micah 6:8.

miette, sideblog of underthesedarlingskies :: fortyish :: Anglo-Cath :: bonkers

[scleroticstatue]

Hey, just a reminder that Catholics and LDS people can now claim religious exceptions to not use AI at work and if they get fired, it's religious discrimination

[jesusliberal]

God bless Maja Chwalinska, who has come from being one of the least of these in her sport -- her winnings during the French Open determined whether she could pay her hotel bills! -- to the certainty of going home with $1.5mil. let her story be an inspiration to young women everywhere. this is what a woman's triumph looks like. she has come from struggle to a place where, if she stewards her winnings wisely, she will be all right for a good while. Lord, give her the wisdom to manage well, and not succumb to worship of what wealth may come.

Ecc. 5:10 whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. this, too, is meaningless. (NIV)

Matt. 25:21 well done, good and faithful servant. you have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much.

[jesusliberal]

dear Atlantic:

Talarico’s public record from the “peak woke” era includes a trail of wince-inducing statements: God is “nonbinary.” There are not two sexes, but six

I hope you were being sarcastic, because all of this holds up to scrutiny when you consider Talarico is a seminarian.

there are six genders in Judaism, and legitimate arguments for God's gender being, well, God.

happy Pride I guess?

p.s. Talarico’s Jesus is meek and mild, a man of heart rather than ego.

um? yes? because unlike MAGA Jesus, Talarico's Jesus is the one from the Bible?

[jesusliberal]

I absolutely love that prayer and being in the Word quiets some people's souls, but have you considered that if you're "reactive" to your loved ones, anxious, and generally not fun to be around when you're not making a habit of Bible study, a course of therapy could be useful? don't tell me God didn't make Carl Rogers.

[jesusliberal]

my net worth is I'm a daughter of the King.

worshipping mammon is for suckers.

[jesusliberal]

so, forget "modest is hottest" for a minute, modest is warmest!

anyone going for office siren in my office would have regretted it today. I walked in to temperature readings in the low 60s. yes, indoors. I had to run my space heater full blast for the whole eight hours I was there. I also huddled under two blankets and inside one cardigan and one wool shawl.

if I had been smart and gone with a flannel dress, petticoat, and bloomers instead of a flimsy frickin' wrap dress that only came to my knees? day would not have sucked quite so many eggs.

yeah, no, tomorrow I'm bundling up.

[importantdogimages]

@importantdogimages

[sacredheart-stigmata]

Please pray for those participating in the hunger strike at Delaney Hall, an ICE detention center in New Jersey. Tom Homan, white house border czar, has gone on record that he plans to produce a court order to force-feed protestors. The people detained in the facility are protesting lack of food, most of which is already unsanitary to the point of being inedible, the lack of medical care, and brutality and abuse from ICE guards. I pray for the safety of the strikers, their freedom, and their families. I pray for the souls of the ICE members who enact this violence, and the politicians who legalize it. May God's divine justice and holy mercy rain down on them all. God have mercy, Christ have mercy.

[americanaclassic]

[jesusliberal]

Janae Danyiel tells me that modest women are getting bullied off the Internet.

so, first of all, I'm grateful I'm middle-aged and also not on TikTok, because wow, things look unfriendly where Gen Z reigns supreme. yikes, guys, do you like being that mean to each other?

to the accusations that modesty is performative: I am indeed performing something. it's the role of "daughter of the King safe and content in my Father's hands".

to the accusations that I'm doing it to be a pickme or somehow play into men's expectations: I would say I am doing the opposite here. men in this century have zero appreciation for a neatly turned-out woman who isn't out to titillate them. in an outfit like today's (green bandeau, green sweater, tea-length denim skirt, yeehaw boots), I distracted no-one sexually, je vous assure. perhaps I am a little bit distracting when I wear dresses with smocking for a front, and sleeves that seem about to slip off my shoulders. but I tug them as high as they'll go, and I plan to do this with those deep square necklines:

so. you know. less hawt tradwifey milkmaid, more suitable for actual farm work. which I don't do, but the look is adorable. and after all I am descended from market-gardeners.

