A journalist and advocate who rose from homelessness and addiction to serve as a spokesperson for Philadelphia’s most vulnerable was shot and killed at his home early Monday, police said.

Josh Kruger, 39, was shot seven times at about 1:30 a.m. and collapsed in the street after seeking help, police said. He was pronounced dead at a hospital a short time later. Police believe the door to his Point Breeze home was unlocked or the shooter knew how to get in, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. No arrests have been made and no weapons have been recovered, they said.

Authorities haven’t spoken publicly about the circumstances surrounding the killing.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Probably a “good Christian”, since the fundamentalist are militantly (in a literal sense) against any sort of tolerance, acknowledgement, or compassion being expressed towards people who don’t completely conform to their heteronormative worldview.

      • almar_quigley@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yes! That’s exactly what you should say to Christians when they start spouting off on their racist, homophobic, or otherwise prejudiced beliefs. You’re a great role model.

        • Nahvi@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I have done and will continue to call out racial and homophobic bigotry as quickly as I do religious bigotry.

          Unfortunately, as shameful as it is, one of those forms of prejudice is supported by most of the active population here.

            • Nahvi@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              It is unfortunate that you think so, there is a lot of wisdom in the various world religions.

              We may be beyond the need for religion, but I doubt even that.

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            There is a difference between attacking someone who chooses a disgusting belief system and bigotry. Any adult who remains a Christian knows exactly what the religion with the highest kill count stands for. They decide to ignore that because they get the warm fuzzies once a week for an hour.

            Now go restore Roe v. Wade or you are useless to me.

            • Nahvi@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              There is a difference between attacking someone who chooses a disgusting belief system and bigotry.

              Bigotry is thinking, what I believe is right and everyone who believes differently is wrong.

              To point at all varieties of Christianity and say, “you are bad,” is being bigoted.

              Now go restore Roe v. Wade or you are useless to me.

              If you want someone useful here are some people that agree with you and will help you fight, assuming you can manage to not call their belief system disgusting to their faces:

              Rev. Angela Williams, a Presbyterian pastor and the lead organizer of SACReD: Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity, told Healthline that faith leaders and religious groups that support abortion rights have been preparing for this moment for a long time.

              https://www.healthline.com/health-news/meet-the-religious-groups-fighting-to-save-abortion-access

              Members of the Episcopal Church (79%) and the United Church of Christ (72%) are especially likely to support legal abortion, while most members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (65%) also take this position.

              https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/01/22/american-religious-groups-vary-widely-in-their-views-of-abortion/

              • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                1 year ago

                Episcopalians are less than 2% of the US population. Jewish people and LGBT people are a bigger voting bloc. Using one of the most liberal and one of the smallest Christian denominations as evidence for what Christianity in the US is like is intentionally misleading, when more than 10x as many Americans consider themselves Evangelicals (about 1/4th).

                • Nahvi@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  as evidence for what Christianity in the US is like is intentionally misleading

                  If I was trying to claim that is that standard view, then it would be misleading. Since I was actually claiming that there are a wide variety of beliefs among Christians, some even aligning with your values, it is pretty spot on representation. Treating them all the same is prejudicial behavior.

                  A fair-minded person would give an individual a chance to act like an asshole before treating them like trash.

                  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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                    1 year ago

                    A fair minded person would see that the predominant effect that all sects of Christianity has on the US these days is negative, and that’s largely due to the evangelical/Nationalist Christian wing. And sure; they might not be the numerical majority of “all Christians in the US”, but they are having a disproportionately large impact on the rest of Christianity in the country, as well as the country as a whole.

                    So sure: you can sit here and whinge all you want about how it’s unfair that people are becoming more and more hostile towards Christians because a subset of them are giving all the others a bad name (huh… where have we seen this dynamic before? Perhaps sometime in the early 2000s, in the context of a related but distinct Abrahamic monotheistic religion…?), but when an extremist sect does evil shit and the rest of the denomination does pretty much fuck-all to stop it, people are going to take an increasingly dim view of the religion as a whole. People don’t like it when you do shitty things to them. That’s just humans being humans.

                    Put another way: I’ll stop pre-judging Christians in America as hypocrites of the highest caliber once they can get their own fucking house in order, because right now it looks a distressingly large proportion of them are doing their level best to tear the fucking country apart in some nihilistic pursuit of hastening the end times so they can get raptured to heaven or some shit like that.

          • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Well hey maybe religious people should stop consistently hurting other humans and society in general because they think their imaginary friend would be down with it.

            • Nahvi@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              It sounds an awful like you are saying, “Well yeah, we are bigots, but we are bigots because they deserve it!”

              Am I misunderstanding you?

              • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                Yes, you are misunderstanding me.

                I’m saying that religion has a richly documented history of intolerance and repression, up to and including the present day. I am simultaneously saying that I am intolerant of intolerance.

                I feel like you should read up on this if you’re still struggling to wrap your head around the nuance of what pretty much everyone else in this comment tree besides yourself is expressing.

        • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Tangentially, my go-to aphorism when some American Christian starts whinging about how “persecuted” they are:

          get off the cross, we need the wood.

          And to be clear: any Christian in the US claiming “persecution” should be viewed with the same seriousness as white, upper-middle class people claiming everyone racist against white property… because both of those claims are categorically bullshit. Nobody in the US wants to or cares about persecuting white people or Christians. We just want all the Nationalist Christians to get the fuck out of our politics and stop trying to push theocratically-derived laws on the rest of us, because just like we don’t want to live under a Sharia legal system, we similarly don’t want to live under a biblical (or Torah-derived, or any-other-religious-text-derived) law system.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Nope, my pointed disdain for backwards, illogical, regressive, exclusionary, predatory cults is showing. I don’t have a problem with religious people as long as they don’t force their shit onto others. Nationalist Christians are trying to force their bullshit theocracy onto the whole country, and that’s very fucking far from ok.

        For the record, I was raised catholic, and I noped the fuck out of that bullshit once I got old enough to ask incisive questions. Maybe you should too.