People are already leaving farms and ranches in droves. Small towns are disappearing. Small farms are getting bought up by large corporations. There are a host of reasons for this and the vast majority of them won't be fixed by cheap fast internet. But in my view, the internet access is no different than electrification. Nobody would be expecting farmers to work their farms without electricity.
If internet access was not available in your city of x million and only 15 people wanted it - scattered throughout the entire city and suburbs and you were one of them who wanted it how would you feel if the providers refused to provide any access because they couldn't make a profit on just 15 folks. You can make the argument that you could move - and that is true. But the farmers and ranchers are stuck to the land and can't move. They do have some limited options for internet access - but nothing that would ever be considered broadband.
I don't object to escrow or other options that people are suggesting to force them to actually provide it and keep it going before getting the money - I'm just not of the opinion that anything will be done under those terms.
Don't know about your circumstances, but I'm happy to subsidize them because I like to eat what they grow and raise. Everybody can talk about competition and how eager companies should be to provide electricity or internet in this day to the rural sticks, but no company is going to do that on its own at a price any farmer or rancher is going to be able to pay. Maybe if they get gigabit to the rural sticks the prices will come down where I live.
While you never have to reboot, you should reboot after new kernels are installed. Otherwise you don't get the security patches. In addition, while most other things will just work the next time the program starts with new libraries, some things like glibc upgrades are used by most everything and also really need a reboot so all running programs get the new patches. Logging out and restarting the X server will generally make sure that any update that affected the display manager will also get the new changes without a full reboot. At least you can do the reboot when it's convenient for you.
The Bible records verse after verse of the wants and desires of God in both the Old and New Testament - and these are just the verses relating to mankind.
As for God's original plan, I'll take Christ's word for it (Mt.25:41). It is just as likely that the concept was well known from ancient time and got passed to many false religions as that it was incorporated into Judaism from another source.
As for your list of primary Jewish historical figures - just like today - He told them what they needed to do to get and stay right with Him. That is the important thing in religion and the Bible. There is no point in dwelling on written descriptions of the results of failure (immediate or eternal) - concentrate on what needs to be done to succeed. Certainly there were enough instances of the wrath of God against people who were not following His will to suffice.
You do have free will in heaven, there is the possibility of sin in heaven, and you can be thrown out of heaven. Satan and the angels in heaven that followed him when he rebelled had free will and sinned. Although they have not been banned from heaven at this point in time (see Job and Rev. 12:10 for references), it will not be their eventual home (Rev. 20:10-15).
The Bible gives no reason to believe that humanity in heaven would not have the same potential problems to contend with. One of the reasons people in heaven are allowed to view the horrors of hell is to remind them to do the right thing (Isa 66:22-24). Clearly, during the millennial period man will still have free will because at the end of it some choose to team up with Satan again in one last attempt to overthrow God (Rev 20:5-9).
Hell was created for Satan and his followers. It was not originally there because of man.
God created man to be His friend. He walked with them in the garden and provided for them. It was their free choice to disobey his very minimal commandment for maintaining that relationship.
Once they decided of their own free will to break their relationship with Him, life got harder for man. It was man's responsibility to pass on God's requirements to each succeeding generation. Man failed at that as well, and Satan muddied the waters with a bunch of false religions because he wants everyone to end up in the same place he will. We did take over his planet after all.
But even today, God's requirements for salvation are simple. Accept Christ as Savior and repent of sins. Christ summed up the commandments to follow as love God and love your fellow man as you would love yourself. Restoring a right relationship with God is easy. Repentance might be hard depending on how you have been living your life. But the Holy Spirit is there to help you in your walk. All you have to do is open the door and ask. He's already knocking.
Whenever you place your eyes on an individual, you will be disappointed, for humanity is sinful by nature. Whenever you put your eyes on a religion, you will be disappointed, for religions are made up of a mass of humanity. Fix your eyes on Christ who is the example and finisher of our faith and is who the Christian church and Christians should be trying to follow. His set of commands were a much tougher standard to live up to than many in the Old Covenant.
We don't get it right all the time. Particular powerful people in the near and distant past have gotten it wrong, acting in the name of Christianity, and have damaged its name. But Christ did it right. Many, many other Christians get it right far more often than they get it wrong. The ones who do still fail make the headlines and get what they've done picked up by a largely hostile press because Satan is trying to destroy Christianity. Shakespeare said "the evil men do live after them, the good is often interred with their bones." That is still just as true today as it was when he wrote it.
Each person will have to answer for themselves before God one day for what they've done and what they haven't done that they should have done. Those who went against God's will in His name will answer for what they have done. Those who went against God's will in another religion's name or outside of any religious influence will also answer for what they have done. Give Christianity a chance. Just be willing to forgive us when we goof up and if you look around some you'll find a group that will overlook your flaws as well. There are some who can take a solitary path and still be the person that God wants them to be, but it is easier with fellow believers. Just let the fruit of the Spirit grow in you while you're waiting for it to grow in others.
Reading some other comments in the discussion, understand that God's standards and eternal consequences will be applied equally to everyone. Christians don't always show God's love to people the way they should and this is particularly true for people who are outside of the norm of the group. But love does also mean caring about where people end up for eternity. That is ultimately what should be important to each individual. God's word is black and white on many issues that the world wants to see as all white or at least grey and white. God isn't going to change His standards just because man wants Him to. Expecting Christianity to change or modernize its morals to make a sinful world feel comfortable is unrealistic. Repentance is hard in many cases, but it is what God expects. We need to show Christ's love to everyone, but understand that like the woman taken in adultery Christ forgave and then said to go and sin no more.
