When The penny drops.
- By Jipsah
- General Theology
- 17 Replies
Unlikely.Or is it because in evangelicalism, they are presented with a more Biblical Christianity
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Unlikely.Or is it because in evangelicalism, they are presented with a more Biblical Christianity
There have been a number of whistle blowers etc and direct confessions from as i recall, at least 10 years ago, that they aim for the knees..Nonsense, they're shooting civilians every, single day. They aren't all "accidents" of war by any measure.
If you're advocating listening to modern prophets, then I warn you, they are a dime a dozen - meaning all self-proclaimed prophets and self-proclaimed apostles are false. But the reason why people want to believe in prophets who "have a word from God" for them is because they are lazy and impatient, and want a shortcut to God's will for them without the blood, sweat, and tears of learning the Bible and what God says is His will there.View attachment 367961
If we are going to be sharing with others the truth of the gospel of Christ and the truth of the Scriptures, we need to make certain that we are getting our truth from the Scriptures, and not just from human beings, no matter how famous they may be. For the Scriptures teach that God will also speak to us through the Holy Spirit.
I’ll probably just go, if I can get myself out of the house.I don’t want to see that. Freaks me out.
Thats part of the problem right there: that human behavior should be governed by a comprehensive list of divine shalls and shall nots - which is the impression you get from earlier parts of the Bible. But the overall intent for correct human behavior that I get from Jesus' words and example can be summed up by: love God and love your neighbor.It does, until you consider that there are a multitude of concepts that aren't covered in the red font. (Red font referring to the words that were supposedly spoken by Jesus)
I've heard that same argument leveraged before, things along the lines of "Jesus never said anything about homosexuality or abortion" (just to name examples)
...but neglect to acknowledge that's true of many modern contentious topics.
People operating on the premise that silence on an issue implies neutrality or even approval of one perspective seems like it would be deeply flawed.
I think the point is neither side is very popular at the moment.I thought this thread was about Democrats
lol The only people that support it are the Dems.A website that's unaffiliated with the Dems is not a policy.
Romans 1, refers to all mankind. Why would a gentile have a different "salvation" experience to a Jew?Actually yes and no. In Romans 1, them refers to only gentiles while in 2 Thessalonians 2 it refers to those living after the Holy Spirit is removed from the world and the great apostasy happens. Both refer to times without the ability to walk in the Spirit.
It is your intentions that matters. You did not intend it negative.So, basically, my friend and I are super close. Like, we've known each other since first grade. We are both Christian, and enjoy quick Bible studies, often over lunch. And, one day, we decided to eat at Panera. If you aren't familiar with the place, just know that most of the items on the menu either come with bread on the side or are in between bread. So we both hauled our Bibles over to Panera and got some food. I don't remember the exacts of what either of us ordered, but those are irrelevant to the story. Whatever I ordered came with a side bread, which my friend really wanted a portion of, so we agreed to split it. As I split the bread, I jokingly said 'this is my body' as a reference to Jesus' famous line to get in the mood for, you know, studying Jesus. He looked a little caught off-guard, but laughed and took the bread. I don't think he was offended by any means, and it may just have been he didn't hear, but the thought's been sticking with me since. Was I blasphemous? I'd appreciate if someone could tell me and, if so, what I can do better next time.
For not talk about how the so called MRNA CRISPR CASPR CUTS OUT bits of our DNA and inserts their own. And how they found out Gods name is written on our DNA and how it changes the name of the DNA(yes 666) when cut.Exactly!
And the Bible does give the title of an ancient Book known as The Book of Jasher. I do not know if the modern Book of Jasher is the same as the one that was given in the Bible but surely it must at minimum be a part of that ancient book.
Book of Jasher chapter four verse eighteen sounds like it could imply CLONING? If we have people with even more capability than Dr. Einstein living many centuries we can know that technology increased rapidly as the world population grew before the Flood of the time of Noah.
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Book of Jasher, Chapter 4 | Sacred Texts Archive
Christianity: 1 And all the days that Enoch lived upon earth, were three hundred and sixty-five years.sacred-texts.com
this is what many christians say and those who research the topic and go into details about it. As we see now how they try to mess with the genes again, it would not surprise me. Especially, as Jesus say, as in the days of Noah and mentions he was the only one "pure". well pure must have meant DNA, it can`t just have meant generally as he was the ONLY one.@PatrickTate said
Is this where we got all the creatures such as the centaurs from ?
