Comments by "John Goldsworthy" (@johngoldsworthy7635) on "Philadelphia Police Detail Arrests Of Armed Men Near Ballot-Counting Facility | NBC News NOW" video.

I don't think I'd want to see a crooked ballet. Dancers should be graceful, not bow-legged.
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Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millenia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to 'hasten the inevitable,' not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion. Faith is the fatigue resulting from the attempt to preserve God's integrity instead of one's own. Religion is a group of scam artists that sell the calming idea that your body is a temple of God, while your mind belongs to them.
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Beware of those who profess devotion to God. Their feigned piety is often the camouflage for their vileness and evil. The worst thing to ever happen to faith was religion. Faith is the belief in something based on ZERO facts. Evangelicals are the largest white supremacist group in America. Remember, half of trump's* support comes from "end times" Christian fundamentalists. They are happy to see Trump bring the end of humanity closer, as it will bring the Good Lord to rapture them from the earth.
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@Maureen-ji8bq There is no god, you utter moron!!!
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I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture. Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
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One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all. “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” “There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
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“Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.” “To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries”
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“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.” “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” “The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.”
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“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” “We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.” “Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.”
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“I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.” “The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.” “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. - Hitchens 3:16”
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“How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.” “Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”
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I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture. Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all. “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” “There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.” “Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.” “To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries” “Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.” “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” “The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.”
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Everyone has the right to believe whatever they want. And everyone else has the right to find it f*cking ridiculous. God doesn’t prevent terrible things because: A) He can’t B) He doesn’t want to C) He causes them D) He doesn’t exist I’ve never been insulted by hateful Satanists for not believing in their devil. Only by loving Christians for not believing in their God.
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@Maureen-ji8bq I'm sorry that you're such a f**king moron!!!
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“My belief is that, morally, God and Satan are vaguely on the same page. According to the common understanding of Satan's origins, 'holiness' is, metaphorically, frozen stiff in his veins: and at that a corrupted formula - i.e. legalism. The vital difference is that God is willing to offer grace for our sins; he delights in grace. God is the one and only holy and just punisher of sin, yes, but that is partly so because punishment for the sake of punishment is not something he loves. Whereas Satan, as the accuser, and as it is written, actually seeks God's permission to punish; he, being a seasoned legalist, delights in finding wrongs and will defy his own morality just to expose immorality. This is why both the anti-religious soul and the violently religious soul are, whether consciously or unconsciously, and sadly enough, glorifying their biggest hater: Satan is not only a lawless lover of punishing lawlessness, but also the sharpest theologian of us all. He loves wickedness, but only because he loves punishing wickedness.” Christianity is the most anti science , anti reason , anti rationality faith system after Islam Yes , Newton was Christian but his findings were not the result of Bible. In fact he rejected everything that did not fit his Christian world view including quantum physics , equal rights to non Christians and atheists etc.
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“I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough – I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race.” “Life is meaningful; death is meaningless and religion’s greatest betrayal to the humanity is that it gave a meaning to death, it wrongly made the death as meaningful! Declaring an ultimate ‘end’ as a hopeful ‘exit’ to somewhere is the biggest crime of the religion!”
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“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” “People don't believe in God because it's true, but because they were the victims of early childhood indoctrination.” “Televangelists preach a corrupted perversion of Christ's socialist teachings. Prosperity gospel is predatory capitalism masquerading as religion.”
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“Religion springs from man's feeling of inferiority.” “In order to create a hatred-free society, the upcoming generations must receive authentic knowledge about the evolution of gods. Schoolbooks must teach the origin of life, anthropology and a brief history of each major religion. Students must learn when, why and how humans invented gods and religions” “The gods we ourselves have created ruled us for centuries! What a great comedy! And what a great tragedy!” “Real atheist is not the one that does not believe in an imaginary big monkey, but the one that gives the imagination more importance than the reality.”
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"All thinking men are atheists." - Ernest Hemmingway "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." Mohandas Gandhi "Born again?! No, I'm not. Excuse me for getting it right the first time."
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"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." - Friederich Nietzsche "The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." Friederich Nietzsche "It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it." - John Adams
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"The world holds two classes of men - intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence." "Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." - Isaac Asimov "The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites." - Thomas Jefferson
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"Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility." "Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration--courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth." "Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain."
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"If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced?" - Percy Bysshe Shelley "Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world." - Voltaire "Faith: not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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"The being we call god is merely a pawn working for a powerful and rational force in some far-off galaxy. This force is trying to weed out people who are irrational by seeing who would be stupid enough to believe in his god illusion so easily. Those that believe in this illusion, he will send to eternal damnation and he will deliver the rational beings, those who stoically refused to believe in a god, to heaven." "God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it." I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
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God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. - Voltaire To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance. A country dominated by televangelism would be unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers, who envisioned religion as personal and spiritua, not social and political. No particular variety of religion was intended to control the political agenda, to set the community's moral tone or to judge who are the true believers and members of our society. But this is precisely the objective of the electric church.
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I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability. - Oscar Wilde "Since no one really knows anything about God, those who think they do are just troublemakers." Religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do.
