I got divorced.
I then met someone and am engaged.
Started reading scripture more heavily.
There is a lot of controversy.

Makes it sound like re marriage is adultery continuously.

Makes it sound like I should return to ex wife, even though I read verses that make it sound as if that isn’t a possibility.

Betrothal sounds like what engagement is today.
Makes me think I’m already re married in Gods eyes.

Deuteronomy 24 1-4 makes it sound as if you couldn’t return to ex wife.
Example: I’m engaged, makes me think as if at some level I’m married.
Or what if she got engaged and didn’t tell me and I find out years later (in the scenario we would be together)



I think to myself because it’s been driving me nuts, am I supposed to be single for the rest of my life.


I met up with my ex wife a few times (my current fiancé knows) to talk get closure etc
And two times we were about to re try our relationship (yes my current fiancé knows)
I am very open about it.

Every time I got close to re kindling with my ex I got pure anxirty
I worries what if I am not allowed to be with her and I find that out and we’re back together or got re married and then it’s real trouble because we just went through prior chaos
So because of that fear and other reasons I decided to not move forward.



The person I’m currently with is incredible,
Is caring wants the best for me encourages me etc


My mind is just in 3 places right now.
I’ve studied the scriptures.
I just feel like I didn’t and can’t get real clarity on this subject.
I’ve prayed numerous times and asked God to make it clear and it just leaves me sitting here wondering what does God want for my life.


All I want to do is honor him
If I am not putting him first then nothing in life matters.


I need true answers and backed up scripturally
Not just cherry picking.

There’s verses in the Old Testament based on certain things I’ve read aside from deutoronomy 24 1-4 and even in New Testament that make me feel that no matter what I do besides being single is wrong.

I do see a psychiatrist and psychologist.


I ask that before you respond to this you would pray and carefully consider your words and advice in general.

By accident, I found this video drop on YouTube. I don't get Fox on TV so I was hoping I could find something covering the debate. This is the whole debate live.
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The Word of God in English Criteria for Excellence in Bible Translation​

By: RYKEN (LELAND).

This author much prefers a literal English translation. How does it compare with Young's Literal Translation and the Literal English Bible?

I bought an dinosaur-egg, it`s said to be around 100 million years old, from the Cretaceous-time, it`s a Segnosaurus-egg, it look a little like T-rex, do you think it`s 6000 years old, still?

Hi there, I guess you could say I'm a new Christian, I'm definitely new to church, and am having trouble figuring out what exactly church is supposed to be about and what I'm supposed to actually do there. To put it bluntly, what's the point?
Coming into it my expectation was...
1) Hear a sermon to teach God's word
2) Interact with and integrate into a community of people who support each other personally and in their faith
3) Participate in charitable works in the community

What I've experienced so far...
1) Check, but then again that could just as well be accomplished on the radio
2) Everybody kind of seems 'in their bubble', i.e. they show up when the service starts, when the service ends they leave and maybe on the way out chat with the same people they always chat to. For example, my ~3rd time at a church, and 1st time in maybe 2 years... during the service there was someone who walked outside, sat against the building, and started crying. My first instinct was 'hey shouldn't someone go talk to that guy?', there were people standing and chatting right next to him, but nobody gave him a glance, so I went and talked to him. When the service ended, overwhelmed by the whole experience, I became that guy. I was outside for 20 minutes or so as 100+ people walked by without a glance or at most a 'drive-by' handshake (as in they didn't even stop walking). There was a really nice older lady who did stop and we had a really good exchange, but I haven't seen her since or had any other meaningful interaction with anyone. Am I supposed to go before the service starts to interact with people? I've tried staying after but it seems everyone just wants to leave.
3) I asked if they needed any help doing things at the church or in any of their community works. It appears I've gotten the ol' runaround in regards to that. Go talk to this guy > go talk to this other guy > he'll pass your info along to that guy and that guy jr. Haven't heard anything back.

Curious about what the forum thinks of the first Republican debates. Who impressed you? What issues were discussed that peaked your interest in the candidate or got you thinking?

I personally did not watch the debates, but I'm interested to hear from those on this forum who did what they thought.

Fears of “social contagion,” used to support anti-transgender legislation, are not supported by science

A recent study claiming to describe more than 1,600 possible cases of a “socially contagious syndrome” was retracted in June for failing to obtain ethics approval from an institutional review board. The survey examined “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” a proposed condition that attributes adolescent gender distress to exposure to transgender people through friends or social media. The existence of such a syndrome has been the subject of intense debate for the past several years and has fueled arguments against transgender rights reforms, despite being widely criticized by medical experts.