No wonder God wanted to flood the earth to be rid of...............
I find this sad. Although we can have our this is right this is not ways, I always try to remind myself, we actually do not deepest down know who is going to be in heaven or not because we do not know their hearts.I was told by a higher up in the small denomination I used to attend that he did not consider me a sister in Christ because he was taking the church liberal and I was a conservative. I think that crossed the line.
I believe you are right in that. Maybe a meet up group outside church would be better as well. I got too big heart man to not feel with the ones suffering. Not the type to walk pass, like the story of the man on the road.I feel for you as well. I believe small groups, small churches are better for relationships and comfort. I was raised in a small church!!! There is a difference.
I think that topic was pretty far down the list for most people.The Gaza genocide was a big problem for the Democrats. The Schumer faction and traditional Democrat faction are pro-Israel while the others were anti-genocide.
A website that's unaffiliated with the Dems is not a policy.Sure you can.
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Defund The Police
Abolishing the police does not mean the abolishing of community safety.defundthepolice.org
It’s not special pleading, it’s applying consistent reasoning. Whenever we see complex, functional information or a cause for a beginning, we infer intelligence or cause. Rejecting design before examining the evidence is itself a philosophical bias. That’s the real issue here.
That may be the case, but I have seen it in a general context, where they are afraid of letting you in, generally. Not saying all, but, I am not the only one who have said itPlease explain:
"Too many women afraid the other women take their men that are single."
Do you mean there are married/attached women who are afraid that the single women will take their married/attached men if more attention was on single life in the church?
This is heresy in 2025.Being able to remember the last 60 years, yeah, I do.
I distinctly remember a time when a Republican controlled Congress would have told a Republican president, "No, Mr. President. We are the US Congress, not your lackey."
Well that is certainly a highly considered reply. And I read it and appreciate it.I don't know that Christian doctrine discourages that. The idea that God's revelation of Himself is "progressive" through history, culminating in Jesus who is THE Revelation of God is, last I checked, considered normative.
Though this can come down to the theological tradition/denomination of Christianity one is part of; as a Lutheran I would subscribe to the words of Dr. Luther when he says, "We believe the Scriptures for Christ's sake, we do not believe in Christ for the Scripture's sake". That is to say, the meaning and purpose of the Bible is Jesus, the point isn't the Bible for the Bible itself; but because the Bible is ultimately about Jesus and points us to Jesus. Or, going back to St. Augustine, "the Scriptures contain but a single Utterance", the single Utterance of Scripture being Jesus.
The historic Christian doctrinal claim is that Jesus is, Himself, the Divine Word of God. To dig fully into what that means would involve getting into layers of Greek and Jewish philosophical concepts as well as digging into the doctrine of the Trinity; but just on an immediate surface level meaning, to call Jesus the Divine Word made flesh, the Incarnate Logos as we would say, means that Jesus is God's way of making plain Himself.
So when we read Jesus saying things like, "If you have known Me you have known the Father" or where John the Evangelist writes, "No one has every seen God, but the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, has made Him known" or where the author of Hebrews writes, "At many times and in diverse ways God has spoken to our fathers through the prophets, but in these last days has spoken to us through His Son ... who is the radiance of His glory and the exact imprint of His Person" or where St. Paul says, "He is the visible image of the invisible God" it's all pointing to the fact that in Jesus we encounter God in the the clearest way possible. Jesus is how God tells us about Himself, and shows us Himself. To encounter to Jesus is to encounter God (not just in the sense that Jesus is, Himself, God by nature, which is true; but because Jesus as the Son shows us, reveals, and presents unambiguously, who His Father is). What is God like? Well God is like Jesus.
So taking these two things together: The point of the Bible is Jesus, and Jesus is the locus of Divine Revelation, God's own Self-Disclosure; then that means we don't get a full disclosure of God outside of and apart from Jesus--so if I read the Bible sans Christ, I am not going to get a clear image of God. I can only encounter who God really is in Scripture if I understand and read Scripture through a Christocentric lens--reading the Bible through Jesus.
