A journalist and advocate who rose from homelessness and addiction to serve as a spokesperson for Philadelphia’s most vulnerable was shot and killed at his home early Monday, police said.
Josh Kruger, 39, was shot seven times at about 1:30 a.m. and collapsed in the street after seeking help, police said. He was pronounced dead at a hospital a short time later. Police believe the door to his Point Breeze home was unlocked or the shooter knew how to get in, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. No arrests have been made and no weapons have been recovered, they said.
Authorities haven’t spoken publicly about the circumstances surrounding the killing.
Probably a “good Christian”, since the fundamentalist are militantly (in a literal sense) against any sort of tolerance, acknowledgement, or compassion being expressed towards people who don’t completely conform to their heteronormative worldview.
I stole this from another poster, but it does indicate that it was probably his ex boyfriend, or drug related, and not a “good Christian” as you imply.
Here’s some excerpts from the local paper.
https://www.inquirer.com/crime/josh-kruger-killed-point-breeze-shooting-philadelphia-journalist-20231002.html
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Not all that strange, just go by a planned parenthood and check out the crazies accosting people outside of those.
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Excuse me, but your bigotry is hanging out. Would you mind zipping up?
Yes! That’s exactly what you should say to Christians when they start spouting off on their racist, homophobic, or otherwise prejudiced beliefs. You’re a great role model.
I have done and will continue to call out racial and homophobic bigotry as quickly as I do religious bigotry.
Unfortunately, as shameful as it is, one of those forms of prejudice is supported by most of the active population here.
What? You mean in America, the country ruled by Christians who impose Christianity on children in schools, where the majority religion is Christianity, where Christian organizations get preferential treatment by the government, where Christianity is the overwhelming majority religion of politicians, and where there is an active political movement to literally enforce state Christianity on the population, and where Christian moral doctrine is being widely used to restrict the bodily autonomy of women?? Ah yes so much Christian hate
Unironically shut the fuck up
You have thoroughly convinced me!
Where can I sign up for the daily hate speech against Christians? Oh, nevermind, I forgot I already have a Lemmy account.
It is unfortunate that rather than learning how to fight against their methods, you have instead decided to emulate them.
“Hate speech against Christians”
Please point out the hate speech in the comment you replied to. Telling you to shut the fuck up isn’t hate speech, and everything else is literally a straightforward fact about Christianity in America. Zero hate speech.
Gotta play the persecution game though, am I right?
Those first two lines were intentionally sarcastic exaggeration. Was I supposed to include a /s for the cheap seats? It seemed pretty obvious from here.
They pretty well lost me when they told me to “shut the fuck up”. I certainly wasn’t going to waste my time on a clearly worded response to someone who likely wouldn’t read it anyways.
Not sure who you think is getting persecuted, I doubt many Christians would hang out in a place like this. Even those that push for the bodily autonomy of women would feel unwelcome with so many people openly hostile to their faiths.
If they’re offended by people acknowledging the impact of Christians on LGBT people in the US, good. Leave. I don’t have time for straight Christians who want to hand wring and whinge about others acknowledging the historical and current negative impact Christianity has had on LGBT people.
Do you know how many fucking anti-LGBT bills have been put forward just this year in the US? This isn’t rhetorical, a real number is attached to it. Don’t google it, think of a number.
What number did you guess?
Because it’s almost 500.
How many anti-Christianity bills have there been in the past 50 years, again?
I’m curious what you consider hate speed or bigotry against christians.
If I dislike all christians that follow the bible/their gods commands and believe in their gods benevolence, would you say I’m a bigot?
tl;dr Maybe. It mostly depends on your wording and actions. Christians are not one group or thing anymore than Europeans or LGBT people are. They are a collection of highly varied peoples that can’t even agree on the number of books in the bible or whether Jesus was man, god, or both.
If someone says or implies “all Christians” are this or that negative thing it moves closer to yes rather than maybe. If someone is accuses a person of being something for no other reason than a group they belong to, then the accuser is probably a bigot.
This wall of text is an eyesore, so I added bold to your words and Italics to other quotes to help with readability. My words have neither.
If you personally dislike them, but you don’t let it affect the way you treat them, I really wouldn’t care one way or another.