The 6 day time frame was just to restore Earth to a habitable state again and repopulate it after He wiped out Lucifer's kingdom by a flood. That said, not having a committee to deal with or regulations to adhere to was probably a time saver. The next judgment is also going to be apocalyptic.
While your comment is true, the Unix/Linux philosophy grew from do one small thing well and interoperate. Even extra keystrokes were omitted in the interest of keeping things small and fast - rm, cp, mv, ls and the like come to mind.
systemd is getting its paws into everything. I too see a use case for some of its features - particularly for mobile users. But their ease of use has really made a mess of some interconnected servers. I'm sure that this will settle down as the code base gets more stable and quits changing, but it has had an impact particularly in trying to find out if an interface is up for some definition of up and waiting till that is true before starting other critical services.
As systemd impacts and worms its way into more and more packages, the ability to "write your own" becomes just about impossible for any small group of people. If any software package maintainer decides - hey - I could use systemd this way and makes the changes, that person understands the software and knows what to change for their package. Multiply that by hundreds of packages. From the other side, in order to undo the encroachment - you not only have to understand how to write an init system, but you have to understand every package that you need that has built a dependency on systemd and unroll all of the systemd related changes which may have occurred over months or at some point years and put your own hooks in without breaking it and then maintain those hundreds of packages. As it works its way into desktops, the number of packages is growing.
The get the source code and modify philosophy was really meant for fixing a problem or two before the end maintainers got around to fixing it or modifying a package or two and taking over those packages for internal operations. Duplicating the programmers of RH or the like really isn't in the cards for any normal person or group. Maybe it is for Mr. Pottering, but not for most everyone else.
A decade from now when systemd has all the bugs worked out and the system admins are happy again, somebody will decide to build a systemg and it will start all over. It would be nice to think that they will remember the systemd mess and do better, but then again they're probably in grade school now - or their parents or grandparents are. That's the sort of init history that got flushed away in the name of new and shiny.
No different than claims of mileage, battery duration, acceleration abilities at start vs. 5 years out, or any of a host of other claims made by the electric industry... All figures may vary depending on where you live, how you drive, how you maintain, blah, blah, blah. Don't trust any of them. About the best you can do is compare values put out by the same manufacturer (and even there they may be fudging a particular model's info to try to get its sales up a bit).
It is also quite possible to be a Christian and be pro-life in the sense that you believe people should be encouraged to nurture life without being against abortion. The closest the Bible really comes to talking about the death of a fetus is found in Exodus 21:21-25 giving laws for two men struggling who injure a pregnant bystander. If the mother just loses the fetus - the only penalty is a fine if the father of the child chooses to bring the matter to trial. If the mother dies, then normal accidental death penalties would be applied. It's really hard to say the Bible equates the two in severity. Christians would do better to offer to adopt and love the unwanted children than condemning the mothers.
As the AC noted, the death penalty was given and applied for many crimes that disrupted their social order - whether for civil or religious reasons.
The Bible is really pretty well consistent. There are spots where different authors made note of different things in their writings that particularly stood out to them. I'm sure that over the centuries there have been a few problems in the recovery of exact texts from the original documents. Clearly - the translation of those original documents to the various languages of today is difficult and the more free and readable the translation is, the greater the likelihood that something isn't quite perfect. Nevertheless - in the basic themes the Bible is trying to present, and in its basic views of what is right and wrong - it is pretty well consistent.
I was thinking sledge hammer, or shotgun at close range, but that would prevent yet another wave of hysteria being promulgated to further... I don't know... lot's of ways to fill in that blank.
How about increasing the detail of the tags and turning each detailed tag into an easy to browse discussion group that isn't tied to news stories. Let the editors figure out some tree hierarchy that would be sane to select from.
Depending on their visibility, they may or may not be used, but having a computers/operating systems/linux/systemd tagged discussion group that reduced even a few percent of the flame wars about it in stories about new versions of linux would be a good thing.
Don't allow AC posting in the discussion threads. Limit the posts each person can make per discussion group to x per week so people have to think a bit more about what they say. Actively monitor the discussion and news threads and if it looks like a new subject is being started assign it a new tag and add it into the tree as its own thread. Alternatively add a new topic flag similar to the report abuse tag that would alert an editor to examine the thread for this activity.
Too many stories devolve into the same general discussion - many examples given in the posts in this thread - climate change, use of natural resources, solar power, electric cars, creation, politics, privacy, elections,.... Provide forums for discussing the basic topics and maybe the story threads would remain more pertinent to the story at hand. If they started overlapping a discussion thread, the editors could move that part of the thread over to the proper discussion thread for continued comments.
The CSS used to display the polls in the sidebar needs radically adjusted at least for Chrome. It ends up being a narrow band making the actual question impossible to read without scrolling. I think this issue is a bigger reason that polls are being ignored rather than the consistent placement, although I agree the sidebar is where they belong.
I didn't bring up Job, and I don't consider it to be a study of prayer at all - although prayer is technically a conversation with God, so I suppose several parts of the book qualify. It doesn't matter that Job's status was restored - I'm simply pointing out that in this case it was. It isn't recorded that he prayed for his status to be restored either. God simply did it because He liked Job. My answer was simply that the family not being restored was not a consideration or expectation. God did give sons and daughters to comfort Job and help him carry on his business and life. In no case did prayer enter into any of these things.
I also take issue with people who say that when someone dies their prayers of healing were answered. No, they weren't. They don't have to deal with the disease anymore, but that doesn't mean the prayer was answered.
A prayer to God that causes something out of the realm of nature to occur is evidence that must be considered by those who observe it in accepting that God exists, with all that implies. A prayer that is not answered in the way we think it should be answered, however, cannot be used as definitive proof that God doesn't exist. He has His own will that is higher than ours, and His own plans for us and history that will be carried out. His will can occasionally be swayed, but judging prayer results as a basis for the existence of God is not the same as advertising.
