Messages

1

Your Turn / Re: Here's a Way to Control Guns

« on: Today at 12:16:37 AM »

I don’t care whether those weapons that are out there killing our children are actual equals of military weaponry or not. I, and a lot of very sensible people, just want them gone.
It is a ridiculous diversion and dodging the issue to contend that they’re not “really“ like military weapons. Seems to me they’re close enough.
And once more I ask: who wants to own these things and why? And why should we let them?

We don't need gun control. We need insane people control.

2

Your Turn / Re: Here's a Way to Control Guns

« on: Yesterday at 09:43:56 PM »

Got no weapon to give.  I do contribute funds for humanitarian relief in Ukraine.

Virtue signal noted.

3

Your Turn / Re: Here's a Way to Control Guns

« on: Yesterday at 09:42:39 PM »

Just as I would have predicted. It’s only almost a M-16. The Ukrainian soldiers without a weapon would love to have one.

Peace, JOHN

Stop it. That's a comment from vast ignorance of the topic.

4

Your Turn / Re: Here's a Way to Control Guns

« on: Yesterday at 09:41:23 PM »

As is usually the case, though, whatever your politics, your prayers are needed far more than ignorant judgment.  Wave your flag another time.  Dancing on the graves of dead kids to make a political speech is tacky.

Dancing on graves is what they do.

5

Your Turn / Re: Greta Thunberg receives honorary doctorate in THEOLOGY

« on: March 22, 2023, 11:58:53 PM »

Bizarre!

I never have liked the idea of "honorary" doctorates given to anybody. I think it is a terrible idea that only puffs up the egos of the recipients.

And even worse is that, when they are given an honorary doctorate, they go around calling themselves Dr. So-and-so!    This is quite pervasive in the LCMS.

As a holder of an actual earned Ph. D. I find the practice of people adopting the honorific of “Doctor” for an honorary doctorate to be pathetic.

6

Your Turn / Re: Artificial Intelligence Sermon Generator

« on: March 20, 2023, 06:01:36 PM »

I'm not sure, since I have no real experience with it. I really want to know more about how AI generates its results; that is, the source material it uses.  I'm under the impression that it gleans from the internet from a variety of sources.  Does it document those sources? I think before I would use it, I would like to understand better how it works.  But it could be a possibility.

The AI has been caught lying about sources.

In one online article "Fabricating Reality with ChatGPT" (https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=20545) the author describes how the helpful AI bot produced a book title, author, and biblio data that was entirely made up. Then it did it again, three more times.

7

Your Turn / Re: Valpo President/Board Decide to Sell Art Masterpieces to Pay for Dorm Renovation

« on: March 17, 2023, 01:26:23 PM »

For many years, a college degree was seen as a way for employers to prescreen prospective employees without actually screening anyone. Many of the jobs that required a degree didn't actually require a degree in order to do them. George Will famously pointed to a job ad for working in a warehouse in which the applicant needed a college degree and the ability to lift 50 pounds. Many years ago, we were looking for a copier. Every sales person I spoke to had a liberal arts degree (most in their mid-20s). I kept wondering why on earth someone would need a college degree to sell a copier it seemed superfluous to me.

A lot of that was due to a Supreme Court ruling (Griggs vs. Duke Power) sustaining a plaintiff who claimed the internal tests for hiring and promotion were racially biased. From what I have read, most companies that had relied on testing for hiring quit doing it to avoid potential liability. They used the college degree as a proxy measurement to screen for people who were likely to be reasonably literate and had showed enough diligence to graduate.

The joke is that now that nobody ever flunks out and everybody gets A and B grades, the value of that degree has fallen. I have read of several companies who have dropped the ‘college graduate’ requirement for employment in just the last couple of years.

8

Your Turn / Re: Thread for discussion of Russia and Ukraine...

« on: March 07, 2023, 07:40:11 PM »

I have a clear answer.
   Kick the Russian asses out of Ukraine, where they do not belong, where the Ukrainians do not want them

Except, of course, for the parts of the Ukraine where the Ukes/Rus do want the Russians there.

