FlailingAce
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User ID: 1084
FlailingAce
1d ago
That's good advice. I attend a Calvary Chapel where we teach the Bible chapter by chapter, so the order is somewhat pre-determined. However, I agree that this is the sort of context that needs to be brought in as part of that teaching to avoid coming across as crassly homophobic.
FlailingAce
1d ago
I'm with you in theory. However in practice many people have beliefs that are influenced by secular culture, so I think it's important to have a considered approach when you introduce ideas that people may struggle with.
The other pastor who gave the advice not to teach Romans has had a lot of success growing his church, while the church I attend has stayed quite small. But I actually left that larger church for this smaller one partly because of lack of depth in the teaching. So, what's more important - reaching more people with the basic gospel message of salvation, or tending to a smaller group of more devoted faithful? I don't think there's an obvious answer. Probably we need both. "But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it." 1 Cor 3:2 - Lots of infants in Christ out there nowadays!
FlailingAce
1d ago
From a Christian standpoint, the whole world is essentially the domain of Satan and his demons. For instance, Satan is referred to as the 'prince' of the world, and offers worldly power to Jesus when he tempts him.
Certainly, many physical events are not tied to the action of angels and demons, since the world generally follows material laws. But Christians will talk often about 'spiritual warfare', which is when the influence of demonic forces coming against the will of God or the work of the Holy Spirit. Because the world is fallen, the demons have influence here, and it seems that this is the way God has set things up. He could, of course, redeem the world and cast down all the demons - indeed, He has promised that He will do this when Jesus returns - but until then, the demons continue to have influence. I would also argue that most demonic influence comes through people, not through them causing earthquakes or the like (disease might fall somewhere in the middle).
As to why this is a helpful view? Firstly, if it's true then it will help you understand the world. Second, it accurately describes how many people act. The 'demonic' is often seen in self-interest, cruelty or callousness, the kind of behavior that we pretend is not normal. Having a perspective that includes the demonic will allow you to better predict human behavior, because it overcomes a positivity bias that many people have i.e. 'thinking the best of people'. Thirdly, people have better psychological outcomes if they see purpose in the things that happen to them. This is a bit of a cynical take, but it can actually be more healthy for many people to believe in demons than to believe that bad things happen with no reason.
FlailingAce
1d ago
"Upon further consideration I have decided to become more extreme in my religious beliefs"
This is me. In college I was an edgy libertarian who thought the Wicca creed of "though it harm none, do as you will" was the height of wisdom. As I've matured, it has become clear that certain ways of being are simply better. And then I came (returned, really) to Christ which has increasingly made me a radical in the eyes of the secular world.
Just last night, in fact, I was approached by my senior pastor about taking a teaching role at my church, with the idea that I would eventually take his job. So I've got a lot of thinking to do about many of these issues, and how to address them in a compassionate but biblical way from the pulpit. My pastor says he was advised, for instance, to never teach the book of Romans, because when you teach Romans 1 (which condemns homosexuality among other things) you will lose half your congregation. He teaches it anyway :) This may not be that relevant to you all or to the discussion but I just wanted to share.
FlailingAce
2d ago
From what I understand, it doesn't require nuclear war, but nuclear war would be the most straight-forward way to achieve their ends (both apocalyptic war and the destruction of Israel). It's not that Iranian leadership definitely wants to launch nuclear Armageddon, but that there are some within the IRGC who would conceivably launch a nuclear weapon at Israel or western countries if they had the capability. Their theology means that normal incentives (mutually assured destruction and the like) do not constrain them - they have a similar mindset to a suicide bomber, ignoring worldly consequences in favor of presumed eternal rewards.
Here's a paper from 2022 from the Middle East Institute that goes into some depth.
While there is hope that the IRGC’s senior leadership will act pragmatically, internal structures within the Guard — including its indoctrination and promotion system — certainly open up the possibility that devoted Mahdists could occupy senior leadership positions. Such a scenario could have far-reaching consequences as it would bring the three pillars of the IRGC’s foreign policy — militias, ballistic missiles, and the nuclear program — under their control. Even if a small number of devout Mahdists occupy senior positions in the Guard, it is possible that they may seek to facilitate and speed up the return of Mahdi.
If you look at Iran's actions through this lens, they make sense. In particular, the Iranian insistence on acquiring nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
FlailingAce
3d ago
It's a specific sect of Shiism called Twelver Shia. They believe that the twelfth Imam, Muhammed al-Mahdi, is miraculously still alive, and that he will return to bring in an eternity of peace and prosperity (and global Muslim rule of course). However, for this to happen certain signs must take place, including an apocalyptic war and the destruction of Israel.
Technically, quite a lot of Shia groups believe in the return of the Mahdi, but Iranian Twelvers in the IRGC are particularly radical, and believe they are required to proactively pave the way for his return.
FlailingAce
3d ago
Aren't you conflating different spheres here?
I want my military leaders to be good a keeping secrets, lying even. I'm very happy that nobody knew about the Maduro raid until it was over. Similarly, much of what's happening in Iran is being kept secret because it literally is top secret.