Eternity is just that - forever - we stretch our minds to think of a lifespan of 100 years or so.
It is true that Job's family weren't brought back to life on earth. A few instances of this were recorded in the Bible in both the Old and New Testaments and have been recorded since Bible days, and yet Job's family were not. Job had other sons and daughters after this, so would have married again. His life went on and was full and blessed.
So what of the original family members? The Bible doesn't declare their status with God at the time of their demise.
If they were right with God, then they got to continue on in the paradise compartment of sheol until Christ's death on the cross and resurrection when He took those souls with Him to heaven.
Even paradise was better than their life on Earth (which was good since Job was wealthy), and heaven certainly is better than anything Earth could provide. Job would have been reunited with them when he died and again - eternity is a long time, so a few years apart would not be a big thing.
If they were not right with God, then they were eternally separated. That is the risk you take when you live your life in such a way that a sudden departure means eternal separation from God and His judgment. Job was righteous, so I think it is safe to assume that he had imparted right and wrong to his wife and children. If they chose to ignore his wisdom and go their own way - how can you blame God for that?
The lesson of Job is to be sure you are ready - even if you think you are rich and self sufficient and have no worries
because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
Yes. Several times. It's an interesting debate both in heaven between God and Satan at the start, and on earth among Job's friends and Job and his wife.
There are a few things to keep in mind.
Job was a good man, but no man is perfect. None of us compare to God for righteousness and holiness. As you read Job you see some of his inner character shine through and it isn't always pretty.
In the end, God restores Job's status.
The story of Job happened far back in the Old Testament before many of the promises that the Bible records were ever made and long before the Holy Spirit was made available to all believers.
The Bible doesn't declare that Jehovah is the only one who answers prayers. But any miracle that is done by a lower power is only done at the forbearance of Jehovah. In Exodus, for example, the court magicians are able to do some of the first miracles that Moses does, but eventually even they declare to Pharoah that they he is fighting the hand of God. In Revelation it is made clear that many will be deceived by an earthly false prophet who does miracles. So it is clear there are many forces outside of our realm of being that are more powerful than us and can affect the natural realms that we live in. These have the power to deceive and have done so through time.
As you said, each person must make a choice as to which of the God's to follow. It's a free choice. Your conscience will guide you in the way - if you haven't seared it already. It would be nice if it was always as easy as the people had it when Elijah took on the followers of Baal on Mt. Carmel
And call ye on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the LORD: and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God. And all the people answered and said, It is well spoken.
but it isn't usually that obvious to most people anymore.
From God's point of view, Christ has come and walked the pages of history doing mighty miracles and showing God's love for His creation to man. His followers have walked the pages of history since also doing miracles to promote His kingdom. None of us are as perfect as Christ was. Some are worse than others. But the example to look at is Christ and not Christians. After His example, what point is there for special effects.
Given the choice, I'll pick the one who lowered Himself to mankind's position, lived as one of us for a time, and died to make a pure sacrifice between ourselves and God. That's unique among the various religions out there. There will always be debate until He returns to set up rule on Earth as to which God is "the" God. In the end, all the false religions that Satan has spread to destroy the humanity that he hates will be wiped away. Unfortunately, by then it will be too late for their followers.
People that I personally know - directly in the family (wife and mother) and other people I have known for a few years have had prayers for healing answered. The prayers were immediate and completely fixed the problem. I know that God does answer prayer.
Unfortunately, such answers to prayer are not reproducible so the skeptics don't care. I've also had prayers for healing go unanswered. That doesn't change my faith.
My rebuttal gave a couple of reasons that the Bible declares that prayer isn't answered. It isn't meant to be an all inclusive list and I don't think the Bible gives an all inclusive list. Others it does list include doubt and sin. A general lack of faith even prevented Christ from doing many miracles in some areas. If even Christ was hindered, I think it is safe to say that Christians today will also be hindered at times when we pray. The lack of faith in God in the slasdot crowd is high. Reminds me of a Darth Vader line, but I digress.
God knows what is best for each of us in every situation. I don't think He will normally give us our way in something that will end up hurting us (either now or eternally) even if we pray for it. I chose the reasons for my response from what the original poster had complained about (donations). If the Bible's reasons for unanswered prayer seem like rationalizations - well human nature hasn't changed much in a long time. It doesn't make it wrong.
God's overriding purpose in the gifts of the Spirit are to spread Christianity to unbelieving people. I think when He knows that will happen, He is more likely to intervene in the normal course of nature for our behalf.
A missionary shared an example of a good friend of his. That young man was sitting in an airport waiting to pick up a friend. As he was sitting, he felt a prompting to go and stand on his head by the pop machine nearby. He brushed it off as the results of bad pizza the first time. He felt it again, and again he ignored it. The third time he felt a strong urging of the Spirit to go and stand on his head by the pop machine, he said OK, went over to the wall and flipped up on his head in a headstand. He saw a guy in a suit stand up and walk toward him and he thought - oh great - here comes DHS to bust me. The man stood in front of him and asked him what he was doing. He told him that he felt God impress on him that he should go stand on his head by this pop machine. The man then told him that he had been struggling with God for quite a while and he had told God just a few minutes ago that if God was real, someone should go stand on their head by the pop machine. The young Christian was able to lead the man who then had tears running down his face to God.
Not many Christians are willing to make fools of themselves just because God wants them to do something. We're too proud, in general for our own good.
God doesn't do tiny lab experiments that are reproducible. He builds experiments on galactic scales. Don't try to reduce Him to the level of a scientist. We simply are too different to ever understand His ways. How could any good come of standing on our head by a pop machine? Only He knows!
