mark46 said:

The market favors those who are plumbers and electricians.

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they do not make enough money to buy an average house and raise a family in a high cost of living area where they work. they live outside of those areas and commute. outside of those areas, they aren't needed. homeowners do their own electrical and plumbing.

the market has responded by raising the bar to become a licensed skilled trade, even higher. by the market i mean insurance companies.

i have a friend who is a plumber and he wants to start his own company, he told me "i've pulled a lot of f'd up plumbing out of houses. turns out it worked for 50 years before me, i don't see why the code needs a 2" vent on a sink. hell it doesn't need one at all." --words to that effect.

you can make 25$ an hour as a roofer while your boss charges the clients 60$ an hour and pays the insurance company 25$ an hour for you to walk on a roof...
or you do it yourself in a few days and buy the materials for a tenth of the price you can pay someone else to do it.

eventually something breaks.

one thing i will say works is you can pay someone to install insulation cheaper than you can buy the insulation from a big box store and do it yourself.
-even in a HCOL

sovereigngrace said:

Dispies make it up as they go. Your diversion is another erroneous theological invention.

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I see you don`t have scripture, however I posted some and that is what needs to be discussed.

Have you ever considered that `Jerusalem` above is made up of two parts - Mount Zion and the city, the New Jerusalem.

`But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,...` (Heb. 12: 22)

Mount Zion is where the Lord Jesus rules from His own throne. His Father has set Him there.

`I have set my King on my holy hill of Zion.` (Ps. 2: 6) `...a throne set in heaven, and one sat on the throne..` (Rev. 4: 2)

The city part is for the Old Testament Saints.

`But they desire a better, that is a heavenly country. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.` (Heb. 11: 16)

So...Mount Zion is the seat of the Lord`s rule and in the highest, with His Body of believers.

`To him who overcomes I will grant to sit with me on my throne...` (Rev. 3: 21)


Then the city part comes down out of the highest heaven to the universe realm and is the rule over the earth.

`Then I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God,...` (Rev. 21: 2)

Daniel Martinovich said:

Not really. Because the the New Jerusalem has always illustrated God's OT and NT saints.
The Bride of Christ

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However, Mount Zion has always represented rulership - David`s and the Lord`s.

BCP1928 said:

It's time for the Democrats to throw LGBTs under the bus and move forward on substantive issues. I'm sorry for those people but it really won't be any worse for them than back in the 50s and most of them survived that. Strategically, Democrats have to decouple the culture war left from the labor left and get down to business.

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this will happen when they realize the real problem is the falling birthrate.

the two sides of the horseshoe will meet in the middle and.. work together to solve that problem.

Apple Sky said:

You live in Oz, maybe you can explain this.

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Funnily enough I drove down that 90 mile road two weeks ago. Here's a piccie I took with my drone (video won't upload):



It's a straight road. No bends or curves. The higher the drone went, the further I could see. Funny that. And if I get the drone to look out to sea at around 1,000m up (well away from civilisation where there may be restrictions) then you can see ships in the distance. But as the drone drops they dissapear over the horizon.

Why do you think that happens?

Oh, another thing. I've now driven across the continent north to south and east to west. The difference in distance is a few hundred kms. Your flat maps show Australia about 5x as wide in width compared to height.

Your flat earth map is very wrong indeed.

ThatRobGuy said:

I'm blaming them because it was their fault...

If we agree that increased public exposure of the Nick Fuentes types is what's driving this fracturing of the GOP...

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No, it’s not merely the greater exposure that the Groypers are getting. It’s also that they’re becoming more numerous on the right, particularly among their younger ranks. The Republican party of old would have censored this stuff themselves.

Landon Caeli said:

From the article:
"Abu Tahir, a student and prayer leader, said the encounter was deeply traumatic. “I had to relive the whole thing again,” he said. “Hearing every voice, every insult, every atrocious claim that they had made against our religion"

Awe, that's so sad. Thing is, as a Catholic, I get to hear my own friends and coworkers rag about my religion my entire life. Anyone see me weeping about it? No. You get over it and move on. It's called being humble.

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Oh, is that what this is? Humility?

BUMP!

Quincey.

ThatRobGuy said:

I said it a few times in this thread, if you want to see a meaningful change in our economy in a way that works for more people, society needs to be less enamored with college degrees for the litany of jobs that currently require them, but don't actually need to.

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Society needs to be less enamored with college degrees?