This also means that it is not difficult nor controversial to say that God as He grants people encounter with Himself meets them not in fullness, but in part. Jesus, for example, says that Moses permitted divorce because of the hardness of the human heart--but that this isn't how it was supposed to be from the beginning. That is to say, there is a limited encounter or limited amount of revelation; at least in some sense. God encounters people in the context of their time and culture. Israelite religion looks Near-Eastern not because Near-Eastern culture is superior or itself of Divine origin; but because that is the culture of Israel's historic context at nexus of Egypt, Canaan, and Mesopotamia--and God gives Himself within the context of that culture.
Circumcision, for example, was not a unique invention of the Israelites, there was an already established precedent in some of the cultures of the ancient near east--but in the story of Abraham and in the giving of the Torah, in the establishment of Covenant, circumcision means something specific; it becomes a sign of Covenant, a remembrance of God's promise to Abraham, it cements an identity based on Divine promises. For Christians, we see those covenant promises, God's covenant faithfulness, fulfilled in Jesus; St. Paul sees circumcision as a shadow pointing to the solid reality of Jesus, in which what matters is not foreskin but a transformation of the heart wrought by grace, and the Christian Sacrament of Baptism conveys a crystallization of the encounter with grace--whereby one is made new in Christ, with a new heart, a new conscience, the birth of becoming a new kind of person that is no longer under the bondage of slavery through Adam, but freedom in the Messiah, who has become the New Adam. For Paul this means "circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing"--the foreskin doesn't matter; and even more importantly--whether one is Jewish or one is Gentile isn't what matters, what matters is faith in the Messiah, the transformation that happens by the power of God through Jesus, in which we are becoming partakers of the new creation, for Christ was risen as first-fruits of the resurrection, and when He returns there will be resurrection, and the longing of all creation for renewal and freedom from the futility of death shall come to pass--that's new creation. Early Christian theologians, from the beginning, spoke of the day Jesus rose from the dead as an "8th day of creation" and highlighted the fact that the Torah commands male babies be circumcised on the 8th day as pointing to this--what does an "8th day of creation" mean? That going back to Genesis chapter 1 the story of creation unfolds in 6 days, with the 7th day a day of Divine rest--an 8th day of creation means new creation. If, in Eden we see creation sold over to slavery and futility through Adam and Eve's mishandling of their responsibility to care, steward, and be faithful rulers of God's good creation--then in Jesus there is a reversal of Adam's disobedient act, a healing and fix to the Fall, and ultimately the making-new of all creation. Through Jesus we, even today and right now, are called to become partakers of that new creation through faith, by grace, as we are being conformed to the image of Jesus, looking forward to the Day when God sets all things to rights; that through our forgiveness and call to follow Jesus we are supposed to be agents of transformative love and representatives of God's kingdom, and living lives that are infused with the hope of renewal and resurrection. To live a godly life is not that I might secure my spot in a good afterlife apart from earth; but because it reflects the hope of renewal, the cessation of death, the setting-to-rights of all things by God in a life of hopeful anticipation and confidence that Jesus has overcome death and the wicked powers and principalities are already defeated--I can therefore go and live my neighbor because that is my full human purpose as an Image-bearing creation of God, reflecting the new reality in Jesus, because God desires the full flourishing of His creation, not just of human beings, but the whole of creation ("Be fruitful and multiply").
And none of what I'm saying here is controversial, this is all of it pretty basic historic Christian dogma.
-CryptoLutheran
Does the Apostle John walk in darkness?Some of the verses of 1 John 1 apply to those who walk in sin/darkness. (6,8,10)
I’m not claiming that science explicitly rules out God, but in practice, methodological naturalism does. It assumes all causes must be natural, so any evidence that might point beyond nature is excluded by default.Your entire line of argument here is misleading. The existence of God is not at issue in this forum or in this particular discussion, science does not rule it out either by definition or in practice and doesn't pretend otherwise. Granted, the theory of evolution causes difficulties for some versions of Christian theology, but representing it as ruling out God is dishonest.
You sound very tense. Have a break and make yourself a coffee. Even try going to sleep. It may help.So no evidence then? How surprising. If you actually had evidence you would be falling over yourself to present it rather than coming up with excuses for not presenting it: it's a very common strategy when one has no evidence.
You could prove us all wrong to our stupid fat faces but won't because I'm a meany?
