Yarddog said:

That sounds exactly like how a MAGAist would actually believe.

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and yet - - - you are still missing proof -

fhansen said:

I've done it many times. What you need to do is follow the advice I added to the end of my last post,. Then we'll have something substantive to talk about.

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I'm really not interested in the rhetoric. If my exegesis is wrong, show it from the passage. If you can't do so, then let's give someone else the opportunity.

Bradskii said:

I guess we're at the same point as I got to above. You've now reached the point where the extra judicial killing of someone just because Trump says he can is acceptable. Shoot people on the street? If Trump says it's OK, then sure. Blow up a house because drug dealers use it? If Trump says it's OK, then sure. Take out a few people without having to produce any evidence? If Trump says it's OK, then sure.

Remember when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Ave. And suffer no consequences? Now you're agreeing that he can.

Hard to do that when they've been blown up.

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Emotional hyperbole because you discovered that you did not know where and when Miranda rights apply?

Sif said:

Then in another situation myself and several coworkers used an LLM to help identify an image that lead to the rescue of a kidnapped child.

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Seriously? That's excellent. Nice work.

Sif said:

I have seen the use of AI/LLMs to do some very criminal and very disturbing things.

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I thought they are all programmed to "do no harm" so to speak. Are you talking about some kind of private AI's or something?

linux.poet said:

I think C will work, but perhaps Python and C# are better choices to save on development time? This application needs to handle text, images, and PDF files.

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Don’t use C for that. C is not good at handling text. C is good for writing device drivers and kernel modules where memory has to be managed manually, and occasional assembler is needed to send specific bits of code to the hardware to handle device interrupts. In fact, C is notoriously unpleasant for handling text, except compared to languages that predated it, but C strings are buggy and often lead to memory leaks, buffer overflows and other problems, since any string of characters your program accepts from a file or user input, you have to allocate memory for it, and then remember to de-allocate that memory when you’re done (or else your program has a memory leak) and you also have to control the input the user makes or they can do a buffer overflow attack and use your program to hack the computer its running on, or such overflows can happen accidentally, crashing your program.

Python and C# (and Java, which you indicated you knew) are infinitely better for what you’re talking about. Python also has a very large array of image processing libraries (but Java, C# and the various Javascript platforms like Node.JS, and also Ruby, are fairly competitive).

Dikaioumenoi said:

The only thing I'm interested in is whether you can engage the exegesis and provide a rebuttal.

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I've done it many times. What you need to do is follow the advice I added to the end of my last post,. Then we'll have something substantive to talk about.

David Lamb said:

I would add that molten glass is liquid, not solid anyway.

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Good point, I missed that.

fhansen said:

Unfortunately, it won't.

For myself, your post is one more in a litany of pseudo or semi-scholarly skewings of the Christian faith using quasi-plausible arguments to undermine the historical understanding of passages, changing the faith that hasn’t changed in over 2 millennia simply because it didn't need to, in an effort to support a novel and deficient albeit now popular theology. Christianity received all it needed at the beginning and required no additional man-based help on the basics.

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The only thing I'm interested in is whether you can engage the exegesis and provide a rebuttal.

AI (or as I prefer to call it, LLM) can be an excellent tool. However, it has flaws and can be misused like many tools. I have identified several times an LLM did not process data correctly and provided inaccurate results. Then in another situation myself and several coworkers used an LLM to help identify an image that lead to the rescue of a kidnapped child. Without the use of an LLM the task would have been exponentially more difficult and longer, and that's assuming it could have even been done without the use of an LLM.

I have seen the use of AI/LLMs to do some very criminal and very disturbing things. AI/LLM is a tool and nothing more. It can be used for some pretty good things, some mundane and fun things, and for some very insidious things. Ultimately it is the human behind the AI/LLM that is the benefit or threat.

linux.poet said:

I have a pipe dream program to make that I want to be cross-platform. However, if I can develop it, it will save me thousands of hours of labor and is probably worth at least a million bucks. I need a language that will run into an exe and/or linux repo.

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How computationally intensive is the program going to be? Do you have any idea about that?

Also if you don’t want people reading your source code, you probably want a compiled language, at least at the bytecode level like Java or C#, or perhaps a full compiled language. There are several very user friendly languages that are fully memory managed and produce fast binaries; D is my favorite, but Rust and Go are also very popular, especially Rust. D I particularly like, and a friend of mine is one of the leaders of the D community and wrote several libraries for it; its almost infinitely easier than writing C++ code, and also easier than writing C code, which I have to do * a lot * for my job, developing embedded systems, many of which are running on real time operating systems (in some cases I have to use assembler, or assembler in C, but in all cases careful manual memory management is required). When I don’t have to do manual memory management, I rejoice.