1) That change has already happened. The market favors those who are plumbers and electricians. Those who go to technical schools make more than those graduating from 4-year colleges. Polls show that it is parents that don't want that for their children. They want their children to have college degrees and have high-class job.

2) Those graduating from a 4-year college have a much poorer job market and it will continue to get much worse. With the aid of AI, one person can do the entry level work of what 2 or 3 (or more) workers did in the past.

3) With regard to whether companies should require college degrees. that is something for companies to figure out. College can provide many useful skills. In any case, some employers will continue to require colleges, some won't. I don't see that as a problem.

After 5 years members of Congress are vested and will receive a pension. In MTG case, she is retiring after 5 years and 2 days.

essentialsaltes said:

When they say the road is straight, that means it doesn't deviate left to right.

View attachment 373515

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Rubbish, this picture has been done to death.

Sadly, I think it is going to get worse. Trump's tone is too authoritarian, too vengeful and even nasty at times. I did like his concilatory meeting with the NYC mayor. I pray we can see more of that from him.

Apple Sky said:

You live in Oz, maybe you can explain this.

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When they say the road is straight, that means it doesn't deviate left to right.

Apple Sky said:

Or this.

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Landon Caeli said:

Thing is, as a Catholic, I get to hear my own friends and coworkers rag about my religion my entire life.

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Do they interrupt your religious services to do so?

Texas A&M committee rules professor's firing over gender identity lesson unjustified​

The internal committee ruled that the university didn't follow proper procedures and didn't prove there was good cause to fire Melissa McCoul, who was a senior lecturer in the English department with over a decade of teaching experience.

[The professor's lawyer believes it will have go to litigation, as the school may not listen to its own committee.]

Sam266 said:

What do you think NDEs are about if not the afterlife and the survival of the self? I've studied this subject for the past 20 years. It includes reading more than 5000 accounts from around the world.

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What is dead is dead, what is alive is alive,

So how can there be an afterlife, First must one come alive or can a corpse bury a corpse?

Matthew 8:21-22.

Said the Rebbe, "When a cold hard heart becomes excited over a Godly idea, is this not a resurrection"

Yarddog said:

Even in wartime Iraq, troops tried to stop speeding vehicles, that could be suicide bombers, because they may be civilians.

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For a moment, but only for a moment, just long enough to decide that whether they were "innocent" civilians or civilians who were also suicide bombers. Any speeding vehicle that didn't stop pretty darned quickly was fired upon, whether it contained women and children or not.

Yarddog said:

These speed boats, may or may not be drug runners, but blowing them up without attempting to stop them by other, is illegal. If not, please give me a law which allows it.

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I don't think you know how law works.

It's not necessary to have a law that allows an action, only a law that prohibits it. What is not prohibited is generally allowed.

Always in His Presence said:

Was Jesus ever sick or in pain?

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Yes, clearly: fasting for 40 days is possible but uncomfortable, as any Orthodox Christian will tell you. Hence the devil tempting Him.

Insofar as Christ is God incarnate, after He put on our fallen nature in order to redeem and glorify it He would have been vulnerable to any and all forms of human suffering up to and including death, and this is reflected in the Creed.

The rejection of the idea of suffering on the part of Christ is the characteristic belief of Docetism and the related Nestorian and Apthartodocetist belief systems, which separate the divinity of Christ from His human prosopon hypostatically, which means you have one divine person united to the man Jesus only by a shared will.

The latter belief system began to emerge in the writings of Diodore of Tarsus, was expounded upon by Theodore of Mopesuestia and then adopted by Nestorius as a means of justifying his attempt to suppress, with force, the use of the traditional title “Theotokos” found in the writings of his illustrious predecessor in Constantinople, St. John Chrysostom, who was also from Antioch originally, and in other early church fathers; before Nestorius, only the Antidicomarians rejected this title as as a group.

Yarddog said:

After WWII, war crime trials executed guards and soldiers which were following orders.

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They executed guards and soldiers who violated what was already international law treaties that Germany had ratified. In other words, they had violated the laws of their own nation.

If a US soldier obeys a law that is declared illegal only after the fact, he will not be prosecuted.

Hentenza said:

He killed himself because of misguided beliefs.

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So he committed suicide ?
Rubbish -

ThatRobGuy said:

That's part of the problem that Democrats have, if anyone was "aligned with Trump" at any point, "you're dead to me...forever"

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What are you talking about?

