• Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.

Trump says he wants to deport ‘the worst of the worst,’ but ICE data shows 72% of people detained have no criminal convictions

So in summary, 0.53% of unauthorized immigrants have been detained. And 0.14% of ICE enforcement officers say they're worn out.
Precisely . This is why Obama tasked immigration enforcement against those few illegal immigrants who had committed serious crimes. That takes a lot more know-how than putting on a mask and grabbing Hispanic-looking people off the street. But it actually makes American safer. Do you realize the economic impact of deporting all the people who are here illegally?

The following papers are organized from the broadest in their analyses to narrower analyses that looked at particular populations or types of impact:
• McKibbon (2024) estimated that deporting 7.5 million unauthorized immigrant workers would result in a long-run drop in U.S. GDP of 6.2 percent ($1.7 trillion at 2023 levels), a reduction in hours worked in the country by 3.6 percent, and three years of higher inflation—peaking at an increase in the inflation
rate of 3.1 percentage points. Deporting 1.3 million people was estimated to drop U.S. GDP by 1.1 percent ($300 billion at 2023 levels), hours worked by 0.6 percent, and trigger additional inflation peaking at a 0.5 percentage point increase.13
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Philosophy of love.

I understand this on some level. Not too long ago I was doing debates in the science forum and I was suffering “debate lag” where it took me days to respond. Sometimes debating here feels like psychological weightlifting to me. If you push too hard, too fast, you can re-traumatize yourself. Listening to your brain telling “er, this is hard, let’s take a break and come back to it” is actually a good idea.

Now that I think about it, I think I actually did debate retraumatization once, but not on this website. However, that descent into mental chaos felt more like digging up trauma that was already in my system rather than adding more trauma from without. *scratches head* It was like opening a door on the top of a tower and getting surprised by the sudden onslaught of wind. Wind being mental chaos in this case.

Actually, I think I did that twice, but the second time was body chaos instead of intellectual chaos, and so I had a degree of control and could manage the situation a lot better. Log off, emergency trip to a therapist immediately, talk to a friend, join another forum for my questions and issues. But that wasn’t just debate, that was chess re traumatizing, hence the physical aspect of it that dragged all my mind-body issues to the surface.

*blinks* Okay, maybe I don’t actually understand it after all, but at least I’m willing to be patient. Better to take a little more time with your responses than to write a bunch of chaotic posts and lose a rather valuable forum account due to losing control of your mind. Or your emotions, which may be more of what this is.


I generally find it easier to empathize with people who have gone through the same experiences that I’ve been through. Frankly, without a common experience, you have to use your imagination to build a solid basis for an empathetic response and it is really hard. Experience is not the obstacle to empathy, it is the bridge that makes true empathy possible.

A child doesn’t have a depth of experience, so an adult demanding that a child empathize with them is just abuse plain and simple. Demanding that the child help them because they need help is also abusive, an adult should be taking care of that child. There’s a difference between training a child to do the laundry so they can do it when they live on their own one day and demanding that the child do the laundry with no help just because the parent is struggling mentally or physically. A child can sense the difference.


Complete lack of emotional communication. The head of household, my father, was an abusive and threatening critic. This has left the entire household basically unable to talk to each other about any honest feelings. You say anything about how you feel, you get criticism of it immediately. You shouldn’t feel that. You shouldn’t think that. The message is clear and obvious.

My and brother learned to relate to each other based on performance metrics. The household is a masterclass in how to respond to criticism.

Me: get angry and fight back. Ignore the criticism, do whatever you wanted to do anyway, and tell dad whatever he wants to hear to get him to get out of the way. (Eventually I took a deep dive and changed up my response to criticism as regards other people, but for me that is a very deep “default mode” that can resurface if you stack up enough frustration and criticism too quickly.)

My mom: get scared and anxious, cite weakness, make excuses and “I can’t do this” over and over again.

My brother: disappear into his internal world and not say anything to anyone. Refuse to answer questions about how he feels or thinks.

