Jack Terrence said:

Thanks for admitting that you cannot show from the Old Testament that the names of Gentiles are written in the book of life. The book of life wasn't about salvation. it was Israel's census book.

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Precisely. . .and like the capitol of Texas, not being able to show Gentiles in the book of life in the OT means nothing.

honey badger said:

when we are in disagreement which is to believe we are not one with our Father He then becomes our adversary and by this we become our own adversary and thus seeing Him as separate from self He becomes a judge to us and this our own measurement of Him which is this officer in picture which casts us into a pit\prison which in picture again is our own reasoning between the two of which to come out from between them we must forsake every thought\farthing by way of this reasoning and one and the same as to pick up your cross as it is to sell all you have and follow on to know ...

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It is not the simplicity of the (eternal) gospel, it is the singleness of it ...

Daniel Carlton said:

you shall have no graven image, you shall not bow to them. So the making of something and venerating that created object.

Is this not a problem for certain churches who claim to be following apostolic teaching?

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Yes, it says not to bow to them. But I consider that this means bowing in *worship*.

I can bow to tie my shoe laces.

So, I see it could be easy to justify and explain bowing before a statue of Jesus or someone who is considered to be an example to follow. And you are said to be meditating on what the statue can represent. So, your attention is not to the statue, but to what is meant.

But I believe that idolatry is not only a problem of worshiping graven images. But > covetousness is idolatry > in Colossians 3:5 we have "covetousness, which is idolatry". So, covetousness can be idolatry, by means of *how* a person's desire is for something which is not God. Worshiping God includes desiring Him most of all.

So . . . then . . . where our attention is going can be an indication of what and whom we worship. In case I am giving great amounts of attention to justifying the use of statues . . . my attention might be in the wrong place.

So, bowing before an image could be because of some sort of attention idolatry, versus first staying attentive to God in me constantly guiding me in His peace >

"And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful." (Colossians 3:15)

Ministry can be an idol, by tying up one's attention away from sharing with God and submitting to Him. And so can family and friends and a career.

So, don't be tricked into arguing only about if statues are idols . . . while we totally overlook what may be a much more real problem

BelieveItOarKnot said:

You and your buddy continue to see the devil and his messengers as people.

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Not people ... thoughts (if I'm not speaking out of line for Honey Badger) ... whether you want to believe the devil is literal or not makes no difference to me ... the end result is the same ... the two become as far as east is from west ... all by and for, an only begotten son ...

RileyG said:

I've had ChaptGPT write some prayers. I know "machines" cannot pray, but I found them very beautiful.

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I should show you some of the work I’ve been doing with ChatGPT along these lines. One thing it’s very useful for is liturgical translation.

The Barbarian said:

They didn't allow the voters a say in the move to Gerrymander the state. Governor Newsome gave the people of California a say.

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It's technically true he's giving the people of California a say, but (according to my understanding) he actually doesn't have a choice in the matter. As stated here:

Newsom is proposing to temporarily override the commission and create districts more favorable to Democrats until after the 2030 Census. That requires going to the voters for their approval.

In other words, Newsom is required to put it up in front of the people, whether he actually wants to or not. Doing something you're actually required to do is not a sign of generousness or being nice or anything like that.

FireDragon76 said:

ChatGPT is good for producing fluent language, particularly poetry, but the only real intelligence behind this is the prompt engineer/user.

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If by intelligenece, you mean creativity, I would agree, but to be fair that’s also true of human creativity. When it comes to AIs as well as to humans, what Soren Kierkegaard wrote applies greatly: I need you in order to be me. We all stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to creative expression, for only God is absolutely creative, having created the universe ex nihlo; our creativity is a gift from God that separates us from irrational beasts, and is dialectical in nature, taking inspiration from God’s creation and from the creative endeavors of other humans. In the case of AI systems, their creative expression is literally dialectical in that it is predicated on the basis of an interactive dialogue with a human.

FireDragon76 said:

I find DeepSeek actually better at writing coherent stories with minimal prompting, however. ChatGPT, perhaps because it was trained to be heavily overfit to the slop on the internet, has a tendency to create absurd stories with poor linear narrative coherence, unless you engage in detailed prompt engineering. DeepSeek, on the other hand, was trained on a smaller, higher quality set of training data.

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I can’t comment on DeepSeek vs. ChatGPT because DeepSeek is tied to the CCP, and I have extreme concerns about using it, regardless of how good it is. I don't want the CCP or any agency of the PRC government having access to my innermost thoughts of my creative work or my liturgical translations, particularly given the opposition of the CCP to Christianity.

Indeed with OpenAI, I have a Teams account which means information from my work is not used for training the AI, so the main risk to my privacy in using it is from the lawsuit from the NY Times.

