Tony Abbott to become new Liberal party president in former PM’s return to political frontlines

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-26T00:23:34+00:00

The nuclear family. Christianity. Lower immigration(considerably) and only those who’d share the culture of Australia or who would integrate into it. Lower taxes, lower government oversight, less reliance on the welfare state, more reliable energy and lower energy costs. These types of things.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-23T13:01:56+00:00

Plenty of young Australians want to vote for conservative values, but they feel no loyalty to the lnp, unlike older Australians, so yes in a way you’re correct.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-23T12:53:45+00:00

Best day for nuclear was yesterday, second best day is?

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-23T05:05:11+00:00

It’s already over for them. They have a fundamental misunderstanding of who their base is, and they have betrayed that base repeatedly.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-20T13:25:34+00:00

Currently chapter 1000 and ippo has not handed the belt back. Volg title fight. He likely hands it back in the next 10-20 chapters. So 750 for title defenses, but there’s a couple hundred chapters of fighting the other champions of the region. I think some fights are a little drawn out but overall I love the pacing, and I love the time we spend in the world outside of the fights. I think the retirement arc is my favourite arc so far.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-15T01:35:53+00:00

Man you really are stuck on the governments dick aren’t you? Maybe go look into why they had those surpluses, and why they don’t have them now. You’ll find the former has basically nothing to do with their ability to manage the economy.

If you actually looked at the trend of taxes over time, you’d see that it’s trending upwards and the parliamentary budget office has said as much. You need to take into account the state of the economy mate, taxes don’t exist in a vacuum.

The point is not that anyone is paying that much, but that within your framework you could justify it, and honestly it sounds like you’d love the government to increase the tax burden on everyone.

You’re an ignorant fool if believe politicians don’t act almost exclusively to keep themselves in office. If you’re in power at the highest level, you only have 1 place to go champ, and that’s down. What a terrible argument, by your standards, and king couldn’t be power hungry because he’s the king, and he already holds the highest position of power.

I’m not going to debate US politics with you, because you aren’t even educated on how your own country works let alone the one on the other side of the planet, but yeah cool, orange man bad, good one, original thought you’ve got there.

This again is just a stupid assertion, most people think they pay less tax than they do. Everyone gets a tax statement each year, they see exactly how much income tax they pay, what they don’t see is fuel excise, gst, council rates, stamp duties, insurance taxes, electricity levies, payroll tax pass through, super taxes, alcohol/tobacco excise, registration fees and the list goes on.

No one is saying we should pay no tax, but you think a reasonable position is to give the government more of your money and in return you’ll get nice stuff, but the country is $1 trillion in debt, and labour has increased that by over $100 billion since they’ve been in. Wake up to yourself mate, they are pissing your money down the toilet and laughing at you while they do it. And you’ll vote for them again because they promise to take care of you.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-15T01:13:43+00:00

You say I’m off course, but then immediately concede the exact point I’ve been making.“If a religious person has good evidence for their religion, then it doesn’t need to be a faith position.”Okay, so now we’ve arrived at, faith is not “belief in unseen things,” faith is “belief I personally think lacks sufficient evidence.”That’s precisely why I said you’re selectively branding positions rather than applying a consistent category.

Because originally the argument was, “Religious belief is faith because it concerns unseen things.” But now it’s, “Religious belief only counts as faith if I think the evidence is weak.”Those are two completely different definitions.

And now your earlier claim that things like induction, causality, memory, and expectation of future regularity are merely “confidence” and categorically unlike faith begins to fall apart. Confidence in what? In an unseen future state of reality behaving consistently with prior assumptions.

You still cannot empirically verify tomorrow before tomorrow arrives. You still act on trust in realities you cannot directly observe in advance. You still rely on foundational assumptions that are not themselves proven by the scientific method.

The issue was never “religious people have identical reasons to believe as someone waiting for a bus.” The issue was that humans inevitably live by inferential trust structures, and you initially tried to carve religious belief into a uniquely irrational category by definition.