The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much - Jas. 5:16b
God's promises are conditional. If you haven't had your prayers answered, look to yourself first. If you're sure you are upstanding, then examine what you are asking for.
Jas 4:1-3 From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. James is a really good book to read sometime and sadly, he was writing to Hebrew Christians.
People do donate a great deal of money to various religious organizations each year. There are some who do so in the hope they can buy God off. It doesn't work that way and church leaders are in error if they imply that.
The vast majority of us donate to charities, and particularly religious based charities because it is both the right thing to do and a means of helping others with far less overhead than when the government is involved. That isn't a blanket endorsement of all charities, but there are some very good ones run by religious orders with very low administrative overhead costs.
Why would you not want enterprises to utilize better software for their Wi-Fi infrastructure?
Open source simply must be permitted to still exist and be freely used in place of what comes with the equipment. I understand the FCC position, and would even accept a closed source blob that directly controls the radio interface, but there is a vast set of other tools that are used in enterprise environments outside of the core radio interface. These are more frequently patched for features and security enhancements than what you can get from the manufacturer.
A no Open Source position hurts everyone - enterprise environments included.
I would agree with most points you make in your last paragraphs and certainly the last one.
I would tend to say that it is too easy to be critical of using particular modern words like rapture and trinity that are - of course - not written themselves in the texts. A quick off-the-cuff reference to what Christian's term the trinity that comes to mind would be the description of Christ's water baptism by John. I would truly be curious to hear an alternative interpretation for 1 Thess. 4:13-18 that is not consistent with what modern Christians term the rapture - regardless of when the church in its history started to think about the meaning in that particular way. To dismiss the spirit of clear non-symbolic passages (as opposed to clearly figurative passages) because of words Christians have tagged them with or how long it took the church to figure it out, or how long it was forgotten by the church when it was understood by the early church just seems wrong.
I don't agree with 100% of the Left Behind theology - it is a work of fiction. But I do think they did get a better than average amount of the prophecy correct, which isn't easy. My biggest issues with their texts would be the extent of the antichrist's kingdom as I think the prophecy would limit it to the extent of the Roman Empire, and I take exception to their mark of Christ/mark of the beast symbols, but overall not a bad attempt to put into readable form a couple of tough books of the Bible to read in most translations. Is it better to try to read and understand the originals? Yes, of course. But most people write off much of the Bible prophecy because they don't have the time or background to try to unravel it. The fact that it is spread over many books some of which refers to near term events and some yet to be fulfilled doesn't help. So while I'd rather people read the best translation of the original they can find, I don't find the fictional texts to be a problem. As you say - people read things many different ways and it will be interesting to see who is actually right or wrong about Revelation interpretations. The important thing is the eternal end point and not a scorecard or grading of unraveling prophecy before hand. And, of course, focusing on the big things would promote unity. Trouble is, agreeing on what the big things are is just as hard a thing to do as getting unity on them.
I suppose that people could take the approach you suggest about the rapture and the planet and not caring about it since it will all pass away. I guess that to me, God Himself is going to beat the planet up pretty hard according to Revelation, so I'm not sure that what we do is going to be noticed. But I would also point out that regardless of the rapture, the timing of it is not foretold. So doing whatever we wanted with the planet would seem to be a pretty silly thing to do - even if we thought it was going to be happening soon. After all, the early church thought it was going to be happening soon as well. We were originally created to be caretakers, and I'd think this should be our goal with respect to the planet itself. Jesus projected a pretty good "waste not" philosophy while on the earth.
As far as the rest, 1 Cor 13 is a pretty good summary of what to shoot for.
The baptism in the Holy Spirit has been going on since Acts 2 for Christians, and a bit earlier if you count Christ. It is one of the divisive issues of the church today, but that doesn't make it less real. Since I have witnessed both baptisms in the Holy Spirit, seen the evidence of changed lives, and have seen the gifts of the Spirit in action, the issue isn't an elaborate construct for me or the Christians I know.
The trinity is clearly present throughout the Old and New Testament.
These are literal Bible truths.
You are correct that Christians today do use terms which are not found in scripture - word for word. We use terms like rapture to describe the events as written in 1 Thess. 4, 2 Thess. 2, and Revelation 4:1 (hereafter being after the church age of Rev 1-3). It is easier to just use one word that is understood among believers than to read out 1 Th. 4 every time you want to talk about the event.
You are right that people who have not heard the truth wouldn't need to hear these things, but if you have been brought up in a Christian household and have chosen to reject Him, you really aren't in that camp.
I won't argue that the church of today has gotten away from what Christ wanted it to be. He tried to make it clear that the church needed to stay united, and every fracture, brought about by sin has fractured the church and weakened it.
Denominations are a curse. But so is the sin in the church that led to some of those splits. Protestantism started because Luther couldn't stand what was going on in the Catholic church and he couldn't find a way to fix it from within. Was he right or wrong? God will decide that.
I can say that the Spirit filled denominations are on the rise and the more classic denominations are failing. The evangelical denominations have had their issues and failures as well because people aren't perfect. You can stand on the outside and throw stones or stand on the inside and try to change things for the better. God wants change first in His children's hearts and then in His church and then in the world outside the church.
You've mentioned LGBT issues a few times. I would agree that Christ would be out trying to save the lost. And once they had accepted His salvation, He would have been telling them to go and sin no more, just like the woman taken in adultery. Preaching against sin is never popular. If you believe people are destined to end up in hell, how is trying to keep that from happening by any means possible wrong? You should love the people and do good whenever possible, But you should also preach the truth in season and out of season.
This Sunday is Pentecost Sunday. It is the celebration of when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the believers in the upper room - the first of many examples in the New Testament. Of one thing I am certain - when the Holy Spirit is in control of God's church, things work fine. When He isn't, there are problems.