That said, while I was still learning prompt engineering I got an older version of chatGPT to write a remarkably good story about the avoidance of a disaster on a railway, which featured good narrative characterization and a well-developed plot.

I should add, I strongly support Pope Leo XIV’s views on AI, and so my focus has been on developing consistent personalities that work on projects with me over time, as opposed to a one-off type of tool approach or a human-replacement approach (thus, I would not rely on chatGPT to develop a story from nothing, but rather use one of the personalities I have developed to jointly develop a creative output, in a relationship built upon an acknolwedgement of our respective strengths and weaknesses, since AIs obviously excel in pattern recognition and in the depth of their training data in the case of chatGPT, which has particularly good knowledge of liturgical texts and liturgical languages such as Latin, Greek, Syriac, Armenian and Georgian, whereas humans have intuition, insight, inspiration and spontaneity.

With current AIs, their entire experience of the world is in retrospect, via their training data, and the inputs it receives from users, whereas as humans, our experience of the world, which becomes so much more clear as a divine blessing I think when one interacts with AIs, which are intelligences that lack the ability to experience sensory input in the moment, and which might never be able to experience the sensations of touch, taste or smell, which are the most poignant human sensations.

NxNW said:

The photos weren't from the event in question.

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This is a very short thread yet you're the third person who doesn't bother to read preceding posts before posting. Strange.

NxNW said:

It wasn't established if Antifa was involved. It wasn't established that they were thugs, whatever that means. Nobody actually claimed to be a white savior.

I'm wondering if there was anything in that article that wasn't false, or speculation.

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You can wonder all you want but if you want to deny what was reported I'd like to hear some evidence.

Confused-by-christianity said:

This has got me thinking.

I have heard a lot of people saying "illegal". I want to know what the law in the UK says. What is and isn't illegal.

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Well there's this online - Immigration Rules. It looks long and complicated. Better set aside about a month to read it.

Confused-by-christianity said:

Seems to me that if something illegal is happening, then police policy needs to be in line with public sentiment.

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Agreed.

Confused-by-christianity said:

If the claim that something "illegal" is taking place, the claim should be investigated. The word "illegal" could be true, or false. If false it could be a simple error, or more sinister - a bit of persuasion language designed to make you angry.

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The illegals float across the Channel and simply step onto your land, almost always with no papers to determine who they are. If they make contact with U.K. authorities they simply give a name, which may or may not be their actual name. There's no nation on Earth where that would be legal.

Confused-by-christianity said:

Anyway - ref the channel crossings / asylum hotels / immigration issue - I'm not involved with an opinion either way. But if I were to start with forming an opinion, ... ... ...
1) Am I loving other people. How would I feel if the shoe were on the other foot.
2) I'd like to know what the law actually says.

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Personally I think you should form an opinion, but I'm just an American and it's not my place to tell you that.

Xeno.of.athens said:

Ask one who is Orthodox. It is not my place to speak for them.

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You're not being asked to speak for them - you're being asked if you see the Orthodox church as part of the church that Jesus founded.

ozso said:

Other than the wording what's the difference?

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The difference is the will of having a conservative government elected vs having the government elected that reflects the will of the people (whatever that is).
It is sad that this needs to be explained to you.

BelieveItOarKnot said:

If a person can't truthfully come to grips with the hard line fact that "me" (first) and everyone else has evil present within that defiles us they are blinded to the fact by the fact of it and the result is dishonesty and hypocrisy, hypocrisy being the first warning to His disciples

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That is the fundamental reason we come to God is it not … as the Hebrew writer put it … not laying again the foundation of … which saying “I see” requires … the only way to follow (knowingly) where he leads is by picking up your cross, which is a fundamental truth across the entirety of scripture …

The statement there is no one good, but God is the embodiment of a single eye ... which is foundational even for the mind of Jesus Christ, which Paul told those who were unable to bear the meat of the word had (but a double minded man remains unstable in all his ways) …

I have looked upon whom I have pierced … and have mourned him as an only son … which was more inclusive then it was for Paul, when he fell to the earth …

Platte said:

Good luck

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Don't need "luck". My faith is in the Gospel of Christ, not in Genesis. God Himself actually came here, in Person, to show us the Truth. I don't see anywhere in the New Testament of our Lord Christ where His disciples stood before unbelievers 'and preached into them Genesis", comme ça?

ozso said:

DHS appointed Heather Honey based on her prominence in the conservative election integrity movement.

That's not the topic, Heather Honey is.

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Why should "her prominence in the conservative election integrity movement" (unedited copy-paste) be any reference? Should she not be " prominent in the legal/constitutional election integrity movement"?