The American Psychological Association and 61 other health care providers’ organizations signed a letter in 2021 denouncing the validity of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) as a clinical diagnosis. And a steadily growing body of scientific evidence demonstrates that it does not reflect transgender adolescents’ experiences and that “social contagion” is not causing more young people to seek gender-affirming care. Still, the concept continues to be used to justify anti-trans legislation across the U.S.

ROGD was proposed as a gender dysphoria subtype in a 2018 paper by psychologist Lisa Littman, then at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Littman’s survey asked parents of transgender adolescents—recruited predominantly from anti-transgender websites and forums—to describe their child’s “sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria” and to state if it coincided with increased social media usage or the child’s friends coming out as transgender.

Like the 2018 study that coined the term rapid-onset gender dysphoria, the recently retracted paper, which was published this March in Archives of Sexual Behavior, surveyed parents of transgender children about their children’s experiences.

The participants in both the 2018 and the retracted 2023 studies were recruited from online communities that were explicitly critical about many aspects of gender-affirming care for transgender kids.

Most experts cite the survey of parents rather than transgender children themselves as another major flaw in the methodology of both studies.

Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health at the University of California, San Francisco, Child and Adolescent Gender Center, concurs. “To talk about what children are thinking, feeling and doing, particularly as they get old enough to have their own minds and narratives, you need to interview them,” she says.

“It is not rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” she says. “It’s rapid-onset parental discovery.”

I have recently started reading the bible, as there isn't really much of a Christian community where I live so was wondering if there's an active Christian community online one of you might suggest where one can explore the faith. This site is kinda confusing for me, not sure if it's even active.

23 August 2023

India Lands on the Moon


India has become the first country to land near the Moon's south pole, just days after a Russian spacecraft crashed trying to reach the area.

The spacecraft Chandrayaan-3 will now spend two weeks looking for frozen water, which could support astronauts on future Moon and Mars explorations.

India Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the success, while scientists and officials clapped, cheered and hugged each other as the spacecraft landed.

The success puts India in the league of space powers, and it's become only the fourth country to successfully land on the Moon following US, China and the former Soviet Union.

This was India's second attempt to land a spacecraft on the moon and comes less than a week after Russia's Luna-25 mission failed.

Source

…would you describe your thought process some other way?

Springboard from a different thread.

Montgomery County Public Schools “misled” parents and a federal court about the controversial introduction of LGBTQ-related reading materials for grades as young as pre-kindergarten, according to a Muslim civil rights group.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said documents obtained from the school system via open records requests call into question the district’s claim that a program to allow families to opt students out of LGBTQ-related instruction would be too disruptive for county schools.

And when a Montgomery County-based media outlet asked MCPS to back up the disruption claim, the district could supply “not a single email, not a single chart, not a single number. Nothing at all, about the issue of too many kids opting out … being the reason the opt-out was canceled,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, CAIR’s deputy executive director, during a community webinar aired on social media Tuesday evening.

CAIR also claimed that officials encouraged teachers to “disrupt the either/or thinking” of pupils who voice traditional values in class.

Ephesians 4:25


The Lord Jesus is leading me this morning to take a slightly different approach to this passage of Scripture than usual, but the result will be the same. For there is a very specific falsehood he wants me to address this morning, and that is the lie of the enemy being scattered far and wide concerning his gospel of salvation, and that is widely being embraced by many of those who profess the name of Jesus Christ. And this is the falsehood he is wanting his people to put away, to discard, to get rid of.

For there is a half-truth gospel which is permeating the American church of today, though perhaps not in every gathering of the church. And what it is teaching is in direct opposition to the gospel of the Scriptures which Jesus Christ and his NT apostles taught. For it cuts short the grace of God and it cuts short the gift of salvation, and it cuts short the gospel (Word) of Christ. For it also cuts short moral purity and divine love which prefers what God prefers, which is what is holy, upright, honest, morally pure, and faithful.

But in many cases, it isn’t just cutting short the truth of the gospel and the message of our salvation, and moral purity, holiness, godliness, honesty, and faithfulness, but it is literally cutting these things out of the gospel. And those who are spreading this godless and cheapened form of the gospel are speaking over the truth, i.e. they are drowning out the truth with their lies, and the truth is getting snuffed out while the lies are being widely accepted and embraced and adhered to by many professers of faith in Christ Jesus.

So, what are we to do? We are to reject the lies, and we are to put them away, and then all of us are to speak the truth of the gospel to one another.