As far as I am concerned, fear and hatred of the unknown and different are as human and natural as love and lust. It is what people do with those emotions that matter.
If someone’s lust encourages them to date and eventually spend their life with someone they are attracted to that is a good expression. If someone’s lust encourages them to violet the privacy of or assault someone then that is a bad expression.
Fear of the unknown and different is similar. If it encourages someone to learn more about different peoples, foods, or animals, then it is a good expression. If it encourages them to disparage or commit acts of violence against them then that is a bad expression.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/bigot
https://www.britannica.com/topic/hate-speech
I see bigotry and hate speech as more words and actions than opinions. What does an opinion matter if it is not expressed through word or deed? Is someone really intolerant if they tolerate someone in all areas except their own mind?
Mostly it comes down to treating any group, Christians in this case, as if they are the same and are each responsible for the acts of all the others.
Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodoxy don’t even agree on the number of books in the bible. If you haven’t run into the idea of the Apocrypha you may find it interesting.
Various numbers below (formatting edited for readability):
https://www.biblegateway.com/blog/2022/04/why-are-protestant-catholic-and-orthodox-bibles-different/
Lest you think that it is only the old testament that is debated here is info about the New testament in Martin Luther’s Bible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilegomena#Reformation
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“Religious bigotry” LOL
The only people who practice anything that could be called that are religious people themselves. Everyone else just wants to be left the fuck alone.
Fair enough. I should have called it anti-religious bigotry.
Calling out your hateful ideology for what it is, is not bigotry. You seem to not understand that word either. Nothing I said was bigoted.
What? I didn’t call anything you said bigotry. Just adjusted the term I used based on your previous statement.
I am not sure what this means unless you think I am religious. I am not.
Religion is a choice
Expression of Religion is a choice. Belief in religion is often more fundamental to who a person is.
nah
Religion is poison.
It is unfortunate that you think so, there is a lot of wisdom in the various world religions.
We may be beyond the need for religion, but I doubt even that.
Finding wisdom in religion is like trying to pick corn out of shit.
Nice quote, though I think it would be better applied to this whole post.
The few bits of wisdom here are so surrounded by shit that most people would need a hose and sieve to find them.
No there’s not.
You can be a wise, moral and ethical person without religion. It’s easy. Tons of people do that every single day.
As an atheist (i do not believe in an intelligent creator, or othewise deity), the more time i invest in being moral and wise the more friends i make with pastors. Most people cannot tell from the surface that i am not religious, the more i ask myself if i am religious or not the more meaningless that question starts appearing.
I don’t identify with any particular religion, but it would be challenging to prove i’m not religious despite the fact that i do not believe in any god.
I can appreciate that train of thought.
A lot of agnostic and atheistic people have spent a lot of time considering their own moral and ethical values; I know I have. While my own version started with an ethics class I took while at a bible school, I still needed to spend plenty of time once I left that life considering what morals and ethical values I thought were relevant.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that an unbiased observer thought I was religious until they got to know me better.
I fully agree.
Edit: That in no way discounts the idea that there is a lot of wisdom in religion. Even if some of it is outdated.
That is not really what I was referring to Edit: when I said I doubt we are beyond the need for religion. There is a (debated) theory that religion was important in moving from tribalism towards modern civilization. Specifically, the belief that a god or gods would punish your neighbor if he was doing evil behind your back may have been a necessary concept in our development. Even in modern times, the idea that our fellow citizens may be doing evil without recourse is a serious consideration. It may be adding to our current societal stresses.
Of course, that could be all horse shit, but I am leaned slightly towards that opinion at present.
What wisdom is in world religions that couldn’t be found elsewhere without all the murdery baggage?
There is a difference between attacking someone who chooses a disgusting belief system and bigotry. Any adult who remains a Christian knows exactly what the religion with the highest kill count stands for. They decide to ignore that because they get the warm fuzzies once a week for an hour.
Now go restore Roe v. Wade or you are useless to me.
Bigotry is thinking, what I believe is right and everyone who believes differently is wrong.
To point at all varieties of Christianity and say, “you are bad,” is being bigoted.
