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Ferb

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Everything posted by Ferb

  1. But that section of scripture also had a fulfillment in the first century. And Jerusalem certainly did experience a lot of poverty - if there was a time when people took no note in Jerusalem because they were busy going about their day to day lives, it was before the Christians had fled, before the great tribulation. But then there was indeed an end to their casual eating and drinking and building - still not for the right reason, but still, Jesus application of Noah's example could logically only apply to the time leading up to the tribulation.
  2. Given the way we were created, I think it is in everyone's nature to want to get married. However, it isn't necessarily in everyone's nature to want to get married within the first hundred years of their life. Looking at the first five chapters of Genesis, you find that many people were of ages in three digits before having their first child, which suggests that either they weren't very fertile (which isn't what you'd expect for perfection) or they were content to wait a while to get married. So while getting married is part of Jehovah's design for us, it may well be true that getting married in your twenties or younger is more of, as you put it, an educated need. As you acknowledge, God chose this manner of reproduction. Not all creatures reproduce in the same fashion. Flowers engage in sexual reproduction but without having two different sexes - each individual has both male and female organs, and God could have made us the same way, hermaphroditic, with no differences between us. Some other creatures reproduce just by cloning themselves, without even needing another organism, and God could have made Adam that way. But Jehovah saw fit to make a man and a woman as complements of each other, even though this was not strictly necessary to allow the earth to be filled. Jesus explicitly said he made them male and female and said for this reason a man would leave his father and his mother and would stick to his wife, and the two would become one flesh. It seems to me that this is why men and women exist - not merely to reproduce, but to marry, to complement each other's unique abilities. For this reason, I believe all people will eventually marry if they live long enough.
  3. I just had a look at their webpage. I'm not sure what there is on there that you think sounds like hate speech. There's opinion pieces like you get in all newspapers, but opinions aren't misinformation. And according to the article, the particular issue sent out apparently claims that the Chinese government endangered the world by not accurately reporting the danger of the Coronavirus. Is this what you are calling misinformation? Are you saying the CCP were being truthful when they said the Coronavirus had been studied and found not to spread from person to person, and so it was safe for the world to accept tourists from China, and therefore that the newspaper's claim that the CCP lied is misinformation? Do we have reason to believe the CCP generally act with good motive?
  4. It's a good job they put that 'literally' in there, or I'd have thought they were talking about a figurative catastrophe.
  5. Rogue One was good though. A group of girls from a nearby congregation said that K2SO reminded them of me. 🙄
  6. I was just looking up something about pushing a branch in git. Autocomplete scares me sometimes. I've been here 5 minutes imagining under what circumstances someone googled this - and that it happened enough times for it to be the top autocomplete result.
  7. The idea isn't to avoid dopamine altogether. It's to avoid having too much of it, because if you easily get the sensation of reward from tapping a game on your phone or getting likes on a forum, you find little reward by comparison by actually doing hard work. The point is to make sure that you only allow yourself reward, or dopamine, from doing things that actually deserve a reward, like getting jobs done that you need to do. Even if the media is upbuilding like this forum, the fact remains that it's a way of satisfying yourself without doing any work - in simple terms, procrastination.
  8. Katty is currently rearranging her Windows taskbar by icon colour. "I need something red, David! Oooh, Adobe Acrobat Reader is red! What's something purple? Visual Studio!" "But Katty, we hardly ever use Visual Studio now we have Visual Studio Code." "Who cares, it's purple!" Weird things happen when someone's an artist and a nerd.
  9. We are all victims - victims of Adam's sin, victims of living of Satan's world and the bad governments he rules over, and more. I think what you're talking about is more than just victimhood per se, it's a kind of learned helplessness, being taught that the problems of which you are a victim are innate to the nature of reality and are always the way things will be. Really, the worst victimhood people are taught to accept is the idea that this life is all there is.
  10. In the first minute, with him pointing out that these people believe that valuing hard work was racist, I think what particularly came to mind was a story he reported on regarding the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, which stated that having a work ethic was part of 'White Culture' - and bear in mind, this museum was set up to promote African American History and Culture. Newsweek states: Notice on the infographic in the article (taken from the museum website, the one removed after it caused widespread outrage, but similar things exist in most race theory teaching course materials) that such biblical values as the husband being the head of a household are also regarded as 'white values' that have been imposed on black people. (And being a national museum, this may well have been something used in school education, in field trips etc. and been government funded - exactly the kind of thing to which this memo would apply.) This is why you should be aware of what critical race theory means - if such people have their way, you will be called racist for being a Christian, because as you can see, believing a man should be the head of the family is, in some convoluted way, deemed racist. It is not something to let your children be taught. So no, he's not making sweeping statements to be provocative. If you've seen previous stories like these over the past year you know he's practically quoting these teaching materials verbatim.