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People are already leaving farms and ranches in droves. Small towns are disappearing. Small farms are getting bought up by large corporations. There are a host of reasons for this and the vast majority of them won't be fixed by cheap fast internet. But in my view, the internet access is no different than electrification. Nobody would be expecting farmers to work their farms without electricity.
If internet access was not available in your city of x million and only 15 people wanted it - scattered throughout the entire city and suburbs and you were one of them who wanted it how would you feel if the providers refused to provide any access because they couldn't make a profit on just 15 folks. You can make the argument that you could move - and that is true. But the farmers and ranchers are stuck to the land and can't move. They do have some limited options for internet access - but nothing that would ever be considered broadband.
I don't object to escrow or other options that people are suggesting to force them to actually provide it and keep it going before getting the money - I'm just not of the opinion that anything will be done under those terms.
Don't know about your circumstances, but I'm happy to subsidize them because I like to eat what they grow and raise. Everybody can talk about competition and how eager companies should be to provide electricity or internet in this day to the rural sticks, but no company is going to do that on its own at a price any farmer or rancher is going to be able to pay. Maybe if they get gigabit to the rural sticks the prices will come down where I live.
While you never have to reboot, you should reboot after new kernels are installed. Otherwise you don't get the security patches. In addition, while most other things will just work the next time the program starts with new libraries, some things like glibc upgrades are used by most everything and also really need a reboot so all running programs get the new patches. Logging out and restarting the X server will generally make sure that any update that affected the display manager will also get the new changes without a full reboot. At least you can do the reboot when it's convenient for you.
The Bible records verse after verse of the wants and desires of God in both the Old and New Testament - and these are just the verses relating to mankind.
As for God's original plan, I'll take Christ's word for it (Mt.25:41). It is just as likely that the concept was well known from ancient time and got passed to many false religions as that it was incorporated into Judaism from another source.
As for your list of primary Jewish historical figures - just like today - He told them what they needed to do to get and stay right with Him. That is the important thing in religion and the Bible. There is no point in dwelling on written descriptions of the results of failure (immediate or eternal) - concentrate on what needs to be done to succeed. Certainly there were enough instances of the wrath of God against people who were not following His will to suffice.
You do have free will in heaven, there is the possibility of sin in heaven, and you can be thrown out of heaven. Satan and the angels in heaven that followed him when he rebelled had free will and sinned. Although they have not been banned from heaven at this point in time (see Job and Rev. 12:10 for references), it will not be their eventual home (Rev. 20:10-15).
The Bible gives no reason to believe that humanity in heaven would not have the same potential problems to contend with. One of the reasons people in heaven are allowed to view the horrors of hell is to remind them to do the right thing (Isa 66:22-24). Clearly, during the millennial period man will still have free will because at the end of it some choose to team up with Satan again in one last attempt to overthrow God (Rev 20:5-9).
Hell was created for Satan and his followers. It was not originally there because of man.
God created man to be His friend. He walked with them in the garden and provided for them. It was their free choice to disobey his very minimal commandment for maintaining that relationship.
Once they decided of their own free will to break their relationship with Him, life got harder for man. It was man's responsibility to pass on God's requirements to each succeeding generation. Man failed at that as well, and Satan muddied the waters with a bunch of false religions because he wants everyone to end up in the same place he will. We did take over his planet after all.
But even today, God's requirements for salvation are simple. Accept Christ as Savior and repent of sins. Christ summed up the commandments to follow as love God and love your fellow man as you would love yourself. Restoring a right relationship with God is easy. Repentance might be hard depending on how you have been living your life. But the Holy Spirit is there to help you in your walk. All you have to do is open the door and ask. He's already knocking.
Whenever you place your eyes on an individual, you will be disappointed, for humanity is sinful by nature. Whenever you put your eyes on a religion, you will be disappointed, for religions are made up of a mass of humanity. Fix your eyes on Christ who is the example and finisher of our faith and is who the Christian church and Christians should be trying to follow. His set of commands were a much tougher standard to live up to than many in the Old Covenant.
We don't get it right all the time. Particular powerful people in the near and distant past have gotten it wrong, acting in the name of Christianity, and have damaged its name. But Christ did it right. Many, many other Christians get it right far more often than they get it wrong. The ones who do still fail make the headlines and get what they've done picked up by a largely hostile press because Satan is trying to destroy Christianity. Shakespeare said "the evil men do live after them, the good is often interred with their bones." That is still just as true today as it was when he wrote it.
Each person will have to answer for themselves before God one day for what they've done and what they haven't done that they should have done. Those who went against God's will in His name will answer for what they have done. Those who went against God's will in another religion's name or outside of any religious influence will also answer for what they have done. Give Christianity a chance. Just be willing to forgive us when we goof up and if you look around some you'll find a group that will overlook your flaws as well. There are some who can take a solitary path and still be the person that God wants them to be, but it is easier with fellow believers. Just let the fruit of the Spirit grow in you while you're waiting for it to grow in others.
Reading some other comments in the discussion, understand that God's standards and eternal consequences will be applied equally to everyone. Christians don't always show God's love to people the way they should and this is particularly true for people who are outside of the norm of the group. But love does also mean caring about where people end up for eternity. That is ultimately what should be important to each individual. God's word is black and white on many issues that the world wants to see as all white or at least grey and white. God isn't going to change His standards just because man wants Him to. Expecting Christianity to change or modernize its morals to make a sinful world feel comfortable is unrealistic. Repentance is hard in many cases, but it is what God expects. We need to show Christ's love to everyone, but understand that like the woman taken in adultery Christ forgave and then said to go and sin no more.
