Jesus warned people very, very frequently against going to where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth AKA Hell. It was one of his favorite subjects.

Jesus told us not to judge others for the sins that we ourselves also commit. All the time we spend trying to decide the state of others’ souls would be far better spent taking the logs out of our eyes before yelling at others about the specks in theirs. Other people’s salvation isn’t your problem, you can’t force people to accept Jesus. (Especially after they have already died.) You can, and should, instead become a shining beacon of grace that attracts people to the faith.

Someone else mentioned whether or not Hitler is in hell. I really don’t care if he is. It isn’t my problem. Jesus saved a man who was right beside him in crucifixion moments before they died, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to hang my entire faith on the salvation of a certain person.

If you’re curious, you should read what some classical Christian writers have said about Hell. The best summary I can give is that it’s a place of such unbridled, horrifying hatred that people will tear the flesh off their bodies and throw it at other people while burning alive because they hate each other so much.

I nuke Moscow. Can’t fall out a window if there are no windows!

There is hope for everyone to get to Heaven, but by no means should we on Earth be making pronouncements on which specific people are in Hell. That’s way above our paygrade and I’m happy to keep it that way. People like this just make all Christians look stupid.

https://tenor.com/view/isildur-no-lotr-lord-of-the-rings-gif-26059395

Integrity isn’t just about doing the right thing when nobody’s watching; it’s also about being mindful of the consequences of your actions. Heck, I’d say that’s the more important side. You might start dumping chemicals into the water without treatment because it’s cheaper and there’s technically no laws against it. But you’re still going to be physically responsible when everyone who lives there starts miscarrying every single pregnancy and the town is abandoned because of your misdeeds.

I would argue that what rights there are is inherently a moral argument. “Murder is not a right” is a moral statement, for example. The government doesn’t change what rights it thinks there are without some kind of moral basis for it. Even if it’s primarily done in the legal sense, we still generally act in the legal system based on a system of morality. Another example: “Compelling people to testify against themselves is wrong.” It would be really useful for the state if they could do that, but legally speaking, the US recognizes that there is a right against self-incrimination.

Laws are written because someone, somewhere, found a moral fault in the law. It’s just that some people believe that the only morality is power, and thus anything they do is justified. That’s why we have the Bill of Rights: it’s meant to stop people from simply saying “the government needs this power so we’re going to give it that power.” It isn’t about creating rights, it’s about recognizing and protecting rights that have existed all along.

But if the government can decide what rights there are, then anything they do is morally correct, no? Unless you’re going to hold the government to a higher moral standard than themselves, in which case the government doesn’t actually grant rights; it can only protect or violate them. If we have a higher moral standard than the law, then human rights do not come from the government, they are defined by whatever that higher standard is.

I think the Nazis were an insane and utterly contemptible political party that destroyed a struggling nation to slake their own thirst for power. But if the government decides what rights there are, then they can simply legislate out of existence the rights of anyone under their jurisdiction. Thus, anything the government does to them is justified.

And my point is that it isn’t the government that decides what rights are. You started this whole “can the government decide what rights are” discussion by dismissing out of hand the right of a person to defend themselves. I’d like for you to go up to a sexual assault victim, especially one who defended themselves with a gun, and tell them “um ackshually you didn’t have the right to defend yourself because guns are evil 🤓”. Or would you only do that after the Second Amendment is deleted from the Constitution?

Yes, I do find it dishonest to say both “the government has the right to grant and revoke rights” and “there are only some laws that are reasonable”. You can’t really take a moral stance against the government like that if they decide you no longer have the right to disagree with them.

I know it doesn’t lead to any particular right being set, but your argument that rights are set by the government still leads to the conclusion that, because the Nazis were in power, they had the right to decide that Jews, gay people, other ethnicities, etc. no longer had a right to life. It would also lead to the belief that the Nazis had the right to protect those people if they wanted to. It would open the door to whatever oppression, discrimination, protection, liberty, and whatever else the ever-fickle government decided. Nobody would be right to resist it because “the government sets the rights, therefore it’s okay”.

