Strange. I think colons are the official way (as I’m just on default web lemm.ee,) so that might be something to contact your client’s devs with.

FYI, spoilers don’t work like Reddit (or at least not on my web client.) Try doing it the way Limfjorden did:

::: spoiler Answer
Three; one to hold the lightbulb and two to carry them while going in circles.
:::

Wanted to make it a bit more obscure for my friends, and also cropped it.

Well to be fair, that wasn’t until 6 hours after my comment and 9 hours after yours, so neither of us could have known for sure.

It’s not fair to assume a member of a population is guilty until they condemn/renounce the problematic members of their population. I remember there being a problem after 9/11 where some people expected individual Muslims to publicly condemn Al Qaeda or else be assumed complicit. If it wasn’t alright there, it’s not alright here.

to irk the “grammer” police on reddit

Hmm…

*Squints*

You done messed up.

to irk the “grammer” police on Reddit

FTFY

Complimenting a username is nice, but you don’t have to throw in a disclaimer about political alignment. I don’t think any of your hexbear friends, if they’re reasonable, would call you a lib because you complimented the username of a guy whose instance is populated by libs.

Don’t be so freaked out. It’s only 2 AM in my timezone.

At least it doesn’t look like it shrunk too.

I have no problem with the acceptable ads system. ABP doesn’t get any money from it, and the ads have to meet the criteria anyways, and it’s easy to opt out. I guess it’s a bit fishy that the list maintainers charge money to get ads reviewed, but the FAQ ThunderWhiskers posted says that smaller companies get it for free, and they only charge the bigger companies. I’m not gonna get up in arms over someone charging Disney money for a service they give the local deli for free.

I also like the way it gives companies an incentive to produce less intrusive ads. With the system, unintrusive ads reach more people. Otherwise, it’s all or nothing, which makes intrusive ads the best option from a greedy perspective; they’re far more likely to be clicked, and the only cost is the risk of damaging the ad ecosystem as a whole (and you know how little corporations can care about damaging ecosystems.)

I dunno, it kinda felt like she was playing along… within the constraints of still doing her job. Printing out a whole paper to say “No.” when a sticky note would suffice, for example.

Indeed. Though that’s not to say asking is useless. He knows what we need, but often entrusts us to ask for it, so that we can see the answered prayers instead of taking Him for granted (plus some other reasons probably.)

I think we’re in agreement here. God gives us chances to bear fruit, but throws out the branches that don’t. Predestination, as Calvinism describes it, says that He decides in advance whether they’re going to bear fruit, and those He wants to bear fruit do, and those He doesn’t never get the chance. I do not see that lining up with the idea that God is all-loving.

That being said, the Bible does say that nobody can come to Christ without God’s call, so I can see how that could be seen as predestination, but there have been those who felt the call and turned away, some of whom came around later. I think in some manner, it might be a warning that you can’t just decide “I’ll get saved when it’s more convenient for me,” because God doesn’t call at your convenience.

I wasn’t trying to “win” in the way you think I was yet. I was just trying to gather information.

My default assumption when someone claims to be saved is that they are until proven otherwise, but believing that the Church and not Christ is the source of salvation is a convincing proof otherwise from my perspective. But then my mind goes into “rebuke” mode and not “plant some seeds” mode, because people who consider themselves part of the Church should be open to rebuke (though of course I still try to be kind about it, that doesn’t come across easily over the net.)

For the sake of the rebuke, I wanted to understand what exactly they believe in so I could address it more directly, but that clearly wasn’t going anywhere. By their logic, I didn’t even have the right to ask because I’m not already part of whatever “Church” they’re a part of. Between their aggression and the fact that I’ve never heard of a belief system that lines up with what they were saying, I saw trolling as a likely possibility, moreso than I let on at this point. I suppose I could have tried for a little longer before bringing it up, but as you can see, I only asked, and then stated immediately afterwards that I didn’t want to assume ill intent.

So it wasn’t intended so much an accusation as a test of the waters, but I suppose it didn’t come off that way, and a troll wouldn’t answer that honestly, so the only purpose it served was to protect my own pride against the vision I had of someone laughing at their screen going “look how long I’m keeping this fool in an argument, and they don’t even suspect I’m trolling.” I’ll try to do better about that in the future.

As for the use of “preposterous,” I did add “to me” to soften it a bit, and this is clearly someone who’s able to handle that level of bluntness.

Thanks for your thoughts. I guess upon becoming sure that they were a troll, instead of calling them out to end it there, I should have shifted out of rebuking mode (since someone who’s pretending to be a Christian for trolling purposes is not going to be open to Christian rebuke,) and considered whether I was in a position to share my faith. In this case, I think I was, but it might be too late now. I’ll take another look tomorrow to see.

The very surface level of Calvinism, being that God is sovereign in all, is something I agree with, but it includes predestination, which is where I take issue. Why would God not offer the same mercy to everyone? And when He does offer mercy to someone, why would He not let us choose? He is sovereign, yes, but He is also loving, and love is not forcing some people to become model citizens while letting others perish without ever having any hope of salvation.

I do believe predestination is technically true in that God already knows the future and knows who will or won’t ultimately be saved, but that doesn’t preclude free will being an operative part of what gets us there.

Mate, I don’t even have a frame of reference to understand where you’re coming from. Do you believe the Bible? What are you, Eastern Orthodox or something? Or are you trolling? I don’t want to assume ill intent, but I’d like to have something to go off of. The idea that mankind can save each other is preposterous to me. What do you think Jesus died for? And also I’m part of a church and I’ve seen God work in my life, so you’re going to have to be more specific if you’re going to say that’s not up to standards.

Is 20 a few? The idea of salvation being through Christ alone is literally in the Bible. What are you talking about? I’ve repented of my sins, and belief in the Bible is not a sin.

Are you talking Catholicism? Even then, you still have Ephesians 2:8-9 “For by grace, you have been saved through faith. And this is not of yourselves, for it is a gift of God. And this is not of works, so that no one may glory.” (CPDV) and James 2 still making it clear that faith without works is dead.

The Bible actually has things to say about that mindset. Namely, if you think “I can go back to sin and just get forgiven afterwards no biggie,” and then do so, you’re not going to get forgiven (Hebrews 10.) But that doesn’t get preached much, probably because it’s easy to get it twisted and think that an inadvertent slip into sin will have the same effect.

Sorry if this comes off as rude, but without Christ, you’re not a Christian. Christianity is the state of being saved, and you can’t good-person your way into salvation. There are three problems with that approach:

• If you believe you can save yourself, that’s an issue of pride. How can your living works ever compare to God’s own son dying for you?
• If you willfully ignore Christ’s salvation (the easier option) in favor of doing good works, that shows an unwillingness to repent of your sins.
• If you try to meet God’s standards (or even just what you think they are) through your works, you’ll never catch up, and you’ll exhaust yourself.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there’s no point in good works or being a good person. They’re the fruits, but they’re not the tree. You can put effort into showing fruits, but without the tree, it’s not going to do you any good in the long run. Or you can grow the tree, and if it’s real, the fruits will come naturally (and if they don’t, the tree is dead^[1].)

It’s only by humility that you can come to salvation. You must recognize your sin and be willing to turn from it (and keep trying whenever you fail.) Otherwise, you’re ultimately not that different from the conservative politicians who pretend to be Christian while sticking to their hateful ways (only in your case, the ways in question might not be hateful.)

I say this not to condemn you, but in hope that you can be saved. Please don’t ignore it.

You wanna work weekends?