  11. How much do you know about Marxism? I'm not sure why you'd even associate it with freedom of speech. You don't really have freedom of speech under a Marxist government. Marxism is about making everybody equal - by force if necessary. Have a read of The Communist Manifesto - it's a pretty short read. Children must be school-educated because otherwise some children would be taught be smarter parents than others, and have an advantage, and not be equal - how can you think that's not what we're taught to believe when you're for some reason convinced of it yourself despite it not being what the Bible says? Women must all have jobs regardless of whether that makes them happy, because otherwise they wouldn't be equal to men - you don't think that's what they're taught in school these days? It's wrong for some people to have more money than others, regardless of how much harder those people work to earn the extra they have, because it's inequality - for some reason most young people believe that, where do you think they get the idea? I wouldn't say that. Or was that an autocorrect from intersectionalism? (I'd still think that's an oversimplification, but that would make more sense.) I'm not sure if mere 'racial sensitivity training' refers to something more benign, but the memo specifically refers to 'white privilege' and, as Katty correctly said, 'critical race theory'. It states: I don't want to speak for or against any particular politician, but I am certainly against the teaching that any race or ethnicity is inherently evil. I don't know if any official curriculum contains such material, though I have seen occasional news about it in schools, and the memo doesn't state that schools have been teaching it, it refers to government employees. Certainly you can see detailed here some examples of how racist 'critical race theory' is, and how some adults have had to undergo training courses in it.
  12. He's even got the protectors on his wrists and my receding hairline. But you know, because I was listening to it in Spanish at the time (just practising recognising basic words), I didn't notice the meaning of the song - it's only now I'm recalling the English words back to mind and notice how it suits us, particularly today while we're submitting our visa application and praying about its outcome.
  13. Just to be clear, when I facepalm while shaking my head from side to side, that does not mean, "That's my favourite idea!"
  14. It seems to me there's a pretty big margin of error in this test! 🙂 It can be measured as well as this test measures stuff. Just put a bunch of strongly agree to strongly disagree statements like 'I read the Bible every day' and 'I always pray before making a big decision'. Throw in some things to try to add some variation, like, 'I attend every ministry meeting', ignore the circumstances that might affect that (just as the questions in these personality tests do - in fairness, the real personality tests used by psychologists are much longer in order to weed out such factors, but people just doing it for fun on the internet couldn't be bothered with such a long test) and the result you'll get will be no less inaccurate than this. Incidentally Timothy, I was looking at travelling through South Korea a while ago (trying to find some way of being allowed to see Katty again during this lockdown hysteria) and I noticed that all the websites in South Korea refer to it as just 'Korea'. So what do they call North Korea? Do they even acknowledge it's existence as a country, or do they just consider it to be a part of their country that is currently occupied by an enemy force?
  15. I've added it to my wishlist, but it'd have to come down in price a lot before I'd try it!
  16. Your life may be like normal. For others superstitious xenophobic lockdown measures have included separating people from their families, by force where necessary. https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2020/04/06/coronavirus-divides-lovers-friends-at-swiss-german-border-fences.html I used to wonder how people could just stand there and watch the communists erect a wall separating them from their families. Now I know that even in the information age people would stand by and accept it, and it turns out, they wasted their time building theirs out of concrete. Not only would people have accepted it if it were a mere wire fence, but some people would have cheered them on repeating their propaganda that they were doing it for the good of the people, comrades!
  17. They always do though. You know if you pause your TV at a random moment, the person in halfway through speaking usually looks really weird, so it's easy to make someone look that way. I've never known a picture of the accused in a news article not look horrifying, even when they turn out totally innocent.
  18. This thread's title seems a bit redundant dear - any conversation with you is completely random 🙄
  19. Indeed. If the guy who passed out wearing a mask while driving his car had instead passed out while, say, walking down a flight of stairs in a public place, it would have been perfectly safe, because he would have been using a mask appropriately and responsibly.
  20. When The Babylon Bee predicted the timeline for 2020, they put in 'Adam Sandler wins 2020 by write-in victory' - which is not that far off from Kanye West. Maybe they have a time machine.