The 6 day time frame was just to restore Earth to a habitable state again and repopulate it after He wiped out Lucifer's kingdom by a flood. That said, not having a committee to deal with or regulations to adhere to was probably a time saver. The next judgment is also going to be apocalyptic.
While your comment is true, the Unix/Linux philosophy grew from do one small thing well and interoperate. Even extra keystrokes were omitted in the interest of keeping things small and fast - rm, cp, mv, ls and the like come to mind.
systemd is getting its paws into everything. I too see a use case for some of its features - particularly for mobile users. But their ease of use has really made a mess of some interconnected servers. I'm sure that this will settle down as the code base gets more stable and quits changing, but it has had an impact particularly in trying to find out if an interface is up for some definition of up and waiting till that is true before starting other critical services.
As systemd impacts and worms its way into more and more packages, the ability to "write your own" becomes just about impossible for any small group of people. If any software package maintainer decides - hey - I could use systemd this way and makes the changes, that person understands the software and knows what to change for their package. Multiply that by hundreds of packages. From the other side, in order to undo the encroachment - you not only have to understand how to write an init system, but you have to understand every package that you need that has built a dependency on systemd and unroll all of the systemd related changes which may have occurred over months or at some point years and put your own hooks in without breaking it and then maintain those hundreds of packages. As it works its way into desktops, the number of packages is growing.
The get the source code and modify philosophy was really meant for fixing a problem or two before the end maintainers got around to fixing it or modifying a package or two and taking over those packages for internal operations. Duplicating the programmers of RH or the like really isn't in the cards for any normal person or group. Maybe it is for Mr. Pottering, but not for most everyone else.
A decade from now when systemd has all the bugs worked out and the system admins are happy again, somebody will decide to build a systemg and it will start all over. It would be nice to think that they will remember the systemd mess and do better, but then again they're probably in grade school now - or their parents or grandparents are. That's the sort of init history that got flushed away in the name of new and shiny.
No different than claims of mileage, battery duration, acceleration abilities at start vs. 5 years out, or any of a host of other claims made by the electric industry... All figures may vary depending on where you live, how you drive, how you maintain, blah, blah, blah. Don't trust any of them. About the best you can do is compare values put out by the same manufacturer (and even there they may be fudging a particular model's info to try to get its sales up a bit).
It is also quite possible to be a Christian and be pro-life in the sense that you believe people should be encouraged to nurture life without being against abortion. The closest the Bible really comes to talking about the death of a fetus is found in Exodus 21:21-25 giving laws for two men struggling who injure a pregnant bystander. If the mother just loses the fetus - the only penalty is a fine if the father of the child chooses to bring the matter to trial. If the mother dies, then normal accidental death penalties would be applied. It's really hard to say the Bible equates the two in severity. Christians would do better to offer to adopt and love the unwanted children than condemning the mothers.
As the AC noted, the death penalty was given and applied for many crimes that disrupted their social order - whether for civil or religious reasons.
The Bible is really pretty well consistent. There are spots where different authors made note of different things in their writings that particularly stood out to them. I'm sure that over the centuries there have been a few problems in the recovery of exact texts from the original documents. Clearly - the translation of those original documents to the various languages of today is difficult and the more free and readable the translation is, the greater the likelihood that something isn't quite perfect. Nevertheless - in the basic themes the Bible is trying to present, and in its basic views of what is right and wrong - it is pretty well consistent.
How about just adding and I agree / I disagree counter pair separate from the moderation system?
I was thinking sledge hammer, or shotgun at close range, but that would prevent yet another wave of hysteria being promulgated to further... I don't know ... lot's of ways to fill in that blank.
How about increasing the detail of the tags and turning each detailed tag into an easy to browse discussion group that isn't tied to news stories. Let the editors figure out some tree hierarchy that would be sane to select from.
Depending on their visibility, they may or may not be used, but having a computers/operating systems/linux/systemd tagged discussion group that reduced even a few percent of the flame wars about it in stories about new versions of linux would be a good thing.
Don't allow AC posting in the discussion threads. Limit the posts each person can make per discussion group to x per week so people have to think a bit more about what they say. Actively monitor the discussion and news threads and if it looks like a new subject is being started assign it a new tag and add it into the tree as its own thread. Alternatively add a new topic flag similar to the report abuse tag that would alert an editor to examine the thread for this activity.
Too many stories devolve into the same general discussion - many examples given in the posts in this thread - climate change, use of natural resources, solar power, electric cars, creation, politics, privacy, elections, .... Provide forums for discussing the basic topics and maybe the story threads would remain more pertinent to the story at hand. If they started overlapping a discussion thread, the editors could move that part of the thread over to the proper discussion thread for continued comments.
The CSS used to display the polls in the sidebar needs radically adjusted at least for Chrome. It ends up being a narrow band making the actual question impossible to read without scrolling. I think this issue is a bigger reason that polls are being ignored rather than the consistent placement, although I agree the sidebar is where they belong.
Lots of places in WY today wind is 40+ MPH with gusts 60+. We could use a few more turbines...
I didn't bring up Job, and I don't consider it to be a study of prayer at all - although prayer is technically a conversation with God, so I suppose several parts of the book qualify. It doesn't matter that Job's status was restored - I'm simply pointing out that in this case it was. It isn't recorded that he prayed for his status to be restored either. God simply did it because He liked Job. My answer was simply that the family not being restored was not a consideration or expectation. God did give sons and daughters to comfort Job and help him carry on his business and life. In no case did prayer enter into any of these things.
I also take issue with people who say that when someone dies their prayers of healing were answered. No, they weren't. They don't have to deal with the disease anymore, but that doesn't mean the prayer was answered.