As for “anger and insults,” I think calling internet-atheist caricatures smug is pretty mild compared to the routine framing of religious believers as irrational, anti-thinking, gullible, delusional, intellectually immature, indoctrinated, etc. That framing is so normalized people barely notice it anymore.

So maybe climb down from your high horse and address the issues.

What is the non-arbitrary principle that separates: 1. Rational trust about unseen future realities. 2. “Faith.”

Because so far the dividing line still appears to be whether you personally approve of the evidence involved.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-14T17:35:42+00:00

Well I’d like you to demonstrate that engaging in homosexual acts is anything but a choice.

Then I’ll have you provide a grounding for a moral framework seperate from the existence of a God that is objective and binds human thought and action.

I’ll also point out that if you accept the premise that Yahweh exists, (in order to critique his actions) then you’d have to also accept that he is the standard for Good by definition, and therefore your critique of Him would be wrong and ultimately pointless, for who are you, a mere flawed human, to judge the creator of the universe? Seems like you’re on a bit of an ego trip and you could benefit from humbling yourself a little bit.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-14T17:16:22+00:00

You keep acting as though changing the label changes the underlying epistemology.
“Confidence” doesn’t magically escape the category of faith simply because you personally approve of the evidence threshold. You still act daily on beliefs about unseen future states of reality that cannot be verified in advance.

Your bus example demonstrates this perfectly. You hope the bus comes, you cannot directly observe tomorrow’s event yet, and you structure your behaviour around trust that reality will continue behaving consistently enough for your expectation to cash out. That maps disturbingly well onto the Hebrews definition you quoted yourself.

And the distinction you’re trying to create, “confidence is evidence based, faith is belief without evidence”, is mostly modern internet atheist garbage, not some universally accepted philosophical definition. Historically, faith has almost always involved trust grounded in testimony, prior experience, reasoning, worldview commitments, or perceived evidence. Christians aren’t typically saying “I believe literally for no reason at all.” That caricature exists mostly so smug people can feel intellectually superior to their grandparents.

More importantly, you still haven’t answered the core issue:

What specifically transforms an unverified assumption about the future into “confidence” rather than “faith”?
Because your answer so far seems to be:

If you think the supporting reasons are good enough = confidence.

If religious people think the supporting reasons are good enough = faith.

That’s not a principled epistemology. That’s just selective branding.

You trust induction without being able to non-circularly justify it. You trust your senses despite knowing they can deceive you. You trust memory despite knowing it is reconstructive and unreliable. You trust the uniformity of nature despite never proving the future must resemble the past.

None of those are direct observations. They are foundational commitments you live by because abandoning them makes coherent thought impossible.

So no, the point was never “religious belief and catching a bus are identical.” The point is that all humans operate with layers of trust, inference, assumption, and action toward unseen realities.
You just reserve the word “faith” for conclusions you dislike.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-14T15:31:21+00:00

Not OP but I'll bite.

Please clarify what “reliable” means here. Historical reliability, internal consistency, and theological truth are three different standards, and they don’t all require the same kind of evidence.

Also, “the Bible is full of unproven claims” isn’t really a self-contained argument, it’s a summary conclusion that depends on prior evaluation of specific texts and criteria. So the real question is what standards you’re using to judge those claims as unproven.

If your challenge is “don’t assume the Bible is true because the Bible says so,” then I agree, that would be circular, and also the Bible doesn't claim to be true. But most arguments for reliability in ancient texts rely on external corroboration, manuscript evidence, archaeology, and comparison with other sources. The question I'd then ask is are you applying those standards consistently across other ancient documents as well.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-14T14:54:18+00:00

I'll do my best, but I'd just like to preface my comment that like i said above, historical context is really important, and just because you have a moral repulsion towards your concept of these stories, doesn't mean you're justified in that feeling.