It’s a deep vibe of emotional anemia. We stand around at church parties like we’re ghosts. We aren’t allowed to talk to anyone else either, and we don’t want to. Hide your trauma and disappear, pretend to be normal. Me and my mother and brother were able to have deep intellectual discussions around the dinner table at points when my dad wasn’t around, but we’re three very different people who can’t really understand the internals of ourselves behind our intellectual viewpoints. We have no room to express them. There is almost no family unit.

But is this phenomenon Christian? Not like 100%. It’s CPTSD for 2 people, dyspraxia for my mom, and a sensory processing disorder for my younger brother, so it’s not a typical household. But we got told that Romans 3:23 was a thing and that no matter how much we sacrificed, it would never be enough for love. All have sinned, and thus all deserve to be criticized in light of Paul’s guidelines in the epistles. I learned really quick that personal self-sacrifice was a pointless endeavor, because there was not enough me to sacrifice. The point is that this household could exist in Christianity without ruffling any feathers. Nobody came along and told me “your ideas of love are unbiblical and wrong”. When I expressed them, people would nod and agree. Frankly, “Love is a commitment to the true good of another person” is a quote from J.Budzisewski’s How To Stay Christian in college. I haven’t read any scholarly disputes against that statement either.

Christians are at war! Get your Ephesians 6 armor on! GO! FIGHT! WIN! There was no glory in getting killed in my household, it was all about killing the evil philosophies of the Enemy through better debate prowess. Read, study and memorize scripture so you know what to say when a friend starts talking about their religion. Under that paradigm, the most loving thing you could do was not to be killed or suffer torture, it was to give guidance to help other people improve in Christ, to move the sanctification process along and help people become more sinless.


If Adam hadn’t been stupid enough to eat the apple, Christ would not have had to suffer on our behalf in order to love us. Not sure how you missed the “Christ had to suffer a bloody death and torture because you screwed up” message, but that was the one I got. Suffering is not a loving thing to do, it’s a consequence of sin.

I was told that suffering was not a loving thing to do, it was a sign that God was trying to teach you something to be less of a rotten sinner. God makes sinners suffer so they will accept the Gospel and get rid of the sin (as a gradual process). As one gets rid of sin, the suffering goes down.

As one grows in Christian maturity, what can happen is that God can just put one through suffering as a witness to others, which is you suffering for the sin of others, just like Christ did. The response to that suffering is to find the person that you’re supposed to witness to, do that, and the suffering will stop. It should be noted that God put Job through suffering as a lesson to him and his friends and as a witness to Satan and to all the readers of the book.

We suffer because we sin, we suffer because others sin, and we suffer because Adam sinned. There is no love in it. Criminals love nobody as they suffer in jail, and this planet is one big prison cell for sinful people.

Love is not about suffering yourself, it is about helping to relieve the suffering of others. There’s a big difference between the suffering endured by the man suffering a lifetime sentence in solitary confinement for killing two prison guards, and the suffering the Apostles endured while they were proclaiming the Gospel. The reason why the suffering of the latter is an act of love is because proclaiming the Gospel is an act of love. It relieves the sin and suffering of billions of people daily. The suffering just authenticates the proclamation: yes, I am going to die on that hill. I will not back down from my belief in the truth, no matter how much you torture me and try to stop me. It’s a witness for the Gospel.

Suffering is just what happens when love and sin collide. God loves us and that is His nature to love; he would not leave us trapped in sin forever because that would not be good for us. He couldn’t not do it. We put Jesus through all that suffering on our behalf. We didn’t have to do that. It’s our fault.

