Sounds nice enough, but not really like an outsider position among the Founding Fathers. OP seemed to be saying that Paine differed substantially from the others in some way, which I would be interested to learn about (not American either, I only have cursory knowledge of the Founding Fathers).

Why, what did he say?

Lichess.org is the best website to play and study chess on, hands down, and it’s entirely Libre/FOSS, with zero ads or trackers (e. g. read here: https://lichess.org/about).

Original art (paintings and sculptures) by local artists. They csn be checked out for three months at a time. It’s really nice to have some original art in your home even if it it’s not by a big name.

Also, I can easily access most of my country’s important newspapers’ online articles that are normally behind a paywall.

Ah, a fellow Krabbé connoisseur!

Haha, I see. Good on you!

• The Village

• O Brother Where Art Thou

• Amélie

• Pride and Prejudice

• Shutter Island

to name a few.

Tbh I think I can understand why people do it. For some using various substances are a quick and simple way to relax/numb unwanted emotions/etc… Some start because of peer pressure. For others it’s just learned behaviour (you’re more likely to become a smoker if your parents are).

Personally, I’ve never as much as tried cigarettes because it just never appealed to me and I had mostly non-smoking friends and family. But I definitely have other bad habits I shouldn’t have gotten into and have trouble getting rid of, so I get the feeling.

Wait, even as a child? Where are you from if I may ask?

Never have I ever as much as tried anything you can smoke (cigarettes, joints, shisha…).

Only interesting if you’re romantically attracted to women, though.

It seems like more and more internet spaces are being taken over by bots. At some point the internet will just be AI talking to itself, while humans will return entirely to offline communication.

Was my last movie too. I really enjoyed it, and even though some would say that it’s slow/not much happens, it left a stronger impression on me than any other film I recently watched.

That was the second-to-last I watched. :)

You’re gonna have to explain that one.

Yes, I very much agree that such explanations are helpful.

Yes, of course.

Both of these things need defining before anybody can answer your question.

“Censoring”, the way I understand the word, means that there’s some kind of institution charged with overseeing and removing parts of a text. So I wonder at which point in the development of the Bible you believe this has occurred.

I’ve argued in a different comment that it’s no secret that certain texts were picked and chosen by the early church as part of its canon, but that (in my opinion) is a very different thing than censoring. To give an analogy: If I was an editor and had to choose the “100 greatest novels of the 20th century” for a book, I would not be “censoring” those I didn’t choose. Therefore I’m asking you what exactly you mean by censoring, and if you can give examples of censorship happening in the development of the Biblical texts.

Secondly, “original Bible” is not at all easy to define. The (Christian) Bible is a collection of texts of diverse genres, by a multitude of authors, in three languages, spanning at least seven or eight centuries in their development. None of the original manuscripts have survived. Instead, for every part of the Bible, there exist different copies which sometimes differ slightly, sometimes starkly. This is the reason textual criticism of the Bible exists as a field of scholarship. Most notably, the (older) Septuagint version of the Book of Jeremiah is about one eighth shorter than the (later) version of the Masoretic text.

All of this means that if you’re going to talk about the “original Bible”, you have to tell us what you mean by that. Do you mean

• the original manuscripts of each individual book or passage, all of which are lost?
• the oldest surviving copies of each passage, respectively?
• the Septuagint (and if yes, which version of it)?
• the Masoretic text (and if yes, which version of it)?
• the current scholarly consensus on the most faithful manuscripts, as collected e. g. in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the Novum Testamentum Graece 28?

Hehe

King James notoriously removed mentions of the word tyrant in his English translations.

AFAIK this is an urban myth. But even if true, it’s hardly a case of “censoring”, but more a (questionable) translation choice. (Because “tyrant” is not a word that appears in the original Hebrew or Greek, so it can’t have been censored in that sense.)

Pretty much any version we know now has taken very liberal translations to change the meanings.

That’s not true. Bible translations differ wildly on the approach they take, but there exist many (at least for English) that are focused on offering a rendition as close to the original meaning as possible. Also, Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic as well as Koine Greek have been deeply studied over centuries and are well understood, so accurate translations are possible with the exception of a small percentage of rare vocabulary. Obviously, perfect translations aren’t a thing, but that’s a moot point and not exclusive to Bible translations.

Most scholars agree that the translations were not accurate.

Which scholars? Which translations? These blanket statements make no sense. Again, many translations have been made or reviewed/proofread by scholars of the Bible’s languages, making your claim dubious at best.

Then on top of that entire books of the Bible were debated and thrown out, the gospel of Mary magdeline is the most famous. They picked and chose what message they wanted.

It’s no secret that settling on a canon was a process that took centuries both in Judaism (for the Tanakh) and in early Christianity (for its New Testament), and was never really finished in the latter case, considering the different canons in use in the major Christian churches even today.

That said, I think this process was a necessity. In early Christianity, there were hundreds if not thousands of Jesus-inspired texts floating around, so if the new church was to have any sort of guiding document(s), they had no choice but to pick and choose. Of course, if you think a text (like the Gospel of Mary you mention) is an important witness of the early church, or a more accurate reflection of early Christian thought than are the New Testament writings, you have every right to make that argument. But I don’t think it’s fair to hold it against early Christians that they “picked and chose what message they wanted”, because that’s kind of the whole point of founding a new religious movement.