A prayer to God that causes something out of the realm of nature to occur is evidence that must be considered by those who observe it in accepting that God exists, with all that implies. A prayer that is not answered in the way we think it should be answered, however, cannot be used as definitive proof that God doesn't exist. He has His own will that is higher than ours, and His own plans for us and history that will be carried out. His will can occasionally be swayed, but judging prayer results as a basis for the existence of God is not the same as advertising.
Eternity is just that - forever - we stretch our minds to think of a lifespan of 100 years or so.
It is true that Job's family weren't brought back to life on earth. A few instances of this were recorded in the Bible in both the Old and New Testaments and have been recorded since Bible days, and yet Job's family were not. Job had other sons and daughters after this, so would have married again. His life went on and was full and blessed.
So what of the original family members? The Bible doesn't declare their status with God at the time of their demise.
If they were right with God, then they got to continue on in the paradise compartment of sheol until Christ's death on the cross and resurrection when He took those souls with Him to heaven.
Even paradise was better than their life on Earth (which was good since Job was wealthy), and heaven certainly is better than anything Earth could provide. Job would have been reunited with them when he died and again - eternity is a long time, so a few years apart would not be a big thing.
If they were not right with God, then they were eternally separated. That is the risk you take when you live your life in such a way that a sudden departure means eternal separation from God and His judgment. Job was righteous, so I think it is safe to assume that he had imparted right and wrong to his wife and children. If they chose to ignore his wisdom and go their own way - how can you blame God for that?
The lesson of Job is to be sure you are ready - even if you think you are rich and self sufficient and have no worries
Yes. Several times. It's an interesting debate both in heaven between God and Satan at the start, and on earth among Job's friends and Job and his wife.
There are a few things to keep in mind.
The Bible is hardly domestic.
The Bible doesn't declare that Jehovah is the only one who answers prayers. But any miracle that is done by a lower power is only done at the forbearance of Jehovah. In Exodus, for example, the court magicians are able to do some of the first miracles that Moses does, but eventually even they declare to Pharoah that they he is fighting the hand of God. In Revelation it is made clear that many will be deceived by an earthly false prophet who does miracles. So it is clear there are many forces outside of our realm of being that are more powerful than us and can affect the natural realms that we live in. These have the power to deceive and have done so through time.
As you said, each person must make a choice as to which of the God's to follow. It's a free choice. Your conscience will guide you in the way - if you haven't seared it already. It would be nice if it was always as easy as the people had it when Elijah took on the followers of Baal on Mt. Carmel
but it isn't usually that obvious to most people anymore.
From God's point of view, Christ has come and walked the pages of history doing mighty miracles and showing God's love for His creation to man. His followers have walked the pages of history since also doing miracles to promote His kingdom. None of us are as perfect as Christ was. Some are worse than others. But the example to look at is Christ and not Christians. After His example, what point is there for special effects.
Given the choice, I'll pick the one who lowered Himself to mankind's position, lived as one of us for a time, and died to make a pure sacrifice between ourselves and God. That's unique among the various religions out there. There will always be debate until He returns to set up rule on Earth as to which God is "the" God. In the end, all the false religions that Satan has spread to destroy the humanity that he hates will be wiped away. Unfortunately, by then it will be too late for their followers.
People that I personally know - directly in the family (wife and mother) and other people I have known for a few years have had prayers for healing answered. The prayers were immediate and completely fixed the problem. I know that God does answer prayer.
Unfortunately, such answers to prayer are not reproducible so the skeptics don't care. I've also had prayers for healing go unanswered. That doesn't change my faith.
My rebuttal gave a couple of reasons that the Bible declares that prayer isn't answered. It isn't meant to be an all inclusive list and I don't think the Bible gives an all inclusive list. Others it does list include doubt and sin. A general lack of faith even prevented Christ from doing many miracles in some areas. If even Christ was hindered, I think it is safe to say that Christians today will also be hindered at times when we pray. The lack of faith in God in the slasdot crowd is high. Reminds me of a Darth Vader line, but I digress.
God knows what is best for each of us in every situation. I don't think He will normally give us our way in something that will end up hurting us (either now or eternally) even if we pray for it. I chose the reasons for my response from what the original poster had complained about (donations). If the Bible's reasons for unanswered prayer seem like rationalizations - well human nature hasn't changed much in a long time. It doesn't make it wrong.
God's overriding purpose in the gifts of the Spirit are to spread Christianity to unbelieving people. I think when He knows that will happen, He is more likely to intervene in the normal course of nature for our behalf.
A missionary shared an example of a good friend of his. That young man was sitting in an airport waiting to pick up a friend. As he was sitting, he felt a prompting to go and stand on his head by the pop machine nearby. He brushed it off as the results of bad pizza the first time. He felt it again, and again he ignored it. The third time he felt a strong urging of the Spirit to go and stand on his head by the pop machine, he said OK, went over to the wall and flipped up on his head in a headstand. He saw a guy in a suit stand up and walk toward him and he thought - oh great - here comes DHS to bust me. The man stood in front of him and asked him what he was doing. He told him that he felt God impress on him that he should go stand on his head by this pop machine. The man then told him that he had been struggling with God for quite a while and he had told God just a few minutes ago that if God was real, someone should go stand on their head by the pop machine. The young Christian was able to lead the man who then had tears running down his face to God.
Not many Christians are willing to make fools of themselves just because God wants them to do something. We're too proud, in general for our own good.
God doesn't do tiny lab experiments that are reproducible. He builds experiments on galactic scales. Don't try to reduce Him to the level of a scientist. We simply are too different to ever understand His ways. How could any good come of standing on our head by a pop machine? Only He knows!
The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much - Jas. 5:16b
God's promises are conditional. If you haven't had your prayers answered, look to yourself first. If you're sure you are upstanding, then examine what you are asking for.