Maybe that's too nuanced.

9

Your Turn / Re: Adam and Eve

« on: February 18, 2023, 07:50:58 PM »

What do you posit is God’s relationship to time? Does God experience temporal duration as we do? Or does God transcend time, holding all of our time in His eternal present? If the later, to say that God intended from the beginning that humans sin does not makes as much sense since then for God there's no beginning or after.

There is a book called "Flatland: a romance of many dimensions" (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/201) that is interesting in terms of thinking about dimensions. It starts with an "organism" which only exists at a point. Then it moves to Flatland where all the creatures live on a plane, and only understand movements in that plane. So if the world is really 3 dimensional, the Flatland people will experience an interaction with a 3D entity as mysterious or miraculous as it moves through their plane.

We live an a 3D world. X, Y and Z coordinates. What if our Creator has a 4th dimension, what we call Time that He can observe and interact with. We can't see it, any more than the Flatland creatures can see the 3rd dimension.

The book has no obvious religious component, but it might stimulate you to think about how God views the universe versus our limited view of the universe.

10

Your Turn / Re: Coronavirus news

« on: February 09, 2023, 10:53:49 PM »

President Biden through the Department of Health and Human Services issued an EO decreeing that all health care providers who receive M & M reimbursement MUST require masking.

Yeah, the hospital system where I get most of my medical care has all the signs up, but only about half the workers and patients have a mask on.

Masks for surgery, I am told, help ensure that nothing from the doctors' mouths or noses fall into the open patient. Masks in the real world do essentially nothing for airborne disease.

11

Your Turn / Re: I Need Some Catechism Help

« on: January 24, 2023, 09:05:15 PM »

Capitalization of “Black” in contradistinction to lowercase “white” is common place in academic writing.

Among other sins of academic writing.

12

Your Turn / Re: What's Happening among the Methodists?

« on: December 29, 2022, 01:16:29 PM »

Here is a new story about this struggle. I'm not sure halting the process will relieve fears.

https://religionnews.com/2022/12/28/umcs-north-georgia-conference-blocks-church-departures/

That's an interesting situation because my understanding is that congregations must apply to leave by the end of 2023 and the next UMC conference is not until a year after.  It's also true that these situations come up whenever there is some kind of upheaval, including mergers.  When the LFC was voting to merge with the ALC all kinds of tricks and underhanded tactics were used.  Churches are not immune to sin or to thinking that the ends justify the means.

And every such maneuver destroys trust when it becomes evident. Self-serving,  self-destructive.

It just means that people will leave individually or by families, instead of allowing a church to vote.

13

Your Turn / Re: Coronavirus news

« on: December 06, 2022, 06:17:09 PM »

The best part of that excerpt was the phrase "highly successful Covid jabs".

I guess success is measured by how many people were bullied into getting the shots.

On the level of "stops the disease" or "prevents infection" there was little success.

14

Your Turn / Re: THERE IS NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY

« on: November 25, 2022, 12:31:48 AM »

Perhaps, Peter et al., this time the sky is falling. But you won’t believe it because the diagnosis comes from people you don’t like.

I don’t like you, and I don’t like your politics. But that’s not the real issue.

I have a PhD in Operations Research, which is focused on data driven decision making and using mathematical modeling to make better decisions.

And I can tell you that the models that predict that the sky is falling are garbage. They gloss over important parts of the problem, and try to make predictions that are well outside the ability of their models over the decades that they are trying to predict.

The number of variables is huge (but inadequate to the task) and the amount of prior data to seed the model is inadequate to the task. Basically the model makers tweak their models to attempt to replicate recent history and project it 100 or so years into the future.

This is a profitable endeavor because it brings funding that academics need. But it isn’t good or competent.

15

Your Turn / Re: Whatever happened to Molech?

« on: November 16, 2022, 05:39:02 PM »

Molech is only one of the three top tier false gods to have reasserted strength in our society - and many churches - today.
Baal and Ishtar join Molech:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/three-worlds-of-evangelicalism-the-gods-return/

I found the part of the article about the three gods to be very interesting, and somewhat unsettling.