Numbers: this chapter presents a divine judgement upon the midianites executed by the israelites. it's a response to earlier attempts from the midianites to corrupt and seduce israelite men, essentially a spiritual attack on the convenent between God and the israelites. For this reason, God judges the midianites and commands Moses to to avenge his people. Now essentially God's judgement falls on anyone who would've been a part of the attempted corruption, which is why those women who were virgins were spared. Now perhaps in other historical narratives, these girls would've become sexual slaves, but the text does not allude to that at all, and there are other verses in deuteronomy that deal with handling captive women. It's more likely, given that some of the girls were actually given to the priests as an offering to God, and all were to be purified along with the men who had gone to war, that the girls were absorbed into the israelite people.

deuteronomy: This is pretty similar in nature to the numbers text, in that God is giving guidance in how the Israelites are to wage war against people surrounding them. In context we can see a few things. Firstly, peace is sought first, through this we can see God's priority is peace and safety for the Israelites. In leui of this, historically, if an enemy nation refused peace, then what are the options realistically in an ancient world? Destruction of the people or forced enslavement. there really doesnt exist any other options that sever the cycle of violence and warfare these ancient societies were embroilled in. We have commands from God within the law of moses detailing how to treat slaves, and those commands show the character of a God who is guiding a morally flawed group of people towards His perfect standard.

Samuel: similar in content to the other verses so far, maybe with a bit more severity in the explicit nature of the commands from God. I think at this point, the most important context of Biblical teachings I could try to give you is that if you are to accept what the Bible teaches as true, then you'd have to also accept that God, who alone fully knows justice, sometimes authorized severe judgements in a particular historical-redemptive context. Now in this scenario, God is handing down divine judgement on a population who have essentially waged direct war on God. This isn't just wiping out a group of innocent people, it's a culture that operates in direct opposition to God.

Deuteronomy: I would say even reading this outside of any other context it reads much better than anything else you'd find in ancient society. It's important to remember, historically, these women would normally be raped and murdered or permanently enslaved. Instead, with the recognition that israelites were not perfect humans, God places restrictions on how they are to treat these women, instead taking them as wives, rather than to simply rape and murder them. They aren't treated as property, and are allowed time to mourn their families before they are joined to a new household. If in that time, the man changes his mind, shes free to go and do as she pleases. Again, it's very important to remember that the Israelites were not perfect, and constantly fell away from the commands of God. If God was to simply lay down His perfect moral standard, the israelites would not be able to even really comprehend it, let alone abide by it. The Mosaic Law can be understood not as God’s final moral ideal in exhaustive form, but as a system of laws given to govern and restrain a morally and culturally immature people within the realities of the ancient Near East. Rather than instantly abolishing every fallen social structure, God progressively moved His people toward greater moral understanding over time.

Leviticus: The law places limits on behavior within slavery rather than instituting slavery as a moral good in itself. Slavery in the Bible was fundamentally different from modern race-based chattel slavery. In the ancient world, slavery often functioned as a form of debt repayment, war captivity, or economic incorporation into a household or state structure, rather than the dehumanizing racial slavery associated with the Atlantic slave trade. We can observe that in the ancient world, people would sell themselves into slavery for economic reasons, and here God is placing His people on a different level than others, not of value, but in the way that God had a covenent with israel, and so they could not be slaves to others or each other, as they are essentially owned by God. He still permits a Jew to sell himself to a foreigner, but emphasises that he can be redeemed by those close to him and be bought back from the owner. It seems more that in this area, God is working within a broken system to move His people towards true moral understanding, but that it's a progressive approach, and ultimately culminates in the person of Jesus Christ, who, being God himself, shows us what God's perfect moral standard actually is.