I mean, abusers cause people suffering, is that loving them? No! Saying that to love is to endure suffering, that sounds like an abuser justification to me “it is loving to put up with my torture”. It actually sounds like the idiotic narrative my dad told me while he was abusing me, claiming that he was loving me and to be anything less than an abusive jerk was unloving and thoughtless. He kept telling me that I was destroying my own life even as he was the one actually destroying it, and sure enough, it’s me that has to re-parent my own dad on the fly because no one else in my household is up to the task. My mom should have done that, but she was too scared and “weak” so it’s up to me the strong one to solve all the problems. I resent that a lot. It’s not loving to sit around and endure suffering like my mom did. One needs to learn from it. One needs to do something about it.

In the face of Christ’s suffering on our behalf, we are the abusers of Christ. All of us. We abused God; God is. Part of believing the Gospel is turning away from the abuse we’ve committed against God, expressing regret, going through the sanctification process and getting better. My father abused me; I am still me, just a better version. There is nothing that I do that wasn’t in me from before: at one point I forced all of my beliefs to be logically consistent with themselves. I would debate, and then I would read back my posts to see in the belief I had in one post was the same as a belief I expressed in a different debate, and evaluate the differences. (Which do I actually believe? Is this consistent with Scripture? Which is actually true?)

That’s a good process for repairing the intellect, but my true trauma was in my emotional intuition, because I had been emotionally abused, and emotional intuition doesn’t completely respond to that sort of work. Intuition is more about hedging probabilities and outcomes, less about what is true than what can be true. It’s a status monitor.

Anyway, I’m going to stop here because I don’t want to overwhelm you by being like “you haven’t finished responding to my previous post, but I’m just going to disrespect that and go after you”, that’s rude. I intended this post to be short, a brief respect of your need for more time, but it has ballooned out of control and that is my own fault. I have nobody but myself to blame.



By showing empathy, we emulate the G-d like attribute of caring for others by being sensitive to their

situations and offering our compassion.


.
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Unearthed emails shed light on Biden DOJ memo calling concerned parents 'domestic terrorists'

The Biden White House communicated with the U.S. Department of Justice before a 2021 memo labeled parents who spoke out about COVID-19 restrictions and LGBT curriculum during school board meetings as "domestic terrorists," according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

America First Legal, a conservative group aligned with President Donald Trump, released documents on Friday that include emails from several DOJ lawyers concerning the National School Boards Association's 2021 letter to the Biden administration.

In the letter, NSBA requested "federal assistance to stop threats and acts of violence against public schoolchildren, public school board members, and other public school district officials and educators." The letter claimed that "threats and acts of violence have become more prevalent — during public school board meetings," as well as through the U.S. Postal Service and other online platforms.

Continued below.

Pray Jesus Christ comforts, heals & provides for all affected by the crash that involved a Bangladeshi air force jet crashing into a building in Dhaka

Pray Jesus Christ comforts, heals & provides for all affected by the crash that involved a Bangladeshi air force jet crashing into a building in Dhaka:

Golden Eagles-Lets Post Our Music-Still Relevant for Today's Traumatic Times

Here is another song from John 14:27.

My peace I give unto you
It's a peace that the world
Cannot give
It's a peace that the world
Cannot understand
Peace to know, peace to live
My peace I give unto you

My love I give unto you
It's love that the world
Cannot give
It's a love that the world
Cannot understand
Love to know, love to live
My love I give unto you
It's a love that the world
Cannot understand
My love I give unto you
Maranatha! Singers
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Tucker Carlson’s Ignorance of Catholicism

Just When You Think Someone is Coming Around


I was just dozing off in my chair with the latest Tucker Carlson interview playing on the TV when Guardian Angel woke me just in time to hear the following.

(Video in link)


Apologies for the poor audio quality.

Did you catch that?

Protestants are the people who “think for themselves” and Martin Luther “took on the 1500 year-old Church by himself”.

The most risible moment is Charlie Kirk proudly asserting that he’s “Calvinist too”.

Luther was a revolutionary who set in motion the destruction of the West by trying to rend Her underpinning foundation – the Catholic Church. Thought for himself? No. He took the volumes of thought of other more brilliant men – like Aquinas and Albert the Great and his own “spiritual father” Augustine – and rejected it as only a man who thinks he knows better can do.