However, if you don’t need the performance, or the obfuscation of your code, that a compiled language provides (and of course, compiled applications like C++, Rust, D, Objective C, Java, C# and so on, can be decompiled), if I were you, I would use Python or one of the Javascript client side options like Node.JS since you already know that.

But if you’re good at Java, you should probably just do that frankly; its probably fast enough for your program, it runs on Linux and Windows and many other platforms, its GUI output has been fully modernized and is now superb, and also, you can use other languages on the Java VM, like on the .NET VM, such as Python, Scala and Clojure, which if you learn them can speed things up. Although I should say the Java implementation of Python is not guaranteed to be compatible with the vast array of libraries people have written for Python, which are the other major reason for using Python - it has a fabulous array of boutique libraries for doing absolutely everything.

However Python programs are scripts, so unless you take special measures, people would find it easier to steal your intellectual property, but they’re going to do that anyway if your software is as good an idea as you think, which it might well be.

Another thing you should consider by the way is that these days, it is increasingly important for Windows for software to be available via Microsoft’s Windows Store, their App Store rip off. It seems probable that Windows will eventually stop allowing users to easily install software not published in that way; I believe this is already the case on some platforms, just as Apple forces you to either jailbreak your iPad and iPhone or run only software from their App Store (and even the Google based Android phone is locked down, the open source Linux kernel notwithstanding).

By the way - you should also consider whether your application could be delivered via the web, because doing that solves the problem of portability to different operating systems altogether. Its also the only way to completely block people from being able to steal your backend code - if your web server is properly secured, since the backend code on a web application is hidden from users, so unless you encode your core application logic in the front end, which obviously one should not do in your case, it would work very well.

Dikaioumenoi said:

Well that settles it, folks!

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Unfortunately, it won't.

For myself, your post is one more in a litany of pseudo or semi-scholarly skewings of the Christian faith using quasi-plausible arguments to undermine the historical understanding of passages, changing the faith that hasn’t changed in over 2 millennia simply because it didn't need to, in an effort to support a novel and deficient albeit now popular theology. Christianity received all it needed at the beginning and required no additional man-based help on the basics.

Study more. Find out what and why the early Christians thought as they did. Go back and read the patristics, the earlier theologians, the early councils, the early church histories and catechisms

Hentenza said:

I agree but I think that the drug problem is a bit more problematic than you suggest. I know of several people in my family and families of my friends that have either died because of drugs or have drugs destroyed their lives so I don’t particularly have much compassion for those involved in the drug trade.

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Oh, the whole thing is horrific I grant you. That is part of why I think we should change our tactics to something that reduces the difficulties of addiction rather then increase it.

Strong in Him said:

That says "sky" not "dome".
It also says it is AS molten glass - "as" and "like" are similes; comparisons.

That verse does not say "the sky IS a molten looking glass.".

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I would add that molten glass is liquid, not solid anyway.

NewLifeInChristJesus said:

You are arguing for a reality that we do not experience. It is clear (or at least it should be) that receiving Jesus (believing in Him) is what gives us the right to become children of God (Jn 1:12) and that God giving birth to us is what makes us His offspring (Jn 1:13). And it is clear (or at least it should be clear) that God giving birth to us is what translates out of the kingdom of the devil into His kingdom (Jn 3:5). Metaphysical reasoning is not needed to understand this.

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This reply is dismissive and rhetorically overconfident. You continue to make a category confusion without acknowledging what I've repeatedly pointed out. The ordo salutis concerns what is logically prior, not what is empirically perceptible. We do not "experience" election, calling, or regeneration as discrete sensations, yet their effects manifest in faith and repentance. The lack of direct experience does not make them unreal; it simply marks them as divine acts beneath consciousness.

John 1:12-13 actually supports this. Verse 12 describes the human side ("receiving" Christ and believing in His name), while verse 13 explains the cause of that response: "who were born... of God." The verb "who were born" (ἐγεννήθησαν) is aorist passive, locating the birth as a completed divine action antecedent to and causative of the believing response. The "right to become" children of God (ἐξουσίαν γενέσθαι) is consequent upon faith, but the birth that makes one a child is God's act alone. You have reversed the logic of the text.

John 3:3-5 teaches the same: apart from new birth, one cannot even see the kingdom, let alone enter it. That is not a post-faith event; it is what enables faith itself. Nicodemus' problem was not disbelief in data but incapacity for spiritual perception.

So this isn't "metaphysical reasoning"; it's exegesis. You have not directly engaged hardly any of the argumentation I have made from Scripture, including the grammatical argument of the OP.