Jas 4:1-3 From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. James is a really good book to read sometime and sadly, he was writing to Hebrew Christians.
People do donate a great deal of money to various religious organizations each year. There are some who do so in the hope they can buy God off. It doesn't work that way and church leaders are in error if they imply that.
The vast majority of us donate to charities, and particularly religious based charities because it is both the right thing to do and a means of helping others with far less overhead than when the government is involved. That isn't a blanket endorsement of all charities, but there are some very good ones run by religious orders with very low administrative overhead costs.
Why would you not want enterprises to utilize better software for their Wi-Fi infrastructure?
Open source simply must be permitted to still exist and be freely used in place of what comes with the equipment. I understand the FCC position, and would even accept a closed source blob that directly controls the radio interface, but there is a vast set of other tools that are used in enterprise environments outside of the core radio interface. These are more frequently patched for features and security enhancements than what you can get from the manufacturer.
A no Open Source position hurts everyone - enterprise environments included.
Hope nobody here is a system administrator at a hospital or doing contract work for a medical specialist.
I would agree with most points you make in your last paragraphs and certainly the last one.
I would tend to say that it is too easy to be critical of using particular modern words like rapture and trinity that are - of course - not written themselves in the texts. A quick off-the-cuff reference to what Christian's term the trinity that comes to mind would be the description of Christ's water baptism by John. I would truly be curious to hear an alternative interpretation for 1 Thess. 4:13-18 that is not consistent with what modern Christians term the rapture - regardless of when the church in its history started to think about the meaning in that particular way. To dismiss the spirit of clear non-symbolic passages (as opposed to clearly figurative passages) because of words Christians have tagged them with or how long it took the church to figure it out, or how long it was forgotten by the church when it was understood by the early church just seems wrong.
I don't agree with 100% of the Left Behind theology - it is a work of fiction. But I do think they did get a better than average amount of the prophecy correct, which isn't easy. My biggest issues with their texts would be the extent of the antichrist's kingdom as I think the prophecy would limit it to the extent of the Roman Empire, and I take exception to their mark of Christ/mark of the beast symbols, but overall not a bad attempt to put into readable form a couple of tough books of the Bible to read in most translations. Is it better to try to read and understand the originals? Yes, of course. But most people write off much of the Bible prophecy because they don't have the time or background to try to unravel it. The fact that it is spread over many books some of which refers to near term events and some yet to be fulfilled doesn't help. So while I'd rather people read the best translation of the original they can find, I don't find the fictional texts to be a problem. As you say - people read things many different ways and it will be interesting to see who is actually right or wrong about Revelation interpretations. The important thing is the eternal end point and not a scorecard or grading of unraveling prophecy before hand. And, of course, focusing on the big things would promote unity. Trouble is, agreeing on what the big things are is just as hard a thing to do as getting unity on them.
I suppose that people could take the approach you suggest about the rapture and the planet and not caring about it since it will all pass away. I guess that to me, God Himself is going to beat the planet up pretty hard according to Revelation, so I'm not sure that what we do is going to be noticed. But I would also point out that regardless of the rapture, the timing of it is not foretold. So doing whatever we wanted with the planet would seem to be a pretty silly thing to do - even if we thought it was going to be happening soon. After all, the early church thought it was going to be happening soon as well. We were originally created to be caretakers, and I'd think this should be our goal with respect to the planet itself. Jesus projected a pretty good "waste not" philosophy while on the earth.
As far as the rest, 1 Cor 13 is a pretty good summary of what to shoot for.
The baptism in the Holy Spirit has been going on since Acts 2 for Christians, and a bit earlier if you count Christ. It is one of the divisive issues of the church today, but that doesn't make it less real. Since I have witnessed both baptisms in the Holy Spirit, seen the evidence of changed lives, and have seen the gifts of the Spirit in action, the issue isn't an elaborate construct for me or the Christians I know.
The trinity is clearly present throughout the Old and New Testament.
These are literal Bible truths.
You are correct that Christians today do use terms which are not found in scripture - word for word. We use terms like rapture to describe the events as written in 1 Thess. 4, 2 Thess. 2, and Revelation 4:1 (hereafter being after the church age of Rev 1-3). It is easier to just use one word that is understood among believers than to read out 1 Th. 4 every time you want to talk about the event.
You are right that people who have not heard the truth wouldn't need to hear these things, but if you have been brought up in a Christian household and have chosen to reject Him, you really aren't in that camp.
I won't argue that the church of today has gotten away from what Christ wanted it to be. He tried to make it clear that the church needed to stay united, and every fracture, brought about by sin has fractured the church and weakened it.
Denominations are a curse. But so is the sin in the church that led to some of those splits. Protestantism started because Luther couldn't stand what was going on in the Catholic church and he couldn't find a way to fix it from within. Was he right or wrong? God will decide that.
I can say that the Spirit filled denominations are on the rise and the more classic denominations are failing. The evangelical denominations have had their issues and failures as well because people aren't perfect. You can stand on the outside and throw stones or stand on the inside and try to change things for the better. God wants change first in His children's hearts and then in His church and then in the world outside the church.
You've mentioned LGBT issues a few times. I would agree that Christ would be out trying to save the lost. And once they had accepted His salvation, He would have been telling them to go and sin no more, just like the woman taken in adultery. Preaching against sin is never popular. If you believe people are destined to end up in hell, how is trying to keep that from happening by any means possible wrong? You should love the people and do good whenever possible, But you should also preach the truth in season and out of season.
This Sunday is Pentecost Sunday. It is the celebration of when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the believers in the upper room - the first of many examples in the New Testament. Of one thing I am certain - when the Holy Spirit is in control of God's church, things work fine. When He isn't, there are problems.