For one thing, when have I ever been that sort of purist?

But more to my point, she’s not some generic Trump-aligned Republican. She’s consistently been one of the craziest, most strident people in American politics.

ThatRobGuy said:

But the reality is, she's in a solid red deep South district (where's she's won handily multiple times, by 75/25 margins). The notion that an unknown moderate, who's not explicitly "Trump-endorsed", is going to win that district is a pipe dream.

Her advantage as an incumbent (who already has name recognition as is well-liked in her district) would give her an advantage that a newcomer wouldn't have.

So I'll stand by my original statement... the Democrats would've been better off extending an olive branch (even if she only sides with them 20% of the time moving forward), vs. what they're going to get as her replacement.

You can bank on the fact that Trump will be watching that house election closely, and making sure to meddle in any way he can to make sure it's a loyalist far-right person who takes that seat... I'll send you $20 on venmo if I'm wrong lol

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I would take a generic conservative over a loony hatemonger like her any day. The fact that she’s on the right side of the Epstein case doesn’t change that.

Fervent said:

Perhaps in a sense there is a higher fidelity, though that is at least a product of survivorship bias given the penchant for destruction of variants. But as far as I am aware, there isn't as open of a process for critical scholarship regarding the manuscripts that do exist. Also, there is the issue of what constitutes a variant given the dialect variance that exists within the manuscripts and the tolerance for at least seven distinct Arabic dialects or "readings". And in addition to the issues you mentioned, there is the unity of the text that is also in play given the relatively late collection into a single codex for the Bible compared to the Qu'ran. My minor quibble with what you had said was simply because it appeared to express a confidence in the Qu'ranic texts that the comparitive interest in critical scholarship creates a slight bias. There is also the issue of the oldest extant manuscript displaying a massive amount of variance from the later standardized texts from chapter order, number, and variant readings beyond the recognized "acceptable" variations.

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Yes, I get that ... I think it's fair to say that from Uthman (650 CE) until now the Quranic textual stability is indeed higher than that of the NT writings over that time-frame; yet it's also true the earliest Quran manuscripts we have definitely show variance going back to pre-Uthmanic era. And those variants sometimes indeed changed the meaning of a verse.

The small size of the Quran, the very early (within 20 years of Mohammed) standardisation and the tradition of memorising/reciting the Quran (facilitated by its smaller size), all helped to maintain that textual stability.

It's true Quranic textual criticism is underdeveloped relatively to the Jewish/Christian ones. And indeed in the Islamic world it's common to exaggerate the Quranic stability and claim perfect preservation (which those earliest manuscripts show is not true). But in Christian traditional circles you will find the same exaggerated claim and even plain rejection of any textual criticism.

NT variants sometimes are plain copying errors, sometimes obvious 'corrections/additions' to facilitate the theology/understanding of the copyist. So all together I still would maintain the textual stability (from original author to now) of the NT is worse than that of the Quran, but that does not mean the Quranic 'revelation' is more believable or true that the NT. I believe Yeshua is the Son of God (YHWH) who died for our sins - something the Quran explicitly denies.

For mission and personal witness to Muslims - even as friends - I need to know the Quran, otherwise I can't make any comparative claims about it relative to the Bible. I need to know about the life of Mohammed in order to make comparative claims relative to Yeshua.

Be blessed!

Glory to God! Awesome!

jonojim1337 said:

12 is the number of lictor states in the original Roman Kingdom. To me this signifies it’s restoration. It doesn’t exclude the multitudes, who take part in the second resurrection, but the first fruits, or the first born, inherit the power structure.

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That’s not Eastern Orthodox doctrine.

You are aware the Orthodox Church officially rejected chiliasm at the second ecumenical council in Constantinople in 381 AD?

Angeleyes7715 said:

I don't feel like I can pray right anymore. I'm scared I'm going to hell. I hallucinated audible demons. I have diagnosed schizophrenia but it felt so real.

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We pray that you can healing, that the power of God will permeate your entire being. That any demonic involvement will be driven ut in the name of Jesus. I too once was struggling and asked God to send someone to help. A couple of months later an avengelist I had seen before was going to be in my area. I went to that meeting and recieved a healing.
As you say you are apostolic, I hope you will consider alternate Pentecostal churches too for help. Lay aside doctrinal differences and let God know that you are open for whatever help that is available. Much peace and grace to you.