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God the Father of All Mankind - 08042022
by 
The Cathedral and Parish of The National Shrine of Our Lady of China
But I want to share with you two ikons of God the Father
I just had a kind of reunion with the latter image. It's like I forgot that it is God the Father, but it is God the Father, and the drawing of the latter was shown after some visions from a Nun.
The first one I just thought it is kinda cool, since it is God the Father through our imaginations. And interesting about it is the colour white.
I think both images are really cool and I want to remind that life is not sad or boring or hell. Because we have a Father who made us, He who is All Good, Almighty, and is Our Father through Jesus Christ whom he begot. And the love that we see and cannot see, and feel and cannot feel; and the beauty of creation and it's complexity and intricacy; is just something that we should always remember, because it is good and joyful. God would want us to be happy.
A reading, Galatians 4:6, NRSVACE
And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!'
What father would not want us to call him affectionately as "Father," or "Papa," or whatever it is in our native tongue? What more is Our Father who Art in Heaven?
Very nice, I love my icons of God the Father.
Fredgast, Attike, Cretoia-Slrathria, and Insulusia
God is good!
Praise Jesus!
Attike, Novi comi res publica, Insulusia, and Geadhland
Holy God, we praise thy name.
God of all, we bow before thee.
All on earth your scepter claim;
all in heav’n above adore thee.
Infinite thy vast domain,
everlasting is thy reign.
Hark, the loud celestial hymn,
angel choirs above are raising.
Cherubim and seraphim,
in unceasing chorus praising,
fill the heav’ns with sweet accord:
Holy, holy, holy Lord.
Lo! the apostolic train
join thy sacred name to hallow.
Prophets swell the glad refrain,
and the blessed martyrs follow,
and, from morn till set of sun,
through the church the song goes on.
Holy Author, Holy Word,
Holy Spirit, three we name thee;
still, one holy voice is heard:
undivided God, we claim thee,
and adoring bend the knee,
while we own the mystery.
Fredgast, Attike, Novi comi res publica, The Pilgrims in the Desert, and 1 otherInsulusia
I love the rendition of this by the Singing Nuns
Fredgast, Attike, Novi comi res publica, and Insulusia
Given the region's recent change in policy, I dropped my WA membership and added two region tags: Anti-World Assembly and Anti-General Assembly.
Castle Federation, Fredgast, Qwertyl, Attike, and 5 othersCristero, The Pilgrims in the Desert, Insulusia, Beiranoah, and Geadhland
I guess it’s just because I’m new, what does all this mean?
Fredgast, Attike, The Pilgrims in the Desert, Insulusia, and 1 otherJohnpaulopolis
The region passed legislation which advised against members being part of the WA.
Christian Democrats, Fredgast, Attike, The Pilgrims in the Desert, and 3 othersJohnpaulopolis, Crusading qwertylians, and Geadhland
Indeed, the WA mandates numerous social policies at odds with Catholic social teaching. For example, the WA requires national governments to provide free abortions on demand and "fully subsidised assisted suicide services." It also requires national governments to teach schoolchildren that "variance in sexual orientation, romantic orientation and gender identity is normal and natural . . . that non-heterosexual relationships are equal to heterosexual ones . . . [and] that one's gender is determined by their gender identity, rather than their sex assigned at birth."
Fredgast, Attike, The Pilgrims in the Desert, Insulusia, and 4 othersJohnpaulopolis, Ottovanus, Beiranoah, and Geadhland
Personally, I’m going to remain in the World Assembly, the same way as the Holy See is a permanent observer of the UN. I obviously don’t support the policies of the WA, but in a perspective of Realpolitik I think that remaining could be useful to support the few acceptable resolutions and in case to help a hypothetical Catholic movement. Obviously, if a Catholic World Assembly is established, as 
Castle Federation wishes, I’ll be honoured to join it. And, last but not least, if the Core of Catholics expressly forbids to remain in the WA, I’ll resign in a spirit of obedience.
