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submitted 1 year ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] Rearsays@lemmy.ml 83 points 1 year ago

But who's committing these crimes, and why so much senseless violence?

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.

[-] Nahvi@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

Excuse me, but your bigotry is hanging out. Would you mind zipping up?

[-] almar_quigley@lemmy.world 93 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Nahvi@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] LadyAutumn 69 points 1 year ago

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

[-] Nahvi@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] prole@sh.itjust.works 34 points 1 year ago

"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?

[-] Nahvi@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Catoblepas 21 points 1 year ago

I doubt many Christians would hang out in a place like this.

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?

[-] Nahvi@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

There is nothing wrong with calling people out when they try to suppress your rights. The problem is pretending all Christians are the same on this issue and using that as a justification to attack them all.

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/25/1124101216/trans-religious-leaders-say-scripture-should-inspire-inclusive-congregations

https://www.gaychurch.org/find_a_church/

I live in BFE Texas and there are ten Affirming Churches in the area; five of them are within about 45 minutes of me. As a comparison there are only two Cowboy Churches in the same area. Every major City I checked had several Affirming Churches.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans are Christian and they are not just going to give that up because you do not like their religion. These are people that need to be convinced of either the rightness of your cause or at least your right to live the way you want. Right now, all they are hearing is "They're trying to turn your little boys into girls" or "Fuck the Christians". Neither of these messages are helpful, and both make them feel the same way as you do when you look at that list. The difference is they have a lot more political influence.

When every asshole that wants to accuse a random Christian of murder, without a single piece of evidence, gets overwhelmingly upvoted it makes that fight harder.

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[-] prole@sh.itjust.works 39 points 1 year ago

"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.

[-] Nahvi@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Fair enough. I should have called it anti-religious bigotry.

[-] prole@sh.itjust.works 25 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Nahvi@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

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.

Calling out your hateful ideology for what it is, is not bigotry.

I am not sure what this means unless you think I am religious. I am not.

[-] GnomeKat 11 points 1 year ago
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[-] 5in1k@lemm.ee 36 points 1 year ago
[-] Nahvi@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz 23 points 1 year ago

Finding wisdom in religion is like trying to pick corn out of shit.

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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.

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[-] afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Nahvi@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

There is a difference between attacking someone who chooses a disgusting belief system and bigotry.

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.

Now go restore Roe v. Wade or you are useless to me.

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:

Rev. Angela Williams, a Presbyterian pastor and the lead organizer of SACReD: Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity, told Healthline that faith leaders and religious groups that support abortion rights have been preparing for this moment for a long time.

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/meet-the-religious-groups-fighting-to-save-abortion-access

Members of the Episcopal Church (79%) and the United Church of Christ (72%) are especially likely to support legal abortion, while most members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (65%) also take this position.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/01/22/american-religious-groups-vary-widely-in-their-views-of-abortion/

[-] afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Bigotry is thinking, what I believe is right and everyone who believes differently is wrong.

No. That is just being human.

To point at all varieties of Christianity and say, “you are bad,” is being bigoted.

Ok? It isnt some weird charm argument winner. You can call me any nasty thing you want and that won't raise from the dead a single Iraqi or stop a single 14 year old girl having to induce an at home abortion because her uncle raped her.

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:

Not good enough. I want to hear a Christian shaman to say that anyone who opposes their religion on the rest of us is no longer a Christian. Disown or own. I like hot beverages and cold ones but not lukewarm ones.

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[-] Catoblepas 3 points 1 year ago

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).

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[-] I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Nahvi@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

There’s no paradox - there’s acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior. If anyone, displays only acceptable behavior, you tolerate them - full stop. If anyone goes out of bounds, you respond appropriately to correct the behavior - full stop.

To borrow a line from /u/theneverfox@pawb.social

https://lemmy.world/comment/3754441

[-] xanu@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

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.

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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.

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[-] Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

If you keep advocating in this fashion you are going to start feeling very backed up against a wall very quickly. When people are routinely hurt by an institution the unambiguous defense of the people within institution as a whole claiming a similar victimhood plays on a part of human nature. What people want of you is to accept that the numbers of people claiming Christiandom to then go on to harm someone means that as someone who claims to be Christian that you should be the first voice to start criticizing your own.

Instead because you cannot separate yourself from your Christian label or other people's frustration and pain caused by other people who do so under the flag of being "Proud Christians" your advocacy appears shallow and self serving. You and all the good Christians you defend become literary "the good man who does nothing" If facing people in your audience who have experienced trauma at the hands of your group what they want to see is that you accept that people like you harmed them and that you are different than them by being able to recognize their pain and shelve your agenda and listen unambiguously. What they are asking is for you to show you care about them and are strong enough to weather and differentiate the criticism they aren't directing at you.

It's a similar effect to how a lot of systemic issues around racism get held up on the feelings of the people in institutions about being implied to be racist. Oftentimes the issues never get dealt with because the conversation has to stop become all about the feelings of the person and how they aren't a bad person. While they may not intend it that person's feelings become the obstacle that throws up the roadblocks on people who are fighting desperately to have less roadblocks. Once this happens often enough people start to figure that that person's feelings DO make them a bad person because regardless of their personal merits they are still in the way and having to sway every individual roadblock by taking them offside and coddling them telling them, it's okay we know YOU aren't a bad person becomes way too much. Thus people start getting more frustrated with the people who demand this treatment and take up their energy and they start getting more strident.

When you place yourself in that spot it's easy to see people's frustration as hate but it is different. They want you to be better.

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[-] oxjox@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

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.

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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.

[-] Nahvi@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Syldon@feddit.uk 11 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] prole@sh.itjust.works 56 points 1 year ago

Christians love to play the victim, when you literally run the country.

[-] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Tangentially, my go-to aphorism when some American Christian starts whinging about how “persecuted” they are:

get off the cross, we need the wood.

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.

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[-] Rearsays@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago

Bigots and manipulating sociopaths have a difficult time reconciling that they’re terrible people.

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[-] pete_the_cat@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's Philly, this is nothing new (Edit: since people love twisting words, I meant violence in general not the specific targeting of an activist journalist for Christ sake). I grew up in South Jersey (half way in between Philly and Atlantic City, NJ) and there's always a headline on the nightly news about "X people were killed in a shootout today in West/South/North Philly today", most people don't see it though since Philly is overshadowed by NYC (anyone from Central Jersey and North gets NYC news). Everything but Center City has always been a shit hole for the most part.

Edit: I live in NYC for 5 years, it of course has shitty areas all over too. Everyone is trying to act like major cities are perfect, crime free areas. Did people forget that the Italian and Irish mobs ran NYC and Philly for decades?!

Having a home invader break into your house and gun you down is not a common occurrence, even in philly. It was a targeted attack.

[-] ABCDE@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago
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[-] LadyAutumn 37 points 1 year ago

This wasn't someone gunned down in a shootout. This was a homeless and LGBT rights activist who was brutally murdered in his home.

Nothing about that is ordinary.

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[-] prole@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you were halfway between Philly and Atlantic City, you were too far away from Philly to pretend to be an expert. But keep using that weak anecdotal "evidence" to continue your ignorant views on urban areas.

Saying "Everything but Center City has always been a shit hole" gives you away. You have no fucking clue. Probably been at least a decade since you've driven within 30 miles of the city.

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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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