So, what is the BIG LIE? It is that we can profess faith in Jesus Christ once in our lives and now all our sins are forgiven (past, present, and future), and heaven is guaranteed us when we die, and nothing can take that away from us, regardless of how we live, and despite the fact that so many are being encouraged that they can continue in deliberate and habitual sin and that it will not be charged against them. And many are even being told that they don’t have to repent of their sins and they don’t have to obey the Lord.

And what is the true message of the gospel of Christ? Jesus said that if anyone would come after him, he must deny self, take up his cross daily (die daily to sin and to self) and follow (obey) him. For if we hold on to our old lives of living in sin and for self, trying to save our own lives, we will lose them for eternity. But, if for the sake of Jesus, we lose our lives, i.e. we die with Christ to sin and we live to him and to his righteousness, in his power, then we have eternal life with him (see Luke 9:23-26; cf. Romans 6:1-23).

And what is the true message of God’s grace? It is that his grace instructs (trains) us to renounce (say “No!” to) ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives while we await our Lord’s return. For Jesus Christ gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works, which are the works God prepared for us to walk in (see Titus 2:11-14; cf. Ephesians 2:10). For Jesus died that we might die to sin and live to his righteousness (1 Peter 2:24; cf. Romans 6:1-23).

For what is the true message of our salvation? It is that by God-persuaded and God-gifted faith in Jesus Christ we are crucified and buried with Christ in death to sin and we are raised with Christ to walk in newness of life in him, no longer as slaves to sin but now as slaves to God and to his righteousness. Therefore we are not to let sin reign in our bodies any longer to make us obey its passions. We are not to continue in sin now that we are under grace. For if sin is what we obey, it will end in death, but if obedience to God is what we obey, it will end in eternal life with God (Romans 6:1-23).

So, does God’s grace to us give us permission or the freedom to keep on in deliberate and habitual sin? God forbid! No, it teaches us to forsake our lives of sin and to now follow Jesus Christ in obedience to his commands (New Covenant). It tells us to cast off the fruitless deeds of darkness and now to walk in holiness and in righteousness, in obedience to our Lord, and no longer in sin. For if sin is what we practice, and if righteousness and obedience to our Lord are not our practice, we will not inherit eternal life with God, regardless of what our lips have professed.

[Matt 7:21-23; Lu 9:23-26; Jn 6:35-58; Jn 15:1-11; Rom 1:18-32; Rom 2:6-8; Rom 6:1-23; Rom 8:1-14; 1 Co 6:9-10; 2 Co 5:10; Gal 5:16-21; Gal 6:7-8; Eph 5:3-6; Col 1:21-23; Col 3:5-11; 1 Jn 1:5-10; 1 Jn 2:3-6; 1 Jn 3:4-10; Heb 10:23-31; 1 Co 10:1-22; Heb 3:1-19; Heb 4:1-13; 1 Pet 1:17-21; Rev 21:8,27; Rev 22:14-15]

Nonetheless, many professing Christians today are deserting the true faith, the truth of the gospel of Christ, and they are abandoning the Christ of the Scriptures. And they are deviating from what the Scriptures teach (in context), and they are abandoning the commandments of the Lord under the New Covenant, and they are charting their own course, instead. So they are wandering, going through life aimlessly while they embrace the lie of the enemy and while they cooperate with the enemy of our souls.

Oh, to Be Like Thee, Blessed Redeemer

Lyrics by Thomas O. Chisholm, 1897
Music by W. J. Kirkpatrick, 1897

Oh, to be like Thee! blessèd Redeemer,
This is my constant longing and prayer;
Gladly I’ll forfeit all of earth’s treasures,
Jesus, Thy perfect likeness to wear.

Oh, to be like Thee! full of compassion,
Loving, forgiving, tender and kind,
Helping the helpless, cheering the fainting,
Seeking the wandering sinner to find.

O to be like Thee! lowly in spirit,
Holy and harmless, patient and brave;
Meekly enduring cruel reproaches,
Willing to suffer others to save.

O to be like Thee! while I am pleading,
Pour out Thy Spirit, fill with Thy love;
Make me a temple meet for Thy dwelling,
Fit me for life and Heaven above.

Oh, to be like Thee! Oh, to be like Thee,
Blessèd Redeemer, pure as Thou art;
Come in Thy sweetness, come in Thy fullness;
Stamp Thine own image deep on my heart.

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Reading this morning through Luke, and in Luke 21:24 Jesus says that Jerusalem would be trodden down by the Gentiles UNTIL the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. Got me to thinking. Clearly the Jews now control all of Jerusalem for the first time since, well at least 130AD, if not 70AD. So are the times of the Gentiles fulfilled? If so, doesn't that mean that we are likely the last generation on Earth before Christ's return?