  21. If you've been studying it for a month and still can't write 'simple basic codes', you would probably be better off starting with a different language. Java is a particularly difficult language, not compiling unless your code explicitly handles every exception that a class can possibly throw. If you're just starting off in programming, it's probably better to start with something like Python, Javascript, or C#. Any of them would have some courses on YouTube. Python would be easiest (you can run it online while trying the code from the videos), though C# is probably the most similar to Java (don't let the name 'javascript' fool you) and would make you feel more comfortable picking up Java afterwards.
  22. If anyone wants to look round the British Museum without any tours, we found the following exhibits of Biblical interest: The Tomb of Shebna (as mentioned above - the room it's in contains the section devoted to the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, although most of the exhibits are too small to read online) The Gates of Nineveh (though you can get a better idea of the scale of them from the picture of Katty standing outside them) The Siege of Lachish - especially the bit where Sennacherib's face has been gouged out because of the shame he brought on his family after his defeat at Jerusalem. Navigating round the museum can be a bit frustrating though - it's particularly tricky moving through doors!
  23. Only way you improve is by trying. I think your cartoon was good. There will always be people you aren't good compared to. I remember a Watchtower talking about singing, and I answered pointing out that so many people say they can't sing, when what they mean is, they can't sing as well as professional singers who are the best in the world at it and who practise it all day and have professional coaches. That's like saying you can't ride a bike just because you've never won a professional cycling competition. You can't claim not to be good at something just because you aren't as good as some other people at it. I can see the expression in your characters' faces, BTG's irritation even comes across in her posture in that first picture.
  24. I'm not sure you fully appreciate what they mean by "discrimination laws, including those enacted with reference to religious considerations". The law in most Western countries forbids any discrimination on the basis of sex, but makes a few exceptions, such as requiring a man to play a male part in a play for example, and more relevantly on the basis of religious reasons. I think this is the kind of discrimination law you have to have in mind. For example, paragraph 44 states, "Participants in the Special Rapporteur’s consultations from countries such as Poland, the USA and Kenya noted that the invocation of ‘conscience clauses’ provided in law had made access to legal abortion effectively unavailable to women in significant parts of the country." So here what he's really proposing isn't 'treating all people with respect', it's forcing you to kill children if you've trained in medicine to save lives. If you say "we're fine with this", that statement certainly doesn't extend to me! But you can always quit your job as a doctor - it's not an outright attack on practicing your religion. The report gets better. Paragraphs 46-53 are all very interesting, but I'll just quote a few bits: So, you can claim that you're not interested in violating anyone's human rights - and as far as Jehovah decided what people's human rights were, you may be correct. But the Rapporteur clearly thinks it's people's human right to be what religion they choose and still have equal rights as men and women, including - for instance - the equal right of a man or woman to be an elder. He spends 8 paragraphs, about a tenth of his report, making quite clear his view that requiring appointed men to be male, not to mention requiring any marriage they are in not to be a homosexual one, would be an example of "religious practices that violate human rights", and that the fact that it's only within a voluntarily joined organisation doesn't make it legal (as he makes further arguments for in paragraphs 70-76). So assuming you want to keep following Jehovah's direction, you are interested in violating people's human rights as the rapporteur perceives them - your wife's for a start, just by exercising family headship and thereby encouraging 'harmful discriminatory gender norms', you nasty human rights abuser! 😀 (Incidentally, I particularly like how paragraph 34 of the report gets all upset about certain organisations using 'pseudoscience' to defend traditional family values and 'social roles for men and women in accordance with their alleged naturally different physical and mental capacities'. Yes, only a 'pseudoscience' could promote such an idea - how does it get accepted, in our day age! Imagine, allegedly men and women have natural physical differences! Ho ho ho! What fool could believe such pseudoscience! 🤣 And they think we're the brainwashed ones.)
  25. We usually use the WOL, partly because it's the quickest and most convenient thing to open, but also because it allows you to have multiple articles open at once and switch between them easily. WT Library hasn't seemed stable since the 2015 edition - starting it up always makes my disk activity go up to 100% and stay there until I switch it off, and I worry it's going to damage my hard drive, so I uninstalled it. I thought when I upgraded to an SSD it would probably be OK so I tried downloading it again, but no, it still constantly uses up as much disk activity as it possibly can as long as the application is open, though doing apparently nothing. JW Library runs OK, but the GUI is so limiting - it handles like what it is, a cellphone app running on a PC.

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