Baxter Williams

Same reason I don't get a dog. I love dogs. Grew up with many. But they chain you down

Musk’s X Lags Further Behind Zuckerberg’s Threads In New Daily User Data Threads first surpassed X in terms of daily active users on mobile devices worldwide in September, according to Similarweb.

Threads beating X and Bsky continues to collapse. Sad day..

www.forbes.com/sites/conorm...

If God really does do things I find morally insane (like annihilation for divorcees) I hope God knows that I am still willing to worship Him, and only don't do so now because I find it possible that this isn't reality.

If there was a window in the sky showing that realm of eternal torment where people who tickled other people went, it wouldn't matter to me if that is an insane punishment for the crime, I would still stop tickling people.

I have often played with the thought experiment that an immoral God was real. Like Judaism being true, imagine a God that apologizes for getting angry, but still gets angry and overdoes it frequently.

I mean, what are you going to do if that is true, NOT try to get on His good side?

My method is less "myths are an excellent tool for symbollism" and more imagining God looking around and thinking "Gosh, everyone's myths are so horrible... guess this one is at least mostly monotheistic. I'll make do with it."

I mean, the only thing the OT is really used for from the POV of the New Testament is providing messianic prophecies (none of which are in that ugly narrative part) and providing a list of rules from which Jesus could create a priority ranking. (#1 love God, #2 love neighbor, etc)

Reading Ecclesiastes helped. Finally I could relate to someone living within that framework.

Really the only feasible way I can entertain reading it inside a Christian framework is as "the myth that God chose to make use of for some reason".

"stunlocked by genocide" is a pretty accurate description of my experience too haha

For me it was when God killed the first born of all Egypts slaves that basically stopped me from reading it for a decade.

given that Jesus knew stories of people taken directly to heaven without dying and is never recorded as personally saying "none are righteous" I'm inclined to think he actually thought some were righteous.

Been musing about how Jesus defended eating with tax collectors by saying that he is there to call the sinners, not the righteous.

Either Jesus is saying that some are righteous, and not in need of a call, or this is just a very rounabout and obtuse way to say "I eat with anyone"

sorry. Been out of the loop but genuinely excited about this

omg

Oh I'm the last person to blaspheme the goodness of God. God is great. People are terrible.

What I criticize is people's opinions on God, not God.

Also that picture you sent seems to forget all the children that die in the womb. This number is close to 50% of all humans per the Catholic dogma because they teach that fertilized eggs are ensouled and the number of fertlized eggs that don't even implant on the uterine wall is close to 50%

www.vatican.va/roman_curia/...

The Catholic church teaches that we are instructed to baptize infants. As to whether the unbaptized can be saved by some method not taught in scripture, the church is deliberately silent.

thee infants quit because some other human made the choice not to baptize them? Who knew that humans had so much power over the ultimate destination of souls?

But it has not taught that they go to limbo nor Hell.

Also would you say that God lacks the power or the will to bring them into the kingdom?

Interesting. Is this because you think Augustine spoke with the authority of God Himself?

Because the church you belong to has not confirmed this via council or ex Cathedra. And other church fathers disagree with Augustine.

Do you also believe unbaptozed babies are in Hell like Augustine?

Woo! Way to go!

Not sure why the png of the logo looks so blurry though.

test page for my website withe logo and a statement that says "this website is under construction"

Well, it took me 2 weeks to learn how to upload basic html code to CloudFlare servers and get my domain to point to it... but still that's a start!

you think Acts was written in 230AD??

So I learned that Catholics say not only is divorce never permitted, but is is impossible for a human to actually do since it is a spiritual union.

When Jesus said, "no divorce except for porneia" I wonder what purpose "except for porneia" serves in their mind?

Good points here

We probably have the same style in effect. Some human writings are closer to the divine than others. There is some threshold above which I will reference them regularly as being better than what I could write.