Politics is a different matter. We should desire maximum transparency from our elected leaders, since their actions are the basis on which we elect them and hold them accountable. In fairness though, much of what they do is also classified, or has effects that require deliberation before sharing information.
But I think op is actually more concerned with the media. We absolutely should, and largely don't, hold them to the highest standards for integrity.
Conflating these spheres just muddies the issue.
FlailingAce
3d ago
best case scenario
Definitely not what Eetan said. Best case might be something like: the costs of war for Iran lead to internal regime change that replaces the theocracy with technocratic moderates. Or something along those lines.
What Eetan described is probably closer to a below average but survivable outcome that would achieve some US goals at a moderately high cost.
Iran is in open warfare with the US and its allies, and has been for decades.
It's also run by a radical religious sect that honest-to-God believes a nuclear war is necessary to bring about the return of their messiah. Depending how credibly you take that belief, they are arguably an existential threat to humanity if they acquire nuclear weapons.
Edit: to be clear, I don't necessarily mean this is sufficient reason for the war, just that it's much more convincing to me then the reasons for Iraq and Afghanistan
I don't disagree with much of this. But I think the US goals in Iran would be much more modest than the occupation and nation building we saw in Iraq/Afghanistan.
I'm sure there's a plan that's in development for e.g. seizing Kharg Island, and I think there's a good chance that Trump gives the go ahead some time in the next few months. There are also likely plans for direct action against specific sites related to nuclear enrichment and the like. We already had a test run for insertion/recovery into the country with the missions to retrieve those pilots, and they went as well as could be expected.
But there's also unconventional warfare, which takes much longer but may eventually bear fruit (assuming it's even happening, but I think that's a fair assumption). This may even be the main effort, with the bombings, economic sanctions, etc. serving to shape the environment. But we won't learn about all that until the declassified retrospectives are published in a few decades.
FlailingAce
4d ago
The frustrating thing to me is that this is all so tied up in American electoral politics.
I'm firmly of the opinion that we should escalate the war in Iran until we win it. The cost in treasure and lives would be far less than in Afghanistan or Iraq and for a much more worthy cause, and many of the people I know in the military would absolutely love to get in there.
Unfortunately, there are midterms coming up! The US is largely incapable of pursuing long-term thinking (at least in the open), because any short-term sacrifice will be parlayed into an election loss for the party in power and the long-term plan will be discarded or reversed.
It seems to me that Trump actually wants to win this war. That's why the MOU and the negotiations have largely been a sham. They are not intended to work. They are intended to pacify people until the votes are in. Trump went for a cease-fire because it would lower gas prices, end of story, that's literally all most voters know or care about the war. And after the midterms pass, I expect him to use the overwhelming might of the US military to violently pursue his goals once again, and more power to him.
I don't have specific analysis to back this up, it's just how the overall picture looks to me.
FlailingAce
6d ago
If the price they pay for it is enough to discharge the mortgage debt, then they should be free to do so. If not then yes it's potentially abusable.
But according to op the first right of refusal has never been exercised. I think that's because if your spouse or kid can afford to buy your house at a discount, it's likely much better for them to help you avoid foreclosure in the first place.
FlailingAce
6d ago
I guess we can agree to disagree. From my vantage, LLMs are a limited form of 'intelligence' that seem to be approaching their asymptotic best case performance. They cannot reason on their own because they are simply statistical models that index the corpus of human knowledge.
General intelligence is theoretically replicable using silicon or any other material. But the question is whether it is replicable using digital logic-gate computers. That's not a theoretical physics question, it's a computer science question. I am happy to take the other side of the bet from you, I just hope AI boosterism doesn't ruin the economy and human society in general in the process.
FlailingAce
6d ago
I quite like the first right of refusal part of this law, and find the second right of refusal for non-profits to be a pretty obvious opportunity for abuse which has been rightly litigated.
I also think such a right of refusal should side-step the foreclosure rules. The problem is that the debts on the property are discharged in foreclosure, whether they're paid off or not. If I'm a tenant who wants to purchase the building that the owner defaulted on, either I should pay enough to discharge those debts, or I need to take them on myself. The whole reason foreclosure exists is for a mortgaged property that nobody is willing to buy normally - if there is a buyer, but at a discounted price, then foreclosure shouldn't even apply. Or am I missing something?
FlailingAce
6d ago
That's not special pleading at all. You have the burden of proof here. The fact that AI can do some things that human intelligence can do does not imply that it can do all of those things. Your faith that silicon can replicate every function of human intelligence is just that - faith.
And even if, theoretically, digital computer systems can do everything a human mind can (which is not at all certain), you'll still need to provide evidence that they can get there using our current technology paradigms (which seems increasingly unlikely from my vantage point - billions of dollars of hardware and the entire human corpus digested, and we can't even get AI to stop hallucinating). Without that evidence, your position is no more realistic than the visions of AI in sci-fi novels from a century ago.
FlailingAce
6d ago
we can know that there is some path to creating intelligence of that level
Yes it's called smart people having kids and educating them well.
You're taking the existence of a phenomenon in one substance and assuming it can be replicated in another. You're getting push back because this is an assumption of your world view, and it doesn't seem like you recognize it as such.