If God knew that man and woman would eat from the tree of knowledge and evil, why put the tree there? And if he created adam and eve truly sinless then why would they sin? Thats a contradiction. So he created them with sin in the first place. And what about a tree suddenly made them realize they were naked? You are telling me they were sinning before aka naked I guess and just didnt know it till they ate the fruit? Idk if thats a metaphor too because theres no record of any fruit trees making people anymore good or bad. Its just fruit, either edible by our digestive systems or not

An advanced placement course for African American studies will go under further review by the Arkansas Department of Education.

“The department is concerned the pilot may not comply with Arkansas law, which does not permit teaching that would indoctrinate students with ideologies such as Critical Race Theory.”

Districts have until September 8 to send materials like the syllabus, textbooks and teacher resources to the Arkansas Department of Education.

We have members on here who have various views on whether or not we should have the death penalty.
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I will summarize this video
The person in the video murdered an elderly victim, this was unprovoked and completely random
For that crime the judge figured that 8 years would be a sufficient punishment

What do you think of that? Would you feel uncomfortable about a society letting known murderers walk free eventually?

We need to also think here for a moment that since this attack was unprovoked and random, it could have been anybody. And the victim that died was somebody's grandparent.

So I ask all that answers this question to put yourself in the shoes of the grieving family.

Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan is under fire for allegedly colluding with foreign regulators to cramp American businesses with rules crafted by European officials.

“Your agency’s collusion with foreign governments not only undermines U.S. sovereignty and Congress’s constitutional lawmaking authority, but also damages the competitiveness of U.S. firms and could negatively affect the savings of millions of Americans who hold stock in those companies via retirement savings accounts and pension plans,” Mr. Cruz wrote.

Rep. Kevin Kiley, California Republican, questioned Ms. Khan last month about whether she was intentionally picking losing legal fights to create the appearance of insufficient laws.

“You’re actually bringing the cases,” Mr. Kiley said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. “You’re losing because you don’t have the authority that you want from Congress, so this is how you think you’re going to persuade Congress to give you more authority — is by exceeding the authority that you now have?”

I'm not just restricting this to the 2024 election. He's a young guy for a presidential candidate and could certainly try again and again in the future. I saw him for the first time in the Republican presidential debate tonight.

Breaking the glass ceiling for a Hindu candidate is certainly tempting. He has some appeal to the Trump fans due to his anti-woke and anti-ESG policies. He's willing to dump Ukraine in favor of Russia. He wants to get rid of the Department of Education entirely. Big fan of fossil fuels. I'm looking forward to learning more about him.

I'm not wild about his positions in general. He strikes me as another populist instead of a conservative. But I'm afraid I'll have to disqualify him from my vote due to his loud announcement that he would pardon Donald Trump. Interestingly, he also seems willing to pardon Hunter Biden, another thing I would be against.

Sometimes I think we become "hard" in our thinking rather than having "soft hearts."

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I had gotten to the point that I just felt I was going through the motions. I was not "undone" by my sin. I was still trying to love people. I was still trying to do God's will. But something was wrong. My faith felt stale. It had become arguments and propositions rather than feeling it in my heart.

I sensed something was not right. So I cried out to God asking God to make my heart soft again. I did this last night.

Then, today, I was surprised at what I was feeling. God just completely wrecked me when listening to this song.

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I heard the lyrics. I took them in. I made them part of my spirit. I started weeping. God was answering my prayer. It made me reflect on the blood of Christ. I meditated on what it was like for Him to have his flesh torn apart as they were scourging Him. Such a high price. Such a high price Christ paid for our salvation. And a lot of Christians live like the devil in the name of "grace." They take for granted the blood of Christ.

I want to urge you: if you feel you haven't been right with God--if you feel you have just been going through the motions. Give it to Jesus. Ask Him to soften your heart. Maybe you need to forgive some people who have hurt you. Maybe those are even people in the church. Maybe they are even people on this forum. Ask God to soften your heart and Christ will have mercy.

So I ran across a video (didn't watch) asserting that calculator's lie (literally, the videographer's words).

What you find out there in the wild is those that assert PEMDAS before everything else; AND others why PEMDAS is wrong. (Parens, Exponents, Mulitplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction).

Aside: The guy (according to title alone) is asserting that all the engineers and scientists and technologists who had a say in how calculators work, were wrong. Yeah.

Anyway, here's my point: All the click bait arguers out there are missing the point. And it's this, all math exists to represent some reality (or adjacent reality -- not trying to shut down pure math). That is, math is for communication. If your audience can misinterpret what you wrote, you wrote it wrong!! IF someone wrote the above equation to represent something in reality, they either wrote it for the calculator (simplest[?] representation), or they failed to communicate what it was they were trying to calculate.