and I know there is always one man somewhere who will find a woman hot in anything she wears. I'm aware there are men who get off to women draped in fabric like we're furniture in a closed house. these men are why I also don't indulge in shoes that don't let me remove myself from a bad situation in a hurry.

to the accusation that I am unduly influenced by conservatism: I'm a center-left Episcopalian with "history nerd" writ large in my psyche. the greater influence is people looking simply beautiful in skirts and petticoats. be me, nine years old and finally! going to the historical schoolhouse in town, and feeling like I'm dressed all wrong for it because I'm not wearing a dress to my ankles. I'm not conservative, I'm born a minimum of sixty years later than I ought to have been.

chase me anywhere you like, web, it's not going to change how I live my life. whatever other answers I may be seeking to the identity question, trust me when I say the opinions of people who deem themselves my judges are not a part of the journey here. only God can judge me.

[sacredheart-stigmata]

I have to say, one of the silliest arguments anti-theist (explicitly stressing this is the community i am discussing, not all atheists or non-christians) people put in my comments is that they have read the bible ‘cover to cover’ and therefore understand it perfectly.

Meanwhile, there are people who spend their entire careers and entire lives analyzing the bible. There are so many different interpretations and understandings of literally every single verse, and while, yes, some denominations have more strict interpretations than others, many, if not most, take extreme joy in sharing and expressing their differences in interpretations. There is no ‘cover to cover’ understanding of the bible, full stop. Put a southern Baptist, an Episcopal, a Coptic orthodox, a Greek orthodox, a P'ent'ay, and a Lutheran in a room for a Bible study and your ‘cover to cover’ understanding will be vastly different than that of each person. Just doing a ‘cover to cover’ reading is, honestly, not helpful for any Christian, and will not ensure you ‘win’ an argument against the Christian existence. It ain’t the argument you think it is.

[aprilsjesusblogging]

Hell you can have four Episcopalians (including a priest) reading the same verse and quite possibly get at least four interpretations, going by my Bible study group lol

But yeah this gets hella comical when you think about the Pentateuch/Torah. Like. Jewish people have been arguing (/positive) about the meaning of them for at least 2500 years. The sheer hubris of thinking you understand them after reading them through once.

So many anti-theists cannot see religion outside of the perspective of the conservative Christianity they grew up with. The idea that there are Christians don't read the Bible literally/inerrantly (that doing so is relatively modern!), that much of it only makes any sense read within historical context, that translation is interpretation, that there are multiple ways of interpreting pretty much every bit of it--it just does not cross their minds. It's so frustrating.

What's funny is that, as a former atheist, I think there are plenty of perfectly valid reasons to not believe in God! But most anti-theists go for the most boring, easily-refuted reasons.

[scleroticstatue]

When there are two conflicting points where the authors had to choose one over the other,

What is the primary purpose of the Bible?

To accurately portray history and God's interventions/Historical-Providencial

To point to Christ/Christological

To tell proper doctrine/Doctrinal

To explain why humans need Christ/Anthropological

To explain how to be saved/Soteriological

To properly preserve worship practices/Liturgical

To convince people to believe in what the author believes/Missiological

To inspire humans to have a relationship with God/Relational

To teach about the future/Eschatological-Prophetic

Each book has its own purpose and no purpose comes out on top

The Bible actually has no specific purpose/no authorial agenda

Something else/very nuanced/no opinion

Voting ended onJun 5

[springsgreenleaves]

All these Biblical polls of yours leave me considering how very divergent our views of God's omnipotence are.

[scleroticstatue]

Oh? I'm curious what you think about it, and what made you come to that conclusion.

I believe God cannot be fully omnipotent and fully good — the condition of the world disproves it — and I could not worship a god that was evil, so he must have some limits on his power that prevent him from overriding free will.

[springsgreenleaves]

Yeah see I believe in His omnipotence.

[scleroticstatue]

Okay, then why does he permit suffering and people to not believe in him? I can't justify worshiping an evil god. I can justify worshiping a God who is bound by the laws of reality — God can't make a square circle or create a world that we exist in that isn't finely tuned for our existence. Hebrews even says that God can't lie. The only way to have a consistent internal theology is to limit one of the omnis — all knowing, all loving, or all powerful — and this is not only the most likely candidate, biblically, but it's also the only one that fits with how the world works scientifically.

