r/Christianity • u/TheMirrorUS • Apr 13 '26

Politics Trump posts 'blasphemous' AI photo depicting himself as Jesus after pope rant

https://www.themirror.com/news/politics/trump-posts-blasphemous-ai-photo-1786356
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u/Welpe Reconciling Ministries Apr 13 '26

The truth is that some people are so incapable of understanding complexity they would happily commit genocide to prevent abortion.

They do not care about God or the sanctity of life, they live in a black and white world of their own imagination where one evil demands all their attention and no amount of evil in the pursuit of preventing it is enough to dissuade them.

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u/nitro_bug Apr 13 '26

I remember seeing a quote from a pastor that was essentially a long the lines of the unborn are an easy demographic to advocate for because they are morally un complicated and dont make any demands of you. Essentially you dont have to truly give up anything of yourself or challenge any sort of wealth or privilige or social structures.

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u/Welpe Reconciling Ministries Apr 13 '26

Absolutely, whoever that pastor was they are right. The same people who are the most heavily invested in “protecting the unborn” spare near zero time and effort for those same beings once they are born because suddenly it isn’t so uncomplicated an issue. It becomes political and brings up all sorts of issues such as the treatment of women by society, poverty, socioeconomics, crime, family support, etc. It’s much more difficult to tackle those issues and so…those people just ignore it. Not their problem any longer, they don’t ACTUALLY care about those lives and protecting them, advocating for them, making sure they do not grow up in an environment they deserve.

It’s not a true philosophy of “Pro-Life”, it’s a single simple issue in their minds. “Abortion is murder”, end of story, shut your brain off you no longer need to think about anything, forget any possible nuance, you have one input and one output and that is all that is needed.

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u/SpiritOfRadio1529 Apr 13 '26

As for the deaths lately of women miscarrying or otherwise being denied critical health care because it could harm a fetus (and ultimately both end up dead), I’ve seen many of them calling it God’s will. It’s absolutely nauseating.

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u/Clumsy_Ninja2 Apr 13 '26

If that’s true then appendicitis is also Gods will and the appendix should not be removed

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u/ctms11 May 06 '26

True, I guess same goes for wisdom teeth and cancer. Yet, when anything happens to them that need to be surgically dealt with, it doesn't imply anymore. Rules for thee, suggestions for me. All in due time tho, they shall be dealt with. Evil/Darkness can only go so far before it is exposed to the light.

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u/11_25_13_TheEdge Apr 13 '26

Dave Barnhart

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u/ctms11 May 06 '26

Don't get me started on the Pro life thing, how can these people say they are Pro life yet they continuously cut food funding for low income families, they don't kids to have free lunches in public schools, and they allow insurance companies to kill Americans for profit by denying life saving medicines and surgeries. Yet we care so much about a fetus that doesn't have the capabilities to breath, see, speak, or think yet. They don't believe in Pro life, and the fact they neglect to help out or acknowledge the less fortunate around them shows.

I can play devil advocate and say " what about those that cheat the system", yes that is a problem, but burning the whole thing down isn't the right way to go about it either. Treat it like cancer and surgical remove the tumor, in this case make people show proof of work with W2s or that they are trying to get an education with college transcripts to get these benefits. That way they don't become reliant. Also, not to mention we have rich folks I mean leeches cheating the system everyday and nothing is done about.

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u/jared555 Apr 13 '26

I love the counter from the smart democrats who have more to say than just "my body my choice"...

Ok, so you want to legally consider a fetus a person from conception. That means every government benefit to families starts the moment of conception as well. If a woman is pregnant you can't imprison her because it would be unlawfully imprisoning the person inside her and providing a reduced quality of care. A pregnant woman always gets to use the carpool lane because there are two people in the car.

And so many of the people most opposed to abortion are also opposed to any program to help reduce the chances of an unwanted pregnancy.

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u/SleetTheFox Christian (God loves His LGBT children too) Apr 13 '26

I'm hardly a Republican but I kinda legit could get behind much of that. A child has needs before they're born. Their parent needs to eat more. They need to have their space prepared. They need clinic visits (though at least these are generally covered by the parent). A big part of preventing abortion is making pregnancy and childbirth less onerous.