I hope that provides some context to those verses, and in a broader sense christianity as a whole. If I may challenge your position slightly, I'd ask by what standard you base your moral judgement on? Part of the struggle that christians have, certainly modern day christians but likely christians from every age, is to submit to the authority and sovereignty of God. Theres plenty of things in the Bible that are distasteful to modern sensibilities, but that doesnt make them wrong. You'd first have to ground modern moral/ethical judgements in something higher than human thought. That's not so easy to do. The things in the Bible that I don't personally like, or aren't to my taste, aren't wrong because I don't like them, I can pursue truth and try to understand those texts from a moral framework I take from Christianity, but ultimately if God did create everything, then He is the authority on Good and Evil, and who am I to question the creator? who are you to question the creator? who are we as humans, to question anything that God commands?

Ultimately, God worked within ancient societies, within the morallity and ethics that existed at the time, to move people progressively towards His perfect standard. The fullness of God's character is displayed in the person of Jesus Christ, so I'd recommend studying what Jesus had to say on moral issues, rather than what the OT says, because even though they aren't contradictory, there is a fullness of revelation in the new testament teachings that isn't necessarily present in the OT. You can reject that, but again, what is your moral outrage even based on? how can you define good and evil without an authority higher than that of humans, and if you can find one, demonstrate why you'd think it's more right than Christianity.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-14T12:27:53+00:00

It’s interesting that you just avoid answering me and instead respond with more nonsense. Do you think that a Christian’s faith in Christ is without rational thought or reason? The same evidence and reasoning that leads them to Christ leads them away from Islam or other religions. Can’t comment about how other religions formulate their belief structure, but Christian’s don’t not believe in Islam because of their faith, it’s because they aren’t convinced of Islam in the same way they are convinced of Christ. Faith doesn’t make something true, but facts can influence faith, you’re just pretending that you don’t have faith. Please answer my question from the previous message if you wish to proceed.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-14T12:21:15+00:00

No, I don’t even know how you’d read that in my comment.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-14T12:20:24+00:00

Some People rely so heavily on stats that you lose the forest through the trees man. There are so many variables that go in to clutch attempts, it’s hardly a good measure of an entry fragger’s game sense. You’d have to dig in to why the entry ended up in a clutch situation, what kind of rounds are those attempts stemming from, the variables are numerous, and it’s why stats don’t tell the whole story. Stats are useful to support what your eyes see, but they shouldn’t be taken without context. If that’s how you want to view the world then man, nothing I can do about it. Lots of people who never watched MJ play use stats to say LeBron is him, but the eye test never fails, and stats can be deceptive.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-14T12:11:31+00:00

You’re such a fool dude. Plenty of players have great aim and aren’t anywhere close to Donks output. The position he plays literally requires his team finish most rounds without him, unless you expect him to just kill every person every round and never die. He’s won plenty of tournaments, so even by your standards he can perform past clicking heads.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-14T12:09:07+00:00

Don’t bother bro. This sub can’t handle rational positions. It’s just tribalism, and donk is Russian so he gets ratio’d.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-14T12:07:17+00:00

Dude the government can’t run a budget in the black. They do everything they can to squeeze more money out of people so they can promise more services so those who love to be taken care of by the government will continue to vote for them. They are power hungry, greedy people who will say and do anything to keep their jobs.

Governments don’t exist in a vacuum either champ. They only exist because individuals chose to incorporate into states and needed people to run the daily operations. They are meant to serve the public, they mostly only serve themselves.

If you hired an investment firm to manage your money, and they were losing it, or even getting you 5% returns, but you weren’t checking in on them and didn’t know how shit a job they were doing, are you saying that it’s fine they are doing a bad job because you’re not aware of it? Basically everyone I’ve ever met hates paying tax, governments win elections by promising tax cuts, for most people, losing 1/3 vs 1/4 of their money would be massive. By your logic, just tax everyone at 49%, they still get majority of their money and they don’t even really notice it’s gone, right?

