> Show me the evidence > Sure, that's a reasonable request. Here are the eyewitness testimonies to Jesus's life, death, and Resurection > That's not evidence > Ok, how about the myriad of archeological findings that support the historical Biblical account? > That's not evidence > Alright, let's use science. The Big Bang and Fine tuning show that a Creator is more likely than not > That's not evidence > Ok, perhaps a philosophical argument will do the trick. Contingency, MOA, Moral argument, and the Kalam. > That's not evidence > Ok, it's hard to see what you'll accept as evidence at this point. I'm starting to think you don't actually want the evidence.

Conversely if a church says you're not saved because you do speak in tongues, don't listen to them. The point being, don't treat secondary issues as primary.

Posting that someone blocked you almost always reveals that it actually got under your skin. That undercuts the usual reason people announce it, to look unbothered, superior, or like the other person is the petty one. If it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t need to tell anyone. When in doubt, don’t post about it...silence looks stronger. It's no different to people going out of their way to tell you how much they don't care. You immediately understand just how much they care.

Atlanta is full of counterfeit religion. I know, I used to live there. Now we see solid pastors like PAM rising up there, as a counter to the spiritual rot that's been around for decades. The entire earth is a warzone, and Atlanta is just one hotspot.

A quote, then an argument, followed by a paper "I had been under the impression that probabilities could express every aspect of human knowledge, even causality, but they can’t. After I realized this, my research shifted completely to a new direction, as I tried to understand how to represent causal knowledge and draw causal conclusions." - Judea Pearl P1: LLMs are next token probability models P2: Every aspect of human knowledge cannot be expressed in the language of probability alone (Pearl quote above) C: Therefore LLMs do not express every aspect of human knowledge. Put another way, LLMs aren't fully thinking in the same way that humans do. Finally, let me end with some research from Google that supports this line of reasoning. arxiv.org/abs/2402.10877

Thank you Lord for carrying the weight I could never bear. The debt of my sin. You deserve every ounce of my worship, and my very life. May the world be full of your praise, dearest Jesus!

Saw You Can See Everything yesterday. The film showcases people and situations that many of us don’t have categories for. Which is why you’re going to hear a lot “it’s this!” and “no, it’s that!” and I came away fundamentally agreeing with both sides. (Almost) every shot is gorgeous and you enter the uncanny valley quite quickly. The director appears increasingly compromised as the movie goes on. There’s a surprise guest actor and a surprise mention of a late political figure, whose audience reaction when he is mentioned you can use to gauge how many sociopaths live in your area. Just a crazy film, like the trailer led us to believe.

Understanding lives at the level of causality, something that the field of Causal Inference shows is impossible to derive from just the data alone, i.e. they are not in 1:1 correspondence. We've all seen situations where multiple explanations fit the data. This is why LLMs break down spectacularly in contexts they've never seen...they have no model that allows them to reason robustly out of sample. Humans, and eventually AI, (will) derive world models from interventions made in their environment, and possibly building on a noumenal substrate like Kant discussed, corresponding to Level 2 on Pearl's ladder of causation.

This does not prove a contradiction in the idea of God because it rests on assumptions that don't hold upon further scrutiny. - For one, a completed infinite totality is not automatically contradictory. Our intuitions don't work well when we leave the finite for the infinite. Classical mathematics accepts completed infinite sets (the natural numbers, the reals, etc.). However, “Indefinitely extensible” is a notion associated with intuitionism and certain anti-realist views of infinity. It is NOT a neutral logical fact that every theist must accept. An infinite being can know infinitely many truths without running out of room or generating a contradiction. - Omniscience does not require that the truths form a set. Alvin Plantinga’s reply to Grim (who makes the more complete version of the argument Sean is making here) is the standard one... even if there is no set of all true propositions, that does not prevent the quantified statement “for every proposition pp, if pp is true then God knows pp” from being coherent. We routinely quantify over all propositions or all truths without needing them to form a set. The non-existence of a set of all truths is no more a problem for omniscience than it is for the existence of truths themselves, or for the claim “every proposition is true or false.” - Probably the greatest reason to think this contradiction is no contradiction is that divine knowledge is not modeled as a growing collection of discrete items. In classical theism, God’s knowledge is a single, non-discursive, eternal act. God knows all things by knowing Himself as the source of all being and possibility. There is no potentiality or extensibility in the divine intellect the way there is in human inquiry. Knowledge is not acquired piece by piece, nor does it form a set that can be diagonalized against in the way Grim describes. So, God’s knowledge is a single, simple, non-discursive act rather than a collection of discrete items that must be totaled and then diagonalized against. God's omniscience does not demonstrate a contradiction.

This, but for Warhammer 40k

I'm just now realizing that my path to financial freedom is through mormonism

The testament to what a great game Halo was (and is) is that even after many years of having the franchise butchered by people who didn't understand or even like Halo, the community stuck around and is making the game even better after all this time. We don't often see renaissances like this.

One of the greatest skills in the AI era is learning how to stare at a wall for 15 minutes in silence

Jesus shed His blood on the cross for sinners who weren't seeking Him, and you think that you're too bad to be forgiven? NO. That is a lie. Believe what God says, not what the enemy or your heart tells you.

Yesterday I didn't foresee (but should have) the kind of blowback I would get from mormons for claiming what all of Christendom has believed about them since time immemorial...that they aren't actual Christians. So let me clarify some things. - Saying they are not Christian does not mean they are uniquely evil people or that they should be persecuted, or that God doesn't love them. He does love them, enough to call out their false doctrine. - Claiming they aren't Christians flows directly from the teachings of Jesus and later church figures. Additionally, no major Christian group accepts them as Christian, and yet they are constantly jonesing to be called by the name despite massive theological differences that is clearly evident to anyone not brought up under their teaching. The Catholic church doesn't even give them the label of heretics. Think about that. - I was surprised at just how canned the mormon apologist responses were, but I guess that applies to every group doing battle on this site. Many of them were trying to get me to doubt my position with Christ because of my stance, but none said why I would not be a Christian for pointing our their false teaching. I don't plan to make this debate my personality here, but I just find it weird how much they desire to be called Christians. They can just claim to be a totally different religion and call it a day. Much easier that way.

@ElJefe53209440, you may enjoy this discussion, being a former mormon who eventually found Jesus

PAM is such a blessing to our generation. This kind of preaching is exactly what you won't hear in most churches, and exactly what is needed in many cases. The severity of God leading to MERCY

"I was not in charge of my own death," he wrote. "I was going to die at God's time, not mine."

Pruss is still affirming Free Will defenses in the PSR debate, as recently as 2022. That he and Koons offer additional arguments from probability and skepticism for the PSR do not constitute a backtrack. They are additional arguments in favor of the PSR, one of which looks a lot like the Strong PSR. The Koons paper you cited also doesn't support the backtracking interpretation. “Failed to win universal acceptance” just shows us what is ordinary in philosophical debates: disagreement. Koons writes: "A recent book by Alexander Pruss (2006a), The Principle of Sufficient Reason, has addressed this question with a number of ingenious appeals to our metaphysical intuitions. In this paper, I will attempt to complement Pruss’s efforts through an appeal to epistemology." To establish a backtrack, you would need to provide evidence that Pruss or Koons either repudiated the compatibility claim, excluded free choices from the relevant explanatory principle, or accepted that free choices may be brute. I cannot find that, and you have not supplied it. It would appear the debate is very much alive and not resolved. See here for more detail alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/… alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/…