Continued below.

To Be a ‘Broken System,’ Someone Had to Break It

U.S. bishops partnered with Democrats to break our immigration system, and now declare it needed to be fixed.

We’ve heard the excuses so many times over the years, we can repeat them by heart.

“It’s a broken immigration system,” “We can’t close the border without fundamental immigration reform,” “It was already broken when we arrived,” and “If you don’t reform it first, you just don’t have compassion.”

Well, President Trump arrived to serve his second term on Jan. 20, 2025, and within days, he had secured the borders. After four years of millions of illegal aliens pouring in annually, the combination of fences, walls, rivers, planes, and federal law enforcement on the ground has brought illegal crossings to effectively zero for these past six months.

Continued below.

“Israel Is Losing Me” Said Influential Commentator Michael Knowles

The popular Catholic and political commentator, Michael Knowles, said the Israeli attack on the only Catholic church in Gaza was just too much

“Israel is losing me”. That’s what the popular political podcaster for the Daily Wire, Michael Knowles said Monday in a post Catholics for Catholics posted on X, the social media platform.

Knowles, who is also a committed Catholic, said he was bothered by the attack Israeli forces did on a Catholic church in Gaza. Pope Leo XIV called for an end to the war between Israel and Gaza, speaking of his profound pain about the strike on the sole Catholic Church in that country.

On Thursday, three people died and others were injured when the church of the Holy Family was attacked by a blast that killed three people, including the church’s janitor. The parish pastor, Fr. Gabriel Romanelli, was also wounded during the attack, drawing condemnation by the international community, including President Trump, according to the White House Press Secretary.

Israel called the blast an “accident,” but Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, said he did not believe that Israeli attack was not intentional.

“Was it an accident? I don’t see any evidence that it was an accident. Can you provide me some proof that it was an accident?” Knowles said during his live podcast at Daily Wire on Friday July 18th. “You struck the church. Churches are pretty obvious targets. They are pretty obvious sites. The cross. Can you explain to me how this was an accident?” he added.

Continued below.

Chip Gaines defends gay couple on new show, slams 'modern American Christian culture'

Chip and Joanna Gaines: When popularity wins over God's truth​


Chip and Joanna Gaines, the beloved duo behind the HGTV sensation “Fixer Upper,” have long presented themselves as exemplars of Christian family life.

That image, or perhaps mirage, that had been built over the years was instantly shattered with one social media post recently.

On Thursday, July 10, Chip Gaines took to X to cheerfully spread the word about their new show on the Magnolia Network, titled “Back to the Frontier.”

“Y’all are going to love this show!! Social experiment + family time well spent,” he promised.

Social experiment? Yes. Family time well-spent? Not exactly. And no, we did not love it.

Chip unfortunately glossed over a pretty big detail: The show features two men in a so-called “same sex” marriage. Even worse, these are men who have “adopted” (purchased) children via surrogacy.

Continued below.
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The man with the legion?

@David Lamb also.

I do hope you guys realize the problem(s) with language, and how it can be deceptive, and can sometimes be used to warrant more or less attention?

God Bless.
Just so you know I accept the fact of 2 Cor. 5:19, where sins, no matter what they are, how many, how active or current, are NOT COUNTED against people, particular against Christians.

Therefore nothing I say to you as a believer is meant to "threaten" your salvation. That is simply not in my positions whatsoever.
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Christians respond to tech CEO’s exposure for apparent adultery at Coldplay concert: ‘A sobering reminder’

Why did Astronomer’s CEO have to resign over his affair?​


I need you to help me out with something. I’m a little confused about this Astronomer-married-CEO-caught-with-his-girlfriend thing.