Thoughts?

This has been doing the rounds over the internet for years, intuition tells us the equation is rubbish as the sum should be infinitely large but was given traction in the early 20th century by perhaps the greatest mathematician in history Srinivasa Ramanujan.

This equation has found its way into physics in the form of bosonic string theory.
In this post quantum field theory describes space-time as being composed of quantum harmonic oscillators, in string theory the sum of the all energies from the infinite number of oscillators is divergent or has an infinitely large value and is therefore useless as a theory.
However if there 26 dimensions which defines bosonic string theory the sum converges to a value of -1/12.

The debate on the validity of this equation is discussed.

2 Corinthians 12:2

I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows.

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Barnes thought Paul was talking about himself:

The reason why Paul did not speak of this directly as a vision which he had himself seen was probably that he was accused of boasting, and he had admitted that it did not become him to glory. But though it did not become him to boast directly, yet he could tell them of a man concerning whom there would be no impropriety evidently in boasting. It is not uncommon, moreover, for a man to speak of himself in the third person. Thus, Caesar in his Commentaries uniformly speaks of himself. And so John in his Gospel speaks of himself, John 13:23-24; John 19:26; John 21:20. John did it on account of his modesty, because he would not appear to put himself forward, and because the mention of his own name as connected with the friendship of the Saviour in the remarkable manner in which he enjoyed it, might have savored of pride. For a similar reason Paul may have been unwilling to mention his own name here; and he may have abstained from referring to this occurrence elsewhere, because it might savor of pride, and might also excite the envy or ill-will of others.

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Similarly Ellicott:

The term “a man in Christ,” as a way of speaking of himself, is probably connected with the thought that “if any man be in Christ he is a new creature” (2Corinthians 5:17; Galatians 6:15).

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Meyer:

I know a man … who was snatched away. Paul speaks of himself as of a third person, because he wishes to adduce something in which no part of the glory at all falls on the Ego proper. And how suitable in reality was the nature of such an event to the modest mode of representation, excluding all self-glory!

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Benson:

I knew a man in Christ — That is, a Christian. He must undoubtedly have meant himself, or the whole article had been quite foreign to his purpose. Indeed, that he meant himself is plain from 2 Corinthians 12:6-7.

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Matthew Henry':

There can be no doubt the apostle speaks of himself.

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Jamieson-Fausset-Brown:

a man—meaning himself. But he purposely thus distinguishes between the rapt and glorified person of 2Co 12:2, 4, and himself the infirmity-laden victim of the "thorn in the flesh" (2Co 12:7). Such glory belonged not to him, but the weakness did.

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Matthew Poole:

man he speaketh of was, doubtless, himself, otherwise it had been to him no cause or ground of glorying at all. Thus several times in Scripture, the penmen thereof speaking in commendation of themselves, they speak in the third person instead of the first. In his saying, it was

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Gill:

I knew a man in Christ about fourteen years ago,.... Which is to be understood of himself, as appears from 2 Corinthians 12:7, where he speaks in the first person; and the reason why he here speaks in the third, is to show his modesty and humility, and how much he declined vain glory and popular applause;

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Pulpit Commentary

I know. A man. St. Paul speaks in this indirect way of himself (see vers. 5, 7).

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Who was caught up to the third heaven?

The scholarship is rather strong that Paul was talking about himself.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said the House could launch an impeachment inquiry as soon as September if the Biden administration doesn’t provide documents to show that President Biden was not involved in his family’s foreign business dealings and did not accept a bribe.

Mr. McCarthy told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow on Tuesday that, “the whole determination here is how the Bidens handle this.”

“If they provide us the documents, there wouldn’t be a need for [an] impeachment inquiry,” Mr. McCarthy said. “But if they withhold the documents and fight like they have now to not provide to the American public what they deserve to know, we will move forward with impeachment inquiry when we come back into session.”

South Carolina's new all-male highest court reverses course on abortion, upholding strict 6-week ban​

The 4-1 ruling departs from the court’s own decision months earlier striking down a similar ban that the Republican-led Legislature passed in 2021.
[The lone female justice retired. And a new, substantially similar, law was passed that addressed one of the concerns of another justice, leading to this 4-1 decision reversing the previous 3-2 one, discussed here:]

South Carolina Supreme Court strikes down abortion ban​

New King James Version, Proverbs 29:2

When the righteous are in authority [H7235], the people rejoice; But when a wicked man rules, the people groan.

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Brown-Driver-Briggs:

1 become many, numerous:
2. a. be great

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I think the English Standard Version is more accurate:

When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan.

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