The reality is the civil rights movement is both about increasing the social power of non-white citizens AND decreasing the social power of white citizens.

The former is what usually feels okay for white citizens, but the latter tends to be what white folks call “reverse racism”. It doesn’t feel great losing the social power tied to your caste, but it’s necessary to create an equal opportunity society.

Stephen Hawkings had an interesting perspective regarding the creation of our universe. When people ponder our universe’s creation, they ask questions like “what caused the big bang?” or “what caused the universe to exist?”. Hawkings would have responded with the sentiment that these kind of questions were pointless. When one asks such a question regarding cause/effect, this presupposes the existence of a timeline. Cause and effect explanations have no merit without time; therefore to ask what caused the creation of the universe is silly, because time did not exist which means the notion of cause/effect would not have existed either.

Nevertheless, I think a lot of the folks commenting here have a problematic understanding of science, which is resulting in them agreeing with the toxic meme. Science and Religion don’t compete because they are fundamentally different in the way they approach understanding the universe. Religions relies on “truths” whereas science relies on “models”. There are no scientific facts or truths, there are only models that can accurately predict things we observe.

For example, the atomic model (atoms, +ions, - ions) can accurately predict a lot of different phenomena in our universe (electrical phenomena, chemical reactions, thermal phenomena, etc). Nevertheless, no good scientist should confidently tell you that atoms actually exist in reality. The atom is a model that functions well in explaining our universe, but that doesn’t mean it is “The Correct Model”.

Have you tried earnestly starting the discussion, or are you expecting others to start the conversation on your behalf? 🙃

The Japanese were attempting to negotiate surrender with the “neutral” USSR prior to the nuclear bombs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan The US wanted an unconditional surrender which included the destruction of the Japanese emperor, who at the time, was the head of the Japanese religion. To put this into perspective, consider the United States request similar to requesting the destruction of the Pope within the Vatican. Because of this, the Japanese were seeking better terms of surrender which did not involved the removal of their religious leader. What the Japanese did not know at the time was the USSR was not a neutral party, and they were secretly mobilizing their forces on mainland Asia due to an agreement Stalin made with FDR prior to the US entering the war in Europe.

The reality is, once Japan learned that the USSR was not neutral and they were going to be fighting the US and the USSR in a two front war, this is when the emperor forced Japan to surrender.

To put things into perspective, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were sadly, just another two cities leveled by the US. The US were performing night carpet bombing on Japanese cities as soon as 1944. Many of these raids leveled several square km of urban areas. https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=217. This is why people argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were probably not the catalyst to Japan’s surrender because the US have been leveling Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens, long before the two nuclear bombs were dropped. None of these raids caused Japan to surrender before.

Describing someone using their race when it is a clear way to discern them from a crowd of people is not racist; but describing someone by their race when it’s entirely irrelevant is likely driven by racism.

The kid being “black” in the statement adds nothing to the information. He could have easily said “I saw a large man at the door and I got scared” and it would not have been any different, since it isn’t like he is trying discern the kid from a crowd. “Black” is being used to justify his fear of the person, and this is inherently racist.

The big bang (if it is still a valid theory) would have been unlike any explosion you have ever witnessed. The big bang was not an explosion of only matter, since time and space were both created during this event as well.