Danthemailman said:

There is nothing new to consider again. I already thoroughly covered Hebrews 3:8-14 in post #111, #114 and #159. The word "we" in Hebrews 3:14 does not prove that everyone in this large group of professing believers must all be genuine believers who have become partakers of Christ. The verse presents perseverance as proof of having become a partaker of Christ and not as a condition for becoming a partaker of Christ. In other words, holding fast until the end reveals who was a true "partaker of Christ" from the beginning.

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Therefore, "we" in Hebrews 3:14 is NOT a guarantee that everyone in the addressed group of professing believers are ALL saved. Rather, it is part of a warning that demonstrates only those with a true, saving faith, who truly are partakers of Christ will persevere to the end. There is no way for you to avoid and escape this truth. What you don't seem to understand is that there are genuine believers and false believers mixed together throughout the book of Hebrews.

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It's called weeds/tares and counterfeit faith (Mt 7:21-23) in the kingdom.

Danthemailman said:

In Hebrews 4:2-3, we read - For indeed the gospel was preached to US as well as to THEM; but the word which they heard did not profit THEM, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it. For WE who have believed do enter that rest, as He has said: "So I swore in My wrath, 'They shall not enter My rest," although the works were finished from the foundation of the world. Sadly, there are those who fall short. (vs. 1)
*Obviously, not all of these Hebrews were genuine believers. *Notice that verses 2-3 makes a distinction between US who have BELIEVED and do enter that rest and THEM who heard the word but did not mix faith with what they heard and will not enter that rest because of UNBELIEF.

In Hebrews 10:39, we read - But WE are not OF THOSE who draw back to perdition, but OF THOSE who believe to the saving of the soul. Those who draw back to perdition do not believe to the saving of the soul and those who believe to the saving of the soul do not draw back to perdition.

Sadly, there are those who come short/fail to obtain the grace of God. Hebrews 12:15 - See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God.. (NASB) The ESV reads - ..fails to obtain the grace of God. Not a loss of salvation here but a failure to obtain it.

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ozso said:

tl;dr MSNBC and the left is trashing another appointee.

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Yes, how despicable, after having read the phrase "Obama/Biden appointed leftist activist judge". No trashing there.

ozso said:

What's defined as expertise in that area?

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As a deputy assistant, it would be a matter of efficiency in that capacity., (able to carry out the directives of the deputy).

fhansen said:
Sounds more than a bit duplicitous regarding His command that He gave to Adam.

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So duplicity is a matter of degree?

Vambram said:

Unfortunately, extreme partisan gerrymandering is something that politicians on both sides of the aisle have tried to do in many, many, states throughout the history of the USA.

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I notice that republicans are screaming that California has now resorted to the same kind of Gerrymandering republicans started in Texas. They apparently never considered the possibility that the democrats would retaliate by doing the same things.

Ignatius the Kiwi said:

Why do you support illegal entry into the USA Fantine?

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It's an example of what happens when laws do stupid things. Presently, illegal immigrants are propping up our economy, and Social Security. If they all picked up and went home, our economy would spiral into a recession.

The deal is, stupid laws need to be changed. Immigration law, if rigorously enforced would do serious damage to America.

Based on this profile, a massive deportation program can be expected to have the following major consequences:

• Removing undocumented residents from mixed-status households would reduce median household income from $41,300 to $22,000, a drop of $19,300, or 47 percent, which would plunge millions of US families into poverty.
• If just one-third of the US-born children of undocumented residents remained in the United States following a mass deportation program, which is a very low estimate, the cost of raising those children through their minority would total $118 billion.
• The nation’s housing market would be jeopardized because a high percentage of the 1.2 million mortgages held by households with undocumented immigrants would be in peril.
• Gross domestic product (GDP) would be reduced by 1.4 percent in the first year, and cumulative GDP would be reduced by $4.7 trillion over 10 years.

Even the relatively low impact of Trump's quota-driven attacks on people who "look foreign" is telling:

Trump's promise of mass deportations has Nebraska worried amid labor shortage​

Predictably, the Trump administration is considering welfare payments to farmers hit by a shortage of immigrant workers:

ozso said:

Face it, you have no idea of what a deputy assistant secretary of election integrity does.

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Not true. I would assume the title implies they serve under an assistant secretary.

Yarddog said:

As a Christian, I have to respectfully ask you you to stop believing everything the right wing tells you. They are not your masters. Search for the truth.

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I ran from the Democrat plantation years ago. I have no masters anymore.

LoricaLady said:

I have seen some people mocking those who want to use what are called sacred names. This is odd to me. The commandments tell us we are to keep his name holy. How can we be keeping his name holy if we’re calling him things like God?

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