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"I'm proud to be an atheist - it helps me stand for so much more and fall for so much less." "Atheism is a requirement for a complete human being. Religion is a crutch that is shackled to you, one you never really needed in the first place, but were convinced by others that you couldn't live without. Once you discover it's only an illusion, that it's not even a real crutch, you discard it gladly." "If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.”
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"Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits." --Dan Barker, former evangelist "Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, 'atheist' is a term that should not ever exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a 'non astrologer' or a 'non-alchemist'. We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to 'never doubt the existence of God' should be obliged to present evidence for his existence-and, indeed, for his BENEVOLENCE, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day."
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"Religion is the opium of the masses." Karl Marx Heaven will be a great place as long as you keep the Christians out. “Hence today I believe I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator” –Adolph Hitler "History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it."
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If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests. "Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do.. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! ..But He loves you."
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"When one person suffers from delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called Religion." "The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on nothing; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing." As far as I can tell from studying the scriptures, all you do in heaven is pretty much just sit around all day and praise the Lord. I don’t know about you, but I think that after the first, oh, I don’t know, 50,000,000 years of that I’d start to get a little bored.
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Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for Atheism ever conceived. - Isaac Asimov Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions. Since no one really knows anything about God, those who think they do are just troublemakers. "Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy." - Ambroce Bierce
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If much of the Bible gets ignored because it is morally irrelevant, immoral, outdated, or factually wrong, another portion gets ignored because it sets the bar too high, like putting divorce on par with—omg—homosexuality. If you want to send a conservative Bible-believer into a froth, try suggesting Jesus was a socialist. Then, when he goes all Jehovah on you, quote from the book of Ephesians. Most of the Bible is neither horrible nor inspiring. It was simply dull and irrelevant: long genealogies written by men obsessed with racial purity; archaic stories about ancient squabbles over real estate and women; arcane rituals aimed at pleasing a volatile deity; folk medicine practices involving mandrakes and dove's blood; superstition that equated cleanliness with spiritual purity and misfortune with divine disfavor; outdated insider politics. On top of that, it was badly written, with some stories garbled and others repeated, though rarely in complete agreement about the facts. The Bible's supposed author seemed like a psychological mess, and I found myself irritated. With a finite number of pages to set the course of human history, this was the best He could do?
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Faith means not wanting to know what is true. — Friedrich Nietzsche The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. — George Bernard Shaw "This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it." - John Adams Religion can never reform mankind, because Religion is slavery. People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs.
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Why is it often that, when someone points out the lies of another person, the person who lied gets angry, rather than abashed. Never is this more apparent than when the lie pointed out is a lie to oneself, and the anger never more fierce than when the lie is one of religion. If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people "When you understand why you don't believe in other people's gods, you will understand why I don't believe in yours."- Albert Einstein
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"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms." - Albert Einstein "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can change this." - Albert Einstein
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If we are to believe the Bible, god created a flood that nearly wiped out all of mankind, taking genocide to epic proportions. Why then is god worshipped and Hitler, who committed genocide on a smaller scale, labelled evil for similar acts? Religion is a tool used by oligarchs for millennia to keep the masses obedient, "tithing" and to be comfortable not questioning scientific fact. It's an insidious tool that has caused the death of hundreds of millions and untold amounts of suffering. People not raised with this cult deformation of their moral outlook are kind to others, generous and helpful just because it's the right way to be a good human, not from some bizarre notion that we will be punished if we do not. If there was a God that punished evildoers, the planet would be free from evildoers. To solve that inconsistency , religious "leaders" invented a convenient boogie man who is constantly trying to foil God's efforts, neatly enabling the whole flawed concept to flourish. We do not see face healers working in hospitals for the same reason we do not see psychics winning the lottery. The scam only works in the context in which they have enabled their ruse. Turn your well-meant intentions to actual constructive efforts.
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@Maureen-ji8bq You're a credulous f**king moron!!
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Modern Christians may talk about God as a loving father, or even a Jesus buddy, the kind you'd want to play golf with, but in reality Bible-God goes out of his way to be intimidating. Worse, he appears to lose control of his temper at times, lashing out like an oversized thwarted three-year-old; and his earthly representatives—including Jesus—do the same. Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. "Get out of here, baldy!" they said. "Get out of here, baldy!" He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. 2 Kings 2:23-25 NIV Early in the morning, as Jesus was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, "May you never bear fruit again!" Immediately the tree withered. Matthew 21:18-22 NIV
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The reality is that the Bible says much more in support of slavery than against it. Even the New Testament Jesus never says owning people is wrong. Instead, the Bible gives explicit instructions to masters and slaves. Awkward. You may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way. Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT
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"If the Bible Were Law Would You Qualify For the Death Penalty?" It identified 35 different offenses that earn a person capital punishment in the Bible. Hint: You probably qualify. And so does the dog who belongs to your kinky neighbor. If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die. Deuteronomy 21:18-21
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“I see Atheists are fighting and killing each other again, over who doesn't believe in any God the most. Oh, no..wait.. that never happens.” “Remember, when you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It is only painful for others. The same applies when you are stupid.” “Beliefs do not change facts. Facts, if one is rational, should change beliefs.”
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