Unless you’ve gone dark on all news and social media, you’ve seen that the CEO (Andy Byron) of an artificial intelligence company called Astronomer and his head of human resources (Kristin Cabot) were awkwardly nabbed on camera at a Coldplay concert in a way that showed they weren’t two platonic work colleagues out on the town. Now, after getting Board of Directors pressure, Byron has resigned over being caught with his girlfriend/mistress, which is really puzzling to me.

So, he was caught red-handed in an adulterous affair. So what?

This is 2025, folks. Our culture is clear in its standard that what two consenting adults do outside of work is A-OK, and that no corporate lifestyle dictates or anything else should trump sexual self-expression. It’s who they are and who are we, or the Astronomer’s Board, to say that their relationship is wrong?

Don’t they remember the whole Bill Clinton Monica Lewinsky thing back in the mid-1990s? Even though a 1998 Gallup poll showed that over 70% of Americans disapproved of Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, his job approval ratings stayed strong and even increased, beginning at around 60%, and rising to nearly 70% during the height of the scandal. When pushed as to why they still supported Clinton as president, Americans said they separated Clinton’s personal morality from his job performance — they believed he had done a good job with the economy and governance, and that his private life was not their concern.

Continued below.
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The Arrogant Have Forged a Lie

“You have dealt well with Your servant,
O Lord, according to Your word.
Teach me good discernment and knowledge,
For I believe in Your commandments.
Before I was afflicted I went astray,
But now I keep Your word.
You are good and do good;
Teach me Your statutes.
The arrogant have forged a lie against me;
With all my heart I will observe Your precepts.
Their heart is covered with fat,
But I delight in Your law.
It is good for me that I was afflicted,
That I may learn Your statutes.
The law of Your mouth is better to me
Than thousands of gold and silver pieces.” (Psalm 119:65-72 NASB1995)

The Psalmist was being persecuted for his walk of faith. He was experiencing reproach, contempt, ridicule, and false accusations from the arrogant and from the wicked who forsook the commandments of the Lord. But he was a companion of all those who feared the Lord, who walked in the ways of the Lord and in his righteousness, and who kept the commandments of God. But despite the persecution he was facing, he believed God dealt well with him.

But he had not led a perfect life. There was a point in time when he wandered from the faith, and when he went astray, but that was in the past. Now he was committed to serving the Lord with his life. Now he wanted to obey the Lord and to walk in his ways, and so he prayed to the Lord that he would have good discernment and knowledge, and that the Lord would teach him his statutes (his commandments), that he might obey them fully.

But even though he was now walking in the ways of the Lord, in obedience to the Lord and to his commandments, by the grace of God, in the power of God, and not of his own flesh, and he was no longer going astray, there were people, the arrogant, who had forged a lie against him, who were trying to destroy him and to give him a bad reputation so that others would reject him and would think ill of him, for reasons of their own we do not know.

Perhaps it was because his teachings were “stepping on toes,” and were bringing conviction to people’s hearts and minds. For he was speaking the truth that they did not want to hear nor to accept. For they did not want to hear that we must die to sin and follow our Lord in walks of obedience to his commands, as part of faith which saves, and that if we walk in sin, and not in obedience to our Lord, that we will not inherit eternal life with God.

At least, that is where many are today, many of whom profess faith in Jesus Christ. They are still wandering in their sins, still living in sinful addiction, and so they want to hear the sugar-coated messages which tell them that God will not judge them for their idolatries and adulteries, and that heaven is still secured for them, even though they ignore the Lord’s commands and they pursue the lustful desires of the flesh, and they don’t obey God.

And so they speak lies against the righteous who are following after the Lord to walk in his ways, who take the teachings of the Scriptures to heart, to obey them, and who are no longer walking in sin, making sin their practice, but for whom holy living is their practice, although they may not be perfect people in absolutely every respect, for they are still clay in the hands of the Potter being molded into the likeness of Jesus Christ, our Lord.

But no matter how we are treated, and by whom, we who are followers of Jesus Christ, in truth, must be those who are walking in the ways of the Lord, obeying our Lord’s New Covenant commands, following the Lord wherever he leads us. Sin must no longer be what we practice, but now righteousness and godly living should be our practice. For if sin is what we obey, and not God, we will not inherit eternal life with God. God says!

