Welcome. 🤗

Well, I didn't know that. Never heard of him before.

My experience with Christians has been very negative. When my disability benefits were wrongfully stopped, after selling all my possessions I ended up so destitute I couldn't afford food. The local food bank is very time consuming and difficult to access, and often closed. After relying on the food bank for a while I fainted in the street and ended up being diagnosed with multiple nutritional deficiencies. In desperation I turned to Christian organisations. I tried local churches but was very rudely turned away. I tried a huge Christian forum with thousands of members - just asking for help accessing Christian food pantries if there are any - and was insulted and given no help. I was told to "man up and sort your own problems out," told that I shouldn't even get disability benefits in the first place because "that's socialism," and when I told them I was so desperate for food that I had turned to shoplifting, I was told to repent and confess my crimes or I would deservedly go to hell. They would not help me. I got so desperate that I joined an online suicide pact forum, wanting someone to help me take my life (I had tried before an failed, so wanted to make sure it got done properly.) Several people made pacts with me but they always let me down at the last minute. Starving and totally desperate, I offered for sale on the forum the only thing I had left, my prescribed medications. For that, I was banned, but just before I got banned one of the members told me about mutual aid and suggested I try hexbear, (which is also how I came to find lemmy.)

The response from people here couldn't be more different than the Christians. The vast majority of people have been empathetic and unjudgmental and multiple people have helped me out with food and other items I need. Sometimes it can take weeks and multiple posts to get a response, but usually someone eventually comes through. I can't even imagine what I would have done without the help from here. People here have shown more kindness and solidarity than any of the Christians.

Life is so miserable here I would consider it a blessing to be sent to the gas chamber at this point. I honestly wonder why they don't legalise assisted suicide, they clearly want us dead. It would be kinder than killing us slowly as they do now.

It took the medical establishment three and a half years to diagnose my cancer. Because they refused to do any tests because I was "too young for it to be anything serious." That whole time I was getting sicker and sicker and being accused of being a hypochondriac. Doctors are idiots.

Thanks. I'm not going to get better though, I'll be taking cancer and thyroid meds for life and the side effects seem to be degenerative, I'm getting worse all the time. They've already caused me to have a stroke and they say I'm in danger of another. That was a whole thing with the NHS too. After my stroke I had to wait so long for physiotherapy that the damage is permanent. I'll never be able bodied again. Which means I will be dealing with the NHS and all the stress that causes for the rest of my life.

Sorry to hear about your wife. The capitalist society we live in really does make being ill much worse than it needs to be. In fact my biggest worry is always finances. I actually got zero points on my benefit reassessment despite being in active cancer treatment, learning to walk again after the stroke and being left partially sighted by the stroke.

Not just the elderly, the sick and disabled, even children. There have been so many news reports of children starving, even bringing empty lunchboxes to school and pretending to eat because their parents can't afford to feed them and they're ashamed for their classmates to know. Multiple news reports of disabled people starving to death after their benefits were stopped. But somehow, always enough for wars, royalty and all kinds of waste like the time the government wasted £10 billion on useless PPE during covid that had to be thrown away.

Definitely. I've had several refuse to write me letters for my benefit claims, even though I am diagnosed. It would cost them 5 minutes to do. It costs me everything when they don't. They just don't care. And when my current one found out I've been feeding myself by begging for food vouchers on here, she looked at me with utter contempt and said I have to stop doing that. Like OK, I'll just starve then. They really don't care if I'm starving, destitute and homeless. Then she gets angry that her silly "therapy" hasn't cured me.

Thanks. I also got a migraine today from being forced to go in a perfume/bleach smelling room. I hate that place.

I'm not sure. My previous therapist, who I saw at the same place in 2019 (and who was also terrible), admitted she wasn't even qualified yet. If you don't have to be qualified to work as an NHS therapist I don't know whether you have to be licensed.

I thought Ukraine had given up their nukes?

It's bonkers to me that some people have billions while I often go hungry purely due to lack of money. Why can't people see how unnatural this is? Has anyone read the Earth's Children series by Jean Auel? It's about cavepeople, but it's such a prime example of how society should be. No-one owns land, everyone is free to hunt and forage as they see fit. The only things people own are basic things like their clothes and arts and crafts that they make and trade with each other. It would be crazy to them if someone said "This land is now mine, you must pay me 50% of all your arts and crafts if you want to live here, pick the plants here or hunt the animals that live here." And yet, somehow the course of human history has led us to a place where a few have more money than they can spend in a lifetime, while millions starve. Why are we standing for this?