FlailingAce
18d ago
God doesn't need to be sympathetic. The purpose of the Bible isn't to make you think God is a chill dude, it's to describe his actual nature.
Also, the mercy in this story isn't capricious, in fact it's the opposite. God gives Ninevah the opportunity to repent, and they take it.
Anyway, the point of this story isn't God's treatment of Ninevah, it's Jonah's response to it. The person reading should see themselves in the person of Jonah, who seeks to avoid God's will for his life. Even a child can understand this basic theme. Jonah gets in trouble because he tries to flee from God's will, and is saved when he returns to that will. This concept is deepened by the context of Jonah's reasons for fleeing (his hatred for the Ninevites). There's no contradiction, this theme of Jonah's anger is an expansion of the simpler concept.
FlailingAce
18d ago
Just on a quick look through the list there's quite a lot of odd choices. Like why does seventh grade have so few items, most of which are short poems - and then they double up on Robert Frost and Langston Hughes? Why?
What was the goal here? It doesn't seem like breadth of cultural understanding. It seems more like a list put together by a committee with a few busybodies each pushing their own favorites and no clear criteria for what to include. Why is Pride and Prejudice, essentially Victorian era chick lit, required reading? Answer: who knows?
Like many such efforts, I can get behind the concept but find the implementation unimpressive at best.
Jonah is essentially about the mercy of God. Your claim that God 'chickens out' is embarrassingly backwards - the people of Ninevah clearly respond as required to Jonah's warning, which is why they are spared. What's interesting is that Jonah doesn't want them to be spared. That's why he initially tried to avoid God's call, not because he was lazy but because he hated the Ninevites and hoped they would be struck down. The ending of the story is the whole point - that God can destroy or give mercy to whomever he wants, and it's not for humans to complain because we have a limited perspective. Jonah tried to avoid God's call because he disagreed with God's plan, and it's only when he repents of that in the depths of metaphorical hell that he's saved. It's quite an interesting and layered story.
I get the vibe that you're some kind of angry atheist type? It's possible that if you'd been properly taught Jonah and other Bible stories as a kid you would have more respect and understanding for them, and maybe less hostility towards God.
FlailingAce
24d ago
And all of the media coverage could have been avoided if people had just treated it as a curiosity and a medical condition
This is a little disingenuous. It was treated as a curiosity and a medical condition. It was specifically the activists who declared that it is an identity and absolutely not a medical condition, which was the genesis of the whole controversy.
Transvestites have been a curiosity since time immemorial. Dysphoria has been a medical condition in the books ever since we've had books. Don't pretend like it was the anti trans lobby that made this an issue.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
Of course education has been bad for a long time, but the fact that it's bad doesn't mean AI isn't making it worse.
As for the data centers, there's a lot of independent reporting on this from people living near them on immediate harms. There's damage to groundwater that makes the local tap water undrinkable, there's constant noise levels in residential areas.
On a larger scale, data centers are now responsible for 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and projected to rise. This paper estimates it at $25 billion in environmental damage per year.
There's also other more subtle impacts. For instance, the Utah data center project is expected to produce a heat island effect that would raise temperatures from 5 degrees during the day to up to 28 degrees at night, potentially preventing the dew point condensation effect and quite literally killing local ecologies.
All of these effects are being ignored in the name of progress, and the costs of these externalities are being paid by the people living in these areas who have no say in the matter.
FlailingAce
1mo ago
I think that last sentence exactly shows why you're out of touch. I'm not complaining about the effects on internet culture. I'm talking about the extreme damage to our education system, where students use LLMs to complete the assignments that were created by LLMs and will be graded by the same LLMs, and the data shows massive loss in basic knowledge and critical thinking skills. I'm talking about the environmentally catastrophic data centers being erected over the protests of the people living there. Real harm to actual people in the Real World.
Since you didn't bother to Google it, I won't bother putting in too much effort either. Here's a link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/terdawn-deboe/2026/05/21/companies-fired-workers-for-ai-now-they-want-them-back/
FlailingAce
1mo ago
I guess you haven't been following this? Or know anyone who works in a big company?
Huge amounts of layoffs have occured predicated on the expectation of efficiencies from AI. Some such companies, once they discovered that AI did not improve efficiency, have been forced to rehire the people they fired, while others just used it as an excuse to cut down their workforce a la private equity, disregarding the long term health of the company. Either way, it's harming workers.
I am right there with you! I struggle to accept when people at my church attribute God's intervention to things that could have happened naturally. But then when I take the inside view on my own life it seems clear that turning and following God had tangible effects, and that things often line up in ways that indicate a guiding hand at work. That includes what I consider an actual miracle: how I met my wife. A story that, when I tell it to others, seems unremarkable!
I think that's the nature of the beast, that another's testimony is insufficient evidence to sway a skeptic, yet may be all the evidence that person needed. Or to put it another way, you won't see the evidence of God's work in your life until you start a relationship with him. I know that sounds like a recipe for self-deception, but it also lines up with my limited understanding of divine hiddenness. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened.
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