Wanted to make it a bit more obscure for my friends, and also cropped it.

Well to be fair, that wasn’t until 6 hours after my comment and 9 hours after yours, so neither of us could have known for sure.

It’s not fair to assume a member of a population is guilty until they condemn/renounce the problematic members of their population. I remember there being a problem after 9/11 where some people expected individual Muslims to publicly condemn Al Qaeda or else be assumed complicit. If it wasn’t alright there, it’s not alright here.

to irk the “grammer” police on reddit

Hmm…

*Squints*

You done messed up.

to irk the “grammer” police on Reddit

FTFY

Complimenting a username is nice, but you don’t have to throw in a disclaimer about political alignment. I don’t think any of your hexbear friends, if they’re reasonable, would call you a lib because you complimented the username of a guy whose instance is populated by libs.

Don’t be so freaked out. It’s only 2 AM in my timezone.

At least it doesn’t look like it shrunk too.

I have no problem with the acceptable ads system. ABP doesn’t get any money from it, and the ads have to meet the criteria anyways, and it’s easy to opt out. I guess it’s a bit fishy that the list maintainers charge money to get ads reviewed, but the FAQ ThunderWhiskers posted says that smaller companies get it for free, and they only charge the bigger companies. I’m not gonna get up in arms over someone charging Disney money for a service they give the local deli for free.

I also like the way it gives companies an incentive to produce less intrusive ads. With the system, unintrusive ads reach more people. Otherwise, it’s all or nothing, which makes intrusive ads the best option from a greedy perspective; they’re far more likely to be clicked, and the only cost is the risk of damaging the ad ecosystem as a whole (and you know how little corporations can care about damaging ecosystems.)

That’s the neat part, I don’t. If there’s anything really important, it will leak into memes, or I’ll hear it from family members, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a piece of news and thought “Oh, it’s a good thing I know that now.”

I can see where you’re coming from. I already blocked the news because I come here for memes and don’t like following the news anyways, but yeah, if you’re looking for non-political news, I guess that can be rough.

Oh, you support a mainstream candidate, huh? What else, do you like eating babies? Why don’t you just admit you’re evil incarnate and vote for my favored candidate instead?

I haven’t really noticed much, but that’s because I’ve taken to blocking political communities once they start bothering me by putting too many article links in the front page or being generally rageful.

I dunno, it kinda felt like she was playing along… within the constraints of still doing her job. Printing out a whole paper to say “No.” when a sticky note would suffice, for example.

Indeed. Though that’s not to say asking is useless. He knows what we need, but often entrusts us to ask for it, so that we can see the answered prayers instead of taking Him for granted (plus some other reasons probably.)

I think we’re in agreement here. God gives us chances to bear fruit, but throws out the branches that don’t. Predestination, as Calvinism describes it, says that He decides in advance whether they’re going to bear fruit, and those He wants to bear fruit do, and those He doesn’t never get the chance. I do not see that lining up with the idea that God is all-loving.

That being said, the Bible does say that nobody can come to Christ without God’s call, so I can see how that could be seen as predestination, but there have been those who felt the call and turned away, some of whom came around later. I think in some manner, it might be a warning that you can’t just decide “I’ll get saved when it’s more convenient for me,” because God doesn’t call at your convenience.

I wasn’t trying to “win” in the way you think I was yet. I was just trying to gather information.

My default assumption when someone claims to be saved is that they are until proven otherwise, but believing that the Church and not Christ is the source of salvation is a convincing proof otherwise from my perspective. But then my mind goes into “rebuke” mode and not “plant some seeds” mode, because people who consider themselves part of the Church should be open to rebuke (though of course I still try to be kind about it, that doesn’t come across easily over the net.)

