this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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United States | News & Politics
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You gotta lose the christian mindset. Change isn't a decision made in your heart and publicly announcing your intentions to everyone.
Change is parity. Change is years of material, real-world, actions building up to show a fundamentally different person.
No, no one can ever be redeemed. But yes, people can show they are a fundamentally different person by working hard for years.
You've got me in your first two paragraphs but lose me in the third. I agree that people can show that they're a fundamentally different person through hard work and successful change, but not that redemption is impossible.
I often like to return to the thought experiment of "if starting now everyone lived forever, how long would we imprison people for their crimes?" Also, we know Plattner was part of multiple evil organizations, but what do we actually know he did for them, because I genuinely don't know.
Being part of the evil organization is a material action of support.
I mean that you have to lose the liberalism inherent in western culture.
Liberal idealism tells us that only ideas matter - that someone can be redeemed by having and expressing the right ideas. Socialism is at odds with this view. A materialist view would say that the track record of actual actions (not words) can cause a cumulative qualitative change.
So no, redemption (a singular act/expression by which one becomes redeemed) is not real.
That's a valid critique. His track record of change doesn't really extend past promises that he's different.
I agree, thanks for hearing me out!
That's how a dialectic is supposed to work, right? Rational back and forth to narrow down the truth?