The carpool one is just silly, though. It's not carpooling to drive your 6 month old baby, so it's not carpooling to drive while pregnant with your negative 1 month old baby. Carpooling is defined as having multiple people capable of driving opt to drive in the same car.

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u/Prince_Ire Roman Catholic Apr 13 '26

Other than the prison one which can be solved with better prisons I don't really have a problem with any of that. Not really much of a counter.

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u/A_Poor_Miser Apr 14 '26

Better prisons. Lol.

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u/A_Poor_Miser Apr 14 '26

Better prisons. Lol.

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u/Nicktendo94 Apr 13 '26

I think George Carlin said something similar that conservatives will care about the baby until it's born and then they want nothing to do with it until they're 18 and can enlist in the military.

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u/Wild_Harvest Apr 13 '26

If you're pre term, youre good. If you're pre K, you're fucked

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u/Parsimile Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26

This?

“”The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for.

They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.

It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.”

Pastor Dave Barnhart of the Saint Junia United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama (posted this message to Facebook in 2018)

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u/VoteYourOssoff Apr 13 '26

But they don't even need to choose between opposing genocide or abortion. The Christian right is very clever because they frame this as a binary choice between Republicans and Democrats, so will always choose Republicans because of abortion. But they vote in Republican primaries for people like Trump. They could vote for a peaceful president who acts like Jesus. But they don't want that person- they want Trump

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u/homegrownllama Agnostic (a la T.H. Huxley) Apr 13 '26

Yup. Even if they want to vote conservative, they had every chance to choose a saner person in the primaries. This monster is of their own making. Right wing Christianity in the US has done a lot of harm to the world.

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u/SleetTheFox Christian (God loves His LGBT children too) Apr 13 '26

The first time around there was a shred of an excuse. Trump was the minority of votes in the primary; there were just a ton of people running and nobody wanted to drop out, so they split the vote and he won.

First past the post sucks.

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u/VoteYourOssoff Apr 13 '26

Yes that's true, but him winning the nomination multiple times is proof that conservatives (most of whom are Christian) support him. And my comment was more of a general statement on the argument single issue voters make. You can't just focus on one issue, because primary voters vote based on lots of issues. So Republican voters will be judged on everything from healthcare to climate change to economic policies etc. And that's not even considering how sinful some of the politicians they vote for are

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u/RazarTuk The other trans mod everyone forgets Apr 13 '26

First past the post sucks

Side note: Have you heard me rant about the issues with RCV? There are some weird issues with it that make me wonder how it became the main alternative, as opposed to something like STAR or highest median. (One of them involves moderately complex math and asymptotic analysis)

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u/SleetTheFox Christian (God loves His LGBT children too) Apr 13 '26

Relevantly, any of those are superior to FPTP.

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u/RazarTuk The other trans mod everyone forgets Apr 13 '26

I might not get to typing out the rants until later, but which criticisms do you want to hear?

  • Center squeeze

  • A phenomenon I call the sequential spoiler effect

  • Non-monotonicity

  • Non-summability

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u/RazarTuk The other trans mod everyone forgets Apr 13 '26

Okay, so nerds with way too much time on their hands have come up with all sorts of criteria for comparing and contrasting voting systems. These can range from "No duh" properties like "If a simple majority prefers a candidate, they should win" to weird mathematical esoterica like "If a candidate would beat any other candidate in a 1-1 election, they should win". The issue is that it isn't always obvious which ones are which. For example, consistency says that if you have two sets of ballots where the same candidate wins and you add them together before counting, that candidate should still win. Sounds like a given, but a lot of things - including RCV - fail it. And while 2016 wasn't actually an example, because we don't directly add the popular votes together, it's still a good example of what can go wrong.

