I see some anti-religion sentiment here. Religion can be and has been many things. To say all religion is evil, to me, misses a central point: mankind needs a Transcendent ideal, something beyond ourselves to give us meaning and purpose. Excise that, we have a vacuum in our souls which will be filled, one way or another. The atheistic, materialist surrogates are, however, arguably far worse. Nietzsche was a good diagnostician, but the idea that we would reach Humanity 2.0 by filling that void with our own self-constructed values was dead wrong. In a way, we can't run away from religion, and these "religions" (like Marxism) have a dreadful track record. I don't think it's too far a reach to say that religion is inevitable. The West secularized itself, in part because of a kind of collective PTSD. In doing so, it created a nihilistic, materialistic, listless populace. Anxiety and depression are through the roof. But even more telling is a simple fact: it seems more and more clear that materialist, secularized society loses the will to replicate itself. Birthrates are below replacement, sometimes way below (witness South Korea). So, someone can rail against religion, but cut out religion, a society will craft surrogates and also drift towards self-oblivion. It will commit suicide, implode. In other words, you can't have the elements that make a culture vibrant, which make a culture flourish, without religion (broadly understood). It's like a lobotomy. The idea might be to excise antisocial behavior, but you also render the person a dull vegetable, a husk.

Body-count asymmetry is morally indeterminate. Higher civilian deaths on one side do not, by themselves, establish: - unjust intent, - disproportionate force, - or moral equivalence / non-equivalence. They often reflect variables like population density, defensive strategy, evacuation capacity, media access, or who is fighting from among civilians. Outcome-based morality doesn’t map onto causation. Moral responsibility in war—if it’s to mean anything—has to track choices under constraint, not raw outcomes abstracted from context. “More dead civilians” does not equal “more immoral” unless you smuggle in assumptions you haven’t defended: - that both sides had comparable alternatives, - that harm-minimization costs were symmetrical, - or that intent and foreseeability are irrelevant. Most public discourse quietly assumes all three and then treats the conclusion as self-evident. Structural inevitability forces a shift in moral vocabulary. If civilian harm cannot be reduced below a certain floor without abandoning the war aim entirely, then: - either the war itself is judged illegitimate as such, - or civilian harm must be assessed relative to necessity, alternatives, and responsibility for the structure of the battlefield—not as an absolute metric. What makes Gaza so morally destabilizing for modern observers is that it exposes a contradiction we’d rather not face: we want wars of annihilation against enemies we define as existential, while also wanting zero civilian blood guilt. History suggests you don’t get both. Ancient societies were brutally honest about this; early modern ones could occasionally finesse it; modern humanitarian language tries to deny it altogether. That denial produces moral claims that feel profound but dissolve under scrutiny—because they rely on numbers standing in for judgment. So it's not that civilian deaths “don’t matter.” It’s that they don’t mean what people insist they mean, absent a serious accounting of structure, strategy, and constraint. And once you take those seriously, a lot of confident moral posturing turns out to be empty.

Here is the recording of our latest session. A national identity constructed entirely upon the negation of another people cannot be reformed. It can only be dissolved. This was the central, hypothesis driving our latest daily session. The room dissected the concept of the "Two-State Solution" not as a moral aspiration, but as a mechanical failure. The collective argued that the "Palestinian" identity is not a standard nationalistic movement. It is a specific political construct manufactured by the Muslim Brotherhood and sustained by UNRWA to serve as a perpetual battering ram against the Jewish State. The group posited that as long as this identity exists, the desire to retake "from the river to the sea" will remain the primary operating system of the culture. Friction emerged regarding the timeline of a solution. Samantha argued for a strategy of indefinite containment, suggesting that Israel must maintain military occupation for centuries if necessary, waiting for a theoretical "deradicalization" before granting autonomy. She represents the lingering hope that time creates new variables. Others argued that if an identity is rooted in the conquest of Tel Aviv and the erasure of 1948 borders, time does not heal. It festers. The discussion pivoted to historical precedents of population transfer, citing the shifting borders of Poland and the partition of India. The consensus suggests that the West has treated this conflict as a unique anomaly when it should be treated as a standard historical correction. We are left with a stark choice. We can continue the diplomatic fiction that two opposing vectors can occupy the same space, or we can acknowledge that peace requires the total defeat of the revanchist narrative. This is not an echo chamber. It is a testing ground where ideas like indefinite containment clash with arguments for total dissolution. Bring your perspective to the table and sharpen your understanding of the West’s most critical conflicts. View the calendar at this link to join our next discussion: https://www.skool.com/libertypolitics/calendar

Many people around the world grew up with a dualistic devil, whether Christian or Zoroastrian or somthing else. Two cosmic forces battling it out. Good vs evil as external war. I've been thinking about the consequences of that belief. Here's what I see: When you believe in two opposing forces, you externalize evil. 'The devil convinced me to do it.' Evil becomes something "out there" attacking you, not something you're responsible for navigating within yourself. And when hardship comes, there's no meaning to find. It's just bad. The enemy won this round. No lesson, no growth. Just senseless suffering. You're not being shaped, you're being attacked. Add cheap grace on top. Sin, confess, repeat tomorrow. Where's the pressure to actually become better? But in true monotheism, even adversarial forces operate under God's sovereignty. God sets the limits. The suffering wasn't enemy victory, it was a loving father refining his son. Painful, yes. But it propels you forward. It means something. Now, I know modern Christian theology teaches that Satan is a created being, subordinate to God. But your own scriptures use different language: 2 Corinthians 4:4 calls Satan "the god of this world." 1 John 5:19 says "the whole world lies in the power of the evil one." Luke 4:6 has Satan claiming "all this authority has been delivered to me" and Jesus doesn't dispute it. John 12:31 calls him "the ruler of this world." That's not prosecutor-under-God language. That's rival-power language. Christians, Zoroastrians, I'm genuinely curious: how do you find meaning in suffering within this framework? How do you reconcile these verses with monotheism? What am I missing?