I have been following this discussion, but many urgent things are going on that limit my posting. The responses to Sabbathblessings have not been in Christian love. God gave the 10 Commandments, so we can assume that they are good. They do convict us of sin, but they are also good for humanity. This is even evident from civil law supporting most of them even in non-Christian and non-Jewish religions and countries. However, the fourth commandment is older than the rest and not actually Hebrew, since the Hebrews didn’t exist when it was first given. Nobody would argue that murder is justified because we are not under the law. So arguing that keeping the Sabbath is not justified for the same reason is not logical. The early church essentially moved the Sabbath to Sunday, and those who are members of congregations that agree have submitted to the authority of those churches. It is their choice, and God will judge as He wills. Since they are not actually trying to break the fourth commandment in actions and keep the Lord’s Day holy, the responsibility seems to be on those in authority in the churches rather than individuals. Then we have Paul’s writings that would indicate that Gentiles are not required to keep the Jewish law. However, keeping the Jewish law while understanding that Christ fulfilled the law and that we live by faith through love does not mean that somebody shouldn’t keep the law if they see it as an expression of love toward God. I don’t cheat on my wife because I’m under the law, but I don’t do it because I love God and my wife and believe God gave good instruction. Nobody would tell me that it is okay to cheat on my wife because I’m not under the law. Maybe, some people think that people who keep the Sabbath are weak, and maybe they are, but Paul made it clear how to deal with it in Romans 14. Choosing to keep the law is far from justification. I get no points for not having killed anybody. I get no points for keeping the Sabbath, except that I find it is good for my closeness to God. My cane helps me walk, but I wouldn’t throw it away because it shows my weakness.

linux.poet said:

Best programming language to develop an application for Windows?
Best programming language to develop an application for Linux?

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Without wanting to seem coy, the answer depends on what you’re trying to program, because some programming languages let you write a simple program very fast, and some applications require performance or specialized libraries. For example on Linux a lot of applications can be quickly programmed by using simple shell scripts and pipelines to connect the output of existing text processing tools. For example, you can take the output of one program, pipe it through grep to match a pattern, pipe it through sed to change that pattern, and then use the > character to output this to a new file (the only place where pipelines don’t work as well is editing files in place, although with some difficulty you can use ed to edit a file in place and control it with a pipeline, but it wasn’t meant for this; another problem is without a special program to sit in the middle, pipelines won’t wait for an EOF before processing the input, but will start processing it immediately; usually this is OK, but there are some cases where you might want the full file before you start working on it. There is also the awk programming language, which is a mini programming language that runs in the shell, although by the time you are using awk, you should probably be using python (historically Perl was written to replace awk for advanced text processing in the command line, but Perl is easy to write but hard to read; Python and Ruby were both written as Perl replacements with a focus on being more user friendly, and most importantly, producing easier to read code). While I was rooting for Ruby, Python won, but then Javascript became a viable language, and Ruby remains an option.

For general purpose programming on both Windows and Linux, the broadest support right now both in terms of learning resources and library support is for Python, and you can also now write applications in Javascript, thanks to Node.JS

GUI development is possible with Python, Perl, Ruby, .NET, Java, as well as the old standard of C++. Microsoft .NET languages such as C# run on Linux; .NET first being ported by Novell as Mono, but then, Microsoft acquired it and now publishes .NET for Linux themselves. The open source .NET Microsoft publishes also runs on other major open source operating systems like FreeBSD*.

I would advise against using PHP for any further web development, since both node.js and Python are superior platforms for backend programming (and with node.js, you’re using Javascript for both your backend and front end, and the idea is you’re less likely to make a mistake programming in one language rather than two), and PHP is a brutal language, in my opinion, not one I’ve ever beeen impressed with.

If you know Java, it is still widely used and supported (the main version of Minecraft is still being developed in Java and serious players prefer it to the other versions), and Java is particularly loved for enterprise applications of various sorts, including a lot of bloated systems running on application servers that give sysadmins who have to deal with them migraines.

Also other languages like Python, Ruby, Lisp (Clojure), and Scala, the latter two being particularly nice, run on the Java Virtual Machine.

*Most of what works on Linux works on FreeBSD, and most of what works on FreeBSD works on OpenBSD, NetBSD and Illumos (Solaris); also there are a few other workable open source operating systems; GNU finally got their Hurd kernel to a usable level, and there is DragonFlyBSD which has an interesting and elegant cluster filesystem. I myself prefer FreeBSD and OpenBSD to most Linux distributions, because OpenBSD has networking software I want and the most secure web server built in; the security on OpenBSD is superb, FreeBSD on the other hand is often faster than Linux and was the second OS after Illumos/Solaris to have ZFS, and FreeBSD’s jails are better in my opinion than most Linux containers, and certainly simpler. FreeBSD’s ports system of automatic compilation of a huge library of software with dependency resolution was the inspiration for the portage system that makes Gentoo famous, except with FreeBSD you don’t have to use it as it also provides binary packages.