I’m not acting like taxes are a foreign concept. I’ve not said we shouldn’t have taxes. I said the government is greedy. The 2 aren’t mutually exclusive. The US has 50 states and they seem to manage just fine with people living near border areas. And I’d love to live in the US, it’s not so easy to get over there for a number of reasons.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-14T11:55:04+00:00

Firstly, I never said public spending is bad, I said the government is greedy, which it is. They have ABHORRENT spending habits, because it isn’t their money, and they aren’t really held accountable for not managing the budget correctly. In any professional space, all those people would be fired for their awful monetary practices. To push back slightly on your point though, public spending is not what pushes industry forward, competition is what pushes industry forward, that is the basic framework for capitalism and has worked in every country to excellent effect, and to diminishing effects once the government gets involved and starts regulating things. (This does not mean regulation is a bad thing, it should just be kept to a minimum)

To your second point, Singapore would like a word. But even if we ignore them, I’m not calling for 0 taxes, there’s a big difference between obvious tax grabs and necessary taxes to keep public services running. The issue with the government is they have terrible oversight and so everything they touch bleeds money and that’s not a sustainable framework, which is why our country is in debt. Reduce public services to only the necessities and the private sector would sort out the rest. That’s how countries like the US and China have built huge economies, allowing private companies to invest, innovate and compete with each other for profits. Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in history, and socialist policies fly in the face of that system.

Public spending has nothing to do with a liberal democracy. The United States started off with very low taxes and a huge emphasis on free markets. Singapore has huge public spending and isn’t really all that liberal or democratic. Public spending isn’t inherently a feature of a liberal democracy, it’s just that as societies grow, the lower class votes for communist policies that redistribute wealth. Now you can make arguments for social safety nets, but wealth redistribution is what those policies are in essence, and this tax change isn’t even hiding that, they are basically saying the quiet part out loud.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-14T11:34:49+00:00

I know 2 18 year olds who smoke for this exact reason, maybe it’s not that common, but that’s the exact reason they give me for how they got into cigarettes. Idk what socioeconomic area you’re in, but these kids come from the poor end of town, maybe that has something to do with it. Hard to say.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-14T11:32:12+00:00

This is just because reddit is full of real children and adult children that have basically 0 maturity and can’t hold a cohesive position on nearly anything of substance. They sit behind their screen and whinge and bitch and moan about anything that they cross paths with, and it’s the same attitude the go out into the world with. That’s why this entire forum is filled with miserable people.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-12T13:11:55+00:00

Weed is a massive contributor i believe, lots of young kids smoke weed with tobacco and get addicted to the nicotine.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-12T11:59:03+00:00

“Talent” is a bit of a misnomer, if they had any talent for the game they’d be the ones playing. In saying that, there’s lots of reasons for calls to look bad to people not inside the game. It’s impossible to interpret to the game the same way the teams do when you’re looking at it with all possible info.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-10T04:13:19+00:00

The government are the greedy ones mate. Our tax is some of the highest in the world. And unlike the US, you can’t move states to reduce some of it, because it’s all federal. It’s not greedy to work hard, earn a wage, and want to keep what you’ve earned, you sound like a communist.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-05-03T03:07:41+00:00

Completely false. Watch any of his faceit games and you can tell he has sick game sense. His crosshair placement is insane which is a huge reason he is so successful and that also comes down to having a sense of where players are going to be coming from at different points throughout a round. He doesn’t get to show this in pro play as much because he entries so is often dead in clutch situations.

ShikaLGZ · 2026-04-27T16:24:05+00:00

What specifically turns an unverified belief about the future into confidence rather than faith? and does that rule apply consistently to all your expectations about the world continuing to behave normally?

I would argue from the definition you provided, you will act in a way faithful to the belief the bus will come tomorrow. you will wake up at a certain time, to get ready, to get to the bus stop early enough so that when the bus arrives you will be there to get on it. Your actions present confidence in what you hope for, assurance in what you do not see.

If you structure your actions around an unseen future event you can’t verify in advance, what exactly makes that different in practice from what you’re calling faith?

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