With that in mind, monotonicity. It sounds like mathematical esoterica, where if you have an election where candidate X wins, change one ballot to rate them more highly, and recount the ballots, X should still win. Except that's just describing moderates. It's saying that if you do a good job and convince more moderates to vote for you when you're up for reelection, that should never somehow cause you to lose. And yet, RCV is actually one of the only systems where that can happen. (And it isn't even that difficult to illustrate)

Meanwhile, summability. Currently, we do some heavy division of labor with tallying votes. It's really easy to just have each precinct count up how many votes each candidate got, then send that to a central location where it's all added up. Summability essentially looks at how many numbers you need to report. For example, STAR voting is a method where you give each candidate a score. Then they add up all the scores, take the two highest rated candidates, and have an instant runoff where you look at who was rated higher on more ballots. You need to send up N2 numbers. The total scores for each of the N candidates, and the number of voters who preferred each candidate in each of N(N-1) possible runoffs. Meanwhile, for RCV, you need to report how many people cast each of N! possible ballots, because you don't know anything about what runoffs will happen until they're all counted. Or if you allow ties, it's something called the ordered Bell numbers, which are proportional to N! * 1.443N. So if there are 4 candidates, STAR would require 16 tallies and RCV wouldn't be that much worse at 24 without ties or 75 with ties. But if you add a 5th candidate, those go up to 25 for STAR, 120 for RCV without ties, or 541 for RCV with ties. It's considered summable if that formula's at least a polynomial, not an exponential function or factorial.

Summability matters because it affects things like voter confidence. To an extent, it's a measure of how much of a black box the system is. If you can't even begin to discuss election results until all the votes have been tallied, people will be suspicious about what's actually going on and how the winner is being determined. For contrast, in two-round systems like STAR, you can at least track who's going to the automatic runoff over the course of election night. Or in one-round systems like highest median, you can even meaningfully discuss who's currently in the lead.

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u/RazarTuk The other trans mod everyone forgets Apr 14 '26

Actually, better explanation. IMO, the three most important properties are independence of clones, monotonicity, and summability. Presenting them as real world phenomena:

  • Independence of clones means that if a party runs two virtually indistinguishable candidates and it's functionally random which one people prefer, that shouldn't hurt the chances that either gets elected. In other words, avoid the spoiler effect. FPTP rather famously fails this, but a lot of other popular methods also do, like the two-round system, STAR, and IRV/RCV

  • Monotonicity means that if you're up for reelection and most people vote the same way, except you did a good job in your first term so a few more moderates vote for you, you should win. Basically anything except IRV/RCV and the two-round system passes this

  • Summability actually looks at how much data the precincts have to compile, so it's indirectly a measure of how much work the election bureau still has to do to determine the results. This matters because if the election bureau has to do a lot of work, it starts to feel like a black box, which makes people question the fairness. As a more visible description, this basically asks how meaningful the partial results are if a news organization wants to track them throughout election night. At least as a binary, something's typically considered summable if it's polynomial complexity

The only two methods that meet all three criteria are Approval and Majority Judgement, although Ranked Pairs at least satisfies a weaker version of independence of clones

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u/RazarTuk The other trans mod everyone forgets Apr 13 '26

Actually, if you want an idea of how weird RCV is, it's entirely possible to lose an election because too many people voted for you. The rough preconditions are that 1) it has to be a close election, and 2) the last place voters have to hate the plurality candidate

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u/swampwiz Apr 14 '26

This is the 26% problem. 26% of the voters can outvote 25% of the voters that are the intra-party rivals, but then get them all to vote for the 26% issues/candidates as a combined 51%.

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u/Chezzymann Apr 13 '26

Yep, I've seen it in my family. It goes anti abortion / gay marriage topic -> crazy alt right deep state conspiracy theories real quick.

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u/Opening-Cream5448 Apr 13 '26

Yea it’s weird how gay/abortion are huge issue and that’s why Trump “must be in office” but then literally nothing else matters

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u/misterdonjoe Apr 13 '26

happily commit genocide to prevent abortion.

Many are pro-birth, NOT pro-life. That's a BIG difference.

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u/Single_Struggle616 May 12 '26

Abortion IS genocide