[springsgreenleaves]

Then what's the point of worshiping Him? Why bother with The Cool Guy in the Sky Who Can't Actually Do Anything?

[scleroticstatue]

What's the point in worshiping a god who can remove all of your suffering, prevent you from sinning, all without interrupting your growth, but doesn't? Why did an all powerful God make humans who even wanted to sin if he could make them differently?

You worship God because he's your father who loves you and wants the best for you. He knows how to get you where you want, if you listen to him, but he cannot — by universal law — force you to follow him. Because if he could, he would be cruel and not worthy of worshiping to not.

[springsgreenleaves]

I worship Him because He is God.

[scleroticstatue]

So, what you're telling me is that, because he holds a position, he has a right to abuse his children and call it love? That he causes suffering, anguish, and eternal torment, and still has a right to our love and sacrifice? That he can be evil and still demand to be called father?

I'm sorry, you're worshiping a demon because that's not God.

[winterinhimring]

The underlying assumption that God must be evil if He is omnipotent is the point of difference, I believe. I don’t subscribe to that and I am fairly sure that Bri does not, either. God can do anything which is consistent with His nature, but His nature does not include evil. Is the author of a book evil because he lets the consequences of his characters’ choices play out, even though he has the power (technically) to stop it all with a word? I would not say so. He’s obeying the rules of the story-world. God is the great Author of the universe and so His characters live, and He does not break the universe and us to prevent our choices from having consequences, either.

( @springsgreenleaves do you think that’s a fair analogy? I’m still hammering it out a bit.)

[springsgreenleaves]

Others more learned than I have answered this better but if I may be permitted to (poorly) paraphrase their words; evil is permitted because it brings about a better good than if there were no enemy to conquer.

[jesusliberal]

humanity does appear to grow through adversity. "whom he loveth he chasteneth" isn't for nothing.

[scleroticstatue]

If God were omnipotent, he could have made humans who didn't need adversity to grow.

[jesusliberal]

I mean, at the end of the day, we have the God we have. this is what was revealed to us. this is what we are. it seems supremely stupid to me to question my maker, given that said maker has a purpose for every breath I take and every synapse that fires off in my puny meat brain. God is bigger than we can ever hope to comprehend -- the mystery remains around so much of this because of the sheer magnitude of God. accepting the premise that God is greater than I am, it is also not really right and meet for me to say, "you got this part wrong". I don't know what has to happen and what are, to quote Doctor Who, fixed points in time. that knowledge is for God to have, and if God wanted me to have it, I would. as for growth: consider that human nature is not to be satisfied with anything. where there's no drama, we make drama. look at Eden. we didn't need more than what we had, according to our origin story, so we fucked around and found out because we had literally nothing better to do. humanity did the equivalent of sticking a fork in a light socket just to give itself stimulation. this metaphor holds in reality. which circles back around to "this is what we are". God made us this way and we didn't get a say in it any more than you had a say in who sired you. if you don't curse out your parents for giving you life, why do you have the temerity to bitch at God about the way you were made?

[scleroticstatue]

When there are two conflicting points where the authors had to choose one over the other,

What is the primary purpose of the Bible?

To accurately portray history and God's interventions/Historical-Providencial

To point to Christ/Christological

To tell proper doctrine/Doctrinal

To explain why humans need Christ/Anthropological

To explain how to be saved/Soteriological

To properly preserve worship practices/Liturgical

To convince people to believe in what the author believes/Missiological

To inspire humans to have a relationship with God/Relational

To teach about the future/Eschatological-Prophetic

Each book has its own purpose and no purpose comes out on top

The Bible actually has no specific purpose/no authorial agenda

Something else/very nuanced/no opinion

Voting ended onJun 5

[springsgreenleaves]

All these Biblical polls of yours leave me considering how very divergent our views of God's omnipotence are.

[scleroticstatue]

Oh? I'm curious what you think about it, and what made you come to that conclusion.

I believe God cannot be fully omnipotent and fully good — the condition of the world disproves it — and I could not worship a god that was evil, so he must have some limits on his power that prevent him from overriding free will.

[springsgreenleaves]

Yeah see I believe in His omnipotence.

