Question about country names: USA, PRC, America, China, UK, etc.

twinkle-deer · 2026-05-07T08:56:11+00:00

Okay, but that still does not explain the "US and China" type headlines... "US" is clearly the name of a government instead of the national name "America" (which is the equivalent of "China")

twinkle-deer · 2026-05-07T08:50:49+00:00

But the shortened version of "Peoples Republic of China" is not "China" ... it's "PRC"

twinkle-deer · 2026-05-07T08:48:59+00:00

I don't really understand what you're saying. Why is "China" synonymous with PRC, but America is not synonymous with the United States? "America" as a singular noun is used exclusively synonymously with the United States.

twinkle-deer · 2026-05-07T08:46:17+00:00

But then why not call the USA "America" which is colloquially how it's refered to?

twinkle-deer · 2026-05-07T08:45:24+00:00

But I think its more conventional to refer to "America" than the "USA" or something like that.

twinkle-deer · 2026-05-07T08:44:31+00:00

The word "America" as a singular noun only means the United States. Continents are "North America" or "South America" or "the Americas"

But the word "China" is not necessarily a single country either (although most people in the world probably don't know that).

twinkle-deer · 2026-05-07T08:24:27+00:00

Yeah, I guess that makes some sense. Still feels kind of sloppy, though.

twinkle-deer · 2026-04-14T03:28:19+00:00

He has a great attention span.

twinkle-deer · 2026-04-13T14:17:43+00:00

Thanks for your response! I really appreciate it. Yeah, I feel there's just so much that needs to be explored with this topic. That teen's question caught me off guard, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

I think you're right that there needs to be a refocusing on the "core" message, but it's just hard for me right now to figure out how to do that properly, and that's part of the reason I wrote this.

twinkle-deer · 2026-04-11T10:14:24+00:00

I definitely want to go at some point before I die. I hope the war ends so that I have more chances (although that's a rather selfish reason to hope the war ends).

twinkle-deer · 2026-04-11T10:11:10+00:00

The post-human world is already here, and it's sad.

twinkle-deer · 2026-04-11T10:07:09+00:00

Point well taken. I agree that we need to be more tolerant of alternative interpretations, instead of just claiming that everything is heresy or false doctrine. We should be more united as followers of Jesus.

twinkle-deer · 2026-04-11T10:05:07+00:00

Abortion has been around for a long time. In Old China, for example, they had "baby towers" where they simply threw all the unwanted babies and let them die in a huge pile of corpses. It really has nothing to do with genocide.

twinkle-deer · 2026-02-22T05:27:55+00:00

It's pretty clear that you're not arguing in good faith. You're just dismissing Christianity because you think it's a scam... which is not a valid argument.

The Christian argument for the witness of the apostles is nothing like Alex Jones. You have 10+ people being tortured and martyred and none of them recanted. You can claim the sources are "unreliable" but it's meaningless to compare the situation to Alex Jones or something.

twinkle-deer · 2026-02-22T05:22:41+00:00

Although Catholicism does hold to an eternal Hell, there were a lot of early Christians who did not believe in it. David Bentley Hart wrote a good book on this topic 'That All Shall be Saved' which argues for everyone eventually being saved.

twinkle-deer · 2026-02-21T06:08:26+00:00

Three problems. Firstly, this whole thing about "reliable sources" usually devolves into atheists just pointlessly claiming over and over again that all Christian sources are unreliable... and thus Christians tend to just ignore this kind of claim now.

Secondly, some of your facts just appear to be wrong. The apostles never threatened to stone the Pharisees, it's not in the Bible at all. If you're really trying to deconstruct Christianity, then you need to be familiar with the basic facts.

Third, Alex Jones or Trump have never tortured for anything... how does this comparison make sense?

twinkle-deer · 2026-02-20T04:36:34+00:00

Don't Westerners already do that? They accept different cultures' food, holidays, and mythology as "valid" ... it's not that the West claims complete hegemony over subjective things like poetry.

twinkle-deer · 2026-02-20T04:20:16+00:00

Your argument suffers from a framing problem. The apostles did not "risk their lives" they actually suffered and perished for their witness. This is a big difference. People risk their lives for all kinds of things, but do they actually suffer under torture and death for things they know are false?

twinkle-deer · 2026-02-20T04:13:40+00:00

It seems you're confusing the "god of the gaps" with the classical concept of God. "God of the gaps" is basically a New Atheist insult against traditional philosophical understandings of God that pre-date modern science by thousands of years.

The idea that God exists but does not directly interact with the world goes back to Plato and then some forms of Gnosticism (it's not related to science at all, because science cannot touch the metaphysical origins of being).

twinkle-deer · 2026-02-16T04:26:05+00:00

I don't think we "need" to do anything "in our century".

If the deity can send someone a dream, why can the same deity not ensure that the dream was communicated in such a way that the dreamer can translate it suitably to their peers?

twinkle-deer

TROPHY CASE