For the sake of the rebuke, I wanted to understand what exactly they believe in so I could address it more directly, but that clearly wasn’t going anywhere. By their logic, I didn’t even have the right to ask because I’m not already part of whatever “Church” they’re a part of. Between their aggression and the fact that I’ve never heard of a belief system that lines up with what they were saying, I saw trolling as a likely possibility, moreso than I let on at this point. I suppose I could have tried for a little longer before bringing it up, but as you can see, I only asked, and then stated immediately afterwards that I didn’t want to assume ill intent.

So it wasn’t intended so much an accusation as a test of the waters, but I suppose it didn’t come off that way, and a troll wouldn’t answer that honestly, so the only purpose it served was to protect my own pride against the vision I had of someone laughing at their screen going “look how long I’m keeping this fool in an argument, and they don’t even suspect I’m trolling.” I’ll try to do better about that in the future.

As for the use of “preposterous,” I did add “to me” to soften it a bit, and this is clearly someone who’s able to handle that level of bluntness.

Thanks for your thoughts. I guess upon becoming sure that they were a troll, instead of calling them out to end it there, I should have shifted out of rebuking mode (since someone who’s pretending to be a Christian for trolling purposes is not going to be open to Christian rebuke,) and considered whether I was in a position to share my faith. In this case, I think I was, but it might be too late now. I’ll take another look tomorrow to see.

The very surface level of Calvinism, being that God is sovereign in all, is something I agree with, but it includes predestination, which is where I take issue. Why would God not offer the same mercy to everyone? And when He does offer mercy to someone, why would He not let us choose? He is sovereign, yes, but He is also loving, and love is not forcing some people to become model citizens while letting others perish without ever having any hope of salvation.

I do believe predestination is technically true in that God already knows the future and knows who will or won’t ultimately be saved, but that doesn’t preclude free will being an operative part of what gets us there.

You said salvation comes through the Church, and not through Christ. That conflicts with the Bible, but when I said so, you said that only the Church has the right to interpret the Bible. You say my version of Christianity only existed in the past few hundred years, which implies that you’re decrying Protestantism in favor of Catholicism, but Catholics and Protestants alike have those verses, which have existed for about 2000 years. You say that the Church, founded by the apostles, is the authority, but in another comment, you complained that modern Christianity follows Paul (an apostle) and only keeps Christ for the branding. Either that, or you’re saying that’s the Church you’re a part of, but that would be a strange statement to make.

If you at least tell me what people call your version of Christianity, I can get a frame of reference to discuss this proper. And if you’re convinced that I’m just going to use that to google “disproof of <whatever it is>” and parrot that^[1], then how about instead you describe your theology, including why you think Jesus died on the cross and how you think the Church is responsible for salvation, preferably with Bible verses to back it up, and I can meet you there?

You are resorting to accusations of heresy because I believe in the saving power of the son of God and refuse to concede that your Church, which you won’t even identify beyond “it’s the same one it’s always been,” is a higher authority. I believe that my church is part of the Church, being a global body of believers who follow the Bible and find salvation in Christ, which has persisted since the onset of Christianity.

If you are unwilling to engage in proper discourse, then my hands are tied, and my best course of action is to assume that you are a troll who wanted to own me for trying to correct someone else’s misunderstanding by being aggressive at me with something ridiculous. Maybe you’re hoping to get me to re-evaluate my comment and expose my hypocrisy, but I already gave my comment a second evaluation before I posted (and a third just now to be sure,) and there’s no hypocrisy here. I don’t have a problem with you coming at me to show where I’m wrong, but you have to actually show where I’m wrong, not just repeat your claim and accuse me of heresy for not believing it. Show me where the Bible supports it, because that’s where my beliefs are rooted, or at least demonstrate the fruits of the Spirit. So far, all I’ve seen is aggression, and that’s not a good approach for changing hearts. If you review what I said to Bones, I was firm, but kind.

You are telling me I can’t find salvation outside the church. I am already part of a church, but apparently it’s not the right church. You won’t even tell me what church you want me to join. At this point, I’m convinced you’re trolling.

Which church? What is your version of Christianity called?