100%. The only thing comparing them does is make each look less bad in contrast with the other.

It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure it was weirdly complicated, like

1. Jesus comes down
2. All the dead believers are brought back to life
3. All believers are taken to heaven
4. Non believers are left on earth doing their own thing
5. 1000 years later, Jesus comes back to earth, raises everyone else back from the dead, then burns everyone/everything
6. Jesus moves heaven back to earth, which is now perfect

… Or something like that? Hard to tell which parts I got taught and which parts I hallucinated in a fever at some point

Edit: I looked it up and I am shocked at how well I remember it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh-day_Adventist_eschatology#Eschatological_events

I grew up around young earth creationists, and was taught at school that carbon dating is inaccurate to the point of uselessness past a couple thousand years. But interestingly they did not believe in hell at all. (They just believe all non believers will be burned to death once, with finality. Not forever)

Yeah, I could imagine there being some kind distinction in a language, such that it is always clear when one is making a metaphor as opposed to being literal. I also don’t know if that actually applies to Hebrew.

But what baffled me was more that even if this were true, holding a belief that goes against pretty much all evidence, based purely on a grammatical quirk of an ancient culture. It’s quite a stretch 😅

So I grew up around creationists. When I presented this idea, the only attempt at a justification I heard was something like “in the original Hebrew the word for a literal day was used, that’s how we know creation happened in literal 6 days”

Which baffled me enough to shut me up, so that guy probably thinks he convinced me.

Many people are not freedom absolutists. They are ok with giving up some small freedoms if it means a better society. Smoking, besides being dangerously addictive, also negatively affects lots of people around you, and it negatively affects the health of children who grow up with smoker parents.

I think ideally it would not be banned outright, just severely limited (no smoking in public except very specific, closed off spaces. No smoking in an environment that children inhabit, etc) but people will just do it anyway, especially because of how addictive it is. So I can definitely understand the motive to just ban it for future generations who are not addicted yet.

Yeah, it’s more like “mildly interesting, a study suggests French could potentially become the most widely used language by 2050”

The Federation would never publish fake data, so it must be true!