If you want someone useful here are some people that agree with you and will help you fight, assuming you can manage to not call their belief system disgusting to their faces:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/meet-the-religious-groups-fighting-to-save-abortion-access
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/01/22/american-religious-groups-vary-widely-in-their-views-of-abortion/
Episcopalians are less than 2% of the US population. Jewish people and LGBT people are a bigger voting bloc. Using one of the most liberal and one of the smallest Christian denominations as evidence for what Christianity in the US is like is intentionally misleading, when more than 10x as many Americans consider themselves Evangelicals (about 1/4th).
If I was trying to claim that is that standard view, then it would be misleading. Since I was actually claiming that there are a wide variety of beliefs among Christians, some even aligning with your values, it is pretty spot on representation. Treating them all the same is prejudicial behavior.
A fair-minded person would give an individual a chance to act like an asshole before treating them like trash.
A fair minded person would see that the predominant effect that all sects of Christianity has on the US these days is negative, and that’s largely due to the evangelical/Nationalist Christian wing. And sure; they might not be the numerical majority of “all Christians in the US”, but they are having a disproportionately large impact on the rest of Christianity in the country, as well as the country as a whole.
So sure: you can sit here and whinge all you want about how it’s unfair that people are becoming more and more hostile towards Christians because a subset of them are giving all the others a bad name (huh… where have we seen this dynamic before? Perhaps sometime in the early 2000s, in the context of a related but distinct Abrahamic monotheistic religion…?), but when an extremist sect does evil shit and the rest of the denomination does pretty much fuck-all to stop it, people are going to take an increasingly dim view of the religion as a whole. People don’t like it when you do shitty things to them. That’s just humans being humans.
Put another way: I’ll stop pre-judging Christians in America as hypocrites of the highest caliber once they can get their own fucking house in order, because right now it looks a distressingly large proportion of them are doing their level best to tear the fucking country apart in some nihilistic pursuit of hastening the end times so they can get raptured to heaven or some shit like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
You gotta take a stand somewhere. The intolerant religious zealots would be a good place to start.
To borrow a line from /u/theneverfox@pawb.social
https://lemmy.world/comment/3754441
The paradox is literally what’s happening with you in this thread, genius. the Christian church has been out of bounds for centuries, and now that people are finally responding appropriately, you kick and scream saying “not like that! you can only respond appropriately if you follow all the rules laid out by the people who oppress you! you need to tolerate our intolerance because our imaginary friend says we need to hate you to stop the end of the world”
There were “good” people who identify as Nazis. should we let that ideology thrive because a minority of its population put flowers on the graves their compatriots created?
I get that you just want to hold hands and sing kumbaya, but I have trouble holding the hands that are covered with the blood of my brothers, sisters, and allies.
The vast majority of Christians have spent your entire life moving more towards the middle. Yet, all you see is the ground that hasn’t been covered yet. When you push them (not me) back and pretend that they should be judged by the actions of their ancestors instead of their own actions, you make it that much more challenging to have them stay in-bounds, or move back in if they have gone astray.
When you compare the Christian Religion that two-thirds of the US shares, to the secular Nazi Ideology, and claim they have blood on their hands, you push them towards radicalization.
When people that support your stance go out-of-bounds themselves, and aren’t called on it they make it that much harder to show the way back in-bounds to the opposition that have strayed.
Huh, dang I guess you’re right. I mean, it certainly would be pretty wild for you to say that if the majority of Christians that I’ve personally met and the ones controlling my government had been organizing and campaigning to take away the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, women, and any racial minority since before my parents ever met. It’d be downright dishonest of you if, instead of moving more towards the middle, christians have spent the last 40 years sprinting to the far right as fast as they possibly could, to the point where a comparison to the Nazis doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Do you honestly think the women’s rights, LGBTQ+ acceptance, or the civil rights movement was championed by the Christian majority and they weren’t the primary opposition to those ideas?
It’d also be insane if the “secular Nazi ideology” was actually heavily Christian and the Catholic Church spent centuries laying the groundwork for Jewish Genocide, helped the Nazis seize power, and continued to protect them long after their atrocities were well known. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany
I guess if you are part of the oppressors, they’re probably quite nice to you. Sorry if my words are what push you to finally be honest with yourself about what you believe. Didn’t mean to radicalize you
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Just be sure you’ve taken a moment to understand who you’re speaking with and what you’re speaking with them about. Because in this case, any issue of bigotry has absolutely nothing to do with this drug related domestic dispute murder.