Thanks for understanding,
Novi comi res publica
Post self-deleted by Geadhland.
I have no intention to advocate mandating the withdrawal of individual nations from the WA. I think ultimately, that is a question for the conscience. I realized, however, that it became impossible for the region of Catholic as a whole to endorse being a part of it sense there is no way in game to take part in World Assembly affairs without the current policies being legal in a nation. Sadly, the WA has no observer status as a game mechanic. It's even sadder that Nation States has tied regional security to the World Assembly delegacy in regions where there is no founder or the founder has gone inactive. We are blessed to not suffer from that dilemma here.
As for the development of an alternative to the WA, that will take some time and some thinking. It won't be able to be done on site, but that then begs the question of where it is to be done and just how it is to be structured and carried out. It's a significant task but one deserving of the time and effort.
What about creating a region like Pro Life International
I think there’s a nationstates court region
This hypothetical one could serve as the Catholic WA superregion
Perhaps, though resolution drafting spaces, voting, and the like would still go unaccounted for. Most of NS takes place on Discord and forums these days while the website itself has become tangential to the political goings on of the wider community.
Christian Democrats, Attike, Novi comi res publica, Insulusia, and 1 otherGeadhland
Thanks! I'll join discord one of these days.
Attike, Insulusia, and Geadhland
For a time, a player operated an independent plug-in that included a "regional assemblies" feature. It's a feature that I wish NationStates, at some point, would add. NationStates already has a system to verify players' identities. That's how it detects WA "multis." If the game administrators were up to the task, they could re-purpose the same verification system and allow regions to have their own assemblies.
However, major changes on this game are often slow to come about. For example, the moderation team has been 
saying for more than a year that NationStates will eventually allow new nations to spawn in user-created regions. Everyone is still waiting for the change.
At the risk of sounding like a fuddy-duddy, this game was a lot better in the past. The two worst developments in this game's history have been the death of ZetaBoards and the birth of Discord. In the past, most regional activities occurred on ZetaBoards sites, and the inconvenience of setting up and maintaining profiles on multiple sites naturally limited the number of regions in which a player could reasonably participate. When ZetaBoards died, regions lost a lot of their cultural uniqueness. And when Discord was born, players could more easily participate in a large number of regions at the same time. The combined effect of these developments was a further consolidation of power in the hands of a small group of players.
Over-concentration of political power has always been an issue on this game, but in recent years, it's become especially problematic. With Discord, a core group of a few dozen players effectively controls all the major regions. If you created a Venn diagram of memberships in all the major regions, the overlap would be substantial. You'd find that the same players control all the power centers on the game. It might not be true in the real world, but in NationStates, there really is a global political order controlled by a small group of global elites.
And it's not just my imagination. Look at the numbers of WA delegates over the past decade:
2022: 940 delegates
2021: 874 delegates
2020: 1,063 delegates
2019: 1,044 delegates
2018: 1,361 delegates
2017: 1,437 delegates
2016: 1,531 delegates
2015: 1,228 delegates
2014: 1,083 delegates
2013: 1,253 delegates
If we take the number of delegates to be a rough approximation of the number of active regions, the game has basically seen a 40% decline since 2016. But the true scope of the problem is even greater. Discord was born in 2015, and ZetaBoards died in 2018. With those two changes, middle-tier regions were basically annihilated. Active players flooded into the game-created regions and a handful of user-created regions, and the number of "powerful" regions dropped severalfold. Nowadays, there's no real balance or diversity on the game. You just get slightly different flavors of the exact same product. You have a few powerful regions with overlapping memberships, a lot of small regions, and almost nothing in between.
Auralia, Castle Federation, Attike, Novi comi res publica, and 3 othersCristero, Ottovanus, and Geadhland
Post self-deleted by Geadhland.
That certainly explains how the political leanings in the mainstream regions of NationStates remain so monolithic. The ironic appeal to unique individuality makes most of those types quite unextraordinary and a reinforcer of unobserved group thinking.
Attike, Insulusia, and Geadhland
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