[Matt 7:13-14,21-23; Lu 9:23-26; Jn 10:27-30; Ac 26:18; Rom 2:6-8; Rom 6:1-23; Rom 8:1-14; Rom 12:1-2; 1 Co 6:9-10,19-20; 1 Co 10:1-22; 2 Co 5:10,15,21; Gal 5:16-24; Gal 6:7-8; Eph 2:8-10; Eph 4:17-32; Eph 5:3-6; Col 1:21-23; Col 3:1-17; Tit 2:11-14; Heb 3:1-19; Heb 4:1-13; Heb 10:23-31; Heb 12:1-2; 1 Pet 2:24; 1 Jn 1:1-10; 1 Jn 2:3-6,15-17; 1 Jn 3:4-10]

Seek the Lord

Based off Isaiah 55
Musical Instrumentation by Mark Bradley
An Original Work / July 20, 2012
Christ’s Free Servant, Sue J Love


“Come to Me all you who thirst; come to waters.
Listen to Me, and eat what’s good today,
And your soul will delight in richest of fare.
Give ear to Me, and you will live.
I have made an eternal covenant with you.
Wash in the blood of the Lamb.”

Seek the Lord while He may be found; call on Him.
Let the wicked forsake his way, in truth.
Let him turn to the Lord, and he will receive mercy.
Freely, God pardons him.
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,”
declares the Lord, our God.

“My word that goes out of My mouth is truthful.
It will not return to Me unfulfilled.
My word will accomplish all that I desire,
And achieve the goal I intend.
You will go in joy and be led forth in peace.
The mountains will burst into song… before you,
And all of the trees clap their hands.”

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The Arrogant Have Forged a Lie
An Original Work / July 22, 2025
Christ’s Free Servant, Sue J Love
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Second Criminal Illegal Alien with Lengthy Rap Sheet Arrested for Involvement in Ambush and Shooting CBP Officer in New York City

Both criminal illegal aliens involved in the attempted armed robbery were released into the country under the Biden Administration and NYC sanctuary politicians ignored detainer

The Biden administration let them in and the woke district attorneys left them on the streets.
Yet most of the adjudication was done while Biden was still in office.
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Thank God for latter rain

Jeremiah 31:25 KJV
[25] For I have satiated the weary soul, and I have replenished every sorrowful soul.

My Respond: Thanking God for latter rain giving me blessings v24 to have a season and future seasons.
Joel 2:23-24 KJV
[23] Be glad then, ye children of Zion, and rejoice in the LORD your God: for he hath given you the former rain moderately, and he will cause to come down for you the rain, the former rain, and the latter rain in the first month. [24] And the floors shall be full of wheat, and the fats shall overflow with wine and oil.
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Wooden prayer cube

-
Have one side telling a person how to receive God's free gift of Eternal Life, by belief in Jesus. Believing Jesus is who who He says He is The Son of God/The Messiah, the resurrection and the life.


Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
She said to Him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”
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Theologians refute misconceptions about 1,700-year-old Nicene Creed

From the article:

The Nicene Creed reaffirmed the orthodox belief that Jesus was “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.”

My understanding is that "God from God" is actually not original to the Creed (and is redundant with "true God from true God,") but it doesn't get nearly as much attention as the other addition of the filioque.

The original Greek text lacks "God from God", but is present in the Latin. Though the expression is, if my source is correct, present in the original 325 Formula.

-CryptoLutheran
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Barack Obama suggests men need gay friends to learn 'empathy and kindness'

It couldn't have been obvious since I didn't do what you claimed. Someone had to assume that I was saying something that I wasn't.

Great.

My ideology is Catholic. I am a child of the all mighty God and Father of all creation. I hope that's your ideology as well.
Sure. Whatever you say. ;)
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