed a break from it not the poster themselves if that's the way they need to express themselves. It felt a bit like spam to me over and over and over. I wouldn't want overkill about anything in my feeds because overkill is overkill and that's all. I don't know how others might feel if some of us were overkilling something else but I think they might feel the same way about "overkill" too. My experience is that when you tell people they are doing something 'too much', they just do it more

it's a new sekrit society

My best friend is an atheist. She seems to be at that 3rd stage you describe here. She is compelled to tell everyone she's an atheist. Sometimes I just roll my eyes, and try to remember how she's been hurt by some religious nutjobs. She knows I'm a big fan of spirituality (not the organized religious type) and no doubt she thinks I'm nuttier than a fruitcake some days! We're good friends.

who is Seicher Rae?

I can understand that. But if it's causing no harm in the forum might be best not to bring up a whole lot of things you differ on. The group might think you are wanting a fight and so turn against you. Pick your battles wisely, I say

If so, I haven't seen it in this thread yet, though. Just ppl telling light-hearted jokes. Fair enough, that you are referring only to this thread and what you've seen. From my perspective I've seen a bit of making fun on this thread, but a very tiny amount.

I don't advocate making fun of anyone for their beliefs, even if I find them absurd or don't understand them. It's rude really. But I do get why some do make fun of religion as so many people have been oppressed throughout the ages and even today, by religious people who believe only they have the truth. So making fun, in some cases, is a bit of a hit back for what amounts to abuse.

Sometimes they are don't you think?

What's the difference between the truth and what people determine is the truth?

That sparked an interesting insight for me. I think we could compare Taylor Swift to a religion in it's own mini way here on the forum. Nothing wrong with people wanting to find commonality, to bond over what they've determined the truth to be, to find comfort in making a truth out of the chaos of life (that truth for them being that Taylor Swift is AWESOME). I certainly wouldn't find any value in taking that away from them. But what if (not that anyone here has done so) they insisted everybody else believe this, or treated badly those who did not get with the Taylor Swift program, even excluding them in the positive reinforcement group membership can bring? Here we see both the value of 'religion' and the problems that can develop from it.

Is this bad?

It doesn't seem to affect the wealthy as much though, especially these days. Funny, that.

Either "we the people" would have been supporting the economy, via increased taxes, or our national debt would have climbed even higher, meaning our children for many generations would have been paying. Nothing the government does is free and eventually it all impacts the people financially. Our US national debt is now over 25 TRILLION. The large relief package that Congress passed was 3 Trillion of that --- TRILLION, i.e. a number with TWELVE zeros (1,000,000,000,000). How many more Trillion would it have taken to pay for everything for multiple months? Yet some other countries are managing to do this - paying businesses to keep afloat until it's safe for business to resume. Otherwise the business must close in many cases, the business owner and all their employees never to return. What will the economic fallout of that be? I can tell you now it's not pretty, and will cost more over the long term than simply paying them to keep afloat for awhile. So now, in the US, we have a huge unemployment problem, and I probably don't have to tell you what the likes of a Great Depression would bring to our world. Sometimes giving to those in need actually improves society in the end, even economically.

Yes it would be dangerous to take out a loan when we don't know what the fallout will be after Covid. It the government had simply continued to pay the business as if they were open then after lockdown payments to employees from said business could have resumed with ease (that is if customers don't feel perpetually fearful of public spaces for years to come and cause everything to crash no matter what businesses do).

not quite it isn't that competition (of any kind) produces winners and losers. It does the question is: how can we harness competition to deliver for the widest number of people ? In the merchantilist view we don't. There can be only one. Sovereignties for example are the most merchantile of systems. There is only one. The sovereign. Everybody else can only win when the sovereign lets them Why is that? Do you think they're stuck in the past and so can only see one solution to maintain/increase profits (an underclass of slaves earning subsistence wages)? Or do you think they're basically attached to exploitation and maintaining the stratification of patriarchy where one class must dominate another in order for the world to feel right to them? As if the world would cease to have any meaning if there was not the rise to the top of something, and the "endless growth" belief that accompanies this philosophy?

Blaming is an art form here in the US Fortunately the New Deal prevails, but for how long? And will reality change after Covid-19?

If you think people in America are living in such terrible conditions why don't you and other socialist countries open up immigration for them to come and live there and your socialist country can take care of them since they're "starving" and "dying"? It's a fair question. I pointed out the many faults of capitalism in it's raw form. Most countries have elements of both capitalism and socialism, and those are balanced according to what residents of any country believe is important - we mitigate free markets. Free markets (capitalism in its raw form) do not a society make - they do create winners and losers INITIALLY through competition, but we do not need to have losers if our society mitigates the markets. When our society deems something important we subsidize it, and that is adding elements of socialism where the concerns of the common good or well-being of a society overall come into play. In other words, society assumes ownership of where the goods of society goes in these cases -- assuming ownership for the common good is socialism defined. Take an apartment building, for example. Through the building and management of the building the free market determines the cost of building it, and the price anyone must pay to live there. What do we do, though, when some in society cannot afford to live there, like the mentally or physically disabled, the elderly, or the mother with children? We, the government we elect, will override free market capitalism and subsidize those who cannot pay because it is within our value system to do so. Via socialism we subsidize both wealthy and non-wealthy individuals or companies, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly (like the bank bailouts in '08). We need to subsidize the poor more. A large percentage of the population are food insecure, and most could not come up with an extra $400 for an emergency expense if needed. The richest 10% own 74% of the wealth, and much of the middle class has been destroyed over the last few decades. Wages have not kept up with inflation. We're in sad shape as a nation. Capitalism has run amok and we need to reign it in with more socialism to demonstrate we care as much about people as we do profit.

That only applies to small businesses. Any time capitalism risks letting a small business become a "loser" -- such squealing you'd think some unnatural act was being perpetrated on the free market. One thing about hyping lockdown-triggered mental illness is that it's a powerfully self-fulfilling prophecy: the more it's promoted as "widespread" the more widespread it becomes, as the expectation of distress spreads among the vulnerable. There's plenty of reason to feel distress, too, but it's a choice to encourage psychological misery as the victimhood of patriots. Worse, though, is the fanciful "self inflicted" notion that the lockdown, not the virus, caused the economic disruption. If governments (and I definitely include Canada here) hadn't fiddle-fluffed around, stalling for weeks before finally enacting lockdowns, the whole disruption could have been over in a month or so.* Instead, we let the virus spread like wildfire in the cities, extending the duration of the lockdowns and making it many times more difficult to unwind the economic disaster we face now. And it is a disaster. How long before automobile production returns to pre-COVID levels? Detroit is predicting end of 2022 -- and that's if everything goes perfectly and a vaccine is widely available by end of this year. So yeah, hurry and get those barbershops and tattoo parlors and coffeeshops open again because that'll turn everything right around, you betcha. ______________ * and that's allowing for WHO and governments (other than Taiwan) to be deluded by the early suppression of information from China, despite having their own intelligence showing epidemic spread was already underway. Laughs. They worship the structure (businesses, corporations) which ultimately enables them to procure the biggest piece of the pie. The other losers outside their prized system designed for maximum profit through exploitation simply don't count. Right, they so bungled initial responses to the crisis yet want us to trust their plan now!!?? Uh, no!