Do you believe that Nazi Germany was justified in killing 11 million people? Because that’s the logical conclusion of your belief.

So the government can decide what rights are? If the Republicans get a 2/3 majority and amends the Constitution to say that LGBT+ people can be killed at any moment, does that make it right?

Also, let’s assume your proposal happens. What specific policies do you mean by “sane gun control”?

How do you propose we lower the number of guns in our society in a way that disarms criminals and doesn’t violate people’s right to self defense?

I’m 99% sure that they’re joking.

They do, but the fact remains that you can’t effectively incentivize people to work more for you personally when they’re already soul-crushingly overworked doing things for everyone else in their rotation. Trying to get more out of nurses who are in the industry already would be trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Also, you don’t go to college for several years to be a server. If people realize they’re going to have to beg for tips from their patients, then that won’t bode well for the profession.

See, there’s a crucial difference in the two professions. A server is someone who brings your food, takes your check, and generally doesn’t do much else. A nurse, on the other hand, needs to balance the life-saving care of dozens of patients at once while dealing with administrative bullcrap the whole time. People tip servers well to incentivize them to spend less time on their phones and dropping plates, and more time carrying food and recording orders accurately. You can’t do that with nurses because they can’t possibly give any more of their time. 91% of nurses experienced high levels of burnout in 2023,, and I’m dead certain that a lot of that is the insane workload. Twelve hour shifts working with uncaring staff and pissed-off patients must be soul-crushing. Then for your employer to try and disguise your looming pay cuts as “a way to give your healthcare heroes a special thank you” would probably cause an exodus from the profession; people can see through that stuff pretty easily.

You’re still assuming this is going to be an immediate industry-wide thing, too. Like I said, people will see through the corporate bs, and they’ll learn at some point that they can go to another hospital, not be expected to beg for tips from their suffering patients, and get paid more than the place that was lowballing them. Word of mouth is powerful. There’s an entire cottage industry of Canadian nurses who cross the border into America for work because they’re so dissatisfied with the Canadian system. Your scenario only works in a setting where there is only one nationwide hospital system that decides the market rate for nursing, and that people wouldn’t decide not to become nurses after seeing that they’re expected to tip them. We already see a nursing shortage because they’re being treated so poorly; trying to make it a tipped industry would only make it worse.

As for the “would you?” thing, I can speak from a degree of personal experience here. I was in the psych ward in May and I was waiting for over ten hours in there to see a psychiatrist. I was tired, hungry, bored, and scared of what might happen to me. I was in no way equipped to make financial decisions at that point, and I get the feeling that the medical field would consider taking tips from someone who was in such an emotionally frail state to be unethical at best. (Oh yeah, and they took away my wallet. Couldn’t give them cash if I wanted to.) My insurance made the cost of going there “reasonable,” (mostly because I wasn’t actually admitted,) but if the hospital expected me to tip the staff there, it would be nonsensical. How would you determine what the tip should be based on? The pre-insurance amount? That’s like $5,000 there if I’m lucky, and 20% of that is $1,000 on a bill I only paid like $275 for. One word: No. The post-insurance amount? That’s $27.50. A pittance compared to how much time and effort went into taking care of me, including the time it took to become a nurse to begin with. Furthermore, I would be so removed from the process of sending the tip that by the time the money reached the nurse(s) who helped me, they would only know me as a name on a bill at best. And again, would insurance be willing to cover the cost of a tip?

What makes you think people will go from tipping $10 on a $40-50 meal, to tipping, say, $100 on a $400-500 medical bill? Or $1,000 on a $4,000-5,000 one? Or even more? Do you think that insurance is going to cover tips for nurses? Do you think every nurse in a given hospital is going to stay there instead of getting a job somewhere else that doesn’t expect them to take tips, especially when they realize that nobody is tipping them?

This reminds me of that chart showing gun deaths over a few years that showed the line going down the more deaths there were. That made sense graphically, they colored it in to look like blood dripping down, but this is just dumb.

If a hospital in the US started paying their nurses the same minimum wage that a server gets, that hospital would suddenly be without nurses and it would be entirely the hospital’s fault.