[scleroticstatue]

Okay, then why does he permit suffering and people to not believe in him? I can't justify worshiping an evil god. I can justify worshiping a God who is bound by the laws of reality — God can't make a square circle or create a world that we exist in that isn't finely tuned for our existence. Hebrews even says that God can't lie. The only way to have a consistent internal theology is to limit one of the omnis — all knowing, all loving, or all powerful — and this is not only the most likely candidate, biblically, but it's also the only one that fits with how the world works scientifically.

[springsgreenleaves]

Then what's the point of worshiping Him? Why bother with The Cool Guy in the Sky Who Can't Actually Do Anything?

[scleroticstatue]

What's the point in worshiping a god who can remove all of your suffering, prevent you from sinning, all without interrupting your growth, but doesn't? Why did an all powerful God make humans who even wanted to sin if he could make them differently?

You worship God because he's your father who loves you and wants the best for you. He knows how to get you where you want, if you listen to him, but he cannot — by universal law — force you to follow him. Because if he could, he would be cruel and not worthy of worshiping to not.

[springsgreenleaves]

I worship Him because He is God.

[scleroticstatue]

So, what you're telling me is that, because he holds a position, he has a right to abuse his children and call it love? That he causes suffering, anguish, and eternal torment, and still has a right to our love and sacrifice? That he can be evil and still demand to be called father?

I'm sorry, you're worshiping a demon because that's not God.

[winterinhimring]

The underlying assumption that God must be evil if He is omnipotent is the point of difference, I believe. I don’t subscribe to that and I am fairly sure that Bri does not, either. God can do anything which is consistent with His nature, but His nature does not include evil. Is the author of a book evil because he lets the consequences of his characters’ choices play out, even though he has the power (technically) to stop it all with a word? I would not say so. He’s obeying the rules of the story-world. God is the great Author of the universe and so His characters live, and He does not break the universe and us to prevent our choices from having consequences, either.

( @springsgreenleaves do you think that’s a fair analogy? I’m still hammering it out a bit.)

[springsgreenleaves]

Others more learned than I have answered this better but if I may be permitted to (poorly) paraphrase their words; evil is permitted because it brings about a better good than if there were no enemy to conquer.

[jesusliberal]

humanity does appear to grow through adversity. "whom he loveth he chasteneth" isn't for nothing.

[iscariotapologist]

Hello! This is kind of random (and last minute), but author Kat Armas is having a live class tomorrow night (8PM ET/7PM CT) called "Following Jesus in the American Empire". I don't know if you have heard of her book "Liturgies for Resisting Empire", but I thought I'd just throw this out here if it's something you or someone who follows you would be interested in. My church put in up in their newsletter recently so it piqued my interest! Here's the link for more info: thebiblefornormalpeople(.)com/classes/following-jesus-in-the-american-empire

oh this is so apt because i literally just watched her video for the cac's daily meditations this morning and was thinking i should look into her lol thank you!!

Following Jesus in the American Empire — The Bible for Normal People

What is the right relationship of faith to politics? If you’re watching the news lately you might have seen it play out in a lot of ways, ma

[jesusliberal]

daaaaaang I wish I didn't have a hard-stop 9 PM bedtime, but I can't mess around with weekday sleep. note to self, though, Kat Armas. this could be enlightening reading.

[blue0909]

Please stop being nonbinary too. God only created one gender. You must conform to that.

THERES ONLY ONE NOW?????

[jesusliberal]

ahem, per seminarian James Talarico, God is nonbinary sooooo

[blue0909]

Please stop being nonbinary too. God only created one gender. You must conform to that.

THERES ONLY ONE NOW?????

[jesusliberal]

come for the fun quizzes, stay for the mopey spinster musings, the wishes that this rib could find the ribcage from which she was torn. I'm waiting for the pain to subside. I know it takes patience and belief. but I'm stuck here, in this place, doing this job, and statistically it's not looking great for me.

please, Lord, don't forsake me in this. take away the longing or bring me my husband. it's not enough that I don't burn with lust. I burn with too much love for one human to contain. I need a safe place to put it, and selfishly I need some of that kind of love back. I sleep, I dream, and always I am reminded, even in my dreams, that something has judged me and always found me unworthy.

who will love me, worm that I am?