Commenters here are arguing with each other over something that has nothing to do with this case. So, it’s not that you care about the victim, you care about virtue signaling.
FWIW, the victim regularly attended an Episcopalian church. So, I’m not so sure he’d be cool with people using religion as a cudgel beneath his obituary.
Is that what it is looking like now? The article was significantly sparse on details.
Yeah. No argument there…
I posted this earlier https://lemmy.ml/comment/4475683
Thank you for the link. The article from that comment was far superior.
I am sorry to hear that Josh lost his life like that. Seems like Philly lost a good guy.
Hopefully it wasn’t actually the domestic option. It is a hard thought to think that someone he helped out by letting them live there would come back to kill him.
Also, I am glad to hear that his friends are looking into rehoming his rescued cat friend.
Well hey maybe religious people should stop consistently hurting other humans and society in general because they think their imaginary friend would be down with it.
It sounds an awful like you are saying, “Well yeah, we are bigots, but we are bigots because they deserve it!”
Am I misunderstanding you?
Yes, you are misunderstanding me.
I’m saying that religion has a richly documented history of intolerance and repression, up to and including the present day. I am simultaneously saying that I am intolerant of intolerance.
I feel like you should read up on this if you’re still struggling to wrap your head around the nuance of what pretty much everyone else in this comment tree besides yourself is expressing.
Thank you for the clarification.
I have read that multiple times. I just think it is a shite theory.
I eventually need to put it in my own words, but /u/theneverfox@pawb.social’s post is pretty good for now: (emphasis added)
https://lemmy.world/comment/3754441
Nope, my pointed disdain for backwards, illogical, regressive, exclusionary, predatory cults is showing. I don’t have a problem with religious people as long as they don’t force their shit onto others. Nationalist Christians are trying to force their bullshit theocracy onto the whole country, and that’s very fucking far from ok.
For the record, I was raised catholic, and I noped the fuck out of that bullshit once I got old enough to ask incisive questions. Maybe you should too.
It took going to a Bible College for me to break it down. That doesn’t mean that I have forgotten all of the good-hearted, well-meaning Christians that I met along the way. I haven’t forgotten all of the assholes either.
Yes I know, there are plenty of busybody assholes that identify as Christians, just like there are plenty of busybody assholes that identify themselves as atheist, gay, straight, athlete or gamer. Some people just feel the need to tell others how to live their lives even when they don’t really understand them. It doesn’t mean that we should act like everyone in that group is the same.
That sort of prejudicial reductionism is the real enemy. It is the thing reasonable, free-thinkers should be fighting against, not turning around for our own use.
Your point seems to be that people should not generalise an opinion on a large group of people. But you fail to ask the question of when passivism becomes guilty by failing to act. Germany was held accountable for the atrocities of the holocaust. They moved on. They educate in schools in an attempt to prevent this from reoccurring. What is happening in the US with republicans can only persist if people support them, and polling suggests there is support there.
You are contradicting yourself.
Care to explain how?
No.
Most honest answer I’ve seen this week.
Agreed. I certainly appreciate the direct honesty.
Christians love to play the victim, when you literally run the country.
Tangentially, my go-to aphorism when some American Christian starts whinging about how “persecuted” they are:
And to be clear: any Christian in the US claiming “persecution” should be viewed with the same seriousness as white, upper-middle class people claiming everyone racist against white property… because both of those claims are categorically bullshit. Nobody in the US wants to or cares about persecuting white people or Christians. We just want all the Nationalist Christians to get the fuck out of our politics and stop trying to push theocratically-derived laws on the rest of us, because just like we don’t want to live under a Sharia legal system, we similarly don’t want to live under a biblical (or Torah-derived, or any-other-religious-text-derived) law system.
Theocratic Christians are such a minority that the risk of this is nil. This is like conservatives fear-mongering about the US going Stalinist.
The US has never had a biblical law system and never will. (Certainly not in the near future, although with infinite time anything is possible).
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Bigots and manipulating sociopaths have a difficult time reconciling that they’re terrible people.
Ah, the ol’ “the anti-bigots are the real bigots” response? Is that where we are now?
They randomly accused people they have no evidence of for commiting a crime. So yeah, they are being a bigot.
Looks like they are both bigots from here.