I’m happy to explain or defend any point when there’s genuine dialogue. But there’s a difference between challenging a claim and dismissing every statement with “evidence please”. I’m here for real discussion, not just one-sided pushback.To be fair, you have made a number of assertions as if they were self-evident principles. Since they are not, you might at least engage in conversation on that basis.
You're right that the 1 in 10¹²⁰ figure is based on comparing the observed value of the cosmological constant with theoretical predictions of vacuum energy, but that's exactly the point: the value we observe is vastly smaller than expected, and yet incredibly precise. Even if the constant could vary by a few times and still allow life, it’s still sitting in a narrow life-permitting range, and no one really knows why.Except this is completely false. There is no "part in 10^120" at all. That number is the *ratio* between the measured value of the cosmological constant and one possible source called the "vacuum energy of empty space" as calculated. This either means that the CC is *not* the vacuum energy of empty space, or the calculations are drastically wrong and need fixing. It says nothing about the "fine tuning" of the CC. That we can do from cosmology (as this is a cosmological issue) and the CC could be several *times* larger than the current value without ripping the Universe apart before stars with the potential for life (planets, etc.) could form. The current value has *zero* impact on the ability of our Sun and planet to form, so it could be *zero* (infinitely smaller) without affecting us. Of all of the alleged "fine tunings" the cosmological constant is the most garbage nonsense.
We can't map all possible universes, but that doesn’t erase the fact that our universe permits life only within a very narrow range of conditions. Saying, “Well, we’re here, so of course it looks fine-tuned” (the observer argument) just pushes the question aside.That is a very silly thing for them to say. There is no well defined limit on the landscape of possible universes, no way to compute the probability of any particular universe, no way of knowing how many possible universes exist, and no way to know what kinds of universes could also produce life that isn't quite like our own.
The so-called "fine tuning argument" is the worst argument for god I've ever seen, because even if you can determine that ours is an extremely rare sort of universe with in the large landscape of possible universes where life could form, it still doesn't tell you why it exists that way. After all, the only kind of universe where beings can ask the question "why is the universe one of those rare types of universes with life" is for there to actually be life to ask the question.
Meaning does require a mind. And that’s the point: DNA contains functional, goal-directed information, like instructions to build proteins. We only ever see that kind of specified, purposeful information come from intelligence. So it’s not assuming a mind, it’s inferring one from the kind of information we observe.'Meaningful' requires a mind to assign meaning to it, so you are implying the conclusion (mind/intentionality) in your claim of "meaningful information".
What’s usually observed is modification or duplication of existing sequences, not brand-new functional information from scratch. Small changes within existing systems aren't the same as explaining the origin of complex, specified information, which is what’s at stake.Oh, if genetic information is functional sequences then this is easy. Scientists have observed the evolution of new functional sequences in experimental evolution studies, documented it occurring in nature, and identified multitudes of cases where it's happened in the past.
Honestly, "evolution can't produce functional genetic sequences" is kind of a silly argument to make.
All the general public is asking is that you tone down the "this is absolutely how it happened" responses to a more subtle response
Sure, many textbooks, museums, and science shows present evolution as a settled fact, not a theory open to challenge. Phrases like “we know evolution is true” are common, and alternative views, especially ones involving God, are excluded by default. That’s the double standard being pointed out.Please provide an example of scientists doing that.
It’s not special pleading, it’s applying consistent reasoning. Whenever we see complex, functional information or a cause for a beginning, we infer intelligence or cause. Rejecting design before examining the evidence is itself a philosophical bias. That’s the real issue here.Buddy, your entire argument is nothing but special pleading throughout the whole thing.
Additional reply to this post. All three gospels agree that Jesus was crucified on preparation/parasceueHi Der Alte, I really enjoyed your posts on this thread. According to your photo and comment. you are well into your 80s and I just wanted to know if you are still with us. If so, let me know.
I thought this thread was about Democratsbut then,
195 days into Donald Trump's term
The president's net approval rating is -15%,
down 0.8 points since last week.
40% approve, 55% disapprove, 4% not sure
Last updated on August 3rd 2025
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Donald Trump’s approval rating
Follow our presidential approval rating poll tracker to see how favourably Americans view Mr Trumpwww.economist.com
Are we lost as a country?