But the main reason I prefer the BSDs is they don’t have systemd or a few other features most of the major distros on Linux now have, with some prominent exceptions.

Delvianna said:

Hi there The entire law that was given by Moses started with the 10 commandments but that was very different by the subsequent ceremonial laws that he then gave later.

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Hi! Some think the Decalogue is separate from all the other laws, but James is a good example that everything in the Pentateuch is Law: Jas 2:10 "For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all."
Besides it must be realized that the Law was not only given solely to the nation of Israel, but that the entirety of it, including the Decalogue was "taken away" with the OT, when Christ said "it is finished." "Then said he, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God. He taketh away the first, that he may establish the second" (Heb 10:9).

Delvianna said:

The idea that God will save us against our will, is not biblical.

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True, then God would be "trespassing!" The concept that God would only chooses certain people for salvation is not sensible, because He "desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1Ti 2:4).

"The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2Pe 3:9; ).

Apple Sky said:

Prove it.

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No one can prove anything to you; you just refuse to accept anything that does not agree with your beliefs.

Apple Sky said:

Prove it.

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I don’t have to. It is what it is. Is like you asking me to prove that we breathe oxygen. Your conspiracy theory mindset has taken you to a place where you doubt the obvious and the proven. If you get on a plane at 35000 feet you can see the curvature of the earth. There are thousands of commercial flights per day so there are hundreds of thousands of people that see the curvature of the earth daily. Have ever flown on an airplane?

Antartica is called the South Pole because it is in the south part of earth’s globe while the North Pole is on the north. This is fully and completely proven. The earth is round and this has been fully and completely proven. There is no conspiracy, only you feigning ignorance.

Apple Sky said:

So the sky is strong as a molten looking glass ?

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That wasn't the point of my quote.
David said that he had looked up all the verses with the word "firmament" in them, and none of them say that it is solid or a dome.
You replied:

Apple Sky said:

Job 37:18
Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking glass?

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The verse that you quoted - presumably to prove David wrong - does not have the word "firmament" but the word "sky".
So that's the first thing. The second is that it does not say that the sky/firmament IS molten glass.

Mercy Shown said:

One day in 7? Why not everyday all day long?

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Yes, this is the thing that always baffles me. We are to love God with all our heart, mind and soul. That would definitely be 24/7 (not just one day of the week) And of course in this day and age especially all fall short of this from time to time because other matters fill the mind, etc. So who hasn't broken this commandment as well as love our neighbors as our selves from time to time. We are to strive for those but no one will ever be perfect in the flesh. Thankfully God is the heart knower.

And people always confuse the fact that the Sabbath was made for man -man's rest. And today we are to be in Christ's rest 24/7. That's where our abode is.

And I find these debates usually fall to the subject of what day should one go to church and worship. It's as you stated in this thread I think most focus on that and not what the Sabbath really entailed back then.

The Sabbath was set as example of rest after work. And Christ did the work on the cross (fulfilling the law) and that's where we find our rest. It's not about some day of the week at this point. But some people see Hebrews 4 differently. But there's a clear difference between sabbaton (the weekly repose) and sabbatismos- and that's the one that remains.

Apple Sky said:

Because I know God is the greatest scientist of them all.

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And yet he did not dictate a scientific account of how he made his creation.

AV1611VET said:

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I'm glad you're so happy that I'm lonely.

Belk said:

I also have no expertise in law so this is coming from my layman's understanding.

I believe international law is against these types of actions, but only in areas the US has not signed on or agreed to.


I would agree with that.

The issue I have with Trumps actions are two-fold.

1) The legal authorization to kill enemy combatants that Bush and Obama used was later seen as faulty.

2) The designation of "Narco-terrorist" is seems completely made up specifically to bypass the law to allow for these strikes.

Taken together this use of force strikes me as very problematic. Most especially since it basis the entire premise on people who voluntarily take a substance and then suffer adverse effects. Imagine if we killed people for having the audacity to brew beer simply because someone who bought it might die of liver failure.

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I agree but I think that the drug problem is a bit more problematic than you suggest. I know of several people in my family and families of my friends that have either died because of drugs or have drugs destroyed their lives so I don’t particularly have much compassion for those involved in the drug trade.